Category: the tale of the tribe
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Deep Scratch Novel Coming Monday 21st
I’m happy to announce I’m releasing Deep Scratch on Monday. Available in digital formats, followed by a hard copy edition in 2021.
To receive a copy, please support me for the price of a coffee over at my Patreon, I’d prefer 3 Euro, but any support (1Euro) will get you a copy, plus you unlock sixty plus unique posts!
If you don’t like it, I’ll send you the money back! How’s that?
I appreciate you. Stay safe and responsible.
–Steve Fly
https://www.patreon.com/stevefly#DeepScratch #OpenSourceHistory #OurHistoriesBack #Sixty #ScienceFiction #TurntableProse
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Toot and Come-Inn: Cannabis Seeds and Finnegans Wake, and dogs, you dig?
Toot and Come-Inn: Cannabis Seeds and Finnegans Wake, and dogs, you dig?
By Steve Fly Agaric 23. (Dedicated to Sirius, the dog)
— Is that answers? — It am queery! — The house was Toot and Come-Inn by the bridge called Tiltass, but are you solarly salemly sure, beyond the shatter of the canicular year? Nascitur ordo seculi numfit. — Siriusly and selenely sure behind the shutter. Securius indicat umbris tellurem.
–James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, pages 512-513.
Back in 2002, when i asked Robert Anton Wilson by email ‘Can you give a list of items for our emergency survival suitcase please?” he replied:“Cannabis seeds, Finnegans Wake, one Rottweiler.”Cannabis Coffeeshop Journal 2017: Writings On Coffeeshop Culture (Volume 1)
by Steven James Pratt
Link: http://a.co/hMWdKax
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Cosmic Trigger Play and The Tale of The Tribe
PART 1: TTOTT and PLAY
“Fuck God In The Ass”–Ed Sanders
“If you can’t say FUCK in public, then the terrorists have won.–D. Scott Apel.
Towards the radical abolition of time as history, in favour of a more flexible playtime where 1994 and 1977 (for example) feedback to each other through the porthole of stagecraft. The Strange Intimacy in the dramatic plays of W.B Yeats, partly influenced by Ernest Fenollosa and his contact with the Noh play tradition of Japan. Within, the accumulation of techniques taken in the Poundian’ sense of that phrase. The exploitation of lighting, stage projection, sound effects and costume all-at-once in a Wellesian’ fashion, sharp transitions. Ritualistic and ceremonial jams with space for improvisation and embellishment, yes. The fair and rare scientific language of higher states of consciousness, further clarified and made new by actors and stage magix, singing, dancing, shouting.
The process of time and humans gathered together: actors, props, lights, sound, projections, choreography, costume, writing, production, promotion, not to mention food travel shelter and personal hygiene. All this, ALL THIS came together in a unique intersection point, or series of intersection points, to lean on a phrase from Burroughs. The words and the lights and the sounds and the ears hearts minds and bodies of both performers and co-conspirators, the audience co-mingled, wrestled together with a Robert Anton Wilson Universe.
Often times i felt the words jump of the script and into the walls, or the mouth or face of another. Letters are OFF the wall. Language of poetry thrown up onto the stage, balls and all. Total transformation of mind and ALL that resembles it. The sheer rush of hearing the wise words of RAW, and many of his cohorts projected into the air with such finesse, attention to inflection, cadence, the swing of the word, amped-up expressive decoration and embroidery.
Cosmic Trigger Play, in my humble opinion, and to curve your ear a little, might have been to the delight of RAWs tribe. I mean to say, RAWs unfinished great work ‘The Tale Of The Tribe‘ criss-crosses with Cosmic Trigger Play in that TTOTT players William Butler Yeats, Marshall McLuhan, Orson Welles, and Perhaps Joyce and Pound may have enjoyed the stage play IMHO…Bruno, Vico, Nietzsche, Fenollosa, Shannon and Bucky too (google em’ & git bck. to me with yr/ thoughts) I’m getting at, or digging into an idea about the hermetic nature of theatre, the multi-media of it ALL, and how the new play satisfies many of the quality critters that Robert Anton Wilson invoked in his last great unfinished work TTOTT. At least TTOTT represents the direction i would like you, dear reader, to ramble into. Please excuse my using it as a playful spring board to get into reviewing the play itself.
