Orange You Glad

Suddenly this week I have found myself bizarrely affected by a film that has been in my life for decades. Its like falling in love with an old friend, a sudden awareness that "THERE you are, how could I have missed this?" This happens so often with things that we have taken for granted, with things that have been a part of our landscape for so long as to be nearly forgotten, in some fundamental way...that even if we mention it, see it, talk about it, some other roof of awareness might still remain to be passed in our understanding and appreciation of it.

Bowie brought me back there. Hearing "Ode to Joy" opening the Ziggy concert in the live film, it was suddenly impressed upon me how perfect it occupied that space, how much it told me of a subtext I had not given enough shrift.

Frankly it is as if you discover a new galaxy, and suddenly you are creating things to fit into that universe.
To me the main manifestation of this is pure color. Large swaths of color, as in the credits- deep primary tones, the blue houndstooth chairs in the living room, the melon walls, the orange and yellow 3-D blooms of the bedspread. All of it brings all things together- an esthetic point of reference that shines a light on hidden subtexts.
     Its aesthetic wholeness and perfection, its total-worldness, inspires even beyond the pure esthetic enjoyment of the space. It contains inside of it all things that I love the most. It is a trope that contains within it, all other tropes, and all the ones I love the best.

Plastic Promises

I am a modernist by nature. Considering the readings I have been doing on fascism lately, I am even more comfortable with this. The term "traditional values" stinks of the gulag and oppression for me, and history agrees with this assumption. When anyone tells you they want to go backwards, be afraid.

Looking back, however, is another story. Examination, contemplation. And modernism is rife with opportunities to do just that. The modern world is almost bursting with heavy matter- condensed experience. In fact it is so condensed that "looking back" into our nearest history is absolutely, deadly necessary. Things move so fast and fashion leaves so much behind, so much unsaid, that to me the Transistor Age (which, to my mind, is a far more appropriate starting point than the industrial age) could stand even MORE study. There are subtle currents everywhere. And the implications of those subtle currents are even more massive than they would be say, 300 years ago. The more things change the more rapidly they change. History's like some sort of kaleidoscopic spinning top in an avalanche, gathering momentum and new pictures all the way.

So you find yourself effecting by strange things that might be a new product of a new kind of history. The uncanny is part of that, but I realize there is this other fleeting feeling I have had all my life that catches me unawares, and interests me, and something I have wanted to write of for some time.

Its that WISH to comply with a commercial ideal. To want to believe in some fairy-tale magical way that a PRODUCT or a television show could really be a modern deliverance. To partake in that breathless sense that everything is possible through Products, and Chemistry, and commerce. How much HAPPIER you could be if you could let your truths go.

Since I became a teenager, television has infuriated me. Not the shows always, but the commercials. Some of them were so sublime (those early eighties Chanel ads were out of this world and I LOVED the Chanel ads in the late eighties with the model Ines de la Fressange, and collected them)....so you saw what was possible, that ads could be wonderfully seductive and enjoyable, really, so you were mostly just horribly disappointed and felt almost gypped in some kind of unconscious way. It was like a fat song and dance that you saw through from the first second. And those pro-American Wal-Mart ads just made me want to load up a gun and kill myself. Just vomitous and so treacly and unreal and PANDERING, really, to your basest stupidest instincts. I have always found patriotism to be terrifying anyway, in too large a dose.
(Sidebar-Lee Greenwood's pukey anthem "I'm Proud to be an American" was so strange to me and still is. It was bizarre and gutless. "Where AT LEAST I know I'm free"? I mean, it struck such a weird, bum note with me, that phrase. Its like the first part of that sentence is missing and that sentence is, "I may be homeless, and work at WalMart and my son was killed by cops and my other son died in Iraq for oil but AT LEAST I KNOW I'M FREE"! But I digress).

So on the one hand, I am a huge fan of commercial art, especially from the mid-sixties to the very late 70's, and I have found truly sublime, well done stuff that shows the potential to make public art very special. There is an elegance that, were it rendered in today's idioms and images, is liable to leave me cold.
But, looking back, there was a great era of creative work being done for public, commercial purposes that echoed a sense of forward-thinking that is so deeply missing from today's ads. Now there is this sense of wanting to go BACKWARDS, there is a "green" sensibility that is all fine and well and good but when it becomes tethered to "traditional values".....again, it's implications are very deep and very telling.

