SciAm has an interesting article up about a saucer-shaped IFO called the wingless electromagnetic air vehicle (WEAV) that will (read might) “propel itself using electrodes that cover its surface to ionize the surrounding air into plasma.” Professor Subrata Roy says, “All of the materials needed to make this aircraft currently exist and plasma is the most abundant form of matter in the universe. If we can somehow tap into that in the future we should be able to fly anywhere.” I say, “perfect excuse for an artist’s conception.” More coverage here.
A notorious tease, he may pretend
not to be aware of you.
Just wait.
He must speak first. Then
you may begin to praise him.
Remember:
sincerity and naturalness
count for more than wit.
His jokes may strike you as
abstruse.
Only laugh if he does.
Gifts?
They say he’s mad for art,
but whether in the melting
elegiac mode of, say, this
Vase of Poppies
or, turning the mirror
to his own face, a bronze skull
gorging on a snake—
that is a matter of taste.
In any case, the expense
is what he notices.
What to wear.
Some authorities
still insist on black.
But really, in this modern age,
your best is all that is required.
Also: On Genius from Camp Concentration.
Ape Resistance. Imagine, if you will an already backward-leaning country, by some strange cast of the die, sliding full-tilt into dogmatic lunacy. Imagine the ascendance of a bona-fide Theocratic state which, above all, ruthlessly “discourages” any mention of evolution or natural selection. Imagine a scientific and non-believer community driven “underground.” The resultant resistance would need a clandestine symbology to identify one another in back-alleys and call others of like mind to arms, something to spray on cathedral walls and wheat paste across incense clouded metropoli.
In advance of this highly improbable possibility I hereby nominate a few pop-cultural symbols heretofore without specific meaning but none the less widely recognized as related to, respectively, the chimpanzee, the orangutan, and the gorilla. These are the symbols worn by the civilized primates on The Planet of the Apes and as such a film would surely be purged from the collective consciousness under an evolution-denying Theocracy, I believe they make the perfect samantics-free but association-rich pro-Darwinian statement. And now you, dear reader, can make that statement from the comfort of your own t-shirt.
Whether it is, in fact, a few of these t-shirts, surviving after humanity obliterates itself, that ultimately inspires the future planet-ruling ape civilization to adopt these symbols in the first place… (Pantheistic solipsism and all that) well, who can tell?
See below for all three designs.
Some Geo. Mather’s Sons Inks: (left to right, top to bottom) Jacqueminot Red. Photo Brown. Old Gold. Fine Chocolate. Blue Black—Deep. Magenta. Peacock Blue. Permanent Purple—Bluish. Persian Orange. Carminated Red. Gloss Black. Light Green.
Slightly adapted from the handsome Price List of Type, Printing Machinery and Material. Manufactured and for Sale by the Printer’s Warehouse, G. Edw. Osborn & Co. 398 State St., - New Haven Conn. 1892.
If you’ve never seen E. Elias Merhige’s hallucinatory and gorgeous film Begotten, well, here it is. Admittedly this is a film not best watched on a computer screen on a lazy summer Sunday afternoon. This is a film meant to be watched alone, in February, at 2 am, on the biggest screen you’ve got, with the lights out and alarmingly potent chemicals of some kind coursing through your system. This is the full version, however, and almost certain to be taken down, so I figured I’d post it while the posting was good. Alternately, if you are faint of heart or simply have no patience for “experimental” film, you might try the yakety-yak version.
Came across a terrific bit of primate related reading today which I wanted to pass on. It’s a pdf titled PrimatePoetics hosted over at SocialFiction. The pamphlet posits that non-human primates have long been observed to use their own type of language in the wild, and that in captivity, those primates being taught human language, through signs, are in effect creating a new language altogether.
Quote: Our language, when it is passed on to a different species, becomes a new language. PrimatePoetics is born from the realization that this language should be appreciated in its own right, as the greatest revolution in literature since the invention of written Chinese 4000 years ago.
Regardless of your take on this assertion the pdf is well worth a read in that it’s a primer of sorts of the history of primate language study and offers an overview, on an “ape-by-ape basis,” of relevant milestones. Very interesting stuff. The illustration above is, of course, a visualization of what I imagine the great apes will say to us once they master their facility for language.
The image you see above is evidently a cabalistic (or qabalistic) symbol of the infinite. It contains within itself all the lines and curves necessary to represent the numbers 1 through 10, as is clearly visible by the added indicators in black. In Hermetic Qabalistic tradition the numbers themselves are representations of the 10 planes of reality, emanations arising from the Ain Suph (or infinite), which are collectively called the Sephiroth. These, as commonly depicted in the Tree of Life are called: Kether (1), Chokhmah (2), Binah (3), Daath, Chesed (4), Geburah (5), Tiphareth (6), Netzach (7), Hod (8), Yesod (9), Malkuth (10), and are each considered to be an emanation of the divine energy (or “divine light’) which ever flows from the unmanifest into manifestation.
Perhaps it is simply that I am uninitiated into the great mysteries, or that I am a disbelieving spiritually bereft heathen, but the “divine” use I immediately imagined for this symbol was something altogether different…
In case you missed it cover art for the third series of radically redesigned Penguin Classics have seen the light of day over at We Made This. You can see them in all their monochromatic glory here. (Thanks Pierce) Pictured above are two of my faves. On the left Orwell’s Books V. Cigarettes, and on the right, to my mind possibly one of the most perfect book covers ever created, Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Both are by David Pearson. Check out series I and II, and hell, check out these for good measure.
I love the way news stories on hallucinogenic drug research always have this sort of willful ignorance to them. Headline: Magic Mushrooms: Study Says They Help Some See Their Spiritual Side. Whenever I see a headline along these lines I can’t help but blurt out, like a annoyed pre-teen, “Duh!” Also, newsflash: water is wet!
Quote: “The study involved 36 men and women during an eight-hour lab visit.” This was a funded study remember. It was Science! Meanwhile the “study” that’s been ongoing for centuries, involving literally millions upon millions of subjects in every age/gender/scocio-economic combination possible, and which, I might add, arrived at this very same conclusion long, long, loonnnng ago, is decidedly not. It’s not of much value in discerning facts or compiling evidence or just generally helping us to better understand the effects of the drug in question evidently, and, as a matter of fact, is dangerous, illegal, and quite possibly evil…
On July 1st 1858 a theory, jointly arrived at by one Charles Darwin and one Alfred Russel Wallace, was presented to The Linnean Society of London in the form of two papers. The theory, of course, was Natural Selection, and it was revealed to the world 150 years ago today. Huzzah!