Required reading

Further proof that Saul Bass' PHASE IV is the best movie ever, here.

THE S FROM HELL

THE S FROM HELL is a fantastic short I recently saw at the BAM Film Fest comprised of disturbed phone interviews with the childhood victims of a post-cartoons corporate logo. Right? Remember all those? "Sit, Ubu, sit! Good dog." Check out the fantastic website created for the movie with links to a variety of spooky brands and logos.

Let them eat brands

Interesting bit about some branding statistics. Also, interesting to consider some glasses cost between $100 and $200...much less $600 and above.

Lost Sounds and Soundtracks: THE DUELLISTS

How do you pull off an historical epic film in just over an hour and a half? Ridley Scott did so in his 1977 Cannes-honored The Duellists working from screenwriter Gerald Vaughan-Hughes' adaptation of a Joseph Conrad short that deftly dashes across 58 scenes spanning 6 discreet epochs inside 16 years, all within a 96 minute movie (not counting credits). Call it "The Mini-Epic."

Full article with five great stream-able tracks here!

Lost Sounds and Soundtracks: HEAT

The precisely hodge-podged sources for Michael Mann's musical cues—sometimes original compositions, sometimes culled from pre-existing pop, rock, industrial, and/or electronic groups—are as diverse as the dusty Los Angeles turfs he agilely vignettes in his consummate epic crime male-odrama Heat.

Check out the full article with tracks here.

Spacerock Score of the Day: Loop's John Peel Sessions-WOLF FLOW

Great music. Great palindrome. Linked here.

Iggy Pop, David Bowie, and THE IDIOT

Great blog about the recording of THE IDIOT here.

SHUTTER ISLAND's most interesting second of film

Unfortunately, that's only 1/496,800th of the otherwise overlong runtime.

The Art of Victorian Photocollage

...in the exhibit PLAYING WITH PICTURES currently at the Met. Loved this and am inspired to do my own, and just really think everyone should go see it.

Post-mortem retinal images

A lot of articles that look to be worth reading over at Bill Jay's website, but of note on page one of the essays, IMAGES IN THE EYES OF THE DEAD, a comprehensive study of the historically misinformed notion that the final image before death is captured on the retina.

File in the "Extremely disappointing that this phenomenon isn't real" category right next to this debunking of archeoacoustics/paleoacoustics being recorded upon the pottery of antiquity. Well, crap.

However, retinal photography for strictly medical purposes remains a valid field, yielding some incredible images.

The screwed up sounds of THE SINFUL DWARF

"Won't it be funny to see a Danish movie titled The Sinful Dwarf? In a theater?" my friends and I mused, sallying forth towards a midnight screening at the original Alamo Drafthouse.

Well, it wasn't funny. It was really messed up, actually...

Find out what happens here!

Watch the skies!!!

Paul Davies, collaborator with SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has just published a book I really want to get, THE EERIE SILENCE: RENEWING OUR SEARCH FOR ALIEN INTELLIGENCE.

Perhaps in reaction, Stephen Hawking has made a public statement about his concerns for attempted contact with extraterrestrials.

Is it too late? Have we already put the last nail in the coffin with the Voyager Golden Record launched in 1977? Check out it's awesome content on this fantastic site devoted to it.

Philip K. Dick EXEGESIS to be published: About Fucking Time

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/books/30author.html?hpw

Now I don't have to figure out how to initiate a publication of it myself, something I was contemplating a strategy for as recently as yesterday while looking through the VINTAGE PKD publications short section of 2 letters to VALIS editor Mark Hurst. Of note, that the protagonist--a fellow named Huston Paige pre-dating Horselover Fat--in the original draft transforms at book's end into a ventriloquist's dummy!!!! (awesomely terrifying TWILIGHT ZONE twist-esque and dropped from the final publication totally), and the following tantalizing quote: "The cooperation of discrete objects: a possible clue to high-order mimicry?" Reminiscent of Jung's SYNCHRONICITY.

However, I can always still edit an annotated VALIS. Maybe on the web, elaborating upon this online version of the entire book.

