Current musical obsession:
I'm a sucker for well-made, good honest pop (ie pop that knows it is pop). Miami Horror seem to do this. I was nervous about the video being trite, but it is quite funny.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Friday, January 21, 2011
Saturday, January 15, 2011
RIP Trish Keenan of Broadcast
Goodbye to Trish Keenan of Broadcast
Over the last two years I'd gotten into some Broadcast. Last year's album with the Focus Group, Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age, was a shimmering, slightly unnerving yet at the same time pastoral piece of music that droned, wept and crept beneath the veils of avante and electro music to reveal some slightly folky undertones. Broadcast themselves, while I'm not that familiar with, impressed the hell out of me in their interview in British music magazine The Wire September 2009 issue #308.
Here's a link. Great people, great thinkers. Rest in Peace and my sympathies to all whose lives you've touched Ms. Keenan.
http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/3069/
Over the last two years I'd gotten into some Broadcast. Last year's album with the Focus Group, Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age, was a shimmering, slightly unnerving yet at the same time pastoral piece of music that droned, wept and crept beneath the veils of avante and electro music to reveal some slightly folky undertones. Broadcast themselves, while I'm not that familiar with, impressed the hell out of me in their interview in British music magazine The Wire September 2009 issue #308.
Here's a link. Great people, great thinkers. Rest in Peace and my sympathies to all whose lives you've touched Ms. Keenan.
http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/3069/
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Dr. Bacteria or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the End
"Science holds plenty of exotic worlds that are not exactly parallel to our own. Rather they overlap outs to a degree but are generally outside direct human experience. Beyond frequencies of sound that we can hear and of light that we can see, very different realities can present themselves."
This is a quote taken directly from the December 2007 issue of Scientific American, page 12 - the 'From The Editor' column. It is a warm-up for the readers to an article by Peter Byrne on page 98 of that issue, an article about Physicist Hugh Everett who in the mid-twentieth century met with disdain and unfavorable responses from much of the scientific community when he proposed a 'Many worlds' multiverse theory. Go here for a slightly annoying but nevertheless fun explanation of Everett's theory utilizing, what else, SuperMario.
Anyway, I woke up later again today and once more found myself swimming up from the deepest reaches of dream-state. This is interesting because that means the subject of all of my recent blogs here have merged, what with dreams and now multiple realities and the idea of 'thing beyond human experience shaping our world.' Because today I double back and talk about what I really think is going to be the 'Big Bad' to our modern life plotline, and that my friends, is bacteria.
Bacteria.
Please allow to quote just a little more from that SCI/AM to further set the stage of my ramblings: "The Universe of the gamma ray spectrum, for example, is utterly invisible to us. But it is painted in the colors of the most energetic events in the cosmos: massive stellar explosions, g]black hold collisions and similar catastrophes."
Okay, I could go on because after I woke up, got my pot of Dunkin Donuts coffee brewing and stopped in the latrine before beginning my customary first-thing-up blogging (to get the juices, and fingers, flowing for the day's real writing) I picked up the Scientific American and found it to be exactly pertinent to thoughts I'd lain down over the last several days or so.
It seems such a marvelous triumph to me that science has, in the last half of the twentieth century and now beyond into what we in our life times would once have thought of as "The Future", come around to a place where it not just recognizes there are entire corridors of the known Universe that are outside of the human experience/perception but CAN PROVE IT. This is especially titillating to those of us who secretly long for some big, undefinable and awesome experience to touch our lives and make the world around us seem that much more beautiful and grandiose: religion does it for some but not for me, although I suppose one has to be careful that in their alternative searches they don't just end up becoming devout "INSERT BELIEF SYSTEM HERE" something I found myself doing a little more than five years ago in regards to studying the occult, most specifically Chaos Magick*
So yeah, there are thing that our race of egotists and species-snobs just cannot comprehend with our limited senses, no matter how great and all-knowing we think we are. And on that note I'd like to take you back to the other day's blog where I prattled on about my dreams a decade ago that warned me of a coming extinction event and how my own personal investigations had convinced me that despite the aura of the dream clinging to the idea of the word 'Nuclear' preceding the event, I know believe (and have believed for some time) that what we really have to worry about is Bacteria.
