Phase III - Stealth Is.

Steve Foland: I hear you’ve been working on a definitive Burroughs biography. How is that going, when can we expect it and is that going to be your final word on the subject?

James Grauerholz: In 1972, when I was not yet twenty, I wrote out-of-the-blue fan letters to Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, in New York and London, respectively.

Allen’s reply led to my meeting him in the Lower East Side in spring 1973, and when I returned to New York City in late January 1974, Allen told me William was in New York, too, and sent me over to meet him.

William’s reply in late ‘72 is interesting. In mine to him, I had written something to the effect that I wanted to interview him, with a focus on his childhood, his school years, his early European travels.

Very little about the first 30 years of Burroughs’ life had been published, as of 1972. Only Alan Ansen’s late-1950s essay* offered any real detail, and it compared intriguingly against Burroughs’ own tight-lipped “Prologue” written — reluctantly — in 1952 for his first book, Junkie (1953), and there were only brief, superficial bios in the early “Beat” stories in LIFE, et al.

…

SF: Were you involved with William’s magickal practices personally? And if so, would you describe an experience?

JG: Not really; let’s say, a few things early on. It’s all there in the Red Night Trilogy if you want to look for it.

But I followed my own spirit guides (so to speak), and they did not impel me to participate personally in the rather well-known “Sweat Lodge” experience that William had in 1991 — with Allen Ginsberg and Michael Emerton, as well as facilitator William Lyon, and the Shaman — whose name escapes me.

I kept the same distance — supportive, respectful, encouraging — from William’s developing contacts with the I.O.T.

(Author’s Note: I.O.T. refers to the Illuminates of Thanateros — A Chaos Magick organization founded in Britain in 1978 by Ray Sherwin and Peter J Carroll)

The way some people think of me as “controlling” William and all this horse shit is ironic to the point of bitter hilarity. The truth is, I made sure that I did not come between him and the people and experiences he had, and relationships he started with them, and kept up on his own. Ask Marcus Ewert, who — bless his heart — has charmingly revealed, to the printed (or electronic) page and the motion picture camera, more details about his affair with William in the latter’s, uh, latter years, than I can imagine very many people even wanting to know. But Marc is, like me, a disciple of Ginsberg (if not also of Warhol), and I can only applaud his let-it-all-hang-out policy about those days and nights with William. But Marcus will tell you, I ran our whole little crew away from that house with the two of them in it, postponed the lawnmowing, etc., so they could — well, do whatever they wanted to.

SF: William’s magickal experimentation, the aspects of recording what he called “Danger Sounds” and replaying them in proximity to his target, or using collage to hit a specific target has become the stuff of legend. Some attribute the closing of one particular establishment to William’s hexes. Is there another specific instance which you can recall that is as dramatic and apparently self-evident?

JG: Nope, not really. You are likely referring to the Moka Bar in London, where William said he received snide, snotty service and lousy, weak tea — and his tape-recorders-and-cameras mock-surveillance routine, back and forth on the sidewalk of Frith Street, and how the Moka Bar failed and was shuttered not too long after that.

Forgive me please, but my cast of mind leads me to suspect the Moka Bar, if it really did sell lousy tea with terrible service, might have been headed out of business, with or without the sound-text-tape-film sidewalk-pacing routine…

As with William’s long-ago theory that, because he had never known a NYC junky ever to get a seasonal cold, it was likely that Junk provided a protective covering to the cells (or else, maybe Junk kept the cells well-exercised and in-shape with a constant cycle of shrinking to kick, swelling back up in re-addiction, kicking, hooked again, etc.) — I pointed out that, because a junky with a good supply on hand rarely leaves his apartment to mingle on the sidewalk with other people (which would expose him to more airborne rhinovirus particles), maybe the apparent immunity was more the result of limited exposure to current pathogens…

This all might sound terrible to you, as if I was a bringdown — in fact, William and I were beautifully balanced. He appreciated that about me, and I appreciated his love for the fantastic and extravagantly-explained. Which is funny, when I remember now that it was William’s own mention of “Ockham’s Razor” in my 1966 copy of Naked Lunch that first alerted me to the existence of Occam’s principle of parsimony….

SF: William’s painting “Creation of the Homunculus IV,” graces the cover of Phil Hine’s Prime Chaos, and a glowing endorsement from William appears on the back of Condensed Chaos. Did William have frequent contact with the leaders of the Chaos Magick movement or was his involvement on an individual by individual basis?

JG: Yes, William was very serious about his studies in, and initiation into the I.O.T. Of course, you would have to ask (if they would even describe it for you) the persons who took part in that initiation — I didn’t. Our longtime friend, Douglas Grant, was a prime mover; William met and liked Peter Carroll and Phil Hine, I am pretty sure. I myself only got to know the good Doug Grant a couple of years after William’s death, in August 1997.

