Iridescence

The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, Vol. 1 by Daniel Chanan Matt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As a Hebrew student, but non-native reader, I found the Pritzker edition of the Zohar to be the best I’ve read. The Zohar is a work of vast depth, however, and this edition did not substitute for a lack of knowing the allegorical subtleties of gematria. I’m sure the editors sought a balance regarding the amount of footnote material presented, give that this edition is 75% notes and 25% content. Readers not familiar with the verse of Torah upon with the Zohar is commenting will need a bible beside them to keep the flow of the original, and contextualize the commentary. I think this is the most voluminous rendering of the Zohar’s light to-date.

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Stolen iPhone police incident number

You’d like to think that in a time where we have such slick, instant feedback, don’t-big-bro-me-bro, omniscient technology… that you could actually use find-my-device location services to get your phone back!

Imagine the scenario: you’ve setup your fancy-pants iPhone with Apple’s own Find My iPhone app, tested it and are feeling good about the sense that you can avoid searching for an hour before realizing it was in the car or at work.  You come home from a walk to a local coffee shop and the phone is nowhere about.  Fire up the re-location service…. and get sent down a long winding path of realizing that the more important part of the service can’t really do it’s job.

In my case, the situation turned out to be theft.  I realized this in 15-20 min when I got back home and realized the loss.  Was it at the shop?  Was it picked?  Fire up the Mobile Me find service and….. there it was, half-way across town in another district.  Phenomenal – the perp. must have had somewhere to go already.

Night’s falling now and we’re driving to not-exactly-the-nicest part of town.  We call the local police en route and explain the situation.  They’ll meet us down the street from where the perp. is hanging out.  After waiting, we see the phone has gone on the move again to a nearby house, and tell the police we can be met there instead, and are thusly informed we now have to meet them at one fixed place – gas station in the area.  OK, riveting man-hunt put on hold.

The police actually take almost an hour to show up.  “It’s a busy night,” they tell us with all the dispassion of life-threaening emergencies.   A group of sirens-blazing, don’t stop for traffic lights, police cars goes past us at different time while we wait, underscoring that some nasty stuff is happing in the area.

An officer eventually shows, with one of the most flooring pieces of information that evening: they won’t help us. Why?  “Because there’s no case law for police to use whatever technology you say you have there to find your lost phone.” I very-diplomatically give him the example that the same technology allows us all to get turn-by-turn driving directions.  We arrive at the point that it really comes down to the need for a warrant.  I propose (what I think is) a perfectly sober scenario: Go to the location of the phone, watch it move from that house, and if it’s being carried by a single person then confront them and ask for it back.  A group of people will be a shell-game that needs a warrant, so basically there’s one scenario that is safe way to be gutsy and set a precedent.

The officer isn’t that kind of guy, so I’m left to contemplate vigilantism and private investigators.  Friends would late offer to go Punisher on the guy, but that wasn’t until after we’d bailed and headed back to maybe still get decent seats for Tron Legacy.  Two slices of cheesecake comforted us instead.

The big moral of this story is that phone tracking services are only useful at reminding you the phone is in the car, or maybe fell off the tractor in the East Field.  So be sure you don’t pay anything for this kind of service unless you’re trying to keep tabs on children who are already well-mannered enough to stay out of trouble on their own.  If it comes to police necessity, it seems they’ll leave you hanging.

Thanks, Apple, and all the other companies offering services like this.  Make the next into relationship formation with law enforcement and the bench.

For those without context to Jeff Koons, or only feeling one side of his work, here you will find the various sides of the commenting allow for arrival at an acceptable median-point.

For the rest of the picture this article shall present, have open Koons website

The Banality series is an important facet. (no direct link available due to HTML frames)  It shows the sense of attitude and charisma, presented through the celebration (as sculptural objects) of the ‘roughest’ dimensions of the aesthetic hand that has presented our human uniqueness.  Koons mixes these dimensions with precision that aims to create logical absurdism – as absurd as the banal whitewashing over our uniqueness.

