217- AI As IA - Fialka's fun interactive workshop explores and re-explores the sensory simultaneity of interconnections between AI=artificial intelligence and McLuhan's IA=integral awareness: IA can be the flip of AI in passing through the vanishing point when seeing oneself both as oneself and as the other. Many AI algorithms are capable of learning from data; they can enhance themselves by learning new. Same with IA. Alice Rae wrote: "McLuhan says in The Mechanical Bride that 'The basic criterion for any kind of human excellence is simply how heavy a demand it makes on the intelligence. How inclusive a consciousness does it focus?' (MB 152) He expands in Understanding Media: 'The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.' (UM 65) The phrase 'integral awareness' implies that the artist is one for whom 'consciousness' is not 'fragmented' by repression (e.g. in the use of the phonetic alphabet), so that McLuhan can say of Joyce, for example, that 'he had no subliminal side to him. He was terribly aware' (Renascence 12(4), p.202). At the same time, 'integral awareness', like the term 'inclusive consciousness', seems to imply the encyclopedism of Cicero's doctus orator, i.e. a consciousness that includes all (or as much as possible) of the culture that has come before it." - http://www.lightthroughmcluhan.org/art.html Stanford professor Jerry Kaplan calls machines “natural sociopaths.” "How about technologies as the collective unconscious and art as the collective unconsciousness?” - McLuhan, who quipped "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.". . . "and then our tools ape us." Does the brain, mind and soul more detect consciousness or more create consciousness?
218- Moving Image Art As Dockless Mobility - Gerry Fialka's fun interactive meet-up interconnects electric scooters with McLuhan Multi-Media Mash-ups. Marshall considered that cinema extends the foot. Most would say the eye or memory. "I remember the images I filmed. They have substituted themselves for my memory," wrote Chris Marker, who also said "I betrayed Gutenberg for McLuhan long ago." Participants will engage in eye contact, verbal exchange and video clips to probe McLuhan's percepts as a new kind of "live cinema as live cinema" https://laughtears.com/liveCinema.html The first word is “live” as a verb. McLuhan suggested that technologies are extensions of our humanness, that in some sense they extend our ways of living. The second use of the word “live” is an adjective, “live” in the sense of “performed in real time.” Reimagine "sex, death and technology" as a way of seeing the paradoxical exuberance of being through moving image. "What can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved fore" - James Joyce "I should prefer to de-fuse this gigantic human bomb by starting a dialogue somewhere on the side-lines to distract the trigger-men, or to needle the somnambulists." - McLuhan "McLuhan used the transforming power of the movie camera and projector as a model of this drama of cognition. When the camera rolls up the external world on a spool by rapid still shots, it uncannily resembles the process of 'making', or sensory closure. The movie projector unwinds this spool as a kind of magic carpet which conveys the enchanted spectator anywhere in the world in an instant - a resemblance of the human's attempt to externalize or utter the result of making sense in a natural effort to connect or 'match' with the external environment" - Robert Dobbs.
219- Live Cinema As Live Cinema - The first word is “live” as a verb. McLuhan suggested that technologies are extensions of our humanness, that in some sense they extend our ways of living. (Most say cinema extends the eye, or memory. McLuhan considered that cinema extends the foot.) Our second use of the word “live” is an adjective, “live” in the sense of “performed in real time,” but also in the sense of “not dead.” We’re reminded of the La Poste, who published the reaction to the premiere of Louis Lumière films on December 30, 1895: “When these gadgets are in the hands of the public, when anyone can photograph the ones who are dear to them, not just in their immobile form, but with movement, action, familiar gestures and the words out of their mouths, then death will no longer be absolute, final.” And so our through-line reads, “If you live cinema (that is, if you actually experience cinema as though it is a real direct experience), then that could be a metaphor for the genre of film called live cinema.” From Luis Buñuel's live narration to Stan VanDerBeek's exemplary multi-media Movie-Drome to Gene Youngblood's Synaesthetic Cinema to Ann Arbor Film Festival's Pat Olesko's interactions with her filmic self, the combo of film and the physical body has been transformative. Carol Schneemann, Sun Ra and PXL THIS's King Kukulele have used their bodies as projection screens. Fialka surveys the historical context of pioneers Jack Smith and Alan Kaprow, who dissolved boundaries between film, art and life. The zeitgeist is alive and kicking. Encyclopedic Fialka probes its roots and where it’s going. http://www.laughtears.com/liveCinema.html and http://laughtears.com/droppingkeys.html
220- The Internet as a Mess - Probe the hidden psychic effects of the Internet, and examine how to possibly cope with them. In the film The Cleaners - http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/the-cleaners/ - people delete images, videos and texts which violate the rules of social media. Interconnect McLuhan's MESS (McLuhan Emergency Strategy Seminar with Bucky Fuller in the Bahamas 1970) with this new mess. “World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation." - Marshall McLuhan, Culture Is Our Business, 1970
221- Noosphere As World Brain's Neural Lace - Interconnect Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ala Vernadsky's sphere of human thought, "atmosphere" and "biosphere" and the four perspectives: “organicism”, “encyclopedism”, “emergentism” and “evolutionary cybernetics.” Uncover these underlying ideas expressed by Nikola Tesla in the late 19th century and James Joyce's secret language Finneganese: "what can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved fore." McLuhan broke the Finnegans Wake code, which was published on the eve of WWll and helped accelerate the emergence of cybernetics. H.G. Wells resonated these themes in his 1938 book World Brain. Starting in 2016, Elon Musk aims to create a Neural Lace, which is a machine interface woven into the brain, to allow the user to access all available human information.
