Skeptical

 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/weird-studies/id1343819177?i=1000538469019

Questions for I am Residency-Brett Waller video production project.

 Brett Waller has asked me to produce a series of questions about my art practice.

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My first inclination is to consider the conversations I have had with Brett Waller in the past. The topics always find a low spot in the topography of how we align ourselves in a survival-day to day. I suspect this to be Brett's and my own predisposition to the narrative of the myth of the heroic individual. How living in a 5th tier city puts us on the front lines of art and its cultural irrelevancy. If I were to telescope out and try to plug in to a bigger picture, I would assert that it comes down to the way people are changing psychologically/socially. Humans and the need for meaning. How we adjusting to the phenomenon of rapid change in contemporary political and economic systems of order. The direction these systems are evolving in require specific behavior and reactions from the humans that make up that systems ecology. I am not sure the best way to describe contemporary American society as "capitalist". Far from an ideal -ist or ism Americans are way more involved in rewarding aggressive machiavellian  behavior with success than smaller more economically vulnerable entities currently pursuing and implementing more innovative or creative solutions to problems. Our systems of governance likewise identify fiercely with private interests. It is difficult to discern between public and private interest. Public interest has developed a full fledged identity crisis. Public interest needs have become gaslighted and folded into the needs of private interest.  (not all the way through this article but probably stated better there: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/capitalist-ideology-and-the-myth-of-the-individual-self-part-1_b_58065ff4e4b0dd54ce358acf) 

7 of cups

Laurel leaves-Apollo and the woman he pursued
Cloaked individual-reminds me of this account by an ex monk of the spiritual guides that contacted Blavatski."As Lopez notes, there is so much worth commenting on in Gechoe’s brief reflections. Perhaps most strikingly, the ex-monk gives Blavatsky the benefit of the doubt that her Mahatmas were in fact Tibetan lamas who appeared to her first in non-corporeal, visionary form and then in the flesh (fascinatingly, he naturalizes Blavatsky’s Masters’ names in Tibetan – ‘Morya’ becomes mu ra, which the Ives Waldo dictionary explains is the name of a Tibetan medicinal herb which increases digestive heat and helps with toothache, while Mahatma Koot Hoomi becomes sku thu med, which Lopez renders as ‘The Cloakless One’, since sku thu med can be literally read as ‘body without the lower parts of a robe’]. One wonders whether the Tibetan orthography of Morya and Koot Hoomi were Gendun Choepel’s own innovation, or whether these were presented to him by the Roerichs. There is probably little way of ever knowing. It is certainly possible that the Roerichs – students of Tibetan Buddhism with some decidedly off-the-wall Theosophical interpretations (see my note at the end of this post for more on this) had come up with and presented these etymologies to Gechoe since we don’t really know how curated his exposure to Theosophical material may have been.  Then again, he lived a long time in India and Ceylon and engaged with all sorts of different people there and has his comments above show, was clearly aware of contrasting views on Blavatsky. One gets the feeling that these insights are very much a product of his own thinking and orientations."

round and round

In April 1583, Bruno went to England with letters of recommendation from Henry III as a guest of the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau. There he became acquainted with the poet Philip Sidney (to whom he dedicated two books) and other members of the Hermetic circle around John Dee, though there is no evidence that Bruno ever met Dee himself. He also lectured at Oxford, and unsuccessfully sought a teaching position there. His views were controversial, notably with John Underhill, Rector of Lincoln College and subsequently bishop of Oxford, and George Abbot, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. Abbot mocked Bruno for supporting "the opinion of Copernicus that the earth did go round, and the heavens did stand still; whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run round, and his brains did not stand still",

1.  Weiner, Andrew D. (1980). "Expelling the Beast: Bruno's Adventures in England". Modern Philology. 78 (1): 1–13. doi:10.1086/391002. JSTOR 437245.

ivresse-Twisted language of South American Shamans and the "spirits" they commune with.

I sense a relationship between the utility of twisted language of the Yaminahua people and the contour rivalry (Contour rivalry is an artistic technique used to create multiple possible visual interpretations of an image. An image may be viewed as depicting one thing when viewed in a certain way; but if the image is flipped or turned, the same lines that formed the previous image now make up an entirely new design.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contour_rivalry
) used in sculptures similar to the stelae found in the Peruvian labyrinth of()
"The third example is drawn from the work of another British anthropologist, Graham Townsley, who worked with the Yaminahua people, and is from an article called “Song Paths” that he published in the French anthropology review L’Homme, published in English in 1993. Francis Huxley and I gave a large excerpt of this text in Shamans Through Time, which is an anthology that we wrote in Rupert and Jill’s basement fifteen years ago.

Yaminahua people drink ayahuasca, which they call shori, and communicate in their visions with yoshi beings. Yoshi are invisible, and they animate plants and animals. But they are also multifaceted and ambiguous, and all reports of them underline the fundamental difficulty of knowing them. They are like and not like. They are the same and not the same.

These entities emit songs, and shamans listen to these songs, sing along with them, and learn to communicate with these entities by singing their melodies back to them, but they use words. And the language that they use to sing to these entities is deliberately abstruse and metaphoric; they speak what they call tsai yoshto yoshto, meaning “language twisting twisting,” or twisted language. Almost nothing in twisted language is called by its usual name. Jaguars are called baskets, anacondas are called hammocks, and fish are called peccaries. In each case there is an obscure but real connection between the two terms. Jaguars are called baskets because certain fibers used to make baskets have patterns similar to the markings of a jaguar. Anacondas are called hammocks because as they hang from trees they sometimes look like hammocks.

Yaminahua shamans say that they use this twisted language to talk to the multifaceted yoshi beings because normal words would crash into them, whereas with twisted words you can go in close but not too close and circle around them and see them clearly. So it’s like with a boomerang: you aim it over there to impact over here. You say one thing to mean another; this is how you address yourself to these multifaceted and fundamentally ambiguous beings who have no unitary nature. So here, metaphor is not incorrect naming, it’s the only naming possible.

The Amazonian people have a view of reality in which the visible world that we usually see is a world of appearances that hides a more fundamental world that is normally invisible and contains powerful entities."-      http://realitysandwich.com/323480/amazonian-perspectives-on-invisible-entities/?fbclid=IwAR3s2-jB__tBt9-tkdH4Kj4_lZaSak2AjeDwPwANblcsAGoQHcHDp_OkG3s   retrieved Dec.14 2018

culture wars -Punk and Intelegence

Stuart Copeland's dad. 

Cherry Vanilla's involvement with Radio Hanoi.-"Hi, my name is Cherry Vanilla and I've got scoops for you…"