The LUXURY & DEGRADATION series extends this banality logical absurdism to present the highlights of a ‘luxury class,’ which Koons thereby portrays via kitsch.  The world celebrates Character, and the absurd is anything but middle-of-the-road.  The Frangelico ad ‘find a quiet table’ features the text by the same name, printed on a background that looks like rolling waves, evocative of the oceanic tidal energy of human relationships that are garmented under the banner of fine alcoholic spirits – as if anything occurs across a quite table but violent desires…

Then EQUILIBRIUM, from “Board Room” on down the list. The spirit of success, enshrined in the primitiveness of sports, is elevated in context of societal high positions. It directly identifies the relaxed posture displayed by those in high social positions. One, Two and Three Ball tanks make less immediate sense, IMO, until viewed after One (Two & Three) Ball Total Equilibrium Tank(s). These latter piece utilize the primitive (banal) game ball as a symbol of triumph in a physical scenario that unquietly moves our body’s proprioceptive system: the system of balance that informs us of the sensation of stability, uprightness, grace… and controlled relaxation. In these latter pieces, the balls float ethereally, untouchable. In the One (Two & Three) Ball 50/50 Tank(s) the balls float, like a yacht, in clean perpetuity.

They are an icon of the luxury class.

Regardless, one does not get to make these statements unless one is socially connected to do so. It must have taken much to pitch people past his earlier works, which used absurdism without much skill, except for the presentation polish (as shown today, we hope he had the same polish back then).

Personally, though, poor guy…. definitely not in his full head, if he didn’t even fully contest.

The UN made a recent advance in its position on humanity’s relationship to Outer Space Affairs, and the subtext is finely coincidental at best.

Both the Telegraph and Wired, as well as other, reported on the appointment of Malaysian astrophysicist, Mazlan Othman, to the Director position of the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs.  ”M. Othman” jokes and ‘They don’t exist’ were the low-hanging fruit of the forums this day.  Naturally, the UN made speedy statement against the matter.  It wasn’t a redaction by any means, though, and only made an ambiguous attack-of-quality that the report was “nonsense.”   Good to know, mates.  Where would anyone get an idea like that?  See if you can spot anything in a recent statement regarding her appointment:

She is scheduled to tell delegates, of the Royal Society’s Kavli conference centre in Buckinghamshire, that the recent discovery of hundreds of planets around other stars has made the detection of extraterrestrial life more likely than ever before – and that means the UN must be ready to coordinate humanity’s response to any “first contact”.

The Telegraph, if not the Nerd-Couture Guarde at Wired, deserve some journalistic credit for not running pulp.  They did, after all, have the chutzpah to publish an article on John Morgan’s book re-opening consideration on the murder of Princess Diana. We have to assume that someone(s), somewhere, made proud on the matter that the UN’s OSA was creating a formal position for space ambassadorship… you know, just in case.  One cannot make a shirt but of whole cloth.  The knee-jerk reply is really just standard procedure to matters of cultural controversy.

This is a great way to gauge public response to interaction with real aliens.  Even if none exist or have ever contacted our government(s).  The UN’s statement on the matter is sound Game Theory with through the voice of PR.  Something special can be calculated here.

The people that are OK with alien existence seem to be rather OK with it.  Stephen Hawking, one of the worlds most public & figurehead scientists, and highly regarded by the bofins and other skeptical authorities of the scientific method, makes an appellation to change the minds of the aliens-don’t-exist thinkers.  Yet, stalwarts doth remain.

People that think aliens don’t exist would have one or another form of break-down upon demonstration otherwise.  Besides fear / aggressions, catatonia, some will experience a form of pleasure, another reaction of break-down could be Allegiance.  Terrorist cels at a whole new level; humans acting against humans on the notion of currying favor with aliens.  The pinnacle of self-loathing and escapism.  I wonder if there exists psychological profiles to estimate how an resistant individual will likely react post-revelation.

