Citizen Ken - Art Culture Media & Performance by Ken Hudson

Loyalist College establishes Second Life campus

2006-12-06T09:18:00.000-08:00

news1204_06: "Loyalist College Establishes Virtual Presence in Second Life
Loyalist College is the first Canadian College to establish a presence in the social-networking simulation universe, Second Life. Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its 'residents'.
Loyalist has established a space on Edu Island, along with 18 other higher educational institutions worldwide.
'We are very pleased to be the first post-secondary institution in Canada to establish a virtual ‘campus’ within Second Life,' said Loyalist President Maureen Piercy. 'It is another innovative development in the application of technology within the learning environment.'
Since the launch of Harvard’s CyberOne course on Second Life in September, schools have been starting to build their e-learning initiatives in this exciting, collaborative environment. The Second Life community has 1.7 million users and is growing steadily. The current migration of higher learning signals a cultural shift in how on-line games can be used for educational purposes.
The Loyalist College virtual campus is located alongside an impressive list of colleges and universities, including New York University, George Washington University, and Empire State College, SUNY.
'This placement underscores Loyalist’s excellent reputation and highlights its strengths on a larger world stage,' said President Piercy.
During the upcoming term, the Loyalist College virtual presence will be available to explore how this environment can be developed to best support teaching and learning. Related web sites include: http://secondlife.com and www.loyalistcollege.com.
- 30 -
Media Contact: George Burton, Vice-President Enrolment Mgmt & Student Services,
Loyalist College, (613) 969-1913, ext. 2355; e-m"

Sony Bravia Extended Advert

2006-10-31T09:13:00.000-08:00


Sony Bravia extended LCD TV Advertisement. Wonderful bouncing ball video in San Fransisco!

Ken Hudson Artist Writer Toronto Kingston Belleville Ontario Canada

2006-10-30T05:20:00.000-08:00

Ken Hudson Artist Writer Toronto Kingston Belleville Ontario Canada: "Ken Hudson Media Clips"

Body Energy Resources and Work

2006-10-29T16:03:00.000-08:00

GROUNDING

This is a way of extending your energy body down into the Earth to keep yourself solidly rooted there. A physicist thinks of a grounding cord as a way of grounding out excessive energy surges, and certainly your energetic grounding cord provides a way of letting go of any energy you don't need any more. Your grounding cord allows you to bleed off extra energy, and also allows you to dispose of any energy you have picked up from an external source.

Many people like to think of their grounding cords as their "roots". Like a root system, your grounding cord stabilises you, so that whatever happens in the world around you, you aren't carried away. You remain stable in the calm, cool energy of the Earth. Plants also use roots to gather the moisture and nutrients they need from the soil; I will teach you how to pull in the nurturing energy of Mother Earth through your grounding cord.

Being grounded helps you stay solidly in your body. When you are strongly connected with the body of Mother Earth, you are more aware of the sensations and energy flows in your own body and all the details of the world around you. This helps you respond to the world in a more immediate and appropriate way. You stay in the present moment, letting the past be and trusting that the future will be even better. This skill is vital for healing or magic, and even more so for healthy living.

Once you learn how to ground, you will want to use this skill consistently in day to day life. When you start to feel stress, worry, anger, hopelessness, or any other emotion that erodes your peace, get your body grounded and breathe in the healing Earth energy. Breathe out whatever may be excessive in your emotional response to the situation. You will start to feel calm and in control. Then you will most likely be gifted with a greater degree of clarity about your situation.

So, here is a meditation that may help you learn how this state feels:

Sit in a chair with your feet flat against the floor. Let your spine be straight and comfortable. If you want to lean against the back of the chair, do so. Take a moment to complete any small readjustments to make yourself perfectly comfortable, and close your eyes.
And gently let your attention come to your breathing. No need to change your breathing in any way, just become aware of it. Become aware of the air entering your nose and travelling down into your chest. Be aware of the slight pause before you breathe out. In. Pause and out. Be aware of the muscles that work as you draw in the air, and how they relax as you let the air out. Easily and effortlessly. Gradually your breathing becomes deeper and more even as you relax into it. Breathe in relaxation, and let any concerns that you don't need to pay attention to now seep away with your out-breath. In, relaxing; and out, releasing. Enjoy this rhythm for a few moments.

Now let your awareness feel where your body touches the chair. Feel where the weight is lighter and where it is heavier. And bring your awareness to the point where your buttocks are firmest on the chair. Feel that connection to the chair, and let your breathing focus on that spot, drawing your breath deep to that point of connection, and feeling as if the outbreath seeps out through that spot. Breathe in. Deep, deep breath right to the chair. And out, straight through your body and seeping through the chair and down below it toward the floor. In, and out.

And as you breath deep and deeper, let your connection to the floor deepen, so that some intangible part of you is sinking deep and deeper through the floor and the foundations to connect with the earth below your house. Even if it doesn't sound rational, why not pretend for a minute that it can happen, and just allow it to happen. Easily and effortlessly. Breathing deep, through this connection right down into the earth, and then push that air out, into the soil. Letting the connection grow further and deeper. Feel the nourishing coolness of the soil. Sense the roots of the trees around your root, and greet them if you wish....

Further and deeper, through the soil, down through the rocks underneath, down through the bedrock. As far down as you feel comfortable going. And feel that part of your being that you have extended deep into the earth go straight through to the core of the planet, to the heart of Mother Earth. Feel your connection with Her heart and enjoy it. This is sometimes called a grounding cord.

And be aware that energy can travel through this connection. Ask the Mother to send you her love, and let it flow up through your grounding through the earth...and the floor...and into your body. And let it flood your whole being. And know that this love is always there for you whenever you care to ask for it. As abundant and free-flowing as the air we breathe, so too is the love of the Mother. You can't take more than your share because the supply is infinite. Let it fill your whole being. Let your being shine.

Once you have felt this feeling, you can make the connection more quickly by focussing on your breathing to bring yourself into your body, and then extending your grounding cord through the floor and deep into the Earth.

Some quick ways to ground include:

Take off your shoes and socks and stand on bare earth or grass. Feel the earth under your feet and feel your energy body sinking into the earth. Breathe right down into the earth so that it begins to feel like an extension of your body.
When it's too cold or wet for bare feet outdoors, or when you're too ungrounded to be able to visualise, try this. Take off your shoes and walk across a room in super-slow motion. V...e...r...y... s...l...o...w...l...y . Concentrate on feeling all the shifting of the muscles, bones, and tendons in your feet and legs as you ever so slowly move and change your balance. It should take 3-5 minutes to walk across a 20 foot room. About halfway across, start focussing on the downward flow of energy from your feet to the Earth, and on Her upward energy flow supporting your weight. You will be grounded by the time you reach the other side.

Pet a cat.

Have a real good belly-laugh.

Sing the deepest note you can...feel it vibrate deep in your belly and pelvis. Imagine the sound extending deep into the earth...and see if you can sing a little deeper....

Work with stones: many suggest obsidian, black tourmaline, or tiger eye, but any rock can help you reconnect with the earth.

Once you know how to ground, you can often do so in 2-3 deep breaths. Just feel that downward flow of energy as you breathe out, like a special type of gravity is pulling your energy body into deep connection with Mother Earth. On the inbreath, feel Her energy coming up to you.

A quick way to confirm that you are grounded is to balance on one leg. If you are properly grounded, this should be easy, and you should be able to move the other leg around in the air without losing your balance.

Whenever you consciously ground and clear your own energy field, you will come back to the present moment, conscious of your own truth rather than another's, and able to face the world around you with greater clarity. Blessings of the Earth to you!

CENTERING

Some people suggest centering to help you with whatever visualisation you wish to do to ground. Others suggest grounding first. The bottom line is that if you are hopelessly ungrounded, you probably won't be able to center too well. Use one of the more physical techniques to get grounded and then center.

Centering is bringing all your mental processes into the center of your head. It is necessary to do this in order to have the focus necessary to meditate, visualise, or do magic or healing.

To center, let your awareness come to a point in the very center of your head. Put one finger directly between your eyebrows and another at the base of your skull in the cleft at the top of your neck. Imagine a point halfway between your two fingers. See or feel a golden light glowing there. Breathe in and see or feel it glow a little brighter. Focus on the light, breathing quietly until your thoughts quiet and the light is all you are aware of.

At any time when you are working, if your thoughts seem to get scattered you can quiet and center them by taking a few deep breaths while focussed on this light in the middle of your head.

A note about visualisation. There is a lot written about visualisation in healing and magical texts. Most people can learn to do it to some extent if they work on it. But every one of us is different, and some people will have more success using sound or body sensation to accomplish these basic energy tasks. This is why I often give techniques that use sensation as well as visualisation. If the techniques I suggest don't work for you, please look in other places. Most books on energy work or magic cover these basic tasks and some will be more visual or sensory...you should be able to find something that works for you.

If your strongest sense is hearing...try to find a note of a pitch that will resonate in that level of your head that I described. Entone that note a few times, allowing the vibration to fill your head, and let it become all you are aware of.

It is actually both interesting and healthy to center in other parts of your body at some times. Many yoga and martial arts techniques train people to center in their "center of gravity." This is around the navel, usually a little higher for men and a little lower for women because of how their body weight is distributed. Focussing here allows the practitioner to shift her weight without losing balance, and keeps one very centered in the body. It is a wonderful feeling to center all your awareness in your heart at times; this is especially useful when doing healing work or before making love.

Shielding

This is a process of defining your personal space in such a way that any energy that is not for your highest good will either not be able to enter, or be reflected, or slide off, or be destroyed when it comes in contact with your aura.

I have no conscious experience with what people call "demons" or "curses," so I don't really believe in organised attacks of evil. But it is certainly possible to pick up anger, fear, shame, or depression from other people, and these are well worth protecting yourself against.

The first step is to become aware of the boundaries of your aura. You may need a friend who is experienced in feeling auras to help you with this the first time if you tend to have an overly expanded aura. Some people have auras that are tight to their body, closed in to protect them. Others have auras that are expanded over many feet around them, diffuse and open to whomever comes along. The former state doesn't allow for a wide range of experience and feelings. The latter allows any and every bit of emotional expression around you to get in to you.

Most people can feel the innermost layer of the aura. The more sensitive you are, the more layers you can feel. Try this....

Rub your hands together until they are warm and tingly. Then put them out facing one another, a little wider than shoulder width apart. Bring them together slowly, and at some point you will feel a resistance, a springiness . Bring them closer together and see if you encounter this feeling again. This is what it will feel like when you encounter a layer of someone's aura. So try it on yourself. Rub your hands together again to wake up the palm chakras, and then start at arm's reach and move your hand inward, facing flat toward your body, until you detect that same feeling of resistance. You you'll probably feel the layer 1-3 inches out, and may feel layers about 8-12 inches out, or even 2-3 feet out.

Ideally you want to function with your aura about two-three feet in all directions around you. If you are meditating in a safe space, you might want to expand it to fit the room. If you are in a place crowded with strangers, you might want to pull it in close, especially if there are intense emotions around. Once you are aware of where its boundaries are, practice pulling it in and letting it out. See what is comfortable. You also want to try to keep it an even distance around you. Many people are pulled in in back and expanded in front. Play with it, now that you can.

So, there are many ways to reinforce the outside of your aura to protect yourself. Many people like to put a silver coat on the outside to reflect whatever comes their way like a mirror. The other most popular shielding is to wrap the aura with white light; the advantage of this is that it will let in anything that is of a similar or higher vibration to the quality of light used, but reflect the rest.

Some people like to use light of different colours, often blue or violet; blue emanates a quality of confidence and peace that repels negative energy, and violet is the highest spiritual vibration, with the capacity to transform lower vibrations to higher ones. When there is a lot of negative energy around me, I will use three layers, white, blue, and violet. The advantage I see to this is that rather than reflecting negative energies to others who might be less able to deal with them, it transforms them.

One technique many people use is to visualise a rose out in front of them to absorb any negative energies. Many people have symbols that are sacred to them which they draw around themselves, or draw and expand so that they can step into them. Some Reiki practitioners work with the Reiki symbols this way.

Another technique many people use is to visualise a ring of fire around them. This could be the regular red-orange fire, a white-hot fire, or a violet flame.

Aura Cleansing

There are many ways to cleanse any unwanted energies in your aura. Some of these are physical acts like smudging or showering. Some are visualisations . When we speak of cleansing the aura, we are not implying that it is "dirty," but one can over time, especially when dealing with other people through the course of a day, pick up bits of their energy and emotions. These may be positive or negative, but they are not yours, and can effect your ability to stay grounded and centered in your truth.

A favourite technique is to burn some sacred herb or incense and let the smoke waft through your aura, carrying any impurities away. Sage is used commonly, both by Native healers and shamans and by witches. Some other herbs used in cleansing incenses are Hyssop, Cedar, Eucalyptus, Rosemary, and Lemon.

Water, of course, is purifying. It can be sprinkled into the aura or one could take a shower...with hot water or rain water! One may want to use saltwater or water with herbs infused in it, or water with essential oils in it. One may use a sprig of a herb with cleansing properties as an asperger to sprinkle the water upon oneself; favourite herbs for this are Hyssop and Rosemary. One can also visualise a shower...and make the water droplets golden, white, rainbows or any other colour that seems appropriate . Sitting in a bath, feeling negative energies seep out the pores also works; it's fun to imagine the dark energies swirling down the drain as the tub empties.

Of course, light can cleanse your aura, too. Letting white or gold light flow in through your crown, through your aura and body, and down your grounding cord will remove any unwanted energies.

It can be interesting and useful to spend some time imagining mists, smokes, rains, and lights of different colours filling your aura. How does a golden rain make you feel? What about a green mist? Or a purple smoke? Or a glowing red light? If you experiment in this way, note the colours that feel good for you, and go back to them for a while before you close.

One can cleanse the aura using nothing more elaborate than breath, just using the outbreath to send any unwanted energies through the grounding cord . This is fast and subtle, so it can be used anywhere, anytime.

The aforementioned violet flame is another effective way to cleanse the aura of negative energies. It transmutes such energies to a higher vibration.

After the aura is cleansed, fill it with your own energy. This is usually a mixture of Earth energy pulled in through the grounding cord and Universal energy pulled in through the crown. Mix the two in the core of your being, and let this energy pour out your crown to fill your aura. Let it shine bright. This is you.

In general, an aura-hygiene program should be part of your routine on rising and retiring, just like washing your face or brushing your teeth. As a minimum, it would include grounding, centering, shielding, and running energy through your aura to cleanse it. Most people like to follow this with a period of meditation, and finish by ensuring the grounding and shielding are still strong.

Of course, you can utilise any of these processes in an elaborate form before ritual, or in a simple and subtle form at any time in the day when you feel scattered or besieged, or when you are about to start any sort of process with other people. You can't control how other people react to anything you say or do, but you can control how their reactions effect you. If you are grounded, you won't be swayed unduly by their reactions. If you are centered, you will be able to respond in a clear and focussed way. If you are well shielded, anything that is negative won't get into your being and make you want to react. If your aura isn't cluttered with other people's energy, your response will be based in your own Truth, not a whole lot of responses you have been taught by others.

http://thedance.com

Antero Alli and his Paratheatrical Research

2006-10-29T15:36:00.000-08:00

paratheatre background
paratheatre; a term coined by the late Jerzy Grotowski to address specific
physical processes of group ritual dynamics developed in non-performance
settings that occasionally culminate in public performance. -- A.A.

http://www.paratheatrical.com/

_________________________________________________________________
Experience Live Search from your PC or mobile device today.
http://www.live.com/?mkt=en-ca

Flying Dog Show retro Batman parody performance

2006-09-28T11:39:00.000-07:00


Banal Batman and Robin introduction from Ken and Dave Brothers (Ken Hudson and David Disher) "Part social commentary, part Punch and Judy show..." MEDIA TELEVISION

Flying Dog Show - Surfing Detectives - Ken Hudson / David Disher 1999 clip

2006-09-27T15:38:00.000-07:00


Performance art duo Ken Hudson and David Disher from Flying Dog Show - Funny clip of lip synched store window show Toronto - includes song and audience sing along.

Flying Dog Show - American Bidet

2006-09-27T15:30:00.000-07:00


Ken & Dave Brothers (Ken Hudson and David Disher) performance art store window show Flying Dog Show - Toronto - 1999

Radio Paradise - eclectic online rock radio

2006-04-20T10:28:00.000-07:00

Radio Paradise - eclectic online rock radio: "We don't charge any subscription fees to listen to RP, we don't force-feed you advertising (either on the air or on our website), and we try to keep our mentions of listener support to a minimum (no endless 'pledge breaks') - but we do require your support in order to continue offering our service.

We think of it as radio on the honor system - just like a kids' lemonade stand or a roadside fruit vendor who knows that most people who take something are going to pay for it.

We offer you a service, and we trust that if you make us a regular part of your day you'll follow through by pitching in with a few dollars or euros or whatever. It's a way of doing business that's discussed at length in the fascinating book Freakonomics - and we're very pleased that it seems to be working quite well for us.

For more information on supporting RP - or to send support right now via credit card, Paypal, or other methods - click the Support RP link. We particularly appreciate the regular ongoing support we get from those of you who set up automatic monthly or quarterly support payments. Thanks"

The Holographic Universe

2006-03-15T13:54:00.000-08:00

The Holographic Universe: "The Holographic Universe
Does Objective Reality Exist?

By Michael Talbot
3-12-6

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser.

To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed "

Cosmic 'DNA': Double Helix Spotted in Space - Yahoo! News

2006-03-15T13:41:00.000-08:00

Cosmic 'DNA': Double Helix Spotted in Space - Yahoo! News: "Magnetic forces at the center of the galaxy have twisted a nebula into the shape of DNA, a new study reveals.
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The double helix shape is commonly seen inside living organisms, but this is the first time it has been observed in the cosmos.
'Nobody has ever seen anything like that before in the cosmic realm,' said the study's lead author Mark Morris of UCLA. 'Most nebulae are either spiral galaxies full of stars or formless amorphous conglomerations of dust and gas�space weather. What we see indicates a high degree of order.'
These observations, made with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, are detailed in the March 16 issue of the journal Nature."

Spring Arts by R.C. Baker

2006-03-08T14:39:00.000-08:00

village voice > nyclife > Spring Arts by R.C. Baker: "In the visual arts, the avant-garde is always about 30,000 years behind the times: The Chauvet caves in France contain sophisticated paintings, drawings, and engravings of animals; perfect stencils of the human hand; abstract dots and stripes; and even found art in the form of a bear skull placed atop a boulder by an unknown Paleolithic designer. Still, there's always room for new voices, and this spring it's women who have a lot to say. Kathleen Gilje is a skilled art conservator with an amazing ability to mimic old-master techniques that allows her to pull icons of the past through wormholes of deconstruction and art theory to create alternate-universe replicas. In 1997, she 'restored' a 'lost' Caravaggio 'copy' of The Musicians, one of the baroque genius's masterpieces at the Met. Accompanying X-rays reveal that the boy holding a love madrigal in the original version is actually stroking his erect penis in the 'newly restored' alternate. Gilje has applied such sleight-of-hand effect to artists ranging from El Greco to Artemisia Gentileschi, and in a new series (at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, 22 East 80th Street, 212-472-6800, opening April 5), she will present portraits of current art-world scholars grafted into the objects of their study: Linda Nochlin, feminist art critic, becomes the full-frontal barmaid in a knockoff of Manet's 1882 Bar at the Folies-Bergere. "

Status Ain't Hood

2006-03-08T14:37:00.000-08:00

The Village Voice: Status Ain't Hood: "Dave Chappelle's Block Party may be the ultimate triumph of the Okayplayer aesthetic, the warmest, gooiest, most feelgood concert doc I've seen this side of Fade to Black, though I should probably go ahead and rent The Last Waltz before I start throwing around superlatives like that. If you've read ?uestlove's mammoth OKP post from immediately after the show (someone more internet-savvy will have to help me find it again), you know that the show itself wasn't the hazy freeform utopia you see in the movie; there was stress about Kanye finishing his set in time to jump on a plane and open up for Usher somewhere, about Jill Scott and Erykah Badu performing back-to-back, about whether the Fugees thing would actually happen as planned. If you were wasting all your time on music blogs around the time the show actually took place, you also know that the audience was vetted and focus-grouped to keep it from being as overwhelmingly white as it would've been otherwise. None of that comes through onscreen, though; instead, we see a group of occasionally genius and perpetually like-minded artists performing for a supremely amped and appreciative crowd, everything flowing effortlessly from one segment to the next, everyone onscreen describing the day as one of the happiest in their lives, which maybe it was. And we also get Chappelle, whose stoner drawl and loping, graceful charisma hold the whole thing together beautifully. In "

village voice > nyclife > Spring Arts by Zach Baron

2006-03-08T14:36:00.000-08:00

village voice > nyclife > Spring Arts by Zach Baron: "Don't Call It Noise Music
Japanese metal bands summon power and energy from the '70s

by Zach Baron
March 7th, 2006 3:27 PM

Catch MONO
photo: Human Highway Records
See also:
Faust Things First
A mammoth production of the epic verse gets a stateside staging
by Michael Feingold

Wonder Women
A season of old masters, Gumby, biomorphs, and cell phones
by R.C. Baker

A Mechanized Culture and its Equally Mechanical Population Meet
by Carla Blumenkranz

Tweaking Their Legacies: Composers Reinvent Themselves
by Leighton Kerner

Dancing in Your Sleep: Label Microcosm Calms the Nerves
by Tricia Romano

Postmodern Pioneer: The Next Generation
Bokaer gets physical, digital, and naked
by Elizabeth Zimmer

Vision Quest
Get your avant-garde fix with plenty of experimental cinema this season
by Ed Halter

To Serve and Protect: A Freestyle Series Rumbles On
by Jim Macnie

We all have our generational breaking point.
Whether it's Mick Jagger's dinosaur skeleton jerking around a Super Bowl stage or the 5,000th Ameriquest commercial about managing baby boomer money in a 'rock and roll' kind of way, a listener's eventually going to lose it and reset his classic-rock radio presets. Kids need to have their say: Foreign language? Novel artwork? Clever genre name? It all flies, just as long as Mom can't take credit. Reggaet�n for reggae, grime for hip-hop, or, if NYC's spring concert calendar is any indication, guitar rock from Japan for guitar rock from the Jurassic.
In the next couple months, New York venues will bring kids the all-over-Jap"

The Mythic Delirium Home Page

2006-03-08T14:33:00.000-08:00

The Mythic Delirium Home Page: "Featured Poem
From Mythic Delirium, Issue 12, Winter/Spring 2005
Lost Over East Texas
Ann K. Schwader"

Body Artists Customize Your Flesh

2006-03-08T14:30:00.000-08:00

Wired News:: "Shannon Larratt was a child when he first dreamed about modifying his body. When his father would make pizza and sit with him to watch Star Trek, Larratt was captivated by the diverse looks of people from other worlds. He was particularly taken with the forehead ridges.
In Larratt's ideal world, 'Everyone looks interesting, everyone looks different.' So when body modification artist Steve Haworth invented a way to implant jewelry under human skin, Larratt jumped on the opportunity.
After Haworth was done, Larratt's forehead sported two symmetrical ridges that stretched at a jaunty angle from a spot above his temples down toward his eyebrows.
Larratt was an early adopter of subdermal implants, a form of 3-D body modification pioneered in 1994 at Haworth's piercing shop in Phoenix, Arizona. The first human canvas for the art form was a woman from New Zealand who came in and asked for a bracelet. Haworth pondered the challenge, then suggested that he could place series of beads under the skin around her wrist. She enthusiastically agreed.
In years that followed, subdermal implants became popular in the community of extreme body modification. The process creates a raised area on the skin in a shape of the artist's choosing. The effect is dramatic: Implants can be most any form you can think of, from Star Trek ridges and small horns, to little stars and hearts sprayed across the chest. Many people with body modifications have combined their implants with tattoos to create often beautiful or terrible effects.
Today, at least 50,000 people worldwide have artistic implants, estimates Larratt,"

BW Powe Canadian Visionary Author launches new web site!

2006-02-21T05:43:00.000-08:00

: "B.W. Powe:
novelist
philosopher
essayist
poet
critic
teacher
director of media events
He has been called 'an original', 'visionary', 'adventurous', 'unclassifiable.' He has been praised in the Globe and Mail and the Montreal Gazette (called everything from 'way cool' to 'a modern day Magellan') and denounced by Barbara Amiel, in Maclean's, as 'an intellectual terrorist'.

His major works include Outage, a novel, and the non-fiction works, The Solitary Outlaw and A Canada of Light.

Outage described and evoked the whirling turbulence of mass media on a lone individual, and urgently expressed the need to make meaning during a period of information overload and image saturation, data deluge. Highly controversial when it was published, The Globe and Mail called it 'the first television novel' and Philip Marchand in The Toronto Star said it created a whole new genre, and was 'always impressive in its determined march toward
truth.' Outage was also the first book to be launched electronically on the then new Bravo! network. Val Ross, writing in the Globe and Mail, said that 'Powe would be reading a book back to the cameras!' The National on the CBC presented a full-length documentary on the novel.

A Canada of Light, his philosophical work, endures as an influential contemplation of the promise of Canada, in the new transnational electronic sphere. Highly regarded in France, and the United States, it was also praised by Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The Toronto Star said, A Canada of Light showed us the poetry in the idea of our country.
A Canada Of Light
B. W. Powe

The Solitary Outlaw explored the role of the intellectual in a post-literate age, by meditating on the presences of Marshall McLuhan, Wyndham Lewis, Pierre Trudeau, Glenn Gould, and Elias "

Citizen Christ : Pipsfarm T-shirts and Culture : CafePress.com

2006-02-18T09:26:00.000-08:00

Citizen Christ : Pipsfarm T-shirts and Culture : CafePress.com: "Citizen Christ
Jesus 'Citizen' Christ - Tradesman on a mission. Regular Joe Saviour - JC 24/7 "

Iran Renames Danish Pastries - Yahoo! News

2006-02-17T12:39:00.000-08:00

Iran Renames Danish Pastries - Yahoo! News: "Iran Renames Danish Pastries By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press Writer
Thu Feb 16, 2:23 PM ET

TEHRAN, Iran - Iranians love Danish pastries, but when they look for the flaky dessert at the bakery they now have to ask for 'Roses of the Prophet Muhammad.'
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Bakeries across the capital were covering up their ads for Danish pastries Thursday after the confectioners' union ordered the name change in retaliation for caricatures of the Muslim prophet published in a Danish newspaper.
'Given the insults by Danish newspapers against the prophet, as of now the name of Danish pastries will give way to 'Rose of Muhammad' pastries,' the union said in its order.
'This is a punishment for those who started misusing freedom of expression to insult the sanctities of Islam,' said Ahmad Mahmoudi, a cake shop owner in northern Tehran.
One of Tehran's most popular bakeries, 'Danish Pastries,' covered up the word 'Danish' on its sign with a black banner emblazoned 'Oh Hussein,' a reference to a martyred saint of Shiite Islam. The banner is a traditional sign of mourning.
The shop owner declined to comment Thursday.
In Zartosht Street in central Tehran, cake shop owner Mahdi Pedari didn't cover up the word 'Danish pastries' on his menu, but put the new name next "

Iran Renames Danish Pastries

2006-02-17T12:26:00.000-08:00

Iran Renames Danish Pastries: "Iran Renames Danish Pastries
Status: Undetermined
A news service called AKI (Adnkronos International) is reporting that Iran has decided to rename Danish pastries 'Mohammedan' pastries. It notes that 'The name change recalls when some Americans started calling French fries, 'Freedom fries' to protest France's opposition to the United States-led invasion of Iraq.'

