Daruma
The daruma is a Japanese folk toy. Bodhidharma, an Buddhist priest from India, lived during the sixth century. He meditated for nine years, remaining immobile the entire time. His arms and legs withered away and dropped off, but Bodhidharma never lost his concentration. The bodiless head of the daruma toy represents that perseverance, that sense of patience and determination.
You are supposed to blacken in one eye of the daruma when you make your wish and when -- patiently and persistently -- you bring that desire to fruition, you are supposed to darken the other eye. Mine is a gift from friends recently returned from Japan (thank you very much) and it sits on my shelf now with all my other warrior and spiritual totems. I've given him a left eye with which to watch over me as I follow through on my request.
Chernobyl Dead Zone
"Here is thing that turned whole region into a desert. It is closed now."
Elena rides through the area surrounding Chernobyl and takes pictures. People were evacuated as fast as the military could get them out and it wasn't fast enough. The background radiation levels are still lethal in a number of areas.
(via Die Puny Humans)
Giant Robots! Smart Handguns!
Technology roundup via Engadget and Warren Ellis' Die Puny Humans. The giant robot crafters at Tmsuk have created the Enryu rescue robot which is intended to act as a rescue beast, being quite able to lift a half ton in either hand. Dottocomu has links to several movie files of the monstrocity in action.
Now, some will cry that such mechanical beast could be turned to EVIL, but Warren Ellis has a note today about Metal Storm's new Vle weapon (click here for an article discussing said gun) -- the Variable Lethality Enforcement weapon. The gun is capable of firing both lethal and non-lethal projectiles and, since it is more electronic parts than moving parts, it can interface with a number of other intelligent systems. The Vle's big brother, by the way, can file up to a million rounds a minute.
My inital thought had been that a million round a minute weapon could certainly stop an EVIL Enryu in its tracks, but it occurs to me as I write this that an Enryu is a perfect candidate for an unmanned assault vehicle. In fact, we could end up with EVIL Enryus outfitted with Vle guns, bent on DESTRUCTION.
Fortunately, it looks like you only need a car door to stop an Enryu in its tracks.
The Transformation of Dedo
Dedo, as the mythology of Paris goes, was a small gargoyle perched atop Notre Dame. He had been carved by a nun who disliked all the fierce gargoyles and wanted something kinder on the roof of the vast cathedral. Replicas of the small crossed-toe fellow have been a mainstay of yard ornamentation shops ever since.
I picked up this one about a decade ago and he's been floating around my houses and apartments since that time, acting as a doorstop, as a bookend and as a watchful agent on my shelf. Last fall he went outside to watch over the small pop of succulents that we had perched on the railing. The winter was harsh to the little guy and he's started to molt. It looks like his back is erupting, almost as if he starting a metamorphosis into a winged creature. I'm afraid to move him as I'm sure it would disturb the delicate tracery of destructive erosion taking place on his back. However, I did add the purple flower for, you know, aesthetics.
The Ephiphany of Elvis
Somewhere in the snowy vastness of Finland, Bill Drummond has an ephiphany (from Bad Wisdom):
"The sleeping Dionysius in all us young tender white males understood the clarion call. This clarion call grew and grew, went out around the world. Echoes. Echoes of echoes answering back from continent to continent, from year to year, from generation to generation. Gangs of young men went out into the world armed only with the buzzing, howling and chiming and single-coil and Humbucker pick-ups and the clatter of drums, screaming their war cries and moaning their laments...
"Now, I know Elvis did not sit down and invent Rock 'n' Roll (Elvis didn't invent anything, nor did Sam Philips with his slap-back echo -- these are incidentals). Elvis was Elvis because within him so much was right: the time, the place, the looks, the heartache, the rage, the depth, the shallowness, the hips, the fire, the ice, the voice, the name, the wantonness and the tragedy: and all of these separate elements were in each other, each contained the seed of all the other components.
"Fads and fashion fanned flames then flickered away. Intellectual snobberies muddied the water. Technial prowess tried to hold us -- the hordes -- at bay. But through all that, Dionysius swaggered on, leering and lurching. He was on the loose for the first time in almost one thousand years. He had been banished since the last Viking raids, since the old gods, the Norse gods, the Olympian gods and the Celtic gods, banished but not killed, just locked deep in our souls.
"So don't look for him in Elvis' quiff, or his tough-but-tender looks, or John Lennon's ache or Dylan's rhymes, or Bolan's boogie or Bowie's masks or Johnny Rotten's disdain, or in any other of the thousands who have heard the clarion call and made arseholes of themselves across the world's stages. Generation after generation has grabbed this mantle as a birthright -- and yes, it is a birthright -- but some forget that before Elvis there was nothing, well, nearly nothing, for a thousand years. Rock 'n' Roll in all its ugly, debased and exploited forms, tore out of and built up from the black man's basic twelve-bar blues, is the soundtrack to every Viking voyage. Once again the white boy can rape and pillage, lie and lick, lust and kick, swagger and swear across the known and unknown universe, the chains of Christian doctrine smashed on a pagan altar...
