Author Archives: bc

TOYNBEE IDEA

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“SUBSTANCE IS INVERSELY PROPORTIONAL TO PONDERABILITY”
-Franklin Merrell Wolff

The Toynbee Tile media virus is a wonderful curiosity that I am happy to propagate onward, upward, and spiraling out of control!

The virility of this cryptic memetic aggregate, interestingly enough, does not spring from digital age machinations, this is no internet phenomena. These messages have been intractably embedded in the asphalt hardware of cities all around the Americas for over 25 years.

TLDR: The Toynbee tiles are messages of unknown origin found in the streets of about two dozen major cities in the United States and four South American cities. Since the 1980s, several hundred tiles have been discovered. They contain some variation of the following inscription:

TOYNBEE IDEA
IN MOVIE `2001
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPITER

My home city of Philadelphia, PA, USA is a focal point in the mystery, as there are such a great many of these plaques in our streets, and evidence suggests that the original creator was likely a native resident.

I first learned of this very peculiar rigamarole via Justin Duer, a highly notable Philadelphia artist/musician. We were sharing display space at the Philly Zine Fest, when he was interviewed by NPR about his long awaited documentary on the matter, Resurrect Dead. (Now available!)

Here is Justin and Co. providing further exposition on a Philadelphia local news segment:

It wasn’t until a couple years after overhearing Justin Duer’s interview that I would become fascinated by the mystery myself.

In late November 2007, upon catching a news story on the radio about the tiles, I began to poke around a bit on the internet for further information on the subject. I’d satisfied my curiosity w/ only just a few brief blurbs, when I inadvertently knocked over my copy of Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero With A Thousand Faces.” I picked up the book, and but of course, it had opened to a page wherein the word “Toynbee” shone out like some kinda clownish beacon.

“The hero has died as a modern man; but as eternal man – perfected, unspecific, universal man – he has been reborn. His second solemn task and deed therefore (as Toynbee declares and as all the mythologies of mankind indicate) is to return then to us, transfigured, and teach the lesson he has learned of life renewed.”

I felt obliged to dig at least a little bit deeper, and in so doing I turned up a video of a St. Louis local news segment, which features a man with a blue beard discussing Toynbee Tiles. And well, it just so happens that I know a fella w/ a blue beard…

I promptly fired off an E-mail to my friend The Capt., who confirmed indeed and of course that it was he in the video. (It seems the video has since been removed from Youtube, alas)

2 days later I would find my first real life Toynbee Tile.

Several months later, en route to my first day of work at a Philadelphia media company, I would walk over a Toynbee Tile while transferring from train to bus.

Having eagerly reported for duty an hour early, I then went to enjoy a coffee at the Penrose Diner, and while reading my well worn edition of Marshall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media”, happened upon the following passages:

“In his Study of History, Toynbee notes a great many reversals of form and dynamic…”

“In the ancient world the intuitive awareness of break boundaries as points of reversal and of no return was embodied in the Greek idea of hubris, which Toynbee presents in his Study of History, under the head of “The Nemesis of Creativity” and “The Reversal of Roles.”

And so it goes, the miscellaneous and disheveled happenstance of experience, where nothing happens for a reason, but everything can get put to a purpose.

“YOU MUST MAKE AND GLUE TILES! YOU!”

bc
Point Breeze, Philadelphia, PA
Friday, December 26th, 2008

P.S. This was originally published over at Only Maybe, where many further details and mysteries are elucidated in the comments section. (where the blue bearded man even shows up!)

Also! This was written before the documentary Resurrect Dead was released, which is the best possible exploration of this mystery, and is satisfying enough to essentially be the final word on the subject :)))

UFOS ON THE LAM

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“THE IMPOSSIBLE OFTEN HAS A KIND OF INTEGRITY WHICH THE MERELY IMPROBABLE LACKS.”
– Douglas Adams

During the winter of 1918, in New York City, Aleister Crowley & Scarlet Woman Roddie Minor conducted the Amalantrah Working. This sexual & ceremonial ritual was intended to open a “magickal portal” through which invoked interdimensional intelligences could come to physical manifestation. (!?!)

