"Kingdom of Fungi" Mouse Pad by Taylor Lockwood

“Another show-stopper from Taylor Lockwood, this durable rubber-backed computer mouse pad features a breathtaking photographic composition of colorful forest fungi. Not some photo-booth quick-print accessory that will quickly smudge or fade, this is a high-quality, professionally printed product that will grace your desk or workstation for years to come. Measures 9 1/4 x 7 3/4″ , with a 3/32″ rubber backing.”

Available from Fungi Perfecti, of course. Be a dear and tell them Arthur Magazine sent you.

ENDS AUG. 7 – ebay auction to benefit Arthur Magazine: Jimi Hendrix, photographed by Ira Cohen in the mylar chamber (1968) – ltd edition signed print

TITLE: Jimi Hendrix
YEAR: 1968
SIZE: 16” x 20”
FORMAT: cibachrome, signed and unframed

All proceeds from the sale of this photograph will be donated to support ARTHUR MAGAZINE.

Currently on exhibit at the Whitney Museum’s “Summer of Love” program

“Looking at these pictures is like looking through butterfly wings …” – Jimi Hendrix

“A rare portrait of Jimi Hendrix with his double, one of the last portraits taken in the Mylar Chamber and one of the most memorable.” – Ira Cohen.

IAN MACFADYEN ON IRA COHEN’S PHOTOGRAPHS

MacFadyen on Ira Cohen: ” Cohen’s colour photographs are reflections in sheets of mylar, images of reversal and transformation, the human form in fluid metamorphosis. These images split and coalesce and vibrate in phantasmagoric configurations, suggesting both the flux of psychedelic consciousness and the reconstitution of physical matter at the atomic level. Henri Michaux, in The Major Ordeals of the Mind, writes of this “disorganizing flux, the frenzied surge which overflows in every direction, which cannot be controlled, retained or contained…” Cohen’s photographs do in fact frame and fix this delirium to an extent, which Michaux saw as the function of the artist who has been there, and brought back evidence: “For someone who knows how to deal with it…there exists a possibility of transforming the scattering, dissipating, dislocating, devastating, breaking, tearing, disco-ordinating convulsiveness into an ally, into the prop, the support of a future radiance and illumination, the very springboard of transcendence…”.

Every few years we exist in a new body, down to the last molecule, and in these hallucinatory photos we see ourselves as shape-shifters, fugitive apparitions of life which dematerializes all around us, every day, in secret. We are, in Deborah Levy’s phrase, the ‘Beautiful Mutants’. It is as if Cohen, recognizing the quality of pose and arrangement in his black-and-white portraits, at some stage felt compelled to shatter the image of contained consciousness, fixed body, permanent personality. His mylar pictures reveal to us another world, an anti-world of anti-matter where sub-atomic particles spin in an orbit reverse to the world we think we know. In Cohen’s swirling, vertiginous movie The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, the human form becomes pure image–stretched, twisted, continually in the process of appearing and disappearing. These mutations and metamorphoses of body and consciousness resemble psychic ‘spirit photography’ of the 1920s, La photographie Transcendantale. Significantly, Cohen refers to these mylar images as astral projections and clearly they have emerged from the outer regions of photography itself – etheric spectres of the Image, psychic apparitions and alien visitations. This is the photography of the séance, and the quantum photography of other worlds.”

MORE ABOUT IRA COHEN – www.iracohen.org

"Until he came to London Kumti Majhi had never worn shoes before – he had never needed to."

Mining giant faces tribal protest

06 August 2007 – The Independent

Until he came to London Kumti Majhi had never worn shoes before – he had never needed to. A member of the Dongria Kondh, one of India’s most traditional tribes from the forested hills in the state of Orissa, he had never had any need to put any protection on his feet.

But the tribal leader knew shoes would be needed if he was to try to halt the construction of a £400m bauxite mine on the Niyamgiri Mountain, the Dongria Kondh’s homeland and a hill they worship as their god.

Since building of the mine and its adjacent alumina refinery first began in 2004 by the UK-based mining giant Vedanta Resources, a battle has raged between the FTSE-100 company on one side and environmentalists and tribal members on the other who say the mine has already caused untold misery and is an ecological disaster waiting to happen.