"The reason we Three Kings are hurtling towards the North Pole with this icon of the King is in recognition of the fact that we have thrown away our young men's years on his very altar. We now want to smash on through to the other side before the tragedy [of Dionysius] drags us down with him. Baby Jesus, here we come!
"Elvis is dead. But it was through Elvis that we were able to experience one of our inner gods we had denied for a thousand years; it was onto Elvis and all those who followed him that we were able to project our undeveloped secret gods. We need those kings and gods and superheroes." [pp. 80-82]
The Weather
"There was a rip in the sky over the bay this morning, a ragged tear in the grey flesh of Heaven that revealed the pearly bone and the glowing yellow subcutaneous fat of the Celestial Body."
The first of Elmore Leonard's Ten Things Writers Should Never Do is "open with talk about the weather." I dislike this rule because the weather is something that holds endless fascination for me. The wind blows where we live; it blows everywhere, I know, but at our house, you can feel it wrap itself around the house as it scours across the hilltop. It can't get in -- it tries, oh how it tries -- all we can feel is the pressure of its frustration of having to alter its course in order to pass around our house. Out on Commencement Bay, the wind kicks up whitecaps and makes the dark water of the bay an unstable, roiling surface. You can see quite a ways up the Sound between Brown's Point and Vashon Island; there is quite a bit of sky to watch how the wind whips the cloud cover between the spits of land.
The days are getting longer. I drive along the water to the train station. Melissa thinks it is a slower route than banging through town down 30th, but I have always countered with the fact that the drive along the water is more interesting. Dawn is creeping close as I make that drive these days, and the gold and red light of the morning sun is starting to color the sky over the water. It is always different and I always tell myself I need to leave a few minutes earlier so that I can stop and take a picture of the sky and water.
If we move out into the valley, I'm going to really miss this drive and I'm trying to decide if the loss of my time with the sea and sky in the morning is something worth fighting for. I shouldn't be writing about the weather so it might as well be invisible. But that isn't true; life would be more pallid without the weather, we would be one step closer to being shuffling corpses without being aware of the wind and the sky.
Bad Wisdom
In an attempt to start reducing the sheer weight of books piled around my desk, I'm trying to get back into reading on a regular basis. It's odd how voracious of a reader I was as a child and how little interest I have in it now. Kinda sad, too.
Anyway, the book in my bag right now is Bad Wisdom by Mark Manning and Bill Drummond. Manning's alter ego (who is in full bloom for Bad Wisdom) is/was Zodiac Mindwarp (of ZM and the Love Reaction, naturally, a one-off -- okay, so they did five records -- hyperbolic poke at rock musicians as the celestial magi of a new glam starfucker of a revolution) and Drummond is/was part of the seminal pop conspiracy organization, the KLF. Bad Wisdom is Fear and Loathing at the North Pole.
"This was the plan: we would take a holy and sacred picture of the King of Rock'n'Roll, Elvis Presley, to the very summit of the earth; once there, we would place it with sincere reverence amongst the chimerical shimmering palaces of ice and snow and then (accompanied by some weird Zen magic) we would light joss sticks, dance about making screechy kung-fu noises, get off our faces, and that would be it: Planet Earth saved. Simple.
"The divine Presleyesque vibes would slide down the myriad icy lines and dance across the scattered lattitudes, transmitting instant love, peace and global understanding. All war would cease; McDonald's hamburger bars would materialize in famine-stricken Third World countries, dispensing free McDonald's Cola and Big Macs to the starving millions; the Dalai Lama would be made President of the Federation of Free Earth and harmony and excellent karma would reign over our beleaguered planet. In our hearts, we knew this to be true."
Of course, they needed cash and drugs before they could leave the country...
In the process of bumping around the Internet after tracking down the link to the book at Creation Books' website, I discover that Zodiac Mindwarp is back with The Love Reaction. They're playing some gigs in England right now or very shortly in support of a new record. Which makes me happy. Manning had the right attitude (at least, this was the attitude on display in his and Drummond's writing) about rock music: disposable and transformative. A lot of Marilyn Manson's proto-glam/post-goth posing and Rob Zombie's Hillbilly Horror fascination shows up in Zodiac Mindwarp, though Manning sears it into your brain with a Hunter S. Thompson-esque style.
As for Drummond, there's some speculation that the U|Rockers are another KLF stunt. Last century, the KLF was going to rock us. This time around, they're catering to the sexual voyeur in each one of us. While rocking us.
Disinformation
While trying to clean up the overflowing bookcase down in my office (that never-empty "books to be read" shelf), I stumbled across Disinformation's 50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know. The Disinformation web site is one of those one-stop shopping clearinghouses for all sorts of information about the strange, the odd, the weird, and the conspiracy driven. In short, one of my favorite places.