"Commonalities between western and native science"

"Cosmic Serpent is a Collaborative project led by Indigenous Education Institute and UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory. Cosmic Serpent is funded by the National Science Foundation under grants No.DRL-0714631 and DRL-0714629." Awesome.

Kerry Tribe's H.M.

Kerry Tribe's H.M. is an amazing 16mm film installation described by my buddy as "projectionist porn" due to the incredibly rickety and complex contraption rigged to run a single strip of film between two projectors at a 20-second delay (the duration of memory left within the titular subject's perception after his experimental 1953 brain surgery resulted in unexpected damage) while a single fixed soundtrack is mixed to sync up alternately with one side or the other of the resultant split-screen, echoingly staggered, pseudo-documentary images...all the means to the end of creating a formally imitative examination of memory, brain lateralization, aging, neuro-plasticity, and the impermanence of consciousness and identity.

Wafaa Bilal

Caught a talk this week by Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal, and was fascinated by his incredibly committed and at the very least literally uncomfortable performances (SHOOT AN IRAQI and ...AND COUNTING) and other video-gaming inspired pieces (VIRTUAL JIHADI, presented with great difficulty and eventual/inevitable censorship in Troy, NY, and scourge of the RPI College Republicans organization, per their blog). Bilal's evening of discussion was presented as part of the ongoing series "You Should Have Been Here an Hour Ago" organized by Arturo Vidich of Culture Push which also did a fantastic evening of workshops as part of The Whitney Biennial two Fridays ago where I observed how to properly suture a pig's trotter, how to cut a single bagel into a linked chain, and how to make ravioli from scratch.

Score of the day: Vangelis THE DRAGON

Album of great long-form jams by Vangelis recorded shortly after the break-up of Aphrodite's Child with a pick-up studio crew organized by master prog-rock mover-and-shaker Giorgio Gomelsky (Magma and Gong) and then released without Vangelis' approval alongside HYPOTHESIS, an album of material culled from the same sessions and very similar but for a misguided sci-fi themed cover that pales in comparison to this amazing image of a Lovecraftian nightmare emerging from the seething ocean. Check it out. It includes an Aphrodite's Child cut only recently unearthed a few years ago on one single compilation.

Info about a different incarnation here.

My initial search today into Vangelis-related blog-posts turned up this amazing entry that purports the numerological relevance of a bunch of arbitrary, random digits on Vangelis' final release with Aphrodite's Child, 666. Turns out it was an Illuminati conspiracy the whole time.

Further fascinating numerological malarkey per Kubrick's THE SHINING here and a few days earlier by the same fellow here.

I'd hate to have to be the one to explain to him how PAL conversion rates and the 25-minute-shorter UK cut would radically change all of these research findings...

Score of the Day: Virgin Prunes' A NEW FORM OF BEAUTY

I learned about Gavin Friday through the soundtrack to IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER on which he does a fantastic, raspy duet with Bono for the title track. Always kind of wondered how and where he fit in alongside U2 in the grand scheme of things till stumbling on the Trouser Press Guide and hearing about Virgin Prunes. A stint at a radio station with a well stocked collection of vinyl provided a little research, and from what I've been able to listen to, here's their most fascinating material: A NEW FORM OF BEAUTY, released over 4 EPs and/or cassettes.

Will the real Michael Moorcock please step forward

Always nice to see an author participate in the ongoing promotion of his works...in the Amazon review section.

Mars, Antarctica provide inspriation for Brooklyn rooftop gardens

...I can't say it any better than the headline. So check it out.

Bakshi LORD OF THE RINGS on Blu-ray

Out last week, Ralph Bakshi's 1978 LORD OF THE RINGS adaptation is finally on Blu-ray, though varying reports don't seem to hold the high definition in such high regard. A shame, as this is probably as good as Bakshi's innovative animated adaptation will ever get on home media. Love it or hate it, I think it's worth noting that when Jackson first promoted his own take on the trilogy, he denied any influence from Bakshi, and only after a few people said, "Hey, don't you think a few of these scene looks suspiciously IDENTICAL to the animated version?" did Jackson admit that, oh, ahem, well, yeah, maybe I did watch that a few times when I was younger.

