Jimmy Page: "It was my life - that fusion of magick and music"
Well, I was hermetic. I was involved in the hermetic arts, but I wasn’t a recluse. Or maybe I was… The image of the hermit that was used for the [inside cover] art-work on Led Zeppelin IV and in the movie actually has it’s origins in a painting of Christ called The Light of the World by the pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt. The imagery was later transferred to the Waite tarot deck [the most popular tarot deck in use in the English-speaking world]. My segment was supposed to be the aspirant going to the beacon of truth, which is represented by the hermit and his journey toward it. What I was trying to say through the transformation was that enlightenment can be achieved at any point in time; it just depends on when you want to access it. In other words you can always see the truth, but do you recognize it when you see it or do you have to reflect back on it later?
Oh well, I lost the first random 10... so here's an even more random 10. I've got lots to do, so I'll submit that as the premier excuse for not exhaustively linking and researching these ditties. Self serve:
1. Rafael Arias Paz- Kaluyos Tradicionales
2. Balkan Beat Box - Digital Monkey
3. The Kleptones - 0130 Psyche Haze (24 Hours)
4. Ruby - Grace
5. Charles Mingus - Better Get Hit in Yo' Soul
6. Beck - Shake Shake Tambourine (Black Tambourine)
7. Billy Bragg & Wilco - California Stars
8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Voodoo Chile
9. Sting - Englishman In New York
10. Ultra Nate - Get It Up (The Feeling)
It's a beautiful Saturday, thusly implying laziness, laughter, and extremely mellow movements from one object/activity to the other. I've so far: made an omelet (including a goose egg!), made a pot of coffee, been back to sleep 1x, retrieved mail from upstairs neighbor, answered the phone 1x, thought rather sensuous thoughts 2-10x, looked around for something interesting and returned to sift through the Bloglines feeds ?x. This anti-burst of inactivity runs counter to the massive pile-o-things I really need to do.
In that spirit, let's nuke some mythical creatures (via):
Now on to the video. I was at a lecture last night by the man I suppose I could call my guru, Andrew Harvey. It would take far longer than I have to type (I'm running the therapeutic youth group later today), but his passionate and powerful invocation of Rumi as the impetus of a new rise in Sacred Activism had me in ecstatic tears. He dropped in the lecture a tidbit I've seized upon: there will be a pilgrimage in Turkey in September of this year to Konya, Turkey to the wild man's tomb to celebrate his 800th birthday. I will be there. I must be. The seed cracked open and I had an A-HA! or, rather, an ADAB! moment.
First off, the video I'm posting here is best enjoyed on the big screen, in the dark, and in a state of mind where you can readily absorb it (i.e. not engrossed in the ADHD style of intertube information sponging and electro-digital pursuit of sensual delights). Nope, this time it's about being meaningful. Ron Fricke's Baraka is one of my top five favorite films, and always will be. I posted a small excerpt before. Now, I post the whole thing, link via Mefi.
