Friday, December 30, 2011

20 QUESTIONS ON 2012 (reprise)

Get the answers direct from Eden Sky at:
20 QUESTIONS ON 2012


Meanwhile, here are some thought-provoking quotes from panelists at an upcoming Prophets Conference called 2012: Tipping Point...

"The purpose of the Maya coming to this planet was very specific: to leave behind a definite set of clues and information about the nature and purpose of our planet at this particular time in the solar system and in the galactic field." — José Argüelles


"Please take the growing crisis very seriously and realize that the time for sacred action has come. Plunge deep into sacred practice so that you can connect with the eternal within you and remain calm and joyful and full of passionate compassion through all the shatterings to come." — Andrew Harvey

"Humanity is facing unprecedented, evolutionary changes. It is amazing - out of the famous Mayan prophecy has come the indication that we are facing the end of this world as we know it and the beginning of the new world of 2012. What vision of the future, of the new world, might we see so that we can place our attention upon this vision as a strange attractor to carry us through this critical time?" — Barbara Marx Hubbard

"2012 is definitely not just about one day in 2012; it is about a sea change that probably won’t bear fruit for many decades. But I believe that 2012 could be seen by future historians as a temporal marker of a great renaissance that will raise a submerged continent of consciousness that has been suppressed by Western science and culture." — John Major Jenkins

"One of the predictions concerns how we’re going to have seven days of darkness. When this takes place, a lot of people that don’t have a spiritual basis are going to go nuts. I have been assured that this will not be the end of the world. It really means, according to the Maya, that the earth is going to go through a period of gestation and enter into a new period. I saw in a vision that we’re going to have two suns. We need to get ready." — Flordemayo

"As we complete this apocalyptic passage, we will conceive ourselves, increasingly, as fractal expressions of a unified field of consciousness and sentient aspects of a planetary ecology - the Gaian mind - that is continually changed by our actions, and even our thoughts." — Daniel Pinchbeck


"We have indeed entered a critical time in human history. A tsunami is rapidly building on the horizon. Every person on earth is connected like never before, through the Internet and cell phones. Most of us have come to understand that we are perched on a shore that is threatened by a mounting wave of economic and environmental disaster." — John Perkins

"We live in a provocative, evolving time that promises to impact how we live together on the planet, how we continue as a species, and how we understand ourselves in relation to a larger universe... this is the time to remember how to live in ecstatic relationship with natural forces." — Llyn Roberts

"Today we find ourselves wandering disconsolately between two worlds — one dying and the other struggling to be born. On the one hand, the spiritual and intellectual certainties of the past no longer command our allegiance. On the other, the promises of a more integral worldview, a cosmology of tomorrow — one based on a deeper relationship with nature and with the larger cosmos — require of us a leap of faith few are as yet willing to take. With the future of the human spirit and the future of the planet hanging in the balance, we have no choice but to embrace courage, imagination, and our deepest inner resources." — Richard Tarnas

"Now, we are in those days when many people are talking about 2012: and some of them don’t see the positive side of the Prophecies because they are looking only at the surface of the Prophecies and not at the deeper meaning of the Prophecies." — Miguel Angel Vergara

[First posted 29 March 2010]



Monday, December 26, 2011

ATOM HEART MOTHER ~ Pink Floyd (Farewell, Shahrizat!)



Atom Heart Mother is the fifth studio album by English progressive rock band Pink Floyd, released in 1970 by Harvest and EMI Records in the United Kingdom and Harvest and Capitol in the United States. It was recorded at Abbey Road Studios, London, England, and reached number one in the United Kingdom, and number 55 in the United States charts, and went gold in the U.S. in March 1994. A re-mastered CD was released in 1994 in the UK, and in 1995 in the US.

This was the first Pink Floyd album to be specially mixed for 4-channel quadraphonic sound as well as conventional 2-channel stereo. The SQ quadraphonic mix was released on LP in a matrix format compatible with standard stereo record players. There was also a release of the quadraphonic version in the UK in fully discrete 4-channel form on the "Quad-8" format, a 4-channel variant of the stereo 8-track tape cartridge.

The original album cover, designed by art collective Hipgnosis, shows a cow standing in a pasture with no text nor any other clue as to what might be on the record. Some later editions have the title and artist name added to the cover. This concept was the group's reaction to the psychedelic space rock imagery associated with Pink Floyd at the time of the album's release; the band wanted to explore all sorts of music without being limited to a particular image or style of performance. They thus requested that their new album had "something plain" on the cover, which ended up being the image of the cow.

