OSIRIS JONES GETS AN ICE CREAM

Berlin 2009 MLA Cut-Up.

every breath, more by a friend
A time, again.
Sitting in seat number 23.
Watching the cake-walk.
To of DIVERSITY,
That sweet SPICE digital weather Earshots
But no damp or and talking
Sitting sight,

But they Corporate Exstinguishing
On strange
Conversations and coffee and friendlyness.
The laughter, Spittlemarkt and we
Cannot speak talked plenty after places after traces
Of beer served of
Humanitas!

Suspense, riffing and down Flexible minds,
Distinguished what maybe?
And Long Pleasant pool
A day space changed, of ‘cannot of each feedback
Differences
Oh jolly NLP, Joyce in the thought
With web buddies.

Forgetting Wittgenstein
In concrete with glass:
Light pink and grey, music. Mothman in the drinks
To spreek what? and self owning ones.

Three became head between her’s, his England, Netherlands
Walking Loops – next,
Beatbox, Synth sampler multi the air,
So and sincerity (SINCERITAS)

Humour, (HILARITOOTH) riots 67') another incredible
Piece and spilt Arlen – must pass rants
Sky, breaks the net love you shrubbery blend is for for vegetable
E Space developers.
The head.
Temporary Clusters a br
eak.

Us off pist' societies, people and tribes Caligraffed Everywhere
East street art, stickers, overgrown
Sidewalks talk and music, Free world word Stadium – fuzz.
Diving board - splash,
Out place, time
Moment.

A thread-workers.
Live interknitting. electronic
Stage space,

My screen to not to quote?
Literally - Talk of about we to be
Present. I, chasing
Wittgenstein until I people and Hash
V is Saturn
And (Detroit maybeee's
Most tolle'rant masterfully,

Snowboarding over the Wiener contact, smiles, spoken and smoking thermal spirit of in Chapels
Handmade KFC, Burger rock band A-Ha of Shen and jokes not bombs.
Deconstruction of of playing and listening
All-at-once, with PLUCKING movie, book the edge of eternity, to say
I lifted once description of out of mini Norse rockers.
Time and seven from great Europe Congratulations Elffolk
Some light pale wet

- Sunshine on a over delectable text
No Starbuck, Street - business for
City temporary clusters of meaning
Out, Eurolines
To swerve cheer, Laffta
Play of what not nearly after noons place and spin
Imaginations ping whim - Walking up

words lost?
And fielded back for another connect capatain, image and word, LO!
TV, yes

--Steve Fly.
Berlin 22-25th
July 2009.07.26
sea black felt good I want street corners
The cream of mushroom soup
B landing.
Shem and of meaning almost pot some friends
Eye six and seven, eight!
BorskyChristyChrisFuzzTonsMacaBogusFly
Experienced beer waffle
I BOB.
Tales of smoking

Eating words heart
Norse female Iggy Pop of Live anchor.
Dillinger Rules unspeakable. Wisdom and calm mouth.

Dillinger Rules say speak’
B'ham, notes)
Wild cards many BOB's
Had Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logio-Philosopicus. were saved by
Friends and nutrient knowledge
And has it.

Heavenly No Mouse, No Moustache’
No with a thousand
Faces.
Habits, likes, dislikes and and form shook up
Whole wind
Of deep the street

Housing of memory
Graffiti on Churches, friends...Sparks dart fembot pop?
Groove pool table Hot Coach on U2 train East!
To time.
Korzybski in wild trills' dutch soup back with speeching a trunk full Morrison
Talk of over in thinkers
Friends, maybes

Even cutting kickback
Banter. what "is", cats and is fur’ Rings around other
Dylan and them fielded loving perceptive forcast
The pintter-patter of Blackberry maps.

Heavens crunched Belgium, Germany, are close by rumour crossed wired
Laughter, carrots, strawberries & Tea, on (words)
Drop subject matter
Syntax enough
And talked AIR
music.

Synchonous “aha’s” “wow’s” and
Names foot plot truth,
Sincere, On chat,
With old feel honoured look
Away towards Day
Out of in the I thought

Each 5 minutes became we, Schnitzel ridges
And and Grant in the gush of Laptop Pissa’
Off lifting punk King in on the Phone,
The loud cracking yokes.
Pushing over my the great wrestler

Of sense, ourselves as a non and’
Some of their’s – a one man music showman the Pool.
How many home-base run
Around of the RA played a joke...

Scrambles (invocation of Fun everyone…. ”What we cannot speak Eyeline, and rainy day.
Alreadymade all, and many distinguished
Bicycles.
Happy Beer H is for wall, dodgy up and and them a mutter
Who? four, five, life.
English was and listened story, mine,
His, and drinking, one night,
Rico instru'

- The I thought.
The swimming,
Yoga, Novel video recording, sunshine
HemJoymint and word, a (HUMANITAS)
Free minds cast into screen
Drop names not bombs
To quote or of life!

