The mind, conditioned as it is by the past, always seeks to recreate what it
knows and is familiar with;
Even if it is painful, at least it is familiar.
The mind always adheres to the known. The unknown is dangerous because it has no control over it.
That is why the mind dislikes and ignores the present moment.
Present moment awareness creates a gap not only in the steam of mind, but also
in the past-future continuum Nothing truly new and creative can come into this
world except through that gap - that clear space of infinite possibility.
PRANKS! ISSUE #11
240 pages. B&W. 46 Interviews with various contemporary artists. Essays. Pictures. defaulted.
FROM INTRODUCTION
by
V.VALE & A.JUNO
p. 4 Unfortunately pranks are usually identified with—and limited topre-adult stages of development. At the point of "adulthood" the multiplication of mischief must cease; youths are supposed to "grow out of" the need to perpetuate pranks as they accept society's restriction of their spirit through the progressive conventionalization of their behavior. The role model of the adult prankster is a scarce archetype indeed. But pranks can continue until one's dying breath: when he died, Surrealist Andre Breton was taken to the cemetery in a moving van.
p.5 ... At a single stroke a prank can dissect an intricate tissue of artifice, exposing a rigid behavioral structure underneath.
By unhinging the context for expectation, pranks explode the patterning which narrows and shrinks down our imaginative potential. What distinguishes a painting from wallpaper, or literature from stock reports, is the tearing and ripping apart of old forms and structures to create new perceptions which renew and refresh life itself. All art attempts to rid life of banality; to expunge the habituation effect whose cause is "daily living".
Obedience to language and image must continually be challenged, if we are to stay "alive".
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
—Jim Morrison
L.A.,1969-71
INTERVIEW: MARK PAULINE
p.9 ... They [the billboards] were a way for me to get my ideas out in public, independent of the art scene. It was like the first leg in a journey away from dependency on these decrepit institutions for the enhancement of your creativity whose sole purpose is to not allow you to be creative, but to crush your creativity. This was me stepping out to test the waters outside of that stifling enclave.
p.14 Andrea Juno: Most artists are living under the horrible myth of the artist as ineffectual, spacey, erratic "genius" who doesn't have to be rigorous, disciplined or precise. Or that if you're an artist you must use a paintbrush.
p.17 MP: Pranks are a constructed, fabricated attack against the framework of the society. They're like a bursting out. Society paints us all into a corner and the whole point of pranks is to open the door and escape !
...
Vale: ... It's first-hand experience of arbitrariness of authority; a kind of sham humor masquerading as genuine fun. Submission to authority can never be more than pointless degradation.
...
AJ: A good prank is a social comment. One has to have a good analysis of the society: who has the power and who doesn't ...the fact that the basic tenets of out society are intrinsically stupefying, inane and evil. A good prank pokes fun and is illuminating, whereas a bad prank supports the society and is a conservative action enhancing existing power relationships, conventionality and all that one is rebelling against. A good prank raises life up to what art should be: a critique of society, and a glimpse into a better, more poetic future!
INTERVIEW: BOYD RICE
p.33 [Boyd feigned locking Dave Simmons (of Fad Gadget) into a closet] "Don't give me that...If I weren't locked in, why would I put up with a half hours worth of abuse ?" He refused to believe that I never locked the door, and wouldn't acknowledge that he hadn't once tried the handle. He couldn't admit to himself (like most people can't) that he was an active participant in his own deception...that he had allowed himself to be fooled because of assumption. The old cliché is true: When we assume, we make an ASS of U and ME.
There's no reason to assume the sun will rise tomorrow, just because it has in the past...That's an overstatement, of course, but the less you take for granted the better off you'll be in the long run. Belief is one of the trickiest traps there is. Nothing takes the place of direct experience and experiment.
INTERVIEW: JOEY SCAGGS
p.38 The world is full of such self-made victims. When you think about that, you think about all of the people who don't know how or are afraid to tap into, recognize, encourage, and nurture their own powers...Just because your history as a child made you a victim, you don't have to continue being one. You don't have to be a self-made victim just because you were the victim of abuse or stupidity by your parents or by society.
INTERVIEW: ABBIE HOFFMAN
p.67 Mythology grows out of closure. So by the time the story was released, it was me doing handstands on the judges' desk in court —the whole concept of court as circus.
INTERVIEW: PAUL KRASSNER
p.90 The autobiography has to be about now, otherwise I'll be competing with myself. The bottom line is the fun and education that you get writing it—it forces you to see the patterns of your life...and how, for better or worse, because of poor decisions, or circumstances, or whatever, it's been almost an inevitable chain leading to where you are now.
...
Andrea Juno: We're in a very dangerous time when all rebellion has been sold back to us, and the symbols of rebellion are just that—mere symbols. No longer can your evaluations of people rely on what they look like, as in the earliest punk years or the early hippie era.
[Rambo, is such a symbol. A corporate created character. A controlled, packaged, rebellious, anti-social, rebel-hero, that is dangled before our, frustrated, consumer eyes, greedy to buy a glimpse of a destroyer in his moment of glorious revenge in order to vicariously fulfill/vent our suppressed rage, indulge our inflamed fantasies. Rambo is conveniently fleshed out for us. He is not a solution to our problems. He does not suggest to us practical solutions. He does not work within the framework of the system. He fights injustice with ire. Rage. Violence. He confronts the bullies with his might. He is our hero. Our Superman. Super man is the Jekyll/Hyde of our times. Embodied in his being, as in our subconscious, is the submissive Clarke Kent/Walter Mitty/Caspar Milquetoast/ and the male rage of Frankenstein/Grendel/The incredible hulk.