Storm Thorgerson, inspired by Andy Warhol's famous "cow-wallpaper," has said that he simply drove out into a rural area near Potters Bar and photographed the first cow he saw. The cow's owner identified her name as "Lulubelle III."

[Source: Wikipedia]

Sunday, December 25, 2011

These Bells Weren't Made For Jingling...




Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield (2003 version)


Featuring the voice of John Cleese

Mike Oldfield in the early 1970s
Tubular Bells is the debut record album of English musician Mike Oldfield, released in 1973. It was the first album released by Virgin Records and an early cornerstone of the company's success. Vivian Stanshall provided the voice of the "Master of Ceremonies" who reads off the list of instruments at the end of the first movement. The opening piano solo was used as a soundtrack to the blockbuster William Friedkin film The Exorcist (released the same year) and gained considerable airplay because of this.

The piece was later orchestrated by David Bedford for The Orchestral Tubular Bells version and it had three sequels in the 1990s, Tubular Bells II (1992), Tubular Bells III (1998) and The Millennium Bell (1999). Finally, the album was fully re-recorded as Tubular Bells 2003 at its 30th anniversary in 2003. A newly mastered and mixed re-issue of the original album appeared in June 2009 on Mercury Records, with bonus material. On 6 June 2009 there were international bell-ringing ceremonies to promote the release.

[Source: Wikipedia]

Saturday, December 24, 2011

Compassion is our New Currency ~ by Rebecca Solnit

“Nothing has been more moving to me than this desire, realized imperfectly but repeatedly, to connect across differences, to be a community, to make a better world, to embrace each other.”

By Rebecca Solnit | Nation of Change

Usually at year’s end, we’re supposed to look back at events just passed - and forward, in prediction mode, to the year to come. But just look around you! This moment is so extraordinary that it has hardly registered. People in thousands of communities across the United States and elsewhere are living in public, experimenting with direct democracy, calling things by their true names, and obliging the media and politicians to do the same.


The breadth of this movement is one thing, its depth another. It has rejected not just the particulars of our economic system, but the whole set of moral and emotional assumptions on which it’s based. Take the pair shown in a photograph from Occupy Austin in Texas. The amiable-looking elderly woman is holding a sign whose computer-printed words say, “Money has stolen our vote.” The older man next to her with the baseball cap is holding a sign handwritten on cardboard that states, “We are our brothers’ keeper.”


The photo of the two of them offers just a peek into a single moment in the remarkable period we’re living through and the astonishing movement that’s drawn in… well, if not 99% of us, then a striking enough percentage: everyone from teen pop superstar Miley Cyrus with her Occupy-homage video to Alaska Yup’ik elder Esther Green ice-fishing and holding a sign that says “Yirqa Kuik” in big letters, with the translation - “occupy the river” - in little ones below.

The woman with the stolen-votes sign is referring to them. Her companion is talking about us, all of us, and our fundamental principles. His sign comes straight out of Genesis, a denial of what that competitive entrepreneur Cain said to God after foreclosing on his brother Abel’s life. He was not, he claimed, his brother’s keeper; we are not, he insisted, beholden to each other, but separate, isolated, each of us for ourselves.

Think of Cain as the first Social Darwinist and this Occupier in Austin as his opposite, claiming, no, our operating system should be love; we are all connected; we must take care of each other. And this movement, he’s saying, is about what the Argentinian uprising that began a decade ago, on December 19, 2001, called politica afectiva, the politics of affection.

If it’s a movement about love, it’s also about the money they so unjustly took, and continue to take, from us - and about the fact that, right now, money and love are at war with each other. After all, in the American heartland, people are beginning to be imprisoned for debt, while the Occupy movement is arguing for debt forgiveness, renegotiation, and debt jubilees.

Sometimes love, or at least decency, wins. One morning late last month, 75-year-old Josephine Tolbert, who ran a daycare center from her modest San Francisco home, returned after dropping a child off at school only to find that she and the other children were locked out because she was behind in her mortgage payments. True Compass LLC, who bought her place in a short sale while she thought she was still negotiating with Bank of America, would not allow her back into her home of almost four decades, even to get her medicines or diapers for the children.

We demonstrated at her home and at True Compass’s shabby offices while they hid within, and students from Occupy San Francisco State University demonstrated outside a True Compass-owned restaurant on behalf of this African-American grandmother. Thanks to this solidarity and the media attention it garnered, Tolbert has collected her keys, moved back in, and is renegotiating the terms of her mortgage.

