Popular Literatures,
like fairy tales & their modern counterparts, comic books,
can be appropriate repositories for certain archetypal projections,
such as those which are used to construct gender role stereotypes.

The issue becomes problematic
when we consider that these projections
can then inform, if not completely determine,
our own personal construction of gender identities.

discuss...

The New Lysurgens

Do you enjoy mystery?
check it before the Man shuts it down:

http://thenewlysurgens.blogspot.com/


There are new adventures in narrative
that challenge our notions of authorship,
Rhine Wine, the legacy of Disco
and the primacy of language over images.

Where will it all end?
And can we even imagine an ending point,
if we have no idea where the hell we are now?

These, and so many more questions,
keep the greatest minds of my generation
up at night when they aren't wondering
"where the hell are the rolling papers?"
eh, use the corner of the map,
it's practically useless anyhow...

Enjoying Cultural Imperialism

What an artifact.
Surf-music motifs slip into traditional Japanese structures
bathed in delicious spring reverb.
The Spacemen:
One would have to be in outer space
in order to have the perspective that makes this masterpiece possible
A subtle mind-melter.
I found it & wanted to share.
Download link can be found in comments.
You might need to get "zipeg" to unlock it.
Enjoy.

Is There Some Sort Of Problem?

It pretty much all goes back to Kant & Saussere.
Kant proposed that we experience everything only within consciousness,
Any zenster could have told him that, but I digress ...
he then went on to identify the fundamental mental processes involved
and live an incredibly rigid & scheduled life.
Saussere, after racking his brain for ages, discovered that words do not have any significance -- other than that which we ascribe to them.
So, we end up without any objective reality,
and a dubious tool to communicate our subjective experience.
Now, try applying these notions to the political conversation going on around us.
Decisions must be made, I concede,
but upon what do we base the foundation of our decisioning making?
Could be a problem ...
The following two films illustrate these points.
The first is a documentary about a 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela.
The second film points out the first film's supposed "lies."
You gotta love our postmodern condition!












Can any of us say anything about things we have not personally experienced
with anything resembling authority?
I guess that I'm trying to say,
"BEWARE YOUR OPINIONS"
more than likely, they are not,
in any real sense,
your own.
dig?

The View Through My Bathroom Window #1

and when the sun set,
there were all these psychedelic lights,
block-rockin' reggaeton,
and out-of-their-mind three year-olds.

but those photos didn't come out vey well.
USE YOUR IMAGINATIONS.

have a splendid Memorial Day & THANK A VET.

Fright Night Feature

Horror Hotel

The unsung American "Wickerman."

Instead of stumbling upon British Pagans,

it's New England's Witches & Devil Worshipers.





There are obvious parallels to "Psycho" as well.

This film features one of the first instances of the
Zombie James Dean motif.

An aesthetic tour-de-force:

Expressionistic & Minimal.


The whole film is available on YouTube
in eight parts.

Click HERE to see part one in another window.

Important Contribution To Our Beautiful Struggle : THE BEATNIKS INVENT POETRY

Few will fault the claim that the BEATNIK ORGANIZATION invented poetry.
While it is literally MORE true to claim that the verse form was first employed by
writer STEPHEN CRANE during the composition of The Black Riders and Other Lines
which took place over three days at a summer campsite high on the shores of Twin Lakes in 1893,
Crane's formal innovation remained hidden in an attic in Amherst Mass. until it was discovered by members of the Blue Oyster Squadron, Seventh Paratroop Division during
the Greenwich Village BEATNIK ORGANIZATION's unsuccessful attempt to blockade
New England during the first three day weekend of 1947.
The BEATNIK ORGANIZATION certainly did popularize and expose millions to the form through "poetry readings" conducted in the coffee houses and 'hot' jazz clubs of Greenwich Village and San Francisco and the garish neon-lit strip clubs of France and at professional sporting events across the globe.
It is due to this proliferation of the form that the BEATNIK ORGANIZATION can be said to have invented poetry. At their height, the BEATNIK ORGANIZATION was able to bring the Cold War to a virtual stalemate and completely subvert and destroy corporate consumer capital culture with poetry.









