self portrait, 1992

When you are young you know nothing but are convinced you know everything. And that’s its charm. It’s what makes foolhardy youth passionate and beautiful. When you are old you know nothing and are well aware you know nothing. After all the trial and error and revolving 3 a.m. philosophies you are still naked and lost. It’s exactly this which tinges age with sadness.

07.12. filed under: !. observations. 5


Postcard from a lifetime away

While going through a box of old photos just now I came across a misplaced postcard which very nearly had me in tears. It was from a friend of mine who died some years back. He was a wonderful guy and I miss him terribly. The saddest thing about coming upon this card for me is the fact that I didn’t just forget about it… no, I can’t even remember ever receiving it. I can’t remember him handing it to me, which he surely did, probably while sidled up next to me at the Library Bar on Avenue A and 1st street. He almost never mailed me anything, preferring instead to just hand over his missives face-to-face. When I pulled it from the box it was like I only just received it… from a lifetime and a trillion miles away. For the benefit of those of you who knew him I’m posting it here. Without doubt you’ll know who it was from instantly.

07.12. filed under: !. personal. 2


What if I wrote a single sentence each day? Would the sentences add up to a novel? No.  A poem? No. And why does escape seem impossible? What if I retreated into non-sequiturs? What if I scribbled on paper and hooted in guttural bursts? Why can’t I? You can. And why the tendency to align, to repeat, to perpetuate? Why does it naturally become this and not something totally different? Why couldn’t it be something nimble enough to avoid the pin and the shadow box? I can’t say. And what if I wanted to tear it all down? You have. You’ve torn it down and built it up again. So why doesn’t it change? Because it is you.

07.09. filed under: !. inquiries. personal. 7


Gensou Hyouhon Hakubutsukan or the Museum of Fantastic Specimens is an online collection of creatures “curated” by Hajime Emoto. All of the creatures showcased in the museum are sculpted from paper, modeling paste and bamboo. The site is in Japanese but certainly worth a slightly confused browse. Via.

A Search for Comity in the Intellectual Property Wars: Comedies of Fair U$e. The entire symposium is now available for your free listening delight.

Science and the Theft of Humanity. In science’s renewed interest in the human condition, a humanist sees the promise of a dialogue and a new golden age.

Political dump: Why Conservatives Can’t Govern, The legal mind behind the White House’s war on terror, The military’s problem with the President’s Iran policy, Iran: Consequences of WarThat Honorable Determination.

Great Mother Plane? Pop Culture Blog offers some nuggets on The Nation of Islam’s UFO teachings. Via.

The Industrial Design Society of America’s 2006 IDEA award winners. Via.

07.09. filed under: link dump. 4


Compare the silent rose of the sun and rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, with this paper, this dust.
That states the point.

With only the flimsiest of pretext I offer a Saturday afternoon selection from one of my favorite poets. I do this for my enjoyment as much as your own. See below for poetry or quail and click away with a marksman-clean scoff. What do I care?

07.08. filed under: !. books.


Composers often speak of fitting chords and melodies together, as though sounds were physical objects with geometric shape - and now a Princeton University musician has shown that advanced geometry actually does offer a tool for understanding musical structure: The Hidden Geometry of Musical Cords. (The thumbnail is not from here but from the gorgeous here)

Headline: Van Gogh painted perfect turbulence The “disturbed” artist intuited the deep forms of fluid flow. Uh, yeah. No chance it’s just a coincidence huh?

McGuffin: an object which has no real meaning except that it sets everything about it in motion. Examples.

Only 32% of the U.S. population has ever been in a bookstore. On the average, a book store browser spends 8 seconds looking at the front cover and 15 seconds looking at the back cover. etc. Mother-load of book-related statistics. Via.

Enjoy the Building Gods, a rough cut to the feature film about AI, robots, the singularity, and the 21st century. Via.

African American Spirituality has taken diverse forms over the years. Much has been written about Black Churches and the African religious traditions of the diaspora. Less, however, is available on the subject of Black magical spirituality, as exemplified in Hoodoo, Conjure, Rootwork, and Candle Burning. Enter Southern Spirits: Ghostly Voices from Dixie Land.

