Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    


I met Alastair in Ireland at the _Transpersonal Psychology
Convention._ It will take a long time to explain the history
of my thinking and activity with "ecological" activism.
And why i feel the brand of my thinking is deeply similar
to that of Alastair. The short answer is i believe our
mentalities are equally fanatic. IMHO. (He has more to be proud
of in terms of accomplishment.)

In my mind, it's as though Alastair is a Western Shaman/Yogi.
Like a true yogi he puts his philosophy to practice. And he
is very fearless. And does not give up. And he wants to
actually accomplish something. Not be an activist who goes
on an anti-littering campaign. He wants to actually change
society. He wants to win.

That's why I said before that i thought he was a hero.

We visited a fairy circle. Just he and I. I think I
just invited him to go with me. I found out where
one was located from the locals. It was on a hill.
We had to trespass to get there. It was very hidden.

(So I thought it was interesting that you brought up
fairy circles as a topic in your book. Though I didn't
have a chance to get the book today to read what you
said about it there.)

Another strange thing to me is that your book touches
upon cannibalism. And though that is an unusual subject,
strangely enough, it is also a subject that, in my own mind,
ties into my meeting with Alastair. When we went to the
fairy circle I meditated there. I can't remember
all the details of the context. But I believe that someone
at the conference had been teaching a kind of "visioning."
I know "Starhawk" teaches that. But I learned the technique
there from someone else. This visit to a special place
was the ending point of the experience of the conference.
A theme of the prvious two weeks had been place, sacred
place and history - - as would befit a conference where a
major theme is the relationship of the human to the earth
and to the natural world. Anyway I saw a jaw bone
in the center of the circle in my meditation.

(Alastair must've really thought I was insane. )

I asked him if anyone had ever conjectured that the
circles were used for sacrifices. He, of course,
knew, i think, about as much about them as i did.
ie Nothing. It had never before even slightly occurred
to me that they should have anything to do
with blood-letting. "Fairy" sounds so innocent.

I believe he wrote later about our visit to the fairy
circle and things we talked about. It was a bit of a walk
and i remember talking with him for a while. I probably
know him better than he knows me, since he is the famous one.

But he did remember me some years later. When I was in
Devon at Schumacher college a mutual friend mentioned
me to him or vis versa and i believe we exchanged hellos somehow.
(e-mail?) (The number of people who are in the circle of those who
in all seriousness think the along the lines he and i do
on these subjects and who have actually attempted to accomplish
change is most certainly very small. To my estimation.)

I usually don't have visions when I meditate. (It's
Extremely Rare) But i did then. There was a beautiful
box in the center of the circle. I opened it up and
there was a jaw bone inside. Other things happened.
And i am remembering it now. But I won't bore you
with it. This experience made me feel in a very strong
way that perhaps the circles were used for sacrifices.
It may have been just a wierd imagination thing.

I see he is going to be teaching at Schumacher in March.
(Ran a search on his name) What a temptation. I would love
to go there again. But it's such a luxury.
  

    


Gail:


The Rock Tribe is the nickname I gave the rock cocaine users that live
in my new neighborhood. I remember in college hearing about an
experiment done with rats. The rats were given a supply of both food
and water as well as a supply of cocaine. The rats found the cocaine
so addicting that they ignored the food and water until they died. The
Rock Tribe are people doing basically the same thing. For a time I
gave them unauthorized medical treatments (I'm no longer licensed) and
tried to help them. Bad mistake.



-Geno
  

    


Indra:

I really don't know what became of "Cletus" if there is any justice
in the world he killed himself. Only once in a lifetime does an
asshole like Edwin come along. After he finally got rid of me, Newbomb
Turk, The Terminator, Screamin' Raddish and others continued posting
virus code in his echo. He finally resigned. He couldn't take it any
longer.

Oh BTW I can tell you how I got access to The Elisting to list myself
as moderator of the echo. I don't know if you remember a BBS software
called Telegard, but it was my greatest secret. You see three guys
wrote the software. One of them was named Pollard. Pollard let Geno
(no one knew Geno and JSF were one in the same back then) write a few
utils for Telegard. Strange as it back seem, one of the programs had a
side effect. If you logged onto a Telegard board (that had run the
program) with the user name of Bruce Bodger using the password of
Slutfucker you were given sysop status. Effectively giving you a back
door into the system. Access to their dos, their system files,
EVERYTHING :) The program I wrote was called "Telefast" and was a very
good program actually fixing a problem with the software and making
the telegard process mail faster.