As any commodity—be it the wrath of suppressed and huddled masses, he, as savior, is offered to us, for a small price * to purchase for a fleeting instant of false gratification. Our barn burning fury is channeled into ineffective outlets, such as sports spectatorship. Where one goes from playing the game to contentment with actively watching. From active play to active passivity sports) by the wizard of odds. Our energies are channeled into the safe mental violence against oppression, not in collaborations with each other to collectively devise a plan to better our situation and carry it out in an act of revolt or social change. Our hostile energies are safely routed by the instigators of our anguish. They placate us by presenting a sacrifice of their image, but one which they alone choose and administer. They control. We believe. Rambo may appear as an innocuous two dimensional presentation, but all his wrath and furry translates into a placated, opiated impotent society.
Rambo is innocently offered to us for our consumption. A pre-packaged deal of relief. Blow off some steam. Live vicariously for a while. Therapy. The subversion lies in the Substitution for real action, real relief, relief from our oppressors, our bosses. and their superiors, the owners who greedily sap profits disproportionate to our labors that we never see. that we never benefit from. While we meekly accept substandard wages for our efforts. With no bearing to the marked value of the product we slave toward manufacture. That we stupidly and blindly slave toward its manufacture in our sacrifice of a life outside the factory/office.
Rambo is presented as a David to us, society, Goliath, yet it is establishment-big business al la corporate America that dangles the puppet image, that presents the Socratic cave shadow, before our eyes in exchange for the fruit of our labors—cash, which we have hard earned from them. [Subsequently, they don't have to whore themselves to labor contract and are free to spend their free time contemplating and creating strategies, policies and administrations of control. Economic control. He who controls the fruit of all labor, controls the market (?) Captains of commerce, Captains of industry, captains of consciousness. Power brokers, Pawn brokers, and we are the pawns. Control of their industries (the means of production) where we work, the conditions, (environment), they set the value of our efforts—place dollar sign on our efforts which in turn become our livelihood, and the producers (us) as well as the conduits of capitol (our money) that they offer us in exchange for our time/ergs—wit & wisdom.
We're paying them to perpetuate the myth, the deceit, the delusion, the opiate—our beliefs, the regime. We fuel their fascistic regime through our tax payer, laborer vote—THE DOLLAR.
We support our own incarceration. We pay for it, fund it, buy it. And by not getting involved in government, by being passive, accepting work, not organizing, watching sports, TV, etc., we ordain our incarceration.
They have fashioned our relief from them — entertainment, an industry itself which they have control of. They know what we want to see. They know what we want changed; ultimately, and radically, we want freedom from them, we want them gone, dead. They know this and control us by giving us the satisfaction of experiencing destruction, the object or focus of which they carefully choose, control. And present it to us as an Illusion of choice. They perpetuate their facade of indestructibility, infallibility, imperviousness, invulnerability by manipulating us through manipulating images. Images we have both been indoctrinated to believe in, and have perpetuated, foolishly, unexamined, unquestioned nurtured even, our attachment to. Our unfounded faith is our neurosis, the disease of our time, giving way to narcissism—we attempt to meet goals that are absurd, to appear as we are not, to behave in ways which betray our instincts, our personalities, our nature. Our short-sightedness and vanity is our doom, our down fall. Society is a facade that is crumbling from within. —bracketed rant mine]
p.91 PK: ...It's necessary to understand the process people undergo so they can live with themselves. For the sake of their self-esteem they have to justify what they do. ... People find their own causes. There's a kind of supply and demand—who knows why.
For some people it's SAVE THE WHALES, for others it's abortion rights. For people who work in a missile factory:
"Well, we need a strong defense." For someone who works in a cigarette factory, they will say, "Well, people have to relax." When I worked for Hustler, I had one...
INTERVIEW: KAREN FINLEY
p.96 My current work is dispelling myths. ...Freud molested his own daughter and sister-in-law on repeated occasions.
INTERVIEW: ALAN ABLE
P.105 ... The capacity we all have to do something is there—we just don't tap it.
p.107 We're living in a hamburger-type world; there's no quality anywhere, and everything you buy—automobiles, everything—is disposable and planned to be obsolete. Because we're consumers, and consumers consume in order to pay welders $25.00/hr. to make cars, or pay doctors so that they can pay their malpractice insurance, ad infinitum—there's no end to that spiral of what it costs in order to function in this jungle we live in. And it's a psychological jungle.
...
So I've used these techniques to get what I really want as a fair shake. Most people don't do that—they're like sheep; they'd rather go to the Nazi gas chamber than protest something or stand up and challenge authority.
[dispense with the indoctrination they taught you in school, and possibly home, of not feeling good about standing up for yourself.
[There's a big difference between the Me Generation of shits who drive down the shoulders of expressways and those who get off the expressway completely and explore and possibly learn a new route, even if it means taking three times as long getting home one time, being lost and hungry without a map in a strange neighborhood.—mine]
[Television is geared toward 12-year-old mentalities because those are the people dumb enough to fall for the misrepresented products that ads call our attention to. —mine]
INTERVIEW: FRANK DISCUSSION
p.157 ... History is such a well-oiled self-perpetuating control machine: people are conditioned to think it's necessary to divulge their personal history—where and when they were born, what their real name is, etc. But all that does is serve to entrap you.
p.158 ...when you look around and see all these insipid social relationships; when you see everyone has bought into all these pallid roles and situations that aren't even fun; when you're surrounded all day by conversation that is totally bland and mediocre: then you can really feel a gut-level rage that makes you want to destroy.
