BRANDTRUEBOY

jamreilly: Collage by Max Ernst from his graphic novel Une...

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:32:49 -0500

Collage by Max Ernst

from his graphic novel Une Semaine de Bonte (A Week of Kindness)

“The novel was first published in Paris in 1934, as a series of five pamphlets of 816 copies each. The novel consists of found images from Victorian encyclopedias and novels, cut up and re-organized into 182 montages which represent a kind of dark, surreal world.”

via wikiP

R.I.P. Vic Chesnutt

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 00:10:00 -0500

Folk singer Vic Chesnutt died on Christmas after going into a coma from a suicidal overdose of muscle relaxers a few days earlier. It seems his desire to die was caused, at least in part, by him being overwhelmed by debt from doctors’ bills—over $70,000 according to reports. Vic was a quadriplegic from a car accident in his teens—in addition to the money he already owed, he couldn’t afford to pay for other operations that he needed. It’s another tragic case to add to the fucked-up chronicles of America’s long broken system, as reported by the Guardian UK:

At the risk of turning a personal tragedy into a political issue, it’s hard not to draw lines between the details of Chesnutt’s passing with the shortcomings of the current US healthcare system. While insured, Chesnutt reportedly owed $70,000 in unpaid medical bills and had recently been served with a lawsuit by a Georgia hospital. On the Constellation Records homepage, Jem Cohen, a filmmaker and producer of Chesnutt’s North Star Deserter vented his spleen at the United States’ “broken health care system depriving so many of the help they need to stay around and stay sane, and a society that never balks at providing more money for more wars but fights tooth and nail against decent care for its citizens. Vic’s death, just so you all know, did not come at the end of some cliché downward spiral. He was battling deep depression but also at the peak of his powers, and with the help of friends and family he was in the middle of a desperate search for help. The system failed to provide it.”

Although I hadn’t kept up with his latest albums, I’ve been a fan of Vic’s since the 90s, and was lucky enough to meet him once backstage after a show at Joe’s Pub in the City. He was very kind and charming, with a calm demeanor offset by intensely bright eyes. Those eyes lent a haunting glow to the dark oscillations (to paraphrase one of his lyrics) Chesnutt channeled through his poetic lyrics and evocative, nylon string guitar strumming. The show at Joe’s Pub had been a mix of new and old songs, including a selection from West of Rome, which had just been remastered and re-released. I’d discovered that album in college, and consider it a masterpiece of artistic vision and spiritual disasters. Despite it’s title the album was a definitive product of the Southeast United States—“smoked and honey-cured” gothic indie rock—you could hear it in Vic’s twang and picture it through the descriptions of dusty settings described in the songs. I’d go somewhere else when I listened to the album—somewhere in between my books and notebooks filled with my scraggly attempts to sound like the great writers I read in my literature classes—a place at an undefined clearing up ahead where I was brave and free enough to represent my own style of writing just like Vic represented own style of rock n’ roll.

The following is a blog post from the beginning of the end of the first version of this blog, in which the narrator, long since outed as playing all three characters at once, attempts to invoke the fictional threesome to allay her own impending sense of doom—imagining a scene in which a similarly depressed TRUE describes her feelings of loneliness and loss by invoking the the art of Vic Chesnutt:

04.15.2007
Become Famous 4 Me

I need the characters…the Magick 3. I need to call upon them again. TRUE, Sterling and Fitz. For the best time and also for the last time. I need them to help me get this right. I need to parcel out just the right words using their eyes as measures. As I’m walking down the street I imagine them pulling up alongside me in a car with tinted windows and a secret symbol stenciled across the windshield in iridescent ink. There they’d be—a few years older but still light years ahead. They had the attitudes and the style, miles of style, so much style it was waaaasted…

***

TRUE and I listened to “Little”, by Vic Chesnutt. She was lying across the couch—sick—but nearly recovered from a nasty summer cold. I was supposed to be taking care of her. Meanwhile my stomach ache got worse by the second. I’m always harboring these crazy longings to have a chilled-out time with just the two of us, but when it finally happens I can’t pull it together.

She sang along to the music, sweetly mimicking Vic’s loopy Georgia drawl.

“’A cup a day to curb visibility…’”

She closed her eyes and shuddered.

“Tea time,” I announced, hating the shrill note in my voice.

