Am I dreaming 9pm? Preliminary Findings

From 'patacritical researcher AMIA:

9pm - Spider sits on the bedroom ceiling. The light flutters a little like it's reflecting off water. "Water FX". But there is no water in my bedroom.

9pm - Driving passenger in jacks car. We leave my place drive down York and head south. I look down at my phone to find a place to route to and then look up again and we're back on York going the same direction but behind where we just were. I totally forget about the dream assignment, then remember it around midnight so I explain the whole thing to jack and ask what we were doing at 9pm. He suggest I write about how we looped back around on York when I wasn't looking and I was confused. That's kind of dreamlike, right?

9pm -Spent all day working on a collage. Felt like I was getting somewhere. Making progress. Look at all that glue on my fingers. Look at what I've accomplished. It's hardly anything at all. Where did all my good work go? Why so much glue for so little? In dreams, time always feels like its moving the wrong way up the escalator.

9pm. On the ground right by my car I find the miniature replica of Kevin's drift wood penis figurine. I sand the balls down a little bit on the bumper block. I've chanced upon too many wooden penises in one night for real life....am I dreaming or is this just what "lucky" looks like in Malibu?

9pm. - Old people fox trotting while the Frank Gary band play some tunes. The waiter brings me a giant plate of peas in pea pods. All the women around me have equally elaborate 60s up-dos with neon subsections. A woman takes a pink cake selfie - probably because the frosting makes her feel decadent. The cherubs swarming around us remind us that heaven is a place on earth.

9pm - I take a nap and I am actually dreaming.

9pm - driving on the freeway. Nothing dreamlike. Just stupid fucking la traffic.

9pm - standing on a weird street corner downtown(?) at the new experimental half hour space. Across from the 24hr doctor/dentist/Botox/tattoo/all-stop-body-shop. Talking to Sarah with the pink smudgy eyes (at nighttime she goes by Serene). I hear someone yell my name in the distance. I look back thinking Yasmina decided to show up, but then it gets much louder and "aaammmmiiiiaaaaa" turns into the scream of the train that passes behind us on the tracks. I turn back to Sarah, "sorry I thought the train was calling my name". I don't know if she believed me.

Image: Final scene from Denis Villeneuve's Enemy (2013)

Recommended Viewing

The Hammer presents Matthew Barney’s epic masterwork The Cremaster Cycle, screened in its entirety over the course of several days. With near cult status in the art world, The Cremaster Cycle is an evocation of the creative process by Barney, a sculptor and performance artist and arguably one of the most important artists of his generation. Visually arresting and often disturbing, The Cremaster Cycle is a grand mixture of history, mythology, and autobiography exploring the creation of form. Each of the five films is projected on 35mm film, and presented in the order of its making.

APR 217:30 PM CREMASTER CYCLE, HAMMER SCREENINGS
Cremaster 4 & Cremaster 1

APR 22 7:30 PMCREMASTER CYCLE, HAMMER SCREENINGS
Cremaster 5 & Cremaster 2

APR 23 7:30 PMCREMASTER CYCLE, HAMMER SCREENINGS
Cremaster 3

http://hammer.ucla.edu/cremaster-cycle/

Unraveling the Internet’s oldest and weirdest mystery

Back in 1996, users of the proto-Web community Usenet got spammed with messages that reached an almost transcendent level of bizarre—a weirdness so precise it implied the influence of a very human intelligence. “Markovian Parallax Denigrate,” read the title of each post, followed by a mountain of seemingly meaningless word spew:

jitterbugging McKinley Abe break Newtonian inferring caw update Cohen
air collaborate rue sportswriting rococo invocate tousle shadflower
Debby Stirling pathogenesis escritoire adventitious novo ITT most
chairperson Dwight Hertzog different pinpoint dunk McKinley pendant
firelight Uranus episodic medicine ditty craggy flogging variac
brotherhood Webb impromptu file countenance inheritance cohesion
refrigerate morphine napkin inland Janeiro nameable yearbook hark

According to later accounts, hundreds of these messages flooded Usenet discussion groups on Aug. 5, 1996, launching the type of intense, rigorous inquiries you’d expect from the geeky academics who frequented the newsgroups back then—none of which turned up any answers. And the event was soon mostly forgotten, washed away in the deluge of information and culture ushered in by the burgeoning popularity of the World Wide Web.