Some obvious fans at Wired drummed up a good little piece about Bakshi to celebrate the release. Some shockingly vivid original cel art over at Bakshi's site gives an idea of what a proper Deluxe Remastered Release might want to aim at looking like.

Buckminster Fuller Institute, Williamsburg

Just visited the BFI in Brooklyn yesterday on North 11th between Driggs and Bedford. They have a fine reading room to satisfy all your Fuller needs, and a great timeline of Fuller's life and accomplishments that I need to go back and look over thoroughly. In particular, learned about the troubled history of the Dymaxion car which, though built in the 20s and 30s, still looks futuristic to this day. Excluded from an auto show at Madison Square Garden in July 1933, Fuller simply parked it outside the event, and traffic was stalled for blocks as passers-by slowed to a crawl to examine it, upstaging the auto show itself. A fatal crash in the car the following October would lead to its loss of support and finance, though Fuller insisted that the accident's blame lay with the other cars involved, not his ground-breaking, stream-lined design.

Cassavetes: THE alcholic messiah

John Cassavetes, Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara on The Dick Cavett show to promote HUSBANDS (1970), maybe one of the most (putting the "dead" back in) deadpan comedies of all time, and an oddly simultaneous promotion of and argument against The American Prohibition.

Take a gander...practically the only TV I've watched this year.

Sad score of the day: redux--LIKE FLIES ON SHERBERT sessions footage

Per my link last month to a copy of LIKE FLIES ON SHERBERT by the late Alex Chilton, here's a link to footage of their recording process...stuttering video streaming over potentially non-sync-sound footage results in little clarification as to how this album actually ended up ever getting recorded, but this is worth a gander for its miraculous ability to make this album seem even more chaotic than I'd ever previously managed to imagine.

Must-see NYC: Crumb's illustrated GENESIS

Cartoonist Robert Crumb's illustrated take on the book of Genesis ending this week at the David Zwirner. Have looked through the accompanying published book, but can't wait to walk into Manhattan and take my sweet time check out the comic word made flesh.

New Left Media

Very impressed by the videos of their's that I've watched so far. Check out New Left Media's coverage of the Tea Party stuff on their website or their channel.

Score of the day: OUTSIDE THE DREAM SYNDICATE

Tony Conrad pairing up with Faust for one of the sickest long-jams ever. Yeah, you want this.

Ralph Bakshi's Bad-trip SPIDERMAN

WFMU's Beware of the Blog completed some of my favorite detective-work a few years ago regarding Ralph Bakshi's incredible, psychedelic kid's cartoon, SPIDERMAN '67. Granted, from what I understand, Bakshi didn't really take over till second season, '68, but that's when the show really became noteworthy, nightmarish, with the endlessly repetitive re-use of action animations (for a newer generation, think of Prince Adam's overly-regular transformation sequence into He-Man in MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE that saved those animators a ton of time and money every episode)...both economic AND nigh-hypnotic, especially to the impressionable 5-year-old mind. When I caught some in my mid-twenties on a vacation through Europe (over-dubbed in Italian no less), I think my jaw literally dropped in reaction to the surreality of Bakshi's cheap, weird, fantastic vision against a visual backdrop of Brakhage paint washes ("Now for children!") and an aural backdrop of...well, read below.

One of the best aspects of SPIDERMAN was its unbelievably groovy music, and finally a few years ago someone via WFMU has unearthed the source material for what would have otherwise remained essentially lost stock jams...stuff from a commercial-music-library-for-rent utilized by on-the-cheap movie and TV producers. This material brought a whole new dimension to the images cranked out of Bakshi's factory, somehow alchemically transforming what might have otherwise been dingy and tedious into fully realized, bizarre material...it's a great example of music and image butressing each other to sublimate beyond their own respective shortcomings: mediocrity is successfully abandoned, skipping the stage of mere decency to arrive straight to greatness. Good job!

On An Overgrown Path: Exclusive - David Munrow on the record

A fantastic podcast about my favourite practitioner and popularizer of early music, David Munrow.

