Waterfront Walk
We took Solomon out for a walk along the water this afternoon. I brought along the camera and took some snaps of the things we saw so that I could show Solomon what he missed.
Yeah, little dude sacked out after ten minutes. So he missed, among other things, the numerous jellyfish which were floating just offshore like egg yolks in the water.
"Now They Will Realise That I am a Genius"
Colin Wilson has finished his new autobiography and believes that it will, once and for all, demonstrate to the world that he is, indeed, a genius. Author of The Outsider, Wilson has written over 110 books after his seminal meditation on art and crime and appears to have vanished off the face of the planet -- the literary planet, that is. Those who traffic in the fringes (that would be me) still think of him fondly had reference his works on a fairly regular basis.
There's a Guardian interview here where Wilson lays down the quote which he will probably be chased with all the way to the grave. It's an interesting read if you're familiar with his work and, if you're not, he'll come off as a bit of a sad misanthrope -- a characterization which won't engender much interest in his autobiography which, from the standpoint of his writing process and philosophical inquiries, should be worth a bit of your time.
Though, if you are only going to read one or two of Wilson's books, The Outsider or The Philosopher's Stone would be the two I'd recommend. His history of the occult is a pretty good primer too. And he wrote a biography of Aleister Crowley which I just snapped up on Ebay a few days ago that is somewhere down in my office now.
You see? With more than a hundred books out here, he's got a few worth thumbing through.
Chilluminati
This one's mainly so that I can keep track of this record and find it when it comes available stateside. Chilluminati press release: "Following on from their worldwide DJ tour as ambassadors for Café del Mar, where illumination took their unique blend of arctic attitude and zippy chic to the coolest places and parties across the globe...the dynamic duo have put together a beautifully sequenced 74 minute mix of their most select "chilluminati" remixes…some familiar, some exclusive, all seminal slices of their unique trip-tastic “eclectronica”...yes, essential illumination." Sound samples here.
I care because they've got Nils Petter Molvaer on a few tracks. His internet presence has dwindled. The above site was built for his NP3 record and hasn't been updated since. molvaermusic.com has become a redirect to a Web Access for an Exchange server. Pity. His site was nicely done and fairly interactive.
Independent Verification and the Chernobyl Rider
There's a note in the forum at the Urban Exploration Resource that the Chernobyl bike rider story (briefly mentioned in this blog here) is actually false. I still haven't decided what is more disappointing: (a) that someone went to all the trouble to craft such a narrative; (b) that I got suckered (well, a lot of us did); or, (c) that I was really saddened that there was a place where the radiation ruled.
(c) is the front runner right now. When I first read the story (don't bother with the link I gave on the entry above, the page is gone now), I was tickled that Nature was healing itself faster than we were and that the animals had already taken over the area. Though with all that supposed radiation, the next generations would have extra eyes and superfluous snouts and what not. (And it occurs to me now that the bit about the animals returning may actually be one of the only true bits of the narrative.) The story played to my fears of a nuclear holocaust -- I readily believed that there would be a place on this planet that mankind had ruined through a radioactive disaster -- and I willingly took the bait.
Who is to say that this person who is debunking Elena's story -- though she's not the only one -- isn't part of the political machinery who is trying to bury the fact that Chernobyl really is a nuclear wasteland. "It's a fine place to visit. Just don't stay outdoors to long and make sure your mask is tight." It's all about the spin and it's all about what you want to believe.
I can't bring myself to blog about the many other instances of the political machinery that is spinning stories right now. Every day there is another story in the blogsphere about American atrocities in Iraq or signs that this country is being run as a cost center and that our leadership are corporate bean counters who are nothing more than whores and pawns for the conglomerates which have funneled money into their pockets. Of course, the "liberal" media is trying so hard to cozy up to those in power (fear? stupidity? I can't decide why) that they can't be bothered to actually chase a story that has some real importance to our forward progress as a species. (I won't even bother wondering how we, as a nation, allowed ourselves to impeach a President over getting a little action in the White House and yet we've allowed The Hand Puppet to murder [by proxy] our own sons and daughters and to destroy decades worth of world-wide goodwill.)
So, yeah, I took the bait about the Bike Rider of Chernobyl. I wanted to believe something there. And maybe that's the problem with all of us right now. We want to believe something. We have to. We can't independently verify every fact that crosses our perception. We've got to ground ourselves somewhere. Is Mary Mycio's story about Chernobyl more true than Elena's Ghost Town? I don't really know. Maybe it is what Robert Anton Wilson says: you must believe nothing.
Though, if enough people witness the same hallucination, then it becomes "true." And maybe they're smoking some serious weed in the tunnels underneath the White House because there is some version of reality coming out of there that is so alien and strange that I can't imagine the byzantine pathways which the spin must take in order for these actions and events to be read as beneficial to any of us.
Black Lodge Noises
We were watching Something Wicked This Way Comes last night and, as Mr. Halloway entered the Dark Carnival, there was a crystalline tone that accompanied him. It was close enough to the sound heard in Twin Peaks' Black Lodge (well, the Red Room for purists out there) that Melissa commented on the similarity. Which got me thinking: is there a unspoken leitmotif for the presence of supernatural evil? Maybe not Evil, but rather Spirits Whom Do Not Have the Best Interests of Humanity In Mind. Or is there something imbedded in that note, some hidden message that has been encoded in such a way that we -- poor, slow bad listeners -- only hear the single note, but Agents of Darkness understand the complete transmission?
I need to sample this note, of course, and see what happens when you slow it down or play it backwards.
