This really piqued my interest.
Tagculture
Having spent the past few days reading drafts of the forthcoming book The Art of Memetics, by Edward Wilson & Wes Unruh, my spirit was elated this evening to come across this ad campaign for Pangea Day, 10 May. a) The Art of Memetics is a truly phenomenal treatment of how memes act to infect and how we can use this to personal advantage to survive and become strengthened in the coming Information Age. b) These videos are such a great idea: we’re so accustomed to hearing our national anthem sung by ourselves, it’s like the little voices in our heads. To have a nation we’re generally ignorant of or have little dealings with take it upon themselves to treat the anthem with such care and heart, makes for a poignant campaign in our coming post-national world.
I find that people tend to jump at the notion that memetics and marketing can be used for good. And I’d like to thank Edward Wilson & Wes Unruh, and the Pangea Day folk, and everyone else out there who understand that as long as everyone is educated, no one can well turn it against another. We can use these technologies and wisdoms to work for a better future.
Above is France sings America. And I’m not pointing fingers at anyone, but as a Canadian (anglais & français, as well as a whole swath of Asian and Middle Eastern dialects), I’ve always found it odd that the Americans would so inappropriately stereotype and ridicule the nation that gave America one of their greatest symbolic gifts: the Statue of Liberty. Regardless, it’s a beautiful sentiment.
See the other three and others on YouTube. I really like Japan sings Turkey and Kenya sings India.
“I am deep in the Amazon rainforest, anxiously losing my mind as the world begins to disintegrate. Around me, all sense of distance is wrapping itself up like spatial origami, slowly shrinking until an entire dimension has disappeared. A moment ago, I was surrounded by 200 people dressed in white and singing like angels, but now they occupy the same space as me… if that makes any sense.
Wherever I look, that is where I am. I can see everything from every angle, all at the same time. In fact, I feel I am everywhere. Outside, in the forest, the thrum of frogs and cicadas drowns out the sound of shrieking monkeys. Below me, the floor is shimmering, vanishing in waves like a spent mirage. Behind, I feel a cold vibration on my neck and sense a growling malevolence. I turn and see a red door, bulging at the hinges. Overcome with dread, I push hard to keep it closed, and all the while I feel a horrible nausea.
When will this end, I am thinking. And, with sweat running down my forehead, how can I survive it? Welcome to the Church of Santo Daime, one of the fastest growing religions in the world. Its mixture of Christianity, South American shamanism and African animism is proving irresistible to thousands of new believers across the globe. But it is its central sacrament, ayahuasca, a powerful hallucinogenic brew made from rainforest plants – a brew that I have just drunk – that makes the Church so appealing to some yet so controversial to others.”
(via the Times Online)
“This is a transcript of a small discussion with botanist-poet Dale Pendell, a long-time practitioner of Zen Buddhism and the occult, a student of the legendary intellectual Norman O. Brown, and-as they say-a graduate of Dr. Hofmann. It took place at the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland, on 23rd March 2008 (read my review). A small group of people who’d just attended Dale’s talk on Zen and psychedelics gathered round a table in the busy foyer, and Dale created a focused bubble of attentiveness with his measured, colourful discourse.
[Question about who taught DP about the occult in Los Angeles.]
Dale Pendell: His name’s not really important. He kind of hid his traces, because he insisted on being without credentials. Anytime I would look for credentials, like, ‘Where did you get your Zen training, Carl?’ ‘Why do you ask? Is that gonna make you believe something I say?’ So he would never tell me. But he had a personal teacher. What he taught was the importance of a personal teacher. His personal teacher was a woman named Mary. And that’s as far back as I know the transmission. But I get a sense of high knowledge being passed on that way: through personal relationships, with some occult structure overt.
I don’t know, he was able to walk in and out of Zen temples like he belonged there. He was an artist, and sat with Suzuki, Roshi in San Francisco, and they palled around like old friends. When Trungpa came to town, they palled around like old friends-he was his driver for a while. Every place he went, he liberated people; he gave people permission. He constantly violated expected behaviour, and laughed a lot. I still consider him my true teacher. I would like to be able to give people permission the way he did.
So, I can’t speak for any occult tradition. I just know there are transmissions of higher knowledge.”
(via Dreamflesh)
“The goat tethered to a tree outside Max Beauvoir’s home is doomed. Mr. Beauvoir, tall and majestic with closely cropped white hair, is a voodoo priest who was just named the religion’s supreme master, a newly created position that is aimed at reviving voodoo.