I pushed off from Fitz’s prized easy chair and headed to the antiseptic kitchen. He was still in Chicago, picking up sad and skinny indie rockers. “Can’t get enough of those assymmetrical bangs,” he liked to say.

“Hey.”

TRUE’s hand suddenly shot out and grabbed my wrist. I jumped and stopped in my tracks.

“Sterling.”

I looked deep into her blue eyes. For once they weren’t glassy.

“What is it?”

“Have I taken it too far?”

I peered down at her hand. Her grip was tight.

“How do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Tell me.”

I didn’t know what she meant, but I liked the conspiratorial tone she was using. It made me feel a part of something.

“I think it’s art for art’s sake.”

“Really?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Oh, come on!”

“What?”

“You only fuck around like you know what I’m on about.”

“That’s right. What are you on about?”

“You haven’t got a clue, do you?’

“I might have half a clue.”

“Oh, yeah?” she shook my hand free. Her eyes grew heavy.

“Maybe you do, what the fuck.”

“You’ve got to rest. I’m going to make the tea.”

“Fine, fine,” she arched her back and collapsed with a sigh against the pillow. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her so tired.

“Just tell me one thing…”

“Yes?” I said.

“Are we still recording?”

***

(via supersonicelectronic) The psychoanalyst Carl Jung thought...

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:12:00 -0500

(via supersonicelectronic)

The psychoanalyst Carl Jung thought that astrology was an intuitive projection of man’s collective unconscious—connecting his psychology to the stars at such a deep level that no causal link can be found:

It is indeed very difficult to explain the astrological phenomenon. I am not in the least disposed to an either-or explanation. I always say that with a psychological explanation there is only the alternative: either and or! This seems to me to be the case with astrology too. - C.G. Jung in a letter to Hans Bender, April 10, 1958, C.G. Jung Letters, Volume 2, 1951-1961, p. 428.

It was this analogous, acausal connection (“either and or”) that made Jung believe that societal changes could be influenced by astrology even in a world in which its study was marginalized. In the 1950s he predicted that humanity would begin a new era “when the spring-point enters Aquarius.” Jung was not specific about the date, but according to astrologers the fabled Age of Aquarius began during the early morning hours of this past Valentine’s Day. The fact that this major astrological event is occurring along with seismic shifts in the plate tectonics of world culture could be the meaningful coincidence—or synchronicity—that fuels a “magical” change in the world. This Age of Aquarius that we find ourselves in is a time of a major paradigm shift—not in the clean slate way that he thought it would be, but with the same dramatic implications for the collective psyche. The two pressing reasons for why we have to make a choice: we can either go with the ecstatic flow of extraordinary events or stubbornly hold on to the old reality and risk being pulled under by annihilating forces.

The global financial meltdown and the environmental crisis are evidence of a paradigm shift. We are living in a time in which new myths are being created. The stories bubble up to the surface from in between the seismic collisions of world culture—ecstatic “mega-ritual” events that take us out of our everyday understanding of the world—defying the language and the logic of average existence.

(via supersonicelectronic) The freedom from this distinction was...

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:31:00 -0500

(via supersonicelectronic)

The freedom from this distinction was among Andy’s greatest gifts. Not knowing what is real and what is fake creates a sense of all-permeating, existential dread coupled with the hilarity of ultimate freedom: like being lost in an artistic funhouse. Nothing is what its seems and yet it is exactly as it was meant to be.

ak47: yutaiguchi: 1970年代にNASAで描かれたスペースコロニー（宇宙居住地）の想像図いろいろ ...

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:50:00 -0500

ak47:

yutaiguchi:

1970年代にNASAで描かれたスペースコロニー（宇宙居住地）の想像図いろいろ : ひろぶろ

I looked out the window at the moody elegance of the Chrysler building and watched yellow and white lights blink all around like fireflies. I love this city because something’s always going on several levels deep. Beneath the surface level hustle and bustle is the constant slow churning of the old parts being made into new parts—bigger and stronger than before. Destroyed buildings come back taller—those from decimated families tumbled through and formed off-shoots. Friends that were families. The devotion I feel towards the city is far greater than any I could ever feel towards a single person. I wasn’t able to love the city as fully in my old life. Back then it was something I had to do battle with—it seemed to be grinding down on me and allowing only the tiny, fleeting victories. Now that I’ve changed everything is different than it was before—everything looks feels, sounds and tastes better. State of the Art. The further I drop out, the easier it gets. I’m no longer killing myself to live—just like in the Radiohead song. Next to the window is a large table made out of a piece of butcher block balanced upon four piles of cinderblock. This is where it happens—where I download the synchs into my brain. On one end is my desk with my laptop and my pens and magic markers and my stacks of black and white composition notebooks (labeled according to the subject matter they contained the notes of—“Psychological Weapons”, “The Matrix” and “Will Smith”) and at the other end sits a flat panel TV on a shiny plastic stand that is always on (although sometimes on mute). I sit off to the side of my laptop so that I have an unobstructed view of the TV screen. Sometimes, when the trail’s hot, I don’t go outside for days, living off of frozen bento boxes in my hermetically sealed bubble, 27 floors up.

