January 2006 Archives
(Here's a great article about McKenna that Erik Davis wrote for Wired in May 2000, called "Terence McKenna's Last Trip")
Excerpt:
$12.21 on AmazonEvolutionary biologists consider humans to be an unevolving species. Some time in the last fifty thousand years, with the invention of culture, the biological evolution of humans ceased and evolution became an epigenetic, cultural phenomenon. Tools, languages, and philosophies began to evolve, but the human somatotype remained the same. Hence, physically, we are very much like people of a long time ago. But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. Rhis is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space. The body can become an internalized holographic object embedded in a solid-state, hyperdimensional matrix that is eternal, so that we each wander through a true Elysium.
This is a kind of Islamic paradise in which one is free to experience all the pleasures of the flesh provided one realizes that one is a projection of a holographic solid-state matrix that is microminiaturized, superconducting, and nowhere to be found: it is part of the plenum. All technological history is about producing prototypes of this situation with greater and greater closure toward the ideal, so that airplanes, automobiles, space shuttles, space colonies, starships of the nuts-and-bolts, speed-of-light type are, as Mircea Eliade said, "self-transforming images of flight that speak volumes about man's aspiration to self-transcendence."
Dates mean little to me in terms of what I should do about them. When it's January 27 and I'm supposed to do something by February 3rd, I have a hard time visualizing what that means. To visualize, it helps to see, and for dates, I've started using a great program called iCalViewer.
The application's creator has a nice description about what the program does: "iCalViewer displays calendar events as boxes dynamically moving towards a finish line which is now. It can do this on your desktop or in a window."
The screenshot here is my desktop. (The photo is of an atoll off the coast of Aitutaki. I took it in Summer 03. Read about our island adventure here)The colored boxes are my appointments and the vertical yellow line is on the left. As events get closer, they move towards the finish line. iCalViewer has kept me out of trouble more than once.
A limited version is free, the full version costs $11. Link
I've just started using Yojimbo from Bare Bones Software, but I think I'll be sticking with it. Here's what I like about it:
Bare Bones makes the flawlessly fantastic BB Edit, and the same loving care can be found in Yojimbo. It's lean, fast, and so easy to use you won't have to spend much time reading how to use it. At $39, it's a great deal. You can download a free, fully-featured, 30-demo from Bare Bone's web site. LinkI can drag the URL from my web browser over to a little tag that sits on the edge of the computer's display, and the web page will be saved locally as a searchable archive in Yojimbo.
I can print any web page as a PDF to Yojimbo. This is a great way to save receipts from online purchases or travel reservations.
I can create searchable notes and categorize them any way I want.
(Click on thumbnails for enlargement) I want all the world to know about the artist Stanlislav Szukalski. Born in Poland in 1893, he was called "Poland's greatest living artist." In 1936, the Szukalski National Museum was filled with his highly-detailed, emotionally-extreme sculptures.
(Left, Szukalski in Glendale, drawn by Jim Woodring) Shortly after the Nazis bombed his museum out of existence, Szukalski came to the United States, where he toiled away in obscurity, living in a small apartment in Glendale, California, until he died at the age of 93.
He was chiefly occupied with his self-made science of "Zermatism," a grand theory that explained the origins of humans and culture. He drew over 40,000 illustrations to accompany his research. One of the most interesting things about Zermatism was Szukalski's dead-serious belief that Yetis had at once time mated with human beings, producing two races -- pure and superior humans, and inferior, troublemaking Yeti-human hybrids. The two races have been at war with each other, culturally and politically, for thousands of years. (For an excellent article about Szukalski, read "The neglected genius of Stanislav Szukalski," by Jim Woodring, which appeared in the Fall 1988 issue of Whole Earth Review)
(Left, a young Szukalski. "Ben Hecht in his 1954 autobiography A Child of the Century describes the twenty-year-old Szukalski he met in 1914 as starving, muscular, aristocratic and smoldering with disdain for lesser beings than himself.") I do not believe in Zermatism, and I don't like the racist overtones, but the artwork that Szukalski drew to illustrate his ideas is just about the most mind-blowing use of india ink and paper I've ever seen. Szukalski's interpretations of ancient Indian, Mayan, and Polynesian stone sculptures are gorgeous and bizarre.