I wouldn't put it past the Iranian government to do this, but what I'm not sure about is whether Danish pastries are actually referred to as Danish pastries in Farsi. Perhaps they use the English term. Also, it seems odd that AFI is the only news source reporting this. A search on lexis-nexis and Google news pulls up nothing else. However, the London Evening Standard is reporting that 'Danish pastries and butter were being cleared off supermarket shelves in Saudi Arabia.' So if people are willing to clear Danish pastries from supermarkets, why not rename them also? I'm leaning towards believing it's true. "

Willie Nelson releases gay cowboy song -- Queer Lesbian Gay News -- Gay.com

2006-02-17T12:25:00.000-08:00

Willie Nelson releases gay cowboy song -- Queer Lesbian Gay News -- Gay.com: "Willie Nelson releases gay cowboy song
Gay.com U.K.
published Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Country music singer Willie Nelson has released a new song called 'Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly (Fond of Each Other).'
On Valentine's Day on the Howard Stern radio show, Willie Nelson debuted his rendition of the 1981 song, written by Texas-born musician/songwriter Ned Sublette, which is also now available for download on iTunes.
Written prior to the highly acclaimed 'Brokeback Mountain,' which started a massive gay cowboy fascination, it features lyrics like, 'That's why they wear leather, and Levi's and belts buckled tight' and 'There's many a cowboy who's more like a lady at night.'
Sublette said he wrote it during the 'Urban Cowboy' craze.
'The song's been in the closet for 20 years,' the Dallas Morning News quoted Nelson as saying. 'The timing's right for it to come out. I'm just opening the door.'
Nelson contributed a song to the soundtrack of 'Brokeback Mountain' -- his rendition of 'He Was A Friend Of Mine.'"

Gay Cowboy : Pipsfarm T-shirts and Culture : CafePress.com

2006-02-17T12:23:00.000-08:00

Gay Cowboy : Pipsfarm T-shirts and Culture : CafePress.com: "Pipsfarm T-shirts and Culture : Gay Cowboy
Gay Cowboy movies and now a Gay Cowboy song from Willie Nelson - don't get left behind (wink) - show your stuff with these classic western theme designs with an urban chic twist!"

Rose of Muhammad - Danish : Pipsfarm T-shirts and Culture : CafePress.com

2006-02-17T12:22:00.000-08:00

Rose of Muhammad - Danish : Pipsfarm T-shirts and Culture : CafePress.com: "Pipsfarm T-shirts and Culture : Rose of Muhammad - Danish
Those silly western pigs - we will rename their favorite pastry in a very humor filled manner. Rose of Muhammad - Danish no more!"

Eat the Danish - Fatwa Parody : Pipsfarm T-shirts and Culture : CafePress.com

2006-02-10T12:21:00.001-08:00

Eat the Danish - Fatwa Parody : Pipsfarm T-shirts and Culture : CafePress.com: "Eat the Danish - Fatwa Parody
Fatwa on the Danish - they are tool fluffy and their sugar is white! Wear this Islamic protest design while burning a flag or jumping up and down in unison. So many uses! Blaspheme the prophet - EAT THE DANISH!"

I'm not Earl : Pipsfarm T-shirts and Culture : CafePress.com

2006-02-10T12:21:00.000-08:00

I'm not Earl : Pipsfarm T-shirts and Culture : CafePress.com: "I'm not Earl
My name is Earl - NOT - Perhaps you are attuned to the Karmic implications of your actions? If not, warn the world that they may taste your wrath. Throw out your list and get to work hot-wiring that car over there - Don't forget to punch those in your way! "

Post-Human Robot : Pipsfarm T-shirts and Culture : CafePress.com

2006-02-10T12:19:00.001-08:00

Post-Human Robot : Pipsfarm T-shirts and Culture : CafePress.com: "Pipsfarm T-shirts and Culture : Post-Human Robot
Technology and People = Post-human - Show the world you embrace your new cyborg state with pride"

Karma's Bitch - TV Earl : Pipsfarm T-shirts and Culture : CafePress.com

2006-02-10T12:19:00.000-08:00

Karma's Bitch - TV Earl : Pipsfarm T-shirts and Culture : CafePress.com: "Karma's Bitch - TV Earl
Karma's Bitch means that (like TV's Earl) you are at the whim of the reaction of your own actions. Careful now - You are not in control! Funny and poignant too"

Backward message - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2006-02-07T04:40:00.000-08:00

Backward message - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Songs with Backmasking"

Songs most known for having hidden messages.

Stairway To Heaven - Led Zeppelin

Another One Bites The Dust - Queen

Mr. Roboto - Styx

Back In Black - AC/DC

Imagine - John Lennon

Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath

I Am Tired - The Beatles

Hotel California - The Eagles

Fire On High - Electric Light Orchestra

Jacob's Ladder - Rush

Gonna Raise Hell - Cheap Trick

Burnin' For You - Blue Oyster Cult

My Name Is - Eminem

Perfect Sense Pt 1 - Roger Waters

Locomotive Breath - Jethro Tull

Behind Blue Eyes - The Who

Tops - Rolling Stones

Buddy Holly - Weezer

Snowblind - Styx

One - Metallica

Pepper - Butthole Surfers

No Anchovies Please - J Geils Band

Better By You, Better Than Me - Judas Priest

Sweet Freedom - Uriah Heep

Still Life - Iron Maiden

Satan Spawn, Caco-daemon - Deicide

Purple Haze - Jimi Hendrix

For Whom The Bell Tolls - Metallica

Bloodbath In Paradise - Ozzy Osbourne

Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap - AC/DC

Black Dog - Led Zeppelin

Down In The Park - Marilyn Manson

Rocket - Def Leppard

Dream On - Aerosmith

Azwethinkweiz - Incubus

Metal Health - Quiet Riot

All Apologies - Nirvana

Hate Your State - Choking Victim

Boys In Black - L7

Get Your Riot Gear - Five Iron Frenzy

665 - Soundgarden

Pry, To - Pearl Jam

Jesus Wrote A Blank Check - Cake

See You On the Other Side - Ozzy Osbourne

The 4th - Filter

Voodoo - Godsmack

Loser - Beck

Lift Your Head Up - Bloodhound Gang

Pain Lies On The Riverside - Live

Ya Hozna - Frank Zappa

Subliminal - They Might Be Giants

Skin Ticket - Slipknot

Strawberry Fields Forever - The Beatles

Sermon - Drowning Pool

Oops, I Did It Again - Britney Spears

Detour Through Your Mind - The B-52s

Aerials - System of a Down

Who Let The Dogs Out - Baja Men

Justify My Love - Madonna

Beat It - Michael Jackson

Do The Dark - Blondie

Final Scream - Grim Reaper

Empty Spaces - Pink Floyd

When Electricity Came To Arkansas - Black Oak Arkansas

Darling Nicky - Prince

Anthem - Rush

Help! - The Beatles

DubaiBuzz Online!: Article / Backmasking

2006-02-07T04:38:00.000-08:00

DubaiBuzz Online!: Article / Backmasking: "Backtracking, or backmasking is the form of inserting hidden messages into tracks which can only be consciously heard when played backwards. Most of the time these messages are inserted purposefully, sometimes by accident, some people even believe that the subconscious can actually pick up these messages. But the nature of the backtracked messages in many modern pop songs is so sinister as to leave no doubt to the intentions and affiliations of these singers. The following are examples of such cases where the backward lyrics seem to fit the
suggestions "

TalkBackwards.com - Backmasking & Reverse Speech

2006-02-07T04:37:00.000-08:00

TalkBackwards.com - Backmasking & Reverse Speech: "For many years there have been rumors that certain songs, speeches, and ads contain hidden subliminal messages that can only be heard when played backwards. This is known as backmasking, and there is much debate about its existence. Use our website to find out for yourself if it is true. Or, listen just for the fun of it."

FIQL.com: Column: The Art of The Radish: Satanic Backmasking

2006-02-07T04:35:00.000-08:00

FIQL.com: Column: The Art of The Radish: Satanic Backmasking: "Backmasking in popular music became infamous in the 1980s when fundamentalist preachers started saying that Satan was speaking to teenagers through subliminal messages hidden in rock music. One only needed to play the record backwards to hear such diabolical ranting as 'It's fun to smoke marijuana', 'I am Satan', 'Serve the Beast for money', 'I love Satan, alright. And Satan knows I love Him' and who can forget the famous, 'Glory, glory to my sweet Satan, there was a little child born, it makes me sad, whose power is Satan', from Led Zeppelin�s 'Stairway to Heaven'.

There were 3 trains of thought at the time in regard to backmasking in popular music:

1. Satan was using musicians as demonic pawns. The messages were put in the music unwillingly by the devil himself.

2. The musicians were Satan worshipers who purposefully planted the messages into the songs.

3. Hogwash

The controversy instigated teenagers across the country to play their records backwards in search of the next new 'Satanic message'. Most certainly a boon for the record industry as well as record needle manufactures.

On the not-so-humorous side, the band Judas Priest actually had to defend themselves in court for the suicide pact of Raymond Belknap, 18, and James Vance, 20 in 1985.

Supposedly, the subliminal messages 'Try Suicide,' 'Let's Be Dead,' and 'Do it, Do it' found on the band�s 'Stained Class' album drove the youths to put shotguns to their heads and pull the trigger. Not only did the band win the lawsuit, but the case helped set a precedent. Law students study the case to this day in order to help them understand the difference between real science and junk science.

After this all unfolded musicians di"

Backmasking on heavy metal rock band recordings

2006-02-07T04:33:00.000-08:00

Backmasking on heavy metal rock band recordings: "You know what you get when you play Twisted Sister's 'Burn in Hell' backwards? 'Go to church and pray on Sunday.' ' Jay Leno, Comedian

Introduction:
'Subliminal advertising' is a marketing technique which tries to manipulate people's opinion, without them becoming aware that they are being influenced. It may consist of a movie clip, image, or sound byte that is superimposed on an image, sound track or video track. It is inserted in such a way that the audience cannot detect its presence. It might be a message 'Drink Coke' or 'Eat Popcorn' flashed on a movie screen so quickly that it cannot be consciously sensed. It may be the word 'sex' or an erotic image in ice cubes of a gin advertisement that can only consciously be seen when it is searched for.
'Backmasking' is a type of subliminal advertising. It can exist in one of two forms:
Intentional backward masking: A verbal message is recorded, is reversed in direction, and is superimposed on an existing musical passage. This can only be done intentionally -- by design. It first appeared in the late 1960s as a result of an accidental tape mixing error by John Lennon in the Beatles' song 'Rain.' He liked it and left it in. It is easy to recognize: when the music is played normally, one hears a passage that sounds like gibberish -- vaguely word-like, as if it is in a foreign language. Played backwards, clear, understandable phrase or sentence is heard. Examples include:'The music is reversible but Time is not. Turn back, turn back, turn back.' Electric Light Orchestra, 'Face the Music' at the start of the song 'Fire on High.'
'Congratulations. You have just discovered the secret message. Please send your answer to old pink, care of the funny farm.' Pink Floyd, 'Empty Spaces,' at th"

FIQL.com: Songs With Backmasking

2006-02-07T04:32:00.000-08:00

FIQL.com: Songs With Backmasking: "Songs With Backmasking
Alternative, Pop, Rock
All the tracks in this playlist are said to have backmasking (satanic or otherwise). Meaning, when the song is played backwards, secret or subliminal messages are revealed. Follow the links to hear samples both forward and backwards."

Reverse Speech - Voices From The Unconscious

2006-02-07T04:28:00.000-08:00

Reverse Speech - Voices From The Unconscious: "Music Reversals
Backward messages in music (commonly known as Backward Masking) have been a controversy ever since the late 60s, when messages were found backwards on some Beatles' albums that hinted Paul McCartney had died. The controversy raged extensively in the late 70s and early 80s when religious fundamentalists claimed that Satan possessed the minds of singers, causing them to insert messages backwards into albums. As we now know, many of these backward messages were in fact examples of Reverse Speech in music. Speech reversals occur naturally in all forms of speech, sung or spoken. This site lists some examples of Reverse Speech in music."

Backward message - backmasking Stairway to heaven

2006-02-05T13:19:00.000-08:00

Backward message - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Probably the most well-known form of backmasking is allegedly audible in the 70's rock group Led Zeppelin's song 'Stairway to Heaven.' The lyrics that are most popularly examplified are as follows:
If there's a bustle in your hedgerow Don't be alarmed now It's just a spring clean from the May Queen. Yes, there are two paths you can go by; but in the long run, There's still time to change the road you're on. Some interpret the reversed lyrics to sound something like the following:
Here's to my sweet Satan The one who's little path would make me sad, who's power is fake/Satan. He'll give you give you 666 [This line is controversial in itself; some say these words do not exist and are simply gibberish. However, this is what they are most usually interpreted as if they can be agreed on as words]. There was a little toolshed where he made us suffer, sad Satan. However, these reversed lyrics are interpretive and nothing can really be proved as to their deliberate insertion."

Backmasking t-shirt's here - Paul is Dead!

Backmasking Blog Entries

2006-02-05T13:16:00.000-08:00

Related Blog Entries: "Your Backmasking Experiences
Excerpt: Please leave a comment here if you're into the whole backmasking thing. Have you tried it? What have you found? Do you think there is something to it, or do you just think it's all a coincidence? This is the place to leave your comments on what you've discovered from your own experimenting.
Posted: 2005.11.02 - 7:24 pm

Other Songs with Backmasking
Excerpt: I've been getting a lot of emails with requests for other songs that have backwards messages as well people sending me lists of songs that apparently have just that. Here are some excerpts (for those of you that care).
Posted: 2004.09.01 - 7:50 pm

Stairway to Heaven Backwards Full Lyrics
Excerpt: An email sharing his opinion on the lyrics to the whole Stairway to Heaven song played backwards.
Posted: 2004.11.06 - 10:36 am

Stairway to Heaven Backwards Interpretation
Excerpt: Some emails I have received and my personal interpretation of Stairway to Heaven. (Though now I've had some reason to change my interpretation - but here it is nonetheless.)
Posted: 2004.02.17 - 12:22 pm

Stairway to Heaven Subliminal Messages
Excerpt: Some time ago I received an email from a professor at York University. He asked if he could use part of my Stairway to Heaven backwards site / idea for a class. Here you will find the conclusion of his experiment.
Posted: 2005.02.08 - 2:43 pm"

Stairway to Heaven Backwards

2006-02-05T13:14:00.000-08:00

Stairway to Heaven Backwards: "Years ago someone told me that if you played Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven song backwards that you could make out 'satanic messages'. It is not my opinion that Led Zeppelin and the other artists here were given some kind of evil power to make these backwards sounds have a satanic message. And, no, I did not create this to show the evils of Rock and Roll. Instead I made this flash piece for two reasons: 1. I was new to flash and wanted to be better at it and 2. The reverse files sound cool.
The way I made these sound clips was first to get a copy of the original versions. For example I took my copy of Stairway to Heaven (I tried it once with a live version but I couldn't hear the message clearly) then opened it in a sound editing program (I used Windows Sound Recorder - but you can use the open source software Audacity), and reverse it. Crop to the place with back-masking sounds. That's it. "

Backmasking: Satan, marijuana and Cheez Whiz - Arts & Entertainment

2006-02-05T13:12:00.000-08:00

Backmasking: Satan, marijuana and Cheez Whiz - Arts & Entertainment

By: Melanie Glover
Issue date: 1/19/06 Section: Arts & Entertainment
Article Tools: Page 1 of 1

In place of Led Zeppelin's alleged satanic lyrics and Pink Floyd's soundtrack to the Wizard of Oz, this generation has found its own fascination with supposed hidden messages in more recent music. Now we have Britney Spears telling us, backwards, in "?..Baby One More Time": "Sleep with me; I'm not too young."

While the validity of these hidden messages varies, old and new, have no logical evidence in most cases, thousands of websites and media publications contain suggestions of subliminal messages in songs and films.

Backmasking - playing songs backward to find new "secret" lyrics - became popular in the 1970s when DJ Russell Gibb started the rumor that Paul McCartney had died after claiming that Beatles song "I'm So Tired" off The White Album played backward contained the hidden message "Paul is a dead man. Miss him, miss him, miss him."

Decades later, backmasking is still a topic popular on the Web and among music fans.

Jeffmilner.com, a personal website created by 26-year-old Canadian Jeff Milner, contains a backmasking section with snippets from several popular songs including Spears' "?..Baby One More Time" and the classic "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin. Instead of the original turntable method, Milner installed software - such as Windows Sound Recorder - that reverses the music files, revealing that a section of "Stairway" including the phrase "a bustle in your hedgerow" backward sounds like "Oh, here's to my sweet Satan," according to Milner.

"I believe that for the most part the backward messages are coincidental," says Milner on his website. "Most people can't even hear the 'message' unless they click on the 'show reverse lyrics' button."

UC Davis psychology professor Petr Janata labeled this phenomenon as "perceptual fill-in," a process in which our expectations shape how we receive sensory input.

Janata, whose research involves mental processes and expectancies with musical stimulus, also said that interpreting hidden messages subconsciously through backwards lyrics is physically impossible.

"When we listen to music our brains have no way of taking lyrics, turning them around and playing them forward to process a 'hidden' message," he said.

Since an article about Milner's site has been published in the Wall Street Journal, the recent college graduate has received a tremendous amount of media attention from ABC News, National Public Radio and beyond.

Janata said Milner's backmasking site is intriguing to people because it makes for a fascinating urban legend.

"It's music meets conspiracy theory," he said.

A similar mysterious musical experiment that is still popular among fans is playing Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon alongside The Wizard of Oz. According to rumors, the album works as a type of soundtrack to the film with tempos matching with scenes. Downloadable versions of the film with the album connected to it are available online.

In Davis, junior Stephen Kurshner and alumnus Chris Saito followed the trend of hunting for connections in film and recordings. Both have seen the simultaneously played movie and album version and agree that some instances coincide, but not all.

They cite that sections of the album eerily match the film - such as the track "Money" beginning when Dorothy enters Munchkin Land - but not enough to substantiate claims of a perfect soundtrack.

"Not enough parts sync up," Saito said. "I think it's mostly coincidental."

Kurshner said he agreed with the "perceptual fill-in" theory suggested by Janata, saying, "The album and movie may seem to go along together, because people expect them to."

Kurshner also said the Pink Floyd rumor along with backmasking in general has been appealing to music fans for ages.

"People want to know something about a band that others don't," Kurshner said. "It's kind of like being an exclusive."

From breaking down songs as obscure as Weird Al Yankovic's "Nature Trail to Hell" to find "Satan eats Cheez Whiz" to Queen's popular "Another One Bites the Dust" to hear "It's fun to smoke marijuana," imaginative musical detectives' interpretations are endless.

Paul is Dead Backmasking Ringer T > Subliminal Backmasking > Pipsfarm Culture Wear and Accessories | CafePress

2006-02-05T12:15:00.000-08:00

Paul is Dead Backmasking Ringer T > Subliminal Backmasking > Pipsfarm Culture Wear and Accessories | CafePress: "Play your Beatles records backwards to hear the hidden messages - This hot awesome design takes you back to those crazy daze of backmasking - Show you got the message! "

Check out all the t-shirt by our friends down at Pipsfarm Culture

Improv Games Collection

2006-01-20T15:01:00.000-08:00

Improv Games Collection: "Improv Games Collection
These are games, handles, warm-ups and exercises. Each of these may belong in one or more Categories .
Some games, known by a particular name, are actually minor variations on a broader game. For those, the link will refer to the broader game handle, and you'll find the particular sub-format indexed here indicated in bold in the text. For an example, take a look at Scene Replay . "

Children's Theatre Company - Minneapolis, MN

2006-01-17T06:55:00.000-08:00

Children's Theatre Company - Minneapolis, MN: "There's no place like CTC...
The 2003 recipient of the Tony� Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre, The Children's Theatre Company is acclaimed as America's flagship theatre for young people and families, serving over 350,000 people each year.

Peter C. Brosius
Artistic DirectorTeresa Eyring
Managing Director"

Fine Arts -- Music

2006-01-16T07:19:00.000-08:00

Fine Arts -- Music: "Canisius College offers a major and a minor in Music. Courses introduce students to the literature and performance of music, as well as its theory and technology. Music appreciation courses cover a wide range of musical styles and give students the basic materials of music and an introduction to the lives, works, and historical settings of the significant composers of the past and present. Through lectures, videos, listening to music examples in class, and attendance at concerts, the courses provide "

Nijmegen WW II

2006-01-16T07:08:00.000-08:00

Nijmegen: Definition and Much More From Answers.com: "In 1940, the Netherlands were invaded by Germany with Nijmegen being the first Dutch city to fall into German hands. On 22 February, 1944, Nijmegen was heavily bombed by American planes, causing great damage to the city centre. Allegedly the pilots thought they were bombing the German city of Kleve, although it has also been claimed to have been a deliberate act. The NIOD announced in January 2005 that its study of the incident confirmed that it was an accident caused by poor communications and chaos in the airspace. Over 750 people died in the incident. During 1944, the city saw heavy fighting during Operation Market Garden."

Nijmegen more

2006-01-16T07:04:00.000-08:00

Nijmegen: Definition and Much More From Answers.com: "In the 8th century, Emperor Charlemagne built a castle in Nijmegen, which marked the start of an era of prosperity for Nijmegen."

Nijmegen: Definition and Much More From Answers.com

2006-01-16T07:01:00.000-08:00

Nijmegen: Definition and Much More From Answers.com: "International Four Days Marches Nijmegen
Nijmegen is famous for the International Four Days Marches Nijmegen also known as the 'Vierdaagse', an annual event starting on the "

International Four Days Marches Nijmegen: Information From Answers.com

2006-01-16T06:59:00.000-08:00

International Four Days Marches Nijmegen: Information From Answers.com: "International Four Days Marches Nijmegen
The International Four Day Marches Nijmegen (or Vierdaagse) is the largest marching event in the world. It is organised every year in Nijmegen in mid-July as a means of promoting sport and exercise. Participants walk 30, 40 or 50 kilometers daily, and, on completion, receive a royally approved medal (Vierdaagsekruis). The participants are mostly civilians, but there are also a few thousand military."

Narnia's Magic Fantasy Myth Worlds

2005-12-19T09:11:00.000-08:00

Narnia's Magic Fantasy Myth Worlds: "SNL - Chronicles of Narnia Rap (video)
SNL - Chronicles of Narnia Rap (video): ' SNL - Chronicles of Narnia Rap (video)

A rare good SNL skit/short about watching the Chronicles of Narnia; Parnell and Samberg kick it Beasties style.'"

Mark/Space: Anachron City: Library: Biographs: Kathy Acker

2005-12-15T06:17:00.000-08:00

Mark/Space: Anachron City: Library: Biographs: Kathy Acker: "'I came out of the poetry world of America. Specifically, I was taught by the second generation of the Black Mountain poets and by Jackson MacLow who was a crossover between that group and Fluxus [links to Fluxus site on the net]. Among the many lessons I had learned by the time I was in my early twenties was a practical one: poets never make money and are, as both Rimbaud and Patti Smith said, the white niggers of this earth'. --Kathy Acker (in the introduction to Young Lust , 1988). "

Jean Baudrillard - The Spirit of Terrorism - 2001

2005-12-15T06:13:00.000-08:00

The spirit of terrorism
Jean Baudrillard
Le Monde 2/11/01

Translated: Dr Rachel Bloul, School of Social sciences, Australian National
University.

In footnotes: personal comments to remind me to think about these points
when later analyzing the piece.

In italics, details about not-quite-direct translations.

We have had many global events from Diana's death to the World Cup, or
even violent and real events from wars to genocides. But not one global
symbolic event, that is an event not only with global repercussions, but
one that questions the very process of globalization. All through the
stagnant 90s, there has been "la greve des evenements" (literally "an
events strike", translated from a phrase of the Argentino writer Macedonio
Fernandez). Well, the strike is off. We are even facing, with the World
Trade Center & New York hits, the absolute event, the "mother" of events,
the pure event which is the essence of all the events that never happened.

Not only are all history and power plays disrupted, but so are the
conditions of analysis. One must take one's time. For as long as events
were at a standstill, one had to anticipate and overcome them. But when
they speed up, one must slow down; without getting lost under a mass of
discourses and the shadow of war ("nuage de la guerre": literally clouds
announcing war), and while keeping undiminished the unforgettable flash of
images.

All the speeches and commentaries betray a gigantic abreaction to the
event itself and to the fascination that it exerts. Moral condemnation and
the sacred union against terrorism are equal to the prodigious jubilation
engendered by witnessing this global superpower being destroyed; better,
by seeing it more or less self-destroying, even suiciding spectacularly.

Though it is (this superpower) that has, through its unbearable power,
engendered all that violence brewing around the world, and therefore this
terrorist imagination which -unknowingly- inhabits us all.

That we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has
dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power
hegemonic to that degree, - this is unacceptable for Western moral
conscience, but it is still a fact, and one which is justly measured by
the pathetic violence of all those discourses which attempt to erase it.

It is almost they who did it, but we who wanted it. If one does not take
that into account, the event lost all symbolic dimension to become a pure
accident, an act purely arbitrary, the murderous fantasy of a few
fanatics, who would need only to be suppressed. But we know very well that
this is not so. Thus all those delirious, counter-phobic exorcisms:
because evil is there, everywhere as an obscure object of desire. Without
this deep complicity, the event would not have had such repercussions, and
without doubt, terrorists know that in their symbolic strategy they can
count on this unavowable complicity.

This goes much further than hatred for the dominant global power from the
disinherited and the exploited, those who fell on the wrong side of global
order. That malignant desire is in the very heart of those who share (this
order's) benefits. An allergy to all definitive order, to all definitive
power is happily universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center
embodied perfectly, in their very double-ness (literally twin-ness), this
definitive order.

No need for a death wish or desire for self-destruction, not even for
perverse effects. It is very logically, and inexorably, that the
(literally: "rise to power of power") exacerbates a will to destroy it.
And power is complicit with its own destruction. When the two towers
collapsed, one could feel that they answered the suicide of the kamikazes
by their own suicide. It has been said: "God cannot declare war on
Itself". Well, It can. The West, in its God-like position (of divine
power, and absolute moral legitimacy) becomes suicidal, and declares war
on itself.

Numerous disaster movies are witness to this phantasm, which they
obviously exorcise through images and submerge under special effects. But
the universal attraction these movies exert, as pornography does, shows
how (this phantasm's) realization is always close at hand - the impulse to
deny any system being all the stronger if such system is close to
perfection or absolute supremacy.

It is even probable that the terrorists (like the experts!) did not
anticipate the collapse of the Twin Towers, which was, far more than (the
attack of) the Pentagon, the deepest symbolic shock. The symbolic collapse
of a whole system is due to an unforeseen complicity, as if, by collapsing
(themselves), by suiciding, the towers had entered the game to complete
the event.

