Apical Meristems

IDX1274 & Wey Nagrom: Euro Traveller

2009-02-11T15:12:00.000-08:00

We are very pleased to present this special gift by the art scientist from the remote hills of Cascadia to n0-age. This album was limited to 20 copies as a 3" cd-r with a special artwork on each item. The music floats from mindful drones to chainsawed ambience which gives a sonorous view of the Europe tour made by Wey "Euro Traveller" Nagrom, and interpreted by IDX1274 after 2002.

A Post-Millennial-Recession Devotional-Hymn

2009-02-03T02:36:00.000-08:00

D O W N L O A D D J M I X @ R A P I D S H A R E

Note: After I originally posted this, I listened back on headphones and noticed that Ableton had somehow managed to fuck up the channels, so the listener may have to re-balance using the stereo-slider, or re-master into mono. I may remix this and ensure proper channel-balance later.

Section I: A Prayer & An Opening

01 II by Philip Jeck & Jacob Kirkegaard (Soaked CD 2002)
02 3m by Chris Watson (Oceanus Pacificus 7" 2007)

Section II: Surface Abrasion

03 Southern Right Whale Surfacing in the South Atlantic by Chris Watson (Outside the Circle of Fire CD 1998)
04 06:15 by Deathprod ft Matt Burt (Deep Throat Puke Orgasms CS 1991)
05 Padmasambhava Tsechu Sadhana: Invocation (Fragment I & II) by The Drukpa Kagyu Order of Tibet (LP 1976)
06 13:57 by The Body Lovers (Number One of Three CD 1998)

Section III: Something Lost (Lamenting/Celebrating)

07 06:15 (Edit) by Deathprod ft Matt Burt (Deep Throat Puke Orgasms CS 1991)
08 Karenina Revisited by Charlemagne Palestine, David Coulter & Jean Marie Mathoul (Maximin CD 2002)
09 05:32 by The Body Lovers (Number One of Three CD 1998)

Section IV: Something Found (Shamanising)

10 Psychotic Photosynthesis (No Drum Mix) by Omar-S (CD 2008)
11 Yanomamö Shamans of Southern Venezuela, November 1978 Recorded by David Toop (Ancient Lights & The Blackcore CD 1995)

Section V: A Lilting Blue Hue

12 Down Home Kami-Sakunobe Zeitkratzer & Terre Thaemlitz (Electronics CD 2008)

Section VI: At the Crossroads

13 08:58 by The Body Lovers (Number One of Three CD 1998)
14 The Crossroads, Kielder Forest in Northumberland, England (Stepping Into the Dark CD 1996)
15 10m by Chris Watson (Oceanus Pacificus 7" 2007)
16 06:15 (Quiet Edit) by Deathprod (Deep Throat Puke Orgasms CS 1991)
17 Southern Right Whale Surfacing in the South Atlantic (Quiet Edit) by Chris Watson (Outside the Circle of Fire CD 1998)

Section VII: In Closing...

18 Feed the Birds (Tuppence A Bag) by Julie Andrews (Mary Poppins OST LP 1964)

75% Review: Kingdom Come by JG Ballard Part II

2008-10-28T09:31:00.000-07:00

Evidently, the book is segmented into Three Parts like the format of this report, and I've just reached the end of the second.

Part the Second installs enormous change into the religious development of the Metro-Center conspiracy, an almost prophetic movement from unrestrained yet directionless chaos, into a loose framework with an objective established by a MAD IS GOOD slogan written into every commercial by Richard Pearson, the "beyond psychiatric help" narrator of Kingdom Come. An ex ad-exec from London (a euphamism for having been fired by his ex-wife who also left him), drawn to the insignificant metro-town of Brooklands by his father's murder(er), who begins the book distrustful of the towns reverence for the dome of the mall, everyone's spiritual center, becomes the script-writer for Metro-God David Cruise. Cruise, whose face is plastered across every billboard and featured on three stations transmitted by the mall, presenter and talk-show host of soccer mom's and other devoted shoppers, is also an actor who found no audience in the bigger city of London.

It follows then, that David Cruise and Richard Pearson, unrequited in their professions elsewhere, should take the reigns of madness which have by now begun to circulate across the cesspool of Metro-Towns down the M5 of England. Somewhat unconsciously, with a quiet vengeance, Pearson becomes the writer of The Consumer's Mein Kampf and Cruise becomes the autocrat Führer, ably displaying his own madness to rabid viewers, men without a message who have found their desert. All for a few washing machines, Pearson insists. With that, Pearson sells his Chelsea flat back home to a doctor and a teacher, both fresh in their professions and suspicious of a man willing to sell his home to move permanently and without hesitation into his dead father's home beside the Kumar's.

