Showing posts with label dreams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dreams. Show all posts
Thursday, 11 August 2016
Augmented Reality Gets Too Real
Once upon a time, gods and angels came unto the people in the night and had their way with them. Later, demonic succubi and incubi were the culprits. More recently, sinister alien Reptilians and butt-probing Greys did the deed. Today, these strange hauntings have adapted to the shifting zeitgeist, and a woman in Moscow claims to have been raped by a Pokemon.
Saturday, 11 June 2016
Monday, 29 February 2016
Sun Ra: Showman or Shaman?
Dreams come true, I know they do
If you believe in love
Mine came true and yours will too
I swear by the stars above
Dreams come true, they just have to
True as the Sun above
Mine came true and yours will too
If you believe in love
Dream of romance
Strolling down Lover's Lane
In a trance
And dream it over again
Dreams come true, they just have to
To prove they're so supreme
Mine came true and yours will too
All you have to do is dream
-"Dreams Come True," Sun Ra
~~~
Sonny had a vision. His body was transfigured. Up he went, and down to a stage on Saturn. They told him to leave school, to speak through his music. The world was due to become a more chaotic place, and there would be trouble in the schools, but music was a language that would be heard.
Ten years later, in 1947, people began to talk about flying saucers. Sonny was always ahead of the curve, but now his private epiphany had some kind of cultural currency.
~~~
Ten years after that, Herman Poole Blount had become Le Sony'r Ra. He had an independent music label, El Saturn Records, and a big band, the Arkestra. With his manager and various associates and pen pals, he traded books and ideas about symbols and religion, ancient times and extraterrestrial encounters. Strange packages would arrive from corners unknown, holding secrets and clues. Long before the Internet, the esoterica of the day all got funneled through Sun Ra, listening to Long John Nebel on the radio when he wasn't writing and rehearsing.
His band were affordably dressed as Egyptians and space men, a silly expression of serious preoccupations of the bandleader. The costumes also helped to undercut the self-conscious rigour of the music.
Sonny was intense about discipline. When his band moved to New York and the music moved further into the avant-garde, he rejected the label of "free jazz." There was nothing free about it; this was music about mind and cosmos. This was space jazz.
~~~
It would be another twenty years before the zeitgeist was ready, and George Clinton produced a flying saucer funk that approximated Sun Ra's aesthetic. Outside of a rewarding cross-pollination that resulted in a series of approachable fusion albums, Ra's music remained a more dangerous, uncanny animal. It was not uncommon for a show to begin with a twenty-minute expression of the creation of the universe as explained by a wall of horns, or end with Ra snaking through the crowd and shouting in people's faces. This was music to change minds.
~~~
He is said to be a pioneer of Afrofuturism, and early on he closely identified with Black struggles. As time went on, he came to see blacks and whites alike as subject to the lies and illusions of a nefarious archontic power using us as pawns for its own amusement.
In some combination of inspired revelation, divine disclosure, informed intuition, and self-mythologising bullshit, Sonny told people that he was a member of the angel race.
~~~
He never changed his story about the time he went to Saturn, but no one saw him dissolve. The historicity of his prehistoric alien abduction is a moot point. It can be judged only in its possible effects.
Sun Ra pioneered the use of electronic keyboards and free improvisation in jazz, but that proves nothing. He was one of the most prolific recording artists of his century, but that proves nothing. He lived and breathed his music, living in a big house with his band and catnapping at the piano, but that proves nothing.
What might actually mean something is that today, twenty-three years after the man's transition, the Sun Ra Arkestra still tours in his name. Ninety-something Marshall Allen dresses as a wizard, blows an electronic whistle, and the band sings the old songs. The crowd and the performers enter a magical space in which a dead man is still alive. They dream of the future, of the boundlessness of infinity, of love in outer space. This is perhaps the greatest proof that Sonny was touched by something, reaching down to make a prophet of a man.
He warned of doom in the grand old tradition, but he used his every day on Earth to wake people up where he could. That he did so without arousing much recognition from the jazz or the flying saucer communities suggests he was right about that evil unseen force of injustice in the world.
