New works in the public domain since 1987.
Oscar the Grouch: I Hate Christmas [youtube].
Eric Idle: Fuck Christmas [youtube].
Fear: Fuck Christmas [youtube].
The Attery Squash: Santa’s Laughter Mocks The Poor [youtube].
The Rudy Schwartz Project: A Sandwich for Adolph [youtube].
Current 93: Happy Birthday Pigface Christus [youtube]
Rex Martin – Holidays are Coming [vimeo]
See also our extended Story of the First Christmas from 2009.
OVO 20 JUVEN(a/i)LIA
112 pages, 8.5 x 11, $10.00
The best of OVO 1987 – 2011. Walter Alter, Dmitry Babenko, Hakim Bey, Trevor Blake, Johnny Brainwash, Chris C. Cilla, Cunnichant Night Owl, Mike Diana, Yael Ruth Dragwyla, James Ellis, Karen Elliot, Feral Faun, Klint Finley, Richard Ford, Chris Gross, Mike Gunderloy, Ginger Hutton, Ian MacEwan, Ernest Mann, Melissa, Thom Metzger, Jennifer Murrian, PM, Gerry Reith, James V. Scianna, Stuart Swezey, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, V. Vale.
Review by Ferdinand Bardamu: “To someone of the Internet Era, where narcissistic self-expression is just a couple of mouse clicks away, the effort and dedication involved in compiling an entire magazine, from writing and gathering the material to binding the physical copies and mailing them out, is difficult to relate to. Still, this is a great little collection of oddities, ranging from poetry to short stories to investigative journalism on offbeat subjects.”
Trevor Blake: Introduction
Mike Diana: Read OVO
Hakim Bey: Salon Apocalypse
Hakim Bey: Evil Eye
Hakim Bey: Intellectual S/M is the Fascism of the Eighties
Hakim Bey: Ringing Denunciation of Surrealism
Johnny Brainwash: Holding Games for Ransom
Gerry Reith: Letter from the Graveyard Shift
Cunnichant Night Owl: Lunalogue
Thom Metzger: The Hypmogoogoopizin’ Man
Thom Metzger: Wad Rules
Richard Ford: Bellowing Forth and Brandishing
James Ellis: Mayhem
Mike Gunderloy: The Meta-Network
James V. Scianna: A Pit Stop Along the Inward Journey
Chris Cilla: Sperm Trek
Anonymous: 23 Sperm Stories 23
Mike Diana: Attack of the Giant Killer Sperm
Feral Faun: Thoughts on Experimentation
tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE: Lidznap
Chris Gross: Three Letters
James Ellis: Control
Klint Finley: The New Currency War
PM: Liberating Wednesday
Ernest Mann: Warbucks Intra-Family Communique
Ernest Mann: Becoming More Free
Karen Elliot: Operation Negation
Walter Alter: Little Wally’s Reader (Lights = Camera = Action / Densest? / The List of Recalibrations)
Chris Cilla: Apple / Pineapple
Review: My Struggle by Mark Mothersbaugh
Review: The Skin Horse by Nabil Shaban
Review: The Myth of Natural Rights by L. A. Rollins
Interview: Melissa
Interview: Stuart Swezey
Interview: Ginger Hutton
Interview: Yael Ruth Dragwyla
Interview: Jennifer Murrian
Interview: V. Vale
Trevor Blake: Tape Fragmentation
Trevor Blake: Magnetic Poetry
Trevor Blake: Saturn Return
Trevor Blake: New Superstition from a Dream
Trevor Blake: Mutants First
Trevor Blake: Science is Anti-Authoritarian
Trevor Blake: Tipping Points
Trevor Blake: Cursed Object
Trevor Blake: Trajectory Through Anarchism
James Ellis: Suffering
Trevor Blake: The Bonus Army
Trevor Blake: Multiple Name Identities
Trevor Blake: Co-Remoting with the Thunderous
Trevor Blake: Ecclesiastes 9:10
About the Contributors
… or assemble your own anthology from what I think of as the best few dozen articles or from all 19,000+ articles.
Trevor Blake: Village Anonymous (after The Prisoner by Patrick McGoohan and after Anonymous). The Village. August 2011.
Trevor Blake: Your Clothing Store (after The Prisoner by Patrick McGoohan). The Village. July 2011.
Melissa is a friend who spoke with OVO about her eating disorder on 12 July 1991.
OVO: When did you first realize there was something wrong about the way you were eating?
Melissa: Last Fall. I was dating somebody and I started doing it a lot. I’ve noticed I tend to do it more when I’m in a relationship. I used to drink a beer every day because it would help me throw up. I came home from work and drank a beer really quick. I was in the bathroom doing my business behind the closed door and the person walked in on me. They suggested to me that l have a problem. I had thought so before but when somebody else confronted me with it I had to confront myself with it. That’s when I realized there was something really wrong with what was doing.
OVO: How long had you been doing it?
Melissa: It’s an on-again off-again thing with me, depending on how you define it. I define my eating disorder not by how long I’ve thrown up or how long ago I starved myself. I think I’ve always had an unhealthy relationship with food. It’s taken on different forms over the years. I can remember when l was young I was deprived of certain foods that my friends could eat because my mother was really into health foods. I would go over to my friends’ house or trade lunches at school, and horde junk food because I was fascinated by it and it was something that was forbidden to me. That’s the first example of it. Over the years it’s been bulimia, it’s been anorexia, there have been points where I’ve been a compulsive exerciser, but the most recurring and the problem I have now is bulimia.
OVO: What is that?
Melissa: It’s called binge-and-purge syndrome. When l start eating I don’t feel like I can stop, then I feel guilty, so to make me feel better about eating all that food I’ll make myself throw up. Or I’ll not eat for a couple days or I’ll exercise for a long time. Some people use laxative but I’ve never done that.
OVO: Was throwing up something you figured out on your own?
Melissa: Yes, it was really easy for me. I’ve always had a nervous stomach. I figured out I could do it and use it as a way of maintaining my weight.
OVO: What is the source of your concern about your eating? Why isn’t it a natural process?
Melissa: I hate to sound like “I have this horrible childhood” but I think that’s where a lot of it came from. We had a rule in our house my sister and l joke about now called the Clean Plate Club (my sister, by the way, is anorexic). We weren’t allowed to leave the kitchen table until we’d finished everything that we had been given to eat. From there I started associating food with reward and punishment instead of just what I needed, like sleeping. It became something else.
OVO: Do you think your mother has some kind of eating disorder?
Melissa: No. I think my mother getting into her health food kick was just something to occupy her because there were things going on in my family that were very stressful for her. It was a means of her being able to cope by being interested in something.
OVO: You go to a group where you talk about this with other women.
Melissa: Yes. Last spring I started group therapy and individual counseling for my eating disorder.
OVO: What are the other womens’ experiences like?
Melissa: Their experiences are very similar to mine. It‘s very interesting because a lot of the ways I react to other things, not just food, are very similar to the other women in the group as well. It’s like obsessive-compulsive behavior across the board, not just with eating. It’s a pattern that develops the way you deal with everything.
OVO: Do you or they see any kind of connection between your eating disorder and media portrayal of women?
Melissa: Yes, and that was what really invoked a lot of emotion in me because I’m very involved in feminism and the portrayal of women in our society. I think it has an enormous amount to do with that. I think that’s why it became such an obsessive thing for me as I got into my teenage years. I’m 21 now. I saw a commercial on TV the other day for a clinic for eating disorders where they called it “the national college womens’ plague.” It’s one of the biggest things that happens to women when they enter college. When l moved to Knoxville is when my eating disorder became the worst. I that has to do with being on my own and food being a focus, something that is a constant, that l could always depend on.
OVO: What is it that you’re the trying to achieve by going to group therapy and counseling?
Melissa: One thing I learned in group therapy is that we’re not there to find a cure. We’re there to give each other support and understand why we do it because that‘s more important. I’d like to think eventually I won’t have to do it. There are times now where I’ll go days or weeks or even months… there was a period not too long ago where I went a couple months without doing it and that felt good, like I had power over myself.
OVO: If it’s something that you’ve done for a long time and that a lot of women have done and do what’s bad about it?
Melissa: It’s dangerous to your health. I have medical problems now because of it. I have a stomach ulcer. You can damage your esophagus. I’ve been lucky enough not to. I’ve never had a cavity in my life and now I have seven because my stomach acid has corroded the enamel off my teeth in the back. It can cause heart problems The two effects it’s had in me have been my teeth, and I get heartburn a lot and I have upper intestinal problems now from stomach acid.
OVO: Why is this occurring in women more than men?
Melissa: I think there’s a stronger image for women to live up to. There is an image that men have to live up to but there’s more emphasis and pressure for women to look a certain way to be accepted our society. It’s contradictory because we offer women a double standard by showing her all these great things she’s supposed to eat and make in her lifestyle and then she’s still supposed to look that way, and it’s impossible.
OVO: Why is it offered if it’s obviously a double standard and impossible?
Melissa: I can’t answer that. I could say just another way for men to have control over women but I think that’s maybe not answering the question, maybe that’s just anger. I think its because women want to have a certain lifestyle that they’ve been given the opportunity to have now and yet they’re still supposed to look a certain way from the old world thinking, pre-feminist thought, and what men find appealing today in our society is thin women.
OVO: Is this a modem problem?
Melissa: The Romans and the Greeks had vomitoriums where they actually would purge on purpose, but I think that was a way of having a decadent lifestyle and there wasn’t any kind image put before them as a reason to do that. If you discount that that it is a modern problem.
OVO: A friend of mine said that anyone who has an eating disorder should have their television taken away.
Melissa: That’s a good point because that’s where the double standard comes from. Commercials. That’s where the image is the strongest, that’s where we see the women that we’re supposed to look like.
OVO: It‘s telling that if you look at an ideal for women (and I think having one is a bad idea in the first place) prior to television that ideal is very different. It‘s changed throughout history but I think there’s a strong connection between modem eating disorders and television. All the years of film before television didn’t inspire eating disorders but film is also a visual medium. The difference is commercials.
Melissa: The food industry has created a demand for the diet industry. It’s a vicious cycle. I notice when I watch MTV sometimes (I watch it when I’m getting ready to go to work to have some background none), that when I want to look a certain way the worst I know people who’ve told me that when they’re dieting that they watch MTV because it gives them inspiration to look like the women who probably have eating disorders themselves.
OVO: What would you want someone reading this who has an eating disorder to know?
Melissa: To know that they should want to get help because it’s not something you should want to do and that you can get help. And it’s dangerous. It doesn’t seem like it’s dangerous and it’s a really easy answer but I’m sure that I’ll be really regretting a lot of what I’m doing ten years from now. I’m sure I’ll have a lot worse problems. I don‘t have a problem discussing it with friends and that‘s where I get a lot of my support but maybe that’s because a lot of my friends have eating disorders. It’s a secret and we go into our rooms to talk about it. Everybody understands that what is said behind that door is not said anywhere else. That’s what defines an eating disorder, it’s something that happens behind closed doors.
