Wednesday, December 26, 2012

7 Unrules of Polyamory

There have been several posts on this site about polyamory that have pulled a significant amount of traffic (about 10,000 and 8,000 and 6,000 hits respectively.) 
Previous posts:

This is a friend of mine, I think she looks cute as hell
(though that's beside the point) and hope that in leaving her
un-named she won't rip my balls off.
Because isn't the juxtaposition just fucking precious?
All of them dealt with different elements of the topic, and all in a rather tongue-in-cheek way. I would like to clear up a few issues about this topic in what I hope is a more straight-forward way. I am doing this because I have been approached by many strangers that seem confused about some rather simple elements of this issue.

So, here are 7 un-rules of Polyamory. Enjoy them, and remember that they are un-rules, and can only at best be understood as guidelines. I hope they spawn some discussion that doesn't come down to argument over labels. The curse of polyamory is labels and laws and rules and taxonomy. Drives me nuts, and honestly, it's not necessary unless if it's a fetish of yours. If it is, enjoy your fetish, but it's not a fetish of mine, so please, let me have mine and you can have yours.

Enjoy!

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Full Metal Orgasm and SEXPUNK

NATEFER
One of many possible outcroppings of both cyber-punk cyber-erotica and cyber--...(tenatacles?) is the indie-produced Full-Metal Orgasm. I wanted to point your direction that way, while opening up the stage to more varied discussion of genres and sub-genres around this area. I of course have no had my coffee, nor any FUCKING coffee at all because of this FUCKING holiday, and my dependence on the local indie cafes around here... so we can expect more typical write ups on here as per our usual... oh who the fuck am I kidding. Here's a bit about Full Metal Orgasm.


Full-Metal Orgasm is a sexy and intelligent adult fiction eMagazine for the digital age. Inspired by a multitude of media and figures such as Heavy Metal magazine, Shirow Masamune, ReiQ, Penthouse Comix, Jun Tsukasa, Demitys, Toshio Maeda, Jin-roh, Pop Chaser and Robot Sex Life, it encapsulates the best of otherworldly sex. From stories featuring gynoids to tentacles, transhumans and aliens alike, FMO calls upon new and veteran writers, artists and other creatives to spawn new worlds and sexual fantasies without boundaries -- all downloadable to your favorite device in DRM-free PDF and mobi formats. Available on the Kindle, and for direct sale from the publisher. More information at http://sexpunk.tumblr.com or search online for Full-Metal Orgasm.

"The nature of modern life is obsession..."

Here are a few more if that does it for you:

How does this relate to mythology? I refer you to our mission statement. Thanks for all the fish.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Friday, December 14, 2012

Extreme Futurist Festival 2012


XFF2012 PROMO from EXTREME FUTURIST FESTIVAL on Vimeo.
Extreme Immersion!

Are you a Futurist? Are you assured that we are going to burn ourselves out as a species in the next century? Are you an artist set on using these tools we have while we have the time, or an optimist set to create an army of Nanobots (or Nanobats, if you live in Gotham) that will cure cancer? There is room for all these perspectives and more at this years Extreme Futurist Fest (XFF for short) being held in Los Angeles. And December 21 and 22 2012! What a time for it. End of the world, man! This even will feature:
  •  Speakers (Randal A. Koene, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Dr. Ben Goertzel, ...)
  • Music (Lydia Lunch, Negativland, ...)
  • Art (Kevin Mack, Shayna Yates, James Curcio, ...)
  • Films (H+ the Digital Series, Surf Now Apocalypse Later, Tragos, ...)
  • Vendors (Grindhouse Wetwares, Re/Search Publications, Mythos Media including the recent Words of Traitors and Rachel Haywire's Acidexia, ...)
  • ...and, you guessed it, a great deal more.

This event is not one to miss no matter your outlook. Find out more on the website, and show up if you can. You don't need to be a "believer" to show.

Just pick up a ticket, bring equal parts skepticism and wonder, and the rest will be history.