In a way, it is the entire system that, by its internal fragility, helps
the initial action. The more the system is globally concentrated to
constitute ultimately only one network, the more it becomes vulnerable at
a single point (already one little Filipino hacker has succeeded, with his
laptop, to launch the I love you virus that wrecked entire networks).
Here, eighteen (dix-huit in the text) kamikazes, through the absolute arm
that is death multiplied by technological efficiency, start a global
catastrophic process.

When the situation is thus monopolized by global power, when one deals
with this formidable condensation of all functions through technocratic
machinery and absolute ideological hegemony (pensee unique), what other
way is there, than a terrorist reversal of the situation (literally
'transfer of situation': am I too influenced by early translation as
'reversal'?)? It is the system itself that has created the objective
conditions for this brutal distortion. By taking all the cards to itself,
it forces the Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are
ferocious, because the stakes are ferocious. To a system whose excess of
power creates an unsolvable challenge, terrorists respond by a definitive
act that is also unanswerable (in the text: which cannot be part of the
exchange circuit). Terrorism is an act that reintroduces an irreducible
singularity in a generalized exchange system. Any singularity (whether
species, individual or culture), which has paid with its death for the
setting up of a global circuit dominated by a single power, is avenged
today by this terrorist situational transfer.

Terror against terror - there is no more ideology behind all that. We are
now far from ideology and politics. No ideology, no cause, not even an
Islamic cause, can account for the energy which feeds terror. It (energy)
does not aim anymore to change the world, it aims (as any heresy in its
time) to radicalize it through sacrifice, while the system aims to realize
(the world) through force.

Terrorism, like virus, is everywhere. Immersed globally, terrorism, like
the shadow of any system of domination, is ready everywhere to emerge as a
double agent. There is no boundary to define it; it is in the very core of
this culture that fights it - and the visible schism (and hatred) that
opposes, on a global level, the exploited and the underdeveloped against
the Western world, is secretly linked to the internal fracture of the
dominant system. The latter can face any visible antagonism. But with
terrorism - and its viral structure -, as if every domination apparatus
were creating its own antibody, the chemistry of its own disappearance;
against this almost automatic reversal of its own puissance, the system is
powerless. And terrorism is the shockwave of this silent reversal.

Thus, it is no shock of civilizations, of religions, and it goes much
beyond Islam and America, on which one attempts to focus the conflict to
give the illusion of a visible conflict and of an attainable solution
(through force). It certainly is a fundamental antagonism, but one which
shows, through the spectrum of America (which maybe by itself the
epicentre but not the embodiment of globalization) and through the
spectrum of Islam (which is conversely not the embodiment of terrorism),
triumphant globalization fighting with itself. In this way it is indeed a
World War, not the third one, but the fourth and only truly World War, as
it has as stakes globalization itself. The first two World Wars were
classic wars. The first ended European supremacy and the colonial era. The
second ended Nazism. The third, which did happen, as a dissuasive Cold
War, ended communism. From one war to the other, one went further each
time toward a unique world order. Today the latter, virtually
accomplished, is confronted by antagonistic forces, diffused in the very
heart of the global, in all its actual convulsions. Fractal war in which
all cells, all singularities revolt as antibodies do. It is a conflict so
unfathomable that, from time to time, one must preserve the idea of war
through spectacular productions such as the Gulf (production) and today
Afghanistan's. But the fourth World War is elsewhere. It is that which
haunts every global order, every hegemonic domination; -if Islam dominated
the world, terrorism would fight against it.

For it is the world itself which resists domination.

Terrorism is immoral. The event of the World Trade Center, this symbolic
challenge is immoral, and it answers a globalization that is immoral. Then
let us be immoral ourselves and, if we want to understand something, let
us go somewhat beyond Good and Evil. As we have, for once, an event that
challenges not only morals, but every interpretation, let us try to have
the intelligence of Evil. The crucial point is precisely there: in this
total counter-meaning to Good and Evil in Western philosophy, the
philosophy of Enlightenment. We naively believe that the progress of the
Good, its rise in all domains (sciences, techniques, democracy, human
rights) correspond to a defeat of Evil. Nobody seems to understand that
Good and Evil rise simultaneously, and in the same movement. The triumph
of the One does not produce the erasure of the Other. Metaphysically, one
considers Evil as an accident, but this axiom, embedded in all manichean
fights of Good against Evil, is illusory. Good does not reduce Evil, nor
vice-versa: there are both irreducible, and inextricable from each other.
In fact, Good could defeat Evil only by renouncing itself, as by
appropriating a global power monopoly, it creates a response of
proportional violence.

In the traditional universe, there was still a balance of Good and Evil,
according to a dialectical relation that more or less insured tension and
equilibrium in the moral universe; - a little as in the Cold War, the
face-to-face of the two powers insured an equilibrium of terror. Thus,
there was no supremacy of one on the other. This symmetry is broken as
soon as there is a total extrapolation of the Good (an hegemony of the
positive over any form of negativity, an exclusion of death, of any
potential adversarial force: the absolute triumph of the Good). From
there, the equilibrium is broken, and it is as if Evil regained an
invisible autonomy, developing then in exponential fashion.

Keeping everything in proportion, it is more or less what happened in the
political order with the erasure of communism and the global triumph of
liberal power: a fantastical enemy appeared, diffused over the whole
planet, infiltrating everywhere as a virus, surging from every interstice
of power. Islam. But Islam is only the moving front of the
crystallization of this antagonism. This antagonism is everywhere and it
is in each of us. Thus, terror against terror... But asymmetrical
terror... And this asymmetry leaves the global superpower totally
disarmed. Fighting itself, it can only founder in its own logic of power
relations, without being able to play in the field of symbolic challenge
and death, as it has eliminated the latter from its own culture.

Until now this integrating power had mostly succeeded to absorb every
crisis, every negativity, creating therefore a deeply hopeless situation
(not only for the damned of the earth, but for the rich and the privileged
too, in their radical comfort). The fundamental event is that terrorists
have finished with empty suicides; they now organize their own death in
offensive and efficient ways, according to a strategic intuition, that is
the intuition of the immense fragility of their adversary, this system
reaching its quasi perfection and thus vulnerable to the least spark. They
succeeded in making their own death the absolute arm against a system that
feeds off the exclusion of death, whose ideal is that of zero death. Any
system of zero death is a zero sum system. And all the means of dissuasion
and destruction are powerless against an enemy who has already made his
death a counter-offensive. "What of American bombings! Our men want to die
as much as Americans want to live!" This explains the asymmetry of 7, 000
deaths in one blow against a system of zero death.

Therefore, here, death is the key (to the game) not only the brutal
irruption of death in direct, in real time, but also the irruption of a
more-than-real death: symbolic and sacrificial death - the absolute, no
appeal event.

This is the spirit of terrorism.

Never is it to attack the system through power relations. This belongs to
the revolutionary imaginary imposed by the system itself, which survives
by ceaselessly bringing those who oppose it to fight in the domain of the
real, which is always its own. But (it) moves the fight into the symbolic
domain, where the rule is the rule of challenge, of reversal, of
escalation. Thus, death can be answered only though an equal or superior
death. (Terrorism) challenges the system by a gift that the latter can
reciprocate only through its own death and its own collapse.

The terrorist hypothesis is that the system itself suicides in response to
the multiple challenges of death and suicide. Neither the system, nor
power, themselves escape symbolic obligation -and in this trap resides the
only chance of their demise (catastrophe). In this vertiginous cycle of
the impossible exchange of death, the terrorist death is an infinitesimal
point that provokes a gigantic aspiration, void and convection. Around
this minute point, the whole system of the real and power gains in
density, freezes, compresses, and sinks in its own super-efficacy. The
tactics of terrorism are to provoke an excess of reality and to make the
system collapse under the weight of this excess. The very derision of the
situation, as well as all the piled up violence of power, flips against
it, for terrorist actions are both the magnifying mirror of the system's
violence, and the model of a symbolic violence that it cannot access, the
only violence it cannot exert: that of its own death.

This is why all this visible power cannot react against the minute, but
symbolic death of a few individuals.

One must recognize the birth of a new terrorism, a new form of action that
enters the game and appropriate its rules, the better to confuse it. Not
only do these people not fight with equal arms, as they produce their own
deaths, to which there is no possible response ("they are cowards"), but
they appropriate all the arms of dominant power. Money and financial
speculation, information technologies and aeronautics, the production of
spectacle and media networks: they have assimilated all of modernity and
globalization, while maintaining their aim to destroy it.

Most cunningly, they have even used the banality of American everyday life
as a mask and double game. Sleeping in their suburbs, reading and studying
within families, before waking up suddenly like delayed explosive devices.
The perfect mastery of this secretiveness is almost as terrorist as the
spectacular action of the 11 September. For it makes one suspect: any
inoffensive individual can be a potential terrorist! If those terrorists
could pass unnoticed, then anyone of us is an unnoticed criminal (each
plane is suspect too), and ultimately, it might even be true. This might
well correspond to an unconscious form of potential criminality, masked,
carefully repressed, but always liable, if not to surge, at least to
secretly vibrate with the spectacle of Evil. Thus, the event spreads out
in its minutiae, the source of an even more subtle psychological (mental)
terrorism.

The radical difference is that terrorists, while having at their disposal
all the arms of the system, have also another fatal weapon: their own
death.

If they limited themselves to fighting the system with its own weapons,
they would be immediately eliminated. If they did not oppose the system
with their own death, they would disappear as quickly as a useless
sacrifice; this has almost always been the fate of terrorism until now
(thus the Palestinian suicidal attacks) and the reason why it could not
but fail.

Everything changed as soon as they allied all available modern means to
this highly symbolic weapon. The latter infinitely multiplies their
destructive potential. It is the multiplication of these two factors
(which seem to us so irreconcilable) that gives them such superiority.
Conversely, the strategy of zero death, of a technological, 'clean' war,
precisely misses this transfiguration of 'real' power by symbolic power.

The prodigious success of such an attack poses a problem, and to
understand it, one must tear oneself away from our Western perspective, to
apprehend what happens in terrorists' minds and organization. Such
efficacy, for us, would mean maximal calculation and rationality,
something we have difficulties imagining in others. And even then, with
us, there would always be, as in any rational organization or secret
service, leaks and errors.

Thus, the secret of such success is elsewhere. The difference, with them,
is that there is no work contract, but a pact and an obligation of
sacrifice. Such obligation is secure from defection and corruption. The
miracle is the adaptation to a global network, to technical protocols
without any loss of this complicity for life and to the death. Contrary to
the contract, the pact does not link individuals, -even their 'suicide' is
not individual heroism, it is a collective, sacrificial act, sealed by
demanding ideals (I'm a bit free here but I feel it corresponds better to
what is meant by 'exigence ideale'). And it is the conjunction of these
two mechanisms, born of an operational structure and of a symbolic pact,
which makes possible such an excessive action.

We have no idea anymore of what is such a symbolic calculation, as in
poker or potlatch, with minimal stakes and maximal result. That is,
exactly what terrorists obtained in the attack on Manhattan, and which
would be a good metaphor for chaos theory: an initial shock, provoking
incalculable consequences, while American gigantic deployment ("Desert
Storm") obtained only derisory effects; - the storm ending so to speak in
the flutter of butterfly wings.

Suicidal terrorism was the terrorism of the poor; this is the terrorism of
the rich. And that is what specially frighten us: they have become rich
(they have every means) without ceasing to want to eradicate us.
Certainly, according to our value system, they cheat: staking (gambling?)
one's own death is cheating. But they could not care less, and the new
rules of the game are not ours.

We try everything to discredit their actions. Thus, we call them
"suicidal" and "martyrs". To add immediately that such martyrdom does not
prove anything, that it has nothing to do with truth and even (quoting
Nietzsche) that it is the enemy of truth. Certainly, their death does not
prove anything, but there is nothing to prove in a system where truth
itself is elusive --or are we pretending to own it? Besides, such a moral
argument can be reversed. If the voluntary martyrdom of the kamikazes
proves nothing, then the involuntary martyrdom of the victims cannot prove
anything either, and there is something obscene in making it a moral
argument (the above is not to negate their suffering and their death).

Another bad faith argument: these terrorists exchange their death for a
place in Paradise. Their act is not gratuitous, thus it is not authentic.
It would be gratuitous only if they did not believe in God, if their death
was without hope, as is ours (yet Christian martyrs assumed just such
sublime exchange). Thus, again, they do not fight with equal weapons if
they have the right to a salvation we can no longer hope for. We have to
lose everything by our death while they can pledge it for the highest
stakes.

Ultimately, all that - causes, proofs, truth, rewards, means and ends-
belongs to typically Western calculation. We even put a value to death in
terms of interest rates, and quality/price ratio. Such economic
calculations are the calculation of those poor who no longer have even the
courage to pay (the price of death?).

What can happen, - apart from war, which is no more than a conventional
protection screen? We talk of bio-terrorism, bacteriological war or
nuclear terrorism. But none of that belongs to the domain of symbolic
challenge, rather it belongs to an annihilation without speech, without
glory, without risk - that is, to the domain of the final solution.

And to see in terrorist action a purely destructive logic is nonsense. It
seems to me that their own death is inseparable from their action ( it is
precisely what makes it a symbolic action), and not at all the impersonal
elimination of the Other. Everything resides in the challenge and the
duel, that is still in a personal, dual relation with the adversary. It is
the power of the adversary that has humbled you, it is this power which
must be humbled. And not simply exterminated... One must make (the
adversary) lose face. And this cannot be obtained by pure force and by the
suppression of the other. The latter must be aimed at, and hurt, as a
personal adversary. Apart from the pact that links terrorists to each
other, there is something like a dual pact with the adversary. It is then,
exactly the opposite to the cowardice of which they are accused, and it is
exactly the opposite of what Americans do, for example in the Gulf War
(and which they are doing again in Afghanistan): invisible target,
operational elimination.

Of all these vicissitudes, we particularly remember seeing images. And we
must keep this proliferation of images, and their fascination, for they
constitute, willy nilly, our primitive scene. And the New York events have
radicalized the relation of images to reality, in the same way as they
have radicalized the global situation. While before we dealt with an
unbroken abundance of banal images and an uninterrupted flow of spurious
events, the terrorist attack in New York has resurrected both the image
and the event.

Among the other weapons of the system which they have co-opted against it,
terrorists have exploited the real time of images (not clear here if it is
real duration, real time or images in real time), their instantaneous
global diffusion. They have appropriated it in the same way as they have
appropriated financial speculation, electronic information or air traffic.
The role of images is highly ambiguous. For they capture the event (take
it as hostage) at the same time as they glorify it. They can be infinitely
multiplied, and at the same time act as a diversion and a neutralization
(as happened for the events of May 68). One always forgets that when one
speaks of the "danger" of the media. The image consumes the event, that
is, it absorbs the latter and gives it back as consumer goods. Certainly
the image gives to the event an unprecedented impact, but as an
image-event.

What happens then to the real event, if everywhere the image, the fiction,
the virtual, infuses reality? In this present case, one might perceive
(maybe with a certain relief) a resurgence of the real, and of the
violence of the real, in a supposedly virtual universe. "This is the end
of all your virtual stories, - that is real!" Similarly, one could
perceive a resurrection of history after its proclaimed death. But does
reality really prevail over fiction? If it seems so, it is because reality
has absorbed the energy of fiction, and become fiction itself. One could
almost say that reality is jealous of fiction, that the real is jealous of
the image... It is as if they duel, to find which is the most
unimaginable.

The collapse of the towers of the World Trade Center is unimaginable, but
that is not enough to make it a real event. A surplus of violence is not
enough to open up reality. For reality is a principle, and this principle
is lost. Real and fiction are inextricable, and the fascination of the
attack is foremost the fascination by the image (the consequences, whether
catastrophic or leading to jubilation are themselves mostly imaginary).

It is therefore a case where the real is added to the image as a terror
bonus, as yet another thrill. It is not only terrifying, it is even real.
It is not the violence of the real that is first there, with the added
thrill of the image; rather the image is there first, with the added
thrill of the real. It is something like a prize fiction, a fiction beyond
fiction. Ballard (after Borges) was thus speaking of reinventing the real
as the ultimate, and most redoubtable, fiction.

This terrorist violence is not then reality backfiring, no more than it is
history backfiring. This terrorist violence is not "real". It is worse in
a way: it is symbolic. Violence in itself can be perfectly banal and
innocuous. Only symbolic violence generates singularity. And in this
singular event, in this disaster movie of Manhattan, the two elements that
fascinate 20th century masses are joined: the white magic of movies and
the black magic of terrorism.

One tries after the event to assign to the latter any meaning, to find any
possible interpretation. But there is none possible, and it is only the
radicality of the spectacle, the brutality of the spectacle that is
original and irreducible. The spectacle of terrorism imposes the terrorism
of the spectacle. And against this immoral fascination (even if it
engenders a universal moral reaction) the political order can do nothing.
This is our theatre of cruelty, the only one left to us, -extraordinary
because it unites the most spectacular to the most provocative. It is both
the sublime micro-model of a nucleus of real violence with maximal
resonance - thus the purest form of the spectacular, and the sacrificial
model that opposes to historical and political order the purest symbolic
form of challenge.

Any slaughter would be forgiven them if it had a meaning, if it could be
interpreted as historical violence - this is the moral axiom of
permissible violence. Any violence would be forgiven them if it were not
broadcast by media ("Terrorism would be nothing without the media"). But
all that is illusory. There is no good usage of the media, the media are
part of the event, they are part of the terror and they are part of the
game in one way or another.

Repressive actions travel the same unpredictable spiral as terrorist
actions - none can know where it may stop, and what reversals may follow.
At the level of the image and information, there are no possible
distinctions between the spectacular and the symbolic, between "crime" and
repression. And this uncontrollable unraveling of reversibility is the
true victory of terrorism. It is a victory visible in the underground and
extensive ramifications of the event - not only in direct, economic,
political, market and financial recessions for the whole system, and in
the moral and psychological regression that follows; but also in the
regression of the value system, of all the ideology of freedom and free
movement etc... that the Western world is so proud of, and that
legitimates in its eyes its power over the rest of the world.

Already, the idea of freedom, a new and recent (sic) idea, is being erased
from everyday lives and consciousness, and liberal globalization is being
realized as its exact reverse: a 'Law and Order' globalization, a total
control, a policing terror. Deregulation ends in maximal constraints and
restrictions, equal to those in a fundamentalist society.

Production, consumption, speculation and growth slowdowns (but not of
course corruption!): everything indicates a strategic retreat of the
global system, a heart-rending revision of its values, a regulation forced
by absolute disorder, but one the system imposes on itself, internalizing
its own defeat. It seems a defensive reaction to terrorism impact, but it
might in fact respond to secret injunctions.

Another side to terrorist victory is that all other forms of violence and
destabilization of order favor it: Internet terrorism, biological
terrorism, anthrax terrorism and the terrorism of the rumor, all are
assigned to Ben Laden. He could even claim natural disasters. Every form
of disorganization and perverse exchange benefits him. The structure of
generalized global exchange itself favors impossible exchange. It is a
form of terrorist automatic writing, constantly fed by the involuntary
terrorism of the news. With all its consequent panics: if, in that
anthrax story, intoxication happens by itself, by instantaneous
crystallization, like a chemical solution reacting to the contact of a
molecule, it is because the system has reached the critical mass that
makes it vulnerable to any aggression.

There is no solution to this extreme situation, especially not war that
offers only an experience of deja-vu, with the same flooding of military
forces, fantastic news, useless propaganda, deceitful and pathetic
discourses and technological deployment. In other words, as in the Gulf
War, a non-event, an event that did not happen...

There is its raison d'etre: to substitute to a real and formidable, unique
and unforeseeable event, a repetitive and deja-vu pseudo-event. The
terrorist attack corresponded to a primacy of the event over every model
of interpretation. Conversely, this stupidly military and technological
war corresponds to a primacy of the model over the event, that is to
fictitious stakes and to a non-sequitur. War extends/continues the absence
at the heart of politics through other means.

Jean Baudrillard - The Spirit of Terrorism - 2001

Jean Baudrillard - End of History

2005-12-15T06:11:00.000-08:00

Jean Baudrillard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "End of history and meaning
According to Baudrillard, in the 20th century, we somehow reached the termination of history. The method of this termination comes through the lack of oppositional elements in society, with the mass having become 'the silent majority', an imploded concept which absorbs images passively, becoming itself a media overwritten by those who speak for it. By its silence, contends Baudrillard, the people create the extreme situation which is exploited by the aestheticising of politics and the symbolically viral kind of conflict that is terrorism. The end of history is typified by the public assumption of revolutionary fulfillment, which is equal to the same, the celebration of the past in the place of concern for the future and the continual repetition of scenarios in identical forms. For Baudrillard this is the natural result of an ethic of unity in which actually agonistic opposites are taken to be essentially the same. For example, Baudrillard contends that universalism (human rights, equality) is equated with globalisation, which is not concerned with immutable values but with mediums of exchange and equalisation such as the global market and mass media."

Jean Baudrillard Four Categories

2005-12-15T06:10:00.000-08:00

Jean Baudrillard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Baudrillard's Object Value System
Baudrillard was heavily influenced by the works of Karl Marx. Like many other philosophers of consumer society, Baudrillard was particularly influenced by Marx's discussion of commodity fetishism, and much of his earlier work was an attempt to re-articulate the logic of commodity fetishism through a post-Marxist frame of reference that took seriously twentieth century developments in linguistic structuralism. Part of this rearticulation involved what Baudrillard called the 'four logics of objects.' He developed four categories for the value of commodities:
The functional value of an object is its instrumental purpose. (A pen writes. A diamond ring adorns an otherwise empty hand.) This is what Marx referred to as the 'use-value' of the commodity.
The exchange value of an object is its economic value. (A pen is worth three pencils. A diamond ring is worth three months' salary.)
The symbolic exchange value of an object is its arbitrarily assigned and agreed value in relation to another subject. (A pen represents a graduation present or a speaker's gift. A diamond ring symbolizes a public declaration of love between two individuals.)
The sign exchange value of an object represents its value in a system of objects. (A pen is part of a desk set, or a particular pen confers social status. A diamond ring has sign exchange value in relation to other diamond rings, conferring social status to the person with the biggest or prettiest ring.) "

Library: Authors: Jean Baudrillard - bibliography

2005-12-15T06:07:00.000-08:00

Mark/Space: Anachron City: Library: Authors: Jean Baudrillard: "Jean Baudrillard
The Mirror of Production
(1975, non-fiction, english edition)
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign
(1972, non-fiction)
Forget Foucault
(1977, non-fiction)
The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture
(1983, non-fiction, english edition)
Simulations
(1981, non-fiction... english version, 1983...Semiotext(e), New York, US... english translation by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman)
In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities
(1983, non-fiction)
Simulacra and Simulations
(1985, non-fiction...Galilee Books, France... original french title: Simulacre et Simulation )
The Ecstasy of Communication
(1988, non-fiction, english edition)
Xerox and Infinity
(1988, non-fiction, UK)
America
(1986, non-fiction, US)
Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings
(1988, non-fiction...Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, US... edited by Mark Poster)
Cool Memories
(1990, non-fiction, US)
Seduction
(1990, non-fiction, US)
Fatal Strategies
(1990, non-fiction, UK)
Revenge of the Crystal
(1990, non-fiction, UK) "

Baudrillard and Simulation

2005-12-15T06:06:00.000-08:00

Baudrillard and Simulation: "In Simulacra and Simulation, French social theorist Jean Baudrillard argues that our 'postmodern' culture is a world of signs that have made a fundamental break from referring to 'reality.'
Baudrillard's concept of simulation is the creation of the real through conceptual or 'mythological' models which have no connection or origin in reality. The model becomes the determinant of our perception of reality-- the real. Homes, relationships, fashion, art, music, all become dictated by their ideal models presented through the media. Thus the boundary between the image, or simulation, and reality implodes (breaks down). This creates a world of hyperreality where the distinctions between real and unreal are blurred. Robert Tilton becomes a simulation of religion; Ronald Reagan a simulation of politics; and Kurt Kobain a simulation of marginality. The culture industry blurs the lines between facts and information, between information and entertainment, between entertainment and politics. The masses get bombarded by these images (simulations) and signs (simulacra) which encourage them to buy, vote, work, play,... but eventually they become apathetic (i.e. cynical). Because simulations and simulacra ultimately have no referents, the social begins to implode. This process of social entropy leads to the collapse of all boundaries between meaning, the media, and the social- no distinction between classes, political parties, cultural forms, the media, and the real. Simulation and simulacra become the real so there are no stable structures on which to ground theory or politics. Culture and society become a flux of undifferentiated images and signs.
This process is analogous to Herbert Marcuse's notion of one-dimensionality. The multi-perspectival negating potential of art becomes collapsed int"

Illuminations: Kellner - Baudrillard the new McLuhan

2005-12-15T06:05:00.000-08:00

Illuminations: Kellner: "Baudrillard's Postmodern Media Theory
In 1967, Baudrillard wrote a review of Marshall McLuhan's _Understanding Media_ in which he claimed that McLuhan's dictum that the 'medium is the message' is 'the very formula of alienation in a technical society,' and he criticized McLuhan for naturalizing that alienation.[3] At this time, he shared the neo-Marxian critique of McLuhan as a technological reductionist and determinist. By the 1970s and 1980s, however, McLuhan's formula eventually became the guiding principle of his own thought.
Baudrillard begins developing his theory of the media in an article 'Requiem for the Media' in _Toward a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign_ (1972). The title is somewhat ironic for Baudrillard is really only beginning to develop a social theory in which the media will play crucial roles in constituting a new postmodernity. Thus Baudrillard is really writing a requiem here for a 'Marxist theory of the media' arguing: 'McLuhan has said, with his usual Canadian-Texan brutalness, that Marx, the spiritual contemporary of the steam engine and railroads, was already obsolete in his lifetime with the appearance of the telegraph. In his candid fashion, he is saying that Marx, in his materialist analysis of production, had virtually circumscribed productive forces as a privileged domain from which language, signs and communication in general found themselves excluded' (CPES, p. 164). Baudrillard's critique of Marx here begins a radical interrogation of and eventual break with Marxism which would culminate in _The Mirror of Production_ (1973). Baudrillard begins distancing himself from Marxism in 'Requiem for the Media,' and in particular attacks Marx's alleged economic reductionism, or 'productivism,' and the alleged inability of the Marxian theory to co"

Baudrillard and Hollywood

2005-12-15T06:04:00.000-08:00

Baudrillard and Hollywood: "In one early scene, Thomas Anderson (a.k.a. Neo, played by Keanu Reeves) opens a copy of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation to a chapter entitled 'On Nihilism.' The book is hollow, serving as Neo's hiding place for computer programs he sells on the black market. Curiously, 'On Nihilism' actually closes the book, it's not a middle chapter as depicted in the movie. I believe this misplacement of the chapter serves as a device employed by the film makers to provide specific philosophical context for this complicated, intriguing film. While such widely divergent streams such as Christ imagery, eastern philosophy, and Greek mythology all inform the narrative and the characters, Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation is probably the best starting point for a philosophical and sociological approach to the movie's content.
In The Matrix, computer technology finally developed to the point of producing artificial intelligence; a thinking, willing, self-determined computer. It continued to learn and grow, gaining control over human society incrementally to the point of almost total control. Human revolt took the form of a mass cataclysm, nuclear in nature, intended to block sunlight from the surface of the earth and shut down the solar-powered computer. The computer then started to breed humans for use as a power source. They were born, grew, and died within gel-filled pods, fed nutrients intravenously while their body heat and electro-chemical impulses were tapped to power the computer. To keep people alive as long as possible, the computer created a program called 'the matrix,' a VR world serving as an exact sensory duplicate of late 20th century earth. Humans in the pods were plugged directly into the computer network through implants at the base of their skulls. Each individual within the matrix pe"

Towards an Ecology of Understanding: Semiotics, Medium Theory, and the Uses of Meaning by Marc Leverette

2005-12-13T06:13:00.000-08:00

Towards an Ecology of Understanding: Semiotics, Medium Theory, and the Uses of Meaning by Marc Leverette: "Towards an Ecology of Understanding:
Semiotics, Medium Theory, and the Uses of Meaning*
Author: Marc Leverette
Published: January 2003
Abstract (E): This paper argues for a bridge between the paradigms of semiotics and medium theory. It inquires into how the two paradigms define media (as text, massage, environment, �) and relate them to other components of the communication chain (the message, receiver, channel, �). While some semiotic approaches tend to concentrate on message interpretation, most medium theorists emphasize the medium or media form rather than content. A link between these two theoretical realms can allow for a more cogent analysis of media and their place in society."

