11/19/2013

Fungi-based plastic alternative wins Buckminster Fuller Challenge

"In addition to being one of 10 esteemed finalists in the Cradle to Cradle Product Innovation Challenge, Ecovative Design — AKA the New York-based startup behind a game-changing bio-material that's “grown” from agricultural waste and mushroom mycelia and can be used for packaging, insulation, and more — has won the sixth annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge.
 
Last year, top honors went to the Living Building Institute.
 
Deemed as “Socially-Responsible Design’s Highest Award” by Metropolis magazine, the Buckminster Fuller Challenge aims to “support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity's most pressing problems.” In this particular instance, the pressing problem at hand would be our reliance on highly polluting conventional plastics. With this big win, Ecovative Design has exemplified a famous quote from the late futurist, "gentle revolutionist," and father of the geodesic dome himself, Buckminster Fuller: “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

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11/17/2013

Ritual and Doctrine of the Illuminati

One day, i rekon somebody will put Illuminati history to verse using such great source material. What a wonderful project, Illuminati history in verse, keeping such fellows as Joyce, Pound, and Yeats in mind when contemplating the delivery. x fly

Ritual & Doctrine of the Illuminati

Monday, August 12th, 2013

Well, the cat’s out of the bag. Jeva Singh-Anand, Josef Wäges, and Illuminaten scholar Reinhard Markner have been collaborating on an English translation of the ritual work of the Illuminati. All the rituals will be featured, from the Novice degree all the way to lesser and greater mysteries, including Regent and Provincial directives, Epopt and Doceten degrees. Conservatively, I’d estimate that the total amount of pages will be over five-hundred at the very least. This amounts to the most significant English translation of primary material in over 200 years.

Joe Wages has been assiduously collecting all of the original writings of the Illuminati with a view toward just such an endeavour. His hard work, dedication, personal funds, and especially the translating talent and hard work of Jeva Singh-Anand have finally paid off. All of this, combined with the knowledge and expertise of Markner, is really something to behold. Hats off all around – great work guys!

Jeva Singh-Anand has posted on his site, a taste – Illuminatus major – of what to look forward to. Please read and link.

As far as the ritual itself, I’m not qualified to comment. I’m not a mason myself, so I can’t assess where or whence it came from. Joe Wages, however, has come to the conclusion that a lot of the ceremony derives from the Strict Observance rite, which Knigge had much knowledge and expertise.
The good thing about this material being published for the first time in English is the fact that all of us will have the originals to look at. We can then judge it on our own level of understanding of the masonic milieu and popular philosophy of the 18th century.
The conspiratorial aspects, I’ll interject, are plainly seen for those who look closely.


http://www.bavarian-illuminati.info/

11/12/2013

The Late Great Robert Anton Wilson Event Part 1 - John Higgs


One day before heading down to London on the bus from Dudley, to see the show at the Horse Hospital i had the following experience:

yesterday, in Stourbridge i had an encounter with an Angel, or what Arthur Koestler calls...'the library angel' category of coincidence, or in my case the charity shop Angel. Let me explain, i walked into the British heart foundation shop and started scanning the books, and within just 2 minutes i found 'The Wild Boys' by William S. Burroughs for a bargain price of £1.50, and on the shelf below a copy of 'The Trial' by Franz Kafka for just 50p. A few hours later i opened up 'Wild Boys' and on the acknowledgment page i became spooked to discover that the only text mentioned, for permission to quote from is non other than 'The Trial' by Franz Kafka. A splendid intersection point and angelic contact coincidance.





"Published on 3 Nov 2013
The Late Great Robert Anton Wilson Event Part 1 - John Higgs

Watch Part 2: http://youtu.be/HsBWj5jNadw

John Higgs (http://twitter.com/johnhiggs/ http://johnhiggs.com/)
Daisy Eris Campbell (http://twitter.com/DaisyEris/)
Hosted By Scott Wood of The London Fortean Society (http://twitter.com/ForteanLondon/ http://forteanlondon.blogspot.co.uk/)

at The Horse Hospital 23/Oct/2013"


11/11/2013

Ezra Pound and Film adaptations of fragments from the Cantos

Hamilton celebrates Ezra Pound’s 128th Birthday

By Max Newman '16
October 31, 2013
Forum on Image and Language and Motion (F.I.L.M.) celebrated Hamilton alumnus and late poet Ezra Pound’s 128th birthday last Wednesday with a night full of history and experimental film adaptations.
Associate Professor of English Steve Yao opened the discussion with a detailed history of Pound from his time at Hamilton to his death in Venice in 1972. Professor Yao claimed, “Pound is arguably the most important poets of the 20th century,” referencing his controversial support of Benito Mussolini and fascism.

A graduate of the Hamilton Class of 1905, Pound portrayed his social and political beliefs in his poetry. “Pound’s goal was to solidify free verse as the dominant mode in American Literature,” Professor Yao said. Pound’s poems draw on revolutionary era American history, Chinese history and his own experiences.