Think of it like this:
In the last twenty years Antibiotics have become a widespread relief for everything from the common cold to any of the other inconvenient little eco-systems that pop up in our blood streams and high jack our bodies for days, sometimes weeks at a time. This is because those antibiotics work. And in the blossoming 'neat and sterile' island of Western Culture we continually refine and replenish the idea that you would have to wait until you came down with such an illness became unthinkable, thus the dawn of the widespread Antibacterial products: hand soap, dish soap, every kind of soap. There's even that antibacterial goo that comes in the small bottle for us to rub on our hands whenever we think we may have come into contact with something that could be 'dirty' enough to lead us into a cold or worse. So everybody's all neat and clean and protected in the modern age, right?
Hold on a minute.
Think about this: for every one day we live bacteria, a microorganism that exists in a dimension that we humans cannot see without the aid of a microscope, cycles through generations. Thus, extending the 'treat-it-before-it-happens' life plan on to a much longer time line, what we are going to find using science or even just the most basic reductive reasoning is that Bacteria, which is like us and other life forms in that the more contact with something that negatively affects its immune system the more it will be able to marshal its forces and eventually, generations later, overcome that something, will eventually evolve past the point where our treatments will work on it. This will take some time, however it is a race being run in two different dimensions, ours and the microcosm of the bacteria, and that means our clock doesn't apply, because again, in relation to us humans, Bacteria evolves faster.
I've been saying this for years but now we've begun to see it. H1N1? Originally called Swine Flu. How many people did you know that had it, because I knew two. And wasn't it like some demented Gilliam/Orwellian science fiction setting to see those pink billboards at the height of that outbreak that colloquialized and even attempted to make 'hip' and 'cool' the immunization shot?
Bacteria can travel too. If you read Howard Bloom's book The Global Brain you'll hear all about how millions of years before we or any other proto-sentient life came along Planet Earth's highest lifeform was Bacteria and it managed to do a lot of the things we think we are so special for doing today with just their DNA and its continued refinement.
They traveled across the globe.
They set up vast and far-reaching communcation networks.
They evolved. Maybe too much, because they eventually led to us, however, that process could always be wiped clean and begun again. In the event of a global human population scything Bacteria may also be damaged, but being that they are more resilient and existing on a micro scale, they'll be back long before we are.
Now why do I seem so hellbent on an extinction event? I'm not, but look around. Better yet, go here and stare at the numbers in the center of the screen. Then, when you've committed at least the last two or three places to memory, hit refresh a couple of times.
world population clock
Now do you get it?
Yeah, so throw away your antibacterial stuff and the next time you get sick, stick it out. We're supposed to go through that stuff from time to time - that's what the bacteria does when we bomb the hell out of it with our fancy shmancy pharmaceuticals and its getting stronger.
The race is on.
......................
* Which is especially ridiculous for any out there who are familar with that particular paradigm. But the important thing was I caught myself! What can I say, raised in a Christian house (not an overbearing one however) I recognize there is certain 'programming' that's been hard-wired into my head. The trick is to locate it when it activates and then hit the DELETE button until it is gone.
This is a quote taken directly from the December 2007 issue of Scientific American, page 12 - the 'From The Editor' column. It is a warm-up for the readers to an article by Peter Byrne on page 98 of that issue, an article about Physicist Hugh Everett who in the mid-twentieth century met with disdain and unfavorable responses from much of the scientific community when he proposed a 'Many worlds' multiverse theory. Go here for a slightly annoying but nevertheless fun explanation of Everett's theory utilizing, what else, SuperMario.