RAW would have been moved and inspired if he were around to see the Cosmic Trigger Play. He would have loved it. Sorry to invoke a cliche’ yet i think it important to consider RAWs position on current events, and not just political and or metaphysical but concerning the creative arts and new media, to attempt to reconsider some of his critical thoughts on the art and culture, social psychology and a further refined focus on theatre. Makes sense right? (you can find all the details about the who to the what now if you type ‘Cosmic Trigger Play’ into any search engine. But wait.
Okay, maybe the best way to push onwards is git’ the 23K (x4) and do it all again. Cosmic Trigger pulling remains an open game, the new Universe sits gleaming in the moonlight. Sparkling, full of stars orbiting planet word. A Cosmic Trigger Play pulled off and etched into the mind-body-speech of a sleepless crew of initiates. A crew ready to roll. Let’s go get em’. (Already feeling terribly confined here in word-world, trying to talk a bit about Bob and the TTOTT and the play and ALL).
Tom Robbins once stated words to the effect that if roughly 15% of the population were reading and acting upon the works of Robert Anton Wilson we might see a new enlightenment/renaissance, or something equally epic and encyclopedic. Of course i agree, and you can find loads of my writings across the web echoing this sentiment. READ HIM. Go to the source.
The tale of the tribe brings together a dozen innovators from history, reaching back to Giordano Bruno (16th century) and into the 21st Century (Claude Shannon). A current of renaissance men, who share a part to play in both the gestation of ideas and influences upon Robert Anton Wilson, and upon Internet. Yes, INTERNET. RAW seemed to be a BIG fan of Internet. I feel he would have supported Wikileaks, Snowdon, EFF, Open Source Projects, Chaos Computer Club meetings, Anonymous, Aaron Swartz, Jacob Applebaum, Cory Doctorow and most Internet rights activists. And i think he would find facebook an amusing distraction from his hologrammic prose.
Lets co-create a new Universe or theatre of the mind, where each and everyone of us can think and act in multiple dimensions, working on many levels, in synchrony, considering set and setting, speech and place-time. Making the invisible visible. Let’s do it again to the gates of eternity.
PART 2: THANKS TO ALL THE COSMIC CREW
Thanks to those wise beings who donated food to the backstage area and those who were kind enough to buy a cast or crew member a well deserved drink. Greg and Wolfy and the Liverpool crew. Mario Dimaggio of Immersive Dome Theaters, and Toby Philpott who helped manage the Maybe Logic Dome at the Find The Others Festival, and all the other performers and exhibitors. The London Film crew who set up at lost, the random helping hands all over the place, the Cosmic Trigger Band, optimistic ideas from Harvey Webb, music and good vibes from Youth, and the phalanx of other musicians and DJs who performed at the ‘Find The Others’ festival, and those who played in London. My friends Emily, Scott Groves and Kev Lane for showing up. Lisa Lovebucket and crafts, Beccy Strong photography, Jonathan Greet photography. And on…
All the strong willed ones who helped transport the entire set and many of the crew back and forth to locations in Liverpool, and in London.Special thanks to John Sinclair, Caleb Selah, CHU and all those who supported the crowd fund launch party and donated time, services, equipment and money to the whole trigger pulling process. Alan Moore for continued support. All the supportive video clips from Douglas Rushkoff, Nina Conti, Irving Rappaport, Alan Moore, Jamie Reid, Bill Nye, John Higgs and those i forgot. To Jack Sarfatti for agreeing to meet with Nic Alderton for an interview in S.F. Special thanks to Rick Rasa, Sandhya Sanjana, Michael Ray, Matt Black, Youth, Tim Eggmond, Dominick Clementson, Caleb Selah and all the voices of the cast for all the musical contributions.