OVO: Who defines the ideal image of a woman and the ideal image of a man?
Melissa: I think the media.
OVO: Who controls the media?
Melissa: Are we talking conspiracy theory here? I think a lot of media is self-perpetuating. I don’t know who controls the media, I think that’s a whole other issue, but I think that by media offering something to the public and by the public response to that, it recreates the demand for it, like the economic law of supply and demand. It’s something that perpetuates itself.
OVO: What can we do about it?
Melissa: It should start with the individual. I try not to be influenced by images of women to look a certain way. I don’t buy the magazines. That‘s a way to start. It’s a choice the individual tries to make. By doing this interview I hope I’m reaching out to someone else. I think it’s important for us to let other people know that it‘s wrong. Know that it’s wrong ourselves then try to let everybody else know why it’s wrong and maybe beyond that do something about it together.
OVO: Like what?
Melissa: Like a support network.
OVO: What about after a support network, or in addition to it?
Melissa: That‘s when you’re ready to step into things on a big scale. I’ve written letters to fashion magazines telling them that their magazine portray images that are unhealthy for women and I think maybe a group could do that. I noticed the other day that there’s a thing on MTV where you can submit a video and tell them what you don’t like about anything. People have the option to complain about something that is on MTV that they don’t like. I thought it would be a fun thing for me and some friends to do, to make one and submit it to MTV and see if there’s a response at all.
OVO: MTV has realized that it can present any criticism of itself without changing. A friend of mine did an Art Break for them. Their contract said you have to have the MTV logo in the Art Break, and even if your Art Break is one minute of you ripping the logo up or seeing it on a TV screen and shooting it or in any way criticizing it, you still have to show the MTV logo. That‘s showing how media perpetuates itself. The problem and the solution are coming from the same source and you can’t hold onto either one of them and pull them away from yourself.
Melissa: Like Coke commercials that don’t have anything to do with the product but show the image of the product.
OVO: That’s why it’s important to boycott that kind of media completely, without exception, and simultaneously to create an alternative that people would hopefully find interesting and stimulating and life-affirming. A lot of what we’ve been talking about is good commodities versus bad commodities but eventually we’re going to have to come up with something that isn’t a commodity at all and return to something like “art” and figure out some way to make art that isn’t a commodity. It’s going to be difficult. That effort started many decades ago and it still hasn’t been achieved.
Melissa: Another example of the double standard is that the commercial I saw for the eating disorder clinic came on MTV. It portrays women as this certain ideal, then offers a solution, then help for the solution later. Usually if you notice on TV diet commercials follow food commercials.
OVO: How does education figure into it?
Melissa: That’s what’s really scary. When you learn about health and nutrition in school, usually the little pamphlets and flyers you’re given are from the National Dairy Board, who say it’s good for you to drink milk. My mother was a teacher and she said it’s because its so hard for the schools to get funding from the State that they will accept funding from corporations. I don’t take it too seriously when McDonald’s gives me a nutrition guide.
OVO: What do you think is going to happen in the future regarding eating disorders?
Melissa: I hate to say it but I think it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any getter. Maybe it will get so bad and so rampant that it will explode and will be like everything else in this world that’s wrong. It’ll just keep happening until something really horrible happens.
OVO: Or something really wonderful.
Melissa: And then we’ll stop and go gee, sorry. When Gloria Steinem came to the University of Tennessee she said more women have died as a result of bulemia than it’s ever been reported of people dying of AIDS. AIDS gets more recognition and I agree its a problem that needs recognition but… Even with me, I know how wrong it is for me to have an eating disorder and I still do it. Even as wrong as I know it is and even as much as I don’t want to be a victim of it, of the media and everything else, I can’t help it. When l go out and l see other people who look good or go shopping and l want to a certain kind of clothes but they won’t look good on me unless l look a certain way… It’s hard for me when people I care about have also have been fed this image that people should look like that as well, like my family. I recently took a family vacation and my aunt is really thin, and her whole family is thin, and it made me feel like I should be thin.
OVO: Have you talked with your mother about this?
Melissa: Yes. My mother was a lot more informed on the subject than l thought she would be. I was thankful for that. She was very supportive. It was a surprise for me to get that support. She agreed that a lot of what she went through on the health food kick maybe contributed.
OVO: How much TV do you watch?
Melissa: When I watch television and pay attention l am very critical. I sit there and watch it and get angry and critique everything. I’m glad I’m to this point now where if it’s on and it’s really bothering me and it’s disgusting I’ll turn it off immediately and I won’t just change the channel. I don’t like to watch a whole lot of television because I think it’s bad in ways besides just image. Sometimes I watch it before I go to work, sometimes I have it on to have in the background when I’m in the shower if nobody’s home. I like to have noise.
OVO: Do you watch TV while you eat?
Melissa: Yes, and it’s scary to notice how many other people do that.
OVO: Television destroys community and that’s another reason to boycott it if you’re trying to to establish a community of support for anything, for any sort of political project or personal improvement art or thought. You can’t just have the TV on all the time.
Melissa: That’s one reason I’m really glad I got a job. Some days I’d wake up and there was only so much in a day that I could do before I’d done it all and I’d find myself watching television. Especially since we have cable. We’re moving soon and I don’t want to get cable when we do. We have a VCR and that’s different. Selective viewing is different. There are a lot films that are worth seeing and are good movies I enjoy watching. That’s what is nice about cable, watching HBO. The other day one of my favorite movies came on and that was nice to watch.
OVO: What movie was that?
Melissa: Pretty in Pink. My housemate bought a TV Guide so that I wouldn’t have to turn on the TV when I was bored and I wanted to see if anything was good on because than if nothing was good on I’d find myself watching anyway. Now I look for things I might want to watch and watch those things only.
OVO: What is it that makes you bored?
Melissa: When l didn’t have a job and everyone else in the house would be at work, I felt that for that period of the day should be… I would clean the house every day, I’d get up and clean, and I was getting tired of cleaning. You can only clean so much until everything is spotless. Then I would wait for everyone else to come home. I was turning into a housewife! I’d make dinner and clean the house and write letters, I did everything I needed to do and there wasn’t anything else I could do, I was looking for a job but you know how that is. Now I’ve got my job and that’s nice but a bad thing is that sometimes when l get off from work I’m so exhausted l can’t think, so l want something to think for me, so I watch a box that tells me how to think. That’s really dangerous. Lately I’ve stopped letting that control me and I’ve only been watching selective television again. I watch Star Trek on Saturdays and I like the show Alien Nation because it deals with racism. When I first moved to Knoxville I didn’t have a TV for the first few months but I still had the eating disorder. I think it’s beyond television. Television influences so many areas of our lives that you can influenced by television without watching it.
from OVO 11 CONTROL (September 1991)
[Postscript March 2011: Melissa is just fine now and has been for a long time.]
Partial script for LOST season 7, episode 1 (“We Have to Go Back.”)
[On-Island - Bamboo grove. JACK SHEPHERD is lying on the ground, VINCENT at his side. BENJAMIN LINUS enters. VINCENT stands when BENJAMIN LINUS appears, then stiffly walks away.]
JACK: Where’s Hurley?
BENJAMIN: Hurley is just where you left him.
JACK: What are you doing here?
BENJAMIN: I’ve come to say congratulations, Jack.
JACK: What for?
BENJAMIN: For putting the round peg in the round hole.
JACK: What happened?
BENJAMIN: What happened was you did as you were told to do.
JACK: That’s it?
BENJAMIN: Well, water filled up a pool and a light came on.
JACK: You set this up.
BENJAMIN: And you just couldn’t wait to do it, could you?
JACK: This was just another test from the Dharma Initiative? My father told me -
BENJAMIN: Your father? Your dead father? And when did your father ever tell you the truth?
JACK: About as often as you have.
BENJAMIN: Oh, don’t play out your daddy issues on me. My god, I got enough of that from John. You remember John, don’t you? You killed him.
JACK: That wasn’t John.
BENJAMIN: Sure it wasn’t.
JACK: What are you doing to us? What does all this mean?
BENJAMIN: I don’t know, Jack. I really don’t. If you want to keep asking just like you always do I’ll make something up and you’ll believe it, just like you always do. Now, what would it mean if I did know. What if I did know what it all meant? That would mean it’s all been decided, and we’re just puppets in some play. Ever felt like a puppet, Jack?
JACK: That’s wrong. You’re wrong.
BENJAMIN: I wish I was, Jack. But it seems to me that everything I’ve ever done in my life, and everything you’ve ever done in your life, was just a spasm from somebody else pulling the strings. Look at all the times you’ve jumped for me, Jack. And I’m just a company man.
JACK: A company man.
BENJAMIN: That’s right, Jack. I work for a company. I get meaningless orders from hidden superiors and I carry them out, and I get paid or I get beat, and the man upstairs certainly doesn’t feel compelled to come down and tell me what it’s all about. Men like you and I aren’t special.
JACK: Special.
BENJAMIN: Special like John was special. Special like Walt. It’s not that some men are more smart, or wealthy, or powerful. Charles Whidmore is all of those things and he’s not special. Hurley… well. The thing is, Jack, unlike you and I some men have free will. They have it and we don’t. They have souls and we don’t. It’s not fair but there it is. That’s the nature of this world. Maybe in some other world all the loose strings tie up nicely in the end, and everybody’s smiling. What a god awful world that must be.
JACK: I’m dying.
BENJAMIN: Maybe, Jack. Unless someone special decides you have more work to do.
[LOST]
17 July 1990 interview with V. Vale, publisher of Search and Destroy, co-founder of Re/Search Publications.
OVO: What is the main source for the information that you publish?
VALE: We never tire of saying that our main influences were surrealism and situationism, and surrealism as you know placed a great deal of influence on objective chance and randomness and insanity and systems for deciphering the world that are a-logical systems We will admit that a lot of it is just purely chance. But of course through the years we have friends and our friends really help us. For example, the film book [Re/Search #10 Incredibly Strange Films] which was actually the first book that broke out of our small industrial music underground audience, that was done just because we got a letter from Jim Morton, who had been collecting these incredible films all his life but particularly since the advent of VCR. He wrote us, and then we went over to his house every Saturday night for years and watched two or three of four movies there and ate popcorn. It took four or five years he guest-edited the Incredibly Strange Films book and we put it out. We wouldn’t have done it if we hadn’t known Jim Morton, let’s face it.
OVO: What is the purpose of Re/Search?
