The actor told a forum on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, whose attendees included Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, he was not sure “freedom” was necessary.

Chan, 55, whose latest movie, Shinjuku incident, was banned in China, was asked about censorship and restriction on the mainland. He expanded his comments to discuss Chinese society in general.

“I’m not sure if it is good to have freedom or not,” he said. “I’m really confused now. If you are too free, you are like the way Hong Kong is now. It’s very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic.”

He added: “I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we are not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want.”

His comments were applauded by the Chinese audience, but triggered fury in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Telegraph: Jackie Chan says Chinese people need to be ‘controlled’

Update: Chan’s comments may have been intentionally or unintentionally mistranslated.

“Over the recent Christmas season, my 21-year-old deejay nephew flipped through the large collection of vinyl LPs from the sixties, seventies, and eighties now shelved in our basement. Many is the time when I have privately cursed that collection, hauling heavy boxes of vinyl up and down steep flights of stairs on moving days. But my husband steadfastly refused to sell or pitch out anything—from the Dukes of Stratosphear to the Stranglers—and now I’m rather glad that he did. We now have a miniature museum of sound from the sixties, seventies, and eighties, complete with original shrink wraps and a few Andy Warhol covers.

But what will future generations – particularly future archaeologists—make of the hundreds of thousands of tons of vinyl recordings that our civilization pressed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? I expect most of you have seen that clever Pepsi commercial set in the future, where a middle-aged archaeologist leads his Pepsi-drinking students through a split level ranch house as if it were a Roman villa, and is unable to identify a dusty glass bottle of Coca-Cola. What will future researchers make of our record collections?”

(via Archaeology Magazine)

(Related: “Digital Needle- A Virtual Gramophone” by Ofer Springer)

“The Nigerian witchfinder who featured so prominently in the documentary on witch children has spoken about the situation and she comes out of her corner fighting. It is a long (and self-serving) interview but here are some highlights:

Helen Ukpabio is the founder of Liberty Gospel Church. She is noted for her preaching which focuses on delivering people from witchcraft, but ever since the documentary on how children branded witches by pastors in Akwa Ibom are maltreated, the evangelist has been at the centre of the storm following allegation that her movies encourage the stigmatisation of witches.

Ukpabio: End of the Wicked came out in 1999. It is surprising that nine years after, somebody is having a problem with a film that has delivered a lot of families. The story line of End of the Wicked has nothing to do with children. The film simply says if a child is greedy – the type that says give me this, give me that, give me puff-puff, akara or sweet in school, he or she could be easily contaminated with witchcraft. So, saying that the film branded children witches, I didn’t see the people that the film branded witches. Rather, we saw children who were greedy and were contaminated by other children who were witches in the school. That is what the film did. It is worrisome that people can be carried away just because of one wizard. Itauma is a wizard and is trying to preserve the posterity of witches, such that in the near future, Akwa Ibom will become useless.
So, if he says that the film branded children witches, I don’t know about that. Is it people that the film branded witches that are in his orphanage that has suddenly turned into home for witchcraft children? He has been running that thing as orphanage but suddenly, because the United Kingdom government voted so much money to fight child abuse over the problem that the Congolese government had with children, he decided to tap into it.”

(via Damn Data:Cabinet of Wonders)

(Related: Stepping Stones Nigeria)

“The city has always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 18th-century coffeehouses of London, where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and radical politics, to the Left Bank bars of modern Paris, where Pablo Picasso held forth on modern art. Without the metropolis, we might not have had the great art of Shakespeare or James Joyce; even Einstein was inspired by commuter trains.

And yet, city life isn’t easy. The same London cafes that stimulated Ben Franklin also helped spread cholera; Picasso eventually bought an estate in quiet Provence. While the modern city might be a haven for playwrights, poets, and physicists, it’s also a deeply unnatural and overwhelming place.

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so. “The mind is a limited machine,”says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. “And we’re beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.”

