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.