Today is 12.19.18.10.3 7 Akbal 11 Xul

517 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

Via ”A girl’s guide to taking over the world” on Facebook.

The deadpan, bored expression on the girl’s face as she flicks up her skirt to flash the giant, hairy merkin straped to her crotch just slays me. The various expressions on the faces of passers-by are priceless. Every time I play it, I dissolve into a fit of hyena-he-hes.

I’ve posted this Storm Large viddy before, but it makes a nice, um, matching bookend to the other, and the song brings similar good cheer to my black little heart—if the vagina fits, wear it:

Vaginistas of the World, UNITE!

Mercy Dotes

In the small hours like lost and found
gloves lacking mates,
my fingertips have closed the stars
embroidered on the wet folds
inside the peaked tent
of your vagina
like eyes brimming with unfallen tears.

My hands need you.

Lambs in wolves’ clothing,
conjoined twins creep
cloaked in their hairy pelts
among the sleeping pack—
all the moondogs held in sway
to the lucent
virtuoso play of cello,
a fit of gleams down your flank.

Sure as your own pups,
my hands find suck—
The little jaws work,
milk fangs nip,
red tongues lap at your teats,
swabs of damp velvet.

In these blind hours like spoons
asleep in a drawer
my hands are orphan ladles
dousing the witch
steam of your rich broth.
Romulus and Remus
keen to the alpha,
hungry for the weep
of beestings
startled from your nipples.

Embers

For forty thousand generations
we stirred the embers
of a low fire,

kept the audible prowlings
of the huge night
at bay.

A small tribe,
we looked up at the stars,
and the spaces between the stars,

tracked the transits
and transformations
of the moon, counted five wanderers,

As chert or clay came to our hands,
words came to us,
and we built them into stories

nested in stories,
tool kits for making memory
into myth,

to tell the children,
to tell the children,
to tell the children

how to compact the whole life of our tribe,
a small tribe,
into a bundle of words and pictures

small enough to carry
inside the head of an elder,

but enough
to survive a long trek,
and feed the whole tribe,

by the low fire,
in the great dark,
under a starry sky,

give us meaning,
give us meaning
give us the meaning.

by which we mean to survive.

Today is 12.19.18.9.19 3 Kawak 7 Xul

521 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

Aurochs and Horses, Chauvet Cave, southern France

Mrs. Dr. Omed and I recently drove to the local Mong-O-Plex to see Werner Herzog’s idiosyncratic 3D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I’m not a fan of 3D or of 3D glasses–neither is Herzog, as it turns out–but it was worth the headache and two days of blurred vision to see this film, and to see how the prehistoric painters used the contours of the cave walls to conjure the presence of the animals.

In his big book on Paleolithic art, The Creative Explosion: An Inquiry into the Origins of Art and Religion, the anthropologist John Pfeiffer proposes the hypothesis that cave paintings are part of the arsenal of “special effects” created by the anatomically modern Cro-Magnons reinforcing and dramatizing the “mnemonic systems” that preserved the technological, cultural, and general knowledge of the tribe.  Pfeiffer points out that “the notion…that knowledge of any sort…should be shared as widely as possible is a relatively recent thing.” Secret ceremonies, degrees of initiation in the mysteries of the tribal cult are also major components of the process of imprinting vital tribal memes.  Not to mention dislocation, pain, and fear. Learning by ordeal. Penile subincision with a stone knife, for instance, concentrates the mind wonderfully; the boy will remember what the elder whispers in his ear. Pfeiffer calls it “education for survival.” He also emphasizes that these are things done in the dark, the ritual drama playing out against a pitch black backdrop, the sputter of flames from fat-fueled lamps licking painted stone into life.

Despite the decimation of traditional tribal cultures in the world wide demolition derby of modern history, we are all becoming more and not less tribal. In the Information Age all the netizens of the Global Village are self-selecting in a frenzy of Lamarckian cultural evolution, into tribes. Not tribes based on kinship or territory, but on shared memes (on shared whims sometimes). Instant communication equals instant tribalism. The question is no longer “what’s your sign,” it’s “what’s your tribe” asked in any number of ways.

In the American midwest there are fundamentalist-run “Hell Houses” that open during the Halloween season with the avowed purpose of instilling the fear of Hell in their customers, and facilitating the conversion of the rubes by literally scaring them into the arms of Jesus. This is the ritual drama of recruitment into a tribal cult in a degenerate form.

As Lao Tzu said, there are many paths, one way. One possible path is to return to making dreamtime maps, epics and legends with plenty of “entertainment value” to transmit the nested data in continuing sagas to the post-illiterate electronic tribes of the noose-sphere, with a trickle-down to the post-literate society at large. Pilgrims and seekers, Dr. Omed has gazed deep into the blue screen of fate.  He sees some. He knows some.  Know it or not, some of you are the root workers, the conjure doctors, the shamans of  Little Sister.  Just keep on doing that hoodoo you do so well.

In related news: All Non-Africans Part Neanderthal

They hate our Freedom Fries! Viva La France!

