The Ghost Light

Blue-Z

2012-01-29T23:34:00.002-07:00

Christmas Books

2012-01-16T21:16:00.000-07:00

kill screen

2011-12-21T12:12:00.005-07:00

Publisher's Summary

At once wildly original and stuffed with irresistible nostalgia, Ready Player One is a spectacularly genre-busting, ambitious, and charming debut—part quest novel, part love story, and part virtual space opera set in a universe where spell-slinging mages battle giant Japanese robots, entire planets are inspired by Blade Runner, and flying DeLoreans achieve light speed.

It’s the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place.

Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of 10,000 planets.

And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune—and remarkable power—to whoever can unlock them.

For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Halliday’s riddles are based in the pop culture he loved—that of the late 20th century. And for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Halliday’s icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes’s oeuvre, playing Pac-Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig.

And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle.

Suddenly the whole world is watching, and thousands of competitors join the hunt—among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. Now the only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is to win. But to do so, he may have to leave behind his oh-so-perfect virtual existence and face up to life—and love—in the real world he’s always been so desperate to escape.

A world at stake.
A quest for the ultimate prize.
Are you ready?

A Perfect Game? (1982 depth work)

--So long and T.Hanks for all the Mazes . . . .

Shall we Play a Game?

Tree of Life

2011-11-14T00:00:00.004-07:00

SYNC

all the world's a stage . . .

2011-11-12T13:06:00.006-07:00

the sun, a ghost light?

you can save her

2011-09-21T14:55:00.017-06:00

In the small hours that night I dreamed that four oil company execs were driving a black luxury sedan through the dark roads of wildest Idaho, when their headlights lit upon a naked woman walking down the center of the road. The four suits braked in astonishment, then eased their sedan up close.

The woman stopped walking and turned to face them. She was stunning. Full hipped, full breasted, dark-haired, unafraid. The men lusted instantly and ferociously. They were four. She was alone. But something in her eyes––an agelessness; extreme dignity; the lack of fear––prevented them from even making cracks about what they'd each like to do.

As they silently eye-raped her, another thing changed: they began to notice scrapes and bruises on her body, and an unhealthy pall on some of her skin. Fear of contagion bled into their lust.

The four men climbed out of the sedan and gathered, shoulder to shoulder in their dark suits, white shirts, silk ties. The woman stood across the car from them, totally vulnerable, yet totally calm. The men did not offer help. The woman did not ask for it. But, seeing the way they kept eyeing her injuries, it was she who broke the silence. In a calm low voice, without a hint of accusation, she said, "I am for you, as I am for all living things. All your lives I have moved with you in your every breath, as you have moved through me. From me you arrived, and to me your will return." She looked at her own body slowly, with the detached air of a physician, or mortician. "These wounds," she said, "have been inflicted by you."

That took care of one threat: the execs no longer hoped for sex. They knew too much about what had been done to her. Sex would be far too dangerous.

They decided to see what they could get by bartering. Since she carried nothing and wore nothing, robbery was not going to produce. But oil execs have their methods.

One of them ducked into the car, produced a chessboard, set it on the dark hood of the sedan. They challenged her to a match. When she merely gazed at them in response, it grew clear that she was passive before any human proposal. She had no choice but to play.

The men swiveled the board to give themselves the white pieces, and the first move. She didn't protest. The suits consulted in low whispers. One of them then slid forward a piece that looked like a white drilling platform. The moment the piece moved, a genuine drilling platform appeared in the Gulf––and a multitude of bruises appeared not so much on as under the woman's bard skin. She shuddered. But her voice was calm as she said, "You may do as you wish. And I will do as I must."

She made a counter-move sliding forward a black piece made of countless tiny carved fish, birds, marine mammals. As the piece arrived in position she sent a ray into the minds of the men, giving them a vision of what their move and her counter-move had wrought: in the Gulf, sperm whales, bluefins, dolphins and sea turtles by the thousands, billions of shrimp and fishes, and millions of birds disappeared from the planet in a writhing black mass.

The four men gaped till the vision faded, then looked nervously at her.

She gazed back without expression.

Less sure of themselves, but still determined, the put their heads together. One of them reached for a piece that looked like some kind of steel earth-eating device. When he touched it, and engine audibly started, then rose to a roar. He slid the piece forward into the boreal forest.

The woman reeled slightly, coughed up a little blood, but her face remained calm and her hand steady as she made her counter move. She touched a piece that looked like a black queen. the queen became a small black cloud. The woman slid it forward. Vast tracts of forest vanished, machines and modules roared, smoke spewed, land and lakes were devoured, sludge reservoirs appeared.

The woman coughed more blood, wiped it away, kept sliding the black cloud/queen forward. White pieces flew from the suits' side of the board. Hurricanes and tornadoes spun over the world.

Insane skies rained oil, dying fish, pieces of houses, shattered birds. Pipelines appeared a the speed of thought, ruptured over farmland, ruptured in cities. Earth's Poles turned to slush. Coastlines and islands vanished under rising seas. Refugees from inundated lands swarmed over borders by the millions, overwhelming hard-pressed countries. Glaciers vanished from every mountain range and more millions swarmed down from the highlands. Ocean gyres reversed direction Trees died by the billion. Nations went to war over water, over hunger, over dearth.

The execs gaped till the vision faded, then turned to the naked woman. She was breathing hard. The was blood at her mouth corners. Her body was a mass of contusions and burns. But her eyes were still clear, her expression calm, and her breasts, hips, flesh, at least in patches were still lovely to behold.

The execs put the heads together, preparing the next move.

The woman breathed, and waited, prepared to do as she must.