(via Boston.com)

“In many South American countries, it has become a tradition to burn human shaped representations of the previous year, as a way to get rid of everything bad that the year brought, and leave way for the new. The following videos show some of these traditions and some of the controversy soome of them have sparked. The image above is from cirofono and represents Venezuela’s President, Hugo Chávez. The image is used according to Creative Commons Attribution License. In Guatemala, the burning takes place in December, on the 7th, the day when they state that the virgin defeated the devil. What they do is burn everything old, broken and useless in their houses, since they believe that the devil hides in those objects throughout the year, and on that day, when he is the weakest, they can cast him out of the houses. Many others, however, purchase piñatas or effigies of the devil to burn, to keep the tradition.”

(via Global Voices Online)

(Related: “Pagan Party: New Year’s Traditions That Hail From The Depths Of Antiquity” via The Vancouver Sun)

In my opinion, we’re all unique individuals with different levels of sexual desire. If one is genuinely happy being (what “society” and the MSM considers) “undersexed” or “oversexed”, how the hell can someone else have the gall to label it as a “dysfunction”? “Really, WTF is “normal”?!

“I’ve seen this story all over the blogs—according to ACOG, 44% of women suffer from sexual dysfunction, usually low desire.  But only 12% said it bothered them.  Which makes a reasonable person wonder if, in a world where we respected women’s opinion of themselves as we respect men’s opinion, we wouldn’t be showing that only 12% of women have sexual problems.  In fact, it seems that the researchers themselves are open about how we frame the expectations put on women in terms of what men want.

In an editorial accompanying the published study, Dr. Ingrid Nygaard, a urogynecologist and professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine, told the story of a female patient “who, not bothered herself by her lack of interest but very bothered by her husband’s distress at her lack of interest, asked, “‘Why am I the abnormal one?’”

“What I see on a near daily basis are women of all ages who feel that because their sex drive is less than their partners’, they are inadequate and in the wrong,” Nygaard said in an interview.

It flips the other way, too.  If you’re a woman whose sex drive outstrips her male partner, you are also made to feel like a freak. Having been in that position in my life, I can remember swinging between feeling hideously ugly and freakish, because we’re just so used to defining “normal” as male.  Luckily, we’ve gotten past thinking of women with high sex drives as dysfunctional, probably under an onslaught of porn that portrays women as insatiable.  But does that mean that there are lots of women out there who are happy with a lot less, but who are being classified as dysfunctional?”

(via Pendagon. Thanks SP!)

“In a city launched by shotgun weddings and quickie divorces, which offers the chance to be wed by faux Liberaces, King Tuts and Grim Reapers, there remains at least one nuptial taboo: you can’t be married by an atheist. Michael Jacobson, a 64-year-old retiree who calls himself a lifelong atheist, tried this year to get a license to perform weddings. Clark County rejected his application because he had no ties to a congregation, as state law requires. So Jacobson and attorneys from two national secular groups — the American Humanist Association and the Center for Inquiry — are trying to change things. If they can’t persuade the state Legislature to rework the law, they plan to sue.

Jacobson, who spends most afternoons reading online or dining at a nearby buffet, is an admittedly reluctant plaintiff. But he’s willing to fight on principle, recalling one time he couldn’t: In the 1960s, the Army demanded that his dogtags note his religion. He reluctantly chose Judaism, which reflected his ancestry if not his beliefs.

“One of the things I like to do is stand up and say I’m a non-believer, so you know you’re not alone,” he said recently. For years Mel Lipman, a friend of Jacobson’s and the American Humanist Association president, had presided over non-religious weddings in Las Vegas. But he belonged to the Humanist Society, a secular branch of the Humanist Association whose tax status as a religious group satisfied the clerk’s requirements.
When Lipman and his wife moved to Florida this spring, Jacobson decided to become the Las Vegas atheist celebrant. “But I’m not going to do it by saying I belong to a religious organization,” he said. “That’s a sham because atheists are not religious.”

(via The Chicago Tribune)

Stepping Stones Nigeria is a legitimate charity registered in the UK who help abandoned and abused children unjustly accused of being “witches and wizards”. Even if you’re unable to help financially, please sign the petitions below and spread the word on your blogs and/or send emails to your friends. It is truly shocking and unbelievable that this kind of abuse is still going on in the 21st century.

