“”
It was a computer’s paradise. No world could have been more hostile to life, or more hospitable to intelligence.

And intelligence was there, dwelling in a planet-wide incrustation of crystals and microscopic metal threads. The feeble light of the two contending galaxies– briefly doubled every few centuries by the flicker of the supernova– fell upon a static landscape of sculptured geometrical forms. Nothing moved, for there was no need of movement in a world where thoughts flashed from one hemisphere to the other at the speed of light. Where only information was important, it was a waste of precious energy to transfer bulk matter.

Clarke, Arthur C. “Crusade.” The Wind from the Sun. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972. 103.

found here

1/ Woman weighing herself on scale and receiving fortune card.

2/ Dog and brandy cask.

3/ Man with cast in hospital bed.

4/ Two women wearing identical gowns.

5/ Safari.

6/ Asking a boss for a raise.

7/ Child wants drink of water in the middle of the night.

8/ Skater making figure eight.

9/ Clock watchers in office.

10/ Little walking toys.

11/ Man painting himself into the corner of a room.

12/ Housing development– houses look alike.

13/ Business charts in office.

14/ Fever charts in hospital.

15/ Avant-garde painting or sculpture.

16/ Flooded cellars.

17/ Neighbors borrowing garden tools.

18/ Women over-shopping.

19/ Computers.

20/ High cost of living.

21/ Tattoos on sailors.

22/ Gals coming out of large cake.

23/ Thirsty man crawling in desert.

24/ Scientists reading old scrolls– Egyptian hieroglyphics.

25/ Psychoanalyst and couch.

26/ Marriage counsellors.

27/ Expectant father– maternity ward.

28/ Auto driving schools.

29/ Men carrying billboards.

30/ Motorcycle cop hidden behind billboard.

31/ Prisoner talking to wife through wire screen.

32/ Dogs biting mailmen.

33/ Martians and flying saucers.

34/ Kid on Santa’s lap.

35/ Cavemen.

36/ Son borrowing father’s car.

37/ Second in fighter’s corner giving him instructions.

38/ Two-person combination of front and rear of horse at masquerade.

39/ Kids making a racket while father is trying to sleep.

40/ Department store complaint departments.

41/ Railroad station lost and found counters.

42/ Doctor testing reflexes with little hammer.

43/ Prisoner tunneling out of jail.

44/ Tot reaching for cookie jar.

45/ Two persons duelling.

46/ Wife trying to balance household budget.

47/ Shoveling snow.

48/ Outdoor grills.

49/ Elopers and ladders.

50/ Golfer trying to break 100.

51/ Sewers and “men at work.”

52/ Ladies’ long conversations on the telephone.

53/ Brush salesmen at the door.

54/ Kissing booth at charity affair.

55/ Tunnel of love.

Marlow, J. (1967). Jack Marlow’s Cartoonist’s and Gag Writer’s Handbook. Cincinatti, Ohio: Writer’s Digest.

About a month ago, our internet surfing crew celebrated a dvd release (thx rhizome) with a special screening of films at the New York Underground Film Festival. For anyone who missed the screening- there’s a dvd with all the goodz on it. So plz buy it!

scans from an old LIFE Magazine with great article on astrology (remaining images + text in comments)

GREENE-EULA. (1969, Sept 26). A Tour of the Zodiac. LIFE Magazine, 67(13), 60-68.

“”
To understand what is happening to us as we move into the age of super-industrialism, we must analyze the processes of acceleration and confront the concept of transience. If acceleration is a new social force, transience is its psychological counterpart, and without an understanding of the role it plays in contemporary human behavior, all our theories of personality, all our psychology, must remain pre-modern. Psychology without the concept of transience cannot take account of precisely those phenomena that are peculiarly contemporary.

“”
I fear that our philosophers have given us no guidance in this matter. Their warnings have customarily been directed against those consciously formulated ideologies that appeal to the worst tendencies in human nature. But what is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology. No Mein Kampf  or Communist Manifesto  announced its coming. It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. But it is an ideology nonetheless, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition. Only compliance. Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology. This, in spite of the fact that before our very eyes technology has altered every aspect of life in America during the past eighty years. For example, it would have been excusable in 1905 for us to be unprepared for the cultural changes the automobile would bring. Who could have suspected then that the automobile would tell us how we were to conduct our social and sexual lives? Would reorient our ideas about what to do with our forests and cities? Would create new ways of expressing our personal identity and social standing?

But it is much later in the game now, and ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple. Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed of light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.

 PHOTO DETAIL

This afternoon I was looking through videos at the thrift store and came across this gem- NATURAL BORN KILLAS ..
Supposedly the number ‘13′ depicts the letter M & refers to southern California… I know MS-13 is a seriously crazy gang too, not sure if these two are related…. and what the other writing references specifically.

FURTHER RESEARCH TOPIC// signs + symbols belonging to various contemporary subcultures and their complex set of meanings & variation: prison tattoos on russian inmates, hobo trainwriting, all types of gang graffiti plus governmental explanations…

old drawing, 2007

ps. nirvana is one of teh greatest bands of all time, in case you were wondering