A few interesting pieces of context exist, for the context of human’s current and active relationship to space-faring races.  The fist, because it’s my favorite story, comes from EarthFiles.com founder Linda Moulton Howe – who told of meeting a retiree of the US DIA, whose official capacity was to “monitor the changes in geo-political divisions between non-humans living on the Earth.” ~Spectacular~

My finely-coincidental matter is the location of the UNO OSA’s 27 staff in the city of Vienna.  During 3rd Reich-controlled times surrounding WWII (1940), Vienna was the place of Viktor Schauberger’s anti-gravity research.  I’m sure any public reports on the matter are apocryphal, if not non-existent at this point (beyond books).  Those that witnessed Schauberger’s repulsine pull from its moorings and engine crash through the ceiling of a factory did ultimately put him ‘well beyond the map’ with Hitler, and ensured his detention in New Mexico US following the arrival of Allied forces.

It’s not as though this is the first serious public discussion of alien relations with humanity.  The Disclosure Project, who coordinated the first US National Press Club gathering on the topic of exo-political, yet still(?) offers seminars on extraterrestrial contact protocols.  Comparatively, reports by the French 3AF are just teasers.

As long as the movies keep showing us that humanity will react awkwardly, or downright poorly, to contact with non-human sentience, exo-political offices will remain the stuff of official PR control.

Sometimes we can be punished because we are able to understand a higher order of [systems-operation] than our actions allow for. The higher understanding is present, but is made available by an allowance from our parents when they remorse at their punitive action.  At that time the nurturing mind, which had given birth to us, wants for it’s severity to have existed only to create the impetus for a higher learning to exist – for it to have been only the notion of impatience that the divine could improve upon in itself.

Our life can experience an energy that is wrong for it in some way – albeit right for the energy’s place of origin.  Within it’s own people.  Why the energy comes to our space, and the effect it can have upon us, may be related.  For within our world the wrongness can serve to create a channel of understanding that in itself contains information that benefits us.  The way of this benefit – that times where it has a fitness for use – need careful consideration.  So if one comes across information of this kind, only patient deliberation will reveal the essence of rightness for our lives.

I read a dream someone transcribed wherein they had a close relationship with a dolphin.  The relationship was as roommates – sharing a space of living for a time in the life where the spirit finds its roots.  In the dream, they described the dolphin as having a romantic interest with the person, despite the difference in species making even its expression impossible – and in fact the person wrote that they also had some form of desire in this regard.  Again, it was unactionable, which is fortunate also because of the damage that the behavior would have upon the soul (non-fulfillment within the life that one has).

The desire, however, did create the fundaments of understanding between worlds that are fundamentally different (thus the improperness for them to have union).  So here is the reason that the story of this dream is appropriate here.  In the dream, they wrote that the understanding they had made for a channel of knowledge, wherein they knew about the ways and life of the sea.  “The secrets and rumors known within the waves and ports.” Special knowledge that was available to a community because of it’s unique position in the world – the knowledge of fish and ocean life! – would have a quite an impact on the thinking and feeling of non-oceanic consciousness.

Here I will propose is the notion of divine purposefulness acting in a scale of knowledge that is beyond individual lives.  Yet, because of that purposefulness, the life of one person may be a conduit to insight that can changes the lives of people.  How – where it is right for the individual and those people – as has been said, remains a matter for patient consideration.

One may suppose to figure out how a thing is done, the other is how to ask permission for it to be done.  The first is limited to an individual, the other is limited only by the divine.

While all the net neutrality discussions are running, a core point to the recent Google / Verizon proposal is an allegation of hypocrisy.  As @vstg005 notes, “championing of non-discrimination and transparency, while simultaneously including the caveat of ‘additional online services’”  From the draft: “A broadband provider could offer additional services that could include traffic prioritization.”