Names in Postmodernity - The who's who of the POSTMODERN cosmos

2005-12-13T06:12:00.000-08:00

Names in Postmodernity: "Names to Know when Reading about Postmodernism,
Postmodern Therapies, or PMTH
If this page is of interest to you, you may also wish to look at PMTHNEWS"

Names to Know when Reading about Postmodernism,
Postmodern Therapies, or PMTH
If this page is of interest to you, you may also wish to look at PMTHNEWS

Aristotle - (384-322 BC) Ancient Greek philosopher, student of Plato and tutor of Alexander the Great. He was the author of many influential texts that havesurvived the centuries. He is the inventer of a systematic logicbasedon the syllogismthat is, in turn, based on the law of an excludedmiddle.
Theodor Adorno - (1903-1969) A critical psychologist from the Frankfurt school that combined Freud and Marx. He argues that capitalism has become more entrenched because it cultivates false needs. Clickhere for a sample of his writing.

J. L. Austin - early twentieth century British philosopher who introduced the concepts performativeutterances. He was the key figure in the development of speechact theory which divides speech into different kinds of interpersonal actions. His philosophy is often called "ordinary language philosophy" because he philosophized about the way ordinary everyday language works.

Tom Andersen -The Norwegian psychiatrist who invented the concept of a reflectingteam. See his book, The Reflecting Team: Dialogues and Dialogues aboutDialogues. Norton, 1991.

Harlene Anderson, Ph.D., PMTH subscriber, Co-Founder of the Galveston Family Institute along with co--authorHarry Goolishian. Today this organization is called the Houston-Galveston Institute (HGI). Together they developed a form of therapy called"Collaborative Language Systems" or CLS. Therapists take a stancethey call " not-knowing." Click here for more on Not-Knowing, She has written the only book on CLS, Conversation, Language and Possibilities,1997, Basic Book Click here for a summary of articles of Goolishian available: Article1.

Jennifer Andrews, Ph.D. in psychology with a specialization in marriage and family therapy, and PMTH subscriber. She is on the faculty at Loma Linda University & also supervises the clinical work of graduate students. Her studies involved work with Virgina Satir, Jay Haley & Cloé Madanes, Salvador Minuchin, Murray Bowen, Paul Watzlawick, Luigi Boscolo and Gianfranco Cecchin, Insoo, Steve and Scott Miller, and also with Michael White. Most importantly, perhaps, she worked with Harry Goolishian right before his recent death. Goolishian was on her dissertation committee. In addition to clinical work and teaching, she produces videotapes about postmodern ideas and clinical work for use in the classroom under the name of Masterswork Productions (www.masterswork.com).

Sir Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989), British philosopher who influenced the development of analytic philosophy.

Bachelard, Gaston - Some consider Gaston Bachelard one of the great minds of our times. He is very prolific. He has published twenty-three books which are expressed in subtle and suggestive prose. His intellectual career, however, began in mathematics, physics and chemistry and he once held the chair in the philosophy of science department at the Sorbonne. He then initiated a wholly new method of workingwith matter, exploring its core with the discourses of psychoanalysis andaethetics.

Bacigalupe, Gonzalo - PMTH subscriber, a native Chilean trained as a family therapist (at the craze of Maturana's rediscovery by Paul Dell in the U.S.) there and then did a doctoral inAmherst at a lucky point in time since so many god people were relatingto each other there (Janine Roberts, Lynn Hoffman, Von Glasersfeld, VernonCronen, Sara Cobbs, Marcelo Pakman, and other social constructionist minds). clickhere for more information clickhere for home page

Baird, Frank - PMTH subscriber, marriage and family therapist.

Marcelle Bartolo-Abela - PMTH subscriber am a Master's candidate in clinical mental health counseling at Springfield College, and an intern in the department of psychiatry at Baystate Medical Center, Massachusetts. I have an interest in postmodern therapies, especially social constructionism. In fact, I will be presenting two papers on (a) how the social construction of the major psychiatric disorders causes clinical harm; and (b) how unacknowledged supervisor bias (constructs) about the tenets of social constructionism are oppressive of therapists-in-training. These papers will be presented at the 8th International Congress on Constructivism and Psychotherapy in June. I intend to apply for the Psy.D. in clinical psychology.

Bauman, Zygmunt - Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds. He is known for his recent work in social theory of modernity and postmodernity.

Bliss Browne - is an Episcopal priest who created and director or Imagine Chicago, a non-profitorganization offering people especially young people, an opportunity todevelop their imagination as city creators to participate
in and sustain change. (web site for Imagine Chicago might be a linkfor the article) - as well as HGI web site.

Mikhail Bakhtin - a theorist writing in the Soviet Union beginning in the nineteen-twenties. He is often cited in postmodern works. Bakhtin argued that all forms of speech involve dialogic thinking. Even apparent monologues are directed toward gettinga response from another. For more information, click here.

Michael J. Banks, Ph.D., PMTH subscriber, is a clinical psychologist in private practice, trainer, & consultant. He has an extensive clinical background in Cognitive-Behavior Therapy,Ericksonian Hypnotherapy, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, & Solution-FocusedBrief Therapy. Known for his
warmth, his sense of humor, and the clarity & depth of his presentations, Michael has designed numerous programs that have aided people in improving their health and enhancing the quality of their lives.

Barthes, Roland. (1915-80). A brillian and influential literary critic. His work is often considered postmodern.

Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) Wasan anthropologist who developed interesting ideas on cybernetics that wereto prove influential in the developments of family therapy. He wasalso, at one point, the husband of Margaret Mead and together they developedthe double-bind theory of schizophrenia and the notion of a schizo-genicmother.

Jean Baudrillard ,sociologist and postmodern theorist. His work is nostalgic,seeing postmodernism as bound up with a proliferation of consumer goodsand services, and a kind of boredom coming from disillusionment.

Hershey S. Bell, MD. PMTH subscriber. Vice Chair and Director of Faculty Development, Department of
Community and Family Medicine, Duke University Medical Center, Durham,NC. Practicing Family Physician since 1985. Expertise in curriculumdesign and competency-based education. Current interest is
compassionate medical education and its effects on clinical practice.

Michael Billig - professorof social psychology, 8 books all with a postmodern slant. He takesa close up look at the way language is used.
Click here for more details

Cathy Birkett - PMTH subscriber and mature student currently completing a Masters' degree in Counselling Psychology at the University of Natal in South Africa. Training included psycho-dynamic, cognitive behavioural, and narrative therapies. Internship at the Student Counselling Centre. Currently
researching health and wellbeing of adolescents in this period of challenge and transformation in our country. Interests in postmodern therapies and
solution focussed work. Married with three grown up daughters.

Leonard Bohanon, Ph.D., PMTH co-list owner and subscriber, Psychologist and Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, Private Practice at Woodlands Family Institute ( http://www.wfipc.com),and staff at the University of Houston Counseling Center. Memberof the faculty at Houston Galveston Institute ( http://www.neosoft.com/~hgi). Lecturer with Our Lady of the Lake University - Houston Campus. Listownerfor SR-L, the Self Relations Psychotherapy Listserv (a St. John's UniversityList).

David Bohm - (1917-1994) physicst and philosopher of science. He gives us a radical view
of physics and talks of dialogue in a way that sometimes sounds like Lyotard.

Lluis Botella Garcia del Cid, Ph.D., PMTH subscriber, clinical psychologistDepartment of Clinical Ramon Llull University, Barcelona, Spain.
click here to e-mail:

Jerome Bruner - A key author whohelped facilitate postmodern understandings in psychology. Clickhere for an account of his constructivist theory. Clickhere for a more detailed discussion of Bruner's contribution to psychology.

Judith Butler - A professor of comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley. Her mostinfluential book is Gender Trouble (1990). She argues against thepolitics of essentialism of gender, that is, she argues against the notionthat women have a common characteristic that makes them different frommen in an essential way.
Click here for moredetails

Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) Germanphilosopher who was a logical positivist with the ViennaCircle.

Michael Coffey B Ed (hons) Ph D (in progress) PMTH subscriber. a pomo (ish) heckler, HIV/Educator, Youth Policy worker, adult educator, imposter, academic (ish), sound artist.. has a twenty year history in experimental music and fourteen years in community education and work. Current thinking on-line at http://www.spin.net.au/~mifilito/thinking.html

Scott Cole - PMTH subscriber. Occupation focus is in communications fields and artificial intelligence, in both technology and management. Licensed minister with a mainline denomination with a previous focus on counseling. Does seminars, training, and publishing on creative writing, etc. Explores and writes at the nexus of religion, philosophy, and psychology about the development of: symbols (words), narrative, motivation, attitude change, meaning and purpose in people's lives, social problems, and the influence of PostModernism on belief and social behavior. Writing and publishing is now (since 1996) primarily a probing series about "the human condition," on the Internet for writers, in the hope of intriguing others to dig more deeply into subjects in social psychology and avoid stereotypes (www.visualwriter.com). From a PostModernist and social constructivist perspective, is concerned about the type of world that we create for ourselves as we reinvent ourselves. Probably born with a PostModernist attitude, has enjoyed PMTH since its inception. Married (30+ years), three grown children.

Diana Cook, Ph.D., PMTH subscriber, sociologist, New York City. reach her by clicking here.

Steven Cooper, Ph.D., psychoanalyst, Massachusets Institute for Psychoanalysis, supports a growing movementin in psychoanalysis that wants to loosen rules on self-disclosure andanonymity in psychoanalysis.

Mick Cooper, PMTH subscriber, -phenomenological psychotherapist, School of Applied Social Sciences, University of Brighton UK, co-author of Sage book entitled ThePlural Self: Multiplicity in Everyday Life, and MANual:The complete man's guide to life.

David Cooperrider, founder of AppreciativeInquiry.

Nicolaus Copernicus - (1473-1543) Polish astronomer who advanced the theory that the earth and other planets revolve around the sun, disrupting the Ptolemaic system of astronomy.

Tom Craig, Ph.D (Religion: Hebrew Bible), Ph.D (Rhetoric and Philosophy of Communication)
PMTH subscriber, Tom is a biblical scholar who also works in the areasof Phenomenology, Semiotics, Disability Studies, and the postmodern discipline of Communicology. Presently the Co-Chair of the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (1997-99) and a Visiting Scholar in the Women's
Studies Program at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, healso works as the Co-Director of "The BodyWorks Consultation," a small,developing company working with individual clients and companies in theareas of neuromuscular integrative activity (NIA); fitness, strength &conditioning; movement analysis and education, chronic pain/repetitivestrain injuries (RSI); and health and disability communication.
Email :
Web: http://members.tripod.com/~Cesura/

Kurt Danziger - Professor Emeritusat York University, Toronto. His most recent books are Naming theMind: How Psychology Foud its Language (Sage, 1997). and Constructingthe Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
contact by clicking here.

Elliott S. Dacher, M.D., postmodern medical theoretician. clickhere to read his article on postmodern medicine. Clickhere to go to his home page. He can be reached by clickinghere.

John Dakin - community mentalhealth nurse and systemic therapist, working in Dunstable, England. Diplomain Systemic Therapy from Kensington Consultation Center. Married with threesons. Interested in relating literature to therapy.

Joyce Dattner, PMTH subscriber, colleague of Fred Newman for more than 25 years. On the founding committee of the first social therapy center in NYC inthe 1970's and a lead practitioner of Newman and Holzman's cultural performatoryapproach to human development....currently the Director of the West CoastCenter for Social Therapy and its clinical training program and the coordinatorof the Bay Area Committee for Independent Culture.

Donald Davidson, contemporary philosopher (b. 1917) who holds that communicative interaction is a thoroughly hermeneutic act that cannot be converted into a logical framework or system of social conventions that detemrines the meaning of our utterances. He argues that we know what someone means by knowing what they intend to expressand that the best way to know this is to learn what the speaker believes. He argues that the best way to understand what the speaker believes isthe application of what he calls the "principle of charity" which assumesthat most of what the speaker believes are things that we believe to betrue. This gives us a provisional way to understand people that canbe modified when appropriate. Davidson insists we must have a notionof an objective truth but he does not give us an account (either hermeneuticor correspondence) of truth.
click here for references

Gilles Deleuze, recently deceased, professor of philosophy who wrote with Felix Guattari. Most famous book is Anti-Oedipus that argued that our culture had damaged usby imposing an oedipus complex on us. Schizophrenia was the proposedmodel for escaping the damage of oedipus.

Jacques Derrida, French philosopher working mostly in the US today. He is the father of "deconstructionism" and is the person who popularized the word " deconstruction." His work is quite obscure and the scholarly public is very divided aboutit. clickhere for more details

Rene Descartes, (1596-1650), important French philosopher and mathematician. He founded analytic geometryand is considered by many to be the founder of modern philosophy. In that philosophy, he held that mind was separate from matter and interactsthrough the pineal gland in the center of the brain. This speculativenotion was deduced through an argument. The argument begins withhis Cartesiandoubtin his own existence (i.e., "Maybe I am only dreaming"). He resolvedthat doubt by saying, essentially, that even if he is dreaming he is conscious,that he could not even doubt if he was not a conscious and thinking subject,and since he is conscious, he exists. In other words, his argumentwas "I think, therefore I am." (see cogito)

Klaus G. Deissler, Ph.D., PMTHsubscriber, psychotherapist in private practice and a consultantin psychiatric and related (also business) field, author of several booksand many articles in family and systemic therapy (in German). He is editorof the German Journal "Zeitschrift für systemische Therapie". Hismain interest is in postmodern ideas and practices beyond systemic thinkingand/or practice. Currently he is editing a book together with Sheila McNameeon the relationship between psychotherapeutic practice and philosophicalideas; especially on social or dialogical poetics.
Clickhere for more information (in German).

Jonathan Diamond, Ph.D., PMTH subscriber, is a consultant, writer and practicing psychotherapist in Northampton and Greenfield Massachusetts. The author of Narrative Means to Sober Ends: Treating Addiction and It's Aftermath (Guilford, 2000), his new book Fatherless Sons: Healing The Legacy Of Loss will be published by John Wiley & Sons in 2003. Jonathan's ideas about addictions, trauma, and psychotherapy are also represented in articles and book chapters including, Post Modern Therapy: New Voices in Clinical Social Work in New Paradigms in Clinical Social Work: Volume 2, Rochelle Dorfman, editor (Bruner Mazel, 1999), and "Making Friends With Your Addiction" in The Psychotherapy Networker (July/August, 2000). He lives with his wife and two sons in Heath MA.

Robert E. Doan, Ph.D. PMTH subscriber Counseling Psychology from the University of Oklahoma (1986). Currentlya tenured, full professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond, Oklahoma. Primarily teach master's studentclasses which include marriage and family therapy, competency-based counseling,and theories and techniques of counseling. Was in private practice for tenyears, but am currently taking a break. Ran a therapy training team fornine years which gave local therapists the chance to sit on reflectingteams and receive live supervision. Have sponsored several workshops onthe UCO campus which have included Michael White, David Epston, Evan Imber-Black,Ken Stewart, Janet Adams-Wescott, Alan Parry, and Gary Sanders. Have beeninterested in narrative/postmodern approaches since seeing Michael Whitein Calgary in 1986 while doing my doctoral internship at the Family TherapyProgram. My work is also informed by evolutionary psychology and the "likelystories" that have emerged in our species. I am especially interested inthe development and evolution of language. In 1994, I co-authored a bookwith Alan Parry entitled "Story Re-Visions: Narrative Therapy in the PostmodernWorld". Most recently, my focus as been the tendency (an evolutionarylikely story) for humans to reify their metaphors and worship their gurus....eventhose who are informed by narrative and postmodern ideas. My hobbies includedistance running, guitar, and fly fishing. I have a summer home in Chama,New Mexico where I spend June and July each year. Guests are welcome. Theair is cool (8000 feet) and the fishing is decent. Always have time forstimulating discussions on the front porch of the old (1912) Victorianhouse we call our second home (my significant other is a school counselornamed Lesia).

Helen Douglas, MA - PMTH subscriber, a philosopher with a counselling practice near Cape Town, South Africa. Her continuing project is to rethink issues of violence and justice through the work of Emmanuel Levinas. To see her website, click here

Carol Drury, PMTH subscriber, Doctoral Candidate George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA; Supervisorof rehabilitation Counselors; Self Employed Mediator, Counselor, and Organizational Consultant.; Current research in investigating the issue of work (employment, not clinical) for people with personality disorders and/or substance abuse (combines qualitative and quantitative data).
Can be reached by clickinghere .

Nick Drury, PMTH subscriber, ClinicalPsychologist, private practice in Rotorua New Zealand. Hippy (1967 - 1972),M.Soc.Sc. (1976), M.Phil. (1980), hospital psychologist for too long, privatepractice. Father to Anna, Paul, & Abdhul Khan, and grandfather of Amini.Occasional marathon jogger, mountain biker, and tai chi. Some interestin zen and profeminism.
Can be reached by clickinghere .

Alastair Duhs, PMTH subscriber, is a narrative and discursive therapist based in auckland, New Zealand. coming to the field of psychotherapy via the wonderful world of physics, he has a passion for nature, how things work, how we construct our senses of ourselves, and how we negotiate this wonderful thing that we
call life. heavily influenced by Foucault, Derrida, Wittgenstein and Michael White, he is also enjoying being heavily influenced by the PMTH list! he can be contacted at alduhs@ihug.co.nz.

Jeffrey K. Edwards, Ed.D., LMFT, PMTH subscriber, I am a Professor of Counselor Education at Northeastern Illinois University, and I am more interested in downsizing and enjoyingmy life, than in creating any new ideas. I stopped two independent practices last year when I realized that all those people in distress I was
seeing had much in common with me, and I was not heeding any of myideas (like, "what would life be like, if you got rid of your cell phones,downsized your lives, and spent more time with your family? -- questionto at
least 4 families with high powered attorneys) I see Postmodernism as an interesting way of approaching therapy, but I'm worried that likeall other ideas, it too has proselytized itself, while at the same timedemanding that
there is not much to truth (a very dangerous and interesting positionto ponder). I, with other colleagues, i.e., Freedman, Bryant, andCombs brought Michael White to Northeastern in 1991, while my mostly modernistfaculty said "who's he??" My interests include supervision of counselorswithin a Strength-based model. You may learn more about me and mywork, including links to "strength-based" articles I have written at http://www.neiu.edu/~jkedward/

Edward Epp, MA studio art, M.Ed Counselling RCC , PMTH subscriber, -artist, therapist, counsellor. Interested in finding new ways to help make the world a 'saner' place, more unified and more beautiful. Attracted to the best of human inventions in therapy as well as in the arts and other sciences.
eepp@osg.net 4616 Hillcrest Ave., Terrace, B.C. VOG 2H3 Canada.

Paul Epstein, PMTH subscriber, holds an MA in Psychology and Drama Therapy from the California Institue of Integral Studies. Paul works with schools and organizations as a drama consultant, helping them use drama as an educational and group-process tool. He resides in Berkeley, California.

David Epston, co-author with MichaelWhite of Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends (1990) which launched a popular school of Narrative Therapy.

Paul Feyerabend (1924-1996) AnAmerican philosopher who argued for a kind of scientific relativism. If truth was, and Kuhn had argued, specificto various paradigms or frames of reference, then it was not possible tosay that science progressed.

StanleyFish- Until recently, he was Chairman of the Department of English,Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English, and Professor ofLaw, Duke University. But this controversial high-profile professor has recently taken a job as the highest paid employee as a Dean at theUniversity of Illinois at Chicago.

Michel Foucault, philosopher, recentlydeceased. Major inspiration for the Narrative Therapy of Epston andWhite. Clickhere for more details

Kilian Fritsch - PMTH subscriber, came to Philadelphia in '77 to work at the Philadelphia Child GuidanceClinic, learned the structural model particularly as it related toworking with hospitalized adolescents and their families. I did adoctorate at the University of Pennsylvania which applied discourse analysis,ethnography and philosophy of science concepts to analysis of psychotherapy.I was lucky to have worked with Ray Birdwhistell, and I became acquaintedwith the work he and Al Scheflen did in the psychotherapy researchproject at Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute in the late 50's.In the mid-90's I became very interested in the work of White and Epston,especially since many of the theoretical sources linked with what I had done at Penn (Geertz, Vygotsky). I'm also a big fan of Ian Hacking.

Gabrielle Guedet, PhD. MFCC - PMTH subscriber, licensed therapist - with practices in both Sacramento & San Francisco - works in areas of Jungian Depth Psychology - also in areas of Child Development & Child Psychology - does trainings & consultations on variousissues & topics - works in areas of mythology - sand tray - but alsoin areas of domestic violence - at-risk adolescents - children (0-5) -a wide variety of issues

Gottlob Frege - (1848-1925). A German mathematician, logician, and philosopher. Many claim he recreatedthe discipline of logic by constructing the first `predicate calculus'. Predicate calculus is a form of logic that analyzes propositions into atomic and quantified statements and that these propositions, along with related axioms, formed a kind of calculus that related mathematics and logic. He also tried to show that mathematics was reducible to logic, and thisgoal was not successful.

Paulo Freire - (1921-1997) A Marxist Brazilian theorist arguing how to educate the oppressed. He arguesfor reducing the power distinctions between teacher and student and bringingthe classroom back into the real world.

Freud, Sigmund (05/06/1856- 09/23/1939), founder of psychoanalysis. He was surely the most influential writer on psychological matters this century. His first influential workwas The Interpretation of Dreams published in 1900, and it was followed shortly by The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1904; and these were followed by many other works.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, recently deceased,philosopher who wrote in the tradition of Martin Heidegger. Gadamer'swork is considered a hermeneutics, or a philosophy of interpretive language.
click here for more details.

Jerry Gale, PMTH subscriber, directorof MFT program at U of Georgia, eclectic influence, interest in qualitativeresearch, current research in conversational analysis of therapeutic conversations, married no children, published 1 authored book (Conversational Analysisof Therapeutic Discourses) and one edited book with Les Steffe (Constructivism in education). Married, 2 dogs, improvisational theatre performances.
click here for more information

Steven Gans, PMTH subscriber, is co-author of Just Listening: Ethics and Therapy (with Leon Redler) and co-founder of The Just Listening Association www.justlistening.com . His Ph.D.is in Philosophy from Penn State and he has taught Philosophy in the U.S and U.K. In search of the lost art of philosophic practice he trained as an Existential Psychoanalyst with R.D.Laing and the Philadelphia Association (London). He practiced as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, is a member of the Philadelphia Association and was on the PA faculty and training committee for over 25 years before returning to the U.S. He has written extensively on the intersection between philosophy and psychoanalysis with special emphasis on the ethical contribution of Emmanuel Levinas.

Harold Garfinkel - a noted sociologist, student of Talcott Parsons. Garfinkel denied that normative rules, no matter how detailed or internatlized could bedeterminative of social condict. He wanted to develop a social systembuilt solely from the analysis of experience structures. Garfinkelfounded the movement of ethnomethodology.

Kenneth Gergen ,Ph.D. professor of psychology, leading theorist in the postmodern and social constructionist movement in psychology. Gergen argues for a distinction being made between social constructionism and constructivism. Clickhere for more details.

Mary Gergen, a professor of of psychology and Women's Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is a noteworthy leader in publications on women's studies and a founding member of TaosInstitute.

Nigel Glaze - PMTH subscriber, Art therapist and systemic family therapist and, Clinical practice in the UK National Health Service. Currently undertaking doctorialresearch with Birmingham University.

Erving Goffman, (1922-1982) A well known sociologist . Goffman wrote about the self in a worldthat both creates the self and oppresses it, talking about such thingsas the way people manage the impressions they make on others and theirsocial roles.

Harold(Harry) Goolishian, Ph.D.recently deceased, co-creator with Harlene Anderson of a school of therapy called "collaborative language systems"(CLS). CLS therapy is highly influenced by Wittgenstein ,Gergen,and Gadamer Therapists take a stance theycall " not-knowing." Click here for more on Not-KnowingSummaryof articles of Goolishian available: Article1.

Murray Graham Gordon works as an organizational consultant, executive coach and philotherapist in New York City. He recently launched www.LivingPhilsophy.org, a website created for discussion of issues related to philosophy, therapy and life in general. He is particularly interested in present in the work of Derrida, Levinas and others. As part of the Living Philosophy network, he and Alison Cichowski have organized a Living Philosophy Café ¾ meetings are every alternate Tuesday at The Fish Bar in the East Village. Philosophy Café meetings are also held from time to time at Other Books, a New York City bookstore devoted to psychoanalytic books.
Murray trained in Organizational Consulting at the William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Institute in New York. He also trained with R.D. Laing’s Philadelphia Association in London in the seventies. He has a Masters degree in Humanistic Psychology from Antioch University, an M.A. in Philosophy from The State University of New York at Stony Brook, as well as an M.Sc. degree in Computer Science.

Antonio Gramsci - (1891-1937) Argued that the working class was not necessarily revolutionary.
Click here formore information

Felix Guattari, M.D. Lacanian psychoanalyst, wrote with Gilles Deleuze. Most famous book is Anti-Oedipus that argued that our culture had damaged us by imposing an oedipus complex on us. Schizophrenia was the proposed model for escaping the damage of oedipus.

Jeffrey T. Guterman, Ph.D., PMTH subscriber, a mental health counselor and counselor educator. His interests include postmodern and solution-focused applications to mental health counseling and education. His 1994 article "A Social Constructionist Position for Mental Health Counseling" in the Journal of Mental Health Counseling (JMHC) served as the impetus for the on-going publishedexchange about postmodernism in JMHC that has included works by AlbertEllis, Allen E. Ivey, Sandra A. Rigazio-DiGilio, Earl J. Ginter, and DonC. Locke. He is director of TheCounseling Zone , an online network for counselors, mental health professionals,and students. Reach him by clickinghere.

Aron Gurwitsch - early twentiethcentury phenomenological sociologist.

Ian Hacking - a Philosophy and History of Philosophy Professor at the University of Toronto and the Institutefor History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. He is an important and original philosopher whose work is well known and widely cited across fields and disciplines. He has written eight books, including, The Taming of Chance (CambridgeUP, 1990), an analysis of the intellectual and social history of statisticsand probability theory in the 19th century; and Rewriting the Soul: MultiplePersonality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton UP, 1995), and, mostrecently, TheSocial Construction of What?