An egg headed character called LAM is supposed to have been the resultant visitor from this most peculiar experiment. Crowley claimed his artistic rendering of LAM (pictured left) was a portrait he drew from real life! The image was published in 1919 within a book of Crowley’s commentary on Madame Blavatsky‘s “The Voice of the Silence.” The image was titled “The Way” and included the following inscription:

“LAM is the Tibetan word for Way or Path, and LAMA is He who Goeth, the specific title of the Gods of Egypt, the Treader of the Path, in Buddhistic phraseology. Its numerical value is 71, the number of this book.”

Much has been made of LAM’s prescient resemblance to The Greys, those world famous pro bono proctologists from the stars, who starred in a great many alien contactee claims of Reagan Era USA, and are now pop culture icons.

“Lam is a Great Old One whose archetype is recognizable in accounts of UFO occupants.” Says Kenneth Grant, who Crowley gave his portrait of LAM to in 1945.

Michael Bertiaux, who claims to have replicated the Amalantrah Working in the 1960’s, described the phenomena as the “subterranean burgeoning of Lucifer-Gnosis.”

Such psychological interpretations of the extraterrestrial visitations actually seem to amplify the mystery! It was no less a luminary of the mind than Carl Jung, in his book “Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky”, who deduced that belief in UFOs better suited general opinion, which very much wanted them to be real. Jung then set himself to answer his famous question:“Why should it be more desirable for Saucers to exist than not?”

This curiosity is exemplified by the regular occurrence of hyperbolic mass media UFO stories, wherein any flimsy premise is suitable to instigate a prodigious memetic buzz. Typically there is nothing even remotely resembling proof offered, only mere assertion, which a great many decide to believe, but why?

Because flying saucers are symbols from an ancient dream language, Jung would propose, the circular shape of a self perfected and projected into the abode of the Gods. An ideal savior and/or nemesis of technologically alienated modern humanity, unidentified flying objects have been imaginatively interjected into history, disrupting the normal proceedings of the world for better and/or worse.

None of which is to say that UFOs aren’t real! Because of course they are, but the quantum leap in logic from unidentified flying objects to alien spacecrafts is something of a recurring curiosity. Regular as rain, someone with governmental bona fides comes out and confirms the existence of “UFOs”, which creates the pretext for a semantic hallucination, because “UFO” is a term that has become synonymous with alien spacecraft, but the presented evidence only ever shows unidentified flying objects. Amongst the confusion of this linguistic shell game highly questionable heresy creeps towards unearned legitimacy. My intent here isn’t to disprove the existence of alien spacecrafts, but rather to point out an age-old epistemological problem, as the Buddha might say, “sabda is not pramina,” testimony is not experience.

The mass hysteria induced by Orson Wells’ radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds on October 30th, 1938, perhaps one of the most effective media viruses ever propagated, is a perfect example of both how readily the public will accept news of an alien invasion, and how the aliens need not necessarily actually exist in order to dramatically effect the reality of the psyche.

“The saucer, no matter how alien it appears, no matter how advanced its demonstrations of power, is not a vehicle from some other star system, it is the oversoul of humanity up to its oldest trick.” Says Terence Mckenna, who frequently experienced contact with alien intelligences under the influence of entheogens, especially DMT, the hypothesized “Spirit Molecule”. Which is a psychedelic neurotransmittor found naturally occurring within the human nervous system.

Beyond even the psychological interpretation, I am most interested in the neurochemical interpretation, as advocated by Dr. Rick Strassman. The general premise is that within certain extreme situations the pineal gland is capable of synthesizing psychedelic quantities of endogenous DMT, thus providing a neurochemical medium for visionary experiences of any and all kinds.

DMT has also been proposed as playing an active role within the brain chemistry of the dream state, so I do here propose the alien contact experience may be a case of neurologically dreaming while awake. Though just to slight the non-believers as well as the believers, DMT is not thought to supply the content of hallucination, but rather just to change the ways and means of information processing in the brain.