On An Overgrown Path: Exclusive - David Munrow on the record

Check it out while I drum up a post for theauteurs' Lost Sounds and Soundtracks column about Munrow's contribution to the monumentally weird ZARDOZ.

Alan Moore: Childhood Was Weird

Just read Alan Moore's THE BIRTH CAUL this morning, originally a spoken word performance piece subsequently published in illustrated form in the collection A DISEASE OF LANGUAGE thanks to Eddie Campbell's scratchmanship. Looks like it's available in its spoken word form here. Look forward to listening to it.

Alan Moore's semi-stream-of-consciousness, T.S. Eliot WASTELAND-style autobiographical reflection upon the immensity of having been born out of nothingness via... something (woman/mother/goddess in our case) and the painful, awkward fumbling towards individuality that follows as we come to terms with subjective existence, the death of those we love, and inevitably, someday, our own self. All pulled off with incredible prose/poetry dipping in and out of differing voices for each self-mythologized lifestage of his maturation over the course of decades. Probably an entire life's work, actually, as I'm sure Moore is still ruminating over all of this day by day.

Moore's own summary from the back of the CD case:

"The caul is the ancient English name for the residual membrane from the amniotic sac that envelops the head of some newborn babies. A traditional belief holds that if the caul is kept (usually by peeling it away onto paper) it can be used as a talisman that will protect the child from death by drowning for a lifetime.

The birth caul is a bell-flower membrane blossomed from the amnion that masks the newborn head. Its presence is occasional. Its purpose is obscure, a vestment signaling involvement in some silent and unfathomable elite; some sect of Trappist embryos that dream the Absolute beneath these wan, translucent hoods.

THE BIRTH CAUL is an evocation, both in a poetic and a ritual sense, of our first landscape and the forces that inform it. Alloying spoken human text with landscaped sound and ritual enactments, it attempts a vortex; winds an inspiral dream from the site and date of its unique performance back towards the drowned, pellucid territory of our origins.

The birth caul, gradually unfolded, is a fragile tatter, a lost map to be restored with these faint tracings, lines as thin and tentative as veins. The flaking membrane charts a monstrous and forgotten continent, each vivid splash of motherblood an archipelago. It is a crumpled and mismanaged postcard from a vanished state, its message in an antique hand not readily deciphered.

The birth caul documents a personal Atlantis, a pre-verbal dreamtime, a naive shamanic state rich with abandoned totems; unremembered dance and fire; the florid signatures of medieval demons half-apparent through the strange-attractor loops of scribbled chalk upon a playground wall. A dark without a doll."

To quote Mr. Jeff Mangum: "Can't believe how strange it is to be any thing at all."

Oldest trick in the book

I just stumbled for Google's "recursion" prank quite by chance, explained in this fascinating list of their saucy jokes.

In the transformation of the universe into information, recursion is GOD!

Jeremy Narby, author of THE COSMIC SERPENT and INTELLIGENCE IN NATURE in interview with Ascent Magazine originally, but this link has better illustrations (check out "The Vision of the Snake"!). Of course I'm initially struck that Dick covered a lot of this turf in VALIS in 1981 such as the link between serpent imagery and the DNA double helix, or the sensation of living within a gigantic, almost unfathomable (due particularly to it's powers of camouflage) system of living information (VALIS=Vast Active Living Intelligence System), and numerous references to the world turning into information either in forward-progressing time-space or as a backwards-process universe heading FROM chaos TOWARDS articulate information). Had my hands on THIS book in NH's best used bookstore yesterday, and, goddammit, should have parted with the $1.50 necessary to make it mine. Now, at the very least, I might do well to pick up this at The Strand ($5.95!!!) or the NYPL which analogously suggests that the photosensitive body's evolution has culminated in the eyeball to receive information directly and indirectly from the sun in much the same was as the brain as an organ has evolved to receive intelligence from the surrounding intelligent universe. Is it any coincidence that it shares a title with one of my favorite (hell, "only favorite") book(s) about cine-consciousness? VERY interesting indeed.....