As we celebrate Poetry Month, it is only fitting that we honor the BEATNIK ORGANIZATION that made our current economic system possible with the invention of poetry.

XOX

*************************************************************************

Happy Birthday LSD : Acid is now eligible for Social Security

The Man has always been against liberation.
That's the Man's job.
And we have our task to fulfill:
Pan-Galactic Liberation.

Somehow, somewhere, someday,
there will be release & reconciliation for us all;
Maybe not today,
but NOW seems like a good place to start.
Remember,








but wait, there's more !!!

Propaganda, Capri Pants & a Hot Dog

Don't let it bring you down ...

How's About A More Balanced Perspective On Thee Byrthday Boy ...

LSD : The Beyond Within : excellent BBC documentary
9 parts



















Now, make a wish & blow out the candles ... all yummy & dark.

An Episode From The Eternal History Of Pan-Galactic Liberation: Mutants & Robots & Cowboys & Bikinis & the Evil Empire : a dream deferred

As the 1970's were becoming the 1980's, the Galaxy was poised on a treacherous brink.
The Cowboy took another ride, out from the sunset
and back into the beautiful struggle.
No 'Faithful Indian Companion' could be found by the 1970's,
and the Cowboys had become co-ed -- if only for drive-in exploitation purposes.
As always, Despotism rode in the shadow of the Cowboy.
Rule of the strong over the weak,
the faster over the slower,
the heavily-armed over the flower-waving peaceniks.
They rode against the last vestiges of the Evil Empire,
a feeble authoritarian system that would hold the entire galaxy in thrall,
and pass dominion from one generation of oppressor to the next.
Neither the path of the Cowboy or the path of the Empire
was ideal -- but at that point in history -- no other options were available.
1001 Nights amid the Haunted Stars,
the beautiful struggle was underway but,
the Mutations had only just begun ...

The Evil Empire had the more powerful weapons,
but the Cowboys had begun to mutate and manifest new powers ...



But early Mutant Powers were more than matched by the mechanized strength of the Evil Empire's robotic golems... ...teamwork is essential to Pan-Galactic Liberation



Mutant Cowboys use stealth & cunning to infiltrate the Evil Empire
The heroic Attack of the Golden Phallus



Mutant Power
works like this:
"I'm rubber & you're glue; whatever you say bounces offa me & sticks to you."



Even though the Mutant Cowboys were able to defeat the lords of the Evil Empire,
the Beautiful Struggle continues. A new culture-hero is required to fully realize
Pan-Galactic Liberation. Cowboys, even glam mutant cowboys, carry the virus of despotism in their cowboy ideology. The new culture-hero will, most probably, be a mutant female & able to connect the human race with technology [love the robots] and restore our connection to the natural world. Mutant powers help us all realize the 'revolution within' but it will take a new culture-hero to bring about the bloodless realization of Liberty. The struggle may be finally realized on the beaches of Normandy, as the eternal cycle turns & turns & turns & turns............

थिस this is it !!!

********************************************************************
करमा योग स्नीज़मिस्त??? ???? ?? ?????
whAt cOUld thAt ???????? oh, I see, OF COURSE.
योग कृष्ण सिवा इस्लामाबाद EDDIE RUSCHA aka "Frenchy"
माया योग
Until the revolution catches up with techno-alchemikal discourse
CUT & PASTE

http://www.highenergyconstructs.com/hecla/category/exhibitions

but please

one-two
one-two
thoo listtthlllllthqndsghllruuiooooolore;
Auuaka "Krandor the Curious" -- known THIEF
एवु this

@#$% ^ */=====/========> SnEeZeMiSt,<================//*[:::]@5%%$$...

************************************************************************

The Underdark: pseudo-scientific proof

The Hollow Earth

Old School Film Style

Reel 1

Reel 2


Reel 3

A Speculative Monomyth

***********************************************
The Legend of Atlantis
***********************************************
amazing paranoid bricolage of speculative history
in 25 parts

wonderful illustrations
kinda new age / D&D hybrid
Also, notice that the sound is never in sync with the picture.

