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THIS PAGE contains the handouts from Laughtears.com:
1-JOKEFLY
2-COV
3- kissfly
4-poll
5-desire
6-mmBURR
7-my art venice
8-nar
9-dream awake FIAfly
10-filmkill
11-chris marker san sol
12-mezz
13-write

we welcome your reactions, thanks, gerry fialka   pfsuzy@aol.com, Laughtears.com 310 306 7330
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Marshall McLuhan's favorite jokes:                                                  Laughtears.com        310 306 7330
The priest is crossing the Canadian border. The custom officer asks him "What's in that flask?" The priest says "Water." The officer takes a swig and says "That's whiskey" The priest declares "It's a miracle."

Two goats are eating celluloid coming out of a film can on the backlot at MGM. One goat says to the other goat, "The book was better."

Two caterpillars are sitting on a branch and watch a butterfly fly by. One caterpillar says to the other, "You will never get me up in one of those contraptions."
 
The big Lufthansa jet was going down in the Mediterranean, a mile off shore.  The captain comes on the communication system to speak to the frightened crew and passengers:  “For those of you who can swim,” he says, “I say swim towards the setting sun for twenty minutes and you will reach safety.  For those of you who cannot swim, I say, Thank you for flying Lufthansa.”  
 
Cat is hunting a mouse.  Mouse hides in hole.  Cat sneaks up to hole and goes, “squeak.”  Mouse comes out.  Cat eats mouse.  Morale of the story?  I guess it pays to be bilingual. 
 
The Empire on which the sun never sets; because you can’t trust an Englishman in the dark.
 
Man never reads handwriting on the wall until he has his back to it.
 
It’ll take more than facts to convince me.
 
Patient: “Doc, I have a terrible ringing in my ear.” Doc: “Get an unlisted ear.”
 
Why do bees hum? Because they don’t know the words.
 
I may be crazy, but I’m not far from it.
After the performance, there wasn’t a dry seat in the house.
Boredom: rage spread thin.
New aftershave lotion to drive teenage girls wild. It smells like a telephone.
There’s no fuel like an oils fuel. [pun]
Confucius say: “He who sling mud, lose ground.”
Don’t look back – they may be gaining on you!
Zeus to Narcissus: Watch yourself!”
Model husband: Small imitation of the real thing.
Travel agency ad: PLEASE GO AWAY
Loan company ad: WHY BE IN DEBT WHEN YOU CAN BORROW MONEY?
Why engage in nit-picking when mud-slinging is our bag?
“What snobs they are — always trying to get acquainted with people like us!”
In the rear-view mirror, you at least see the back-seat driver!
Easy glum – easy glow!
Nobody knows the rubble I’ve seen. (S.J. Pearlman)
Familiarity breeds consensus.
A man’s home is his hassle.
An Englishman’s home is his coffin. (Joyce)
Why does a chicken cross the street? Because eggs are cheaper on the other side.
Who was that lady I saw you out with last night? That was no lady, that was my son.
Happiness is discovering that your dentist wears dentures.
YOU CAN’T PROVE YOU ARE SANE unless YOU GOT DISCHARGE PAPERS FROM A MENTAL INSTITUTION