“Stepping Stones Nigeria works in partnership with local organisations in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria to build sustainable futures for some of the region’s many disadvantaged children. Our approach focuses on four main areas:

Street Children: Working with the Child Rights and Rehabilitation Network (CRARN) and our sister NGO - Stepping Stones Nigeria Child Empowerment Foundation (SSNCEF) to protect, save and transform the lives of children who have been stigmatised as being ‘witches’.

Education: Supporting the Stepping Stones Model School and the Bebor International Model School to provide an outstanding level of education to orphans and disadvantaged children.

Literacy: Training and resourcing primary school teachers in the use of synthetic phonics to significantly raise literacy levels.

Advocacy and Campaigning: Advocating for child rights at a local, regional, national and international level through our Prevent Abandonment of Children Today (PACT) campaign.

Our work focuses on some of the most challenging issues that children face today such as:

* Lack of access to good quality education and resources

* Stigmatisation, abandonment and killings of so-called child ‘witches’

* Child Trafficking

SSN supports our partners to provide welfare, education, skills and hope to disadvantaged children. We believe that access to an education is every child’s right and that this is the key that will unlock Nigeria’s potential. SSN also believes that every child has the right to be protected from violence, trafficking, sexual exploitation, forced labour and deserves a standard of living that is good enough to meet their physical and mental needs. Our work helps to restore the health, happiness and self-dignity of each child, whilst repairing the physical and pyschological trauma inflicted that has so often been suffered by the hundreds of children that we work with.”

(Stepping Stones Nigeria. Thanks Kerry!)

(Petitions: “Help The Child Witches of Nigeria” and “Stop Liberty Foundation Gospel Ministries of Nigeria from Labeling Children as “Witches”)

(Video: “Saving Africa’s Witch Children”. Warning: This video is VERY disturbing.)

What is Rage Froobling? It seems to be an aggressive and competitive version of Parkour. Since it’s a fairly new thing, there’s not much available on the net about it. Parkour is a mind/body discipline with the objective of moving from point A to point B as efficiently and quickly as possible. It is frequently used in military training and is used as a means to overcome obstacles in an emergency.

“Parkour is a physical activity that is difficult to categorize. It is often mis-categorized as a sport or an extreme sport; however, parkour has no set of rules, team work, formal hierarchy, or competitiveness. It is an art or discipline that resembles self-defense in the ancient martial arts. According to David Belle, “the physical aspect of parkour is getting over all the obstacles in your path as you would in an emergency. You want to move in such a way, with any movement, as to help you gain the most ground on someone or something, whether escaping from it or chasing toward it.” Thus, when faced with a hostile confrontation with a person, one will be able to speak, fight, or flee. As martial arts are a form of training for the fight, parkour is a form of training for the flight. Because of its unique nature, it is often said that parkour is in its own category.

A characteristic of parkour is efficiency. Practitioners move not only as fast as they can, but also in the most direct and efficient way possible; a characteristic that distinguishes it from the similar practice of freerunning, which places more emphasis on freedom of movement, such as acrobatics. Efficiency also involves avoiding injuries, short and long-term, part of why parkour’s unofficial motto is être et durer (to be and to last). Those who are skilled at this activity normally have an extremely keen spatial awareness (a.k.a. air sense). Traceurs say that parkour also influences one’s thought process by enhancing self-confidence and critical-thinking skills that allow one to overcome everyday physical and mental obstacles. A study by Neuropsychiatrie de l’Enfance et de l’Adolescence in France reflects that traceurs seek for more sensation and leadership than gymnastic practitioners.”

(Rage Froobling. h/t: Live For The Outdoors)

(Related: Documentary on Parkour: “Jump Britain”. Philosophy and Parkour via Parkour North America.)