VALE: The surrealists had a slogan, something like “Matter Over Mind,” but what it meant was it is a mistake just to assume that one proceeds from the idea to the material reality. Very often its just the opposite. You might say the material reality suggests the theory, shall we say, and frankly I got started publishing back in ’77 because of punk rock. Of course it wasn’t called that then but it was very exciting, as undifferentiated and undefined and unlimited as it appeared to be because it was revolt, it was the youth revolt or revolution (if you dare to use that word) of the ’70s. And I was involved right from the very beginning before it had become codified and more or less set in amber. And so for me it was like a vehicle, it was an opportunity to… I don’t know, I just did it. My main motivation was kind of anger at the status quo. I’d always been angry at the status quo anyway, but, you know, what do you do? A lot of people just become criminals or whatever, or drug addicts, or they just can’t cope for a lot of good reasons. Society gives us all plenty of reasons but it also provides the narcotics in the form of television and actual narcotics so that we can “adapt,” shall we say. And so yes, it’s definitely a struggle against mind control, against conditioning, against banal information. We were born with the birthright of curiosity and there’s nothing more natural than to be curious, but of course this faculty is extinguished early in life. It seems like society does everything it can to either extinguish this faculty or to channel it only along channels of consumption rather than you yourself doing something creative on your own, something creative and original and obsessive and unique on your own. I don’t think society can really handle that, because it’s too destabilizing. It’s like we’re in a vast consumption machine, we’re part of it, and society would function (it thinks) better if we would just go along with the programs. And so obviously anyone who is a lover of freedom is going to go against that in all its manifestations. And yet it’s not just enough to fight, whatever that means. You have to eventually start doing something. And in our case we more or less accidentally discovered that we could do something and sort of realize our own identities and destinies by becoming publishers. Re/Search however is not the same as Search and Destroy. Re/Search happened when I met Andrea [Juno] back in 1980, after we’d been very depressed for a year by what we thought was the death of punk rock. It was certainly the death of punk rock as we knew it, that is as a viable underground, a microcosmos of society. We were depressed for a year but then realized that this shouldn’t be the end of publishing.
OVO: Are the Re/Search archives open to the public?
Vale: No, because we’re not public figures. If all we were to do were to run a library we’d never get any work done, and obviously our work comes first. It’s hard enough as it is right now just to deal with all the business aspects let alone function as some sort of archive. It so happens that we’ve been attacked by Jesse Helms [R-NC] and Dana Rohrabacher [R-CA] and entered into the Congressional Record because they don’t like our book Modern Primitives, which is yet another Re/Search publication which is advocating a certain theory of self-liberation or exploration. That’s all it was intended to do, provide theory for this kind of activity, but apparently the powers that be would like to have this kind of theory and information repressed.
OVO: What kind of trouble have they been giving you?
VALE: Actually we should context this in a much wider overview that obviously America right now is under (thanks to less than probably one-tenth of one percent of the population) which is these very organized fundamentalist Christian fascists who have nothing to do with their lives but write letters all day to their congressman and call up advertisers threatening to boycott things like The Simpsons. In other words, a minority group trying to pretend and camouflaging themselves as some kind of vox populi majority, which they are not. They’re mostly these very ignorant people in the South, people who have long since shut off any creative potential in their lives. They’re just consumed by envy and they want to control all the rest of the population, who might be having more fun than them in some way. The Reagan agenda was to turn the country back to the McCarthy ’50s, since he was an informer for McCarthy, and to take away all the gains of the ’60s. That complex agenda is still being realized. Every day there’s some new article in the paper on page 40 how 160 stores in the deep South took away Playboy Magazine from their stands. Little things like that don’t even get reported here on the West Coast. Thing like that are happening all the time but the more you find out about it the scarier it gets.
OVO: Yesterday a group called AIDS Response Knoxville had their office fire bombed. I just found out about that this morning.
VALE: If you could send me the clipping… see, that was not in our paper today. It doesn’t surprise me. So what you have now is a great deal of information containment going on. We’re living in the illusion that all the information is available, that were living in a global village and all that, but most people get their information from TV news, which is of course extremely compressed and bowdlerized and operates by omission. We should all be subscribing to our own little clipping services I suppose to get the kind of news such as the incident you told me about just now.
OVO: I didn’t find out about it from the paper. I found out about it from a friend and he said there’s only a tiny article about it.
VALE: That’s perfect, that’s exactly the way things happen and are happening. The propaganda techniques which Hitler initiated in terms of mass media control of the population, they‘re real good now. Helms is a master of negative campaigning, in which life gets simplified down to whether you’re for child pornography and obscenity or… Helms’ voting record is incredible, he’s a madman, the total enemy of liberty. But even when Helms is gone there‘ll always be someone to take his place. This kind of control mentality will apparently always be with us but yet we’re trying to do a small campaign so that all the minority papers across the country will at least have a copy of his voting record and also start to get a larger overview of all these isolated little incidents that’ve been happening, which together paint an extremely depressing picture of the abridgment of our freedoms.
OVO: Have there been specific incidents of you having trouble with Modern Primitives?
VALE: Knock on wood, no. We had two art shows based on the book, and that‘s how it started. If you don’t have any information on this I’ll send it to you.
OVO: No, I don’t have any.
VALE: Okay, I’ll send you the whole little press packet on that, with all the articles that’ve come out. See, that’s what l mean, someone as relatively hip and aware as you don’t know. Multiply this by about a thousand for all the little environmental groups all over. Their little news things never get reported. I just found out today that all the searches that the FBI did of all these Earth First houses, the people involved with Earth First because of two people blown up by a bomb, the FBI keeps reporting to the news that they blew themselves up rather than what they should be doing which is trying to find out who really did it. I didn’t realize until I read the paper today that all the searches the FBI did of people who deal with Earth First were all warrantless. To me that is really frightening. Did you know that? Do you think that means anything? And we only found out because our good friend Jock Sturges, a photographer, got busted recently. We’ve known Jock for years. For the last twenty years he has specifically focused on, shall we say, beautiful adolescent girls who are developing. But they are not pornography, he’s not the head of a kiddie porn ring by any means. He’s got the most incredibly beautiful negatives you’ve ever seen, eight by ten inch view camera negatives blown up to twenty by twenty-four inch prints that have a million gray tones in them. And we only found out from him that basically the First and Fourth Amendments are dead. The Fourth Amendment is unreasonable searches and seizures. Because the FBI just busted into his house without a search warrant. And this was all done, as Burroughs has kept us appraised of and warned us against all these years, in the name of fighting the “drug problem.” Because here’s what they can say now: they can come in because (a) they have a reason to believe you are about to destroy evidence and (b) they have a right to watch you because they have reason to believe you might try to commit suicide or commit harm to yourself. Isn’t that nice?
OVO: They’ve certainly got our best interests in mind.
VALE: Yes, of course.
OVO: How do you prevent Re/Search from becoming a part of the process of -
VALE: – co-option and assimilation? You’re dealing with what McLuhan called a very cool medium (or is it hot, I can never get that straight), but you’re dealing with a medium that is a book, and do you realize how few people read anymore? The numbers are incredible, how much reading has declined even though the population has doubled. When people do read, what do they read? They mostly lead these airport kind of books. It’s really frightening. The reason most people avoid books is because, let’s face it, there’s only a minority that reads any more, almost everyone else watches television and gets their information from TV. And in order to read effectively I find that l must have complete silence, as much as possible, and this is not the modem way. A lot of people these days, it’s like a conspiracy to keep them from thinking. As soon as they get up in the morning they have their radio blaring or put on a tape or something. We’ve all known people who’ve had the TV on eight hours a day. Of course we don’t know people like that any more, but they’re out there, like zombies or something. And so I still think that if you’re putting something out in a book you have more of a chance of making it with some kind of integrity. Because books aren’t you, Re/Search is not me or Andrea; it’s on its own. And if it has some ideas that light up your brain and catalyze in some way, which is the best that one can hope for… the books really do have a life of their own. And we’re just putting out a combination of information, images and ideas, hopefully, as well as trying to direct people to other books, which continue the same kind of inspiration.
Re/Search
20 Romolo Street #B
San Franslsco CA 94133 USA
http://researchpubs.com/
from OVO 11 CONTROL (September 1991)
Update, February 2011
Jim Morton writes about films, pop culture, and advertising.
http://popvoid.blogspot.com/
Boyd Rice was formerly credited as guest editor for Re/Search #10 Incredibly Strange Films.
http://www.boydrice.com/
Andrea Juno founded Juno Books.
http://twitter.com/AnimaJuno
Jesse Alexander Helms, Jr. died in 2008.
Dana Tyron Rohrabacher is the U.S. Representative for California’s 46th Congressional district.
AIDS Response Knoxville served at least between 1987 and 1999 and may still exist.
Jock Sturges’ studio was the subject of an FBI raid on 25 April 1990. Accused of child pornography, a Grand Jury did not bring an indictment against him.
Wikipedia, Judi Bari Car Bombing:
In 1990, a bomb exploded in Judi Bari’s car, shattering her pelvis and also injuring fellow activist Darryl Cherney. Bari and Cherney were later arrested after police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation suspected that they had been transporting the bomb when it accidentally exploded. The case against them was eventually dropped due to lack of evidence. Bari died in 1997 of cancer, but her federal lawsuit against the FBI and Oakland, California police resulted in a 2002 jury verdict awarding her estate and Darryl Cherney a total of $4.4 million. Eighty percent of the damages were for violation of their First Amendment rights by the FBI and police trying to discredit them in the media as violent extremists despite ample evidence to the contrary. The bombing remains unsolved.
House of the United States of America:
Warbucks Intra-Family Communique
I know that you don’t like to think this, but we are much like humans. We are subject to the human frailties. We forget. We get slip-shod. We fall short of our disciplines. You have selected me to be the family coordinator and I agreed to be, at least until someone better comes along. So that’s why I’m now reminding you of some of our basic principles for handling slaves.
Our slaves can get bored easily. When bored, they get restless. They start thinking, and questioning order. Therefore it is necessary for us to direct their thinking into areas which keep them dependent on our leadership. We must make them feel dependent on society for all their needs. Make them feel important to the Great Whole to which they belong. Keep them too deep in debt to have any spare time to experiment with principles of self-sufficiency, or even just getting out of hole.
A few of the slaves who refuse to conform are squatting in various places and planting their apple seeds, plum pits, grape seeds, avocado pits, orange seeds, nuts of all kinds and vegetables. They are not using our hybrid seeds. They found organic natural seeds more productive. They are creating Gardens of Eden, with free food, no rent and and acceptance of the Golden Rule instead of Government. So far, only a few of the smarter nonconformists are doing this. This gets them off our case; however, we must not give them any publicity, as it might encourage more our workers to not conform.
The family came up with a great innovation when they first decided to “allow” the peons to “own” land. Ownership gives them roots ties them down and makes it a easier to find them. It also gives us a classification of slave known as landlords. They serve us by forcing people to pay them rent in order to have a space to sleep on this planet. Thus they all work for us for the rest of their lives. We must always make them think that this is normal and that everyone has always had to pay rent and that they always will.
If the slaves deviate from present thought patterns, they might think it strange that they “agree” to work for us for 30 years to buy a place to sleep. They might wonder why some “primitive” people are able to build their homes from the material at hand in a couple of weeks and have no mortgage to pay. They might even find it simpler, more enjoyable and even more adventuresome to walk to where they wish to go instead of working for us to earn money to make perpetual car payments to us, so that they can get to a job to make the money to make their car payments. To say nothing of the car maintenance costs and depreciation. We must constantly entice them to buy. They make much better workers if are always in debt.
