the most famous lens flare in hip hop history

snoop's aura

swivel

why was this not on his last album?
maybe my favorite kells song from the modern era,
up there with echo & yellow light -

youtube.com/watch?v=D4J16UhY5qk

making love over and over again
looking at your body - did you get a tan?

read dis

John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces [pdf ]

wintertime love

whatscookingamerica.net/squash.htm

inca ore - ruff ridin.mp3

chainmail water

Theodor Adorno: Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1947)

Toy shop. Hebbel, in a surprising entry in his diary, asks what takes away ‘life’s magic in later years.’ It is because in all the brightly-coloured contorted marionettes, we see the revolving cylinder that sets them in motion, and because for this very reason the captivating variety of life is reduced to wooden monotony. A child seeing the tightrope-walkers singing, the pipers playing, the girls fetching water, the coachmen driving, thinks all this is happening for the joy of doing so; he can’t imagine that these people also have to eat and drink, go to bed and get up again. We however, know what is at stake.’ Namely, earning a living, which commandeers all those activities as mere means, reduces them to interchangeable, abstract labour-time. The quality of things ceases to be their essence and becomes the accidental appearance of their value. The ‘equivalent form’ mars all perceptions; what is no longer irradiated by the light of its own self-determination as ‘joy in doing,’ pales to the eye. Our organs grasp nothing sensuous in isolation, but notice whether a colour, a sound, a movement is there for its own sake or for something else; wearied by a false variety, they steep all in grey, disappointed by the deceptive claim of qualities still to be there at all, while they conform to the purposes of appropriation, indeed largely owe their existence to it alone. Disenchantment with the contemplated world is the sensorium’s reaction to its objective role as a ‘commodity world.’ Only when purified of appropriation would things be colourful and useful at once: under universal compulsion the two cannot be reconciled.

Children, however, are not so much, as Hebbel thought, subject to illusions of ‘captivating variety,’ as still aware, in their spontaneous perception, of the contradiction between phenomenon and fungibility that the resigned adult no longer sees, and they shun it. Play is their defense. The unerring child is struck by the ‘peculiarity of the equivalent form’: ‘use-value’ becomes the form of manifestation, the phenomenal form of its opposite, value.

In his purposeless activity the child, by a subterfuge, sides with use-value against exchange value. Just because he deprives the things with which he plays of their mediated usefulness, he seeks to rescue in them what is benign towards men and not what subserves the exchange relation that equally deforms men and things. The little trucks travel nowhere and the tiny barrels on them are empty; yet they remain true to their destiny by not performing, not participating in the process of abstraction that levels down that destiny, but instead abide as allegories of what they are specifically for. Scattered, it is true, but not ensnared, they wait to see whether society will finally remove the social stigma on them; whether the vital process between men and things, praxis, will cease to be practical. The unreality of games gives notice that reality is not yet real. Unconsciously they rehearse the right life. The relation of children to animals depends entirely on the fact that Utopia goes disguised in the creatures whom Marx even begrudged the surplus value they contribute as workers. In existing without any purpose recognizable to men, animals hold out, as if for expression, their own names, utterly impossible to exchange. This makes them so beloved of children, their contemplation so blissful.

I am a rhinoceros, signifies the shape of the rhinoceros. Fairy-tales and operettas know such images, and the ridiculous question how do we know that Orion is really called Orion, rises to the stars.
pp. 227228

"Human beings do not realise the extent to which their own sense of defeat prevents them from doing things they could do perfectly well. The peak experience induces the recognition that your own powers are far greater than you imagined them." - Colin Wilson

"...Hegel defined identity as "the identity of identity and nonidentity" - the idea being that any concept or act of identification glosses over differences and unifies things that are like in some ways but unlike in others. For Adorno, negative dialectics explores "the nonidentity of identity and nonidentity," i.e., disintegrating all of that."

from wikipedia
"...Adorno's work in the years before his death was shaped by the idea of "negative dialectics", set out especially in his book of that title. A key notion in the work of the Frankfurt School since Dialectic of Enlightenment had been the idea of thought becoming an instrument of domination that subsumes all objects under the control of the (dominant) subject, especially through the notion of identity, i.e. of identifying as real in nature and society only that which harmonized or fit with dominant concepts, and regarding as unreal or non-existent everything that did not. Adorno's "negative dialectics" was an attempt to articulate a non-dominating thought that would recognize its limitations and accept the non-identity and reality of that which could not be subsumed under the subject's concepts. Indeed, Adorno sought to ground the critical bite of his sociological work in his critique of identity, which he took to be a reification in thought of the commodity form or exchange relation which always presumes a false identity between different things. The potential to criticise arises from the gap between the concept and the object, which can never go into the former without remainder. This gap, this non-identity in identity, was the secret to a critique of both material life and conceptual reflection."

