Whore-hey Looee Boar-hay-zs

The Witness (El Testigo) by Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

In a stable that stands almost within the shadow of the new stone church, a man with gray eyes and a gray beard, sprawled amidst the odor of the animals, humbly seeks his death as though he were seeking sleep.

The day, faithful to vast, secret laws, moves about displacing and blending the shadows in that modest place; outside there are plowed fields, and a ditch clogged with dried leaves, and perhaps some faint tracks of a wolf upon the black clay at the edge of the forest.

The man sleeps and dreams, forgotten. The tolling bells that call to prayer awaken him. In the kingdoms of England, the summoning of the bells has already become part of the evening’s routine; but, in his boyhood, the man has seen the face of Woden, the divine horror and exultation, the cumbrous wooden idol overladen with Roman coins and unwieldy vestments, the sacrifice of horses, dogs and prisoners. The man will die before dawn, and along with him will also perish, never to return, the last direct, eyewitness images of the pagan rites. The world will be poorer once this Saxon man has died.

We may wonder at events that exist in space, but reach their end when someone dies; and yet some thing, or an infinite number of things, dies and is lost along with anyone’s death, unless there actually exists a universal memory, as the theosophists have speculated. Over the course of time, there came a day that forever blinded the last eyes to have witnessed Christ; the Battle of Junín, and the love of Helen, died with the death of some one.

What shall die with me when I die? What pathetic or inconsequential form will the world nevertheless lose? The voice of Macedonio Fernández, the memory of a bay horse in an empty lot at the corner of Serrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur inside the drawer of a mahogany desk?

─ Translated from El hacedor (1960) by Andras Corban Arthen

The "Nite Brite" Phenomenon: A Distinction

Phosphorescence:
a process in which energy absorbed by a substance is released relatively slowly in the form of light. This is in some cases the mechanism used for "glow-in-the-dark" materials which are "charged" by exposure to light. Unlike the relatively swift reactions in a common fluorescent tube, phosphorescent materials used for these materials absorb the energy and "store" it for a longer time as the processes required to re-emit the light occur less often.






Fluorescence:
a luminescence that is mostly found as an optical phenomenon in cold bodies, in which the molecular absorption of a photon triggers the emission of a photon with a longer (less energetic) wavelength. The energy difference between the absorbed and emitted photons ends up as molecular rotations, vibrations or heat. Sometimes the absorbed photon is in the ultraviolet range, and the emitted light is in the visible range








Bioluminescence:
the production and emission of light by a living organism as the result of a chemical reaction during which chemical energy is converted to light energy.The chemical reaction can occur either inside or outside the cell. In bacteria, the expression of genes related to bioluminescence is controlled by an operon called the Lux operon. Bioluminescence has appeared independently several times (up to 30 or more) during evolution. Bioluminescence occurs in marine vertebrates and invertebrates, as well as microorganisms and terrestrial animals. Symbiotic organisms carried within larger organisms are also known to bioluminesce.

Ars Gratia Artis

From Juxtapox magazine: "Check out this trippy five-minute video, Khoda, by Reza Dolatabadi. Dolatabad is a graduate film student who made this film from 6,000 individual paintings shown at a rate of 20 per second. It took over two years to complete and is pretty mind-blowing."


Khoda from Reza Dolatabadi on Vimeo.

As much as I think the artist's style is a little too comic book-y for me, the sheer magnitude of effort, focus, determination, and patience that this project demands is inspiring. It reminds me in some ways of underground avant-garde film visionary ("vision-ree"), dreamweaver, and facepainter? Stan Brakhage.

Since the inception of his filmaking in the late 1950's Brakhage has pioneered scores of experimental techniques that are ubiquitious in all genres of cinematography today. Particularly germane here was his penchant for sedulously hand painting directly on individual celluloid frames, treating each of them as if they were mini-canvases, works of art in of themselves. He would then project these micro-cathedrals of color and time at 24 fps using 16mm projector.

The result:



To aid in his assiduously prescient transfiguration of traditional cinema, he employed other techniques such as fast cutting, in-camera editing, scratching film, double-exposure, reverse film looping, etc. Most of his pieces are silent, in color, and range from a few seconds (Eye Gaze) to feature length (Text of Light). The means themselves were Brakhage's ends (as is true for all 'ars gratia artis'): just as much as he aimed to create a finite, condensed visual stimulus, each creatively nascent and exploratory process seemed to be just as vital to him and the success of his work.

See also: Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger

Grease meets pest

Black Lips channel their 1960's pork pie plumber bum garage revivalist herion-sheik trash influences shamelessly and to great effect on their new ELPMAH (Extended Long Play Music Album for Humans...c'mon you knew that). Less of what you'd expect from their previous bluesy indie-rock inflected beer spraying "flower punk" (their own *yuck* euphemism) and more of a succession of opiate-induced hot nods to the purveyors of good types of sound like The Kinks and Velvet Underground. Things happen with music when listening. Singer Alexander Cole pays tribute to the late great Joe Strummer in track 8, BBBJOT, hijacking Strummer's trademark proncouncement of the word "fail" (as in "Rude can't fay-all").
Speaking of that track, these are some of the lyrics:

It don't matter what they say
He cant be the Jack Johnson of the day
Big, black baby jesus on the way. C'mon!
The Jesus of today. C'mon!
Do it, do it today, big, black Jesus on the way.
It don't matter what they say.