If we allow them space to think, they may question the vehicle with which they are killing themselves: 50,800 persons dead and 1,900,000 disabled in 1981 in the United States alone.They may see how machines and their present manufacturing processes are destroying their life-support system. They may see that all the processed junk food we’re selling them is making them sick and costing them more; see that their boring, unsatisfying jobs are driving many of them crazy. They might even discover the simplest unprocessed foods which are cheap and healthful.
As it is recorded in our family archives, one of our forefathers, Galus Julius Caesaer once sald: “Give them breed and circuses, to keep them from rebelling.” It is a simple matter to give them food, but it takes a little more imagination to give them circuses. I guess this is the creative part of being slave masters – to create diversions to keep their gullible little minds busy.
Our Watergate Scandal was a fine circus. It kept them thinking and talking along safe lines for years. We are still getting some mileage out of the Kennedy Assassination and they still aren’t sure whether we shot the real Kennedy, his double or a dummy. We have fine show going on Central America and in the Middle East, some still lingering in Germany, others in Vietnam, the USSR and China.
We may use the recent invasion to start another World War. It will be a challenge to attempt to involve our sheep in another big war, so soon after the last one. However, we may be able to pull it off, to get them angry enough to fight. We wouldn’t need to use the older nuclear bombs, as they could be dangerous to our families’ health. We might use a few of our cleaner H-Bombs. It will be a creative, fun time for us. Wars are truly the sport of kings. They are more fun to stage and run than chess games, or are hum-drum activities of production or politics.
Creating straw men for slaves to knock down is one of our best numbers. We set it up and let them tear it down. It diverts much of their creative energy. We create another excellent diversion by resisting their efforts to tear it down.
We learned long ago that people can think only one thought line at a time. We feed them thoughts and they either fight them or go along with them.
Music has always been an effective tool for setting their moods, their pace and leading their thoughts. While dancing they learn to step to the beat of our drummer and keep the pace we set. This teaches them to obey orders. The drum has always been useful for this. We let them touch each other during the dance. They seem to enjoy touching and they feel successful when they keep in step, so this training process becomes self-perpetuating. It also serves as an excellent distraction.
They must occupy their minds with keeping in step to the beat and with how they are going to entice their partners to deb. If they are constantly bombarded with distractions they will have no time to do any real thinking. They will only be aware of that which we make them aware.
Our closest guarded secret is the fact that slavery still exists in every country on this planet.
Laborers, farmers, traders, professionals, managers, directors and presidents – all take pay, so they must obey our orders. They are not aware of their bondage. Some are vaguely aware of the idea that “big money” runs everything. But they are unable to relate to the idea that they are part of that “everything.”
They think that they are free people, making all their own decisions We allow them to make the unimportant ones. The important ones we cover in their laws, and in their customs and religious and moral codes. We have even trained them to punish their own kind when they do not conform.
We have been masters for a long, long, time. We teach kids how to work, to be submissive and to obey orders. These kids grow up to he good slaves, like their parents. Most of the parents even go so far as to break their own kid’s spirits. So by the time they are of work age, them are docile, gullible and easy to manipulate.
Through all our media, including books, we give them a substitute for living. For example, we encourage them to live vicariously through the exciting adventures of fiction. This puts their fantasy life through an exciting energy drain which seems to satisfy some of their emotional hunger.
This substitute fills one of those spaces in time which they might have used to go out and experience life first-hand. Distractions keep them from discovering the bondage they are in. We must continue to titillate them to want to watch television and movies, to read newspapers, magazines and books to listen to radio and music.
We use the mass media not only for a distraction but also to help create their basic beliefs and expectations. Of course, the schools and churches serve this purpose too, as do popular songs and music. We use the media to create the desire to buy. In this way we motivate them to work for us.
They continue to administer to our needs as they did to Caeser’s and as they did for the priests in the time of the great pyamids. Our ancestors really knew how to handle people! As slaves get more education it takes a little more finesse to keep on top of them; however, it’s basically the same even today. Keep them fearful; fearful of death, fearful of pain, fearful of each other. Always encourage competition: it’s like fighting, separates people and keeps them fearful of losing.
We have made them afraid of death by telling them that they have spirits which live on after their death. If they obey our rules, which we tell them were inspired by God, their spirits will be assured entrance into Heaven or reincarnated into a better existence, depending on which of our religions they have chosen. This makes them afraid to die, because they know they haven’t obeyed all the rules (which we deliberately made too difficult to always be obeyed). If they can be kept afraid they are more easy to manage. Then they look to us for guidance and protection.
Promoting fear of pain is another distraction we have always used. We must not give them time to discover that pain is their body’s method of alerting them to the fact that they are doing something wrong to it. So before they can check out the reason for the pain, we channel them to a doctor who will attempt to numb the pain. The doctor will take up time and money doing so. It creates a great diversion, and debt. Some people talk about their pain constantly. The patients’ pain will usually return (sometimes to a different part of their body) after their cure. Doctors usually don’t remove the cause of pains. This would put them out of business.
We hire some of the slaves to act as police and soldiers so that we can threaten to inflict pain and imprisonment on the others. They literally enforce their own slavery when they take jobs in law enforcement and the military. We keep them too busy and too broke to realize this.
Sports and gambling have always been good spectacle. Sex may rate second place, drugs third. We have achieved a sort mass hypnosis by using movies, TV and music, with which we have been able to implant suggestions and beliefs without their being aware of it.
We may need to give our ecology program front page coverage again soon. It can take up the Slack to hold their attention in case it is untimely to start a war now.
Remember, the Warbucks family has ruled on this planet for six thousand years, so it is our right and destiny to continue doing so. Keep up the good work and if you have any problems, contract Alexandria or Ernest, as I’m taking a little vacation.
- Cleopatra Warbucks
from OVO 11 CONTROL (September 1991)
See also:
OVO 2 (1987)
Wikipedia: Mike Diana
Michael Christopher “Mike” Diana (born 1969) is an underground cartoonist who became the first artist ever to receive a criminal conviction for obscenity in the United States.
In the early 1990s, Mike Diana, a young man from Tallahassee, Florida, began producing the adult comic book Boiled Angel. This amateur comic contained graphic depictions of a variety of taboo and gory subjects, and it was distributed to only a handful of retailers. In 1991, while investigating a Florida murder case, a police officer discovered an issue of Boiled Angel and, desperate for clues, contacted Diana, informed him he was a suspect, and requested a blood sample. The real killer was soon apprehended, and Diana was not pursued. The officer in question, however, collected additional issues of Boiled Angel and sent them to the State’s Attorney’s office where they went on file. Two years later, the Assistant State’s Attorney, Stuart Baggish, came across the books and sent Diana a certified letter that said he was being charged with three counts of obscenity pursuant to Florida Statute § 847.011(1): one for publishing the material, one for distributing it, and one for advertising it. At this point, Diana contacted the non-profit First Amendment organization the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF), which provided him, free of cost, with the services of several prominent defense attorneys and expert witnesses.
Diana was employed as an elementary school janitor at the time of his first notoriety. He had used the school’s copier to reproduce some of his comic books representing crude, graphic drawings of sexual molestation and limb severing. Some of the material was allegedly left there, and Diana was fired.
On June 4, 1996, after a brief trial, Largo, Florida, Circuit Judge Douglas Baird declared the comics Boiled Angel #7 and Boiled Angel #ATE to be obscene, stating that he found them to be “patently offensive,” and that “The evident goal of the appellant’s publication is to portray shocking and graphic pictures of sexual conduct so it will be noticed. If the message is about victimization and that horrible things are happening in our society, as the appellant alleges, the appellant SHOULD HAVE created a vehicle to send his message that was not obscene.” Diana was found guilty on all three counts, and was sentenced to a three-year probation, during which time his residence was subject to inspection to determine if he was in possession of or was creating obscene material. He was to avoid all contact with children under 18, undergo psychological testing, enroll in a journalistic ethics course, pay a $3,000 fine, and perform 1,248 hours of community service. He was also ordered to cease drawing for personal use, and his place of residence was to be open to inspection by the police, without warning or warrant, at any time, for illustrations violating this ruling. He was not sentenced to any jail time, but spent four days in jail between the dates of the verdict and the sentencing.
To fulfill the requirement of undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, Diana was informed that the doctor whom he would see charged $100 an hour, which he would have to pay for himself, and that his evaluation would take two hours. After the evaluation, Diana was informed the session would cost $1,200 because the doctor claimed to have spent 10 hours reading Boiled Angel in preparation. Out of funds, Diana was unable to pay, and the doctor refused to give her evaluation to the court, effectively making him in violation of his probation.
Two appeals to the State Appellate Court failed to have the case reversed or reheard in Florida. During the first appeal process, the prosecution used evidence gathered after the original trial, a move that, according to the CBLDF, is usually considered unethical. The only count of the three under which Diana was convicted that was judged incorrect was the conviction for “advertising obscene material.” The Court agreed that it was improper to convict someone for advertising material that had not yet been created since Diana could not, at the time, know the nature or character of the work. The courts refused to accept an amicus brief submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union, and responded without comment to the second appeal. On June 27, 1997 the United States Supreme Court denied Mike Diana’s petition for a writ of certiorari without comment, effectively ending his legal options in his battle to overturn his conviction.
Diana moved to New York, where he was granted permission to serve out his sentence, and fulfill his community service obligation through volunteer work for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
OVO was one of the handful of publishers that printed Mike’s work before his legal troubles. My only trouble connected to Mike’s work was having OVO removed from the shelves of a magazine store in Knoxville, Tennessee. Mike also contributed original art to OVO 15 SPERM (February 2005). Compare the style and content of Mike’s work in 1990 with the 2007 television program Superjail [wikipedia][google video]. What Mike paid the price for, Cartoon Network makes the profit from.
Mike Diana
http://www.testicle.com/mikediana.htm
(from OVO 10 MAYHEM July 1991)
Ginger Hutton was a friend of mine who worked in a used bookstore in Knoxville, Tennessee USA.
OVO: Who buys true crime books?
GH: Everybody, it’s the fastest growing section in the store. A lot of times people will come up with a handful of Harlequin and historical romances and true crime. There are a lot of 40-year-old women who are overweight unhappy-looking housewives who are reading historical romances and true crime, and obviously getting a kick out of both because they keep coming back. It’s mixed as far as male and female but I think women buy more. All ages although again it’s older people mostly.
OVO: Are there people who just get true crime or do most people get the romances as well?
