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John Henryism

Games Without Frontiers

Scratch Asid Test

I DRANK THE KOOLAIDE (show)

“Drinking the Kool-Aid” perversely references The Jonestown Massacre of 1978- the tragic result of 913 persons’ devotional adherence to one man’s crazed edict. Panned and sifted into the pop culture’s lexicon, it has come to indicate an individual’s blind following of what the “group” desires or the absolute acquiescence to an ideology or system of beliefs.

http://www.kusteratiltongallery.com/2006/12/i_drank_the_koolaid.html#more

Note: it was grape Flavor Aide, not Koolaide

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ACID TEST

Though Wolfe did not indulge in the same frequent drug use as the subjects in his work, he was intrigued by their experience and attempted to capture their state of mind and frequent revelations. To do so, he used extensive interviews and primary texts including many interviews, letters, and recordings from Ken Kesey, Norman Hartweg, Hunter S. Thompson and Robert Stone (among many others) to re-create not only the story of the Merry Pranksters, but the "subjective reality" of their experience, which relates obviously to Kesey's philosophizing of intersubjectivity. Wolfe seems to write just as maniacally as someone who would have been “on the bus", while his "[recreation] of" his subject's "subjective reality" is occasionally interrupted by his "impersonal and objective" narrator's self-inclusion. Wolfe's infrequent first-person recounting creates the underpinning dynamic between subject and journalist in the novel, which establishes Wolfe as a medium of the acid culture to what he calls "the outside world," in a form which he was concurrently establishing as a medium of journalism within a greater medium of literature.


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WAR IN 2004

What does drinking the Kool-Aid mean today? It signifies that the person in question has given up personal integrity and has succumbed to the prevailing group-think that typifies policymaking today. This person has become "part of the problem, not part of the solution."

What was the "problem"? The sincerely held beliefs of a small group of people who think they are the "bearers" of a uniquely correct view of the world, sought to dominate the foreign policy of the United States in the Bush 43 administration, and succeeded in doing so through a practice of excluding all who disagreed with them. Those they could not drive from government they bullied and undermined until they, too, had drunk from the vat.

What was the result? The war in Iraq.

Fire Starter

Visual arts

* Akiane Kramarik: 12 year old Christian artist who has been featured on television and in museums since age 10.[56]
* Jan Lievens: Painter apprenticed at 8 and an independent artist at 12.[57]
* John Everett Millais: Painter who entered the Royal Academy at eleven.[58][59]
* Alexandra Nechita: Painter with solo exhibit at age eight.[60]
* Dylan Scott Pierce: Wildlife art illustrator at 10.[61]
* Pablo Picasso: His Picador is from age eight, see List of Picasso artworks 1889-1900.
* Stephen Wiltshire: An example of autistic artist child prodigies, he is an English artist[62][63]
* Zhu Da: Prodigy poet by age 7 and later a painter.[64][65]

My Kid Could Paint That
Description

Is four-year-old Marla Olmstead a child prodigy? This bashful little girl from a middle-class family in Binghamton, New York, rocketed from total obscurity to international renown and sold more than $300,000 worth of paintings. Marla was compared to Kandinsky, Pollock, even Picasso. Her work captured the imagination of the world. Art openings, limousines, and television appearances became part of the Olmstead family's normal routine. Then, just as quickly, the media turned the tables. 60 Minutes aired a segment casting doubt on the authenticity of Marla's work, and the Olmsteads' world changed in an instant.

Is Marla a genius of abstract expressionism? Or is she a petite pawn in an elaborate hoax, an innocent victim exploited by parents who sold her for the glow of the spotlight and the lure of the almighty dollar? Filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev wisely allows audience members to draw their own conclusions.

Deftly interweaving multiple narrative threads, My Kid Could Paint That scrutinizes society's obsession with child prodigies, explores the complex debate over what makes something art, questions the media's creation and subsequent destruction of heroes, and even examines the ethics of documentary storytelling. Bar-Lev's film, a portrait of the artist as a young girl, is itself a fascinating work of art.