‘To the isolated, isolation seems an indubitable certainty; they are
bewitched on pain of losing their existence, not to perceive how
mediated their isolation is’— Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics

"zoo race" christian video game

do what you do and do it well

joseph campbell - the power of myth - the hero's journey (video)
alicia keys - no one (video)

summer reading

aiwazzsaying digital library

so overwhelming, so good!
click the link above if you are interested by any of the following:
pynchon, joyce, neurolinguistic programming, pdf files, phenomenology, hermeneutics.



eva from inca ore writes with unmatched charm.

identity fulfillment / seaweed seminary

via ran prieur:

telling people you're going to do something makes it more difficult to do it


upper caz, woman in traditional attire of a scandinavian tribe whose name i do not remember at the time of this post.

protip for computer users

add-art replaces ads with art.
it has my made net-scape navigating infinitely more pleasant, so i thought i would share.

dad forwards

i love my dad.

Olivier Messiaen and the Song Thrush

flare shot from the freeway

creditses:
cerebral museum, native funk and flash, the internet, brendan, ariel mahon & vanessa walsh, hans pokora, danielle napier garcia

planned personhood

not given lightly

right on, ran:

Descartes's big mistake, in "I think therefore I am", was in the word I. He mistook his western ego for the whole of his identity, and never considered the possibility that the "I" doing the thinking was part of a much larger consciousness.

Really he was saying, "The detached self thinks the detached self is the whole self, therefore it is."

http://ships.galutschek.at/video/delta_queen_2006/calliope_full_length/large.html

why must we be apart?

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/02/28/DDG5Q59D8J1.DTL

busy nerding out on rym, check:

here
and here.

the loosening front of the golden west

a) A pdf file of notes summarizing the ideas of Carl Jung, via the Icarus Project. Way decent.

b) Mullein. aka Aaron's rod, lady's foxglove, cow's lungwort, clown's lungwort, bullock's lungwort, donkey's ears, torches, mullein dock, velvet plant, velvet dock, Our Lady's flannel, Adam's flannel, old man's flannel, woollen, rag paper, candlewick plant, wild ice leaf, Jupiter's staff, Jacob's staff, Peter's staff, shepherd's staff, shepherd's clubs, beggar's stalk, beggar's blanket, golden rod, clot, cuddy's lungs, duffle, feltwort, fluffweed, hare's beard, hag's taper, great mullein.

c) http://www.hobo.com/king_drawings.htm

the lightning of king arthur's tribes (will scatter all unholy vibes)

a handful of lydia mendoza tracks.

florida scientists grow a rat brain in a petri dish, teach it to fly f-22.



do you like this antiquated map of corsica? it's very dramatic.

worlds collide (two years earlier than we previously thought)

goodbye beacon hill

to show fealty, to answer the helm, to be pliant

yet another "the most important thing on the internet" post.
seriously, propers to r.p. for linking to this comprehensive history of the world with a slight emphasis on combative martial arts.


highly reccomended.

plus:

According to the legend, when the [Mandrake] root is dug up it screams and kills all who hear it. Literature includes complex directions for harvesting a mandrake root in relative safety. For example Josephus (c. 37 AD Jerusalem – c. 100) gives the following directions for pulling it up:

A furrow must be dug around the root until its lower part is exposed, then a dog is tied to it, after which the person tying the dog must get away. The dog then endeavours to follow him, and so easily pulls up the root, but dies suddenly instead of his master. After this the root can be handled without fear.

&
Yoro Diallo - San Wo San
via Awesome Tapes From Africa.

dragonstrike

vernal crossing

yogurt

1-2 QTs milk
yogurt starter (buy your favorite yogurt that contains live active cultures)
anything you want to add (a little sugar, maple syrup, fruit)

scald 1-2 QTs milk (heat near, but do not boil), let it cool to luke warm temperature. Get a 1 or 2 QT mason jar and put 2 TBS of yogurt starter in it (any yogurt with live active cultures), pour the luke warm milk over the yogurt starter. Add maple syrup, sugar... whatever you like. Stir it all. Leave lid off mason jar and put it in a 6-pack (small) cooler. Fill the cooler up with warm water around the mason jar. Put the lid on the cooler and let it sit for 8-10 hrs. It should now be yogurt...remove the mason jar, cap it and refrigerate the yogurt. I prefer not to eat the yogurt until it's been refrigerated for about four hours. The consistency of real yogurt will be a bit runnier than the store-bought stuff. I might be mistaken, but believe that's because commercial yogurt has pectin to make it more gelatinous.

