-FUPPETS-

A LIFETIME OF MUSIC 1973-2011 (Part 17)

2012-01-12T14:03:00.006-06:00

1989. What a fucked up year that was. A bunch of metal (mostly glam/hair) acts headed to Moscow to play a giant concert. It was very dull. So much else was going on. The hair metal bands were in the process of being usurped by the super sleazy Guns N Roses, and Guns N Roses had yet to bloat into everything they originally hated. Primus was making everything weird. REM was growing into the biggest damn band in America after years of low-level obscurity.

GUNS N ROSES - Patience

PRIMUS - To Defy The Laws Of Tradition

REM - These Days

-FUPPETS- AS WE KNOW IT IS DEAD: LONG LIVE THE 5TH BUDDHA

2012-01-05T13:32:00.003-06:00

-FUPPETS-

The 5th Buddha is here!

Thrill your mind to the collected essays of RXTT, the 5th Buddha!

-FUPPETS- will continue as a dumping ground for all things music/art/science.

More to love.

Is -FUPPETS- Dead?

2011-12-02T12:11:00.003-06:00

Well? Maybe. Maybe it is moribund. Maybe it has exhausted itself. MAYBE.

But what is to come? What is next? In the midst of life we are in death etc.

There may be a re-boot. There may be a continuation, or a part II, or some sort of -FUPPETS- prequel... Who knows? If Hollywood can do it so can -FUPPETS-.

For real. -FUPPETS- will be back, better than ever, very soon. It will be an expanded format, with specific sections relating to Music, Art, Science, etc., making it easier to browse and enjoy the -FUPPETS- that so many dozens love.

A LIFETIME OF MUSIC 1973-2011 (Part 16)

2011-10-12T11:45:00.008-05:00

1988. By this time the idea of "college rock" had morphed into "post-modern rock" then into "alternative rock" and so on and so forth as whatever fad catch-all name for non-mainstream music came into vogue. All sorts of crazy music was erupting into people's ears. Operation Ivy was already doing it's hardcore ska-punk thing in the Bay Area. The Pixies were making an eerie music, skeletal yet anthemic. Fugazi had begun to morph hardcore punk. The Red Hot Chili Peppers funked out with their cocks out. (check the dick socks in the clip) Dinosaur Jr brought the aural bliss of their "ear-bleeding country." Rock music history should view 1988 as 19-eightygreat.

Operation Ivy - Knowledge

The Pixies - Where Is My Mind?

Fugazi - Waiting Room

The Red Hot Chili Peppers - Fire

Dinosaur Jr - Kracked

-FUPPETS- MUSIC: SYG Compilation A & B

2011-09-14T12:33:00.005-05:00

There is a place, long thought to be mythical, where the various rejects and anomalies that are drawn to -FUPPETS- House Band SONIC YOUTH gather and conjoin their minds in mutual antagonism and love. That place is the Sonic Youth Gossip Forums. This fertile Meta-mind has in the past brought us such joys as jennthebenn's NO SETLIST: Pieces of a Sonic Life , The Top 20 Albums of the 2000's , and the infamous Top 20 Greatest Albums Ever . Now comes it's greatest experiment yet!

SYGMATA THE BLEEDING Part A

SYGMATA THE BLEEDING Part B

(a compilation of tracks from the world of SYG)

Check out the sonic output of the most fertile meta-hive-mind on the interwebs! SONIC LIFE!

-FUPPETS- House Band, SONIC YOUTH, is Huge In China

2011-09-03T13:17:00.002-05:00

This gives -FUPPETS- hope. From a wikileak release concerning Shanghai.

SONIC YOUTH Bigger Than Black Eyed Peas in China

Montrose Arts Society Introduces New Members

2011-08-26T12:17:00.003-05:00

A LIFETIME OF MUSIC 1973-2011 (Part 15)

2011-08-24T11:25:00.008-05:00

1987. It was the perfect time for The Cure to come fix everything damnit. The Pet Shop Boys were pushing their wry brand of anti-rock dance music. -FUPPETS- House Band Sonic Youth were about to release their masterpiece, DAYDREAM NATION. While the goth guys tried to ape Robert Smith, the goth girls tried their hardest to mimic Siouxsie Sioux. Meanwhile, on the west coast of the USA, a fermenting pot of insanity and rock called Jane's Addiction were recording their first LP, a live album.

THE CURE - Hot, Hot, Hot

THE PET SHOP BOYS - It's A Sin

SONIC YOUTH - Silver Rocket

SIOUXSIE & THE BANSHEES - Candyman

JANE'S ADDICTION - Trip Away

Montrose Art Society

2011-08-24T11:18:00.002-05:00

The Montrose Art Society is a group of artists from Houston TX. They recently put a call out to artists for new members. On September 30th they are holding an opening for an exhibit of the new artists' work at Caroline Collective. More info can be found here.

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult

2011-08-09T15:27:00.002-05:00

This cannot be embedded, so if you want to party with the greatest jam of 1991, click the image below. Sexonwheeelz by My Life with The Thrill Kill Kult.

-FUPPETS- thinks Microsoft Points are full of SUX

2011-07-20T13:15:00.005-05:00

Does this pricing structure make any sense to anyone? It seems reversed.
Look carefully at the pricing.

One can pay $4.99 for 400 Microsoft Points (MSP). If one desires double that amount, 800 MSP, then you pay $9.99 for them. How is that a deal? Buying the smallest package twice would come out to $9.98, saving 1 cent. But what if one desired four times the MSP? That costs $19.99, whereas purchasing the small package four times would total $19.96! How is it they are charging MORE when one purchases in bulk?
The discrepancy gets worse the more MSP that are bought. It may seem like nothing at all but it is a subtle rip-off that, over time and with the many millions of XBOX Live Users who are required to purchase and spend these MSP, earns Microsoft a ton of money. What a load of bullshit. In every other form of marketplace, whether real or virtual, the more of anything that is purchased the lower the individual price becomes. Not with this XBOX Live bullshit. They want you to feel those pennies are not worth the hassle of multiple small purchases. It is a soft-tactic but an extremely effective one.

-FUPPETS- Video Of The Day: fIREHOSE

2011-07-17T11:53:00.003-05:00

-FUPPETS- has been looking back at the musical past. fIREHOSE, and specifically the LIVE TOTEM POLE E.P. , were mindblowing. -FUPPETS- owes a debt of gratitude eternally to the one and only Hinstigator, Heath Hayner, for turning -FUPPETS- onto this E.P. with his incessant playing of it!

The E.P. is a collection of various songs that fIREHOSE would cover live, from Wire to Blue Oyster Cult to Public Enemy to the Butthole Surfers. There are also a couple of Watt originals. Here for your ear's pleasure are the Wire and the P.E. covers.

fIREHOSE - Mannequin

fIREHOSE - Sophisticated Bitch

SOZAVAC is back in the game!

2011-07-02T12:14:00.001-05:00

SOZAVAC.com

TRAPPER JENN M.D. is at it again

2011-07-02T12:00:00.004-05:00

JenntheBenn, the mind behind Trapper Jenn M.D. has in the recent past covered an exhaustive review of the entire Beatles discography, and previously had done the same for -FUPPETS- House Band SONIC YOUTH.
She is now 4 records into the discography of that great musical group Sleater Kinney.
It is, as always, a great read. Check it out!

TRAPPER JENN M.D. - Sleater Kinney Discography

In honor of this here is a -FUPPETS- Sleater Kinney favorite tune for your ears.

SLEATER KINNEY - Get Up

CRIME WAVE Finishes First Tour

2011-07-02T11:39:00.002-05:00

Out of the bowels of Texas comes CRIME WAVE. They have just finished touring in support of their new release, the Modern Lobotomies EP, (available at Agro-Wax Records with 5 different covers!)

Here is a sampling of the greatness that is CRIME WAVE. Let it pummel you into sonic bliss.

CRIME WAVE - Unsatisfied

CRIME WAVE - You Are All Satan

CRIME WAVE - Idi Amin

CRIME WAVE - Denim Infidel

-FUPPETS- Video of the Day : Recs Of The Flesh

2011-07-02T11:23:00.004-05:00

It is time to spring forth from the torpor of real life to once again grace the intermetanetwebs with the -FUPPETS- that everyone needs.
To bring this about requires ritual and song and intoxication and devastation and hopefully all of it will be encompassed by the great new video by -FUPPETS- favorites Recs Of The Flesh.

-FUPPETS- apologizes to Max OfTheFlesh for the tardiness in sharing this. Enjoy!

RECS OF THE FLESH - Subliminal/Delusional

-FUPPETS-

2011-05-26T18:03:00.002-05:00

A LIFETIME OF MUSIC 1973-2011 (Part 14)

2011-05-03T15:15:00.011-05:00

1986. Another year in the trudge we call life. What is middle school but institutionalized mutual torture? If it was not for music, many would have gone plain INSANE. Augustus Pablo was using a child's toy to create outstandingly bad-ass reggae music. Guns N Roses had yet to explode but were blowing brains in the LA scene. Ozzy was on heavy rotation for certain. Depeche Mode started getting dark and morbid in the best way. Killing Joke just got it on.

AUGUSTUS PABLO - Java

GUNS N' ROSES - Rocket Queen

OZZY OSBOURNE - Bark At The Moon

DEPECHE MODE - Black Celebration

KILLING JOKE - Chessboards

1991: The Year Punk Broke

2011-05-01T10:47:00.002-05:00

-FUPPETS- Video Of The Day: SONIC YOUTH

2011-05-01T10:17:00.003-05:00

Only -FUPPETS- House Band Sonic Youth can bring -FUPPETS- back from a month-long hiatus. Add in the fabulous news announced on Record Store Day 2011 that the classic concert movie/documentary 1991: The Year Punk Broke is finally going to come out on DVD!!! -FUPPETS- is ecstatic, and has savored the VHS version for 20 years already.

SONIC YOUTH - Mildred Pierce

-FUPPETS- FOR READERS LI

2011-04-01T11:32:00.007-05:00

51. Not the "Area" but the number. Years ago -FUPPETS- would never have imagined reaching that many. Hopefully the flow will continue until # 100. Did you know that the actual date of the end of the Maya calendar is June 5th 2012? The greedhead fux that seek to make money off of the blind idiots are telling everyone it will be in November. -FUPPETS- suspects it has something to do with money.

ESCAPE ROUTE: The Suprising Potential of a Prison Library - ( Avi Steinberg - The Boston Globe )

IS AMERICA A PLUTOCRACY? - ( Francis Fukuyama - The American Interest )

OPIUM WARS: A key step to securing peace will be to wean Afghan farmers off growing poppies - ( Robert Draper - National Geographic )

IRONY IS GOOD!: How Mao killed Chinese humor ... and how the Internet is slowly bringing it back again - ( Eric Abrahamsen - Foreign Policy )

THE APOSTATE: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology - ( Lawrence Wright - The New Yorker )

-FUPPETS- Loves Forgotten Hip Hop

2011-03-30T14:44:00.007-05:00

Anytime an "Official History" is fabricated by pendejos there are ommissions. There are many old Hip Hop classics that no one plays anymore. -FUPPETS- wants to share a few. MC Serch gets it started, with the help of Chubb Rock and a very young Nas. Special Ed, at 16 yrs old, could rhyme with the best. De La Soul's Buhloone Mindstate LP should be considered one of the high water marks, but is denied because of the "official" acceptance of the 1st De La LP as the great one. De La Soul always got better and better. These fux just don't know.

MC SERCH - Back To The Grill

Special Ed - I Got It Made

DE LA SOUL - Ego Trippin' (Pt. 2)

The Beatles are getting the full Trapper Jenn M.D. check-up

2011-03-30T13:50:00.004-05:00

After having plowed through the official discography of -FUPPETS- House Band SONIC YOUTH, rending it apart critically and analytically, Trapper Jenn M.D. is now Revolver-deep in the throes of Beatlemania. Album by album, song by song, check it out here:

TRAPPER JENN M.D.

The questions are many; What will she think of Ringo's output? Will she discuss (F)aul McCartney? Will due respect be given to the amazing and life-changing "white" album? -FUPPETS- cannot wait.

-FUPPETS- Needs to Catch Up

2011-03-30T13:31:00.003-05:00

Thurston Moore, of -FUPPETS- House Band SONIC YOUTH, has dropped his new slab on the world. -FUPPETS- will have to tune the sonic life. Chck out a track from the new album. It is called Benediction. Thurston's like the reverse Neil Young. He started off with massive skronk and is ending at soft introspection. Weird. Is that because Neil is Canadian?

-FUPPETS- Favorite Planetary Nebulae

2011-03-30T12:10:00.004-05:00

Everyone digs on planets and stars and galaxies and black holes. -FUPPETS- loves Planetary Nebulae.

-FUPPETS- Video Of The Day: MINOR THREAT

2011-03-29T10:51:00.004-05:00

-FUPPETS- has been on a bit of a hiatus lately. No more. To get things started once again here is -FUPPETS- Video Of The Day. MINOR THREAT - In My Eyes

-FUPPETS- Loves Solar Prominences!

2011-03-11T11:48:00.005-06:00

Ahh, the Solar Prominence. These amazing expulsions of stellar matter have been captured often by our Sun-orbiting satellites. This one is an exceptionally large one. According to the good folks at Astronomy Picture Of The Day, this prominence is so large that the Earth could easily fit underneath the arc of matter being expelled! Amazing!

LARGE SOLAR PROMINENCE

-FUPPETS- Spotlight: RICK JAMES

2011-03-11T11:26:00.002-06:00

Rick James was FUNKY. His music is always funky. Even the songs he wrote or produced for others were funky. -FUPPETS- is very glad for this. The Funk can not only move, it can remove, dig? Rick James always brought the heavy funk, even though he was a crazy bastard. Here are a few of -FUPPETS- favorite Rick James tunes.