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COVfly LAUGHTEARS.com   I should prefer to de-fuse this gigantic human bomb by starting a dialogue somewhere on the side-lines . . . Since [1910]  the word has been used to effect a universal hypnosis. How are words to be used to unweave the spell of print? Of radio commercials and “news”-casts? I’m working on  that  problem.   The word is now the cheapest and most universal drug.” –McLuhan to Ezra Pound    NEW COVENANT  by Robert Dobbs 4-19-18:   I’m going to present here an insight into Marshall McLuhan that no McLuhan scholar ever discovered. Even Don Theall missed it (THE MEDIUM IS THE REAR VIEW MIRROR, 1971, pp.152, 178, 187, 191, 193, 196, 207, 208, 215, 216, and 219). Most McLuhan apologists take on the accusation that MM is a “technological determinist” and come up with some pattern to wiggle MM away from the stigma. AND, Theall quotes Kenneth Burke on an additional deficiency in MM’s "theory of everything" - MM’s lack of appreciation for the “drama” in human experience. Both charges are easily dismissed when one understands   there is no “McLuhan” in his books  (see MM’s RENASCENCE review of Richard Ellmann’s biography [1959] of James Joyce wherein   MM says there is no Joyce in Joyce’s oeuvre… “All criticism is autobiography." - William Irwin Thompson). BUT, it is obvious there is a “technological determinist” stance in the prose of MM’s books of 1962 and ’64 - THE GUTENBERG GALAXY and UNDERSTANDING MEDIA. The catalyst for epiphany is McLuhan’s little-known theater project he planned for Broadway in the mid-70s wherein the characters in the play are the media themselves - the media present their stories. So, with this insight one can understand that MM’s books, GG and UM, are written by the PRINTED BOOK as narrator itself. These two books have to be “technologically determinist” in approach because the books are subject to the dictum that “the medium is the message”. In other words, these books are consciously expressing their visual-space bias at their foundation, i.e., written by the robotic (technologically determined). Gutenberg Man is a robot, said MM. Hence, the “cold, frightening tone”, in GG and UM that critics complained about, is intentional. That’s why there is "no human drama”  (Theall and Burke) in these early books. The style comes from the PRINTED BOOK (as author) itself. It shapes the theory, creates perspective, is the user that dominates the content. Once this is noted, the next question pops up: where, in McLuhan’s oeuvre, are the characters representing the non-Gutenberg media? They are found in MM’s TV and radio performances (and in his more expository style in his letters to newspapers and colleagues). However, this is the ELECTRIC MEDIA doing the acting!! They’re not so “determinist”: more the interactive - casually conversational - and more flexible, telephonic, telekinetic, ambivalent, transmitting and receiving, piloting and accommodating, in approach - ranging over the spectrum from headline to advertising, stylistically. Think of the “Bailiff” in Wyndham Lewis’ “The Childermass”, or the "Prince of the Air” (a great electric engineer, master of hardware and software), but far more relaxed.  Even McLuhan’s next seven books (1967-72) tend toward the tactile expression of mixed-media while always self-consciously commenting on the McLuhan “myth” itself and insulting/judging their dull competitors - no “technique of suspended judgment" here. So, this is the strategic posturing of McLuhan’s role as an adjudicator in the Global Theatre - the greatest actor of the 20th Century - more autonomous, discontinuous and perfect-pitched, more multi-levelled, more blasé, and less commercially compromised, than anybody you could name - from Clark Gable, Katherine Hepburn, Marlon Brando, to Susan Sarandon, Robert Redford, Dr. Dre, or Meryl Streep.  Oscars.org  completely missed this! Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty (who regularly went to L.A. beaches with a copy of UM in the 80s, according to Mary McLuhan) missed this… but they KNEW there was something they were missing, hence their UM fetish!! Gloria Allred missed this!! YOU missed this!!!  McLuhan invented a way to be the anti-environment (solving the artistic problem) to the Global Theater wherein "everybody is crew and there are no spectators”. Only the CIA, KGB, and MI6 knew this (see Richard Barbrook’s IMAGINARY FUTURES, 2007) - McLuhan’s “triggermen” (see the June 22/51 letter to Ezra Pound wherein MM explains his motives in a world in which the “word” is THE drug.)### Defintion: Android Meme-Automated self-replicating unit of cultural transmission; machines communicating with machines.Remember, the parts of the Android Meme are the Chemical Body, the Astral Body, the TV Body, and the Chip Body. the AP position, which is post-Chip Body and post-TV Body. Human bodies are First Nature, the human bodies make Second Nature, which is media and language. There's a subtle interplay between the bodies and the media. The bodies as souls come and go, but the media keeps building itself through time. So we come to the point where the media builds itself, completes itself, and it's merging with the bodies.The best way to express that is to show the bodies, show the Android Meme dominating them, which is just simple language dominating humans in this dimension, then the language resolves itself through the Android Meme. We've moved into the fused First and Second Nature situation, and therefore you can't tell the difference between First Nature and Second Nature.   Cloned ESP.  I mean, people don't need words to function today. They have a post-verbal language, which is the intuitive electric media. Electronic digital media. e-mail be considered language?That's ESP. That's mainly your instant interaction with people with words that are a component but not the dominating medium. In fact, the post-moderns talk about the end of the logocentric, that's visual space language. Verbal written language, that disappeared in the 20th century . But you still have language in terms of tactile communication, which is, you use a computer, e-mail, the fellow responds back to you, like when you do instant messaging. That's not verbal language. Verbal is inside it, part of what you read, or you can send pictures, but the instantaneous, the medium you use, the digital environment, is the language, is your tongue. It's your means to communicate.I would say the simple agenda is this. Whatever traditional images you have that make you think you're being affected in a certain way, get rid of those images! Break up those images you have. Don't think "psychosomatic," don't think this, don't think "organic food processes," don't think any of these normal ideas of what might be causing you pain. What's affecting you is something that you can't really visualize. So you loosen up the people's obsession on, "Oh man, I ate too much Wheat Germ, that's causing  this, I better go get a doctor to give me a drug."If you get lost in that thought form, and the doctors give you a "solution," then that'll cause you more problems. You need to just sit back and say, "Yep, I'm being massaged," and just accept it.  Basically the population's being put on a collective LSD trip, in a more subtle way than TV managed to do. Because these refined vibratory devices are affecting our chi levels, our etheric bodies, which is then affecting the astral plane. So we're being affected in ways that no knowledge system can map anymore.The media needs new content. Because the media want to be kept on and people want to live in that discarnate cyberspace of TV. They want to be part of it every day. So every form of human expression will be used and exploited and expressed. So, you can play a game where each one of us is both figure and ground. Every one of us in this planet is in a yin-yang situation - we're creating our own disease as well as curing it.The hidden environment is what's really motivating everybody, and creating a lot of obsession or neurosis, and the stress of life is always caused by the new invisible environment. Therefore, an antidote or an anaesthetic to that is the past environments, but to use them as props. So, all human creativity is now provided as the content, but the mixed corporate-media create the stress on people, and they're trying to find out how that stress is affecting them. They'll never be able to find out how that stress is affecting them. But all they have to do is understand what I'm talking about."Process" is what is affecting all of us, that's the hidden ground, and they just reflected the need, subconsciously, for psychology to adapt to the new electric environment in the '60s and '70s, the electric environment being processual. So they came up with concepts of "process". Now that concept is obsolete because they've exhausted it, people are no longer using it, but they are stuck in an environment that is process incarnate. So, they've got a problem.You are saturated with TV by the time you are 18 or 19, you want to know what to do, you want to develop an identity. Study something that has taken the best of what has happened in the last 40 or 50 years. You study that and then you realize that the understanding you got from that is obsolete. Then that's the apocalypse - finding out that you don't exist. You have to deal with the fact you live in an almost Oriental oblivion, you live in a resonating void. Once you realize you are gone, you are invisible, in terms of expressing that relation to anybody else, you might then realize "I'm still here!", and then you start to realize you've survived.1929: "But the fact remains that, so recently that most people have not realized it, the Earth has become ONE place, instead of a romantic tribal patchwork of places.... What has fact on its side is still this strange synthesis of cultures and times (which we named Vorticism in England) and which is the first projection of a world-art, and also I think the clearest trail promising us delivery from the mechanical impasse." - Wyndham Lewis. 