Much like the International Hand Signals of Imminent Danger, there should be International Lietmotifs of Nearby Danger. There probably are. We just don't think about them consciously; we just know -- lizard brain reactions -- when we hear them. The rattle on a rattlesnake, for instance. Anyone who has spent anytime in the desert knows that sound. Instinctively. The cough of a hunting leopard is probably another one. John Carpenter penned synthesizer music signals the approach of all sorts of bad things: washed up actors, poorly managed scripts, and atrocious dialogue. Of course, that isn't so much a lietmotif as it is an entire genre.
The Infinite Dance of Silly Birds
UFOs over Mexico
Wired News is reporting an AP story about UFOs over Mexico. "Mexican Air Force pilots filmed 11 unidentified flying objects in the skies over southern Campeche state, a spokesman for Mexico's Defense Department confirmed Tuesday. A videotape made widely available to the news media on Tuesday shows the bright objects, some sharp points of light and others like large headlights, moving rapidly in what appears to be a late-evening sky."
A picture from the video can be seen here.
[spotted by my man Craig]
Electricity Makes Us Angels
I finished the first Pirate Radio CD tonight. Inspired partly by the use of Nine Inch Nails' "The Mark Has Been Made" in Man on Fire and Mimetic's "Overpraise." I'm pretty pleased with it and it has certainly germinated a good number of ideas about connectivity -- which is the point. It's all about contextualization and recontextualization (though this is certainly crude by Stone Glass Steel standards). Anyway, here's the entirety of the liner notes.
The message is transparent and the secret of its connective thread is this -- :[1]: "time, indeed" :: basil poledouris 'hymn to red october' :: skincage 'the bruised mandala' :[2]: spyra 'three players in an artificial landscape' :[3]: advert :: nine inch nails 'just like you imagined' :[4]: fennesz 'the other face' :: front line assembly 'sex offender' :: male or female 'louder than silence' :: minion 'supressed feelings' :: wolfgang amadeus mozart 'offertorium : domine jesu' :: peter namlook & bill laswell 'the catalyst' :: radio kuolema 'quando noi morti ci destiamo' :[5]: male or female 'amplified' :[6]: red reflection 'nearly god' :[7]: peter gabriel 'before night falls' :: "god is a thought" :[8]: einsturzende neubauten 'youme & meyou' :[9]: skincage 'regenesis' :[10]: helicopters :: wind :[11]: qntal 'sine nomine' :[12]: aphex twin 'grey stripe' :[13]: aphex twin 'hexagon' :[14]: ammo 'iceberg salad' :[15]: contact :: skincage 'relapse' :[16]: nine inch nails 'the mark has been made' :[17]: "something has happened" :: "smash the control images" :: "smash the control machines" :[18]: red reflection 'while england slept' :[19]: kong 'undertow' :[20]: foreign terrain 'the benificial and the deviant' :[21]: covenant 'bullet' :[22]: pest(e) 'wrinkle' :: franz schubert 'ave marie' :: numbers station V2 transmission :[23]: mimetic 'overpraise' :[24]: "and the seventh angel..." :: adjacency pair 'dageyh'
The last one of these that I did was a few years ago and I didn't annotate it properly. I was being coy and what I've got now is a CD that I can't place all the bits from. So it's all about documentation this time around.
Boy's Weekend Out
Melissa and Solomon are visiting the twins in LA this weekend and my sister is off having her second baby tonight, so everyone is busy but me. I've been catching up on movies and music here, and harassing the cat. Caught Van Helsing last night. Dumb and noisy, and Kate Beckinsale's marble-mouthed Romanian accent was almost tolerable. However, so many effects in every shot made the film ultimately dull and lifeless because the actual live actors had to work so hard at imagining anything beyond the full circle of green screens around them that they kind of forgot to insert any kind of chemistry and passion into the work. (Which is looking past the disaster of a script in the first place.)
Unlike Man on Fire, Tony Scott's new film, which bled and burned with passion. Tony's the more commercially driven of the Scott brothers and he veers towards Michael Bay territory with his pacing of cuts. But he's got the family eye for composition and Man on Fire was a fusion of the Scott style of color and composition and all the tricks and cinematic quirks that Oliver Stone tried to introduce us to with Natural Born Killers. It's a rare thing these days when a film delivers its emotional hits through both the music, the cinematography and the editing. Sorry. It's a rare thing when a thriller/revenge film delivers its sucker punches through the M and the C and E.
I picked up a stack of films from the library on the way home. I've got a new mix disc project in mind, and I'm going to be scanning a number of films for sound bytes. While those are running, I'll be finishing up a few music reviews that are outstanding and -- hopefully -- get two chapters of the novel done.
Yeah, brain on fire. That's what two hours of cinematic crack injected into my eyeballs will do.
Gotta run.
The Bunnies Do The Shining
Recently, the Bunny Theatre Troupe did a 30-second version of The Exorcist which was all very cute and silly and, well, succinct. They're back and they're doing The Shining this time around. It's thirty seconds of your day and, afterward, you can say that you've seen The Shining. Really. I've sat through all 146 minutes of it -- but not the 273 minute version of it, what sort of masochist do you think I am? -- and I can attest that all the good bits can be found in these thirty seconds.
Hypersonic Sound
Warren Ellis has a note about the Hypersonic Sound Beam that is being developed by the American Technology Corporation. References a 2003 USA Today article about the technology. Basically, ATC is developing a means of ultrasonic sound propagation that allows for delivery of sound to a specific point and only to that point. It's like wearing headphones but without being connected in any way with the source of the transmission.
Those kids at ATC are busy. "American Technology Corporation is Shaping the Future of Sound® by developing and licensing its technology and intellectual property portfolio which includes: the award-winning HSS® (HyperSonic® Sound Technology); NeoPlanar® Technology; PureBass® Sub-Woofer Technology; HIDA™ (High Intensity Directed Acoustics), LRAD™ (Long Range Acoustic Device) and SFT® (Stratified Field® Technology)."