Tin Drum Roll

Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a composite German word that describes the process of dealing with the past (Vergangenheit = past; Bewältigung = management, coming to terms with, mastering), which is perhaps best rendered in English as "struggle to come to terms with the past". The German word Geschichtsaufarbeitung (lit. "processing of history") is more or less synonymous, but less common.
Contents

Vergangenheitsbewältigung describes the attempt to digest and analyse the past and to learn to live with the consequences of the dark chapters of such a past. The focus on learning is much in the spirit of George Santayana's famous quote that "those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it". As a technical term in English, this relates specifically to the atrocities committed during the Third Reich, when Adolf Hitler was in power in Germany, and to both ongoing and historical concerns about the extensive compromise and co-optation of many German cultural, religious, and political institutions by National Socialism. The term therefore deals at once with the concrete responsibility of the German state (the Federal Republic of Germany assumed the legal obligations of the Reich) and individual Germans with what happened "under Hitler" and with questions about the roots of legitimacy in a society whose invention of Enlightenment collapsed in the face of Nazi ideology.

here

Flow

Massive Wave

A Low Grade Drama

TV show "Without a Trace"

Primed
When a young artist disappears, the team is concerned that one of her subjects may have been unhappy with her work.
Airs: Sunday January 21, 2007

"im like a cypher who feeds on other peoples tragedies"
-Artist quoted in a recolection by her less successfull artist/assistant, who lives out of her car amd becomes privy to the artist's demon.

"Cadmium is an expensive red paint"
-Investigator explaining that the missing artist was using cadmium red for the first time in her images, which are traced from photographs she takes.

Complete my Sentience

Nickled and Dimed, My Guru Said

The customers that most real estate gurus go after are relatively uneducated, inexperienced, and poor. Sheets spent much of his adult life as a salesman. One of the main things salesmen must do is overcome objections. As you would expect, one of the objections you run into when you try to sell investment advice to poor people is, “I don't have any money to invest.”

here

GOTTERDAMERUNG

You know, the room tone.

The Lonely Crowd

The revolutionary idea of contemporary art was that any object, any detail or fragment of the world could exert the same attraction and raise the same questions as those formerly restricted to a few aristocratic forms called works of art. That was democracy : not just in the access of all people to the enjoyment of art, but in the aesthetic upr-ising of an object-world where, to quote Warhol's famous formula, each object, without distinction, would have its quarter hour of fame - and particularly those banal objects, images and commodities. All are equivalent, everything is great - universal ready-made. Reciprocally art and the work of art are also transformed into objects - ready-mades without illusion nor transcendance - art as a merely conceptual acting-out, a generator of deconstructed objects that deconstruct us in turn. Conceptual objects generated not by art itself, but by the idea of art. No body, no face, no gaze - just organs without a body, flows and networks without substance, fractals and molecules. No more judgment, pleasure or contemplation - one gets connected, absorbed, immersed, just as within force-fields or networks.

-Baudrillard

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari begin to develop their concept of the BwO - body without organs, their term for the changing social body of desire. Since desire can take on as many forms as there are persons to implement it, it must seek new channels and different combinations to realize itself, forming a BwO for every instance. Desire is not limited to the affections of a subject.

In their later work, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and Guattari eventually differentiate between three kinds of BwO: cancerous, empty, and full. Roughly, the empty BwO is the BwO of Anti-Oedipus. This BwO is also described as "catatonic" because it is completely de-organ-ized; all flows pass through it freely, with no stopping, and no directing. Even though any form of desire can be produced on it, the empty BwO is non-productive. The full BwO is the healthy BwO; it is productive, but not petrified in its organ-ization. The cancerous BwO is caught in a pattern of endless reproduction of the self-same pattern.

The term is borrowed from Antonin Artaud's radio play "To Have Done with the Judgment of God" (1947):

When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions

and restored him to his true freedom.[1]

In social theory the concept of self-referentiality has been introduced as a sociological application of self-organization theory by Niklas Luhmann (1984). For Luhmann the elements of a social system are self-producing communications, i.e. a communication produces further communications and hence a social system can reproduce itself as long as there is dynamic communication. For Luhmann human beings are sensors in the environment of the system. Luhmann put forward a functional theory of society.

Why do otherwise intelligent individuals form seething masses of idiocy when they engage in collective action? Why do financially sensible people jump lemming-like into hare-brained speculative frenzies--only to jump broker-like out of windows when their fantasies dissolve? We may think that the Great Crash of 1929, junk bonds of the '80s, and over-valued high-tech stocks of the '90s are peculiarly 20th century aberrations, but Mackay's classic--first published in 1841--shows that the madness and confusion of crowds knows no limits, and has no temporal bounds. These are extraordinarily illuminating,and, unfortunately, entertaining tales of chicanery, greed and naivete. Essential reading for any student of human nature or the transmission of ideas.

