DEEP SCRATCH

Author: flyagaric23

  • Quotes from Ezra Pound Guide To Kulchur

    I am currently reading Ez’s guide again and find it very stimulating with great ball of genius striking in the direction of the 2008-2013 global recession, music, painting, sculture and poetry. –Steve fly

    Full text at Scribd.

    Quotes from…

    EZRA

    POUND

    GUIDE
    TO
    KULCHUR

    “To put it another way: it does not matter a two-penny damn whether you load up your memory with the chronological sequence of what has happened, or the names of protagonists, or authors of books, or generals and leading political spouters, so long as you understand the process now going on, or the processes biological, social, economic now going on, enveloping you as an individual, in a social order, and quite unlikely to be very “new” in themselves however fresh or stale to the participant.”

    “I suggest that finer and future critics of art will be able to tell from the quality of a painting the degree of tolerance or intolerance of usury extant in the age and milieu that produced it… That perhaps is the first clue the reader has had that these are notes for a totalitarian treatise and that I am in fact considering the New Learning or the New Paideuma… not simply abridging extant encyclopedias or condensing two dozen more detailed volumes… May I suggest (not to prove anything, but perhaps to open the reader’s thought) that I have a certain real knowledge which wd. enable me to tell a Goya from a Velasquez, a Velasquez from an Ambrogio Praedis, a Praedis from an Ingres or a Moreau…”

    “Ideogram is essential to the exposition of certain kinds of thought. Greek philosophy was mostly a mere splitting, an impoverishment of understanding, though it ultimately led to the development of particular sciences. Socrates a distinguished gas-bag in comparison with Confucius and Mencius… At any rate, I need ideogram. I mean I need it for my own job…”

    “Usura rusteth the chisel It rusteth the craft and the craftsman It gnaweth the thread in the loom None learneth to weave gold in her pattern; Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered Emerald findeth no Memling… Usura slayeth the child in the womb”

    “Dante uses che sanno in his passage on Aristotle in limbo. He uses intendendo for the angels moving the third heaven… Our Teutonic friend, what’s his name (Vossler is it?), talks about schwankenden Terminologie des Cavalcanti’s. I believe because he hasn’t examined it. Till proof to the contrary overwhelms me, I shall hold that our mediaevals took much more care of their terms than the greeks of the decadence.”

    “This book is not written for the over-fed. It is written for men who have not been able to afford a university education or for young men, whether or not threatened with universities, who want to know more at the age of fifty than I know today, and whom I might conceivably aid to that object.”

    http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Guide_to_Kulchur

  • Solar flares and freaky weather (Oaklahoma Tornado?)

    It just struck me that maybe the recent solar flare activity might be partially responsible for the freak weather conditions, and tornados in particular.

    What are the connections, if any, between solar flares and weather on earth. Is there any evidence to suggest that in the future, rather than putting all the efforts into worrying about radio and communications interfearence on earth after a large solar flare, having the foresight to warm or prepare for freak weather, tornados and wind storms in particular?

    Maybe it was Solar Flare M3.2 of May 17th 2013?

    Steven James Pratt

  • Finnegans Wake in the Bronx by John J. Healey (Huffington Post)

    Finnegans Wake in the Bronx

    Posted: 05/15/2013 7:00 pm
    2013-05-15-Wake1.jpg

    “I think my life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face: it was so near to me, and her arms were round me, and she sang to me.” George Eliot from Daniel Deronda

    In our Highbridge apartment in the Bronx there were hardly any bookshelves to speak of. My father liked to read but I don’t ever recall him lost between the pages of anything more complicated or literary than the novels of John O’Hara. My older brothers, to the best of my knowledge, only read what they were assigned in school. My sister, closest to me in age and who now reads more than all of us put together, was a good Catholic girl devoted to Nancy Drew. My early tastes were wed to Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Robinson Crusoe and Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki. My father was a Congressman and these books were sent to me by his secretary in Washington from the Library of Congress, and the act of reading has been something special ever since.