Clontrad

Avoid dementia by chilling out and mingling.
by William Atkins

Inside programmable road signs

also, from ran prieur via nthposition:

"The globalisation of addiction, a book review about Bruce Alexander's work showing that drug addiction is caused by environmental stresses:

A colony of rats were allowed to roam together in a large vivarium enriched with wheels, balls and other playthings, on a deep bed of aromatic cedar shavings and with plenty of space for breeding and private interactions. In this situation, the rats no longer showed interest in pressing levers for rewards of morphine: even if forcibly addicted, they would suffer withdrawals rather than maintaining their dependence. It seemed that the standard experiments were measuring not the addictiveness of opiates but the cruelty of the stresses inflicted on lab rats..."

trudy

from senegal with love:
ifang bondi - saraba

my boy devon just put his blog up!!
rush on over: http://dynamitesetoffallopiantubesdot.blogspot.com/

you don't have to go to college

UC Berkeley Webcasts
MIT Open Courseware

syllabus + public library successssss .

real talk volume 2

Required viewing for anyone born after 1920.

This edition of real talk concerns itself with a four-part BBC documentary called "Century of the Self". This may be the most important documentary I've ever seen. From the wikipedia article:

"This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy." - Adam Curtis

...The documentary describes the impact of Freud's theories on the perception of the human mind, and the ways public relations agencies and politicians have used this during the last 100 years for their "engineering of consent".

...Along these general themes, The Century of the Self asks deeper questions about the roots and methods of modern consumerism, representative democracy and its implications. It also questions the modern way we see ourselves, the attitude to fashion and superficiality.

The business and, increasingly, the political world uses PR to read and fulfill our desires, to make their products or speeches as pleasing as possible to us. Curtis raises the question of the intentions and roots of this fact. ...The documentary shows how by employing the tactics of psychoanalysis, politicians appeal to irrational, primitive impulses that have little apparent bearing on issues outside of the narrow self-interest of a consumer population. He cites a Wall Street banker as saying "We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. [...] Man's desires must overshadow his needs."

This is, unsurprisingly, not being released on DVD.

highly recommended:
-Century of the Self on Google Video
-Century of the Self on YouTube, broken up into ~10 minute segments.

(photo courtesy of the polaroid kid)

Mælkebøtten

so amazing! so cheap! so attractive!
watch out art world, look out damp climates:

moss graffiti recipe

real talk volume 1

This is required reading for anyone who bought anything last year.

If the words Cargill, AIG, CNPC, and Roche mean nothing to you;
If you are unaware of the human consequences of supporting Chevron, Dole, and GE;

Please do the world and yourself a favor and GET SMART to the primary political force of our era:

Multinational Monitor's 10 Worst Corporations of 2008

lichen what i'm seein

"Question: In the book, you attempt, like Montaigne, to paint from life, so as "to enlighten a last voyage, backwards and against all, to again be the first." You don't act afraid of death. . . or aging. You speak of eternal moments. "Life is ageless," you say. "We fool time."

Answer: I will always love breaking the spell that dooms our destiny to an ineluctable downfall. Wear-and-tear, sickness, [and] death are the effects of an absent life, not an ontological curse. It is not death that is frightening, but the mortifying control that kills us daily -- the denaturation and wasting of our living forces. I have too much life to bother myself with worries about death while I'm still exhausting my passions. A thought that doesn't find favor in a society in which money ages and kills its victims with their consent. He who samples the wonderments of living knows true youthfulness, which leaps beyond the ages. It is necessary to finish with the operative senility that identifies youth with profitable and consumable frenzy. The time that I insist upon is the time of the heart."

-From an interview with Raoul Vaneigm.
-The Revolution of Everyday Life

Kabebateli

excerpt from "sacred sonoma"
Austin Creek (Cazadero)

Silas D. Ingram came to this area in 1869 and built a hotel on Bei Road just west of the present town. He entertained many folks from the San Francisco area until the hotel burned down in 1874. It's said that one of Cazadero's most famous visitors was none other than the train robber Black Bart, who held a stagecoach at gunpoint on the Fort Ross Road just outside of Cazadero on August 3, 1877. Years later, the train that serviced this region stopped running on July 31, 1931, and on that day a burial ceremony was held for the last train to town.