This book, Behold!!! The Protong, is a part of Zermatism that attempts to find the roots of language, or the "proto-tongue." (Is it any surprise that Szukalski thinks Polish is the ur-language?) Szukalski's writing in the book is fascinating:
Could it be possible that human society would tolerate Manape halfbreeds and continue to further inbreed with them? Not intentionally! But there are always irresponsible drunks and men of low mentality who, when sexually pressed, are willing to copulate with a hole in a fence or to rape, despite protests from period-best females.$15.72 on Amazon
Electroplankton for the Nintendo DS is my 8-year-old daughter's current favorite obsession. It's not a game. I would describe it as a music synthesizer with cool animation. It will record your voice or accept input from your stylus to produce wonderfully weird music.
Even though it's hard to explain exactly what Electroplankton is, the interface is so easy to use, and the results so immediate and pleasing, everyone I show it to becomes instantly charmed by it.
The one sad thing is that you can't save your favorite creations. That's too bad, because I think this could become a legitimate musical instrument. $34.99 on Amazon
The history of LSD is as trippy as the drug itself. Discovered by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1938, LSD eventually got into the hands of US government agencies, who looked into its potential as a brainwashing / psychological warfare substance (going as far as secretly dosing unwitting and innocent civilians with mind-blowing does of acid to study its effect).
LSD also worked its way into the literary elite as well as organized crime. It spawned cult religions and fueled the hippie revolution. It inspired new forms of artistic expression and turned the generation gap into an uncrossable chasm -- with martini drinking, flag waving, station wagon driving, Burt Bacharach listening squares on one side, and blotter licking, joint smoking, free loving, tambourine rattling hairy freaks on the other.
Acid Dreams goes deep into the causes and effects of the LSD revolution, introducing fascinating characters like Al "Cappy" Hubbard, a hard core rightwing acid evangelist, and Sidney Gottlieb, a CIA scientist who thought nothing of slipping acid to unsuspecting people and leaving a trail of permanently damaged (and in at least one case, dead) people behind. Even if you have no interest in the psychological effects of LSD, the social effects make for an engrossing story, which is expertly told by Acid Dreams' authors, Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain. $11.20 on Amazon
My friend Mr. Jalopy alerted me to the astonishingly effective Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. In a world deluged with so-called wonder products that fail to do anything but inflict a feeling of shame for being suckered into buying them, I'm happy to report that "magic" is not too strong a word for this cleaning product.
The Mr. Clean Magic Eraser resembles a small, brick-shaped marshmallow. It radiates an essence of almost cartoonlike purity. Mr. Jalopy used his to wipe away decades of smokey grime from the surface of a pinball machine he rescued. I use mine to remove traces of dust covered sugar, honey, syrup, and grease that my kids are fond of wiping on the walls, cabinets, and doors of our house. Their foul paws are no match for the magic of Mr. Clean. I keep one in my pocket at all times. $2.99 per 2-pack on Amazon
Art Spiegelman says it was the spine of the book of the 1928 poem "The Wild Party" by Joseph Moncure March that intrigued him sufficiently to pull it from the shelves of the used bookstore he was browsing. He was even more impressed by what he read, describing it as a "hard-boiled, jazz-age tragedy told in syncopating rhyming couplets."
Spiegelmans' 75 illustrations running throughout this lengthy poem that tells the story of a debauched and deadly party thrown by a couple of vaudeville performers are appropriately lurid and menacing. $10.20 on Amazon
$14.96 on AmazonExcerpt: "Borges and I" by Jorge Luis Borges
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page.
This is unlike any other book of magic tricks I've seen. Most of the activities in Penn & Teller's very amusing How to Play in Traffic are better described as pranks, but they're not mean-spirited. Most of them are benign ways to delightfully mystify friends and strangers alike.
One of my favorites is The Gideon Bible Card Trick, which you can perform the next time you're staying at a hotel. You ask your friend, or the bellman, or anyone you want to trick, to shuffle a pack of cards and draw a one while you are across the room. Then you pull out the Gideon Bible that all hotels have in the bed table drawer. Ask your friend to turn to Revelation, chapter 17 ("which is all about abominations, and sounds for all the world like an invitation to hell"). Then you hand him a warm clothes iron and tell him to iron the page while keeping one hand on the card. What happens next is chilling:
"Slowly, brownish bloodstains appear on three isolated words of text --
(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) 
The book has complete instructions for performing the trick. There are lots of other equally fun tricks in the book. $12.89 on Amazon
Entertainers Penn and Teller hate people who try to pass themselves off as having real magic or psychic powers. They also hate people who try to make money through lies. In Bullshit, a half-hour series on Showtime, hosts Penn and Teller use heavy handed, obnoxious, funny, and sometimes cruel pranks to expose charlatans who make their living duping other people. They've gone after penis enlargement pill pushers, channelers, alien abductees, and people who say second hand smoke is worse for you than it really is.