Notes on Universal Feedback

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:05:00 -0500

(do-nothing)

One of the best ways to see universal feedback at work is through the activity of self-organizing groups. A self-organizing group is one that comes together without the hierarchy of a top-down command. Its members are motivated by their own desire to gather—not by paycheck, leader or religion. It’s non-corporate—grassroots in the truest, organic sense. The group exists because of deep, hidden connections that go beyond the everyday. The sheer number of self-organizing groups around today are only possible because of the flourishing of the social web. Applications such as Twitter and Facebook allow people to gather virtually—as one would at a gigantic cocktail party—complete with overheard conversations and the big names that are crowded by admirers and social climbers. The self-organized groups that have resulted are like groups of friends—the connections are fluid—at time tempestuous and at other times rigid and stuck in old models.

Unlike its social media cousin, Evolver.net, which was built with the intention of fostering not one but several self-organizing groups, the group on Reality Sandwich sprung up unplanned like a rhizome—a philosophical concept by Deleuze and Guattari which likens de-centralized, non-hierarchical systems to opportunistic plants such as ginger that use a horizontal stem in order to grow in-between trees. The trees were the old model—the top-down world in which authority came on high. The rhizomes weren’t bent on taking and replacing the trees as plant kings of the forest—they revealed a way of existing not as an either/or of systems but of an either and or. The botanical and conceptual rhizomes were about an expansion of possibilities—it wasn’t about doing away with the old—it was about coming up with that which was the least expected, like living life as a gathering of decentralized multiplicities in a world of towering, top/down metaphysical ideals.

The RS rhizome sprung up in damp shadows of the comment boxes. The posts themselves were submission only—their closed system based on approval factors formed the forest of trees while the comments became the twisting brambles and moss below where anyone who registered for the site could join in.

An old cohort from back in the blog 1.0 days used to say—sometimes comments are the best part. I don’t know if this was often the case given the generally high quality of the writing on RS, but what I did find to be the case was that the RS comment boxes were ripe for synchronicity—there were always connections being made through links or obscure references that would be mind-blowing with epic levels of uncanniness. I’d think—isn’t it crazy, I was just thinking the same exact thing!…or, wow, that’s the same book I was drawn to on my friend’s bookshelf yesterday—a friend who has the same initials as this commenter, making it not only about the connection of the book but about the friend, and the timing of having been over their place when I was, with the spine of the book sticking out from the shelf, just as the light in the room turned into long strands—the afternoon undoing its golden locks and letting them fall over us…

My research has shown that the grounds for telepathy increase in proportion to the amount of recognition that self-organized group members have of their status as members. It wasn’t enough to all happen to fall into a certain category in which they shared certain things in common—it was the group’s awareness of being a group that made the self-organized group truly dynamic. Not only were the commenters on RS technically members of a group by virtue of having a log-in and password, they were also members by virtue of an assumed curiosity towards RS’s subject matter. That said the group had no real rules—no membership dues or meetings to attend.

What was real was that you had the feeling you were in the middle of something. A way of thinking and being that was happening NOW.

Magical things happen in places where people feel compelled to gather without being coerced into doing so. Wanting to do something makes a huge difference in the experience of doing it—whatever it is. The feedback loops created in the comment boxes effects the entire site—from the writing to the graphics and layout—everything feels like it’s coming together according to remote control powers—there is the nagging sensation of a larger significance, the sensation of being one part of a bigger story.

(foresting)

Can you feel it? The light is getting brighter....

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 08:53:00 -0500

Can you feel it? The light is getting brighter. When’s the last time you looked at the sky? Have you noticed the shimmery wash of Alex Grey pinks and purples—the chem trail visual symphony and distinct sense of otherness that I feel is up there, right in front of our eyes. Something is different: am I the one who changes it through the filter of my own perception or does it look that way to you too?