Hundreds of other foreclosure victims are now being defended by local branches of the Occupy movement, from West Oakland to North Minneapolis. As New York writer, filmmaker, and Occupier Astra Taylor puts it,

"Not only does the occupation of abandoned foreclosed homes connect the dots between Wall Street and Main Street, it can also lead to swift and tangible victories, something movements desperately need for momentum to be maintained. The banks, it seems, are softer targets than one might expect because so many cases are rife with legal irregularities and outright criminality. With one in five homes facing foreclosure and filings showing no sign of slowing down in the next few years, the number of people touched by the mortgage crisis - whether because they have lost their homes or because their homes are now underwater -- truly boggles the mind.”


If what’s been happening locally and globally has some of the characteristics of an uprising, then there has never been one quite so pervasive - from the scientists holding an Occupy sign in Antarctica to Occupy presences in places as far-flung as New Zealand and Australia, São Paulo, Frankfurt, London, Toronto, Los Angeles, and Reykjavik. And don’t forget the tiniest places, either. The other morning at the Oakland docks for the West Coast port shutdown demonstrations, I met three members of Occupy Amador County, a small rural area in California’s Sierra Nevada. Its largest town, Jackson, has a little over 4,000 inhabitants, which hasn’t stopped it from having regular outdoor Friday evening Occupy meetings.


A little girl in a red parka at the Oakland docks was carrying a sign with a quote from blind-deaf-and-articulate early twentieth-century role model Helen Keller that said, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt within the heart.” Why quote Keller at a demonstration focused on labor and economics? The answer is clear enough: because Occupy has some of the emotional resonance of a spiritual, as well as a political, movement. Like those other upheavals it’s aligned with in Spain, Greece, Iceland (where they’re actually jailing bankers), Britain, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Chile, and most recently Russia, it wants to ask basic questions: What matters? Who matters? Who decides? On what principles?

Tunisians honor Mohamed Bouazizi whose self-immolation sparked a revolution

Stop for a moment and consider just how unforeseen and unforeseeable all of this was when, on December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian vegetable vendor in Sidi Bouzid, an out-of-the-way, impoverished city, immolated himself. He was protesting the dead-end life that the 1% economy run by Tunisia’s autocratic ruler Zine Ben Ali and his corrupt family allotted him, and the police brutality that went with it, two things that have remained front and center ever since. Above all, as his mother has since testified, he was for human dignity, for a world, that is, where the primary system of value is not money.

“Compassion is our new currency,” was the message scrawled on a pizza-box lid at Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan - held by a pensive-looking young man in Jeremy Ayers’s great photo portrait. But what can you buy with compassion?



Quite a lot, it turns out, including a global movement, and even pizza, which can arrive at that movement’s campground as a gift of solidarity. A few days into Occupy Wall Street’s surprise success, a call for pizza went out and $2,600 in pizzas came in within an hour, just as earlier this year the occupiers of Wisconsin’s state house had been copiously supplied with pizza - including pies paid for and dispatched by Egyptian revolutionaries.

[Read the full article here.]

"The ad hoc invention of the people’s mic by the occupiers of Zuccotti Park, which requires everyone to listen, repeat, and amplify what’s being said, has only strengthened this sense of presence."

Friday, December 23, 2011

RAP NEWS UPDATE: State of Planet Earth as we lurch drunkenly or sleepwalk towards 2012...







The Juice Media RAP News series is the brilliant brainchild of Hugo Farrant and Giordano Nanni. In the last year or so subscribers to their YouTube channel have skyrocketed.

I'm happy to have met Hugo Farrant (who plays Robert Foster and almost every character in RAP News) in September 2010 when he was stuck in Malaysia waiting for his agent to sort out his Australian visa. While sojourning at Magick River, Hugo received an email from Julian Assange (of WikiLeaks), inviting him to record a special episode of RAP News in London. Soon after that the hit counter on The Juice Media channel went berserk...



These guys are absolutely, mindbogglingly amazing... standing ovation, folks!

Thursday, December 22, 2011

The Children of Pertak in glorious black&white...

Kimas with a photograph of herself
Mugging for the camera
Partners in grime
Future politician
Poster boys
Chairman of the Bored
With Ljuba Schmiedel, a young German living in Amsterdam
Friendly adult attention is a scarce resource in Pertak Village
Paper cut-outs & YouTube
An introduction to digital photography
Photographing the photographer
With Luis Gonzalez Medina, a yoga teacher from Chile
Kimas's feral beauty captured
Eye contact

These expressive black&white portraits were taken on 8 December 2011 by Lennart Naurholm (right), a 27-year-old photographer from Denmark whose dream is to become a kindergarten teacher somewhere in Asia.