Professor Yao describes Pound’s poetry as “difficult” and “mystical” because of its political commentary through romance language. This is especially true in The Cantos, Pound’s unfinished poem split into 120 sections. The poem was highly controversial as politics became heated at the start of World War II. Pound takes the reader through his ideas, focusing on oppression in China due to government corruption.

Professor Yao ended his opening words by introducing the evening’s main attraction: “Emergency-room physician in Toronto by day (and night), Bernard Dew has an aesthetic calling and artistic gift: he is a devotee of experimental poetry, and Ezra Pound in particular, and is fascinated with avant-garde film, especially the work of Stan Brakhage. In recent years Dew has brought these fascinations together in a series of remarkable cinematic adaptations of selections from Pound’s epic Cantos.”

Many of Pound’s poems are ekphrastic, written verses in response to visual images or paintings. Dew brilliantly took the text and turned them back into images through his films portraying Cantos #49 and #116. Four years in the making, Dew primarily gathered footage from Venice, Pound’s home for the last few decades of his life as well as his burial ground.

In Canto #49, Dew has a typewriter-at-work overtone throughout the movie as 15mm film images flash on and off the screen. The grainy collage of film allows the viewer, for even just a few minutes, to journey inside Pound’s complex poetic mind. The images move quickly from beautiful Italian architecture to abstract color flashes Dew filmed in his basement.

In his final completed Canto, #114, Pound reflects upon the poem as a whole. “It’s especially moving to see him questioning himself,” Dew said. Rarely do poets question the legitimacy of their work, yet Pound explores his crisis in depth.

Dew portrayed the beauty of Pound’s reflection by filming the first half of the Canto in in silence. Images of long, drawn-out ocean waves fill the screen in silence as if representing Pound’s mind at work.

Bernard Dew offers an intriguing perspective on Pound’s legacy. Although the films will unlikely appear in a theater near you, the adaptations are slowly circling around the world depicting Pound’s poetry in a language that is universal.

http://students.hamilton.edu/spectator/arts-entertainment/p/hamilton-celebrates-ezra-pound-s-128th-birthday/view

Robert Anton Wilson: further musings by steve fly

 Robert Anton Wilson: further musings by steve fly


Robert Anton Wilson spent over 50 years producing original thoughts and ideas, criss-cossing academic boundaries like a flock og migrating birds. All-at-once an independent scholar, social critic, comedian, playwright, poet and novelist. RAW lived through WWII, the cold war, the 1960s counter culture explosion, the digital technological millennium and the globalization of humanity by way of the world wide web. RAW kept a front row seat next to other great scientific philosophers of the 20th/21st century, observing patterns and communicating with great care and attention to language, meaning and clarity, what he suspects is going on.

RAWs approach to the questions confronting all American citizens, and so by default the entire planet, currently under the boot of the U.S.A, are critical alternative perspectives and insights desperately lacking from both the public and academic discourse, and that have new roads into almost every department of any existing academic center you care to think of. Yet, what i find most stimulating about RAW and his ideas circles around his fierce independence and adherence to the principle of thinking for oneself, questioning everything and constantly reformulating based upon new data.

Every human being on earth can benefit from literacy, and RAWs particular take on the human condition features the development of language and critical reasoning as tools to enable good functioning in a chaotic universe, inhabited by shadows, distractions, illusions and disinformation. I feel that RAW left us all with examples of how best to confront confusion, propaganda and low level information warfare, his life as a case study and scientific experiment, in the tradition of R. Buckminster Fuller and Dr John Lilly, where they're own mind-body system is recognized to be a scientific laboratory itself, and so the nervous system and linguistic operating system also can be seen as scientific instruments.

It strikes me, when i surf around the web and more often read newspaper headlines and/or watch TV shows, that in 2013 a large proportions of professional scientists, and almost ALL politicians seem to have not picked up on this principle of 'inprobable objectivity' at all. On the contrary, the direction of most political and popular scientific discourse seems to be skewed towards materialist ideology and a 'bad' use of language, manipulated and squeezed through various filters to attract either/or investors, voters, or whatever ends maybe required, e.g, higher carbon monoxide limits, or the use of genetically modified seeds. There are an increasing amount of people waking up the coercion and trickery played by authoritarian structures, so as to keep the position of authority right where it is, with a centrist, top down, capitalist model. An Aristotelian war-head.

RAWs ideas and special writings smash away hundreds of rotten foundations that support these authoritarian monsters, often targeting the strongest parts of his opposing arguments, so as to be sure to totally demolish them. RAW has referred to himself as a libertarian anarchist, and a 'guerrila ontologist' in the past. I think these descriptions help distinguish his kind of constructive and cheerful criticism from the dull speculations and sensational garbage i detect in many of today's so called 'exposers of the truth' not least those who claim to be uncovering the all powerful 'Illuminati'. A hugely popular meme in 2013, largely due to the bastardization of RAWs ideas, along with a handful of others during the 1960s war on some culture.

 --Steve Fly Agaric
23 November 2013.
Amsterdam