Jürgen Habermas - present day German philosopher who argues against Lyotard. GadamerRorty and postmodernity. He says that the project of modernityis not a failure. It is just incomplete. Habermas works inthe tradition of Critical Theory. His central theory is a theory of " communicativeaction." His theory has a evolutionist or developmental frameworkand he is sympathetic towards the work of Kohlberg and Piaget. Hewas a genetic structuralistm, and had faith in the Enlightenment and rational progress.

David Haddad Ed.D., PMTH subscriber, Family Therapist, Psychologist in private practice. Current interests,consulting/training/supervision in community mental health context, i.e,major mental illness, domestic violence, aging etc.. As a student of meditationfor the past 25 years, I am also intesested in the interface between spirituaityand wellness.

Harré, Rom - is a lecturer in the philosophy of science and fellow of Linacre College in Oxford University. He is also Professor in the Department of Psychology at Georgetown University, Washington, DC and Adjunct Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Binghamton University. He is a prolific author with over 30 published books, many of which have been influential. His books include Social Being (1979, 1993), Personal Being (1983), Physical Being (1991), The Discursive Mind (with Grant Gillett, 1994), and The Singular Self (1998).

David F. Harris, PMTH subscriber, MTS, is currently a Masters student in Community Counseling. While obtaining an undergraduate degree in choral conducting and a Masters in Theological Studies, Harris worked in developing and managing technology departments for large non-profits for over twenty years. His philosophical interests include Wittgenstein, Kant, Nietzsche, and Foucault. His readings in Psychology have focused on Freud, neo-Freudians, and social constructionism, especially the work of Ken Gergen. He resides in Atlanta (USA) with his wife and Australian Terrier.

Georg Hegel - (1770-1831). German philosopher who proposed that truth is reached by a continuing dialectic in which everything is divided into two parts, a thesis and an antithesis, and these opposites come together to yield a closer approximation of thetruth only for this syntheis (and every subsequent one) to become splitinto a new thesis and antithesis which reaches a new synthesis. Hismajor works include ThePhenomenology of Mind (1807).

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), a Germanexistentialist who spoke of there being two modes of existence, the Authenticand the Inauthentic. The Authentic mode is conscious of the deathand experiences 'Anxiety towards death'. The Inauthenic mode involveshumans (Dasein) in 'prattle' (as opposed to 'discourse) and to accept withoutreflection the beliefs passed on by others. His major work was Being and Time, in 1927. Heidegger has been rejected by manyphilosophers today because he was involved in the Nazi party for Germanyduring WWII. The irony of this in relationship with his philosophyis profound. His later philosophy (post WWII) abandons these ethicalissues, is largely concerned with language and is recognizeably postmodern.

Barbara Held, Ph.D. professor of psychology at Bowdoin College, Brnswick Maine, and therapist in private practice. Held is an outspoken critic of postmodernism. She calls instead for what she labels a "modest realism" in all psychotherapy theory and practice. To read more about Held in a PMTH article click here.Or click here to read JerryGale's article discussing Held. Heldin connectio with Gergen.

Tom Hicks, PsyD, M.S.W., PMTH subscriber, member of the PMTH advisory group. Currently in private practiceinSan Diego CA. Worked in hospital, agency, private practice settingssince 1979. Teaches graduate marriage, family therapy at San DiegoState University part-time. Married - newborn, and another childdue in October 1999. Interests: Surfing, Tennis, Swing-Dancing, CollabortiveApproaches to therapy.

Hill, Priscilla, Ph.D. PMTH subscriber, psychologist who has been involved in group therapy process research; interested in ordinary language study.

Sophie Holmes, Psychologist and Marital& Family Therapist in private practice Melbourne Australia. Director of Williams Road Family Therapy Centre. www.williamsroad.vic.edu.au I've done and am doing a number of
things in the family therapy and therapeutic community but the most interesting is that I am pursuing my own research - On the nature of Expertise in Family Therapy. (I am quite a way through it - well at least
that's my fantasy.) I got tired and irritate with the myth that a certain number of bags full of theory made a good clinician. My stating point was to use naturalist research methods to explore what it is that happens when
novice and experienced therapists walk in a room and being to talk with people. How do they all proceed with each other .....? sophie@williamsroad.vic.edu.au

Lois Holzman, Ph.D., PMTH subscriber, specializes in Vygotsky theory, click herefor more details

Lynn Hoffman,ACSW, PMTH subscriber, is an internationally known lecturer on family therapyand author of several books on the subject, including Foundationsof Family Therapy, Basic Books, N.Y., and Exchanging Voices, Karnac Books,London. She is particularly interested in applying postmodern ideas andformats to teaching, writing, therapy and consulting. Currently,she is experimenting with reflecting consultations on the Internet.

bell hooks, postmodern writer who focuses on the black experience through a postmodern lens. See

Michael Hjerth, PMTH subscriber, am part of the FKC team in Stockholm. Sweden and am is a 39 year old licensed psychologist. My doubts about the relevance of the recieved view of psychology are so strong that I prefer to call myself a post-psychologist: the theory and praxis of change and creativity were
always more interesting to me than explanations. I was a musician beforebecoming a psychologist and still regards therapy as very close to art.At the same time, I think that social construcionism, discursive psychology,the neurosciences and evolutionary perspectives might provide us with buildingblocks for a more "sound" science of psychology. But it would perhaps betterto find another word than "psychology". My daily work is mainly trainingand supervising solution focused work. Most of the persons
I work with are involoved in social work, substance abuse or educationalstuff. I am a board member of the European Brief Therapy Association (EBTA), I also edit a couple of web sites, includning the EBTA web newsletter,and am a member of the recently formed Solution Focused Brief Therapy Research Committe. E-mail:EBTAweb:FKC web:

Penn Hughes, Ph.D. - PMTH subscriber, a clinical psychologist who works with parolees for the California Department of Corrections. His undergraduate degree is in history. Hehas a master's degree in sociology, which claims his intellectual loyalty,most importantly George Herbert Mead and symbolic interactionism. His psychology thesis advisor was Lois Shawver.

Edmund Husserl - Founder of themodern school of phenomenology. He introduced the concept of bracketingandpresumed that the mind filters and constitutes perceptions by translatingthem into a framework of meaning.

Douglas Ingram, M.D., postmodern psychoanalyst who writes about language and the language construction of psychoanalytic sessions.Click here to see an online paper.

Bobbie Iversen is a social workerand dean and Un. Penn. She is very interested in the notion of the geneogramas as assessment tool from a social construction perspective. She is alsoone of 40 social workers teaching in university settings who recently metto talk about sc ideas in sw curriculum She has a doctorate but I don'tknow if it is a Ph.D. or
Doctorate of Social Work.

Frederic Jameson - A professorof Comparative Literture at Duke Uiversity. He publishes on Marxismand Postodernism. Probably his most important book is: Postmodernismor The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Jameson wrote the introduction to Lyotard's book, The Postmodern Condition.

William James - 1842-1910. American psychologist, sometimes called America's first psychologist, published a two volume introduction to Psychology that was the college text on thesubject for many years. He work, however, was in the tradition ofphilosophy, yet was quite readable. He was the founder of pragmatism andthe psychological movement of functionalism.

Graeme Kane, PMTH subscriber, Psychologist in community health. Interests include post-modern therapies, social constructionism, painting, the beach, gardening and good food. Thinking about private practice but find community health sector a rewarding challenge. Obtained BA (Honours) in 1991; Graduate Diploma in Educational Psychology (1995) and Master ofPsychology (Counselling) in 1999.

Kant, Immanuel. 1724-1804. German philosopher who argued that the mind processes incoming information by filtering itthrough a mental apparatus. As such, it is impossible, he argued,for us to know about the world outside our minds, however, he held, thatit was possible to discover by reason alone something about the natureof the way our minds work. His classic work making this argumentis the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). In his ethical work is theCrique of Practical Reason (1788), he put forward his stystem of the CategoricalImperative, which is rather like the Golden Rule (i.e., Do unto othersas you would have them do unto you.) Kant should be considered anativist (because we are born with the mental apparatus), and a constructivist His work has been very influential in western philosophy.

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55), The founder of Christian existentialism. He believed that his God is known only by a "leap of faith," which also is a leap into the eternal and the irrational. Only the immediacy of personal experience confers reality as a "Truth in Subjectivity". His main work is probably the ConcludingUnscientific Postscript (1846).

Chris Kinman, PMTH subscriber, lives and works lives and works near Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada withhis wife and three small children. I love water: Fishing, tide-pool searching with his children, seas and rivers. Has been involved in theVancouver area, in the development of several therapeutic programs servicingchildren, young people and their families. These programs have beenfor those children, young people and families in the care of the government,those in the Corrections system, and those dealing with issues of substancemisuse. He talks of feeling enchanted at the moment with the "languageof gift", and how this can enrich our therapeutic practices and he readsDerrida, Deleuze and Guitarri, and other postmodern writers.

Ivan D. Kovacs, PMTH subscriber, Professor Emeritus, CSUH. - 1950's psychologist: National Neuropsychiatric Institute, Hungary; 60's family service agency, US., "Training school" for juveniles, Center for Research on Conflict Resolution etc. - 70's developed undergraduate program in which interdisciplinary teams and students explore contradictory academic orientations, their conflicts etc. and the participants' intra and interpersonal processes in this context w/ goals: theoretical understanding, intra and interpersonal development. - Personal interest: relationships between living, meaning and valuing, interacting as constituents and vulnerabilities of being human

Derrick Klaassen, M.A. - PMTH subscriber interested in narrative psychology, cross-cultural/genderpsychology, psychology of religion and qualitative research. He grewup bi-culturally and bi-lingually in Germany
and is currently employed as a research assistant at Trinity WesternUniversity in Langley, BC.

Ulf Korman, PMTH subscriber, family therapist in Sweden, highly influenced by Cecchin
plays clarinet in a symphony orchestra, married, 11 year old daughter,research in progress towards Ph.D.
Click herefor more detailed account.

Thomas Kuhn - recently deceased philosopher of science. His groundbreaking book, The Structure of ScientificRevolutions, argued that science progressed both within paradigms (thatframed the problems that scientists could investigate) and by breakingwith paradigms and beginning new ones. When science progressed withinparadigms, this was called "normal science."

Jacques Lacan - a renegade Frenchpsychoanalyst who set French psychoanalysis in a tailspin primarilyduring the 1930's and 1940's. He was a transitional figure betweenstructuralism and poststructuralism, although some would argue that hewas primarily one or the other.

Larner, Glenn - a clinical psychologist working in child and family therapy. He has published widely in family therapy journals on the relevance and application of Derrida's deconstructive philosophy to a postmodern psychology and psychotherapy. He is also a doctoral student at Wollongong University researching a thesis on thistopic. ADDRESS: Queenscliff Child and Family Health Service, PO Box605, Brookvale, NSW 2100, Australia.

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von. 1646-1716. German philosopher and mathematician.He invented differential and integral calculus
independently of Newton and became famous for the metaphysical theorythat we live in "the best of all possible worlds."

Peter Lenaerts, PMTH subscriber, clinical psychologist, director of the Institute for Psychotherapeutic Relations and Reflections (IPRR) in Belgium. http://users.pandora.be/iprr.psychotherapy
Works also in the Netherlands as a postmodern and systemic psychotherapist in a psychiatric hospital GGzEindhoven. Uses poems and art in his work with psychiatric clients.

Jessica Leon - PMTH subscriber, LCSW, and RPT (Registered Platy Therapist), practicing for 5 years. She specializes in working with young children, utilizing play therapy as the primary intervention. Currently, she is in a Ph.D. program in counseling, with a specialty in marriage, family and couple's therapy.

Katherine Levine, PMTH subscriber, member of PMTH advisory group, Social Worker, aging hippy, published twotrade (popular) books on parenting, adjunct professor, provided securedetention for 366 delinquent kids, converted Jew, happily married,2 birth children.
click herefor more extended version of this info

Emmanuel Levinas - (1906-1995) - a French philosopher who inspired other French philosophes who wrote in the fertile period after WWII. Levinas argued that ethics precedes ontology, that is, that what exists in the world emerges phenomenologically for us when we awaken to our ehtical commitments and the predicaments that they bestow on us.

Valerie E. Lewis, PhD, PMTH subscriber, Clinical Psychologist. Many years in private practice, was last teaching part time in a postgrad university course in geropsychology and involved in teaching in the Erickson hypnosis
diploma in Perth Australia. Now retired and living the good life in the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, doing volunteer work and being a grandmother. Immigrated to Australia from North America many moons ago. Can be reached on valewis@lagunacom.com.au or click here.

Elizabeth F. Loftus - A well known critic of the notion of repressed memories. clickhere.

Brendeen Longoria, BSW, MSSW student Univ. of Louisville. PMTH subscriber to learn more about narrative and post modern perspectives in conjunction with my Christian beliefs. Currently working as therapist with children in Severe Behaviorally Handicapped Day Treatment program ages 6-16, doing individual, groups, and family work with mental health, learning disabilities, and educational issues. Worked previously with adolescent girls in psychiatric group home. Child protection for 3 years. Pastorial counseling for 6 years there had experience with DID, PTSD, Adult Survivors of Sexual Abuse. Group facilitator for "Curse to Blessing" encounter groups 2 years. Homeschooled 5 children grades K-6. Enjoy working with children and families. Biracial marriage 17 years. Mother of 4 children, 1 deceased. Currently in Cincinnati area, Kentucky side of the river. Future plans to secure MFT & LCSW licensure.

Jean-Francois Lyotard, recently deceased, French philosopher, most famous for defining postmodernism as an incredulity towards metanarratives. His postmodernism is visionary. It was Lyotard who introduced the notion of paralogy. Clickhere for PMTH NEWS article comparing Lyotard to Kuhn.
Click herefor a collection of articles and texts introducing Lyotard's ideas

Lakoff, George, a linguistic professor who has published influential works on the subtle presence of metaphorsin ordinary language. Clickhere to see some of his works.

Jacques Lacan, recently deceased French psychoanalyst who was highly critical of American psychoanalysis and offered interpretation of Freud's writing that tried to show us the way language works to create an unconscious. Clickhere for more details.

Edward(Floyd ) Langner - PMTH subscriber, imaginary person. With thelistowner's permission, Floyd presented himself on PMTH late December in2000. Although Lois Shawver knows who the imaginary person's authoris, she has not told. Moreover, she invited other people to joinas Floyd. If they do, then it is possible that even she will notknow who is posting as Floyd at any given time.

John Lawless, Ph.D., PMTH subscriber. I am an assistant professor at MCP Hahnemann University and consider myself a postmodern family therapy heavily influenced by narrative therapy and collaborative language systems. I graduated from the University of Georgia in May 2000 and was fortunate to have Jerry Gale as a mentor. Jerry sparked my interest in narrative therapy, social constructionism and qualitative research. My current research explores the discourse of contextual issues (e.g., race, ethnicity and culture) in marriage and family therapy (MFT). I use the term "discourse" in a loose way. For me it implies not only the conversations that MFTs have in the therapeutic and supervisory context but also the way that MFTs present themselves textually. My research experience has been in quantitative and qualitative research methodologies but recently I have focused most of my energy into qualitative research, conversation analysis and textual analysis. My clinical work has focused on working with adolescents and their families. Outside of academia, I am married, Kathryn, with two children, Connor and Aidan. I have studied Northern Wu Taijiquan. Other interests include; running, backpacking, and kayaking.

Claude Levi-Strauss - A structuralistanthropologistwho was very influenced by Saussure. He analylzed cultural organizations (usually primitive cultural organizations)to uncover the way in which their language worked to lay down a kind ofpermanent or inflexible structure in their thinking. Clickhere for more details.

Andrew Lock, Ph.D. PMTH subscriber, professor of psychology at Massey Univ, New Zealand.
Click here for more details

Jim Lord, PMTH subscriber. Works withinthe framework of appreciativeinquiry (a theory and practice of socially constructing shared desiredfutures inspired by the best of the past and present), by speaking, writingon the application of AI to the development of philanthropic collaborations (a.k.a. "fund raising").
http://www.appreciative-inquiry.org

Karl Marx (1818-83), social philosopher and political activist, and founder (with Friedrich Engels) of the worldCommunist movement. He rejected the philosophical idealism of G.W.F.Hegel but accepted his dialectical method and combined it with the philosophicalto produce his own approach of dialectical materialism. He was highlyinvolved in efforts to overthrow of capitalism which he saw as exploitiveand self-destructive. His monumental work was Das Capital (3vols., 1867, 1885, 1894).

Jeffrey Masson (1940-) Ph.D. inSanskrit from Harvard University and professor of Sansckit at toronto until1980. In 1970, however, he began training as a psychoanalyst andin 1980 he was made the Project Director of the Sigmund Freud archives. He quickly had a serious argument with Anna Freud over what he claimedto be her father's suppression of evidence of infnatile seduction.
Masson's book, The Assualt on Truth: Freud and Child Sexual Abuse,spawned an important controversy around psychoanalysis.

Humberto Maturana - wrote with FranciscoVarela Together they composed Autopoietic theory. Aupoietic theoryis a constructivist system that analyzes living systems as operational circularities. Rather than focusing on atomic referents in an objective world it talks of the relations among processes in phenomeology.
Click here fora good external site on Maturana
Clickhere to go to a relevant PMTH article,

Marsha McDonough, Ph.D., PMTH subscriber, Psychologist and Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Private Practice in Austin, Texas, and adjunct faculty at the University of Texas Department of Educational Psychology. Co-founder of Cuente Conmigo, an insitute in Austin, Texas dedicated to supervision, training, consultation, andcommunity outreach from a collaborative/postmodern stance.

Sheila McNamee, Ph.D. Professorof Communication at the University of New Hampshire, and the former Chairof that department. She is a founding member of the TaosInstitute, editor of Therapy as Social Construction with KennethGergen, and the author of numerous chapters and journal articles onsocial constructionist theory and practice.
Her work is focused on transformation of societal practices withina range of contexts including mental health, organizational life, education,community development, and health care. Her most recent book is Relational
Responsibility: Resources for Sustainable Dialogue with KennethGergen (Sage, 1998). She is editor of Therapy as Social Construction(also with Kenneth Gergen) and has authored numerous articles and chapterson social
constructionist theory and practice. Sheila lectures and consultsregularly, both nationally and internationally, for universities, privateinstitutes, and organizations.

Thierry Melchior - Philosopherand Psychologist at the Mental Health Service of the University of Brussels,co-founder of the Milton H. Erickson Institute of Belgium and of the BelgianSociety of Hypnosis, author of a book "Créer le Réel" (Editionsdu Seuil, Paris 1998) and some papers (in French) dealing with hypnosisand therapy in a constructivist framework. E-mail : tmelchio@ulb.ac.be; Website (in English and in French) :
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/1380

Louis Menand, a professor of humanities at City University of New York who warns of the dangers that postmodernism poses to the future of American liberal education.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty - (1908-1961). a French philosopher who wrote during the flowering of French philosophy immediately after WWII. He is known for insisting that the human mind is "embodied". That means that the way humans think and understand is heavily influenced by their physical existence as bodies.

Salvador Minuchin, child psychiatrist, family therapist, founder of the structural family therapy approach. He was inspired by Saussure's structuralist theory of language. Minuchin was one of the last living family therapy pioneers, who is now seen as a grandfather-figure by a lot af family therapists. Born in Argentina, but living in the USA for decades. See PMTH article on Minuchin,

John Morss - Ph.D., PMTH subscriber.A critical psychologist and senior lecturer in Education at the Universityof Otago in New Zealand. He is a very readable author of severalbooks and book chapters critiquing the notion of psychological development.

Fred Newman, Wittgensteinian philosopher, click here for more details

Leland (Lee) Nichols - PMTH subscriber. Leland (Lee) Nichols is Professor Emeritus and former Chair of Communication Studies, California Statue University Sacramento. He was hired by the university off the unemployment line (sort of) when the PBS station he ran failed to renew his contract. (They had heard the rumor he was gay.) .Before that he was head of public policy research for the State Assembly, press aid to the governor, and an NBC news reporter/ commentator. He is currently at work on The Village Factor, a book which seeks to explicate how interactions in our symbolic villages construct identity.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Nietzsche is famous for speaking of the 'Death of God'. Many of hisworks have a passionate and poetic quality about them, especiallyThus Spake Zarathustra (1883-91). Also see Beyond Good &Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), and Ecce Homo(1888). He talked of the way in which the Christian moralityis founded in the psychology of the slave and tried to 'transvaluateall values' so that his readers would be inspired to champion
the master morality. His writing was used by the Nazis afterhe was institutionalized by his sister.

John O'Leary, Ph.D. PMTH subscriber, psychologist/psychoanalyst on the faculty of Columbia University, supervisor at the William Alanson White Institute.

Kiernan O'Rourke-Phipps, MA, PMTH subscriber. After a career as a teacher of English as a Second Language at universities in England, the United States, and the Middle East, I am currently a graduate student in the Marriage and Family Therapy Specialization at the University of Oregon. With an M.A. in Sociolinguistics and extensive graduate studies in postmodern critical theory, I hope I can contribute another voice to the PMTH paralogy.

Laura Packer, Psy. D. PMTH subscriber candidate at Wright State University, PMTH subscriber, Clinical Directorfor The Willow Counseling Clinic, clinical hypnotherapist, family therapistwith a postmodern influence?
Reach her by clicking here.

Mara Selvini Palazzoli - Founder of the Milan school of family therapy. Clickhere to see her recent obituary.

David Pare - PMTH subscriber, an assistant professor in counselling at the university of Calgary. A charteredpsychologist and family therapist, David has a
longstanding interest in social constructionism, and collaborativeideas and practices. Much of his writing touches on the applicationof narrative ideas to therapy, and has appeared in Family Process, theJournal of Collaborative Therapies, the Canadian Journal of Counselling,and The Therapist's Notebook. David and Glenn Larner are currentlyediting a book with 20 international contributors on relational nonviolencein psychology and therapy.

Ian Parker, Professor of Psychologyat Bolton Institute, and co-director of the Discourse Unit (Deane Road
Bolton BL3 5AB UK) Member of the Psychology PoliticsResistance. Recent work on the intersection of Marxism and psychology(Psychology and Society: Radical Theory and Practice, co-edited with RussellSpears, Pluto Press, 1996), critical perspectives in discourse analysis(Culture, Power and Difference: Discourse Analysis in South Africa, co-editedwith Ann Levett, Amanda Kotler and Erica Burman, Zed, 1997), the productionand circulation of psychoanalytic explanation (Psychoanalytic culture:Psychoanalytic Discourse in Western Society, Sage, 1997), and criticalassessments of realism and relativism in psychology (Social Constructionism,Discourse and Realism, Sage, 1998). webpage
click here for more details clickhere to email.

Alan Parry, Ph.D. PMTH subscriber, psychologist, family therapist and adjunct assistant professor, Family Therapy Program, Department of Psychiatry, University of Calgary. I did my Ph.D. in at Berkeley in the late 60s and never quite recovered. I became a narrative therapist probably because I couldn't stop telling stories about life in the 60s and eventually co-authored a book with my good friend Rob Doan entitled Story Re-visions: Narrative Therapy in the Postmodern World. I have also written a few other articles on related topics, including a couple on chaos theory reflecting, I suppose, further fallout from a postmodern lifestyle. My greatest accomplishment, apart from marrying my wife, Elke, and co-creating a blended family of seven (now adult) children and seven grandchildren, was running a marathon a few years ago without training for it ( due, not to hubris, but to a foul-up in the registration) in three hours, twenty nine minutes.

Talcott Parsons - (1902-1979), an influential American sociologist. He argued that society tended toard a self-regulating, self-maintaining entity with each part serving a purpose of function. This line of thought is called functionalism. He believe that science progresses by a process of successive aproximation. He provides asociologized version of he logical positivist treament of epistemology.
For a good external Parsons link click here.

Charles Sunders Peirce -(usually pronounced "purse"), American philosopher, logician, physicist,and mathematician (1839-1914), sometimes thought to be America's greatestphilosopher, founded what he called "pragmatism," the theory that the meaningand truth of statements must be defined in terms of their practical andobservable consequences. It was a philosophy designed to achieveclarity and, eventually, a convergence of all opinion in an inter-subjectiveand consensual truth.
See Peirce

John Peters is professor and coordinator of the doctoral progam in collaborative learning at the Un of Tennesee,Knoxville. He has multiple publications and a forthcoming book on collaborativelearning.

Joe Pfeffer, Ph.D., PMTH subscriber,is a psychologist at the Family Court of St. Louis County (Missouri) andadjunct professor in the Department of Counseling and Family Therapy atSt. Louis University. His doctorate is from Washington University. He has been a "postmodern evolutionary" without knowing it since he discovered EdmundHusserl and phenomenologywhile an undergraduate at Georgetown University. His major psychologicalinfluence was Carl Rogers, though he bases his ideas about "personality"on Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. His first "postmodernrevelation" occurred at a Michael White workshopin 1993. Since then, he has been on a postmodern journey that stillfeels like it is just beginning.
Joe has a particular interest in psychologicalassessment in a postmodern context. His current work involves attemptingto co-construct psychological evaluations with court-referred divorcingcouples who are arguing over child custody. He is especially interested in using a ReflectingTeam format as part of this process.

Plato - (427? - 347 BC) Plato was anancient Greek philospher, whose ideas, arguably, have dominated westernthinking for over two thousand years. He was a follower or studentof Socrates and he founded the Academy where Aristotle studied in his youth.

David Pocock, PMTH subscriber, Principal Family Therapist, Child and Family Consultation Service, Marlborough House, Princess Margaret Hospital, Okus Road, Swindon, SN1 4JU, U.K. dpocock@poey.demon.co.uk Click here to visit his website.

Karl Popper - Karl Popper was not auniversity philospher, but his philosophy of science has been embracedby many scientists. He is an outspoken critic of Marxism(see The Open Society and its Enemies).

Jonathan Potter, Professor of Discourse Analysis at Loughborough University. He is the author of Mapping theLanguage of Racism and Discourse and Social Psychology (bothwith Margaret Wetherell) and Discursive Psychology (with Derek Edwards).
click here for more details

Ptolemy - second century a.d., Alexandrian astronomer, mathematician, and geographer who based his astronomy on thebelief that all heavenly bodies revolve around the earth.

Willard Van Orman (W.V.O.) Quine - grandfather of American analytic philosophy.
Much of his work was in mathematical logic. Read about his essay "TwoDogmas of Empiricism."

Sadeq Rahimi, PMTH subscriber, Doctoral Candidate of Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University. Currentresearch involves collective identity. Clinical work concerns victims oftrauma . Can be contacted by clickinghere .

Eero Riikonen - is a psychiatrist in Finland. See his book, Eero Riikonen & Greg Madan-Smith'sRe-Imagining Therapy (Sage, 1997.)

Peter Rober, PMTH subscriber, memberof the PMTH advisory group, clinical psychologist, family therapist andco-director of the trainings institute Feelings & Context (Arthur Goemaerelei,3 - B-2018 Antwerp Belgium)
Reach Peter Rober by clickinghere .