*******************************************
The Legend of Atlantis
*******************************************
enjoy

xox

Theory & Pan-Galactic Liberation in Literature

I'm lousy at links: copy & paste
http://harelbarzilai.org/words/omelas.txt


Ursala Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas” provides a great deal of material for critical thought in a mere nine paragraphs of prose fiction. Part utopian fantasy, part dystopian horror-show, part heroic adventure and part critique of intellectual methods of understanding, this short story is much more than sum of it’s parts. Le Guin’s command of narrative voice and tone deftly navigate through some of the thornier issues associated with how human societies are organized. Le Guin's story operates as a text, offering riches to the engaged reader and provividing insights into the theoretical difficulties of Pan-Galactic Liberation.

In the story’s opening paragraph, Le Guin’s narrator describes the city of Omelas as a utopia. Natural images are combined with urban images creating the impression of a harmoniously unified whole; “the sea” is paired with “the city,” houses are joined with “moss-grown gardens,” the streets are “avenues of trees.” This harmonious unity is further developed in the description of the citizens’ “procession” that begins the Festival of Summer; “procession” denotes orderly movement, and order is rarely used when describing the movement of a city’s entire population. In Omelas, “the procession is a dance.” This procession is totally inclusive; the full spectrum of human society participates. All ages, from “old people in long stiff robes” to dodging “children,” are included. The dancing procession cuts across the few class and gender categories in a utopia, and everyone from “master workmen” to mothers with their infants are included. Even the horses of Omelas participate, “the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as their own.” This unity is expressed down at the level of grammar; in sentences where as few coordinating conjunctions as possible are employed. Individual clauses are stung together creating a syntactical collage that corresponds with the unified image it describes. This utopian harmony is also emphasized by the paragraph’s bracketing references to music and bells; music necessitates harmony.

In the second paragraph, Le Guin completely changes direction. The narrator switches from detached omniscient description and begins directly addressing the reader. The narrator poses a series of non-rhetorical questions, which ask how one can describe “joy” when:

All similes have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves.

The narrator argues that civic joy and happiness automatically refers to a certain type of archaic political organization. This referential relationship bears a semiotic stamp that the narrator insists the reader reject:

I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy or slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb.

The narrator dispels the reader’s reliance on archaic political systems to explain civic joy and explains that social order in Omelas is not organized along capitalist or authoritarian lines. However, the narrator also dismisses any notion in the reader’s mind that the people of Omelas are merely “bland utopians” and any “less complex than us.” The narrator is concerned that the reader may make these assumptions because of an intellectual bias that considers happiness as “something rather stupid” and accepts that “only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.” The narrator argues, echoing the very words of Hannah Arendt, that this bias is predicated on “a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.” By directly addressing the reader, the narrator rejects possible unconscious assumptions and attempts to bring about the conditions for a more completely conscious reading of the text.

The narrator’s self-reflexive strategy of directly addressing the reader is also employed to invite collaboration in imagining Omelas more realistically. The narrator is concerned that Omelas “sounds like a city in a fairytale” and suggests “it would be best if imagined it as your own fancy bids.” Here Le Guin overtly opens the text to something similar to the heteroglossia found in Mikhal Bakhtin’s Dialogic Imagination. However, this heteroglossia is between the narrator and reader and not characters within the text. This enforces a primacy of the broadest possible context over the text. The set of possible contexts invited to collaborate in the imagining of Omelas is limited only by the number of different readers. What is normally an implied invitation to “play” with the text -- as Roland Barthes argues -- becomes an overt request to collaborate in its creation. The narrator’s suggestion of collaboration with the reader is an engraved invitation that is overtly and physically engraved in the text.

