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October 11, 2005

~Expect the best / Accept the worst~ —Jawbreaker

So there's been, a, well, a dearth of posts lately. Dunno if that's going to change anytime soon. But it's been 25+ days since my computer rebooted and Safari is getting downright laggardly.

There were no donkeys in Qian until someone who was fond of curiosities brought one in by boat. After the man got it there, he found the donkey was useless, so he let it loose near the hills. A tiger, upon seeing it, thought it was such a large beast that it took it for a god. So the tiger hid in the forest to spy on it. Bit by bit the tiger came closer to it, but carefully so that it wouldn't know.

One day the donkey brayed, and the tiger was so terrified that he ran far off. He thought that the donkey was going to eat him and was extremely frightened. Yet as the tiger kept observing it time and again, he realized there wasn't anything unusual about the donkey. The tiger had gotten increasingly used to hearing the braying. He now came out near the donkey circling it, but still dared not pounce. In a little while, he pressed even closer to it, and he nudged it unconcernedly. Overcome with rage, the donkey kicked out at the tiger.

Now the tiger happily reckoned to himself, "So this is the extent of its talents." Thereupon he leaped, roaring loudly, and ripped open the donkey's throat. He ate his fill and then left.
It probably isn't fair to Joss Whedon's "Serenity" to say that this unassuming science-fiction adventure is superior in almost every respect to George Lucas's aggressively more ambitious "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith." But who cares about fair when there is fun to be had? Scene for scene, "Serenity" is more engaging and certainly better written and acted than any of Mr. Lucas's recent screen entertainments. Mr. Whedon isn't aiming to conquer the pop-culture universe with a branded mythology; he just wants us to hitch a ride to a galaxy far, far away and have a good time. The journey is the message, not him.
"Directing a film was as exciting and daunting as it was supposed to be," said the CAA-repped Whedon. "I learned a lot on 'Serenity' and hope I hid that from the audience."
The lead animators on Serenity are attentive and usually get Joss' vision in a few takes. I also think because of television and Joss' must-do mentality, we just figure it out. On "Buffy" we never had time or money, but we always found a way. On Serenity we used this must-do mentality with the best crew imaginable. Jack Green and Dan Sudick were there to make it work. We were constantly challenging ourselves with what could be done. The hovercraft chase is a great example. As scripted, it read like a three-week shoot, with heavy CG. We didn't have that, but we had the scene. So we cooperated and problem-solved the sequence to what it eventually became. A practical cowboy and Indians chase, with a bit of wire removal and some terrain replacement. We were only able to do this by using the unique talents of our crew to overcome safety, aesthetic, and schedule restrictions. Joss finished the story beats in two days, I cleaned up the action over the next two, with a third aerial day. We did it in one week. We also shot the plan, as there was no room or budget for improvement. And yet because we were shooting the actors on the craft, they could improve and Joss could follow them.

Just wait until we have a little money.
JW: I find that when you read a script, or rewrite something, or look at something that's been gone over, you can tell, like rings on a tree, by how bad it is, how long it's been in development.

NG: Yes. It really is this thing of executives loving the smell of their own urine and urinating on things. And then more execs come in, and they urinate. And then the next round. By the end, they have this thing which just smells like pee, and nobody likes it.

JW: There's really no better way to put it.

TIME: Tim Burton's Corpse Bride is out this month as well, making it effectively national Goth month.

NG: We are Goth icons. Joss and I. We don't have to be Goths, because we are Goth icons.

JW: I'm low on mascara. It's weird. I've made my bones with vampires, but I've never really associated anything I did with Goth that much, except that I've kind of made fun of them.
Defence, diplomatic and legal sources say negotiations are stalling because the Saudis are demanding three favours. These are that Britain should expel two anti-Saudi dissidents, Saad al-Faqih and Mohammed al-Masari; that British Airways should resume flights to Riyadh, currently cancelled through terrorism fears; and that a corruption investigation implicating the Saudi ruling family and BAE should be dropped. Crown prince Sultan's son-in-law, Prince Turki bin Nasr, is at the centre of a "slush fund" investigation by the Serious Fraud Office.
Two other points I want to make is, one, we can all pitch in by using -- by being better conservers of energy. I mean, people just need to recognize that the storms have caused disruption and that if they're able to maybe not drive when they -- on a trip that's not essential, that would helpful. The federal government can help, and I've directed the federal agencies nationwide -- and here's some ways we can help. We can curtail nonessential travel. If it makes sense for the citizen out there to curtail nonessential travel, it darn sure makes sense for federal employees. We can encourage employees to carpool or use mass transit. And we can shift peak electricity use to off-peak hours. There's ways for the federal government to lead when it comes to conservation.
The trifecta is complete. The Republican leadership in the Senate, House and White House are ALL officially under investigation.
Tyco -- whose executive L. Dennis Kozlowski had just departed under an ethics cloud -- was worried that the Bush administration might embrace legislation promoted by Democrats that would impose higher taxes on domestic-centered companies that had moved offshore to cut their tax bills. The legislation was motivated by popular anger over such offshore moves, and carried the additional penalty of barring such firms from receiving federal contracts.