In this new playground of the mind, Cruise becomes a deranged presenter, in the grips of hallucination, fear, adulation, loss; a film noir hero, advertising nothing but waywardness, whatever horror Pearson writes into the 30 second script or talk-show program, promoting a political message of twisted consumption to the revering masses.

The terrible gravity of the mall increases, and the scope of its product irrevocably alters the minds of its viewers and the effect is fascism, once again described by the school-principle, speaking for the people, to an unbelieving seller of washing machines:

'... Who needs liberty and human rights and civic responsibility? What we want is an aesthetics of violence. We believe in the triumph of feelings over reason. Pure materialism isn't enough, all those Asian shopkeepers with their cash-register minds. We need drama, we need our emotions manipulated, we want to be conned and cajoled. Consumerism fits the bill exactly. It's drawn the blueprint for the fascist states of the future. If anything, consumerism creates an appetite that can only be satisfied by fascism. Some kind of insanity is the last way forward. All the dictators in history soon grasped that -- Hitler and the Nazi leaders made sure no one ever thought they were completely sane.'

'And the people in the Metro-Center?'

'They know that too. Look, how they react to your new cable ads.' Sangster pointed a grimy finger at me, grudgingly forced into a compliment. 'A bad actor howls from the roof of a multi-storey car park and we think he's a seer.'

'So David Cruise is the führer? He's fairly benign.'

'He's a nothing. He's a "virtual" man without a real thought in his head. Consumer fascism provides its own idealogy, no one needs to sit down and dictate Mein Kampf. Evil and psychopathy have been reconfigured into lifestyle statements. It's a fearful prospect, but consumer fascism may be the only way to hold a society together. To control all that aggression, and channel all those fears and hatred... Give them violent hamster wheels like football and ice hockey. If they still need to let off steam, burn down a few newsagents.'

As the message increases, by now cautiously watched by the government, treating the whole movement with cold distance, affecting neighbouring Metro-Towns like a virus and raising everyone in Brooklands into a state of anarchy, we are brought to the conclusion of Part II with the army at the doors of the Metro-Center and the God of it all either assassinated or pulling a trick of smoke and mirrors to get the attention of a public in rapture.

An Invitational Inquiry (Number One)

2008-10-17T12:22:00.000-07:00

If you (anyone) are reading this blog/post, please chime in on this subject. I do not want to propose any answers myself, except for the purpose of suggestion. Diversity of opinion is key here, besides which I am doubtless deficient and could learn a thing or a Million here...

A))) What were the emergent factors which gave rise to the increased capacity of the Hominid brain? What critical differences made it possible for us to develop, more naked as time drew on, without need of sharp tooth, claw or phantom-features such as eyes on our asses like butterflies do on their wings?

Basic biological need, and the struggle for survival were probably quite high on the list of things which may have inspired critical changes in behavior. Or were we cast here by some vengeful god, with all the world as our dominion, with all the trimmings of culture pre-supplied that we would not need our wits, only our devotion to reach the highest? There are claims that certain of the great apes do not eat meat and that our stomach's are not meant to digest anything outside the realms of fruits and vegetables (in books such as Drugs Masquerading As Foods by Suzar), which suggests we have always been on a course of benevolence towards animals and only lately have we been toxifying ourselves with animal products.

(Below you'll find an image of Penfield's Homunculi exaggerating our Sensory & Motor Hemispheres)

B))) What does this say about our current state of affairs and where we are going specially? Do New Age claims of Universal Consciousness/Love have any bearing? Similarly, what can we then expect of benevolence, or malevolence, which don't appear to be integral/inherent in our dealings with others?

For instance, are the claims made in a book like The Seven Principles of Infinite Being by David Martin Wells in any sense true, which are: 1) Infinite being is all that is. Nothing exists outside of it. 2) We are all infinite being. 3) Destiny exists due to your pre-planning the themes in your life. 4) Free will enables you to explore your true potential. 5) Life reflects what you project. 6) Abundance is natural. 7) Love is the only reality.

C))) What then is our spiritual/material destiny and that of other life on this planet/elsewhere? Why are there few other species on this Earth who can communicate as effectively with us as we can together with our myriad languages?

Some believe there are aliens, which are us in the Future, who have ascended and accomplished the seemingly impossible: universal love/kindness, without war and in harmony with one another and the universe. We share this belief about Nature, yet who can prove it? Who speaks the language of nature, and has brought back messages that amidst it there is no suffering, no death, no threat to life?

D))) Tell me a story that describes and integrates the above and I will publish it here later.

This Post's Material References Include: A))) Images & Books

Human Tree: Google image, African Plains, Sensory & Motor Homunculi & Drugs Masquerading As Foods by Suzar.

B))) Images & Books

Galaxy in Hand: Google image. David Martin Wells' book, The Seven Principles of Infinite Being.

C))) Images & Books // D))) Images & Books

Superman in Brain-Evolution Machine.