‘By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy - indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction’- William Osler (Canadian Physician, 1849-1919)

“It may well be that our means are fairly limited and our possibilities restricted when it comes to applying pressure on our government. But is this a reason to do nothing? Despair is nor an answer. Neither is resignation. Resignation only leads to indifference, which is not merely a sin but a punishment”- Elie Weisel

“Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all-the apathy of human beings.”- Helen Keller

“The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”- Plato

“The biggest conspiracy has always been the fact that there is no conspiracy. Nobody’s out to get you. Nobody gives a shit whether you live or die. There, you feel better now?” -Dennis Miller

“The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment”- Robert M. Huchins

“Is it ignorance or apathy? Hey, I don’t know and I don’t care”- Jimmy Buffet

(I originally wrote this to take a look at the apathy prevalent in our society today without intending to look at this as a ‘generational thing’ because it generalizes entire groups of unique individuals, but I discovered that in order to talk about the current situation it was necessary to go back in time and look at the sociological trends that got us here.)

Recently someone sent me a link to the famous article written by Tom Wolfe, ‘The �Me’ Decade and the Third Awakening’. When it first came out it in the mid-seventies it caused quite a stir. So much so that it became the label for an entire group of young people growing up at that time. ‘The Me Decade’ or ‘The Me Generation’ went on to become the ‘Baby Boomers’ new title. ‘See me, feel me, touch me, heal me.’ Analyze me, listen to me, and talk to me, me…me!! After reading through the article, it occurred to me that Voltaire was right. ‘Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose’. The more that things change, the more they stay the same.

Some friends and I were talking over dinner when their 20 year old son commented on the attitude of some of his generation. He said that his peers are (and I quote) ‘very spoiled, selfish, and unrealistic about work and life in general. They tend to be self-indulgent, messy, and wait for others to take care of things. Some want a good paying job without having to be too inventive or work too hard for it, and many are foolish about handling money. Immediate self-gratification is expected and pursued. There is a tendency to blame others for things and many have to be rescued from their own lack of experience or incompetence.’

The youth of ANY generation has some of these qualities, so what’s different?

Much of the ‘Me Generation’ were the product of hard working parents who grew up during the Great Depression, and who fought and lived through WWI and WWII. Scarcity was the norm, and family and community were of priority. The future rebels of the 60’s grew up hearing about war and the enormous struggle to make ends meet in the quest for the ‘American Dream’. The anti-war protests, civil rights movement, sexual liberation, and other movements of the 60’s and 70’s, were led by a youth whose idealism and vision led them to believe that united together they could ‘change the world’. In essence this was correct. Many things did change, and some issues we’re still fighting for today.

Continue reading

“As I searched Amazon.com for reading materials related to the fantastic to add to my wishlist the description of Monster Theory: Reading Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) struck me as intriguing: ‘Explores concepts of monstrosity in Western civilization from Beowulf to Jurassic Park.’We live in a time of monsters. Monsters provide a key to understanding the culture that spawned them. So argue the essays in this wide-ranging and fascinating collection that asks the question, What happens when critical theorists take the study of monsters seriously as a means of examining our culture?

‘In viewing the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body, the contributors to Monster Theory consider beasts, demons, freaks, and fiends as symbolic expressions of cultural unease that pervade a society and shape its collective behavior. Through a historical sampling of monsters, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies to our continued desire to explore difference and prohibition.’

Monster Theory is edited by Jeffrey J. Cohen who is associate professor of English and human sciences at George Washington University. Dr. Cohen agreed to discuss the collection of essays that make up this book, and in particular his contribution to the volume.”

(via TheoFantastique)

“Wired magazine’s own ‘Senior Maverick’ talks with Ken Wilber about some of the ideas behind Kevin’s blog The Technium, which explores the various ways humanity defines and redefines itself through the interface of science, technology, culture, and consciousness. Kevin also shares some of his own thoughts about the role of spirituality in the 21st century, going into considerable depth around his own spiritual awakening several decades ago.”

(via Integral Life. h/t: Integral Praxis)

(The Technium Blog)

“Kelly Sheckler is blond with a heart-shaped face and a warm smile. Five feet tall on a good day, she’s mother to three children, wife to Tom, employee of the Environmental Protection Agency, keeper of a tidy home in Lawrenceville. But when she crosses a stage at the downtown Sheraton Sunday, she will be something else altogether: KhaZelia VanGough — warrior, leader and Miss Klingon Empire 2008 hopeful.