Lobbying disclosure statements filed by Abramoff listing his work for Tyco cite the "Executive Office of the President" as one of his lobbying targets on the tax and contracts issues. Others were the Department of Commerce, the General Services Administration and Congress. Greenberg Traurig records submitted to Tyco describe specific contacts with the White House legislative office, a source familiar with the matter said yesterday.

Rove's personal assistant at the time, Susan Ralston, formerly worked as Abramoff's secretary. It could not be learned yesterday whether she was among those contacted by any of the 14-person Greenberg team recorded as working on the Tyco account.
Sigils, servitors and god-forms are three magickal techniques that chaos magicians use to actualize magickal intentions. Sigils are magickal spells developed and activated to achieve a specific, fairly well defined and often limited end. Servitors are entities created by a magician and charged with certain functions. Godforms are complex belief structures, often held by a number of people, with which a magician interacts in order to actualize fairly broad magickal intentions. These three techniques are not quite as distinct as these definitions would suggest, they tend to blur into one another. The purpose of this essay is to explain these magickal tools, indicate their appropriateness for different types of magickal intentions, and show how these tools relate to the general theories of chaos magick and of Dzog Chen, a form of Tibetan Buddhism.
At a news conference with a U.S. ambassador, a prominent Sunni politician shouted that the mostly Shiite police force was behind many of the killings -- a charge the police deny.

And the killing isn't one-sided. An ambush in a western Baghdad suburb last month began with the execution of an entire Shiite family inside their home.

CBS News was shown a pamphlet by a young man too afraid to reveal his face. It's an order for all Shiites to leave his neighborhood, or be killed -- given to him in broad daylight by masked terrorists. The man said if he did not leave, he will die.

The police did nothing, so within days, a powerful Shiite militia struck back at the terrorists, raiding the same neighborhood. In much of Iraq, armed factions like this one operate beyond the law.
He decides that he will set himself to describing every instant of his life, and until he has described them all he will no longer think of being dead. At that moment he dies.
Prince Saud said he met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week and added that American officials generally responded to his warnings by telling him that the United States successfully carried off the Iraqi elections and "they say the same things about the constitution" and the broader situation in Iraq now. On Thursday, in fact, the senior administration official said, "The forward movement of the political process is the best answer."

Prince Saud argued: "But what I am trying do is say that unless something is done to bring Iraqis together, elections alone won't do it. A constitution alone won't do it." Prince Saud is a son of the late King Faisal and has been foreign minister for 30 years.
Archeologists have long and often times looked for evidence of Odysseus on modern Ithaca, but never found anything significant from the Bronze Age. This led many scholars to dismiss Homer’s version of Ionian island geography as strictly a literary creation.

But two pieces of fairly recent evidence suggest archeologists were looking in the wrong place. In 1991, a tomb of the type used to bury ancient Greek royalty was found near the hamlet of Tzannata in the hills outside Poros. It is the largest such tomb in northeastern Greece, with remains of at least 72 persons found in its stone niches.

One find there is particularly telling. In Book XIX of the “Odyssey,” the just-returned and still disguised Odysseus tells his wife (who may or may not realize who she’s talking to; Homer is deliberately ambivalent) that he encountered Odysseus many years earlier on the island of Crete. He describes in detail a gold brooch the king wore on that occasion.

A gold brooch meeting that precise description lies now in the archeological museum at Argostoli, the main city on Kefalonia, 30 miles across the island from Poros. Other gold jewelry and seals carved in precious stones excavated from the tomb offer further proof the grave outside Poros was used to bury kings.

Greek archeologists also found sections of ancient city walls extending for miles through the hills around and well beyond Poros. These surround both the village and a steep adjacent hill which bears evidence it once served as an acropolis, what the Greeks called hilltop forts in most of their major cities. The stones of the walls date to about 1300 B.C., the approximate time of events described in the “Iliad” and “Odyssey.”

Most likely, the royal capital at Ithaca was a much larger city than Poros or any other town on either modern Ithaca or Kefalonia. It would have needed a major source of water. There is none on modern Ithaca, but streams abound near Poros, where there is also a small man-made lake. This area had the necessary water. The island now called Ithaca likely did not.
The rhythms shift and swell, fade, rebuild, break down. Double time. Decrescendo. Layer upon layer weaving in and out, throbbing into a frenzy, spinning, colliding, subsiding, then returning to a familiar refrain.

"There's an intangible high, an almost meditative state you can get to," says Bill Keiser, a 49-year-old systems analyst from Tampa. "I leave here more ready to go back to work Monday morning."

What started as a college project has spiraled into something almost spiritual. Christine Jalbert, a 26-year-old modern dance student, began the circle with her belly-dancing friend Johanna Krynytzky. They invited six friends the first Sunday; the second week, they hung a few fliers.

"For my class, we were supposed to create something that would generate community and foster self-expression," says Jalbert, who had never drummed before. "I wanted to come up with an atmosphere where adults could let go without alcohol. It's really evolved into something much bigger."