A standing ovation for the hundreds of cuddly crowd-funders and thousands of supporters across the planet who re-tweeted, forwarded by email or better yet spread the word-by-mouth of the impossible play made possible. Big up. And a nice one to the reviewers and those who published in support of the project, in particular the Liverpool Confidential and the Independent. And, finally, to those who did not get a mention, it really sits with you now, so thanks in anticipation. I feel fortunate to have had such a schooling process collaborating with the following sleepless crew:
Actors
Oliver Senton – Robert Anton Wilson
Kate Alderton – Arlen /Jano Watts / Miss Portinari
Dixie Mcdervitt – Luna / Ensemble
Lee Ravitz – Kerry Thornley / Simon Moon / George Dorn
Andrew Mackbean – Dr Timothy Leary / Hagbard Celine
Josh Darcy – Ken Campbell / Gary Kerstein / Greg Hill / Ensemble
Tom Baker – Aleister Crowley / Robert Shea / Ensemble
Daisy Campbell – Mavis / Prunella Gee
Claudia Egypt Bolton – Eris / Ensemble
Robert Wells – Slim / Goat Boy / Ensemble
Katy-Anne Hellis – Karuna Wilson / Angel / Paula / Ensemble
Larry Sidorczuk – Albert Hoffman / Ensemble
Nick Helweg Larson – Postman
Irving Rappaport – Jaques Vallee / George Harvey Webb / Ensemble
Peter Wilson – William Burroughs
Nick Marcq – Alan Watts
Michele Watson – Lead Ensemble
Amanda Maye Steele – Ishtar (wed/thu/sat mat)
Elizabeth Sandford-Richardson – Ishtar (fri)
Katy Claire – Ishtar (sat)
Robert K.G Temple – As himself (sat)Team
Daisy Eris Campbell – Writer and Director
Michelle Watson – Conferestival Director
Dominic Search – General Manager & Webtech
Nadia Luijten – Stage Manager & Social Media
Claudia Boulton – Production and Popery
Nic Alderton – Production, perks and Film
Polly Wilkinson – Graphic Art & Merchandise
Scott McPherson – Projections and Virals
Steve Fly – Music Director
Chris Farncombe – Lighting Design
Sadie Spencer – Lighting Desk
Padrigo Brown – Scenery & Props Maester
Dominick Clementson – Sound Desk (wed/thur)
Josh Chedwin Evans – Sound Desk (fri/sat)Credits
Christian Wach – Website Design
Jonathan Greet – Stills Photography
Andrew Ab – Stills Photography
Adam Clark – Stills Photography
Bobby Campbell – Initial Artwork
CHU – Illuminatus Set Painting
Gary Acord – Initial website hosting
Lee Isserow – Camera Liverpool
Michelle Olly – Promotions & Vibes
PART 3: RE:VERSE-RIGGER
thus was it in time
here with discordian sounds
of Sun Ra and Tim Leary
in my head 1973 1993 to infinity
time has come ready1950s & 1990s mixed with
Nixon era cointelpro paranoia
3 stooges of interplay
on many levelsBogart and Saul Goodman
totally Orson unhinged
gates of eternity
hyperreal investigationtrigger pulled
lasagna launched
comets and interstellar
regions crossed
acid Crowley Lilly love scenetimespace and speechspaces
reshaped to travel-time
the eternal nowness of
Robert Anton Wilson
Universe breathing
chanting enochiancaptured and shored by
Daisy Eris and her pirate ship
of initiates bound for planet mu
mu unbound from the page to
the stage pulling it all
offblowing minds out of time
into-starseed-spaces
light body voice speech
enactments towards
decohere…
cosmic trigger
with claritas humanitas
and hilaritas
Black Mass Scene – Visual Projections and Photo by Hagbard Celine PART 4: SOURCES AND RESOURCES
http://www.rawillumination.net/2014/11/cosmic-trigger-play-news-roundup.html
http://maybelogic.blogspot.nl/2014/11/cosmic-event-in-london.html
http://boingboing.net/2014/03/17/raws-the-cosmic-trigger-as-a.html
http://maybelogic.blogspot.nl/2014/09/cosmic-trigger-re-play.html
https://www.flickr.com/search?text=cosmic%20trigger%20play&sort=relevance
Steve Fly at the drums – Photo by Jonathan Greet -
Frances Yates and the Mnemonic Works of Giordano Bruno
After Warburg’s death in October 1929 and the migration of the Institute to London in 1933, Brunian studies at the Warburg Institute took a very different direction thanks to the research of Frances Yates (1899-1981). While Warburg’s interest in Bruno and image-based thinking brought his philosophy towards the present, Frances Yates’ hypothesis of an Hermetic Bruno rooted his thought in a distant and partly mythical past at the antipodes of modern times. Nevertheless, while her Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) takes a different path from that traced by Warburg, her other Brunian study, The Art of Memory (1966), is perhaps her book closest to Warburg’s preoccupations. Indeed the history of mnemonics practices, by means of which mythological figures lived from the Antiquity onwards as animated bearers of learning in the intimacy of the human brain, had everything to interest Warburg. In fact the Art of Memory was written in close consultation with Gertud Bing as confirmed by this excerpt from the preface:Now that the Memory Book is at last ended, the memory of the late Gertrud Bing seems more poignantly present than