Tuesday, January 22, 2013

MAYBE IT’S A BANG BUT MORE LIKELY IT’S A WHIMPER













It’s been a while since we ran anything by our pessimistic pal Chris Hedges. Maybe I was making the transition from US politics (barking and dangerous) to Euro politics (old, corrupt, and dangerous) but this scenario of doom is too good to miss. The Mayans didn’t put us out of our misery but capitalism may well do the deed.

“The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever,” Wright said. “It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have overrun the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger and better. We have to understand that this long period of expansion and prosperity was an anomaly. It has rarely happened in history and will never happen again. We have to readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world. But we are not doing it, because we are carrying far too much baggage, too many mythical versions of deliberately distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that what being modern is all about is having more. This is what anthropologists call an ideological pathology, a self-destructive belief that causes societies to crash and burn. These societies go on doing things that are really stupid because they can’t change their way of thinking. And that is where we are.”
And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we like past societies in distress will retreat into what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us. “Societies in collapse often fall prey to the belief that if certain rituals are performed all the bad stuff will go away,” Wright said. “There are many examples of that throughout history. In the past these crisis cults took hold among people who had been colonized, attacked and slaughtered by outsiders, who had lost control of their lives. They see in these rituals the ability to bring back the past world, which they look at as a kind of paradise. They seek to return to the way things were. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the 19th century, when the buffalo and the Indians were being slaughtered by repeating rifles and finally machine guns. People came to believe, as happened in the Ghost Dance, that if they did the right things the modern world that was intolerable—the barbed wire, the railways, the white man, the machine gun—would disappear.Click here for the rest

Click forthe Gates of Eden

The secret word is Hollow 

MARILYN SEZ…


“We’re all doomed. Get used to it.”

LOVE KNOWS NO BOUNDARIES

















The great H. R. Giger and his alien. Seemingly Giger is well pissed off by the lack of credit he has received for his creation. Click here to read all about it on Dangerous Minds.

THE FROZDICK FAMILY
















Seven bearded little Frozdicks meet with Fidel.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

SUNDAY BREAKFAST














Shinjuku is one of my favorite neighborhoods in the city of Tokyo, mainly because it’s wild, wooly, crazy-neon gorgeous, and a bit yakuza from what I could see. And also our good friend Yukiko lives there. It has an array of bars to rival Lower Manhattan or Brighton, buts it’s big on tourism and that spawns weirdness like the saloon in the picture that I couldn’t resist posting to share its bizarre wonder. I mean, could you imagine curing your Sunday morning coming-down hangover in a joint like that? I wouldn’t even fancy it for the Saturday drunk of the night before. (Did I mention the giant animatronic strippers?) Fortunately there is an invisible but very serious and very Japanese sign that says “NO ANARCHISTS, DOGS, OR ALCOHOLIC POETS “ The place is also way out of my pay grade and Tokyo social strata and they would never let me in which probably just as well but I still gawp such garish glory.

Click here for Don Henley’s best drunk song ever.

The secret word is Equilibrium

MARILYN SEZ…



















“Nothing was ever out of my pay grade.”