Roger Ebert’s recent piece that challenges the presence of Art within games is wonderful.  Though I think his article has a mix of flaws and insights, the essential elements that drive criticism are wholly important.  It has generated response from key people in the dialogue, and so much hating.  I think the stand-out things to me are:

Absinthe, a spirit of legend, has in recent years been revived under the banner of being neither a psychedelic nor a deliriant.  True as those statements may be on the surface, I was pleased to discover an errata that may tie the fabled drink with more righteous roots.  With all due respect to the reasons for concealment and the initiatory threshold, I offer in context this paragraph from Wikipedia

Absinthe is derived from the Latin absinthium, which in turn is a stylization of the Greek αψίνθιον (apsínthion), for wormwood. ….. Some claim that the word means “undrinkable” in Greek, but it may instead be linked to the Persian root spand or aspand, or the variant esfand, which meant Peganum harmala, also called Syrian Rue-although it is not actually a variety of rue, another famously bitter herb. That Artemisia absinthium was commonly burned as a protective offering may suggest that its origins lie in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root *spend, meaning “to perform a ritual” or “make an offering.” Whether the word was a borrowing from Persian into Greek, or from a common ancestor of both, is unclear. Variant spellings of absinthe are absinth, absynthe, and absenta. In English it is pronounced /ˈæbsɪnθ/ ; in French, [absɛ̃t]. Absinth (without the final e) is a spelling variant used by central European distillers. It is the usual name for absinthe produced in the Czech Republic and in Germany, and has become associated with Bohemian style absinthes.

Contemporary entheogenic studies have created a great fondness for Asphand – if not a secluded one.  The MAOI has become the foundation for ‘shroom-huasca’, another melange that has produced so notable effects as to be compared with the jungle-beverage, Ayahuasca.

The Greek affection of the name, even erroneously should we assume a Persian root, is interesting because of the mysterious ‘XueXion’ beverage also present at the in Eleusinian Mysteries.  It is no scholarly assertion that the Mystery beverage was MAOI-based, even by prevalent sources.  The etymological root between Absinthe and Asphand, however, does bear some consideration in this matter, with classical reinforcement by the Mediterranean prevalence of Rue.

Plainly, and personally, I am not convinced that Greek and Egyptian mysteries, even to the degree in which they may have had a psycho-chemical component, were composed upon DMT.

Authenticity means that all the tricks will fail.

I had a realization about what ‘the transition through 2012′ means.  This vision was proudly brought to me by Andy Samberg’s single I’m On A Boat, and a viral ad by Old Spice.  Naturally, if you don’t know these memes front to back, from here “there are dragons.”

The I’m On A Boat song became a phenomenon by leveraging the laugh-at-yourself capacity of people who envision that they will never be on a boat, let alone a yacht. The whole damn song is a parody of the fact that being on a boat is such a rare thing for said individual that they would break out in song to solely celebrate the event. It’s light hearted cynicism and a self-deprecation even at its best.

The Old Bay ad took it up a level, and at the same time let the cat out of the bag.  It’s a romance-parody mindfu^# that crescendos in the main act announcing “I’m on a horse.”  Genius.  See what happened there?   Let’s imagine: the trigger sets in: [most] people don’t know what it’s like to be on a boat.  It’s more epic than most of what goes on for them.  Like many things.  E.G., like horses.  Equistrianism.  C.V. Arabic royalty.

It’s the same boat phenomenon.  The media wizards get that and exploit it… but remember the context: 2012.  In 2012-is-coming world, people are waking up, or are going to, ‘cross the grand junction.  Waking up people live in the Real World – the one where the heart’s passions are front and center.  Passions like being on a boat, riding a horse, and others.  Memes make fun of the foibles, like alughing at yourself because you current world does not include the authenticity you know in your heart.

That’s the old game, though.  You still playing that?  Awakening people learn quick and live sincerely thereafter.  Sincere existence is the game post-2012, and if you aren’t playing it, you won’t be playing.  Getting wank and rile off the low-grade habits…. not very 2012.