My favorite episode has Penn and Teller going after PeTA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), exposing them as hypocrites of the lowest kind. While PeTA boycotts animal shelters for euthanizing animals, PeTA euthanizes 2/3 of the animals it rescues. And while they support terrorists that firebomb medical research clinics that use animals to develop new kinds of life saving drugs, the woman who is second-in-command at PeTA uses insulin made from animal products to keep herself alive. (She has some nonsensical excuse that its OK for her to save herself by killing animals because she is saving animals). Eye opening bullshit indeed! Season One $29.99 on Amazon Season Two $25.99 on Amazon
Project Gutenberg now has 17,000 e-books available for free download now. The top 100 list for a good place to start exploring. PG's e-books are plain ASCII, but in recent years, they've started offering human-read MP3s of books (like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes), a utility to convert e-books to the Plucker format (for Palm handhelds) on the fly, and movies and still photos.
I usually read Gutenberg texts on my Palm by converting them to the Palm document format with an excellent donation-ware utility for Mac called Pordible.
I just started using PG's RSS feed of recent eBooks, which is updated nightly, to see the list of new books that kind volunteers around the world have scanned in. There's a lot of great reading here -- you could stop buying books and just use PG as your free Amazon.com from now on. That is, if you don't mind not reading books published after 1923 (which, in most cases, are still under copyright in the US).
Excerpt:
$11.20 on AmazonAnthrax was a strange disease which was worrying farmers all over Europe, that here and there ruined some prosperous owner of a thousand sheep, that in another place sneaked in and killed the cow - the one support - of a poor widow. There was no rime or reason to the way this plague conducted its maraudings; one day a fat lamb in a flock might be frisking about, that evening this same lamb refused to eat, his head drooped a little - and the next morning the farmer would find him cold and stiff, his blood turned ghastly black. Then the same thing would happen to another lamb, and a sheep, four sheep, six sheep - there was no stopping it. And then the farmer himself, and a shepherd, and a woolsorter, and a dealer in hides might break out in horrible boils - or gasp out their last breaths in a swift pneumonia.
Koch had started using his microscope with the more or less thorough aimlessness of old Leeuwenhoek; he examined everything under the sun, until he ran onto this blood of sheep and cattle dead of anthrax. Then he began to concentrate, to forget about making a call when he found a dead sheep in a field - he haunted butcher shops to find out about the farms where anthrax was killing the flocks. Koch hadn't the leisure of Leeuwenhoek; he had to snatch moments for his peerings between prescribing for some child that bawled with a bellyache and the pulling out of a villager's aching tooth. In these interrupted hours he put drops of the blackened blood of a cow dead of anthrax between two thin pieces of glass, very shining bits of glass. He looked down the tube of his microscope and among the wee, round, drifting greenish globules of this blood he saw strange things that looked like little sticks. Sometimes these sticks were short, there might be only a few of them, floating, quivering a little, among the blood globules. But here were others, hooked together without joints - many of them ingeniously glued together till they appeared to him like long threads a thousand times thinner than the finest silk.
Taking the opposite tack of Charles Addams or Edward Gorey, Charles Burns draws his goulish characters with creepy precision, using lots of rich black areas and careful brush strokes. The effect is stunning, and instantly recognizable. Interestingly, I read an interview with Burns where he said his lettering skills were poor, and that his wife does all the lettering in his comics. (Fortunately for him, his wife lettering is as good as it gets.)
El Borbah is an oversize, 96-page black and white book that collects several stories starring one of Burns' most memorable characters, a morbidly obese private detective who wears a Mexican wrestling costume on the job. It sounds silly, but the stories are anything but -- they are excellent noir fiction with suspense and twists along the entire ride. Burns would make a hell of a novelist, but I'm glad he's sticking to comics. $11.53 on Amazon
I'm very happy with this Green Lantern anthology, which contains the complete run of Green Lantern stories from Showcase 22-24 and Green Lantern 1-17, from 1959 to 1963. Gil Kane is a great example of a Silver Age DC comic book artist. He doesn't hold a candle to the master, Jack Kirby, but there's a commendable, quiet elegance to his work that's pleasing and makes the story easy to follow. Like many comics of the era, the stories are exceedingly weird, which is great. Comic book writers were trying to break out of the staid superhero genre by tying the plots to current events, and by placing the characters in bizarre situations that feel almost like Stanley Milgram experiments.
This 526-page black and white anthology costs just $10, a fantastic bargain. The only reason I started collecting comics in the first place was because I liked to read them. With anthologies like these, there's no reason to waste money buying the originals. I wish DC and Marvel would do this for all the good silver age comics they published. Link