    2013-05-15-Wake3.jpg
    But one of the few books in our library, if you could call it that, a line of volumes unable to fill a lone shelf in the living room partly hidden behind an easy chair, was a first American edition of Finnegans Wake published by Viking in 1945. I remember looking at it out of curiosity, knowing nothing at all about Joyce, when I was eight or nine-years-old. It stood out from the other books adorned with more romantic covers and titles. And I remember leafing through it, lying on the floor, and finding it absolutely nonsensical.

    A mystery I’ve never been able to solve is how did it get there? Who bought it? Who might possibly have tried to read it in that household? The only person I can think of is my mother. She had gone to college in an era when not all that many women did. But I knew nothing then, and to this day know nothing about her literary tastes.

    In my adolescence and early twenties I used the Wake as a prop, often successfully, with which to impress people. It was only later, as a challenge to myself, living up in the mountains south of Granada, Spain that I forced myself to get through it with the help of auxiliary texts. I have never regretted it. It is still my opinion that the last pages of Finnegans Wake are among the most beautiful ever written in the English language.

    2013-05-15-Wake2.jpg
    It took seventeen years to finish, has a circular form – the last sentence is continued by the first – and it employs a repetitive, Giambatista Vico inspired, four-stages-of-history notion. Many believe it was written to be read aloud. Joyce spoke seven languages and had a working knowledge of eleven more, all of which he employed to create pun-compacted words whose manifest meanings are often only clear thanks to a phonetic similarity to their closest English equivalents.

    Joyce once described Ulysses as his book of the day and Finnegans Wake his book of the night, written in ‘dream-speak.’ It is for this reason that much of it is, frankly, and famously, unintelligible. But in a gratifying concession to linearity, its language does become somewhat clearer towards its ‘end.’ As it wakes up, regaining consciousness, repression exerts its editorial function and the language pulls itself together. As in Ulysses, it is the book’s main female protagonist, in this case Anna Livia Plurabelle, who brings the tale to its conclusion, its ‘fin-again’, before it begins anew.

    2013-05-15-Wake4.jpg
    Did my mother buy this book? Perhaps someone gave it to her as a gift? It was not inscribed until I put my own name in it when I turned twenty. It is one of the few objects from my childhood I’ve managed to keep. I suppose ascribing its presence in the Bronx to my mother has been part of an idiosyncratic campaign to create the sort of parent I wish to remember having. It’s as if, being the youngest and oddest one in my family, and given her early demise with so few real memories of her, I have tried retrospectively to fashion an ally.
    2013-05-15-Mom.jpg
    Like all of the characters in Finnegans Wake Anna undergoes many transformations. In the magisterial final pages she becomes the River Liffey that runs through Dublin just before it empties into the Irish Sea. The four stage cycle in play here is that of rivers in general which start in the highlands, flow down and out to sea where they mix with the ocean’s salt, and then rise up as mist into clouds that are blown back over the land where the moisture condenses and falls as rain seeping into the earth again to make its way back to the river’s source. Anna speaks in a tone of regret, a tone of remorse and nostalgia, mourning the past, an Irish tone if ever there was one. But it is a most appropriate tone well paired to a beautiful definition once annunciated by the late Joseph Campbell:

    ‘Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending; death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.’

    This also brings to mind the haunting words spoken in the Hebrew service when sitting Shiva: “A final separation awaits every relationship, no matter how tender. Someday we shall have to drop every object to which our hands now cling.”
    Ergo, ‘Live Life and be Merry’…

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-j-healey/finnegans-wake-in-the-bro_b_3277426.html

    Follow John J. Healey on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jjhealey3

  • Politicians, Peptides, and Stupidity (and the tale of the tribe)

    Politicians, Peptides, and Stupidity: An Evening with Robert Anton Wilson

    “Dr. Robert Anton Wilson was the author (along with Robert Shea) of the popular Illuminatus! trilogy, which won the Prometheus Hall of Fame award for science fiction in 1986. His other books have found great acclaim as well, many of them achieving “cult classic” status. Wilson has been described at various times throughout his life as a novelist, philosopher, psychologist, essayist, editor, playwright, poet, futurist, civil libertarian and agnostic mystic.