MOSES WAS HIGH ON DRUGS, ISRAELI RESEARCHER SAYS

Moses was high on drugs, Israeli researcher says

We can own you: Genetic branding

Check out how fucked people will be in the future...I mean, now.
First learned about this practice in THE CORPORATION a few years ago, and don't want to beat the shit out of the folks who pioneered it any less.

Democracy's Endgame forum at MIT

Driving down to Boston today to check this out on a live video feed at MIT. Expect the discussion to lead to many more links.

Whale Songs

Seriously, what are they talking about down there? I'm rereading MOBY DICK right now, which is the best, and this has provided a fine backdrop.

Meditation score of the day: Angus Maclise's ASTRAL COLLAPSE

"6th Face of the Angel" off of this particular collection of Maclise's work has long been my favorite piece to sit cross-legged and cross-eyed to. Give it a shot. "Dracula"'s real scary, and everything else (by him, though quite out of print) is worth tracking down. He even out-arted John cale when he quit as drummer for The Velvet Underground well before their first album because the band was getting to be too commercial an outfit (or else, was he fired for forgetting to show up too often to concerts...stories vary). Went on to create the killer music for Ira Cohen's INVASION OF THUNDERBOLT PAGODA, one of my all-time favorite movies.

That far-out sound

Joel Cohen, formerly of the killer early music ensemble The Boston Camerata, had a great article in the quarterly publication Early Music America about cross-pollination in medieval music and the proposal of that cross pollination by Thomas Binkley, founder of Studio der Fruhen Musik and the Early Music Institute at Indiana University. How is it Bloomington sounds more and more like one of the coolest places in the US? What? And the Early Music America site also has a page with some interesting links and downloads.

THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND

Just finished reading this fantastic book by late Princeton pscychologist Julian Jaynes...2 copies at The Strand remain for $4.47 as of last Wednesday when I was in. Here's a link to a fantastic TIME MAGAZINE article from 1977 about said book, summing up Jayne's biography and theory on the history of pre-conscious man. As a side note, the Ancient Near East Art wing of the Met is one of my new favorite things in NYC, where a lot of the original artwork from the civilizations discussed by Jaynes can be looked at, and you can marvel at the incredible graphic design sensibility these folks had immediately upon INVENTING METALLURGY (not too shabby).

Meal of the day (Meal of a lifetime): Doubles

Woke up with a mean post-nasal drip that had me vowing to consume no more than broth over the course of the day. Within an hour, I'd had a proposition from my buddy "Invisible Circle"-Dave to eat West Indian doubles that shattered my best-laid therapeutic and recuperative plans. Thanks to this incredibly well researched blog and Dave's commitment to biking in the rain, I basically got to enjoy this monumentally perfect food from, at least in the opinion of these linked bloggers, the best joint in Brooklyn from the dry comfort of our other friend's apartment on an otherwise rainy, nasty day. I think the old saying should be modified to: "Starve a cold. Feed a fever. Unless you're offered doubles delivered directly to you. In which case, eat yourself sicker."

Carl Orff, Olympia

I've been a very big fan of Orff's 'Musica Poetica' (exercises designed by Orff and collaborator Gunild Keetman to train children how to play instruments) since hearing it used unforgettably in Terrence Malick's BADLANDS (and copied unapologetically by Hans Zimmer in the BADLANDS homage TRUE ROMANCE). If you like those sweet tunes, here's some fantastic music along similar lines composed for the 1936 Olympics hosted by the Nazi party and filmed famously in OLYMPIA by propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.

Medicalization of Sex: challenged

Didn't David Cronenberg make some really creepy movie about an oppressive near-future in which unisex genital standardization is mandatory, either governmentally or socially...oh wait, we're already living in it!

Saw a very inspiring PowerPoint yesterday at the New School's No Longer in Exile gender studies conference about how to keep activism entertaining yet uncompromising, courtesy of the New View Campaign, a group dedicated (with great senses of humor, creativity, and craft no less) to supporting genital diversity amidst the scary world of cosmetic surgical homogenization.

