ELVIS LIVES: pit your nearly 8 seconds of careless thought on the subject against a man who spent 25 years investigating it

Adventures in Science: Test "The Secret"

The achievement of your goal is assured the moment you commit yourself to it.

Mack Douglas

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If that's the case, commit to growing wings and jump out of a tree.

 

The irony of calendar collision

We put in the 2012 widget to satisfy the curious as to exactly when the Long Count ends and thus when the latest attempt at predictive programming by the engineers of consent reaches its use-by date.

What is ironic is that the actual Mayan calendar from which the doooomsday date was plucked out of the aether by a junkie and a new ager separately but near simultaneously and in each case a serious error of logic was committed.

The Mayan type calendar is cyclical, and contains many cycles- recombining what the mainstream scholars call "gods", combined with "colours", animals and plants. This level of scholarship is much the same as saying that the letter A means tent.

The actual Mayan cycles, if one were to give credence to any magic behind them, would indicate that any significance to unlucky days and so on, much as for superstitions from Britain or Europe or anywhere else, have their significance only in relation to individuals of particular birth dates or to classes of people or events based on their own aetiology.

In simple terms, the end of the cycle countenanced this December, ends a processional astronomical calculation. Then a new procession begins. There is a significant set of scientific data, now adopted by second rate "researchers" in the sciences having had sufficient time to integrate the original real research from "non-scientists" who did all the real work.

What this processional data indicates, and why the ancients cared about it so much, has nothing to do with magic or the fictional versions of ancient cultures (always all about "gods", "religion", "priesthoods" and so on, even though some prominent ancient cultures HAD NO WORD FOR GOD. And for that matter HAD NO PRIESTS. Scribe =/= priest) and everything to do with calculations relating to events in the cosmos which impact climate, tectonics and radiation levels (leading to mutational rates / oncogenetics) here on Earth. The effort required, even for civilisations with technology exceeding our own, was significant. The warning from the stars that the ancient monuments contain (along with so much more) were practical creations, intended to commemorate the lives lost (presumably in their millions) as well as pointing to when such disasters might return. There's nothing mystical in that, it's the basis of many predictive sciences to look at past cycles with something more than a mindless uniformitarian bent.

The irony is that climate change cultism is far less scientific than actual atmospheric physics, chemistry or sunspot research; and yet to stand on their own dunghill and complain about "2012 hysteria" is ridiculous.

But not end on an ascerbic note:

1. see if you can see the astral spider (cf Nazca) in the centre of the "Mayan" calendar stone... Spider "demons" from "the stars" were a genuine mesoamerican belief, or at least something believed to exist- spider webs drifting at night seemed to "prove" the existence of these awesome creatures

2. people see past rather than focus on the ghastly nature of the illustrations, similar in kind and possibly even directly culturally linked to those of eg ancient Tibet- half eaten heads, raw severed heads, cooked severed heads and so on. This sort of illustration has a long esoteric tradition and is quite a preoccupation of secret Tibetan "Buddhism".

3. It's probably not generally known by anyone but as luck would have it the Antikythera difference engine cogs map to the equivalent "wheels" of the ancient mesoamerican calendar. Given that a significant part of the mesoamerican calendar was Venusian, it's a bit odd that the presumptive European origin of the Antikythera mechanism maps the same apparently highly culturally specific information. And of course as far as we know no one was planning a rocket to Venus etc. in 500BC-100AD so any preoccupation with Venus is odd itself, despite the "Type B" armchair experts rationalisations of their own irrational explanations of continuity errors...

4. note the four "evangelists", "direction stars", "cosmic beasts" and so on- surrounding the central figure.

THEY LIVE, WE SLEEP: The Obama Administration: All Your Privacy And All Your Stuff Belong To Us

The Obama Administration: All Your Privacy And All Your Stuff Belong To Us

 Did you know that the federal government claims that it can take away your constitutional rights any time that it wants to?  Over the past several decades, there have been an endless parade of laws and executive orders that have been slowly and methodically carving up our rights under the U.S. Constitution.  Most Americans are not even aware of the "creeping totalitarianism" that is happening.  Most Americans just trust the "authorities" when they tell us that certain things "must be done" in order to keep us all safe.  But even if we gave up all of our privacy, even if we gave up all of our liberties and our freedoms, and even if we gave the government all of our stuff they still would not be able to keep us safe.  It is inevitable that evil people are going to do evil things, and if you are counting on the Obama administration to keep you safe then you are being delusional.  Obama is not going to save us from anything.  But Obama will gladly take away our rights and our freedoms if the American people allow him to.  The Obama administration seems to have an endless lust for more power.  Sadly, if we do give away our rights it will have some very serious consequences.  If we freely give away all of the rights that we have been given under the U.S. Constitution it will be incredibly difficult to ever get them back.  Giving up liberty for security never works, and if we want to be worthy of being called Americans then we need to start standing up for the republic that our forefathers worked so hard to build.