1946: "But I should perhaps add, before concluding, that just as eclecticism as a policy would find its justification in a new synthesis, so, in the case of an individual artist, his personality will all the time be creating a personal synthesis ...When all the cultures have been digested , we shall become a new cultural creature: an Earth Man."--Wyndham Lewis 1960:“Experimentation has passed from the control of the private artist to the groups in charge of the new technologies. That is to say, that whereas in the past the individual artist, manipulating private and inexpensive materials, was able to shape models of new experience years ahead of the public, today the artist works with expensive public technology, and artist and public merge in a single experience. The new media need the best artist talent and can pay for it. But the artist can no longer provide years of advance awareness of developments in the patterns of human experience which will inevitably emerge from new technological development." - Marshall McLuhan. 2003:   "It is now possible to probe the role of politics within the vision of communications beyond media. Particularly now the political element within communication is of the very essence of the process of creating probes and percepts that will ultimately lead to the decentering of the global megalopolis. And this must be done with the awareness that the 20th century launched a "new science" a "poetic science" that will permit analysis of the interplay of contrapuntal oppositions within the cosmic chaosmos--- the post-global village." Donald Theall              LAUGHTEARS.com     310-306-7330 Gerry Fialka
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Kissing  is our greatest invention. On the list of great inventions, it ranks higher than the Thermos bottle and the Airstream trailer; higher, even, than room service, possibly because the main reason room service was created was so that people could stay in bed and kiss without going hungry.   The mirror is a marvelous invention, as well, yet its genesis didn’t require a truckload of imagination, the looking glass being merely an extension of pond surface, made portable and refined. Kissing, on the other hand, didn’t imitate nature so much as it restructured it. Kissing molded the face into a brand-new shape, the pucker shape, and then, like some renegade scientist grafting plops of sea urchin onto halves of ripe pink plums, it found a way to fuse the puckers, to meld them and animate them, so that one pucker rubbing against another generates heat, moisture, and a luminous neuro-muscular friction. Thomas Edison, switch off your dim bulb and slink away!  Transcending class and financial status, completely democratic in its mysterious capacity to deliver cascading pangs of immediate physical and emotional pleasure, kissing proved inherently if irrationally sweet. It was as if that modicum of atavistic sweetness still remaining in civilized western man was funneled into kissing and kissing alone.   Kissing is the glory of the human species. All animals copulate but only humans osculate. Parekeets rub beaks? Sure they do, but only little old ladies who murder schoolchildren with knitting needles to  steal their lunch money so that they can buy fresh kidneys to feed overweight kitty cats would place bird billing in the realm of true kiss. There are primatologists who claim that apes exchange oral affection, but from here, the sloppy smacks of chips look pretty incidental: at best, they’re probably just checking to see if their mates have been into the fermented bananas. No, arbitrary beast-to-beast snout nuzzling may give narrators of wildlife films an opportunity to plumb new depths of anthromorphic cuteness, but on Aphrodite’s radar screen, it makes not a blip.   Psychologists claim that talking to our pets is a socially acceptable excuse for talking to ourselves. That may cast a particularly narcissistic light on those of you who kiss your pets, but you shouldn’t let it stop you. Smooch your bulldog if you’re so inclined. Buss your sister, your uncle, your grandpa, and anybody’s bouncing baby. No kiss is ever wasted, not even on the lottery ticket kissed for luck. Kiss trees. Favorite books. Bowling balls. Old Jews sometimes kiss their bread before eating it, and those are good kisses, too.   A final thought: beware the man who considers kissing as nothing more than duty, a sop to the “weaker” sex, an annoyingly necessary component of foreplay. That man has penis plaque in his arteries and will collapse under the weight of intimacy. Send him off to the nearest golf course while those of us who are more evolved celebrate the unique graces of the kiss:    No other flesh like lip flesh! No meat like mouth meat! The musical clink of tooth against tooth! The wonderful curiosity of tongues!  –Tom Robbins   
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POLLSTERGEIST   –  “One can't judge McLuhan by any particular statements he makes. One will easily find apparently contradictory statements in other communiques performed by him. McLuhan means it when he says he doesn't have a point of view. McLuhan mimed a process of awareness, as I write in my published essay on McLuhan:  http://fivebodied.com/project/content/view/30/98/1/2  This is why an anticipated cursory inspection of McLuhan's books produced the intended effect that they were rampant with confusion - an early and persistent complaint by his critics, which proved the success of the technique ("You mean, my whole fallacy is wrong." - McLuhan's statement in Woody Allen’s  Annie Hall).  One minute McLuhan seemed to be a utopian, the next a neo-Luddite, then a Gnostic, still later an agent of the Vatican, or a Zen Buddhist, then a technological determinist, pseudo-scientist, Manhattan Project romantic, and on and on and back and forth. But the classifiers couldn't see the method in the actor's performance - the miming of the fate that the  Pollstergeist needed "a rapid succession of innovations as ersatz anti-environments" ( Counterblast) to disguise the fact it had long disappeared. His satiric retrieval of the mini-module of acoustic and tactile mirrors via the constituency of the homeopathic print mirror, in the genre of a "memory theatre," reflected the contemporary Medusan after-image of collective technological quadrophrenia, and its complementary human echo.  Be that as it may, McLuhan accepted new technology as inevitable but he didn't recommend accepting its hypnosis and our consequent numbness that encouraged us to destroy the best achievements of the past.  McLuhan was not paranoid. He worked to create formulas for decreasing paranoia between both cultures and individuals. These formulas provided the means to enter any culture or medium in order to enjoy and exploit their biased dynamics. See the last two sentences on p.120 of  The Medium Is The Massage.  Twelve years ago, an entity claiming to be the spirit of McLuhan speaking through the Evergreens told me that we were witnessing the end of paranoia. I interpret "McLuhan's" projection as the understanding of the effect of an experience that is being provided by the great seduction known as the Android Meme. – Robert Dobbs  "The Earth is now an old "booster-stage"… a quaint form of Camp ... a sort of archaeological museum affording immediate access to all past cultures simultaneously on a classified-information basis." - Marshall McLuhan  Laughtears.com 310-306-7330    RIA = Resonant Interval Algorhythms
That’s the cable-news business model. Conflict means urgency, and urgency means viewers glued to the channel. So it seeks out arguments and pushes buttons. It is a machine designed to generate stress and negative emotion. Mr. Trump does not exactly lack for that as it is. His entire career philosophy has been that fighting is humankind’s most productive state, that the fight-or-flight response is to be savored and cultivated. So he seeks out more of it on cable, using it for affirmation and motivation, to pump himself up for battle. He stews in its acidic anger-juices, seething and tweeting and sending out more waves of hostility for cable news to reflect back. Because this feedback cycle results in news everywhere, all of us end up trapped in the mind-set of an angry cable-news junkie, even if we’re not watching. It’s like secondhand smoke. – James Poniewosik NY Times 12-13-17  http://fivebodied.com/project/content/view/30/98/1/2  
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Laughtears.com  310-306-7330  FREE Meet-Ups, Films, Music, Art, Poetry
 