RICK JAMES - Give It To Me Baby

RICK JAMES - Ghetto Life

RICK JAMES - Superfreak

Record Store Day 2011

2011-03-10T15:05:00.003-06:00

-FUPPETS- favorite new holiday is just over a month away. Record Store Day is a time for all vinyl head geeks to come together and gather for easy disposal. . . wait. That is not right at all. Record Store Day is the day we all wait in line for those limited edition releases that are limited because only about 5,000 in the whole country want it. On third thought, maybe the truth is that the magic of Record Store Day lies in glorifying in the rituals of record buying which bring us together as nerds. Soon the official list of limited release items will be revealed.

-FUPPETS- has already covered 5 Reasons Why Vinyl Records Rule. Check it out if you missed it.

-FUPPETS- Song of The Day : STIGMATA (remix)

2011-03-09T20:52:00.002-06:00

This song was one of the most ass-blastingly amazing slabs of polluted, bleating riffage and skull-crushing drum machine agitation ever. Play it loud. LOUD! This version was available solely on the 12" single for the longest. -FUPPETS- will love it forever.

MINISTRY - Stigamata (remix)

A LIFETIME OF MUSIC 1973-2011 (part 13)

2011-03-08T10:53:00.007-06:00

1985. One year past George Orwell's expiration date. It was a strange time. The USA was being ruled by a puppet government, using the ever-progressing deterioration of Ronald Reagan due to Alzheimer's Disease to achieve their own ends of avarice and mass-brainwashing. It was an ugly, ugly time for the mainstream arts, as greedhead assholes cut arts budgets and school budgets. It was a good time to be rich and white and powerful. It was a terrible time for anyone else. The truly creative felt this and unleashed their creations. The music was the medicine, or at least the soporific, that we all needed. PRINCE was at his manic funky pinnacle, and anything he touched was gold, but he was offering his death for your happiness. METALLICA brought us their ode to loneliness, death, and oblivion, allowing the metal-heads to "feel it." TIL TUESDAY sang about the oppression of an abusive relationship. THE CULT brought back the bombast to rock and roll, reminding us that pure raw sexlove can provide shelter from the world's shit, if only for a time. NEIL YOUNG sang about heroin's beauty and toll at a concert to raise money for Ethiopian starvation relief efforts. THE SMITHS sang about "illicit" love in the face of violence and hate. -FUPPETS- remembers it as a weird time.

PRINCE - I Would Die For You

METALLICA - Fade To Black

TIL TUESDAY - Voices Carry

THE CULT - She Sells Sanctuary

NEIL YOUNG - The Needle & The Damage Done

THE SMITHS - Hand In Glove

ART FOR TODAY (Part 1)

2011-03-08T10:21:00.006-06:00

ART FOR TODAY

(Part 1)

The history of the visual image as a means of communication may predate even spoken language. It is easy to imagine some proto-human scratching marks on the ground to communicate with his fellow primates. From such rudimentary beginnings it is just a matter of time before humans as skilled as the artists who painted at Lascaux, or Chauvet are using marks and color and line to not only share information, but to supplicate the world around them for a good hunt, or to bemoan the death of a loved one.

Images are powerful things. It is no mere coincidence that much of the modern human brain is devoted to the processing of visually received stimuli. Our eyes are our best developed sense organ. Because of this, our images have grown ever more sophisticated as the full extent of our visual power is utilized. The growth appears to be exponential, mirroring much of human development. This growth can be charted like much of history by following the high water marks.
BIG IDEAS come into the world of the visual image when society needs them. The outdated imagery that was supplanted by the development of three-point perspective in paintings existed for millenia before. Flat, two dimensional imagery, in which size was indicative of status as opposed to a true representational measure, and which represented ideas as opposed to visible reality was the norm for most of the world's visual artists. This was true in the cultures of Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Europe, Africa, etc., and speaks of the aims of the visual image in those cultures.
I am not referring strictly to the content of the artworks, to the subject matter. I speak instead of the means available to the visual artists to make their point as those points relate to the culture at large. Let's look at ancient Egyptian art for example.
In Egypt's Old and New Kingdoms the use of visual art was mainly to serve the Pharaoh, the Temples, and the wealthy by spreading propaganda. Whether this was religious propaganda or political propaganda is irrelevant. What is relevant is that the art was straightforward, simple enough for even illiterates to understand the message being imparted. The images were in grids, demarcating a rigid stasis. Egyptians believed their leaders were gods on Earth. They believed in the endless cycle of life, mirroring the Nile river's yearly floods, in which everything plays it's proper part, and the people are but miniscule pawns in a much larger story being played out by the elites. In a desert the only constants are the magnificent terror of the Sun and the durability of stone. Everything else is in flux. Death can come on the back of a locust swarm or the mouth of alligators. Disease is a curse and death is a time of judgment. Life must have seemed so hard to ancient Egyptians. It was so brutal and short that their whole culture became one of worshiping death, or at least the state of being called “dead.”
Could this be why their art is so rigid? Egyptian visual art which survives shows actions, events, places, personages, and tells a narrative story, which can also be read allegorically. It does not place any importance in portraying motion, or the passage of time. It focuses instead on the action, and what that action means. The images do not care about relative size, and are so stylized and formatted as to make it impossible to differentiate between the carved figures. This problem is solved by the use of the cartouche. These are symbols that name the important figures in the artwork, such as pharaohs, gods, etc. The lower classes are portrayed by their jobs, not by anything individual. The artworks themselves were constructed to last for eternity, since whatever one was buried with would be what they enjoyed in their afterlife. Stone carving thus becomes the critical art form for the times. It allowed people of power to inscribe the walls of their death chambers with every possible thing they could ever desire in the afterlife.
These are means to an end. The Egyptians truly believed that birth determined one's life and that the individual will was but an afterthought, in many ways mirroring the modern Indian culture and caste system. Life was just a way-station which would present a person with the challenges, and the person's decisions concerning these challenges would then be judged upon one's death. Of course the art also showed you how to react to the challenges of life, thereby creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Egypt flourished for millenia with few challenges to this art ideal.

Much of the ancient world worked this very same way. The art served the ruling classes whims, allowing the mass illiterate poor to share in the legends and myths of their culture without having to actually read the source material. Art then served the purpose of pure narrative and allegorical communication from one group of elites to another group of subjects.
As society changes the purposes of art change as well. What used to be something only the aristocracy or royalty could indulge in now became accessible to the just plain wealthy. The houses of the wealthy became the showpiece for their new found appreciation of art, usually centered around portraits of themselves and their relatives which granted the subject a grandeur and power through it's very existence. Art became personal. It was not long before a new middle class of people was created. These people, not wealthy nor poor, but with enough money to afford some of the nicer things and the education to appreciate them, were the ones that opened a floodgate.
The visual image gained wider and wider exposure. Because of the new audience, the art changed as well. Images became appreciated more for their ability to describe and show the real world than for their symbolic and propaganda uses. Since in art everything builds upon everything else, the early reasons for art still exist and will always exist. They are only supplanted like an onion skin atop an onion skin by new demands placed on art. It all builds a framework of visual reference. Regular people were now exposed to more visual imagery than ever before and therefore the sophistication of the audience grew and grew.
The Old Masters managed to combine everything art is about and still explore new paths, new ways to make their art suit their purposes. The discovery of three-point perspective shone a light upon all the previous images. Those with proper perspective are obvious to the eye, to anyone's eye, for perspective allows to the tricks one's eye plays to be used for the full effect of the painting. After a while, any artist not working with proper perspective, or at least faking it as well he could, was considered “naive,” a backhanded compliment which essentially means, “your art is good for someone who knows nothing about art.” This becomes the main driver behind the visual image for centuries. Each new generation perfecting the techniques and ideas that allow for the art required by the times.
Artists are always at the vanguard of culture. Sometimes it is an idea that drives them to new places and sometimes it is a new media. Around 150 years ago the first tube paints were being sold, as the industrial revolution modernized and streamlined the means of production the world over. No longer did artists have to painstakingly prepare and manufacture their pigments and paints, or hire a crew of assistants to do so. The artists was freed to take his canvas and turn art from an indoor endeavor to an outdoor pleasure. Nature again became the main inspiration. These artists could go out into the world with their easel and paints and create artwork of immediacy. A preliminary sketch of a painting which used to take weeks could be done in hours, and many painters began to appreciate the beauty inherent in artwork that sought not to minutely recreate the nature before them, but instead to capture in colored paint, the way light played upon the world.
This was a very big conceptual leap forward. It was pushed along by the science of the times as well. People used to believe everything was what it was innately. A red jacket was a red jacket. A white egg was a white egg. Science showed that, as far as optics are concerned, common sense is useless. A red jacket receives white light, absorbs every color wavelength except red, and bounces red back at our eyes. Our brains then say, “this jacket is red. Paint it red.” Painters early on realized that the nature of the light greatly affects the nature of the color of an object. Morning light would make a red jacket appear violet, whereas overcast light would make the red appear toned with grey or black. Color is created in the eye. Someone like Monet would paint fast, loose, to catch that one specific light effect he sought to recreate in the viewer's eye. Painters were literally trying to paint light.

As the society progresses it absorbs the lessons of artists, and accepts them as truths. Society is stupid that way. Instead of understanding that everything works in a continuum and that nothing end and nothing begins and that one idea does not replace another, society dumps old ideas as fast as new ideas come. These new ideas are then treated as the new dogma. Society is stupid and slow and ignorant and will always need art to show the way to new thought. The problem lies in that society gets more and more rigid and therefore more and more resistant to the changes brought about or implied in artist's work.
These avant-garde artworks were among many chosen 70 years ago by the National Socialist Party of Germany as being decadent and obscene. They were not decadent nor obscene because of puerile content, or nudity or offensive imagery. These artworks were dangerous to that totalitarian regime, just as dangerous as art remains today for totalitarian governments worldwide, because of the IDEAS. The strange thing is that the Nazi Party actually put on exhibitions of this "degenerate art" to which over 3 million people went. They truly were insane.

Ideas in art are pulled by the artists from the meta-structure of humanity's total consciousness. Artists draw material and inspiration from places they do not even register. The entire world feeds their minds. An artists of any type is like a tuning fork. A tuning fork can be made to vibrate by another tuning fork being struck and brought near it. They do not have to touch. One fork vibrates the air and the air then vibrates the previously inert tuning fork. Now imagine an artist, a creative person, whose entire day is composed of endlessly varied stimuli affecting him or her in ways so subtle they may not be apparent for decades. Subtle, yes, but powerfully affecting nonetheless.
As the world turned industrial, and life moved from the pasture to the chaos of urban city living, certain artists felt the pull towards a complete dismissal of representation. They sought truth and beauty in the relationships of colors, lines, shapes, hues and tones. They did not seek to represent anything at all. To them, abstraction was a perfectly natural response to a world ever more constrained, ever more visually cluttered. A day's walk in any city would flood the mind with more visual imagery than a year spent on one's country farm. Imagine what that would do to someone extra-sensitive to stimuli of any sort. It only makes sense that artists sought to escape into pure abstraction.

Abstraction may seem to negate all the rules art had come to be built upon, but it is, in fact, just the end result of the path those rules laid out. Painting involves using colored material to create an image. The relationship in a still-life between a vase, let's say, and a tablecloth is one of color. Color, and how it is placed, defines boundaries, depth, texture, and light, as well as serving allegorically as a symbol. Pure abstraction engages a viewer through the same means as a representative image. The goal is different thought. Representative imagery needs to evoke the actual structure of the world. Abstraction seeks to create a new world to be judged by the aesthetics of the art of painting itself. In an era where anyone can create a near perfect representational image (photography) painting needed to create a sense of it's own value apart from pure documentation.
Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, etc., were all attempts to create art that allowed the artists to define art itself, or at least test the boundaries. They set their own rules, or tried to, but these rules were still only workable in direct reference to the boundaries they sought to replace These boundaries are the boundaries demarcated by culture and society itself. The past 200 years have seen the Industrial Revolution change not only art but the viewers of art and the artists as well.
Currently, we are in the midst of another whirlwind change in society, and therefore in humanity. The ability to have the vast sum of human knowledge and endeavor accessible from anywhere on the planet has affected artists greatly. If you think the Industrial Revolution brought chaos and infinite new experience, you will not be ready for what our cyber world is bringing us. If done right, this tool will increase the sophistication of everyone with access to it. Every image ever seen in a museum is available to be viewed through technology. Some artists are using the web itself as an art form, and others are turning into Luddites, afraid of being replaced as image makers by computers, or worse yet, regular people. All this is causing a new change in art.
Art can no longer be just representational, or abstract, or low-brow. Art needs to point the way to the future, good or ill. It needs to change itself to show the way to humanity. What is needed is a new Meta-structure for art. Artists have seemingly exhausted every combination of media, size, shape, color, etc., available for a two dimensional visual image. What has only been tried a few times, by artists such as M.C. Escher, is to create imagery, a new art essentially, which does not depend on the “normal” human points of spatial reference.

This will be discussed in Part 2 of ART FOR TODAY. Coming soon.

-FUPPETS- Can't Help It

2011-03-07T16:11:00.003-06:00

-FUPPETS- can't help it. This came as GREAT news, and -FUPPETS- will rejoice tonight.

PHIL COLLINS RETIRING FROM MUSIC

-FUPPETS- could feel it comin in the air. . . but wishes him well. Not being able to hold a drumstick anymore due to nerve damage is a motherfucker for a long-time skin pounder such as he.