Then, around 2006, the event’s Wikipedia page became a favorite bullet point for any number of “creepy Wikipedia” lists that made their way across blogs and obscure Web forums. Soon bloggers had dug up something even more curious.

At Google’s public Usenet archives, only one message remains with a subject line that reads “Markovian Parallax Denigrate.” And the name on the sender’s email address was curiously familiar to anyone who happened to be a national security wonk: Susan Lindauer, a former journalist who was arrested in 2004 after allegedly serving as an agent of Saddam Hussein’s government. She’s has since become a purveyor of sundry conspiracy theories, from a Lockerbie bombing cover-up to 9/11 trutherism. Shortly after Lindauer’s connection to all this was dug up, the Wikipedia page disappeared. You needn’t have been a conspiracy nut to connect the dots, to think something fishy was going on.

Was the Markovian Parallax Denigrate a message—a cipher hiding a deep government secret?

This is a story of two Susan Lindauers and how they accidentally gave a second life to one of the Internet’s oldest and weirdest mysteries.

Read the rest of 'patacritical researcher Kevin Morris' investigation here.

Further to dérives

Mobile Maze
aka: Living Labyrinth

"What we all dread most is a maze with no centre."
                                       — G. K. Chesterton, Father Brown

The characters are wandering through a maze, except that they just turned around, and the door they just came in is now a wall....

Perhaps this place is a Living Structure Monster, is possessed by a demon or inhabited by a spirit, making it a Genius Loci, or it was built with tracks, pistons and engines to move according to the beat of an arcane clockwork heart (or high-tech AI), but usually, there is no way to stop or even detect the mechanism. You must let it herd you or puzzle it out the trick it wants. Alien Geometries (especially Oh Look, More Rooms!) may complicate it still further, along with any door being possibly a Cool Gate. As can the possibility of being eaten.

Sometimes it is, in fact, a mind game: the character's sense of direction is confused, or he can no longer recognize which parts he has been through.

The Maze is the parent trope. If paired with an Psychological Torment Zone, it becomes a deadly Closed Circle.

from http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MobileMaze?from=Main.LivingLabyrinth

Paranoid Subjectivity and the Challenges of Cognitive Mapping...

Via 'patacritical researcher Joni Spigler:

Anthony writes "One of the great ambiguities of the present is whether and how to attribute plotting to state or capital, or to myriad agencies pullulating in the intermundia between them. Jameson's 'Totality as Conspiracy' was of course anything but a counsel to abandon the (in any case inevitable) activity of totalisation, but a manner of tracking how socio-economic compulsion was figured and displaced as para-political agency. Piglia explores a way to bring totality and conspiracy closer together, by considering Pierre Klossowski's view of the economy as 'an invisible and multiple manipulation that knots and rivets individuals, groups and ensembles to the movements of money', amounting to a 'practice of experimentation on subjects'. But the upshot of this conspiratorial imaginary is not paranoid passivity, it is a counter-conspiratorial activity, in which the artist conjures an opposition to the productivity of monetary conspiracies, another economy (here Piglia nicely brings in Bataille's admiration for Keynes's own 'plot' to counter, or perhaps save, capitalism: by burying money in coal mines). 'The conspiracy (complot) tries to modify relations of force that are adverse to it and has the secret as its foundation and flight as its condition'. Such a movement from an epistemology of totality to a practice of conspiracy can also be traced from Debord's Society of the Spectacle to the later Comments, which is prefaced by this statement: 'As long as certain pages are interpolated here and there, the overall meaning may appear just as secret clauses have very often been added to whatever treaties may openly stipulate; just as some chemical agents only reveal their hidden properties when they are combined with others.'"

from a rewarding thread at http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/paranoid-subjectivity-and-the-challenges-of-cognitive-mapping-how-is-capitalism-to-be-represented/1080

In case there isn't enough about NASA in Room 237...

An exciting 'patacritical exercise would be to take Mr. Wysmierski's detailed reading of the film as the basis for a renovelisation of the story -- not with any mention of the moon landing necessarily, but with prose descriptions of, for example, a menu with 11 lines on it as Mr. Halloran shows Wendy and Danny the kitchen. Who want's to tackle this exciting extra credit opportunity?!