As you can see, I should be there, short of an airplane crash or getting flagged as a terrorist. So... see you there! -J

As featured on Disinfo.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Traversing Imaginary Landscapes

I recently discovered this book by happenstance, and am sorry that it wasn't one of the books that I had in my research arsenal when working on The Immanence of Myth. It is right up the alley of what I was trying to express in the sections on the mythologies of science, at least for the most part, and I would highly suggest it as a companion work to that book, or vice versa.
"In the Beginning was the Word are the words that begin the Gospel that establishes the quintessentially Western cosmology in which the world is a word, a sound  that unfolded space through time. Our word "cosmology" still echoes with the reverberations of that Johannine vision of seven Greek syllables  seven deeply resonant vowels that, like the opening of Bach's Art of the Fugue, set forth the theme that has the architecture of its variations implicit within it. From the seven syllables of Creation t the seven seals of the Apocalypse, the story of our world is the sound it makes in its passing. It is only after the opening of the Seventh Seal that there is silence in heaven of half an hour.
In telling the story of once upon a time in gospel, myth, or fairy tale, in returning in the imagination or the time of the arche, it is not so much what one says that builds a world, for once can say that the world began in wind or water or word, but it is the telling itself that sets up the structure of identification, the narrative structure that gives form to time and space. When the newly born infant moves its arms and legs in rhythm to its mother's speech, it does not yet know the mother's language, but the sounds themselves set up a relationship of Self and Other that is the fundamental arising of a world." (Imaginary Landscape). 
We may consider so many other models of cosmology, from the Logos and representational models of cosmology that emphasize the word, such as in the Sefer Yetzirah, the original (recognized) Qabbalistic text which lays out the basis of creation as the permutation of a divine language, the Torah itself "made of fire" Or we might consider the more pictographic and fanciful cosmology of the Pueblo Indians, who show a 4-fold creation story that at once calls to mind elements of the Osiris myth and the ascention of Shiva and Shakti in the Kundalini serpent in the Tantrik traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism  (As diverse as those two traditions are otherwise.) Regardless, this idea holds true, and it is with this concept of cosmology and narrative that we enfold ourselves without our world and at once make sense of it and find our place within it.

The same is true within our very bodies.

In fact, as previously mention on this site, I have been running a sort of web class with the intent of helping people in facilitating creativity and possibly presence of mind. It's a sort of loosely defined system of movement meditation practices.

"Internal Arts will be a series dealing with the creative process in its various guises: from meditative techniques to anecdotal material from independent artists." 

Catch that HERE on Alterati, and at the same time, consider exploring it alongside works like Imaginary Landscape, Apocalyptic Imaginary, and The Immanence of Myth. These books may appear somewhere between dense and obtuse if you are unfamiliar with a certainly philosophical approach, and they all employ an element of repetition to get ideas across. But they also constitute a sort of teaching, the self teaching the self through a deeper exploration of symbols, that cannot be given in a classroom, or certainly not a classroom that merely provides us with facts and figures. They represent the culmination of decades of work between us, and the practices that I'm trying to share in Internal Arts, while I try to pass them along without any pretense of authority, are not easily discovered nor gained.

And I know that I have what most people would consider a verbose way of speaking and writing when I am doing so "naturally" that is out of sync with "the times" and I should really "get with it." I'd like you all to know that I typed this entire paragraph with my middle finger.

Goodnight, friends.


[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Sunday, December 09, 2012

David Mack on sequential narrative.


David really hit it out of the park on this one, in my opinion. I don't really feel like commentary is necessary.

  Read our 2007 interview/conversation.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Monday, December 03, 2012

The Music of the Spheres Again Audible, Totemic Animals March

By Brian George

“The heavenly motions are nothing but a continuous song for several voices (perceived by the intellect, not by the ear); a music which, through discordant tensions, through syncopes and cadenzas, as it were (as men employ them in imitation of those natural discords) progresses towards certain pre-designed quasi six-voiced clausuras, and thereby sets landmarks in the immeasurable flow of time.”—Johannes Kepler, The Harmony of the World (Harmonice mundi)
__

In an email about her relocation to Wyoming, Amely Greeven wrote: “I committed to staying through the winter, in a cabin owned by a wildlife photographer. When I went to visit it, deliberating about whether to take the leap, a female moose ambled out of the trees, dipped her sable muzzle into the creek, and then wandered up the jewel-green field next to me—yards from where I was standing. I took that to mean, ‘Yes, come here, and live next to us....’ I felt like Snow White. Will bluebirds come and braid my hair?”