Miss Klingon Empire is an annual pageant at DragonCon, the sci-fi/fantasy geek gathering that descends upon Atlanta every year to pay homage to Superman, Storm Troopers and Star Fleet, among others. To win Miss Klingon Empire, a contestant need not have the best costume or the prettiest (ugliest?) face. Simply, she must embody a Klingon, a fictitious alien race famous for its ridged forehead and brutal manner that debuted in the original ‘Star Trek’ TV series and has been a part of the ‘Trek’ franchise ever since.

Contestants don’t catfight — female sci-fi lovers tend to stick together — but they don’t play around, either. Thousands of audience members won’t let them. When a past contestant appeared on stage in a Hooters uniform, the audience was at first entertained but quickly dismissed her, judges recalled. Klingon women may be known for ample bosoms, but they’d never show them that way. And once the queen is awarded her crown, trophy, sash and flowers, judges name no first or second runner-up. In the Klingon world, there are only winners and losers.”

(via ajc.com)

(Related: “Klingon Like Me” via Techgnosis)

“Australian-born adventure writer Paul Raffaele doesn’t let a little danger stand in the way of a good story. In the course of his career, he has reported on modern-day slavery, dived with great white sharks and accompanied Afghan police into illegal poppy fields.

Now, in his weirdly compelling book, “Among the Cannibals: Adventures on the Trail of Man’s Darkest Ritual,” Raffaele, 64, who writes for Smithsonian magazine, intrepidly makes contact with 21st-century man-eaters. The author, who is recuperating from shrapnel wounds suffered on assignment during a suicide bombing attack in Afghanistan, spoke to me by telephone from his hotel in New York.

Schatz: Why do the Korawai in Papua New Guinea practice cannibalism?

Raffaele: They do not see it as they are eating human beings. I see it as a Stone-Age rationalization of disease that kills you, and you don’t really know why…. What they’ve come up with is this monster from the other world called a khakhua. He comes into the clan, and he inhabits the body of someone they know. And then begins to magically eat the insides of another clan member who eventually dies. And when he dies, the Korawai have to find the khakhua who killed him, so they search about and eventually come up with the khakhua and kill that person and eat that person. They have to get revenge against the khakhua.”

(via Bloomberg.com)

(Related: documentary on the Aghori sect in India-“Sadhus: India’s Holy Men” and “Cannibalism May Have Wiped Out Neanderthals”)

‘I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins. I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading pages someone long gone has called my attention to.’ So wrote Helene Hanff, author of 84 Charing Cross Road, the definitive novel about the lure and grip of used books. Hanff knew the power of the musty book smell, the red-pen underlines, the bent-down pages that meant someone, somewhere marked that spot as the phone rang, the baby cried, or the clock ticked well past bedtime.

The secondhand book is more than merely a bargain for the book lover. It’s a cross-cultural, inter-generational link between readers. A torch-race, of sorts, with batons passed in all directions, from the collector to the student, the casual reader to the obsessive.

[..] In this PopMatters special feature section, eight writers-each their own unique breed of book-lover-step inside the world of secondhand books and demonstrate the diversity of the experiences it contains. Kirby Fields describes the small town store that went from temporary linger-spot to provider of his childhood education. Erika Nanes explains the careful process of date selection based on a man’s handling of his used texts. Diane Leach praises those flyleaf inscriptions, Deanne Sole dissects the world of the St. Vincent de Paul charity store, Justin Dimos reveres the famed Caveat Emptor, while Rob Horning, David Pullar, and Ian Mathers take business-like approaches to the subject, breaking down the secondhand bookstore’s fiscal concerns (among other things).”

(via Pop Matters)

“The Religion and Popular Culture group on Yahoo! recently issued the following call for papers: Call for Papers: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays on the Zombie.

We are seeking proposals for an interdisciplinary edited volume discussing the zombie from a wide variety of perspectives and within a wide range of contexts. We encourage submissions from any discipline, including but not limited to English literature, film studies, media studies, cultural studies, gender studies, queer studies, philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, history, psychology, economics, and political science. We especially welcome new approaches to the study of zombies. In addition to theoretical essays on zombies, we also welcome critical discussions of specific zombie films, novels, and graphic novels, including those both pre- and post-Romero.”