Last week Kumti Majhi travelled from his village to the annual general meeting of Vedanta Resources to inform shareholders of the fate of his people. Although reporters were banned from attending the AGM, The Independent spoke to Mr Majhi outside the Mayfair conference centre.

“Niyamgiri Mountain is a living god for us,” said the father of four who until now had never left the state of Orissa. “It has provided us with food, water and our livelihoods for generations. Even if we have to die protecting our god we will not hesitate, we will not let it go.”

On Thursday critics of the mine will finally find out whether their three-year campaign has been successful when the Indian Supreme Court sits to rule on the construction’s legality. Three petitioners have brought cases against Vedanta in what could be a landmark ruling .

A Supreme Court committee has already accused Vedanta of “blatant violation” of planning and environmental guidelines. A separate report from the Wildlife Institute of India also criticised the project citing its “irreversible” impact on the environment.

Activists say the project is a threat to the environment and to the distinct culture and practices of the three Kondh tribes that for centuries have had a symbiotic relationship with their sacred mountain, foraging and hunting in some areas and eschewing other areas out of respect.

Vedanta rejected accusations that the rehabilitation of families was unsuitable and strongly defended its environmental record saying the company had abided by all environmental regulations.

"He is Twilight's Last Gleaming."

The government has commissioned living weapons of mass destruction to wage war on terror. The survivors return home broken, bitter, insane. Some form gangs, some go psycho. Some turn into ‘A’ list celebrities with ‘A’ bomb fists. The city is now a war zone.

San Futuro needs a Super Cop to enforce summary justice. His eyes will reflect the rocket’s red glare. He is Twilight’s Last Gleaming.

MARSHAL LAW

A bad choice is better than no choice at all.

**********************************

“Top Shelf is proud to announce that it has just signed Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill’s MARSHAL LAW, and will publish a MARSHAL LAW Omnibus next year — THE all-up one-volume, full-color, 500(+)-page definitive MARSHAL LAW collection.”

The decline of the magazine cover

“In the 20’s and 30’s and on into the 40’s and even 50’s and 60’s the image on a magazine cover was all important, and standing out from the competition on the shelves was regarded as fundamental to its success. Stunning ‘Poster Covers’ as they were called were fêted by every magazine from Vogue to Vanity Fair, Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar, and of course Life magazine in photographic terms.

“Over time however the ‘Poster Cover’ and its defenders in the magazine’s Art rooms began to slowly lose favor to the philosophy of ‘cover lines‘ and what would begin as a whole new direction in magazine cover design. This I think can also be seen as a sure sign of the rising influence of marketeers and advertising suits within a magazine’s boardroom and the increased marginalization of its art department’s influence. The magazine cover had become in many cases no more than a grotesquely enlarged small ad.”

Continues here.

"Bread and Puppet continues, more than 40 years on, to live an ideal of art as collective enterprise, a free or low-cost alternative voice outside the profit system."

The New York Times- August 5, 2007

Spectacle for the Heart and Soul

By HOLLAND COTTER

GLOVER, Vt.

FOR the first time in many summers the Bread and Puppet Theater will travel nine hours from northern Vermont for a New York City gig, at Lincoln Center on Wednesday evening. Then the troupe will turn around and ride back to its farm just below the Canadian border, where it will put on the same show. You can easily spot the group en route: 1963 school bus, painted sky blue, with a mountain landscape, an angel and a beaming sun on the side.

People who know of the troupe without really knowing its work tend to link it to political street theater of the 1960s, an accurate but incomplete association. Recently I’ve been thinking of the theater in a contemporary context. At a time when the art industry is awash in cash and privilege, and theater tickets routinely go for $100 or more, Bread and Puppet continues, more than 40 years on, to live an ideal of art as collective enterprise, a free or low-cost alternative voice outside the profit system.

I have another association with the troupe: Bread and Puppet gave me the single most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen in a theater. That was in 1982, in the sloping, wide-open field that is part of the theater’s farm in Glover, Vt. There the collective was presenting a two-day festival, Our Domestic Resurrection Circus, as it had done almost every summer since relocating from the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early 1970s.