[I haven't watched this one all the way through yet but] PLEASE READ BETWEEN THE LINES while watching this doc.This documentary is written as a fiction so to be presented or give a impression of a true story till the end to mock and make fun in that way of who believes in the fake moon landing, but it is their way to slowly get the message out. Make fun about something that is a hoax to reinforce the idea that it isn't.

And here's an excellent "making of" documentary:

Required Viewing #16

ARISE! The Church of SubGenius Recruitment Movie

A QABALISTIC INTERPRETATION OF Dr. Seuss' GREEN EGGS AND HAM

I'll be posting some more links pertaining to Greg Bishop's talk shortly (as well as our other guest speakers) but I came across this quintessentially 'patacritical exercise in the Excluded Middle anthology Wake Up Down There! (available through the EM website)

The book begins with the innocent sentence,"I am Sam."

This simple phrase is perhaps the most sublime. Sam can be seen as an abbreviation of the sacred Sanskrit mantra from Vedic literature, So'Ham, which means "I am that."

Thus we have the Hebrew God name Eheieh or I Am That I Am. Sam can also be seen as one of the the root words of Samadhi, which means "together with," sam, "the Lord," Adhi. Thus we have together with, I Am. Either way this is certainly Kether; the uppermost sephiroth on the tree of life--complete unity. This blissful state is secretly betrayed by the repeating of it. Here also, we have the appearance of a new character. He is the witness to the statement repeated,"I Am Sam."

Dualism has been evoked and heaven will never be the same. The negative veils of existence have been shattered. Kether has given way to Chokmah and Binah, the Yin And Yang of creation. There is nothing left but to look to where this new consciousness emanated and to speak what now appears in reverse."Sam I Am !"

Like an inverted pentagram, the truth is seen improperly due to the faulty perspective of the viewer. Immediately, we see the second character resist. He states,"That Sam-I-Am! That Sam-I-Am! I do not like that Sam-I-Am!"

Here we have it! The Ego separates from the now Higher-Self (Sam-I-Am) and begins to resent it, not realizing he is it! This resentment is the root of all human error as Nietzsche so exactly examines in Will to Power. Yes, the original sin is committed. The observer posits himself separate from the observed. But the Higher-Self is ready with a solution, an offering, a Holy Eucharist,"Do you like green eggs and ham?"...

read the full article on the EM website: http://www.excludedmiddle.com/occulted_dr._seuss.htm

Image: The Most Holy Tree of Eggs & Ham by D. McGovern

"Cockatoo Finding Out He's Going to the Vet"

up her ago sold
spotters her star
shakers arms
of hers I'm shoppers
all show sup I

Cyprus sucks
are bigger my help
charity rash anything
sands wanna tell I
some France I shot shots homes
senator trash socks group
touchstone acts
moments started sorry thanks
substandard

Spartans nice sharp
arms some stuff

Stuff on stack stacks
shack stocks stocks I
of checks huh you

['patacrirical free verse by Max generated with youtube subtitle]

Digital Excavation of Gendered Reptilian Evidence!

Courtesy 'patacritical researcher Amia Yokoyama:  "Kind of like Shaver and his rock books. These suspicious youtube users glean footage from the internet, and use different digital "excavation processes" to "paint" out the reptilian qualities found in the culled video imagery. Often times, pointing out abnormalities in the eyes - in these instances, mostly women." 

Another surprise guest: Greg Bishop

Independent researcher, zine publisher, broadcaster, and art historian Greg Bishop will address a number of 'patacritically relevant issues, including "Alien Writing" and "1950s UFO Contactees as an Unrecognized Art Movement" You can read some of his material here:  http://www.excludedmiddle.com/

PKD's Exegesis online!

'patacritical researcher Alan S. Tofighi alerted me to this collaborative online reconstruction of Philip K. Dick's "Exegesis" - the more than 8000 pages of speculative philosophical writings that PKD produced between his visionary experience in 1974 and his death in 1982: http://zebrapedia.psu.edu/#!/page_Goal

Szukalski & Zermatism

Here's a didactic panel from the exhibit Brian Tucker curated from the work of Richard Shaver and Stanislav Szukalski, summarizing Szukalski's philosophical speculations. To learn more about this remarkable visionary artist and 'patacritical anthropologist, visit http://szukalski.com/