needs

I was searching the Internet for some nurturance, and found a great post or two on blogs. Then my mother skyped me, asking at once if I had enough money for food. She said she loves me.

http://midtownprint.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/nurturing-creative-fulfillment/

Rev-o-lution

So this is the post about the energy of the revolution in this world- kind of a freewrite:

And i quote Joseph Campbell: "The effect of the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and release again of the flow of life into the body of the world." So personally this means stepping out of bed and going into the body of the world without knowing what's gonna happen necessarily, or not knowing how I'm going to react to the sameness and dullness. It's a blind diving, a leap of faith. I mean obvious hazards along the path can be easily avoided, but even a blind man sees that. Revolution, viva la revolucion. To me it's the unlocking of something, an initiation into the doing something passionately, maybe completing a task or a solving a great problem.

I work in media now, as a co-creator of a television show called Peace Pedalers. They're asking for my imput. I feel like doing the greatest job, but a part of me wants that job to be finished already. I sense the fear of failing along the path. The path to pathos. The path that is passion.

Peace Pedalers is like a path to peace. Jesus is the prince of peace, and one thing about Christianity is that it's got a bloody history of crusades and holy wars. Christian Opus Dei flagellate themselves because of their mistakes, and they call that self-sacrifice and justice?

This here is a revoltionary time. One guy rides his bike for world-peace while another attempts the trials through the written voice. If writing is not a guidance then it is a transmission. For me, at it's hottest, a tranpassion. Can anyone explain for me the "Passion of the Christ?" To be pasionate about hanging on a cross, to love demons, to submerge into the Underworld, willingly, or not, and begin to question why one is not truly radiant and happy. Is that not the Passion of the Christ?

Is that not revolutionary? Some say Jesus was the original non-violent revolutionary, because the revolution was not a change in society but a change in himself. Psychology could write for miles in that direction, but simply stated, how am I doing what I'm doing just now?

I've tasted sweet gratitude recently, a swelling of the whole body into a place of timeless passion and tears and that amazing understanding of the greatness of another person. I want more of those whole-body insights. I think that would revolutionaize my life and the life of many of my friends.

That's enough about this revolution business for now. I have discovered through wikipedia that passion and suffering go together in Christianity, but I'm not in the mood to brood right now.

I'm more curious about Sumer the Monster Tamer as shown in Joseph Campbell's book "A Hero with a Thousand Faces, " although I'm perplexed by an interview I saw with Campbell where he said that he himself was not a hero, but that he thinks that you and I should embrace that mythic role. Right, so this book I'm looking into, the "Hero," does speak a lot about monsters. "The ordeal is a deepening of the problem of the first threshold and the question is still in balance: Can the ego put itself to death? For many-headed is this surrounding Hydra; one head cut off, two more appear - unless the right caustic is applied to the mutilated stump. The original departure into the land of trials represented only the beginning of the long and really perilous path of initiatory conquests and moments of illumination. DRAGONS HAVE NOW BEEN SLAIN and surprising barriers passed - again, again, and again. Meanwhile there will be a multitude of prelimenary victories, unretainable extasies, and momentary glimpses of the wonderful land."

As my answer to the question, "Can the ego put itself to death?" is not it cannot, because two heads emerge. I connect that idea with spiritual materialism, exactly as Campbell says, "One head comes off, and two grow back." A person drops out of school in order to do less harm, but in fact unknowingly has unplugged himself from the life, the body of the world in favor of marijuana smoke and petty complaints with coworkers at a caregiving job. OOOF that was me. But now I feel I'm back. Back on Boogie Street to quote Leonard Cohen.

So to take that image of the lazy hippie drop-out pessimist, and try to distance myself from it, that to me makes the pain multiply. It grows another ego head of "I'm so dropped in, and very unlike those lazy, God-fearing hippies." From page 108: "The hero, werher god or godddess, man or woman, the figure of a myth or the dreamer of a dream DISCOVERS AND ASSIMILATES HIS OPPOSITE (his own unsuspected self) EITHER BY SWALLOWING IT OR BY BEING SWALLOWED. One by one the resistances are broken. He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty and life, and bow or submit to the absolute intolerable. THEN HE FINDS THAT HE AND HIS OPPOSITE ARE NOT OF DIFFERING SPECIES, BUT ONE FLESH.

Would that be the same as taming that beast of the same flesh? Obviously to assimilate it is not to chop its head off. i'd better get a glass of water before some swallowing comes to transform meeeeeee.

A movie review

Alister Crowely said, "Every man and woman is a star," back in 1913, and Hollywood put it to use. But behind the stardom lies a shadow, like so many celeberty scandals have revealed. I feel like I can't go to sleep tonight until I describe at least some of what I took in tonight while watching "Wild at Heart," by David Lynch. Nicolas Cage plays "Sailor", a young driver for some mobsters in the city, who witnesses the torturous murder of a man whose daughter he falls in love with and escapes the state with for "sunny California." The daugheter has a mother that's insanely pissed and wants him dead and hires his former mob emplyer to off him. Meanwhile Sailor and Lula, or "Peanut",as Sailor calls her, played by Laura Dern, are on the road, violating Sailors parole and unknowingly get followed by Lula's mothers hitmen through New Orleans and a place in Texas known as "Big Tuna," a small trailer town with a little motel. Here is where a lot of the action takes place, where they catch up to the hot lovers.

The things that impressed me were the juxtapositions of love and violence, and the sex, innosence and blind attraction of the lovers.