' To understand the limitation of things , desire them.' - Lao Tzu
 
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” – Rilke.... ' People know what they  want because they know what other people want.' – T. Adorno…..  Lightnin’ Hopkins - “The blues is something hard to get acquainted with, like death.
 
Can you imagine what I would do if I did all that I can? - Sun Tzu
 
"Like eros itself, perpetually incomplete but searching for completion anyway." -David Yaffe on Joni Mitchell's  All I Want
 
"The  more specific you are, the more general  it'll be." -  Diane Arbus  
 
"We have art so that we may not perish by the truth." - Friedrich Nietzsche
 
" Finnegans Wake is more than a book...it contains the world. So owning it is like having the essence of everything. I feel like it might just as well be a Sumerian text." - Patti Smith
 
"There's something vile (and all the more vile because ridiculous) in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad  comedies of their private woes . - Fernando Pessoa

The reason why the  grave-digger made music  must have been because there was none in his spade.  - Herman Melville,  Moby Dick
 
Steve Martin quotes David Mamet a lot, to the effect that  ''no art comes from the conscious mind.''
 
"The ordinary desire of everybody to have everybody else think alike with himself has some explosive implications today." – McLuhan
 
There they lie, the nursery rhymes so much at the back of our minds that we can’t remember when we first learned them. What did they give us, so long ago? A suggestion that mishaps might be funny rather than tragic, that tantrums can be comical as well as frightening, and that laughter is the cure for practically everything.” Mother Goose remained so appealing and her rhymes so enduring (calling them “ astonishing,” “golluptious” “pomsidilious ” and “yo-heave-ho-ish”). – Iona Opie
Mother Goose remained so appealing and her rhymes so enduring (calling them “ astonishing,” “golluptious” “pomsidilious ” and “yo-heave-ho-ish”).
“There they lie,” she wrote, “the nursery rhymes so much at the back of our minds that we can’t remember when we first learned them. What did they give us, so long ago? A suggestion that mishaps might be funny rather than tragic, that tantrums can be comical as well as frightening, and that laughter is the cure for practically everything.”

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Avant Garde Cinema Saved Humanity ?
        Marshall McLuhan on William Burroughs for The Nation Magazine 1964
1. Today men’s nerves surround us; they have gone outside as electrical environment. The human nervous system itself can be reprogrammed biologically as readily as any radio network can alter its fare. Burroughs has dedicated Naked Lunch to the first proposition, and Nova Express (both Grove Press) to the second. Naked Lunch records private strategies of culture in the electric age. Nova Express indicates some of the “corporate” responses and adventures of the Subliminal Kid who is living in a universe which seems to be someone else’s insides. Both books are a kind of engineer’s report of the terrain hazards and mandatory processes, which exist in the new electric environment.
2. Burroughs uses what he calls “Brion Gysin’s cut-up method which I call the fold-in method.” To read the daily newspaper in its entirety is to encounter the method in all its purity. Similarly, an evening watching television programs is an experience in a corporate form — an endless succession of impressions and snatches of narrative. Burroughs is unique only in that he is attempting to reproduce in prose what we accommodate every day as a commonplace aspect of life in the electric age. If the corporate life is to be rendered on paper, the method of discontinuous nonstory must be employed.
3. That man provides the sexual organs of the technological world seems obvious enough to Burroughs, and such is the stage (or “biological theatre” as he calls it in Nova Express) for the series of social orgasms brought about by the evolutionary mutations of man and society. The logic, physical and emotional, of a world in which we have made our environment out of our own nervous systems, Burroughs follows everywhere to the peripheral orgasm of the cosmos.
4. Each technological extension involves an act of collective cannibalism. The previous environment with all its private and social values, is swallowed by the new environment and reprocessed for whatever values are digestible. Thus, Nature was succeeded by the mechanical environment and became what we call the “content” of the new industrial environment. That is, Nature became a vessel of aesthetic and spiritual values. Again and again the old environment is upgraded into an art form while the new conditions are regarded as corrupt and degrading. Artists, being experts in sensory awareness, tend to concentrate on the environmental as the challenging and dangerous situation. That is why they may seem to be “ahead of their time.” Actually, they alone have the resources and temerity to live in immediate contact with the environment of their age. More timid people prefer to accept the content, the previous environment’s values, as the continuing reality of their time. Our natural bias is to accept the new gimmick (automaton, say) as a thing that can be accommodated in the old ethical order.
5. During the process of digestion of the old environment, man finds it expedient to anesthetize himself as much as possible. He pays as little attention to the action of the environment as the patient heeds the surgeon’s scalpel. The gulping or swallowing of Nature by the machine was attended by a complete change of the ground rules of both the sensory ratios of the individual nervous system and the patterns of the social order as well. Today, when the environment has become the extension of the entire mesh of the nervous system, anesthesia numbs our bodies into hydraulic jacks.
6. Burroughs disdains the hallucinatory drugs as providing mere “content,” the fantasies, dreams that money can buy. Junk (heroin) is needed to turn the human body itself into an environment that includes the universe. The central theme of Naked Lunch is the strategy of bypassing the new electric environment by becoming an environment oneself. The moment one achieves this environmental state all things and people are submitted to you to be processed. Whether a man takes the road of junk or the road of art, the entire world must submit to his processing. The world becomes his “content.” He programs the sensory order.                            7. For artists and philosophers, when a technology is new it yields Utopias. Such is Plato’s Republic in the fifth century B.C., when phonetic writing was being established. Similarly, More’s Utopia is written in the sixteenth century when the printed book had just become established. When electric technology was new and speculative, Alice in Wonderland came as a kind of non-Euclidean space-time Utopia, a grown-up version of which is the Illuminations of Rimbaud. Like Lewis Carroll, Rimbaud accepts each object as a world and the world as an object. He makes a complete break with the established procedure of putting things into time or space:
That’s she, the little girl behind the rose bushes, and she’s dead. The young mother, also dead, is coming down the steps. The cousin’s carriage crunches the sand. The small brother (he’s in India!) over there in the field of pinks, in front of the sunset. The old men they’ve buried upright in the wall covered with gilly-flowers.
But when the full consequences of each new technology have been manifested in new psychic and social forms, then the anti-Utopias appear. Naked Lunch can be viewed as the anti-Utopia of Illuminations: During the withdrawal the addict is acutely aware of his surroundings. Sense impressions are sharpened to the point of hallucination. Familiar objects seem to stir with a writhing furtive life. The addict is subject to a barrage of sensations external and visceral.
Or to give a concrete example from the symbolist landscape of Naked Lunch:
A guard in a uniform of human skin, black buck jacket with carious yellow teeth buttons, an elastic pullover shirt in burnished Indian copper […] sandals from calloused foot soles of young Malayan farmer […]
The key to symbolist perception is in yielding the permission to objects to resonate with their own time and space. Time and space themselves are subjected to the uniform and continuous visual processing that provides us with the “connected and rational” world that is in fact only an isolated fragment of reality — the visual. There is no uniform and continuous character in the nonvisual modalities of space and time . The Symbolists freed themselves from visual conditions into the visionary world of the iconic and the auditory. Their art, to be visually oriented and literary man, seems haunted, magical and often incomprehensible. It is, in John Ruskin’s words:
… the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connections; of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character. (Modern Painters) The art of the interval, rather than the art of the connection, is not only medieval but Oriental; above all, it is the art mode of instant electric culture.
8. There are considerable antecedents for the Burroughs attempt to read the language of the biological theatre and the motives of the Subliminal Kid. Fleurs du Mal is a vision of the city as the technological extension of man. Baudelaire had once intended to title the book Les Limbes. The vision of the city as a physiological and psychic extension of the body he experienced as a nightmare of illness and self-alienation.  Wyndham Lewis, in his trilogy The Human Age, began with The Childermass. Its theme is the massacre of innocents and the rape of entire populations by the popular media of press and film. Later in The Human Age Lewis explores the psychic mutations of man living in “the magnetic city,” the instant, electric, and angelic (or diabolic) culture. Lewis views the action in a much more inclusive way than Burroughs whose world is a paradigm of a future in which there can be no spectators but only participants. All men are totally involved in the insides of all men. There is no privacy and no private parts. In a world in which we are all ingesting and digesting one another there can be no obscenity or pornography or decency. Such is the law of electric media which stretch the nerves to form a global membrane of enclosure. 9. The Burroughs diagnosis is that we can avoid the inevitable “closure” that accompanies each new technology by regarding our entire gadgetry as junk. Man has hopped himself up by a long series of technological fixes: 
You are all dogs on tape. The entire planet is being developed into terminal identity and complete surrender. 
We can forego the entire legacy of Cain (the inventor of gadgets) by applying the same formula that works for junk — “apomorphine,” extended to all technology: 
Apomorphine is no word and no image — […] It is simply a question of putting through an inoculation program in the very limited time that remains — Word begets image and image IS virus — 
Burroughs is arguing that the power of the image to beget image, and of technology to reproduce itself via human intervention, is utterly in excess of our power to control the psychic and social consequences: 
Shut the whole thing right off — Silence — When you answer the machine you provide it with more recordings to be played back to your “enemies” keep the whole nova machine running — The Chinese character for “enemy” means to be similar to or to answer — Don’t answer the machine — Shut if off — 
Merely to be in the presence of any machine, or replica of our body or faculties, is to be close with it. Our sensory ratios shift at once with each encounter with any fragmented extension of our being. This is a non-stop express of innovation that cannot be endured indefinitely: 
We are just dust falls from demagnetized patterns — Show business — 
It is the medium that is the message because the medium creates an environment that is as indelible as it is lethal. To end the proliferation of lethal new environmental expression, Burroughs urges a huge collective act of restraint as well as a nonclosure of sensory modes — “The biological theater of the body can bear a good deal of new program notes.”
10.  Finnegans Wake  (1939 novel  by JAMES JOYCE) provides the closest literary precedent to Burroughs’ work. From the beginning to end it is occupied with the theme of “the extensions” of man — weaponry, clothing, languages, number, money, and media in toto. Joyce works out in detail the sensory shifts involved in each extension of man, and concludes with the resounding boast:    The keys to. Given! 
Like Burroughs, Joyce was sure he had worked out the formula for total cultural understanding and control. The idea of art as total programming for the environment is tribal, mental, Egyptian. It is, also, an idea of art to which electric technology leads quite strongly. We live science fiction. The bomb is our environment. The bomb is of higher learning all compact, the extension division of the university. The university has become a global environment. The university now contains the commercial world, as well as the military and government establishments. To reprogram the cultures of the globe becomes as natural an undertaking as curriculum revision in a university. Since new media are new environments that reprocess psyche and society in successive ways, why not bypass instruction in fragmented subjects meant for fragmented sections of the society and reprogram the environment itself? Such is Burroughs’ vision.                                                                               11. It is amusing to read reviews of Burroughs that try to classify his books as nonbooks or as failed science fiction. It is a little like trying to criticize the sartorial and verbal manifestations of a man who is knocking on the door to explain that flames are leaping from the roof of our home. Burroughs is not asking merit marks as a writer; he is trying to point to the shut-on button of an active and lethal environmental process.
 