Related Materials & References:

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History by Howard Bloom, Breaking the Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon by Daniel Dennett & The Sunfood Diet Success System by David Wolfe.

25% Review: Kingdom Come by JG Ballard Part I

2008-10-16T11:36:00.000-07:00

JG Ballard, who published Crash in 1973 (after The Atrocity Exhibition, which was something of a prelude), applies the precision of a pathologist performing an autopsy on the living corpse of the 21st Century throughout many of his novels (which also include Millenium People, Cocaine Nights and The Kindness of Women -- an autobiographical take on his early life in Shanghai).

In Kingdom Come (2006), the author goes for the jugular pulse of Consumer Culture at the heart of a metro-town (in suburban England), a satellite of London that barely graces a map, containing no visible staple of the European diet: there are no churches, no playgrounds, only an enormous Metro-Center Mall (casting it's shadow across the town), a Colosseum, and fledgling oppositional businesses against burgeoning minorities modestly trying making their mark. Narrated by Richard Pearson, whose father was murdered in the Mall, the book charts its course through the web of supporters and detractors of the Mall, the pulse of which is found throughout every establishment and profession, but does not flow smoothly through the Asians, Bangladeshi's, or other minorities of the town. Thus there's a subtle chord of racism struck repeatedly throughout the novel.

We are immediately introduced to the latent dreams of the suburbs with the first line, narrated by no one in particular, adding shadow to the beast of this book before we've even seen the monster (if we ever do):

The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world...

The reader is soon drawn into the narrator's struggle (an ex-advertizing agent fired by his ex-wife) for understanding of the vacuum of both his father's death and that of the soul of the town he finds himself in. A hate for the Metro-Center consumes some professionals of the city: teachers, doctors, police-officers, lawyers; that is more viciously mirrored by the sports-teams who revere the symbol of St George's Cross, itself a sign of belonging to a society of individuals who answer to the gravity of the Mall and Colosseum, the local religion: Consumerism, that which answers everyone's needs before they've even asked the question, effectively feeding the spiritual hunger with a rootless habituation of purchasable desires.

(this St George's Cross comes from here in Toronto, ON)

Mr Pearson, assured that the local mad hatter Duncan Christie is the murderer of his father by the police and manager of the Metro-Center, meanders through this aberration of the soul without the least suspicion of its hidden demons whose advocates surround him on all sides. Meeting lawyers over his father's estates, and police over the details of the murderer, and the doctor who treated his father on his deathbed, he soon grows fascinated with pro and anti allegiances, a fascination which transforms into a vengeful obsession when the killer is released without charges, witnessed by local professionals as being nowhere near the murder.

Thinking the police inadequate, against the suggestions of police and associates to go home, Pearson stays on and investigates the scene, the witnesses, the sports-supporters, and the 'murderer' himself. Learning of the gravity of the Metro-Center, a school-principle at the end of reason, unable to control his students, and unbeknownst to himself, extols the nightmare culture to him one evening while overlooking the dome from a distance:

'All these retail parks, the airport and motorway culture. It's a new kind of hell...' '... The shadow of Freud's statue lies across the land, the Agent Orange of the soul. Believe me, things are different here. We have to prepare our kids for a new kind of society. There's no point in telling them about parliamentary democracy, the church or the monarchy. The old ideas of citizenship you and I were brought up with are really rather selfish. All that emphasis on individual rights, habeas corpus, freedom of the one against the many...'

Always at the center, the mall, like a black Moon in the distance presiding over everyone like an eye-in-the-sky, more powerful than religion (of which these suburbs, like many others, are devoid), more powerful than the state, with a hold over the citizens lives that seems at once inescapable, malicious, yet impossible to define. Yet Ballard as usual charts a course for the seemingly indefinable aspects of our dystopic culture, and the sickness of man which knows no limits, all too capable of repeating the mistakes of history if not happy to do so.

Welcome to Brooklands.

Bicycle Repairman

2008-10-15T12:13:00.001-07:00

Superheroic citizens AND bicycles: does it get any better? Don't argue, just watch. The skies. For PLAIEDIANS! c/o Monty Python.

On the Way to the Temple...

2008-09-29T09:23:00.000-07:00

"O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all - what is it?

"And where did it come from?

"And why?" asked Julian Jaynes in the opening pages of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Perhaps these are the (coded binary) words carved onto the innerchamber walls of the hallowed Facebook Temple where mind expresses the way it wishes to be seen. There, looking into its oracle-eyes, we are reflected as by opposing mirrors and captured in an abyss of the self.

Adbusters #80 deals with this idealized self-imaging in an article called "Quit Facebook" by one Carmen Joy King. I don't fully identify with her sense of disconnection, and so remain a part of the "community."