GH: There are people who just get true crime. Most of them are very normal and conservative looking, they don’t look like the kind of people who are taking a book home to study from it. But I have had people come up to the desk and recommend stuff for me. “Oh, if you read that kind of stuff this one’s really good, he does it with an axe.” l’m not sure that they’re distinguishing between fiction and non-fiction. I’m not sure that its real to them. It’s entertainment. And that’s what’s happening with ell these TV shows, America’s Most Wanted, Emergency 911, you watch them go out and rescue people who got hit by cars. Suddenly sick voyeurism is socially acceptable. I’m not sure why that is. Part of it may be that the world is starting to fall apart in more obvious ways. Crime rates are up all over the place, the environment has become so bad that it can’t be ignored, and I think what used to be horrifying to people when compared to all the other problems in their life is not at all horrible. It diverts them. If they can read about a serial killer in Seattle they don’t have to think about the drug dealers in their neighborhood. I think American culture is sick and has been getting sicker for a long time, and is finally reaching a point where it’s not concealed any more. When I started reading true crime it was something you snuck out of the store, like sex books. Now it’s everywhere, there’s no stigma attached. Which you could say is good because its more open but its also an indication of a dangerous trend in American culture.
OVO: When did you start reading true crime books?
GH: I started reading them when I was about 14, reading Reader’s Digest which always condensed the best crimes. I read about Bundy right after he was arrested. It was very scary and very compelling and something you didn’t talk about and something your parents didn’t let you watch on TV. I have always been fascinated with death, and violent death is more interesting than other kinds. That’s why I was attracted to it.
OVO: Why do most people read it?
GH: Most people are afraid of dying and afraid of crime. That’s the big issue now. The government is really pushing that, as if crime is the worst thing we have to worry about, which it’s not. People are afraid and this is a way of confronting their fears or overloading themselves. If you read about something long enough its not shocking or frightening any more. Maybe its a way of desensitizing themselves.
OVO: Do most of the people who buy these books progress to the books with more graphic descriptions and violent deaths?
GH: l don’t know. They tend to buy them buy the bunch, six or eight at a time. People are demanding more graphic true crime books because if you look at the latest ones coming out (I get to see them all at work) the photos are getting more and more graphic. The ones that came out ten years ago had no pictures at all, or if they did they had pictures of the victim and the killer before they were victims and killers. Whereas now you get morgue shots of somebody’s face blown away. People won’t buy them if they have no pictures in them, they’re disappointed. l’m assuming that this trend in publishing is somehow related to demand.
OVO: Have you progressed in your reading, starting with Reader’s Digest, which is rather sanitized, and now you seek out things that are more extreme?
GH: Yes, but I don‘t do it to shook myself. What l do is find something that interests me, a particular serial killer or a particular method, and read everything I can get on that subject. And I prefer that it be more graphic because then you actually know what happened. I don’t like the sanitized version because in the back of my mind it’s still a confrontation with mortality and you have to look it full in the face to get anything out of it. If you’re going to start digging around to find reality then you have to look at the whole thing, and it’s not pleasant, but the less pleasant it gets, at least with crime, the more real and true it is. That’s why I do it, that may be true with other people. Seeing the people who buy it I don’t think it is.
OVO: Does true crime media contribute to a sense of jadedness and to crime?
GH: To jadedness, yes. I doubt that it contributes to crime but it makes crime so common that there’s no horror to crime any more, it’s entertainment. Its creating some disturbing attitudes. Reading about crime and being fascinated by crime is one thing but thinking of crime and murder as entertainment is something entirely different. Most serial killers don’t think of murder as entertaining and it’s disturbing that that’s how its being billed in America, and that’s how people tend to look at it. Its just a TV show with a bad guy and a nice dead person.
OVO: Why do you think it is that most of the people who get these books are women when most of the people described as victims in these books are women?
GH: If you look at it as confrontation with your own mortality then reading about your own sex being killed would be that much more disturbing and that much more of a confrontation. I think part of it is that they like to read about people who kill women, then get caught, then get killed. I think its a way of extending hatred. The way most true crime books are written you can direct all your hatred at this one bad man and you can believe that everything is caused by bad men. In a way you aren’t responsible, and no one else is responsible. They hardly ever dwell on the circumstances that led this bad man to be bad. It’s an outlet that women don’t have. Women don’t generally go out and beat each other up. They don’t have as much of an organized focus for hatred.
OVO: What are things going to be like in ten years?
GH: We can’t even begin to imagine the number of serial killers we’re going to have. It’s been doubling or more every year for years. Ten years ago l think there were six. Last year there were thirty-five known serial killers. These are the ones that we know about. There are people disappearing who are certainly being killed. It’s going to continue to go up because child abuse is on the rise. Our culture has accepted violence as entertainment. Now kids who were going to have problems anyway can sit around every single night and watch people kill each other on TV. In spite of the moralistic tone, TV is like hypnotism, you sit and absorb, and if you’re hearing about this guy who sliced up ten women and this guy who’s wanted for killing his wife and two kids it gets in your mind and becomes acceptable because its just a TV show. I think that will contribute to a lot of murders. I think everybody ought to be doing more reading and preparing themselves.
(from OVO 10 MAYHEM July 1991)
Trevor Blake: Redshirt.
Tricorder.
Tricorder with blinky light.
Imagine a world in which art is forbidden! Art galleries would close. Books would vanish. Pop stars would shed their glamour overnight. Advertising would cease, television would die. We could refocus our vision not on a succession of false images but on the world as it is. A stillness would fill the air. Art has provided us with fantasy worlds, escapes from reality. For whatever else it is, art is not reality. Soap operas, novels, movies; concerts, the theatre, poetry. None of these are real as a starving child is real, as a town without water is real. Art is the glamorous escape, the transformation that shields us from the world we live in. Injustice, endemic disease, famine, war. Those are real. Art has replaced religion as the opiate of the people just as the artist has replaced the priest as the voice of the spirit. Once we reached inside ourselves to find God / truth /really / etc. Now we find only art. We are regulated by our addictions and art hm become an addiction. We struggle through life in a drugged dream, searching for escape, for brighter fantasies, longer voyages of the imagination, louder music. Another’s life is always more interesting than our own. It is only those who have given up art who can experience the true nature of creation. Now, a self-perpetuating elite sell art as a commodity for the wealthy who have everything while making the artists themselves rich beyond their wildest dreams. Art is money. It is ironic that the myth of the artist celebrates suffering while it is those who have never heard of art, the poor and wretched of our earth, who truly suffer. To call one person an artist is to deny another the equal right of vision. Paint all the paintings black and celebrate the dead art: there is no booze in hell. We tum away from mountains of food that rot in storage while acres the globe humans grow too weak to eat because it is time for our favorite TV program. We live up to our knees in blood, wasting not only hours but days – whole lifetimes – in the bind belief that art is good, art is pure, art is its own justification – and a nightmare scourges our planet. Until we end famine there will be no peace. Artists are murderers! Artists are murderers just as surely as is the soldier who sights down the barrel of a gun to shoot an unarmed civilian. Without art, life would be unendurable! We would have to transform this world. Overnight, one person’s dream can become a nation’s future – but we do not seize power because we are enchanted by art. Forbid art and revolution would follow: the withholding of creative action is the only weapon left. Seeing and creating are the same activity. Those who create art are also creating the starving. In a world in which art is forbidden the deserts would flower. Give up art. Save the starving.
(from OVO 14 Suffering March 1992)
The Skin Horse
1982
Written by Nigel Evans and Nabil Shaban
Featuring Nabil Shaban with Nick Finden, Tony Gerrard, Tina Leslie, Kathleen Venner
Documentaries on the disabled can be difficult to watch. Not in the sense of such films being ugly. Documentaries on the disabled can be difficult to watch because one simply can’t find them. Frederick Wiseman shot Titicut Follies in 1967. The film depicts the lives of inmates at the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Their lives were made up of being bullied, forced feed, sprayed with a high-pressure water hose and confined in unlit windowless rooms. In 1968 the film was removed from distribution and all copies were ordered destroyed by Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Harry Kalus. Judge Kalus said he acted in the interest of the privacy of the inmates. The following year in that the film was allowed to be shown but only to health care professionals. Wiseman appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which declined to review the case. According to Wikipedia, “the dispute marked the first known instance in the history of the American film industry that a film was banned from general distribution for reasons other than obscenity, immorality or national security.” Superior Court Judge Andrew Meyer lifted the ban on the film in 1991, on the condition “a brief explanation shall be included in the film that changes and improvements have taken place at Massachusetts Correctional Institution Bridgewater since 1966.” Today you can buy a copy of Titicut Follies from Zipporah Films, Inc.
No such luck for The Skin Horse. Channel 4 (formerly Central Television) commissioned the 1982 film but does not sell it. No one sells it, not legally. Worldcat does not list it as existing in the interlibrary loan system. Exactly one private library has it in their collection. If you are exceptionally fortunate you may have seen it one of the few times it has been broadcast on television. The documentary isn’t banned, it is merely unavailable.
The Skin Horse is a documentary by and about disabled people and their sex lives. Not their secret longing and private thoughts, although these are part of the film. This is a documentary about sex, sex among the disabled, sex between the disabled and the able.
Co-author and narrator Nabil Shaban does not skirt around the issue. The Skin Horse is an adult film, made by and for adults able to speak most clearly about themselves. Perhaps mere suggestiveness would not have succeeded in this film. Perhaps like the Last Poets or Valarie Solanas, the time for subtlty ended long ago for Shaban. When a person is just a little different from the norm, suggestiveness and being coy are more common. When we find a birthmark or personality quirk in a partner it stands out for a moment and then is gone. When one or one’s partner isn’t even considered fully human by some people, the time to beat around the bush ends. The average life span of the disabled is shorter than that of the non-disabled. The average screen time of the disabled is measured in minutes-per-decade compared to the screen time of the non-disabled. A wink and a nod just isn’t going to cut it. These are stories told once, and there’s no follow-up special presentation later on. The Skin Horse is honest in a way most sex documentaries only aspire to be honest.
The honesty begins with a discussion of beauty. In antiquity philosophers claimed physical beauty was a virtue, like honesty or courage. Deviation from the form was either a punishment or a moral weakness. The etymology of the word monster is that of a beast sent by the gods as a warning. In the 21st Century other theories of beauty predominate. The Skin Horse speaks of four theories of beauty. All quotes are from The Skin Horse.
Is beauty like the sun, radiating from a center and growing cold with distance? Some sections of The Skin Horse support this classic idea. Nabil: “Most disabled or deformed people I met at special school, sheltered workshop or crip college couldn’t wait to go to bed with an able-bodied person. I know that to be true of me.”
Is beauty is in the eye of the beholder? Perhaps disability does not matter. Those who are left handed tend towards mental illness, higher rates of suicide and imprisonment and shorter life spans. But being left handed is not seen as a disability. Nor are glasses on a person with a slight vision problem. Perhaps what we see as beauty or as a disability is arbitrary, a frame of reference we are free to modify or reject. This was the thinking behind the founding of the Outsiders in 1979. The Outsiders “is a vibrant social and peer support network of disabled people. We are many different things to our many members. [...] Whenever possible, Outsiders works together with other groups to campaign for the acceptance of disabled people as sexual partners.” The Skin Horse includes interviews with a founder of The Outsiders: “If I’d thought about it before I started I don’t think I would have ever dared to do it because I never really thought it would work. Everyone said it wouldn’t work. But actually, however disabled you are you are still able to love somebody and be loved. So the most amazing marriages and… parings… have taken place. Dispite the fact that they might not only be disabled but also homosexual. Goodness knows, they’re just like anybody else.” The Skin Horse also includes interviews with a member of Outsiders, Jack: “Everyone’s got ability and disability.”