As an adjunct to my belated post on Bastille Day, I offer this video clip from the movie Casablanca,  a scene in Rick’s Cafe Americain in which Paul Henreid as the resistance leader Victor Lazlo leads a rousing chorus of La Marseillaise to drown out German officers singing Die Wacht am Rhein. Both songs are rather bloodthirsty patriotic hymns. Never mind that Victor Lazlo is supposed to be a Czech resistance leader, and that Morocco was in colonial subjection to France. It makes no sense, but I always tear up when I watch it.

Viva La France!

Here’s a full version of the anthem with lyrics in French and amusing English translation:

La Marseillaise was written and composed by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle in 1792 and adopted in 1795 as the nation’s first anthem. The melody is an adaptation of a theme written in 1781 by Giovan Battista Viotti. It became the rallying call of the French Revolution and received its name because it was first sung on the streets by volunteers (fédérés) from Marseille upon their entry into Paris on 30 July 1792 after a young volunteer from Montpellier called François Mireur had sung it at a patriotic gathering in Marseille and the troops adopted it as the marching song of the National Guard of Marseille. A newly graduated medical doctor, Mireur later became a general under Napoléon Bonaparte and died in Egypt at 28.

Marchons! Marchons!

Today is 12.19.18.9.15 12 Men 3 Xul

525 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

Marie Antoinette is famously said to have said, when told that the peasants had no bread: ”Qu’ils mangent de la brioche. Let them eat cake.” The overseers at my place of employ bought doughnuts for the serfs yesterday. I added the caption in magic marker, purely for my own amusement, and the digital memento of the picture. I forgot the “s” in “Qu’ils.” Oh, la.

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts are favored in corporate venues when there is a need to reward the workers with a dose of the sweet grease jones. Were it not for the institution of the meeting in our work-a-day culture, I’m not sure that Krispy Kreme would still be in business. Modern American oligarchy, unlike the ancien régime, makes sure that the peasantry has plenty of cake to eat. For now.  If you try, I bet you can hear the voice of Republican princess Michelle Bachmann saying, “Qu’ils mangent de les beignets…Let them eat doughnuts,” and then the American Id in the voice of Homer Simpson responding, “Mmmm...doughnuts…”

Yesterday was Bastille Day. On July 14, 1789, citizen insurgents in Paris stormed the Bastille Saint-Antoine, a medieval fortress built by the French king Charles V and used as a prison by later French kings, including Louis XVI. There were only a few prisoners locked up in the Bastille that day. The Marquis de Sade had been transferred to another lock-up just ten days earlier. Nevertheless, the Bastille was to the citoyens of Paris a sinister reminder of their oppression under absolute royal power. The attacking crowd was not looking for cake, or to free a few prisoners. They were after the large store of muskets, powder, shot, and ball warehoused there. 30,000 pounds of gunpowder smells like revolution. Load up on guns and bring your friends.

Lafayette sent the key to the Bastille to George Washington as a gift. This key is still at Mount Vernon:

Give me leave, my dear General to present you with the main key of the fortress of despotism. It is a tribute, which I owe, as a son to my adoptive father, as an Aide-de-Camp to my General, as a Missionary of liberty to its Patriarch.   Marquis de Lafayette

A financial crisis caused in part by the debt taken on by the French crown in bankrolling the American Revolution was a prime cause of the fall of monarchy in France.  The French King backed our revolution against Britain, and in the end lost his head for it. Americans in general don’t know much history, and the French Revolution and its causes is probably not a popular subject of study. But many of the problems facing France in the years leading up to the Revolution have curious reverberations in these latter days when our own ruling elites are poised to lose their heads over massive government debt largely incurred by financing foreign wars.

It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair,

we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Today is 12.19.18.9.13 10 Ben 1 Xul

527 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

“Austrian driver’s license strains credulity.”

It’s a perfect headline. The lede is pretty good, too:

(BBC News) An Austrian atheist has won the right to be shown on his driving-licence photo wearing a pasta strainer as “religious headgear”.

Niko Alm first applied for the licence three years ago after reading that headgear was allowed in official pictures only for confessional reasons.

Mr Alm said the sieve was a requirement of his religion, pastafarianism.

The Austrian authorities required him to obtain a doctor’s certificate that he was “psychologically fit” to drive.

A self-confessed atheist, Mr Alm says he belongs to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a light-hearted faith whose members call themselves pastafarians.

Mr Alm’s pastafarian-style application for a driving licence was a response to the Austrian recognition of confessional headgear in official photographs.

It is the police who issue driving licences in Austria, and they have duly issued a laminated card showing Mr Alm in his unorthodox item of religious headgear.

The next step, Mr Alm told the Austrian news agency APA, is to apply to the Austrian authorities for pastafarianism to become an officially recognised faith.

The story would be perfect if Herr Alm had legally changed his name to “Al Dente.”

H/t Blag Hag

Brewster McCloud/See you in the next life

I once took a bus from Oklahoma City to Stillwater, Oklahoma to see the Robert Altman movie Brewster McCloud. In the midst of writing the last post, I flashed on Rene Auberjonois’ scenes as “The Lecturer” in that film. Altman made such gloriously weird movies way back when. I googled, and found this lovely combo of the last scene, Brewster’s Icarian flight inside the Houston Astrodome, and the song Next Life by Suede. Enjoy.