~David James Duncan The Heart of the Monster

strange attractor

2011-08-23T23:11:00.003-06:00

butterfly wings, or owl eyes?

strange attractornoun Mathematicsan equation or fractal set representing a complex pattern of behavior in a chaotic system.

summer (almost over)

2011-08-16T14:01:00.007-06:00

Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril

Leading environmental scientists predict that as many as 185 million Africans will die this century as the direct result of climate change. Many more will face untold suffering in other parts of the world. As I write, famine is increasing. Flooding is increasing, as are the disease and insecurity caused by water scarcity around the world. Climate change is real. It has begun. The countries that are the least responsible for causing climate change are paying the heaviest price. The average U.K. citizen pro- duces nearly fifty times as much carbon dioxide as any citizen in the developing world. And in the United States the production of carbon dioxide is significantly higher. This is a serious injustice. As an African, I urgently call on ordinary people in rich countries to act as global citizens, not as isolated consumers. We must listen to our consciences, not to governments who speak only about eco- nomic markets. These markets will cease to exist if climate change is allowed to develop to climate chaos.~Desmond Tutu

"Pervading all aspects of Nez Perce existence was their ancient and overriding relationship with the land. The earth was the supreme provider, to be revered--not owned--as the mother of life for all creatures. Human and earth were inextricably intertwined through birth, life, and death, in a nonmaterial nurturing that pervaded all aspects of existence."~Jerome A. Greene

&

2011-08-03T14:32:00.002-06:00

Nobel Nutcase

2011-07-26T17:22:00.004-06:00

Brian David Josephson, FRS^[1] (born 4 January 1940; Cardiff, Wales^[2]) is a Welsh physicist. He became a Nobel Prize laureate in 1973^[3] for the prediction of the eponymous Josephson effect.^[2][which is basically nonlocal communication-quantum tunneling]

As of late 2007, he was a retired professor at the University of Cambridge, where he is the head of the Mind–Matter Unification Project in the Theory of Condensed Matter (TCM) research group. He is also a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.^[4]

Parapsychology

Josephson is one of the more well-known scientists who say that parapsychological phenomena may be real, and is also interested in the possibility that Eastern mysticism may have relevance to scientific understanding.^[12] He has said that one of his guiding principles has been nullius in verba (take nobody's word), saying that "if scientists as a whole denounce an idea, this should not necessarily be taken as proof that the said idea is absurd; rather, one should examine carefully the alleged grounds for such opinions and judge how well these stand up to detailed scrutiny."^[5]^[12]

In 2001 Josephson's views on the paranormal were under the spotlight when he wrote about them in a booklet to accompany six special stamps to honour the 100th anniversary of the Nobel prize.^[14] The Royal mail had sent Josephson a request to write a small article about their award and the implication of research in their field they could use in conjunction with the special Nobel Centenary stamp issue.^[14] He wrote the following:

"Physicists attempt to reduce the complexity of nature to a single unifying theory, of which the most successful and universal, the quantum theory, has been associated with several Nobel prizes, for example those to Dirac and Heisenberg. Max Planck's original attempts a hundred years ago to explain the precise amount of energy radiated by hot bodies began a process of capturing in mathematical form a mysterious, elusive world containing 'spooky interactions at a distance', real enough however to lead to inventions such as the laser and transistor. Quantum theory is now being fruitfully combined with theories of information and computation. These developments may lead to an explanation of processes still not understood within conventional science such as telepathy, an area where Britain is at the forefront of research."^[12]

He came under criticism from several fellow physicists including David Deutsch, a quantum physicist at Oxford University who stated: "It is utter rubbish. Telepathy simply does not exist. The Royal Mail has let itself be hoodwinked into supporting ideas that are complete nonsense".^[14]However, Josephson maintains "There is a lot of evidence to support the existence of telepathy, for example, but papers on the subject are being rejected - quite unfairly".^[14]

In 2005, Josephson said that "parapsychology should now have become a conventional field of research, and yet parapsychology's claims are still not generally accepted". He compared this situation to that of Alfred Wegener's hypothesis of continental drift, where there was initially great resistance to acceptance despite the strength of the evidence.^[15] Only after Wegener's death did further evidence lead to a gradual change of opinion and ultimate acceptance of his ideas. Josephson said that many scientists are not yet swayed by the evidence for parapsychology and the paranormal. Josephson contends that some scientists feel uncomfortable about ideas such as telepathy and that their emotions sometimes get in the way.^[15]~Wikipedia

heart of the monster

2011-07-10T21:33:00.007-06:00

traveling here . .

reading these . . .

thinking about this . . .

play nice.

2011-07-05T00:01:00.001-06:00

something from nothing.

2011-06-13T20:34:00.006-06:00

"There were others who had forced their way to the top from the lowest rung by the aid of their bootstraps."

read.

Von Neumann proposed that all numbers could be bootstrapped out of the empty set by the operations of the mind:

The mind observes the empty set. The mind's act of observation causes the appearance another set - the set of empty sets. The set of empty sets is not empty, because it contains one non-thing - the empty set. The mind has thus generated the number 1 by producing the set containing the empty set.

Now the mind perceives the empty set and the set containing the empty set, so there are two non-things. The mind has generated the number 2 out of emptiness. And so it goes on all the way up.

Stated stepwise the operation is:

STEP 0 {} Empty set has 0 parts.

STEP 1 { {} } Mind generates set containing empty set, which has one part.

STEP 2 { {}, { {} }} Mind generates set containing two parts, the set and the set containing the empty set.

etc, etc

So the entire number system, from zero to infinity, is generated purely and simply by the play of mind on emptiness, in the complete absence of the need to refer to any material objects being counted.

http://kwelos.tripod.com/transpersonalpsychology.htm

Rand Om

2011-04-29T17:35:00.007-06:00

A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates is a 1955 book by the RAND Corporation. The book, comprising primarily of a random number table, was an important 20th century work in the field of statistics and random numbers. It was produced starting in 1947 by an electronic simulation of a roulette wheel attached to a computer, the results of which were then carefully filtered and tested before being used to generate the table. The RAND table was an important breakthrough in delivering random numbers, because such a large and carefully prepared table had never before been available. In addition to being available in book form, one could also order the digits on a series of punched cards. The main use of the tables was instatistics and the experimental design of scientific experiments, especially those which employed the Monte Carlo method; in cryptography, they have also been used as "nothing up my sleeve numbers", for example in the design of the Khafre cipher. The book was one of the last of a series of random number tables produced from the mid-1920s through the 1950s, after which the development of high speed computers allowed faster operation through the generation of pseudorandom numbers rather than reading them from tables.~Wiki

can you find a pattern?