Is beauty a spiritual force? Is beauty to the body as the mind is to the brain? Perhaps beauty and disability are not part of us at all, but a shadow cast by an inner light. Most of the speakers in The Skin Horse hold this theory of beauty. Nabil is a keen researcher into the paranormal, psychic powers, UFOs and utopian politics. Open the gates to a single taboo and the rest come marching in. Nabil: “From childhood we learn that there is always more than meets the eye, that external appearances are misleading, that what exists within us all is always greater than the sum of the parts. [...] To admit love is to admit there is more to appearances. And to admit that we all have to work much harder at being human. We have to consider not only the body but also the soul.” Another man speaks of sex as a spiritual experience rather than a physical one: “I know the joy, the contentment, the feeling of spirituality, the utter relief from the limitations of my body which comes from sex. Just calling it sex is a very limiting word. It’s far more than people think with just one word. My body is very limiting but in sex I feel complete freedom.” Tina Leslie talks about the difference between her body and her self. “Sometimes I eat in front of a mirror to see the mask as other people see me. And try to see their feelings. But this is what they see. It’s got nothing to do with me, the real me, a lover sees that, the real me. But I still never quite, quite believe it. But my god, I’d rather this than some celibate martyrdom. [...] Some people see me as an ugly thing. They can’t see me as a being, and as a sexual person, never. Christ, I don’t mind being seen like that. What’s the point of militant feminism? I like men. I don’t want to take refuge in something disabled women use as an excuse suppress their sexuality.”
Is beauty a fetish? Are some beautiful because they are different? Thousands of gigabytes of disability pornography are shuttled about the globe every day, lending some weight to this theory. Nearly thirty years earlier, The Skin Horse made the connection between acceptable fetishes (weight lifters and surgical beauty queens) and unacceptable fetishes (in a word, freaks). Nabil: “Perfection becomes an imperfection, a curiosity, a handicap, and the handicap when taken to its physical extremes becomes an end in itself. Hence, King Size [magazine]. Jonny the Wad. Chesty Morgan. King Dong. Big Bum. And all those freaks we have learned to love and loathe. And some people lust after.” Freaks have their place, but it is a well proscribed place. Nabil: “In the world of sexuality, there are three genders: female, male and disabled. And what is more, traditionally, in the disabled group, we are categorized into monsters or children. Children, eh? So we’re either monsters or children. We’re either abused or patronized. We’re either a fetish or sexless. Never in between. [...] It seem we need freaks not only to reassure ourselves of our own normality but more importantly to help us rediscover something. Perhaps that’s why we create our own freaks in myths, legends, fairy stories, literature and films. Perhaps that’s why we impart a certain humanity in them, and allow them to love and be loved. But of course only in fiction.” Here The Skin Horse shows some of the approved and fictional couplings between able bodied persons and freaks, such as Leda and swan, a maid and a minotaur, Kala and Charleton Heston.
If the disabled are (or would like to be) similar to anyone else in their sex lives, are they similar in their loneliness? One man in The Skin Horse says so: “The problem of exploring one’s own sexuality is a problem that everyone has.” But no matter how we sees ourselves, the challenge in starting and maintaining a relationship (or getting laid) is in how others see us. One woman in The Skin Horse describes her everyday life at the home for incurables for the past 34 years: “Washed, dressed, put in my chair. [...] Sometimes I ache for the human contact that I’ve been denied. For a new face that isn’t a nurse or another incurable. [...] It’s this sense of waste that I resent most of all. It’s as if people like me are somehow supposed to live our lives beyond frustration. As if part of accepting our lot should include the complete denial of any emotional life at all.” Hey! you’ve got to hide your love away…
Getting off for the disabled can mean breaking laws as well as breaking taboo. One man talks about when his personal assistant brought him to a prostitute: “She was really sort of a bit freaked out by the fact that this guy carried me up the stairs and plunked me on the bed and said ‘there he is.’ I stayed there for about three or four hours. One hears so many terrible things said about prostitutes and I believe it’s still illegal and all that but in that case in point the lady who I saw fulfilled a very useful purpose and I’m eternally grateful to her. [...] The events leading on from [hiring a prostitute] did make me much more relaxed and more self confident in myself as a sexy person, to meet other people, to make relationships, and I suppose over the last few years that has been growing and it’s still growing.”
The men and women in The Skin Horse are largely still with us. Comedian Tony Gerrard continues to perform. The Outsiders still exists, and is the only place I’ve found that has The Skin Horse in its library. The Skin Horse was where I first learned of Nabil Shaban, and I hope that this review can draw more attention to this singular work. But Shaban has done much more, prior to and since The Skin Horse. He has many stage, film and television credits to his name, some of which are listed below. He was part of the CRASS Collective and in 1980 co-founded the Graeae Theater. Shaban is an artist, an author, an animator, a director, an actor and a musician. He is a father. How uncomfortable he must feel to know he’s been such a positive influence on my life and the lives of so many others. Sorry, friend, you’re a hero.
Shaban offers many of his works online at YouTube and elsewhere. If I Decide to Commit Suicide, You Need Hands and The Fifth Gospel include Tina Leslie, also seen in The Skin Horse. If I Decide to Commit Suicide is a video for Shaban’s poem of the same name. It quotes from Eraserhead by David Lynch, just as The Skin Horse quotes from Lynch’s Elephant Man. You Need Hands is a dark music video. The Fifth Gospel describes Christianity as ‘body fascist’ and shows Shaban and Leslie being patronized during a trip to the non-healing fountains of Lourdes. Morticia is available as a video on demand from amazon.com. Morticia is about a girl who wants to become a vampire. A third party has posted The Strangest Viking online. This is a documentary narrated by Shaban on Ivar the Boneless, a viking who conquered much of England. An excerpt from The Alien Who Lived in the Sheds is online. In The Alien Who Lived in the Sheds, Shaban shows that for all his fire and thunder he can make fun of himself. Shaban is a believer in the paranormal, but is aware of how such beliefs can look to non-believers. Shaban is an advocate of the outsider, but it not immune from gawking when he meets a fellow outsider. Shaban is his body, but his body is also a source of pain. Alien includes a film within a film, and this film is again one of his poems set to music and video. For all his success in the theater, Shaban has experienced one significant setback. He secured money for a production of his play The First to Go when England joined the war against Iraq. The First to Go is a play about the fate of the disabled under the T4 program in wartime Germany. Shaban returned the government’s ‘blood money’ in protest and the play has yet to find another backer.
Nabil Shaban has successfully scattered the ash circle that kept able and disabled actors apart. He is a man who can be judged on his talents. Shaban recently turned fifty and has many years of innovation and experimentation ahead of him. Thank you to Nabil Shaban for opening many doors, taking many risks and thumbing your nose at heresy.
Nabil Shaban (selected works)
Stage:
Film:
Television:
Radio
Books:
Internet:
Trevor Blake is a sign language interpreter who lives in Portland, Oregon USA.
1.
Gauge function is the highest order of cognition in a total field.
2.
The level of technological development in any given society is the primary measurement of its state of intellectual amplitude. The result of technological advancement is axiomatically the production of free time, that is, time available to an expanding array of choices rather than to an expanding array of necessities. Freed from necessity, a society can invent forward, project a wide field of ideals determined by curiosity and exploration rather than inventing backwards within a narrow field determined by irritants. Up to now, invention has concerned itself with the creation of objects in space. In a free-time society, invention will emphasize organizational schemata for information throughput. The impetus will be to design frames of reference unfettered by ideology. Human culture will then consist of the interplay between various interpretive frameworks developed by their adherents in a spirit of problem solving.
3.
Technology is inherently democratizing. The popularization of technophobia will be increasingly perceived to be against the best interests of humanity. In dense information fields fear is dissipated when full attention can be applied to success in problem solving. Technology supplies the tools for amplifying intelligence to every citizen. The economics of mass production dissolves hierarchies of privilege. Technology is the sharing of created wealth, not the concentration of exploited wealth. Technology requires an educated work force in the production end. Under feudalism, divisions of labor were decided upon by tradition, birthright, wealth, privilege, etc., and resulted in caste system boundaries that tended to freeze the evolution of intelligence, hence the tendency of all pre-capitalist societies to collapse. Chattle control of technology is now an historic futility. The genie is out of the bottle. Human knowledge has passed the threshold where it may now self-amplify at a geometrically accelerating rate rather than at the pre-electronic, pre-TV linear rate.
4.
Imaging technology is the present organizing principle of social forms for two reasons: (a) information density – “a picture is worth a thousand words” really means that a picture oriented society has more accuracy of detail about its phase states. It can better predict the outcome of its policy decisions. This makes for stable social evolution. (b) image plasticity – a wider variety of imaginary constructs can be brought the 3-D world and tested for reality. Individual imaging prototyping, ie fantasizing, becomes less bound to subjective personality loops and better able to engage problem-solving efficiencies within the measurable realm of the externally perceived universals. It is time to place computational phenomena into the visual cortex of the brain. Over half the brain’s neurons are used to process and understand visual input. Its visual input data channel has a bandwidth estimated to be about 2 gigabits per second.
5.
Imaging screen plasticity allows for alternative functions of the same instrument. With the addition of touch screen, data glove or other “hot screen” technology, it can multi-function as memory, gauge display, media interface, and process controller. This is a powerful form of throughput amplification. Any tool that can lessen boundary pile-up and discontinuities between phases or objects is more efficient. A carpenter’s hammer can either drive or pull nails without retooling. The human mind is very good at alternating or simultaneous functions. It can walk and chew gum; it can both perceive and conceive. The imaging screen tool best reflects our capacities to both view and visualize and will probably be the first component of an artificial intelligence array that exceeds the primary limiting factor of human individual sentience – our built-in focus outward from a binocular being point singularity. An A.I. setup with multi-points of view, many eyed, will accelerate the next revolution in applied knowledge.
6.
Screens will be used to modulate other screens. Within a large bank of info feedback screens, any shift in paradigms introduced by the data or operator will cause a kaleidoscopic cascade of phase and intensity determinants to spread out across the screen like a living mosaic. Observations of changes in the rates as well as the shapes of patterns will awaken dormant potentials, such as our visual sense of acceleration pattern. Consequently, many of our biological sensoria will receive an impetus to make themselves available to a human-made environment of mental evolution. Interacting with images will become direct and immediate: in resonate proximity to internal visual imagining. This is an important development because it couples process of imagination to the real world where their function-ability is made apparent. By visually representing and revealing the interconnectivity of events within a phase and, by extension, of all phases within our universe, technology becomes the most humanitarian of all human endeavors.
7.