I miss the Space Age. I miss the age where everything was possible through SCIENCE. I fully understand that science too has its limits, like every human system- democracy, communism, psychology, religion. But I fully embrace the logical in human systems and discourse. Without logic, all arguments are rendered null and void. You find yourself arguing over the improvable, instead of being curious enough to test the limits and ask questions. You cannot argue with an evangelical.

It must be said here that I am a follower of Jesus all the way, and consider him a great revolutionary and a wonderful star to guide your ship by. But I abhor the vast majority of Christians and Christian Newspeak and groupthink and think they are heretics, to the core. They loathe the poor and only want to talk about abortion and gay marriage and no longer love their enemies, take care of their communities- the MLK Jesus is entirely absent from the 700 Club and "Left Behind" freak jobs that pass themselves off as Christians these days.
And with the rise of the evangelical Right comes with it a terrible hatred of intellectuals, science, and critical thinking. When you take a people who BELIEVE they will rise from the dead on Judgement Day, you are dealing with people who have no truck with the laws of even the farthest reaches of Quantum Physics. There is this bizarre denial of factual data, this complete reliance on their own interpretation of a vast trove of testaments that were discarded, shaped, and used to consolidate power and THEY DON'T ASK QUESTIONS. "Do I believe what John is saying when he contradicts Luke?" They don't ask that. They believe their CONFUSION is a blessing. That things are inherently unknowable and that to try is a heresy.
In this atmosphere, the Space Age strikes one as so much more inclusive, so much more of a kinder place to be.

I love and have begun collecting those Soviet space lapel pins (as I mentioned in my previous post) and that dizzying, swooping sense of a Great Future is a really, truly beautiful thing to me. "To the Stars"! is such a wonderful cry, a wonderful thing to reach for, far superior to a battle cry. That pride that just bursts from the vast amount of art created during that period of the Soviet space program (despite there being very compelling evidence that Gagarin was not the first Russian in space). A wonderful sense of possibility and BELIEF is written all over it.

I DEEPLY value the intellectual, the scientific, debate, questions and criticism. I am also happy with mysteries, and do in fact agree that much of our universe IS unknowable. But I am ALSO in love with the journey, of the discovery, the bizarre and wonderful universe that science sheds its light on. I don't believe in cloning, or bizarre monkeying-about with the forces of nature. But gaining and reaching for a deeper understanding of nature and asking those questions is just a fantastical thing, really. It is completely, in my opinion, in total accord with spiritual life.

So in that respect, its understandable that a certain class of advertisement or public art lends itself to a certain kind of romance. Arguably, that is its reason for existing, is to woo you. And I LIKE that feeling, frankly. And I am not sure why. I want to be complicit in that process. I want to believe- in a retrospective view through the lens of commercial art- that these things were POSSIBLE.

I have often been reminded, wandering and exploring on those magical odd detourments I take often , that there is a certain smell that wafts from a department store in summertime that I find very romantic. A sort of "woosh" as you walk past and the automated doors open, giving you a blast of frigid air and a bright, plastic scent. The hotter it is that day, the more magical the effect, and you don't even need to go inside to feel uplifted. Its sort of a naive sense of "everything is still all right with the world" in that the A/C is going, we have bright shiny products, people will smile at you, you will find something that will change your life......

This passes through my mind on such a subtle level that I forget to even be aware of it. It certainly makes a banal shopping trip that much more interesting. Wintertime is always grimmer somehow, shopping, what with Christmas and the vomitous music and the eye-raping displays of products you can never afford nor need at all. The romance goes out of it, and is only rescued by the enjoyment of the pretty lights or perhaps a small miniature scene on a white blanket of little trains going through tunnels, or talking dolls. That is the kind of nonsense I am always excited by. I'd rather to go to the Frye's electronics store in Burbank, with its crashed spaceship sticking out of the roof, that I would ever rather go to a Radio Shack (a store that used to REEK with analog stereo romance, and wonderful funky lights, and that solid-state smell I still so enjoy- and which has been entirely eradicated in favor of cell phone plans and IPhone cases).

Give me nonsense and romance. Give me a wonderland of scents and colors and mystery and promise. Don't try to convince me that you are going down to earth with all your green-zen-garden hardwood-floor-organic esthetic. You are NEVER going to be that and putting that on is a LIE. Its selling us a past for which we were ill-equipped and ripe for ruin in the first place. Simplicity is MY job. I don't want it sold to me as a lifestyle. NEVER.