Anyway, I woke up later again today and once more found myself swimming up from the deepest reaches of dream-state. This is interesting because that means the subject of all of my recent blogs here have merged, what with dreams and now multiple realities and the idea of 'thing beyond human experience shaping our world.' Because today I double back and talk about what I really think is going to be the 'Big Bad' to our modern life plotline, and that my friends, is bacteria.
Bacteria.
Please allow to quote just a little more from that SCI/AM to further set the stage of my ramblings: "The Universe of the gamma ray spectrum, for example, is utterly invisible to us. But it is painted in the colors of the most energetic events in the cosmos: massive stellar explosions, g]black hold collisions and similar catastrophes."
Okay, I could go on because after I woke up, got my pot of Dunkin Donuts coffee brewing and stopped in the latrine before beginning my customary first-thing-up blogging (to get the juices, and fingers, flowing for the day's real writing) I picked up the Scientific American and found it to be exactly pertinent to thoughts I'd lain down over the last several days or so.
It seems such a marvelous triumph to me that science has, in the last half of the twentieth century and now beyond into what we in our life times would once have thought of as "The Future", come around to a place where it not just recognizes there are entire corridors of the known Universe that are outside of the human experience/perception but CAN PROVE IT. This is especially titillating to those of us who secretly long for some big, undefinable and awesome experience to touch our lives and make the world around us seem that much more beautiful and grandiose: religion does it for some but not for me, although I suppose one has to be careful that in their alternative searches they don't just end up becoming devout "INSERT BELIEF SYSTEM HERE" something I found myself doing a little more than five years ago in regards to studying the occult, most specifically Chaos Magick*
So yeah, there are thing that our race of egotists and species-snobs just cannot comprehend with our limited senses, no matter how great and all-knowing we think we are. And on that note I'd like to take you back to the other day's blog where I prattled on about my dreams a decade ago that warned me of a coming extinction event and how my own personal investigations had convinced me that despite the aura of the dream clinging to the idea of the word 'Nuclear' preceding the event, I know believe (and have believed for some time) that what we really have to worry about is Bacteria.
Think of it like this:
In the last twenty years Antibiotics have become a widespread relief for everything from the common cold to any of the other inconvenient little eco-systems that pop up in our blood streams and high jack our bodies for days, sometimes weeks at a time. This is because those antibiotics work. And in the blossoming 'neat and sterile' island of Western Culture we continually refine and replenish the idea that you would have to wait until you came down with such an illness became unthinkable, thus the dawn of the widespread Antibacterial products: hand soap, dish soap, every kind of soap. There's even that antibacterial goo that comes in the small bottle for us to rub on our hands whenever we think we may have come into contact with something that could be 'dirty' enough to lead us into a cold or worse. So everybody's all neat and clean and protected in the modern age, right?
Hold on a minute.
Think about this: for every one day we live bacteria, a microorganism that exists in a dimension that we humans cannot see without the aid of a microscope, cycles through generations. Thus, extending the 'treat-it-before-it-happens' life plan on to a much longer time line, what we are going to find using science or even just the most basic reductive reasoning is that Bacteria, which is like us and other life forms in that the more contact with something that negatively affects its immune system the more it will be able to marshal its forces and eventually, generations later, overcome that something, will eventually evolve past the point where our treatments will work on it. This will take some time, however it is a race being run in two different dimensions, ours and the microcosm of the bacteria, and that means our clock doesn't apply, because again, in relation to us humans, Bacteria evolves faster.
I've been saying this for years but now we've begun to see it. H1N1? Originally called Swine Flu. How many people did you know that had it, because I knew two. And wasn't it like some demented Gilliam/Orwellian science fiction setting to see those pink billboards at the height of that outbreak that colloquialized and even attempted to make 'hip' and 'cool' the immunization shot?