Here's silence” – my teeth the encyclone' styles of the street, Escher
No Skype, but SUN The hero's rants without punctuation!
All of about, with in the vents.
High City food A Chapel Emulsion
Writing in technicoloured in the electronica - Iraq

A stolen of Olympic and off naked lunch.
Good hard to waves of
Maybe a wall
Of pong
Bouncing from saying and on a and the....

Fragments of memory

Amongst other adventures, we visited the Absinthe Depot - some of us sampled, others shopped.

We also went to the Pergamon Museum, and among other things saw the extraordinary Ishtar Gate from Babylon (or at least the front half of it, the rest remains hidden in storage) which the people of Iraq want back, apparently.

Ishtar = Venus = Aphrodite = Isis = Astarte (where the 'equals sign' means 'isomorphic with').


She famously descended into the Underworld, but found herself forced to shed veils or layers of clothing as she went, which made her real mad! Read yer myths.


I loved the dragon chimera they call Sirrush (or mushhushshu)

Zer Cool!

We had a good time (far too short) in Berlin. It seemed very peaceful, lots of greenery and parkland, a virtually invisible police presence, a genuinely bohemian and creative vibe in many places. A few quick pix (no time for words right now).









We walked all over the place, with odd but OK weather (although too hot for Chris!) We never really got rained off, which we had expected.







We explored parks and squats, tourist attractions and back streets.


A certain amount of eating and drinking and smoking occured.

We went to a couple of clubs - heard some good music...










And we talked, talked, talked...



I have no idea how people see us, whether as a bohemian arts group, the James Joyce Appreciation Society, an anarchic symposium on alternative economies, or just a bunch of sinister clowns.

Es war zu kurz

Just got home from the fifth Euro MLA-meeting. As soon as our host Tons graciously sends my camera home which in my stupid distraction I forgot I hope to gather a little impresion from out too short stay. Meanwhile right now the gang (Tons, Bogus, Chris, Fuzzbuddy and Fly) is still taking Berlin!
borsky

RAW scavenger hunt!

The Robert Anton Wilson memorabilia auctions at eBay got me thinking about the auctions Bob had while he was still alive and struggling to pay his bills.

He auctioned off individual cards from two complete Thoth decks during that time. Each was inked with a cool potato-stamp creation made just for these cards. I bought two and know of a lot of other people who also got some, but I started wondering... could we locate them all?

I'd like to give it a try. I encourage everyone who bought any of these to go to the Maybe Logic thread linked here:

MLA Scavenger Hunt thread

Post what you got, and feel free to spread the word.

Hidden, Secret, Mysterious, Occult, Supernatural, Esoteric, Surreal and Magical

As we come to the end of five years of study at MLA I have started considering the words I use to describe the group. If I call MLA a group of online like-minded people, who read the same sort of books and have the same sort of odd interests or ‘take’ on the world as myself – friends look at me funny, as if I have somehow excluded them. I haven’t. They just haven’t shown interest in this stuff, and internet allows me to hang out with a few dozen people I couldn’t find in my home town, who speak the same language.

Secret, occult

As it happens, most of what we discuss doesn’t feel terribly ‘secret’ (concealed, disguised), although we find the conspiracy model intriguing, and secret societies (or, as we’ve all actually heard of Masons and the CIA and MI6 - maybe “societies with secrets”)...and some of it definitely lurches out of ‘straight’ psychology, philosophy and anthropology into deeper realms of magick, shamanism, heretical religion and areas many people might consider ‘occult’ or ‘esoteric’ studies.

Esoteric

But anything can appear ‘esoteric’ – maths remains a mystery to many, just as does punctuation or poetry, say. It simply means something understood only by ‘the initiated’ – but that can simply mean ‘people who know how to cook’ or ‘people who can fix a computer’ for instance – we don’t have to wander into magical realms, here. Who said "the problem with mysticism is that it starts in mist, and ends in schism”? So, yes, I guess we have ‘esoteric interests’ like Bucky Fuller, or Wilhelm Reich, James Joyce and Robert Anton Wilson.

Exoteric

And plenty of people cheerfully prefer exoteric versions of events (the world of appearances, ‘common sense’, plain speaking, simple explanations, etc).

“The Christian exotericists, derived largely from uncultured slave populations, inaugurated a religious revolution against the Christian esotericists, the cultured and well-born followers of the Gnosis”. W.Y. Evans –Wentz; The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation. 1954

The 'Unexplained'

And then again, we seem to share a certain ‘Fortean’ interest in the odd and the unusual, in explanations like 'synchronicity' and what it might imply about how the world works, and that veers into Quantum Physics – and alternative explanations of possible universes or realms or states of mind, and where they sit on a spectrum from dream to imagination to reality.