222- Understanding Media Fallout - Fialka probes Cameron McEwen's McLuhan's New Sciences blog https://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/ to understand Who says What to Whom in What channel with What Effect. "Media are extensions of the human senses. They modify the patterns of human association while remaining rooted in this or that sense, and these staples are not limited to any geographical area, but are co-extensive with the human family itself." - McEwen. Richard Hofstadter expands "
who gets what, when and how?" to "who perceives what public issues, in what way and why?"
223- Skateboarding As Cinema - "Skateboarding can help you escape the present but not the past or the future." - Bing Liu. Fialka interconnects home movie making and subversive teen mobility.
225- Scat As Eye Ear Toe - Airto Moreira plays out all the band parts verbally without an instrument (from a Miles Davis 70's avant funk era song) in the film A Different Kind of Blue. Aubrey Logan suggests listening to Kind of Blue by Miles Davis to develop scat singing skills. Jon Hendricks says that Charlie Yardbird Parker is the highest form of talking. Reimagine McLuhan’s probe: “Song is slowed-down speech. The reason cultures have different musical tastes is ultimately connected to language difference.”
227- Pixelvision As Live Stream - Gerry Fialka and Brett Neese's fun interactive workshop interconnects the infamous Fisher-Price toy video camera, the PXL-2000, and the internet's live streaming simultaneity. Merge the art forms of the new millennium and delve deep into discussion by probing the retrieval of Marshall McLuhan's maxims: “The next medium, whatever it is — it may be the extension of consciousness — will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form." “The art object is replaced by participation in the art process. This is the essential meaning of electric circuitry and responsive environments. The artist leaves the Ivory Tower for the Control Tower, and abandons the shaping of art objects in order to program the environment itself as a work of art.” There is an old saying in Silicon Valley that if you are not paying for the product, you are the product.
228- McLuhan As Zen - Marshall said he was in dialogue with time, rather than taking a point of view. He wrote: “A. N. Whitehead pointed to the discovery of the nineteenth century as the discovery of the technique of invention. Bertrand Russell pointed to the great achievement of the twentieth century as the technique of suspended judgement. That is, the discovery of the process of insight itself, the technique of avoiding the automatic closure or involuntary fixing of attitudes that so easily results from any given cultural situation – The technique of open field perception. Both the discovery of the method of invention and the discovery of the technique of insight not only concern scientists but humanists, and have been freely used by both of what C. P. Snow calls the two cultures. So much so, indeed, that the resonant statistic of about 95% of the greatest scientists of human history now being alive may apply equally to poets, painters and philosophers.”
229- Post Mumble Rap As Video Game Skin (or Fortnite skin) - Fialka probes how we extend our senses with song, dance and video games. In the game Fortnite, you can buy skins or emotes to use or show off during an actual match. It's something akin to showing up at a basketball game with some bling on. They give you no competitive advantage in the game. They are purely cosmetic, which is a word rooted in cosmos, suggesting "the universe as an embodiment of order and harmony."
