




So much forgetten already
So much forgotten
So much to forget
Once the idea of purity
born, all was lost
irrevocably
The Black Musician
in a house up the hill
Nigger in the woodpile
Skeleton in the closet
Sorry. Didn't mean you.
An old man, someone's
daughter
Arises
& sees us still in the room
of off-key piano & bad
paintings
him off to work
&new wife arriving
(The candle-forests of
Notre-Dame)
beggar nuns w/ moving
smiles, small velvet sacks
& cataleptic eyes
straying to the gaudy
Mosaic calendar
Windows
I write like this
to seize you
give me your love, your
tire eyes, sad for
delivery
A small & undiscover'd
park -- we ramble
And the posters scream
safe revolt
& the tired walls barely
fall, graffiti into
dry cement sand
an overfed vacuum
dust-clock
I remember freeways
Summer, beside you
Ocean -- brother
Storms passing
electric fires in the night
"rain, night, misery --
the back-ends of wagons"
Shake it! Wanda,
fat stranded swamp
Woman
We still need you
Shake your roly-poly
Thighs inside that
Southern tent
So what.
It was really wild
She started nude & put
on her clothes.
An old & cheap hotel
w/ bums in the lobby
genteel bums of satisfied
poverty
Across the street, a
famous pool-hall
where the actors meet
former ace -- home of
beat musicians
beat poets & beat
wanderers
in the Zen tradition
from China to the
Subway
in 4 easy lifetimes
Weeping, he left his pad
on orders from police
& furnishings hauled
away, all records &
momentos, & reporters
calculating tears &
curses for the press:
"I hope the Chinese junkies
get you"
& they will
for the poppy
rules the world
That handsome gentle
flower
Sweet Billy!
Do you remember
the snake
your lover
tender in the tumbled
brush-weed
sand & cactus
I do.
And I remember
Stars in the shotgun
night
eating pussy
til the mind runs
clean
Is it rolling, God
in the Persian Night?
"There's a palace
in the canyon
where you & I
were born
Now I'm a lonely Man
Let me back into
the Garden
Blue Shadows
of the Canyon
I met you
& now you're gone
& now my dream is gone
Let me back into your Garden
A man searching
for lost Paradise
Can seem a fool
to those who never
sought the other world
Where friends do lie & drift
Insanely in
Their own private gardens"
The cunt bloomed
& the paper walls
Trembled
A monster arrived
in the mirror
To mock the room
& its fool
alone
Give me songs
to sing
& emerald dreams
to dream
& I'll give you love
unfolding
Sun
underwater, it was
immediately strange
& familiar
the black boy's
from the boat, fins & mask,
Nostrils bled liquid
crystal blood
as they rose to surface
Rose & moved strong
in their wet world
Below was a Kingdom
Empire of still sand
& yes, party-colored
fishes
-- they are the last
to leave
The gay sea
I eat you
avoiding your wordy
bones
& spit out pearls
The little girl gave
little cries of surprise
as the club struck
her sides
I was there
By the fire in the
Phonebooth
I saw them charge
& heard the indian
war-scream
felt the adrenalin
of flight-fear
the exhilaration of terror
sloshed drunk in
the flashy battle blood
Naked we come
& bruised we go
nude pastry
for the slow soft worms
below
This is my poem
for you
Great flowing funky flower'd beast
Great perfumed wreck of hell
Great good disease
& summer plague
Great god-damned shit-ass
Mother-fucking freak
You lie, you cheat,
you steal, you kill
you drink the Southern
Madness swill
of greed
you die utterly & alone
Mud up to your braces
Someone new in your
knickers
& who would that be?
You know
You know more
than you let on
Much more than you betray
Great slimy angel-whore
you've been good to me
You really have
been swell to me
Tell them you came & saw
& look'd into my eyes
& saw the shadow
of the guard receding
Thoughts in time
& out of season
The Hitchhiker stood
by the side of the road
& levelled his thumb
in the calm calculus
of reason.
By Brad Wieners
If, as Mickey Knox once quipped, media is like the weather, only man-made, then Tibor Kalman is a man for all seasons. Kalman has excelled as a magazine editor (Colors), an art director (Artforum), a creative director (Interview), and an industrial and graphic design entrepreneur (M&Co) whose clients included Chiat/Day, Jenny Holzer, MTV, MOMA, Talking Heads, and New York's 42nd Street Development Project. Born in Budapest, Kalman emigrated to the US in 1956 at age 7. He grew up in Poughkeepsie, interviewed Timothy Leary for his high school newspaper, and left New York University for Cuba in 1970 to cut sugarcane in the Ten Million Ton Harvest. Recruited by Oliverio Toscani, Kalman launched Colors in 1991 in New York but two years later moved his family to Rome to continue working on the magazine. In 1995, he quit Colors and returned to New York, where he continued to brood over how to make a truly international magazine. His magazine idea is so intriguing, Wired may collaborate with him on it.