Some Of -FUPPETS- Favorite Songs From The Movies

2011-03-07T14:35:00.004-06:00

Sometimes the funniest parts of movies are the songs the lead characters play. Man, does -FUPPETS- love cracking up at funny songs in movies. One of the all-time movie song greats is the comedy duo of Cheech & Chong. They always incorporated music into their live act, records, and films.

MEXICAN AMERICANS (from Cheech & Chong's Next Movie)

ME AND MY OLD LADY (from Things Are Tough All Over)

SAVE THE WHALES (from Nice Dreams)

EARACHE MY EYE (from Up In Smoke)

5 Reasons Why Vinyl Records Rule

2011-03-01T14:23:00.011-06:00

-FUPPETS- is of the opinion that vinyl records rule all. While many audiophiles praise the inherent sound quality of vinyl records -FUPPETS- can think of several more equally valuable reasons why vinyl discs reign supreme.

1. The Large Format: Vinyl records are, on average, around 12" square. This creates many surfaces for art and text. The front cover, back cover, as well as the inner sleeve or sleeves offer so much space. Add fold-out covers and inserts of all types and the possibilities are endless. Such a surface lends itself to color, embossing, die-cuts, gold foils, etc.

2. The "Pocket": Most records come packaged in cardboard sleeves which open on one side. Sometimes this is on the top of the sleeve but mostly it is on the right side. Since the inner sleeves holding the actual records sit inside this pocket, and since the records are then shrink-wrapped in plastic, this makes a perfect little place to insert almost anything that fits. Coins, posters, dried flowers, stickers, photographs, etc. have all been placed inside the sleeve for the listener to discover upon opening. CD's have always been too small and fragile to allow for such bad-assery. They used the CD long-box for a while but that was just an initial reaction to being forced to sell a new media in an old media's shelving system. Digital media files come with other media files, if anything at all. Vinyl hunters know the thrill of discovering sleeve loot, even in used bins.

3. The Analog Nature of the Recording: A vinyl record is essentially a piece of plastic pressed like a coin. Instead of a relief sculpture, as you would see on any denomination of coin, what is impressed upon the hot plastic is a continuous spiral of analogically encoded information. This info is the sonic wave form itself. If you imagine a record as a spiral ramp with a crack running all the way up the middle, then the extent which that crack widens and narrows and wiggles left and right is the record groove, a literal representation of the sound being recorded and reproduced. It creates a sculpture that recreates sound. That is as fucking awesome as if we could make a drawing of the way a skunk smelled and then by having someone look at the drawing they would experience the stink. It is almost fucking magic it is so awesome.

4. The Analog Nature of the Playback: No electricity is required to either create or decode records. What is required is a stylus of some sort attached to a megaphone. The most basic is a tightly rolled up paper cone. Attaching a sewing needle or pin to the end of the cone would result in higher fidelity, although it would damage the recording as it played it back. Of course the finer the point the better the sound recreation, which is why turntables use tiny sapphires and diamonds in the tip of their stylus needles. No electricity is required to turn the platter either. A hand crank was used to turn the early machines and still can be.

5. Durability: Records get scratched, causing skips. They sure do. They also can develop cracks and warp from excessive heat, causing sonic irregularities like pops and crackles. The old shellac ones were actually brittle, shattering if dropped on a hard surface. Even so, we can dig up old, dusty, scratched, cracked platters and clean them up, place them on a turntable, and play back the information within. It may not be complete, perfectly intelligible, or listenable for pleasure, but the sounds are STILL THERE. As an archival material it appears to be very durable, and the only known way of preserving sound that, all things being equal, is fairly permanent (as far as human civilization goes). Place a stack of classic LP's in a vacuum sealed time capsule and bury it for millenia along with instructions for playback, and they will be playable! Frankly, we could make records out of discs of diamond, with laser etched grooves, and create a mechanism to record our voice as humans for the foreseeable eternity! A diamond LP would never warp, break, scratch, etc. MAGIC! That is durability. Your voice's literal sonic waveform captured on a nearly permanent media. So durable it was used on the Voyager craft, both of which have left our Solar System.

While diamond LP's are a dream, collectors still savor the sounds coming from 78 rpm discs recorded over a century ago. Shellac and plastic do not biodegrade very readily. A record collection can be stored and handed down like a library from one generation to the next. All it takes is one lengthy worldwide energy shortage to drive our electricity-sucking digital media to extinction. A Trillion motherfucking bits of data forever eradicated, Hell, to play back CD's you have to have a fucking laser. To play digital media you need a microprocessor. To play a fucking record -FUPPETS- can use a goddamned paper cone!

You're gonna want some vinyl records after the zombie apocalypse of 2012. -Don't come running to -FUPPETS-.

Ode to the Space Shuttle

2011-02-25T16:58:00.006-06:00

Goddamnit -FUPPETS- loves the Space Shuttle. -FUPPETS- remembers grade school in Puerto Rico and being pulled out of class to see the Space Shuttle Columbia's exhaust trail as it arced into outer space. It is easy now for people to take the fleet for granted, even with the multiple tragedies, because the shuttles were and are so amazing. They made space travel seem easy, simple even. The successes of the fleet such as the International Space Station, the Hubble Space Telescope and our current technological revolutions have made everyone forget how amazing it is to go into outer space. There have been less than 600 HUMAN BEINGS to leave our atmosphere!!!! EVER! FUCK! That is amazing and under appreciated. There are over 6 Billion people currently alive. There have probably been several dozen-Billion Homo Sapiens creatures crawling upon the face of our Earth. Only several hundred have ever left the safety of our atmosphere. They join the company of several dozen monkeys, dogs, mice, and assorted small creatures who have experienced what it feels to leave Mother Earth. -FUPPETS- hopes that this is not lost on the government and those in power as they plan the next fleet of vehicles to further the human expansion into Space.

On February 24th the Space Shuttle Discovery launched for the final time. It is a sad time for -FUPPETS- and all space nerds worldwide.

Feb 24 2011 - Final Shuttle Launch, Space Shuttle Discovery

-FUPPETS- Reaches 50,000 HITS!!!!!

2011-02-25T10:13:00.004-06:00

Thanks to one and all who swing by to connect their brains to the -FUPPETS- meta-coaster of art, music, and science.
-FUPPETS- will continue on in the ever-more pressing quest to open minds and shake shit up.

Here is a video of what happens when people fuck with 50,000 volts of electricity.

What the Fuck???

2011-02-22T12:11:00.003-06:00

-FUPPETS- knows that adverts on this site are pulled by Google Ads to reflect the individual blog's content. Therefore it is surprising to see an advert for some bullshit Christian Life Music Tour pop up on the page. -FUPPETS- will counterattack with a lovely tune by the one and only Bathory entitled In Nomine Satanas.
-FUPPETS- has always maintained that the Spanish "Satanas" sounds so much more evil and ominous than the curt English "Satan." "Satan" sounds like a brand of dish washing soap. Lemon scented Say-tan. Bah. What a lame name. It will always be SATANAS!!!!

BATHORY - In Nomine Satanas

-FUPPETS- For Readers L : CRACKED.com edition

2011-02-22T11:46:00.004-06:00

Ahh, the good people at CRACKED.com are one of -FUPPETS- favorites, and always good for a laugh. -FUPPETS- was always a huge fan of Cracked and Mad magazine, which warped minds in an oh-so-wonderful way. It is good to see that fuck-em-all spirit still alive on the metawebs. Here is a selection of articles from that site for your reading pleasure.

10 Creepy Plants That Shouldn't Exist

5 Hollywood Secrets That Explain Why So Many Movies Suck

6 Famous Artists You Didn't Know Were Perverts

5 Classic Board Games With Disturbing Origin Stories

8 Historic Symbols That Mean The Opposite of What You Think

-FUPPETS- Video Of The Day: The Red Hot Chili Peppers

2011-02-14T12:15:00.005-06:00

Today -FUPPETS- Video of The Day presents the very first television appearance by the Red Hot Chili Peppers on, of all things, the very short-lived, pre-Growing Pains Alan Thicke show titled Thicke of The Night. They play one of -FUPPETS- favorite tracks off of their first album. True Men Don't Kill Coyotes and that whole eponymous record made for excellent late night driving music back in the day.

The RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS - True Men Don't Kill Coyotes

A LIFETIME OF MUSIC 1973-2011 (Part 12)

2011-02-12T11:52:00.008-06:00

1984. Did Orwell get it right and no one noticed?

GBH asked for fire. The God of Thunder became a War Machine. RUN DMC went off on sucka MC's. SLAYER shared their dark magic. Prince took us to erotic city.

GBH - Give Me Fire

KISS - War Machine

RUN DMC - Sucka MC's

SLAYER - Black Magic

PRINCE - Erotic City

-FUPPETS- Hopes Egyptians Get It Right.

2011-02-02T15:52:00.007-06:00

REVOLUTION IS IN THE AIR. -FUPPETS- WILL PROVIDE THE SOUNDTRACK INSPIRATION.

EGYPT 2011: Citizens clash against state police

The BEATLES - Revolution

The BUTTHOLE SURFERS - Revolution Pt. 1 & Pt. 2

EVERY MAN'S GOT A RIGHT TO DECIDE HIS OWN DESTINY, AND IN THIS JUDGEMENT THERE IS NO PARTIALITY. SO ARM IN ARMS, WITH ARMS, WE'LL FIGHT THIS LITTLE STRUGGLE, 'CAUSE THAT'S THE ONLY WAY WE CAN OVERCOME A LITTLE TROUBLE

BOB MARLEY & The WAILERS - ZIMBABWE

-FUPPETS- For READERS XLIX: Vigilant Citizen Edition

2011-02-01T12:57:00.004-06:00

-FUPPETS- has a soft spot for the Vigilant Citizen website. It is one of -FUPPETS- Favorites and always provides some very interesting food for the ol' grey matter. Here is a sampling of the essays/criticisms/articles available at their site. Vigilant Citizen's motto is "Symbols rule the world, not Words, not Laws." They understand that the people in power have only one goal for anything and everything they do. That goal is to STAY IN POWER, by any and all means available to the super-rich and super-powerful. If you do not understand this, or if you choose not to believe that the prime motivator of nearly everything in our human existence is that simple and basic, then you could benefit from a bit of an eye opening. With the ever increasing consolidation of all media markets, from print to film to radio to television to the Internet itself, the number of people who actually decide what most of us see/read/hear is ever shrinking. With such a monopoly comes a massive amount of power and influence. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. VIGILANT CITIZEN exists to help us fight back, at least in our own minds. From architecture, to media, to film analysis, here is a small sampling.

SINISTER SITES: The Denver International Airport

Mind Control Theories and Techniques Used By Mass Media

The 5 Most Sinister Corporate Logos

The Esoteric interpretation of Pinocchio

When insiders expose the ugly side of the entertainment industry

-FUPPETS- Video Of The Day: SONIC YOUTH

2011-02-01T12:37:00.002-06:00

OH YES! -FUPPETS- House Band, SONIC YOUTH, have always blown out assholes and eardrums with their live show. Many thanks to CHOUT for uploading so much great SY stuff to the metawebs. CHOUT is a -FUPPETS- Hero. Here is Lee Ranaldo tearing it up.

SONIC YOUTH - Skip Tracer

UNDERBELLY : Empty building on W. Dallas

2011-02-01T12:06:00.006-06:00

UNDERBELLY loves to find places that are being used as street galleries. One such place is on W. Dallas, near downtown Houston. This empty building used to house a Futon store, and is now being used by homeless to seek shelter from the cold winter weather. The art on display is constantly being painted over and covered up but here are a few that UNDERBELLY has managed to photograph.

UNDERBELLY: Mary's Bar Update

2011-01-18T16:10:00.003-06:00

That lovely bit of vacant property on Waugh and Westheimer which is fondly remembered as Mary's Bar by most of Montrose is still holding it's own as a street gallery. New art is constantly finding it's way there. UNDERBELLY continues to document the street art of Houston TX.

A LIFETIME OF MUSIC 1973-2011 (Part 11)

2011-01-18T14:40:00.008-06:00

1983. A decade into existence. The musical landscape is forever changing. Sounds disappear and sounds reappear, often in new strange guises. A young group in the UK was beginning their path to indie rock immortality, for THE SMITHS are truly immortal. A tiny Brit with a voice like Odin himself, RONNIE JAMES DIO penned an anthem to loneliness that actually rocked harder than anything he had done with Black Sabbath. Frank Zappa's band hooks up with a blonde from the future and helps MISSING PERSONS craft a sound that would be stolen by hordes of New Wave wanna-be bands. (Imagine if Gwen Stefani could actually sing and had original ideas). REM fired the opening salvo in their subtle yet passionate assault on the ears of the world. Other bands had their own way to do things, and POISON IDEA influenced many that would come afterwards. Meanwhile, -FUPPETS- House Band, SONIC YOUTH, was showing us how the city is a natural scape, and doing so with the severe chaos that only they are capable of.

THE SMITHS - Accept Yourself

RONNIE JAMES DIO - Rainbow In The Dark

MISSING PERSONS - Words

REM - Carnival of Sorts

POISON IDEA - Marked For Life

SONIC YOUTH - Making The Nature Scene

-FUPPETS- Video Of The Day : PRINCE

2011-01-17T13:50:00.003-06:00

Today's -FUPPETS- Video Of The Day is in honor of the current NFL playoffs and the upcoming Super Bowl. In 2007, in a driving rainstorm the likes of which had not ever been experienced in a Super Bowl, Prince delivered the best halftime show -FUPPETS- ever saw. Thanks be to Prince. The Super Bowl halftime show is usually the worst part of the entire day. Artists and bands just play these cheesy medleys of their own songs while Prince mixed it up in a great way, drawing from many different types of music and genres to entertain everyone. Prince is a HUGE Minnesota Vikings fanatic and knows what football fans wanna see. I do not think the fucking Black Eyed Peas are gonna do a thing to even come close to Prince's performance. Fuck em with a dead porcupine. The guitar solo on Purple Rain alone blows the entire recorded output of the Black Eyed Peas out of the water.