SF: William’s “Orgone Chamber” is well known to his devotees. Did you feel the effects of it as well? When did William’s interest in Radionics begin? Can you recall who introduced him to the subject?

JG: Yes, I suppose I could feel something in the various Orgone Boxes I have sat in. William’s 1940s letters reveal his early contacts with the works of Wilhelm Reich, although it’s evident (from, for example, several sources gathered by Ted Morgan for Literary Outlaw, 1988) that Burroughs had come into contact with some of Reich’s writings, in translation, by the 1930s. As to who brought it to his attention, my immediate guess would be his childhood friend, Kells Elvins. And there are several sources we might search for more evidence of that source in William’s life for that particular influence.

SF: Given his influence on Magickal theory and practice (The Cut-Up, Third Mind, Dream Machine and his writing) who would you say was William’s largest influence? Crowley, Spare, none of the above?

JG: Pardon me but I don’t see many direct influences by William’s thought upon Magickal theory — the other way around, heavens, yes.

But Burroughs considered Crowley a bit of a figure of fun, referring to him as “The Greeeaaaaaat BEEEEAST!” in that behind-closed-doors, queeny comic delivery he used sometimes: his voice rising straight up in pitch, into an hysterical falsetto. You can hear it in lots of tapes, I’m pretty sure.

William knew quite a bit about Crowley’s life and work, and he certainly dug deep into the Necronomicon (anonymous but often attributed to Crowley) when it became available in a snazzy, black-morocco, tooled-leather hardback binding. He appreciated much about Aleister Crowley. Influenced by him? I don’t really see it. And to be truthful, I knew more about Austin Osman Spare than William did, in the beginning.

…

SF: What, if any, opinion did William have for Jack Parsons’s work?

JG: William’s thoughts about Jack Parsons were, I believe, based far more on what he knew about Parson’s life, than on any writings or paintings by Parsons. William knew about the origins of JPL, the early ties to L. Ron Hubbard, and so forth. If memory serves, William was mainly impressed by the way that Parsons’ life ended.

“An Italian inventor, Enrico Dini, chairman of the company Monolite UK Ltd, has developed a huge three-dimensional printer called D-Shape that can print entire buildings out of sand and an inorganic binder. The printer works by spraying a thin layer of sand followed by a layer of magnesium-based binder from hundreds of nozzles on its underside. The glue turns the sand to solid stone, which is built up layer by layer from the bottom up to form a sculpture, or a sandstone building.

The D-shape printer can create a building four times faster than it could be built by conventional means, and reduces the cost to half or less. There is little waste, which is better for the environment, and it can easily “print” curved structures that are difficult and expensive to build by other means. Dini is proving the technology by creating a nine cubic meter pavilion for a roundabout in the town of Pontedera.

The printer can be moved along horizontal beams and four vertical columns, and the printer head is raised by only 5-10 mm for each new layer. The printer is driven by a computer running CAD software and prints at a resolution of 25 dpi (dots per inch). The completed material resembles marble, is stronger than concrete, and does not need iron reinforcing. The printing process can successfully create internal curves, partitions, ducting, and hollow columns

…

Dini will carry out trials in a vacuum chamber at Alta Space’s facility in Pisa to ensure the process is possible in a low-atmosphere environment such as the moon.

“Powered only by an elastic band, it flits up and down and flaps its wings languidly – just like the swallowtail butterfly it was modelled on. The band powers a mechanical crank that drives the wing motion.

“To our knowledge, our model is the first free-flying replica that has the same basic dimensions, mass and shape as a real insect,” says Hiroto Tanaka of Harvard University’s microrobotics lab, who designed the model with Isao Shimoyama of the University of Tokyo, Japan.”

From The Art of Memetics by Wes Unruh & Edward Wilson:

We’ve covered a good deal of ground now, from examining construction and distribution of memes to exploring how group minds come into being. We’ve examined how to distribute signals and discussed the power dynamics of information and the overlapping domain of marketing, magic, and masterminding. Now let’s backtrack a bit and examine how to program your preconscious mind intentionally. Your preconscious mind needs precise goals which it interprets literally, and those goals should be upgraded regularly. Your preconscious mind also retains memetic content indefinitely, and so once a meme is embedded it will continue influencing you until it is deliberately altered or removed. Likewise, once a meme is dissolved from your preconscious mind you will no longer have the result of that meme present in your life. By keeping a record (be it journal, collage, series of tattoos, etc.) you can track the directions of the preconscious motivators.

The preconscious mind is driven by emotional energy to move along specific pathways, acting on the dominant memetic structures. Those structures are put into place through repetition, which is a replication of action. What you believe determines how you imagine, and what symbolic structures you access while imagining. We’ve already discussed how the preconscious mind isn’t affected by the passage of time (when you picked up a meme), but rather by the intensity or resolution of a meme. As your beliefs are the very currency of a memetic economy, and belief constrains the patterns imagination can take, monitoring your imagination and critically thinking about why your imagination consistently follows specific vectors will help you identify the belief structures that limit your creativity.