His grand residence on the outskirts of the Haitian capital serves as a temple for voodoo practitioners and a late-night hangout for those paying customers eager to take in an exotic evening of spiritual awakening. The temple, the P?ristyle de Mariani, is where Mr. Beauvoir and his followers dance around a giant totem to the beat of drums. It is where they light bonfires to summon the spirits. And it is where they drain the blood of animals like that scrawny white goat to, among other things, heal the sick.
On a recent night, Haiti’s voodooists convened for a special ceremony. With music blaring and devotees dancing with all their might, two children threw white rose petals on a red carpet. Then along came Mr. Beauvoir.”
(via The New York Times)
“Heavy metal is the ideal soundtrack to the bloody conflict raging in Baghdad right now. The city boasts a macho crowd-guns for hire, thrill-seeking journalists, war profiteers, kamikaze insurgents-and metal holds machismo in very high regard. Of course, Acrassicauda, the band at the center of the documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad, which opens the New York Underground Film Festival April 2 (a DVD release comes later this year), was not born of war-torn, modern-day Iraq, but rather a much less openly violent society.
Baghdad’s metal scene grew from a small community of teenagers with a shared love of American music-many of the most accomplished and well-known Iraqi groups got their start covering Metallica and Ozzy Osbourne. In the late 1980s, bands like Scarecrew performed regularly to sold-out crowds of headbangers and moshers, albeit in small halls and with almost no commercial backing. By the late ’90s, the scene had cooled slightly, though a few bands, like Converse and Passage, still played regularly for packs of fans numbering in the low hundreds.”
(via The Village Voice)
(“Heavy Metal in Baghdad” site)
Many many more: Popped Culture.
(Bill Whitcomb sent me this, watch out for his pop culture tarot essay in Immanion Press‘s forthcoming pop culture magic anthology, and the revised and expanded edition of his book The Magician’s Reflection)
I’ve been thinking about what Steampunk has to offer the world besides being another quaint subculture, particularly in light of the fact that it’s about to step over the line of subculture and into trendy nonsense that will inevitably bring with it hoards of pipe clogging band waggoneers.
What I’m really interested in is the Victorian enthusiastic amateur inventor/scientist part. The way I see it, most of the worlds problems – poverty, hunger climate change etc.- will never be effectively addressed by a top down, high tech research and loads of investment capital approach. Rather, I imagine that any progress that will have any real effect will have to be of the sort that a self educated person can make in their garage.
There’s been a lot of debate about weather or not all the Steampunk case mods etc. are legitimate as they don’t actually use steam, aren’t real Babbage engines or whatever and I think that’s pretty legitimate although it also misses the point.
Which is that steampunk is really an art movement. It doesn’t really have any cultural agenda such as the original punk movement did and it’s certainly not interested with making steam age technology “useful”.I would like to propose that were there to be some sort of a Steampunk cultural ethic it should be in taking that amateur inventor approach to modern technology with an eye to addressing the issues that humanity faces today.
Oh, and it should of course be done in such a way as to exemplify quality workmanship and ostentatious ornamentation.
There are many people out there who belong to this church and don’t even know it exists. So here’s an introduction:
“This site won’t help you do anything. I’m not trying to help you become more focused, motivated or confident. As the most happily apathetic, bitter and cynical person possibly inhabiting the planet, I’m not qualified to do so, and furthermore, I couldn’t care less. If you’re deluded enough to think your life could be made meaningful if only you might happen across the right website to assist your personal development into something other than the aimless, insignificant conglomeration of matter you are, fine; but this isn’t the one. Like life itself, there is nothing meaningful to be found on this site. The Church of Apathy is a place for those enlightened enough to understand that there is no god, meaning to life, or such thing as free will to enjoy our indifference and the failure it inevitably breeds, because it is easier and, within the context of the big picture of the impermanent universe in which we reside, holds the same value as trying and “succeeding” – absolutely zero. That’s it.*
– Reverend Bob
“Robert Delford Brown is the strangest pastor I know.
And I don’t think he’d mind me saying that. (I checked, by the way.) In fact, being different from all the rest was part of why he founded the Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. in 1964.
Entrenched in the high experimentation of New York’s art scene in the 1960s, Brown wanted a way of marrying his modernist art with his need for a religion without barriers that would allow him as well as his art to be ever-questioning and ever-evolving.
So he came up with Funkupaganism, an Orthodox Pagan religion.”
(via Star News Online)
(Funkupaganism via Funk Up)
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