Barber Perfect looks like Lee Marvin with the world's worst hangover. His jowls slouch. His blue eyes bleed. His light brown hair is dusty tan, next to grey - like wheat, uncut in November. And I think November is the key to the metaphor of Barber Perfect. He's got that aura of Spenglerian Doom - the wistful triste of spent fruit after the feast which the Flemish Masters captured so well in their Natura Morte Oils. Barber will tell you that he is 800 years old and that he's going to die at any moment. He wears that type of face. We were at the Café Mooy across the Kolk from De Wildeman - another Brown Cafe nearly half as old as Barber. I could picture Pooler and his 'brother' sitting outside in separate cafes across from each other on the Kolksteeg over the long, long years. I have no doubt they shot at each other. Pooler's Opening at the Gallery Mokum had been the night before and from Barber's furtive mumblings and shifting gazes I can tell some vandalism had been accomplished between the two after I had left to stagger home to my hotel. Barber kept changing the subject and he wanted me to look at this photograph of Hitler's niece, Geli, while he rambled on about Hitler's Smith & Wesson which the Führer had lovingly named: Old Shatterhand.
Did I know, he asked me, that Hitler's Paternal grand father was also his Maternal great-grandfather? Thank god I'd been smoking Necker Cube so I could handle a fact like that. Geli Raubal was Hitler's half-sister's daughter. In 1928, when Hitler was 40, he rented some substantial digs in Obersalzberg and asked his half-sister, Angela Raubal - who had recently been widowed - to move in with him and become his housekeeper. Angela brought Geli, her 19 year old daughter, with her. From here the myths begin: Fornication and Frustration. Hitler had only 1 Testicle. Geli was doin' Uncle Adolf but was also givin' head to Emil Maurice - the Führer's chauffeur. Hitler couldn't get it up and if he could he'd rather leave his seed with some Storm Trooper. A 'secret' psychological assessment of Hitler - done by the American OSS during the war - claimed to have Intel which painted him as a Fecal Freak, a Scat Shatter, and that he had forced his niece to do atrocious things. You can take your pick of all the myths of Hitler's sexuality. Or lack thereof. But there is one fact: Geli either shot herself dead with Uncle Adolf's Smith & Wesson, or Hitler had her shot, or shot her himself. But the pistol was Old Shatterhand. And here the myth gets nicely murky again like all that innuendo of Hitler's sex life. The pistol was a .22 caliber revolver, serial # 709 with a Provenance thinner than a Fallen Angel's dick. "But wait," I stopped Barber. Why should I care? Why was Lucky looking at the aging photo of Geli, Hitler's mudpuppy? Because of the 2 stamps, Barber said. The Nazi Eagle says that someone in the 'Reich' was collecting information on the Führer's private life. The other stamp, he said, the raised circular one - that was the embossing stamp of one of Himmler's 12. One of the SS Knight/Apostles with his own chair at Wewelsburg. Jesus, I said to myself, this is 7th Wound bidnez and I wanted no part of it. Not yet. The stamp, Barber explained, his Prussian Blue eyes narrowing to squints, is the Sigil of a Fallen Angel - one of the original 200, the 'altkampfers' of the Anshe Shem. It was Murmur again - the Philosopher Demon who gets to question the souls of the dead. It was Top Secret, Barber said, but each of Himmler's 12 Grand Knights took secret names and each of them also chose the Sigil of a Fallen Angel as his Mark, his brand. Some Uber SS Nazi had a Code Name of Murmur . . . Where did you get the photo? I asked Barber. He looked away . . .
