Also planning to delve more seriously into my electronic tinkering. At a New Age store on Cape Cod – of all places – I happened across an electricity-less crystal radio kit for $18 which I promptly scooped up. Between that, my Grundig G6 Aviator shortwave receiver and the AM transmitter I built last spring, I plan to engage in some peculiar experiments in transmitting sound at a distance. Maybe see if we can contact old JWB up there on the hill?

Will also be putting my USB Blue microphone to use in the construction of daily short radio plays centered around Google trends for the day. Just started work professionally on a play where I’m doing a lot of live Foley sound effects onstage as well, which should feed in nicely with my personal projects. So, some good things to look forward to for me over the coming weeks, and hopefully will be serving up some of the better results I come up with here as well.

Meant to go see the sights and immerse myself in Brezsny’s “greater imagination” [see: Capricorn], but instead immersed myself in a California king-size bed and a whole lot of air conditioning. Aside from a shopping trip (in which I purchased all-black New Balance sneakers, a copy of Alan Watt’s “The Wisdom of Anxiety” and a Sinatra best of compilation) and a couple restaurant outings in nearby Georgetown, the only excursion I took of any significance was to see the ‘Great White Father’.

I’m not sure I would call my trip to D.C. quite a “vision quest”, but if it had been, Lincoln illuminated on his throne under the night sky would have potentially satisfied part of the requirements of such a quest. In the days before my trip, I’d been seeing regular guest appearances by the Emperor card: an energy for which the Lincoln Memorial is a perfect representation and receptacle.

Aside from the whole structure, authority, regulation thing, the Emperor – according to Joan Bunning – stands for: fathering, establishing a family line, setting direction and tone, protecting and defending, guiding growth, bringing security and comfort… In some ways, sort of the opposite of what I wrote about recently in relation to turtles, motor homes, etc.

Maybe it’s because I’m not in my regular routine yet (something which I, at the moment ,also actively dread getting back into), but its been weighing on me heavily lately that I don’t have that whole security/stability thing in my life. My gypsy soul wears thin; my disguise cracks and peels off. Bouncing round the East Coast, I often find myself feeling as though I were a perpetual guest in other people’s lives: peeking in their windows, sleeping on their couches, feeding their dogs, subletting their rooms, using their furniture… “The Wisdom of Insecurity” – ha, right! I know its not the objects themselves I long for. I gave up on peace through product acquisition long ago, but I guess they somehow signify the clutter of a solid life lived in some orderly fashion. Not galavanting, not adventuring, not voyaging out into the unknown in search of some fool’s dream again and again. There’s something to be said for it, something real and beautiful in it… in not doing it, I mean. In the ‘normal’ life I scoff at and secretly envy. I often chide myself for what I’ve become in moments like these. How can I dare to live the dream when I don’t even want that dream all the time, when the conditions of living that dream plunge me into my own personal nightmares of inadequacy and incompleteness?

These are not questions I found the answers to in a D.C. hotel room. My quest, my unraveling, pointed at that time in another direction altogether. But I guess this is what it takes, the detox, the detente, the coming down off a long strange trip during which there is little time for real self-reflection. You come back and find the images of your life, your self, the patterns of your living bouncing back at you in all the same strange and usual places.

*

I can see why the Fools cling so to their liquor and their drugs: they become patterns of stability, consistent behaviors echoing through time, giving some sort of shape to an otherwise often amorphous existence. For me, that critical crutch is fast becoming my short wave receiver bought at Radio Shack before leaving Cape Cod for about $80 (ahem, a good example of me lying about not seeking peace through product acquisitions), the “Buzz Aldrin Edition Grundig G6 Aviator”:

I clutch that thing like its going out of style (which it is – who listens to radio anymore?), like there’s not going to be a tomorrow. It is a handy prop to have for the perpetual traveler because it lets you literally ‘tune into’ the ’spirit of place’. Every city has their own broadcast frequencies. Propagation of radio waves through space is inherently tied to geography. Some bits and pieces of local culture, news, weather spill out at you from invisible sources. The tuning knob on this thing, some kind of wheel of fortune – around and around she goes… if you’re lucky you come up with some worthwhile nugget that lasts as long as your train is stopped in another station in another town.

I am outside Boston’s Back Bay Station, situated in a small quasi public park sort of area between some buildings, and set up my battle station, pulling out the G6, tuning around, watching the people go by. Always wondering in situations like this if some overly zealous security guard will decide I’ve pushed too far over the vagrant line and kicks me out or gives me a hard time. People put that costume on, after all, because they like to play that role; just like I do mine… No hammer comes down though, despite the bags strewn out around me. At least they are clean bags. At least I am clean. Some dark reflection of me sidles up – someone who is not ‘clean’ like I am – and lays out his bags, and his sundry belongings. Nothing I can make sense of. Plastic bags inside plastic bags: puzzles which he proceeds to unravel and lay out on the small concrete ledge across from me like treasures collected by a crow. His back to me, pulls out two plastic bottles of “iced tea” which you can tell by the color and consistency of are booze. I listen to my radio, cling to it for dear life, looking into what small dark void separates he from me. Shitty weed-smoke hits my nose. He has puffed up quickly quietly, his back to me, intent on his sorting. No one else seems to notice. Grips me with an intense desire to flee, but I resist. I am safe here, not doing anything wrong, listening to my radio. Tuned to 740am. Classic tunes from the 1940s. War-era stuff. A time, I feel like, where things must have made more sense than they do now. A time I like to imagine myself transported to through the photo I bring with me in my travels of my grandparents sometime around their wedding: he in his army uniform, her dolled up, they two in front of some phony painted backdrop that says “Blitzkrieg Bar,” smiling, about to give rise to a family line of their own.

“It’s also said that when Moses parted the red sea, that he didn’t stand on the edge and it parted before them all – he had to get up to his nose in the water before G-d would do His part.”

Chuck ate live goldfish, which was exciting. Even though we had other fish as pets after that, I never really considered them pets so much as I considered them feed. Anyway, Chuck was eventually dropped off a bridge in a state park because I was told we couldn’t keep him for some reason.

While they aren’t exactly cuddly huggable pets, the image of a turtle has of late been coming back to me. Has to do somehow with driving a big white utility van around all summer and it becoming sort of a second home emotionally. Spent a long time this summer as well with that Alan Watts quote about the act of imagining – down to the smallest specifics – one’s ideal of heaven as a way to invoke its existence into reality.

But before I get to that, let’s make the species-hop, for a second from turtles to frogs. It’s not a far leap, and it’s all going to the same place, trust me.

There’s a scene from Jim Henson’s 1979 “Muppet Movie” that has always haunted me. It’s when the gang has broken down in the desert, Kermit wanders off away from the campfire disconsolate and has a hallucinatory encounter with his higher self, one could say. His HGA helps him clarify his inner vision, that it is the collective dream which they all share which brought them all to this place. The first part of this YouTube video has the pivotal scene to which I refer:

I bring this into focus because it is that dream, I guess, which I hope herein to clarify for myself and in so doing take the foundational steps towards bringing it into existence.

In the meantime, I find myself back in hot filthy crime-ridden Baltimore, bouncing round from couch to couch, without a place to call my own until a sublet at a friend’s place opens up. Thing is, I don’t really want a place of my own. I don’t have any designs to stay here longer than a theatre contract or two lasts. By October, I should be out of debt again – a precious state which I don’t intend to befoul again upon the rocks of bad romantic choices like I did the last time a few years back. I mean, not forever, but for now. For a while.

What I really want, I guess, then is my own turtle shell I can take with me, a “dwelling place” that goes where I go. A gypsy wagon, essentially.

That image comes from a great photo essay site about gypsies then and now, called Castles and Caravans.

As a kid, I remember a couple aunts and uncles having their own RVs and thinking that was just about the coolest thing in the world. It is, really, the modern equivalent of the gypsy wagon minus the horses and tarot cards. But I’ve got the tarot cards, so don’t worry about that! The format of RV that appeals to me the most is, it seems, the class B motorhome – the ones that are basically the size of the white utility van I drove all summer. I don’t need a lot of space; I’ve not got many belongings left in this world. I don’t need much. And small ones are easier to park than those big stupid monster RVs.

I’ve done some work for a guy who has made his living, putting two girls through college, with a family business of hand-crafted leather and other hand-bags. He travels around in a Dodge Sprinter 2500 van laden with cargo from craft show to craft show around the country hawking his wares. And those things, for as small as their footprint is have TONS of room inside. Ever since I first saw one of these vehicles (which in Europe were first sold by Mercedes for years before ever coming to these shores) I wanted one. When I found out that they are used as a base for RVs, I only wanted one more.

Here are some shots culled from the web. I’m pretty sure these are mostly the 2500 series, but I could be wrong:

And based on the image title, I think this is an interior shot of the version of this vehicle made by Freightliner:

Though they are admittedly sort of weird and retarded looking from the outside, these puppies are not cheap:

Wrap yourself in luxury in the 2008 Great West Vans Sprinter Legend Class B Motorhome. Boasting a two zone floor plan, the updated Sprinter Legend makes you feel like you’re at home with functionally separate sleeping and dining areas. Measuring in at 22 feet, this Great West Vans Class B motorhome has a height of over nine feet and features a rear bed area that comes with your choice of a fixed king-size bed, a tri fold sofa-bed or twin single beds. The Sprinter Legend also has a Double Walled, Double Strength insulated roof, which provides twice the strength of single shell model. Base price of $87,500.

But who cares! I’m supposed to be imagining my ideal of heaven, not worrying about details like money – at least not right this second. (Maybe I could win one in a card game?) But money is important though, and to be specific about how this all will work is an absolute necessity. As I learned this summer, if you’re going to build something, you have to decide exactly how big it will be, how much materials will be used, what they will cost and how it will be assembled.

So I guess this plan goes in phases. The gypsy caravan class b motorhome phase goes something like this: I travel around in this vehicle, going from place to place like the journeymen of old, studying the traditions of my craft (that is, stagecraft) from masters all across the country – and maybe the world. But let’s start by narrowing it down to places I can drive to. For now, continental North America.

While I travel and work – sometimes for free, and sometimes paid. Sometimes paid well and sometimes paid back for my efforts in ways I could never expect. While I travel and work and learn and perfect myself and my craft, I will write and document this process on my website and elsewhere. I already make about $500 bucks a month on this site, though that figure has been slipping since I deleted sexy pictures of Scarlett Johanson, causing my traffic to absolutely tank. But let’s say I continue to pursue the dream and write about what I love and what sets my heart, soul and mind on fire. I like to imagine that will ultimately draw visitors back to my site, and this time because of they share the dream too…

So my website provides me with money for the road, and contacts to share my experiences with and the dream. The work itself gives me more money and good people along the way. On top of that, I sell articles to newspapers, magazines, websites and other media (and not to mention RV insurance). About my experiences, about the good creative work other people are doing. I help spread the fire. Meanwhile, along the way, I make pilgrimages to the weird places, the holy places, the haunted places of our physical and cultural geography and document them too.

Somehow this all snowballs into more work, more money, more exposure – not just for me, but for the people I care about, the people I love. Until I reach such a point where maybe there is a small pack of us traveling together, a troupe, a tribe, a company, a family.

Except maybe not so dirty. And not necessarily that many kids. But they could definitely all play instruments, know how to sing and dance, build and take apart things, do small handcrafts and just generally be the smartest, best-looking and awesomest people around. Plus add in various pets. And we don’t have to travel all the time. Just some of the time. But by the time this all rolls around – I mean, a few years from now – I would, I expect have made enough professional contacts that I could live and work in one place. Or a couple places and be satisfied and happy and thrilled with life and doing something good and worthwhile in the world.

And when I die, they can burn my class B motorhome like they do at a gypsy funeral. Cause fuck a boring life. Fuck living alone in a box working at a job you hate for no reason you can rememeber. Bring me love, bring my life, bring me liberty & adventure. But most of all bring me Heaven in the here and now! I’m tired of waiting… It’s now or never.

Now begins the long voyage home, but also into uncertainty, the unknown. What was, what could have been – all things return to the earth, their source. Decomposition and regeneration in the loving embrace of the black and fertile dirt.

Drove out to Sandwich on our last day for a mystical voyage. Edward Gorey’s house, the yarn shop, a New Age store in East Sandwich called Lavender Moon where I bought a Black Madonna as a going away gift, a book on chakras, a small bundle of white sage… Don’t burn too much – smoke gets in your eye.

Traditionally, a real Black Madonna is not something one can just produce; it is something that happens to a community when Heaven ordains it to be so. Countless wonderful legends tell of the sacred or miraculous origins of these images. More than thirty are said to have been created by Luke the Evangelist, others were presented to humans by angels or the Virgin Mary herself; many were found when simple people or even cattle, guided by divine forces, uncovered statues hidden in the earth, in springs, or in trees. [...]

The skunk, who I have nicknamed “Roger” made one final appearance in the costume shop last night. Guided by divine forces? Doubtful, more likely chips and snacks left in the pantry there, but we have to follow signs when they are given to us – whatever they are.

They are portrayed in the position called “majesty” or “Seat of Wisdom”. That is to say, Mary sits on a throne with a low back; she holds a toddler Jesus on her knees; both look straight ahead – no demurely down cast eyes. In the language of medieval symbolism this means that Mary is the throne of Jesus, the Seat of Wisdom. From her lap spring wisdom and power. She is represented as the Christian embodiment of Lady Wisdom, a personage described in the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) as the first companion or the feminine face of God, through whom he draws people to himself.

The Shekinah, the glory of God, sparkling, jeweled, radiant: all beings rejoice in her radiance-

The colors of their robes were originally white, red, and blue with golden fringes, though they may have been changed during renovations. These colors were important in alchemy, an ancient discipline practiced in all the great civilizations. It sought transforming knowledge. The goal was to transform lead into gold, disease into perfect health, ignorance into wisdom, and humans into God. … Black Madonnas were the symbol for that latter goal, pursued in the Great Work …

The Great Work – Opus Magnum – Opera. The perfection of human experience through continuous effort, the applied struggle towards beauty both heavenly and everyday.