CONTACT -  Gerry Fialka  pfsuzy@aol.com  310-306-7330
 
VISIT=Laughtears.com for MUSIC, FILM, ART, LITERATURE, NEW MEDIA, GAMING, AVANT GARDE, POETRY, JAZZ, FUNK, COMEDY free events      JOIN IN and READ FINNEGANS WAKE outloud with a group of people every FIRST TUESDAY at the MARINA DEL REY LIBRARY

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My Art Belongs to Venice     Gerry Fialka    Laughtears.com   310-306-7330
 
How does a beach town become a sacred ground?  Gerry Fialka's interactive workshop probes the enduring existence of artists in an ever-changing Venice, California. Exploring the intentional and random roles that creative artists play in the life of Venice and vice versa, the workshop asks: How can a place affect the art-making and art-viewing done there, and exert a hidden influence on the psyches of its creative people?    Fialka surveys the lively history of artists nurtured in Venice, from the Beats to the Hipsters. This impressive legacy includes the Cool School superstars, such as Ed Kienholz, Ed Ruscha, Wallace Berman, Marjorie Cameron, Ed Moses, and Robert Irwin; notable Boardwalk renegades, such as Sunny Zorro, Dougo Smith, Diane Butler and Vinny DiGaetano; and skilled painters, such as Tibor Jankay, Ray Packard, Earl Newman and Rip Cronk. What threads or themes, if any, can be said to unite the works of these diverse artists? Artist Mike Kelley commented that making art is making your sickness everybody else's sickness. Does that idea of illness and a unifying disaffection apply to the artwork done in Venice over the years?   As a cclaimed screenwriter and director  Paul Schrader has said, “The job of the artist is to attempt to sell out, but fail.”  This workshop sees whether that axiom applies to these many illustrious artists of Venice, past and present--whether they successfully made failed attempts to sell out.
 
Using Venice and its artists as a test case or jumping-off point, the workshop aims to examine larger questions of why art is created in the first place. What functions does it serve, for its creators and its audiences? Equally important, what terms, priorities, and metaphors make sense to use when talking about the reasons for art?  McLuhan and Warhol both said that art is anything you can get away with. We will trace interconnections between the famous ideas of "art for art's sake" and "the medium is the message."  From another perspective, Marcel Duchamp said that there is no art without an audience. Can Venice's art community help us to better understand the audience's role in the creative process?      Returning to the idea of Venice as a sacred ground, a place of art and mystery, the workshop will look at how Thornton Wilder used different metaphors in addressing art's functions. He wrote, "Art is confession; art is the secret told. . . . But art is not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time. And the secret is nothing more than the whole drama of the inner life."  That framework suggests that we must always ask, "What is art about, and then what is it  really about?" Together, Fialka and workshop participants will consider: What is Venice's art  really about?  
 