Meanwhile in 1918 New York City, Aleister Crowley is told “It’s all in the egg.” When he questions this statement he is answered “Thou art to go this way.”

On Love On Wir

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A particularly neat thing about working with Hilaritas Press and the RAW Trust is getting included in the internal conversations about the technical side of maintaining Robert Anton Wilson’s legacy, and getting to see all the deep care and thought they’re putting into the new editions of his books.

A recurring discussion that occurs in regards to copy editing RAW’s books is whether or not a given passage contains typos or if RAW was being especially clever.

These mini mysteries are amplified by the fact that previous editions of RAW’s books, published by perhaps less attentive publishers, did indeed contain a fair number of typos, but also, RAW’s psychedelic prose was very much influenced by surrealist, occult, and experimental writers like Joyce, Pound, Crowley, Burroughs, etc, so some unusual usages of language are to be expected.

My favorite passage that got put through this review process was from Nature’s God, featuring Maria Babcock’s internal monologue as she drifts off to sleep:


“And if all this could be coded, as John said Leibniz said, into the one and the zero, the upright 1 and the cauldron-like zero, the wand and the cup, one l’oeuf one vier, on love on wir, ein loaf ein vir, and she sloped down and slooped up and slipped round into sleep.”

My case for keeping this text intact was as follows:

Okay! I think I got something on this…

So yes indeed since she is falling asleep the narration is taking a hypnogogic turn, and RAW is playing Joycean word games.

Generally speaking when deciphering holographic prose the etymology of the words is important.

Straight forwardly enough, “l’oeuf” is French for “the egg,” whereas “vier” is German for “four,” but also suggests “one who vies for something.” And what vies for an egg in this context? A sperm? Wand and cup, 1 & 0, wink, wink!

“On love on wir” I think continues the tantric thought, with wir as we, but also wir has proto-slavic roots where it means “vortex, whirlpool, whirl, swirl, eddy” continuing the seminal stream o’consciousness

As for “one loaf and one vir”

In the 1879 Harper’s Latin Dictionary, the word vir is defined as:

“vir, a male person, a man.”

Which may be as simple as having a bun in the over, but also I think I remember some story about a fella turning his body into bread or something??

I’m not saying that’s necessarily what RAW intended, but I think it def works as holographic prose  :)))

HARMON’S HEAD

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This is a model of the Dan Harmon created sitcom Community based on The Eight-Circuit Model of Consciousness, a metaphysiological construct developed by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson.

It is most certainly an imperfect mapping of the show, based on an imperfect psychological model, which cherry picks certain characteristics, and ignores others, but I found that it ends up fitting far better than I expected it to, and since the show is known for its impeccable story structure, it’s interesting to find something resembling character structure as well. For the sake of simplicity this is based on the original “Greendale Seven Study Group” incarnation of the cast.

1C. Shirley Bennett – The Oral Bio-Survival Circuit

This circuit is concerned with nourishment, physical safety, comfort and survival. This circuit is imprinted early in infancy. The imprint will normally last for life, unless it is re-imprinted by a powerful experience.

Shirley is a nurturing, morally simplistic, mother figure. She is concerned with what is “nice.” This circuit is considered the equivalent of Freud’s oral stage of development, and Shirley can be seen adhering to this role when she finds herself compulsively baking treats for the group to snack on. Her primary motivations are her three kids and her sandwich shop, both of which represent the obligations of the Oral Biosurvival role.

2C. Troy Barnes – The Emotional–Territorial Circuit

The emotional-territorial circuit is imprinted in the toddler stage. It is concerned with domination and submission, territoriality etc.

Troy is a childlike, emotional, ex high school prom king, whose character arc travels a trajectory from social domination to losing himself in deference to his relationship with Abed. He also frequently has territorial struggles with Jeff, the de facto leader of the group. This circuit is considered the equivalent of Freud’s anal stage of development, and Troy does indeed proclaim a fondness for “butt stuff.”