Reading Into Things

2008-08-01T14:39:00.000-07:00

Morning, immemorial. When a story is read, flesh is given to the spirit of its pages. Ten days stated last forever. Readers of the Bible can't change how the world began, it can only shape the perception of it's adherents. No matter how many times you read Genesis, it just didn't happen except in your mind. Yet the future can still be affected. Apocalypse is a self-realized agenda created by deliberate misconstruing of facts and educating people in economy rather than ecology, or of resignation to an eye in the sky secret agent man.

The Master Musicians of Jajouka

2008-07-15T21:39:00.000-07:00

"Listen to the music, the primordial sounds... let the music penetrate you and move you, and you will connect with the oldest music on earth." William S. Burroughs

They performed for us here in Toronto tonight. Phenomenal. The pipes of Pan are unlike conventional Western musical traditions. I even shed a few shuddering tears of joy at the opening minutes of the set, eyes closed, jarred by the rhythm of the raita.

From the Rif Mountains of Morocco, several waves of artists and musicians have canonized them, beginning with Brion Gysin, Paul Bowles and William S. Burroughs. Later, Brian Jones of the original Rolling Stones released a psyche-washed diluted blend of their music in the sixties, and years later a reunion with the Stones occurred on some forgettable LP. All the while, they've maintained an influx of new producers (Bill Laswell, Talvin Singh, etc) who've recorded and re-recorded their ancient music, which, by the way, has been passed down through the Attar family for more than 1,000 years. Traditionally excused from manual labour by the country's rulers because of the healing powers of the music. I'm not sure about their situation now. Technically, their music may be up to 2 or 4,000 years old depending on the ever accurate internet account, of which this is now yet another.

At the close of the set, they came to the edge of the stage, away from distracting mic difficulties, where we could clearly see and hear what they were doing, in full light of their lineage and context within the sacred, in our happy profane Pheonix Concert Theater setting. For a moment, it was clear. And then we washed ourselves clean of any intimate debris as we all re-emerged back onto the streets into our disreputable lives.

A Metaphor for Our Epoch

2008-07-15T05:05:00.001-07:00

Much inspired by conversation about the extinction rate of species and the tendency for media to reframe every ecological debate into a question of "But what is it worth?" we came across the convenient visual descriptor of Jenga to describe our sense of seeing everyone engaged in a collective play of seeing how many species (and this means all kingdoms of life on earth) we can remove from the bottom before the whole shithouse comes down...

So many worker bees rushing to build the mythic Tower of Babel. And if it doesn't work, fundamentalists pray, perhaps Jesus will come back a 'second' time and visit some wrath upon the unbelievers of the guy in the sky.

A Note On the Detached Observer

2008-07-14T09:04:00.000-07:00

Lately, I have been yielding to the experiences that have been somewhat outside, or inaccessible to my nature of living in the past, with the intention of complete observation and acceptance. This process draws influence from my upbringing as an only child, when I was less enthusiastic about sharing space with others. Separating from bodily-experience, elevating my observation to that of an imagined bird of detached observation point was a common practice. It was often a perspective that was full of revelation and surreal wonderment at, say, the bizarre roots of human interaction. The hexagram which refers to this facilitated awareness in the Book of Changes is 61: Insight (Inner Truth).

Most references to these hexagrams throughout this blog will be from either Sam Reifler's I Ching: A New Interpretation for Modern Times or deoxy.org/iching/random

2008-07-14T08:58:00.000-07:00

"Writing delivers us into discoveries of what, till we had formed some way to articulate it in language, had remained unformed, had been unknown to us," Reginald Gibbons says. "The articulation becomes the knowing; the knowing comes out of the process, and it refuels a further effort of articulation. A sense of ecstatic fruitfulness, of rich discoveries, of voyaging, comes to us in the exhilarating moments of being-in-our-work-in-progress."

W(here) to Begin?

2008-07-11T16:16:00.000-07:00

With outrage... learning, as always through the Mainstream Media-Lens, that a refracting edge of the American Imperial Oil and Industrial Food-Complex Machine has called upon countries (via one U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte) to lower "export restrictions and high tariffs" and eliminate "barriers to innovative plant and animal production technologies, including bio-technology."

And so we follow, one after the other, in the brave footsteps of money and monopoly, until one by one back in the closet lays, each and every one of us reduced to a radiated mineral-deficient working mole of society.

Or how about... we begin converting underutilized city green-space into a self-sufficient edible empire for our undernourished communities?

If we were to take the meme that to work for the environment is in the long-run also work for our broad economy seriously, as suggested Norman Myers (author of The World Atlas of Planet Management), we might consider the impact of our ignorance and chose first to green our cities, and in so doing, create a sustainable economy. For, what on Earth do we produce commercially that is not somehow derived from or inspired by our 'inexhaustible' natural world? Therefore, wouldn't securing a future be economically sustainable?