Multi-screen image display arrays are key to solving the problem of information overload. There is not too much information, there is too little cognitive ability to handle it. The synthetic capabilities of the visual cortex (mass-free mental imaging, thought pictures) coupled to the synthetic potential of our matter-composed universe (molecular Lego kit) provides us with a very large number of invention activated problem solving avenues. Actually we are over-engineered for survival. Meeting the necessities of biological survival is a piece of cake, an amoeba can do it. But systems propelled by discomfort are limited in that they focus backwards upon point-causal determinants (see #2). These systems are automatic not autonomous. Systems attracted by pleasure are area-focused rather than point-focused. They exercise forward acting (future oriented) area causal apperception over a range of possibilities. The implication of choice requires a modeling system which allows the comparative consideration of options in an autonomous manner. This modeling system should borrow as much as it can from the dimension of simultaneity in order to hold several or many choices up against each other for comparison. For this reason it is ideally multi-screen with zoom in / out potential at all foci and peripherally inclusive as well.
8.
Various studies on the nature and effect of television upon culture have been made, their results and attendant opinions published. None, however, have taken into account a hitherto unknown potential of the video medium, that of multi-screen viewing. When television is discussed it is always within the parameter of a single screen, much like cinema. Marshal Mcluhan first hypothesized an important characteristic of technological advance – the tendency for the previous technology to dictate the form its subsequent evolution. For example, the first automobiles placed the engine in front, where the horses went. They called it the horseless carriage. This is a shock reducing social mechanism which serves to validate the past in its form while incorporating a new utility. So it is with television. We have a medium imprisoned within the form of its predecessor, cinema / theater. It has been captive to cinema’s physical form up to this point (ie a single screen) and theater content (the presentation of dramatic emotional suspense). Television is ideally suited to multi-screen arrays. Furthermore, being electronic and portable, its content is ideally suited to instantaneous update and real time look-in on relevant events. The ability for the viewer to switch through channels, to view within the autonomous framework of the domicile environment and to utilize the autonomous potentials of VCR and camcorder is lessening the power of “theatrics” in political and economic life – the popular anti-charisma of General Schwartzkopf is instructive.
9.
Multi-screen arrays imply more than one point of view which is the basis for dimensionality. We perceive time from the standpoint of a succession of temporal points of view. We perceive space from a binocular point of view, the conceptual fusion of which gives us 3-D. Multiple points of view is a very powerful attribute of full awareness and, moreover, is the primary means by which awareness amplifies itself. Putting oneself in the other person’s shoes, for example, is a key to successful communication and the generation of understanding. Having the flexibility to adopt many points of view during the analysis of a situation is the creative way to avoid traps in cognition. Multi-screen arrays are tailor made for collaborative problem solving via teleconference hookups. We can map out facets of a situation like a cubist painting and come upon a more complete picture. Completing our picture of the universe is the name of the game.
10.
Problem solving is very simple given enough information. The facts usually sort themselves out into necessity fields and mental effort is potentially freed up to pursue more and more pleasure of creativity. This is art. We are going to have to learn how to operate with freedom of choice within an incredibly dense global information matrix. The densest personal info matrix is the visual one. The human retina is capable of differentiating about 2 million color hues and intensities and probably a larger number of shapes, spatial attitudes, distances and motions. We mainly use only a small portion of the visual field at any one time, a pencil thin cone of maximum attention, and we see as we read, in a scanning manner. This leaves the peripheral visual field almost unused, merely a cue-up function; like hearing – an attention director. Expansion of peripheral apperception is desirable because it allows a wider field of view for the simultaneous comparative gauging of visual info which will, in turn, amplify that same potential within the memory and projective areas of the mind. In short, we can make parallel processing abilities accessible to consciousness. One can get a taste of this ability by setting two TV sets side by side, tuning in two different stations with audio up on both and concentrating on getting the gist of both programs simultaneously. Within ten minutes you should be catching on.
11.
High definition TV (HDTV) should be perceived by the media aware public as more than an embellishment upon the world of entertainment. 1,120 scan line resolution will transform our perceptual field and its resultant social appetites much as photo-journalism via Life and Look magazines helped to transform America from agrarianism to industrialism. HDTV viewed upon a living room TV set will make such superficial genre as game shows, soap operas, sitcoms and allied exercises in inanity naked to our faculties of analysis and skepticism. Nature does not represent itself to us in low definition. We do that. The lower the definition, the more the optical phenomena take on the properties of undifferentiated peripheral visual field object, to cue-up our attention to more detailed, information dense appraisal. Low definition communication leaves us in a state of mystery to one degree or another, which is not a fulfilling process. HDTV plays directly to the central retina, where the blanks get filled in. If the TV program content is a mismatch with the detailed configurative capability of the retina, the viewer will change channels to program content which does that capability justice. With HDTV, video as a single-screen artifact reaches its maximum point of exploitation. It is suitable for nothing less than a documentary approach at all times. Low definition sectarian ideology is incapable of instantaneous update and will be perceived as a retrograde, obstructing methodology of patterning. The viewer will be freed from any frame of reference which locks interpretation into pre-orchestrated categories. Fields of knowledge will become wide angle, making apparent the interconnectivity of event flux and causality. Equirement will supplant style. The demand for precision in all bio-necessity aspects of life will dictate a form-follows-function structuralist aesthetic.
12.
The compact handicam allows us to look in on areas of human discovery as they occur without the mitigation of commentary or editing or political top spin. exploration, laboratory and field research, global conferences, classroom lectures, etc. could be tuned in to for personal enjoyment and university credit. The key is “real-time”. CSPAN is the most important network currently in existence. Emergency situations already benefit to a degree from this technology, particularly in the medical field where difficult procedures are accessible to world wide expertise while in progress. The recent events in China were covered in large measure by students with smuggled handicams. We are witness to events as they unfold. abuses of police or government procedures captured by a palm-corder, cannot be denied without the peril of full discovery and blown cabals. Video testimony and video documents are being recognized as legally true. The drama is reality itself.
13.
McLuhan’s prediction of the electronic global village is no joke. We are beginning to see into the lives of our global neighbors on an intimate scale, independent from the force feeding of stereotypes via ideological and governmental channels. The most important network program to date is America’s Funniest Home Videos. The most important broadcast area of the world was Eastern Europe. Real life is far more transformative and entertaining than entertainment, it touches us more deeply, and bonds us together at the level of reality. Truth is manifold viewpoint, manifold verification.
14.
We no longer have the option to select whether or not we perceive an event, but only where to place it within our frame of reference, what importance to give it. In an era of remote telecast, nothing remains remote, everything is right in front of our face. Your hand-held channel selector is a marvelous anti-gravity device. You don‘t have to get up to change the channel, consequently you don’t tend to get trapped inside mass inertia systems. The tendency, then, is to not pattern your mental life after mass / inertia systems. The remote channel selector is democracy’s most powerful weapon. Truth is never boring.
15.
The digitizing of media via digital signal processing is an exciting prospect from the standpoint that this will help in standardizing electronic communication languages. The more we appreciate that phenomena can be subdivided into smaller and smaller constituent particles, the more we perceive those particles responding to field interactions. This is how we can get to the ideal from the real. Image and recording quality will no longer be a function of equipment cost. There will be absolutely no point to operating giant media entertainment networks. With fiber optics and degeneration-proof image and sound recording, every human is a news wire service, like ham radio operators during a local emergency. Fiber optics already carry in-house video teleconferencing capability within many corporate office complexes. When the band width problem is solved, either by fiber optics or a rediscovery of Tesla standing wave technology, the wires will be humming with so much communication flux that new visual shorthand languages will spring up out of necessity. That will be interesting.
16.
Up to now, what we call communication is really sound wave communication carried out in a relatively dense atmosphere at very slow speeds within a linear sequential framework. Light travels 100,000 times faster than sound. This is the speed of vision. The visual field is also simultaneous. You can recognize many objects at a single glance. The advantages of incorporating a visual language into everyday affairs is readily apparent. The nature of that language is totally wide open. It could be any mix of graphic symbol, color cues, positional cues, motion cues, 3-D display, audio intermix, you name it.
l7.
Nikola Tesla, in his later years, claimed to have invented a process whereby mental images could be transferred to an imaging screen. His absolute mastery over the theory and application of EMF is a matter of historic fact. We use his AC current, polyphase motors, radio, transformers, etc. on a daily basis. The military has taken the threat of Soviet deployment of Tesla-based EMF weapons very seriously; it was the impulse to develop the SDI program. We should make the attempt to understand EMF phenomena as Tesla did; the vacuum being no vacuum at all, rather a seething sea of electrostatic potential, a stressed vacuum.
18.
The leading edge of media research is currently to be found in the field of aircraft cockpit instrumentation display. Whenever you have two systems in relative motion, the requirements for rapid information updating rise exponentially as a function of the increase in velocity. Necessity dictates accuracy, ie, a high volume of data, a dense data flux. These lessons can be applied to everyday life where the velocity and instability factors are less than in flight systems, but the simultaneity factors are greater. Information throughput density is the constant in either case. In education, students could fly themselves through a knowledge landscape at their own learning velocity. Information density is conceptually akin to object velocity. The more of it that pours through your visual perceptual field, the faster you are going, even though you may be physically at rest. This is why “couch potatoes” are actually rocket sled pilots traveling at warp speed.
l9.
What we presently enjoy as technological progress has been, up to this point, essentially a spin-off from military R & D. National destiny has heretofore required the motive of threat to unify and drive science. With the easing of cold war tensions, technology can be harnessed more directly to global human needs, but the motive of discovery must be powerful enough to supplant the motive of threat. Space exploration is vital as a replacement ‘science driver’ because only in that realm is the crucial factor of power vs. weight, ie, miniaturization, the primary factor.
20.
“Television has served as an internal communications system. Lawmakers can be working in their offices and keep one eye on the television screen to check the progress of debate on the house or senate floor” (story in the San Francisco Chronicle April 4, 1989). Government officials must absolutely be elected and appointed on a basis of technological literacy first and foremost. Even that won’t stop the capitol buildings from becoming ceremonial halls and museums.
21.
Tele-synthetic reality – virtual space imaging and allied tactile-referent systems – may prove to be a very big let down in any practical sense. It will intrinsically apply most easily to remote control of robotics, and a simulation trainer for certain kinds of athletics. Its over magnification of the subjective will tend to move it into the area of expensive escapist entertainment and even porn. However, certain of its spin-off developments are showing potential. Two forms of goggle-type display technology have recently been made available which will have consequences beyond their immediate markets. The first goggle display places heads up data overlayed upon the normal visual panorama. The prototypes do not have head movement tracking and directional capabilities, but can superimpose any word or symbol code upon the real world. No reason why one couldn’t read the paper while driving the car, for example; simply a matter of depth of field awareness. The other goggle technology projects any video signal directly in front of the eyes, but blanks out real world image. This British invention is designed as a substitute for regular television viewing with stereo earphones and goggle display in an integral unit. The remarkable potential in these videophonic goggles is that they will effectively cause the reintegration of the imaginative processes of cognition away from the subjective and towards the objective, real world. Such close-up projection will, in fact, substitute external objective content and relations for internal subjective imagination. Daydreaming will have a powerful impetus to relate directly to reality, rather than being a form of personal escapism. Documentary visual uptake will immerse the viewer within the docu-world and further accelerate the citizen’s potential to participate in world affairs beyond the mere possession of opinion.