PRINCE - Super Bowl Medley (Part 1)

PRINCE - Super Bowl Medley (Part 2)

A LIFETIME OF MUSIC 1973-2011 (Part 10)

2011-01-11T11:58:00.003-06:00

1982. More and more homes around the USA were getting cable television, and with it MTV. At that time MTV was as white-bread as any other media outlet, barely showing any Hispanic or African-American bands. This allowed what was and still is a fringe music, Heavy Metal, to take over the MTV airwaves. Metal bands provided visually stimulating, although oftentimes moronic, videos of their bombastic songs. Iron Maiden, one of the giants of double-barrel guitar twaddle were tearing it up with their second singer, Bruce Dickinson. Judas Priest was blasting their loud rock to the world with an all-time classic. Ozzy Osborne had left Black Sabbath and hooked up with a tiny dynamo called Randy Rhoads who rocked but died too soon. Meanwhile, funk-master supreme Rick James was doing his thing at the height of his funky powers.

IRON MAIDEN - Run To The Hills

JUDAS PRIEST - Breaking The Law

OZZY OSBORNE - Flying High Again

RICK JAMES - Mary Jane

-FUPPETS- Video Of The Day: PILOT TO GUNNER

2011-01-11T11:12:00.003-06:00

Today's -FUPPETS- Video Of The Day is from an East Coast ass-kicking rock group called Pilot To Gunner. -FUPPETS- first became aware of these bad-asses through their first EP, Hit The Ground & Hum, and their following albums, Games At High Speeds, and Get Saved, continued the awesomeness.

PILOT TO GUNNER - Put It In The Post

-FUPPETS- In Memoriam 2010

2010-12-23T17:40:00.009-06:00

2010 is almost over, and before it is -FUPPETS- wants to spend a little time remembering some of the people whose stay with us here on Earth made it better in some way, even if just by making us laugh. This is a highly subjective thing so if there's anyone you feel has been left out please comment below.

JANUARY

KENNETH NOLAND: American painter. Painted beautiful abstractions and was one of the "Color Field" painters. Died of cancer.

ANDREW LANGE: American astrophysicist. Self-administered death by asphyxiation.

J.D. SALINGER: American writer. Just plain old.

FEBRUARY

ANDREW KOENIG: American actor. Suicide, probably because people never stopped calling him "Boner."

MARCH

MERLIN OLSEN: American Football Hall of Famer and TV actor. Cancer.

PETER GRAVES: American actor. Heart Attack.

COREY HAIM: American actor. Cause of death is undetermined.

HERB ELLIS: American Jazz guitarist. Alzheimer's Disease.

APRIL

MALCOLM MCLAREN: English band manager and raconteur. Cancer

DIXIE CARTER: American stage, film, and TV actress. Cancer.

GURU: American rapper (Gangstarr). Cancer.

MAY

LENA HORNE: American singer, civil rights activist, actress, dancer.

FRANK FRAZETTA: American fantasy/science fiction artist. Died after a stroke.

RONNIE JAMES DIO: Heavy Metal singer. Died of stomach cancer.

MARTIN GARDNER: American science and mathematics writer.

JOSE LIMA: Dominican MLB player. Died after a massive heart attack.

ART LINKLETTER: Canadian/American TV and radio personality. Natural causes.

GARY COLEMAN: American TV actor. Died after an intracranial hemorrhage.

DENNIS HOPPER: American actor and director. Prostate cancer.

JUNE

RUE MACLANAHAN: American actor. Stroke.

JOHN WOODEN: American basketball player and coach. Natural causes.

JIMMY DEAN: American singer, actor and businessman. Died of natural causes.

GARRY SHIDER: American musician (Parliament Funkadelic). Brain and lung cancer.

MANUTE BOL: Sudanese-born NBA player. Death from acute kidney failure.

JULY

HARVEY PEKAR: American comic book writer. Died after and accidental overdose of antidepressants.

GEORGE STEINBRENNER: American businessman and owner of the hated Yankees. Heart attack.

DERF SCRATCH: American musician (FEAR).

AUGUST

LOLITA LEBRóN: Puerto Rican activist and advocate fro independence.

CATFISH COLLINS: American musician (Parliament Funkadelic/James Brown). Cancer.

SEPTEMBER

KEVIN McCARTHY: American actor. Pneumonia.

EDDIE FISHER: American singer and husband to endless Hollywood starlets.

GEORGE BLANDA: American Football Hall of Famer.

TONY CURTIS: American actor. Cardiac arrest.

Stephen J. Cannell: American TV writer. Skin cancer.

OCTOBER

BENOIT MANDELBROT: Franco-American mathematician. Inventor of the Mandelbrot Set.

TOM BOSLEY: American actor.

BOB GUCCIONE: American publisher. Cancer.

NOVEMBER

LESLIE NIELSEN: Canadian/American actor. Pneumonia.

DECEMBER

DON MEREDITH: American Football player and TV broadcaster. Brain hemorrhage.

BLAKE EDWARDS: American film director, screenwriter and producer. Pneumonia.

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART: American musician.

DENIS DUTTON: Academic. Creator of Arts & Letters Daily.

A LIFETIME OF MUSIC 1973-2010 (part 9)

2010-12-22T15:41:00.006-06:00

1981. The post-punk era was in full swing. Bands were just singing crazy crap. It was a wonderful time. Siouxsie & The Banshees were wailing their peculiarly awesome insanity. New Order was crafting a whole new existence after Joy Division. At the same time the titans of prog RUSH were at their florid technical peak, merging intricacy with melody as few could do. At the other end of the sonic spectrum the Circle Jerks were letting it all hang out in primal fashion.

SIOUXSIE & THE BANSHEES - SpellBound

NEW ORDER - Everything's Gone Green

RUSH - Red Barchetta

CIRCLE JERKS - Red Tape/ Back Up Against The Wall/ I just Want Some Skank/ Beverly Hills/ Wasted

UNDERBELLY: Vacant bar as gallery

2010-12-22T15:09:00.005-06:00

Mary's was the iconic Montrose bar, and used to be the centerpiece of the old pride parade, with countless drag shows on it's roof. It has sat vacant, up for sale, at it's corner of Waugh and Westheimer, and currently is serving as what UNDERBELLY terms a street gallery, with work constantly added, painted over, or altered on the outside walls.
Mainstream Houston sees this as vandalism, as the ugly markings and scrawls of hoodlums. -FUPPETS- does not. What is ignored is that these are creative works done by creative people who happen to use walls instead of canvas. Like all Art, some is crude, some is magnificent, and some is painfully ugly.
Here are the current crop of pieces up at Mary's as of December 20, 2010. UNDERBELLY exists to expose these transient works to the outside world, and will continue to update any new work added to Mary's bar.

RXTT

-FUPPETS- FOR READERS XLVIII

2010-12-21T12:19:00.004-06:00

READ!!!!!

THE EDGE Asks Selected Contributors: The flat earth and geocentric world are examples of wrong scientific beliefs that were held for long periods. Can you name your favorite example and for extra credit why it was believed to be true? - ( The EDGE )

Inside the mind of Scientology's Messiah: Twenty-five years after his death, Michael Bywater revisits the sacred texts of the pulp science writer turned prophet L Ron Hubbard - ( Michael Bywater - New Humanist )

WORLD'S LARGEST NEUTRINO OBSERVATORY BUILT AT SOUTH POLE - ( LiveScience.com )

WHY DO WE HATE MODERN CLASSICAL MUSIC?: Avant garde art and architecture are loved, but in music we cling to the past. We're missing out. - ( Alex Ross - Guardian UK )

-FUPPETS- THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Leaks Don't Come Out of the Sky

2010-12-21T12:03:00.003-06:00

"Is the WikiLeaks disclosure of Pentagon and State Department internal
documents dangerous, by reducing U.S. military and diplomatic effectiveness? Or
good, by pulling down the veil of secrecy around government? Obviously there are
arguments on both sides. Here's what struck me. Last week this New York Times page-one story reported the Obama administration "plans to further step up attacks on al-Qaeda and Taliban insurgents in the tribal areas of Pakistan."
Maybe that's a good idea; maybe it's not. But as an item of information, the Times story is far more explosive than anything in WikiLeaks disclosures so far, most of which contain trivia and statements of the obvious. The Times story tells al-Qaeda and Taliban factions in tribal Pakistan that raids and air strikes will increase. The story is a warning of something about to happen, rather than a retrospective on prior events. And the story is sourced to unnamed "administration officials." That is
-- the information was leaked by the White House or Pentagon.
Perhaps the purpose of the leak was to make the president sound tough at a time when his poll numbers are fluttering. Perhaps the purpose was to make the U.S. military sound powerful at a time when a $725 billion Pentagon budget request was awaiting approval in Congress. The purpose cannot have been to help American soldiers and air crew in the field. Their chances would be best if U.S. forces struck al-Qaeda and Taliban targets without warning, with nothing said by the White House or Pentagon until after the operation was over.
I don't question the Times' decision to run the story. What I question is White House and Defense Department officials denouncing Julian Assange when he publishes leaks that embarrass the powerful -- then merrily using leaks themselves when they think the powerful will benefit. If revealing government information is, on its face, an offense, White House and Pentagon officials who leak to reporters should be chased across the world and prosecuted just as vigorously as Assange.
Maybe the WikiLeaks idea is indeed wrong. But compared to White House and Pentagon officials who leak to the press when it suits them, isn't Assange -- who uses his name rather than hide behind anonymity -- the honest one? "

Gregg Easterbrook

MFAH Fine Arts Fridays - 12/17/2010

2010-12-21T11:17:00.004-06:00

Fucking harpsichord. Man, I hate the plink-plonk sound of harpsichords. Thank goodness for Bartolomeo Cristofori and his development of the pianoforte. Without that we may never have escaped the mechanical sterile horror of that fucking instrument.

The contemporary instrument movement in some music circles asks that pieces of music be performed on instruments from the piece's time. Some see this as the "true" sound of Baroque music, and some see it as a neat experiment in sonic time travel. Others just find it a curiosity, like wash boards or rotary dial phones, neat as decoration but otherwise completely ignorable. This is how 90% of the attendees at last Friday's event at the MFAH seemed to find it. Christmas music is mostly kept in the background (thank Mario), but this was pure coma-inducing tempos and vaguely lyrical baroque melodies.

The MFAH always has members parties and this was one of a series called Fine Arts Fridays.
As a member I always go and get a kick out of it. I love being in any museum when it is normally closed, and as Homer Simpson said, "artists LOVE free food Marge! Look at Jasper Johns!..."

You go enough times and you start recognizing people. Some are high society, and some are artists hungry for some free fruit/cheese/drinks/art. I know I dig into it with pleasure. A man can make a meal out of crackers, brie, cheddar, Monterrey jack, Swiss, grapes (green and red), strawberries, wine, well drinks, sodas, etc. I have never seen bigger green grapes than the ones I ate Friday. That's classy produce. I did wonder if caterers have a pact of some sort that mandates they only ever serve brie, cheddar, Swiss, and Monterrey jack.

The newly finished Asian Art wing of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston was the centerpiece of this F.A.Friday. The permanent installation of the gunpowder painting commissioned by the MFAH from artist Cai Guo-Qiang of China. The room smelled slightly of gunpowder and sulfur and felt like walking directly into a classic brush and ink painting! Amazing! I have loved Japanese and Chinese scroll paintings for a long time.

Frankly though, the inclusion of just a few free standing works severely detracted from the artwork on the walls. I would have appreciated experiencing the gunpowder painting alone, just myself and the walls. Luckily the works are not permanently installed, unlike the gunpowder paintings. Perhaps the MFAH people may yet decide it is best to have it be an installation type space and not use it as a gallery display space. I hope they do, seeing as how the Cai Guo-Qiang artwork is supposed to be the showpiece of the Asian collection. It does the art a disservice to clutter it up with unrelated artworks. The work is beautiful.

The wings holding the arts if India and Korea were a bit at odds. The Korean side, while heavy on pottery, was sparse and disjointed as a collection of objects. The MFAH's holdings are not too large in the Korean arts. The Indian side though has so much beautiful gold work, intricate and sensual sculpture, and even carved ivory pieces. Quite a rich variety, and the Indians definitely know how to sculpt a curvy sexy lady!

The museum was not as packed as usual for these events but it being the holidays and the party season this is understandable. The people watching as always was superb. Hell, if you are a jewelry whore the jewelry watching is usually top notch as well. There was even jewelry laying on the sidewalk outside the doors. Oh, the riches! These events are always interesting for the way they bring and mix together people from very different walks of life.

The only requirement is to be a member of the MFAH. An individual membership costs around $50/year. That is a serious deal. Those fifty bucks get you unlimited entry to the museum, invitations to most MFAH parties and events, discounts at the MFAH gift shop, and free drinks, cheese, and fruit! Ha! Not bad at all.

RXTT

-FUPPETS- Video Of The Day

2010-12-16T14:21:00.004-06:00

Today's -FUPPETS- Video of The Day is a homemade one by -FUPPETS- friend Anneke Caramin, of ANNET'S PLAYGROUND. She is an artist who has designed books, and album covers and has recently used her art to make the following video. Enjoy!