Tony M. Roberts, Ed.D. (Educational Psychology ), PMTH subscriber, is Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Kingwood College in Houston, Tx. His interests include semiotics, narrative psychology, identity formation under conditions of media saturation and instructional technology.
click here to email:

Brent Dean Robbins, Ph.D. (cand.), PMTH SUBSCRIBER, is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist who is Visiting Assistant Professor at Allegheny College. He is an offspring of Duquesne University's tradition of phenomenological and postmodern clinical psychology. His work has focused on postmodern psychotherapy, the critical theory and phenomenology of emotion, the history and philosophy of psychology, and the critical history of childhood. He is co-editor of Janus Head (http://www.janushead.org) and a partner of Trivium Publications. His home page is Mythos & Logos, at http://mythosandlogos.com.

Sharon Doubell Robins - PMTH subscriber - 36 year old SA student/ ex teacher. Currently: meandering down the road - via a Masters in Psychoanalytic Literary Theory analysing the voices of the 'multobiographers' of Dissociative Identity Disorder - to a Masters in Psychology, and narrative training in reflecting teams. Intention: to work with adolescents in the fields of drug addiction and AIDS bereavement (a soon to be developmental norm in SA.) Penchant for: lone ritual dancing around the French poststructuralist cult fires of Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan etc. Can be found: sawing off the branch she is sitting on, or paradoxically in search of 'spiritual' elegance.

Richard Rorty - An current day American philosopher who is often identified with postmodern thought in spite ofthe fact that he claims not to be postmodern.

Claire Robson, PMTH subscriber, Marriage and Family Therapist. Working on Ph.D. in MFT at Syracuse University. Previously educated (AAS in Agricultural Science) and employed in agriculture - dairy, pork, poultry, draft horses, and vegetables - before deciding that humans had some worth, too. Homeschooled three sons for 4 years before returning to school for MFT, and currently working with NY
FarmNet (based at Cornell in Ithaca, NY) to provide informational,referral and consulting services to New York's farming community. Researchinterests in Agricultural Marriages and Families.

Bertrand Russell - (1872-1970). English philosopher, known especially for his work in mathematical logicbut he also wrote many popular philosophies on social issues.

Harvey Sacks - Although he published little during his life and died an early death in 1975, Harvy Sacks deliveredlectures that were highly influential in sociology and sociologinguistics. They played a major role in the development of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (CA),

Adam Sandelson - MSc - PMTH subscriber, is a BACP Accredited Counsellor in London, manages a primary care counselling service in the NHS, and is principle tutor for the final year of the CPPD Advanced Diploma in Humanistic Integrative Counselling (a BACP Accredited Course). Interested in issues of integration between psychoanalytical and humanistic approaches.

Robert Santos - PMTH subscriber, ex-Ph.D. candidate in English/Critical Theory, with background in psychoanalytic theory (Lacan, Kristeva), feminist film theory, Heidegger and Foucault. Volunteer counselor trainee at the Southern California Counseling Center in Los Angeles. Works days doing sales for an Internet service company, and is planning to enroll in a Masters program in counseling psych in '02. Interested most avidly at this point in narrative therapy, theories of the subject and the challenges of essentialism and authenticity to a postmodern therapist.

Riet Brevoord Samuels, Ph.D.in Clinical Psychology. PMTH subscriber. Dutch, but residing in theS.F. Bay Area. One daughter. Clickhere to email.

Carlos J. Sanchez. PMTH subscriber. Born in Puerto Rico. Family therapist with extensive experience working with low income and minorities. Trained with some of the well known figures in family therapy. Area of interest is
children/adolescent and their families. Strong believer in introducing postmodernism to traditional psychotherapic models. Presently the clinical director at a residential treatment facility in Philadelphia.

Samantha Sands - PMTH subscriber "I am an EAP counsellor/case manager working in London, and a trainee
integrative psychotherapist currently studying on the Advanced Diploma programme at Regent's College. I undertake a voluntary clinical placement at my local community counselling service."

Sappho - A creative female lyric poet inancient Greece who lived and wrote on the island of Lesbos. Mostof her poems express adoration of women. more on Sappho.

Jean Paul Sartre, famous French existentialist (1905-80). Sartre was a novelist, playwright, and philosopher. Heparticipated in the French Resistance in World War II, He was also involvedin Marxist politics. His most important work is Being and Nothingness(1943), In 1964 Sartre stunned the intellectual world by refusingthe Nobel Prize for literature.
moreon Sartre

Ferdinand de Saussure - (1857-1913) Founder of structural linguistics. Structural linguistics presented a very powerful idea about the way language works. Basically, the idea is that language is based on naming things. Then, once we master a language, we master the ability to trigger certain responsesin the minds of listeners who also know this language simply by sayingthe name of things. One might say "tree," for example, and the listenerwould then have the concept of a tree brought before her mind. Theword "tree" is the signifier and the concept is called the "signified"and the entire langauge web is called a "signifying system." Saussure'smajor text was written posthumously by his students who culled the workfrom their notes. The text is "Course in General Linguistics" andit is fairly easily read.
To read more about Saussure, click here

Arthur Schopenhauer, (1788-1860), He was overshadowed by G.W.F. Hegel until 1852 when Schopenhauer's system was popularized. Schopenhaur's main work, The World as Will and Idea (1818), argues that human beings are driven by desire and to satisfy that desireleads only to ennui.

Moritz Schlick (1882-1936). German philosopher and a leader of the ViennaCircle.

Alfred Schutz - Early twentieth century sociologist who combined Weber's sociology with Husserl's phenomenological method. He argued that Verstehenwasnot accomplished privately but was a skill based on public training. inwhich we learn to judge intentions, goals, motives, etc. He advocatedstudy of sociology from the stance of scrutinizing one's experience ofother persons. the other person is known as the Other.

Searles, John, philosopher at University of California, Berkeley, California, who is well known in his work on "speech act theory." Click heretoread a review of one his recent books. Clickhere to go another site page on Searles

Yishai Shalif - PMTH subscriber living in Jerusalem. 42 years old Married to Deena and OT and father to threechildren. A practicing orthodox Jew. Currently trying to co-author (in MichaelWhite's sense of the term) with people and institutions theirpreferred Narratives. Has an M.A. in school/educational psychology and clinical psychology of children. Has been around the world (Adelaide, Chicago) trying to learn Narrative practices. Runs the School Psychological services in Modiin Ilit, a new town midway between Tel-aviv and Jerusalem in Israel. I teach Narrative practices and Mediated Learning Experience and have aprivate practice at home working with families young people and children.

Lois Shawver, Ph.D. PMTH subscriber and listowner, clinical psychologist, Oakland, California.See more details by clicking here Click here for an annotated list of Shawver's published articles dealing with postmodern issues. Click here to read an online interview with Lois Shawver. Click here to read a copy of a recent paper by Lois Shawver. Click here to email

Jerry Shaffer, Ph.D. PMTH subscriber, retired Chair of Univ of Connecticut Philosophy Dept in 1995, MA in Marital and Family Therapy, now in private practice for individuals, couples andfamilies. He can be reached at U-54, Storrs, CT 06268-2054, USA, (860) 486-4421.
and click here to email.

Steve de Shazer, Co-founderof SFBT (Solution Focused Brief Therapy) a popular family therapy modalityinfluenced by the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Helen Shoemaker, Ph.D., psychotherapist and PMTH subscriber. In addition to having a private practice, Dr. Shoemaker directs three programs in the Counseling Psychology program at Holy Names College, Oakland, CA.

John Shotter, professor of interpersonalrelations, Wittgensteinian, major postmodern theorist. His work ishighly compatible with Kenneth Gergen's work although it may be more influencedby Vygotsky and other authors who talk about the construction of the senseof an inner mind. Clickhere for more details.

Craig Smith, Ph.D., PMTH subscriber,member of the PMTH advisory group, Marriage, Family and Child Counselorin private practice in Solano Beach Counseling Center in San Diego, CA. He teaches at San Diego State University, and is the co-editor (with DavidNylund) of the book, Narrative Therapies with Children and Adolescents.

Don Smith, PMTH subscriber, MS Education andPHD study in Critical Theory and poststructuralism, University of Rochester. One of the Managers of Curriculum Development for Xerox Corp. Husband and father. My wish: To help move technical training away from behaviorism and to reduce patriarchy and conrol in the workplace.

Maryhelen Snyder - Psychologistand Family Therapist in Albuquerque, N.M. Private practice; Clinical Director, Relationship Enhancement Institute; Adjunct Faculty University of New Mexico Medical School, Dept. of Psychiatry. Co-creator with daughter, Susie Snyder, of "Co-constructive Relationship Therapy." Poet (two books published aswell as poems in literary journals). Edited "Ethical Issues in FeministFamily Therapy" (Haworth); numerous professional articles and book chapters.Most excited about articles on "Becoming the other..." and the dialogicnature of intelligence, as well as the article I sent for the archiveson "poetry" as a metaphor for therapeutic process.

Socrates - 470?-399 BC. An ancient Greek philosopher who created the Socratic method of instruction throughquestion and answer. Most of his teaching has survived through thewriting of his famous student, Plato. Socrates was tried for corruptingthe minds of youth in Athens and put death for his crime.

John Söderlund - PMTH subscriber, is the editor of a fledgling bi-monthly publication entitled NewTherapist. The magazine is designed to serve as an independent, comprehensive survival guide and support for therapists. Johnis a former financial journalist of a decade with several South Africanand British publications and the Reuters news agency. The grindof daily journalism drove him to seek a more measured life as editorof a magazine with more soulful subject matter and fewer deadlines.

George Spears, PMTH subscriber, Postmodernist and Social Therapy Student; credentials,BS Health Administration, New York State Alcoholism Credential,#999, trained in individualand group counseling techniques; employment, Shelter Administrator, Cityof New York Department of Homeless Services, have some degree ofoversight over all (67) shelters in the city; for the last (17) years astudent/practitioner of social therapy, the non-diagnostic approach totherapy developed by Stanford trained philosopher, Fred Newman, Ph.D.that is challenging the categories and assumptions, that is, the'truth', 'objectivity', 'explanation', 'reality', 'knowing', 'self' and'identity' paradigms that underlie mainstream social, and in particularpsychological, science. clickhere for more detals.

Spence, Donald, Ph.D. a professorof psychiatry who teaches at Princeton University. His first book, NarrativeTruth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis ,shook the postmodern world. Also see TheFreudian Metaphor. In general, his work makes it difficult to maintain a position o fnaive realism regarding the psychoanalytic venture. SometimesSpence seems nostalgic about the modernvision,but in general his work is very supportive of postmodernideas in that it deconstructs modernillusions.

Spinoza, Baruch. 1632-1677. A Dutch philospher who identified God with the universe and advocated anintellectual love of God.

John Stancombe, consultant chldpsychologist in clinical practice in the UK National Health Service. Currently undertaking doctoral research at the Dept of Psy, Birkbeck College,U of London, examining the negotation of blame and culpability in familywork, and therapists' collegial discourse. His other interests includethe impact of post-structuralism and postodernism on therapeutic practiceand the practical-moral dimensions of helping. (1998article)

Kenneth Stewart - Ph.D., PMTH subscriber, licensed psychologist, licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, facultyat Minnesota School of Professional psychology, husband and father, Currently focused on the concept of "curiosity" in clinical work as well as on temptations of power, bike rider who is interested in nature photography. Clickhere to see Dr. Stewart's website.

Manfred M. Straehle - PMTH subscriber, 1st year doctorate counseling psychology student at Temple
University. A graduate of the Social Therapy Program at the East Side Institute (currently enrolled in a post posst graduate program there). Interests include philosophers such as Feyerabend, Bergson, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Lyotard, and so forth. Influences on therapeutic perspective include Fred Newman, Lois Holzman, Efran, Kelly, Whitaker, Rogers. Central morality adapted from Fred Newman and is centered on creating and building friendships. Manfred, likes to play music, songwrite, record, and create and build friendships. Current interest is primarily focused on improvisation (from theater and comedy) and counseling and other contexts. Currently co-authoring a book with professor Jerry Petroff of Temple University on Evolutionary Communication in the Work Place. It is based on
postmodern and beyond postmodern ideas and my experiences in some 28 jobs in my 27 years as well as Dr. Petroff's experiences in educational consultation in North Jersey and NYC. Requests of the outline can be obtained as well as the introduction. click here to email

Strawson, Peter F. (1919) – a British philosopher. His most influential book was Individuals (1959) in which he talked about the way in which we create a sense of our human individuality through the ordinary ways we talk about ourselves and other persons. For example, In Individuals, Strawson says "Let us now think of some of the ways in which we ordinarily talk of ourselves…We ascribe to ourselves actions and intentions…" (p.89) Strawson was the teacher of Rom Harre and Harre carries Strawson's theme of how we individuate ourselves forward in his own writing in cognitive psychology.

Tom Strong, Ph.D. psychologist and a professor at the College of Arts, Socialand Human Sciences, University of Northern British Columbia, 3333 UniversityWay, Prince George, British Columbia Canada, V2N 4Z9. You can reachhim at strongt@unbc.ca

Susan E. Swim, Ph.D. , PMTH subscriber, Faculty Houston Galveston Institute. Currently, holds a (part-time) faculty position at Loma Linda University in Loma Linda, CA. Past part-time faculty Our Lady of the Lake University , .Private Practice Los Angeles and San Gabriel Counties. Online faculty and instructor for HGI-Taos Institute courses in Social Constructionism , .On Line faculty and instructor for Massey University through HGI.Local, National, and International Presenter on Collaborative Systems Language Approach to Therapy. Multiple publications on CLS and a variety of topics ,.Trained, personally, with Harry Goolishian 1983 to his death, Licensed in Texas L.P.C., L.M.F.T , Licensed in California L.M.F.T , .Editor for JST for the last ten years. Will assigned editor emeritus this year for JST.AAMFT member 1984 and Approved Supervisor since 1989.23 year history of Individual, Marriage, and Family Therapy. 20 year history of teaching, presenting, and publications.Passions teaching, practicing and publishing CLS, especially in California where there is a prevalence of modernistic thinking that I have never experienced before.

Thomas Szasz - A psychoanalyst whopublished many books deconstructing traditional mental illness and treatmentconcepts, mostly in the 1960's and 70's. The most famous and mostinfluential of these was The Myth of Mental Illness published in the AmericanPsychologist in 1960 and a book by the same name the next year.

Karin Taverniers, Ph.D. in psychology. PMTH subscriber. Family and couples therapist with a specialization in gender, diversity and cross-cultural issues. Born in Belgium, raised in different countries, currently living in Buenos Aires, Argentina. On the faculty of "Universidad del Salvador", and the "Centro de Estudios Sistémicos" in Buenos Aires. Board member of the "Asosciación Sistémica de Buenos Aires" (ASiBA). Also an online therapist: http://www.thecounselors.com/kt.html

Thrasymachus - An ancient Greek scholar. His ideas have been preserved for us only in the writing of Plato. In Plato'sRepublic, Thrasymachus is represented as having a muddled theory thatleaves us wondering why it is ethical to restrict one's interests for thesake of others. Plato has Socrates answer this question by referring to an ethics of justice which is human nature.

Leon Tan - Counsellor in Auckland Aotearoa/New Zealand. Practicing artist and poet. Meditation teacher. Interested in zen, postmodernism, transpiritual practice, ecopsychotherapy, tai chi, and yoga. Engaged in postgraduate psychotherapy education.

Karl Tomm, psychiatrist and family therapist with articles on postmodernism.

Alfred Treptow, BSc. PMTH subscriber, South African, 60yr. old full time pastor, modernist theologian advancing to postmodernist thinking, pastoral counselor, organizational psychologist, family therapist. Completed Master's thesis: Narrative Therapy - a Paradigm Shift, influenced by teachers such as M.White, D.Epston, J.Freedman, S.McNamee, K.Gergen et.al.

Francisco Varela - wrote with HubertoMaturana. Varela is an immunologist-turned-neuroscientist - aradical critic of cognitive science that thinks of the mind as a computer. Builds off of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Co-author with Evan Thompson(philosopher), Eleanor Rosch (psychologist) to write TheEmbodied Mind.

juliane varvaro, PMTH subscriber, PhD student, background in political theory, psychology, philosophy, andphilosophy of education. click hereto email

Lev Semenovich Vygotsky - Early twentieth century Soviet psychologist who theorized about the way in which conceptual development occurs in children based on social practices. clickhere for Andy Lock's summary wonderful of Vygotsky.

John Walter, PMTH subscriber, works as a change consultant (social worker by discipline) with individuals, families, couples, and organizations. He is the cofounder of CONSULTATIONS, an organization dedicated to the use and development of optimistic approaches to change. Along with Jane Peller, he wrote "Recreating Brief Therapy: Preferences and Possibilities" with Norton (2000) and "Becoming Solution-focused in Brief Therapy" with Taylor and Francis (1992). His workshops include 1. CREATIVE INQUIRY: Recreating Brief
Therapy, 2. Creating Opimism with Couples, and 3. Helping Clients Change Someone Else! More info can be obtained at his website, www.johnlwalter.com He is 56, married to Jane Peller, and is the proud father of Nate.

Samuel Weber - A professor at in the Humanities Center at John Hopkins University. He writes on postmodern and psychoanalytic topics in a way that reflects his interest in language.

Judy Anderson Weintraub, PMTH subscriber, juvenile delinquent (1964-67), hippy (1967-70), MA, political science (1976), instructor, American Government(1976-77), Ph.D. dropout, Social Science(1980), parent (1983 to present); MA Educational Psychology (1986), MFCCtherapist since 1985; protective services social worker (1987 to present),intermittent pencil artist, painter, poet, musician, philosopher, computernerd and paralogist in evolution. Photo at http://members.aol.com/jawbuffy/

Jude Welles Ph.D., PMTH subscriber, I work as a clinical psychologist in private practice in Pacific Palisades, CA. Originally trained in behavioral methods and philosophy of science,I was also trained in psychoanalysis, and was a training and supervisinganalyst and director of training of LAISPS, a component organization ofthe IPA. I wrote "Narration of Desire: Erotic Transferences and Countertransferences" with Harriet Wrye, Ph.D. For the past several years, I have been focusing my working and writing on consolidating a transdisciplinary/narrative approach to understanding and dealing with people in distress.

Michael White, co-author with DavidEpston of Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends (1990) which launcheda popular school of Narrative Therapy.

Susan White, Ph.D. (1997), Lecturer in the Department of Social policy and Social Work, Doctoral thesis analyzed institutional discourses in contemporary child-care social workin England. Recent publications concern social theory and its relevance to social welfare; mental health and motherhood; time, temporality andchildwelfare; and (with John Stancombe) blamings in family therapy. She is currently researching young people's narratives in personal distressand, with colleagues, is about to begin a comparative study of the linguisticpractices of child-care social workers in England and Finland. (1998article)
contact: Sue.white@man.ac.uk

Jane Whitehead, MA, PMTH subscriber, neophyte Narrative therapist and MFCC intern at Miracle Mile Community Practice in Los Angeles, CA.
contact: Click here to email

Richard Catlett Wilkerson ,PMTH subscriber, A Bay Area dream educator and cyberdream-sharingpioneer. Authorof _A Brief History of Dream Sharing: Theory, Techniques and Cyberspace_ and _Postmodern Dreaming_, Richard's focus is on the marginalized stateof dream sharing and its restitution as a cultural practice though applications of postmodern theory and online dreamwork.
http://www.dreamgate.com/pomo clickhere to email.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, (April 26, 1889- April 29, 1951).a brilliant philospher of language who as becomea major influence in much postmodern thinking. He was the primaryinfluence in Lyotard's influential book, The PostmodernCondition, in which Lyotard defined postmodernism. He is a primaryinfluence for Kenneth Gergen, John Shotter, HarleneAnderson, Harry Goolishian, Fred Newman, Lois Holzman, Steve de Shazer,and many others. There is an ongoing readingofWittgenstein's major work going on. Summary of Clickhere for Introduction to Wittgensein article. Clickhere for an article on Wittgenstein's concept of a language game.
Click here for an external article on Wittgenstein

Solomon Yusim, M.D. ("SY")- PMTH subscriber, is a "lapsed" physician turned systemic therapist, mostly in private practice. After eight years as a full-time faculty, he is now an adjunct faculty in family and community medicine at BaylorCollege of Medicine in Houston, Texas. His path to postmodern thinkingabout therapy and life, in general, lay through some desperately frustratingyears of trying to practice therapy from the "all-knowing," expert positioninformed by his medical school training. The turning point in his careerwas a chancy meeting with Harry Goolishian,who invited him to spend a postdoctoral fellowship year at the GalvestonFamily Institute, the home of the CollaborativeLanguage Systems (CLS) theory and practice. His current maininterests are in the application of CLS ideas to physician-patient communication and in development of collaborative relationships between pomo-influenced therapists and primary care physicians.

JOEY SKAGGS MANIFESTO

2005-12-09T19:04:00.000-08:00

JOEY SKAGGS MANIFESTO: "ARTIST'S MANIFESTO (DOGMA)
For more than forty years, Joey Skaggs has hoaxed TV networks, wire services, newspapers, magazines, and radio stations around the world. From Good Morning America to CNN to Entertainment Tonight to the BBC to Globo TV. From The New York Times to The Washington Post to Il Giornale to Die Welt.

No international news source has been or continues to be safe from Skaggs' exploits. Sometimes his work requires little more than an answering machine, a press release and the help of a few friends. Sometimes it takes years of dedicated research and development, assistance from highly specialized co-conspirators, and the best that technology has to offer before a concept is developed to the point of becoming a performance. Whichever the case, Skaggs has repeatedly made national and international headlines by creating and performing outrageous, funny, and incisive satirical commentaries on our times.

The creator of such international hoaxes as The Cathouse for Dogs, The Celebrity Sperm Bank, Portofess, The Solomon Project, The Fat Squad, Sexonix, Hair Today, Ltd., and Metamorphosis - The Cockroach Vitamin Pill, Skaggs is the most prolific independent media satirist in America today.

His work is unorthodox, provocative and iconoclastic. Using guerrilla tactics and advertising and public relations techniques to make social commentary, he carries on in the tradition of theater and satire while using the tools and technologies of the 21st century to communicate on a global scale. And he does so without breaking the law or taking money from unsuspecting people. In essence, he is an artist who uses the media as his medium to make a statement.

Skaggs is a storyteller, myth-maker, skeptic, philosopher, writer, performer, and artist. His work is designed to rock the boat --"

joey skaggs as uncle sam

2005-12-09T19:03:00.000-08:00

JOEY SKAGGS COMMENTARY

2005-12-09T19:02:00.002-08:00

JOEY SKAGGS COMMENTARY: "The Art of the Con:
A notorious prankster uses hoaxes to expose the media
By Joey Skaggs
Extra!
March/April, 1999

We're living in a time when it seems everything we see on the news is a bad joke: President Clinton and impeachment, Y2K and the end of the world, Viagra raising the dead, cloning your dead pet dog.
So how can a conscientious media prankster make a mark? When reality gets this strange, pranks are needed more than ever to jolt us into reexamining our values.
With the Internet's immediacy, its availability to anyone wishing to plant an idea, service or product for the world to consume, there's more opportunity than ever for both pranks and scams. Anyone can"

JOEY SKAGGS COMMENTARY

2005-12-09T19:02:00.001-08:00

JOEY SKAGGS COMMENTARY: "In 1976, readers of the Village Voice read an ad for a 'Cat House for Dogs' promising sexual gratification for your dog for $50. The ad was followed by press releases to major news outlets announcing the new venture. The result was a flood of incoming phone calls to the dog pimp, a mysterious figure by the name of Joey Skaggs. Some calls were from people asking if they could have sex with the dogs. The news spread and generated outrage from the ASPCA, the Bureau of Animal Affairs, The NYPD Vice Squad, the Mayor's office, and coverage by sources from Al Goldstein's Midnight Blue to WABC. The WABC coverage led to a subpoena from the Attorney General's office for Mr. Skaggs. The gig was up. The authorities had successfully closed down this threat to humanity and the world could go on living. But then Mr. Skaggs held a press conference at the Attorney General's office announcing that the whole thing had been an elaborate hoax, that the naivete of the media who bought in to it had been recorded for history and that this whole performance was indeed the chosen medium of art of one man, Joey Skaggs.
Mr. Skaggs, is an SVA alumnus and sometimes SVA teacher whose body of work over 34 years includes hoaxes at the expense of Entertainment Tonight, Geraldo, the National Enquirer, and projects with descriptions such as Hippie Bus Tour of Queens, Fame Exchange with John and Yoko, Celebrity Sperm Bank, Gypsies Against Stereotypical Propaganda, Windsurfing from Hawaii to California, Fish Condos, Bad Guys Talent Management Agency, Brooklyn Bridge Lottery, Maqdananda: the Psychic Attorney, and the recent Rudy Doody happening in Washington Square Park.
VO: Joey, can you state what it is exactly that you "

USNews.com: Gotcha! (8/26/02)

2005-12-09T19:02:00.000-08:00

USNews.com: Gotcha! (8/26/02): "Gotcha!
Strange but true: This is the golden age of hoaxes
By Thomas Hayden
She strolls onto the stage as if into her own living room, casually elegant in a twinkling, black tunic top and matching trousers. 'I love you, Sylvia!' cries an exuberant young woman, her enthusiasm rising above the applause of 2,400 paying audience members. Sylvia Browne--psychic, medium, prolific author--accepts the affirmation gracefully and takes the podium. 'I want to talk to you about angels, about spirit guides, and about how to become more psychic.' Shudder. This is precisely the conversation I've spent most of my life avoiding. But I was trapped in a sea of believers, and having paid $78.50 of U.S. News's money for my seat in the Atlantic City Convention Center auditorium, I didn't dare attempt an escape"

JOEY SKAGGS - artist and prankster

2005-12-09T19:00:00.001-08:00

JOEYSKAGGS: "Multimedia artist Joey Skaggs has been called everything from the World's Greatest Hoaxer to a royal pain in the ass. He's been threatened, assaulted, summonsed, subpoenaed, arrested, deposed, dismissed, trivialized, maligned, even thanked and praised. In fact, Skaggs is America's most notorious socio-political satirist, media activist, culture jammer, hoaxer, and dedicated proponent of independent thinking and media literacy.
What follows is a partial documentation of artist Joey Skaggs' conceptual media performance work. It is not all inclusive and it is not his life story. However it is intended to illustrate Skaggs' evolutionary process as an artist who uses the media as his medium. Hopefully it will serve as an educational tool for all media consumers.
Click on a hot spot in the image or a graffitti tag in the street to see more. "

The Art Guys

2005-12-09T19:00:00.000-08:00

The Art Guys: "The Art Guys Agree on Painting (photo by Paul Hester)
1994 (first performed 1983) Mike and Jack dip their right hands in paint, then shake hands over a sheet of paper. A painting is produced by this activity (background pattern).

'...a cross between Dada and David Letterman, John Cage and the Smothers Brothers. Add a touch of Claes Oldenburg and Groucho Marx, and you've got a fair idea of the performance/conceptual art of Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing, the two Houstonians who are in year fourteen of their collaboration as The Art Guys.'
--The New York Times, 1995

...You've just walked in on The Art Guys Website while it's changing--keep checking back for exciting updates!"

