I’ve considered having a tattoo for a while, but never with any genuine conviction. The symbol from the Swastika Stone on Ilkley Moor had quite a profound impact on me, and I was contemplating getting that over my heart until I moved to Golders Green and started going swimming a lot. Frankly, I wasn’t ready for the kind of confrontations that ManWoman seems so admirably committed to facing on behalf of ‘the gentle swastika’.
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Just recently I got an email from David Jay Brown about the re-launch of his website, Mavericks of the Mind. I bought the book of the same name (co-authored with Rebecca McClen Novick) around 10 years ago, and it opened up a lot for me. Books of interviews are great access points, inspirational signposts to areas worthy of more study and exploration. And a book of interviews with people Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Allen Ginsberg, Laura Huxley, Nick Herbert, Stephen LaBerge and Robert Anton Wilson was just what I needed at the time.
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This will be blogged to death before long, but for good reason. Last night I saw a mention on a mailing list about Amazon.com offering a full text search. It didn’t really sink in until I used it. Now, when you enter search terms in the standard search box, the results returned, in addition to the usual matching on titles and authors, will include books that contain your search terms somewhere inside them.
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I’d been meaning for a while to get out and photograph some of the amazing spider webs I’ve been noticing more and more as this autumn’s progressed… So of course, when I seized the opportunity, seeing a wonderful sunset taking shape this evening, I opened the door in excitement only to be faced with a massive web spanning most of our little doorway arch. With its web anchored to the floor and the arch, its creator sits dead centre at chest level.
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Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, recently left the company. A long-standing luminary in the tech field (Joy was a prime mover in the development of the Java programming language and various Unix operating systems), he became known to a (slightly) wider audience via his April 2000 Wired Magazine article, ‘Why the future doesn’t need us’. The Matrix had primed the public for millennial techno-fear, but Joy did the valuable service of giving a good few left-brains a wake-up call, even as our right-brains thrilled to Keanu’s fight against the machines. The focus of Joy’s warnings about technological evolution, and the potential it contains for human obsolescence, was a trinity of disciplines that have been given the title "GNR". No, nothing to do with Axl Rose; it stands for genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics.
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David Blaine has succeeded in, if nothing else, dragging British idiosyncracies to the surface.
I caught a Sky One special last night, an update on his 44-day water-fast on the banks of the Thames. I struggled to see some valid objections to his stunt, but for all my efforts, I just saw the faults of the objectors.
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I didn’t make it down to the ‘End the Occupation of Iraq’ demo in London today, so I thought the least I could do is spread some revealing information about the growing behind-the-scenes cash-in on this occupation.
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It’s often the case that news channels like BBC News 24 run the more revealing stories in the wee hours of the morning, for reasons we don’t even need Chomsky to help us divine. I thought I’d caught one of these little outbreaks of reality last night when the guy dishing out the business news, of all things, started a bit with the unholy truth: "With OPEC protecting its members’ short-term interests, what about when the oil runs out?" Admitting to the finitude of our civilisation’s black lifeblood is a rarity in mass media; in news focused on economic stories, it seems tantamount to blasphemy. Or, more accurately, revealing a basic part of the world that has hitherto been psychotically blanked out.
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I would have blogged this over on the norlonto.net homepage, but we’ve got a notice there we need to keep up until a bit of spam domain spoofing tarring our good name blows over…
I just got some unrelated spam at the norlonto.net enquiries address, apparently from a Chinese firm calling itself Shanghai Peak Science & Technology of Chemicals Co., Ltd., trying to flog us "Tryptamine & Phenethylamine, Protected Amino Acid, Hormone Steroid, chiral compounds and intermediates". Anyone familiar with Alexander Shulgin will recognise those first two words as the families of substances he and his wife have known and loved. You’ll certainly be acquainted with the first family’s friendly PR agent, the magic mushroom, and the second family’s highly successful, albeit media-savaged son, ecstasy.
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On Tuesday I went to a great Kosmische gig upstairs at the Garage in Highbury. Caesar Romero belted out their rumbling, vibrant fury of latino-tinged horror-fuelled instrumentals, with their stunning dancer giving it her all. Groop shone as ever, a colourful burst of deep grooves and righteous energy. And the headliners, The Vanity Set—sleazy, theatrical NY rock fronted by the wonderful Bad Seeds drummer James Sclavunos—crowned the night with their grandiose, self-deprecatory musings ("I started a joke that made the whole world start crying / I didn’t realise / The joke was on me") and impressive musical talents (hats off to Meredith Yayanos’s spine-shaking theremin and stunning vocals).
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