I want the romance. The plastic promises. I know they can never be fulfilled. But I want to reach for something beyond myself. And commerce, and the terms it uses, can aid or abet any process. It is lifestyle propaganda. Putting a farmer in an advertisement will never convince me that that is your process. Or your lifestyle.

I like the older, more promising, more silvery and glittering, lies the best.

The Architectural Uncanny

"The contemporary sensibility that sees the uncanny erupt in empty parking lots around abandoned or run-down shopping malls, in the screened trompe l’oeil of simulated space, in, that is, the wasted margins and surface appearances of postindustrial culture, this sensibility has its roots and draws its commonplaces from a long but essentially modern tradition."

 Anthony Vidler


THIS. 

There is probably nothing else that has so defined my life, apart from love and depression, as the uncanny. Its something I have chased all my life. From a very young age, I wanted that same feeling as I had when I heard ghost stories told by my family- I wanted that wonderful sense of dread, wrapped up in safety. Something about that is just necessary for my mind. 

And the uncanny is literally defined as something that occurs in the most banal of environments. It isn't necessarily just a spooky building- its the fact that that spooky building is on a quite ordinary street. Its the juxtaposition, that tension. That sense of the surreal and spooky sidled up next to the almost grossly familiar. 

Even before I fell in love with business architecture (and by definition, in this context, disused business architecture) I remember a dream I had as a very young child, not more than five. It was so vivid. I was in a city, at night, and there was a skyscraper, with some of the offices inside lit up. The most ordinary thing. But in the dream it was absolutely breathtaking. There was involved by strange association, a potted palm. The type you find in lobbies, the type that by definition are probably not even real. I had a set of Childcraft Encyclopedias (bless them, with their wonderful sixties typography, psychedelic woodcuts and visions of cities of the future, glowing in a white-glitter utopia) and there was picture of a clown on a small stage with a potted palm. It looked so- weird to me. So night-like. The dark stage which I could see behind the fake wall. Every time I thought of that skyscraper dream, I thought of that potted palm.

So strange, like a piece of candy thrown into the junk drawer of your mind, adhering itself to other strange symbols. 

CCCRAzy

Not sure exactly what set it off, in retrospect it seems nearly accidental. But somehow I randomly decided to look up ticket prices between here and Russia, and found them to be cheap. Very cheap. Remembering a longtime desire to visit Chernobyl, I started snooping around and found, again, cheap tours, cheap hotels, and an article that stated that the two cheapest tourist destinations for 2015 were the Ukraine, and Russia.
And, spookily enough, found that a momentarily lost brother of mine is apparently traveling right now in Eastern Europe and the former CCCR (USSR).

Fancy that.

Of course, the fact that Putin is doing his KGBest to raise a dead Soviet Union from the ashes by making a play for the Ukraine (and Georgia, and Chechnya, etc.) probably renders those countries a bit tricky to actually visit as of this writing. So, apart from Chernobyl, which is a must-see and far out of the reaches of Eastern Ukraine (the hotspot and border), I have decided to forego any travel there for the moment.

For the moment.

But it really sent me off into a wonderland, which is a healthy thing for me to be sent off in every couple or so years. If you are an artist you know what I am talking about. I think that every artist's esthetic should evolve, like a growing thing. It should take signals from the air around it. Its good to get a slug of something that gets you all jazz-handy and jumping around, something that informs your brain weather and gives you new pictures.

Principle among these new obsessions, and a place that has actually begun to eclipse Chernobyl for me, is Buzluzdha.

Say it with me.
Buzluzdha. 
Just the sound of it makes my eyes roll back into my head. 

I have never been so obsessed with a building. 

These pictures come from Damien Richter's amazing Bohemian Blog. I insist that you visit. I warn you tho, if you are at ALL into abandoned places, you will be up all night reading of his exploits. But Buzluzdha tops them all for me. 

Its an abandoned Communist Party HQ, built in 1981. Terrifying in its concrete glory, it stands isolated on a mountain in Bulgaria. I have spent countless hours of late reading about it, planning a whole vacation around it, dreaming of it, thinking of laying in its frightening, hulking maw. These pictures don't even include its fascinating inner auditorium, which features a hammer and sickle in its center.....YOU MUST see more photos. Do this. Fall down the rabbit hole as I did. 

Its almost like some Brutalist beast, or some kind of UFO. Never have I seen a building that just made me want to fall down in front of it in terror and some kind of awe. But awe gone all the way is probably alot like terror. Something biblical in that, I am sure. 