Comedy Central - Shows - The Colbert Report

2005-12-08T13:46:00.000-08:00

Comedy Central - Shows - The Colbert Report

The Colbert Nation

2005-12-08T13:44:00.000-08:00

The Colbert Nation: "Thursday, December 8, 2005
Episode 27 Recap!!
Before I go any further, I just want to reassure everyone that the impending pundit fansite webmasters' strike that everyone's been talking about will not affect the day-to-day operations of colbertnation.com! My loyalty is to the Nation, not to the hamfisted jerkbags at the webmasters' union who keep threatening me and sending their older brothers to paint 'SCAB' on the side of my house. So rest assured, even though the strike starts tomorrow and I've been warned of 'dire consequences,' the show will go on! Here are last night's highlights!
On Target: 'When I go to Target, yes, I want a dozen tube socks for $1.99. But what I really want is to see the words 'Merry Christmas.' Regardless of the time of year. If I don't see those words, I would walk right out of that store, except that is a fantastic price for tube socks. They're all I sleep in.' Sure beats my XXL Washington Redskins t-shirt!
On poverty: 'By the way, I've got a message for poor people: stop being poor. When you're destitute, you make us look bad. It's your patriotic duty to go out and earn a lot of money, so dictators like Hugo Chavez can't say 'There are people who die from the cold in winter in the U.S.'' We've got a reputation to protect!
On drug-sniffing wasps: 'This threat isn't directed at us� it's aimed at our best friends: this nation's drug and bomb-sniffing dogs. They're getting their jobs outsourced to swarms of unthinking, unfeeling invertebrates. It takes six months of training and up to $15,000 to train a dog. A wasp can be trained in just five minutes, and literally works for sugar water.' Plus if all you want the wasps to do is sting people, you don't have to train them at all!
One thing I loved about Stephen's"

NPR : A Fake Newsman's Fake Newsman: Stephen Colbert

2005-12-08T13:43:00.000-08:00

NPR : A Fake Newsman's Fake Newsman: Stephen Colbert: "Comic and journalist Stephen Colbert is the fake senior correspondent on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. We talk with Colbert about his reports, from 'Rathergate' to 'This Week in God.'
Colbert started his comic career with Second City in Chicago. He helped create the HBO sketch comedy series Exit 57 which won five Cable ACE awards in 1995. He also wrote and performed sketches on The Dana Carvey Show. On Comedy Central, Colbert was also a main part of the three-season series Strangers with Candy, featuring Amy Sedaris. A film version of that show is now at the Sundance Film Festival.
In addition, Colbert is the voice of Ace for Saturday Night Live's animated short features, 'Ace and Gary: The Ambiguously Gay Duo'."

Marshall McLuhan 1947 - PART ONE

2005-12-08T05:37:00.000-08:00

Five Bodied :: View topic - 1947 - PART ONE: "'Between the current specialisms and cadres of our university curricula and the dialectical methodologies prescribed by Professors Adler and Hook, there is but small discrepancy. These men are conformed to the technological bias of the age.... At present, the emotional education of the students of Professors Hook and Adler is very little assisted by them but is left, by default, to the agencies of press, radio, and screen. For example, Van Johnson, as much as Humphrey Bogart, represents moral and esthetic preferences of a complex kind. Preferences shared by Catholic and Communist alike. A democratic education which turns out students unable to 'place' these objects as easily as a bit of TIME prose is not viable. The ability to spot an economic fallacy is of very much less political and social relevance than a trained sensibility. And it is the failure of Hook, Hutchins, Adler, Van Doren, and Maritain alike to face this problem which constitutes the most obvious lacuna [gap - BD] in current discussion. The really new political fact of our day is that the major educational force is that of commercial entertainment. What happens in the class-room is no longer of comparable impact. That is why Professor Hook can not be said to offer an education for modern man.' -

Marshall McLuhan, 'Mr. Connolly and Mr. Hook', Sewanee Review, Vol. 55, July, 1947"

DADA

2005-12-08T05:36:00.001-08:00

Five Bodied :: View topic - DADA: "German-born artist Max Ernst once quipped that it was impossible to stage an exhibition on Dadaism, saying it was like trying to capture the violence of an explosion by presenting the shrapnel.

The early 20th-century avant-garde art movement was born out of the despair many artists felt over the deaths of millions of soldiers in the First World War. As they rejected the society they considered responsible for the slaughter, these poets, painters and photographers lashed out at establishment values with absurdist slogans and provocative images.

In a bid to capture the explosive energy of the era, France's Pompidou Center has staged a sprawling dada retrospective which it billed as the largest in 40 years.

'Max Ernst said that a dada exhibition was impossible, so you are no doubt going to see a failure, but a slightly surprising failure,' curator Laurent Le Bon joked Monday at the unveiling of the exhibition, which opens Wednesday and runs through Jan. 9, 2006.

It groups more than 1,000 works by 50 artists, ranging from luminaries like Jean Arp, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray to lesser-known figures, including the many women who contributed to the movement.

Visitors amble through a maze of rooms set out in a checkerboard pattern, a recurring theme in dada paintings and collages.

Exhibits range from the porcelain urinal that Duchamp famously elevated to the rank of art - thereby laying the foundation of conceptual art - to Picabia's target paintings, which prefigure those of American pop artist Jasper Johns.

Fans of Man Ray's modernist photographic experiments will find a number of his so-called rayographs, stark black-white prints obtained by placing objects directly on photographic paper and exposing them to light.

'When you loo"

Five Bodied :: View topic - Who is BOB Part 2!

2005-12-08T05:36:00.000-08:00

Five Bodied :: View topic - Who is BOB Part 2!: "Bob Dobbs'

LIES LIES LIES LIES LIES LIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

He was born in 1949 as ROBERT DEAN-
He RIPPED OFF Ivan Stang and the Church of the Subgenius, and this is the only reason anyone has ever heard of him

This should be quite revealing. . .
http://www.grayarea.com/subgenius.htm "

Famous New York Journalist Intuits Chip Body

2005-12-08T05:34:00.000-08:00

Five Bodied :: View topic - Famous New York Journalist Intuits Chip Body: "Out of the delirium of Judiana (Gawker�s coinage), a paradigm shift? Out of the welter and whirlwind of exegesis of intelligence leaks comes � redesigned intelligence? An epistemological extreme makeover? We�re way beyond meta now when we talk about the media. We�re beyond self-examination (Rather); self-congratulation (Deep Throat); beyond heroes (Murrow) and villains (Capote virtually accuses Capote of negligent homicide). We�re beyond meta-parody (Stephen �Colbert). We�ve moved from self-examination to, well (figuratively), self-colonoscopy. We�re into double-secret- meta-meta territory. And I�d argue that it�s begun to affect our brains. But in a good way.

I think the recent total frenzy of Judiana�the Talmudic, blogospheric analysis of the entire spectrum of speculation, rumor, conjecture in the Plame case and its Judy Miller subplot that has consumed so many of us�may mark the moment when the way we process information has changed in some deeper fundamental way that transcends this particular media colonoscopy, transcends media consciousness and suggests some deep internal realignment of the prefrontal lobes.

What I mean is that whatever the Plame special prosecutor decides�and I write before any indictments have been filed�I believe the escalating online delirium of Judiana and Plame blame-game analysis will be remembered as the moment when more than the media changed. The very nature of literacy, perhaps even the shape and texture of consciousness changed, the way Virginia Woolf declared human character changed in 1910. All that transformative stuff McLuhan predicted might actually come"

Menippeans vs. Varronians

2005-12-08T05:31:00.000-08:00

Five Bodied :: View topic - Menippeans vs. Varronians: "associated with both of these forms. It also should be noted that McLuhan used a lot of material about _The Dunciad_ in the concluding pages of _The Gutenberg Galaxy_ (much of it from my paper). It may also have some bearing, considering on how you interpret it, as to whether McLuhan was a �cynic� or a Christian humanist working in the line of Erasmus, Pope and others. Obviously I am inclined to believe in his schizoid way, which ultimately had to end up in a Catholic position, he sided with the Catholic Erasmus and Pope, both of whom like him were not �main line� Catholics.

Donald Theall

P.S. Also you might find useful the discussions of �put on� in _From Cliche to Archetype_ that occur in the discussion of Genres in a section on Joyce, the epyllion and masks (p. 100) and on the last page in a discussion of Charlie Chaplin.] "

Five Bodied :: View topic - 1987-2005

2005-12-08T05:26:00.000-08:00

Five Bodied :: View topic - 1987-2005: "Post subject: 1987-2005

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2005/3242lar_v_gspan_timeline.html

This timeline appears in the October 28, 2005 issue of Executive
Intelligence Review.

[`GREENSPAN SHRUGGED'

LaRouche vs. Greenspan:
An 18-Year Fight Over Financial Derivatives

Alan Greenspan, an acolyte in the cult of Ayn Rand, was appointed chairman
of the Federal Reserve Board in August 1987, shortly before the 'Black
Monday' crash of Oct. 19. From that perch, he has for 18 years overseen the
deregulation of the U.S. financial system, allowing financial derivatives to
run wild, overwhelming the physical economy, and bringing the world to the
precipice of economic-financial collapse. As the following chronology shows,
every step of the way, Lyndon LaRouche and EIR have been warning of the
consequences of these disastrous policies. Up to now, the Congress and the
American people have, in general, not listened, preferring to chase the
'riches' that have come with the biggest speculative bubble in history. The
time in which to implement a change in policy�back to the American System�is
running out. "

kenji siratori

2005-12-08T05:24:00.001-08:00

kenji siratori: "

"

Kenji

2005-12-08T05:24:00.000-08:00

Five Bodied :: View topic - Kenji: "EXTREME BIO-CYBERPUNK HORROR>>>insanity medium of the human body pill cruel emulator that was sucked to the emotional replicant of super-genomewarable abolition world-codemaniacs that was biocaptured a chemical=anthropoid acid of the soul/gram made of retro-ADAM is accelerated the virus::clone-dive a trash sensor drug embryo rave on the DNA=channel of the cadaver feti=streaming_body encoder that was send back out to the acidHUMANIX infection archive genomics strategy circuit technojunkies' era respiration-byte nerve cells of the hyperreal HIV=scanner forms to the brain universe that was processed the data=mutant of her ultra=machinary tragedy-ROM creature system murder-gimmick of the cadaver city Blog.... I compress the insanity medium of the human body pill cruel emulator to the brain universe of the murder-protocol emotional replicant performance technojunkies' DNA=channel hacking the soul/gram made of retro-ADAM acidHUMANIX infection****the genomics strategy circuit of the abolition world-codemaniacs nerve cells that accelerates the virus of the artificial sun to the hunting for the grotesque WEB=joint end of the cadaver feti=streaming_body encoder that clone-dives a chemical=anthropoid mass of flesh-module vital to the era respiration-byte sending program murder game of her digital=vamp cold-blooded disease animals different of a trash sensor drug embryo-hyperreal HIV=scanners that were controlled plug-in....

That was Kenji... "

Bob Dobbs Tiny Note Chart

2005-12-08T05:20:00.001-08:00

Five Bodied :: View topic - Kurzweil's Six Epochs of Evolution

2005-12-08T05:20:00.000-08:00

Five Bodied :: View topic - Kurzweil's Six Epochs of Evolution: "No, they're encoded in the Tiny Note chart.

Epoch 7 is the 1991-1999 period in which the interplay of all the previous eras is replayed as the after-image of the Android Meme which disappeared as GROUND in 1990. This was the period of quadrophrenia in Orphic baroque spirals. The Tiny Note chart is a picture of Epoch 7.

Epoch 8 is from 2000-2020. It is the era of the new hexadic AP (Anthropomorphical Physical), not the old AP. It is shown in the bottom rung of the Bob Dobbs' Formula chart.

Sleeper hasn't posted it yet so here it is from another site:

http://www.posi-tone.com/BOB/Chart4.gif "

Five Bodied :: View topic - Question(s) for Bob

2005-12-08T05:18:00.000-08:00

Five Bodied :: View topic - Question(s) for Bob: "I don't have ascetic ideals. I see myself as a glutton for the four bodies. But if you watched me using just one (in your case you observed my Chemical Body - I didn't have my Chip and TV Bodies with me in Toronto. And I tend to eat my audience/colleagues when on the road), it might look ascetic. But if you saw me at home using all four, think the purple guitar scene at the end of the recent SpongeBob movie. I spin quadrophrenically in all four. "

Hooked on the web - chip body withdrawal

2005-12-08T05:17:00.000-08:00

Five Bodied :: View topic - chip body withdrawal: "Hooked on the Web: Help Is on the Way
By SARAH KERSHAW

REDMOND, Wash.

THE waiting room for Hilarie Cash's practice has the look and feel of many a therapist's office, with soothing classical music, paintings of gentle swans and colorful flowers and on the bookshelves stacks of brochures on how to get help.

But along with her patients, Dr. Cash, who runs Internet/Computer Addiction Services here in the city that is home to Microsoft, is a pioneer in a growing niche in mental health care and addiction recovery.

The patients, including Mike, 34, are what Dr. Cash and other mental health professionals call onlineaholics. They even have a diagnosis: Internet addiction disorder.

These specialists estimate that 6 percent to 10 percent of the approximately 189 million Internet users in this country have a dependency that can be as destructive as alcoholism and drug addiction, and they are rushing to treat it. Yet some in the field remain skeptical that "

Kennedy Assassination - Finally, a media ecology classic!!

2005-12-08T05:16:00.000-08:00

Five Bodied :: View topic - Finally, a media ecology classic!!: "I've just finished reading A FAREWELL TO JUSTICE: Jim Garrison, JFK'S
Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History by Joan Mellen,
professor of English at Temple University, and author of 17 books.

This 'Shakespearean tragedy' (545 pages, including 130 pages of footnotes)
takes advantage of the release of 4 million documents since Oliver Stone's
movie JFK (1991) and uses the life-story of Garrison for a frame.

This book arrived in stores about 2 weeks ago. As a matter of fact, her
former husband and mentor, Ralph Schoenman, told me yesterday that she is
having her book launch this week in the New Orleans area where all the
characters and spooks surrounding Garrison's 1969 Clay Shaw trial will be
dropping in. Mellen spent $150,000.00 of her own money over the last 10
years interviewing the main players of the New Orleans end of the
assassination planning.

Never has the drama of tetrad management within the Android Meme (1960-90)
ever been demonstrated so well since MM's Socratic intervention.

Now MM scholars (if they dare) and Hexbodhi can get a clue as to the purpose of MM's science. "

In Media Res/Memorium: The New York School of Media Ecology

2005-12-08T05:13:00.000-08:00

Five Bodied :: View topic - In Media Res/Memorium: The New York School of Media Ecology: "when it comes to
the '80s, Lotringer, who here recounts his passage through the decade, will
probably always be remembered for his Foreign Agents series--those little
black books through which the art world first learned the name Jean
Baudrillard.

The '80s began in 1983, with the publication of Jean Baudrillard's
Simulations, which propelled a kind of weightless nebula into culture just
before a charge of Orwellian paranoia took over. At the time, there was this
lingering anxiety: Would 1984 keep its appointment? The answer was no. The
society of the spectacle had already become a society of spectators, and
Foucault's panopticon a Mobius strip. Everyone was waiting for George
Orwell, but Baudrillard arrived instead.

Orwell envisaged a permanent war for peace, but by the '80s we had 'pure
war'-- politics itself had become war by other means. Ronald Reagan passed
his Star Wars budget, domestic social programs withered, and the Soviet
Union simply began to implode. But then came America's turn to implode--in
slow motion--and Simulations laid out the self-destruct program. The
'precession of simulacra' and the 'desert of the real' perfectly described
the new landscape: The mirage preceded the image. America was there to hide
the fact that it never existed. Was the president of the United States for
real? Being an actor, Reagan seemed like a real person, but"

Hamlet's Echo Performance Artist Ken Hudson the Android Meme Cycle

2005-11-26T06:02:00.000-08:00

Ken Hudson's Experimental Hamlet Performance / Film - Post Production
Ken Hudson's experimental adaptation of Hamlet has entered the next to final stage of post-production. This short film explores the moment of realization that Hamlet experiences at the end of the play where he "puts it all together" in a maelstrom of insight prior to his death.

The film version which runs approx. 1.5 minutes is inspired by McLuhan's notion of acoustic space, where all elements exists simultaeously. Hamlet re-visits his experience in the "rear-view mirror" of memory, piecing together the fragments of the play into one clear insight. The music has already been selected - an original composition by Ken's old graduate school comrade, Eric Anders.

"Expect the film to be ready for preview screenings Spring 2006," says Ken Hudson. "Much of the work in structuring the film is complete, and I am heading into the final edit. Undoubtedly there will be some revisions after the preview screenings, and before it is released to the public."

The Android Me and Me (Hamlet's Echo) is already included within the University of Guelph's Adaptations of Shakespeare website. It was inspired by conversations and the writings of not only Marshall McLuhan, but also BW Powe, Frank Zingrone, and Eric McLuhan. The title and basic concepts are directly inspired by paramedia ecologist Bob Dobbs, and his idea of the "Android Meme".

Hamlet's Echo Performance Artist Ken Hudson the Android Meme Cycle: "The Android Me & Me (Hamlet's Echo)
This experimental site-specific, inter-media theatrical / filmed-art presentation explores the nature of being, performance, and technology, through a fragmentary staging of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The recorded fragments will later be formed into a complete narrative.
FROM THE PROGRAM NOTES:
Thank you for approaching this new work of mine with curiosity. Let me try to help you understand what you are about to experience. We all take for granted that we live in a global village, a global theatre. Look around. The entire space you see is our theatre today. Those walking before you may or may not be stagehands rigging the set. All of the elements around this King's College Circle, natural and fashioned, is my adaptation of Hamlet. Soon my formal scripted action will begin and you may glimpse fragments from it. Then again, you may not. I am sorry about that, which is why the show is both short and free. Some of the action will take place at long-distance, in New York City and other locations. Our performers there will use technology to contibute their parts to the whole. All the fragmented action will be documented and assembled later to form a complete narrative"Hamlet's Echo Performance Artist Ken Hudson the Android Meme Cycle: "The Android Me & Me (Hamlet's Echo)
This experimental site-specific, inter-media theatrical / filmed-art presentation explores the nature of being, performance, and technology, through a fragmentary staging of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The recorded fragments will later be formed into a complete narrative.
FROM THE PROGRAM NOTES:
Thank you for approaching this new work of mine with curiosity. Let me try to help you understand what you are about to experience. We all take for granted that we live in a global village, a global theatre. Look around. The entire space you see is our theatre today. Those walking before you may or may not be stagehands rigging the set. All of the elements around this King's College Circle, natural and fashioned, is my adaptation of Hamlet. Soon my formal scripted action will begin and you may glimpse fragments from it. Then again, you may not. I am sorry about that, which is why the show is both short and free. Some of the action will take place at long-distance, in New York City and other locations. Our performers there will use technology to contibute their parts to the whole. All the fragmented action will be documented and assembled later to form a complete narrative. I invite you to visit androidmeme.com to view this film and photographs from the show. My aim is to evoke Hamlet's meaning, while remaining completely autonomous of any formal theatrical premise or structure. I hope "

IndiePodcasting.com - Music Podcasting and Promotion for Unsigned and Indie Bands

2005-11-26T06:00:00.001-08:00

IndiePodcasting.com - Music Podcasting and Promotion for Unsigned and Indie Bands: "Artist: Eric Anders
Song: 'Icarus'
For Rolling Stone critic Gail Worley, Not At One is #11 CD of the year for 2004, and 'Struggle' is the #4 song of the year for 2004!
Performing Songwriter Magazine describes singer-songwriter Eric Anders' music as 'touching on the trance-like ecstasy of David Gray and the deadly seriousness of Nick Drake.... Anders is as engaging a singer and musician as he is writer.'
CD Baby's founder Derek Sivers, someone who hears thousands of CDs every year, said the following about Eric's debut Not At One: 'one of the best CD's I've ever heard.'
Music critic Mark Wilson wrote that Eric Anders' second full-length release, More Regrets, is 'a masterpiece of dark, ambient textures, layered soundscapes and subtly hypnotic grooves.'"

IndiePodcasting.com - Music Podcasting and Promotion for Unsigned and Indie Bands

2005-11-26T06:00:00.000-08:00

Ken Hudson courses Loyalist College Continuing Education Belleville

2005-10-21T07:55:00.000-07:00

Ken Hudson Workshops courses Loyalist College Continuing Education Performance Artist Theatre Director Media Consultant Alternative Writer Canadian Toronto Belleville Victoria: "COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
Shakespeare through Performance. The Bard's words were intended to be spoken in performance and heard by an audience, not to be read in silent contemplation. Taking an active approach to understanding Shakespeare we will 'study' three dimensions of the theatre � acting, directing, and playwriting � through actual experience by rehearsing and then staging several scenes from Shakespeare�s plays. The emphasis here will be on developing character, line analysis, delivery, devising the character�s subtext, gesture, movement, and blocking. No previous acting experience is required.
Mass Media and Popular Culture. A survey of the major cultural institutions of contemporary culture, including art, literature, television, movies, and music, to understand how values and society are shaped by mass culture. Study will focus on both the variety of media used and the content or messages of contemporary culture. A range of popular topics will be addressed, supported by select readings and media presentations: A fascinating exploration of the world around us."

S T E L A R C

2005-10-21T07:49:00.000-07:00

S T E L A R C

This is the authorized site of the Australian performance artist.

CTheory.net - Kroker - Algebra of Identity

2005-10-21T07:47:00.000-07:00

CTheory.net: "Algebra of Identity
Skin of Wind, Skin of Streams, Skin of Shadows, Skin of Vapor

D. Fox Harrell

1. Introduction & Braiding
Here, I braid three cords together, identity, algebra, and poetry. Identity is the subject matter, algebra is a tool for representing sign systems of fluid identity, poetry is used as the enactment of the view of identity described with the algebra. I also use algebra to aid in the development of computational techniques for implementing a system that generates prose poetry in response to a user's prompts -- a call and response form which is thematically fixed but variable in particular expression and metaphor.
The subtitle of this paper: Skin of Wind, Skin of Streams, Skin of Shadows, Skin of Vapor is meant to evoke a restricted notion of identity, and the insubstantiality of that notion. A focus on skin is obsessive and solipsistic. I am expected to write about it in a paper on identity. When ethnic identity is made binary and colorized, we talk in bodily terms, of skin. It is evocative -- it is a membrane, protecting, projecting, coating, an exterior, a superficial, obvious and immense organ. I shan't disappoint these expectations of skin obsession, but when I write of the traits of ethnic identification these are just symbols for a classification based conception of social identity.
Wind whips, shrieks, or is unnoticeable. Streams bears small creatures below rocks, rush with energy and transparency. Shadow obscures, cools, relaxes. Vapor moistens, hides, causes ships to crash, is fluid but hangs in the ether. If we can imagine these four skins, we can also imagine skin of tangled roots, illicit love, unscratched itches, crossed senses, angels, or demons. I shall get back to this later.
What I wish to conjure is a sense of the fleeting"

Stellarc's Prosthetic Head - Performance Art

2005-10-21T07:46:00.000-07:00

CTheory.net: "Prosthetic Head
Intelligence, Awareness and Agency

Stelarc

It is misleading then to talk of thinking as of a 'mental activity'. We may say that thinking is essentially the activity of operating with signs. This activity is performed by the hand, when we think by writing; by the mouth and larynx, when we think by speaking; and if we think by imagining signs or pictures, I can give you no agent that thinks. If then you say that in such cases the mind thinks, I would only draw attention to the fact you are using a metaphor, that here the mind is an agent in a different sense from that in which the hand can be said to be the agent in writing.
If again we talk about the locality where thinking takes place we have a right to say that this locality is the paper on which we write or the mouth which speaks. And if we talk of the head or the brain as the locality of thought, this is using the 'locality of thinking' in a different sense.[1]
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Preliminary studies for the 'Philosophical investigations'.
An intelligent agent needs to be both embodied and embedded in the world. Awareness is generated through the interaction of the entity with its environment. So the concern is whether we can perform effective behavior at appropriate moments and in the right places. Often consciousness is not necessary for bodies to perform adequately. We can articulate, coordinate and even control situations without being conscious of when and how we are doing it. In fact, we perform successfully because we perform habitually and automatically. So complex behavior is possible without consciousness. (In fact 'surprise' happens when our sensory feedback does not match our expectations). Perhaps there would be less of a philosophical dilemma if the word 'consciousness' was replaced by 'attention', to"

Stellarc

2005-10-21T07:45:00.000-07:00

CTheory.net: "The Prosthetic Head when exhibited is projected onto a large screen in a darkened gallery space and its enormous size gives it a presence that it would not have in a smaller format.[3] The audience may ask questions of the head and respond to its replies, not by using spoken language, but by the obligatory use of a keyboard interface, positioned on a podium placed at an appropriate distance from the Head. This text-based interface partly reflects communicative exchanges that occur in e-mail or on-line discussions, in which participants may construct fictional identities within a space that has encouraged the rhetoric of fluid and multiple selves. Metaphoric of the cybernetic condition it signifies the extent to which identity has been de-centered in techno-culture. As such it compels us to confront the partial, the fractal and the fragmentary.
Designed to reflect this ontological state, Stelarc includes in the catalogue multiple still frames from the Prosthetic Head animation highlighting repetition and the discernable differences that denote behavior. One of his statements in the catalogue focuses on the automatic, repetitive aspects of human behavior. He maintains that '...we perform successfully because we perform habitually and automatically'.[4] Stelarc alludes to our self-controlled and regulated internal system as well as behavioral aspects that we remain unaware of which allows us to operate effectively as conscious beings, directed to the external environment. He said, perhaps in defense of the Prosthetic Head, which is not a conscious entity, that 'Even complex behavior is possible without consciousness'. He also maintains that the Prosthetic Head only becomes an intelligent agent through the '...overlaps and interfaces between bodies'.[5] Whilst this might be consistent with human interaction, he is arguing here against the metaphysical "

Ken Hudson Loyalist College Continuing Education Course Descriptions

2005-10-21T07:44:00.000-07:00

Ken Hudson courses Loyalist College Continuing Education

2005-10-21T07:43:00.000-07:00

Ken Hudson Workshops courses Loyalist College Continuing Education Performance Artist Theatre Director Media Consultant Alternative Writer Canadian Toronto Belleville Victoria: "Canadian Performance Artist and Writer Ken Hudson to teach WINTER 2006 LOYALIST COLLEGE CONTINUING EDUCATION BELLEVILLE ONTARIO CANADA

Canadian Performance Artist and Writer Ken Hudson announced that he will be offering a several courses and workshops in Eastern Ontario this coming Winter 2006 in conjunction with Loyalist College, Belleville, Ontario"

Loyalist College Continuing Education - SCHOOL PROFILE

2005-10-12T09:48:00.000-07:00

Loyalist College of Applied Arts and Technology: Established: 1967

Number of Students:

Programs: The Loyalist College of Applied Arts and Technology offers over 62 fulltime academic and career-oriented programs leading to degrees, diplomas, and/or certificates and more than 40 additional programs via Continuing Education. The College provides 2 bachelor degree options in Human Services Management and in Nursing; the latter is a collaborative effort between the College and Brock University in which students take the first 2 years of study at the former and complete the remaining 2 years at the latter. Apprenticeships are also available through the College in Automotive Services, Early Childhood Education, and Food Services. The College’s Loyalist Training & Development Centre (LTDC) makes available customized training to employers and employees including Microsoft- and CISCO-certified training packages designed to prepare individuals for employment in the information technology field. Loyalist College offers unique double diploma programs for graduates; these are pairings of related programs allowing a graduate of a 2-year program to complete a second diploma program faster, usually in 1 month. Additionally, the College has in excess of 75 university transfer agreements that provide students with the opportunity to transfer to university to continue their education. Such transfer agreements enable students to earn a diploma at the College and then apply those credits earned towards a degree at a university.