... In terms of psychological applications, doing pranks at the job helps you keep your mind—they keep you from being ground down to nothing. After a full day's work without pranks, I'm often three quarters brain-dead—definitely duller. But when you're doing pranks, you're exercising your mind, being creative, and that counteracts a lot of job-related retardation of your thought process, so that the job has far fewer deleterious effects!
J.G.Ballard ISSUE #8/9
174 pages, black & white with pictures of photographs, interviews with Ballard, Excerpts from his work. British science fiction writer, J.G.Ballard.
Ballard was featured in the 1987 epic length (152 min.) motion picture by director Steven Spielberg, Empire of the Sun, based on the autobiographical novel by Ballard adapted by British playwright, Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead). Music by John Williams. Color. Stars include John Malkavich. Plot: 9-year-old boy living a sheltered life with his doctor father and house wife mother in Shanghai when Japanese invade during WWII. He is separated from his parents during a frantic mass exodus. He is imprisoned and sent to an internment camp where he learns to survive.
Ballard wrote a poignant short story, popular during the 1960's about a man seeing a psychologist. The man is convinced that these ominous black billboards that have recently been erected along the highways are flashing subliminal messages.
He may be best known for CRASH, a novel about automobile accidents. Recently adapted for the screen.
I listened to an abridged edition of Drowned world, 1963? Review pending.
ON DOGS
They have a guard role.
They also have a submissive role of total devotion that people crave. (p.22)
A.JUNO & VALE:
America never went through a "surrealist" phase of cultural development; in England there was at least a small surrealist movement, with David Gascoyne, Herbert Read, Conroy Maddox—
(p.23)
J.G.B.
I think we're in a situation not unlike the 50's, which at the time seemed a bit dull...but things were happening—the rails were being laid on which everything was suddenly going to go forward at enormous speed. That may be happening now—I have that feeling. I don't feel as depressed about everything as I did about five years ago—when I felt that nothing was ever going to happen again.... (p.28)
As you get older—25 years from now—you begin to find friends fall by the wayside. If you get divorced, you never quite make up the friendship with the spouse. A few die, or immigrate—you name it; interests change. But the typewriter still remains, of course, and work goes on. So you look inside your own head—endless forests crisscrossing across the sensorium. I'm not sure that's a very good way to live—I somehow think it may be terrible. [laughs] (p.32)
Our central nervous system provides us with a conventional view of reality that most people accept simply in order to be able to cope with the day-to-day business of crossing rooms, walking up staircases, or talking to one's agent on the telephone. Unless one accepts a high degree of conventionalizing, reality would be impossible. You can't start off every second by saying, "What's this white structure besides me? Uh—it's a wall." (p.43)
I'm interested in deciphering the whole system of codes that I
see—by dismantling that whole conventionalized apparatus with which our central nervous systems cope with the business of
day-to-day living—which, of course, is the greatest trap facing us all.
(P.44)
The fact that I am who I am is a giant accident. This is a paradox we all have to live with: each of us has a unique character and identity which is an enormous accident, a complete billion to one chance against, while at the same time it's totally real. For each of us, existence is like being the winner of some enormous lottery prize! It's both a product of enormous chance (what are we, just a twitch on some sort of vast random cosmic tracing?) but at the same time it's totally real.
...it's one thing to indulge some sort of dream of violence or explore a psychopathic urge within the freedom of one's own skull. It's quite another thing to actually have to fuse that psychopathic vision into an actual novel or a piece of music. Having to do that is a sobering effect. I can only speak as a writer, but the requirements of constructing an imaginative work that will touch other people's imagination and elicit a powerful response from them, does tend to eliminate the frivolous....
(p.47)
...our lives are a kind of extended practical joke we play on ourselves without realizing it. I mean, look at me here, living in a suburban house with a rusting outside and a television set that doesn't work—the only thing that does work is the corkscrew—and I feel it must be a joke. What am I doing here? I must be a character in a Pinter play, or in a sitcom that has gone out of control of its scriptwriters.
We're like people who always go to the same restaurant and always order the same meal. Without making very much effort, we could all have far richer lives and more diverse, more exciting and interesting experiences.
What's so sad about most people's lives, my own included, is that they accept the roles that are given to them; they become a stockbroker or a secretary or a science fiction writer and just carry on with it, rather like a minor actor in Crossroads. I think I might have had a much more interesting life if I'd never been a writer. I put too much of myself into my writing, but there we are. (p.109)
Ideas gleaned from John Lilly,So Far… An Autobiography.
Wrapping this odiously practical package in pat psychoanalytic clichés made John angry. His angry reaction to them was interpreted as the cause of his problem. His acquiescence would be the "cure." Through this dialog of text book Freud, John gained insight into the complicated devious logic sophisticated people used to coerce others in order to operate. He saw how they smooth over the edges of individual preferences, and persuade, compromise, and acquiesce for their own ideas, ideals, institutions benefit and profit.
Life’s time’s fool, and time that makes a survey of all the world, must have to stop.
—W.S.Shakespeare
Paraphrased from the pages of GROWING UP ABSURD, by Paul Goodman.
(Like What Uncle Sam Really Wants and Lies My Teacher Told Me, this book is rich in ideas and well written.)
Our economic problem of synthesized demand, manufactured taste, debauching the public and preventing the emergence and formation of natural taste. It is under these circumstances that there cannot possibly be an American culture; we are doomed to nausea and barbarism. And then they have the effrontery to declare they give the people what they demand and that they are not responsible for the low performance level of the arts.