3C. Annie Edison – The Symbolic or Neurosemantic–Dexterity Circuit

This circuit is imprinted by human symbol systems. It is concerned with language, handling the environment, invention, calculation, prediction, building a mental “map” of the universe, physical dexterity, etc.

Annie is an exceptionally organized, intelligent, and responsible overachiever, who emerges as the most efficacious member of the group. This circuit is activated by stimulant drugs, such as caffeine and amphetamines, and so Little Annie Adderall’s pill addiction makes perfect sense in this context. Her efforts in the debate team, Model UN, the Save Greendale Committee, and her aspirations to become an FBI agent all speak to her desire to achieve agency via language and dexterity.

4C. Jeff Winger – The Domestic or Socio-Sexual Circuit

This fourth circuit is imprinted by the first orgasm-mating experiences and tribal “morals”. It is concerned with sexual pleasure (instead of sexual reproduction), local definitions of “moral” and “immoral”, reproduction, rearing of the young, etc. The fourth circuit concerns itself with cultural values and operating within social networks.

Jeff is a morally relative father figure to the group, which he formed accidentally after a failed subterfuge to try to get into Britta’s pants. Jeff is both a source of inspiration and mitigation for the group, which in either case is an exorcising of social control. He shows them the “right truth.” Jeff is an expert at manipulating cultural relativism in order to create his preferred socio-political environment. Jeff enjoys the power of paternity without committing to the responsibility of actual fatherhood.

5C. Britta Perry – The Neurosomatic Circuit

This is concerned with neurological-somatic feedbacks, feeling high and blissful, somatic reprogramming, etc. It may be called the rapture circuit. When this circuit is activated, a non-conceptual feeling of well-being arises. Perceptions are judged not so much for their meaning and utility, but for their aesthetic qualities. Experience of this circuit often accompanies an hedonistic turn-on, a rapturous amusement, a detachment from the previously compulsive mechanism of the first four circuits.

Britta is a socially conscious bliss ninny. She is well versed in the aesthetics of rebellion, but her understanding of the actual issues tends to be superficial, and consequently her ideas usually annoy more than they illuminate. Britta is no stranger to altered states of consciousness, she has been shown to be a frequent pot smoker and occasional psychedelic drug user, she has seen the world from outside the first 4 conventional or “terrestrial” circuits, but hasn’t fully integrated this perspective. This situation makes her something of an outcast, and she is consequently considered “the worst” by the rest of the group.

6C. Abed Nadir – The Metaprogramming Circuit

This circuit is concerned with re-imprinting and re-programming all earlier circuits and the relativity of “realities” perceived. This circuit consists of the nervous system becoming aware of itself.

Abed is a painfully self aware savant of media with extreme meta sensibilities. He has “medium awareness” and sees his world through the incidentally true filter of it being a TV show, and often becomes concerned with the multiversality of alternative timelines/realities. He often uses this transcendent perspective to program the behavior of the group. Abed may be the best example of the “metaprogrammer” archetype in all of pop culture. He can be seen experimenting with altering the social dynamics of the group via simulations in his dreamatorium, or by dosing the female members of the group w/ chocolate during their menstrual cycle, or by trying to directly alter the group’s reality by way of interfacing with the show’s storytelling conventions.

7C. Pierce Hawthorne – The Morphogenetic Circuit

This circuit is the connection of the individual’s mind to the whole sweep of evolution and life as a whole. It is the part of consciousness that echoes the experiences of the previous generations that have brought the individual’s brain-mind to its present level.

Pierce’s old age makes him both a source of wisdom and antiquated prejudice. This circuit is often described as the storehouse of collective memory, and Pierce does often act as an almost supernatural repository of information about the group. Pierce knows everyone’s secrets, and while he sometimes succumbs to villainy, he invariably uses this knowledge to induct the group into further maturation. The ideology of this circuit tends to be incorporated into a lot of new age bs, which Pierce would be perfectly comfortable with in his capacity as a Level Five Laser Lotus in his Reformed Neo Buddhist community.

8C. Dan Harmon – The Quantum Non-Local Circuit (Overmind)

The eighth circuit is concerned with quantum consciousness, non-local awareness (information from beyond ordinary space-time awareness which is limited by the speed of light), illumination.

