Oh gentle readers, my blog posts have been few and far between, I know. I’ve been sort of overwhelmed with attempting to navigate the sea of information online as of late. I’ve found the migration of users from Myspace to the cleaner, yet just as time-wasting, Facebook to be a semi-fascinating phenomenon. Social media — is it a groovy new way to communicate or just the next dot com bubble? I think that remains to be seen, and the future is unwritten so it’s anyone’s guess. I know lately that I crave to return to some more primal, pure, way of living. Twitter and Facebook are nice, yes, but what about steppes and tundras? Deserts, forests and oceans. Albert Hoffman in his old age and wisdom said that we must include nature in our everyday lives in order to be happy. I agree. A conundrum of modern life has always been how to marry progress with happiness. Here are ten historic clashes that kicked our intellectual evolution into overdrive:
I have to blog about this infographic from the New York Times article,Why Is Her Paycheck Smaller? While the results are annoying (yet not surprising), I find this to be a very cool little infographic. It’s interactive, so click on the below image to go to the NYT page then rollover the dots to see details.
Or collapsing, depending on how you look at it. People getting laid off left and right. The center cannot, and will not, hold. I’m trying to stay positive and forward-thinking, but it’s becoming really hard. I’m thankful to still be employed. The future is unwritten.
Here’s something nice I discovered this week, however: Picnik, the online image editor. My favorite feature is the Firefox extension, which allows you to edit and upload images without ever leaving your browser. Nice to not have to launch Photoshop just to do some quick image edits/fixes.
Another cool thing I discovered this week is the Maybe Logic Academy. Online courses are offered by well-respected authors and social critics on subjects such as Gnosis, NLP and secret initiation rites. There’s even a course on how to run your own cult. According to the website, by the course’s end “students will have designed and developed their own religious cult to the point of marketability.”
Harry Smith is the kind of guy who makes me feel guilty. Guilty for not going out and making art and documenting the human experience every minute of every hour of every day. Watching a folk music documentary on the Ovation channel tonight, I was reacquainted with the genius of Harry Smith. Harry Smith compiled (from his own collection) the legendary Anthology of American Folk Music, which was released in 1952 on Folkways Records. In 1965 he went on to record and produce the first record by avant folk/rock pranksters, the Fugs. Not only that, he was at one time “the greatest living magician” according to the godfather of experimental cinema, Kenneth Anger. Because even before Harry was capturing magical music, he was making magic with film. Check this piece out:
The life and work of Harry Smith is severly interesting. Visit his website here. And though I have only started this bad boy, here’s a hefty and heady analysis of Smith’s films, entitled Alchemical Transformations: The Abstract Films of Harry Smith (Jamie Sexton). Now, go make art.
OK so I’ve sort of neglected my REAL blogging duties lately here at Pink Moan in favor microblogging over at Twitter. What can I say, I have a short yet intense attention span. If you’re interested, my Twitter handle is Gnat74.
Weekend before last my friend Kitty and I made a trip to the Integratron, near Joshua Tree. Long story short the Integratron is an acoustically perfect, wooden geodesic dome-type structure. A late UFO enthusiast built it over the course of many years, but now these cool women own it and offer sound bath therapy sessions in the dome. Per the Integratron website: “The Integratron is the creation of George Van Tassel, and is based on the design of Moses’ Tabernacle, the writings of Nikola Tesla and telepathic directions from extraterrestrials. This one-of-a-kind building is a 38-foot high, 55-foot diameter, non-metallic structure originally designed by Van Tassel as a rejuvenation and time machine. Today, it is the only all-wood, acoustically perfect sound chamber in the U.S.” During a soundbath sesh, a series of quartz bowls are rung that correspond to each Chakra. The effect is uber-spacey and trance-inducing due to the dome’s heightened acoustical properties. No, this isn’t just hippie mumbo jumbo. I don’t know if I was in between sleep and wakefulness at one climactic point during the soundbath, but I do know I was somewhere else entirely. Here are a couple of pics, one exterior and one shot of the roof of the dome. Hey the iPhone camera isn’t too bad, sure wish it had a flash:
I discovered Afri-Cola (German brand of cola) last night during the Monks documentary: The Transatlantic Feedback. Many years ago an Afri-Cola commercial was supposed to feature music by the Monks, but that’s not even the strange part. My friend saved me some effort by eloquently blogging about Afri-Cola here. Feast your eyes on what is perhaps the finest, and surely most German, cola commercial ever (sort of NSFW):
…start blogging again this week. Just got my grad school application finished and uploaded over the weekend so I’ll have more free time to write soon. In the meantime, check out my friend’s newish blog four-thirty-three, it’s rad. Through four-thirty-three I was introduced to this fabulous piece of web work: the David Lee Roth Runnin’ with the Devil soundboard. You should definitely check it out, awwww yeeeaaah!
So what’s everyone doing for NYE? I can’t find it online, but I’d highly suggest reading the wonderful Lester Bangs article on NYE (included in the Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung collection), titled appropriately “New Year’s Eve.” It pretty much sums up how I’ve always felt about this holiday. I’ll leave you with the opening line:
“On New Year’s Eve of 1972 I attended a great party thrown by someone I didn’t know and inadvertently fell into a protracted conversation with this nearsighted social worker about 20 or 25 who kept babbling about his Volkswagen until I finally had to say: ‘Wait a minute. Are you telling me that the owning of a Volkswagen is a social, or a political act?’”
Here’s a mental health break for the holidays: a hilarious clip from that mediocre Ricky Bobby movie Will Ferrell came out with a couple of years ago. I mean, it’s kind of Xmas-y. It’s all about the baby Jesus…