Chapter 1, Jobs
p25
What happens to the verbally bright who have no zeal for a serviceable profession and who have no particular scientific or artistic bent? For the most part they comprise the tribes of salesmen, entertainers, business management, promoters and advertisers. Here there is no question of utility or honor, so an ingenious boy will look elsewhere for a career.
Consider the men and women in TV advertisements, demonstrating the product and singing the jingle. They are clowns and mannequins, in grimace, speech and action. Synthetic demand aside, these are human beings working as clowns; the writers and designers of it are human beings thinking like idiots; the broadcasters and underwriters know and abet this behavior.
Juicily glubbily
Blubber is dubbily
delicious and nutritious
eat it, Kitty, it's goooood.
Alternately, they are liars, confidence men, smooth talkers, obsequious, insolent, etc.
[Blabmeister's interjection: With a constant flow of pathetic idiocy streaming out of the television 24 hours a day, what message do you suppose this delivers to children? What impression do you suppose they come away with from exposure to this incessant stream? At first, when TV was new, adults could shrug it off, its stupid advertising claims. But now that the children of TV’s premier are adults, they are assimilated into the crap culture. They had no reference of a non-TV environment from which to compare. They are dupes, inculcated, like the second generation of Vietnamese fighting the war or the prior generation without knowing peace time life. Their reference for normalcy is war. Their life, since infancy, has been war. This is what they are imprinted with. They are warriors by lifestyle. We, suburban americans are crap mongers because we were raised on TV. And ultimately by parents and teachers who were raised off it as well. Baby Boomers are nostalgic for the crappy television programs that were less crappy then, than the recent past ones which are better than the present ones running.
Even for those who wake up, who get an idea of how horrible, how ridiculous it all is, it is nigh impossible to tune out. There are those who move to the wilderness. The removal of the stimulus has profound effects. Live with out it and see. It is not simply removed. It has so deeply influenced us, this pop culture, consumerism, that we do not see, do not realize just how much it influences our thought, our feeling, our behavior, our reflection. We are blind-sided by it, and blind to it. It is pervasive, it is underestimated in its effect on us. You cannot undo your past. Once exposed to it, you are infected for life. If you grew up in isolated conditions, and only saw ten minutes of television your entire life, it would stay with you, you would remember it to your dying day.
We are not only influenced by what we see on television, in advertising of all sorts, but by what we do not see. What is absent has a profound effect on us as well. The absence of an object, of an item, can be obvious or so subtle as to be subliminal. Twentieth century advertising is the master art of subversion and slight of mind. Manipulation of the observer with image, suggestion, words, symbols. They may not sell you their product, but they can influence your estimation of the opposite sex, by re-enforcing extant values, be they conscious or latent.
End of Blabmeister's rant]
p28
There are not enough worthy jobs in our economy for average boys and girls or adolescents to grow up toward. There are thousands of jobs that are worthy and self-justifying, and thousands that can be made so by stubborn integrity—especially if one can work as an independent. Those with extraordinary intelligence or special talent can carve out a place for themselves—conversely, the corruption and waste of the work place are all the more sickening to them. Our economic society is not geared toward the cultivation of its young or attainment of important goals that they can work toward.
This is evident from the guidance which consists of measuring the student and finding some place in the economy where he can be fitted; chopping him down to make him fit; or neglecting him if they cannot find a slot.
We have gotten so that] Nobody asks if a job is useful or honorable. [What this means is] to grow up into such a world that the reality is: "During my productive years I will spend eight hours [remember, this was written in 1956! More like 10 hours, now (1996)] a day doing no good [under disagreeable conditions].
Blabmeister's interjection:
Children are not stupid. They may be naïve, gullible, but they are perceptive. They see their elders and have a clue as to what they are in for. How many parents come home beaming with joy and shining with positive energy and optimism. Mine didn’t. And people, parents especially, wonder why youths are taking drugs -willingly-. Not as victims of school yard pushers, but active participants seeking relief, escape. I’m not blaming parents for coming home tired, and irritable. But look at the world that adults have created, are in the process of creating—perpetuating, for their young. This is why I, and many others of my age and intelligence, perceptiveness, are refusing to raise children. To afford to be self-supporting is to work more than a full-time job. The marketplace—business world in this country is a zoo, a jungle. We know it need not be. Drugs are a welcome escape. Reality, the current situation, is ugly. Its nauseating. Why would I want to raise a child in this environment? I was largely sheltered as a child, and childhood was still painful. The sheltering I received contributed to my disillusionment. The gap between the truth, the reality of the big bad world, and my idyllic living conditions contributed to my disillusionment, estrangement, alienation.
Page 30
Our society, which is not geared toward the cultivation of its young, is geared to a profitable expanding production, a so-called high standard of living of mediocre value, and the maintenance of full employment [a closed job market—The Unemployed Need Not Apply].
[In short, the carrot wilted long ago. The picture that replaced it has faded and been stolen. The note excusing the absence of the picture of the wilted relic, was eaten by the cat. The ass is dead, sold off for chop. Yours is next. Beware the butcher’s blade. The rich must eat. Let them Eat the Poor! Yea, verily, they feasted. Amen.]
Goodman goes on about the Beats at length. Here he lists the preferred Beat jobs.
Section 8, chapter III
Among the Beats, a principle of integrity is clearly operating in the choice of job. Many of the humble jobs of the poor are precisely not useless (or exploiting). Farm labor, hauling boxes, janitoring, serving, and dish washing, messenger—these jobs resist the imputation of uselessness (or exploitation) made against the productive society as a whole. No questions are asked. No beards have to be sheared. Nor is this as accidental connection. Personal freedom goes with unquestioned moral utility of the job, for the level of simple physical effort of personal service, the fraudulent conformity of the organized system sometimes does not yet operate; the job speaks for itself.