In Thailand recently, he found himself a temporary job teaching kindergarten kids and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. He decided to dedicate his life to working with children and support himself with photography. Some of his abstract landscapes are already decorating homes and offices in many European cities.

Take a tour of Lennart Naurholm's photo gallery on FlickR and if any of his powerful images catches your eye, you can buy a mural-sized quality print by emailing him directly.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

I miss my Uncle Frank! Happy Solstice, Folks...

FRANK ZAPPA (21 December 1940 ~ 4 December 1993): I was a true fan
Munich 1978

New York 1978, featuring Terry Bozzio on drums

City of Tiny Lights, New York 1978, featuring Adrian Belew on guitar & lead vocal

Rome 1982, featuring Steve Vai

Steve Vai gets spanked

Black Napkins @ The Palladium, New York, 1981

Chick Corea jams with Dweezil Zappa, 26 August 2011, in Kansas City

Last interview: Frank Zappa talks about his friend, Nicholas Slonimsky

Stravinsky conducts Zappa (just a clever and charming spoof, Zappa was a great fan of Igor who died in April 1971, long before Zappa wrote "Strictly Genteel")
“Music is the only religion that delivers the goods.” ~ Frank Zappa
“If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.” ~ Frank Zappa

“A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it is not open.” ~ Frank Zappa

“I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.” ~ Frank Zappa

“There's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over.” ~ Frank Zappa

“Take the Kama Sutra. How many people died from the Kama Sutra as opposed to the Bible? Who wins?” ~ Frank Zappa

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.” ~ Frank Zappa

“A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.” ~ Frank Zappa

“Government is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex.” ~ Frank Zappa

“Anybody who wants religion is welcome to it, as far as I'm concerned - I support your right to enjoy it. However, I would appreciate it if you exhibited more respect for the rights of those people who do not wish to share your dogma, rapture, or necrodestination.” ~ Frank Zappa

“May your shit come to life and kiss you on the face.” ~ Frank Zappa

“The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, all the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions.” ~ Frank Zappa

Pauline Butcher with Frank Zappa backstage in Anaheim in 1968 (Plexus Books)
FRANK ZAPPA, HIS GROUPIES AND ME
Zappa's one-time personal assistant, Pauline Butcher, has written a book, titled Freak Out! My Life with Frank Zappa - 43 years after she relocated from London to Laurel Canyon, a suburb of Los Angeles, to work for the man with whom she was utterly besotted. She subsequently returned to England, continued her studies, and married a guy named Bird, who's now a banker with Rothschild's, based in Singapore.

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

In Loving Memory of Mr Vertical Eyebrows...

Roger Reginald Putra (7 Nov 2008 ~ 14 Dec 2010)


Father & Son: Mr Wong & Roger Putra
Roger was more than just a dog, much more than a member of the family - he was like a second son to Anoora and me. His father, the illustrious Mr Wong Beng Oi, was a greatly beloved part of our lives for more than 10 years. Mr Wong enjoyed an enormously happy life with us and died of old age in August 2010.

Roger was his genetic legacy, the only pup in the second litter born of a beautiful young bitch with Doberman pedigree who mysteriously appeared at our doorstep one morning and decided to stay. The name "Lulu" just came to me, so that's what I decided to call her.

Roger's beautiful mum, Lulu
At that time it didn't occur to me that Mr Wong's mum had also been named Lulu - Lulu Yap, to be precise, and her mother was a minute but majestic full-blooded Spitz known at various times as Curly-Wurly, Mrs Curlington-Wurlington, and Madam Wu. In short, Roger Reginald Putra was the great-grandson of Madam Wu - one of the original Magick River canine corps, left behind by her previous owners, Mavis and Clifford, when they migrated to Australia in 1990.

Roger Putra was named in honor of my friend Raja Petra (better known as RPK the Blogger King) who was miraculously freed from ISA detention on 7 November 2008. Even as we rejoiced at the good news, we discovered that Lulu had given birth to a solitary roly-poly pup who looked pretty much like Mr Wong. Initially I couldn't choose between Reggie or Roger, so Reginald was included as a middle name, adding a touch of class. Occasionally, Roger was referred to as the Ten-Tit-Tot because he had no siblings with whom to compete for his mother's milk. As a result he quickly became also known as Fatty Boy.