 “The Balinese have no word for art, they do everything as well as they can.”…. "Art as radar acts as 'an early alarm system,' as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them." …. – Marshall McLuhan
 "If it commands attention it's culture. If it matches the couch it's art." - Robert Williams
 
"One is an artist as the cost of regarding that which all non-artists call 'form' as content, as 'the matter itself.' To be sure, then one belongs in a topsy-turvy world: for henceforth content becomes something merely formal - our life included." - Friedrich Nietzsche 
 
"Art as a radar environment takes on the function of indispensable perceptual training rather than the role of a privileged diet for the elite." - W.T. Gordon
 
Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrad:  1) What does it enhance or intensify? 2) What does it render obsolete or replace? 3) What does it bring back that was previously obsolesced? 4) What does it become when pressed to an extreme, what does it flip into? We are probing the psychic and social effects of the environments created by the invention. Every invention (from philosophy to cellphones)  generates environments that provide services and disservices, and none of them reflect how the invention was originally intended to be used (= its content). For example, the CAR: ENH= private mobility, OBS=horse & buggy, RET=knight in shining armor, REV=bomb, home, traffic jam.
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"The point of the  Narcissus myth is not that people are prone to fall in love with their own images but that people fall in love with extensions of themselves which they are convinced are not extensions of themselves. This provides, I think, a fairly good image of all of our technologies, and it directs us towards a basic issue, the idolatry of technology as involving a psychic numbness."  And  " Holmes genius for constructing patterns from chaotic surface events is a critical perceptual tactic for the electronic/information age ..." – McLuhan   “All situations are composed of an area of attention [figure] and a very much larger (subliminal) area of inattention [ground] ….Figures rise out of, and recede back into, ground….for example, at a lecture, the attention will shift from the speaker’s words to his gestures, to the hum of the lighting or street sounds, or to the feel of the chair or a memory or association or smell, each new figure alternatively displaces the others into ground…The ground of any technology is both the situation that gives rise to it as well as the whole environment (medium) of services and disservices that the technology brings with it. These are side effects and impose themselves willy-nilly as a new form of culture”.-Robert Dobbs   McLuhan:“Film is high-definition pictures. You don’t have to fill in the blanks, so you’re detached and can think critically. Radio, telephone—they give you less to go on, and you have to fill out the message with your own story. But they’re still relatively hot. At the far end of the gamut is TV. It’s cool, low definition; you get completely absorbed in processing the bombardment of dots, hypnotized. It’s also non-sequential, like newspapers. Movies flow narratively, sequentially, the way we see. TV throws everything at us holus-bolus like sound. We can see only one thing at a time, but we can hear many things at once, even around corners. That’s why film is an eye medium and TV an ear medium.”    The phonetic alphabet fell like a bombshell on tribal man. The printing press hit him like a hydrogen bomb. Now we’ve been blitzkreiged by TV.   The horseless buggy was the only way people could describe the automobile. Families whose wealth was based on carriages and buggy whips soon went bankrupt. Horsepower moved from animals into cars.   The wheel extends  the foot in an automobile. In this way the wheel amplifies the power and speed of the foot, but at the same time it amputates. In the act of pressing the gas peddle, the foot becomes so specialized it no longer performs its original function, which is to walk.   If the wheel is an extension of the foot, then money is an extension of muscle, radio an amplification of the human voice, and the hydrogen bomb an outgrowth of teeth and fingernails.   Why should the sending or receiving of a telegram seem more dramatic than even the ringing of a telephone?   What do you think Hitler meant when he said: “I go my way with the assurance of a sleepwalker?” –MM      Laughtears.com

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Dream Awake  Gerry Fialka Laughtears.com  310-306-7330  pfsuzy@aol.com                           Page 1 of 2
 
Probe the hidden psychic effects of human inventions (words, cars, philosophy, art, cellphones, etc) as extensions of our senses. Marshall McLuhan explored how artists reveal these effects so we can learn to cope with their disservices, and flip them into services. Consider his aphorisms like "We shape our tools then they shape us" and how they can be reinvented. For example, he updated it: "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools ape us." McLuhan reworded Robert Browning's "Our reach should exceed our grasp or what is heaven for?" into "Our reach should exceed our grasp or what is a metaphor? (meta for)." Contemplate & reword these: "If it works, it's obsolete." ... "You mean my whole fallacy is wrong." ... "Carefully make plans then do the opposite." ... "The Balinese have no word for art they do everything as well as they can." ... "How about technologies as the collective unconscious and art as the collective unconsciousness?” ... "The artists of our culture, 'the antennae of the race,' have tuned in to the new ground and begun exploring discontinuity and simultaneity." ..."Understanding is not having a point of view."... "Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior."

Walter Benjamin recommended "mastery, not of nature itself, but of the relationship between nature and humanity."

McLuhan called his probing process "applied Joyce" examining  Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, which must be read outloud with a group of people. Joyce sought epiphanies in everydayness, satirized information overload, and invented language about language with new words like  "laughtears" and "feelful thinkamalinks." 

"Artists live in the present and write a detailed history of the future." - Wyndham Lewis

"This concern which interests us more than anything else: the blurring of the distinction between art and life." - Marcel Duchamp... "Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life." - Confucius ..."Get your job and your life as mixed up as possible" -?

"Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable" - Banksy
         "Art is anything you can get away with." - Andy Warhol... 
             "Most people don't know what they like, they like what they know." - Igor Stravinsky 

 "I am a failure, but not a miserable failure" - Frank Zappa.... "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. - Samuel Beckett...."Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." - Winston Churchill. 

"Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it." - Jean Cocteau…
                    "The goal of the artist is to attempt to sell out, but fail." - Paul Schrader 

Moshe Feldenkrais said that it is literally possible to identify a weakness and incorporate it to become a strength. We are normally taught to overcome a weakness. Turn breakdowns into breakthroughs, flip rejection into redirection. …"I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own tastes." -Marcel Duchamp

"I remember the images I filmed.... They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory. I wonder how people remember things who don't film, don't photograph, don't tape. How has mankind managed to remember? I know: it wrote the Bible. The new Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will have to reread itself constantly just to know it existed." -  Sans Soleil by Chris Marker, who said:“I betrayed Gutenberg for McLuhan long ago.”  
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"The key is to bring the audience up onto the stage and into the scene with you. It is they who must give you even more than you give them in way of imagination and creative power." - Ruth Draper...“The pressure of experimentation is greater than the fear of embarrassment. That is the essence of art.” - Wolfgang Tillmans....“Art is a lie that tells the truth.” - Pablo Picasso…"The artists that I'm interested in are the ones that make a picture of the times they live in....The eye always craves what it doesn't see." - Marilyn Minter …."Art is confession; art is the secret told. . . . But art is not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time.” - Thorton Wilder …"My task as a poet entails the work of seeing the world without language and then bringing that seeing into language." - Gary Snyder 

"I would like to think that the sounds people do hear in a concert could make them more aware of the sounds they hear in the street, or out in the country, or anywhere they may be...I prefer laughter to tears." - John Cage 

"Life is short, break the rules, forgive quickly, kiss slowly, love truly, laugh uncontrollably, and never regret anything that made you smile. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did.  So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” - Mark Twain
 
"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others." - Martha Graham

"The real secret of life - to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. Instead of calling it work, realize it is play." - Alan Watts... "Bob Fosse's dancers seemed as if they were playing at dancing more than actually dancing." - Sam Wasson...
                                 "Who can tell the dancer from the dance?" - W.B. Yeats

