Idea Fix - The Blog

Looking around at our culture, the McLuhanean media environment of the 21st century, I can’t help but find it monstrous. I am jaded and normally don’t give a fuck “bring it on… the horror, the horror” but sometimes late at night it hits me, it gets me, it terrifies me.

Like the ad below for The Joker and Heath Ledger…”Not all jokes are funny”. It seems to carry an awful prophetic air. I hate mainstream advertising and it gets more insidious and more intrusive as life goes on. We all accept it as part of our mental environment but I fucking hate it. I hate with the kind of passion one hated things two thousand years ago.

I read somewhere they are inventing a technology that will enable advertisers to use our skulls as speakers for ads that only the owner of the skull will hear. Mad voices advertising products exclusively in our skulls…we are isolated in some Ad mans Dantean ring of hell. The story about this technology was presented as the latest hippest marketing tool. It is a monstrosity. When DID OUR HEADS BECOME THE PROPERTY OF THESE VAMPIRES?

But really, don’t our heads already belong to these vampires? …As long as I have lived some fucker has tried to sell me something. George Lucas colonized my childhood unconscious with dreams for his toys. I would dream and long for the latest action figures or space ship. What kind of vile pornographer does such a thing. And I like Star Wars…still do. Could I do otherwise?
I have been sold feces. You know what? I have bought it too. I have become monstrous. Our society is now so deracinated we don’t even know where to begin to look for answers. Sometimes in these billboards and ads the monstrosity is laid bare like augury.

Ads flogging some piece of shit camera present us with mutant one eyed beings plastered all over the city like some warning of some yet implemented eugenic experiment. Ads that threaten us with every form of roadside death, cancer or work place accident from activities we are fully aware are dangerous already. Hollywood for the 77th time giving us endless images of Apocalypse or a destroyed New York… a blueprint for some future terrorist attack planned jointly by Al Qaida, the CIA and Hollywood pitched first to us as an audience marketing exercise. Ads for rappers that turn everything that was once good about rap into a vast mockery of itself through vistas of overt endless expenditure and bling… belying an overcompensation for fear of poverty. Ads that present impossibly achievable physiques with air brushed faces like images of some future race of clones. That’s only the ones I can remember while writing this… the rest are monstrously buried inside.

Who will save us from this mental violence? What cleansing fire shall sweep away this thicket of the waste land? What bird will be able to soar above this omnipresent crepulence? For what is to come… how can anyone expect different?

Is a sacred Tibetan mountain holy to four major religions Hiduism, Bubbhism, Janism and the Bon faith. In the Hindu religion it is considered the home of Lord Shiva. It is featured in the Werner Herzog documentary The Wheel of Time (well worthing seeing, out locally) and documents amongst other things the pilgrims who travel around the mountain in reverence. Some make the journey laying down on their belly’s and then standing up moving forward to their head and then laying down again. Only the most devoted acolytes do this obviously. Kailash is in a remote part of Tibet that takes numerous days to get to along dangerous paths and you need to pack your own supplies. It has been considered off limits to mountain climbers and is one of the few peaks in the world where man’s fetid foot print has not stepped. It is was also featured on the cover the excellent Throbbing Gristle CD “Part 2: The Endless Not”.

There is something interesting about this mountain to me.

Cool new book about Heidegger’s Hut at Todtnauberg by Anthony Sharr. Heidegger wrote Being and Time and many other major works here. Full of interesting pictures of the hut and the famous well… as well as maps and designs for the Hut’s layout itself. A must for Heidegger groupie’s like myself. I will have to tell you about my failed mission to Todtnauberg in the German winter of 2004 sometime. Basically, the hut was too far away from the town for me to walk in winter. I considered it by luckily Kristen talked me out of it. But I did see the ski village, hills and valleys close by to get a feel for their Being.

Here is a link to description of the book at MIT:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10948