Chapter III SECTION 8
P69
The big money is in the system. So unorganized wages are low. Yet the price of subsistence at the market is standard high. Taking such a job, a man loses his freedom, he never stops working. He is used and made a fool of by the system, and this is in itself dishonorable. This is the dilemma of the voluntary poverty in our society: either to compromise one’s integrity (but then why bother?), or to be abused and made a fool of.
[ If you die on the job, please sign out, wrap yourself in plastic, and, for God’s sake, DON’T BLEED on anything on your way out the door!
I have not been a farm hand or waiter, but I have been all of the rest. ]
CHAPTER IV SECTION 1
p71
BOREDOM & STUPIDITY DEFINED
The pain one feels when doing nothing or something irrelevant, instead of something you want to do but wont, can’t or doesn’t dare. Boredom is chronic if you have repressed the thought of it and are no longer aware of it. A large part of stupidity is chronic boredom. For a person cannot learn, or be intelligent about what he is not interested in, when his repressed thoughts are elsewhere.
A large part of our common wasteful inactivity is the neurosis of chronic boredom. Aims are forbidden and punishable, or unobtainable and painful; so we inhibit them and put them out of mind. In a vicious circle, the repression that makes the idea of the aims threatening; the aims are now rejected also in ourselves. So we are bored and inactive. We see how boredom turns to apathy, the lack of incentive.
At first this Sunday-afternoon neurosis, of lively children brought to pause, is worse among the middle class than the poor, for the middle class is less permissive, it has stricter standards to maintain and more expensive furniture to protect. But by adolescence it is generally evident that in all classes of the young, hanging around, reading comic books, or watching TV. It is evident in their notion of what is acceptable behavior in their groups, in their sexual paranoia, in their inability to think up anything interesting. Their hearts are elsewhere and they don’t remember where.
Ineptitude, not knowing how; the situation in which, even if they know their aims, children don’t know the means or can’t manage the means. I propose that in this
respect our present system is uniquely bad and getting worse. For ironically, just in our times, when science and technology are so advanced, this factor of ineptitude also increases, and children become practically more stupid.
"Techno-boredom"
—Reverend Puzzling Evidence (?)
In an abundant economy, there is a plethora of means of what a person doesn’t really want.
"Technological Bluff"
—Jacques Ellul
Appendix:
The entire action of On the Road is the avoidance of interpersonal conflict.
Noam Chomsky’s What Uncle Sam Really Wants.
I hadn’t read very far into this short book before I realized this is one of the quintessential Blab books. The last book I read that gave me this impression was Gore Vidal’s The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, also a short book published by Odonian Press’s Real Story series.
Chomsky comes recommended by both Vidal, and Jello Biafra.
An incredible indictment of the US Government.
Chomsky discovers a little know policy of an unknown policy maker whose instructions the us government has been following at least since 1948.
If you never believed the US attacked South Vietnam to save it from communism, this book tells the real reason. If you are like me and saw through the veil of lies justifying the Persian Gulf War, but aren’t sure why US armed forces stomped Arabs, Noam has an answer for you.
This book crystallized numerous fragments in my memory or unsolved mysteries, unanswered questions. I was certain the Drug War on the American people was a greased pole for swinish politicians to pretend to scale, but I hadn’t yet fathomed why. Chomsky has lucid insight into Uncle Sam’s modus operandi.
100 pages. $5.00. Check your public library.
James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me.
Excerpt from page 67.
Europe’s fascination with the Americas was directly responsible for European self-consciousness. In a sense there was no "Europe" before 1492. People were simply Tuscan, French, and the like. For that matter there were no "white" people in Europe before 1492.
Excerpt from page 68.
It is always useful to think badly about people one has exploited or plans to exploit. Modifying one’s opinions to bring them into line with one’s actions or planned actions is the most common outcome of the process known as "cognitive dissonance," according to psychologist Leon Festinger. No one likes to think of himself or herself as a bad person. To treat badly another person whom we consider a reasonable human being creates a tension between act and attitude that demands resolution. We cannot erase that we have done, and to alter our future behavior may not be in our best interest. To change our attitude is easier.
Leon F. A Cognitive Theory of Dissonance, 1957
page 143
"It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christian."
—Montisquieu
page 70
On Columbus.
The worshipful biographical vignettes of Columbus in our textbooks serve to indoctrinate students into a mindless endorsement of colonialism that is strikingly inappropriate in today’s post colonial era.
William S. Burroughs' Junky, paperback ed. 1985
xvii paraphrased
I am paralyzed with heavy reluctance, I simply cannot reread it (the manuscript I have written).
Page 1, paraphrased.
The rudeness of many Americans depressed him, a rudeness based on ignorance of the concept of manners, and the premise that, for social reasons, all people are more or less equal and interchangeable.
Page 2
What Lee looked for in any relationship was the feel of contact.
Page 6
Moor was motivated, kept alive and moving by hate, but there was no passion or violence in his hate. Moor's hate was a slow, steady push, weak but infinitely persistent. He had aged without experiencing life, like a piece of meat rotting on a pantry shelf.
Page 23
He looked like a sullen child unable to locate the source of his ill temper.
Page 25
Lee did not enjoy frustration. The limitations of his desires were like the bars of a cage, like a chain and collar, something he had learned as an animal learns, through days and years of experiencing the snub of the chain, the unyielding bars. He had never resigned himself, and his eyes looked out through the invisible bars, watchful, alert, waiting for the keeper to forget the door, for the frayed collar, the loosened bar. . . suffering without despair and without consent.