I responded: Whether animals can become the vehicles for higher powers, or whether, by some quirk of a-causal clockwork, they can appear at just the right time and in just the right place in order to make some larger purpose understood, you can certainly feel when something out of the ordinary is going on.

When I was 16, and at the beginning of phase of almost psychotic creative transformation, I experienced, late one night, at 2:00 AM or so, an enormously loud ringing and droning sound. At first, I took this to be some type of bizarre emergency warning system, designed to get each person in the city out of bed, although it seemed like overkill for anything short of an imminent nuclear war. The sound could also be compared to Tibetan chanting: Enormously low, bone-shaking bass notes supported a middle ground of somewhat complex musical geometries, repetitive but chameleonic, and difficult to hear all at once, which then rose into almost inaudible overtones.

When, in the morning, I discovered that no one else had heard the sound, I was, to a certain extent shocked. I was shocked in the way that you are when you find out that your parents have had sex, and that your birth may in some way be connected to this act. On a different level, I had begun, even as it was happening, to suspect that this sound was actually the “Music of the Spheres.” For many thousands of years, perhaps, the volume had been turned down way too low, or else our ears had been plugged with wax. Then suddenly—and no doubt for reasons that were long ago explained, but by temperamental teachers, and in a language we don’t speak—the music became audible.

Internal Arts, now on Alterati.com

Internal Arts, a podcast / web video series will be running on Alterati over the next few months (possibly longer):
Internal Arts will be a series dealing with the creative process in its various guises: from meditative techniques to anecdotal material from independent artists. 
Whether you are a writer, musician, visual or film artist, or just want to learn a little about the ins- and outs- of the creative process from those who struggle to make a living at it, this show is for you. We will also often explore meditative and movement practices that might not necessarily seem connected with creativity or the arts at first glance. 
These are quite possibly more important than all the discussions we will be having about independent arts and media production, as they get us out of the 'the chair,' out of our heads, and back into our bodies. It is in and through our bodies, and nowhere else, that the true creative process begins. We are not brains in bottles. 
It's our hope that you will find these practices and conversations an indispensable part of your own practice.
If you would like to contribute to the show, contact James Curcio.

Subscribe on iTunes to this and other Alterati shows.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Sunday, December 02, 2012

Agnosticism - not for dummies




I was having a conversation with William Clark just now while watching Baraka and a number of things I've been thinking about lately all gelled at once.

So let me try to lay out the pieces.

I was talking earlier with another friend, Matthew Grossman, about the role of belief in our lives. Both of us agreed that belief is actually fairly inconsequential. It doesn't much matter what any of us believe. If someone thinks their beliefs are important, they're giving our thoughts too much value. I know plenty of people that change their beliefs and then think they have changed. But they are the same person from the outside. And when people change, it isn't as a result of belief that change comes about.

The next piece of this thought process -- many athiests and religious folk alike have attacked me or looked down on me for saying that if I have to be pushed into a corner on defining my relationship to the divine, it is as an agnostic. "The basis of that is a-gnosis - not knowing," they say. And that's quite right. But who wants to admit that they don't know?

Let me explain. The base religious experience is awe, even terror, or ecstacy (being beside or outside of ones self), and all of it is in the face of an infinity that is beyond measure and comprehension. It is precisely this a-gnosis, not knowing, that is the base of spirituality in a positive sense. This isn't exactly negative theology- that derives from an intellectualization that comes as a reaction or result of religious experience, as a way of defending the psyche from that yawning abyss against which we must profess complete ignorance. If you don't encase yourself in belief (which as I said is unimportant) or the pretension of knowledge about the existence or non-existence of your idea of divinity -- that is, the objective nature of things which transcends all categories of thought -- then you must profess your agnosticism.

Thus may also explain why I say I'm a Taoist when asked what I "am" in this regard. (Though does our relationship to the transcendent define us? I remain agnostic on that matter...) Because Taoism is a religion/philosophy that is defined on the human level by valuing flow, of getting out of the way of ourselves, of allowing ourselves to come into accord with what naturally is, in any situation, of dissolving or even emphasizing loss, and on the divine level it professes a complete lack of knowledge, because knowledge is not the right thing to bring into the house of God.

This is what I believe. Though, as I said, it couldn't matter less.

More on God and the Problem of Certainty.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...