Will there be a third X-Files film?

7:35 AM Tuesday Apr 10, 2012

A third X-Files movie has been mooted by one of the show's writers. Photo / Supplied

 

An executive behind The X-Files is trying to persuade movie bosses to fund a third film based on the hit conspiracy theory show.

Writer Frank Spotnitz says the TV show, which ran for nine seasons from 1993 till 2002, and two movies, the last of which hit cinemas in 2008, should be rounded out with one final movie.
"There is a very active and relentless fan campaign for a last movie," Spotnitz told Sciencefiction.com.

"I do feel like it would be a terrible shame if that didn't happen."

Spotnitz said the idea for the movie was already in progress. X-Files' stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were reportedly already confirmed to reprise their roles as FBI special agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.

"It feels wrong not to give it an ending around the alien colonisation of Earth ... I have a clear idea of how it would go and I've been talking to (creator) Chris Carter about it for a long time.

"I'll keep banging the drum whenever I meet the Fox (studio) guys."

Both films, 1998's The X-Files and 2008's I Want to Believe, made money at the box office.
However, I Want to Believe had poor reviews, charting at just 32 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Carter, Duchnovy, and Anderson will appear together in the Fox 25th Anniversary Special on April 22.

- Herald online

the religious experience of philip k. dick | b r n r d .net

the religious experience of philip k. dick | b r n r d .net

the religious experience of philip k. dick

In 1974, science fiction writer Philip K. Dick experienced a series of mystical visions. They would greatly influence his writing, most explicitly in 'Valis', a philosophical exploration of gnostic, christian and other religious themes. They also inspired comic book artist Robert Crumb to adapt Dick's experiences, as recounted in interviews, into a short story: 'The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick' (online in reasonable quality images).

The ancient Greek word for what Dick experienced was 'enthusiasmos' (enthusiasm), literally: possessed or inspired by a god. The term is often associated with the Dionysian Mysteries, in which trance-inducing rituals would bring participants to a state of 'ekstasis' (ecstasy). Other 'symptoms', which Dick also experienced, include 'anamnesis' (literally: loss of forgetfulness, or recollection of events outside one's own life) and 'xenoglossia' (speaking in languages unknown to the speaker).

In Dick's case, his prolonged drug use may have been a cause for his visions. He, however, interpreted them in terms of divine inspiration, believing at first that he was a persecuted Christian in Rome in the first century AD, and later that the spirit of the prophet Elijah had entered him.
Whatever one's verdict on the 'truth' of these experiences, it is no wonder his novels all deal with the fragile nature of reality - or the philosophical implications of the fact that we humans think too much. The question in Crumb's story sums it up in typical Dick style:

Was it the onset of acute schizophrenia, or was it a genuine mystical revelation, and then again, is there any difference?

What is LOST's John Locke doing on the first edition cover of a PKD novel from 1966?

The Swimmer

If you haven't watched this film, go away and watch it then come back to this post.

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THE SWIMMER

Fcourt
Lawrence Russell

The Swimmer (1968) dir. Frank Perry writ. Eleanor Perry (based on the short story by John Cheever) cine David L. Quaid edt. Sidney Katz, Carl Lerner, Pat Somerset music Marvin Hamlisch art Peter Dohaus

star. Burt Lancaster (Ned Merrill), Janet Langard (Julie Anne Hooper), Barbara Loden (ex-mistress), Tom Bickley, Bill Fiore, House Jameson, Kim Hunter, Janice Rule, Bernie Hamilton, John Garfield Jr., Charles Drake, Dolph Sweet, Marge Champion, Nancy Cushman, Diana Muldaur, Joan Rivers, Diana Van Der Vlis

Cheever Surrealism: an American Midsummer Night's Dream

A man emerges from a dry forest of scrub oaks and haunted wildlife in a slow long distance lope, naked except for his tight swimming trunks, enters a garden dominated by a large feminine swimming pool. His entrance is mysterious and primal, like a dream figure leaving one memory and entering another. He dives into the blue, swims a couple of lengths, rises sensuously onto the apron of the pool where he is handed a fresh cocktail by a beaming woman leaning forward from her recliner:

Helen: (purring) Neddy... where've you been keeping yourself?