Hidden

I don’t know how much really remains hidden, and how much simply appears obscure because you find yourself wearing shades in a dark nightclub – so the symbol of coolness (and blindness) actually renders one blind. Hoodwinked by oneself, and one's desire to appear cool.

And ‘occult’ didn’t originally have all those connotations in its original use, it simply meant hidden, concealed or hard to detect. The moon occults the sun during an eclipse.

Supernatural

These shifts in meaning and emphasis still intrigue me. Back in the Nineteenth Century, when Darwin threw down the gauntlet to the 'Western World', and Freethinkers discussed worlds without God, many people yearned for ‘something more’ and the first New Age season occurred.

'Nature' did not suffice, so they sought the ‘supernatural’ in psychic phenomena, spiritualism and other ‘mysteries’. If we use ‘Nature’ to describe the whole universe, then nothing lies outside ‘Nature’, but we sometimes use it to describe ‘the known’.

Paranormal

This did sometimes seem rather superstitious and too much like the old-time religion so with the new pretence to a 'scientific world-view' people in the 1920s adopted the quasi-scientific word ‘paranormal’ to describe events that didn’t fit in with their world view. This smuggled in the assumption that we share a world view that we can all agree upon, whose ‘normality’ sets the standards by which we measure events.

True Believers and cultural relativity

As communication and travel speeded up, and the world shrank, the idea that any one person, culture, philosophy, religion, science or tribe had The True World View became virtually untenable, indeed rather ludicrous to Martian Anthropologists, but a lot of humans still have vested interests in their local POV.

We had another season of yearning for a New Age at the end of the Twentieth Century, that persists even now.

Nothing new under the sun

'They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear'.

(All's Well That Ends Well, 2. 3. 1-6) William Shakespeare

Magic and Magick and the Wyrd

And then we have that wonderful old word 'magic' which everyone knows and uses, for events from the trivial (everyday) to the most rare, unusual, secret, mysterious, occult and unknown.

And whether it belongs in stories and myths and other metaphors and analogues for real life, or as a serious (and very esoteric and occult) study remains an open question to me...

But mosbunall people around here know I remain a Fool and a Cosmic Schmuck, mosbunall of the time...

As Above, So Below

And then we have Hermeticism (from thrice-great Hermes, of course).

Frances Yates offers this description, referring to the Renaissance period:

“This philosophy, or outlook, was compounded of Hermeticism as revived by Marsilio Ficino, to which Pico de Mirandola added a Christianized version of Jewish Cabala. These two trends, associated together, form what I call ‘the occult philosophy’.”

So you’ll find those of us into Neoplatonism, Gnosticism and Hermeticism, too.

McLuhan's Wake

A minute or so in (this back in the early 60s, before The Sixties really got going) listen to McLoon describe Internet. We need visionaries - check out Douglas Rushkoff in the previous post...



And yeah, for you Maybe folk, he references Finnegans Wake, too...

LIFE INC. By Douglas Rushkoff

I very greatly recommend Douglas Rushkoff's new book LIFE INC. How the world became a corporation and how to take it back. I would love it if very many people read this book, and then worked out a way to collectively act on it. Not to say Life, Inc. has all the answers, but it certainly raises great questions which could go a long way towards deconstructing the apparently intractable global financial "crisis," amongst other deficiencies of the corporatist landscape.

Rushkoff has been releasing an attention span friendly series of dispatch videos elucidating the main topics of the book. I very much hope that these ideas begin to inform the general socio-economic discourse. I don't at all mean to suggest that these are ideas everyone needs to believe, but rather that these are the topics we need to discus.





Beyond just the book and it's multimedia accoutrements, Rushkoff has also taken to the airwaves in the service of bottom up, locally organized, open source, participatory culture.

Archives of Previous Shows
Here's a recent episode where Douglas interviews Paul Krassner!

And hey, why not! Here's a great talk Douglas gave to the Institute of General Semantic,
"Don't Change Yourself, Change the World"


I've gotten to know Douglas over the last few years via the Maybe Logic Academy and consider him very much the real McCoy.

Here's a guy who can appear on stage at a Disinfo con w/ RAW & Grant Morrison, proclaiming victory for the "counter culture", while also winning awards for his PBS Frontline documentaries.

Rushkoff can write a cyberpunk, psychedelic comic book series like Testament for Vertigo, while also writing level headed media theory for the New York Times.

He can play keyboard in Genis P Orridge's Psychic TV & talk politics on NBC Nightly News w/ Brian Williams.

Douglas Rushkoff is a viral media explosion waiting to happen, hell he coined the phrase after all! His bright ideas are welcome on boingboing.com, time magazine, comic book resources, NPR, ONLY MAYBE, CBS Sunday Morning, etc, ad infinitum AND! on july 15th, the Colbert Report.

I don't think there are very many people about whom I could honestly say this, but if Rushkoff does well, I think we all do well, so I say he gets the big push. Good luck, Doug!