Datafile: A Million Random Digits

Shakespeare's Sister

2011-04-24T23:50:00.008-06:00

"I can throw rays from every quarter of the universe into one vast focus."

did you know the first computer programmer was a Lady?

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852), born Augusta Ada Byron, was an English writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine; as such she is sometimes portrayed in popular culture as the "World's First Computer Programmer".^[1]^[2]
She was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron (with Anne Isabella Milbanke), but had no relationship with her father, who died when she was nine. As a young adult she took an interest in mathematics, and in particular Babbage's work on the analytical engine. Between 1842 and 1843 she translated an article by Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea on the engine, which she supplemented with a set of notes of her own. These notes contain what is considered the first computer program—that is, an algorithm encoded for processing by a machine. Though Babbage's engine was not built until 1989-91, Lovelace's notes are important in the early history of computers. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities.~Wiki

-but did she have a room of one's own?

She pondered her growing powers of mind. They were not strictly mathematical, as she saw it. She saw mathematics as merely a part of a greater imaginative world. Mathematical transformations reminded her “of certain sprites & fairies one reads of, who are at one’s elbows in one shape now, & the next minute in a form most dissimilar; and uncommonly deceptive, troublesome & tantalizing are the mathematical sprites & fairies sometimes; like the types I have found for them in the world of Fiction.” Imagination—the cherished quality. She mused on it; it was her heritage from her never-present father.
We talk much of Imagination. We talk of the Imagination of Poets, the Imagination of Artists &c; I am inclined to think that in general we don’t know very exactly what we are talking about. . . .
It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science. It is that which feels & discovers what is, the real which we see not, which exists not for our senses. Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds . . . may then with the fair white wings of Imagination hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live.
She began to believe she had a divine mission to fulﬁll. She used that word, mission. “I have on my mind most strongly the impression that Heaven has allotted me some peculiar intellectual-moral mission to perform.” She had powers. She conﬁded in her mother:
I believe myself to possess a most singular combination of qualities exactly ﬁtted to make me pre-eminently a discoverer of the hidden realities of nature. . . . The belief has been forced upon me, & most slow have I been to admit it even.
She listed her qualities:
Firstly: Owing to some peculiarity in my nervous system, I have perceptions of some things, which no one else has; or at least very few, if any. . . . Some might say an intuitive perception of hidden things;—that is of things hidden from eyes, ears & the ordinary senses. . . .
Secondly;—my immense reasoning faculties;
Thirdly; . . . the power not only of throwing my whole energy & existence into whatever I choose, but also bring to bear on any one subject or idea, a vast apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant & extraneous sources. I can throw rays from every quarter of the universe into one vast focus.
~The

Information

a science of sync?

brane new world

2011-04-20T09:32:00.016-06:00

now what's your metaphor for the universe again?

"Do we live on a brane or are we just holograms?"

"The Medium is the message."

Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar—a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist. McLuhan's work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries.^[1]^[2]
McLuhan is known for coining the expressions "the medium is the message" and "the global village" and predicted the World Wide Web almost thirty years before it was invented.^[3] Although he was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, his influence waned in the years before and after his death and he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles.^[4] In the Internet age, however, there was renewed interest in his work and perspective.~Wiki

The End In Sight?

or perhaps a return to an older form of consciousness?

¹⁵Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein." ~Mark 10:15

TOE?

What is The Now?

(death to literary man and literary consciousness?)

-seems like I've got an essay to write. . . . need more info

. . . were it not that I have bad dreams.

2011-04-16T22:51:00.013-06:00

[S]NYC review of books

2011-04-06T23:07:00.002-06:00

fishers of men

2011-03-30T22:36:00.010-06:00

"If a big wave comes in, large and unfamiliar fishes will come from the dark ocean, and when they see the small fishes of the shallows they will eat them up. The white man's ships have arrived with clever men from the big countries. They know our people are few in number and our country is small, they will devour us."~David Malo

David Malo (or Davida Malo) [1793-1853] was a leading Native Hawaiian historian of the Kingdom of Hawaii. He became a Christian minister and founded a church.

(it's a divided tail)

abiding w/ the dude. . . .

2011-03-18T10:29:00.008-06:00

Turning pages, Bridges begins, “I just saw the word joy, and I see it’s underlined twice, and I got a star beside it, so let me read this aloud and see if it’s interesting. “As you are dozing off, think of strong determination, that as soon as you wake up in the morning you are going to maintain your practice with continual exertion, which means joy.” We were talking earlier about anxiety, excitement. That’s an exertion of sorts. But you can have that same exertion, but have this joyful attitude. Like I can study my lines for the day because I’m anxious about it, or I can just have fun studying lines. This word joy—another one of the slogans is “Approach all situations with a joyful mind”—I find in my practice joy is a big part of it. My parents were very joyful people. Whenever my father came onto a set to play a part, you got the sense that he really enjoyed being there, and this was going to be a good time. And everyone was just—[raises his arms] raised! When you relax like that, you’re not trying to force your thing onto the thing. You’re just diggin’ it. My mother was the same way. That’s what I aspire to.”

The Natural

How Jeff Bridges works with anxiety and maintaining a joyful mind.

Katy Butler

Contact.

2011-02-19T22:55:00.003-07:00

. . . with?

Forever Now.

2011-02-10T22:00:00.002-07:00

EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY

happy Valentines

Bridging The Gap

2011-02-09T13:53:00.009-07:00

Lewis Henry Morgan (November 21, 1818 – December 17, 1881)

Lewis Henry Morgan (November 21, 1818 – December 17, 1881) was a pioneering American anthropologist and social theorist, and one of the greatest social scientists of the nineteenth century in the United States. He is best known for his work onkinship and social structure, his theories of social evolution, and his ethnography of the Iroquois. Due to his study of kinship, Morgan was an early proponent of the theory that the indigenous peoples of the Americas had migrated from Asia in ancient times. His social theories influenced later Leftist theorists. Morgan is the only American social theorist to be cited by Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.~Wikipedia

Die Brücke

"While studying Seneca society, Morgan was formally incorporated as an adopted member, in part to honor his work with them to preserve their reservation lands from being taken by European Americans. They named him Tayadaowuhkuh, meaning bridging the gap (between the Iroquois and the European Americans.)"~Wikipedia