“Objects are unobservable. Only relationships among objects are observable. So if you think that the question, ‘Will we ever learn?’ implies a goal, a particular point and time we will arrive at, a particular object, we will never know that. Because objects like that do not exist, only relationships among objects exist. It is like asking, ‘Will there ever be silence?’ It's like, ‘Will you ever die?’ Well, you'll never know because to be dead is a specific experience that seems to imply isolation which could not be known. Because nothing exists in isolation, you will never experience death. You will only experience those things that involve relationships. The end point of time, death, cannot be experienced because it's not a relationship among events." - Robert Dobbs
  

Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrad:  1) What does it enhance or intensify? 2) What does it render obsolete or replace? 3) What does it bring back that was previously obsolesced? 4) What does it become when pressed to an extreme, what does it flip into? We are probing the psychic and social effects of the environments created by the invention. Every invention (from philosophy to cellphones)  generates environments that provide services and disservices, and none of them reflect how the invention was originally intended to be used (= its content). For example, the CAR: ENH= private mobility, OBS=horse & buggy, RET=knight in shining armor, REV=bomb, home, traffic jam
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FILM CAN'T KILL YOU BUT WHY TAKE A CHANCE   Gerry Fialka  310 -306-7330   pfsuzy@aol.com
Laughtears.com McLuhan's percept: 
"May I suggest art in the electronic age is not a form of self-expression, but a kind of research & probing. It is not a private need of expression that motivates the artist, but the need of involvement in the total audience. This is humanism in reverse, art in the electric age is the experience, not of the individual, but of a collectivity." Probe "rearview-mirrorism" - when new media looks backwards for content and meaning. When McLuhan yelped "The future of the future is the present," he was revealing that the artist lives in the present and writes a detailed history of the future. "It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education and entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter. It's like setting up a distinction between  didactic and lyric poetry on the ground that one teaches, the other pleases. However, it's always been true that whatever pleases teaches more effectively." - McLuhan, THE BROTHER SIDE OF THE WAKE - Gerry Fialka and friends reinvent (and  reimagine, expound, understand, interpret,  translate, articulate, resuscitate, expose, enhance, evoke, de-make) the Orson Welles film  The Other Side of the Wind via the Mennipean satire of James Joyce and much more. Delve deep into the hidden psychic effects of the philosophy that the journey is more important then the destination. What are the motives and consequences of Chris Marker's probing of the inability to escape time? Why even make a film when you can just live life as if it is a film? As it lives in your imagination? Consider these quotes from Orson Welles and others:"Who do I have to (expletive) to get out of this picture?""The great danger for any artist is to find himself comfortable. It's his duty to find the point of maximum discomfort, to search it out." “You could almost say a director is a man who presides over accidents!” "One should make movies innocently — the way Adam and Eve named the animals, their first day in the garden…Learn from your own  interior vision of things, as if there had never been a D.W.Griffith, or a Eisenstein, or a JohnFord, or a Jean Renoir, or anybody."  “There are only two things it is ever seemly for an intelligent person to be thinking. One is: ‘What did God mean by creating the world?’ And the other? ‘ What do I do next?’”AND consider these quotes by others... Peter Viertel wrote that John Houston enjoyed working on the Welles film because it was a perilous undertaking and he enjoyed "an adventure shared by desperate people that finally came to  nothing." The  gods graciously give us a first verse for nothing; but it is our task to finish the second, which must harmonise with the first and not be too unworthy of its  supernatural  brother .” - Paul  Valéry"Nothing is what I want." - Frank Zappa  "I started out with nothing and still have most of it left." - ?  "Pull the wool over your own eyes." - ?    “What he creates he has to wreck.”- film critic in  The Other Side of the Wind Jean Renoir: "A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again." "  The voyage will not teach you anything if you do not accord it the right to destroy you." - Nicolas Bouvier "An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it." - Paul Valery Michelangelo Antonioni: "The greatest danger for those working in cinema is the extraordinary possibilities it offers for lying." Director Gus Van Sant proclaimed that film making devastated his life. Orson Bean said movies saved his life. RIA (Reverse Intuition Aberations)  Film can't kill you... unless you are sitting in the wrong movie theater, when real bullets start to fly....   or you believe folks like this: "I've always considered movies evil; the day cinema was invented was a black day for mankind," Kenneth Anger, or... Frank Capra: "Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream, it takes over as the number one hormone; it bosses the enzymes; directs the pineal gland; plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to film is more film." "It makes me into a clown,” noted the supposedly Teutonic Werner Herzog. “That happens to everyone. Just look at Orson Welles, or even people like Truffaut. They have become clowns. What we do as filmmakers... it's immaterial. It's only projection of light." Darren Aronofsky told Elvis Mitchell that filmmakers should become performance artists because the chemicals involved in filmmaking are destroying mother nature. Director Richard Foreman wrote a play entitled   “Film is Evil, Radio is Good”. Joshua Oppenheimer says, "Films can't   change the society, they can simply open the space for discussion which can lead to social change and start new forms of social activism." As readers of this essay, we can bypass the   environments created by cinema (the so-called “subliminal effects”) and just become environments ourselves. Indeed, “If the images of the present don't change, then change the images of the past," proclaimed Chris Marker. Meanwhile, Joshua Oppenheimer's two films   “The Act of Killing“   and “The Look of Silence“ offer   revealing   rejoinders to these two quotations: "Those who cannot remember the past are   condemned to repeat it," from George Santayana, and   "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," by James Joyce. The killers of Communists in Oppenheimer's films keep repeating, "The past is past," as if we didn’t know that already. Don’t they realize that all times happening now? Can we reprogram the environments of our inventions? Can we de-hypnotize   ourselves and hack our own perceptions? Let us propagate the aspiration of Wyndham   Lewis "Artists live in the   present and write a detailed   history of the future." In fact, the past has seen us looking for guidance to the screen.  Tetrad -   1) What does it enhance or intensify? 2) What does it render obsolete or replace? 3) What does it bring back that was previously obsolesced? 4) What does it become when pressed to an extreme, what does it flip into?
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Laughtears.com Text from Sans Soleil 1983 film by Chris Marker  "Because I know that time is always time   And place is always and only place   And what is actual is actual only for one time” – TS Eliot. The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black. He wrote: I'm just back from Hokkaido, the Northern Island. Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane, others take the ferry: waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep. Curiously all of that makes me think of a past or future war: night trains, air raids, fallout shelters, small fragments of war enshrined in everyday life. He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time. Those memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories. He wrote: I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter. At dawn we'll be in Tokyo. …He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?...  A people of nothing, a people of emptiness, a vertical people. Frankly, have you ever heard of anything stupider than to say to people as they teach in film schools, not to look at the camera? … And only for one place". Video games are the first stage in a plan for machines to help the human race, the only plan that offers a future for intelligence. For the moment, the inseparable philosophy of our time is contained in the Pac-Man. I didn't know when I was sacrificing all my hundred yen coins to him that he was going to conquer the world. Perhaps because he is the most perfect graphic metaphor of man's fate. He puts into true perspective the balance of power between the individual and the environment. And he tells us soberly that though there may be honor in carrying out the greatest number of victorious attacks, it always comes a cropper. …And beneath each of these faces a memory. And in place of what we were told had been forged into a collective memory, a thousand memories of men who parade their personal laceration in the great wound of history. In Portugal—raised up in its turn by the breaking wave of Bissau—Miguel Torga, who had struggled all his life against the dictatorship wrote: “Every protagonist represents only himself; in place of a change in the social setting he seeks simply in the revolutionary act the sublimation of his own image.” That's the way the breakers recede. And so predictably that one has to believe in  a kind of amnesia of the future that history distributes through mercy or calculation to those whom it recruits: Amilcar murdered by members of his own party, the liberated areas fallen under the yoke of bloody petty tyrants liquidated in their turn by a central power to whose stability everyone paid homage until the military coup. That's how history advances, plugging its memory as one plugs one's ears. Luis exiled to Cuba, Nino  discovering in his turn plots woven against him, can be cited reciprocally to appear before the bar of history. She doesn't care, she understands nothing, she has only one friend, the one Brando spoke of in Apocalypse: horror. That has a name and a face. I'm writing you all this from another world, a world of appearances. In a way the two worlds communicate with each other. Memory is to one what history is to the other: an impossibility. Legends are born out of the need to decipher the indecipherable. Memories must make do with their delirium, with their drift. A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector. Madness protects, as fever does . I envy Hayao in his 'zone,' he plays with the signs of his memory. He pins them down and decorates them like insects that would have flown beyond time, and which he could contemplate from a point outside of time: the only eternity we have left. I look at his machines. I think of a world where each memory could create its own legend.  He wrote me that only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory—insane memory:   Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. In the spiral of the titles he saw time covering a field ever wider as it moved away, a cyclone whose present moment contains motionless the eye. …That's for a start. Now why this cut in time, this connection of memories? That's just it, he can't understand. He hasn't come from another planet he comes from our future, four thousand and one: the time when the human brain has reached the era of full employment. Everything works to perfection, all that we allow to slumber, including memory. Logical consequence: total recall is memory anesthetized. After so many stories of men who had lost their memory, here is the story of one who has lost forgetting, and who—through some peculiarity of his nature—instead of drawing pride from the fact and scorning mankind of the past and its shadows, turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion….Brooding at the end of the world on my island of Sal in the company of my prancing dogs I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory. I wonder how people remember things who don't film, don't photograph, don't tape. How has mankind managed to remember? I know: it wrote the Bible. The new Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will have to reread itself constantly just to know it existed.
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Mackdaddy founder of avant-funksters Black Shoe Polish, Gerry Fialka and Brad Kay, music historian and jazz pianist supreme probe the motives and consequences of the Minstrel Show, voluntary Negritude, Afrofuturism (Sun Ra, Jimi Hendrix), the relationship of Duke Ellington & Marshal McLuhan, and Lenny Bruce & Frank Zappa, who said, “  I'm not black, but there's a whole lots a times I wish I could say I'm not white.” Why do  whites emulate blacks? Shoe fly in da buttermilk. Trading dozens. If ya can't dazzle'em wif yer brilliance, baffle wif yer bullshit. Gwine up to Hebbin. Louie Armstrong's white pot dealer Mezz Mezzrow writes that from the moment he heard jazz he "was going to be a Negro musician, hipping [teaching] the world about the blues the way only Negroes can." "I'm playing dark history. It's beyond black. I'm dealing with the dark things of the cosmos." - Sun Ra. "We just play  Black, We play what the day recommends." - Miles Davis. "In my kosmos, there will be no feeva of dischord." - Krazy Kat. "I've got a move that tells me what to do." - James Brown. Black jazz icon  Ornette Coleman said to Keith Jarrett: " Man, you've got to be black. You just  have to be black! "  Jarrett, who is White (Scottish & Hungarian with zero African, though he looks otherwise), to Ornette Coleman: " I know. I know. I'm working on it."  

