WEIRDOVERSE

Artsy-Fartsy Mumbo Jumbo

TOYNBEE IDEA

Posted on August 4, 2019 by bc

“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

Posted on January 27, 2019 by bc

“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.”

How James Joyce inspired Star Wars

Posted on December 21, 2017 by bc

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!

Posted on January 6, 2017 by bc

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 :)))