230- Night As Day - "There is nothing in the dark that isn't there when the lights are on." - Rod Serling. "In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories... Darkness promotes speech." - Alberto Manguel
To be, or not to be--that is the question...To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub, - Hamlet, Shakespeare
231- Light As Movement - “...light itself comes in packages..and is emitted and absorbed not continuously, but in small units of quanta...traveling through space at high velocity.” - The Dancing Wu Li Masters.
232- Zappatistas As Technology - Fialka's fun interactive "playshop" interconnects people influenced by Frank Zappa and the systematic treatment of art. McLuhan examined how humans extend themselves with their inventions. Fialka is tumultuously tweekin' the camaraderie of Zappa historians.
2= How much speed is necessary?
3= How can artistic (and art-related) autonomy evolve from haughty sovereignty to modest networked devolution?
4= How to make tangible the idea that belonging is in becoming—not in having been?
5= How can one transform art’s currency into art’s confluence?
6= How is crisis commodified as entertainment?
234- Subaltern Subgenuis - Fialka interconnects McLuhan and Jane Jacobs with Gayatri Spivak.
235- Figure Finnegan As Play Ground - Fialka's fun interactive workshop playfully probes McLuhan's Menippean translation of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce via todayness, the Gestalt therapy of Fritz Perls and New Criticism of I.A Richards. The retrieval of oral culture in a visual society where the word makes the market with centers everywhere and margins nowhere, museum without walls and city as classroom while cut and pasting pastimes of the mystery landscape with social networks when juggling Thornton Wilder, McLuhan, Lewis, Pound, Cage, Duchamp, who travel at the speed of thought amongst inventories of hidden psychic and social effects qualifying every known Menippean narratorial clause because there ain't no sanity clause on the mourning stage at the memory theater of the rogues' gagster gallery, thus all-at-onceness, rearview mirrorism transforms hendiadys, tetrads and percepts synesthesially smelling "speak that I may see you" which seduces discarnate Mobius strips of past software surfing social media maelstroms. Social engineer Gerry Fialka repurposes the "who new" genres of antiquarian and post-antiquarian James Joyce studies by transforming the very format of seminar lectures into the form and content of Finnegans Wake itself in this interactive workshop. Bonus extra credit includes the effects-precede-causes of electric scooters. “Under conditions of electric simultaneity the ground of any figure tends to become more and more noticeable. Perhaps it all began with cubism and the discovery that by eliminating the merely visual or rational relations between services, by presenting the inside and the underside at the same time as the outside, the public became totally involved and aware in a multisensuous way." - McLuhan
236- Hologram as Holeopathic Retrieval - Rock stars now appear in concert, live, after they are declared dead. "Holeopathic" is a mixture of "homeopathy" and "hologram." Homeopathy is a form of medical treatment where the physician takes the essence of a substance and dilutes it, the theory being that the tinier the dose the more potent it is. A hologram is an artificial environment indistinguishable from the reality upon which it's based. https://www.zappa.com/news/artwork-revealed-2019-bizarre-world-frank-zappa
237- Neurodiveristy As Performance Art - Gerry Fialka's interactive workshop probes the performance art of people on the Venice Boardwalk who scream, yell and rant. Some people may call them "shamans," but most use terms like "crazy." Their brain chemistry may be a variation of human wiring, rather than a disease. It can be considered a variation in functioning rather than a mental disorder to be cured. Respecting people as "people first," might work more humanly when referring to individuals with disabilities. One could celebrate these forms of communication and self-expression, possibly in the world of performance art. "Every person an artist - On the way to the libertarian form of the social organism." - Joseph Beuys. "Art is anything you can get away with." - Marshall McLuhan and Andy Warhol. This happening can involve Venice P.A.R.T. = Venice Performance Art Ranting Tribe.
238- Edjamacation As Subversion - Fialka's fun interactive workshop probes maverick approaches to education, flipping John Dewey into huey louie. Auden said "A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep." Chick Strand asked her students to describe their first sexual experience. Sun Ra took his students' notes from his lectures and never gave them back. Harry Smith studied Indian string games by getting busted in jails of the Southwest so he could learn from the drunk tank occupants. James Benning asked his Cal Arts experimental film students to hang out in the lobby of a polices station, and watch a sunrise for a hillside. Mary Jane Shoultz started Commie High in Ann Arbor, Michigan via McLuhan's The City as Classroom.