It isn't just Buzluzdha, tho. That held the key that unlocked a flood of other associations, and it left me wondering why it had taken me so long to notice that many of my favorite things or fascinations- clean lines, Brutalist architecture, abandonment, time warps and disquiet- are all to be found in the former Soviet Union, in big, fat, terrifying hordes. 

I have long had a fascination with the poles- particularly the Antarctic, just because of Captain Scott really. But something about snowy places began to seem very surreal to me. Very frightening. Unknowable. Maybe its because of "The Shining", but winter, REAL winter- and places rendered uninhabitable by the cold- hold a real claim on my imagination. Throw some abandoned satellites in there and some old hulking concrete Commie monuments and you have a recipe for Place I Must See Now. (I do understand that not all of EE or Russia lies under a constant blanket of snow. But winters get real there, lets not kid ourselves).

SO that sends you off on a million tangents. Every day for weeks now I have been googling "abandoned Eastern Europe" or "communist architecture" and peeing myself looking at the pictures. I don't even know what to see first. I read everything I can find, have combed through pages upon pages of Youtube searches, and that sends you off into another rabbit hole. Soviet Sci-fi, for instance.  Or Soviet space docus!!!! I mean, don't even get me started. 

I am learning that if you are someone like me who obsessively collects content (videos of all sorts) and has for years, you have probably plundered through mountains of crap looking for jewels and you get real good at sifting. Since I am constantly chopping up film to make videos and VJ I had gotten that smug sense that I had pretty much devoured the lion's share of what was out there, and just kept my eye out for recent uploads- no need to march into the hinterlands and beat the bushes like in years past. This is how I learned that you are doing yourself a disservice if you are not diligently searching Youtube using foreign search terms. I Babelfished "Soviet advertisement" and getting the phrase "CCCR реклама", I unleashed a torrent of creaky old adverts that I will probably spend the next few months sifting through. Adverts with music whose provenance can only be guessed at (one doubts that Soviet officials- and I use the term to cover all its Bloc officials as well- were too concerned about properly crediting the music they ripped off), whose meanings and products are hidden in a Cyrillic fog. Which makes them WAY more fun. 

And then there are things that give you a glimpse of the daily life of your ordinary citizen. 

Witness this housewife's ad for some fryer contraption. A carousel of amazing strange fryups are panned over dramatically. But the thing I find most fascinating about this advert is, glancing out the window, you see a typical Soviet apartment bloc and bleak, gray skies. 

I certainly don't want to dissolve many generations of pain and paranoia into a a mere artistic statement. But I can't help but be fascinating with the entire Soviet schlock- the bizarre architecture, the cold formality of a dead satellite, the eavesdropping spookiness of it all. 

I have been told that to travel to Russia, its best to have a friend on the ground to show you the ropes. As a new friend said, "things can go wrong there very fast". I have never liked authority, and have always quaked and jabbered in the presence of cops as if i carted dead bodies or kilos of coke round in my trunk (and I have never done either). I can't even imagine being given the "show me your papers" number by a real, bonafide Russian official. I would probably start crying and apologizing for whatever American crimes I am supposed to be guilty of by association. I just have no spine in those circumstances. I can't even imagine what it must have been like to KNOW that informers are a part of every single human enterprise- even down to the grocery store you work at. I can't imagine living under a dictatorship.

And maybe that's something to do with why I find Communist leavings so interesting. I have often thought about how all the abandoned factories all over America, all the middle-American abandoned cornfield-adjacent ghost towns, the entirety of Detroit, told a story about a passing age. "This bank/fast food/housing project/factory is gone now because (insert poignant-and-possibly-angering reason here)." It really told a story to me.

When you put this level of abandonment as it stands in Eastern Europe and Russia, the story told is FAR more poignant and spectral than ours. There are still countless stories waiting to be told, and probably many are being covered over afresh by Putin as we speak. Because Putin is very much of the old guard. He is a former KGB man who has been laying the groundwork for the resurrection for much of his life. He wants to bring all of it back-with a capitalist swagger thrown on top. He has NO PROBLEM with coming off as the ultimate James Bond villain. He is like something out of a spy novel. And he is for real, and he controls much of Europe's energy supply, due to his making-nice with Europe (and screwing Ukraine/Chechnya in the process). He doesn't care if you think he is an underhanded sonofabitch. His flat effect and strange attempts at seeming like a "regular guy" are somehow terrifying. If anyone on earth could start WW3, be sure its not some guy in a cave wearing a robe and a machine gun, ISIS notwithstanding. 