Lost interviews with Philip K. Dick

These have been around for a while and linked to repeatedly, but I'm going to continue my recently premiered Philip K. Dick karaoke video project along these lines, I believe, with these as text or source material. Over the course of these downloadable mp3s, Dick discusses (with Paul Williams of ROLLING STONE, I'm going to cavalierly guess...but don't take my word for it) among other things...oh hell--check out the subject labels for the goods.

Fuller score of the day: UNDERWORLD U.S.A.

Streaming here till who-knows-when. I will have to keep an eye on this Crackle site business, even if that eye will be peering via my painfully slow Powerbook G4.

Sad score of the day: Alex Chilton R.I.P.

Let's just say, I've listened to Alex Chilton's first solo album a hundred times more than all of the Big Star albums together. Something tells me allmusic.com's one-star reviewer didn't really "get" this one, but maybe some grandchildren of its deconstructionist rock n' roll trailblazing took the cue and ran with it...on my mp3 player shuffle mode, I've repeatedly mistaken CROOKED RAIN, CROOKED RAIN outtakes for the bonus tracks on LIKE FLIES ON SHERBERT that I was less familiar with at the time. Get it. Chilton passed yesterday and will be missed. Too few musicians can still act as transducers to draw down sounds from outer space.

Philip K. Dick letter to editor Mark Hurst re: Julian Jaynes

**Probably should have posted this yesterday...from SELECTED LETTERS vol. 5**

March 17, 1977
Dear Mark,

Sorry I was somewhat abrupt with you the other night on the phone. It was an expression of my concern about Sherri, nothing more. Her friend Kathy had come over and told me, “I think now Sherri is dying.” Kathy is very practical and down-to-earth, and I never heard her say anything like this before. It fits my impression completely. Anyhow, that is our personal problem; on to news about VALIS.
The issue of TIME MAGAZINE which I told you about is off the stands, so I presume you were not able to get hold of a copy. I have the book which it discussed: Julian Jayne’s THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (cost me $13, but it was well worth it). Here is his stunning theory, based on a decade of research:
Humans originally were bicameral—that is, they used two hemispheres of the mind (“bicameral” means “two-chambered”). The left hemisphere was used for speech; the right contained the inner voices of the gods or dead or living kings, which the bicameral man heard as commands to do what was socially necessary; i.e. the inner command voices kept him at his tasks. Extraordinary as it may seem to us, when a king died, his people continued to hear his voice—on an inner basis, for some time after he was dead; this is why in the most ancient cultures throughout the world the dead king’s body was provided with food, etc., since he, in the form of his voice, was very much alive to his followers. However, somewhere between two and one thousand B.C. man began not to hear these inner command voices; as Jaynes puts it, “The gods fell silent.” Man made frantic and even somewhat tragic efforts to get the gods to talk to him as before; for example, this is what the Delphic Sibyls did: they spoke for the god Apollo, but by that time (600 B.C. to 100 A.D.) only a few simple peasant girls could hear the godly voices. And finally even they could not. By 100 A.D. no one could hear the voices of the gods anymore.
In reading Jaynes’ book I discover that although he is very certain (and very correct) that these inner command voices issued out of man’s right hemispheres, in no way is Jaynes really sure what specifically the voices were, if you follow me. He does not even really claim to know, although he speaks of them sometimes as being introjected voices of former kings now dead. He does not seem to believe or claim that this is all that these voices were mainly he concentrates on the human agony of the loss of these voices, due, he says, to the rise of consciousness in the left hemispheres of men so that they so to speak gave themselves their own commands, were no longer automatons reacting to command voices from their right hemispheres. Bicameral man ceased to exist and modern man took his place. Modern man, as Ornstein says, is cut off from his right hemisphere, from whatever it is now doing—which seems to be a lot, according to Ornstein and Joe Bogen and other researchers, such as I quoted in A SCANNER DARKLY.
Nowhere, though, does anyone except Jaynes—and this is the marvel of his theory—advance the idea that at any tie did the right hemisphere speak to the left. Jaynes says, and I think rightly, that this falling silent of the godly voices is what has come down to us as the myth of the Fall. At one time man talked and walked with his god, but that all ended; hence we speak of the Fall. And the idea of Original Sin is that we ourselves were responsible for these godly voices falling perpetually silent, as they remain up to this day.