22.
In the recent discussions about the most strategic of our nation’s industries, electronic design automation (EDA) has received undeserved neglect. EDA is nothing less than the computers ability to design itself into a more efficient form – it is the computer design of computer components, and is an absolutely crucial technology. The amazing fertility of electronic technology is constantly shrinking the “shelf life” of new products, now down to under a year. Rapid obsolescence has brought EDA into its own as a method for accelerating the design phase of new products through prototype testing. The implications of EDA, however, are far deeper. EDA is laying the practical foundations for artificial intelligence capabilities; in particular, the ability of a piece of hardware or program to educate itself about a task and then improve its performance on that.
23.
Computer aided design, animation and engineering will integrate within the entertainment industry and will eventually replace sets, actors, locations, cameras: everything, in fact, that we call “Hollywood.” Photorealistic animation will burst out of its “special effects” containment to take over the entire production. Feature-length entertainment will be produced start to finish by a handful of men and women in an editing suite at a hundredth the cost. Photorealistic animation will be as detailed as modern cinematography with the advantage of absolute creative freedom. The division between “amateur” and “professional”, “B” grade and studio, “artistic” and “kitsch” will be dissolved by the power of the animation hardware and programs themselves.
24.
Given proper in / out and control interface, any electronic circuitry can be made to function in the form of a software program. Any digitizable signal can be softwared through a computer to make the computer function in any way, as audio, video or radio gear, electronic testing and diagnostic gear, electronic gauge and monitoring gear.
25.
More international bodies will convene to work out interface standards for information technology than will meet to promote world peace, and will be more successful at both tasks.
26.
The economics of surplus, first-generation obsolete gear will remove overheated overhead costs from still viable technologies and promote vigorous experimentation and “re-prototyping” into new and unusual functions. This area should not be overlooked for its potential to provide breakthrough “off the shelf’ type applications and conceptual flanking movements, particularly in the area of parallel processing which may prove to be effectively applied in the absence of fast processor speeds.
27.
Up to this point most futurist projections have been hampered by either a simple minded “gee whiz” approach or an overly cautious approach philosophically opposed to technology per se. In absolutely no example of popularized futurology have authors exhibited an understanding of the process of mind that results in efficient applied human invention. This outlook robs us of a great sense of security about the intelligence of our forebears well as a sense of confidence in our ability to educate ourselves out of any problem that these three dimensions of existence present, eventually even that of mortality. Without a cultural optimism based on the real and tangible and beneficial accomplishments of the best minds of our kind, we hobble and retard human progress to a great cost of unnecessary pain. It is a shame that the names and stories of the great inventors are not an universal part of our folk culture and that the power of their method is kept from us.
28.
“Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to ‘make it’ on the planet and in the universe. We do. It can only be accomplished, however, through a design science initiative and technological revolution” – R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path 1981.
(from OVO 12 SCIENCE November 1991)
Multi-screen video display arrays are the key to solving the problem of information overload. Actually, conceiving the problem as one of too much of one thing is a bass-ackwards approach. Problems should be conceived in terms of too little of the other thing. There is not too much info, there is too little cognitive ability to handle it. The synthetic capabilities of the visual cortex (mass-free mental imaging through pictures) coupled to the synthetic potential of our matter-composed universe (molecular lego kit) provides us with a very very large number of problem solving avenues. We are over-engineered. Meeting the necessities of biological survival is a piece of cake; an amoeba can do it. But systems propelled by discomfort are limited in that they focus backwards upon point-casual determinants. These systems are automatic, not autonomous. Systems attracted by pleasure are less focused. They exercise forward acting (future oriented) area-casual apperception over a range of possibilities. The implication of choice requires a modeling system which allows the consideration of options which is an autonomous function. Problem solving is very simple given enough information. The facts usually sort themselves out into necessity fields and mental effort is potentially freed up to pursue more and more pleasure, mainly mental pleasure. This is creativity, this is art. In order to become artists we are going to have to learn how to operate within an incredibly dense information matrix. The densest info matrix is the visual one. The human retina is capable of differentiating about two million color hues and intensities and probably a larger number of shapes, spatial attitudes, distances and motions. We mainly use only a small portion of the visual field at any one time, a pencil thin cone of maximum attention, and we see as we read, in a scanning manner. This leaves the peripheral visual field almost unused, merely a cue-up function. Like hearing, an attention director. Expansion of peripheral apperception is desirable because it allows for the simultaneous comparative gauging of visual info which will, in turn, amplify the potential within the memory and projective areas of the mind. In short, we can make parallel processing abilities accessible to consciousness. One can get a taste of this ability by setting two TV sets side by side, tuning in two different stations with the audio up on both and concentrating on getting the gist of both programs at the same time. Within ten minutes you should be catching on.
(from OVO 7 INFORMATION October 1989)
TV is not cinema. It is, above all, a multi-screen medium, and when properly acted upon by the senses, makes apparent and emphasizes that aspect of choice which is the direction of attention. The discovery of the inherent nature of phenomena, such as TV, is simply the discovery of that action which is most efficient. Efficient action in the realm of mental activity is verifiable and measurable as the increase of intelligence. The TV medium, which has a high potential information density, can literally create human genius, contrary to the mutterings of “new age” mandarins. The operant concept is: full potential. Since potential is a pre-existant state, how do we perceive and predict the potential of any system? This, boys and girls, is the biiiiig question. Stated otherwise, how does human intelligence select actions which leads to its increase? My guess is that we must categorize efficient info as possessing density over time, ie, high throughput levels parallel in simultaneous space. We perceive many things simultaneously with our senses, but we can engage info at greater distances with greater predictive ability in comparative array via the sense of sight alone. The greatest inventions in all history were the microscope and the telescope. Knowledge, and primarily visual knowledge, bridges the gap between quantity and quality. The more info you got, the smarter you is. This axiom is predicated upon the hypothesis that the universe is ultimately knowable. Those of you who wish to challenge this hypothesis can best do so by choosing to remain stupid. The universe is neither random nor infinite, merely complex. The only shape that knowledge has that is independent from the shape of the universe is its rate of growth within our minds. Knowledge and universe act upon each other. Mass and energy attempt to understand one another. The TV screen is an efficient interface between these two manifolds of existence. It is a container (medium) which allows many image phases to play upon it. Its potential can be multiplied by itself simply by adding more screens. With a multi-screen array, one is forced to act one’s attention upon it in a way that inescapably increases (A) the quantity of perceived material and, more importantly, (B) the potential to operate within the container of mass / energy which is simultaneously, and that, kids, is the definite characteristic of the global village.
(from OVO 7 INFORMATION October 1989)
Art:
Jack Bender: The Hatch Painting.
John Cabrera: Lost on the Subway.
Criticism:
Klint Finley: Hatch 23.
Jorje Garcia: Dispatches from the Island.
Jason Hunter: A Theory on Time Travel.
Various: Lostpedia.
Various: Lost Media.
Various: Lost Theories.
Video:
BBC Lost Experience.
John Lock and Dr. Pierre Chang Meet for the First Time.
LOST Opening Theme with Original Lyrics.
LOST Friends.
The Final Episode.
The Dharma Initiative. Red herring or consequential? Once one of the biggest mysteries of “Lost,” much of what it was about was revealed in season five. A short refresher course: Dharma (Department of Heuristics And Research on Material Applications) was founded in the 1970s by a couple of scientists named the DeGroots, who were greatly influenced by the work of psychologist and inventor B.F. Skinner. They were given funding by one Alvar Hanso, which allowed them to send a large team to the island to conduct research in meteorology, psychology, parapsychology, zoology, electromagnetism and Utopian social engineering. [...]
One person who has thought about this quite a bit is blogger Klint “Klintron” Finley, who has written about the concept of “real-life Dharma initiatives” extensively at Hatch23.com. “I think it stems from various trends and movements from the ’60s and ’70s,” he said. “More specifically, anywhere that two or more of the following intersected: Eastern spirituality, fringe science, defense spending, disturbing psychological research, experiments in utopian/communal living and experiments social control.” He points to many possible influences for the Dharma concept but thinks there is one in particular that shares a lot with Dharma: the Esalen Institute. Made famous in a 1967 New York Times article, the institute began as a place where one could, as its website says, have “the intellectual freedom to consider systems of thought and feeling that lie beyond the current constraints of mainstream academia.” It still serves as a retreat center at the beautiful Big Sur mountains to this day and, according to the website, has been devoted to the exploration of human potential since the 1960s. It’s here that the “Physics Consciousness Research Group” was allegedly co-founded in 1975 by theoretical physicist Jack Sarfatti. Sarfatti is the author of such works as “Progress in Post-Quantum Physics and Unified Field Theory” and “Super Cosmos: Through Studies Through the Stars.”
And what about Dharma’s benefactor, Hanso? Aside from maybe Richard Alpert and Charles Widmore, no one character has fascinated and mystified fans more. … In fact, much of the online “Lost Experience” a few years ago revolved around him. (According to Finley, Hanso may have been modeled after people like inventor Charles F. Kettering, who died in 1958.) In ABC’s game “The Lost Experience,” players found out that a main reason for his interest in the Dharma Initiative was the “Valenzetti Equation.” In “Lost” lore, this is a calculation of the exact date on which humankind would wipe itself out, consisting of the familiar “numbers” from the hatch, Hurley’s lottery ticket and, we now know, Jacob’s candidates. Dharma was trying to change these numbers in order to save the world.
Article continues. Congratulations to Klint Finley for this interview at CNN. Disclosure: I am an ‘advising scholar’ for Hatch 23.
Subtitled.
Wikipedia:
Ghada Jamshir is a Bahraini women’s rights activist and an ardent campaigner for the reform of Sharia courts in Bahrain and the Arab Gulf states. Jamshir heads the Women’s Petition Committee lobbying for a law that would shift jurisdiction over family and women’s affairs from Islamic Sharia court to civil courts. In 2006, Time Magazine identified Jamshir as one of four heroes of freedom in the Arab world, and Forbes magazine selected her as one of the ten most powerful and effective women in the Arab world.
In 2005, the Bahraini government brought three criminal charges against Jamshir for allegedly publicly defaming the Islamic family court judiciary, and faced a jail sentence of up to 15 years. These charges were eventually dropped on 19 June 2005. Since 2006, Ghada Jamsheer has been under permanent surveillance, there is a 24-hour presence of plainclothes Public Security officials of the Ministry of the Interior outside her home. After her criticism of government policies, Bahrain authorities ordered the local media and press to prevent the publication of any news relating to Jamshir. The order came from the Royal Court, through its minister Shaikh Khalid bin Ahmed Al-Khalifa. Jamshir also claims that the Minister of the Royal Court gave her a direct threat demanding that she end her public work, after which the regime attempted to install a spy camera in her house, bugged her telephone, and sent individuals to bribe and blackmail her.
I admire her courage.
Look at the faces of these people as the facts are revealed. Listen to the silence.