Cazadero, like many places among the redwoods and fog, is full of ghost stories. One day in 1893 the Northwest Pacific Railroad was running a train, led by engine #9, to bring tourists through a town called Ingram to Cazadero. Austin Creek was flooding and the train got trapped near the outpost known as Elm Grove. The train bridge gave way, toppling one of the cars into the raging creek. Seven men died, but only 6 bodies were recovered immediately.

Later an Indian man came to town, accompanied by his dogs, heard the news of the lost man and said he could find the missing body. He went down to the creek, lit a candle, placed it on a shingle, and set it out onto the water. It floated downstream for about a mile, then the shingle started spinning, the candle went out, and the dogs began to bark. The Indian suggested the townsfolk dig there; when they did so, they found the body of the lost man. Today, residents and visitors have reported feeling negative spiritual energy from certain pools fed by Austin Creek and its tributaries.

The Pomo took up residence in the areas just to the north of Cazadero, for it was close to the Lake Sonoma Valley. Three villages were once situated along the creek: the Tanem, the Kaletcemaial ("sitting under a tree") and the Tsapewil ("acorn-shaped"). One site near Cazadero was called Kabebateli, meaning "big rock place," and it's easy to see why. Archaeological studies have turned up a number of stones believed to have been used the local Pomos in relation to fertility rituals. Eighteen petroglyphs were found along Ward Creek where it crosses the Big Oat Creek, a major tributary of Austin Creek. All of these rock carvings were found on moss-covered schist boulders, and consisted of ten cupules, or convex indentations, about the size of a golf ball; 2 lines which were abraded in form; 4 with both cupules and lines; and 2 which had cupules and wide, deep grooves carved into them. Also, pestles and stone fragments were found all across the Austin Creek area.

However, the rock that probably gets the most attention today is Split Rock. This monolith was said to be the only part of Cazadero damaged in the 1906 earthquake, which shook the ground hard enough to split the rock into two pieces.

hedgehog signaling pathway

I found this on the internet as "bruce lee's life lessons"
I would like to believe this was written by mr. lee himself.

1. What are you really thinking about today?

"As you think, so shall you become."

Perhaps the most basic statement of how we work. Think about what you
are thinking today. What do those thoughts say about you? About your
life? And how well do they really match your plans for your life and
your image of yourself?

It's easy to forget abut this simple statement in everyday life. It's
easy to be quite incongruent with what you think on an ordinary day
compared to how you view yourself and your goals. A simple external
reminder such as a post-it with this quote can be helpful to keep you
and your thoughts on the right track. An brilliant and beautiful
expansion on this thought can be found in James Allen's As a man
thinketh (that can be downloaded for free here).

2. Simplify.

"It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential."

"If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you'll never get it done."

If you want to improve your life then it's tempting to want to add
more. One problem with this may be that you don't really have the time
or energy to do more though. And so your efforts to improve become
short-lived.

Adding more and more just creates more stress and anxiety. Removing
clutter and activities, tasks and thoughts that are not so important
frees up time and energy for you to do more of what you really want to
do. And as the clutter in your outer world decreases the clutter in
your inner world also has a tendency to decrease. This has the added
benefit of making it easier to actually enjoy whatever you are doing
even more while you are doing it.

Adding more thoughts and thinking things over for the 111:th time may
create a sense of security. It's also a good way to procrastinate and
to avoid taking that leap you know you should take. And the more you
think, the harder it gets to act. Perhaps because you want to keep
that comforting sense of security and avoid the risk of wrecking that
feeling.

Thinking has its place. It can help you plan a somewhat realistic
route to your goal and help you avoid future pitfalls. Overthinking is
however just a habit that will help you waste a lot of time. It's more
useful to replace that habit with the habit of just doing it.

3. Learn about yourself in interactions.

"To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person."

The one person that is the hardest to get to really know may be
yourself. Studying yourself while you are alone may result in some
insights. But it's also likely to produce a lot of made up thought
loops and doubts in your mind. A good way to really learn more about
yourself is study yourself in interactions with other people. How
people react and act in these interaction can over time teach you a
lot. And what you think and how you react can perhaps teach you even
more.