Dan Harmon is widely considered synonymous with the show he created. So much so that the defining characteristic of the show in season 4, the one season where he wasn’t involved in its production, is his obvious absence. Although there is of course a small army of actors, writers, directors, designers, dungeon masters, and production crew members that help bring Community to life, it is the general consensus that the reality of the show is the imagination of Dan Harmon. And if you follow along with his podcast and documentary Harmontown, it’s easy to imagine all these characters and ideas churning around in Harmon’s prodigious and self-aware mindscape. Harmon is the part of Community that emerges out of meta-fictionality and is part of a higher reality, our reality, the real world of everyday experience. In the 6th season, and perhaps series, finale, Harmon effortlessly opens the fourth wall, and the show becomes a sincere expression about his real life, and his real life becomes a natural extension of the show. The sitcom as transcendent mythology. Cool. Cool, cool, cool.

The Tao of Alan Moore & Grant Morrison

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I have something of a fascination for the recurring manufactured drama between comic/occult/visionary writers Alan Moore & Grant Morrison. Often times billed as an epic magickal war, w/ thematic shades of Aleister Crowley vs. William Butler Yeats coloring the contextual landscape, this imaginary battle persists through ideaspace, converging into a mythic hypercontextual metanarrative.

There are plenty of blow by blow accounts that establish the conflict from each side’s point of view, each of which demonstrates the kind of selective attention and confirmation bias that one would expect from any such dust-up. For my own part I not only don’t care who is “right,” I disbelieve in any such animal, at least in this particular conflict. This is all a nonsensical Hulk vs. Superman argument for the Vertigo set after all, with impossibly low stakes all around, which is all the more reason to have some fun with it, so here’s some fuel for the campfire :)))
My all time favorite writer is Robert Anton Wilson, the iconoclastic, psychedelic, futurist, occultist, agnostic-mystic, who seems in many ways to have prefigured the likes of Moore & Morrison. Both AM & GM have professed admiration for RAW, and I tend to see their conflict in terms of each wanting to occupy the same role as the successor to Pope Bob’s illuminating, cosmic triggering, tale of the tribe. The Merlinesque sage. Though I doubt it’s actually that specific, and both AM & GM have surpassed RAW in fame & fortune anyways, but I certainly do think that both are trying to fill the same niche, preach to the same choir, and have misgivings about whether or not the town is big enough for the both of them.

I used to think that this was some sort of unfortunate state of affairs, the world’s 2 greatest magi, who should have so much common ground, engaged in petty dispute. Their egoless cosmic wisdom deployed in service of “well, he started it!” Though I’ve come to see this antagonism as a perfectly natural consequence of a metaphysical duality. They seem to me to be two sides of the same coin, a janus head locked in a discordian entanglement, the diametrically opposed Hodge & Podge of the Erisians’ Sacred Chao.
Their duality is explicitly evident even in just the plain fact of their contrasting visages, the mythically shaggy Alan Moore and the gleamingly shorn Grant Morrison. Though perhaps their oddly iterative surnames are the more obvious tell? I suppose now is as good a time as any to mention that the word “Magis” is a Latin word that means “more.” Though this interconnection goes well beyond mere superficial coincidence, and seems to permeate their creative personas and great works.

On the one hand we have the principled and incorruptibly working class Alan Moore, who has been unable to get Hollywood to stop turning his stories into movies, no matter how much venom he spits their way, and on the other hand, we have the stylish and glamorous pop art star Grant Morrison, who despite their great enthusiasm and full cooperation, has yet to see a direct mainstream adaptation of their creations hit the big screen.

It’s perfect yin/yang imagery: Alan Moore sitting in his hometown of Northampton UK, with an active disdain for the corporate entertainment industry, yet unable to escape its harsh spotlight. Meanwhile, Grant Morrison, cruising around the Hollywood hills in extravagant sports cars, actively developing mass media content, but still mostly creating their masterpieces in the comic book medium. (Though I do certainly hope and expect GM’s ideas will have their time in the mainstream, and by the looks of the new SyfyTV series Happy! that time may yet be upon us.)