Track 11, The Drop I Hold finds Cole dropping some slow-ass drug-addled white boy rhymes over a great lazy, west-coast rhythm with a 97.1 worthy-hook. Stylistically, this song stands on its tippy toes as it refreshingly creeps up on you past the dozen plus tracks of effortless fuzzed-out drug jams. So what the hell about all this? Well they lose the disorientingly euphoric experimental loops and drum triggers (which really helped set themselves apart from the scene of snore) and plug raw into tube amps. It's nothing new, but I love the Kinks and Velvet Undergound, so to get down with some New York contemporary shitpster-ish, 20-something, fun-loving boredom crashers who drop $$$$ to get the best worst guitar tones and devote their lives to singing out of key and tapping into the pot-hazy, sexy apathy of some of the best bands of the 20th century is a thing I'll do.

try it.

Vulpine Pounce

Ffft fft boing!

Let's crow old together...

It's no secret, these murderous jet black winged enigmas are fiercely intelligent. So much so that evidence of their zoological cognitive feats beg repudiation of the negative "bird brain" colloquialism. There are two phenomenon in particular that prove that crows have something going for them in the evolutionary gene pool:

1) This first one is illustrative of crows' impressive ability to adapt to an urban environment that has been exponentially constructed around them. Whereas other less adaptable birds would migrate or change food sources to survive, crows dig in their awkward lil' heels and make do with what they've got:



2) One defining characteristic of an intelligent animal is if they can use tools to their advantage in the wild to solve novel problems. Crows? Check. Specifically, New Caledonian Crows create hooked probes from twigs in order to obtain food. They have developed this behavior over thousands of years of rich crow stick-bending tradition and evolution, therefore the story of a crow named Betty is all the more intriguing.

Betty was caught as a child and put in captivity with Abel, a male who spent the last 10 years in a zoo. A small bucket of pig heart (crow's fave) was placed in a pipe and the crows were presented with a straight wire and one already bent into a hook. Abel, being the opportunistic male that isolation has turned him into, grabbed the hook and took off, leaving Betty to her own devises. So, she strategically bent the straight wire into a hook using her beak and feet in order to get to the food. This is the first time an animal had been observed making a hook out of unnatural material to solve a novel problem. Get it girl! To make sure this wasn't a fluke, Betty was tested with Abel again, this time with just a straight wire to go on. 9 out of 10 times, Abel laid back while Betty turned it out by fabricating a hook and obtaining the grub.

Now, it's real sweet because..."The researchers say that Betty's creation of hooks cannot be attributed to the shaping or reinforcement of randsomly generated behavior. And since she had no other crows to model, no training with pliant objects, and very limited prior experience with wire, they see her actions as novel and purposeful. " So even though she has probably seen and taken part in past behavior that involved creating hooks in the wild, Betty had to adapt those experiences to solve a completely new problem, something pretty 'heady' for a lil' bird brain. I mean scientists are saying that Crows may even surpass Chimps in their ability to use tools to their advantage.

"This is how they do it" (this is how they do it):



How it gets done in the wild (note the meticulous selection of twigs and leaves needed to engineer the hook):

Cueva de las Manos

Let's go to Patagonia! Now what you have here is an archetypal example of a been-there-dreamed-that, dime a dozen, I'm yawning again caus' I'd rather be watchin' Gossip Girl, run of the mill and stuck in a well "Cave of the Hands". Located in the southern region of South America (yep, good ol' Santa Cruz, Argentina), this cave lies deep in the valley of the Pinturas River (River of Paintings). Ostensibly someone deemed this 79ft x 49ft hole in the Earth important enough to be protected as a UNESCO (eh hem: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) World Heritage Site on the basis of "paleontological and archaeological historical importance". Go figure.

Clearly this cave gets it's name from the sundry stencils of left-hands painted on the cave walls some 9,000 years ago. The paintings were able to be dated by means of the tools that were found at the scene of the crime. The indigenous inhabitants of the land at that time (quite possibly forefathers of the Tehuelches, Ferdinand Magellan's "Giant People") used bone-made pipes to shoot mineral ink onto the walls, blocked by their hands, therein creating perhaps the world's first stencil art. (Banksy et Le Rat eat your poser hearts out...)

Apparently it was a rite of passage for these graffiti-loving natives to mark their journey into manhood in this cave because the size of the hands resemble that of a 13-year old boy. However it could very well be that they were older, as primitive civilizations tend to be all gross and under-developed like.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. That's not it. As if these flawlessly preserved demarcations of ancient rituals and artistic expression aren't enough to satisfy your curiosity for all things Patagonian, there's also... more paintings! Cueve de las Manos and a few sister caves have been tastelessly littered with depictions of humans, guanacos, rheas, felines, geometric shapes, some zigzag patterns, representations of the sun, and some hunting scenes for good measure. Really all your standard hunter and gatherer fare. The ceilings of these caves also glisten with thick, red dots, supposedly created by the never-gets-old method of dipping your bola in red ink and recklessly splattering your local cave ceiling with it.

This is more information: "The colours of the paintings vary from red (made from hematite) to white, black or yellow. The negative hand impressions are calculated to be dated around 550 BC, the positive impressions from 180 BC, and the hunting drawings to be older than 10,000 years".

So, are we going or not?

whoa!

So, guys, the news.

What are the haps in the news?