~~~
They plan to leave this world one day
In sundry rocket ships to sail away
They plan to go to somewhere there
In splendid ships of models rare
They plan to find another place in the sky
Without saying farewell, without saying goodbye
They plan to put the White House on the Moon, soon
And the Kremlin on a satellite
-"They Plan to Leave," Sun Ra
~~~
Further reading
If you believe in love
Mine came true and yours will too
I swear by the stars above
Dreams come true, they just have to
True as the Sun above
Mine came true and yours will too
If you believe in love
Dream of romance
Strolling down Lover's Lane
In a trance
And dream it over again
Dreams come true, they just have to
To prove they're so supreme
Mine came true and yours will too
All you have to do is dream
-"Dreams Come True," Sun Ra
~~~
Sonny had a vision. His body was transfigured. Up he went, and down to a stage on Saturn. They told him to leave school, to speak through his music. The world was due to become a more chaotic place, and there would be trouble in the schools, but music was a language that would be heard.
Ten years later, in 1947, people began to talk about flying saucers. Sonny was always ahead of the curve, but now his private epiphany had some kind of cultural currency.
~~~
Ten years after that, Herman Poole Blount had become Le Sony'r Ra. He had an independent music label, El Saturn Records, and a big band, the Arkestra. With his manager and various associates and pen pals, he traded books and ideas about symbols and religion, ancient times and extraterrestrial encounters. Strange packages would arrive from corners unknown, holding secrets and clues. Long before the Internet, the esoterica of the day all got funneled through Sun Ra, listening to Long John Nebel on the radio when he wasn't writing and rehearsing.
His band were affordably dressed as Egyptians and space men, a silly expression of serious preoccupations of the bandleader. The costumes also helped to undercut the self-conscious rigour of the music.
Sonny was intense about discipline. When his band moved to New York and the music moved further into the avant-garde, he rejected the label of "free jazz." There was nothing free about it; this was music about mind and cosmos. This was space jazz.
~~~
It would be another twenty years before the zeitgeist was ready, and George Clinton produced a flying saucer funk that approximated Sun Ra's aesthetic. Outside of a rewarding cross-pollination that resulted in a series of approachable fusion albums, Ra's music remained a more dangerous, uncanny animal. It was not uncommon for a show to begin with a twenty-minute expression of the creation of the universe as explained by a wall of horns, or end with Ra snaking through the crowd and shouting in people's faces. This was music to change minds.
~~~
He is said to be a pioneer of Afrofuturism, and early on he closely identified with Black struggles. As time went on, he came to see blacks and whites alike as subject to the lies and illusions of a nefarious archontic power using us as pawns for its own amusement.
In some combination of inspired revelation, divine disclosure, informed intuition, and self-mythologising bullshit, Sonny told people that he was a member of the angel race.
~~~
He never changed his story about the time he went to Saturn, but no one saw him dissolve. The historicity of his prehistoric alien abduction is a moot point. It can be judged only in its possible effects.
Sun Ra pioneered the use of electronic keyboards and free improvisation in jazz, but that proves nothing. He was one of the most prolific recording artists of his century, but that proves nothing. He lived and breathed his music, living in a big house with his band and catnapping at the piano, but that proves nothing.
What might actually mean something is that today, twenty-three years after the man's transition, the Sun Ra Arkestra still tours in his name. Ninety-something Marshall Allen dresses as a wizard, blows an electronic whistle, and the band sings the old songs. The crowd and the performers enter a magical space in which a dead man is still alive. They dream of the future, of the boundlessness of infinity, of love in outer space. This is perhaps the greatest proof that Sonny was touched by something, reaching down to make a prophet of a man.
He warned of doom in the grand old tradition, but he used his every day on Earth to wake people up where he could. That he did so without arousing much recognition from the jazz or the flying saucer communities suggests he was right about that evil unseen force of injustice in the world.