When the “shit comes down” will you be ready? Quote: Homesteaders, environmentalists, missionaries, doctors in developing nations, and others living in areas where there is no power can rely on Lehman’s. (Thanks Tom.)

 

07.08. filed under: link dump. 8


Solomon D. Butcher and the Nebraska pioneers.

Or: homing-in on the homesteaders.

The mud was high, the sod-roofs were damp, the watermelon was sweet, and in the lens of newfangled camera’s men never smiled. It was Nebraska in the late 1800’s and at “only one-ninth of principle due annually, beginning two years after purchase” it was destination soon crowded with homesteaders. One of them was Solomon D. Butcher who arrived in Nebraska in 1880 to farm. After five years of struggle he realized that he was not tough enough to meet the demands of the homesteader’s life but having in those five years developed a genuine love of the life, and realizing that the period of settlement would soon be over, he set out instead to create a photographic history of what it was to be a pioneer. Between 1886 and 1912 Butcher generated a collection of more than 3,000 photographs. Like most men “he died believing himself a total failure.” His work, however, for its breadth and specificity, has proven to be one of the most important chronicles of homesteading ever exposed to the light.

07.08. filed under: art. !. history. humanity. people. 3


Detail from Nite Lite by Dodie.

Erowid: an exhaustive source of information on psychoactive plants, chemicals, and related subjects. A lot to peruse including the vault, a gallery of hundreds of examples of “psychedelic art” many of which even manage to rise above what you might expect from that categorization. Similarly see: the Lycaeum.

Enjoy this fine flash presentation on Imagining the tenth dimension.

goods has helped to discover a large primordial ‘blob’, more than 10 billion light-years away. With a diameter of 200 000 light-years, the blob is twice as big as our Milky Way and the total energy emitted is equivalent to that of about 2 billion suns. Despite this, the object is largely invisible.

“The cow says: moo.” Shamanistic resource on working with animal guides.

Enjoyable essay: Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine.

Long list of international equivalents to John Doe, Richard Roe, etc.

Derived from the jungle Quichua verb ikaray, “to blow smoke” for healing, the Spanish word icaros designates the magical lyrics, incantations, either whistled or spoken, by Amazonian shamans in a variety of ritual contests, especially during healing sessions and during ayahuasca ceremonies, to establish contact with the spirit world. Listen for yourself: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.

07.04. filed under: link dump. 3


The physical inevitability of death in the mind of someone living

A bit of delicious art news: Damien Hirst’s iconic piece The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living (1991), which consists of a shark suspended in a tank of greenish formaldehyde, is rotten. Well, not exactly, quote: “The animal suspended in formaldehyde has deteriorated dramatically to the naked eye since it was first unveiled at the Saatchi Gallery in 1992 because of the way it was preserved by the artist. The solution which surrounds it is murky, the skin of the animal is showing considerable signs of wear and tear, and the shark itself has changed shape.” So essentially the shark is rotting. Perfect irony considering the title of the piece don’tcha think? The piece sold in late 2004 for £6.5m, one of the highest prices ever paid for a work by “someone living.” Hirst is evidently in talks with the buyer to replace the shark. The dealer Larry Gagosian said: “The shark is a conceptual piece and to substitute a shark of equal size and appearance, in my opinion, does not alter the piece.” I agree with him, though what the truth of such a statement really portends for the value of a piece of art…

07.03. filed under: art. !. 6


That G.W. Bush does not bother reading the paper is a on the record and well known. That the current Administration in Washington on the whole dislikes the press is obvious. First there was the uproar over the revelation of the N.S.A. wire-tapping program. Just last week we witnessed the President, Vice President, and other members of the Administration lash out angrily over the New York Times story which disclosed a secret C.I.A. program to trace financial records. Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, even called for a criminal investigation of The Times. It seems that something must be done.

07.02. filed under: !. criticism. headlines. politics. 2


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