So, you’re fully authenticized.  Your spirit rocks the moment, and the quantum timeless.  The Real multiplies your coherence in 7-fold fractals.  An ad streams through – the content is some lovely thing sitting there smiling, and the camera angles 100% render their profoundly real character.  It radiates with the force from a whole unified crowd of human energy…. and that’s the entire ad.  Brand.  Slogan.  fin.

Maybe.  Remember, this is 2012-means-something world – and if that means that your tricks are based on anything besides authenticity… you won’t be playing the game.

Authenticity, the trick of the new game.

The Church / Seven Candles
1160 Lincoln St
Denver‎ CO
United States

An opportunity arrived to investigate the parish of St. Mark, after its gothic-evoking exterior elements were spotted from the street.  The site is current in use as a club venue called Seven Candles – turned over to the business sometime after 1988 when the building was given over in dispute.

It's still much like this, but with a wild dance floor and aerial acrobats

The feel of the place is great, particularly if you get there by 8 or 9pm, before it’s packed with people and takes on their mood.  Sushi is served in one of the side rooms until 1am.  The chapel, closed to the public, has an array of symbols that interestingly complement the rest.

The chapel sits in the NW corner of the building. The gusset tops form a ring of stained glass panels, alcoves of fleur de lys above a full-moon / disc, and five fronded palms, alternating. Two arches divide the room into three sections. Each arch is compose of reinforced square angles to follow the two slopes if the ceiling. This gives the arches the shape of the Hopi kivas – a square upon a larger square.

The eastern wall is three window panels. The centermost bears a gold caped nun with a central white stripe upon her robes.  The stripe is compose of 9 squares, and is ended top and bottom each with a half-square.

Her arms stretch out as the crucifix, but hands open to embrace. She smiles. Subtle to the cobalt background panel illumination are rays emergent from her head, high above which is a serif-cross (even arms) in red, evocative of a rose.

Beneath her in the panel are two flower-like designs, green and gold. The design is like four pin oak leaves to the diamond corners, the square corner 3-barbed points like fleur de lys.

The background surrounding each design and the nun is a vessica, double walled.  The vessicas interlock in a diamond arrangement, the nun’s head centered over one.  In the space of the wall is marks like rain or tears or thorns? These raise up the lower half of the vessica, the top half as garland, and evocative of the Apprentice Pillar. Outside the walls in the background is more oak leaf like pattern – forest like.

The entire border of the glass is patchwork of green and gold, red and white.  Most of the panels have a pattern like bark.  Two panels are red outline crosses.

The stone wall in which the window panels are set is painted with a tesselation of gold crowns in the spanish style, the glorious light radiating down from them in 9 rays. Vertical bands, floor to ceiling, of gold ivy and crosses – the ivy on green and the crosses on red – separate the crown tesselations. Beneath the cereal window panel is painted a Christian cross, it top truncated by the window above.

Painted on the wall to the left, amid a green field holding gold fleur de lys, is an Alpha surrounded by a triangle of black with gold borders. The right, amid the same field and trangle, is an Omega. The Alpha bears the same shape as the Omega except including the ‘lintel’ bar.

On the north wall adjacent to the alpha, and amid its own red field holding gold crosses, is an emblem of St. Mark. It is set upon white with a circle, a scroll bearing the name of St. Mark is surmounted by a winged sphinx. The sphinx bears a lion’s head – full mane, in the Coptic style, surrounded by a halo.  His right paw rests upon an open book.

Alas, these last paintings were seemingly not original to the parish’s founding in 1889.  The chapel, dating to the founding, is known as a Chapel of the Holy Comforter and from this photo in 1975, the walls were not covered the patterns and emblems that they do today.

Overall, no archeological discovery here – but it seems like someone may have attempted to make prominent the feminine amid the coptic / egyptian garments of ‘St. Mark.’  The builder’s inscription was not evident on the first visit, but given there was something surreally calming about the the dance floor and aerial acrobatics as I looked down from the VIP floor reading my book on grail legends – I’ll look next time I’m there.