So. Luckily, it thus far appears that he will keep his hands off EE for the time being. This summer I shall go there. 

Melanie Gaydos and the Myth of "New Beauty"

                                                           photo by Eric Lee Bowman

Melanie Gaydos.
I love you.
I want others to love you.
But I have to be careful in my approach.

Melanie Gaydos is a model. She was born with something called ectodermal dysplasia. This changes one's ability to grow hair, have sweat glands, effects the nails and teeth, and in fact seems to be an umbrella term that encompasses a wide range of unusual detours from the norm. Hers is a severe case. But she wanted to be a model. And she is one. A high fashion, fine art model, perhaps one day on a runway, already featured in a number of music videos.

One thing straight tho.
The more time I spend with her pictures, the more I think of her, the more I understand her, the harder it is to stand the obvious pandering that happens. People love her DESPITE her face. People think, "oh, poor girl, how brave, that DESPITE her face, she wants to be a model. How sweet". They commend her on her bravery (which of course she must have, truly), they deride the norms of beauty and focus on her body (because "DESPITE" her face her body is, it is true, extraordinary, and so on).

I have to say that I honestly, truly, DO think she is beautiful. This isn't some soft-peddling of what is obviously a face that is unusual, a disease that I am sure has caused her numerous difficulties in her life. But the more I look, the more I see, and the more I feel awake. I feel like another sense opens up when I see her. It isn't some pitytrip for a woman suffering. Its someone looking at another and saying, "no, you know, I really LIKE this. I really DO think this is something else. I want more of this in my life".
Her mouth, in particular, I find beautiful. When she wears lipstick, her face takes on such a wonderful shape that it blows my mind.

The WAY she conveys in her photos- there is something she is bringing forth that i can't put my finger on. Its like she is dispensing this new wisdom or something. I kept thinking, "new beauty"....

but that's bullshit.

Beauty is beauty. As she herself said, "beauty is a state of being...I have never felt I was ugly and I don't feel that way now".
It isn't about saying, "yes, maybe, I could look at that and not feel sorry for her and I think her struggle is beautiful, poor girl". NO. NO.
It really isn't that.
Beauty is beauty. Just because you get locked in and fooled by an overwhelming majority doesn't mean that when someone like Melanic comes along (which is, of course, never) you should softpedal and make it sound like she is no different from others. She is AMAZINGLY different. She is WONDERFULLY different.

You may, upon first seeing her face, be shocked. I was. I had to know- is she real? What is happening here?
Then I got really profoundly touched by her interview for "What's Underneath". I cried. Alot.
Then I got over it.
She is so much more than even THAT.

The more I look the more I am amazed. When I spend some time with her photos and then look at other people, its just not as interesting. Its just not as....yes, beautiful.

The whole dialog of "stretching" one's idea of beauty to encompass Melanie Gaydos is just.....shit. Its shit. What is beauty? Really? Symmetry? A body without scars? A mouth that is not a cleft palate? Can a cleft palate be beautiful?

I think it is. I am glad to learn this lesson and not be someone crying. She is beautiful to me. There is no "new" beauty, just new eyes to see what has always been. Its an extraordinary lesson in my own bullshit. And a lesson in keeping your eyes and mind open.

Jamaican Noir

I decided to make a playlist that exemplified that sound that i have started calling "Jamaican Noir". There is that subsect of Jamaican stuff whether it be dub or ska that has a disquieting tone to it....like a shadow cast of a long gunman after dark in the streets of trenchtown. Noir is the only thing to call it.

The first song in this mix is Big Youth's "Keep Your Dread"....which just sounds so shadowy and worried that it starts things off at the very right tone. There are a few tracks here like "Blacula" that might not have the most worried tone, but they have a MAD tone that just sounds like everyone is on a bad trip. There are 35 songs total on this playlist, just download the zip file and open everything up and the playlist will just populate in order. Apart from the first couple songs I didn't agonize too much about the order. Didn't do any crossfades- this is all just raw MP3's. Wish I had the time and the right material to make an accompanying clip loop but I alas do not.

You can download it all here. Enjoy.