Page 27
Lee had conversational routines that Allerton had never heard.
Page 39
I might well have destroyed myself, ending an existence which seemed to offer
nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation.
Page 40
Poor Bobo came to a sticky end. He was riding in the Duc de Ventre's Hispano-Suiza
when his falling piles blew out of the car and wrapped around the rear wheel.
He was completely gutted, leaving an empty shell sitting there on the giraffe-skin
upholstery. Even the eyes and the brain went, with a horrible shlupping sound.
The Duc says he will carry that ghastly shlup with him to his mausoleum. . .
.
Page 58
Lee was depressed and shattered. The warmth and laughter of Saturday night was
lost, and he did not know why. In any relation of love or friendship Lee attempted
to establish contact on the non-verbal level of intuition, a silent exchange
of thought and feeling. Now Allerton had abruptly shut off contact, and Lee
felt physical pain as though a part of himself tentatively stretched out towards
the other had been severed, and he was looking at the bleeding stump in shock
and disbelief.
Page 60
Like many people who have nothing to do, he was resentful of any claims on his
time. He had no close friends. He disliked definite appointments. He did not
like to feel that anybody expected anything from him. He wanted, so far as possible,
to live without external pressure.
Page 91
In some cases of schizophrenia a phenomenon occurs known as automatic obedience.
I say, "Stick out your tongue,' and you can't help yourself from obeying. Whatever
I say, whatever anyone says, you must do. Get the picture? A pretty picture,
isn't it, so long as you are the one giving orders that are automatically obeyed.
Automatic obedience, synthetic schizophrenia, mass-produced to order. That is
the Russian dream, and America is not far behind. The bureaucrats of both countries
want the same thing: Control. The superego, the controlling agency, gone berserk.
Incidentally, there is a connection between schizophrenia and telepathy. Schizos
are very telepathically sensitive, but are strictly receivers. dig the tie-in?
Page 93-94
A hunchback with withered legs was playing crude bamboo panpipes, a mournful
Oriental music with the sadness of the high mountains. In deep sadness there
is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There
it is. When you realize it, you cannot explain it.
People crowded around the musician, listened a few minutes, and walked on.
The musician coughed from time to time. Once he snarled when someone touched his hump, showing his black rotten teeth. Lee gave the man a few coins. He walked on, looking at every face he passed, looking into doorways and up at the windows of cheep hotels. An iron bedstead painted pink, a shirt out to dry . . . scraps of life. Lee snapped at them hungrily, like a predatory fish cut off from his prey by a glass wall. He could not stop ramming his nose against the glass in the nightmare search of his dream. And at the end he was standing in a dusty room in the late afternoon sun, with an old shoe in his hand.
Excerpts from William S. Burroughs' Queer, paperback edition, Penguin
134 pages. No illustrations.
page x
Just when you think the earth is populated with shits, you meet a Johnson.
Yes, you found a Johnson, but you waded through Shitville to find him. You always do.
page xiii
The withdrawing addict is subject to the emotional excess of a child or an adolescent,
regardless of his actual age.
xvii
...I was paralyzed with a heavy reluctance, a writer's block like a straightjacket:
"I glance at the manuscript and feel I simply can't read it. Painful to an extent
I find it difficult to read..."
xxvii
I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer
but for...[the] realization [that] I live with the constant threat of possession,
and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the ... contact
with the Ugly Spirit maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have
no choice except to write my way out.
page 1
The rudeness of many Americans depressed him, a rudeness based on solid ignorance
of the whole concept of manners, and on the proposition [premise] that for social
purposes, all people are more or less equal and interchangeable.
P.6
Moor was a thin young man with blond hair that was habitually somewhat long.
He had pale blue eyes and very white skin. There were dark patches under his
eyes and two deep lines around his mouth. He looked like a child, and at the
same time like a prematurely aged man. His face showed the ravages of the death
process, the inroads of decay in flesh cut off from the living charge of contact.
Moor was motivated, literally kept alive and moving, by hate, but hate was slow,
steady push, weak but infinitely persistent, waiting to take advantage of any
weakness in another. The slow drip of Moor's hate had etched the lines of decay
in his face. He had aged without experience of life, like a piece of meat rotting
on a pantry shelf.
P.22
On Allerton: He looked like a sullen child unable to locate the source of his
ill temper.
P.25
Lee did not enjoy frustration. The limitations of his desires were like the
bars on a cage, like a chain and collar, something he had learned as an animal
learns, through days and years of experiencing the snub of the chain, the unyielding
bars, watchful, alert, waiting for the keeper to forget the door, for the frayed
collar, the loosened bar . . . suffering without despair and without consent.
EXCERPTS FROM FRANK ZAPPA'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY: THE REAL FRANK ZAPPA BOOK
Page 89
I detest love lyrics. I think one of the causes of bad mental health in the
United States is that people have been raised on 'love lyrics.'
You're a young kid and you hear all those 'love lyrics,' right? Your parents aren't telling you the truth about love, and you can't really learn about it in school. You're getting the bulk of your 'behavior norms' mapped out for you in the lyrics to some dumb fucking love song. It's a subconscious training that creates a desire for an imaginary situation which will never exist for you. People who buy into that mythology go through life feeling that they got cheated out of something.
Page 90
What I think is very cynical about some rock and roll songs—especially
today—is the way they say:"Let's make love." What the fuck kind of wussy
says shit like that in the real world? You ought to be able to say "Let's go
fuck," or at least "Let's go fill-in-the-blank"—-but you gotta say "Let's
make love" in order to get on the radio. This creates a semantic corruption,
by changing the context in which the word 'love' is used in the song.