    In this video from the Libertarian Party’s Presidential Nominating Convention in 1987, Wilson treats the audience to a humorous and irreverent talk about everything from the state of world politics to a discussion on metaphysics, chemistry, and the nature of reality.–http://www.libertarianism.org/media/video-collection/politicians-peptides-stupidity-evening-robert-anton-wilson

  • Art and money, how?

    Art and Money?

    How is it, who issues it
    creative and yet counterfeit
    for nothing

    a second look
    double take
    the time space
    inversion with

    value?
    empty things in time space
    filled with space time
    what do you call it
    money or art?
    artney/moart?

    which technical abilities
    aesthetic reflections
    information content and
    originality

    in economics
    the painted euro
    fabricated pound
    sculptured dollar
    projected bit

    coin from paper to
    data and back to the newest
    paper cash

    canvas
    mini illustrated notes
    of limited beauty
    money as counterfeit art
    art as counterfeit

    money
    draw you notes now
    to Elmyr and twenty Bob
    what’s unique and rare art

    what value system is held
    in s/place my numbers
    5, 10, 20, 50, 100
    limited proportions
    artistic value

    distortions
    Art & money raise
    question:
    what is money,
    who issues it
    how?

    Steve ‘Fly’ Pratt
    (Amsterdam)

    Steven James Pratt

  • Police Horse Blues

    Police Horse Blues by Steve Fly

    I woke up one morning

    with a horse in my bed

    after a hard nights work

    this is what she said:

    –

    I don’t wanna work for those police no more

    Oh no, i just don’t wanna do it

    I wanna roam in the lush fileds and grass

    not bust up unions for Norman Tebbit

    –

    So i brushed up my horse

    and took her round’ the course

    she ran like the wind

    and then she said at the end

    –

    I don’t wanna work for the Police no more

    they just treat me like a pig

    i don’t belong in the city at all anymore baby

    like a bear don’t belong in a wig

    _

    Then the cops came and got her

    carted her off with their trotter

    now she’s back on the beat

    stompin’ heads with shoes on her feet

    –

    Oh lord, that horse don’t wanna work for the police no more

    that horse just wants to run free

    if it was up to me honey

    I’d free dogs from the clutches too,

    let em’ all be.

    –Steve fly
    Amsterdam. Wednesday 15th May.

    Inspired by seeing two police horses foaming at mouth while on my way home from work today. Poor bastards, i thought. 

    Steven James Pratt

  • Photo Pano Picture Mixture

    Photo-pano picture mixture
    audio sonic soundtrack
    fixture
    listen with eyes and seer the future
    non-local and 360 rotational
    adventure furniture
    A new movie and unique
    song
    as the scene spins and
    the film moves along

    omnidirectionally

    Hand made arts in new dimension
    panorama spaces – the now
    apprehension
    lend some attention
    look listen touch travel
    suspension

     

    Bridge to a new synthesis
    of media
    Chews your experience

    fly through the novel painting

    leap frog from
    the edge
    cutting all corners  off everything
    churn on

    –Steve Fly.
    Vondel Park, Amsterdam. May 4th, 2013. 2-3 PM.

    Steven James Pratt

  • Conspiracy Conspiracy Conspiracy: 3 ways of looking-atom

    Conspiracy Conspiracy Conspiracy: 3 ways of looking at THEM.

