As the Cosmic Yule Turns...

 

 

 

 

 ... expect a brighter tomorrow... no matter what the Overlords decree.  Happy Holidays to all!

(Note: for more Lisa Gerrard, visit Trans-D's holiday post.)

 

 

 

Cheers(!) to another imaginary year...

 

Once In A Lifetime

"And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, "Well... how did I get here?"

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

And you may ask yourself, "How do I work this?"
And you may ask yourself, "Where is that large automobile?"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful house"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful wife"

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Water dissolving and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Under the water, carry the water
Remove the water at the bottom of the ocean

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, into the silent water
Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

And you may ask yourself, "What is that beautiful house?"
And you may ask yourself, "Where does that highway go to?"
And you may ask yourself, "Am I right? Am I wrong?"
And you may say to yourself, "My God! What have I done?"

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, into the silent water
Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money's gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was and look where my hand was
Time isn't holding up, time isn't after us
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Letting the days go by, same as it ever was

Here a twister comes, here comes the twister
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Once in a lifetime, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by"

- Lyrics to Once In a Lifetime (1980) by the Talking Heads.

***

It's all in our heads, my friends, all in our heads...

Heads in a Net of Pearls - DS 2020

Once again, this goes out to Mac in the multiverse: Happy Birthday, baby!

PS   Mac's Blip.fm link on the sidebar has been repaired.

 

 

The Little Prince Returns

"The loveliest and saddest landscape in the world..."

 "Here, then, is a great mystery. For you who love the little prince, and for me, nothing in the universe can be the same if somewhere, we do not know where, a sheep that we never saw has - yes or no? - eaten a rose...

Look up at the sky. Ask yourselves: Is it yes or no? Has the sheep eaten the flower? And you will see how everything changes...

And no grown-up will ever understand that this is a matter of so much importance."

***

"This is, to me, the loveliest and saddest landscape in the world. it is the same as that on the proceeding page, but I have drawn it again to impress it on your memory that the little prince appeared on earth, and disappeared.

Look at it carefully so that you will be sure to recognize it in case you travel someday to the African desert. And, if you should come upon this spot, please do not hurry on. Wait for a time, exactly under the star. Then, if a little man appears who laughs, who has golden hair and refuses to answer questions, you will know who he is. If this should happen, please comfort me. Send me word that he has come back."

 - Two excerpts (and two illustrations) from the final pages of Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. (See previous October 18th post,)

 

A Virtual Birthday Card

"Happy Birthday to Mac in the Multiverse"
Corvid-20 sculptures and photo - 2020, BG Dodson
(Click to enlarge)

Mac,

From All of Us

To all of You -

OX

Putting Things in Perspective

 

A Contaminated Culture (2)

A live version of Peter Gabriel's tribute/lament to Bantu Stephen Biko, a South-African anti-apartheid activist who was arrested and beaten to death by Port Elizabeth state security officers in 1977.


"You can blow out a candle
But you can't blow out a fire
Once the flames begin to catch
The wind will blow it higher."

- The last stanza of "Biko", 1980 Peter Gabriel.

A Contaminated Culture

Maybe it's just me, but, from Mac's expression in this 2008 self-portrait
(shot from a cell-phone), he seems to be peering into the future...
and that future is now.  

"SARS is an unknown disease. We don't know where it came from; the possibility exists that it came from space or was cooked up by a terrestrial lab. Already, the virus is mutating. Just beneath the calm surface of newspaper headlines, a viral storm is brewing. We'll probably weather this one out. But what about the next one? And the one after that? 

A barrage of mutations, new vectors, failed quarantines. A choking silence engulfs the planet..."

- Mac Tonnies via this April 17, 2003, blog post. (Note: the initial strain of the 2020 Corona virus was referred to as SARS-Cov-2.)

"Up early. New short-story idea: "The Other Room" (based on a futuristic version of the 'looking glass' technology described in the previous post). In the story, venturing outdoors is rendered virtually impossible due to genetically contrived airborne diseases and pollution. Interpersonal contact is limited to communing with 'neighbors' via high-rez wallscreens. The screens are so advanced that they're easily mistakable for actual separate rooms, fostering a sense of enhanced personal space.

