Freescha-Moving

I met Freescha online a while back but lost touch after I dumped my myspace account. They live in the Valley near Valley College...I always loved this song..seemed like a great match for the psychadelic studio pan. Think I'll drop those chaps a line...

Logan's Run Apocalyptic Ending Sequence

...yes there is life after 30.

Logan's Run Re-Mix

wtf

Larry King Live: UFOs With Former Arizona Governor Pt. 1

Brain Lecture 6 Limbic System: Hallucinations, PTSD

BrainMind via Hollingsworth

Nanking and Hobbes

The Human Animal creates invisible circles around groups and communities that give them identity. Moral codes and attitudes do not apply to Individuals from rival groups outside of this circle, who can in fact be imagined as sub-human or sub-animal. This is because it is necessary to destroy and eliminate communities that threaten the resources or safety of the group in question.
This is known as a Hobbesian Dilemma:

As a result, Hobbes believes that it is psychologically unnatural for altruists to exist. If just one narrowly self-interested person exists no altruist can survive unless he/she becomes narrowly self-interested too. In such an environment, known as a State of Nature, Hobbes argues that a person must always be suspicious that another will attack in order to maximize his/her own self-interest. Therefore, in order for a person to maximize his best interest, he must attack the other person before that other person can attack. Each such conflict between two people in a state of nature has been termed as the "Hobbesian Dilemma." However, in the field of Game Theory, the Hobbesian Dilemma has the same structure as a "Prisoner's Dilemma."

Hobbes believed that the "Hobbesian Dilemma" results in a State of Nature because morality is an unstable enforcer of social cooperation. According to Hobbes, a stable enforcer can only exist if not one person can deviate from the established rule by which the rest adhere to. Since cooperation among people is biologically necessary, a stable enforcer must exist. Hobbes believes that the best form of social enforcement is the existence of an all-powerful sovereign.

....which explains why governments exist and wage war with each other...because if there was no government, people would exist in a state of anarchy in which the Rape of Nanking would look like a mild argument. Funny how nature and biology are the driving forces in large abstract social concepts like "Nations".

Greensky Greenlake

...is a great song by Dead Meadow. Trotting out most of my paintings from the past couple of years it seemed like the best soundtrack for this pointless yet somehow satisfying montage. I'm on an i-movie kick, so probably am going to be making some random and perhaps ill-advised jabs at this new dimensional avenue. You tell me.

studio pans

Dennis has got me hip to the whole video tip. We shot some footage in my studio and are hopefully going to push it around until it turns into something cool. Watching the raw outtakes in his loftish editing bay I was struck by the sound of my own voice..,I never knew there was such a deep and resonant authority in those pipes. Michelle says I kinda sound like Terence McKenna minus the geeky mister rogers bit . So if nothing else, I might have a future as an interviewer in arts related blog based video projects. I mean if this turns out it would be fun to produce an ongoing series of artist interviews and short pieces...maybe even start a blog devoted to the whole idea. Imagine the possibilities..following Steve Canaday around for a day... a stop-motion sped up video of a Bart painting...a shirtless Mario Correa mixing paint...you get the idear.

Back at home and curious, I fired up my digicam and this was all I could manage to figure out how to do...but just wait my pretties...just wait.

PartyBoyz

Steve's roomates' bedroom.

Gratitude

...this post was a little too private to leave in the public sphere. Hopefully the right people read it it while it was up.

Mad Max - Motörhead - Ace of Spades

Peak Oil documentary

Peak Oil: Gas Prices, Supply Depletion & Energy Crisis

our savior

Renewable energy
battery electric vehicle

beyond the superdome

bubble

..when the bubble pops, that's when everything becomes real.

Olduvai Theory

I'm thinking of moving to Paraguay

George Bush and his family just bought several thousand acres of land in Paraguay, which according to most computer models is the country least likely to suffer ecological damage from nuclear fallout patterns. Hawaii is also attractive. At the very least I need to get LASIK surgery within the next couple of years.. there won't be any contact lenses or optometrists in the coming war storm. Might also be a good idea to invest in some lead.