    Among the many trillions of petabytes of information that Robert Anton Wilson processed in his lifetime, may we dwell for a moment on his internationally recognized role as ‘the dean’ of conspiracy theory. The DEAN! (and self confessed model-agnostic)

    Next, consider his repeated banging and thumping on the theme of ‘the fallibility of the human nervous system’. He seduced his readers with his art, to THINK, in a kind of ‘field’ approach of–plurality and multiplicity–opposed to a narrow, single-sighted, atom-beam view. (or the useful synthesis from exploring both of these different ways of seeing)

    Im 99.8% sure that a huge part of Dr Wilson’s teachings detail how to transcend the Alex Jones style ‘territorial chest beating’ also found in the FOX news style ‘well suited lies’. His methods and his operating manual-style guide-maps, work like magical tools to help transform idiocy and ignorance throughout the world into humour and surrealist poetry, while secretly introducing his readers to the 20th’ and 21st’ centuries’ greatest hits (e.g. quantum mechanics, cybernetics, LSD and ‘hologrammic historical fiction’, and, as i wrote earlier maintaining his position as the DEAN of conspiracy theory) 

    I have always been a pretty out in the open RAW fan, again here I want to stress today, bluntly that if you have not picked up on RAW and his ideas yet, you had better start soon or else…you’ll be run over on the information superhighway. IMHO you cannot get such a balanced and encyclopedic guide to culture ANYWHERE else (from the perspective of just one individual with an exceptional globalist view).

    RAW writes with an urgency and passion that drives his special model agnosticism into a kind of activism. Within his entire lifeswork its rare to find Dr Wilson ‘chest beating’ or writing ‘well dressed lies’ unless he tells you before or after that he has tricked the reader with a put-on or self confessed bias. His awareness of awareness and healthy self-criticism increase his appeal in the days of ‘cock sureness’ and ‘unwavering certainty’ on the left, the right, and wherever there is chaos and injustice.

    READ HIM.

    –Steve ‘fly’ Pratt
    Amsterdam.
    6-7.30 P.M, Wednesday 24th April. 2013.
         

    Steven James Pratt

  • RAW360 (dot) net

    www.raw360.net

  • Ninja Jamm is here!

    Ninja Jamm is here: Enter the mix http://ninjajamm.com/

     http://ninjajamm.com/

     “In marketing terminology, a killer application (commonly shortened to killer app) is any computer program that is so necessary or desirable that it proves the core value of some larger technology, such as computer hardware, gaming console, software, a programming language, software platform, or an operating system.—Wikipedia, killer app.

    Let Us Play—Coldcut

    “Ninja Jamm is a free music app that lets anyone instantly remix Ninja tunes using touch control, state of the art effects and killer music from Ninja artists.”—Ninjatune.

    Summer 2012 sees a new ear-ra in sound mixing, DJ performance and mashability’. IMHO the art and crafts of the disc jockey started with the hand-to-eye-to-ear skill set when the first vinyl manipulators started their experiments in the mid 1970’s, through to the new touch sensitive ‘tablets’ that respond to touching, tickles and scratch motions in a notable return to physical hand movements that trigger audio and visual media.

    Yet for a moment there I thought that the CD-DJ phenomena flourished, and reduced the touch of a vinyl record platter to buttons and sliders with awkward looking LCD displays. I had a personal love of vinyl, and traditional vinyl turntablism and up until (May 18th 2012) i held firm to my beliefs by only spinning vinyl records for nearly 20 years.

    The new interactive touch surfaces combined with real time, latency free, control bring some excitement in hands on DJ’ing back into a new sense of what DJ artistry consists of, technically. I feel its important to remember that  the equipment remains only a part of the art. The content, the music, the samples and the tasteful synthesis (mixing) help define comprehensive and information rich DJ’s from predictable ones.

    Enter Ninjatune as a case in point. The rare example of sampling and software innovation running simultaneously, and keeping a consistently underground and forward thinking philosophy, today probably best summed up as an Open Source and Mash-up sensibility. Personally, when I discovered Ninjatune and their music back in 1993, I gushed at the mixture of sample based instrumental Hip Hop and experimental electronica.