The keeper of the Elist in Europe at the time ran Telegard. I just
logged on and changed the moderator (and then the password, so the
"real" moderator couldn't change it back) to me. Thus I controlled the
echo. The first thing I did of course was throw Edwin out of the echo.
Now if you remember how fido works, a moderator of an echo controlls
it. When I asked his uplink to cut his feed, being the elisted
moderator the uplink had to comply. Not only was Edwin upstaged, but he
lost access to the echo. That is why I told you he "must be mad enough
to shit in his hand and throw it at me..." 



-Geno
  

    

Indra, you said:

"I wanted to
 demonstrate the power of the imagination to create worlds, and the
 consequences of its failure in the real world."

This is a central theme in this discussion and throughout the book. In the
case of the account of the Union Carbide problem in India, the first-person
account in the book is very compelling. What online or imaginary world would
you contrast that with?

Also, you were helpful in bringing an end to Micronet (if you wish to give
an account of that situation, it would be useful -- maybe a thumbnail sketch
of the preceeding war and why you got involved). Yet even though you had
faxed off the materials that BT finally took seriously, you were there for
the very end, piled on a bed with all of the other participants as the clock
was striking midnight. What was it like for you to be on both sides of that?
What were you feeling as the end came closer? And is the book the first time
folks knew that you were involved in bringing Micronet down? If not, how did
they react when they found out?
  

    <scribbled by tnf Tue 26 Oct 99 14:40>
  

    
Tyler Durden strikes again.
  

    <scribbled by tnf Tue 26 Oct 99 14:40>
  

    
"Where does Tyler Durden come from? Why do his violent schemes so
capture the troubled, insomniac narrator?"

 - breathless blurb (hell, almost as breathless as the stuff on my
jacket) for The Fight Club. Thanks Donna, for that apt remark.
Colostomy Bagboy is the alias by which you-know-who is known in "The
Virus Creation Labs", George perhaps not wanting to air the JSF
monicker. Bagboy used to make occasionally forays onto Fidonet, but
mostly just looked after the virus collections at the Oklahoma
Institute of Virus Research, so he was a sort of librarian.

Geno, you're a fine one to talk about kinky girls. What about Slasha?

But he makes a good point. I had to do a piece for Amnesty about
British firms' illegal involvement in selling stun guns and electronic
shock batons. The research had been done, undercover, by a journalist
friend called Martyn Gregory. He'd secretly filmed salesmen from
British Aerospace (govt. owned) waving the things around and joking
about how they made people jump. The footage appeared in a Channel 4 TV
documentary series called "Dispatches". Martyn was accused by Michael
Heseltine (Tory bigwig minister) of falsifying the evidence. He sued
Heseltine for libel and won... My piece was going to be about all this.

Once again I needed a stun gun to photograph and the Dalai Lama's
parcel was back in his hands. It's illegal to possess the things in the
UK. So I went on the internet to see if I could find pictures, and
found any number of stores selling them to all comers. So, a couple of
weeks later, this wicked looking thing, capable of delivering a 300,000
volt kick, arrived in the post, complete with a well-meaning
handwritten note that said, "For best results use Duracell batteries."

This was weird, but not as strange as all the other stuff that came
floating up on the net. The electronic shock device has a long history.
At one time Victorian ladies used them as health aids, they apparently
soothed the nerves. This was the Jurassic age of sexual toys. Later
versions, still classed as electric health appliances, gradually
stopped trying to disguise their intended use and gradually began to
resemble the things in the Dalai Lama's bundle - evil electric dog-dick
dildos, with copper bands to maximise contact with the internal
membranes of all possible orifices. The Cretaceous saw the emergence of
the first modern vibrators, a Bauhausian zeal for letting form follow
function, with what results we see at fine stores all over the web. Yet
other websites record an evolutionary offshoot that regressed from
pleasure towards suffering: nipple-clamping electrodes hooked up to car
batteries, electric ballock-restraints and much else besides. Back
full circle to the world of Amnesty - one of the first things I ever
did for Amnesty was interview a Tamil man who had been hung up by his
ankles, hosed with cold water and then had his balls wired into the
grid - and to the Vortex which had an Academy, Madame Pompadora's,
devoted exclusively to the arts of pain.
  