The circus, a bunch of political skits, concerts and vaudeville acts, took place in the afternoon, and it was fun. (The troupe’s Lincoln Center appearance will follow more or less this format, on a smaller scale.) Then at sunset came the pageant, a kind of morality play told in epic visual terms. During Vietnam the themes had been specific. Wrongs had a name and a solution: Stop the war. By the 1980s the issues had become many and complicated — threatened nature, global consumerism, nuclear dangers — and remedies far less sure. The 1982 pageant had an odd tone, brusque and apocalyptic. It opened with a bucolic scene: little cutout houses and trees carried onto the field, followed by puppets of dancing cows. Villagers in masks arrived, milked the cows, settled down to bed, woke up, had children who within minutes had children of their own. This was ordinary life set to haunting music: vigorous, low-church American folk hymns from the 19th-century collection “The Sacred Harp.”

Suddenly four dark puppet horses with devil riders wheeled in from afar, backed by a huge dragon. Almost without warning the devils waved black banners over the villagers, who fell to the ground, dead. The devils then piled the houses and horses together and set them alight. Good and evil alike were in flames. Moral chaos. End of story.

But not quite. As the fire burned, a half-dozen great white gulls or cranes — muslin kites carried on sticks by runners — soared up from the horizon and started flying in our direction. They came right to the flames and soared over them as if looking for signs of life. Then they circled back across the field, melting into darkness. It was fantastic. Only when they were out of sight did I see that night had fallen and stars were out. It felt like an impossible trick of stagecraft, a miracle. I had been simultaneously transported and pulled back to earth.

Continue reading →

"Assholes of the Week" by Paul Krassner

*Anybody who text messages while driving, unless the message being texted is, “Hey, what’s happening? I’m in my car now, just about to crash. Please say goodbye to my family. And if I cause someone’s death beside my own, would you sincerely apologize for me….”

*ABC News anchor Charles Gibson, for introducing a propaganda piece–“A bit of a surprise today. Two long and persistent critics of the Bush administration’s handling of the war today wrote a column in the New York Times saying that after a recent eight-day visit to Iraq they find significant changes taking place”–when in reality Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollock originally supported the war even before it began (Pollack’s 2002 book was titled “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq”). The next day, Dick Cheney perpetuated that party lie on Larry King Taped without being challenged. Cheney also insisted that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were secretly married in Massachusetts, then adopted a Chinese baby.

*The Southern Baptist Convention and Focus on the Family, for writing this joint letter to the American Psychological Association for considering a public denunciation of any attempt by therapists to change sexual orientation: “We believe that psychologists should assist clients to develop lives that they value, even if that means they decline to identify as homosexual.” They were also concerned that such an APA policy could lead to so-called heterosexuals undergoing conversion therapy in order to return to their gay roots.

*The Israeli government, for offering an increase of a mere $20 increase in its monthly $487 stipend for Holocaust survivors to compensate for years of neglecting its 240,000 citizens who suffered through the Nazi concentration camps. Ironically, survivor groups charge that they are now treated better in Germany than in Israel.

*Retired Lt. General Philip Kensinger, for lying about when he became aware that former football star Pat Tillman’s death in Afghanistan was actually caused by friendly fire, a cover-up allowing the U.S. to portray him as a hero. Kensinger confessed that he had been brainwashed as an adolescent when he saw the Paddy Chayefsky movie, “The Americanization of Emily.”

*Pepsico, for selling its Aquafina bottled water with a drawing of mountains over the nameplate to imply that the source of the water was mountain springs, although it is actually tap water. Henceforth their bottles will be labeled P.W.S. for “public water source” or, if you prefer, “piss without sodium.”

*Capitalism, for causing profits to trump compassion–Johnson & Johnson cuts 4,800 jobs and shares rise; Unilever cuts 20,000 jobs and shares rise–while addicts to the system continue to snort the bottom line.

*Rupert Murdoch, for demonstrating so blatantly how money buys power. Be on the lookout for the new Wall Street Enquirer, featuring a cover story on the economic repercussions of Hillary Clinton’s cleavage accompanied by a life-sized photo.

*Republican Senator James Inhofe, for calling global warming a hoax.