Putting our faith in a new generation of creators and art lovers, we call upon all youth to unite. And being youth, the bearers of the future, we want to wrest from the comfortably established older generation freedom to live and move. Anyone who directly and honestly reproduces that force which impels him to create belongs to us.~Die Brücke manifesto

The God That Speaks

2011-02-04T15:40:00.010-07:00

Louis David Riel (22 October 1844 – 16 November 1885)

Chester Brown reinvents the comic book medium to create the critically acclaimed historical biography Louis Riel, winning the Harvey Awards for best writing and best graphic novel for his compelling, meticulous, and dispassionate retelling of the charismatic, and perhaps insane, nineteenth-century Metis leader. Brown cooly documents with dramatic subtlety the violent rebellion on the Canadian prairie led by Riel, who some regard a martyr who died in the name freedom, while others consider him a treacherous murderer.~Drawn & Quarterly

-I just finished this (241 page) work. Quite good. I actually stayed in a hotel named for Riel this past summer in Winnipeg, which is why I noticed and grabbed this book from my local library the other day--Strange and interesting place & guy. According to the graphic novel, Riel named the Canadian Province of Manitoba. In the work Riel states, "I suggest 'Manitoba'. It's a Cree word that means 'the God that speaks'." Riel is later referred to as "The Prophet" in the novel late in the struggle of protecting the rights of his people.

Rethinking Riel

Keeping it Riel

(first 12 pages)

. . . for they shall inherit the earth

2011-01-31T21:41:00.007-07:00

Big?

Have we made it yet?

(-i sing the body electric!)

technology saves.

2011-01-25T22:10:00.005-07:00

MoM + PoP = wholeness.

2011-01-22T22:38:00.008-07:00

recall our current state, the state of the union. . . .

Science and religion are often pitted against one another; but how do they complement, rather than contradict, one another? We learn how one man applies the deepest insights of modern physics to think about how the world fundamentally works, and how the universe might make space for prayer: John Polkinghorne onBeing

Critical Messages

2011-01-06T22:33:00.004-07:00

Michael Brophy, Tree Curtain, 2004, oil on canvas. Photo: Frank Miller.

Went and saw this exhibit today (first Thursday).

Thought it was something altogether different, thought it was about the idea of "play"--wrong museum. Anyway, it sums up my moment pretty well. . .

Steve Davis, Lime, Oregon, from The Western Land Series, 2007-09, archival inkjet print.

Rick Bartow, Salmon Chant, 1995, soft pastel and graphite on paper. Photo: Frank Miller.

Na'vi Gate. . .

. . . Gimme Shelter

Log42

2011-01-05T21:19:00.003-07:00

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

True Grid Response

Filed under: Uncategorized — d3b-432 @ 9:19 PM

An Excerpt from "Aisle 13" in response to True Grid Example:

As I started walking toward customer service in the front of the store I noticed something odd. “Captain Ahab” was stocking jellies and jams. At about the same time I had that thought an employee approached this man.

“Billy. You shaved. What do you call this look? Is this a ‘Captain Ahab’, or maybe it is called ‘Tug Boat Pilot’?”

“No. I just like kissing my girlfriend, and the mustache was getting in the way. It isn’t a ‘look’.”

As I walked by this Ahab, I considered Moby Dick and proceeded toward Customer Service. I had just read Moby Dick this past winter and was more than a little obsessed with it.

What was it to be aboard a ship headed by a madman whose motives were indecipherable? The ship sought oil, but the captain sought something more and stranger than revenge. He sought destruction of truth. He had been blackened by some kind of fire that scarred him from crown to soul and because of that he sought to destroy the essence of life? His only discernable goal was to destroy the sacred animal of his hunting tribe, which in turn would unravel the very fabric of existence.

The truth of the Pequod was isolation. Ishmael said as much. Everyman is an island or isolato or something like that. The only thing today that comes close to speaking to the meaningless alienation on board The Pequod is Radiohead’s body of work.

Radiohead’s whole career has been one of a loosing battle with the idea of meaningless alienation. OK Computer illustrates modernity’s union of plastic, number, and electricity. With Kid A and Amnesiac, one is convinced that the machine is succeeding in destroying humanity’s soul. Hail to the Thief leaves little to no room for redemption. Maybe the thief is Ahab, maybe someone else. “After all it was you and me.” I should say this though, In Rainbows children revivify us.

Meaningless alienation really became symbolically active in the 19th century when the snake in the garden was a locomotive. How does something that unites also divide? Was it literally an  that forced us from the garden? If we looked more closely would we see that “The Tree of Knowledge” was actually an electrical telegraph pole, and our expulsion from the garden is really due to our technology? Or, is something more fundamental the cause? Did we loose something bigger in the garden when we fell (asleep)?

My thoughts returned to Thoreau: “But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.” Radiohead’s response to our modern world then adheres to his notion of art: “The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition [slavery], but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten.” We can’t even conceive of a higher state anymore. Our fall occurs everyday in a Wall-Mart.

From this reverie in the garden I awoke to Radiohead’s “Black Star” playing in the background. I walked by the deli and smelled burning toast. Hmmm. Maybe my train of thought was driven by the song in the first place. Probably. Or, maybe my train of thought was driving the music.

robotron

2011-01-05T15:15:00.004-07:00

Man v. Machine. . . The Matrix has you?

Mind Games

Sad Robots. . .

. . . or Evil Bee?

where we find ourself today. . .

science or nature man . . .

life seeks balance.

everybody's a critic

2011-01-04T19:57:00.006-07:00

Up Front: Why Criticism Matters

Illustration by Leonardo Sonnoli

By THE EDITORS

Published: December 31, 2010

~Sunday NY Times.

read all of this:

Six accomplished critics explain the importance of their work.

Stephen Burn | Katie Roiphe
Pankaj Mishra | Adam Kirsch
Sam Anderson | Elif Batuman

Editors’ Introduction

More Critics on Criticism

going with Buzz. . .

2011-01-04T12:12:00.002-07:00

Living On Earth: Forged in The Stars

Tron Grit

2010-12-25T22:16:00.003-07:00

-tonights choice:

Woody

Buzz?

we went with Woody.

still visiting. . .