Creepypasta, Memes, Orbis Tertius and Time Away

haven't spent much time nurturing this blog of late. had a bit of a crisis of confidence, as they call it, in my life and my esthetics. i recently left a collective in los angeles that i had been a part of for five years. was hellbent on either writing a book or making a film about Broadcast, but James cannot be involved due to his schedule and his still-overwhelming grief. I am hoping that someday that story will still be told, but it might be a long while. in any case, my own work must go on, which consists of my education, and focusing more on the fine arts. I have moved into a new place which is providing me with alot of peace and time to get things realigned in my mind. i have definitely been suffering from a lack of creativity, but today i felt the forces come back and am back on the case, working on a new video and getting some other things, like my website for my video work/vjing, up and running.

now that that explanation is out of the way i would like to share some interesting intersections.

a few days ago, i spent the evening as i sometimes do wandering round the web. being at an impasse will do that to you. but i rediscovered a fascinating bit of 21st century fiddling that i have been fascinated with for a while- the creepypasta.

for those that don't know, a creepypasta is a meme or false mythology that is made with two intentions- to frighten, and to go viral. its the internet equivalent of an urban legend, but constructed specifically with the knowledge that it is not true, with (so i surmise) the hopes that others will believe it is true.

my longtime favorite in this genre centered around a 1970's children's show called "Candle Cove". Apparently this was a television show with dark undertones and lots of children screaming, and there were purported viewers of this show that remembered watching it as a child. These "memories" featured this tidbit- their parents claimed that the entire time they were viewing it, all the parent could see on the tv was static.


some more very strange creepypastas can be found here.

for some reason, it only occurred to me this weekend how Borgesian this all is. It instantly reminded me of the story "Orbis Tertius" by jorge luis borges, one of my favorite writers. In this story, a false mythology/cosmology by a Council of 100 is distributed, inseminated really, throughout the culture. The idea was to supplant reality by rewriting history. every time a member of the council died, they were replaced, ensuring that the rewriting would go infinitely. Language, flora and fauna, everything was being re-imagined over hundreds of years, seeping into the culture with the eventual aim of eradicating the previous human history completely.

i have always been a fan of urban legends, and am fascinated with the way they occur and what they say about the culture that they infiltrate. its also fascinating to realize that people are unwitting participants in the building of myths, which really are what urban legends are. the idea that groups of people purposefully have chosen to create new urban legends, release them and watch them go is very interesting to me. and it brings up a lot of interesting notions.

first off, there are a few creepypastas i have stumbled on without realizing their false provenance that scared me absolutely silly. This is one of them. The tricky thing is, that when you decide to research these, inevitably you are faced with endless blogs and posts repeating these ad infinitum, making the discovery that they are in fact, NOT REAL, much more difficult to do.

here is where my love of quantum physics comes in and leads me to ask, "if a whole bunch of people begin believing that these things happened, have they in fact happened?"

the idea of reality is something i have always questioned and even before becoming immersed in quantum physics i realized that reality is nothing but a mass agreement. its a bunch of people who have decided that this, and not this, is reality, and there is this denial that reality is far more fluid than people realize. in other words, reality as we know it is only a consensus. there is literally nothing that can be called "absolute reality". its subjective. even with a mass consensus, its simply a consensus that our subjective reality is "real". and we can of course never know what another's reality is. fascinating, really.

with this in mind, you begin to wonder if the roots of some of these memes will not become so obscured that many people will begin to believe it. people as a whole don't tend to research everything they come across. call it the death of critical thinking. if people read it somewhere, they tend to believe it. i am not so cynical as to believe that people are merely sheep, because i don't believe that they are, but i do believe that humanity as a whole (especially in the western world with our mass of "entertainments" and media overload) are VERY easily distracted. when you are easily distracted you can be easily fooled. this is something that every magician knows instinctively.

if fifty people believe that charlie noonan existed, that "candle cove" was a real show, that a demented kleenex ad screened in japan led to mass suicides, is it not, in some sense, real? in a landscape of holographic multiverses, what does this imply? does not this imply or impart a degree of "reality"?

i do believe in things like the law of attraction, having seen in manifest in my life in a myriad of ways. i need a new scarf, or a printer, and within a few days, after focusing, it will "find" me. the more sure i am, the quicker it seems to happen. the belief that it will happen is of course the one necessary ingredient to these proceedings. belief makes things so.

in twenty years, will our world be so littered with memes that we have forgotten that they are not true? I remember rumors from my childhood- that joan jett had died in a plane crash, that prince was dying of AIDS, etc- and laugh about them now. obviously, enough people believing in something does not make the thing come to pass always.

but these were actual people. these were rumors. if you create a false reality, whole cloth, what will be the long term effects? i so very much wish that borges were still alive. i believe he would have much to say on the subject- and i think it would have delighted him.