Interesting Facts: The Loyalist College of Applied Arts and Technology has a low teacher to student ration of 1:15 which means students which makes for a more interactive and personalized learning environment. Graduates hold the College in high regards with 95% willing to recommend it to friends.

Loyalist College of Applied Arts and Technology
Wallbridge-Loyalist Road
P.O. Box 4200
Belleville, Ontario
K8N 5B9, Canada

Tel: 613-969-1913 or 1-888-LOYALIST
Fax: (613) 962-1376
Email: liaison@loyalistc.on.ca

McLuhan International Festival of the Future or Bob Dobbs Conference?

2005-09-06T05:06:00.000-07:00

Hey what a budget! You can go corporate or you can check out the Bob Dobbs conference scheduled to coincide with this years MIFF - Bob is the outlandish star of last years EXTREME MCLUHAN - click here for more details.

McLuhan International Festival of the Future: "Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911 - 1980)
The world-renowned visionary once labelled by Tom Wolfe as, 'the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov' in his article, What If He Is Right?, wrote the seminal works The Mechanical Bride, Understanding Media, and coined the terms The medium is the message and the Global Village which have become such a part of our daily language that we tend to forget the original voice.
Born in Alberta, educated in Winnipeg and Cambridge, UK, McLuhan became Professor of English Literature at St. Michael's College, the University of Toronto. He taught a program in Culture and Technology, a concept that was light years ahead of its time, and often raised the ire of the local academia. He spent 33 years here and abroad watching, listening, reading, researching and hypothesizing about the impact of media upon the world around him and advising others how to connect with that world.
As a consequence, in 1970, Governor General Roland Michener honoured McLuhan as a Companion of the Order of Canada, the highest lifetime achievement award for Canadian citizens. McLuhan's citation reads, 'For his contribution to the understanding of the relationships between media and society.' "

The Interdictor - disaster journal

2005-09-06T05:03:00.000-07:00

The Interdictor: "This journal has become the Survival of New Orleans blog. In less perilous times it was simply a blog for me to talk smack and chat with friends. Now this journal exists to share firsthand experience of the disaster and its aftermath with anyone interested.
You can reach me on ICQ at 21710340 if you're so inclined.
Live Cam Feed: Cam mirror#1 and Cam mirror #2
RSS - American Red Cross - directNIC - vonmises.org - New Orleans LA post-Katrina Intel dissemination wiki
If you want to link to my blog, please use this URL: http://mgno.com/
IRC channel has been opened: IRC is on irc.freenode.net in #interdictor - #interdictor-scanner for transcript of NG radio and #interdictor-chat for discussion; JavaApplet
Photos can be found here: All photos have been mirrored here: http://www.nola-intel.org/pictures/. Media has permission to use the photos with credit to directNIC.com
We have received a lot of media inquiries on our operations. To avoid taking away time from the crew onsite in New Orleans, please contact E. Hodge at ehodge@intercosmos.com for media related inquiries.
We are considering any location for temporary relocation of our offices. Please send turnkey options that will accommodate 55 people to noah@intercosmos.com.
Thank you NextGenStats, US21 Computers, Advection, National Net, Marlin Web Hosting, EV1, Ods.org & Nac.net for helping out. "

New Orlean Disaster Blog - Cams - Journal - Pics

2005-09-06T05:02:00.000-07:00

Who knew when I hosted my websites with directnic that I would be participating in the Hurricane Katrina disaster - however, this company, based in New Orleans, with registered sites amounting to 2% of the entire internet rode the disaster out to keep mine and everyone's sites up - ok, they went down for 24 hours, but they arranged for fuel to be trucked in and fed deisel generators by hand to get and keep the servers up and running.

To give you an idea of the customer service they achieved, realize that my telephone went out yesterday (back on now) and bell canada said, 4 days to fix it - 4 days! Whereas my sites went down on Friday, I emailed directnic in a disaster zone, they say 24 hours, and it's done.

HEY LOOKING FOR A HOST! DIRECTNIC ROCKS! let's help get them 3% of the internet - they deserve it....

They also have a blog/journal with cams and pics from their perch at outpost Chrystal - from there you can get the real scoop on the disaster and see/hear/watch what the mainstream media will not show you:

The Interdictor: "This journal has become the Survival of New Orleans blog. In less perilous times it was simply a blog for me to talk smack and chat with friends. Now this journal exists to share firsthand experience of the disaster and its aftermath with anyone interested.
You can reach me on ICQ at 21710340 if you're so inclined.
Live Cam Feed: Cam mirror#1 and Cam mirror #2
RSS - American Red Cross - directNIC - vonmises.org - New Orleans LA post-Katrina Intel dissemination wiki
If you want to link to my blog, please use this URL: http://mgno.com/
IRC channel has been opened: IRC is on irc.freenode.net in #interdictor - #interdictor-scanner for transcript of NG radio and #interdictor-chat for discussion; JavaApplet
Photos can be found here: All photos have been mirrored here: http://www.nola-intel.org/pictures/. Media has permission to use the photos with credit to directNIC.com
We have received a lot of media inquiries on our operations. To avoid taking away time from the crew onsite in New Orleans, please contact E. Hodge at ehodge@intercosmos.com for media related inquiries.
We are considering any location for temporary relocation of our offices. Please send turnkey options that will accommodate 55 people to noah@intercosmos.com.
Thank you NextGenStats, US21 Computers, Advection, National Net, Marlin Web Hosting, EV1, Ods.org & Nac.net for helping out. "

McLuhan International Festival of the Future 2005 - bob dobbs anti environment

2005-09-05T17:05:00.000-07:00

Bob Dobbs creates Anti-Environment to this year's stagnant McLuhan Festival - CLICK HERE

User Manual

What Is It?
A ten day public Festival exploring our future life, work and play.
When Is It?
Friday September 23 to Sunday October 2
Where Is It?
In more than twenty venues across Toronto, from the University of Toronto to the Drake Hotel, from the Design Exchange to the Gladstone Hotel, from the National Film Board to the West Queen West and Regent Park.
What's The Difference?
Oddly enough, this is the world's first public Festival of the Future. We want to inform the locals, excite the tourists, and display tomorrow's culture and technologies. We're a blend of Culture, Commerce and Community.
What's The Audience?
The smart, the curious, the well-educated. Ages depend on the program. Younger people will go for the Queen West action; academics, poetry buffs and McLuhanatics will flock to the U of T; each of our ten theme Future Days will appeal to specific interest groups, Green Day, China Day, Design Day, School Day and so forth; and our free public exhibits at City Hall, Dundas Square and the Design Exchange will attract thousands. How many? We don't know, but we're projecting a paid attendance of 20,000 plus.
What's The cost?">McLuhan International Festival of the Future: "The Global Village returns to Toronto!
Spend 1O Future Days living at the speed of thought, to experience the ultimate blend of high-tech and culture.

User Manual

What Is It?
A ten day public Festival exploring our future life, work and play.
When Is It?
Friday September 23 to Sunday October 2
Where Is It?
In more than twenty venues across Toronto, from the University of Toronto to the Drake Hotel, from the Design Exchange to the Gladstone Hotel, from the National Film Board to the West Queen West and Regent Park.
What's The Difference?
Oddly enough, this is the world's first public Festival of the Future. We want to inform the locals, excite the tourists, and display tomorrow's culture and technologies. We're a blend of Culture, Commerce and Community.
What's The Audience?
The smart, the curious, the well-educated. Ages depend on the program. Younger people will go for the Queen West action; academics, poetry buffs and McLuhanatics will flock to the U of T; each of our ten theme Future Days will appeal to specific interest groups, Green Day, China Day, Design Day, School Day and so forth; and our free public exhibits at City Hall, Dundas Square and the Design Exchange will attract thousands. How many? We don't know, but we're projecting a paid attendance of 20,000 plus.
What's The cost?"

BOB DOBBS: from the Five Bodied Bob Archive - Android Meme's Xenochrony

2005-09-01T07:35:00.000-07:00

Bob Dobbs the enigmatic media ecologist and consultant arrives in Toronto this fall just in time to provide a foil (read anti-environment) to the much touted (and not very well thought out) McLuhan Festival 2005. Last year Bob's awesome performance at the Drake Hotel in the extreme McLuhan series had the whole conference a buzz with the media (medium) of inter-dimensional metaphoric communication. This year Bob goes bandit and instead of participating in the festival (hey festival organizers where's the money to pay people to give their knowledge?) he is having his own five day conference to run parallel with this year's McLuhan fete. 5 days - 5 bodies - 5 bucks! For one of the most insightful speakers and thinkers in the whole media studies boat. Check out the details here and Bob's official site too.

The Android Meme Xenochrony quoted below has been very influential in my own thought and my art....hey, where do you think the Android Meme Cycle comes from? Mostly talking to (I mean listening to Bob) and his interpretation of McLuhan's thought, and how it applies to a five bodied post-human constitution. Ironically Bob's style in this paper is "blog" - written before such a thing existed, Bob, as always, is ahead of the curve in sensing cultural shifts before they occur - or is culture reacting to Bob? Decide for yourself:

Five Bodied Bob Archive - Android Meme's Xenochrony: "Jan.22/98 (Los Angeles)

AArtVark (editor for Flipside): Bob, you're not going to be a cover feature in the magazine anymore. You're going to have a regular column each issue. What do you think?
Dobbs (New York): Well, I've been the only constant thing on the cover for the last two and a half years, and X-day is coming up on July 5 this year for Rev. Stang and his gang. That'll be it for them! So, sure, I can start releasing the real files on July 6.
AArtVark: We'll need a name for the column.
Dobbs: Let me think about it. I'll get back to you in a couple of days.
Aug.15/71 (Montreal)

Randy: What's new, Connie?
Connie Dobbs: Here, try this. We call it D-cell water. It's purified water. It seems to slow down the aging process.
Randy turned off his television set and took the glass in his hand. He trusted whatever Connie said.
Dec.4/63 (Dartmouth, Nova Scotia)

Bob walked up Portland Street with Flaps, who was only 14 years old.
Dobbs: We and all our activities are pills for the gaping maw.
Flaps: I don't think Oswald killed Kennedy.
Dobbs: Oh yeah, he shot Kennedy.
Flaps: Are you sure?
Dobbs: Yes.
Feb.22/56 (Toronto)

Dobbs slammed Ted Carpenter up against the blackboard.
Dobbs: McLuhan says that we, each of us, are a pattern of information. Well, who is patterning Ray Birdwhistell?
Carpenter: Yeah? Well who blacklisted Dorothy Lee?
May10/36 (Paris)

Ezra Pound stared at the very young-looking fourteen-year-old Bob Dobbs.
Pound: Go for the higher hypothesis. Forget Joyce and his Aristotelianism, think like Plato.
Dobbs: What w"

Bob Dobbs Media Ecology festival TORONTO CONFERENCE 2005 Marshall McLuhan Performance Artist

2005-09-01T07:17:00.000-07:00

Bob Dobbs Media Ecology festival TORONTO CONFERENCE 2005 Marshall McLuhan Performance Artist: "bob dobbs media ecology toronto conference 2005 marshall mcluhan festival
TORONTO SEPTEMBER- OCTOBER 2005"
BOB DOBBS creative visionary of the 2004 McLuhan Festival in Toronto returns in 2005 with his own parallel conference - his anti-environment to the much maligned McLuhan festival. Tentatively entitled, BOB DOBBS and THE CANADIAN PHAT IN CONCERT 5-nite run - The previous theme will be the invisible, confidential subtext. Details to follow, but except 5 conference sessions with one of the most interesting and enigmatic figures in media studies today. Email for more information.TORONTO STAR STORY ABOUT BOB DOBBS BY MCLUHAN BIOGRAPHER PHILIP MARCHARD

Sooner or later, I thought, I was going to have to read The Da Vinci Code.
I was going to have to read it before I read the novelists on the Giller
shortlist. It was my duty as a books columnist.
I asked Bob Dobbs if he had read The Da Vinci Code. Dobbs was hosting an
event in the downstairs theatre later in the evening. "Former McLuhan
archivist Bob Dobbs expands on McLuhan's ideas while discussing the
present-day simulation of ESP in our electronic environment," was the way it
was described in the festival schedule.
Dobbs told me he was using a quotation from my Marshall McLuhan biography on
the subject of McLuhan and ESP. "It's on page 142 of the book, I think," he
said. (He was right, it turned out. I was flattered.)
Dobbs also told me the event was somewhat more involved than the description
in the festival schedule. It was more in the nature of an actual sÈance with
some of the illustrious dead. He told me who they were, but I do not feel at
liberty to reveal their names.
As for The Da Vinci Code, he hadn't read it. He hardly needed to. His own
father had been a member of the Priory of Sion, the group of illuminati
mentioned in the novel. The novel itself was "simple and stupid."
I gathered at least that it was not a historical novel.]
http://tinyurl.com/3nuz8
[Toronto Star, Oct.16, 2004. 01:00†AM
Cracking Canada's literary code
Giller nominees reveal persistent obsession with past and small towns
By PHILIP MARCHAND
Thirteen years ago, I wrote a piece in the Star suggesting that the emphasis
in Canadian literature on rural or smalltown Canada, and the emphasis on the
past as opposed to the present, was due to end.
Not that I was against such literature. I was just saying there should be
more room in Canadian literature for fictional examination of the life we
live now, in the suburbs and the great cities of this country.
I wasn't expecting Canadian authors to jump up after reading this article
and start writing about clubs on Queen St. instead of harvest time in old
Orillia. It was a thought.
In more recent years, I noticed the tendency of the Giller Prize juries to
like historical novels. I wrote about that, as well. I hope I didn't sound
crabby about it.
Recently, the 2004 Giller Prize shortlist was announced.
Three of the six nominated books were historical fictions ã Wayson Choy's
All That Matters dealt with Vancouver in the 1930s, Shauna Singh Baldwin's
The Tiger Claw dealt with Nazi-occupied France and Pauline Holdstock's
Beyond Measure was set in 16th-century Italy.
Miriam Toews's A Complicated Kindness was set in a small Mennonite town.
Alice Munro's short story collection Runaway was also set for the most part
in small-town Canada, and had a decided flavour of retrospective, of looking
backward.
That left Paul Quarrington's Galveston, which was contemporary in setting
and flavour, although a bit removed from life in the big city as well.
That was fine; I wasn't complaining.
But I still wondered if, in our literary culture, a work of fiction set in
present-day Toronto was somehow regarded as a bit trivial.
A good writer who carefully observed contemporary life always ended up
sounding satirical, and to some people satire was Not Serious. Better to
have these soulful looks at the past, at a way of life that was vanishing.
That was real literature.
Ezra Pound said that the artist was the antenna of the race, and presumably
he meant fiction writers as well. But there was nothing in such recent
Giller Prize winners as Richard B. Wright's Clara Callan (small-town Ontario
in the first part of the 20th century) or M.G. Vassanji's The In-Between
World Of Vikram Lal (Kenya in the 1950s and '60s) that suggested sensitivity
to new stimuli.
Pound, by the way, was not suggesting that artists made good fortunetellers.
He was merely suggesting that artists, unlike most people, actually lived in
the present instead of the past. They might not even know exactly what they
were doing but their work registered changes in the human environment.
You could see the bourgeois family coming into its own in the 18th-century
novels of Samuel Richardson. You could see the new urban life, shaped by
such phenomena as finance capitalism and newspaper sensationalism, in the
novels of Balzac and Dickens.
By coincidence, just as the Giller announced its shortlist, the McLuhan
International Festival of the Future ã named after a professor of literature
who took much of his inspiration from the works of James Joyce and other
modernist writers ã came to town. (It continues until tomorrow.)
I thought I'd drop by the Drake Hotel one night last week and ask some of
the McLuhanites, or McLuhanatics, as they are sometimes referred to, what
they were reading.
Were they finding in the "serious" fiction of today the same insight McLuhan
found in Joyce and Wyndham Lewis?
Were they looking forward to the new Wayson Choy or the new Paul Quarrington
or any of the other novels on the Giller list?
The Drake Hotel, in case you didn't know, is a trendy place that opened on
Queen St. W. earlier this year. It had different rooms for different events,
including a little theatre downstairs with plastic lawn chairs for the
audience. Upstairs, in the main lounge, was a fireplace and an inscription
on the wall: IT'S A CRUEL WORLD AND I'M GONNA DO ALL I CAN TO KEEP IT CRUEL.
A dozen or so people had gathered in a section of the lounge to talk about
Marshall McLuhan when I arrived. Eric McLuhan was hosting the discussion and
urging the creative director of the festival, Thom Sokoloski, to repeat an
experiment that his father undertook in 1960, when one group of students
listened to the Kennedy-Nixon debates on radio, and another group watched it
on television.
This time one group could watch the Kerry-Bush debate on television, and
another could just listen to the audio portion.
"Get the two groups sequestered and after the debate have them talk among
themselves and collect their ideas, and then have them talk to the other
group," McLuhan suggested. "Why not?"
He looked up and saw a Computerland balloon floating in the sky. "Talk about
media ã a hot air balloon."
"Advertising computers," another member of the group said, to laughter.
I asked Eric McLuhan what he was reading.
"I love detective stories," he said. "I like to see how they're built." This
was in keeping with Marshall McLuhan's own interest in the genre, which he
felt had affiliations with French symbolist poetry. Both started with a
certain effect (in the case of the detective novel, a murder) and invited
the reader to discover the process by which that effect came to be.
Eric McLuhan also liked The Da Vinci Code.
"Totally bogus," he said. "And a good read."
I asked Sokoloski what he was reading. The answer was varied. He had just
read a book by Guy Debord titled Society Of Spectacle, about a school of
artists called the Situationists, and also the catalogue for the Jean
Cocteau exhibit in Montreal. A lot of his reading was done on the computer
screen.
"I like to build my own book and sit down and read all these interesting
things I've picked up from the Internet," he said. "During the Iraq war, I
was fascinated by what other newspapers in the world, like Le Monde, were
saying."
I pressed him further. "I love cooking magazines," he said. "You give me a
good recipe and I'm in heaven. That's a complete commitment to recipe form,
structure and delivery. You start cooking at 4 and you've got to put it on
the table at 6."
I was beginning to despair about Choy and Quarrington and Alice Munro.
I asked a man named Eric, a 39-year-old McLuhan devotee who had worked in
advertising and building websites, what he was reading. He said Camus's
novel L'…tranger, which sounded hopeful, if not exactly something hot off
the press.
Then he added, "The Da Vinci Code. Couldn't put it down for two days."
A volunteer for the festival said she was on the waiting list for The Da
Vinci Code at her local library.
Sooner or later, I thought, I was going to have to read The Da Vinci Code. I
was going to have to read it before I read the novelists on the Giller
shortlist. It was my duty as a books columnist.
I asked Bob Dobbs if he had read The Da Vinci Code. Dobbs was hosting an
event in the downstairs theatre later in the evening. "Former McLuhan
archivist Bob Dobbs expands on McLuhan's ideas while discussing the
present-day simulation of ESP in our electronic environment," was the way it
was described in the festival schedule.
Dobbs told me he was using a quotation from my Marshall McLuhan biography on
the subject of McLuhan and ESP. "It's on page 142 of the book, I think," he
said. (He was right, it turned out. I was flattered.)
Dobbs also told me the event was somewhat more involved than the description
in the festival schedule. It was more in the nature of an actual sÈance with
some of the illustrious dead. He told me who they were, but I do not feel at
liberty to reveal their names.
As for The Da Vinci Code, he hadn't read it. He hardly needed to. His own
father had been a member of the Priory of Sion, the group of illuminati
mentioned in the novel. The novel itself was "simple and stupid."
I gathered at least that it was not a historical novel.] The Great Bob Dobbs

What about Bob?

...Bob Dobbs probes McLuhan's techniques of modern anthropology to discover the "out-of-awareness" aspects of culture while examining the rhetoric of advertising and entertainment. This interactive discussion will help shift perceptions of the effects of our ever-changing media structures.ROBERT DOBBS, author of PHATIC COMMUNION WITH ROBERT DOBBS, has evolved common sense into the discipline of "media yoga." His extensive research has been utilized by Donald Theall (THE VIRTUAL MARSHALL McLUHAN), Frank Zingrone (THE MEDIA SYMPLEX), Barry Miles (ZAPPA), Kevin Courrier (THE SUBVERSIVE WORLD OF ZAPPA) among many others. DOBBS serves as a paramedia consultant to everyone from universities to major corporations. His recent appearance at The McLuhan International Festival of the Future was the talk of Toronto.

Robert Dobbs summarized McLuhan's contribution in his letter to the editor of the March 3, 2003 issue of the New York Observer: "Ron Rosenbaum's celebration of the works of Norman Mailer ('Mailer Was the Rage,' Feb. 10) perhaps misses the context that cries out for the Great American Novel. The essence of the G.A.N. is the range of its 'put-on.' It attempts to put on and wear not only its own times, but the full history of printed American literature, especially its recognized classics.

Mr.Mailer's problem involves the question of whether a book can compete with the other put-ons, or media, that engage the American multi-consumer. Perhaps a solution is to write a novel that puts on all the media. This was accomplished by Marshall McLuhan with his published work, especially UNDERSTANDING MEDIA, which he considered a new form of novel and a new kind of science fiction.

Mr. McLuhan, starting from the premise that the daily newspaper was the great American novel, put on the competition, and did what Mr. Mailer couldn't -changed the world and the English language- all through his writing.

"We must invent a NEW METAPHOR, restructure our thoughts and feelings. The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature." - McLuhan

Media analyst/cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan believed that artists need to integrate, analyze and utilize rapid changes in technology, in order to truly have a mass impact on people in the modern age.

"In Renaissance times, it was the scientist versus the humanist. The scientist would invent and the humanist or artist would write or create, dealing with the side effects of the invention."

McLuhan felt that, for the most part, traditional art was no longer serving this purpose.
"McLuhan believed that electronic environments were molding people on a scale that was greater than any artwork, and that, therefore, artists should embrace the technologies of the future," says Dobbs.

McLuhan's oft-cited example of his theory in practice was James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a book Dobbs says mirrors the media environment of radio, which was dominant in the 1930s. The book was finished in 1939.

McLuhan's theory on media was divided between old "analog media" (newspapers, radio, TV) and forms of digital media that were in early stages of development in the 1960s and 1970s, and now are common in the home computer age.

McLuhan, understanding information overload and short attention spans, would often express his philosophy in catch phrases and sound bite quotes.His catch phrase for old media was that the "medium is the message."
"By this, he meant that in mass media environments, people are molded not only by the content but by a sensory bias specific to the medium," says Dobbs.
For digital media, he adopted a different adage, that the "user is the content."
"Once VCRs, and eventually computers, became readily available, it gave more control to the user," says Dobbs. "Now you can control the time that information is fed to you.
"With PCs and workstations and the internet, people are able to interact and have more of a choice. The user can mold and manipulate the content."
"Generation X is still somewhat in the clutches of old media. Generation Y, the younger generation, however, laughs at the old mass media. That's why Jon Stewart (host of the Daily Show, a news spoof television program) is more powerful than Dan Rather," says Dobbs.
"Now the flip side is that sometimes with digital media the user tends to think he's in control, when he's really being fed information in the same form of old media."
In November and December 1981, after McLuhan's death, Dobbs sifted through decades of McLuhan's letters, essays, manuscripts and notes, making chronological sense out of the materials.
"I had known McLuhan for years," says Dobbs. "His family knew I knew him. "I knew the history of his work. So I was asked to organize McLuhan's 'garbage', so to speak — all of the filing cabinets and boxes that were in his house."
The results of Dobbs' work now rest with the National Archives in Ottawa, as McLuhan was Canadian.
McLuhan's heyday of popularity was in the 1960s, starting with the release of Understanding Media in 1964, and reaching its peak in the late 1960s.
"His ideas were kind of a youth culture fad at that point," says Dobbs. "He also went through a period in the 1970s where it was not cool to like him."
Dobbs considers McLuhan's best proteges to be futurist authors Charles Reich, Alvin Toffler and John Naisbitt.
But Dobbs suggests that perhaps today's information age is not ripe for theorists like McLuhan to be viewed as leaders or idolized in popular culture.
"These days there seems to be no need for gurus speaking for society," says Dobbs. "Society is so fragmented by digital media and full of micro-gurus, all reaching their small enclaves."
"The closest equivalent that I can think of to the sort of gurus with mass reach that there used to be would be Wired magazine, where the magazine itself has become the guru," says Dobbs.

Bob Dobbs the enigmatic notorious media ecologist, philosopher and author, radio personality and Marshall McLuhan archivist. Link to Bob's articles and charts. Learn about his controversy with Church of the Subgenius. Decide for yourself: avatar, prankster, or both.

Bob Dobbs was born in Paris on 2/2/22 into a family of butlers to an extremely high-ranking family in international intelligence. Through his father he met not only the major political but also artistic figures of the time: Joyce, Crowley, Hitler, Beckett, Eliot, the list goes on....... His first 'assignment' was to travel to Toronto and befriend Marshall McLuhan to find out just how much the man knew, particularly about 'Finnegan's Wake', which had been used as a manual for global control since its publication. Through his own brand of xenochronistic jujitsu, he slowly climbed up the ladder of influence until he won the top spot of the 'Secret Council of Ten' in a rigged election, and was able to begin whistleblowing. In the meantime he inspired Ivan Stang to create the Church of the SubGenius in Dallas, based upon a portrait of his father and a myth combining Dobbs with RAW's Hagbard Celine. He and his wife Connie are the only real people on Earth: everyone else disappeared long ago.

Pipsfarm T-shirts and Culture: Paris Hilton (August 2003) MAXIM ONLINE:

2005-08-06T06:47:00.000-07:00

Pipsfarm T-shirts and Culture: Paris Hilton (August 2003) MAXIM ONLINE:: "Paris Hilton (August 2003) MAXIM ONLINE:: 'Paris Hilton (August 2003)

Where you?ve seen her:
Blitzing the international party circuit while benefitting from the $3.8 billion-a-year Hilton hotel fortune. She is starring in Fox?s new reality series, The Simple Life, where she will forgo all her lavish trappings (money, cell phones, butlers) for five weeks while living with an Arkansas farming family. '"

Awesome new blog about T-shirts and Culture

2005-08-06T06:46:00.000-07:00

Pipsfarm T-shirts and Culture: "Previous Posts
Paris Hilton (August 2003) MAXIM ONLINE:
FOX Broadcasting Company: Paris Hilton & Nicole Richie: The Simple Life: FOX TV Show Official Site: Video, Pictures, Pics, Photos
T-shirt PARIS HILSTON EBAY POP CULTURE STORE ENTERTAINMENT MEMORABILIA SIMPLE LIFE
T-shirt AC/DC AUSSIE CLASSIC ac dc ROCK MUSIC tshirts from Pipsfarm ebay store
T-shirt AEROSMITH TYLER AMERICAN ROCK MUSIC tshirts from Pipsfarm ebay store
Aeroforceone...
Pipsfarm T-shirts
Nothing on but a T-shirt Jessica Simpson
eBay: RETRO EDMONTON ESKIMOS MESH CFL FOOTBALL JERSEY L #70 (item 5221777553 end time Jul-27-05 13:39:33 PDT)
Archives
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August 2005 "