In fact, cases such as Tulipomania in 1624--when Tulip bulbs traded at a higher price than gold--suggest the existence of what I would dub "Mackay's Law of Mass Action:" when it comes to the effect of social behavior on the intelligence of individuals, 1+1 is often less than 2, and sometimes considerably less than 0.

Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds

Halber Menschengestalt

estalt psychology (also Gestalt theory of the Berlin School) is a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies. The classic Gestalt example is a soap bubble, whose spherical shape (its Gestalt) is not defined by a rigid template, or a mathematical formula, but rather it emerges spontaneously by the parallel action of surface tension acting at all points in the surface simultaneously. This is in contrast to the "atomistic" principle of operation of the digital computer, where every computation is broken down into a sequence of simple steps, each of which is computed independently of the problem as a whole. The Gestalt effect refers to the form-forming capability of our senses, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and whole forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves.

here

The mathematician George Pólya popularized heuristics in the mid–20th century, in his book How to Solve It. He learned mathematical proofs as a student but he did not know, nor was he taught, the way mathematicians arrived at such proofs. How to Solve It is a collection of ideas about heuristics that he taught to mathematics students – ways of looking at problems and formulating solutions.

heuristics

Hermeneutics may be described as the development and study of theories of the interpretation and understanding of texts. In contemporary usage, hermeneutics often refers to study of the interpretation of Biblical texts. However, it is more broadly used in contemporary philosophy to denote the study of theories and methods of the interpretation of all texts. The concept of "text" is here also extended beyond written documents to any number of objects subject to interpretation. A hermeneutic is defined as a specific system or method for interpretation, or a specific theory of interpretation. However, contemporary philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has said that hermeneutics itself is an approach rather than a method. He also believed the Hermeneutic circle to be the central problem of interpretation.

hermeneutics

ociological theorists, most notably George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman, saw the Cartesian Other as a "Generalized Other," the imaginary audience that individuals use when thinking about the self. The Cartesian Other was also used by Freud, who saw the superego as an abstract regulatory force.

psychic glue

I am a golden god

“The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.”

“The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience.”

“The only questions worth asking today are whether humans are going to have any emotions tomorrow, and what the quality of life will be if the answer is no.”

“They wouldn't be heroes if they were infallible, in fact they wouldn't be heroes if they weren't miserable wretched dogs, the pariahs of the earth, besides which the only reason to build up an idol is to tear it down again.”

-Lester Bangs, Critical Giant



"I always thought that you needed to know the code for finding out what was actually going on when you read mainstream publications," he said. "We just say it. It is supposed to be the conversation that occurs between reporters at the bar after they have finished their stories."

-Nick Denton, Blog God

here

touting teutonic technology

MagiQuest is a vast 20,000 sq. ft. realm powered by award-winning technology, packed with over 150 dazzling wand-activated events.

magiquest

world of warcraft

the matrix online

MMOG

Cargo Cult

Over the last seventy-five years most cargo cults have petered out. Yet, the John Frum cult is still active on the island of Tanna, Vanuatu. And from time to time, the term "cargo cult" is invoked as an English language idiom, to mean any group of people who imitate the superficial exterior of a process or system without having any understanding of the underlying substance.

The term is perhaps best known because of a speech by physicist Richard Feynman at a Caltech commencement called cargo cult science, which became a chapter in the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!. In the speech, Feynman pointed out that cargo cultists create all the appearance of an airport right down to headsets with bamboo "antennas", yet the airplanes don't come. Feynman argued that some scientists often produce studies with all the trappings of real science, but which are nonetheless pseudoscience and unworthy of either respect or support.

here

9021

Mulch

Imagine the consequences if lots of people started creating “fake” art without acknowledging what they were up to? The whole art-as-investment illusion would evaporate. The market would crumble. Art myths could no longer be trusted. The Triple Candie’s Hayes biography, in other words, is spun largely from myths and clichés that sell art and artists today.

