The end of chatter...

and I have nothing to say lately...

Alzheimer's theory...

I don't know much about Alzheimer's Disease, just the basics. Of course that makes me completely unqualified to utter any medically sound or reasonably informed statements about this serious issue. So here goes! Could it be that this relatively modern sub-class in the age-old condition of old-age senility is evolution's way of switching gears on us before we go? By that I mean could it be that we return to all the phases of animal consciousness we experienced in the womb in reverse order? I'll take my theory one step further: Could it be that we are seeing a higher incidence of Alzheimer's because somehow modernity, with all of its toxins, pharmaceuticals, and fast living, causes us to spend our allotment of human consciousness before our biological clock ticks out?

(Image: A room for sensory integration therapy, or snoezelen; an emotion-oriented psychosocial intervention for people with dementia. Talk about psychic triggers!)

Some observations on drinking...

So, two months no booze. Fascinating to feel the brain and the overall system rewiring itself. I stopped not because there was "an issue," but because I was done with the stuff. There were taxes on the smallest amounts: A glass of wine would cause head-splitting, ear-ringing headaches, a beer would bring on brain fogs that would make London jealous. I think I'm allergic to the stuff. Actually, I think we all are. Uh oh... here comes the soap box...

A couple of thoughts (ok, 3):

1) People often drink to "unhook" themselves from the day. It's a hugely reinforced ritual - toil by day in misery and drown your sorrows in spirits by night. That interruption, that ritualized disengagement from the natural flow of one's life, has an interesting effect - I call it Groundhog Day Syndrome. You see, by "letting go" of your sober, suffering self, and jumping tracks to a looser, less stressful headspace, you create a cycle of repetition. You wake up, compromised and weary of the situation you psychologically distanced yourself from with drinking. You struggle to get through it, emotions throbbing, synapses shooting blanks, yearning for escape. Rinse. Repeat.

2) If you look around, alcohol is praised like a godsend. People talk about it winking and nudgingly, hinting at a wild and crazy inner self that comes out when the work is done. People strongly identify themselves by their choices of booze: The pretense of wine. The all American Budweiser. That quiet girl in marketing and her Margarita blowjobs. The worship. The bravery. The release! Alcohol loosens our inhibitions and makes us feel, temporarily, euphoric. (You know the rest.) Why is this?

3) What if alcoholic beverages were actually teaming with "intelligent" lifeforms that had a single goal: to colonize our bodies and eat away our brains and livers? What if over millions of years these bacterium and spirochetes had found a really good way of tricking us into welcoming them into our bodies? As in: Beguile the host with a veil of pleasure! The old Trojan horse set-up, or better yet, the siren on the rock, or what about a pretty green lady who beckons and prevents us from realizing we've been invaded until it's too late!


("The Absinthe Drinker" by Victor Oliva)

Brian & Bob...

Watch this one through - the finger counting sequence at the end is fantastic... Somehow reminds me of this spontaneous ramble jumble...

Indelible moments...

When you discover something that you can feel confident about at the deepest levels of thinking and feeling, you have found the yardstick by which you will measure all future experience. Do you remember what that something is?

("Le Jardin" by Walton Ford)

"Thiscintigration"

The sudden, profound awareness that the closest we can get to "reality" is through a loose interpretation cobbled together by our perceptions. The realization that our senses can be manipulated and misinformed. The breakdown of the here and now into nonsensical elements.

WARNING - DO NOT DRIVE OR OPERATE HEAVY MACHINERY AFTER VIEWING.

"Deventure"...

Gearing up to go to an anticipated event, going to the event, reaching the front door and for whatever reason, not going to the event and just walking around, following your nose, and having a much, much better time than you would have had at the event.

"Maispacey"

The tendency for anything potentially great (or just good) to be ruined as it is smothered under the shellack of someone's insistent and utterly dopey personal glaze. Bad taste by way of an unchecked over-assertion. For example, I'm sitting in what is, at its core, a very beautiful garden in the back of a schmancy West Hollywood establishment. Of course, just a nice shady grassy space would be too little, not enough cloying thematic treacle you know. So, there has to be an abundance of cute bamboo furnishings, a massive zen pond, koto music piped in, and a front room filled with enough Asian-flavored New Age crap to make your chi sink into your chai.

"Infoxication"...

...Intellectual intoxication produced by an excess of information. The excess of information that comes with the landslide of available information present nowadays produces occasionally a difficulty in assimilating such a volume in a reduced time. The consequence is time becoming a very scarce resource and, therefore, getting the attention of the audience becomes a priority in Internet.

Source

"Keanuphobia"...

...The fear that Google is really just another layer of the Matrix that appears to answer questions and provide information when really all it does is keep you Googling in the Googleplex.

Evolution and pole shifts in pop values...

Remember when cads and sex-starved maniacs were all the rage? So many aspects of pop culture which seemed "on the money" at the time make little sense to us now. Conversely, I believe that we're in the midst of a paradigm shift at the moment, and so the reverse is true. Things are about to start happening that won't make any sense to us now, but will make perfect sense in five to ten years.

(More blue cartoons by Playboy illustrator Erich Sokol here)

News Giant...

Very sad to lose the voice and tenacity and humanity of Tim Russert, one of the great broadcast newsmen of our era. The coverage of the coming election will spin on a different axis as a result of his passing. To what degree is in the hands of his colleagues. RIP.

On the bus, own the bus...

If Muhammad Ali were born into a world with no boxing rings what would his forum have been? His engagement with life is total and unstoppable. Not all of us are in possession of such an irrepressibly fluid life force. If pianos didn't exist, Mozart most likely would have been a crazy man. If the presidency didn't exist George Bush would have been a tipsy baseball fan. And if _______ didn't exist, then Pablo Gazpachot would just be another faceless blogger.