ever. In the early days, she read and discussed my drafts, watching constantly over my progress, or lack of progress, encouraging and discouraging by turns, ever stimulating with her intense interest and vigilant criticism. She felt that the problems of the mental image, of the activation of images, of the grasp of reality through images – problems ever present in the history of the Art of Memory – were close to those which preoccupied Aby Warburg, whom I only knew through her.Frances Yates expounded the first results of her research on Bruno’s art of memory in a seminar at the Warburg Institute in 1952. She showed her reconstruction of the wheel described in the De Umbris Idearum, Bruno’s first mnemonic work published in Paris in 1582. The two wheels illustrated below are part of the same work and serve as an introduction to using the larger wheel.In the first fixed ring the practitioner will assign a mythological or heroic figure to each letter. Bruno provides some examples : A Lycaon; B Deucalion; C Apollo; D Argos … (see De Umbris Idearum, pp. 107 ff). The letters of the second ring correspond to an action or a scene associated with each figure. The examples provided are: AA Lycaon at a banquet; BB Deucalion and pebbles; CC Apollo and Python; DD Argos and some cattle (ibid, p. 112). Thus rotating the first inner ring operates permutations between the figures and their action. Further permutation occurs when the third wheel is set in motion. It contains attributes or enseignes which can be easily passed from one figure to another. Bruno provides only four examples and leaves the rest to the imagination of his reader. These are : AAA, Lycaon at a banquet with a chain; BBB, Deucalion and pebbles with a headband; CCC, Apollo and Python with a baldric; DDD, Argos and some cattle with a hood. This way the systems makes it possible to create combinations of letters representing words, acronyms or syllables to be remembered by means of animated images mixing the attributes and accustomed actions of familiar mythological figures.BAA: B Deucalion A at a banquet A with a chain
MAD: M Perseus A at a banquet D with a hood
CAD: C Apollo A at a banquet D with a hood
COD: C Apollo O and Proserpina D with a hoodTo approach the larger wheel Bruno advises his reader that `…it is necessary to dilute the printed page into an immense space’. The last section of De Umbris idearum describes the content of the larger wheel over 40 pages. It consists of five concentric rings divided into 150 rays each subdivided in 5 cells. On the outer rings are numbers, letters, the name of inventors followed by four more wheels of words corresponding to the categories of agent, action, enseignes, attributes (adstans) and circumstance.
- Frances Yates reconstruction of Giordano Bruno memory wheel from `De Umbris Idearum’ – Click the image to access full version (PDF 1.5 mb)
`How did the system work? By magic of course, by being based on the central power station of the … images of the stars, closer to reality than the images of things of the sublunar world, transmitter of the astral forces, the `shadows’ intermediary between the ideal world above the stars and the objects and events in the lower world.’ (The Art of Memory, p. 223)This interpretation, based on a misplacing of the images of the planets, was first revised by Rita Sturlese in her critical edition of the De Umbris of 1991 (pp. LXVIII ff.) and later by Francesco Torchia (‘La chiave delle ombre’, Intersezioni, 1, 1997, pp. 131-151).Both scholars strip Bruno’s construction of its magical character. According to Sturlese the wheel is in fact an adult toy conceived to learn foreign words. Here each ray corresponds to a set of syllables combining one consonant with one vowel. Thus reconstructing a word with its phonetic constituents amounts to combining the various elements of each section. The addition of the images described in the last ring before the hub creates in the end a mnemonic background by means of which new words can be remembered. For instance to remember the word Numeratore you should pick the first syllable in the outer ring, NU, which corresponds to `Apis’; the second syllable in the second ring, ME: `in tapeta ’; the third syllable, RA, in the third ring: `deploratus’; the fourth syllable, TO, from the 4th ring: `compedes’; and finally RE in the 5th ring. This last ring provides a background against which to set the image thus created: `…mulier super hydram tres cervices e quarum singulis septem exiliunt capita habentem, vacuas antrorsum tendens manus’ (De Umbris, p. 151). -
Multi Model Agnostic Geometry: MMAG by Steve Fly Agaric 23
His philosophy was one of multiple model agnosticism – not just simply about the existence of God but agnosticism about everything. With MMA, there is no point getting hung up on the models themselves because that’s all they are – models.—John Higgs, KLF. pg. 258.