here

Finnegan is Awake

"In certain highly evolved societies, the intellectual élites progressively detach themselves from the patterns of traditional religion. The periodical resanctification of cosmic time then proves useless and without meaning. [...] But repetition emptied of its religious content necessarily leads to a pessimistic vision of existence. When it is no longer a vehicle for reintegrating a primordial situation [...] that is, when it is desacralized, cyclic time becomes terrifying; it is seen as a circle forever turning on itself, repeating itself to infinity."[19]

-Mircea Eliade

set theory

ASH: I don’t know if you can picture the Lipton’s tea box. Lipton is named for Sir Thomas J. Lipton, the founder of the company, who was a yachtsman and became a symbol of the British Empire . There’s a tiny picture of him in the corner of the box. He’s all white, not like a white colonialist, but white like a ghost. But no one ever notices that or thinks about Sir Thomas Lipton anymore. In fact he’s not even “Sir” anymore on the box, he’s just Thomas J. Lipton. They made him really small and they pushed him into the corner, where he now haunts his own brand. I guess they don’t want their tea to be associated with imperialism. Payless doesn’t have a figure like Thomas J. Lipton, but they’re haunting their own brand just the same.

n+1: By retaining the orange.

ASH: And by making it ghostly and apparitional—as opposed to aspirational. Because it’s not aspirational; it’s “pay less.” I mean, the aspiration is that you save money. But that’s a negative now, for them. They think nobody wants to look like they’re saving money.

n+1: Maybe by making the “Payless” sort of ghostly and rounded and inconsequential, “Payless” becomes just another one of those words that doesn’t mean anything.

ASH: Exactly. This is about unmeaning. They are unmaking the brand. They’re trying to go from “Pay Less”—to what sounds like “Payliss.” It sounds like “painless.”


N+1

too much, magic bus

I said, now Ive got my magic bus (too much, magic bus)
I said, now Ive got my magic bus (too much, magic bus)
I drive my baby every way (too much, magic bus)
Each time I go a different way (too much, magic bus)

I want it, I want it, I want it, I want it ...

Every day youll see the dust (too much, magic bus)
As I drive my baby in my magic bus (too much, magic bus)

mAGIC cARPET rIDE

Songfacts:
The group wrote this based on the bass line their bass player, Rushton Moreve, came up with. The only words he had written for it were, "I like my job, I like my baby."

This was the second big hit for Steppenwolf. "Born To Be Wild" was released a few months earlier. They were on different albums, with "Born To Be Wild" on their first and this on their second, although this was released well before their second album came out.

Lead singer John Kay wrote the lyrics. He got inspired when he put the demo tape in a home stereo system he bought with the royalties from their first album. That's where he came up with the line, "I like to dream, right between my sound machine."

Black Light Meme

EXBOX

Brick House

Reviews were mixed - it was clear that some people just didn't "get it" at all and couldn't see what I was trying to do, whereas others obviously saw the same potential in it that I did. I guess it was hard to review since it wasn't a game, and all the reviewers were used to was games. I got the worst review I'd ever had (for the Spectrum version, which was denounced as "pointless hippy nonsense" in some magazine I can't recall) and the best review I'd ever had (by a journalist who evidently saw something profound in it too, and wrote that he found "mere words too cumbersome to describe its brilliance".

retro

ANALOG

Hold your thought

Vortex

3. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very
painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the
results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had
best break down sooner rather than later.

17. Art forms that appeal to modern leftist intellectuals tend to
focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an
orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control as if there were no hope
of accomplishing anything through rational calculation and all that
was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment.

here

Ding Dong

Schoolastic

Smoke gets in my eyes

Playboy

Night Train

The German diplomats, experts in revolution, did not select any one revolutionary to overthrow the government of his country. They assumed unpredictability and so supported many revolutionary persons and movements, betting, as it were, on all the horses in the race. They did not put these revolutionaries on their payroll, win them over to the cause of the German Emperor, dictate what they should or should not write, or issue orders guiding specific actions. The Germans used well instructed agents to influence decisions and events, but they left the revolutionaries to their own ideologies, tactics, and devices. Only rarely were direct contacts made ; seldom were the revolutionaries cognizant of the source of the unexpected assistance. Many revolutionaries were willing to accept any help offered, on the grounds that they were upholding their own convictions and were actually using the Germans for their own ends. The Germans recognized this attitude, and to strengthen their political warfare capabilities, stimulated sentiments of this nature.

here

Fleurs du mal