Roger's handsome brother Rupert,
murdered in May 2009
The background to how Roger abruptly vanished from our lives on the morning of 14 December 2010 has already been recorded in a blogpost dated 25 December 2010. Even after a whole year has elapsed, my heart feels heavy when I think about the utter meaningless of this sub-humanly brutal act of violence, directed against me via our beloved canine son. 

When Roger was barely 6 months old, his mother Lulu and elder brother Rupert had both been murdered on the same night by a bunch of drunken Orang Asli. This was perhaps the canine equivalent of the Kennedy family...

In Roger Putra's case, the prime suspect happens to be a social misfit in his early 50s named Uha Anak Penengah. However, I have yet to obtain incontrovertible proof that it was Uha who slashed Roger with his parang - and not any of 3 or 4 other middle-aged Temuan males, each of whom is perfectly capable of such a reprehensible act, having allowed their minds to be taken over in service of Umno's land-grab agenda via the JHEOA (recently incorporated as JAKOA or Jabatan Kemajuan Orang Asli) who view me as a subversive thorn in their side, because I stand in the way of their money-making and control-freak schemes.

It was no use reporting this heinous crime to the police (to whom dogs are haram and therefore better off dead or non-existent; in any case, the police have shown so little interest in the gruesome murder of a Mongolian beauty 5 years ago, why would they bother investigating the death of a dog?) And even if I knew beyond any shadow of doubt that Uha was the murderer, what else could I do except kill him? That wouldn't bring Roger Putra back to life - and I'd end up spending the rest of my days in prison. 

Roger Putra & Ayita: unmitigated beauty

Uha, like his father, suffered from warty skin and a surly, truculent disposition. He had had very little luck with the opposite sex. Five years ago Uha had tricked a girl from Pahang into marrying him, but she died mysteriously within a week. The day Roger Putra was murdered, he was accompanying a very beautiful Moroccan lady on her morning walk. The sight of such unmitigated beauty must have infuriated Uha. If he couldn't possess it, he would viciously and vicariously destroy it...

A humble offering to Roger's sweet memory
No, the only recourse was to acknowledge the abject misery and absolute pathology of Uha's existence - to empathize with his emptiness and pain, to understand that his soul was in a terribly dark place, and to envision his eventual enlightenment and liberation from the hellish horror of his own hateful life. Uha seemed to me the embodiment of hopeless frustration, self-loathing and envy; unable to imagine a happier destiny for himself, his inner rage and feelings of inadequacy were externalized as aggression, hostility and violence. Indeed, this is the root cause of  fanatical bigotry and xenophobia manifesting as militant jingoism - the very stuff that spawns ultra-rightwing, fascist mobs like Pekida and Perkasa.

It began raining as soon as I set off with Anoora and Ahau on a pilgrimage to the approximate spot where Roger Putra met his untimely death a year ago. Getting drenched despite our umbrellas, I found a small rock nestled between two rubber trees and placed some flowers and a candle upon it. A few sticks of incense and a couple of soggy crackers completed our humble offering. As I completed the simple ceremony, the rain abruptly stopped and a brilliant ray of sunlight flashed from the treetops. The three of us washed ourselves by a small waterfall on our way home. 

Beloved friend and canine son, Roger the irreplaceable

Losing Roger Putra has been the single most painful and tragic experience of my life - even more intense than returning home 40 years ago to discover my pet cockatoo had been stolen. At least I could hope that she would be kindly treated wherever she was. 

Roger Reginald Putra was the perfect embodiment of beauty, robust health, innocence, joie de vivre, and an irrepressible sense of adventure. The sight of him was enough to bring cheer and contentment to my heart. To think that anyone could possibly kill my beloved canine companion just to get at me encapsulated all the cruelty, violence, hate, and repressed sexuality that have kept humanity in the bondage of sadomasochism and armed conflict for countless generations - delaying, if not thwarting, the possibility of heaven on earth, instead of in the hereafter.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

How about some lowbrow art? Much sexier than lowbrow politics, that's for sure!

Some folks swear by their Volvos. 

I confess I much prefer Vulvas. 
Especially ornamental ones that belong in an art gallery 
for born-again philistines like myself...

Pipe-smoking bow-tie pussy (bring your own pipe)

Anatomical is much funkier than political correctness

Greybeard hippie's squaw?


Diabolically obscene but I'm a horny old devil


The pedophile's choice - revealing one's inner child


It will flap its wings till they're dry and then fly away




No hair is a good hair day for Homer Simpson

                                                                      
                                                                              Pussyface? You mean ME???


Shaved Fish was the title of John Lennon's 7th solo album.
This would have been the perfect cover shot.

[These tattooed vulvas were found on a friend's Facebook wall]