239- Not Me: David James As Frank Zappa - Fialka's fun interactive workshop on identity and the arts. When I told David James that I sometimes like to read about experimental film instead of seeing it, he responded, "Not me." When I told Frank Zappa that listening to the commercial radio (that was playing in the room we were in) could turn one into a normal person, he said, "Not me." As media ecologists, how and why do we understand our environments and how they shape our behavior.
240- SemiFlat As SeamyFlat - Harry Smith claims Bruno invented cinema 5 thousand years ago. James Joyce reinvented it and flipped it into social networking 7 decades before Facebook. "I can read readin' but I can't read writin' 'cause this writin' is written rotten" - Popeye's confession to Wimpy on his abilities as a semiotician. "Studying painting with Hans Hofmann had sensitized me to depth phenomena, to strange readings of depth including the most unnatural: flat." - Ken Jacobs, who asks the question: "Do we really need stories?"
241- PTSD As The Mechanical Bride - Gerry Fialka's fun interactive workshop probes the interconnections of post-traumatic stress disorder and Marshall McLuhan's percepts on perception. Explore post-traumatic stress disorder, trauma, multiple personality disorder, psychoanalysis, and contemporary neurobiological and postmodernist theorists. Delve deep into Gregory Bateson's double-bind theory, the legend of Nosferatu, and the SubGenuis axiom, "Pull the wool over your own eyes."
242- Pop Art As Anti-environment - "Pop Art serves to remind us … that we have fashioned for ourselves a world of artifacts and images that are intended not to train perception or awareness but to insist that we merge with them as the primitive man merges with his environment. The world of modern advertising is a magical environment constructed to produce effects for the total economy but not designed to increase human awareness … Pop Art is the product of drawing attention to some object in our own daily environment as if it were anti-environmental." - Marshall McLuhan, ‘The Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment’
243- Eye Right Be Cause You Wrong? - Fialka's workshop probes "Relative Causality as Absolute Causality." If a dog could talk, could we understand it? https://www.quora.com/Must-there-exist-the-necessary-being-that-is-the-cause-of-all-contingent-beings
244- Why Right? - Fialka probes the motives for writing. Francine du Plessix Gray said: "Flannery O'Connor said it best: 'I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.'" Gray continues: "I write out of a desire for revenge against reality, to destroy forever the stuttering powerless child I once was, to gain the love and attention that silenced child never had, to allay the dissatisfaction I still have with myself, to be something other than what I am. I write out of hate, out of a desire for revenge against all the men who have oppressed and humiliated me.
I also write out of love and gratitude for a mother and stepfather who made me feel worthy by hoarding every scrap of correspondence I ever sent them; love and gratitude for a husband of exquisite severity who still edits every final draft that leaves my typewriter. I write out of an infantile dread of ever disappointing them again.
I write because in the act of creation there comes that mysterious, abundant sense of being both parent and child; I am giving birth to an Other and simultaneously being reborn as child in the playground of creation.
I write on while continuing to despair that I can't ever achieve the inventiveness, irreverence, complexity of my favorite contemporary authors - Milan Kundera, Italo Calvino, Gunter Grass, Salman Rushdie, to name only the foreign ones. They are certain enough of their readers' love (or indifferent enough to it, since the great Indifferents are the great Seducers) to indulge in that shrewd teasing and misguiding of the reader, that ironic obliqueness which is the marrow of the best modernist work. It is not only my lesser gift that is at fault. Behind my impulsive cataloguing, my Slavic unleashing of emotion, my Quaker earnestness to inform my readers guilelessly of all I know, there still lurks the lonely, stuttering child too terrified of losing the reader's love to take the necessary risks.
Yet I remain sustained by a definition of faith once offered me by Ivan Illich: 'Faith is a readiness for the Surprise.' I write because I have faith in the possibility that I can eventually surprise myself. I am still occasionally plagued by that recurring nightmare of my jaw being clamped shut, my mouth frozen in silence. But I wake up from it with less dread, with the hope that some day my tongue will loosen and emit a surprising new sound which even I, at first, shall not be able to understand."