Merrill: (marvelling at the sky) Oh here and there, here and there... what a day... have you ever seen such a glorious day?

Thus starts the odyssey of Ned Merrill (Lancaster) through the rural Elysian yards of upstate New York and the perpetually stoned society of party animals who own them. An amnesiac with no memory of his fall from grace (quite possibly suffering from a bad case of chronostasis), he stands sipping his drink, glimpses other yards, other pools in the cascading landscape of forest and dale.

He has an epiphany:

Merrill: If I take a dogleg to the south west, I can swim home....

How? Why?

Merrill: Pool by pool they form a river... all the way to our house... I'll call it the Lucinda River, after my wife.

Burt Lancaster The Swimmer

A noble, romantic gesture from the lips of man dressed in self-deception. At first he appears to be an incorrigible optimist, the very epitome of the American child-man driven by bourgeois altruism and free market determination. But as we follow his progress pool-by-pool towards his stated destination, his God-like persona gradually decays, and the essential schizoid nature of his reality is revealed. He swims the pool of his former mistress, has an ugly encounter. He swims the pool of his former baby-sitter, takes her with him for part of the journey. A storm threatens, he injures himself cavorting in a horse paddock. He disrobes completely for a swim in the pool of two nudist patricians, limps off into the dimming light.

If you make-believe hard enough, then it's true for you

In a key scene, he encounters a solitary boy playing a flute at a lemonade stand below a tree. The boy's parents are away somewhere. Merrill has no money but cajoles the boy into giving him a drink. He asks the boy if he can use his pool... but when they arrive at the pool, they find it empty. The boy says he can't swim very well. Undaunted, Merrill gives the boy a lesson, and they simulate different strokes across the floor of the dry pool. "If you make-believe hard enough, then it's true for you," Merrill tells him, and the boy is suddenly delighted by his apparent success in swimming an entire length.

But as Merrill departs, he hears a sinister reverberation... he turns, sees the boy bouncing on the spring-board above the deep end.... Yes, in this low tech but high concept film, symbolism is everything.

The screenplay is by Eleanor Perry, at that time the director's wife. It should be noted that it's no mere photocopy edit of the John Cheever story and is arguably better. Cheever's talent was for writing realistically about his social milieu in a very unrealistic way. He was an American surrealist. Events happen, nothing is rational. A product of disfunction in his writing method? His stories are really condensed novels because they use summation and long time-frames. In fact, they read like social essays, their style slightly archaic in the manner of the scented rhetoric of Henry James. The Swimmer is typical in this regard, its Biblical tone and elliptical humor quite anti-dramatic.

Eleanor Perry solves this by dilating the action into a series of symmetrical scenes at a series of symmetrical swimming pools. She also accelerates the symbolism by introducing new characters and reinventing others, and all this works despite a modest debt to the expressionism of the Italian filmmaker Antonioni. What is a Hollywood film without sexuality? Julie Anne (Janet Langard) the nubile baby-sitter is a clever departure from the original story, yet the invention is pure Cheever. This character allows us to see Merrill through eyes of an innocent on the edge of corruption, for elsewhere the characters are already corrupted. Everybody drinks, pretending success, but in fact they are anticipating failure. Although Merrill's failure is an unstated business debacle, the bigger failure is something that's both abstract and physical, spiritual and natural, that deals with the coming into and the going from life itself. As Merrill advances, he thinks he's evolving, but in reality he's devolving.

In the Cheever story, Merrill starts out with his wife but leaves her at the first pool; in the Perry film, she exists only as an ideal, a device to drive the action towards its paranormal ending.

post-war sexist ass-slapping triumphalism

So while The Swimmer uses a paradigm rather than a plot, the narrative is nevertheless very visual and metaphoric. For some, the heavy reliance on sub-text will be a delight; for others, a bore. Rooted in the episodic tradition of Bunyan's A Pilgrim's Progress, the action seeks to be instructive and moralistic. At times, it's like watching a National Geographic documentary about the rites and customs of some forgotten tribe in the Amazon jungle. It's pure anthropology.