2010-12-20T16:42:00.006-07:00

EXCERPT

A Visit From the Goon Squad

By JENNIFER EGAN

Published: June 20, 2010

"Found Objects"

good people

2010-12-10T12:38:00.009-07:00

2010-12-01T14:45:00.000-07:00

sin

2010-11-29T17:09:00.002-07:00

The darkness you fear is yourself. Don't externalize your demons, they are you. Open up! Let's be guilty together. Let's make this comedy of errors a passion play. If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to be embarrassed [I'm bare assed] about!

"You were sick, but now you are well again. And there's work to be done."~Kilgore Trout

Soup's on. . .

thinking about the f word. . .

2010-11-28T21:36:00.003-07:00

~Guerrilla Girls

Move Forward

2010-11-19T16:53:00.004-07:00

"Venus of course rules the feminine and Jupiter rules personal growth and politics." ~Dana's Blog: Nov. 18

Shamanic Woolf

2010-11-05T13:01:00.002-06:00

Bring MoM & PoP back together. . .

2010-10-05T17:02:00.001-06:00

lacuna |ləˈk(y)oōnə|noun ( pl. -nae |-nī; -nē| or -nas )an unfilled space or interval; a gap• a missing portion in a book or manuscript.• Anatomy a cavity or depression, esp. in bone.

2010-09-21T16:00:00.001-06:00

this is almost as fascinating as pop music:

URL: http://www.TreeIncarnation.com/sphere_eversion.htm

THE UNIVERSE GENERATOR
The sphere which shapes our world

Extended animation of Bill Thurston's "Outside In"

If humanity is indeed the measure of the cosmos, whatever primal structure which creates the universe should echo the key attributes of cosmos nature and our bodies.

We are powered by vital functions such as the human lungs, heart and sex organs. Scroll at right to see: The contraction of the heart. Ribs over a membrane which expands and contracts. A phallic penetration --the reverse of which is the drawing apart which powers cell division. And much more.

2010-09-13T20:43:00.001-06:00

where did they turn a church into a mosque?

I think I just fell in a black whole. . .

2010-08-22T16:20:00.009-06:00

Edith Piaf Non je ne regrette rien

www.youtube.com

Edith Piaf's last and greatest song...

August 2 at 4:08pm · Comment · · Share · Promote · Report

2 people like this.
- The Sync Whole
  ‎"The song Non, je ne regrette is performed by Edith Piaf. Marion Coutard who plays Mal in Inception won the oscar for Best Actress playing Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose. She beat out Ellen Page, who was nominated with her that same year (2007) for Juno. Ellen Page plays Ariadne in Inception."
  
  -and those are syncs baby!
  
  my gaze upon "France" "Trains" and "Mother". . .
  August 2 at 4:13pm · ·
- Ehrlen xxxxxx
  No, nothing at all, I regret nothing at all
  Not the good, nor the bad. It is all the same.
  No, nothing at all, I have no regrets about anything.
  It is paid, wiped away, forgotten.
  I am not concerned with the past, with my memories.
  I set fire to my pains and pleasures,
  I don't need them anymore.
  I have wiped away my loves, and my troubles.
  Swept them all away.
  I am starting again from zero.
  
  No, nothing at all, I have no regrets
  Because from today, my life, my happiness, everything,
  Starts with you!
  
  English translation shows an inception at the end of the song.
  August 3 at 7:59am · · ·

Remov‎"Non, je ne regrette rien"(No, I regret nothing)

2010-07-23T13:21:00.006-06:00

DEATH AND ITS AFTERLIVES IN THE TAROT

Rachel Pollack

Does this emphasis on awareness move us away from the idea of a literal life after death? I would argue no, for it seems that the duality of literal vs. metaphoric, experience vs. philosophy, is one of the traps the Devil uses to hold us back from knowledge of our true selves—whether before death, or after. The whole movement of these last cards is to carry us beyond duality.
If the Sun was the light of revelation, Judgment is the sound. Together, they raise the dead. We then face a choice, an act of free will. Liberation or a conscious return to the physical realm of the senses. The choice is free. Instead of return the soul may separate from the Wheel and enter a wider World, reunion with our divine origins.

2010-07-23T11:55:00.005-06:00

I'm reminded of the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis today (by the other ghost light).

Both The Power of Nightmares, and The Century of the Self are something you should see to understand the age we are NOW leaving.

a quick look at some influential art movements. . .

2010-07-07T11:20:00.005-06:00

Romanticism or Romantic Era is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution.^[1] In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature,^[2] and was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography^[3], education^[4] and natural history.^[5]
The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, made of spontaneity a desirable character (as in the musical impromptu), and argued for a "natural"epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage.
Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate a revived medievalism. . .in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes more authentic than Rococo chinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.
The modern sense of a romantic character may be expressed in Byronic ideals of a gifted, perhaps misunderstood loner, creatively following the dictates of his inspiration rather than the mores of contemporary society.
Although the movement is rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which prized intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism, the ideologies and events of the French Revolution laid the background from which both Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment emerged. The confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities; indeed, in the second half of the 19th century, "Realism" was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism.^[6]Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as heroic individualists and artists, whose pioneering examples would elevate society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority, which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. ~Wikipedia

2010-07-07T11:11:00.000-06:00

Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It was largely an Italian phenomenon, though there were parallel movements in Russia, England and elsewhere. The Futurists practiced in every medium of art. . .

