THE SHOW SO FAR

war rages, a testament to the consilidation of power by the dark empire of neo-conservatism The days of enlightened public sector investment into things that really matter are probably gone forever, so much road kill, rapidly receding into the rearview mirror of a speeding yellow Humvee, like the Indians, the buffalo and the tall green grass that have gone before it. One can only hope that within this emerging ocean of banality, there will remain a few scattered islands of progressive dissent.

There was a paleontologist on the radio today who spoke of the feathered dinosaur fossils that they keep finding in China. It turns out that dinosaurs are much more closely related to birds than they are to crocodiles and lizards. They never really went extinct. Only the big ones did. They are in fact all around us. Avian intelligence is something quite cold yet equal and in many cases superior to mammalian intelligence. It is much older and more calculating, yet capable of supreme abstraction. It survived the evolutionary palimpsest and prospered. There are far more extant species of bird than there are of mammal.
I have seen ravens up here in the Pacific northwest, collaborate in hunting. One will distract a dog and the other will come in and take its food. My roosters frequently feint finding food to entice hens in close enough proximity that they can jump on top of them and mate. It’s kind of a Mesozoic form of date rape. James Blish, in Midsummer Century imagines what would have happened if birds had gained pre-eminence over mammals on a parallel earth and formed the dominant culture. Hitchcock of course imagined this as well. They are out there waiting. We don’t really understand them, but many of our cosmologies imagine us turning into them when we transform into the next level. What are angels if not hybrid bird men? Radio bird men- way up high. They evoke our deep desire to become more avian- more evolved. Tibetan sky burials return our flayed bodies to the sky via the vector of the Lammergier who soars above the stony plateaux, dropping our bones from dizzying heights to crack them for their sweet freight of marrow. What could be better?

I’m still wrapping my head around blogging. I’ll have to just start. I was planting Japanese green onion starts today and remembered the little twitches that started emerging in Doubleyuh’s face, shortly after 9-11, followed by an odd and sudden increase in the coherence of his speaking. Also, you probably remember the bandaid on his chin a couple of days around 9-11. He was supposed to have cut himself shaving. That was the implant site. The human jaw is a pretty good resonating transducer for minute electrical impulses. Many folks have experienced picking up some annoying AM radio signals via the capacitance caused by fillings in their teeth bathed in the weak saline solution of their saliva. The KGB used to use wooden spikes as undetectable bugs, to pick up audio from distant rooms. Doubleyuh became a very effective ventriloquist’s dummy after 9-11, via his jaw implant. His new, measured speaking patterns incorporated delays to download what he was to say next. It was kind of like talking on a satellite phone. At first it was obvious, but now he has internalized the timing a bit better. The ultimate ventriloquist’s dummy. Our pal Phillip Dick often imagined such things. Have you read “The Simulacra?” Tony Blair is also showing some cracks. He is definitely losing it and I am sure something very horrible is happening to him. It is probably torture or the threat of such. He has developed the giddiness of someone who is threatened on a daily basis.
Anyway, the “tracking banality with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter” quote is from Chris Marker, Chreees MarKHER, ( French) who is the closest I can think of to a Blog filmmaker. He used this line in his 198(3?) film Sans Soleil.

I’m thinking I might have to go down the blog road. I’ve been trying to correlate disparate elements in my fevered little mind, such as an exceptional treatise on relic Paleozoic, living fossil, forests in Western China (home of my favorite tree, “Dawn redwood”-metasequoia glyptostroboides (metasequoia ), which apparently used to grow in the Canadian arctic during the periglacial hotspell and learned to lose their needles in the long but warm arctic night, now living only in a remote valley in Hupeh province, (I’ve been planting them everywhere) with the rise of “Science” based music such as GRANDADDY and the FLAMING LIPS. I sense a deep nostalgia for the language of science as we understood it in “the space age” without the tyranny of the corporatism that has so taken it over. In a way, we may be living through science’s last gasp. We’re starting to no longer trust it. It again points to diminished faith in the ‘general model’ and the appreciation of the need for empiricism and criticality. Perhaps this is the high baroque of post modernism.
Anyway, this is what keeps me awake at night, in addition to, of course, the unsettling perception that we are about to consumate many of our planet’s collective Armageddon cosmologies in the Persian Gulf.