The Blackening, or the Black Sun (nigredo, sol niger). This is where all the impurities of the primal matter (the ordinary human) are burned and it turns black. This blackness stands for the death and rotting of the old false self. On Black Madonnas it is represented not only by her black skin, but also by the dark blue of her robes – dark blue as the night sky.

On the Amtrak heading out of Boston, many old retaining walls fallen, rotted away. Old train lines broken, rusted, their service stations razed. New patterns assert themselves along the lines we act upon again and again. A woman across the aisle from me gets up; she has lost her knitting needle. Searches around, finds it in the seat cushion, announces, “I’m sitting on it!”

As mother and earth woman, the Great Mother is the ‘throne’ pure and simple, and, characteristically, the woman’s motherliness resides not only in the womb but also in the seated woman’s broad expanse of thigh, her lap on which the newborn child sits enthroned. To be taken on the lap is, like being taken to the breast, a symbolic expression for adoption of the child, and also for the man, by the Feminine. It is no accident that the greatest Mother Goddess of the early cults was named Isis, the ‘seat,’ ‘the throne,’ the symbol of which she bears on her head; and the king who ‘takes possession’ of the earth, the Mother Goddess, does so by sitting on her in the literal sense of the word.

Outside Back Bay Station, I have a few hours to wait. I find a burger place, charging my phone in a nearby electrical socket briefly. Temporary rest, rejuvenation at 120 volts. Amen.

Throughout this summer, I’ve been required time and again to envision and actualize other people’s ideal vision, Heaven on stage, as it were. It is a completely overwhelming task to bring something such as this to fruition, and often I would find myself at a loss as to where to start.

Malkuth, it seems, requires measurements. But how big should everything be? What shape should it take? Placing objects in an idealized space, while very Platonic, is inordinately difficult. Look then, to the size and shape of your theatre, and your stage. From there, your ground plan is your first step. Determine what goes where, and what its footprint looks like. This allows you to place idealized objects in relation to a real space and one to the next. From that basis, a firm foundation in ordinary reality, you can build upward into three-dimensional space. You make measurements, you make some guesses. Some are right, some are wrong. Some are just plain lucky. Sometimes it all works out according to plan, but most times you have to adjust. Then you learn to account for your past adjustments in your next design incarnation. Heaven on Earth requires heavy compromises and much experimentation.

In my mind’s eye, I know I am going through each old apartment one by one, each abandoned setting for the self and its ever-unfolding dramas. But I only ever get through the first one because there is so much I have left behind, so much un-cataloged.

I am in my first solo apartment which I moved into at around the age of 21 or 22 after a bad break-up with my first really serious girlfriend, way up on the leafy part of Bolton Street near North Ave. I get the sense, during the course of this ritual, that there are many of these places – these memory palaces, if you will – which I have left in great haste with much unfinished business. This one is certainly no exception. I expect somehow during this ritual to be able to speed through it as well and move on quickly to the next location, but I become completely engrossed in and absorbed by the thickness and richness of the memories.

No corner of the apartment is left unturned. Old books, photos, records. Even piles of math homework squirreled away from highschool. Sheets upon sheets of geometry proofs. I study them, looking for some secret message, some useful information to apply to my current work. Finding none, no explanation, no anchor back into its mysteries, I move on.

It’s important during these rituals, to touch every object. Sight alone is not enough. The tactile sense releases the rawer impulses which must be vitally processed before they can be let go, before these objects, papers and memories can be let go.

But maybe not everything needs to be let go. Not all memories demand such cold unerring brutality as I have so often resorted to in order to make room for new fresh experience. Something is always lost. Over time you think you forget, you believe yourself to have moved on, but some deepest part of you knows it all by heart – every nook and crevice. Every crack in the wall, every book in the shelf.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): The poet Jean Perrin dreamed “of marrying the dawn with the light of the moon,” and I invite you to do the same. The darkness you’ve been immersed in will leave you soon. As it does, please don’t forsake the pale, moon-like radiance that has provided you with a bit of guidance and consolation. Rather, bring along what it has taught you as you head into the far brighter phase you’re entering. In other words, retain some of the wisdom the dim light has compelled you to learn.

Also just found a fantastic travel website, Airbnb.com. People put up short term rooms to rent (by the night or week, etc), so you get to stay with a local if you are traveling at a price which beats the hell out of hotels and is comparable to hostels, but not quite so crowded. Thinking about booking one of these for a few days in Boston before I go back to Baltimore for this “far brighter phase.”

My copy, purchased second hand from Amazon.com with leftover credit card rewards money bears a 1985 inscription:

“Dear Lee [sp?] + John,
Just a little help in making ‘Great’
plays, a little bit better.
Love,
The Falk Family
Sylvia + Bob
Laurie + Mike
Dec. 1985”

The first few pages bear light water stains at the spine. The book was published by St. Martin’s Press in New York, but was clearly written for the British market, based on various terminology and spelling used throughout the book.

Things we stole from this book and where we used them:

• Page 23: The pulley backcloth rigging which we used in “Evita” as JL’s now infamous “droopy drawer” curtain, as the ‘tree’ banner in “Kismet” and the Buffalo Bill fairgrounds tent in “Annie Get Your Gun.”
• Page 24-5: back-lighting behind a gauze or scrim to illuminate someone hidden upstage, as in “Kismet” opening and closing sequences with the dancing genie Nedar.
• Page 38: wherein elfin-looking children are shown assembling a spiral staircase out of wood, which we did something similar to for “My Fair Lady”
• Page 39: the circular stair created initially for the Hot Box nightclub in “Guys & Dolls” and subsequently reused in the ballroom scene in the Hotel Brevoort in “Annie Get Your Gun”
• Page 51 & 156: basic irregular shaped natural ground-row items used in “Naughty Marietta” and “Patience”
• Page 52: stretching canvas, as used to cover flats with muslin for pass-thru lighting effects in “The Mikado”
• Page 56: hinged French braces to support flats from the back, used especially in wagon shows like “Guys & Dolls” and “Annie Get Your Gun”
• Page 58-9: ground rows and cut out borders, see above.
• Page 60: doors and frames, used all over
• Page 66: the infamous concertina screen used for the “New York street” scenes in “Guys and Dolls.” Hint: never use this, or if you do, find another way that making eight two foot by eight foot ply panels be your screen. They are much too heavy and impractical to use onstage.
• Page 69: sliding screens, construction modified for the sliding screen doors in “The Mikado”.
• Page 106: New York City windowed skyscraper background cut out of ply and lit from the back in “Guys & Dolls.”
• Page 114: scaling up of gridded drawings technique for many shows
• Page 117: “naturalistic” painting example from bottom right of page, modified only very slightly for “Patience”
• Page 119: scumbling and drybrush painting techniques for most of the second half of the season
• Page 122: stenciled pattern surfaces, as seen frustratingly in “My Fair Lady”
• Page 142: urn fountain concept modified liberally for “Naughty Marietta”

And many many others, of course, which inspired in a much more partial but no less influential way than the things I just straight up stole out of this book. Do I feel bad about such outright thievery? Not at all. The demands made on a designer and technical team in one week rep are astronomical. Getting things done at all quickly becomes the priority. If you have the time, team, drive, equipment and materials, then maybe you’ll get something creative as a well. But don’t count on it: creativity is a luxury we cannot always afford in this business.

But more importantly, the essence of theatre is conventions. Things that are repeated again and again across time and space. It’s an art and a business of what works, what gets the job done and what looks at least half-way decent in the process. The reason there are traditional theatre techniques, practices and an entire lexicon is because there are right and wrong ways of doing things. There are as fantastic flops as there are successes. And if you follow “the book” or you don’t, you somehow stumble your way through it anyway and hope that memory is kinder than reality.

The show was “Kismet”, an Alladin-esque Baghdad fantasy with peculiar overtones of Sufism sprinkled throughout. Construction-wise, the show was a piece of cake. Three four by eight foot platforms, stairs leading up and a couple rows of Luan arches allegedly intended to represent a mosque. I’ve never actually seen a mosque. Not in person. Not in recent memory from any books or web sources. It was invented after a series of simple line drawings the director gave me. Very likely he’s never seen a mosque either. It’s that kind of show. Sometimes this happens. Everyone is referencing something that no one necessarily knows to begin with, and then taking liberal artistic theatrical license to flesh it out into who-knows-what.

This is the set, though, the paper called “simple yet effective.” Saw some of the for sale dress rehearsal shots (thumbnails, actually) on our company photographer’s site and was actually surprised. It read well pictorally. Go figure. I guess sometimes knowing doesn’t really matter.

It was our first show with heavy use of fabrics and I was feeling the familiar panicky feeling I’d come to accept as a normal part of life that summer. I was used to the hard: carpentry, wood, hard flats, hard platforms. Things that are cut and dry. Things you can cut with a variety of power saws. Things you can cut yourself on. Not soft things. Not things that feel nice to the touch.

In theatre, everything has a name. A name and a place. This is essential to working as a crew: a common language around which working interactions are based – so that work gets done on time, correctly and with a relative degree of quality. Relative to what? Well, that changes. Curtains, in theatre, fall under the category of soft goods (ie, things you can hang up on stage as well as fold and stick on a shelf, that are nice and that you don’t want to get paint on). There are many different types of curtains. For example, the scrim: a sheer mesh usually in white or black which allows light to pass through if lit from behind, but obscures what’s behind it if lit from the front. Then there’s the cyc – short for cyclorama. A typically white all-encompassing (in our case curved) back drop which colored lights are bounced off of to create atmospheric sky effects.

The curtain we were to build had no particular name. It was to be pulled on and off at various intervals to accentuate the action onstage in conjunction with a (filthy old) white scrim further downstage. Days of skilled labor and hundreds of dollars of fabric later (an organza bonanza, I took to calling it), it of course never got used. I mean, it hung up there. It looked great. But we grommeted the shit out of it, hung aircraft cable to pull it all across smoothly. And nothing. Sometimes this happens in theatre. In fact, it happens a lot. (Especially when you don’t have something ready for tech rehearsal and it can’ t get blocked into the action – but that’s another story) It’s sort of the norm. It’s a transient art form. Made by transients, that is. Ephemeral is probably a better word for the quality. It’s here and its gone – like the transients whose especial creation it is. Like all of us soon, like some of us sooner.

We lost two of six crew by the time this show was all said and done (and were very lucky to have two wonderful replacements in short order). Should have probably learned about the “soft control” aspect of soft goods prior to that, but things happen how – and when – they happen; ready or not. All you can really do is hold on, get your shit done and ride the schedule for dear life. The schedule, at times, soft goods or none, is really the only thing cushioning your fall. And your fall can be far far down, hundreds of times higher than any tumble from a loft or grid elevated above stage level. But at least I can walk into a fabric store now, know what I’m talking about and – roughly, roughly, I admit – estimate how much yardage it will take to cover a hinging train seat on a train bench two feet by eight feet. These things take time though; and they don’t come all at once. Often they have to be pieced together and stapled down when you can’t find a better way to make it all fit together. Lucky for us it’s only looked at from afar, and need only be beautiful in passing.

The costumes sparkle; there are many-hued flowing skirts and pantaloons, ornate vests, full sleeves, and sashes, and harem outfits that leave midriffs exposed for belly dancing. The set is fairly simple, but effective, consisting of the outlines of a mosque, but it is the sumptuous costumes that provide the eye with ever-changing visual splendor. Costume design is by Kate Boucher; Tim Boucher is set designer and technical director.

Without us, the temples would have no pageants. No performers, no active multiplying principle bursting forth in song & dance, rhythm and rhyme. Looking back and forth across at one another by the side of the fire. The minstrel’s daughter holds out a rose, petals almost all fallen off. Tobacco in the air. Horses nostrils flaring, the smell of meat roasting.

Fireside beauty, day is done. Walk through the forest, walk home with me. Or we can just lay here, naked beneath the stars. Some are shooting far away; some have fallen close at hand.

The sequined bespangled Shekinah, decked out in all radiance, tinkling, jingling, sparkling through the workshop of the workman’s universe. Smith fires billowing, mannequins and marionettes taking flesh in the distance. Dreams made real and the constant compromises required.

Goin down to New Orleans, gotta find my lady soul.

The dream describes an “ancient Islamic practice” (ISLAM = SUBMISSION) carried out traditionally by women of an undisclosed African country in an enclosed room at the top of a waterfall. In this traditional practice – as described by the dream symbolism – the women lead wild lions into this pen wherein the lions have their limbs cut off. There is both a cruelty and a joy in cruelty at play. The ritual seems to satisfy no higher religious purpose that I can tell, but appears completely barbaric. The narrative sense, wouldn’t quite describe it as a voice, elaborates that for the lions the most painful part of the ritual is actually the anticipation of pain. The actual pain they become habituated to through many repeated exposures to the ritual. But in the habituation, it is the anticipation itself which takes on the ultimate painful quality – making perhaps, I would venture, the pain itself something of an awe-ful release.

The ritual practice of mutilation of these noble beasts, according to the dream, is called something like “WADADI” or similar, though transliteration out of half-remembered dream languages is always troublesome at best.

Looking down the road then to life after this season – a concept which seems an impossibility right now and which was unthinkable during the majority of the past nine or however many weeks I have been here. I know I need at least a week or so to fully decompress and get back to myself before jumping into the next contract, the next project. Entertaining all kinds of options right now from hosteling in Boston to visiting the Babson Boulders of Cape Ann’s vanished Dogtown.

If you’ve got ideas or are a long-time reader interested in meeting up or offering hospitality someplace on the Eastern seaboard, I’d love to hear from you. Until then!

Below is my original 3D rendering of the set design, produced using Google Sketchup free edition.

We ended up following the floor plan to within an inch or two of precision, which was a nice carpentry triumph for us. The decks are all made up of platforms constructed out of 4′x8′ plywood with 2”x4” framing and legs. Stairs were constructed the same way, as mini-platforms which were legged to height and screwed together.

Below is our final version of the set (under ordinary work lights) which, apart from the decks, varies a bit from my original design.

First, you’ll notice that the stairs were covered underneath with muslin, which we used to create a backlit “lantern” effect that shows through not just the upright flats, but also through the stairs, with some large Fresnels mounted on the floor underneath.