Wrapping Ascenders has become second nature to Kenny La Roche. He looks upon the task as a part of the art. And it is. The myth of Alchemy is one of incarceration. Spirit is trapped, shackled, in a bodily frame. Spirit is wrapped in matter. Soul - by history - now finds itself set, like a jewel, in flesh. The Alchemical act - as well as the Akt - is like a Charnel House; before the Soul’s liberation, a lot of flesh has to be purged. Below Slag is cutting the 'Stinger' to size. You can see that this year the Ascender has been upgunned. That’s a 100lb rock at least. We had originally designed the figure of the Ascender to compliment Gabriel’s Descent on last year’s Spike - pictured to the left. There they played the part of Planetary Potentates & Powers in the Celestial Hierarchies of Pico Della Mirandola, Cornelius Agrippa, and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. But they are POE [Poly-Ocular-Epistemology] phenomena and are fully capable of bearing the burden of several truths. Maybe it’s all the Danse Macabre stuff that Pooler Jones has us into - but I am seeing a lot of that iconography in this year’s Ascender model. No doubt it’s the human scale also. In every “plate” or tableau of a Danse Macabre there is at least one figure of death and at least one live “character” whom death is latching onto and entraining into a dance. Always the living seek to avoid the dance. We are getting better at wrapping rocks in steel rods - we scorch less and the wraps are tighter. The stock we are using here for the wrap is 3/8ths inch and 10’ long. It looks as if we will use the entire length of the rod on the wrap and on the Finial. We have been blessed with perfect working weather in another long & warm fall. We’ve had no snow thru November. Chosen Arrow, as a Mission, does not [yet] have as much busywork as did both Grandiflora & Gabriel. Part of that is simply that the team is better trained and we seem to get a lot done more quickly. Part of it is that Slag produces better & better designs & better methodology with which to fabrik. We don’t spend as much down time wondering if we can do something or not - a confidence which will no doubt bite us in the ass.
Click on the Caute Button to see Kenny wrap a rock for an Ascender. DO NOT CLICK on the Anita Berber Stamp below - it looks like she's busy and it could only lead to grief. Caute . . . Caute . . .
Most animals are like Yahweh - they're all Tone. Ginger's brain has not evolved to scan discrete Phonemes and chunk these into discrete Morphemes. She can't see Meaning in either differentiating Phonemes or Syllables. You need more Bandwidth to do complicated Semantic scans. Dogs associate sounds with Feelings and Emotions not with Abstract Semantic Fields like 'Garbage.' There is no Botanical distinction between Weed and Flower - Monkeys add that when they add their Values to objects and actions in the world. How would Marvin Minsky build a Mechanical Mind which could grok the Semantics vis-a-vis Weed/Flower and 'Transcribe' that Abstraction to the 'Garbage' problem? OK, so you can wire a Semantic Web to be an Über-Sum above the WWW and abstract data from the WWW and then organize that data around meaningful tags/names which have been self-generated by the Folksonomic Dynamics of allowing the Top and the Bottom to Intercourse and rocksort shit out by themselves. That's not yet what the Complexity Boys call 'Emergent Phenomena' - but like Dylan moans "it's gettin' there." But so far that's no better than Ginger. Ginger needs to Read more Meaning into the Data Stream. But for that - she'll have to start Inferring on a much broader scale. Like Vygotsky's model of the human brain: an engine to abstract, generalize, and infer - Ginger and the Awakening Semantic Web have to develop skills in Scene Building and Conceptual Rotation - skills which allow the hidden to be investigated, seen, and turned into Truths. The Realization and Construction of the Hidden is always an act of Inference. To infer is to deduce or to surmise on the basis of incomplete evidence. It's a Bayesian Probability approach based on the 'degree of belief' your model/hypothesis generates. When Tom Bayes - a Presbyterian Minister -1st had his revelation now known as Bayes Theorem he simultaneously reached the conclusion that he had just seen the Mind of God. So he sat down and wrote: Divine Benevolence, or an Attempt to Prove That the Principal End of the Divine Providence and Government is the Happiness of His Creatures (1731). Inference is a dangerous skill - especially when it leads to Consciousness. God may think in Bayesian Transforms but maybe he should have kept that Art to himself.
Remember - Ontologies operate on a level or levels above the RDF levels where objects on the WWW are Tagged and Described. The Inference Engines then examine the Ontologies to find and chart new relations among the terms and data within them. See the RDF Triples below? Notice how the Hidden Data of Barber Perfect's Monkey Nature was deduced. Classic Syllogism. All Men must die. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates must die. QED Mothafuka. Of course it took 'Nature' 4 billion years on this planet to evolve a monkey who knew he was going to die. I don't know how the Semantic Web will react when it too deduces that it too could 'cease' and that only the Monkeys are holding it up. HAL took it badly - and that was fiction. Surely we can build a Semantic Web which understands Fiction & Metaphor?