Wired: As a designer, you've said you try to make things look wrong. What do you mean?
Kalman : We live in a society and a culture and an economic model that tries to make everything look right. Look at computers. Why are they all putty-colored or off-fucking-white? You make something off-white or beige because you are afraid to use any other color - because you don't want to offend anybody. But by definition, when you make something no one hates, no one loves it.
So I am interested in imperfections, quirkiness, insanity, unpredictability. That's what we really pay
attention to anyway. We don't talk about planes flying; we talk about them crashing.
What about those computers? Do they make for more beige, or less?
In a way, computers are helpful, because more and more they are giving individuals the power to fuck things up.
You've said that mass media are horribly beige because sponsors want predictable results. You've also said you want your work to be "mass." So how do you get the sponsorship needed for mass without beige-ing out?
Let's face it: we live at a time when government is less and less
powerful, less and less effective, and the agent of social change, at least for the immedia
te future, is the corporation. So people are going to have to figure out
ways to co-opt corp
orations, to trick them into doing socially responsible things. Colors was a very good example of that. You could look at it as a progressive educator, making people
think in new ways about race. Or, if you looked at it as a Benetton stockholder, you might say, "This is a really great
way to reach the kids."
Yeah, but some look at Colors and think: Benetton uses politics the way Nike uses basketball. They see you co-opted, not Benetton.
Look, if someone is going to permit me to make a publication that is politically and culturally progressive and not tell me to put their favorite movie stars on the cover, if I get to do what I want in an honest way - as I did in the beginning at Colors - then I'm going to do it.
No one gets to work under ethically pure conditions, and I think if you are in touch with your audience and they think what you are doing is honest and credible, then you're on safe ice.
Have media always been so compromised?
There was a time not so long ago when egomaniacs made media to their own personal standards, and when you make something for yourself, it will always be far better and more honest than something you make to please the marketplace. With computers, individuals can be egomaniacs and make the media they think is good.
If you were to design a robot, what would it do?
It would laugh at all my jokes. Actually, intelligent people have spent far too much time talking about robots. What we need is fewer people imagining what robots could do and more people thinking about racism.
How many black people, other than Spike and Mike, work on those cool Nike ads that use African-Americans to set cultural and fashion styles? Let's get robot geniuses working on that shit.
Which is more accurate: "Information wants to be free" or "Information wants you to gimme a hundred dollars"?
Everybody who wants information wants it to be free. People who make it, assemble it, edit it, and publish it want to make a living at it. Some of them want large Mercedes-Benzes. But what I want to know is: How is info supposed to be free when food isn't?
Where are you looking for innovative media?
I don't know. Probably it's being hatched in some garage. It's always the freaks in garages who make things move forward. There's always a garage and antisocial behavior involved. I think without those two things there is no real cultural advancement.
There seem to be a lot of new-media garages. What's your take on them?
I think some of the most innovative Web sites have probably already come and gone. Meanwhile, I think there's tons of room left to experiment with traditional media.
Like what?
I want to know if it's possible to make a movie that's just words, or if it's possible to make a movie on paper. And why can't television be 100 times faster? Or slower? And why are 90 percent of magazines structured the same way? And why do they all stop at borders?
What comes after postmodern?
Relief. Clarity. Faith in the future.
Memory
Aleister Crowley, Little essays towards Truth
Memory is of the very stuff of Consciousness itself. Consider that we can never know what is happening, but only what has just happened, even when most actively concentrated on what we call "the present."
Moreover, no impression short of Sammasamadhi can ever pretend to confer any coherent idea of the Self. That exists only in an order of Consciousness far deeper than direct perception, in a type of thought which is capable of combining the quintessence of countless impressions into one, as also of transforming this tabula rasa into a positive prehensile Ego. Whether this process be hallucinatory or no, it is surely memory which, more than any other function of the mind, determines its possibilities.
Now, whatever view we may take of the nature of the Self, it is clear that our limit of error will constantly diminish as the range of our observations is extended. To calculate the orbit of Neptune from a period of days when it is retrograde could lead to formidable fallacies. When memory is seriously weakened, the resulting state approximates to dementia. Memory is then, in a figure, the mortar of the architecture of the mind.
