Words by my Brilliant Friend, Batman

Subject: "The whole world's wild at heart and weird on top..." Lula Fortune in "Wild at Heart"

I hate the nuts on BOTH sides. I’m a firm skeptic when it comes to Conspiracists with an agenda who are as intractable in their self-righteous clinging to an imagined truth as any Republican (I wanna vomit when I encounter people who think they know it ALL). But I’m also a firm believer in the EVIL of the military industrial complex—and the fat old white men “behind the curtain”. Did u see Lynn Cheney with Jon Stewart last night? Man, she is one scary woman. I guess proximity to evil does that. She actually thinks her husband is charming and funny and chock full of honesty and integrity. That’s the worst part. She BELIEVES they’re righteous and good... “One may smile, and smile, and be a villain”. There is NO end to human ignorance.

Not to mention the vast, sluglike, dim-witted, UN-consciousness of the masses—who indeed have ceded control of their minds, bodies and spirits over to the Master Controllers and the slobbering, mindless, selfish greed of their own primitive desires. They keep me in business. Oops. Would that be all of US? Uh oh.

“Zeitgeist” is dead-on in recognizing that WE’RE the ones demanding this shit. Because we’re the ones who’ve let ourselves become placated, medicated, mediated, manipulated, mesmerized and brain-dead. And it would be a kinda cool idea to re-frame our reality—and get with the power we have in nature and our own dark selves... Otherwise, we can continue to live as Baudrillard, one of the modern French philosophers believes, in the artificial existence that our modern, media-saturated lives have become. He called it “Simulacra and Simulation”... and postulated that human experience has been degraded (by all the symbols and signals that tell us how to think, what to feel, and what to do) to a simulation of reality instead of reality itself.

Maybe because I got into manipulating this artificial reality at an early age I’ve always seen it for what it is—while still living in it as we all do. I always felt Rene Magritte brilliantly prognosticated the power of art and media to devalue our connection to reality when he painted “The Treachery Of Images (La trahison des images), which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe, This is not a pipe (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe!. (In his book, This Is Not a Pipe, French critic Michel Foucault discusses the painting and its paradox.)” In fact, the Surrealists were always my favourite artists in art school. Hmmmm... I wonder what they would have thought about “911”?