Moore seems furious at corporate media for their exploitative and manipulative business practices, rightfully so, whereas Morrison seems giddy w/ their opportunity to exploit and manipulate the global reach of corporate brands to broadcast their idiosyncratic ideas, also rightfully so.

Morrison for their part seems somewhat aware and encouraging of the view that they and Moore are a dichotomous pair, as evidenced by their description of their contrasting approaches to the superhero genre in their book Supergods, comparing Moore’s approach to that of a missionary and their own to that of an anthropologist. Though this is a critical comparison that naturally favors their own style, there is an element of truth to how each writer has handled the unreality of the genre.

Moore’s superhero work was deconstructive in nature, bursting the bubble of these adolescent power fantasies by bringing real world logic to these imaginary worlds. Moore’s approach was to make the superhero genre more like the real world, where absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the concept of heroism is ambiguous at best. Moore brought superheroes to their logical conclusion, and having brought them to their end, saw little use for them moving forward.

Morrison’s work is a contrary reaction to this take on superheroism, which embraces a more idealistic perspective, and attempts to bring the wondrous surreality of these fictional universes into our own. Instead of making the Superheroes more like us, Morrison wants to make us more like the Superheroes, crafting aspirational and provocative stories meant to transform the reader into self actualized super beings.

I see these as perfectly compatible perspectives, Moore’s art imitating life & Morrison’s life imitating art, functioning as a virtuous feedback loop, as Stan Lee would say, “excelsior!”

And just to complete the bizarro circuit, Alan Moore recognizes no such kinship with Grant Morrison, and seems quite irritated to be brought up in the same breath as them at all. GM seems perfectly willing to acknowledge and praise the genius of AM’s work, and to admit to some degree of fault in their provocation of Moore. Whereas Moore refuses to acknowledge GM’s work might be possessed of mere competence, and expresses righteous fury at the indignity of being dragged into any of this ridiculous nonsense. (Sorry, Alan!)

These contrasting observations seem nearly inexhaustible, and you’d be hard pressed to find a significant character trait in one that isn’t antithetically expressed in the other, we Discordians must stick apart, after all, and these two have it down to a science. Though there is a kind of agree-to-disagree beauty to this odd couple, where each seems to strive to express that which is beyond individual expression, to become transparent to a light that is bigger than themselves, and perhaps this effect is best achieved through combined effort, unintentional as it may be. I know my mind is a much better place for having read from both of these oeuvres, and for that, I thank them both very very much :)))

SEE ALSO
KING MOB IN PHILADELPHIA

How James Joyce inspired Star Wars

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This is a fairly easy observation to make, but I’ve never seen anyone else connect these particular dots, and so here’s How James Joyce Inspired Star Wars.

It’s a well known piece of trivia that George Lucas borrowed from Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero With a Thousand Faces while composing the story of the original Star Wars movie. Luke follows the archetypal Hero’s Journey that Campbell outlined in his book. Though then another well known piece of trivia is that Joseph Campbell borrowed from James Joyce’s book Finnegans Wake while developing the structure of The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Campbell’s concept of the Hero’s Journey was inspired by Joyce’s monomyth. There is thus a direct line of influence from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to Campbell’s Hero w/ a Thousand Faces to Lucas’ Star Wars.

Not that there are all that many recognizably Joycean elements in Star Wars, but there does remain the general theme of common people contending against oppression while on a mythic journey of self discovery. What is it that the Finnegans are supposed to do once they awaken? Why they begin to rebel against the empire of course! In Finnegans Wake nothing ever means only one thing, but a particularly interesting interpretation, offered by Joyce himself, suggests the title is a warning to the ruling classes that the oppressed rise, eventually, in every historical cycle. That is, the Jedi always return.