Bacteria can travel too. If you read Howard Bloom's book The Global Brain you'll hear all about how millions of years before we or any other proto-sentient life came along Planet Earth's highest lifeform was Bacteria and it managed to do a lot of the things we think we are so special for doing today with just their DNA and its continued refinement.
They traveled across the globe.
They set up vast and far-reaching communcation networks.
They evolved. Maybe too much, because they eventually led to us, however, that process could always be wiped clean and begun again. In the event of a global human population scything Bacteria may also be damaged, but being that they are more resilient and existing on a micro scale, they'll be back long before we are.
Now why do I seem so hellbent on an extinction event? I'm not, but look around. Better yet, go here and stare at the numbers in the center of the screen. Then, when you've committed at least the last two or three places to memory, hit refresh a couple of times.
world population clock
Now do you get it?
Yeah, so throw away your antibacterial stuff and the next time you get sick, stick it out. We're supposed to go through that stuff from time to time - that's what the bacteria does when we bomb the hell out of it with our fancy shmancy pharmaceuticals and its getting stronger.
The race is on.
......................
* Which is especially ridiculous for any out there who are familar with that particular paradigm. But the important thing was I caught myself! What can I say, raised in a Christian house (not an overbearing one however) I recognize there is certain 'programming' that's been hard-wired into my head. The trick is to locate it when it activates and then hit the DELETE button until it is gone.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
The Origin of the Pentagram
If you've ever wondered where this symbol came from or why it has appeal/power to people go here. Hint - it has nothing to do with the devil, who doesn't exist.
For me the Microcosm/Macrocosm, As Above So Below paradigm for life, the Universe and Everything is the defining 'belief' I assign to the otherwise frighteningly chaotic existence we puny humans try so hard to assign meaning to. There's no real evidence for any other defining parameters, but the micro/macro thing has tons of it, and the Pentagram is one of the most elegant examples of that.
So of course the enemies of knowledge demonize it. Of course.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Mr. Z's Daring Escape From Tedium and Some Thoughts on Global Destructon
My good friend Mr. Z moved to Australia late in 2010. He was scheduled to take a month-long trip to both the land of Aussie and New Zealand over a year ago, some shit came up and he postponed. Now, I don't want to get into the shit that came up, it's not my place to say anything about that here other than the fact that at the tail-end of said shit, in approximately April, Mr. Z came out here to LA to visit me and we had several long discussions in which I did my best to help him 're-focus' himself. In some circles I'm sure the role I play for two of my best friends, Mr. Z and the other Mr. D, would possibly qualify as slightly mystical. In modern day language however, this could almost be true of anyone who spends time listening to friends when they are in trouble and actually taking the time to help them traverse the often dangerous or exploitative narrows of their thoughts and actions. So April saw Mr. Z and I taking a bit of a medicine trip out into Joshua Tree, where we spent hours driving around, parking, walking, discovering and eventually performing a bit of a makeshift ritual to clear the man's head of the evil bullshit that had been battering at his defenses and explicit sense of self for the better part of six months.
Almost six months later he had a visa in Australia.
Now, I bring all this up because while Mr. Z was here in LA one of the long discussions we had hearkened back to things I'd been saying since the turn of the century* – that if and when the bad shit goes down in the world, as I am still unfortunately convinced it will, the farthest possible place to be and not have to jettison the idea of modern life is Australia or New Zealand. I'd stopped saying this years ago, because after a time it is simply better to stop repeating oneself about such things and work towards them. Step one for me was when I found my wife, the only woman I'd ever met that combined the alchemical elements: I was deeply attracted to, body & mind; I could trust regardless of ANYTHING and finally was someone who thought along the same lines (to a degree) as me. Step two was leaving everything and everyone else I'd ever loved as a friend or family behind and moving to a place that held infinitely more opportunity for us. Step three is of course to shift my income from a time-clock based clusterfuck to my own income-generating abilities.
Still working on that.