The Decemberists - From My Own True Love (lost at sea)

UNDERBELLY: What does an artist do after years at one place, when moving to a new locale?

2010-12-16T13:53:00.005-06:00

Throw a party, and put everything on the walls in an art studio fire sale!

Tod Bailey, a painter originally from Dallas, has been a resident of the David Addickes Sculptureworx studios on Summer St. for years, creating and showing his work. He is headed to Paris, to dip his toes in for a while, eventually hoping to land near northern Italy somewhere. It is a risky but necesary thing for artists to do, as one must refresh the mind and input new experience. Spending years staring at the lonely sillouette of downtown Houston's skyline behind an industrial facade of run-down warehouses will make one's brain cry out for relief. Paris is as good a relief as any.

*****

Luckily for Tod he has many friends to share the night with. From around 4:00 PM, people wandered through the artwork displayed. The keg got floated sometime between The Ted Leo Trio's set of blues covers and originals and Bright Men of Learning's set of adult-alterna-rock. These nights are chaotic at best and Tod Bailey was kept busy greeting newcomers, appeasing friends, and working to sell as many of the works on display as possible. The wine/cup/food table was nearly as warped as some of the paintings, and no one gave a fuck. Life is for living.

*****

One cannot take one's friends with them when they move. It is one of the suck-ass
realities we all face, but think about an artist. That artist has to leave behind his friends as well as the works he has created. Painters such as Tod, who work on large canvases, have to sell off, store, or lend artworks. When your typical work is at least 7 feet wide, storage and transport are tough. The ones that hurt are the "favorites," the pieces of art so fucking awesome that you never want to sell them. It is best in that case to lend them to friends and family.

*****

Having used all the space in his personal studio the party spilled out into the hallways of the large building, extending far into the cavernous structure. Paintings everywhere! Looking at them all it seemed very fitting that Tod was heading to Paris, as his work contains what seems a large Fauvist and Cubist influence. It will be very interesting to see what influence Paris and all of Europe will have on his sensibilities. Like many of us Houstonians, he shares a twisted-on-end world view because, frankly, Houston's flatness and homogeneity can twist the mind. Will the European countryside soften this? It may drive him insane. Whether this is for the good or the bad of his art will be judged much later. Now, all that matters is the intent to change, and the action to impliment it. Tod Bailey is in the thick of that shit it right now. It's a good place to be.

RXTT

CORPORATE JEWELRY: Bank of America Loves Mexico From a Distance

2010-12-16T13:33:00.004-06:00

Everyone seems to hate corporations these days, and the bastards have definitely earned much of it. For all the moaning and crying that CEO's do, they are still making big bucks and spending that money to make more money. That is the main goal of acquiring an art collection. They think it is a nearly infallible investment. Whether that is true or not is highly questionable, but it is not the only reason powerful businesses battle each other for the latest big purchase. Art has for all time been used to burnish the persona of individuals as well as corporations. Modern Fortune 500 companies are no different from any other past conglomerate loading up their personal spaces with the world's art, seeking a bit of that art's glory to rub off.

*****

Art depends on this need that corporations have. The modern world's money engine are the multinational corporations. Like the Vatican before them, they use their power to gather art, chosen by professional art advisers not just for it's future value and current quality and beauty, but also for it's lack of scandal or controversy. This is evident in the current photography exhibit on display off the South entrance to the Bank of America lobby. Titled Luces y Sombras: Twelve Travelers in Mexico, the show's stated theme is that of the traveler, but judging from the selection of images, the Mexico being photographed is better enjoyed on it's formal aesthetic terms as opposed to anything culturally Mexican.

*****

This is odd because the core of the exhibition is pulled from a work called The Mexican Portfolio by painter, photographer, and filmmaker Paul Strand, who traveled to Mexico between the World Wars and decided to take up residence in the country for years at a time. The other choices also draw from expat artists, mostly American, who like Strand, found something tremendously beautiful in Mexico. Many became deeply enamored of their new home, using their art for social change.

*****

The Mexican Portfolio was one of these important works which drew people to Mexico in the years following it's publication. The selection of images are chosen for such formal qualities that any social commentary ends up ignored. It focuses on abstract architectural details, religious icons and statuary, and somber formal portraits. They are beautiful images, highly contrasted light and dark spaces in an infinity of tones, but collectively they build no narrative about the Mexico we are looking at, and that is how the bank wants it to be. After all, images of poverty cast a harsh shadow on the opulent bank lobby in which they reside. It doesn't help that the exhibit is tucked away in a corner, visited mainly by people making phone calls and seeking a quiet empty area to do so.

*****

Who else needs art to aid in image spin control? Mexico! Things are ugly and getting uglier in our neighbor's front yard. This exhibit is part of a Mexican Bicentennial celebration and is underwritten by the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Consulate General of Mexico. Bank of America invests heavily in Mexico and needs to do something to improve the rightfully harsh public image of that country. Are these photos of Mexico by non-Mexicans beautiful artistic images? Yes. Do they collectively give the viewer a deeper knowledge of the Mexico the artists fell in love with? No. Even great art can be dulled by playing it safe.

*****

Corporations have their own individual personalities. Their art choices tell as much about them as your choices do about you. Join me in exploring Houston's corporate psyche through what they choose to adorn themselves with, their art collections.

RXTT

-FUPPETS- Loves Solar Prominences

2010-12-15T11:54:00.003-06:00

-FUPPETS- cannot get enough astronomy. There is an infinity of discoveries to be made. Check out this great short video of a large solar prominence captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

SOLAR PROMINENCE

Here is APOD's description of the video.

"...an unusually long filament explode out from the Sun. The filament had been seen hovering over the Sun's surface for over a week before it erupted earlier this month. The image sequence was taken by the Earth-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in a color of ultraviolet light specifically emitted by helium. The explosion created Coronal Mass Ejections which dispersed high energy plasma into the Solar System. This plasma cloud, though, missed the Earth and so did not cause auroras."

A LIFETIME OF MUSIC 1973-2010 (Part 8)

2010-12-15T10:16:00.003-06:00

1980. By now punk was dead, and bands started to use the new rock template to create new sounds, all of which would later be diluted and relegated to a few specific sub-sets of rock such as post-modern, new romantics, alternative, indie, goth, hardcore, post-modern, new wave, etc. Fuck categories. They are only good as suggestions, as vague ideas about what to expect from a band, but they DO NOT DEFINE THE MUSIC DAMNIT!
DEVO was warping minds and no one knew what to do with them. That is how -FUPPETS- loves it. FEAR was still bringing the fucking rage and honest hostility to the West Coast. No one ever did it better. GANG OF FOUR was post-punkin' their way out of England. Also out of the UK, The SPECIALS continued mixing punk and ska and whatever else their ears picked up.
Meanwhile, back in Texas, ZZ TOP continued their stomp-boogie accross the face of the Earth.

DEVO - Gates Of Steel

FEAR - I Don't Care About You/Beef Bologna

GANG OF FOUR - Damaged Goods

THE SPECIALS - Gangsters

ZZ TOP - Just Got Paid

A LIFETIME OF MUSIC 1973-2010 (Part 7)

2010-12-14T08:45:00.005-06:00

1979. Shit was getting weird. The west coast started spitting out bands as ugly and harsh as anything to come out of NYC or London, and The Dead Kennedys were blowing minds and scaring The Man in SoCal. Dire Straits had a massive hit with a song they first recorded as part of a 5-song demo soon after forming. The Cure released their first album, Three Imaginary Boys, starting a thirteen album, thirty year journey. Bob Marley was on his last large tour before cancer took his life at age 36.

DEAD KENNEDYS - California Über Alles

DIRE STRAITS - Sultans of Swing

THE CURE - Three Imaginary Boys/Killing An Arab

BOB MARLEY & THE WAILERS - Positive Vibration

-FUPPETS- For Readers XLVII - Science Edition

2010-12-09T09:41:00.005-06:00

47. The fifteenth prime number. The atomic number of silver. There is even a society devoted to exploring the preternatural appearance of the number 47 in all aspects of the Multi-verse.
-FUPPETS- loves science, but 47 articles is much too much. Here are just a few.

SpaceX launches the first commercial space capsule into orbit and returned it safely back to Earth - ( Tariq Malik - Space.com )

Black Holes and Warped Space Revealed by Powerful New Array of Radio Telescopes - ( Science Daily )

Theoretical Breakthrough: Generating Matter and Antimatter from Nothing - ( Science Daily )

A Science of Literature? Great idea, so long as we can get actual scientists involved - ( Chris Mooney - Science Progress )

Microbe finds Arsenic tasty, redefines life - ( Dennis Overbye - New York Times )

OPEN TO INTERPRET UPDATED!

2010-12-08T12:19:00.003-06:00

John Lennon 10/09/40 - 12/08/80

2010-12-08T10:44:00.004-06:00

The BEATLES - Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except For Me and My Monkey

A LIFETIME OF MUSIC 1973-2010 (part 6)

2010-12-02T10:22:00.007-06:00

1978. Shit was going CRAZY in 1978. Strange serial killers roamed the land in society's ugly backlash to the fairy-tale 60's. Talking Heads captured it perfectly with their upbeat paranoiac fantasies. Across the Atlantic, Joy Division was beginning their assault on the minds of the world with their first televised appearance. Back in the bowels of NYC, Glenn Branca was shaking shit up skronkilatin' on the guitar, feeding heads who would go on to explode noise rock. At their titanic peak, the Old Ones favorite band, Black Sabbath, was scaring the world.

"Fear and Chaos are the greatest fuel for Art" ~ -FUPPETS-

*(Down South, they just decided to get full-on weird. Embedding is not available for this but you have to check it out. The B-52's performing Rock Lobster live in Atlanta just months before the release of their first album. )

TALKING HEADS - Psycho Killer

JOY DIVISION - Shadowplay

GLENN BRANCA - live solo

BLACK SABBATH - Electric Funeral

NASA announces press conference

2010-12-02T10:11:00.003-06:00

Below is the official media advisory from NASA. There is a lot of speculation regarding what this actually means. Guesses range from a discovery of bacterial life on Titan to some previously unknown parameter for life that can now be tested from Earth. The statement, "to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life," is what is driving all of this but to -FUPPETS- it does seem like they may have discovered a new method to detect life-supporting, Earth-like planets.

MEDIA ADVISORY : M10-167 NASA Sets News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery; Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 2 p.m. EST On Dec. 2 WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.

The news conference will be held at the NASA Headquarters auditorium at 300 E St. SW, in Washington. It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency's website at http://www.nasa.gov/.

Participants are:
- Mary Voytek, director, Astrobiology Program, NASA Headquarters, Washington
- Felisa Wolfe-Simon, NASA astrobiology research fellow, U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, Calif.
- Pamela Conrad, astrobiologist, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
- Steven Benner, distinguished fellow, Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, Gainesville, Fla.
- James Elser, professor, Arizona State University, Tempe

Media representatives may attend the conference or ask questions by phone or from participating NASA locations. To obtain dial-in information, journalists must send their name, affiliation and telephone number to Steve Cole at stephen.e.cole@nasa.gov or call 202-358-0918 by noon Dec. 2.

For NASA TV streaming video and downlink information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

-FUPPETS- Loves Auroras

2010-11-29T10:37:00.002-06:00

Aurora Borealis timelapse HD - Tromsø 2010 from Tor Even Mathisen on Vimeo.

One of the most beautiful and mysterious of all natural phenomena, auroras are a longstanding -FUPPETS- favorite. The above time-lapse video captures some of the recent auroras over Norway. The Sun is back in full after a dormant period of three years, and this is causing some beautiful auroras. The light itself is created when high energy particles streaming from the Sun are bent and captured by the Earth's magnetic field, whic concentrates the high-energy particles at the magnetic north and south poles of our planet.

Robert Anton Wilson Excerpt of The Day 7

2010-11-24T09:30:00.003-06:00

Robert Anton Wilson was stricken by polio as a youngster. As he reached an older age he began to exhibit signs of Post-Polio Syndrome, a deteriorating disorder of the nervous system which occurs in many polio survivors. This progressed through it's many debilitating and painful stages until his death on January 11, 2007. The following excerpt is RAW's recounting of his reacion to the premature obituary for him printed in 1994.

Cosmic Trigger: Volume 3: My Life After Death

I GOT RUN OVER ON THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY

In Which the Author Learns of His Own Death
and We Begin to Look Behind the
Masks of Art and Magick

This is not a normal world.
-- Batman

"Maybe" is a thin reed to hang your whole life on, but it's all we've got.
-- Hannah and Her Sisters

According to reliable sources, I died on February 22, 1994 -- George Washington's birthday. I felt nothing special or shocking at the time, and believed that I still sat at my word processor working on a novel called Bride of Illuminatus. At lunch-time, however, when I checked my voice mail, I found that Tim Leary and a dozen other friends had already called to ask to speak to me, or -- if they still believed in Reliable Sources -- to offer support and condolences to my grieving family. I quickly gathered that news of my tragic end had appeared on Internet, one of the most popular computer networks, in the form of an obituary from the Los Angeles Times:

"Noted science-fiction author Robert Anton Wilson was found dead in his home yesterday, apparently the victim of a heart attack. Mr. Wilson, 63, was discovered by his wife, Arlen.
"Mr Wilson was the author of numerous books....He was noted for his libertarian viewpoints, love of technology and off the wall humor. Mr Wilson is survived by his wife and two children."

This L.A. Times obit originally got on the net via somebody in Cambridge, Mass. I thought immediately of the pranksters at M.I.T. -- the Gremlins of Cyberspace, as somebody called them.