The founder of Futurism and its most influential personality was the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti launched the movement in his Futurist Manifesto, which he published for the first time on 5 February 1909. . . He was soon joined by the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and the composer Luigi Russolo.
Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. "We want no part of it, the past", he wrote, "we the young and strong Futurists!" The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists. They repudiated the cult of the past and all imitation, praised originality, "however daring, however violent", bore proudly "the smear of madness", dismissed art critics as useless, rebelled against harmony and good taste, swept away all the themes and subjects of all previous art, and gloried in science.~Wikipedia

2010-07-07T11:06:00.001-06:00

Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland, during World War Iand peaked from 1916 to 1922.^[1] The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry,art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. Its purpose was to ridicule what its participants considered to be the meaninglessness of the modern world. In addition to being anti-war, dada was also anti-bourgeois and anarchistic in nature.
Dada activities included public gatherings, demonstrations, and publication of art/literary journals; passionate coverage of art, politics, and culture were topics often discussed in a variety of media. The movement influenced later styles like the avant-garde and downtown music movements, and groups including surrealism, Nouveau réalisme, pop art, Fluxus and punk rock. ~Wikipedia

2010-07-07T10:01:00.002-06:00

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world.
Modernism rejected the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and also that of the existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator.^[2]^[3] This is not to say that all modernists or modernist movements rejected either religion or all aspects of Enlightenment thought, rather that modernism can be viewed as a questioning of the axioms of the previous age.
These oppositions are inherent to modernism: it is in its broadest cultural sense the assessment of the past as different to the modern age, the recognition that the world was becoming more complex, and that the old "final authorities" (God, government, science, and reason) were subject to intense critical scrutiny.
Current interpretations of modernism vary. Some divide 20th century reaction into modernism and postmodernism, whereas others see them as two aspects of the same movement.~Wikipedia

Garbage. . .

2010-07-03T17:33:00.006-06:00

"Garbage And Gravitas"

by Corey Robin

Unlike Kant, the emblematic modern who claimed that the rightness of our deeds is determined solely by reason, unsullied by need, desire or interest, Aristotle rooted his ethics in human nature, in the habits and practices, the dispositions and tendencies, that make us happy and enable our flourishing. And where Kant believed that morality consists of austere rules, imposing unconditional duties upon us and requiring our most strenuous sacrifice, Aristotle located the ethical life in the virtues. These are qualities or states, somewhere between reason and emotion but combining elements of both, that carry and convey us, by the gentlest and subtlest of means, to the outer hills of good conduct. Once there, we are inspired and equipped to scale these lower heights, whence we move onto the higher reaches. A person who acts virtuously develops a nature that wants and is able to act virtuously and that finds happiness in virtue. That coincidence of thought and feeling, reason and desire, is achieved over a lifetime of virtuous deeds. Virtue, in other words, is less a codex of rules, which must be observed in the face of the self's most violent opposition, than it is the food and fiber, the grease and gasoline, of a properly functioning soul.

2010-06-17T11:42:00.002-06:00

But by the time we reach them, those green fields are always in decline. The spell never lasts. King Arthur is always dying, and the Elves are always shuffling off toward Valinor, where mortals cannot follow. Narnia falls into chaos, then drowns and freezes, and the survivors retreat into Aslan’s Land. We think of fantasy and modernism as worlds apart, but somehow they always end up in the same place. They are perfectly symmetrical. Fantasy is a prelude to the apocalypse. Modernism is the epilogue.

The Believer - The Death of a Civil Servant

www.believermag.com

Cambridge Secret Societies, Complicated Smells, Boot Dealers, Poetry about Fairies, Freud’s Theory of the Uncanny, Virginia Woolf, Western Lordlings, Peter Pan, Flying Ships, Death-Proof Elves, Missionary Ladies, Trotting Knights, Murdering Beethoven, The League of Nations,The Antiquarian Revival, J...

2010-05-10T17:48:00.000-06:00

and the dark was made light. . .

2010-05-01T15:19:00.005-06:00

Omega Point:

Both of those days are history now, but during the years in between [11/9/89 & 9/11/01] "capitalism" became for me another word for maturity. I mean that I came to understand growing up as the process of resigning yourself to Reality ... the brute reality of egoism, the idiotic reality of competition, the imbecilic reality of the incentive-driven life and the duty not only to exist, but to exist with a cozy layer of lard on your ass and a protective patty of bullshit on your eyes. Two times nine, two times eleven. Like dust clouds rising from the double collapse, a special kind of consciousness billowed up from the debris of this decade, as yet unaware of itself, mine, ours: 119911. The palindrome-consciousness of my generation. A generation for whom all there was to see in front or behind were immense clouds of dust and debris. But it''s worth trying to understand it, this palindrome-consciousness. I don''t think anyone really has, not yet anyway. Its elders have gagged it. It''s supposed to just shut up. Well, maybe it can make a little noise, maybe it gets to speak a few lines, but only if they''re watered-down, sugar-coated, shrink-wrapped, and sanitized for consumption. The plan is to keep its voice stifled until the members of yet another generation grow old, petrified and contaminated, a thousand little renunciations stamped into their faces like crows-feet. And all this so that when the moment comes for this generation to claim its place in the history books and walk out onto life''s big stages, it will be too late. By then, that beautiful spirit forged by the double collapse will have been entirely co-opted, its need for air sated by snack food and other assorted trivialities. This is why I have set out here to document the phenomenon before rot sets in, before life has eaten away what is left of my innocence. I''ve had it with the sage advice of the compromised and resigned. Let me say right away-I know it''s true-our generation-the sons and daughters of the BOOM and the BADABOOM-our generation now has within its grasp the kind of power and the kind of honesty that can work the great changes, that can create real works of art. Every day I watch as our elders shamelessly extend their empire and spread their bullshit around and it makes me nearly blind with rage. Why don''t they just finish dying for fuck''s sake and take their miserable egos with them, their nostalgia, their State, their sexual liberation, their failed revolutions, their shattered illusions, their political parties, their parliaments and their putrid corpses. We don''t want any more of the historythey are writing. Here''s ours, right here!
For the children of the double collapse, the initial motivation behind the new spirit of revolt isn''t economic. It''s respiratory. It starts with a vague, unpleasant and overpowering feeling. A stifling feeling of being cornered, boxed in, buried alive! Does that do it justice? It''s a violent claustrophobic reaction to the idea that the world is a finished piece of work. That among other things, it has finally been confirmed that there is only one system of political, social, and cultural management available to humanity. You get strangely ill from having your options cut off like this; it''s a disease without obvious symptoms. Its first sign is an overpowering sense of powerlessness. Then nausea sets in, it moves up through the gut, chokes the throat and then spreads throughout the entire body. This is the malaise that is driving the spoiled children of the West as they attempt to rediscover the possibility of resistance. Was it just some kind of panic attack? I don''t think so. The last twelve years were clogged with despair. If we''re still here, it''s because we were forced to invent a reason to go on living. We had to forge an outlook that REJECTS RESIGNATION.~Camille De Toledo (trans. Blake Ferris)