The 50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know book is CD-sized and should be in the door pocket of everyone's car because each of the entries can be devoured in about five minutes -- that space of time which you always have at some point while out driving. I just thumbed it open to the entry about the prevalence of art forgeries in most of our world-class museums. Their source for this factoid is Thomas Hoving's False Impressions: The Hunt for Big-Time Art Fakes, a book which I think I've read. (In fact, I found it on the shelves downstairs in hardback so I must have -- not that I can remember any of it.)
"What few art professionals seem to want to admit is that the art world we are living in today is a new, highly active, unprincipled one of art fakery." (Hoving)
Donald Trump's Hair
Depending on how well and how long I've slept the previous night, the first hour of the morning can be filled with strange hallucinatory bits where I try to re-engage my brain. There's about a half hour of concentrated ritualistic behavior that occurs shortly after I get up and most of it has become a rote process which I can -- for the most part -- accomplish half-asleep. So, while the espresso machine is warming up and I'm making breakfast, the remainder of the night drains away from my head and I can finally think more clearly.
But that half hour of drainage can result in random excursions down strange mental corridors. This morning, for instance, I discovered the secret to Donald Trump's hair. I'll tell you the secret: he knows.
Mr. Trump's been on TV a lot recently, stumping for his new job as the Jeff Probst of the City. His involvement in Mark Burnett's urban Survivor series is a cunning marketing/branding move. Every week, Trump gets to showcase another facet of how deeply entrenched he is in New York City. Naturally, my view of NYC is skewed by what I am shown on the TV which is entirely the point. I'm supposed to not be able to distingush a difference between Donald Trump and New York City -- these two things are meant to be inextricably linked in my head.
And the clever catch phrase which sums up the Apprentice process: "You're fired." Probst has "the tribe has spoken" which, after nine years, has netted him nothing on the cultural landscape. Trump, after four weeks, has inserted the viper strike hand motion and those two words into the memosphere. Melissa and I have been firing each other over all manner of petty transgressions these last few weeks.
Okay, but Trump's hair. Since The Apprentice has been running, every comedian and media gadfly has had their chance to take a shot at Trump about his hair. It's an easy target, good for a quick laugh. What occurs to me this morning is that Trump isn't so vain that he's oblivious to the commentary, he actually welcomes it. Why? Because it makes him fallible, it makes him human, and therefore less threatening.
In our commerce driven society, a perfectly realized billionaire is the equivalent of the divine king of old religion driven cultures. He is not one of us; he is separate, magical, distinct, a creature to be revered and feared. A billionaire with dodgy hair is a human being who just got lucky. In some ways, he optimizes the capitalist ideal: anyone can re-make themselves into anything they desire by the application of their focused Will. You too can be Donald Trump if you want it badly enough or try hard enough.
The hair is part of the PLAN. It allows him to choose the manner in which he will be ridiculed by the jesters of our society. It allows him to pre-influence our dialogue about him when he is not in our presence. It puts us at ease. We open the door to him more readily, not realizing that we're inviting the wolf into the sheep pen.
Yeah, I'm onto him. I've seen through his cunning disguise. It only looks like I'm a shambling idiot at 5.00am in the kitchen. That's my cunning disguise.
New Dinosaurs
This is a nice counterpoint to Godzilla's forced retirement. Scientists have found remains of two new dinosaur species on Antarctica. One, classified as a theropod which is an upright carnivore of the same basic type as the Tyrannosaurus Rex, was found on a peninsula which pokes out towards South America. The other, a slower-moving plant-loving sauropod, was found in the interior of the frozen continent, near the Beardmore Glacier.
More details can be found at the Globe and Mail or BBC News.
Godzilla on Vacation
(via CNN) Godzilla is going into retirement. "Toho studios' executive producer, Shogo Tomiyama, said Thursday that the latest movie -- marking 28 releases and 50 years of Godzilla films -- would probably be the last one for at least a decade. 'We have done all we can to showcase Godzilla, including using computer-graphics technology. And yet we haven't attracted new fans,' Tomiyama told The Associated Press. 'So we will make the 50th anniversary film something special, a best-of-the-best, and then end it for now.' Godzilla: Final Wars is set to premiere in Japan in December, with a U.S. release to follow. The giant, genetically altered dinosaur will fight to the finish against 10 different foes, new and old."
Now I'm definitely going to have to teach Solomon how to play Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters on the GameCube. We've got to get our city-stomping monster fix somewhere.
Or, we'll have to start following the not-so-epic blood-sport of Kaiju Big Battel.
(thanks to my man Craig for the bad news and the pointer to Big Battel)
Just Imagine
I got an email today advertising an event this coming Saturday at Holocene in Portland, Oregon, featuring DJ Anjali & The Incredible Kid. According to the email advert, the DJs will be spinning: "Afro-house, Asian garage, Bhangra, Mid-East hip hop & dancehall, UK dubstep & bouncement, Reggaeton, Merengue House! Now imagine everything in-between!!"
My head explodes trying...