Cell Phone Addiction, not Belly Dancers, Will Ignite the Revolution

There is trouble afoot in the Meädow of the Töads. Firstly, there has been a counterrevolutionary coup led by a bourgeois ingrate, “King Töad!” Secondly, this “King Töad” has denigrated our fellow revolutionaries for having the temerity to passively view cultural appropriators masquerading as belly dancers. Well hashtag this, King Töad, you bourgeois bastard! The passive resistance is coming to end your White Russian style counterrevolution!

Friends and comrades: active participation is rubbish! Continue reading

Töads versus the Spectator Society: Lessons Learned at the Belly Dance Saloon

Our friend Chris de la Töad just had a birthday, and the Töad Code commands us to celebrate at times like this. Chris’s understanding wife volunteered to take care of their tadpole for the night, and thus our small group was free to go in search of live girls.

We found ourselves at Habibi of the Nile for Belly Dancing Night.

Belly dancing is the sexiest entertainment that you can talk about openly at family dinners or other family functions, like funerals. Belly dancing appeals to men and women of all ages. Anyone with a spark of life in them has no choice but to enjoy belly dancers.

Joie de belly dance…

Continue reading

A prayer for the Töads

Brothers and Sisters
Let us rejoice in the infinite wisdom of
Maynard James Keenan
and
Let Us Prey now
A prayer for the Töads
And for the health of the Meädow:
Withering our intuition
Missing opportunities and we must
Feed our will to feel the moments drawing way outside the lines.

Let us see there is so much more
and beckon us to look through to the infinite possibilities.

As below, so above and beyond
Let us imagine drawing outside the lines of reason.
 Let us push the envelope.  
Let us watch it bend.

Over thinking, over analyzing separates the body from the mind.
Withering our intuition leaving all these opportunities behind.

Feed our will to feel this moment urging us to cross the line.
Let us reach out to embrace the random.
Let us reach out to embrace whatever may come.

Let us embrace our desire to
feel the rhythm, to feel connected
enough to step aside and weep
to feel inspired, to fathom the power,
to witness the beauty, to bathe in the fountain,
to swing on the spiral
of our divinity and still be human.

With our feet upon the ground we lose ourselves
between the sounds
and let us open wide to suck it in.
Let us feel it move across our skin.

We are reaching up and reaching out.
Let us reach for the random or what ever will bewilder us.
And following our will and wind we may just go where no one’s been.
We’ll ride the spiral to the end and may just go where no one’s been.

Spiral out. Keep going…
Amen

http://youtu.be/EDlC7oG_2W4

 

A Prayer to Reality

On individualism and Prometheus

Let these celebrations of reality encompass the manic spasms of a fucked up culture spiraling toward oblivion. May they be a final gasp for fresh air where there is none to be had.

Our mental environment has been overrun by the corporations. The all powerful media. There comes a point where we must ask ourselves, as a species, if we control corporations, or if they now control us? Let us return to the roots of reality and human existence.

Prometheus stole fire from the gods, and gave it to humanity. The gift of fire; the first of our technologies. This gift enabled the escape to individualism — humanity’s independence from the gods of nature.

For this, Zeus sentenced Prometheus to an eternity of avian torture: having his liver pecked out daily by a bird.

The seemingly equal omnipotency nowadays. The pervasive face of advertising and the media; the dead-eyed faces of models you see in print that all look so strangely similar. The creatures you are told to aspire to be. We are not one of them. We don’t want to be one of them. It is time to celebrate individualism without shame.

Now is the time of a new fight. Let us celebrate Prometheus’s sacrifice with liver damage and fire, and claim freedom from our new situationally imposed cultural overlords, these gods of our own making.

Töad Meädow. Possibly your last chance at true freedom within the psychic and physical landscapes that make up our fleeting reality.

Reality and Limitations

When considering my personal goals for our celebrations of reality, I’m caught considering the nature of what exactly it is that we are celebrating, as well as questioning the limitations I find myself getting stuck in.

When considering the limitations that present themselves, I find myself coming to a line, and wondering how far past that line I can push myself to go.

Pondering this line in the sand led me to consider the concept of duality within reality as a whole.

I first began thinking on the topic of ego and ego death, and the concept of the constant death and rebirth of the ego in my everyday life.

I often strive towards this state of “ego death,” and I find that the moments of pure truth and beauty that I witness, (which I feel are generally my main goals for these celebrations), mostly come from within that state of egoless objectivity.

But, we often live in the in-between. The ‘bardo’ state — bouncing between these moments, and the more subjective, ego enacted moments that allow us to: form thoughts, consider the future and work our way through social constructs.

In the essay Being and Nothingness, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre writes on the topic of objectivity and subjectivity. He talks of how the mere possible presence of another person causes one to look at oneself as an object and see one’s world as it appears to the other.