2010-04-29T21:42:00.006-06:00

quoting from a blog that is resonating tonight:

Theatre Ideas: "Marga and Desi"

I was reminded this morning of Joseph Campbell, the brilliant mythologist whose Hero With a Thousand Faces, and his interview with Bill Moyers The Power of Myth, have been so influential in our understanding of the importance of mythology in culture. I'd like to quote extensively from the book The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work, edited by Phil Cousineau. On page 45, Campbell, in his discussion of Jung's "collective unconscious," says that
"mythic symbols come out of [the unconscious that each one of us shares], not out of the personal depth at al. Every mythology is, of course, oriented to a historical situation; it comes out of this people, this province, and that one and the other. And so there is that local inflection. But what is inflected are the deep energies of the total id."
He then goes on to discuss anthropologist Adolf Bastian, who called those common themes of the collective unconscious "elementary ideas." However, Campbell reiterates, "they always come to expression in specific social environments and it's historically and geographically differentiated. [Bastian] called those differentiations Volkergedanken, or ethnic or folk ideas."

Campbell then goes on to discuss the same idea as it appears in the art criticism of India, in which "these same two aspects of images are recognized. The folk aspect, which simply has to do with people and things in stories and time and space is called desi, which means local, popular. On the other hand the elementary ideas, when the diety is represented, are called marga, the path."

Campbell, as is the case in all of his writing, finds the common ideas, the "marga," the "elementary ideas," the "collective unconscious" that lie beneath the "desi," the "Volkergedanken." The structure of the hero's journey is one of these margas, a structure common to many, many hero myths.

To say that a hero myth from the past or from another culture is "universal" is to evoke the marga. However, the marga is clothed in the language, the images, the ideology of the time and place in which it is created. Marga "is from a root word mrg, which refers to the footprints left by an animal," Campbell continues. "So following the elementary idea, you are led to your deepest spiritual source." Once one recognizes the underlying myth in the story being told, no matter how foreign it is to your contemporary mind, it is possible to tap into the power of the myth itself. In fact, Brecht would probably note that the defamiliarization of the past or of another culture actually makes us able to see the marga more powerfully, since it is not caught up in the fog of contemporary issues and ideology. (Thus the settings ofThe Good Person of Setzuan and The Life of Galileo.) So those who point to the universality of past masterpieces are correct in referring to their presentness, their contemporaneity.

Nevertheless, marga-stories all wear the clothing of their place and their time. Their images are drawn from the vocabulary of the people to whom they are meant to communicate. While their clothing would have been transparent to those for whom the story was written, to us the clothing is opaque, something that must be explained and stripped away in order to connect to the story beneath.

This process of decoding requires a certain level of education (assuming that said education is oriented toward learning the great ideas of past cultures), and to that extent the process excludes those who do not possess the skeleton key that will release the genii.

2010-04-28T12:54:00.012-06:00

-I found these gems in my lunar craft last night, 427:

The problem for even the best-intentioned environmental action is that it imagines that it can confront a problem that is standing outside it. Confront the bulldozers. Confront the chainsaws. Confront Monsanto. Fight the power. What the environmental movement is not very good at is acknowledging that something in the very fabric of our daily life is deeply anti-nature as well as anti-human. It inhabits not just bad guy CEOs at Monsanto and Weyerhauser but nearly every working American, environmentalist included. Which is a way of saying that the Barbaric Heart is not unique to capitalism even if it finds the rationality of capitalism very comfortable for its purposes. The Barbaric Heart also inhabits many of those who are most vulnerable to capitalism, and it can function even within those who see themselves as capitalism's enemy.~Curtis White

My attitudes on such questions are dramatically inconsistent. For (a) I regard any gifts that I have, and any good that I do, as a matter of pure good fortune; so that the idea that I deserve credit for them is some strong sense seems absurd. But (b) I do not regard others’ achievements and good actions as pure good fortune, but feel admiration (and, where appropriate, gratitude) of a true-responsibility-presupposing kind. Furthermore, (c), I do not regard bad things that I do as mere bad luck, but have true-responsibility-presupposing attitudes to them (which may admittedly fade with time). Finally, (d), I do (in everyday life) naturally regard bad things other people do as explicable in ways that make true-responsibility-presupposing blame inappropriate. I suspect that this pattern may not be particularly uncommon.~Galen Strawson

And?

(I've been poking around at the sync whole, for about 42 minutes and all I came up with is this:)

This?

2010-04-23T11:12:00.005-06:00

A skinny young boy holds his breath and dives into the mouth of an underwater cave — a lacuna — swimming toward pale blue light as his lungs scream for oxygen. He emerges, gasping, in a ghostly cenote, a sinkhole in the Mexican jungle fringed with broken coral, wedged with human bones: a place of sacrifice and buried remembrance. When the tide rushes out, it will take the boy with it, “dragging a coward explorer back from the secret place, sucking him out through the tunnel and spitting him into the open sea.” He’ll paddle to shore and walk home, obsessed forever after by hidden passages that contain deeper meanings — meanings that only art may recapture. He’ll acquire a notebook and fill it with stories and memories; when it’s full, he’ll begin another and then another. But were he to consign these notebooks to the scrapheap, how would their mysteries be known? Who dares plunge into the wreckage of a discarded history, not knowing the risks of retrieval?

Barbara Kingsolver’s Artists and Idols
By LIESL SCHILLINGER
Published: November 5, 2009

2010-04-23T10:14:00.004-06:00

-"No fewer than six crescent moons rise in the sky." (this is worth your time!)

THE RINGS OF SATURN
RON MILLER

8 Wonders of the Solar System

"What might future explorers of the solar system see? Find out by taking an interactive tour through the eyes of Hugo Award-winning artist Ron Miller. Text and narration by Ed Bell"

1 THE RINGS OF SATURN
You are cruising in the troposphere of Saturn under the most magnificent ring structure in the solar system. Few sights are more astounding. The white, icy rings soar 75,000 kilometers above your head. Ring shine illuminates everything around you. No fewer than six crescent moons rise in the sky. The light from the setting sun scatters against a mist of ammonia crystals, forming a sun dog. You are buffeted by ammonia clouds that stream by you at speeds greater than 1,500 kilometers an hour. These are some of the fastest winds in the solar system. More than 30,000 kilometers below you, with pressures no human-made thing could survive, is a global ocean of liquid metallic hydrogen. There will be no landing on this planet.