Everybody spoke in southern drawels, especially Cage. And there was so much sickness, so many demons in the film that showed up in different forms. Many David Lynch movies have long scenes that include some silence, and this had many.

I felt that the silences allowed for the absurd characters with their extreme vices to penetrate the viewer. For example there was a scene when one of the big-wig hitmen was on the phone with another receiving a contract for murder as he was sitting with his pants down on the toilet and a topless Asian dancer was moving sensually in front of him, her face to the camera, him in the background. The spaceousness in the scenes allow for some humor amidst the absurd tragedy of women that sell themselves for money, as I saw in the scene with Raindeer the mobster boss talkng on the phone and behind him the group of burlesque females fanning him, and talking vulgar shit about workmates without hiding it. And that's what I mean about absurdity. The negativity is conveyed so well because in a normal movie the oppressed women would also be oppressing their hateful feelings. But this was clear and open: yes we are sex-slaves, and yes we are miserable, and our Boss is fine with that. This is fresh and the audience will not have a scripted or correct way to react emotionally. It's like, "this is the life of misery and all miserables involved are actively subscribing to it." It kind of takes the victim-mentality out if it. There are no opinions from David Lynch in this movie. What's more, "David" in hebrew has the esoteric meaning of"the door of perception," says my housemate David Plate, a student of etymology and linguistics. I think that Lynch wants to impress the audience with raw, direct experience unattainable from a perception that actively pursues an agenda (the normal human perceptive condition).

Enough of my agenda to end all agendas. In this movie you can see for yourself how strange the style and content is. For example, Sailor wears a snakeskin jacket and sings to Lula like Elvis in the middle of a rock and roll concert. He's the most romantic person in the world, and sexiest too. And he's bad, immoral, and confused. His outstanding certainty is his love for "Peanut," the only connection in the world that makes sense. "Parental guidance," a word that came from the courts, is something that Sailor says he never got any of. Peanut and Sailor talk about smoking, and they're seen in about every scene with a cigarette between their lips. Sailor's mom and dad died of "smoking or alcohol related illness," said Sailor, and Peanut says that she now smokes a different brand than her mother, the overly evil, Mel Brooks/Leo-like character with red lipstick. It's clear how these "vices" are passed down generationally. She also tells the story in one scene after a big fuck about her old uncle "Jingle Dale" that loved Christmas so much that he'd dress up as Santa Clause in July. The footage makes it progressively clear that he's not mentally healthy- and finally they show an image of his mother holding up his underware covered with cocroaches, something he useed to put in there himself. Sailor responded to the story saying, "it sounds like your uncle never got to sit down with the old Wizard of Oz and get some good advice."

I love that Lynch puts a loonie in the picture. And in fact, this ties into my main idea here that the demons of all forms, from mobsters to cigaretts, live inside of even the good people, and the craziness of "Jingle Dale" is a direct reference to the insanity and psychosis of our society as a whole. In a lot of movies the "good guy" is basically smart and in direct opposition to the evil forces. In "Die Hard" Bruce Willis plays the hero that saves the day using the good virtues of courage and honor. He wins out because of his whole-heartedness. Lynch takes a vastly different approach to heroism in "Wild at Heart," by putting in all these devils. The demon of cigaretts, a proven killer, is shown so much that it makes me sick. And on a couple of ocasions you even see Sailor smoking two at a time, and always in scenes that imply heavy emotions, which is like the whole movie through, both positive and negative.

The demon of violence is everywhere, and drawn out to a point of extremes to where you just want it to stop, like the scene where they shoot the banker and the dog runs off with the hand. It causes a person to really feel their body, which is probably a good thing even though it feels queezy and foul. And because it's shown that these demons are passed down, I for one started to identify as someone who embodies these things-I started remembering the time I got my heart broken, and how it must have been for the other person then. Lynch shows a very profound emotional dynamic between the lovers, where both of them know that Sailor is only attractive when he believes in himself, something that causes a lot of secrets to be held- just as in almost every human relationship.

All along the film there is the belief in magic, from Lula wearing red shoes and clicking her heals to get to a better place, or Sailor striving to make it "a little farther down the yellow brick road" by having faith in his strength and the power of giving Peanut what he thinks she deserves. This is such a non-pretty love tale, yet it's depths are very human, moreso than any other romance I've seen.

You may or may not agree that director David Lynch is enlightened. After all he puts out so much violence and ugliness in his films. And "that's just the thing", as my housemate David Plate often says. The ugliness is here for us to embrace it, and that's how Sailor and Peanut manage to stay in love methinks.

Emotions good or bad serve a direct purpose, which is to bring us into the present moment and ground into our bodies, the instruments we use to live this life. David Lynch's movie was equivilent to three hours of meditation to me- I got high just feeling those things without trying to change them.

In the green of the mountain condo

I like getting high. Today it's Monty Python, Nancy Sinatra and rubab pie, in the company of Jill and her two parrots. It's a high from listening, not smoking or dancing. I see Jill.

I remember G, and the power he seems to think he's deriving from labelling people. Jill is tall, a big person, and skinny, with a concave chest. And I also see her with my body, and she's big there. Just energy.A creator, chicken coop maker, bread baker, a taylor and a paintor. All that and a bag o' potato chips.

What's the joy in seriousness? Right this moment it is a rock song, a kneading of the chest, subtly. The band is Ninja Academy, track 5. I found an Ipod onthe ground and noone claimed it.It's mine to keep,with10,000new songs.