Intricate mandalas flash in code—sacred geometry appears in the crops and the clouds. Information is becoming known by a new found ability that is in between hearing and sight—an increased intuition—a higher sense of coordination like the kind that sends the nimble-minded Google researcher cartwheeling across the internets. You go (joyfully) where the search leads you, remembering that no matter how chaotic it may seem at any given moment, the internet is a lot like life itself—we always make only the moves that we were meant to make—and only at the right times. Our human evolution is opening us up towards recognizing that our magnetic sixth (or seventh?) sense—the kind birds use to navigate the earth—is not about knowing, but about feeling.

Can you feel it?

(via peachme) Since the summer I’ve been getting deep in the...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:35:00 -0500

(via peachme)

Since the summer I’ve been getting deep in the philosophical mud trying to sculpt a theory of Universal Feedback and Flow. A combination of things—including a Nassim Haramein lecture I attended at Collective Hardware, my experiences DJing vinyl records, and a mystical vision I had on a Florida beach coalesced into the insight that everything that exists is a feedback loop both created by and creating an exchange of energy. What’s more this exchange is constantly happening—on the level of atoms all the way to galaxies and black holes, the universe IS a fractal flux falling apart at the same time that it comes together. It’s a snake eating it’s own tail. I’m learning how to see through the veil of the everyday and experience the constant back and forth just behind it. This exchange can take many different forms (perhaps an infinite number of them) but it is always a give and take of energy. By focusing on that which appears solid and true it is revealed to be mostly empty space with flashes of static appearing and disappearing according to a web of criss-crossed signals. Like the inhale and exhale that form a breath—or the hyper-awareness of one hand touching the other—or the journey inwards that is embarked upon by focusing on the myriad detail radiating in the single NOW of the present. It’s not a matter of cause and effect—that’s the tricky part, getting past the long held belief that one thing causes another. Everything that appears is the result of it being simultaneously discovered and created by our perception. The exchange happens all at once—it’s not that one part comes first and allows for the other, but that one part doesn’t exist without the other—like how the ying and yang is only a ying and yang. Similarly, the insight of universal feedback teaches us that we only exist as individuals because we exist as networks. You can’t have one without the other.

The illusion that one thing causes another has morphed into an entire metaphysics, in which meaning stands outside of a thing as an ideal that infuses it with its essence. We believe that things happen because of other things—taking it to the extreme of interpreting that which happens as being what we deserve, based on whether we are “good” or “bad” people.

Nothing is inherent good or bad. There is only the perception and misperception of individual events—and only from the vantage point of an all-seeing God could anyone know which was which.

It may be too early to tell, but it seems that what I’m creating is a philosophy of collective relativism by which instead of qualities what exists is the infinite quantity of possibilities present in each and every instant. In addition to facts and figures and all that is true and definite the masses learn to focus their attention upon that which overlaps and gets fuzzy, vacancies, null sets and static. These in-between places are where new myths and legends are born. We look for openings in time—wrinkles by which to stretch out an ordinary collection of charmed moments into an infinity of infinities—an epic tale like a necklace with a never-ending string of jeweled stones that forever cast their light in the darkest places.

A few months ago I had the first in an ongoing series of synchs...

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:20:00 -0500

A few months ago I had the first in an ongoing series of synchs involving the Mona Lisa. It started when I was researching pix of stencil graffiti online. The objective was to find and save pix of anonymous hotness, blow them up and print them out so I could recreate the stencil with a piece of mylar and an exacto knife for my FTW T-Shirts project—thrift store t-shirts customized with graffiti style stencil sprays. FTW (Follow The World) T-shirts was an experiment with online telepathy—the goal was to “magically” select the perfect shirt from the ranks of second-hand goodness and to intuit the right stencil design to add to it. As I searched through various Euro picture galleries of stencil-based street art, I felt my mind drift with the beats emanating from my red Tivoli desktop speaker, dressed in the distinctive clitter clatter it gave them—like the hard wood Italian soles racing across cobblestones. I dreamily clicked on this and that before coming across a Romanian stencil spray of the Mona Lisa—complete with the perfect accident of a tear-drop shaped paint drip in the corner of her eye. This caught my interest—I sat up—ready and awake. When I hit the forward button at the bottom of the pic, the next stencil was the exact same image except that this Mona Lisa had its head half-transformed into Woody Woodpecker. Perfect, I thought to myself, as I right-clicked triumphantly. This must be the feeling a fisherman has when making a prize catch after hours of waiting knee deep in icy water. I started typing “Mona Woody” into the Save File box at the exact same moment Slick Rick’s “Mona Lisa” came on the magic shuffle—a song that I had thought, until that moment, had been accidentally purged from my iPod:

Well, it was one of those days — not much to do

I was chillin downtown, with my old school crew

I went into a store — to buy a slice of pizza

And bumped into a girl, her name was Mona — what?