The 7th installment of the Star Wars saga includes 2 potential high-profile references to the monomythic source material. The episode title The Force Awakens is a pretty simple jump from Finnegans Wake, and it’s an even smaller leap of logic to Finn, the stormtrooper turned rebel hero. Of course, these may be merely coincidental creative decisions, or worse yet, perhaps memetic synchronicity is an emergent, and especially nerdy, property of complex narrative systems :)))

The Rorschach test like aesthetic of Finnegans Wake’s holographic prose pretty much guarantees that you can find any number of Proto-Star-Warsian elements buried within, depending on how hard you are willing to look for them. For example: “right glad we never shall forget, thoh the dayses gone still they loves young dreams and old Luke with his kingly leer, so wellworth watching” (JJ, FW, Pg 398).

I couldn’t agree more!

For further connections between Star Wars & Finnegans Wake see Polish writer and translator Krzysztof Bartnicki’s Far Wars project :)))

Also, This telephone game of inspiration reminds me of my other fav second gen iteration: Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea’s Illuminatus! trilogy influenced Grant Morrison’s Invisibles which influenced The Wachowski’s Matrix trilogy. Though then of course Finnegans Wake was a huge influence on the Illuminatus! trilogy to begin with, and so it goes for what Terence McKenna called the quintessential artwork of the 20th century.

If you’re interested in diving into Finnegans Wake, without the commitment of contending with that impossible sea of textual mish-moshing, I heartily recommend WAYWORDS AND MEANSIGNS

A free unabridged musical version of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake created by a collaborative collective of intrepid Joyceans. Surf’s up!

Praise Caesar!

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My review notes from an advanced screening of the 2017 film War for the Planet of the Apes :)))

War for the Planet of the Apes luxuriates in its unique cinematic context, as the third installment of a very critically and commercially successful trilogy, but also as the 9th overall offering of a particularly ridiculous Hollywood film franchise. This movie has a mandate for suspension of disbelief that other films could never have, and uses it to great effect, creating a movie that is completely ludicrous, but also a wonderfully complex cultural artifact.

From its inception the Planet of the Apes movies have ostensibly been about the end of humanity, though more often than not the seriousness of that premise was hidden behind delightful rubber masks and fun sci-fi tropes. The reboot trilogy played it much more straight, but largely the first 2 films were just well executed action movies. War for the Planet of the Apes seems to have much larger ambitions, and appears to be trying to make a genuine artistic statement through the unique medium of the summer blockbuster. The film persists as a kind of pastiche of cinematic touchstones.

The first act of the film plays with the duel aesthetics of classic war & western genre films, before settling into a pretty straight forward Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now homage. And just in case the audience misses the references, the film hits you over the head with an actual sign post, spray painted on a wall, “ape-ocalypse now,” a jarring bit of meta-exposition that I don’t think many other movies could get away with, but here it just works, after all, it’s a Planet of the Apes movie! 

“IT’S A MADHOUSE!”

Though this supposedly summer popcorn flick then takes a perilous turn towards symbolically representing some of humanity’s greatest atrocities. A metaphor that at first seems far too heavy to place upon these flimsy pop culture icons, but again, somehow, they get away with it. The film piles on allegories of numerous oppressed people, so much so that eventually the specific cases give way to the general principle of dehumanization. The apes emerge as true archetypes of the other, making their eventual triumph magnificently cathartic and emotionally resonate. When the narrative journey of the film inevitably leads to the last remnants of humanity being obliterated, the climatic moment is a subtle, but interesting, emotional juxtaposition. The extinction of our species is experienced as a well deserved victory for our beloved protagonists. A conflict resolution that sends quiet ripples of cognitive dissonance through the viewers dual identification with both the main characters of this story and their own real life humanity.

The character of Caesar completes his heroic character arc, becoming a kind of Moses like mythic figure, bringing his tribe to the promised land, which then also completes a meta-contextual circle, as the story returns to its origins, waiting for Charlton Heston to come down from the sky.

War for the Planet of the Apes simultaneously functions as an action-packed-thrill-ride and as a thoughtfully constructed semiotic examination of modern humanity. Watch gun wielding apes on horseback ride boldly into battle!! As they also mostly communicate silently through subtle body language, bringing forth perhaps the most well realized representation of non-human intelligence in all of cinema. 