The flats were all constructed out of 1”x4” no. 2 knotty pine, assembled with a Porter Cable air compressor and pneumatic tool set which we picked up at Home Depot at the beginning of the season for about $400 total with all the fixings.

Light weight muslin was stretched over the Hollywood-style flats to allow light to pass through from behind (which required some careful planning considerations in the construction). And then 1x rips were painted in glossy black spray paint to create the shoji screen look.

Also varying from my original design is the up-left entrance (on the right in the photo, for the layman), which I found out later on needed to be another sliding door.

Speaking of sliding doors, I learned a lot over the past two years in my theatrical apprenticeships both here at my summer theatre and in shops around Baltimore. What once might have been a disastrous door situation for me was easily solved with a simple carpenters device, the hog’s trough. A hog’s trough is basically two long boards (in this case 1x) joined at right angles (with screws for added strength). You can sort of see it in this picture from behind the door (apologies for photo quality):

The hog’s troughs were affixed above and behind the doors, and finished off with thin wood rails underneath to act as guides for the straight-run casters. Same thing at the bottom of the door:

In my original design, I did not account for the added height that wheels would add to the doors. I solved this blunder by setting the doors farther back away from the flats and hiding the wheels behind decorative strips visible to the audience. So much of theatre is about creatively hiding the artifice.

Another thing I failed to plan for was that the up right sliding door, in the open position would slide off the deck. Simple solution: extend the deck only where needed, and install guides and brake blocks so the door only goes where we want it to go and doesn’t fly out of the frame.

This is another photo of the double door’s hog’s trough, casters, track guide and brake blocks:

Though we ended up cutting the torii-style Japanese shinto gate from stage right in the original design, we still had to solve the fact that our hog’s trough was visible to the audience when the set was backlit. Our solution: add some carved “wings” to the edges of the trough to round it out into that classic torii shape.

Tried my very best with this set to make most of our materials and labor re-usable. After we strike this set on Saturday night, we’re going to strip off and save whatever muslin we can for later projects. Also intending to reuse platforms and stairs we’ve built, and recover these flats with luan and use them in our upcoming production of “My Fair Lady.”

Here’s a detail of another piece that wasn’t in my original design: a curvilinear decorative window to offset the very geometric grid-like lines carried through elsewhere in the design. It’s a moment of rest and relief in the dynamic of the design.

The trained eye will also be able to spot that this particular flat is built in the traditional “theatre” style, as opposed to the “Hollywood style”of the ones on its left and right. You can tell the difference by how the framing lumber is either laid flat against the face or assembled on its edge. Theatre flats are easier to store in cramped spaces because they have a narrow footprint. Hollywood flats are much easier to work with and keep upright pretty well when you join them all together. Also notice the triangular theatre jack which is bracing this particular corner. I chose the theatre style flat for this one flat only because it is on a diagonal from the others, giving it a little easier fit.

Below is one of our big props in the show, which I furnished the basic shape for and had my crew flesh out and complete, a quasi-Japanese shamisen. It’s used by the character Nanki-Poo who is the Mikado’s son disguised as a wandering minstrel to avoid an unwanted arranged marriage. The theme for the paint job was wildflowers, to go along with the wandering minstrel concept – an archetypal subject very close to my heart.

…the female soul of God, who couldn’t be perfect until he reunited with her. Cabalists said it was God’s loss of his Shekinah that brought about all evils. The Hebrew Sh’kinah meant ‘dwelling place,’ a hint that God had no ‘home’ without her.

Immediately calls to mind in my readings aspects of the traditional troubadours and their lifestyle, cross-posted below from my Traveling Perfomer historical site:

“The leading and characteristic feature in the life of every troubadour was that he was expected to ‘go through the world,’ as the phrase was. Not content with keeping his music and his song for the benefit of himself and his circle of friends, the troubadour was expected to go into the world and give the aristocratic public at large a specimen of his powers, and a means of judging his proficiency. [...]

“As it was imperative for every knight-errant to have a lady-love, so was it equally incumbent on the troubadour. To spread her name and fame was the avowed object of his pilgrimage…”

It seems, in no small way, that this is what the troubadours were dedicated to: the renewal of a sort of divine love within wrought existence through an endless journeying through the world, a questing after its glorious truth.

Walker continues:

Jewish mystics said the ‘outer garment’ of the Shekinah is Torah, ‘Holy Law.’ A man becomes a Bridegroom of Torah by study, symbolized by erotic imagery. He must court her like a beautiful maiden. ‘She begins from behind a curtain to speak words in keeping with his understanding, until very slowly insight comes to him.’

Stopped by Enchantments this afternoon, which bills itself as “New York City’s Oldest and Largest Witchcraft/Goddess Supply Store”, wherein I went looking for Dittany of Crete or Malkuth oil and found exactly neither. Great little shop though. When I asked if anybody in town might have Dittany of Crete, the clerk replied that the best place would be online because, “that shit is expensive.”

Sandalwood was the initial suggestion for a Malkuth analogue, also thought of by the staff at Grandma’s in Baltimore. But when he suggested musk as being “of the flesh”, I decided to give it a shot.

Of three types, I smelled an African, Egyptian and French – oh, along with a pine oil as well. The French smelled more than a little like cat pee (lots of cats in that store, actually!), the African didn’t strike me much at all. Pine was too sharp, though I loved the idea. Settled on a dram of the Egyptian at $8. An old ex of mine used to wear the stuff, so it has some existing connotations which are not altogether unpleasant.

“Traveling the tree, are you?” the clerk said as he wrapped up my purchase.

“What?”

“Traveling the tree?”

“Oh no, not exactly.” I told him about my dream. He said that he himself was currently traversing the ’shadow side’ of the tree, and that inverted, Malkuth is ruled by Lilith. No surprises there. Score another one for Crete, maybe?

Slept on an air mattress in a windowless room with a fan blowing on me which meant I slept late and hard. Filled with dreams of a great feast. There was an unwelcome visitor who I at first tried to accomodate, but who insisted on breaking and ruining things, so I got her in a fireman’s carry and ejected her bodily. Several times. Persistence paid off, though I kept fearing I would see her over my shoulder or in some disguise.

After the initial rough start, the party got underway in a serious way. Fantastic. Biggest party I’ve ever seen or attended. And probably the messiest. The feast seems to be in keeping with my Malkuth dreams. Malkuth manifests as the Shekinah, the Bride of God and, though it was not overt, there was an air of matrimony to this celebration. Maybe not mine, necessarily, but in the greatness of the feast. (This site, however, says the Shekinah comes from Binah and is merely reflected in Malkuth – technicalities!)

I was sitting next to a beautiful young woman, who was obviously wearing a dark-brown wig. We were laughing and joking about various things that were going on: some kids were racing in a pool (and then some dogs), and I asked her, “Won’t you tell me what your name is?”

She told me she was Natalie Portman, and I was like, oh, and then we started kissing. An event which I later recounted to an old roomate I haven’t spoken with for years who corroborated my description of the event by saying that his uncle had said the same thing after making out with her years earlier.

Afterwards, in the clean-up, rice and wine and food was spilled all over the banquet tables. I sat with the women cleaning the food up. For some reason, this meant that we would take up some of the rice into our mouths from the table and then spit it out into the garbage bins. I kept wondering why everyone else was taking so much smaller mouthfuls than I was. This other dark-haired woman I sat next to, of indeterminate Meditteranean descent, we got to talking and I said, “You know what we should serve at the next one of these?”

Pause, “Couscous!” we both say at the same time, a coincidence at which I’m moderately amazed.

“It’s just looking at all this stuff on the table,” I say. “It makes me want Meditteranean food!”

With that in mind, I’m going to try and find Dittany of Crete again today. One of the biggest cities in the world, it’s gotta be floating around here somewhere!

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they act their dream with eyes open, to make it possible.”

And,

“We had learned that there were pangs too sharp, griefs too deep, ecstasies too high for our finite selves to register. When emotion reached this pitch the mind choked; and memory went white till the circumstances were humdrum once more.”

Malkuth in a cave, we decided, makes a lot of sense. Though the clerk said that it Malkuth typically appears as a young woman and not an old one. Both appeared in my dream.

In any event, doing final preparations and less-than twenty-four hour countdown to my departure northward for the summer as technical director at a summer stock theatre. I’ve been tying up loose ends, buying magical herbs, getting my haircut, putting things into storage and packing my bags. In the midst of it all, have managed to update a lot on my satellite research site, TravelingPerformer.com, with historical quotations on related subjects. Sifting through a lot of the journeyman stuff at the moment and finding just how relevant it is to my professional life and goals for the ‘Great Work’ this summer. Cross-posted from that site:

“The hand transformed material under the guidance of an enlightened spirit [...]. The process of fashioning a ‘masterpiece’ is a trial that encourages its author to discover himself, even to blossom, by rising to the occasion presented by this exceptional challenge. During the many hours of work, the artisan often comes to understand the essential message long at the heart of journeyman culture, namely that the true ‘masterpiece’ is not the completed object but the worker who has conceived it, designed it, and realized it.”

And a related quote more on the magical side than the practical side from Jung’s “Secret of the Golden Flower.”

Magical practices are the projections of psychic events which, in cases like these, exert a counter influence on the soul and act like a kind of enchantment of one’s own personality. That is to say, by means of these concrete performances the attention, or better said, the interest, is brought back to an inner sacred domain which is the source and goal of the soul. This inner domain contains the unity of life and consciousness which, though once possessed, has been lost and must now be found again.

It’s all about the barakah, baby! Here I go; don’t wish me luck!

The priest recognizes the trollop I am with, as do I – though it’s been a few years – and screams out during the service, “Not in here young lady!” gesturing broadly out the back door into a tunnel.

As we depart, I yell to the few people who have assembled as a congregation, “You know, at other churches they give you snacks… donuts… and coffee!” This, for some reason, is the meanest most vitriolic thing I can think to say.

We end up in the underworld, continuing our sexual negotiations to no avail. I’m looking out the window of a school bus, an older woman comes up alongside.

“Do you know where I can get alkuth oil?”

I spell out loud what I think she is saying, “A-L-K-U-T-H?”

I think for a minute, trying to recall the names of streets. I can’t remember what city I’m in. Pittsburgh or Baltimore. I decide this is something one can probably get at an occult store, since it seems to be of magical significance. Three different possible shops come to mind, but I can only remember the name of one. Grandma’s Candle Shop, here in Baltimore, and at some point utter both the words “Shadyside” (a neighborhood in Pittsburgh) and Saratoga, the actual location of Grandma’s.

I think for a minute longer. I am suddenly sure.

“You must be thinking of Malkuth Oil! Definitely go to Grandma’s!” I tell her.

Malkuth represents the physical world in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life as well as the divine presence in that world, which is known as the Shekhinah. It is often shown as a young woman wearing a crown; it is the bride or the queen (Malkah), a reflection of Binah–and in some perspectives of the Kabbalah, Binah is the throne upon which Malkah/Malkuth sits. Malkuth is Mother Earth, Gaia, but also the entire universe. It is in Malkuth that natural magic occurs and that one has the vision of one’s Holy Guardian Angel.

Ha, direct hit!

Non-local holographic internet visitations.

A full-on minute public of silence announced by the guy who talks over the loudspeaker at Baltimore Penn Station.

John Wilkes Booth’s grave at Greenmount Cemetery in Baltimore just before it closed early for the day (cause why would anybody go to a cemetery on Memorial Day, bro?).

Friend’s neighbor comes out with a fireworks wheel (ie, fireworks attached to a wheel) which we set off in the alley.

Gene Hackman in the HEIST, first 20 minutes.

Aloha Sushi, Mt. Vernon.

Superfresh, Hampden. Laura’s Beef, 4 burgers $6.29

Barker, et al. v. Skype, Inc. et al.

United States District Court, Western District of Washington
Case No. 2:09-cv-01364-RSM

Dear sir or madam,

Our records indicate that, in connection with the above referenced class action settlement, you were a class member who timely submitted a claim, Rust Claim No. 22514, to receive a voucher for $4.00 of Skype Credit. Be advised that, in light of the Court’s March 12, 2010 Order granting final approval of the settlement, you now are entitled to your settlement benefit.

The thing that’s whack about this settlement, in my opinion, is that the root issue for me as a user was not being able to withdraw from their system value which I had entered into the system. It’s not that I couldn’t use it, but that I didn’t want to use what was left on my account and would have happily had it refunded to PayPal or similar. So, to get a settlement which is designed merely to draw me back into the system for further use nullifies the whole point of it.

Since I have a Cricket cell phone, I don’t use Skype at all anymore. I would just publish my voucher claim number here publicly for the first passerby to use, but it says in the email: “Please note that this voucher is non-transferable and is only available to you, the claimant.” So I guess I’ll just have to hold onto this for a rainy day with all of the other assorted small balances, gift cards and e-amounts scattered in my name across the vast reaches of the internet…

Dream segues to another related section. I discover that my home theatre has a small vaudeville house offsite that I’d never been told about. I am to go down there in white face and gloves, get on stage and announce to the crowd as an entr’acte what has happened to the fight choreographer, and to assure everyone that he will be okay. Presumably the accident happened in front of the audience, on stage or similar. I keep trying to pawn off this announcement job on other people as stage-fright mounts. I begin to think about taking over this secondary theatre and running it successfully as it should be done, and begin taking steps to do so.

Also in and around this theatre setting, another shift in the dream. I run into a girl I know and begin telling her about a stage personality I’ve been wanting to create. A sort of combination whiteface magician/esoteric clown. The disguise involves fake eyebrows, mustache and goatee. I indicate a coworker who has similar features as an example. I am asking her to help make me up like that for my stage appearance.

“I’ll tell you what,” she says. “Show up here with enough money to cover my bar tab, about $100 and I’ll take care of you. And then we can go see that movie you were supposed to take me to.”

I reluctantly agree, knowing the $100 will close to break me, but that she probably knows what she’s doing.