He speaks of how this transformation is most clear “when one sees a mannequin that one confuses for a real person.”

While you believe it is a person, your world is transformed. During this time you can no longer have total subjectivity. The world is now the other person’s world, a foreign world that no longer comes from the self, but from the other. The other person is a “threat to the order and arrangement of your whole world…Your world is suddenly haunted by the Other’s values, over which you have no control.”

When you realize it is a mannequin, and is not subjective, the world seems to transfer back, and you’re again in the center of a universe.

Ken Wilber takes these concepts to the next level by studying and categorizing ideas in terms of their nature as a holon, a term deriving from the writings of Arthur Koestler.

He observed that it seems every entity and concept shares a dual role: being both an autonomous, self-reliant unit (whole entity) unto itself, and also a part of one (or more) other wholes.

Consider that a cell in an organism is both a whole as a cell and and at the same time a part of another whole – the organism.

Likewise a letter is a self-existing entity and simultaneously an integral part of a word, which then is part of a sentence, which is part of a paragraph, which is part of a page; and so on. Everything from quarks to matter to energy to ideas can be looked at in this way.

He then organizes how we as humans act as wholons; as parts, into quadrants:

“I”
Subjective Individual
Intentional
“It”
Objective Individual
Behavioral
“We”
Subjective Collective
Cultural
“Its”
Objective Collective
Social

 

According to Wilber, this means that multiple viewpoints are inherent in the nature of wholons and each of the four approaches has a valid perspective to offer.

Wilber states that it is important to consider all four perspectives since all are needed for real appreciation of a matter. To collapse them all or dismiss one of them is often a serious mistake.

Wilber then describes his AQAL (All Quadrants All Levels) theory which also considers:

Multiple lines of intelligence including: Cognitive, ethical, aesthetic, spiritual, kinesthetic, affective, musical, spatial, logical-mathematical, karmic, etc.

Levels or stages of development including: cognitive development, moral development, hierarchy of needs, psychosocial development, ego development etc.

States: This refers to those aspects of consciousness that are usually, without specific training, temporary, experiential, and often implicitly or unconsciously experienced. E.g. waking, dreaming, and sleeping.

States can also refer to exogenous or induced states, which are intentionally generated from exterior influences; such as psychedelics and other drugs, or situational induced states, such as hypnotherapy or guided imagery.

Types: For example, masculine/feminine.

Bringing this back around to the point at hand, it seems when wondering what we can personally do to contribute to these celebrations, that if we can pull inspiration from all dimensions of reality… we can accomplish almost anything.

Nebraska Thunderfuck XoXo

On Metaxis, Metamodernism and the evolution of the American Dream.

At the beginning of the 19th century, modern art broke from tradition and adherence to strict continuity and conventions. Art became “whatever you could get away with.”

Then, half way through the 20th century, the horrible existentialist nag of post modernism began to take hold. Postmodernist critics proclaimed that newness was exhausted and that everything new was just an insignificant variation of something that had already been investigated or created.

Postmodernists went on to claim that the next logical progression in the arts was to borrow, combine, refer to, imitate or comment on previous works of art. Therefore postmodern artists should no longer seek to create entirely new means of art, and their artwork should now become an investigation of what was already new.

Plato coined the term “metaxis” to refer to the state of existing and oscillating between two opposite poles. Examples include simultaneously being an individual and a member of a group, or being an observer and also a performer.

American Dream writer David Foster Wallace once spoke of “analysis parayalysis” – the inability to make a choice or decision while needing to make one in order not to perish.

This can be especially seen in our generation in North America. We experience the great modern abundance and consumption of resources in our daily life, but are postmodernistically aware of the brewing ecological crisis at hand.

We, thinking postmodernistically and buy locally grown organic vegetables, but we drive our modern gas-powered car an extra half mile to get them.

Metamodernism means continuously oscillating between the two “opposite poles” of modernism and postmodernism, and simultaneously surpassing both movements in search of new ground.

It is a structure of feeling that builds upon itself. It’s about participation between the observer and the artist and this participation feeds upon itself.

The Metamodernist Manifesto claims “Metamodernism shall be defined as the mercurial condition between irony and sincerity, naïvete and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons. We must go forth and oscillate!”

Dutch professor Hans Boutellier speaks of a society that gradually takes the shape of an improvising jazz orchestra, in which individuals aim to provoke direction to complexity by establishing networks based around like-minded ideas or ideals – structures that sometimes lead to harmonious playing, but, as with all forms of improvisation, often lead to chaos and disharmony.