TL;DR: As above, so below! This blockbusting story universe movie synthesizes both the higher and lower discourses, adding substance to the spectacle, and emerges as a fine example of pop culture’s accelerating complexification :)))

RAW Currency

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Back in the summer of 2006 I created a novelty currency for Robert Anton Wilson to use in a crowd funding effort to help pay for his end of life care. The idea, as conceived by Vincent Murphy, was to print up some RAW money, Emperor Norton style, which Mr. Wilson would then autograph, and auction off on eBay. A plan which was pulled off w/ modest success, and ended up chipping in around about $1,000 to RAW’s medical bills.

(Eventually Douglas Rushkoff & Mark Frauenfelder would initiate a much more substantial fund drive, which afforded RAW the opportunity to pass away in comfort & levity.)

At that point I’d been studying w/ Bob for 2 years, and had become accustomed to regularly learning mind blowing life lessons from that damn old crank, but this one got me good!

See at that time I couldn’t sell any of my artwork to anyone at any price. Hell, I couldn’t even give the shit away! But in his hands 10 scraps of paper I made were worth $100 + each. Now the obvious difference is the autograph right? Except at the same time the RAW bills were selling on eBay, I won an auction for a signed coffee mug of his for $10. So what made the difference? How did RAW transform my paper into money? Well, magic, of course!

RAW had a bit about the surreality of the Federal Reserve, a private bank, printing money into existence, ex nihilo, which begged the question: what transforms that paper into money? And why does only the paper printed by that particular institution pass for money, and all else is considered counterfeit? RAW mused that the Federal Reserve must have a magic wand! After they print paper bills they wave the magic wand over the paper and presto change-o: the paper transubstantiates into money.

And the truth in that joke makes for some very funny money indeed!

So as to honor the lesson learned from this almost decade old caper, I should like to release the RAW currency into the wild. Print it, enjoy it, spend it, whatever you want it!

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE RAW CURRENCY MONEY SHEET.
A 2 page pdf, which if you print on a duplex (double-sided) printer, will give you 3 RAW bills per sheet.
(Cut out along the front page for correct trim size)

“Wealth is nature’s abundance, freely given, plus the exponential advance of technology via human intelligence, and as Korzybski and Fuller demonstrate, this can only increase at an accelerating rate. Money is just the tickets or symbols to arrange for the distribution—either equitably, in a free money system, or inequitably, as under the tyranny of the present money-cartel.”

From: Illuminating Discord: An interview with Robert Anton Wilson

I was reminded of all this recently after watching the entirely excellent film “The Big Short” wherein the absurdity of the finance industry is elucidated w/ stunning clarity. As the movie so bluntly states: “It’s possible we are in a completely fraudulent system.”

TAO OF McCLOUD

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A single Q&A with Scott McCloud from a Reddit AMA

bc: Hi Scott!
I must say I find it very noble that you don’t run around the comics industry throwing copies of Reinventing Comics at people yelling “I told you so! I told you so!” Though I know you’re skeptical about your own prescience, and haven’t seemed to have embraced digital distribution very much for your own comics. How do you see the concept of Reinventing Comics 15 years later? Also, maybe enjoy this ridiculousness! A comic I made and gave to you about 10 years ago, when you were at a store signing in Delaware, during a snow storm: MUTATING COMIX

Scott McCloud: (Great op art image there! Thanks. :)
There are plenty of things that I didn’t anticipate in Reinventing Comics like the importance of crowdfunding. And some of the rosy predictions that I made, which might’ve seemed prescient in 2010, could look sadly premature by 2020 if basic safeguards like Net Neutrality are murdered in the crib.
We’re really making some great progress in other areas though. Diversity of genre, gender balance, institutional support, public perception, the literary and artistic successes of the last 15 years… Those different revolutions that I wrote about are almost all on track!

BONUS! Back in 2021, I tried to google a phrase and the only result was from me 12 years ago talking w/ Scott McCloud, of which I have zero memory :)))