EarthlingZ Weblog: March 2005

Best Crop Circles of 2004

An updated map on the EarthlingZ site to photos by Lucy Pringle of the best crop circles of last year:

The Self as Metaprogrammer

"The human mind wears its belief systems as armor and the techniques of shamanism are ways of breaking through that armor by eroding the fundamental expectations of reality as defined by our beliefs."

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Sakura in Ueno

Cherry Blossoms in 1875 were much the same...

Public Gardens at Uyeno - Tokiyo
albumen print with applied color
"Photographic Views and Costumes of Japan."
Yokohama: F. Beato & Co., ca. 1875

Burning Man Photo Gallery

A gallery of Burning Man Photos, 1996-2004

30m. Freeform Ice Sculpture

The Story

Olympic Mountain Valley

Olympic Mountains, Washington State
photo by Sam Abel
click on image for full size

Musician can 'taste music'

"...A tone interval of a minor second induces sourness, while a major second leaves a bitter taste.

A minor third is salty, while a major third is sweet.

Other tastes, according to the tone, are of "pure water," cream (either full or low-fat, depending on the note), "disgust" and also of mown grass."...."

NEWS.com.au

We Are Zogg

Resistance is futile

Rock Balancing Photo Gallery

Rock on wave rock

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Sacred Earth Dance DVD

Sacred Earth Dance DVD
by Mishaal

Seeds for this project started growing in 1991, when our dear friend Xiaomin (artist and Qigong master), first filmed GoRo and me playing music and dancing in the caves and forested hills of Ohio. In 1997 we filmed again while traveling in Capadocia, Turkey. The results of this footage lead to our idea for the Sacred Earth DVD project.

Sacred Earth DVD is a collection of short film clips, filmed in nature and at ancient sacred sites: the Pyramids in Giza, Egypt; the enchanted caves and temple ruins of Capadocia,Turkey; the great Thar desert of Rajasthan, India; and at dawn on Makena Beach, Maui, Hawaii.

More than a performance film, it's actually a sharing of my dance as a moving meditation, a prayer and an offering: my way of centering and connecting with the spirit of the earth, eternal wisdom, and it's how I receive my inspiration and vision.

Extra scenes included on the DVD were filmed in a wide variety of settings, from Istanbul and Tokyo to the desert of Rajasthan under a full moon. There is also a special bonus mix by visual artist extraordinare Shinya (Aura).

Goro did an amazing job editing the footage and creating and arranging the music (ambient oriental style). Also incuded is live music by Sirocco (CA) in Maui, and in India by Gaffor Kahn and with Talib Barna, who was the little boy singing in the first scene of 'Latcho Drom' some 15 years ago (my all-time favorite film of the journey of the Gypsies), as well as live music in Istanbul, and by Sevda (Madoka, GoRo, and Hataken) in Tokyo .

In addition to screening the Sacred Earth DVD, we will also share for the first time in public those early videos from '91 and '97. The first is sure to bring a smile to those who know us (my how we've grown!)

Hayat çok güzel

Mishaal

Inside the dance

"'Our premise was to show how dance and music can heal and bring a community together.'"

Inside the dance

Dances of Ecstasy

Dances of Ecstasy:
"Well the film is about how different cultures all over the world connect with a divine power through dance and rhythm. And I was very inspired by in contemporary culture I think, the growth of dance in for example, the raves, where young people dance all night and I was just interested to explore how people have been working with trance for many, many years in traditional cultures, and was there a link between the two?"

THOREAU, WALKING (Art and Legal Ambiguity)

Art and Legal Ambiguity: "In one of Henry David Thoreau's last essays,'Walking,' he makes a plea for 'absolute freedom and wildness in our lives -- in contrast to the merely civil --because man is an inhabitant and part and parcel of Nature rather than a member of society.' The height of this freedom he suggests is Walking -- or, as he prefers to call it, sauntering -- off the beaten path. A true Walker, he feels, is willing to get lost in the woods and that society is made from two or more of these Walkers connecting and forming a network rather than by laws made through legislation or dictated by religion from above.

Things have changed. Not only is it increasingly more difficult to find the offramp from that beaten path but the means of connection have increased dramatically in ways that Thoreau wouldn't recognize. But his basic premise is still valuable. We create society (and culture) through confrontation with each other and joining either in combat or in collaboration. Just like the internet could be said to only exist when two computers connect we are a society only in relation to each other. You might say that Thoreau lived by himself in the cabin at Walden Pond in order to find the 'source code' for society."

FULL MONTY:

The tribal '80s - Critical Essay

EXCERPTS FROM:

Blood of the poets: the tribal '80s - Critical Essay
Tom Holert

.....In his 1992 essay "Notes on the New Tribalism," communitarian philosopher Michael Walzer discussed the return of the tribes on a global scale and the problems of the intellectual and political left in comprehending the logic of "tribes" rather than "classes." Tribalism, in this perspective, concerned the integration of individuals through shared tradition and culture, a guarding against the "fragmentation" of Western liberal society and the promise afforded by a community of values that countered the self-centered modes of individualism.

At the same time, looking back on the '80s and forward into the '90s, another philosopher, Zygmunt Bauman, claimed that postmodernity, as the age of "contingency," is also the era of neotribalism and community, since contingency needs friendship as an alternative to madness. The "neo" here points to the difference between traditional practices of community (as corporations with strict regulations of inclusion and exclusion, where membership is seldom a question of individual choice) and the whole of individual acts of self-identification that result in the "tribes" of the present-tribes that tend to be "concepts" rather than "integrated social bodies."....
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....To an apocalyptic structuralist like Jean Baudrillard, however, such primitivism figured as the symptom of the "end of the social," the end of any "normal" sort of relationship. In the New York of 1984 the French po-mo flaneur saw "only tribes, gangs, mafia families, secret societies, and perverse communities." Only such neoprimitivist, postsocial entities had any chance of surviving "the whirl of the city"; traditional communal models (like the heterosexual couple) were on their way into the dustbin of history. ...

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.... At the end of the decade, it was once again nece ssary to realize that the production of art is inseparable from considerations of where one belongs (or is thought of as belonging); every individual is a member of a plurality of families, biological and extended, so it becomes crucial to politicize the question of which are open, which closed. Not to mention what these questions might have to do with the way art is produced, displayed, communicated, received, and used.....