~~~
They plan to leave this world one day
In sundry rocket ships to sail away
They plan to go to somewhere there
In splendid ships of models rare
They plan to find another place in the sky
Without saying farewell, without saying goodbye
They plan to put the White House on the Moon, soon
And the Kremlin on a satellite
-"They Plan to Leave," Sun Ra
~~~
Further reading
Thursday, 26 February 2015
The Psychology of Wonder
"Arguably one of the most significant contributions of psychology is that
our understanding of ourselves is more defined by what we believe in
our heads than by the actual external world that we experience. If you imagine you are the center of the universe, then you experience yourself
as a different person than one who imagines they live on a speck of
dust. However, even better, if you can imagine living in different
kinds of universes, then who you are becomes a fantastic landscape of
possibilities."
Why The Afterlife Is Beyond Science
"'But he is merely dreaming all the time, or rather, living with the
fantasy created by his strongest desires on earth.' Over time,
whatever form time takes in that condition, the 'dream' fades and the
person or soul awakens to his true condition, Myers said."
Monday, 5 January 2015
Ludicrous
Mark Stout reads Putin's mind: he was referring to psychics reading Madeline Albright's mind, when he referred to hearing about foreign interest in Siberia. As everyone knows, psychics are ridiculous, ergo, Putin is ridiculous. A political pundit has no need of a nuanced understanding of parapsychology.
Someone with an interest in parapsychology has no need of a political pundit. They can investigate phenomena themselves, and with others.
It's been shown that crowd-sourcing rubes can be just as effective as consulting experts. It might even magnify psychic powers. Hunter Lee Soik has developed an app called Shadow, intended for use as a dream journal, but conceivably useful as a seismometer for keywords in the precognitive unconscious. A larger sample of users would be necessary to see if it works as such.
Making scientific breakthroughs through experiment and discussion occasionally entails a certain amount of risk, and the possibility that one will appear ridiculous. Academics and scientists do not like to appear ridiculous.
A petition was signed by hundreds of scientists around the world to prevent the University of Mumbai from hosting a single session of the Indian Science Congress, the subject of the session being descriptions of flying vimanas in ancient texts. As everyone knows, the portions of mythology that don't correspond to modern expectations are unequivocally the religious fictitious bits. As such, science can't benefit from discussing what doesn't exist.
If you don't look, you'll never see. If you know something can't be, you'll have a harder time observing it. Conventional channels are not conducive to finding new perspectives.
Raquel Cepeda recounts for the Personal Journeys section of the New York Times exactly how to see UFOs: "You [have] to open yourself to the ludicrous, be a fool, so to speak, to have faith, in life and in love." The New York Times has printed the secret, if perhaps only online, and there is no way to debase that with irony.
Someone with an interest in parapsychology has no need of a political pundit. They can investigate phenomena themselves, and with others.
It's been shown that crowd-sourcing rubes can be just as effective as consulting experts. It might even magnify psychic powers. Hunter Lee Soik has developed an app called Shadow, intended for use as a dream journal, but conceivably useful as a seismometer for keywords in the precognitive unconscious. A larger sample of users would be necessary to see if it works as such.
Making scientific breakthroughs through experiment and discussion occasionally entails a certain amount of risk, and the possibility that one will appear ridiculous. Academics and scientists do not like to appear ridiculous.
A petition was signed by hundreds of scientists around the world to prevent the University of Mumbai from hosting a single session of the Indian Science Congress, the subject of the session being descriptions of flying vimanas in ancient texts. As everyone knows, the portions of mythology that don't correspond to modern expectations are unequivocally the religious fictitious bits. As such, science can't benefit from discussing what doesn't exist.
If you don't look, you'll never see. If you know something can't be, you'll have a harder time observing it. Conventional channels are not conducive to finding new perspectives.
Raquel Cepeda recounts for the Personal Journeys section of the New York Times exactly how to see UFOs: "You [have] to open yourself to the ludicrous, be a fool, so to speak, to have faith, in life and in love." The New York Times has printed the secret, if perhaps only online, and there is no way to debase that with irony.
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