But Mr. Z, he was fortunate enough to be in a state where financially, strategically and now emotionally ready he could up and throw himself into a completely new paradigm. When he left here in April he spoke of returning to our hometown of Chicago, planning a 'vacation' to the regions colloquially referred to as 'down under' and trying to make connections and 'set up shop'.
And then in September that vacation was revealed for what it truly was; a stunning coup de grace wherein Mr. Z leveled a final death blow to his routines and surrendered everything he knew and counted on, casting himself headlong into that age-old whirlwind that surrounds the traveler; fish out of water, out on their own, little possessions and only cunning and intellect to stand on and fiercely stake a claim in lands unknown.
And by jove, Mr. Z has done well for himself.
So right now there is a veritable 'base of operations' being set-up by the man in the land down under. And I am quite proud of Mr. Z and continually wish him nothing but the best.
.................................................
* Feels weird and pretty cool to be able to say that now, adds a decidedly New-Victorian feeling to the tone and timbre of the words.
..................................................
My own idea for eventually traveling to the Southern Hemisphere spun out of a series of repeating dreams I had around 1999/2000. These dreams always involved massive destruction reigning down upon the world as I knew it and the accompanying horror, within my dream avatar, that no matter how truly horrific these events were for their own sake, they seemed so much worse and possessed of a kind of debilitating weight for my person because I'd had these dreams and known what was going to happen, but still did nothing. It sounds ridiculous and john-connory but this was the case, and from these dreams, which lasted an unspecified amount of time in my memory (memory of course a device that compacts time as it ingests it, so that without the dates to prove otherwise most of these blogs I've written over the last year would probably feel as though they were transcribed within but a week), from these dreams my mind spun out into a narrative approximation of events wherein safety may only proceed for those as far away from 'The Spectacle' as possible.
Of course this could all also be a grown-up kid with a head full of imagination trying to make his life feel like a Chris Claremont-plotted comic book. Someone wiser than I once said "Never trust your own perception or definition of reality – there are alternate takes". But progressing on this particular train of thought...
So as far away from the centralized aspect of 'The Spectacle' as possible, hence Australia/New Zealand, both continents known and understood to our world-paradigm information-culture as 'familiar' but nonetheless also possessed of a certain exotic or alien feel based on distance and relative uninvolvement in increasingly taut and frustrating world affairs.
Distances?
Okay? As example, Melbourne, Australia is ~8682 miles (13972 km) from Cairo, Egypt. Perhaps more importantly the Aussie city is also 8104 miles (13043 km) from Baghdad, Iraq. Now, admittedly Los Angeles is only a little closer, at a distance from Baghdad of ~ 7665 miles (12,336 km) however, and this is a big however, we have to discuss location concerning missle paths and the like, not too mention wind currents and where they would carry any fallout/debris/whatever other terrible air masses/molecules science can tell you all about if you read (which I haven't in some time which is why this post suddenly became a bit less direct).
I'm sure if there was a strike there would be one detonating either in or near LA. Melbourbe? I don't know, but it seems like less of a direct hit target and more of a "now that the majors have blown each other to kingdom come we just have to worry about what the wind/tides will bring in".
Wow, this is such a cheery topic, eh?
But now here's the thing. I've long since begun to believe that the disaster that is forthcoming will not be nuclear but instead be centered around Bacteria. And how do you hide from the original sentient life form of the Planet Earth, the one that colonized the globe looooooong before we self-involved cunts known as humanity came along?
You don't.
More on Bacteria later.
Almost six months later he had a visa in Australia.
Now, I bring all this up because while Mr. Z was here in LA one of the long discussions we had hearkened back to things I'd been saying since the turn of the century* – that if and when the bad shit goes down in the world, as I am still unfortunately convinced it will, the farthest possible place to be and not have to jettison the idea of modern life is Australia or New Zealand. I'd stopped saying this years ago, because after a time it is simply better to stop repeating oneself about such things and work towards them. Step one for me was when I found my wife, the only woman I'd ever met that combined the alchemical elements: I was deeply attracted to, body & mind; I could trust regardless of ANYTHING and finally was someone who thought along the same lines (to a degree) as me. Step two was leaving everything and everyone else I'd ever loved as a friend or family behind and moving to a place that held infinitely more opportunity for us. Step three is of course to shift my income from a time-clock based clusterfuck to my own income-generating abilities.