The main character has lived his adult life 'sharing' his germicidally insulated apartment with a female love interest. But all they can do is look at each other and talk; it's as if they're on opposite sides of an invisible glass barrier (which, in a very real sense, they are).

Anyway, toward the end of his life something goes wrong with the programming of his homeostatic apartment building and he realizes that the woman in the 'other room' is a computer program designed to keep him from going crazy -- she never existed; he's wasted his life pining away over a simulacrum. And the World Outside is worse than he's imagined.

. . . And they all lived happily ever after."

- Mac Tonnies via this March 15, 2004 blog post. (Note: From the Life Imitates Art files, here's a couple of recent articles about proposed legislation in England: Sex is now illegal in the UK between people from different households, and the BBC article, Coronavirus: New laws come into force as England lockdown eases. I'm not sure if said legislation passed, but I certainly hope not!)

"Although I harbor serious reservations about humanity's ability to make the evolutionary cut, I'm not without hope. I sense great things in the making. I enjoy experiencing this dire, ever-accelerating point in our species' history; our potential as genuine cosmic citizens challenges the imagination and stretches conceptual boundaries to dizzy extremes.

I'm willing to embrace transcendence or endure extinction. I must perpetually concede either possibility, no matter how dramatically different, regardless of how exciting or dismal. I walk a fine existential edge, fearing and cherishing, enlivened by a vertiginous sense of astonishment and horror."

- Mac Tonnies via this April 19, 2006 Posthuman Blues blog post.


"The New Totalitarians come forward smiling obsequiously like head waiters in third-rate Indian restaurants, and assuring us that everything is for our benefit." 

- A quote from British author J. G. Ballard (1930-2009) posted on Posthuman Blues December 09, 2004.

***

Originally this post was meant to present a number of blog quotes from Mac's Posthuman Blues posts tagged "disease," with the notion that, while it's not possible to determine Mac's view on our current world crisis, reading bits of his output regarding past epidemics might be somewhat illuminating... although the fall-out from past disasters wasn't as severe as that which we are currently experiencing.

That was my intention anyway. But, after spending a great deal of time gathering together Posthuman Blues material, I found some of it disturbing but much more of it consisting of quotes pulled directly from news-pages with merely a sentence or two ad libbed by Mac  it seemed almost  pointless. Well, pointless except to remind us of certain historical information that many of us may have forgotten, although the last of the disease posts was written in 2007, merely over a decade ago.

For example, I don't know if many of us ever knew about this event (via this April 13, 2005 post), one for which Mac reserved comment:

"Labs scramble to destroy pandemic flu strain. Nearly 5,000 labs in 18 countries, mostly in the United States, were urged by the World Health Organization to destroy samples of the dangerous virus because of the slight risk it could trigger a global outbreak. The labs received the virus from a U.S. company that supplies kits used for quality control tests."

And, then again, there were those three bubonic plague-infested lab mice which went missing from a biocontainment lab in New Jersey posted on September 25th of that same year. Mac's comment?

"So far no one has been reported dead from bubonic plague, so it looks like we lucked out. Emphasis on "luck."

Lest we forget, also from 2005 (apparently a banner year for medical lab disasters) and posted on October 8th we have a report of a deadly Spanish-flu virus reconstructed by alumni at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and stock-piled in Georgia... supposedly under "strict safety conditions" and (allegedly) to "predict future pandemics and develop new vaccines and treatments." Interestingly, its DNA sequence was made available on the internet. Understandably, Mac compares those "strict safety conditions" with the earlier story about the rodents at large.

One of his final disease posts - Plague of bioweapons accidents afflicts the US - from July 25th, 2007, begins with the sentence: "Deadly germs may be more likely to be spread due to a biodefence lab accident than a biological attack by terrorists."

Ah, yes, as if "biodefense" wasn't potentially a form of terrorism. In any case, regarding the present pandemic, despite media efforts to bring global-warming into the fray and/or blame it on animal contact, etc., if recent history tells us anything it seems equally as likely (if not more) that the Corona virus strains originated and/or were contained in some medical lab or bio-weapons lab as was initially reported.* The worst-case aspect of this possibility is that a new pandemic cannot be very far behind. After all, not only can accidents happen, accidents will surely happen. This is a given. It's a Murphy's Law kind of thing... and I've heard Murphy was an optimist.**