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Laughtears.com WRITEfly    
What I like  in a  good author  is not what he says but what he whispers. -  Logan Pearsall Smith                
  " Writing is easy : You just stare at a blank page your  forehead bleeds ." - Gene  Fowler      
  There goes another novel - Balzac referring to ejaculation

If my books had been any worse , I should not  have been  invited to Hollywood, and  if  they  had been any  better, I should not have come." -  Raymond Chandler  

“I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”  - Kurt Vonnegut                                                                                                                                         
If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.   - conventional instruction on etiquette
If you haven’t anything nice to say about anyone, come sit by me. -  Alice Roosevelt Longworth           
  There is only one thing that can kill movies  and that is education. -  Will Rogers                               "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable,  must be the truth ." -  Arthur Conan Doyle       
    A s for   the critics  -  don't even ignore  them. -  Samuel Goldwyn
The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth  which  men  prefer not to hear. -  Herbert Agate
"All Moansday , Tearsday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, and Shatterday" and " My consumers are they not my producers ? "   James Joyce , Finnegans Wake     
The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder. - Alfred Hitchcock. 
If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit. There's no use being a damn fool about it. - W.C.Fields "
Art, like morality , consists in drawing the line somewhere." - Gilbert K.  Chesterton
 I think it's the duty of the  comedian  to find out where the  line  is drawn and  cross  it deliberately. -  George Carlin          
  Hockey is a sport for white men. Basketball is a sport for black men. Golf is a sport for white men dressed like black pimps. - Tiger Woods  
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. - Napolean Bonaparte 
The real comic novel  has to do with man's recognition of his unimportance in the universe. -  Anthony Burgess             
  If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.  - George Harrison via Lewis Carroll                                                                                                                           
  "He had felt like a man rushing to catch a train he was anxious to miss." - Helen Hudson  
   " Genius is childhood recalled at will." - Charles Bauderlaire. "Ask questions a child would ask." - Albert Einstein.
Jean Cocteau declared, "What one should do with the young is to give them a portable camera and forbid them to observe any rules except those they invent for themselves as they go along. Let them write without being afraid of making mistakes."
There is an old saying in Silicon Valley that if you are not paying for the product, you are the product .  

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