Previous experiences will always be repeated unless the imagination is properly engaged, because those patterns are already in existence internally. Once the imagination is engaged without the constraints of belief, you can begin to be selective about adopting or generating new meme structures. Once engaged, new memes require an incubation period to properly unfold and become dominant, during which time problem solving and goal achievement is being pre-consciously calculated. This programming of the pre-conscious mind is very straightforward, and throughout this text we’ve been exploring the various methods that can be used, as well as the theory behind these practices.

The best results will come from clearly believable and attainable goals which elicit a strong emotional reaction. Begin by specifying all the details of the goal in clear and unambiguous language. The end results should be clearly visualized, and creating a tangible representation of this end result to be a focus for visualization is incredibly useful, and might as well be ESP in as much as psychic abilities and ESP develop directly from this flexing of the imagination’s muscle.

Daily visualization that resolves around having the goal (as opposed to needing the goal) creates a resonance with the subconscious mind and triggers events that will lead you to your desired result. Celebrating successes along the way is reinforcement even more powerful than using positive affirmations, as affirmations can trigger unconscious resistance to the statements98. Over time, the visualization should be made more and more immediate through sigilization techniques, the eventual outcome of this is an intuition as uncanny as any natural ESP or psychic gift.

Continued below…

continue reading…

Duncan Laurie: The Secret Art from DANGEROUS MINDS on Vimeo.

Duncan Laurie, author of The Secret Art, is one of the world’s foremost experts on the “forbidden science” of radionics. Some of you may recall Duncan from the Disinformation TV show. He’s the genteel mad scientist/artist from Jamestown, Rhode Island who looks like Harrison Ford and who works in laboratory housed in a glass building. In 2000 I recorded an interview with Duncan where he demonstrated the subtle energy exchange between plants and his mind-blowing collection of radionics devices. Continued @ Dangerous Minds

Much clearer and more direct information on Albert Abraham’s work is avbl. through our friends at Borderlands.

philiPKNixon - Mind Your Head (Ikipr’s “Watch your face, homie” Mix) from Ikipr on Vimeo.

In anticipation of the upcoming performance of The Abattoir Pages, Joseph Matheny in conversation with John Harrigan about anything and everything that comes to their mind.

Listen here and check out Apocryphon.org for Foolish People’s upcoming performance.

After EsoZone Portland 2009, we will release the “EsoZone Protocol,” a set of guidelines similar to an open source software license that will enable organizers to host an EsoZone in their own city as long as they are free and follow the “unconference” model.

On October 9th, participants will arrive at Watershed PDX and collaboratively create the schedule. The event will be free and open to the public, and anyone will be able to propose a session, lead a workshop, or suggest a group activity. The approach is called “unconferencing,” a technique pioneered by tech-industry events.

 

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Art is always an excellent break from information gathering.

An avant garde short film from Peter Tscherkassky.

Carbon nanotube arrays could be the basis of high-density energy storage devices and efficient chip cooling systems. The performance of such devices, however, depends on the quality of the nanotubes and the precise structure of the array. So researchers including Anastasios John Hart, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, are honing techniques for growing carefully structured forests of high-quality carbon nanotubes. Hart made these images with a scanning electron microscope; all show vertically grown nanotubes.

From Foolish People’s Cirxus

Samm says about himself:

I am a writer for the The Foolish People Website

I am a sometime contributer to Key64

I have been published in the now defunct Konton a chaos magick magazine published by the als now defunct chaosmagic.com Most of my writings were also included in the Best Of Konton anthology they put out as well.

I was published in the Magick On The Edge anthology.

I am the co-creator of the sadly neglected chaoscurrent.com

 

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Care of the R & D scientist @ Dangus labs.

“It’s a mass meditation to stop the dude’s pacemaker.

ticker going. Well,. that needs to change! So let’s DO DIS!

I’m

Alternatively,

then removes the still-pumping pacemaker from his nefarious chest.

The date is Sunday, July 12. Folks, let’s do this for the betterment of humanity!

yrs.,

heck/dang”

The Recorder said: “We have subpoenaed witnesses to the number of three, and up to this morning only two have arrived that I am aware of. I wrote to the Department for certain data in this case, and as to whether there were any accusations, imputations or charges against Philip K. Nixon or Wes Unruh, and in reply thereto I have received certain files which will require time to give a careful examination. There are several questions to be decided by the Court, one of which is as to the best mode of procedure, and these matters might be taken up first. I have an official copy of OSK’s application for a Court of Inquiry, and also a letter from the Adjutant General transmitting it to me, which seems to be the basis of this inquiry…”

 

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Also see: Occulterati - S3