(via TheoFantastique)

This is kinda weird:

They are the amazing pictures that were beamed around the globe: a handful of warriors from an ‘undiscovered tribe’ in the rainforest on the Brazilian-Peruvian border brandishing bows and arrows at the aircraft that photographed them.

Or so the story was told and sold. But it has now emerged that, far from being unknown, the tribe’s existence has been noted since 1910 and the mission to photograph them was undertaken in order to prove that ‘uncontacted’ tribes still existed in an area endangered by the menace of the logging industry.

Full Story: Guardian Observer

I just re-read the original story from the Daily Mail, and I don’t see any mention of the idea that this was a previously unknown tribe, merely uncontacted. In fact, it’s noted in the article that this was just one of about 100 uncontacted tribes in the world. I also looked at the Survival International site when the story broke and didn’t get the idea from that site that this tribe was a new discovery. So if they were trying to mislead me, they failed. It sounds more like a lot of people have poor reading comprehension skills rather than deception on the part of Survival International.

Update: Ross at Ectoplasmosis has pretty much the same reaction I do

Skin painted bright red, heads partially shaved, arrows drawn back in the longbows and aimed square at the aircraft buzzing overhead. The gesture is unmistakable: Stay Away.

Behind the two men stands another figure, possibly a woman, her stance also seemingly defiant. Her skin painted dark, nearly black.

The apparent aggression shown by these people is quite understandable. For they are members of one of Earth’s last uncontacted tribes, who live in the Envira region in the thick rainforest along the Brazilian-Peruvian frontier.

Thought never to have had any contact with the outside world, everything about these people is, and hopefully will remain, a mystery.

Full Story: Daily Mail

(via Dedroidify)

This is too cool not to share. From Dutch designer Tim Smit, made of stylish neoprene and strategically lined with body molded kevlar, this runway show stopper will be the must have accessory for your next war, skirmish, struggle, conflict, combat zone or civil strife you find yourself in or starting. Aeon Flux eat your heart out.

More pics via Yanko Design.

This really piqued my interest.

Having spent the past few days reading drafts of the forthcoming book The Art of Memetics, by Edward Wilson & Wes Unruh, my spirit was elated this evening to come across this ad campaign for Pangea Day, 10 May. a) The Art of Memetics is a truly phenomenal treatment of how memes act to infect and how we can use this to personal advantage to survive and become strengthened in the coming Information Age. b) These videos are such a great idea: we’re so accustomed to hearing our national anthem sung by ourselves, it’s like the little voices in our heads. To have a nation we’re generally ignorant of or have little dealings with take it upon themselves to treat the anthem with such care and heart, makes for a poignant campaign in our coming post-national world.

I find that people tend to jump at the notion that memetics and marketing can be used for good. And I’d like to thank Edward Wilson & Wes Unruh, and the Pangea Day folk, and everyone else out there who understand that as long as everyone is educated, no one can well turn it against another. We can use these technologies and wisdoms to work for a better future.

Above is France sings America. And I’m not pointing fingers at anyone, but as a Canadian (anglais & français, as well as a whole swath of Asian and Middle Eastern dialects), I’ve always found it odd that the Americans would so inappropriately stereotype and ridicule the nation that gave America one of their greatest symbolic gifts: the Statue of Liberty. Regardless, it’s a beautiful sentiment.

See the other three and others on YouTube. I really like Japan sings Turkey and Kenya sings India.

“I am deep in the Amazon rainforest, anxiously losing my mind as the world begins to disintegrate. Around me, all sense of distance is wrapping itself up like spatial origami, slowly shrinking until an entire dimension has disappeared. A moment ago, I was surrounded by 200 people dressed in white and singing like angels, but now they occupy the same space as me… if that makes any sense.

Wherever I look, that is where I am. I can see everything from every angle, all at the same time. In fact, I feel I am everywhere. Outside, in the forest, the thrum of frogs and cicadas drowns out the sound of shrieking monkeys. Below me, the floor is shimmering, vanishing in waves like a spent mirage. Behind, I feel a cold vibration on my neck and sense a growling malevolence. I turn and see a red door, bulging at the hinges. Overcome with dread, I push hard to keep it closed, and all the while I feel a horrible nausea.