    The new Ninja Jamm APP makes sense in the age of mash up culture, remix-mania and digital culture gone feral. Ninja have a 22 year history that stands testament to their visionary and somewhat prophetic outlook on music culture, DJ’s, VJ’s and electronic music.  Now in the summer of 2012 I believe their shareable, mashable philosophy fits perfectly with  the new global APP village orgy.

    “Instant remixing functions in push-button form let any music lover dive right in, yet Ninja Jamm is deep enough to engage DJs, musicians and producers. This one is fun.”—Ninjatune.

     
    Ninja Jamm by Fly Agaric 23.(Amsterdam, September 2012.)

    “Killer Apps”–Juice Aleem. (New Flesh For Old)

    Ninja Jamm Ninja Jamm
    It’ll unhinge you man, unhinge you man

    Sneakin out the window and down the drain pipe
    on a Saturday night, tonight’s light is ripe, rip reeeep, rip, write ripe.

    Like a cat or a panther I creep near the curb
    My mind is kept calm as it swims in the herb

    Ahead I spy the Ninja Shop right next to the dock
    So I pull out my microphone from my hemp sock

    I said, “Yo, what’s up, I’m here to get me some APPS
    Shinobi at the counter looked at me and said “perhaps’

    Perhaps you have some killer apps to help set riddim traps
    Turn LP’s into maps, escape the beat through cat flaps?

    Take a look around, tap-tap, listen understand,
    Bring what you found and leave it here in a mound,
    I’ll mix it up in an APP and Zap Zap, a tech-cloud sound.
    I stand dumbfound.

    I walked around the store and picked up some stuff,
    Weapons, clothing, instruments and a gold Ninja tooth.

    Throwing stars and pentagons, knives and darts
    All made with the greatest skill and crafts of the arts

    Hemp rope and ladders and invisible dust
    Swords, chords and passwords to a remix by Krust

    Flags bags and stealth drone kite banners
    And Ninja shop staff with big heart and kind manners

    Telescopes microscopes and spectrocilloscopes
    Hidden microphones, speakers and unstable isotopes

    A Shapeshifting manual of style on blue tile
    Bungee ropes unravelling for mile after mile

    I walked to the counter and gave Shinobi a smile
    “Put all this into an APP from the top of the pile.

    So I booted up my Ninja APP and went for a walk
    Soon I started to talk, then I wrote in chalk:

      Ninja fingers and 2 gold Buddha thumbs

    Touch the Scruff of the head nod

    Multi-channel suite with
    Two Fingers sounds hyper-Tobin

    Snug as The Bug inna’ Slugabed,
    Poison dart in heart of the beats

    exquisite 23 course serving of DJ Food/
    Cold-cutting the cheese

    Brain thaw and brain feeder for the Coldcuts
    Atomic Moog, RE:volution and sound mirrors

    NJ Beats back in a Bogus Order
    Dextrous like the Bonobo

    Lush audio visual synthesis:
    The Cinemeatic Orchestra

    Cutting hard candy and acid squelch
    DJ Kentaro rotation

    A labyrinth of rhythms unlocked
    from Daedelus feather soft

    Innovative trans-genre tempo flux
    of the Funki Porcini

    Phat chunky Herbaliser grooves
    for the mother board.

    Slicing knife blade voices of Skalpal
    Jazzy chops, picked and Chris Bowden

    Flight path and charter for Airborn audio.
    Lingua dicing dancefloors

    A polished solid audio spark Plug
    To power the Wagon Christ

    Vibe medicine and beat pharmacopeia
    for Qemists and Juice Aleem

    Parts and pieces for the ferocious
    cutting teeth of King Cannibal

    Fender Bending gloves for scratching claws
    of the pause of Kid Koala

    Blending harmony and beauty with gravity
    and touch: the Irresistible force

    XY ‘floating points’ FX
    Hand cushion for Antibalas
    percussion

    Steve ‘fly agaric 23’ Pratt
    www.raw360.net

    Steven James Pratt