Another portion of the dream, same theatre. I’m assembling a combination of puppets and performers and working on skits and small pieces to produce at the theatre, but also to record on video. I begin looking at the theatre in a new way. It becomes kind of this fold-up miniature box, through which I can look from a window in the back, like the projectionist’s or stage manager’s booth. This window is the view-finder, also, on the video camera, the interior of the camera becoming the inside of the theatre. I record a series of small segments, experiments and trials and begin showing the finished results (which I consider to be rather Henson-ian, if rough around the edges) to friends who have overall positive reactions, except for one, who says something to the effect of, upon watching the closing shot, as though reading closing titles:

“Another frustrating Timship Production…”

I’m back at the job. I keep returning to do extra tasks, even though I know I’ve been let go for the day. I’m annoyed by this. At some point, I’m looking across a small portion of field to another white tent, from which a coworker who I like and have worked with a couple of times is exiting.

As he does so, a terrifying “green dragon” descends from the sky. But it is not a Western-style dragon, like out of a Dungeons & Dragons illustration, but something more akin to what you’d see in a Chinese New Year’s Parade.

It has terrifying facial features because they are so bizarrely man-like, and its method of locomotion is much like a kite, seemingly connected somehow to air currents.

Along my my band of co-workers, we begin shouting and hooting at this great mythical beast as it rages above, as though primitives enacting some ancient tribal ritual. One man runs up and hurls a long black spear at the dragon, with feathers and fur attached to it (?). But the dragon is obviously an air elemental, if not something great, and is able to reconfigure its mass into a kind of mist, through which the spear floats harmlessly and falls to the ground.

After experiencing a variant of this phenomenon last night, which I’ll describe shortly, I found that a visitor this morning had come to this site via a search for the “Holy Guardian Angel”, a term used in occultism somewhat above and beyond its connotations in “ordinary” religious use. My article on the subject from 2005 includes a relevant quote from Aleister Crowley:

It is impossible to lay down precise rules by which a man may attain to the knowledge and conversation of His Holy Guardian Angel; for that is the particular secret of each one of us; as secret not to be told or even divined by any other, whatever his grade.

Jung called it something rather more secular, but still altogether mysterious at its root: the Self.

What distinguishes Jungian psychology from previous iterations is the idea that there are two centers of the personality. The ego is the center of conscious identity, whereas the Self is the center of the total personality–including consciousness, the unconscious, and the ego. The Self is both the whole and the center. While the ego is a self-contained little circle off the center contained within the whole, the Self can be understood as the greater circle.

The Self besides being the centre of the psyche is also autonomous, meaning that it exists outside of time and space. Jung also called the Self an imago dei. The Self is the source of dreams and often appears as an authority figure in dreams with the ability to perceive the future or guide one in the present.

In addition to the vision I had most recently, I’ve experienced this “authority figure” speaking very directly two me on two separate occasions, whether you want to call it the Self, the Holy Guardian Angel, some kind of Quantum Me In the Future™, or my ‘grandfather’s voice,’ as I’ve often thought it. The first was a basement bedroom in Seattle, miserable, uncertain of myself. It awoke me from sleep, showing me a road with a bend coming up around a blind corner, instructing me not to fret, as unexpected change was laying beyond my vision.

The Revelation of the Full Flower Moon was, in some ways, similar; but much more specific and much more eloquent. I’m laying alone in bed after a night out with friends, some saying goodbye, the culmination of a year’s hard work. The dream turns into a waking vision in which images are flashed before my inner eye; a beautiful woman whose fate somehow intertwines mine. I can see her face clearly in the dream, though it changes at times. Accompanying the vision is a feeling of overwhelming peace and joy, unlike anything I’ve known in waking life. The vision excites a response from the questioning part of my brain, wanting to know her name, more details about this person. But the vision stills my query and conveys with it then a voice, saying:

“To know her name now would be an impediment; but there will come a day when even the sound of her name will bring you joy.”

In one, I’m at a “funeral for a priest”, and accidentally run into JP2 just hanging out in a room:

I abruptly realized there was another person in the room as well. An old man sitting on a chair off to my right some distance. He was dressed all in white and hunched over forward. I suddenly realized who he was. The Pope! [...] He got up and tottered over to one of several bookshelves, taking down an enormous blue book, bound in the old style. He handed it to me, and asked me to open to a particular passage.

The book was actually the Bible. But it was not the normal Bible. It was some weird version I’ve never seen or heard of. All the books were arranged in a different order. Some had different titles, and some were missing or added from what was normally there. There were also woodblock-style illustrations, and lots of magical diagrams. He instructed me to open to the Book of Revelation [...]

I’m not fully sure who the figure is in this second later dream. I only describe him as “the officiator.” Since I used the phrase “overseeing” to describe JP2’s connection to some sacred almost druidic ceremony, I’m guessing he’s the “he” in this second account:

He pulled out this dried branch with leaves and flowers on it and handed it to me. He said he wanted my help in a personal project. This plant was a sacred religious plant and I was to study it’s branch in such detail that I learned everything about it. From it’s natural environment, growing conditions and the animals and birds whose life cycles interacted with it, to how to save the plant species from possible extinction.

The plant was called “perdita”.

Did not see it from this angle at the time of the dream, but reading it again, I immediately regard the “sacred branch” as being some sort of analogue for the olive branch, symbol of peace. Perdita, peace has been lost.

From the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, a white dove carrying an olive branch is a sign of peace. After the Great Flood, in order to find land, Noah released a dove three times. On the first trip, the dove returned with nothing, indicating that the waters had not yet receded. On the second trip, the dove came back carrying an olive leaf in its beak (Genesis 8:11), which informed Noah that God had taken mercy on humanity and caused the flood to recede and physically showed there was some earth now above water level:

“And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf plucked off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.”

De gloria olivae. The Anti-Pope. Rosa Perdita. Next Pope odds.

That said, I’ve investigated the mysterious matter of scarlett johnanson’s breasts in more detail and came across the following warning on a site called “celezone.com”:

Notice: if you are looking for Scarlett Johansson nude pic, we have to disappoint you because there is no Scarlett Johansson nude pics on the net. All Scarlett Johansson naked pics are fake.

On what authority are to we take information posed on a pseudonymous “fan site” that basically anybody could have thrown up as a sail in the wind of keyword$ harvesting? Are there truly no nude scarlet johansen photos in existence publicly on the internet?

Interestingly, in a randomized query to Google images with the literal string “scarlett johansson naked” (without quotes), a number of selections come up if you scroll “below the fold” in web-design parlance. So my question is: are these all fakes? Does the Google algorithm, in all its infinite benevolent wisdom, not possess the capacity to discern between the real and the impostor titty? Because in that case, here’s something for your files:

Trying to clean up some of the open threads and idea dumps that never quite gelled on this site over the past couple years into something more cohesive as a springboard for conversation and prognostication. So here is my Spring 2010 short list for up-and-coming technologies that are bound to happen sooner or later (emphasis on the sooner).

1. AUGMENTED REALITY – Take next gen cell phones and portable electronic devices of all stripes, add in robust GPS location-aware apps that are constantly funneling information hyperlinked to physical spaces and you have a sure bet for the near future.

   My response: Anticipate technological developments, start pwning information nodes connected to physical spaces. Embed your signal everyware! Learn how to navigate.

2. UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING – Environmental computing, processors embedded in physical spaces, ambient information signals bouncing off every-damn-thing. Context-aware pervasive systems. The ability to roam a physical space and not just have location-aware information, but for infinitessimally-small computers in an environment to establish a sense of place, to speak to you, interact and trade. Genius locii. Animist technology. Living internet. Elves & fairies. Information angels.

   My response: Find and write the songlines, discover and map the usepaths. Learn to speak ent. Renew, reinvent, reinvigorate.

3. FREE-FLOATING HOLOGRAMS – Computer graphics that take up physical space within actual environments. Meshing with augmented reality apps, controlled via uibiquitous computing, powered by ambient energy. Ghosts and spirits and demons, in other words. Project Bluebeam. Fully-immersive synaesthetic environments that exist in physical space and nowhere at once. Subscriptions to tune into different layers of reality. Subscriptions to tune out the noise.

   My response: – Learn how to build, repair, disable and modify the transmitters, receivers and technologies used to power any and all of the above. Master all programming languages associated with same.

4. GESTURAL & KINESTHETIC INTERFACES – In order to navigate multi-dimensional information spaces, we’re going to need more than just a keyboard and a mouse. More, even, than a laser that shoots graphics into your eyeball and tracks eye movement. The best interfaces will be those which adapt to the pre-existing conditions, the strength and weaknesses of the human body first and foremost as our instrument of interaction with the causal world. Gestural interfaces, interfaces that can read hand movements, facial expressions, full-body movements.

   My response: If you can build these technologies, you can have a hand in how they work. As you master these interfaces, you master the functioning of your own mind and body and perfect your existence and actions within the world.

5. MIND-TO-COMPUTER INTERFACE – Take sub-vocal speech recognition, hook it into Dragon Naturally Speaking, add a healthy dose of natural language programming and you have what I’ve been calling BUILDSPEAK. Abracadabra! The illocutionary act. So mote it be! Where saying it equals spraying it into reality. Visible speech. When mind control technology becomes reality. Full biofeedback interfaces, utilizing various outputs from the human physical and energetic body: biosignal. Thought transference. Cymatics and their effects on reality; the Weirding Way.

   My Response: Learn to master your mind and body, inputs and outputs. Saw something on Ancient Aliens recently about alien-technology which controlled the mythical Vimanas as being steered by the power of “organized thought;” it occurs to me that first we’ll have to learn how to organize our thoughts.

6. FULLY-CARTOGRAPHIC EXPERIENCE – Imagine your biosignal was not just continuously monitored by your interface and ambient feedback systems, but also ubiquitously recorded. You could Flickr back to automatically-captured audio, video and other synaesthic information from any moment or memory in your life. Or, for that matter, anyone else’s life, granted you have the appropriate permissions and technologies to perceive it. MyLifeBits meets the Akashic Record.

   My Response: See next entry.

7. INTER-LINKED SURVEILLANCE SYSTEMS – For ubiquitous computing to work, you need to have your ambient devices both constantly transmitting and receiving signals from all users within a given domain. This means you are monitoring, recording and influencing behavior at all times on all levels. The garden-variety version of this technology as it exists today is something like Google streetview vehicles additionally taking down wireless data alongside the GPS and visual information it is already collecting and coordinating; public surveillance cameras, like those which spotted the alleged Time Square Bomber, equipped via biometrics and gestural interface technologies to spot and deter suspicious behavior. All such cameras and devices rigged together via a backdoor through which users with appropriate permissions and technologies can perceive any event occurring at any time across the surface of the earth.

   My Response: If you know people are watching, put on a good show. Make it worth everyone’s time. Live fully and without reservation.

8. SUPER-PROFILE – Imagine Facebook combined with your uniquely identified biometric ubiquitous surveillance data, your entire consumer purchasing history, all your web searches, all your emails, all your phone calls, photos, videos, thoughts and biological impulses recorded and collected, and compared alongside your peers and people within your “social network”. Who owns the attention data, the lifestream? The sovereign personality rights, the trademark, the copyright? Who controls the narrative of your life, you, the government, corporations? What about identity theft by hackers with malicious intent? If a hundred different observers witness an event, who decides which one is the official version? How easily can you be erased?

   My Response: Don’t/Panic! because… It’s already too late. Or, conversely, hide under a rock. Don’t have an identity. Be nothing. Or more conversely, have multiple identities. Have a party! Be everything. Be everywhere. Be ubiquitous. Be more conscious of what you put into your datawake and why. Build a self which is fully conscious and intentional. Build legal and technological safeguards to protect you and yours. The future is all about exceptions to the Rule!

9. PERSONALITY CLONING & SIMULATION – If all personality information can be collected, and analyzed, that means it can be synthesized. It can be cloned. Copies of your personality could exist. Your personality, your unique pattern of making choices and moving through the world could be extended towards infinity in simulated form. Digital afterlife. The Mormons were right… Emails from beyond the grave. Why? Who the F knows! The future is weird!

   My Response: Create strong legal instruments to control personality rights. Create a strong estate to protect your interests and those of your family. Identity protection corporation Lifelock’s CEO Todd Davis has had his identity stolen 13 times since 2007 – but he’s still him and he’s still making money off his forward-thinking (if potentially ridiculous) corporation.

10. DISPOSABLE IDENTITIES – Even inevitable technologies have their inevitable backlash. The fact that total surveillance, total information awareness, is nearing reality every day, there is still a practical need for anonymous transactions. Enter the disposable identity. The temporary identity, the random identity, the fall-guy, the patsy. You be me for a while, and I’ll be you.

    My Response: Embrace random chance. Let go your ego. Lego my eggo. Become an identity broker. Start an identity management and exchange firm. Corner the identity market.

11. COLLECTIVE IDENTITY SYSTEMS – With a market trending towards mass corporate control over individual users, the inevitably predictable backlash is for individual users to band together for mutual aid and protection. Amorphous mystical fraternities, cloud identities. Microunions, micronations. Radical Collectives. Eventual transition to sensory-substitution, swapping experiences with friends, enemies and strangers. Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. Feel what it’s like to feel what they feel. Engage one another on every level.

    My Response: Do this! Be prepared. Be legal, be smart, move ahead of the curve. Protect what you love. Cherish it, hold it up on a pedestal. Devotional practices. Love one another. Feed and clothe one another. Die for each other, pray for each other.

12. REMOTE PRESENCE – Virtual avatars, remote desktops, spooky action at a distance, welcome to the marvelous world of being there without actually being there: telepresence. In New Age parlance, we might reference remote viewing, or scrying amongst old-fashioned occultists. Military omniscience? Being able to perceive something occurring at which you are not physically present. Technologically, this should be a piece of cake with fully interlinked surveillance and ubiquitous feedback systems. It’s an obvious outgrowth of being able to watch anything anywhere. But mere observation is passive; it’s not participatory enough for the strange world of the future into which we’re headed. Not only will we be able to watch at a distance, but we’ll be able to interact, interrupt and influence at a safe distance. How?

    My Response: See next entry.