Is life a dream? Is there such a thing as a collective unconscious? The director Frank Perry uses some interesting montages and double exposures in the bridges that link the scenes. Merrill stares at the sky, sees a river of pools... or, Merrill stares... and from his eye a dark horse emerges. These art-house saccades are elementary in this age of computerized special effects, but they are effective and accurate indicators of Merrill's psychological condition.

And how about Burt Lancaster... did he ever make a bad film? Probably... but The Swimmer isn't it. His attitude (post-war sexist ass-slapping triumphalism) and his physique (the trapeze artist in middle-age) are excellent for the role. Yes, he's the star (he's in every scene) but his role isn't sympathetic. Typically he conflicted with the director (who thought Lancaster wasn't right for the role) during filming and even came to believe what everyone else at the time said about the film, i.e., it was a disaster.

© LR 11/01

***

GUEST REVIEW: THE SWIMMER (1968)

When Burt Lancaster began his career as an actor, it appeared this was going to be a career in the mold of Errol Flynn or Randolph Scott. In films like The Flame and the Arrow, Jim Thorpe-All American, The Crimson Pirate, Vera Cruz, Ten Tall Men, From Here to Eternity, The Kentuckian, Trapeze, Gunfight at the OK Corral, and Run Silent, Run Deep, Lancaster seemed to personify and embody the American ideal hero.

However, behind those swell guy teeth and that brandished chest was a shrewd actor, who, as he seasoned, made increasingly interesting choices. In the second half of his career, Lancaster often played off that earlier, heroic persona with admirable risk taking. If Elmer Gantry and Seven Days in May might be aptly described as loudly presenting the dirty underbelly of Americana, then The Swimmer intimately one-ups them.

In 1968 director Frank Perry with writer/wife Eleanor Perry adapted John Cheever’s acclaimed allegorical New Yorker short story, The Swimmer, and brilliantly cast the iconic Burt Lancaster as the pathetic hero. The Perrys had previously teamed for the equally disturbing David and Lisa (1962) and made quite a splash on the art film circuit. Surprisingly, that film even garnered a couple of Academy Award nominations, which enabled the team to make The Swimmer.

Still from The Swimmer (1968)The Swimmer begins on an absurdly bright, sunny day. Ned (Lancaster), the epitome of a tanned, virile, soulless suburbia, decides he is going to enthusiastically embark on a strange, epic, connect-the-dot journey by “swimming” home through the neighborhood swimming pools. He takes along a nubile girl (Janet Langard), but at each pool he encounters facets of his failed life and the crack in his facade slowly begins to expand until the inevitable, tragic conclusion. The physical reality of The Swimmer (a day in Ned’s life) is mere allegory and the allegorical symbolism of Ned’s entire life which is, in fact, the physical realm into which we are drawn.

Lancaster, the sex symbol, is perfection as he superficially pats his neighbors on the back, encounters a discarded mistress, is confronted by his numerous lies, his betrayals, his failure as a husband, father, friend and neighbor. By the time he reaches his own home, his paradigm has altered from cartoon sunshine and forced, surface smiles to despairing rain. When he reaches his porch, he is vulnerable to all the elements which mercilessly come down upon him in all forms, including nature itself. Ned has ultimately realized his hollow state.

Impressively, The Swimmer has a dreamlike, short story, episodic pacing, not at all what is expected in the medium of film, and this adds to its uniqueness. The Swimmer, fragile indeed in its quite odd structure, is a case where casting really counted. It would not have worked without its star. Unfortunately, The Swimmer is out of print and even when it was briefly available, Columbia disrespectfully released it an a cheapo presentation. (NOTE 2/12/10: Astute reader MCD tipped us off to the fact that The Swimmer is available for download from Amazon for $9.99). Still, it’s a rarity in being a film that actually lives up to and surpasses its reputation.

The Perrys went onto make Last Summer and Diary of a Mad Housewife before divorcing. Separately, the two never equaled the artistic level they achieved together. Lancaster continued to carefully cultivate his screen persona in films like 1900, Moses the Lawgiver, Atlantic City, Local Hero, Rocket Gibraltar and Field of Dreams.

Give a fuck. Read a book.

Books are the antibiotics of ignorance.