And, after you've been blown away by that, here's my random 10 iTunes ditties for this week (now with mp3s or Youtubery whenever possible and legal):
I discovered this here in 1987 when I picked up a few horse-chestnut stalks and pinned them together with thorns, and I found that holding them up to the light was really beautiful. I wondered if I could span a couple of trees with them, and I was amazed that I could. Now here I am 30 years later making a mesh that spans a room 12m wide. I wanted to put this in to show the way things have grown, the technical things, you know....' One of Goldsworthy's talents is to make such intricate stunts look easy. At one point he quotes Whistler's notion that a work of art is not finished until all signs of the effort of making it have been removed. He likes that idea. I suggest the 'black hole', the great cairn of oak branches he has created up the corridor, as a good example of that. He laughs, in the way you might when thinking of the challenges of disciplining a high-spirited child. 'Stone to some extent has a system to it,' he says. 'But with wood every branch is totally different. I always look at the branches laid out on the grass before I begin and I think, "Oh fuck, here we go." I used to do them in a day. I can throw them up. But I took my time with this one, three days. To start with, you don't know what character it will take. If the base gets too wide it can be very sort of lumpen.' What he is trying to bring out, he says, is something like the same quality that existed in the original trees. 'That effortlessness. A tree is so perfect in its profile but it is underwritten by this enormous daily struggle over years and decades. That is the energy I am aiming for.' [many sweet images] [wiki] [arches]
Frank Miller's literary themes have a tendency to evoke homosexuality as reserved for villains [1]
Director Zack Snyder admits to using homosexuality to scare young men [2]
The historical sexual reality of Sparta is far different than the world Miller and Snyder have created (strictly heterosexual, while the villains remain ostensibly queer) [3]
Far from being the prototypical democracy implied in 300, Spartans created slaves out of the underclass [4]
Spartans exercised extreme cruelty in crafting civil law [5]
In lieu of the distorted image of Spartan moral character, historical Spartans openly practiced eugenics, wherein babies of questionable health were weeded out by bathing them in wine until they convulsed [6] and tossed over cliffs to their death [7]
The film is crafted in such a way that the antagonists are quite dark skinned, sexually ravenous or physically deformed (well beyond historical reality). Many have cited the film for its rather overt racist tones [8]
In summation: "If 300, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war. Since it's a product of the post-ideological, post-Xbox 21st century, 300 will instead be talked about as a technical achievement, the next blip on the increasingly blurry line between movies and video games." [10]
I learned the South African National Anthem when I was but a wee 14 year old lad in 1987 from watching Paul Simon's Graceland concert in Zimbabwe. N'kosi closed the show. I still get goosebumps. Sadly, while Apartheid is no more, the same xenophobic ideas still fuel hatred around the world. These few minutes of television from 20 years ago still give me hope that we shall overcome, someday.
Weird: Mahala Raï Banda showed up with a song at #9 last week, and at #8 this week. Those are the only two songs I have of him out of 4,471. There is a 0.04473272198613285% chance of that happening. Oh great spirits of synchronicity, what have I to learn from this?
Consider that each human eye normally receives data at a rate of about 8.75 megabits per second, a bandwidth which is significantly greater than most high-speed Internet connections. The visual cortex is the most massive system in the human brain, and it is packed with pathways which manipulate the rush of visual data before handing it over to the conscious mind. When disease begins to kink this firehose of information, a legion of neurons are left standing idle.
It is worth noting that the human brain already has significant talent in dealing with partial blindness. Every human eye has a blind spot where the optic nerve passes through the retina, and the visual cortex automatically fills in these blind spots by extrapolating what should be there based on the surrounding detail. Since a person's two blind spots do not overlap, the brain can also cross-reference the eye data when both eyes are active. In gradual-onset blindness, it is possible that these brain pathways attempt to fill in the new obscured areas. Since the eyes are sending reduced amounts of data with a greater frequency of errors, the visual cortex may produce more and more outlandish guesses.
Try the experiment mid-page to perceive your blind spot. I verbally exclaimed loudly upon perceiving mine.
I discovered this here in 1987 when I picked up a few horse-chestnut stalks and pinned them together with thorns, and I found that holding them up to the light was really beautiful. I wondered if I could span a couple of trees with them, and I was amazed that I could. Now here I am 30 years later making a mesh that spans a room 12m wide. I wanted to put this in to show the way things have grown, the technical things, you know....' One of Goldsworthy's talents is to make such intricate stunts look easy. At one point he quotes Whistler's notion that a work of art is not finished until all signs of the effort of making it have been removed. He likes that idea. I suggest the 'black hole', the great cairn of oak branches he has created up the corridor, as a good example of that. He laughs, in the way you might when thinking of the challenges of disciplining a high-spirited child. 'Stone to some extent has a system to it,' he says. 'But with wood every branch is totally different. I always look at the branches laid out on the grass before I begin and I think, "Oh fuck, here we go." I used to do them in a day. I can throw them up. But I took my time with this one, three days. To start with, you don't know what character it will take. If the base gets too wide it can be very sort of lumpen.' What he is trying to bring out, he says, is something like the same quality that existed in the original trees. '
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