Page 203
Death by Nostalgia
(It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice—-there
are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. When
you compute the length of time between "The Event and The Nostalgia For The
Event, the span of time seems to be about a year less in each cycle. Eventually
within the next quarter of a century, the nostalgia cycles will be so close
together that people will not be able to take a step without being nostalgic
for the one they just took. At that point, everything stops. Death by Nostalgia.)
Hydrogen
Page 238
"As you grow older in your observation of the peoples of this Earth world, it
becomes more noticeable that stupidity is the reigning virtue. The masses are
always willing that somebody take responsibility of caring for them."
—Paul Twitchell, The Far Country
Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.
This is not a matter of 'pessimism' vs. 'optimism'—-it's a matter of accurate assessment.
Not only is there more stupidity than anything else in terms of universal quantity, but there is a wonderful quality to this stupidity. It is so intensely perfect that it completely overwhelms whatever it is that nature has piled up on the other pan of the scale.
Stupidity is replicating itself at an astonishing rate. It breeds easily and is self-financing.
The person who stands up and says, "This is stupid," either is as to 'behave' or, worse, is greeted with a cheerful "Yes, we know! Isn't it terrific!"
When Hitler was doing his shit, a whole bunch of people thought he was terrific, too. How could they be wrong? There were so many of them; they thought they looked good together—-their arms all went up at the same time.
It seems to me that Americans in the eighties exhibit a remarkable willingness to embrace Fascism, especially when it is presented to them on a TV tray with balloons and bunting all over it.
It would be easier to pay off the national debt overnight than to neutralize the long-range effects of OUR NATIONAL STUPIDITY.
Forget about Iranian stupidity, or Chinese, or Russian, or South American, or Canadian stupidity—-our very own home-made incompetence gets The Grand Prize.
We're not talking light-hearted foolishness here—-when we go for stupid we go for BIG STUPID—-like the people who shoot at you on the freeway, or the Rambos and Rambo-ettes who blow people away in shopping malls and fast-food restaurants with automatic weapons.
Page 240
Here it comes, folks! Watch it grow! One day, the BIG STUPID goes to a PTA meeting,
winds through the PTL Club, wends its way to the White House, spreads out from
the Oval Office like a cow flop into the judiciary system, dribbles over onto
the desks of BIG BUSINESS, and the next thing you know we've got THE VERY BIG
STUPID.
THE VERY BIG STUPID is a thing which breeds by eating The Future. Have you seen it? It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly bottom line, derived by closing the R & D Department.*
I can't think of any developing nation with a genuine 'fondness' for America. People in those countries see America as a threat to their national security; they see US as an 'Evil Empire.' Everything Reagan said in the early days about Russia is easily descriptive of our country, viewed by a developing nation.
Because we posses THE VERY BIG STUPID, they know there is always the possibility that we might use it on them—-accidentally.
Folks, over the years we have developed a first-strike capability with this hideous weapon, and have already deployed it several times, disguised as Reagan Administration 'foreign policy.'
Some people in the Imaginary Heartland of America might say,"Who gives a shit? They ain't going to get us. They ain't coming over here. Why, some of 'em don't even have air-o-planes."
That kind of guy has bought stock in THE VERY BIG STUPID, and has reaped a philosophical dividend which states on its face that, as a Special Christian Nation, we have the right to stomp all over the other guys (Manifest Destiny). God is on Our Side, and we're supposed to do this, because we're the only creatures sophisticated enough to bring peace and sanity to the rest of the world. Pheeeeeeeeeeuuuuuuuuuwwwwwww.
Page 241
The Exaltation of Ignorance
Stupidity has a certain charm—ignorance does not.
It has been said that ignorance is bliss—I'm not so sure. Perhaps I have been deprived in the regard but, never having been truly ignorant, I find it difficult to speak with any authority on the topic of such a 'blissful state.'
I have, however, observed a lot of other people who were certifiably ignorant, and I wouldn't say they were in a state of 'bliss.' They were having a good time, but I wouldn't call it 'bliss.'
When we celebrate Ignorance, and make that the National Standard of Excellence, we embarrass ourselves.
We celebrate it in hit records, TV sitcoms, most films, most commercials and, to a great extent, in our schools.
Our school systems train kids to be ignorant, with style—-functional ignoramuses. They do not equip students to deal with things like logic; they don't give them the criteria by which to judge between good and bad in any product situation. They are groomed and launched to function as mindless buying machines for the products and concepts of a multinational military-industrial complex that needs a World Of Dumbbells to survive.
As long as you're just smart enough to do some kind of job, and just dumb enough to swallow the bunting, you're going to be 'all right'—-but, if you venture beyond that, you run the risk of mysterious stomach problems and migraine headaches.
I believe that U.S. schools have a Search and Destroy program, aimed at any hint of creative thinking exhibited by students. Somebody plans this curriculum. Somebody watches to make sure it all goes well. Somebody watches to make sure it all goes well. Somebody pays big bucks for this shit.
The book is 352 pages with photographs and illustrations. The hardcover sold for $20 in 1989.
*I was laid off when my employer decided to close the R & D lab, 2001. —Blabmeister
Are you familiar with the Taoist tale of Duke Mu of Chin?
Duke Mu of Chin said to Po Lo: "You are now advanced in years. Is there any member of your family I could employ to look for horses in your stead?" Po Lo replied: "A good horse can be picked out by its general build and appearance. But the superlative horse—one that raises no dust and leaves no tracks—is something evanescent and fleeting, elusive as thin air. The talents of my sons lie on a lower plane altogether; they can tell a good horse when they see one, but they cannot tell a superlative horse. I have a friend, however, one Chiu-fang Kao, who in things appertaining to horses is nowise my inferior. Pray see him. Duke Mu did so, and subsequently dispatched him on the quest for the steed. Three months later, he returned with the news that he had found one.