Multi Model Agnostic Geometry.
by Steven James Pratt
Flyting: Selected Writings
by Steven James Pratt
Link: http://a.co/f5pSkqP
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Liffissippi River to Joyce’s Poundland
…and when the mode of the
music changes
the walls of the
city shakea perspective from relative place
humbled individual to their part
in universe and othersingle individuated mind
in time
gathering tales and knick knacks
of history into a trick bagdo you feel melody and riddim’
in verse
word sound image sandwiches
attention to source
to _____ and just storyword jazz s c r a b l e m and
recontext’ of everything
in John Coltrane and
James JoycePound’s eccentricity flows
to American in Europe, Joyce’s concentricity
circulates the planettwo sides of a new shiny coin
ideograms on side a
hologrammic prose on the fliptwo torrential rivers of ink
bleeding shared currents
liffissippiJoyce’s Be-Bop and
Pound’s symphonic compositions
cut and mixed togetherHomeric history and Ulysses
in a conch shell sunset
and a Dublin street fightthe inner
Joyce and the
outer
Pound dynastic index
Irish American tell all talesThe Cantos awake
a wake Cantos:
a dream/nightmare from
which I am trying to awake
(not)sleepwalking giants leave
footprints in the mud
trackers reverse the prints
into beastsexplicit Cantos give us facts
weights and measures, the dates
places, names and flames to witimplicit Finnegan offers us
truer ficts, rubber inches,
neurological realism and the funnies…like J.C’s Ballads versus
Stellar Regions
it’s a whole different thing
consistent in its genius‘FW is psycho-archaeology
Dr Wilson said.
‘no mystery about the Cantos,
Pound said.
they are the tale of
the tribehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegans_Wake
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cantos
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tale_of_the_Tribe–Steve Fly
Amsterdam, 9th June, 2013 -
Massive Online Open Courses: From McLuhan to MOOC.
Note to Maybe Logic Academy!
http://www.maybelogic.org/Massive Online Open Courses: From McLuhan to MOOC.
Jonathan D. Moreno
“In this summer of 2012 the buzz in the world of higher education is about massive online open courses, or “MOOC.” It seems that cyber-prophet Marshall McLuhan saw this coming.
As a classroom teacher for over 35 years who is about to set a virtual foot onto the campus of MOOC U (my neuroethics course will be offered by Coursera in January, the other major entrant into MOOC being EdX), I wonder what I’m getting into. I have a feeling I’m not alone among my dozens of colleagues in this regard. Surely they also wonder if the transmission of knowledge to which they’ve given much of their lives is about to undergo an unpredictable transformation in which they will play a part. University of Virginia professor Mark Edmundson is dubious that the classroom artistry of the truly fine teacher can be captured in the online experience.
Edmundson has a point. I know exactly what he means when he compares those precious moments of didactic flow in a physical classroom to jazz improvisation.
Yet the precise contours of the MOOC experience and its implications for higher education remain a mystery to everyone, including the investors, institutions and instructors. All we really know is that (1) the sheer number of potential online students is mind-boggling and hard to resist; and (2) the “production values” need to be far better than those for the university-produced online lectures I’ve watched in the past few years.
The MOOCs need to hit that sweet spot between two hours of a static lecturer-focused camera and the flash-and-dash of TED Talks. But at this stage that still doesn’t tell us much about what to expect.
In search of an oracle, I stumbled upon a piece co-authored by Marshall McLuhan in 1967 in, of all places, Look magazine (many teachers worry that online students will look but not think). The article forecast the learning experience of “The Class of 1989”; the same issue included a long essay by a Look senior editor on “The Generation Gap.” Just as young people were demanding more “relevance” in schools, McLuhan recites the longstanding progressive critique of standardized education as “bodies of knowledge” and lectures, the latter seen “one of the least effective [mode of education] ever devised by man,” soon to go the way of all other “mechanized production line[s].”
Instead, McLuhan wrote, “the new modes of instantaneous, long-distance human communication — radio, telephone, television — are linking the world’s people in a vast net of electric circuitry that creates a new depth and breadth of personal involvement and events and breaks down the old, traditional boundaries that made specialization possible.” McLuhan thus foresaw the end of the mass-produced student. “When computers are properly used, in fact, they are almost certain to increase individual diversity. A worldwide network of computers will make all of mankind’s factual knowledge available to all students everywhere in a matter of minutes or seconds.”
Not bad for 1967, just as the Pentagon’s packet switching technology was indeed laying the groundwork for “a worldwide network of computers.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-d-moreno/massive-online-open-cours_b_1695128.html
DEEP SCRATCH 