245- Quantum Causality As Schrodingers Cat - Fialka probes Robert Anton Wilson, who wrote: "This is ordinary causality, as we usually experience it," he said, as Natalie stifled a yawn. "A causes B, which causes C, and so on. I go to Wildeblood's party at A, and meet you, and we come here to B, and we discuss Krazy Kat at C, which leads to Schrodinger's Cat at D. Got it?" "Yeah, the Gutenberg fix; the linear mode, as McLuhan calls it…" "Right you are. Now quantum causality, before the appearance of the epiphenomena of space and time, functions entirely differently if we trust Bell's Theorem. It looks more like this." And Williams sketches rapidly: . . .He went on like that for nearly an hour. He spoke of the differences between the map and the territory; between the spoken word ("a sonic wave in the atmosphere") and the nonverbal thing or event which the word merely designates; between the menu and the meal. He quoted Hume, Einstein, Korzybski, and Pope Stephen. He dragged in the latest theories in perception psychology, Ethnome-thodology, and McLuhan's version of media-message analysis https://www.e-reading.club/bookreader.php/71400/Wilson_-_Schrodingers_Cat_Trilogy.html 246- Quantum Consciousness As Unconscious Filmmaking - Looking at the creative process through Penrose colored glasses.
247- Tailgate Slogans As Monopolies of Knowledge - Fialka probes bumper stickers like "ESP down, Use signals." "Where the hand of man never set foot" - James Joyce. "Once upon a time called Right Now" - George Clinton. "Question Authority, But not your Mother." "The worst things in life are free."
248- Take To Daze: The Millennial As Dropout - Fialka probes (and maybe updates & reboots) the McLuhan 1972 book Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, which contain these words: "As all monopolies of knowledge break down in our world of information speed-up, the role of executive opens up to Everyman. There are managers galore for the global theater."
249- Fairy Tales As Safe Place Questions - Fialka probes Eudora Welty's axiom "There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer." Explore McLuhan, Joyce, Rousseau, Walter Benjamin and Bruno Bettelheim, whose The Uses of Enchantment influenced Kubrick.
250- Can Art Really Save Your Life? Fialka probes motives of art and music. “Art saved my life. Art was the place that made me want to educate myself. When I became an artist, it was where the most interesting thinkers were.” - Mike Kelley
(PLEASE NOTE: More details on any proposals upon request: 310-306-7330 pfsuzy@aol.com)
251- P.O.B As P.O.B - Pain of betrayal as printed-oriented bastard. Interconnect Orson Welles with Gutenberg.
253- Causality As the Cosmic Egg
254- McLuhan As Judo
255- Fialka Workshops As Click Bait
256- Vacuum Tube As Poetics
257- Cosmic Consciousness As Inclusive Unconsciousness
258- Hopping Frequencies As Quantum Consciousness
259- Skool As Leisure
260- Annette Michelson As Avant-Garde Intercom
261- Soul'd Out: Self-Destruction As Art
262- Freud As Shake Your ESP Ear
263- Mother Culture As Folk Religion
264- Phyllis Kind As The Art Of Necessity
265- Will Vinton: Mud As The Fifth Element
266- Magic Realism As Ensuing Hilarity
267- The Cosmic Joke As Character vs Story
268- How To Make The World A Better Place
269- Experimental Film As HypeBeast
270- Bloom As Bloom (Harold and Joyce)
272- Hypnagogic Vision As Consciousness
273- Sorel Etrog's film
Spiral As McLuhan
274- TikTok As (gulp) Avant Garde Cinema
275- Computerized Facial Recognition As Experimental Film
276- Quantum Entanglement As Faster-Than-Light Consciousness
277- Past Environments As Props
278- Art As Spirituality
279- Swimming Fast As Social Media
280- Government Shutdown As Resonant Interval
281- Quaver As Effect
282- Semiquaver as Seismic Effect
283- Twitter As Wabi-sabi
284- Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) As Advertising
285- Wikipedia As Utopia: Marxist Sociologist Erik Olin Wright
286- Thomas Merton As Wu Wei
287- Poet As Priest: Robert Scheer
288- Film Viewing As Uber
289- Going out to be alone - Fialka probes McLuhan's question "In every other country, including the Eskimo world, people go outside to be with people and inside to be alone. Why did the Americans ever hit upon this weird reversed pattern?"
290- Conflict As The Human Condition - Interactive workshop probing: “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….In 2002, Donald Trump called Citizen Kane his favorite movie. His advice for the title character, Charles Foster Kane was ‘Get yourself a different woman.’” –James Poniewosik NY Times 12-13-17. "The word makes the market." - McLuhan. "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." - Robert Dobbs
291- WR: Mysteries of Makavejev - Fialka worldly revolutionary encounters with screening Dusan Makavejev's films in public on the big screen.