2010-04-13T12:45:00.002-06:00

just dance. . .

Gong the Rat « A World of Words

svenworld.wordpress.com

Ruminations from the Spaces between Soil and Soul

The Sun Magazine | Enlightenment Is A Bitch

www.thesunmagazine.org

The Sun is an independent, ad-free monthly magazine that for more than thirty years has used words and photographs to invoke the splendor and heartache of being human. The personal essays, short stories, ...

2010-04-10T12:07:00.004-06:00

find peace in mindfullness & stillness

The Ultimate Dimension

By Thich Nhat Hanh

2010-04-06T13:58:00.004-06:00

this is sync.

Grief and rage--you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you--may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn't that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story for yours.

~Anne Carson

2010-03-30T17:10:00.003-06:00

Warrior Monks & Super Soldiers. . .

Journal of Non-lethal Combat: The First Earth Battalion

ejmas.com

syncbook

2010-03-29T14:47:00.005-06:00

on facebook. . .

reading convergence. . .

2010-03-27T11:56:00.016-06:00

To be, or not to be

I'm having a nice convergence of themes currently in the things I've been reading and watching:

Note the dualities. Science v. Faith. Good v. Evil. God v. Devil (Black Dogs & Smoke). Bridge!

2010-03-10T21:04:00.008-07:00

Red Eye Rules:

It’s about the increasing dominance—scratch that, the unqualified triumph—of a certain way of seeing, of reckoning value. It’s about the victory of whatever can be quantified over everything that can’t. It’s about the quiet retooling of American education into an adjunct of business, an instrument of production.

Duhumanized:
When math and science rule the school
An essay from Harper's
By Mark Slouka

2010-03-03T21:23:00.004-07:00

Exit The Matrix. . .

If you want to know what's really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of to musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than with truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless.

"The Serfdom Of Crowds"

2010-02-28T14:17:00.003-07:00

It is not all online, but should be read.

Growth Outgrown

[From The Intellectual Situation, Issue 8]

October 5th, 2009

Capitalism is a bet about tomorrow--and it's always the same bet. Tomorrow will be "better" than today. More wealth will be created, more resources will be used, and, excepting recessions, the economy will continue growing forever. The bet takes the form of credit and investment--you lend or invest a sum today to get back a larger sum tomorrow, because tomorrow there will be more of everything (except oil, old-growth forest, et cetera). We must keep lending and borrowing, laying the same bet over and over--whether via consumer credit, corporate financialization , or governmental debt--no matter what hindrances present themselves; if we don't, the system stalls and falls apart. No more growth, no more credit; no more credit, no more capital. By betting on growth we call it into being--for however long the wining streak can last. You can short everything but the system itself.

To Thine Own Self Be True. . .

2010-02-26T13:10:00.002-07:00

Hamlet & Claudius:

2010-02-20T12:32:00.003-07:00

The Labyrinth is thoroughly known . . .

-very much worth your time

2010-02-10T10:10:00.012-07:00

Stanislov Grof

On Nonordinary States Of Consciousness

After I began my work, I realized that we do not have a special term in psychiatry for nonordinary states that have positive potential, so I decided to coin one myself: I call them “holotropic,” meaning literally “moving toward wholeness.” What this implies is that we are not whole in our everyday state of consciousness, because we identify with only a fraction of who we really are. The Hindus say we are not namarupa, meaning “name and shape,” or “body and ego.” We carry deep within us a core of divine energy that is identical to the creative energy of the universe. Holotropic states take us — sometimes in small steps, sometimes in large jumps — out of our everyday identity and into deeper realms of our psyche, where we can reclaim our cosmic status. We realize our own divinity and our essential deep connection with other people, nature, and all life.

2010-02-02T13:26:00.001-07:00

This little book is completely turning my world around. So much.

2010-01-24T09:52:00.001-07:00

4:32

"A Message To Garcia" -"He asks no questions, makes no objections, requests no help, but accomplishes the mission."
flow.
--not sure what's up with the video. Love this song.

2010-01-23T13:19:00.000-07:00

I'm loving this book. Did you know honest Abe had a medium meet with him before he signed the emancipation proclamation? His wife went to séances pretty often. Also-Masons, Mormons, Shakers, and spiritualists of all sorts promoting inclusion all living in the same town. Crazy!

Mitch Horowitz

www.mitchhorowitz.com

Mitchhorowitz.com is the website of Mitch Horowitz, one of the leading editors and publishers of spiritual and metaphysical books. The site features information on new and upcoming books in world religion, ...

2010-01-22T13:02:00.000-07:00

So David Foster Wallace and Eckhart Tolle walk into a bar. . .
--I'm sharing this whole magazine one piece at a time.
This one about DFW really works well with the earlier piece about Tolle.
enjoy!

The POINT Magazine: DEATH IS NOT THE END: By Jon Baskin

www.thepointmag.com

The Point Magazine is based in Chicago, IL and is focused on publishing rigorous but accessible intellectual writing about the cultural, political, and moral issues affecting our world.

2010-01-18T15:10:00.002-07:00

Watched this lately?

I'm ready for Nosis. Soon Jim?

Where are we going DB? (Dave Bowman)

2010-01-17T15:12:00.003-07:00

Today's reading:

finding truth in The Happy Valley

w/ Rasselas

2010-01-13T10:45:00.000-07:00

My Medicine:

"The strange dialectic of Ovid's exile poetry, its oscillation between fantasies of recognition and fantasies of irrelevance, reminds us that narcissism is a response to the fear of insignificance."

The POINT Magazine: THE WITHERING OF NARCISSUS: By Jonny Thakkar

thepointmag.com

The Point Magazine is based in Chicago, IL and is focused on publishing rigorous but accessible intellectual writing about the cultural, political, and moral issues affecting our w