Mona Lisa (what?) *singing* Mona Lisa, so men made you..

I felt the buzz of the synch course through me—mixing with my happiness at hearing the track again. I felt awake down deep, like I’d downed a cup of coffee for the spirit—setting me off to investigate further, casting the hungry hunting bird gaze of my third eye across the internets. The synch told me this image meant something—it let me know I was on the right path. My google research quickly revealed that Woody Woodpecker was one of the few American cartoons shown on Communist run Romanian TV—which meant that the stencil undoubtedly invoked childhood memories for many Romanians of a certain age. Pop culture meets the masterwork, revealing the nostalgia and trauma contained within both of them. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to see the “real” Mona Lisa again—which is to say I wanted to see a picture file reproduction—the closest I’ve ever been to DaVinci’s work. As familiar as the image was, that post-synch google was the first time I could ever remember taking the time to really look at it. Other times I merely sucked in the familiar face vacuum cleaner style but this time I stopped and observed the sparkle in the eyes and the upward curl of the mouth—while all along I saw the reflection of my own face on the monitor screen, adding my own layer to the cultural assemblage that was the painting. I used what I had learned from my ongoing, virtual apprenticeship under Andy Warhol to recognize opportunities for art riffs in the exchange between the image and the culture within which it’s created. I’ve learned that the importance of a piece has to do with the expansiveness of its reach across the centuries. In the case of the Mona Lisa a core chunk of western culture’s expressive genius as well as its crippling repression is revealed in DaVinci’s masterpiece. He paints a deep humanity (light! Heat! Lust! Love!) glowing through a mask of culture and class.

I decided to make both stencils. They didn’t really fit with the ones I already had— the hip-hop head silhouettes and 60’s style psychedelic chicks with stenciled stars in their eyes, but the synch and the charge that being re-introduced to the painting had given me made it feel like a necessary part of my FTW line-up. The only way to really test the power of online telepathy was have lots of stencils to choose from so that I could intuitively choose one that was “right” for that particular shirt and person. I could put the two faces on the front and back of a single shirt—or just use one at a time or mix them up with other stencils. I chuckled as I imagined the possibilities of pairing ML with Eazy-E—or maybe Steven Colbert. I felt certain that no matter how I ended up using them it would be the right way— there was significance to them—something special, something with meaning.

As if in confirmation of this it seemed that as soon as I cut out the stencil I started seeing the Mona Lisa everywhere—on TV commercials and in print ads that appeared across the pages of magazines opened randomly. I saw her on display in the window of a poster store underneath the Port Authority. It seemed there was an especially large number of ML’s within a several block radius of Collective Hardware. A series of wheat pasted ML’s seemed an hommage to Andy on Elizabeth Street. It was a short stroll from the pizza slice bearing ML on the side of Lombardi’s Pizzeria to the Keith Haring mural of tripped-out orange and black faces on Bleeker and Houston—the eyes of which I’d considered making into a stencil for the purpose of giving the Twitter bird crazy staring eyes. I’d forgotten that this corner was it’s home. I wondered if seeing it again was a sign that I should cut out those crazy eye stencils—perhaps they were meant to go with the ML pix.

As I contemplated the green atomic symbol, dancing men and funhouse characters on the giant slab of concrete, a man stopped in front of me and took out his iPhone. I noticed that his screen background was a picture of the Mona Lisa.

I was drowning in information that I knew was important if only...