When will this end, I am thinking. And, with sweat running down my forehead, how can I survive it? Welcome to the Church of Santo Daime, one of the fastest growing religions in the world. Its mixture of Christianity, South American shamanism and African animism is proving irresistible to thousands of new believers across the globe. But it is its central sacrament, ayahuasca, a powerful hallucinogenic brew made from rainforest plants - a brew that I have just drunk - that makes the Church so appealing to some yet so controversial to others.”

(via the Times Online)

(Santo Daime site)

“This is a transcript of a small discussion with botanist-poet Dale Pendell, a long-time practitioner of Zen Buddhism and the occult, a student of the legendary intellectual Norman O. Brown, and-as they say-a graduate of Dr. Hofmann. It took place at the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland, on 23rd March 2008 (read my review). A small group of people who’d just attended Dale’s talk on Zen and psychedelics gathered round a table in the busy foyer, and Dale created a focused bubble of attentiveness with his measured, colourful discourse.

[Question about who taught DP about the occult in Los Angeles.]

Dale Pendell: His name’s not really important. He kind of hid his traces, because he insisted on being without credentials. Anytime I would look for credentials, like, ‘Where did you get your Zen training, Carl?’ ‘Why do you ask? Is that gonna make you believe something I say?’ So he would never tell me. But he had a personal teacher. What he taught was the importance of a personal teacher. His personal teacher was a woman named Mary. And that’s as far back as I know the transmission. But I get a sense of high knowledge being passed on that way: through personal relationships, with some occult structure overt.

I don’t know, he was able to walk in and out of Zen temples like he belonged there. He was an artist, and sat with Suzuki, Roshi in San Francisco, and they palled around like old friends. When Trungpa came to town, they palled around like old friends-he was his driver for a while. Every place he went, he liberated people; he gave people permission. He constantly violated expected behaviour, and laughed a lot. I still consider him my true teacher. I would like to be able to give people permission the way he did.

So, I can’t speak for any occult tradition. I just know there are transmissions of higher knowledge.”

(via Dreamflesh)

“The goat tethered to a tree outside Max Beauvoir’s home is doomed. Mr. Beauvoir, tall and majestic with closely cropped white hair, is a voodoo priest who was just named the religion’s supreme master, a newly created position that is aimed at reviving voodoo.

His grand residence on the outskirts of the Haitian capital serves as a temple for voodoo practitioners and a late-night hangout for those paying customers eager to take in an exotic evening of spiritual awakening. The temple, the P�ristyle de Mariani, is where Mr. Beauvoir and his followers dance around a giant totem to the beat of drums. It is where they light bonfires to summon the spirits. And it is where they drain the blood of animals like that scrawny white goat to, among other things, heal the sick.

On a recent night, Haiti’s voodooists convened for a special ceremony. With music blaring and devotees dancing with all their might, two children threw white rose petals on a red carpet. Then along came Mr. Beauvoir.”

(via The New York Times)

“Heavy metal is the ideal soundtrack to the bloody conflict raging in Baghdad right now. The city boasts a macho crowd-guns for hire, thrill-seeking journalists, war profiteers, kamikaze insurgents-and metal holds machismo in very high regard. Of course, Acrassicauda, the band at the center of the documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad, which opens the New York Underground Film Festival April 2 (a DVD release comes later this year), was not born of war-torn, modern-day Iraq, but rather a much less openly violent society.

Baghdad’s metal scene grew from a small community of teenagers with a shared love of American music-many of the most accomplished and well-known Iraqi groups got their start covering Metallica and Ozzy Osbourne. In the late 1980s, bands like Scarecrew performed regularly to sold-out crowds of headbangers and moshers, albeit in small halls and with almost no commercial backing. By the late ’90s, the scene had cooled slightly, though a few bands, like Converse and Passage, still played regularly for packs of fans numbering in the low hundreds.”

(via The Village Voice)

(“Heavy Metal in Baghdad” site)