I will put it to you simply: white human male monkeys are tuned to the color/glow of golden female flesh. It's in the Umbra of their Genes. It's not a Meme. When advertisers and hookers 'dress for the test,' they are going Semiotic and Signing Wildly! They know the response. That's a 'Fixed-Action-Pattern' in Etic-Speak. Sign - Stimulus - Response. Pavlovian Pap. I'll let Jimmy Watson and Barber Perfect argue about all the other colored monkeys and what shade turns them on - but for the pale-skinned monkeys of Northern Europa, hot female skin is a Hue which flips a switch. Spengler may have gotten off waxing about 'Studio Brown' as the color "which carries the battle of Space against Matter to a decisive close" - Atelierbraun, he wrote, was the color of the dispossessed soul - but in May in ADAM-Mokum Aleph - Amsterdam, it's always been the deep gold of the well-sunned young female which made the ecosystem hum. It's only a Sign of Reproductive-Health, the Etics yawn; all of what Monkeys call Beauty can be reduced to a short genetic-tract on survival. Everything which gets your dick up was Naturally Selected to get your dick up. You shouldn't be surprised. Every part of god, Spinoza knew, was only a Necessity.
We went to a bar called “In de Wildeman” on Kolksteeg. It sat at the end of a medieval alley and had been open since 1690. It had 150 different kinds of beers - 20 or so on tap - Pooler had been drinking beers and such at the Wildeman for a long, long time. The bar became the place where Pooler and I would meet. I was only in Amsterdam for two weeks - doing research at the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica - but Pooler was spending the entire spring in the Low Countries so when we met like this - which is often in our lives - we would most likely be staying in different hotels and accommodations. Kenny and his crew had a lot of places where they could stay in Europe. I usually settled on a small single room in a quiet hotel. Pooler took the 3 pictures (left) of the table where we sat daily and read Huzinga and Spengler while we sampled exotic beers. We met Barber Perfect in other bars and joints but the Wildeman became the place where Pooler and I met for breakfast and beers.
Click the button above 3 times to watch skippy swill & study. Click the button below once to start a Wildeman automatic slide show.
The Wildeman was a `bruine kroeg’ - a brown cafe. Men had been smoking in the Wildeman for over 300 years and there was a dull lacquer - a patina - over everything. It was a warm place in a cold country which sold beer and other spirits so it had acquired a kind of spiritual essence which the Dutch prize highly. It had `gezilligheid’ - a familiar coziness. The bar had two rooms. A large room with the main bar and all the taps and a smaller adjoining space which had been designated as a No Smoking area. It had a smaller bar and 4 small tables. Advertisements for ancient beers - old Eurotin signage - were nailed up all over the walls. The bar served a Ploughman’s lunch anytime. But the best part was that the bar was expensive. Rare beers cost more. So there were very few tourists and when they did come they didn’t stay long. So for two weeks Pooler and I would meet at the Wildeman in the little room and argue over Oswald Spengler or we would read and compare our two editions of Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages. Pooler had the book in its original Dutch:Herfsttij der middeleeuwen. We were playing translation games with the two editions because he had immediately leapt on the English title. “Autumn,” he said would be better than Waning. Fuck you, I said, but under my breath. Suddenly you could hear Merlin in the big room screaming. He too was a regular - Like Pooler and I, he came every day. He lived right up the alley in substantial digs. His name is Nicole Williamson and he is the British actor who played Merlin in the Arthurian movie Excalibur. He was screaming that he had to drop 12 kilos in a month and that he wanted and that he needed desperately “a river of money.” He’s also furious at someone’s government for extending the tax on private boats to include his. He swears he will scuttle his boat in Scapa Flow over the grave of the German Navy. Also: he does not like the way the young men stroke the asses of their young women as they stroll the Kolk. He told the bartender - who is the only person he speaks to - that there were two things he couldn’t get at home: Lobster Thermidor and a blowjob.
24¼ is a magic number. At least it’s iconic. It’s a number that looks like what it has to do. In this case it has to bend the lotus and merge. It was the middle of October and we had the shop back up and humming. The Captain was in & out, back & forth. If he didn’t already have a name we’d call him Necker Cube. It was the “old wound” with the Captain: it was groinal. So he went south a lot. Slag-the-Frabriker had salvaged a brake-wheel drum from one of his dead vehicles and the team had drilled holes in it and had fastened it down to the work-log so that we could use it as a fixture. We are too cool these days to call them Jigs. We have a goal this year: we want to build a colony of Ascenders. We are using as our prototype the tallest Ascender from last year’s Gabriel Mission. But this year we are making the Halos perfectly round. Slag and I cut 60” legs from ½” stock on his band saw while IwoJima worked with the Captain - or alone - at the HaloDrum. He learned to one-hand the Acetylene torch and bend steel with the other. He is our own Personal Thor. He’s our Vulcan. IwoJima is a Postpost God of the Forge. The Ascenders have a cross base which binds their legs together in a perfect square. From above you can see that we have squared the circle of the Halo. The alchemical cross-ties are 19¼” and are also cut from ½” stock. The Captain and Jim sparked up the Arc Welder and attached the ties 8” up from the bottom of each of the Ascender’s legs. They did good work & produced Flat-Table Halos which will present a large-size rock in very pleasing proportions. When finished the Ascender will stand 6½’ tall on a 22” square base. Very human proportions. Very Danse Macabre.