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:46:00 -0400

I was drowning in information that I knew was important if only I could figure out how to lay out all the different pieces. I was frustrated and about to finally give up when I received a series of signs. That was when the nature of my work changed—I went from playing detective to mining synchronicities. Everyone’s experienced synchronicity at some time or another—whether or not that’s what you called it. A series of uncanny “Twilight Zone” events connected not by causality but by meaning, as Sting sang in the Police song, “Synchronicity”:

A sleep trance, a dream dance,

A shared romance—synchronicity…

We know you, they know me

Extrasensory—synchronicity…

A star fall, a phone call

It joins all—synchronicity

The more I studied them the more synchronicities seemed to occur to me—each one taking me deeper into some tale to which I didn’t know the plot. What’s more, the coincidences in my life started to link up in uncanny, yet undeniable ways to various pieces of popular media. The feeling I got when these links were revealed was usually one of bliss and awesomeness. The first few times that it happened I tried to shrug it off. I told myself I was imagining connections where there were none. But they kept happening.

oxahau: blackholevacation: (via deversoir) Evening came and I...

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 06:55:00 -0400

oxahau:

blackholevacation: (via deversoir)

Evening came and I felt boxed-in. I watched TV all day and hadn’t caught a single synch—not a tremor or a gastronomical event or anything— just like the day before and the day before that. Usually a lull meant that an intense series of synchs were making their way towards me—even so, I couldn’t help but wonder: Was it all over? Was the download finally finished? Did I have all the information I needed? After all that I’d seen, a part of me still believed it possible that I’d wake up one day and everything would be back to normal…

trixietreats: samuraifrog: comicallyvintage: Who Needs...

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 17:10:00 -0400

trixietreats:

samuraifrog:

comicallyvintage:

Who Needs Sleep?

I love his beautiful death eyes.

Glitch Nation (Part Deux-Doo-Do-DaDa-Da)

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:04:00 -0400

Part 1

(nequest)

The idea of the glitch gets further turned inside out later on in the Matrix trilogy, when Neo meets The Architect who explains that although the prophecy is that The One will destroy the Matrix, what he or she will really do is reboot it—causing everything to be destroyed and then created anew in a slightly different variation. Among all the things accounted for in this new matrix will be a group of people destined to be the next rebel uprising. The truth is that there is no singular “truth”: all that exists outside the Matrix is another Matrix—similarly, there is no such thing as being outside of reality—our efforts to deconstruct it are what build it back again, efforts that begin with our awareness of the system as a system that can never be fully eradicated. Something always escapes—something unexpected—like an accident or another kind of surprise—a tiny bit of slippage that’s able to regenerate itself.

Is it possible that this understanding about the value of mistakes, glitches, accidents and our inability to make anything (or anyone) truly gone for good has effected our collective attitude to such a degree to have fundamentally changed the nature of that reality?

(via voodoovoodoo) Is it possible that by becoming hyper aware...

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:08:00 -0400

(via voodoovoodoo)

Is it possible that by becoming hyper aware of the way we experience reality we can change that reality? Perhaps a UFO sighting IS the experience of that change. The object in the sky is a blind spot in the context of our gaze—something that escapes our understanding and doesn’t make sense—a tear along the seams of reality that we immediately fill with unconscious fantasies. For the scientist Jacques Vallée, like Jung, the primary focus was not upon the “realness” of the craft but upon the psychological aspects to the event of seeing it. Vallée believed that, “…mythology rules at a level of our social reality over which normal political and intellectual action has no power….” He offers the following analogy by way of explaining what he called (back in 1978) the “open source” nature of reality:

Suppose you’re walking through the desert and you see a stone that looks as though it was painted white. A thousand yards later you see another stone of similar appearance. You stop and consider the matter. Either you can forget it or - if you’re like me - you can pick up the stone and move it a few feet. If suddenly a bearded character steps out from behind a rock and demands to know why you moved his marker, then you know you’ve found a control system.

My point is that you can’t be sure until you do something. Then you realize that what you were seeing, the thing that looked absurd and incongruous, was really a marker for a boundary that was invisible to everybody else until you discovered it because you looked for a pattern. I think that’s exactly what we have to do with UFOs. We have to do something that will cause them to react. And I don’t mean building landing strips in the desert and waiting out there to welcome the space brothers.

Vallée’s words bear an uncanny resemblance to the following scene from The Matrix—a movie that became a metaphor (myth) for the nature of reality at the turn of the millennium:

[Neo sees a black cat walk by them, and then a similar black cat walk by them just like the first one]

Neo: Whoa. Déjà vu.

[Everyone freezes right in their tracks]

Trinity: What did you just say?

Neo: Nothing. Just had a little déjà vu.

Trinity: What did you see?

Cypher: What happened?

Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.

Trinity: How much like it? Was it the same cat?