("Ali, Zaire 1974" by Howard Bingham)

Hello, you live in the Corporate Era...

"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism
because it is a merger of State and corporate power."

- Benito Mussolini

Inside the creative bubble...

(Visuals: "Genesis" Music: "In My Room" Beach Boys)

Improvised Ecstatic Device...

While in an ecstatic state, Shri Maharaj Ji becomes completely unaware of his surroundings and is unable to clothe or feed himself, let alone find shelter. Those who happen upon him during an ecstatic state care for him as if he were a helpless child. When Maharajji Kripalu is experiencing ecstasy, he is also unpredictable, arriving and leaving unexpectedly. Regardless of what he may have been doing, his divine ecstasies often cause him to leave for another Indian home, village, or city. Because of his pattern of ecstatic wanderings, especially when he was young, many people are able to witness his samadhi and be inspired by his divine nature.

Achieving a sustainable madness...

I'd like to call for a new round of experiments in creative madness. The kind that got started in the 1960s... Hold it right there Rainbow... Put the god's eye down Moonbeam. This time it doesn't have to include every frizzy-haired freak jumping on the bandwagon, just a few visionaries who can restrain themselves from over indulgence and really focus on refolding the old envelope into new origami shapes.

“The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.” says Mick Jagger in Performance.

There's truthiness in that statement. I mean a large part of all that madness in the 60s was just people saying: hey, life is precious, why are we wasting it on corporate servitude and fearfulness? Let's unglue this system and see what this species (i.e. humanity) can really do. The madness was a way of shaking off the shackles of mundane, repetitious conventionality. Unfortunately, drugs entered the picture, and in my opinion that's where it all went down the shitter. I think drugs clouded the issue of exploration and gave plenty of really adventurous souls permission to act like idiots and over indulge their "trips" into so-called alternative living. They got lost in the non-plot - albeit somewhat ecstatically - much the way the film Performance does. Also important to note how some pop experiments went awry in places like Altamont where the raw stench of humanity was simply too powerful to channel in any meaningful direction. Sympathy for the Devil may have been a good track for igniting imaginations over headphones, but not such a great choice for the powderkeg atmosphere of a live venue.


Today we are living in remarkably creative (and yet somehow constrictive) times. The Internet has unleashed enormous waves of innovation and personal expression, it's just that there's really not much of a way for the cream to rise to the top. Creative chaos is the flavor of the day - in some ways it's a very Utopian state for a society to achieve, however, it necessarily implodes under the magnificent weight of its unsupported output. What is the infrastructure of a dream, man?

(image from Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain)

Running from mirrors...

If you sat down at a table with three other yous - that's three other people who were you - not copies, not twins, not robot replicas, Y-O-U - how would that go? Would you have things to talk about? Laugh about? Would you be fascinated and probing, guarded and uneasy, or horrified and leaving that table?

Perimum Enthusiasm...

Woke up this morning saying the phrase "Perimum Enthusiasm" aloud. Now what the hell could that mean? It sounds like an exotic rose or maybe a kind of champagne side-effect. Googling "perimum" turns up the usual worlds of words and images.
Is it a scramble of premium? Premium enthusiasm... Go Team! I say...

I used the anagram server as a possible decoding tool. Here are some results:

A Supermen Hi Summit
A Summertime Punish
Sheep Ruts A Minimum
A Mutineer Humps Ism
Temper A Minis Humus
A Mum Spit Sum Herein
Immerses A Hump Unit

among thousands of others...

I tend to be floored by the potential significance of these mysterious bits of psychic lava. Are they messages from within or just pretty burning rocks?

War Room...

You are important!

.

GOBAMA!

OK, so that's a relief! The hope for better leadership is here. What we do with Obama, what we ask him to do for us, is in OUR hands now. I never signed up for the Anyone But Bush mentality, and along those lines I don't think Hillary should just be given the vice presidency as a consolation prize. Our country will move away from its current mess because we make shrewd choices and because there are visionary individuals at the helm. Show us your vision Obama and we'll show you ours.

Guilty Pleasure...

The Go! Team - Doing it Right
Uploaded by Cooperative-Music

Yup, I admit it, somehow lately The Go! Team has become my in-house pep squad, my slayer of noxious moods, my dazzling dose of cotton candy chaos. I know kiddies, that makes me hopelessly 2005. Sue me. They hit the high buttons and make me think hell yeah, I'd travel the globe making goony music that sounds like Sesame Street by way of Bootsy Collins for a while. Who wouldn't?

The Beauty in Horror...

Working through the loop-di-loops of inner and outer states can be utterly exhausting. What I mean is you can get everything how you want it internally - all the thoughts and feelings in their right places - all the repressions and denials held back in a relatively stable configuration - all the work and immediate issues laid out on your psychic desk top just so. But we must consider these conditions optimal. We do not live in a vacuum, nor can we expect the outer world to care one bit about our inner organization. The best we can hope for is weathering the storm and hoping that the nature inside of us corresponds enough with the nature outside of us to create some sort of harmonic sympathy. Of course we've been running in the opposite direction of "Nature" for a while now. Which makes me wonder - does Nature update with human evolution or do we become a cancer on it as we leave Nature's nature behind?


("The Ship Sank" by Andrea Offermann")

Grote Ballonnen...

Where does helium come from? That stuff is pretty light, so is it up in the atmosphere? Do we send rockets up to gather helium for our party balloons? Is there a helium cloud city? Are you going to a party in the atmosphere of the helium cloud city? Do dumb questions fill your passing moments?

(Big Round Balloon from Bubble XL)