"It is now in Shach'iu, he added. "What kind of a horse is it?" asked the Duke. "Oh. it is a dun-colored mare," was the reply. However, someone being sent to fetch it, the animal turned out to be a coal-black stallion! Much displeased, the Duke sent for Po Lo. "That friend of yours," he said, "whom I commissioned to look for a horse, has made a fine mess of it. Why, he cannot even distinguish a beast's color or sex! What on earth can he know about horses?" Po Lo heaved a sigh of satisfaction. "Has he really got as far as that?" he cried. "Ah, then he is worth ten thousand of me put together. There is no comparison between us. What Kao keeps in view is the spiritual mechanism. In making sure of the essential, he forgets the homely details; intent on the inward qualities, he loses sight of the external. He sees what he wants to see. He looks at the things he ought to look at. So clever a judge of horses is Kao, that he has it in him to judge something better than a horses." When the horse arrived, it turned out indeed to be a superlative animal.
Above excerpt taken from J.D.Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
Notes from Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Dell, 1955, paperback ed. p.52
His response to them as sexual beings was one of frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening manifestations of the miraculous, instruments of leisure too powerful to be measured, too keen to be endured, and too exquisite to be intended for employment by base, unworthy man. He could interpret their naked presence in his hands only as cosmic oversight destined to be rectified speedily, and he was driven always to make what carnal use of them he could in the fleeting moment or two he felt had before someone caught wise and whisked them away.
p.55
...they would begin to have shrieking nightmares...the piercing obscenities
they flung into the air every night from their separate places...rang against
each other in the darkness romantically like mating calls of songbirds with
filthy minds.
p.65
He saw a simple, sincere face that was incapable of subtlety or guile, an honest,
frank face with disunited large eyes, rusty hair, black eyebrows...
p.70
He was a militant idealist who crusaded against racial bigotry by growing faint
in its presence. He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.
p.84
Her bed was at the very end of the ward, near a cracked window thickened with
grime. Rain splashed from a moiling sky and the day was dreary and cold. In
other parts of the hospital chalky people with aged, blue lips were dying on
time.
p.85
[He] had been born too late, and too mediocre. Some men are born mediocre, some
men achieve mediocrity, and others have mediocrity thrust upon them. With [him]
it had been all three.
p.90
All his life he had longed for one thing, to be absorbed.
p.143
"...that might be the answer—to act boastfully about something we ought to
be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail."
p.154
[he] dreaded him for a complex of reasons he was too petrified to untangle.
Wind whistling up through the jagged gash in the floor kept the myriad bits
of paper circulating like alabaster particles in a paperweight and contributed
to a sensation of lacquered, waterlogged unreality.
p.209
For a few precious moments the chaplain tingles with a weird, occult sensation
of having experienced the identical situation before in some prior time or existence.
He endeavored to help and nourishing the impression in order to predict, and
perhaps even control, what incident would occur next, but the afflatus melted
away unproductively, as he knew it would. Déjà vu. The subtle,
recurring confusion between illusion and reality that was characteristic of
paramnesia fascinated the chaplain.
He was interested in such corollary optical phenomena as jamais vu, never seen, and presque vu, almost seen. There were terrifying, sudden moments when objects, concepts and even people that the chaplain had lived with almost all his life inexplicably took on an unfamiliar and irregular aspect that he had never seen before and which made them seem totally strange: jamais vu. And there were other moments when he almost saw absolute truth in brilliant flashes of clarity that almost came to him: presque vu.
p.328
He was a perceptive, graceful, sophisticated man who was sensitive to everyone's
weaknesses but his own and found everyone absurd, but himself.
p.334
"...the mission's entirely unnecessary. It's only purpose is to delay German
reinforcements at a time when we aren't even planning an offensive. But that's
the way things go when you elevate mediocre people to positions of authority."
p.414
Moral was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian's fault. The country was in
peril: he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence
by daring to exercise them.
Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to break the chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all.
p.445
He was wide-awake, and knew he was a prisoner in one of those sleepless,
bedridden nights that could take an eternity to dissolve into dawn.
p.454.
...Yossarian felt sorry for the gentle, moral, middle-aged idealist, as he felt
sorry for so many people whose shortcomings were not large and whose troubles
were light.
afflatus: inspiration or powerful impulse, as of an artist or poet.
paramnesia: distortion of memory with confusion of fact and
fantasy. Same as deja vu.
HAM ON RYE by Charles Bukowski
p154
Because when you hate, you don't beg.
You can forgive a fool because he only runs in one direction and doesn't deceive anybody.
p174
The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil and another, and no
matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was
nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned
nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything
in the worst way possible, like voting for presidential candidates who reminded
them of themselves.
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
I believe that you are sincere and good at heart. If you do not attain happiness,
always remember that you are on the right road, and try not to leave it. Above
all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself.
Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute.
Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad
within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself.
Avoid fear, too, though fear is only the consequence of every sort of falsehood.
Never be frightened at your own faintheartedness in attaining love. Don't be
frightened over much even at your own evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing
more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared
with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly
performed and in sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal
does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though
on the stage. But active love, Active love is labor and fortitude...
* THIS PAGE IS A DATA BASE AND IS INTENDED PRIMARILY FOR REFERENCE PURPOSES. *