I admired the artistic verisimilitude of the Gremlin who forged that obit. He mis-identified my ouvre. (Only 6 of my 28 books could possibly get classified as science-fiction, and perhaps 3 more as science-faction.) He also, more clumsily, stated my age wrong by one year and the number of my surviving children wrong by one child. Little touches of incompetence and ignorance like that helped create the impression of a real, honest-to-Jesus L.A. Times article -- just as creaking chairs, background coughs, overlapping dialogue, scrupulously "bad" sound quality etc. make the bogus newsreels in Orson Welles's two greatest movies, Citizen Kane and F For Fake, seem "just like the real thing."

The forged L.A. Times obituary may not rank with Welles's most monumental hoaxes -- e.g. his prematurely Deconstructionist "war of the worlds" radio show, where bland music and increasingly ominous newsbreaks thoroughly confused a mass audience about the borderline between "art" and "reality." But the Times forgery, if not of Wellesian heft, certainly contained a Wellesian blend of art and magic: in retrospect, it even reminds me, a little, of the 1923 Surrealist art show, in which the audience first encountered a taxi-cab in the garden -- a cab which had rain falling inside but not outside -- and then confronted a sign telling them gnomically:

DADA IS NOT DEAD
WATCH YOUR OVERCOAT

I always think that double dip of guerilla ontology (by Dali and Breton, respectively) carried the baffled audience beyond surrealism into post-modernism, i.e. Total Agnosticism and/or terminal bewilderment. Certainly, art and life, and art and magick, have never gotten clearly disentangled again to the satisfaction of all observers. In this struggle to knock down the Iron Curtain between creativity and "reality," I tend to see the Wellesian men-from-Mars hoax as the second major step after surrealism and, ahem, I sometimes immodestly consider my own works a third step.

But the Gremlin who killed me on February 22 carried the "transformation of mind and all that resembles it" (Breton) one quantum jump further than I ever had. He caused real grief and shock, if not Wellesian mass panic.

One friend told me that the first bulletin he saw, on Compuserve, just quoted the alleged LA obit and then added, "This is as bad as learning that Zappa died. I think I'm going to meditate a bit, in his memory."

Another networker, female, keyboarded in a whole chapter of Ecclesiastes in my memory -- "For everything there is a season, a time for every matter under the sun: a time to be born, a time to die" etc. -- and then added "Now get out there and PARTY LIKE HE'D WANT YOU TO!"

One bulletin from "The House of Apostles of Eris, San Francisco" said that "attempts to contact Robert Anton Wilson have been unsuccessful" -- hmmm? -- but nevertheless reassured all that "RAW is alive and busy with religious works." I think the author of that bulletin intended to sound unconvincing, especially to the initiates of my Classic Novels (Erisian "religious works" consist of mind-fucks or "shocks " in the strict Masonic sense). He or she certainly cast contagious suspicion on the other denials being posted on the nets by various friends who had managed to contact me. Certainly, the conspiracy buffs who have followed my career ever since Iluminatus will not believe a report that includes the suspicious admission that nobody could find me .... Many contributions to the alive-or-dead controversy seemed unsure whether I had died (or hadn't died) in Los Angeles or San Francisco. The funniest one of all claimed I survived, but in Howth (County Dublin, Ireland) -- where I lived during most of the 1980s:

"Contacted at his home in Howth Castle, Wilson said 'The reports of my death have been slightly exaggerated. I can still totter about a bit and even crack a weak joke occasionally.'"

To which some wit, recognizing the Joycean jest, replied: "Shouldn't that be Howth Castle and Environs?"

The Howth legend continued to circulate from one net to another, and soon included the news that I had taken over management of the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal (CSICON) after the death of its founder, Prof. Timothy F.X. Finnegan, of Trinity College, Dublin, and that CSICON still offers $100,000 to any "normalist" who can produce "a perfectly normal person, place or thing -- or even an ordinary sunset. Or an average day."

Of course, Finnegan and CSICON exist in some sense, like Howth Castle, as readers of my works know by now -- not quite in the sense in which the Statue of Liberty exists, but not entirely in the metaphoric sense in which the National Debt and the Holy Trinity "exist" either. But the result of all this was beginning to make me wonder if I only exist in some semiotic or metaphoric sense myself, sort of like an elderly male Madonna. I mean, like, man, do I exist the way the Howth Castle in Dublin exists, or the way the Howth Castle and Environs in Finnegans Wake exists?

I remembered a Spiritualist treatise I had once read. (I skim all sorts of weird literature, which keeps me from believing totally any of the stuff we get told as Official Truth by the major media). This ghostly tome claimed that we poor spectres often do not know we've died until some medium "contacts" us and explains why people have started treating us so rudely lately -- e.g., why even our wives and children ignore us outright unless we knock over the lamps or rap in code on the tables.

I had also read Jonathan Swift's hilarious "pamphlet war" with the astrologer Partridge about whether Partridge had or had not died on the day predicted by a rival astrologer, Isaac Bickerstaff. ("Bickerstaff" sounds a lot like Swift himself, operating behind a Mask as usual, just as Lemuel Gulliver, the scientific world traveler, also sounded curiously like Swift; we shall learn much about Reality and Masks in this enquiry.) Although Partridge insisted vehemently on his continued vitality, Swift's argument, a model of Celtic subtlety, held that just because a man claims he hasn't died and may even believe it himself, this does not logically require us to credit his unsupported testimony. This left poor Partridge floundering -- (never argue with a Dublin intellectual) -- and now I felt myself floundering a bit also.

Obviously, my testimony on the matter would not convince Swift, when he decided to play the Scientific Skeptic, and I wondered if it would convince CSICOP --the group opposing CSICON.

CSICOP (Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) believes that the "normal" actually exists somewhere, and not just in some Platonic spook world. They claim it exists everywhere, and that nothing else at all exists anywhere. (If you see any of the 10100 not-normal things in this world, they will claim you had a hallucination.)

As a famous bard wrote:

He thought he saw a banker's clerk descending from a bus
He looked again and saw it was a hippopotamus

I remembered a Phil Dick novel, Ubik, about a bunch of dead people who don't know they have died and think the universe has slowly started turning into shit. If that happened to me, I would not and could not know about it -- by definition.

Thoughts like that can really unsettle your mental architecture, especially if you wasted a lot of your life on epistemological philosophy, and on cannabis extracts. I, alas, have indulged both those vices on many occasions, and I fear that I have become a horrible example of Aggravated Existentialism. Worse yet: I have also heard Albert Rosenfeld, a distinguished M.D., lecturing on "clinical death," say, "We have come a long way from the day when Marshall Dillon lifts the sheet and says, 'He's dead, all right.' Now it takes a committee to decide." But these ontological doubts got pushed aside when the C.I.A. entered the Trip, playing the Wrathful Demons of this bardo. Somebody (signing her/him/itself as "Anon.") logged the following into several computer bulletin boards:

"THE C.I.A. KILLED ROBERT ANTON WILSON...

"Wilson did not die of natural causes. He was assassinated. Earlier on that day, Wilson was injected with a time-delay poison based on shellfish toxin, by agents of the CIA's special SUPER SECRET BLACK OPERATIONS SQUAD, using a special microscopic needle made of a plastic which dissolves in the body without a trace. Wilson's body had immediately been taken and cremated and the usual step of an autopsy had been bypassed, BY ORDERS FROM ABOVE.

"It is clear why the power$ that be wanted Wilson dead. Wilson was a dangerous element; the government can only govern if the majority does not question the system (whoever currently "rules" does not matter.) The troublesome minority can be dealt with discreetly, by means of EXECUTIVE ACTION (assassination), which is what happened with Wilson....

"Earlier the same agencies (CIA, NRO, DEA and CFR/TLC/Bilderberger BOLSHEVIK SHADOW GOVERNMENT) had LSD advocate Timothy Leary neutralized with a neurotoxin which DESTROYS THE MIND and ARTIFICIALLY INDUCES A STATE SIMILAR TO SENILITY...

"Dissemenation of this information is encouraged. MAKE 30 COPIES."

Cute as a shit-house rat, I thought, when I read this. Now, whenever Tim tells people I haven't died, that will furnish further evidence of his "senility." Of course, I also enjoyed the idea that somebody, somewhere, might consider me important enough to terrorize the C.I.A. and call out their SUPER SECRET BLACK OPERATIONS SQUAD to terminate me. Since CLASSIFIED represents the rating directly below SECRET in government security manuals, I wondered how the CLASSIFIED BLACK OPERATIONS SQUAD spends its time -- giving housemaid's knee or genital warts to editorial cartoonists? Others grew more eldritch:

"Maybe the government has installed a VIRTUAL RAW in his place to allay people's fears. Oh, sure, he can respond all he wants, but I know it's not the real RAW."

But my favorite contribution of the Wilson Mythos was logged by somebody using the moniker, The Green One:

"There is no toxin. There is no needle. You have not heard of a toxin. You have not heard of a needle. They were not tools of the conspiracy. There is no conspiracy. The toxin and the needle, which do not exist, played no part in the conspiracy, which does not exist. Fnord. Repeat after me. There is no toxin..."

What can I add to that bit of guerilla ontology, except to say "Fnord indeed?"

-FUPPETS- REGGAE FEST 2010

2010-11-24T08:54:00.004-06:00

In the spirit of thanks -FUPPETS- brings you an array of reggae music meant to make your day go the right way. Nothing exhaustive, just songs to enjoy while thinking of all the wonderful and amazing things the Multi-verse has brought into existance.

-FUPPETS- gives thanks for:

BURNING SPEAR - Marcus Garvey

DAMIEN MARLEY - Welcome to Jamrock

BOB MARLEY & THE WAILERS - Roots Rock Reggae

LEE SCRATCH PERRY - Rainy Night Dub

BUNNY WAILER - Boderation

-FUPPETS- Video Of The Day : PETER TOSH

2010-11-22T09:24:00.004-06:00

Original Wailer, martyr for the cause, eternal revolutionary, Peter Tosh is what everyone needs to provide the foundation of subsumed rage that is Monday's truth.

PETER TOSH - Downpressor Man

midnight

2010-11-22T00:05:00.003-06:00

Sunday is at an end. The zone of time designated as our own has signaled ashift to Monday. Monday is a hideous thing sometimes. -FUPPETS- knows the remedy that is required. It is a jolt that only art of some sort can fulfill.

A taste of things to come.

A LIFETIME OF MUSIC 1973-2010 (part 5)

2010-11-19T07:31:00.006-06:00

The year is 1977. The psychedelic heyday of 60's rock has come and gone and a clean, polished, civilized type of adult contemporary rock starts to push across the airwaves. Music for comfortable 30-somethings is never what propels the rock forward. It took a bunch of dead-end street bums to bring the fervor, the rage, the joy of rock back to the kids. The older, jaded artsy types created a new way to make music. They were sick of "rock n roll." They were sick of people appropriating the blues world. In Australia, bands like the Saints and Radio Birdman spread the chaos. In NYC, Talking Heads had released their first LP and sought to inject humor and intelligence into their music.

The DEAD BOYS - Live at CBGB

SUICIDE - Ghost Rider

The Saints - Live at Paddington Hall

TALKING HEADS - Don't Worry About The Government

A LIFETIME OF MUSIC 1973-2010 (part 4)

2010-11-09T09:20:00.006-06:00

1976. It was the 200th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence. It was a perfect time to shake everything up. The stagnation was rampant. The kids were fed up. Like Johnny Rotten and his Sex Pistols, they were pissed and saw no reason for optimism. It is always a good thing to be reminded that in art of any kind there are indeed NO RULES. The Patti Smith Group, although a bit older and wiser, felt this way too, and wanted to explode poetry and music in new ways. If this all seems pretentious, and what art is not, there were some fellas from Australia crafting a true rock monolith which grows until this day, and is known as AC/DC. Thank the music gods for that, since 1976 was awash in sappy, ludicrous, singer-songwriter CRAP.

THE SEX PISTOLS - Anarchy In The UK

PATTI SMITH GROUP - Horses

AC/DC - TNT

OPEN TO INTERPRET has been Updated!

2010-11-09T09:17:00.002-06:00

The art assault continues with 15 new drawings for your perusal over at OPEN TO INTERPRET. Go check them out and let your mind reveal itself. Art is ever more necessary. Do not let yourself suffer because you are not exposed to enough artwork.

-FUPPETS- FOR READERS XLVI

2010-10-27T13:30:00.004-05:00

At one point the United States of America had 46 states. There were less before that and more after. It seems to -FUPPETS- that many people automatically assume that the USA has reached a limit of some sort on allowable states as if the even number of 50 somehow confers finality. This is because people are stupid. It would not take much more to have the US Virgin Islands, Guam, and Puerto Rico established as US states. They are all less remote than the state of Hawaii, and far more hospitable than Alaska. They are all US protectorates, or commonwealths, or colonies, or whatever, and the people born there are all citizens instantly with all rights granted to all US citizens. The US government already uses money to run the postal service, infrastructure, government, and military protection for these places. It would be little more than a formality to grant them full statehood, with representation in Congress in equal proportion to their population, just like all other states. Why has the US government not done this in the 60+ years since annexing Hawaii and Alaska? It is a very thorny question and the answers are likely not pretty. -FUPPETS- does not have them, only suspicions, and the knowledge that nothing is ever done, by governments nor by private enterprise, with anything other than the filthy lucre of money in mind. So keep your eyes open, your mind open, your ears open, ask the questions, especially the OBVIOUS ones, for those are the ones that they are hoping you never actually ask. You never know what will make that connection in your brain, allowing for insight and wisdom not gathered from the fucking TV news or the bullshit infotainment disguised as educational TV.