292- Alchemy As Satire - Fialka probes how artists invent anew then satirize it. Tertium quid (Latin for "third something," literally, "third what") is the alchemical term referring to an unidentified third element that results when two known ones are combined. Laurence Sterne, Preston Sturges, and Frank Zappa among others satirized their new inventive forms of creativity. Sterne's novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy combines the biographical novel with the comic novel resulting in a preface that never begins. 293- Mistakes As Typos - "A poet can survive everything but a misprint." - Oscar Wilde. “Typos are worse than fascism.” ― I.F. Stone. There is a typo in every word of Finnegans Wake on purpose.
294- Wrongness As ? - Fialka probes the services and disservices of wrongness. " I really enjoy the way Frank takes simple winning musical themes and twists them inside out-- adding just the right amount of 'wrongness' to keep you guessing." - blog writer Reeltime.
295- Instant Replay As Experience - Fialka probes "the instant replay." "I think the instant replay is probably the most powerful experience that you will ever have in your lifetime. . . . One of the conflicts of a progressive and rapidly changing world concerns the use of surrounding services which have been obsolesced by daily innovations and discoveries. A vast new industry has been born from this conflict, and its name is 'Camp', and its motto is: 'Throw something lovely away today. Help beautify junkyards'. Despite the grotesque aspect of 'Camp' as the incessant revival of that which has scarcely had a chance to register its appearance or existence, it has already been itself obsolesced by the popular technology of the video replay. The instant replay, available mainly to the audiences of sporting events, offers, as it were, the meaning minus the experience, reversing Mr. T.S. Eliot's observation that 'we had the experience but missed the meaning'. The instant replay is the meaning in that it is less concerned with the input of experience than with the process of perception. The instant replay, indeed, offers not just cognition but re-cognition, and leads the mind to the world of pattern recognition, to aftersight and foresight. . . . Living in a new environment of instant electric information has shifted American attention from specific goals to the cognitive thrills of pattern recognition, a change most obviously manifested in the TV service of the instant replay." - Marshall McLuhan. "First, the Pollstergeist would generate the means for its own metaphysical self-consciousness, its own doubleness, or folding back on itself - the instant replay. This technology would allow the Pollstergeist to wallow in and exploit its own "memory theatre", and, like an artist, create the effects beforehand, anticipating its first extension, of its own subsequent evolutionary leap - the hologram." - Robert Dobbs.
296- Barbara Rubin As Peacemaking Pollinator - Fialka probes Rubin's film and spirituality. Ed Sanders of The Fugs, called her "the legendary Barbara Rubin, who wandered the era pollinating across the film, poetry, folk-rock, and peacemaking scenes." Chuck Smith's 2018 biographical documentary is called Barbara Rubin And The Exploding NY Underground.
298- Word? - Fialka probes the question "Do you believe in God?" Harold Bloom said, "I'm not an atheist. My attitude towards Yahweh is that I don't like him and I don't trust him and I wish he would go away. But I know the won't, because he's built into the language, as Nietzsche said. He's part of the way we think." The word "Catholic" means: across and below environments.
299- Film As No Formula - Fialka probes the underground and Jonas Mekas, who said, “There is no formula. The avant-garde is always the front line in any field. In science, in music, where somebody just comes in, moving ahead into some totally unknown area, the future, and doing something not so much that people aren’t used to, but going maybe to different content, using different techniques, different technology. That’s the avant-garde to me. That’s where usually it’s all very fragile, and on the front line is where usually most of the bullets hit you. Most of the attacks are directed against the front line. It’s that area that I felt needed somebody who would defend it from all those critics and those attacks. So that was my function, to try to help those very fragile new developments.”
300- Fialka As Tummler - Inspired by Danny Kaye, Gerry Fialka probes his role as "tummler," a word meaning "a funmaker, a 'live wire,' a clown, a prankster, the 'life of the party'" according to Leo Rosten. The roots of the word: An entertainer or master of ceremonies, especially one who encourages audience interaction (from Yiddish טומלער Tumler, from טומלען tumlen 'make a racket'; cf. German (sich) tummeln 'go among people, cavort').
Gerry Fialka
310-306-7330