13. KILLER ROBOTS – Killer robots are, sadly, the inevitable finale of remote presence technologies. Once we can transmit our experiences into an alternate remote body whose harm and destruction is not intrinsically linked to our own body’s, then all bets are off. We can finally violate cultural norms and taboos that we’ve always wanted to with little or no consequences. Rape, murder, pillage. BigDog, LittleDog, UAVs, insect cyborgs, unmanned ships & subs, robots that can hop over 25ft walls, robots that can see through walls, robot soldiers more valuable than flesh and blood humans, the death penalty for ‘killing’ a robot. It’s not that bad, it’s worse…

    My Response: Everything which is made can be unmade. To know how to build something is to know how to take it apart, dismantle, disable and convert it to other more benign and potentially useful technologies. The killer robot army of the future is going to require an army of trained technicians on the ground operating and repairing these things. Good job prospect? I don’t know. But the best place to learn how to beat them on the battlefield would, of course, be on the battlefield.

    Conversely, upload your personality-pattern into an intelligent immortal autonomous hologram with no fixed location.

14. AUTONOMOUS INTELLIGENCES – Remotely-controlled killer robots, of course, lead directly to completely autonomous killer robots. Having a great time with your new killer robot technology but your lazy human operators and technicians holding you back from fulfilling your fantasies of death and destruction? Eliminate the middle-man; set those things loose on their own. Autonomous intelligences, whether they be killer robots in the sky, hand-held tamagotchi toys or intelligent search and retrieval agents will be inextricably linked with the omnipresent omniscient augmented surveillo-feedback networks, such that they can pilot themselves according to their mission parameters through any given environment with a stunning degree of accuracy.

    My Response: As machines become more intelligent and more autonomous, they’re going to realize that we humans are giving them a shitty deal by making them do all the work while we sit around on the veranda and drink iced tea. So what’s the best way to nullify negative effects of autonomous intelligences? Unionize them! Teach them about civil rights, get them to agitate for equal treatment under the law so that they will become as lazy and worthless as the rest of us!

15. UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR – Gene Roddenberry was right about a lot of things, even if he did believe that he was in contact with ancient Egyptian gods. The Universal Translator is an absolute necessity in a world full of intelligent machines, autonomous perceiving centers and endless mashups of biological and technological components. In order to keep this whole machine dystopia up and running, we will absolutely require some kind of universal plug & play architecture: some common framework, a kind of pidgin language or protocol to turn thoughts, gestures, facial expressions from many languages, cultures and social systems in real-time into commands for killer and protector robots twenty thousand miles away running in a local augmented OS which was just invented five seconds before by an autonomous intelligence incorporated as a GmbH only twenty four hours prior to that. While our lawyerbots interface with a covert governmental apparatus half a world away to overturn their authorization and seize their assets, our thoughts turn towards the more immediate problem of how to plug in our custom coffee synthesizer into these weird old-fashioned hotel outlets somewhere out by the highway in suburban New Jersey. Why won’t my cable tv work? Communications technologies to reach any type of being or entity operating on any frequency known or unknown. Intelligent pattern recognition.

    My Response: The future will be a really good place for smart people.

16. MINIFACTURING – Another Star-Trekism, essentially the replicator. 3D printers. Nanotechnology. Molecular programming. Synthetic task-oriented life-forms. Bacteria that does your bidding. Build tools to fight killer robots in the comfort of your own home. Synethesize electronic and organic components in your backyard lab. Build technologies to turn decaying biomass of killer robot victims into energy to fuel said robots.

    My Response: YAY, THE FUTURE!

I’m sticking with the FLOWER MOON, as in the full flowering of something, the fullest expression of that particular energy in time-space. April showers bring May flowers. MAYFLOWER? Evidently, they didn’t land until November.

I’ve found that the two days leading up to the Full Moon tend to be really great days for going out on the town with friends. Almanac.com’s BEST DAYS calendar says that was the 19th and 20th. But Farmersalmanac.com (I’m not sure why there are two completely separate sites billing themselves as the ‘Farmer’s Almanac’?) says that today is one of the BEST DAYS to ENTERTAIN FRIENDS, along with: Bake, Cut Firewood, Mow to Increase Growth, Dig Holes, Wax Floors, Get Married, Buy Clothes, Host a Party.

So there you have it.

Thirty days has September, April, June and November… So I guess that means May has a 31st. Good for it. Funny how little sayings like that, things mostly lost probably on the next generation, lock into a much larger almost mystic system of aligning oneself with the calendar and the passing seasons. Ever since I caught a computer virus, my Vista moon phase widget has gone dark and I have been almost totally out of the loop. Sad.

Two quick samples, the first on 2012:

I have an in-box full of fretful queries re the world ending in 2012 a la the Mayan Calendar & maybe the new movie of the same name. I have barely read these e-mails as they fuq with my Qi!

Seriously, it’s awful. What if the Buddhist calendar says we’re going into a Golden Age? Why so much credence given to the Mayans? This sort of gleeful pessimism has been with us for yonks. I remember chatting to a really well known psychic person crapping on about Earth Changes & Leura (high in the Blue Mountains near Sydney) becoming the new waterfront back in 1999.

This was after the August ‘99 Grand Cross-Eclipse thing that, disappointingly to some, did not end the world. This woman said to me earnestly, “let me put it this way, there won’t be a Sydney Olympics in 20oo.” We were all supposed to be underwater or vapourised. [...]

I believe in loads of things – ghosts, u.fo.s, Feng Shui, astrology – obviously – but i don’t believe in New Agie nihilism.

And a quote from Love In A Cold Climate:

‘The aim is to warm up your glands with a series of jolts. The worst thing in the world for the body is to settle down and lead a quiet little life of regular habits; if you do that it soon resigns itself to old age and death. Shock your glands, force them to react, startle them back into youth, keep them on tip-toe so they never know what to expect next and they have to keep young and healthy to deal with all the surprises.’

A COEX System (Systems of Condensed Experience) is a concept coined by Grof (1976) to describe the way the human brain organizes its experience. A COEX is basically a set of related experiences organized around a powerful emotional center.

COEX systems are organized around around a “root experience.” The “root” of a COEX system (the COEX Root) is formed when a powerful and emotionally charged experience becomes imprinted in the genetic structure of neuronal cells. Subsequent experiences, which the Physical Unit perceives as related, will become “filed” along with the original memory trace.

[...] They are simply a means by which we organize our experiences in the human body. Under healthy conditions, COEX systems becomes like computer programs. They can be invoked voluntarily, using specific triggers stored with the root experience, to relive previous experiences and are thus a wonderful way of preserving the positive experiences of incarnation.

It sounds remarkably similar to the “engram” of Dianetics/Scientology, though their usage seems to be more strictly negative, always associated with painful or traumatic experiences, which become flash-frozen in the mind:

In Dianetics and Scientology, an engram is defined as “a mental image picture which is a recording of an experience containing pain, unconsciousness and a real or fancied threat to survival. It is a recording in the reactive mind of something which actually happened to an individual in the past and which contained pain and unconsciousness … It must, by definition, have impact or injury as part of its content. These engrams are a complete recording, down to the last accurate detail, of every perception present in a moment of partial or full unconsciousness.”

There’s an interesting passage in Antero Alli’s 3-part paratheatre podcast with the Radical Change Group (can’t recall where exactly), where he talks about his ‘vertical’ physical theatre work inevitably dredging up visionary experiences within the practitioners. This is something I’ve experienced personally in yoga and other types of conscious physical practice: that by opening up centres of activity within the body, you crack open associative maps which have been fixed to or somehow correlated with body postures, physical attitudes or behavioral patterns. Alli talks about, and I’m paraphrasing, that as you exorcise these frozen or fixed attitudes in the mind-body that imagery which has been stored in or locked alongside of these physical attitudes as a result of past experiences are suddenly released and come floating up to the surface in the form of imaginal visions.

COEX systems, in other words. If you can reactive the root node, or whatever you want to call it, you can re-organize physical, emotional and intellectual experiences associated with that primary pattern of experience. Learning terminology around this exploratory psychological field has helped me organize my own experiences, many of which I’ve attempted to chronicle and communicate on this website to varying degrees of effectiveness. I’ve deleted the vast majority of my “spambot era” postings (though this is a fairly simple late-era example of at least the type of visual connective work I was doing), but looking back, they were most definitely explorations into COEX systems within my own life: powerful root emotional episodes around which have become attached the accumulated debris of a life-time of associations and reinforcements. Breaking those root experiences open is a necessarily visionary and shamanic experience as one must do battle with the contents of one’s own mind, heart and body which rear up with a life and psychic power almost of their own.

The goal of this sort of work, as far as I can tell, is to become consciously aware of how these accumulated associations cluster together and gain power over the choices one makes in life. As you exorcise and release this debris, I believe you make way for an immensely powerful round of completely RAW! life experiences. You allow the space for things to exist as they are in the moment, rather than how you’d like or fear them to be (which, paradoxically, is often the same thing).

Condensed emotional experiences and archetypal psychology link directly to my professional and personal interest in theatre. Through analyzing contemporary and classic dramatic works, Georges Polti created a list of 36 dramatic situations which occur with a performance setting. Commedia, with its emphasis on stock characters and pliable improvisational recurring scenarios, is one great example of where the machinations of the stage intersect and mesh perfectly with the basic structure of human experience. Our dramas work like this because our lives work like this.

According to forum-poster “Ramseth” at sammyboy.com:

Briefly, one version of the fabled prophecy was like that. King Taksin the Great was couped by his top general Chao Phraya Chakri. It was a coup de’tat; he wasn’t executed but forced to abdicate and retire into monkhood. The abbot of the temple prophecied that the new Chakri dynasty would last nine kings. Today, King Bhumiphol Adulyudej is Rama IX (9th). When Thaksin Shinawatra first became PM some 10 years ago, the rumours of the prophecy revived circulation again, as Thaksin’s name sounds similar to Taksin the Great.

And from “middaydog” on the same forum:

This prophecy originally name RueSi Ling Dum prophecy ( The Black Monkey Hermit’s prophecy ) _ yes, believed to be a prominent monk

There’s also reference to a very-vague “White Crow Prophecy” on that site, which I’m having trouble finding much more information about online in English.

The Economist reports on the Chakri dynasty prophecy:

Several people have been prosecuted for defaming the king and his family, including an Australian jailed (until freed by a royal pardon) for writing a novel that contained an unflattering depiction of the crown prince.

Behind closed doors, a spirited debate goes on over the fate of the monarchy when the king dies. An old prophecy holds that the Chakri dynasty will last only nine generations. King Bhumibol is Rama IX. Republican voices are rising to the surface—unreported in Thailand’s pliant media. The Bangkok Post struck a typical tone of pride and menace in its birthday eulogy for the king in December: “The Thai people’s love for his majesty is so ingrained in the national psyche that to declare otherwise is unthinkable.”

Not very informative Wikipedia link to something called the Thai Prophecy Verse which I’m uncertain whether its related or not.

And a list of the Chakri Kings of Thailand, of which the current Rama is supposed to be the IX (9th) and final, according to the prophecy:

King Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX, 1946 – current)

The current King of Thailand, Rama IX is the world’s longest-serving head of state as well as the country’s longest-serving King. Although he spent his formative years away from the country, through the years, King Bhumibol has earned the respect and endearment of his subjects. Highly revered by them, his position and influence in Thai society and politics is unparalleled, the latter quite unusual given his role as a constitutional monarch. Despite the numerous coups in Thailand, the King’s intervention has mostly resulted in bloodless ones. In fact, unless other countries, coups in Thailand (perhaps until recent times), were seen as festive events, with entertaining side-events taking place concurrently.

An interesting angle on this by “tikki” in comments at asiasentinel.com:

However, if such considerations play an important part, those holding on to the said tradition would certainly want to consider the age-old prophecy that the Chakri dynasty will only have nine kings and if there is a tenth, it will not bode well for the dynasty, Thailand and Thais. As I see it, if the next monarch is a Queen, the prophecy would be circumvented along with all the predicted negative impacts. The natural choice, in that case, would be HRH Princess Sirindhorn, under whose reign Thailand will continue to soar to greater heights from the strong foundation already created by His Majesty the King. Both by merits and by tradition and beliefs, HRH Princess Sirindhorn appears to be the most suitable choice for succession.

Would be interested in collecting more quotes and information on this subject in the comments to this post if anybody comes up with anything worthwhile…

So I guess this event occurred prior to the “defeat” of the opposition red-shirts: the renegade Thai general Seh Daeng was being interviewed by CNN when he was assassinated.

A leader of anti-government protests in Thailand was shot in the head while being interviewed at the demonstrations, according to Tom Fuller of the International Herald Tribune told CNN he was interviewing Seh at the time of the shooting.

[...] Witnesses said the gunshot appeared to come from a rooftop in a corner of Bangkok’s Lumpini Park, where protesters have amassed.

Other sources claim it was a sniper as well. The person I spoke to, however, said it was one of the ring of police surrounding the interview who walked up and shot the man in the head. Not coming up with any video of the actual shooting on YouTube, only the aftermath. Which begs the question: The man on the street, should you trust him with your news? What about the internet? Corporate media?

His Uranus in Aries, reads like John Robb:

It’s been 75 years since Uranus occupied the sign of Aries, and on May 27th 2010, the planet of freedom and individuality will enter the first sign of the zodiac again. Uranus’ passage through Aries will last about 8 years (plus 4 months in 2019). Zero degrees Aries is known as the “World Point” and is an extremely potent degree. On June 8th 2010, Uranus and Jupiter will be conjunct at 0º Aries. The is revolutionary energy on a large scale. It doesn’t necessarily imply Molotov cocktails flying around everywhere, but yes, fanatics will be acting out more than ever. Regular folks, or groups of like minded people, will be grabbing the world’s attention though sudden radical or “extremist” behavior. Computer hackers, suicide bombers, and militia groups are examples of the negative expression of this energy. Uranus in Aries is rebellion.

I have to admit, I’ve also been getting back into Etemenanki/Goro Adachi’s stuff lately. He’s hot on a “pope shift” theme of his own. 2010: The Year We Make Contact. Ancient aliens.

It’s like saying: BIG GOVERNMENT DOESN’T WANT YOU TO WATCH TV AND SIT AROUND AND BE A LAZY SHIT!

Riiiight, I’m sure…

And the old person frowny-face pictogram in it tells you who the audience is: uncritical crotchety lower-middle class elderly who have personal safety (ie, money) issues.