"Deal With Reality or Reality Will Deal With You"

FIVE THEMES FOR NICOLAS ROEG

The Man Who Fell To Earth

Terence McKenna: The World and its Double Pt.5

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Steven LaRose: portraits or landscapes from the uncanny mist

The paintings have a quiet Zen-like presence. They are not spectacular, radiant, theatrical, or lustful desirous objects, but instead possess a subtle and poetic beauty-one that would be easy to miss in the constantly moving image stream of todays artworld. Mostly they remind me of European art between the Wars..the short lived and nearly forgotten movement known as Tachisme, or l'art informel-perhaps as washy liquid acrylic minimal offspring of the work of Otto Wolfgang Schulze(a.k.a. Wols). But unlike Wols who propped his paintings against the Existentialist rhetoric of Sartre and died apocalyptically young from tainted horsemeat, Steven LaRose offers no theoretical polemic or tragic romantic persona for us to frame his activities. In fact he offers very little of the sort of knowing and affected context that has become de rigueur for entre into the elite pocket of what is considered "important" art 'round these parts.

What we get instead is something much more interesting and fresh, something that could've only come from a place outside of Los Angeles, outside of the grinding and ferocious tumult of professionalism that so quickly can turn the creative impulse into one more McProduct , replacing what was once candid and hopeful with the dour and cynical mannerisms of ironic nihilism. I've never been to Ashland Oregon, but a quick search on the internet filled my imagination with visions of a lush and verdant arcadia full of rolling hills, free-spirited hippie chicks, and old timers smoking pipes outside the General Store. I form a picture of a late summer evening in some sort of amphitheatre where crowds are happily lounging in the cool grass as live New Age sitar fusion music floats over the gathering while free-loving all natural nymphs surround me on a hemp picnic blanket. A winsome Castillian beauty with flowers in her hair leans towards me with a lump of sugar placed between her full lips...
Ashland, Oregon
nude protest in Ashland
So it might be that the Ashland that I have invented in my mind bears little or no resemblance to the actual, but what is important is that Ashland is NOT Los Angeles. Steven said that he started blogging to connect to a group of peers, a community that was larger than the very small handful of likeminded souls that have decamped in said mountain town. This is why I'm even writing this post, because it was through this serendipitous process that somehow we came to each others attention. But despite this connectedness, his work, or his motivations and reasons for making it remain pure of spirit-unsullied by the cold mechanistic forces that might've ripped his project to shreds if it had tried to emerge in this environment.


It is the genuine belief in the creative urge that one is left with after immersion in this world. The very simple act of dropping some paint on a panel and moving it around is in fact a truly exciting and revelatory process which we are in constant danger of forgetting. No marks are completely intentional or unintentional, no forms can be replicated. Out of this field of contingencies, the artist loosely orchestrates the emergence of a composition.- a taxonomy of coincidence. The Uncanny Mist is neither representational nor abstract, neither portrait nor landscape. It is open to all of these possibilities, a plenum of choices, a union of opposites. In the Mist the words "man" and "nature" dissolve into meaningless syntactical constructs and we begin to see the ground of being emerge unadorned by linguistic hallucinations.





Later as my class was reading reviews and eating pizza at a nearby restaurant we started to talk about Steven and how much he seemed to resemble his art-how it was impossible to separate one from the other, and how his enthusiasm and excitement were gleefully contagious leaving us all with a smile and feeling of discovery. One of them observed: "I really like that guy- he didn't seem like he was trying to impress us. He was just being himself."

"You know he's not from LA," I reminded them.

"Oh- no wonder."






Steven LaRose: portraits or landscapes from the uncanny mist

Social Instability

This widening gulf between the haves and have-nots has been a consistent trend for a generation or more. Economists largely agree about the primary underlying reasons. New technology has made many jobs obsolete, while creating dramatic opportunities for wealth in computers, finance, and media and entertainment. Global competition has done the same. As middle-class assembly-line jobs vanish, and routine white-collar work gets outsourced overseas, the value of education and special skills rises. The power of unions continues to decline.

For people in the broad middle class, the economic picture over the past decade has been mixed. Unemployment has been low and inflation largely contained. But behind those reassuring trends, you'll find a lot of volatility in labor markets — what economists call "churn." In short, there's more hiring and firing going on.

That churn had led to new opportunities for many workers, but caused hardship and anxiety for many others. Add to this the fast-rising cost of health care and the decline of employer-paid pensions, and you understand why many middle-class families describe themselves as financially squeezed. Low-income Americans, of course, are financially squeezed as well, only more so.

from NPR.org

Alex Jones on TRANS-HUMANISM:

Steven Pinker on Art

Everyone should go and buy The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. Here's an excerpt on art:

(click for readable larger images)