Neo: It might have been. I’m not sure.

Morpheus: Switch! Apoc!

Neo: What is it?

Trinity: A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.

(via supersonicelectronic) We tend to think of progress in terms...

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:28:00 -0400

(via supersonicelectronic)

We tend to think of progress in terms of scientific inventions and improvements in medicine, travel and technology—but I believe that the advancement of the human spirit has more bearing on the quality of our lives. The peaks and valleys of the story of our self-awareness are often visible only to an eye trained to read in between the lines of the facts and figures of history. They outline the true measure of human evolution, which is in the amount of self-awareness attained by the general public. It might not be obvious but thanks to pop culture we recently advanced to a whole new level. American inspired TV has taken over the world—and the internet has risen up alongside it primarily to give us a means to talk about our favorite shows and movies and stars who star in them. As a result we’ve reached a saturation point in which post-modern marketing is mass produced and served up in microwave-safe, pop art inspired everyman containers and packaging. Everyone knows what it is, even if they don’t know what it’s called. It’s a language filled with cues that run like a laugh track beneath and between our multi-media streams. It’s a brand new t-shirt with a retro slogan design. It’s the sample of a TV show in the middle of a hip-hop song, or a commercial about the making of a commercial that never actually shows the product its advertising. Marketers no longer expect people to buy into a straightforward message—instead they build a pre-fab ironic critique into their campaigns.

I’m writing this in a way that makes it sound like a purely bad thing, but that’s not my intention: post-post modernism is neither good nor bad, just like post-modernism wasn’t either extreme, nor modernism before it…they are merely stages of understanding in the evolution of the human spirit. From the all-plastic center of post-modern meaningless gleams the 9/11 center—in which meaning was simultaneously destroyed and disseminated—the need to feel blew out across the country like the burning dust that blew across the city.

In fact, everyday post-9/11, post-post modernism has become self-aware to the point of paranoia— it is our own gaze looking back at us—our own psychic projections that we see in the sky as well as on the TV screen.

This is a moment of cultural confusion—of mashed-up disjointedness and TiVo’d happy moments. We’re at the moment in time when the DVD has ended and we can’t find the remote and we’re too lazy to get up…so the menu sequence plays over and over. There’s a handful of frames and a bit of a broken song followed by short pause before repeating—over and over, the way a CD used to skip. This is our reality—the next step is not to turn it off but to fall asleep with it on, and dream a new life based on it—a remix of a sequence from a TV season—a series of weekday evenings strung together in a beautiful silver disc—dangling like a large pendant from a necklace.

The dream becomes reality.

(no wonder we call the plastic boxes CDs and DVDs come in “jewel cases”)

Writing this reminds me that Jung had a dream that he recounted in his autobiography of “lens shaped” flying saucer in the shape of a telescope—which led Jung to wonder whether he was dreaming the UFO, or whether it was dreaming him…

trixietreats: seditionsgraphiques: are2: Screw Loose ...

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:26:00 -0400

trixietreats:

seditionsgraphiques:

are2:

Screw Loose

Today’s perfect blue September sky drenched the city in crystal splashes of light reflected off of windows and glass building facades—cool dark shadows gathered at the edges of fountains and subway entrances, where office workers enjoyed abbreviated cigarettes and attenuated cell phone conversations…

If I squint my eyes the picture blurs and it’s 8 years ago…the see-saw of nostalgia goes up and down and I’m happy then sad then happy again…my love of life and this city rising high like smoke before falling back to Earth with a stomach clenching THUD…

Everything seems the same but I know it’s not. What happened to us on that day? What happened to me?

What have I become?

[9/11 opened a door to another universe—hence the plethora of doubles (especially double “ones”—which signify a gate) surrounding the event itself and appearing throughout popular culture in the months preceding it. A cursory glance reveals there are the two ones in the date of 9/11 and two planes that struck The Twin Towers, phallic skyscraper symbols of a capitalist power so great that it precluded all critique by already including its own opposition and meta-discourse, while at the same time resonating with the power of the greater two pyramids of Giza. There’s the phantasmal appearance of Frank and his twin rabbit ears in Donnie Darko (U.S. release date=1/19/01, an inversion of 9/11/01). The ears resonate with the idea of the rabbit hole as a doorway to a magical dimension in Alice in Wonderland. This other world exists within a surprisingly close proximity to our own reality, like Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings—a place described by Tolkien as being on our own Earth but “at a different stage of imagination”. The cinematic adaptation of this epic was shot between the twin doublings of October 11, 1999 and December 22, 2000, the second installment (entitled, The Two Towers) was released in 2002 (a year of two twos) and includes a character called Gollum—a creation consisting of half real actor and half CGI. Each of his scenes had to be filmed twice, the end result being a doubling of frames, a doubling of technology and humanity, and a doubling of fact and fiction.]