What you see, feel and hear in other people may be a reflection of
you. The things you learn by thinking this way may not always be
pleasant, but they can be enlightening. They help you to see yourself
and also how you may be fooling yourself. And these powerful insights
can be very valuable for your personal growth. So, in interactions
with others, try asking yourself: what is reflected?

4. Do not divide.

"Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be
not for or against."

This is a very useful and powerful thought. It is also one that
obviously is hard to live by. Why? I believe it's because the ego
loves to divide and find ways to "add more" to itself. It want's to
feel better than someone else. Or more clever. Or prettier. Or cooler.
Or wiser.

How can you overcome this way of thinking and feeling?

To me it seems to boil down to not identifying so much with your
thoughts or feelings. That doesn't mean that you stop thinking or
feeling. It just means that you realize – and remember in your
everyday life – that the thoughts and emotions are just things flowing
through you.

You are not them though.

You are the consciousness observing them.

When you realize and remember this it enables you to control the
thoughts and feelings instead of the other way around. It also enables
you to not take your thoughts too seriously and actually laugh at them
or ignore them when you feel that your ego is acting out. When you are
not being so identified these things you become more inclined to
include things, thoughts and people instead of excluding them. This
creates a lot of inner and outer freedom and stillness. Instead of
fear, a need to divide your world and a search for conflicts.

To learn more about this I would recommend Eckhart Tolle's books and
signing up for the 10 free and excellent webcasts - available both in
video and audio form – that he's doing with Oprah right now.

5. Avoid a dependency on validation from others.

"I'm not in this world to live up to your expectations and you're not
in this world to live up to mine."

"Showing off is the fool's idea of glory."

The ego wants to add because it thinks it's not enough. One way of
doing that is by craving validation from others. We want to feel
smart, pretty, successful and so on. And the validation makes you feel
good for a while. But soon you need a new fix.

And the problem with being dependent on validation from other people
is that you let other people control how you feel. This creates a
rollercoaster of emotion in your life.

To find more emotional stability and to take control of how you feel
you need to get your validation from to a more consistent source.
Yourself. You can replace the expectations and validation of others by
setting your own expectations and by validating yourself.

And so you validate yourself by thinking about how awesome you are.
You don't sell yourself short. You appreciate how far you have come
and the positive things you have done. You appreciate your own value
in the world. You set goals and you achieve those goals. This builds
confidence in yourself and in your abilities. These things will help
you to build a habit of inner validation.

Now, showing off. Why do we do that? To get validation from others.
However, this need for validation often shines through and that is why
a thing like bragging seldom works. Instead of seeing the cool and
successful person you are trying to project people just see the
insecure and needy person looking for validation. And your bragging
falls flat.

6. Be proactive.

"To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities."

It's easy to get locked into a reactive mindset. You just follow along
with whatever is happening. You do what the people around you do. You
react to whatever is going on.

And so you get lost in your circumstances. This way of thinking
doesn't feel too good. You tend to feel powerless and like you are
just drifting along.

A more useful and pleasurable way of living is to be proactive. As
Bruce says: to create opportunities despite the circumstances around
you. This feels better and provides better results. But on the other
hand it's also more difficult. It's easier to just drift along in the
reactive stream of life. And if you want to be proactive then you may
have to take the lead quite often. And that can be scary.

Still, living proactively is so much more rewarding and exciting.

7. Be you.

"Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not
go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it."

Just being yourself is a hard thing to do. You may do it sometimes.
And other times you may forget or fall back into old thought patterns.
Or you may imitate someone else.

And that comes through too. And it may work.

But I believe that being the real you will work better. Because there
the genuine you is shining through. Without incongruency, mixed
messages or perhaps a sort of phoniness. It's you to 100%. It's you
with not only your words but you with your voice tonality and body
language – which some say is over 90% of communication - on the same
wavelength as your words. It's you coming through on all channels of
communication.

So I'm not saying: "yeah man, you should just be yourself because it's
the right thing to do etc." I'm saying that I think being your
authentic self – the one where you do little dividing, the one that
needs little validation from others, the one where your ego is not
running the show and trying to get something from someone – will give
you better results and more satisfaction in your day to day life
because you are in alignment with yourself. And because people really
like genuine and people really like authenticity.

land of the chaste one & i don't understand you!

remote corner, where rough grass grows. click to make bigger.

internet unknowns: desperately seeking info on mexican whistle slang

The Gladiators - Thief in the Night