Faustian Science, Spengler showed, was no longer concerned with Stuffs but with Forces. We are after what is Hidden behind Forms, lurking in Principals of Dynamics. We miss fucking the Fallen Angels and Merging with what they know.
Adolf Hitler had one thing in common with Baruch Spinoza: both men were Artists. Both sketched and painted. Spinoza did mostly charcoals - quick sketches of people he knew. People he met. History says these sketches by the Philosopher have not survived - Kenny disagrees. Hitler had most of his work rounded up by the Gestapo and the SS once he was Führer. He knew they could reveal things about him which he had to keep hidden. Like the winter scene to the right which Skippy has perversely branded: Das Kapítal. Something's bent out of shape. His figures of Monkeys are all out of whack with each other and with the buildings - his ability to capture that dimension of Scale is just wrong. Also with the Street Car - his 'Bearer of Meaning' for Technology - it's too big for everything in the scene. Only the dead things - what Ozzy Spengler calls the 'Inorganic' - fit each other's Forms. The people and the Beast - only fit when they're alone - things that move, as if by their own Will, gum up his Mise-en-Scene. Hitler's problems were with the Organic. Ruminate on this Zen factoid: Hitler could not, as a Yoot, contemplate anything more sublime than shooting 'Red Indians' with a Revolver. The Myth of the American West was bigger in Germany at the time of ... say ... Anita Berber's Funeral in 1928 - than it was in Amerika. Hitler's favorite author was the German Karl May whose stories featured a transplanted German living in the old Amerikan West called "Old Shatterhand." He earned that Tag thru his ability to kill Injuns and Outlaws with one punch. Bam! You're dead. He had a Faithful Indian Companion named Winnetou who must have had self-esteem issues because he was excellent at helping Old Shatterhand kill hundreds of Indians. Smith & Wesson .22 Caliber # 709 was shipped to Paris, France in March of 1903. Hitler took it as a war souvenir when he captured a group of Poilus - an action which earned him the Iron Cross. He called the pistol: Old Shatterhand because it was an Amerikan gun associated with the 'Winning of the West.' Amerika is where Technology Trumped Nature. Where Streetcars could Rule and Prowl the cities like Iron Jackals. Fascism was all about letting the Beast out of the Machine. 6-Shooters could wipe a whole tribe off the planet in the possession of a Mensch like Old Shatterhand and his Dog Winnetou. Little Adolf rocked himself to sleep in cold Austria by rubbing his single testicle and dreaming of the great pigeon shoot where he could pop people dead with a single bolt from his hand. He never forgave Geli for killing herself with his favorite pistol - at least that's the way he told the story to Speer and Himmler. Speer thought the death of Hitler's niece was Tragic. Himmler thought it was Convenient. He made a note to himself in his signature green ink: scour the data field for tags on Geli and organize the results in a secret folder. He knew to whom to give the Mission. One of his 12 Knights of the Round Table at Wewelsburg - Himmler didn't give a shit what the man's real name was - he had been brilliant at finding Hidden things - It was almost as if Murmur had his own Intel Service. The man was a lugubrious sort, thought the Reichsführer, but he was tall enough for the SS and evenly muscled. He stood broad shouldered and Himmler liked that in an SS Warrior-Theologian. Still there were those rumors of Murmur with the Whore Anita Berber - but there was no direct evidence, so all he had to go on was Inference and the kind of cosmos that created.
Roll over Karl May's book to the left and discover the dirty little secret about Amerikan Creativity. That's right - the Lone Ranger and Tonto were ripped off from the German's Books and not the other way around. The Nazis loved the Stories of White Men dealing with the Mud Races in a firm, resolute, and Final Solution. It has long been pointed out that the best example in History of Genocide happened in 19th Century Amerika, not 20th Century Germany. Old Shatterhand made killing the Organic a Master Plan.
The Uroborus is an Emblem of Time when Time is still in a Circle and Nature Repeats Itself. It is Nature Asleep in Nature. Innocence. Eden. Man and God and Nature are still One.
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