Walter Logeman: Journal
Pacifica Graduate Institute | Campbell & Gimbutas Library by Richard Buchen
Lucas had read The Hero with a Thousand Faces while working on the script of the first of the Star Wars movies, and had gone on to read the Masks of God and other writings. When Star Wars debuted in 1977, it followed the Hero very closely. Lucas said at an award ceremony in 1985, “It is possible that if I hadn’t run across him I’d still be writing Star Wars today.”
Hillman: Well, some reviewers has a scientistic ax to grind. To them, my book had to be either science or new age mush. It’s very hard in our adversarial society to find a third view. Take journalism, where everything is always presented as one person against another: “Now we’re going to hear the opposing view.” There is never a third view.
My book is about a third view. It says, yes, there’s genetics. Yes, there are chromosomes. Yes, there’s biology. Yes, there are environment, sociology, parenting, economics, class, and all of that. But there is something else, as well. So if you come at my book from the side of science, you see it as “new age.” If you come at the book from the side of the new age, you say it doesn’t go far enough — it’s too rational.
Another interview, this one by Scott London 1998.
This is a 1996 or so interview, very interesting in 2003!
So I see much more — I mean this sounds ridiculous for a Jungian psychologist to be talking this way — but I see the way of looking at a lot that goes on today — it would be good to put back on a pair of Marxist glasses.
Another reason for this is the Marxist idea that capitalism can only survive by its last phases, which is through war material. Producing. Having wars and producing useless goods, which are not good for the people. That’s what we’re doing. The biggest part of the budget is still the defense budget. We’ve got no enemies anywhere. And it’s still space shots. The spin-off of the trickle-down from them is so remote, but it keeps all the constituencies voting, because they’ve got a little piece of the defense industry, everywhere in the country. Look at that through Marxist glasses.
This was all said fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, the way we are — the way the country is functioning was predictable according to Marx’s view of capitalism.
affords being peed on
Wonderful, and I am thinking what else affords? Doorknobs afford being grasped. The mouse is more affording than the touchpad or the little keyboard thingy. The world speaks to us, some things ask to be touched, others scream to be put down, killed off. Tim Berners-Lee’s aim was right when he invented the http protocol because cyberspace was affording it. The roots of the word afford seem to lie in carrying forward, a sort of “aforward”. Some things are screaming out to be invented.
Poster Reason – Interview
Disney’s cartoon rodent speaks out on the Eldred decision. By Jesse Walker. Mickey manages to answer some questions just before “three Disney bounty hunters entered the bar and seized Mickey.”
I was taken by the moment in Peter Wollen’s Film Friendship’s Death, where the visitor, a robot speaks about being a machine. Yes the image below is the robot, superbly played by Tilda Swinton. It seems the 2002 Teknolust film continues a theme that began in 1987 – 15 years earlier – with this movie. We have had other moments of machines talking about what it is like to be a machine, this one must rank with Hal in 2001. I snapped the image off my TV and transcribed the dialogue from the video.
“What will happen when your machines have intelligence? When they become autonomous, when they have private thoughts?
“You humans look down on your machines because they are manmade, they are a product of your skills and labour. They were not even tamed or domesticated like animals were. You see them simply as extensions of yourself, of your own will. I can’t accept that!
“I cant accept sub-human status simply because I am a machine based on silicon rather than carbon, electronic rather than biological.”
While looking for images to put in my next post I found this… I’d like to see the movie, written and directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson (Not in Alice’s).
SIFF 2002– reel review: Review by Jennifer Albert:
Tilda Swinton stars in TEKNOLUST as Dr. Rosetta Stone, a biogeneticist who has lost her entire family to a mysterious disease and copes with her lonely life by infusing her DNA into her computer.
slant // magazine.com: Teknolust Review by Ed Gonzalez:
Hershman’s all-neon-like cyber-philosophy is not only muddled but it also sounds as if it was penned by Bj?rk herself (Ruby tells Rosetta via the cyber-geek’s microwave: “Feel my luminous halo. Think of me as part of your cyborgian spine.”).
Review for Teknolust (2002) by Harvey Karten (this is the a sympathetic and thorough review):
“Teknolust” is itself the creation of Lynn Hershman-Lesson, whose “Conceiving Ada” four years ago is a more complex fantasy contrasting the lives of a modern computer geek named Emmy with that of Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada the 19th century woman who developed the forerunning of today’s computer. Ada was played by the remarkable Tilda Swinton, a good choice not only for that pic but for computer-lover Lesson’s current project, in that along with her beauty comes the vague feeling that she is herself an alien.
Later:
There is more and more to explore about this movie:
Dan Epstein interviews Lynn Hershman-Leeson
www.teknolustthemovie.com
Palm Ruby
Conceiving Ada (1997): Tilda Swinton, Francesca Faridany, Karen Black, Lynn Hershmann-Leeson
Some thorough but easy to read entries, for example: Harriet Taylor Mill, I hope they keep up the work and complete what is started there.
This was the biggest march I have seen in Christchurch for a long time. The sense of unity and purpose was strong. There must have been 2000 people at any one time in the three hours I was involved, with people all ages. The clear message was NO WAR, and for NZ to be out of the Gulf. It was great to see such a broad range of participation – churches etc. and also Labour Party. The Labour Party had a speaker and he was applauded for his anti-war statements but the otherwise polite gathering had no time at all for his idea that the UN could sanction this war.
I found Green Party Keith Locke’s speech clear, forceful and uplifting. I had a sense that this war could be stopped.
Silicon Valley – Dan Gillmor’s eJournal
Dan Gillmor reports well on the sad loss of our heritage.