"Hope of another life"
Click each button once- above & below - one at a time to watch Iwojima and Skippy make Halos.
Barber Perfect thinks the 4th Reich will rise not from the ashes of the 3rd but from the 3rd or 4th generation of Semantic Webs which - like a Cybernetic Gestapo - prowl the WWW and arrest/modify/elaborate or delete Rogue Memes and track down their 'Saints.'
A Semantic Web is set of formats and languages, bots and agents, that find and analyze data on the World Wide Web. They operate 'above' the Web on a Meta-level and are equipped to 'reason' about the data which they apprehend. And then make decisions.
Right now Semantic Webs are being used to discover new drugs and then to personalize their use for a guy like the Captain, or Iwojima - guys with both genetic and experiential histories. A SW bot can find and parse your genealogy and then cross-reference that lineage with all "family" medical histories - turns out you got 32 micro-cousins over the past century with dilated cardiomyopathy and the bot figures there might be 4 or 5 genes with strong connections to a chromosomal region, and your genome shows similar "statistical" mutations . . . so maybe you shouldn't . . . and you can do all this at home, on your laptop, and fuck your HMO. A Semantic Web builds its chi by stacking 3 Meta Levels on top of the WWW. RDF Format assigns every piece of data on the Web - and all links which connect 2 pieces of data - a unique name called an URI (Universal Resource Identifier). Every Web Address - that is, every URL - are forms of URIs. So 2 pieces of data, and the info of their connectiveness, are grouped together into 'Triplets.' For example: "Barber Perfect is a Racist" is composed of 3 URIs. One for Barber - one for "is a" - and one for Racist. A concept like "is a" is so common a connector between other concept/memes that it has already been assigned it's own specific URI. As have 1000's of other Memetic-Connection-Concepts. It's this commonality which is slowly forming the Web's 1st Universal Language. Remember, every URI would automatically enjoy Universal Translation into any language which uses the same URI in its own native tongue for a specific concept. Given a generation or two to modify and grow and this feature alone will make the WWW Star Trek's Universal Translator device. The next level up - a Meta-level above URIs - is the Celestial Sphere of Ontology Languages. On this level Adam names everything. This is the level of semantic agreement that will make the activities of the URIs below 'meaningful.' On the Adam Level, terms and their relationships are agreed upon and made communal. The 1st Level of URIs is simple Abstraction - this is an URI and this is how it is connected. On the Second Level of Ontology Languages is Generalization - these URIs are leading me to believe . . . And on the 3rd Level the Devil gets paid for the Dance. . .
It was a beautiful Sunday Noon - my last Sunday in Amsterdam. Barber and Pooler and I are hungover and playing poker at Hooters. We're drinking short beers and nibbling on cashews and pickled eggs. Fucking Pooler is getting skinned and now he's prickly & pissed and accusing his 'brother' of cheating somehow. Barber showed up with his own deck and Pooler thinks it's too much of a coincidence - about the Barbed Wire - and he swears there is some arrangement/mutation sequence to the images on the cards. So he's confiscated the deck and has laid them out at random face down on the table so he can compare and contrast. Barber gloats. He has as much admitted that yes infuckingdeed he has marked the cards, but Pooler can't find the code and I'm too stoned to try. "It could be just a simple replacement cipher," Barber was goading now and had moved beyond the gloat. "Maybe," he offered, "it's not the pictures of all those little pieces of twisted wire." Here he paused and posed. "Maybe you have to ID them. Maybe you have to know all their names." Pooler said something sharp in a language which Skippy knew to be Occitan. Skippy doesn't speak it but he reasoned that a Bayesian logarithm applied to the tone, the context, and the long-term sitcheeashun, would yield: "Fuck you." Barber laughed and said something back in Old Prussian - or was it Latvian? Skippy studied the Barbed Wire designs on the cards for a long moment and then tapped one with a knuckle. "9 of Diamonds," he said. Pooler glanced at him from the corner of his eye. Barber Perfect gleamed. Skippy flipped the card over and there it was. Fuckin' Barber had added insult to injury - the face-cards were yuppie copies of a famous deck of Playing Cards which had been designed and created in France during the Restoration. The revolution had been spent; Napoleon was dead. The royals were back on the throne. Pooler had appreciated the irony of it all, but now that he had seen that Skippy had broken the code - he was positively foaming at the mouth. "Goddamn You Skippy!" I just chuckled at how much Pooler Jones sounded like Slag whenever Skippy would skip school and phone in well.
The left one goes to Spinoza. Ma'at, on the right will take you to the gods. Leibniz would see the Righteous Geometry in those choices. So would Dick Cheney. Skippy sees it all as the Inevitable Blowback from Ecological Constraints on Metaphor. He knows that all Cosmology is based on the Paradigmatic Structuring of Ecosystem Dynamics. So are all the forms of our Intelligences - but shit like this got Jimmy Watson fired, and Giordano Bruno burned at the stake. Ideas like these are a Solvent to Religion, as well as to the Popular Wisdom of the Monkey's Universal Equality. So maybe you should just go visit Persian Kitty's and jerk-off. In the end - they'll be less of a mess.
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