WHEN INSIDERS EXPOSE THE UGLY SIDE OF THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY - ( Vigilant Citizen )

MUSIC AND SPEECH SHARE A CODE FOR COMMUNICATING SADNESS IN THE MINOR THIRD - ( Ferris Jabr - Scientific American )

COLONIAL STUDIES: Real ants offer no lessons in moral human conduct - ( Deborah M. Gordon - Boston Review )

BEN FRANKLIN ON AMERICAN HAPPINESS: A wise advisor for troubled times - ( Jerry Weinberger - City Journal )

THE VALLEY OF TABOOS: Daring to discuss Africa's indigenous beliefs - ( Johann Hari - Slate )

A LIFETIME OF MUSIC 1973-2010 (part 3)

2010-10-27T13:04:00.005-05:00

1975 is where the third stop on our sonic journey finds us. A strange year which helped seed so much of what came to follow. The Ramones were just a few steps removed from living on the street. Herbie Hancock and his Headhunters decided to fully embrace the funk, the soul, the roots and got Jazz funky again. KISS had begun their assault on decency and good taste and still had the edge a real rock band needs. -FUPPETS- thinks it must have been some good times.

RAMONES - Loudmouth

HERBIE HANCOCK - Chameleon

KISS - Strutter

A LIFETIME OF MUSIC 1973-2010 (part 2)

2010-10-20T15:10:00.005-05:00

The second year of our collective sonic journey. -FUPPETS- brings you choice cuts from that most unruly year, 1974. The funk was still strong. Sabbath still roamed the Earth with it's original 4-headed monstrosities. Lou Reed was blond and still waiting for his man.
Join -FUPPETS-.

THE OHIO PLAYERS - Fire

BLACK SABBATH - Children Of The Grave

LOU REED - I'm Waiting For The Man

Robert Anton Wilson Excerpt Of The Day 6

2010-10-06T10:36:00.004-05:00

This is -FUPPETS- 6th installment of the Robert Anton Wilson Excerpt Of The Day. Today's excerpt is from RAW's book Cosmic Trigger Vol II: Down To Earth. In this, he lays down his rules for dealing with BS (i.e., Belief Systems, dogmas, absolute truths, etc.), which are (1) never believe totally in someone else's BS and (2) never believe totally in your own BS.
Both of these rules are among the most important of -FUPPETS- Rules To Live By. They make it a lot easier to navigate the ever-increasing miasma of bullshit that humans claim is dead-certain true, and that you must believe too.

*****

Cosmic Trigger Volume II: Down to Earth

EVERYBODY GETS A CAR

By 1900, when my father was 8 years old, information had doubled again. The process had only taken 150 years this time.

That year Max Planck published his first paper on quantum mechanics, beginning the process by which science in this century would gradually abandon Aristotelian logic and evolve in a non-Aristotelian, almost Buddhist direction. We were learning that the "one" "objective" Aristotelian "real world" previously posited by all Western thought existed only as a concept in our linguistic structures: that the only worlds we knew were plural and created by our senses and scientific instruments, all of them uncertain to some degree and all of them given structure by the inbuilt hardware and software of our senses and instruments.

The Boer war was raging in South Africa, as the English and Dutch fought over which of them should govern and exploit the native Black population. In China, the Boxer Rebellion represented another of the countless efforts by Third World peoples to throw off dominations of any and all white conquerors, British, Dutch, whoever.

In 1900 also the king of Italy was assassinated by idealists who thought the liberation of the workers could be achieved by murdering the Masters one by one. In Russia, Lenin returned from 3 years exile in Siberia, and went on plotting to liberate the workers by organized world revolution. The International Ladies Garment Workers Union was formed in New York by those who thought the workers could be liberated by forming coalitions and bargaining collectively with the Masters.

All of this followed, inevitably, from the general increase in living standards throughout the Industrial world. In the new Second Wave civilizations, the ruling class was living maybe 100 times better than the ruling class of ancient Rome; the middle classes were living better than ever before; and the idea that even the lower order had the right to a decent life, formualated by the most radical thinkers of the 18th century, continued to reassert itself, in dozens of forms now forgotten in addition to the two forms we all know.

1. the Democratic Socialism which by learning to co-exist with free enterprise, has permanently improved life in Europe, Canada and most of the industrial world, outside the U.S.; and
2. the Totalitarian Socialism of Marx, which has recently collapsed after making a mess of all its Utopian dreams.

Also in 1900... Major Walter Reed discovered that yellow fever was not contagious by persuading volunteers to sleep with blankets taken from fever victims who had died, and then he correctly deduced and later proved that the fever was spread by a mosquito. Mendel's great essay on genetics, ignored for 35 years, was suddenly rediscovered by the scientific community. Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams.

Human life span in the U.S. had quantum-jumped to 47 years. For the first time in history, a newborn human had a good chance of living longer than 30 years.

Also in 1900.... the U.S. Navy bought its first submarine, and the Kodak company sold its first camera.

Only one U.S. home in seven had a bathtub. As Sinclair Lewis records, the Reagan-Bush mentalities of the period often said, "Why give bathtubs to the poor? They'll only put coal in them."

Brooks Adams had already published The Law of Civilization and Decay, in which the Westward movement of Capital throughout history was documented for the first time. Adams did not realize that this trajectory was, more fundamentally, a movement of information -- capital being the fruit of technology, i.e., of information that is totally accurate -- but he did see that, if the trend continued, the English Empire would collapse by about 1950 and be replaced by an American Empire.

-FUPPETS- Video Of The Day: CALLE 13

2010-10-05T12:23:00.004-05:00

Today's -FUPPETS- Video of The Day is brought to you by the Puerto Rican instigators CALLE 13. It is their newest clip, titled Calma Pueblo. The clip is NSFW, but it is killer. The track includes a couple of the Mars Volta fellas as well.

Calma pueblo [HQ]
Uploaded by rigalero. - Explore more music videos.

-FUPPETS- Science Digest

2010-10-05T11:33:00.002-05:00

-FUPPETS- loves scientific endeavor. Humans have an innate need to explore, whether it be experiencing physical travel, or delving into what is unknown. Scientists use the empirical scientific method to answer questions about our world and ourselves. Science does not require "belief" in itself for it to work. The scientific method works even when the results are completely unexpected. These are the thrills of the researcher. It is in these unexpected surprises and setbacks that the light is shined on a dark corner of our knowledge.

The Nobel Foundation has announced the 2010 recipients for the Nobel Prize in Physics. Two Russian-born physicists, working at the University of Manchester, discovered/created a new form of carbon called GRAPHENE. Graphene is a two-dimensional "sheet" of carbon atoms. The chemical, physical, and electrical properties of this material are quite wild.

As a material it is completely new — not only the thinnest ever but also the strongest. As a conductor of electricity it performs as well as copper. As a conductor of heat it outperforms all other known materials. It is almost completely transparent, yet so dense that not even helium, the smallest gas atom, can pass through it. Carbon, the basis of all known life on earth, has surprised us once again. ( Associated Press )

It is amazing that us humans are capable of creating whole new substances, and that it seems the sky is the limit. Scientists will be researching the capabilities of graphene for decades.
Here are the two Nobel Prize winners, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov.

-FUPPETS- Video Of The Day : Casi Cada MInuto

2010-10-01T12:29:00.004-05:00

Today's -FUPPETS- Video Of The Day is a collaborative effort produced by three members of the hive-mind known as the Sonic Youth Gossip Forum. One member provided the music (_slavo_), another one sang (knox), and yet another provided the video (nicfit). If you need to zone the fuck out, or if you just want to escape whatever current bullshit is tearing your mind up, watch this video. Let it fry your brain in a most wonderful way.

Casi Cada Minuto - Waves

A LIFETIME OF MUSIC 1973-2010 (part 1)

2010-09-24T12:02:00.005-05:00

-FUPPETS- is glad to bring you a new feature which will showcase 37 years of music through the magic of YouTube. Today's installment takes us way back to the year 1973. Ride the mind-way with -FUPPETS- and let's travel back in time together.

PARLIAMENT FUNKADELIC - Cosmic Slop (live 1973)

KRAFTWERK - Tanzmusik (live 1973)

MARVIN GAYE - Let's Get It On (live 1973)

-FUPPETS- Ruminates

2010-09-24T09:01:00.003-05:00

The world is a very strange place, full of surprises and horrors, sometimes both in the same package. People are easily coerced by those who seek to use them for their personal gain. Pointing out the obvious differences between people as some form of determinant of worth is the single stupidest thing humanity can do. Each and every human on this planet is directly related to every other single human. In fact, the biggest lesson of evolutionary biology and genetic science is that every single bit of life on this planet, from the lowly human to the beautiful and grandiose amoeba, is part of one large extended family, a family whose roots run back BILLIONS of years.
-FUPPETS- has always maintained that race is a social construct, and means nothing at all in the real world of biology. The arbitrary coloring on one's skin, or of one's hair, or the arbitrary shape of one's lips, nose, and eyes, are purely products of chance. Understand this. When you see someone different, you are choosing to set them apart from you. What makes you so special? You are definitely NOT. You are one human among 6-7 BILLION humans, all with the same urges, needs, desires, and sorrows. Do you get it? Spend time accepting the differences, not pointing them out for ridicule. It is a sad shame that so many of our elected representatives use these differences to scare us into voting for them, instead of the "other." It just shows what they really care about, which is themselves and their positions of power.

-FUPPETS- VIDEO OF THE DAY: JIMI HENDRIX

2010-09-23T15:10:00.002-05:00

Many thanks to Ann Ashtray of the infamous Sonic Youth Gossip Forum for the link to this. In the year 1970, a music fest was held in Georgia called the Atlanta Pop Festival. This was the second and final year for the fest, and it featured many bad-ass artists, from Jimi, to the Allman Bros., to BB King to Grand Funk railroad, and Captain Beefheart.
Here is Jimi giving us a fabulous version of his classic RED HOUSE.

JIMI HENDRIX - Red House

-FUPPETS- Loves Time-Lapse Photography!

2010-09-20T16:06:00.001-05:00

Timelapse Montage from Mike Flores on Vimeo.

The above video shows the sky as the Earth rotates, providing a great sped-up view of the heavens above our beautiful planet.

3-D Printing is All The Rage

2010-09-14T12:29:00.001-05:00

The good people over at the New York Times have shared this cool video looking at the current state of three-dimensional printers. Awesome.

-FUPPETS- Video Of The Day: JAMES BROWN

2010-09-10T14:36:00.003-05:00

Today's -FUPPETS- Video Of The Day comes from the one and only James Brown, master of all that is soul and funk, provider of the music by which a million asses are probably shaking this very second. James Brown took it to the next level so many times they shold have named it after him. The James Brown Level. Here is a live performance of Get On The Good Foot, blisteringly fast and ridiculously tight. Amazing. To paraphrase one of the comments on this video, never has someone made walking in a circle look so damn cool.

JAMES BROWN - Get On The Good Foot

Robert Anton Wilson Excerpt Of The Day 5

2010-09-10T13:28:00.002-05:00

Today's ROBERT ANTON WILSON Excerpt Of The Day, (#5 if you're counting), comes from a book he wrote while he was an editor at Playboy magazine. The book is titled Sex, Drugs & Magick. The following excerpt is actually the foreword to the 2000 edition of the book.

Sex, Drugs & Magick
PREFACE TO THE 2000 EDITION

And the Beast said:
"By their pee shall ye judge them,
and by thy pee shall ye be judged.
And all will be divided by their pee.
And in the snow shall their names be written."
- The Book of Urinomics 1

This book dates from 1972-73, and the man who wrote it does not exist anymore. Even I, occupying the same body that he did, hardly remember him and quite often do not agree with his opinions at all, at all. I have therefore corrected and updated his ideas in about a hundred places because, frankly, he embarrasses me at times, especially since we share the same name as well as the same body.
Around the time he wrote this book, Robert Anton Wilson had passed the age of 40, lost the rigid right/wrong ideology he had picked up during the anti-war and anti-segregation movements of the 1960s and thought he had outgrown the dogmatic follies of his youth, achieving a middle-aged and mellow agnosticism about everything. Ten years later, as Ronald Reagan sat in the White House, Wilson reached 50 and, looking back, felt astonished at how much folly had persisted even in his 40s. As he approached 60 a few years ago, he began to realize that he still had his share of human idiocy even in his 50s. Today at 66+ (beginning to merge with him now), I can only wonder how much of the current Robert Anton Wilson literary output of palaver will embarrass me when I reach 75-80...
Nonetheless, I don't feel particularly disgraced by another printing of this book. Some of it still makes a lot of sense to me, after corrections, and I see that in the semi-fictionalized- "case histories" I have accidentally provided a son of "ideogrammic" history of the 1960s—still the most controversial decade of the century, and well worth looking at again, to learn what we can from both its wisdom and its blunders.
The major blunder I acquired from the 1960s counterculture was the notion that the Enemy (with a capital E), was ignorance and that this could be cured by education. I now feel more inclined to accept R. Buckminster Fuller's description of the four major problems confronting the world as "ignorance, fear, greed, and zoning laws." Being untypically brave (like most fools), I always underestimated the role of fear in human affairs; having simple desires, I underestimated greed; and not being an architect, I never grasped the perfidious nature of zoning laws. Above all, I failed to realize the extent to which the synergy of ignorance-fear-greed-zoning laws in maintaining the tyranny that Fuller calls MMAO (Machiavelli, Mafia, Atoms and Oil) - the banks, the mob, and the energy cartels.)
My current thinking about MMAO derives from Fuller and, in relation to the topics of this book, even more from the Sub- Genius Foundation of Dallas, TX, which refers to MMAO as "the Con."
Many think the Con is just a joke or a parody of other conspiracy theories. To such doubters, the Sub-Genius Foundation says that this is "the Time of Pee"—the time foretold, when people would be judged not by works, nor by family, nor even by looks, but by their urine.

