Mad person, social menace, intellectual criminal

This is turning, serendipitously and by design, into a Year of Dangerous Ideas for me, and i must say, it’s thrilling.

These days i’m listening heavily to the lectures of one Terence McKenna, to whom i was introduced by former Toff-boy S-Ray Jay while heading north in his right-hand-drive Delica en route to a honey farm to collect dead bugs for some nefarious purpose.

McKenna’s a relic from the psychedelic 60s, except that, far from being an addled drug burnout, he strings radical and deeply subversive ideas together with a facility that argues well for alien intelligence. Here are a few of many, many galvanizing words from his 1987 lecture, Light of Nature (part 3, abut 42 minutes in):

[W]hat is really happening is a return to the primacy of feeling, and feeling is not something you can convey to people the way you convey facts to them. Facts can be handed down every week through Time magazine and the latest of Science News and Nature. But feelings will not lend themselves to that marketable, hierarchically distributed system. And consequently feelings represent a back[lash] against that.

Yet feeling is the modality in which we all operate. So as long as we are under the umbrella of the print-created, linear, post-Medieval institutions that promote the myth of the public, the notion of the atomic individual, the notion that we are all basically alike, then we are going to be unempowered.

Just so you know what you’re getting into if you decide to pursue McKenna’s ideas, he precedes that paragraph with the following:

The answer to self-empowerment lies in the psychedelic experience. The answer to dissolving the hierarchically imposed set of mythical conventions that disempower us lies in the psychedelic experence.

Whew! You hear enough of this (and i’m on about my ninth hour of listening and relistening) and you want to start crawling around in the forest looking for mushrooms.

Instead, though, i’m going to crawl around the Sunday wilds of Thunder Bay, looking for the transcendence of breakfast and a good café.

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There’s a wealth of audio material available on-line if you google up “terence mckenna audio“. I started here.

And lest the man be considered a fringe lunatic or pleasure-seeker, here’s a quote (from the Wikipedia article) that shows him to be pretty gounded:

It’s clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. These are the two things that the psychedelics attack. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war. But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it’s not easy.
—Terence McKenna, “This World … and Its Double”

Can you believe what you see?

Stare at the + sign till the dots disappearClick on the thumbnail to display the full-size image.

Stare at the plus sign in the middle for about a dozen cycles, and watch how what you see changes, and changes again. It’s all about the green dot; oddly, there is no green dot.

Sorta makes me wonder what i walk by and “see” every day, or walk by and do not see. The world is a mysterious place.

Olympic handshake

I don’t usually post political stuff, and i most definitely won’t be posting Olympics stuff, or anything else related to circus-maximus, coliseum entertainment (the new, improved opiate of the masses).

But here’s a clever nexus of the two from the innovative and effective AVAAZ.org activist organization, in the form of an Olympic handshake from the world to China. From the site:

The Beijing Olympics should be a moment to bring citizens around the world together. But the Chinese government still hasn’t opened meaningful dialogue on Tibet, or made progress on Burma and Darfur — and global activists’ messages are too often lost in a firestorm of accusations about being anti-Chinese.

We’ve decided to take the moment back with a powerful, unambiguous message of peace, friendship and dialogue — the Olympic Handshake. The handshake began with the Dalai Lama, passing through the streets of London, now it’s gone online where all of us can join in — help the handshake travel toward Beijing, where our message will be delivered through a big Olympic media campaign before the closing ceremonies. Join the handshake, and see yourself and others as it goes around the globe!

It’s one way to harness the power of the Internet for something beyond porn and email. Go forth and multiplex.

Winnipeg scenes

I have been lax in posting pics of my birth town. Here’s a taste of what it’s like.

First, the strawberry season (about two weeks long)

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Louis Riel stands proud before the parliament buildings

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An Exchange District art gallery
(one of many)

The Winnipeg cottonwoods, on the
grounds of the Rainbow Stage

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It’s a long, straight road to Gimli and Lake Winnipeg

The long, straight road to Gimli

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Stone, stone, stonework at the intersection of Portage and Main

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The “illustrated bear” park

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A downtown mural (one of many — i tell you, it’s an arts town)

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And an open-air swing-band concert at the Lyric Theatre, Assiniboine Park

So much for skeul

Here are some just-received words of advice from the keyboard of old Ukee friend Markus (now moved on to bigger and better), whose judgment is unimpeachable:

I think I forgot to say, FUCK UNIVERSITY.

Don’t do it. Since commencing a Masters in 2000, I have stopped writing songs and poems. And stopped dancing — which used to be my identity, no shit. People that knew me before then think of me mainly as a dancing fool.

Nuff said. It kills your soul. Fuck that. Now I work for [a government department].

Okay, that about puts paid to that little pipe dream, ’cause i trust Mark’s opinion more than my own. I also must admit to serious subterranean doubts about the ultimate use of more skoolin’, as i’ve mentioned in a previous entry.

This here’s a good spot to post this Life in Hell cartoon, which spoke to me so eloquently some years ago that i went to some trouble to scan it, and then hang onto the file all this time, now to be posted for your edification. (Click to enlarge, duh.)

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Jee-zus Kee-flippin-rist. As i type this entry musing on my own self-worth, the TeeVee next to the computer displays three musical geniuses playing a Haydn piano-violin-cello trio (i dunno which one). They are twelve years old.

And i gives up.