Still working on that.
But Mr. Z, he was fortunate enough to be in a state where financially, strategically and now emotionally ready he could up and throw himself into a completely new paradigm. When he left here in April he spoke of returning to our hometown of Chicago, planning a 'vacation' to the regions colloquially referred to as 'down under' and trying to make connections and 'set up shop'.
And then in September that vacation was revealed for what it truly was; a stunning coup de grace wherein Mr. Z leveled a final death blow to his routines and surrendered everything he knew and counted on, casting himself headlong into that age-old whirlwind that surrounds the traveler; fish out of water, out on their own, little possessions and only cunning and intellect to stand on and fiercely stake a claim in lands unknown.
And by jove, Mr. Z has done well for himself.
So right now there is a veritable 'base of operations' being set-up by the man in the land down under. And I am quite proud of Mr. Z and continually wish him nothing but the best.
.................................................
* Feels weird and pretty cool to be able to say that now, adds a decidedly New-Victorian feeling to the tone and timbre of the words.
..................................................
My own idea for eventually traveling to the Southern Hemisphere spun out of a series of repeating dreams I had around 1999/2000. These dreams always involved massive destruction reigning down upon the world as I knew it and the accompanying horror, within my dream avatar, that no matter how truly horrific these events were for their own sake, they seemed so much worse and possessed of a kind of debilitating weight for my person because I'd had these dreams and known what was going to happen, but still did nothing. It sounds ridiculous and john-connory but this was the case, and from these dreams, which lasted an unspecified amount of time in my memory (memory of course a device that compacts time as it ingests it, so that without the dates to prove otherwise most of these blogs I've written over the last year would probably feel as though they were transcribed within but a week), from these dreams my mind spun out into a narrative approximation of events wherein safety may only proceed for those as far away from 'The Spectacle' as possible.
Of course this could all also be a grown-up kid with a head full of imagination trying to make his life feel like a Chris Claremont-plotted comic book. Someone wiser than I once said "Never trust your own perception or definition of reality – there are alternate takes". But progressing on this particular train of thought...
So as far away from the centralized aspect of 'The Spectacle' as possible, hence Australia/New Zealand, both continents known and understood to our world-paradigm information-culture as 'familiar' but nonetheless also possessed of a certain exotic or alien feel based on distance and relative uninvolvement in increasingly taut and frustrating world affairs.
Distances?
Okay? As example, Melbourne, Australia is ~8682 miles (13972 km) from Cairo, Egypt. Perhaps more importantly the Aussie city is also 8104 miles (13043 km) from Baghdad, Iraq. Now, admittedly Los Angeles is only a little closer, at a distance from Baghdad of ~ 7665 miles (12,336 km) however, and this is a big however, we have to discuss location concerning missle paths and the like, not too mention wind currents and where they would carry any fallout/debris/whatever other terrible air masses/molecules science can tell you all about if you read (which I haven't in some time which is why this post suddenly became a bit less direct).
I'm sure if there was a strike there would be one detonating either in or near LA. Melbourbe? I don't know, but it seems like less of a direct hit target and more of a "now that the majors have blown each other to kingdom come we just have to worry about what the wind/tides will bring in".
Wow, this is such a cheery topic, eh?
But now here's the thing. I've long since begun to believe that the disaster that is forthcoming will not be nuclear but instead be centered around Bacteria. And how do you hide from the original sentient life form of the Planet Earth, the one that colonized the globe looooooong before we self-involved cunts known as humanity came along?
You don't.
More on Bacteria later.
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