They listen to you through your telephone without its even being off the hook, and record you through satellites that can peer down any street, anywhere...
They kick your door in any time they want to. All they have to yell is "DRUGS!" and your spouse is in jail, your kids are farmed out to the state, your car and house are suddenly theirs...
Nobody up there is a friend of yours; nobody up there wants you to have what you would call freedom. The purpose of "government" is to produce consumers and workers who will keep the cost of labor down, and the profits high for the owners...
For this has become so crooked and perverse a nation that your precious bodily fluids are no longer your own, and not even your bladder or bloodstream are private. There is no place where they may not watch.
- Church of the SubGenius

The 1973 author of this book never could have imagined a State so crazily totalitarian, or a population so brainwashed into sheep-like submissiveness, that such absurdities could occur. But then, only Kafka and Orwell in their most eerie satires on bureaucracy-gone-bonkers could imagine an obscenity like our Piss Police. The State in which we live can only accurately be called Urine Nation.
How can this happen in a once-free Republic where searches of the person are forbidden except by court order after probable cause has been shown? Urine Nation, posing as the representatives of you and me, is engaged in an alleged "War on Drugs." That justifies trashing the Constitution.
Now this is, on the face of it, absurd.
1. Wars on drugs or other insensible things (objects, sub-stances) can only be carried on by lunatics. The Con cannot be accused of insanity: of ignorance, yes, and of fear, greed and zoning laws, but not of being batshit crazy. They are not making war on chemicals—or on the laws of physics, or anything of that sort. They are making war on the American people—on all of us, although only a few of us know that yet.
For instance, as you may read in Pissing Away the American Dream (Pissing Away the American Dream, edited by David Ross, Digit Press), on January 1989 the Minneapolis police smashed down the door of the home of an elderly Black couple, using "flash bang" grenades which accidentally set the house on fire and killed both old people.
The cops were looking for "drugs," but never found any. The chief of police justified the murders of two innocent citizens (and the total violation of the Fourth Amendment) by saying, "This is war."
The war is being waged against people, not chemicals, and it is people who get killed.
2. Even within the off-kilter logic of its own rhetoric, the "War on Drugs" is nonsense.
If you go out your door and drive a few blocks, they say, you will find at least one store boldly declaring that they sell DRUGS, although some say PHARMACY, which can only be deciphered by those who know Greek roots; and in these stores, hundreds of drugs are available. Nearby is a supermarket where you can buy cigarettes, containing nicotine, a drug more addictive than heroin according to former Surgeon General Koop. Next door is a BAR where you can buy dozens of varieties of C2H30H, a heavily addictive substance, statistically linked to wife and child battering, divorce and violent crime.
Urine Nation, thus, is not making war on all drugs, or drug- users, but only on some. The government asserts that the drugs on their taboo list are the worst ones; skeptics like me say they are merely the ones that are either (a) cheap and effective, like herbal medicines, and/or (b) not easy to monopolize, like marijuana or (c) better than the higher priced drugs manufactured by the large pharmaceutical corporations that financially support both political parties.
The only people literally "at war" with drugs—all drugs—are the Christian Scientists. Eight of them are currently appealing their convictions for refusing to give their children the drugs ordained from on high by the Con/MMAO.
As Count Bismarck once said, "Laws are like sausages: you have much more respect for them if you haven't actually seen how they're made."
Many of the chemicals and herbs forbidden by the Con are not only harmless, but are widely believed to be beneficial. The war against the users of these substances is just as vicious as the wars against all other substances on the taboo list.
Over the past 10 years, the Food and Drug Administration has engaged in raids on alternative health companies - companies operating openly and, they thought, legally - that more and more tend toward the violence of DEA raids on suspected crack dealers. In every case, the companies were selling vitamins and herbs that a growing minority of the medical profession approves but which MMAO and the FDA do not approve.
For instance, in 1990, the FDA raided the offices of Dr. Jonathan Wright, a fully qualified physician with an M.D. from the University of Michigan Medical School, terrorized the staff with drawn guns, and seized all the vitamins and herbs they could find. They never did file criminal charges against Dr. Wright for the heresy of giving his patients cheap medicines instead of expensive ones, but this raid was only one of hundreds of similar Gestapo-style operations, creating what libertarians call "a chilling effect" on scientific freedom.
As the Life Extension Foundation wrote:

. . . The FDA's strong-arm tactics are used to intimidate and terrorize Americans into toeing their police state party line on healthcare and medicine. The FDA's purpose is not just to destroy the business and lives of their targets, but also to spread fear and terror throughout the land so that others who may be tempted to rebel against the agency will remain meek and submissive.

In the 1980s, a Fundamentalist couple named Randy and Vicki Weaver fled to a mountain top in Idaho, to get as far as possible from the U.S. government, which they considered a Zionist conspiracy. However goofy that idea was, it was the only "offense" of which the Weavers were guilty. They didn't annoy their neighbors and they didn't plot an insurrection against the government: they just tried to avoid and evade it. This alone was too much for the Feds. They sent in an informant to make friends with Randy and eventually entrap him into selling a shotgun. With that excuse, the FBI and ATF made war on the Weaver family, killing Vicki while she stood holding her baby in her arms, killing the older son, and even killing the family dog.
The Weavers sure had a lot of nutty ideas; nobody but another Fundamentalist would deny that. But maybe their idea of the nature of the current U.S. government, and its attitude toward its serfs and subjects, was a hell of a lot more accurate than the ideas you read in liberal journals.

-FUPPETS- For Readers XLV

2010-09-10T09:35:00.003-05:00

45. That is the number. Forty-five shots in the dark trying to shed some bit of light onto the brains of the inter-meta-net-web masses. -FUPPETS- does not do this for personal gain.
-FUPPETS- does this because the world is already full of idiots and does not need any more.
-FUPPETS- wants you to know someone cares, at least enough to tell you that you are getting stupid watching moronic shit on television and discussing the same moronic shit with the morons that you work with, leading to a slippery slope of stupidity from which it is hard to climb out of.
-FUPPETS- is looking out for your best interests.

WHY HAVE UFO's CHANGED SPEED OVER THE YEARS? - ( Martin S. Kottmeyer - The Philosophers Magazine )

LOST IN TRANSLATION: What do we lose when languages die? - ( Alex Rose - Obit Mag )

THE CRIMEWAVE THAT SHAMES THE WORLD: It's one of the last great taboos: the murder of at least 20,000 women a year in the name of 'honour'. Nor is the problem confined to the Middle East: the contagion is spreading rapidly - ( Robert Fisk - The Independent )

THE WEB IS DEAD: Long live the internet - ( Chris Anderson/Michael Wolff - Wired )

SARAH PALIN, THE FORCE & THE FURY: Even as Sarah Palin’s public voice grows louder, she has become increasingly secretive, walling herself off from old friends and associates, and attempting to enforce silence from those around her - ( Michael Joseph Gross - Vanity Fair )

REVALORIZING THE TRADES - ( Camille Paglia - The Chronicle Review )

TERRA INFIRMA: The rise and fall of quicksand - ( Daniel Engber - Slate )

AN AMORAL MANIFESTO (Part 1) - ( Joel Marks - Philosophy Now )

Everything wrong is right again. Welcome back NFL!

2010-09-09T09:39:00.002-05:00

-FUPPETS- can finally relax. The NFL season is about to begin. Life is beautiful again.

-FUPPETS- Video Of The Day: PUBLIC ENEMY

2010-09-08T16:44:00.003-05:00

-FUPPETS- is proud to bring you the latest video offering by the mighty, mighty PUBLIC ENEMY, always a -FUPPETS- favorite. Enjoy.

PUBLIC ENEMY - Say It Like It Really Is

Timeline of the UNIVERSE

2010-09-08T11:41:00.002-05:00

Seven years ago Northwestern University physicist Adilson E. Motter conjectured that the expansion of the universe at the time of the big bang was highly chaotic. Now he and a colleague have proven it using rigorous mathematical arguments.
The study, published by the journal Communications in Mathematical Physics, reports not only that chaos is absolute but also the mathematical tools that can be used to detect it. When applied to the most accepted model for the evolution of the universe, these tools demonstrate that the early universe was chaotic.
Certain things are absolute. The speed of light, for example, is the same with respect to any observer in the empty space. Others are relative. Think of the pitch of a siren on an ambulance, which goes from high to low as it passes the observer. A longstanding problem in physics has been to determine whether chaos -- the phenomenon by which tiny events lead to very large changes in the time evolution of a system, such as the universe -- is absolute or relative in systems governed by general relativity, where the time itself is relative.
A concrete aspect of this conundrum concerns one's ability to determine unambiguously whether the universe as a whole has ever behaved chaotically. If chaos is relative, as suggested by some previous studies, this question simply cannot be answered because different observers, moving with respect to each other, could reach opposite conclusions based on the ticks of their own clocks. - ( Science Daily )

Click the image above for the full article.

-FUPPETS- Loves Bugs and Scanning Electron Microscopes

2010-09-07T09:33:00.003-05:00

The good people at the UK periodical the Telegraph have put together a great slide-show of some spectacular images. The images of various bugs/spiders and other assorted creepy crawlies have been individually colored to help differentiate the various parts of their anatomy.
-FUPPETS- has always loved scanning electron microscopes and their ability to give us a glimpse of a world so small that it is usually overlooked by everyone. The image below is the head of a fly maggot. It looks like a bizarre Muppet!

ALL SONIC, ALL DAY!

2010-08-29T11:17:00.005-05:00

Here is -FUPPETS- House Band SONIC YOUTH exploring the skronk in 5 separate live settings over the years. Enjoy, because -FUPPETS- surely will.

SONIC YOUTH - The Burning Spear (11/08/83 - Milan)

SONIC YOUTH - Brother James (1991)

SONIC YOUTH - Candle (1993)

SONIC YOUTH - I Love You Golden Blue

SONIC YOUTH - I'm Insane

-FUPPETS- Video Of The Day: WAVVES

2010-08-26T15:29:00.004-05:00

Today's -FUPPETS- Video Of The Day is a funny low-budget clip from noisy rockers WAVVES. It is from their latest album King Of The Beach. Enjoy! Make some noise!

WAVVES - Post Acid

iNudge - Make a Tune

2010-08-26T08:56:00.004-05:00

Thanks to -FUPPETS- friend STEVOK from the Sonic Youth Gossip Forum for this link.

iNudge

There have been several webpages where you could make a tune or create a song, but the iNudge page is simply the best yet. Not only can you change instrumentation, but you can extend the measures as long as you need, giving you the opportunity to write longer, more complex beats and pieces of music.
Check it out, explore the possibilities, and if you like, post a link to your finished piece in the comments section!

Here are just a few examples, made by the SY fantatics. Click on their screen names to hear the tunes.

STEVEOK - ANTAGON - BRELIGION - BEAUTIFUL PLATEAU - ANN ASHTRAY

BLAZE The Pot Smoking Deer

2010-08-25T09:13:00.003-05:00

Sometimes the state of things in the world around us calls for a dose of insanity. Luckily for -FUPPETS- insanity abounds throughout the intermetanetwebs. Even better is when insanity actually comes knocking, sharing of itself! So it was for -FUPPETS- and the inspired bit of animated madness called Blaze the Pot Smoking Deer.
A fine gentleman and auteur who goes by the moniker atsonicpark is behind Blaze... and recently reminded -FUPPETS- of the trove of weird to be found in his warped cartoons. Here, for your viewing pleasure, is episode 0 (sort of a prologue if you will) of Blaze the Pot Smoking Deer.

Blaze - Episode 0

CLICK HERE to be directed to Blaze's YouTube channel, where you can absorb the other 7 episodes at your leisure.

A chaotic world requires chaotic art. It is only fitting. As the Butthole Surfers once said "In these times of counter-revolution, you're gonna encounter a counter-revolutionary man, OH! Gary Shandling, Gary Shandling, Gary..."

EYEBORG - The Future is Here!

2010-08-24T12:39:00.005-05:00

The image above has not been altered. That is Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence. When he was young, he suffered an accident which left his right eye very damaged. As he grew older doctors told him there was nothing that could be done and they would have to remove it. Being a filmmaker, he decided to get a wireless camera placed into his eye socket, instead of a prosthetic eye.
Read the full story here.
Being a bad-ass, he has also taken to calling himself Eyeborg. Tremendous! -FUPPETS- is very excited.
The first screening of the footage he has put together using his eye cam will be shown in Melbourne Australia's OTHER FILM FESTIVAL, which is a film fest focusing on work by and about disabled people. The organization OtherFilm, which puts the festival together, is "a collective based in Brisbane, Australia, dedicated to avant-garde, experimental, abstract, expanded and other film."

THE PARADOX OF CHOICE

2010-08-24T12:03:00.004-05:00

One of the coolest things to happen in the recent past in the world of academia and intellectuals is the TED Conference. TED Conferences began in 1984, and have become worldwide events. The people who put these on have made sure to record all of the speakers and have made available to anyone the videos of these lectures. It is quite an amazing list of speakers and topics. -FUPPETS- admires anyone willing to share knowledge and to ferment thought in the world.
In this video, psychologist Barry Schwartz gives a lecture based on his book, The Paradox Of Choice. It is a very interesting probe into why we value the idea of choice and what has occurred because of our overwhelming demand for more and more choice.

BARRY SCHWARTZ - The Paradox of Choice