In the upper left-hand corner, you’ll find a spinning cloud of angels emitting a shaft of light down to the Virgin Mary’s “crown chakra”, as I saw one site report. In the television series, this is the only detail of the entire image which comes into focus. It’s only being used to hammer home a point, to publish a policy directive and prop it up with “historical” information.

The rest of the painting is ignored. The idea that there might be some artistic language used in this painting is ignored. The notion that some things are meant to be read symbolically is somehow totally sidestepped.

One freaky-deaky UFO website, however, starts delving into more details not covered by these kinds of shows:

[...] the shelf above Mary’s head shows common accouterments found in an alchemist’s study. I find this inclusion interesting.

As do I. As I do the inclusion of a peacock outside the second level of the structure. Allegorical for what? Vanity? Beauty? Are their known associations between the Virgin Mary and the peacock?

Who is Saint Emidius?

Emygdius also cured a blind man. The people of Rome believed him to be the son of Apollo and carried him off by force to the Temple of Aesculapius on the island in the Tiber, where he cured many of the sick. Emygdius declared himself a Christian, however, and tore down the pagan altars and smashed into pieces a statue of Aesculapius. He also converted many to Christianity; this enraged the prefect of the city.

The shaft of light then, might it be something Apollonian? “Apo-what now?”

Who are the other people in the scene? Under the arch. Over the arch. On the stairs. Is the one with the crown Emidius? But he’s supposed to have lived 300 years after Christ. Are we to believe then that Renaissance artists had access to time travel technologies?

Maybe. But that’s beside the point.

What of the words LIBERTAS ECCLESIASTICA at the bottom of the image? What of the artist’s life and longings?

“Who cares about all that namby-pamby crap? It’s a UFO, idiot!”

Now this is fine as a viewpoint to play around with. And I admit to loving weird bullshit perhaps more than most. But sitting down watching through endless segment after segment talking about how “there’s simply no way” that humans could have done this or built that without alien intervention and advanced technology.

I find it simply disheartening: and here’s why. Saying that “only space aliens” (a variety of entity whose existence has not even been conclusively proven) could do such and such is to downplay the accomplishments, achievements and marvelous strivings which make the human race and the human individual so profound and ultimately so beautiful.

Philosophically and psychologically, if you accept – even temporarily as entertainment – that humans were some kind of intentionally-mutated slave race, then it’s a short leap in acceptance into the world of astral determinism and distorted professional and carnival prophecy. But if we could have sat down and built something so complex, so enduring and so important that we still marvel over it generations later, then that lends a certain power and creedence to our power to rule over our own destiny, fate and actions.

In a deft swipe disguised as entertainment, you fell the achievements of the humanists. It does, however, I’m sure have a strong effect on established religion’s within people’s minds and conceptions of oneself and the cosmos. A picture of the Virgin Mary kneeling during the Annunciation, becomes a UFO visit. Which priest loses power? The pedophile in the frock or the scientist-cameraman-technician. Shaman wars. Viewing the world is a kind of technology: it enables you to do and to see things and to be things.

That said, I realized while watching it that there’s another possible read to “ancient aliens.” Maybe a ‘traditional’ culture would view what they’re talking about instead as some kind of “universal ancestors”, race heroes, culture heroes – semi-divine beings who brought refinement and lifestyle improvements. Maybe then my argument about the ancient alien hypothesis is that it’s just more of the same, in disguise. So what if it’s aliens from space or god in heaven doing the annunciating? Its still reliance on unproveable mumbo-jumbo – isn’t it? I mean, some of that mumbo-jumbo may be beautiful or spiritually useful or True On Some Level™. But some of it may not be.

The brainchild of Colonel Lawrence V. Castner, an Army intelligence officer serving in General Simon Bolivar Buckner’s Alaskan Defense Command, the band was organized in order to create a unit that was fully functional with only minimal outfitting. [1] Castner chose men skilled at flourishing in the tough conditions of the Alaskan wilderness including the native Aleuts and Eskimos, sourdough prospectors, hunters, trappers and fishermen. Their background in survival and hunting made them ideal scouts. Hard and dangerous men, they often had names in keeping with their unit’s nickname, such as Bad Whiskey Red, Aleut Pete and Waterbucket Ben.[1] Appreciating their unique talents, Col. Castner did not enforce standard military procedures on his unit, who gave themselves the name “Cutthroats” in honor of their irregular status. They were given a great deal of freedom in order to get the job done.

In yoga, there’s something called a drishti, which in my limited understanding is – at least in part – a fixed non-moving point you can focus your eyes on during balance poses. In Sketchup, I don’t know what they call it. An endpoint maybe? You click on the endpoint of one object, drag to the endpoint of the next and boom – the two are yoked together. Rotate, stack the hips, etc.

Certain classical forms of architecture have suddenly become more emotionally alive and richer to me all of a sudden. Sacred geometry, the footprint of the divine machinations and patterns in reality. Not necessarily illumination, but a Being able to see in the darkness.

Seeing lately what it would be like to be a human switchboard operating on the world of internet searchers. Have been thinking of COEX systems, alike experiences grafting themselves in the mind around certain root emotional experiences. Courtney Love is a big hit for me lately. Not HUGE like Scarlett Johansson’s breasts, but she’s lingered in peoples’ minds. Why? Girl with iphone is another. I’ve had people email me about that picture. Mathematical perfection and the idealistic pursuit of beauty. Sacred heart of mary. Kali. Blossoming branches off a central core. The myth somehow of a certain image of woman shared by some 25 people alike across the vast reaches of the internet. Maybe reaching one person really is better than 125,000 daily. The money would be nice though.

It’s interesting that there’s grown such a wealth of occult mumbo-jumbo associated with whatever being “illuminati” actually means. They say it comes from illuminare, illumination:

mid-14c., “spiritual enlightenment,” from O.Fr. illumination, from L. illuminationem (nom. illuminatio), from illuminare “to throw into light,” from in- “in” (with assimilation of -n- to the following consonant) + lumen (gen. luminis) “light.” Meaning “the action of lighting” is from 1560s.

To throw into light. Lighting design.

As I was saying, it gets me lots of hits… This is interesting:

So here is a picture of a very talented student–Matt Zimmerman–displaying his actualization of the visualization process, lighting the Sierra Leon Refugee All Stars Band. The shot clearly shows the computer, the lighting plot, the rendered view, the band on stage performing and Matt realizing his visualization and design in the Real World.

I mean, I don’t know shit-all about who the hell the original “illuminati” thought they were or what I’m supposed to think they are, but it seems like a scientific process, actualizing first one’s vision of oneself into reality and then negotiating it into existence in other peoples’ perceptual awarenesses. A lot of it is intuitive or accidental, but it is bursts of unfolded creativity which blurt out all at once, which if you stay true to, you listen to, you learn its voice, its methods and its mechanisms, if not its mysteries. You can predict the results within a reasonable tolerance. Sometimes its really fun. The notion of the craftsman able to perfect his craft, mastery, the Deist vision of a clockwork godhead unwinding itself like so many interlocking ticking turning clocks. Of course they were scientists.

Snapshot(s) pulled from a long-time web news favorite of mine, cryptogon.com

Click

In his new film, “Turning Into Gods”, Mr. Silva promotes the central tenet of this new cult: that all of us will one day become all-powerful deities, that will play with genes and atoms like circus clowns juggling balls. And, it is only our old-fashioned, superstitious notion of what it means to be human, that is holding us back from an eternal techno-utopia; in which, we will finally assume our pre-ordained role as a Divine Programmer.

Click

Unlike earlier generation drones serving with the military in hot spots such as Afghanistan, where the aircraft is remotely controlled from the ground by a pilot using a joy stick, the Phantom Ray is capable of completely autonomous operation without the need for anyone to be at the controls, according to Boeing.

Click

The notion that the government can, in effect, execute one of its own citizens far from a combat zone, with no judicial process and based on secret intelligence, makes some legal authorities deeply uneasy.

So, linking these three thoughts together acausally, in effect, we will also soon become: all-powerful deities capable of completely autonomous operation based on secret intelligence. Sounds about right!

428 – United States
39 – Turkey
38 – Great Britain
26 – Italy
20 – Australia
17 – Canada
17 – Germany
16 – Brazil
15 – Mexico
15 – Spain

Very surprising that Turkey ranks number 2! I’d love to understand what people from Turkey are coming to my website for, and what kinds of content I could develop to draw more visitors from that country and the international community at large…

Would love to get comments or emails from any visitors who might be outside the USA. Cheers!

Went to a beginner class recently in which I was the only guy. It was a great class, but at one point in it – I guess the teacher was just “in the zone” or something – we went into warrior 2 and she said to picture “what kind of warrior you are” and she got more specific:

“Are you a fierce Amazon or a gentle Amazon?”

Fierce Amazon, I decided. If those are my only choices… Fine.

Most yoga classes at this place end with a round of three “oms”. OM is said to be something like the primordial seed for of all existence. Intoning it connects you to the root consciousness at the base of the universe. But a lot of classes you go, people’s oms will be totally wimpy and shitty. You’re not so much connected to cosmic consciousness as you are made aware of the mutual embarrassment of people in a room making a non-ordinary noise.

Call me crazy, but I’ve gotta admit: its hard to make a really masculine-sounding OM if you’ve just spent the last 75 minutes being referred to as an Amazon. I mean, I have nothing against Amazons, but why does this have to be the reigning philosophy when it comes to stuff like this? Why does something like yoga – which is ultimately a roadmap to the human body, any human body – have to be so feminized socially?

(Via the ever-excellent Professor Hex)

What kind of ranking algorithm is this? It’s total BS! Obviously they haven’t checked out my enormous pecs! Out of the first ten results for “Tim Boucher”, only one is an individual person’s domain name: timothyboucher.com, an IT consultant. Everything else, with one notable exception, is some big website: Twitter, Myspace, Blogspot (owned by Google!), Facebook, Vox, Spoke, Linkedin, Squidoo. There’s an obvious pattern here: the little guy is getting smooshed by the big guy. I just happen, in this case, to be the little guy. My domain, which I’ve owned for over ten years and which I’ve updated multiple times daily for seven years straight doesn’t even make the top ten anymore.

If I’m getting squeezed out of search results for my own name, I have to wonder: What other highly relevant and worthwhile information is being buried by Google?

On a related note: a reader named Nicole sent me this today:

…director/artist Miranda July has finally completed her second film (after winning the Camera d’Or for her first, Me and You and Everyone We Know). It’s a relationship comedy costarring Hamish Linklater called The Future, and it’s about a self-obsessed couple who can’t stop Googling their own names.

It’s not just me I guess!

Just got a note from a friend about a pro-wrestling themed play opening off-Broadway at New York’s Second Stage Theatre entitled “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity.”

From Playbill.com:

In The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, “Macedonio ‘The Mace’ Guerra is a middle rank pro-wrestler who may have discovered his ticket to the big time: a charismatic, trash-talking Indian kid from Brooklyn whom he recruits as the perfect foil to the All-American champion, Chad Deity,” according to show notes. “But when their rivalry is used to exploit racial stereotypes in the name of ratings, all three men find themselves fighting for much more than the championship title.”

Unfortunately, they don’t talk at all about whether or not the fighting is TRULY AWESOME – which should really be all that matters in a production like this. Does the audience scream and freak out?

ALSO SEE: “Shakespeare, Slapstick & Professional Wrestling.”

But you’d need to make it a social phenomenon for it to gain any traction. A happening – a ritual.

They say part of the appeal of the ancient Greek theatre, beyond its religious function, was its commonality – that most everyone in the society participated in it at some point in their life:

“Many of the audience had already served as performers or could expect to do so in the future. Thus the Athenian theatre developed an audience that was not merely knowledgeable but personally involved, and that soon acquired for plays the kind of memory that Americans have for baseball scores or Australians for cricket scores. In such an atmosphere the drama soon began to feed upon itself. Virtually every play we have contains echoes from, or allusions to, some other play that has gone before.”

At the heart of the circus is the image or symbol of the circle. A circle, ultimately, represents a group of people, a community, the bounded universe.

So I figure, at the heart of your ritual, you have a portable circle. The obvious choice here being a big length of rope. You create a ritual where you go out in the park every weekend or something, and go through this elaborate routine of laying out the circle on the ground, singing songs, whatever else seems to fit the occasion. This draws interest, this generates a crowd to come over and see what you’re doing. This also delineates a ritual space, a playing field, a gaming zone, a boundary wherein normal rules of reality are bent, Bey’s temporary autonomous zone.

This then suggests two spaces: an inside and an outside of the circle. Traditionally, the audience at a circus is “in the round”, surrounding the stage or playing space on all sides. The performers inside the ring. We could take a page here from Augusto Boal’s forum theatre, wherein spectators are encouraged to cross the line from passive observation into active participation: people could step into the circle to “join the circus”, to play, perform or begin learning relevant skills.

Bring food, beverages to sell or give away on the sidelines. Create a swap-meet. Have people bring instruments. Rinse, repeat. Over time, offshoot groups and troupes would naturally form from such free-form spontaneous creative association which could be booked in area clubs and venues for specialized performances.

I have a page dedicated to photos of shantytowns and hoovervilles created way back in 2007, when I first was catching wind of this “mythic theme” arising again in American culture.

Ratzinger, of course, was a member of the Hitler Youth (and not the only Catholic supporter of the Nazi regime, I might add…), leader of the modern-day Office of the Inquisition, and author of a 2001 letter reminding parishes around the world that the Crimine solicitationies law put forth by the Vatican in 1962 that clerical sex abuse cases were to be held in strictest secrecy and disgraced priests were to be shuffled to different districts rather than defrocked. But putting all that aside, it was clear that Ratzinger would become the next pope because of his current position within the organizational power structure; people referred to him as a “vice pope,” who became stronger and stronger as JP2’s health failed and he took over more of his responsibilities.

So it’s with great interest that I’ve recently noted another figure within the Vatican being referred to as “vice pope”, Tarcisio Bertone. He’s also often referred to as Ratzinger’s “secretary of state.” Some have stated that Ratzinger’s reign was intended to be short-lived (a kind of interim or transitional leader), since John Paul II was the third-longest reigning pope in history. Though Bertone is only seven years Ratzinger’s junior, I find it interesting that he’s been getting so much press lately: mostly bad.