At 9:10 p.m., 34 people are playing and at least that many more are listening. It's almost dark. A pregnant moon has parked overhead.

The faint light of a fishing boat slides along the horizon. A shooting star silently slips into the saltwater.

The drummers roll on, keeping time with the tide.

The earth's heartbeat echoes along the beach.
I can't say there's one formula to the structure of my sound, but there's definitely this sense of a syncopation of all these different layers of culture that move at different rhythms and tempos: African-American culture, academic culture, digital media. I love the word "syncopation." Syncope means a small gap in consciousness, and when you play with those gaps and make a mesh out of those presences and absences, that's a beat. Everything is about pulling together these disparate fragments.
I look at Burning Man as a postmodern carnival. I'm one of these kinds of guys who likes breaking down words, and carnival means -"carni-vale" - throwing the flesh, you know, being able to wear all these different masks and being able to switch identities. Afro-Caribbean culture and a lot of southern European culture is fascinated with carnival, with the festival of the saints. These are all neo-pagan eruptions that Christianity somehow absorbed. But when you apply that Dionysian search for some eruption of irrationality into a very regimented world… it's madness by normal standards.
I've kind of distanced myself from the psychology of psychedelic culture. I DJ'd at Burning Man last year and took some DMT. I felt much more disassociated than before. At the end of the day, that's what it's all about: the logic of things, you do A thus B happens or C happens. But psychedelic culture breaks those associative chains, and makes you feel like everything's without cause and just floating. When I did that heavy psychedelic at Burning Man, I actually felt like my brain had gone past the point of no return. I mean, everything's already fragmented, but it feels like if I touch this stuff ever again, my brain will just fly to pieces.

In general, I haven't done anything over the last year or so - I've had some coffee, some wine. The more I've actually pulled back from stuff, the more it feels like the entire planet is psychedelic -- like the geometry of a city seen from above, or seeing ocean waves just near the Mediterranean. Monaco looked like a Walt Disney recreation, but then you realize that Disney is just recreating that weird palace vibe. We live in a culture of relentless quotation. You see something, you absorb it, and it pops up unconsciously in your next thing. After the last time I did DMT at Burning Man, I felt like my brain became Time Square, a kind of boring, rushing collage of conflicting images and ideas, each one demanding its own time and space in my brain.

I think a lot of this stuff is psychologically corrosive. To get any work done, you can't think like that, because you're just outside of any notion of normal language and being able to communicate and deal with things. It takes a lot of psychological integrity to be able to balance between psychedelic culture and being able to maintain and build a normal world and still have that sense of overview. When you talk to some executive guy, they've got just a one-track mentality, because that's what allows them to do their thing. Anybody who wants to do something has to compress.

Once you've done X amount of some substance it actually remodels your perceptions, the architecture of how you experience stuff. You do the drugs and then the drugs do you. When you look at a computer screen, synaesthesia is just there on the surface, like when you touch it and you see little waves bubble away. There are special effects at every level and from every angle.

As an artist, I'm at a paradox, because part of me has that urge to trip. But there's always the sense that once you go past that point of no return, you're in a universe of one, because you're your own language structure, your own mentality. At the peak of any trip you sometimes feel this inability to have any sense of real language. That's what Burning Man felt like: that sense of linguistic loss, of not being able to enunciate normal words or the flows of how you would normally put sentences together. It's post-linguistic or something.
When that sort of indoor life gets dull, you could invest a little of the 200 million in hardware and start a little war of your own. You can get anything you want out there: T-72's are going for scrap-metal prices. People think tanks are useless, but that's way oversimplifying things. Tanks worked beautifully for the Serbs till the NATO airforces got involved. If you're fighting irregulars in a treeless landscape like the 'Stans, tanks work just fine.

So you buy some MBTs, some artillery, go in and just wipe out one of the local clans. That'll get the locals' attention. They love a winner. Make your own flag. Your own uniforms. Convert the whole place to some cool religion, dump that Islam nonsense: declare the first Zoroastrian jihad, rolling back the inroads of Islam, that imported flea-ridden Arabian cult. Or, I don't know, you could revive the old Egyptian gods. No, Zoroastrianism would be better. It's more local, and pretty cool too from what I've read.

Worshipping fire, leaving your dead on rooftops to be eaten by vultures. Think of the speeches you could make: "We are the Army of Flames, the Sacred Fire of Tadjikistan, and in Zoroaster's name we vow to burn across the steppes until all is cleansed and ashen!"

God damn, think of the possibilities! The CIA would love you: an anti-Muslim jihad! They'd need C-5A's to hold all the cash they'd send you!

A war like that is just a big pyramid scheme: you take a village and distribute the loot and the women to your men. Then you round up all the surviving men and boys from that village and offer them a simple choice: join us and be reimbursed with the loot and women from the next village we take, or die right now. It's a very effective sales pitch. Repeat until the whole Steppe is yours.

Posted by Jon Rubin at October 11, 2005 11:22 AM

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