Well, now, consider my novel VALIS. Here is an ancient teaching satellite which is also an ancient invisible “godly” life form. Look at what I can add to my book based on Jaynes’ book—which due to the TIME article is probably being widely read and discussed, now. Obviously, VALIS/Zebra is the source of these inner godly voices; the right hemisphere is a transducer-receiver for VALIS/Zebra, and at one time VALIS/Zebra spoke to man in exactly the way that Jaynes describes. I therefore in VALIS am saying what the source of those now-silent voices is, which Jaynes does not for the simple reason that he cannot and hence does not try. I say, there was VALIS long ago, talking with man as I talk with other men now. However, I differ with Jaynes in certain crucial respects (and I wrote him a long letter yesterday to outline this); VALIS/Zebra still instructs man, but now it is done subliminally, in dreams, and in invisible manipulation of man’s acts through engramming and disinhibition. VALIS/Zebra works on, but in secret. Thus I wrote to Jaynes that although we do not hear the gods any more, that does not mean that they are no longer there and no longer active. To think that because we fail to hear them they no longer exist is a failure to think logically and in fact practically. It would be as if I believed that after you and I, Mark, ceased talking on the phone the other night, you ceased to exist—because I could no longer hear you. (I also pointed out to Jaynes that the voices of the gods still direct us in the form of what we call conscience, which I’m surprised he didn’t think of).
The main value for my book VALIS is that just as the work of Ornstein and Bogen formed a scientific basis for A SCANNER DARKLY, so will Jaynes’ revolutionary new work form a scientific basis for VALIS. Jaynes has not really gone far enough (he says, however, that he plans to push his work further in a forthcoming book). He makes a completely convincing case for the “lost inner command voices of the gods which have now fallen silent” but he does not try to explain the objective origin of the voices (by the way—he says that in our times, among modern man, the voices show up as the hallucinated voices which schizophrenics hear, that in fact schizophrenics are the remnants of bicameral man, unable to function, not understood or appreciate, in the modern world; also, the voices which schizophrenics hear tend to deride them rather than guide them: they are demon voices, not godly voices).
That fits in with my book VALIS inasmuch as Houston Paige either is schizophrenic or fears that he is. A good scene might be one in which Paige, tottering on the edge of schizophrenia, begins to hallucinate, but instead of hearing godly command voices which instruct him as to how to cope with stress situations, they, as is so common in such voices, mock and insult him, a travesty of the ancient godly voices—these voices, in fact, in degenerate form.
I will have Sadassa Sylvia be reading Jaynes’ book. She, of course, will suppose that the now-silent godly command voices issued from the Aramchek satellite. Meanwhile Paige, who also has read the book (or anyhow the article in TIME) supposes that these voices emanated from Zebra.
The point is, Jaynes’ theory, research and book form the first scientific basis for VALIS/Zebra that I’ve yet come across, except, of course, the gene pool abreaction and disinhibition which I believe I already mentioned to you. The advantage to this is that TIME has given it good publicity.
I frankly don’t think that Jaynes in his forthcoming work is going to be able to give a satisfactory account (assuming he tries to) of the objective origin of the right hemisphere command voices. Also, I am not thoroughly satisfied as to the reason he gives for them falling silent; i.e. the rise of modern conscious man; after all, aren’t there primitive tribes today who would have, we should suppose, whatever archaic kind of mind our own cultural ancestors once had? But they, too, no longer hear any godly inner voices, yet they are at least as primitive as the Greeks and Hebrews of one thousand B.C. It seems more likely to me that the source of these voices fell silent, rather than the way Jaynes supposes it: that we simply can’t hear them now because of changes in us.

Phil

Total score of the day

ZAMBONI: EARLY KRAFTWERK!

The key here is the 1971 Radio Bremen thing. Astonishing, as in: "I am astonished!"

Score of the day

MUTANT SOUNDS: SLEEP "Jerusalem" aka "Dopesmoker" CD 1996 (US)