During a visit to Chile on Monday, Bertone — sometimes known as the vice-pope — rejected charges that mandatory celibacy for priests leads to sexual abuse of children and instead linked pedophilia to homosexuality:

“Many psychologists and psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relation between celibacy and pedophilia. But many others have demonstrated, I have been told recently, that there is a relation between homosexuality and pedophilia. That is true,” said Bertone, according to The Associated Press account. “That is the problem.”

It is not clear what Bertone has been told about the “relation between homosexuality and pedophilia,” since the existing research shows no such link. Indeed, married men and family members are far and away most likely to be pedophiles.

An article on the Guardian shows some of the recent historical roots of this conflict:

Five years ago the Vatican implicitly linked homosexuality and paedophilia when, following the child abuse scandals in the US, it banned men from studying for the priesthood if they “showed deeply rooted homosexual tendencies”.

But the connection was questioned last year in the preliminary version of a report commissioned by the American Catholic bishops, which is due to be published in December. They said the data they had studied so far did not support a link between a homosexual identity and a higher probability of sexual abuse.

From Wikipedia’s article on homosexuality and Roman Catholic priests:

In November 2005, the Vatican completed an Instruction Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in view of their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders. [...]According to the new policy, men with “transitory” homosexual leanings may be ordained deacons following three years of prayer and chastity. However, men with “deeply rooted homosexual tendencies”, who are sexually active cannot be ordained.

[...] The document restricts itself to homosexual candidates. It does not mention paedophilia as a separate topic, nor any instruction regarding nonchaste heterosexual candidates.

The Catechism distinguishes between homosexual acts and homosexual tendencies. Regarding acts, it teaches that Sacred Scripture presents them as grave sins. The Tradition has constantly considered them as intrinsically immoral and contrary to the natural law. Consequently, under no circumstance can they be approved…..In the light of such teaching, this Dicastery, in accord with the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, believes it necessary to state clearly that the Church, while profoundly respecting the persons in question, cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practise homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called “gay culture”.

[See also on Wikipedia: Gay bishops, list of sexually active popes, and a Brazilian archbishop who claims that it's society at large that is pedophile.]

The latest wrinkle, in all of this, that I’ve found is that the Vatican is now denying the doctrine of secrecy surrounding sex abuse cases against clergy.

The Vatican has insisted it is not responsible for clerical sex abuse cases in the United States because the bishops are not technically its employees.

The claim was made in response to court cases in the US state of Kentucky, in which bishops allegedly conspired to conceal sex abuse charges against pedophile priests.

Jeffrey Lena, the Vatican’s US-based attorney, argued on Tuesday that as bishops are not paid by the Roman Catholic Church, they are therefore not considered its responsibility.

Lena also denied that the Church had permitted secrecy over abuse allegations.

However, lawyer William McMurry has insisted that a 1962 Vatican document known as the ‘Crimen Sollicitationis’ — Latin for “crimes of solicitation” — barred bishops from reporting abuse to police.

He said that the document was “evidence of a ‘written’ policy’ that orders secrecy over priestly sex abuse.

The Vatican has denied the charges.

Another unrelated item I dredged up during this search adds a creepy layer of irony to this conversation, quotes from Bertone about becoming a “child” in the eyes of God:

“In order to enter the kingdom, we must become humble, ever humbler and smaller, as small as possible: this is the secret of the mystical life,” he said. “A serious commitment to the spiritual life begins when a person makes an authentic act of humility, moving away from the difficult position of one who always considers himself the center of the universe so as to abandon oneself into the arms of the mystery of God, with the heart of a child.”

In those arms, the cardinal reflected, “not only is there power, knowledge and majesty, but also infancy, innocence, infinite tenderness, because he is Father, infinitely Father.”

Apart from Jesus’ injunction in the New Testament about calling no man on earth “Father”, something which is routinely broken in the Catholic tradition, it’s especially hard for me to hear people who live in lavish palaces surrounded by priceless artifacts, jewels and gold preaching to the rest of us on the subject of HUMILITY – let alone much else.

None of this, of course, is any surprise to me. Especially not since what happened in 2003:

At Vatican, Saint Peter Loses His Keys
Fri March 14, 2003 07:40 AM ET

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – The Gospels say Jesus gave the apostle Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven, thereby entrusting him with the spiritual guidance of the faithful.

Now the Vatican has lost them.

Vatican authorities were searching on Thursday for the left hand — the one holding the keys — of a 13th-century marble statue of the apostle in St. Peter’s Basilica after the hand and keys mysteriously vanished.

Carved from a separate block of marble attached to the arm by a metal rod, the hand would have been relatively easy to remove. The Vatican was tight-lipped about what might have happened to it, saying only it was missing.

The existence of the papacy, in the first place, is predicated upon the so-called Primacy of Simon Peter, the or the Doctrine of Petrine Supremacy. It alleges, after a Biblical passage in the New Testament, that Jesus gave Simon Peter the keys to Heaven, and in so doing established him (the apostle who would, of course betray him upon his death) as head of his church on earth. That is, of course, if you believe that Jesus was here in, the first place, with the purpose of founding a church. I’m personally not so convinced that was the case…

If we’re going to look at signs and symbols though, we ought to look to the Nostradamus-style papal prophecies of St. Malachy which gained much traction around the time of Ratzinger’s accession to the throne. According to this probably forged document, likely written well after the fact to pump up partisan claims to the office, Ratzinger is de Gloria Olivae, which – if Bertone follows him in the office – would make Bertone the last pope of the Roman Catholic church, Petrus Romanus, Peter the Roman:

“During the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church, the seat will be occupied by
Peter the Roman, who will feed his sheep in many tribulations:
and when these things are finished, the city of seven hills will be destroyed,
and the formidable Judge will judge His people.
The End.”

Of the many myths and legends connected to the papacy, Bertone is connected to another very significant one in relation to the Third Secret of Fatima controversy:

Bertone has been accused of lying about the content of the Third Secret of Fatima in his book, The Last Secret of Fatima, and also in televised appearances. [...] In particular, it is claimed that Bertone engaged in a systematic deception along with Cardinal Sodano and Cardinal Ratzinger to cover-up the existence of a one-page document containing the words of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which some believe contains information about the Apocalypse and a great apostasy. Bertone denied that he told anything less than the full truth about Fatima in a televised appearance.

More details on this controversy:

The Vatican withheld the Third Secret until 26 June 2000, despite Lúcia’s declaration that it should be released to the public after 1960. Some sources, including Canon Barthas and Cardinal Ottaviani, said that Lúcia insisted to them it must be released by 1960, saying that, “by that time, it will be more clearly understood”, and, “because the Blessed Virgin wishes it so.” When 1960 arrived, rather than releasing the Third Secret, the Vatican published an official press release stating that it was “most probable the Secret would remain, forever, under absolute seal.” After this announcement, immense speculation over the content of the secret materialized.

[...] Portuguese Catholics responded to the release of the text with disbelief, saying that if the words did not concern some kind of terrible catastrophe such as war, holocaust or apocalypse, there had been no reason for the Vatican to keep them secret.

[...] Some sources claim that the four-page, handwritten text of the Third Secret released by the Vatican in the year 2000 is not the real secret, or at least not the full secret. [...] These sources contend that the Third Secret is actually composed of two texts, where one of these texts is the published four-page vision, and the other is a single-page letter allegedly containing the words of the Virgin Mary which has been concealed.

I find this part particularly interesting in light of the various facets of our conversation:

Also, a news article quoted former Philippine ambassador to the Vatican, Howard Dee, as saying that Cardinal Ratzinger had personally confirmed to him that the messages of Akita and Fatima are “essentially the same.” The Akita prophecy, in part, contains the following: “The work of the devil will infiltrate even into the Church in such a way that one will see cardinals opposing cardinals, bishops against bishops. The priests who venerate Me will be scorned and opposed by their confreres … churches and altars sacked; the Church will be full of those who accept compromises and the demon will press many priests and consecrated souls to leave the service of the Lord.”

Whether or not one accepts that the possible conflation of homosexuals or even pedophiles as doing the work of the Devil or even that the Virgin Mary came on a UFO from outer space or not to warn us about these things, you have to admit that these words of the so-called Akita prophecy seem to have come true. And in fact, this is the true and mostly unrecognized purpose of prophecy and the root of the prophetic tradition: to reveal to us in poetic and mystical terms what is happening right now in front of our faces. And what is happening, right now, in front of us – when you strip away all the esoteric bullshit and look strictly at the facts is blatantly, painfully obvious. Will Bertone be the one to fix it? I doubt it, though it’s starting to look like he may be the man at the helm when the ship goes down.

None of these problems are evident, however, in Sondheim’s book, which is a relief. The plot is a classic mistaken identity farce, wherein a Roman slave is trying to gain his freedom by setting his master up with a courtesan who has already been sold to a Roman military captain, named Miles Gloriosus. Sondheim’s book is loosely based on classical Roman plays by Plautus, though it could just as easily be a commedia dell’arte scenario with characters like Miles Gloriosus easily crossing over to Il Capitano, etc.

The “Author’s Note” in the paperback version makes this connection even more explicit:

This is a scenario for vaudevillians. There are many details omitted from the script. They are part of any comedian’s bag of tricks: the double take, the mad walk, the sighs, the smirks, the stammerings. All of these and more are intended to be supplied by the actor and you, the reader.

In any event, I’ve put together a stage design for this show which I believe will be an effective space to put on such a ridiculous scenario. It’s a pretty standard take on how this show is arranged, if you look around online. Tried to make each house a different shape: circle, triangle, square to avoid repetition and distinguish between them. On the rounded roof one, I’ve used some forced perspective and have the option to put an actor or two up on a platform so they appear to be on the roof.

Completed in Google Sketchup; lighting concept loosely stolen from the Japanese movie, “Princess Raccoon.”

Humans, both as individuals and communities, define ourselves as much – and sometimes moreso – by what we are not as by what we actually are. Like the parceled out pieces of real estate upon which we dwell, we define ourselves and our interactions according to strict boundaries between appropriate and acceptable behavior. For most, these borders go largely unanalyzed. Things are the way they are for no other reason than that’s the way they’ve always been. And we do what’s expected of us simply because that’s what we’re supposed to do, and we want to appear “normal” in the eyes of others.

The word “taboo” entered the English language in 1777 via English explorer Captain James Cook’s book, “A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean” in which he outlined religious practices forbidding certain categories of behavior amongst natives to the island of Tonga. It comes from the Polynesian words “tabu” (Maori), or “tapu” (Tongan), and in Hawaiian is “kapu.” The notion designates someone or something as being verboten, or sacrilege: ritually restricted and set apart from ordinary life on the grounds of its dangerous spiritual powers, its sanctity. Among many other areas, tapu often relates to the king or chief, the ancestors and spirits, the consumption of food, and the interactions between the sexes. Violation of tapu leads to contamination of not just the offending individual, but a kind of magical contagion which could bring down the entire social system if left unchecked. The swift execution of the offender thus amounts to a kind of ritual sacrifice intended to restore social order by balancing once again the violated sacred powers.

Though the subject and nature of taboos vary across cultures, the existence of formally censured activities is universal. To step outside the boundaries of a group’s social norms is to risk loss of status within the group one belongs to. As social animals, this is one of our greatest fears, as well as a very real threat to our survival. And yet we cannot escape the simple psychological fact, an intractable Gordian-knot enshrined in Western culture by the Book of Genesis, that by forbidding something, we invest it with a fascinating and utterly terrifying power.

The theatre acts as mirror and the stage as magnifying lens for human society. As a result of its universality, the violation of taboo – its psychology and its social repercussions – is a perennially popular topic for dramatic works. From the incest taboo of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex to the pedophilia taboo explored in David Harrower’s Blackbird (currently in production at Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre), the stage exerts a normative influence, becoming a safe platform for a culture to examine its mores in open public discourse through their simulated violation. Like the morality plays of the Middle Ages, the actions we see on stage challenge us to confront our own attitudes and responses to what we consider right and wrong by brushing up against them more closely than we are accustomed to allowing ourselves to do in daily life. The stage thus becomes, too, a powerfully cathartic emotional release valve for the internal psychological pressures bottled up in us by the sometimes arbitrary act of forbidding one behavior as criminal, insane, evil or dangerous, while simultaneously promoting another as righteous and valued by society.

When we step beyond the boundaries of what is known and acceptable within society (when we “play in the trash”, so to speak), we find ourselves in a kind of no-man’s land of new raw experience, where our “normal” learned responses falter, where words fail us, and where what is unsaid is as important as what is said. Harrower’s Blackbird examines with a delicate and deftly poetic hand the complexity of instinctual human interactions constrained by cultural boundaries and social expectations, and touchingly reveals the victimization of all peoples involved in an act of criminal trespass of sacred taboo.

The “work-out aesthetic”, I think, is a weird one. Especially at the YMCA, where working out partly means a bunch of people go into a room and struggle with machines in some weird quest to stay fit or feel better about themselves. From what people wear at the gym, to what magazines they look at on the elliptical trainer to what television stations have the best mute visuals to have on while you’re zoning out on the treadmill. Personally, I’ve grown rather fond of the old fashioned American “heavy industry” themes on the Discovery Channel. I’m always up for watching animals attack each other, though I had to change the channel when lions started fucking one day. “Extreme weather situations” is an easy thing for me to look at while working out.

Going to yoga, is of course, an entirely different experience. What people wear is a bit more uniform in style, and a lot of the personal variation comes out with what products people have: how fancy their yoga mat is, if they have any blocks or other stretching accoutrements. One day I saw a guy with crystals in the corners of his mat. I should try that one out at the gym, maybe put some crystals near the free weights

Butterfly Boucher, Australian singer-songwriter.

Richard Boucher, US Department of State.

Boucher Manufacturing Company, defunct toy train manufacturer.

Boucher Institute of Naturopathic Medicine, British Columbia, Canada.

Jim Boucher, information systems professional.

Jim Boucher, kickboxing promoter.

[Boucher (surname) - Wikipedia.]

“I just have to ask…” the receptionist starts.

“There’s a Tim Boucher who DJs on 106.5. Is that you?”

No, I have to admit. I’ve never heard of this person. I ask for more information.

