The road to Damascus...

I've learned that yesterday was St. Paul's day. Who was he? I mistakenly remembered him as one of the original disciples but he was actually their enemy at first, before becoming an apostle. He was Saul before he was Paul. An angry, violent, worldly man who one day saw the light, so bright, he was blinded by it. He changed his name to Paul and became a great teacher and Christian leader and he wrote for the original bible club. He gained healing powers and performed miracles. He had a serious beef with St. Peter at Antioch over circumcision. Martin Scorsese chose Harry Dean Stanton to play him. What's in a name? Letters.

After the bloodletting...

To the ferocious beauty who tore me to smithereens, I dedicate this rebuild to you.

Love and war...

"In love the currency is virtue. You love people not for what they do for you, you love them for their values, the virtues which they have achieved in their own character." - Ayn Rand

"If Man is going to stay aboard our spaceship Earth, it can't be done by politics because politics is so inadequate. The Earth can not be commanded by politicians because they don't know about the Earth, they have to go on the kind of design we now have and so they can only give you war."
- Buckminster Fuller

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace...

“It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some island of the blessed where people are free to indulge and express their individuality. This is not true. I have seen many people spill out their emotions – their guts – online and I did so myself until I began to see that I had commodified myself.”

- Carmen Hermosillo

“On Facebook and Twitter, you are performing to attract people – you are dancing emotionally, on a platform created by a large corporation. People’s feelings bounce back and forth – happy Stakhanovites, ignoring and denying the system of power... I think sometime in the future people will look back at the millions and millions of descriptions of personal feelings on the internet and see them in similar ways. This is the driving belief of our time: that ‘me’ and what I feel minute by minute is the natural centre of the world. Far from revealing that this is an ideology – and that there are other ways of looking at human society – what Twitter and Facebook do is reinforce the feeling that this is the natural way to be."

- Adam Curtis

From her to eternity...

(Windsor McCay)

Paraprosdokian...

If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end,
I wouldn't be a bit surprised.

- Dorothy Parker

(Harry Holland)

Bison bullies from New York...

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Help?

Lost in found lexical ambiguity...

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Binaural Beats on Kanye's Monster...

Let's wallow in our infantile "NSFW" culture today shall we? A world that treats human anatomy and sexuality as bad things that can get working people into serious trouble. How can we get on with the business of life, and by life I mean money, when it turns out that people might have squidgy erotic lives and ew-gross biological yearnings that transcend the safety of our work cubicles and our cool outfits. Impossible!

I want to also make a prediction for the Summer of 2011. I predict that members of the NSFW tribe (and the media-makers who feed them) will fill the airwaves with digital outrage when it is discovered that there are hidden evil messages in our pop songs. Let me clarify: I had a pretty awful experience with reigning provocateur of NSFW culture, Kanye West's new "Monster"" video yesterday... (seriously, listen at your own risk).

Visual content aside, three minutes in my heart was pounding and my head was throbbing. I knew at once why: binaural beats. Though I can't find anything to verify my intuition, I'm telling you the song is heavily laced with dark binaural beats, very likely lifted from the oddly expensive "Gates of Hades" by iDoser or other similar aural toxins. Seriously kids, I know you love a thrill but this stuff is dangerously potent at the emotional/neurological level. Must you?

My prediction is that the public will get wind of this "subliminal brainwashing" (via leak of course) and the fear will kick in. Binaural beats will be collectively demonized as dangerous and downright evil in some circles. And that would be a shame. Because like politicians, neckties, wines, jokes, and human beings, there are all kinds of binaural beats. Many are quite benign, palliative, and even uplifting, while others are hellbent on pushing the technology to its darkest most injurious extremes. And that's how we are in the NSFW age. Uninterested in the good, obsessed with the bad that is always a click away.

Torque...

There are many words a guy like me could benefit from meditating on, and "torque" is one of them. In the metaphoric realms it represents both the power with which a core lifeforce spins and the internal mechanism that propels a life forward through space and time. Some are born with rich, beautiful souls but zero torque, and therefore little place in the modern world. Others born with unrelenting natural torque that drives a lifeforce lacking in depth and dynamism. Torque channels and regulates our personal force into precise real world action. Calibrate it wisely. The physical world loves momentum...

(Team Hot Wheels teaser by Bandito Brothers)

To boldly go nowhere...

Frankly I'm shocked that no one responded to my rallying cry for a transgressive cat fiction (and non-fiction!) book club. What's wrong with people? Alas, chalk another one up for the visionary righteousness of the marketplace.

Lasers slicing chaos...

The boiling, swirling soup of creative chaos. It's an eternal place. A confusing place. A hellish place. A place of infinite potential. A place of impossible progress. The romantic image of the genius magician who intoxicated by cosmic input miraculously orchestrates masterful worldly output. Ta Da!

In contrast to all that magnificent teen hippie shit, I was struck by Ingmar Bergman's assessment of the creative process in his autobiography The Magic Lantern.

"My rehearsals are operations in premises equipped for the purpose, where self-discipline, cleanliness, light, and quiet prevail. It is proper work, not a place for private therapy between producer and actor... I want calm, order, and friendliness. Only in that way can we approach a limitless world."

Timelines...

At some point I would like to plot the days and events my life on a graphic timeline. The one seen here, a Victorian era wall chart of world history, starting with Adam and Eve (hmm...) was hanging on my wall as a kid. Loved it.