The reader is encouraged to collaborate in the imagining of Omelas’s society. There seems to be a correspondence between the narrator/reader relationship and that between the Hebrew God of Genesis and Adam and Eve in Eden. The reader is encouraged to imagine anything that fancy can provide -- as Adam and Eve had total freedom within Eden -- with one prohibition; the narrator imposes a single limit: “one thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt.” The parallel between the prohibition on “guilt” in Omelas and the prohibition of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge in Eden is apt because one of the results from breaking Eden’s prohibition is the creation of guilt. As long as this prohibition is honored, the reader is encouraged to imagine Omelas in any manner they choose.

The narrator then returns to the previous strategy of omniscient description. The same syntactical devices and imagery is deployed to similar utopian effect. After describing the preparations for a horse race, the narrator once again directly poses a question of the now collaborating reader: “Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.” After this direct question, the narrator returns to omniscient description but with very different effect.

In the following paragraph, the narrator employs the now familiar techniques of omniscience, but the narrator’s intention has undergone a Derridian inversion. It is not an expansive and inclusive utopia that the narrator describes but a closely limited, solitary dystopia of extreme alienation that exists in beneath Omelas:

In the cellar of one of it’s spacious homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed widow somewhere across the cellar [...] the floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch [...] the room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become defective through fear, malnutrition, and neglect.

Periodically, the child is physically abused; less periodically the child is feed starvation rations: “it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.” Even with this lengthy quotation, much of the child’s condition has not been touched upon; the child lives with overwhelming fear of inanimate objects, has lost the use of language, and displays all the symptoms of advanced starvation. This an extreme -- if not the most extreme -- and unemotional description of Julia Kristeva’s process of abjection to be found in literature. The narrator’s unemotional omniscience makes the description all the more powerful.

The abjection of the innocent child is the ideology upon which the utopia of Omelas is sustained. The narrator omnisciently explains that if the child were rescued or removed from its abject condition, “in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms.” This ideology is related more closely to that of Zizak than that of Marx. That the citizens of Omelas are all aware of the child’s condition does not release them from the closed system of this ideology: “they all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know it has to be there.” When adolescents first learn of the child and are taken to see it, some would like to alter the situation, but they come to terms with their disgust.

The reconciliation of disgust with the abjection of the child and the utopian conditions which it allows is pure Zizakian recognition:

Their’s is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of there music, the profundity of their science.

In this quote, “architecture” can be read in its most basic meaning as the organization of life within space, “music” as harmony in time and “science” as reason applied to the physical world. The total existence of this utopia is predicated on a recognition of the total abjection of this innocent child. As Zizak postulates, there can be no liberation from the closed system of this utopia’s ideology, only recognition.

The narrator then poses a final direct question to the reader: “now do you believe in them? Are they more credible?” While this may be referring back to the earlier point regarding our intellectual bias for evil and pain, the narrator’s presentation is more nuanced than that. The narrator’s explanation of how the joy and happiness of Omelas refers back to an ideology, and not some fairytale king, creates the illusion of an illusion of utopia. Intellectually, Omelas becomes a credible utopia.

However, the narrator has one final omniscient description: “there is one final thing to tell, and this quite incredible.” Sometimes, the citizens of Omelas never become reconciled to the ideology of their utopia. They escape the ideology based on abjection by simply walking away:

Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

This moving passage of prose [which always makes me a little misty at the very least] illustrates another element of Zizak’s thought. Yes, a place exists outside the closed systems of ideology, but it relies on the assumption of a reality absent of meaning; a primal nothingness which even a completely omniscient narrator “cannot describe at all” because it would lack any referents and any of the signification upon which language is based. While this kind of reality may not exist, to seek it -- alone and in the dark -- is just about the bravest and most heroic endeavor imaginable: the individual's personal struggle to realize pan-galactic liberation.

The intellectual profundity and narrative complexity of “The Ones Who Waked Away From Omelas” can be a surprise considering that it’s author is usually dismissed into the literary ghettoes of fantasy or science fiction. However, this short story can easily raise by its own merits from the darkness of genre fiction into the realm of Barthes’ semiotic texts without a hint of irony or postmodern distancing.