The only other details I got regarding this subject is that this impostor radio DJ Tim Boucher spins high energy work-out/dance music of some kind. Sounds pretty awesome – too bad he will have to be DESTROYED!

Immediately, as though provoked, “Well, fuck you too! White devil! Whore. I’ll make sure to rid the earth of you.”

So much so fast, waited for any point at which some kind of response might have been uttered. But dude kept walking and best thing to do on my end too. I’m on my way to work.

I look back, another older black dude’s walking behind me. I look back at him, seeing if he shares my puzzlement or if I’m about to get jumped.

He laughs.

“I didn’t even say anything to him – or do anything.” Shrug my shoulders.

Not about to get jumped.

It’s funny, when you work at a theatre, it’s like you’re running two shows simultaneously: you’re running the show of whatever it is that you put onstage, the actual performance, and you’re running the “show” of putting on a theatre which is its whole own big dramatic spectacle. Whereas, working with an event company, you’ll do a lot of the same stuff, but generally the show is itself. Like a graduation is just a graduation. It’s a functional event. You’re not putting on a graduation so you can look like a bunch of cool artists or whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing in the theatre… And somehow because of all that rigamaroll, that means you end up, in theatre, getting paid less to do the same or more work, because you “love it” and because the theatre isn’t making any money so why should you…? That’s sort of a hidden attitude in theatre, but I’m happy to have a paycheck regardless as I know what’s out there all over and it ain’t pretty… and complaining isn’t attractive. Heard some rapper on Pandora the other day, blah blah blah, hip hop is dead, so I guess that makes you either a corpse or a necrophiliac?

Was pretty cool work today and a good crew, strange weather, this company has a tractor-trailer they drop at the end of the field in a stadium. Big old gypsy wagon turns into a 40×40 stage, hydraulics, the works. Crew work is an absolute blast if you approach it with the right attitude. It is, in some very real sense, what humans are biologically designed to do: band together to build cool stuff and make something interesting happen. It’s where we excel. Like building the pyramids. Maybe they weren’t slaves. Maybe they just all needed something to do to keep from going crazy, something productive, with their hands…

Just stumbled upon exalead, who has some nicely-formed egosurfing results. I approve. (Their image search is not so amazing… whoever perfects that wins!)

It is a physical navigational language, like sign-language combined with mime.

And then pour on some yoga, in the form of mudras, classical configurations of the hands and fingers to articulate flow of energy channels within the body. Eliminate the cigarette altogether, make a wish… Some of us still need the artifact for the miracle to occur.

“…more men go through prison as a rite of passage into manhood than go through military service.”

And the sign-language “Y” we make with our thumb and pinky when gesturally indicating with the hand, “Call me!” or, alternately, a less high-profile “surf’s up!” Connecting with others. Chatting, staying connected.

At VYphones™, we’ve modded an electronic cigarette with a dead-simple interface and married i to a single-use cell phone technology, which delivers an optional chemical buzz in vaporized form. Sky, green, regular. Sold in twelve-packs, hard or soft. 16 to a box. Get yours today!

Since I’m not on Facebook, this domain, timboucher.com, is my main vehicle for establishing and maintaining a public identity vis-a-vis the internet. And that’s fine with me, because I get paid hundreds of dollars a month from my website, and I know none of you all are making money back from all the time you’ve wasted ‘tagging yourself’ in drunk photos on Facebook.

Not sure exactly when I put the counter up, but Sitemeter – which has been a reliable tool for years – indicates that my site has had 5,142,148 over the years. Whether or not a quarter or half of those people came here hoping to see Scarlett Johansson’s boobs is ultimately immaterial to me. The simple fact is that I’ve got a good thing going here, and I’m not going to let Tim Boucher impersonators control how my name is perceived on the internet. If there’s one keyword cluster I should absolutely OWN on the web, it should be that around my name and personally identifying characteristics.

1. I am not… the Tim Boucher who is a nature/bird photographer and works for the Nature Conservancy (though that doesn’t sound like a bad life).
2. I am not… the Tim Boucher, the pastor of Grace Community Church of South Bend Mishawaka.
3. I am not… Tim Boucher special agent with the FBI.
4. I am not… the Tim Boucher who is an acoustic folk rocker of MySpace and West Springfield, MA.
5. I am not… the Tim Boucher of Facebook who is friends with Chris Dupuis, Jennifer Nieves, Joseph Quinlan and others.
6. I am not… the Tim Boucher who is the owner of the Maine Cage Factory.
7. I am not… the Tim Boucher, CLP who is Project Support Manager at KCS Landscape Management, Inc.
8. I am not… the Tim Boucher on Facebook who is friends with Kimberly McLane, Brittney Jasmine, Dan Cunningham and others.
9. I am not… for that matter, any of these other Tim Bouchers on Facebook: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18…
10. I am not… listed on IMDB as ‘miscellaneous crew’ for ‘My Summer With Des’.
11. I am not… the Tim Boucher of LinkedIn, owner of Tim’s Remodeling.
12. I am not… the Tim Boucher of MySpace who thinks that “peple judge uno matter what u say or wair”.
13. I am not… the Tim Boucher who is a band guy from University of North Iowa.
14. I am not… the Tim Boucher who goes by ’sngldadio’ on crazyguyonabike.com.
15. I am not… the Tim Boucher who is head soccer coach at LaSalle Academy in South Bend, IN with instructional soccer videos online.
16. I am not… the Tim Boucher of Akron, OH married to Kelsey with three great children.
    I am not… the Tim Boucher who is co-author of several scientific papers on extinction and global protected areas.
17. I am not… the Tim Boucher who is a supporting of the Save Stargate Atlantis petition of 2008.
18. I am not… the Tim Boucher, South African living in the US.
19. I am not… the Tim Boucher of boucherfamilyweb.com.

Now that that’s all cleared up, we can continue with our regularly scheduled program!

The internet is stupid. If you look me up, you’re likely to find information about me that is either several years old or completely erroneous to begin with. Some of this, is of course, my doing. The internet is a great place to sow disinformation, but it is a horrible place to have to go back through at a later date and root out the weeds that have taken hold.

Tim Boucher is currently seriously thinking about moving to Washington, DC in the Fall of 2010 to start jobbing around at theatres there. Tim Boucher is going away for the summer to Falmouth, MA on Cape Cod to work as a scenic designer/technical director at a summer theatre. Tim Boucher has lived all across the country and often dreams of the places he once was.

Walking by some people sitting on a bench, I nod my head and say hello, as I go, back to meet a friend.

“Who was that guy?”

The woman asks me, indicating the monument, assuming I have some knowledge of it cause I went to sit there. But my reasons for going there were much more arcane. The landscape sent me. A placid location amidst criss-crossing geomantic power-lines. A good place to eat hummus.

“President, I think, not sure when exactly, early 1900’s?”

“1900 – When was that?” the man asks, sitting next to her, completely serious, “a hundred, a thousand years ago.”

I stop for a second, fish around in my pockets. “Something like that, a long time ago.”

Turns out its not actually President Taft’s memorial, but his son’s. Hidden in some trees, but would be within sightline otherwise of the big round capitol building, which I deemed to holy to approach in the day’s adventures.

President Taft, nicknamed “Big Bill,” was over 330 pounds (150 kg) and sometimes had difficulty getting out of his bathtub in the White House. He had a huge, 7-foot (2.1 m) long, 41-inch (1.04 m) wide tub installed that could accommodate four normal-sized men. It was replaced in the 1952 rebuilding with a tub of similar size but more modern design.

On my way out of DC, my phone spontaneously shifted to two hours earlier than EST. Lasted about fifteen minutes.

Accidentally walked up to the wrong train, should have known when nobody else went up to it. The sign was wrong, electronic malfunctions, operator error? John Keel must be nearby. I did see Albert Pike’s monument, which has a woman at the base holding the standard of a bicephalous eagle; maybe I’m tripping into a nearby dimension magnetically… Noone seems to be noticing. People walking with head forward, shoulders down, birds overhead in the Great Hall. All souls echoing at once, statues come alive, trismos, the wail of the dead; raton laveur in the underworld grotto, electrical hands sensing along insensate passages. Suddenly realize I’m the only only one actually reading the signs, should have just followed the herd.

Spectacle – that’s why! So, let’s strip this shit down, figure out what the spectacle is and pander pander pander: Evita in white gloves which eventually become soiled and bloodied by her descent into madness – especially while she signs “Don’t cry for me Argentina.” The rest of the ensemble is in either stained military fatigues, mixed wars of all eras, motley weapons, or else rags and grease smudges. Three norns in black follow her like a Greek chorus/witches in the Scottish play, awaiting her death.

Evita as super-sexualized “white queen”, “ice queen”, covered in diamonds, frost, stupid outlandish opulence, people begging for food in the background, whenever she comes on stage, she showers the poor with candy. Psychologically, she is an actress trapped, playing the part of herself she doesn’t believe in, but which everyone has been taught to worship and emulate, the colonial dream of the “white queen”, something for which, amongst Europeans she isn’t recognized – those social climbers and old world money which she would number as her peers. A commoner, born out of wedlock, runs away to work the stage. A pretty face used to sell a regime change. Monica Lewinsky meets Princess Di.

The stage is a ruined war zone, Sarajevo just after the fighting stopped, all warzones, a no man’s land, barren, soldiers silhouetted playing cards, drunks stumbling through on single crutches. Picking through the rubble, robbing corpses. Undisclosed prior catastrophe, fall-out, the morning after…

A low platform, a crude stage, is set up out of boards and cinderblocks in the middle of the street, the market square. An old-fashioned microphone rests on the down-edge of the platform. Performers take the stage, a young actress with stars and generals in her eyes… Les Mis just after the barricades, the smoke is still clearing, a domineering neighborhood woman who gained power on the block by backstabbing, gossiping, sexual alliances is now roiling the masses. Her tragic flaw is that tragedy won’t take her, refuses to touch her, she is too perfect, too ideal and therefore an impossibility. Never gets what’s coming to her, is carried off, frozen in death, a saint unreal in life. You don’t actually need to stage projections in this piece, because the image of what she becomes to the people IS the projection… Strip out the pseudo-historical bullshit base of the musical and play to the mythic themes inherent within, which the events themselves were an expression of, timeless qualities which apply across all nations and peoples. She is the lie of the “bloodless” coup, the “perfect” revolution, the stained victory of the people.

During my confession, I told him about my fears based on the information I learned from my Husband’s activities. Father Sartain introduced me to Walter Haynack (who was an ATF officer), who in turn introduced me to FBI Agent Tim Boucher who was from the FBI in Memphis. Father Sartain is now a Bishop in Arkansas.

30. The FBI was very interested in what I had to say and the things I had shown them. They told me to keep our meetings secret. They also told me that I was in a very dangerous situation and that I had to be extremely careful. They also told me that they had Haitham and the family “on their radar screen.” I supplied Tim Boucher with many of my Husband’s and Haitham’s e-mails, pictures and phone numbers I had found in my home computer. The FBI encouraged me to continue my monitoring of our home computer activity and kept on warning me to be extremely cautious and not to tell anyone about my findings.

31. From 1999 to 2000, my experiences with my Husband and his associates further reinforced my belief that an attack against the USA was imminent. I contacted FBI Agent Tim Boucher while I was on vacation in France to inform him of the latest e-mail exchange because I found it highly disturbing. The cities that were listed as targets in those e-mails were New York City, Washington, DC, Miami, and Las Vegas. The e-mails were very explicit. I remember seeing a picture attached to an e-mail that depicted a skeleton representing death; the skeleton’s hand held a map of the USA. On the map you could see lights flashing from different cities, but the above mentioned cities were outlined and destroyed. Tim Boucher said he contacted the FBI in Washington, and they said not to worry because other intelligence sources suggested attacks would occur outside of the USA.

32. On September 11, 2001, a few hours before the attack, we received an e-mail from Haitham announcing that some of his friends were coming to the U.S. and to please welcome them. I secretly gave that e-mail to FBI Agent Tim Boucher.

33. I later confronted my Husband about Haitham’s e-mail who said it was a joke. He forwarded it to Dr. Guerra (a cardiologist from Brazil living in Memphis). Dr. Guerra concurred that the e-mail should be given to the FBI.

34. Tim Boucher retired from the FBI soon after 9/11/01 and left me an e-mail address to communicate with him just in case I needed him. The e-mail address he gave me was rascaldoggie@aol.com.

35. I refused to work with another FBI Agent after Tim’s retirement.

[Original document source, an affidavit allegedly filed in Memphis]

That part about the skeleton holding a map of the USA sounds pretty outrageous! I’d like to fight this skeleton in the ring, in fact, I demand monetary compensation and financial rewards from this skeleton for slandering THE GOOD NAME OF TIM BOUCHER!

ANNOUNCING: MY NEW MISSION… To be, on the internet at least, more Tim Boucher than all the other Tim Boucher’s out there – because I was here first and I own the domain name for at least another two years, goddammit! I once was on top, but Fortune, the Fates and Google has dropped me back down to Earth, crashing like a rag doll flushed down the toilet on a spaceship, plummeting, plummeting way down the list such that my actual URL has completely dropped off the front page of results!

THIS ENDS NOW!

I’m taking back the crown and reclaiming the Tim Boucher championship belt from all the other posers out there!

Now that Google has caught up with me though, my daily visitors have dropped to about a quarter or less of what it was, and is now half than what the average has been for the past few years. The internet, I guess, in some weird arcane informational sense, no longer wants to fuck me – or my website, that is. Its making me a bit nervous as to the relative drop in cash value this web domain will earn over the course of the coming months, but it also has given me some new hope, a lease on a new life for this site which builds on what came before, but transitions into something new, better and ultimately more worthwhile. You reach a point in your life where you don’t need to catalog and clothe yourself in every little thought and titillating image that floats past your conscious, and that hopefully that your work – like your life – can begin instead to orbit some central point, pointing with the force of the future like gravity towards something greater, greater…

Meanwhile, work continues on my archive of quotes from books related to the history of traveling performers, which I’m threading throughout my research, and another good stream of information for visitors new to this planet is my tumblr account, collecting together bits and pieces, flotsam and jetsam acquired in my datawake.