My hopes for these celebrations of reality is to achieve great oscillations of both chaos and harmonies, irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt, and modern and postmodern art, thereby creating a community in which we can play off of each others “jazzy structures.”

Let us go forth and oscillate!

The next natural evolution of consent culture

There’s nothing like a good protest to excite the senses and stir the loins. When the workers and the activists unite together against their 1% captialist bosses, the camaraderie is palpable. But now, on college campuses across the United States, the 1 percent is fighting back. Using the Trojan horse of feminism, they are taking away the romanticism of the protest, removing all the sexuality inherent in fighting the bourgeoisie, and continuing their mission to turn the working class into sexless drones. I am, of course, talking about the bourgeois plague of affirmative consent.

Friends and comrades: affirmative consent is rubbish. While claiming to try to prevent rape on our nation’s college campuses, the petty bourgeois elements in academia have usurped power unto themselves and enacted a series of ridiculous step-by-step regulations that will enslave our students’ body parts to adjunct sub-committees and turn over due process to a group of Chablis-sipping, Saab-driving economics professors and other la-di-da administrators. Often referred to as “yes means yes,” these academics have sought to make sexual contact as exciting as filling out a student loan application.

When Lenin stormed the Winter Palace and sought a celebratory poke with a fellow comrade-in-arms, he did not have to elicit “da” from the lowly soldier that gave him a tug job behind the bins, nor a “da” from the servant that he did revolutionary style on the old Tsar’s bed! Tovarish Lenin was wise enough that he didn’t need a passel of bourgeois do-gooders incessantly cackling “Nyet means nyet” to refine his sexual style. And “da means da” would have dampened the mood on that glorious day.

These days, when students are attending a rally, no longer can the buzz of hearing the words of Mumia Abu-Jamal stir them to call for his freedom and their fellow activists into their beds. Now on college campuses, a checklist must be ticked off by bank manager wannabes. Would Che Guevara and whatever man or woman or person of gender diverse experience he sought to liberate with his socialist thrusts of sexual delight have consented to some bourgeois bastard with a clipboard checking off each stage of Marxist merriment?

Affirmative consent’s signature failure is that it is capitalist in its orientation. In fact, it even places responsibility of sexual conduct on the individual! What sort of cis-scum nonsense is that? Comrades, in the progressive era in which we live, allowing the individual choice over their own means of sexual interaction is both dangerous and inherently bourgeois. That is why we must choose to replace affirmative consent with social consent – only your social circle, commune or family can decide whom you should have sex with.

Social consent is the only progressive choice. Affirmative consent merely prolongs the free market delusions that the sexually entitled carry. They do not realize that the market for sex has completely failed and that society must step in to correct this. Social consent allows anyone but yourself to make informed choices about sex. This approach allows corrective measures to take place so that side effects of the free market of sex are curtailed. Imagine if someone was assigned sexual intercourse with Elliott Roger. No bloody massacre then! There would be no genital-hoarding scum like Julien Blanc driving Elliott Roger to homicide. In the world of social consent, Elliott would have asked his peers if he could have sexual intercourse with a co-ed. Of course society would have said no to that weedy bourgeois low life defiling its best youth, but society could, as a corrective measure, assign him to the manager of a Burger King or perhaps a reality television star. While both are associated with insects infesting flesh, Elliott’s sex with either one would have sated his homicidal tendencies.

So come the glorious day of the revolution, social consent is how we will choose to distribute the sexual ecstasy of the victory of the working classes. Sex for the people and by the people! I welcome ways that we can put in place technology where at least three comrades consent to two other comrades having sex with each other. Please leave your comments below. Thoughts from the cisgender biased supporters of affirmative consent are not welcome.

Adrian Kimble is the Leonard Peltier Distinguished Professor of Sociology at California State University – Barstow. Ze’s views are those of the working class and not the university.

Why do we burn down beautiful things?

Everything is temporary. Eventually, entropy will turn the universe into a pile of goo. The state that your consciousness occupies right this fucking second has changed and is gone by the time you finish this sentence. The cute chicky-snack you met and fell in love with at the bar last night will never call you. The special moments you shared with her are gone.

So why do we spend so much time building intriguing and beautiful works of art, just to watch them be destroyed?

The destruction is a reminder. That amazing sculpture or whatever it is will soon be on fire. So while it exists, you better climb on it, smell it, look at it, take pictures of it, fuck it. Get the most you can out of it. Soak up the experience and artistry. Let it permeate your brain. Because it’s going to burn. You’ll miss your chance. Seize the day. Seize some art. Do some shit.

Or don’t.

You can make the decision not to climb and touch and experience. Use the knowledge of that decision to acknowledge your limitations. The world doesn’t wait for you. You must keep up with the world the best that you can. We all do.

Here today, ashes tomorrow.

Adiós.