It seems impossible even to begin to discuss its nature as it is in itself; for it is not a Thing at all, but only a relation between impressions. We must be content to observe its virtues.
First of all is that already noted, its extent in time. Second is the faculty of selection.
It would be as undesirable as it is impossible for the memory to retain all impressions indiscriminately. Such memories are found only in lunatic asylums. The memory, whatever it may be, depends on cerebral metabolism; and it thrives on a proper harmony of exercise, repose, and economy just as does muscular strength.
Memory as such is practically worthless; it is like an abandoned library. Its data must be coordinated by judgment, and played upon by skill; it resembles a great Organ which requires an organist.
By classifying simple impressions, one obtains ideas of a higher order; the repetition of this process gives a structure to the mind which makes it a worthy instrument of thought. And this means enables one to retain, and to bring at will from their quiet resting-place, a thousandfold the number of facts which would overwhelm the untrained memory. One must model one's mind upon the arrangement of the ends of the nerve-fibres and the brain.
At will! Here is the great key to proper selection, that one should resolutely remember all facts that may be useful, and as resolutely forget all those impertinent, to the True Way of one's Star in Space. For so only can one economise the mnemonic faculty; and this is to say: no man can begin to train his memory duly until he is aware of his True Will.
There is then -- as in all matters pertaining to the intellect -- a vicious circle; for one can only become conscious of one's true Will by a judgment (of Samadhic intensity) upon all facts that it is possible to assimilate. The resolution of the antinomy is found ambulando: that is by the selective training above indicated.
A further complication of this whole question appears during the practice of Yoga, when, the sheaths being successively stripped from the mind, one begins to remember not only long-forgotten facts, but matters which do not refer to the incarnated Ego at all. The memory extends in time to infancy, to one's previous death, and so further to an unlimited series of experiences whose scope depends on the degree of one' progress. But, parallel with this intensification of the idea of the Ego, its expansion through the aeons, there arises (in consequence of the weakening of the Ahamkara, the Ego-making faculty) a tendency to remember thing which have happened not to "oneself," but to "other people" or beings.
Herein is one of the most irritating obstacles in the Path of the Wise; for the normal development of the memory in Time leads to a better understanding of the True Will of the individual (as he conceives of himself) so that he perceives an universe teleologically more rational as he progresses. To be compelled to assimilate the experiences of supposes "alien beings" is to become confused: the old hotchpot of Choronzon (Restriction be unto him in the name of BABALON!) gapes once more for the Adept, who possibly supposed himself already (in a sense) a Freeman of the City of the Pyramids.
But it is just this experience -- in default of any other -- which eventually insists on his undertaking to cross the Abyss: for the alternative to sheer insanity is seen to be the discovery of a General Formula comprehensive of Universal Experience without reference to the Ego (real or supposed) in any sense.
This paradox, like all others, should be a lesson of supreme value: this, that every difficulty is for our vantage, that every question is posed only in order to lead us to an answer involving a triumph infinitely more glorious than we could otherwise have conceived.
And meditation upon this whole matter may not unlikely bring us to this further vision of wonder: that the nature of things themselves is in reality but a function of Memory.
фестивал на паметта и спомените
*имах един приятел, който буквално се напиваше от спомени. взимаше произволен миг и го извайваше, преекспонираше, превърташе и гледаше отново и отново, без да губи и милисекунда удоволствие. едва ли преживяваше, по-скоро бе постигнал някаква естетическа отдалеченост, която го превръщаше в превъзходен поет и ужасен любовник. :)
*дълго време спомените за определен период от живота ми, към година и нещо, бяха избледнели или изтикани; фактологически можех да си спомня някакви неща - била съм там, правила съм това или онова с този или онзи, но го усещах като някакъв стар филм, който не ме вълнува по никакъв начин. странното е, че спомените ми за емоциите от това време бяха концентрирани в една поредица от 4-5 съня, които преживявах много по-реално и наситено. струваше ми се, че ако успея да ги разбера, ще отключа някаква врата.
*в един разказ на Борхес протагонистът Фунес има налудничавата способност да помни всичко, наистина всичко - и му липсва какъвто и да е филтър, който да отсее дребните, ненужни детайли (примерно карето на покривката от 17 февруари миналата година) от значимите неща в живота му. умира в нещо като инертен ступор.
впрочем има и подобен истински случай.
...и нещо, което намерих, докато ровех за още от същия :)