*Anti-asshole of the week: Jeff Berkin, deputy director of the FBI’s Security Division, for replacing its hypocritical 13-year drug policy disqualifying applicants from becoming agents if they had used marijuana more than 15 times. He explained that it created problems for those who, when asked in polygraph exams, couldn’t remember how many times they had smoked pot.
——–
Paul Krassner is the author of “One Hand Jerking: Reports From an Investigative Satirist,” and publisher of the Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster, both available at paulkrassner.com.

"Workers of the world… relax!"

THE ABOLITION OF WORK
by Bob Black

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By “play” I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.

The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for “reality,” the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously — or maybe not — all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.

Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx’s wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists — except that I’m not kidding — I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work — and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs — they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They’ll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don’t care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.

You may be wondering if I’m joking or serious. I’m joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn’t have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn’t triviality; very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I’d like life to be a game — but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.

Continue reading →

This Sat in L.A. – Don Bolles celebrates 51st birthday

“Bolles here. Y’all might be interested to
check out my birthday extravaganza on Saturday, August
4th, @ Thee Fractal Space Pyramid, 122 Glendale Blvd,
Los Angeles (next door to the Bob Baker Marionette
Theater). I’m asking a $10 donation, but it’s going to
be pretty *^$%^# action-packed. First, there’s the
debut of Nora Keyes and Don Bolles FANCY SPACE PEOPLE,
with our lovely new drummer, Bionic Billy Blaze; we’re
premiering our new Dr. Bronners’ Anthem, “All One (or
none)”, and there will be soap giveaways! There’s
MAYBE a secret Germs set (if Pat wants to do it) and
definitely a set of 45 Grave “hits” performed by Thee
Snow Snake Orchestra, a band with twice as many
original 45 Grave members as the thing that’s going
around calling itself 45 Grave and that sucks. I (that
would be moi, Don Bolles) play guitar and mostly do
the vocals, Paul Roessler (Screamers, 45 Grave, Nina
Hagen Band, Twisted Roots, Nervous Gender) plays
keyboards and sings, Cayt Scandal (Civet) plays drums,
and there are some VERY groovy celebrity guests slated
to appear. And we’re opening with Court of the Crimson
King, complete with Mellotron, so attendance is
mandatory, one would imagine, for Arthur readers. I’m
DJing, as is QUIN BRAYTON, and you can bet we’ll be
playing the shit out of the good shit, alll night
long! There’s beer — even Heffeweissen — and stuff,
so come on down. And it’s okay to bring me presents. I
don’t mind, really.

Thanks, and hope to see ya there… Space Rock all
night with us!”

world wide tuning meditation

7:00 PM August 21, 2007
Damrosch Park Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival NYC
and
Malibu Creek State Park, CA

There will at first be clouds or clusters of sounds. Eventually the clouds and clusters transform into harmonies, with common tones moving through the sound field as tuning takes place on many levels, actually and metaphorically.

The World Wide Tuning Meditation is offered in the spirit of bringing many people together through sharing a simple way of sounding and listening together. Sounding in the way proposed is open to all regardless of experience. Language is not a barrier as there are no words, only vowel sounds that are common to all.

Each person is invited to make their own private and silent dedication of intentions for this community of voices to have effect, personally and for radiating to others, out to the world.
How would you like for your sound to affect the world?

Tuning score by Pauline Oliveros

The World Wide Tuning Meditation (2007)
Begin by taking a deep breath and letting it all the way out with air sound.
Listen with your mind’s ear for a tone.
On the next breath using any vowel sound, sing the tone that you have silently perceived on one comfortable breath.
Listen to the whole field of sound the group is making.
Select a voice distant from you and tune as exactly as possible to the tone you are hearing from that voice.
Listen again to the whole field of sound the group is making.
Contribute by singing a new tone that no one else is singing.
Continue by listening then singing a tone of your own or tuning to the tone of another voice alternately.
Commentary:
Always keep the same tone for any single breath. Change to a new tone on another breath.
Listen for distant partners for tuning
Sound your new tone so that it may be heard distantly.
Communicate with as many difference voices as possible.
Sing warmly!

For more information and to commit to perform in NYC check out the Deep Listening Institute.
Sympathetic activity happening in the abandoned water tower in Malibu State Park. Info here.