“Just Disturbia”— Lady Gaga & Rhianna...

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 01:00:00 -0400

“Just Disturbia”— Lady Gaga & Rhianna Mashup

There’s been too much worrying about all the time spent worrying—there’s been too much feeling bad. Too many “I’m sorry’s” to too many people. No matter what u do energy can’t be destroyed.. No matter how hard u try. You can penetrate anything you want. You can liberate anything you want. Everything’s exchanged but nothing counts, no one and nothing’s permanent…

(just dance, it will be OK)

I AM BRIDGE. …a reply in the form of a digression to...

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:14:00 -0400

I AM BRIDGE. …a reply in the form of a digression to @seallion

The Bridge

by Franz Kafka

I was stiff and cold, I was a bridge, I lay over a ravine. My toes on one side, my fingers clutching the other, I had clamped myself fast into the crumbling clay. The tails of my coat fluttered at my sides. Far below brawled the icy trout stream. No tourist strayed to this impassable height, the bridge was not yet traced on any map. So I lay and waited; I could only wait. Without falling, no bridge, once spanned, can cease to be a bridge.

It was toward evening one day- was it the first, was it the thousandth? I cannot tell- my thoughts were always in confusion and perpetually moving in a circle. It was toward evening in summer, the roar of the stream had grown deeper, when I heard the sound of a human step! To me, to me. Straighten yourself, bridge, make ready, railless beams, to hold up the passenger entrusted to you. If his steps are uncertain, steady them unobtrusively, but if he stumbles show what you are made of and like a mountain god hurl him across to land.

He came, he tapped me with the iron point of his stick, then he lifted my coattails with it and put them in order upon me. He plunged the point of his stick into my bushy hair and let it lie there for a long time, forgetting me no doubt while he wildly gazed around him. But then – I was just following him in thought over mountain and valley – he jumped with both feet on the middle of my body. I shuddered with wild pain, not knowing what was happening. Who was it? A child? A dream? A wayfarer? A suicide? A tempter? A destroyer? And I turned so as to see him. A bridge to turn around! I had not yet turned quiet around when I already began to fall, I fell and in a moment I was torn and transpierced by the sharp rocks which had always gazed up at me so peacefully from the rushing water.

Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

(via eatsleepdraw) Deleuze and Guattari’s utopian concept of...

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 22:02:00 -0400

(via eatsleepdraw)

Deleuze and Guattari’s utopian concept of becoming a Body Without Organs—either as an individual (in relation to his or her myriad personas) or as a populace—is becoming more and more of a possibility as social media rises in prominence, making all of the world and its people just a click away from one another. The ability to connect without the intermediary of a government or a corporation is itself revolutionary—as it allows groups to form organically, as opposed to hierarchically. The many are talking to the many. The false divisions between being the head of an organism and being its feet are being eradicated, as each one of us realizes that we each have a role to play. The lowly colon and fingernails are just as important as the celebrated biceps, or poetical eyes. It isn’t only a matter of needing one another to survive—it’s that we wouldn’t even exist in the first place if not as a network.

oxahau: Al unísono I took out one of the buds and placed it on a...

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:22:00 -0400

oxahau:

Al unísono

I took out one of the buds and placed it on a white piece of paper. Even the shadow that it cast under the army of halogen desk lamps looked like something from another dimension. The purple red and golden leaves (which were themselves tricked out with jagged punk rock edges) were coated with crystallized bits of what looked like thread encrusted with glittery pixie dust powder. I dug out a small clump from the bud to reveal more tiny threads—now they looked like wiring, like the inside of a gutted microphone. Everything about it was at once very different from other plants and yet still undeniably plant-like—from the dankness of its thick green aroma to the small stalks that looked like miniature pieces of broccoli. There were no seeds. You wouldn’t say it was dirt or mineral or flesh. It wasn’t fruit, synthetic or manmade in any way. And yet man had been an influence, a caretaker and a guide to it becoming an advanced version of itself.