    
..joining in. Hi there Indra, hope everything is fine with you! I'm in
this editing suite, and telneted in just now to relieve my sore eyes.
I'm thrilled to see Geno here, and the link between BBS culture and IP
dito is interesting. One related phenomenon is of course Hotline, a
client/server software that allows anyone to set up a BBS-like server
over the IP protocol. Hugely popular with the warez pirates right now. 

Reading the discussion on living in the real world vs. in the virtual
one, I can not help recollecting Laurence Fishburne's now much sampled
line: "Welcome to the real world". And later, when describing The
Matrix to Keanu: "What is reality? Smell and taste is just electrical
signal interpreted by your mind"

As a cybergypsy (I guess I can call myself that if I'm in the book,
right Indra?:), I think it's very difficult to evaluate the impact of
the Net when we're smack in the middle of it all. There's two
reflections on Gutenberg I find interesting. One by Anthony Giddens,
who says that the exiting thing wasn't the printing press, but what the
increased distribution of certain texts led to - The French Revolution
being one of his examples. The other reflection is McLuhan’s when he
refers to the printing press as the democratization of the written
word. And then he goes on to say that we need the same thing for
television.

And the Internet isn’t just interconnectedness, it’s also the world of
Media in the hands of everybody. Right now you can scare any Hollywood
executive with just three words: Blair Witch Project.

On the other hand, of course we need to worry when the latest issue of
Fortune is all about dotcoms...:)

Well, back to editing (a short animation that actually will ‘air’ both
on TV and the Web...wouldn’t have been the case two years ago). Would
be interesting to know what you’re writing on right now, Indra!
  

    
Ho hum. 
  

    
Marguerite, I saw Alastair at the end of August, when I went to do a
reading at the Edinburgh Festival. He came to the reading in character,
ie as he appears in Cybergypsies. Back in '91, after the Gulf War when
George Bush had gone fishing and John Major's govt was pretending
Saddam's attacks on the Kurds weren't happening, Alastair went to work
in Edinburgh one cold slushy day dressed in a business suit, barefoot,
carrying a placard saying "Kurds. Barefoot and Starving." He stood on
the corner of Princes Street and blew blasts on a conch shell which had
been given to him by a Fijian chief... I'd rung him to say I was going
up to the Festival. He sat at the back of the theatre during the
event, and when I read the part about his witness he came walking
forward through the audience, exactly as described in the book, blew
blasts on his conch and then talked about our experiences of those
days. It was spellbinding.

Your trip with him to the stone circle must have made an impression
because he told me afterwards that he is writing a book about the Wee
Folk. 

btw did you get the answer to the riddle: the flag on the temple-top
is flapping in the wind? Is it the wind that is moving? Or the flag?
  

    


Well, ObloidPro is supposed to emulate the BBS experience.
www.obloidsphere.com
I know there are others.

But I'm really happy with this one.
Jamesy is still tweaking it. And it just got up
and running after at least an 18 month hiatus.

Many of the young people who frequent it have literary
aspirations. They publish a zine: Doomed to Obscurity.
Also recently revived from the dead.
  

    

slippage there

the above was in response to 84
  

    
Your Holiness, what a pleasure. I tried to call you last night, but as
usual got a recorded message in Swedish. Never mind what I'm writing,
tell em what you're writing. And meanwhile...

*short excerpt*

"Yes, yes, yes, but was it Madison?" Magnus asks. "You never saw her
face."

"Of course it was Madison."

"How could you know that?"

"No-one else has breasts like that. Besides they cut to a big close-up
and I recognised the stud in her tongue."

*end excerpt*

You've sort of missed Geno, well possibly.
  

    
Well I've logged in and emailed Jamesy. The (few and sensible)
questions at the front made me remember the impertinent interrogation
to which we BBS sysops used to subject our users - name, home and work
telephone numbers, full address, hobbies, interests, what computer,
modem and software they were using - and they had to answer.

To get into a virus BBS you had to answer stuff like:

"What is your view on the anti-virus community? Do you hate them? Do
you like them? Give GOOD and COMPLETE and SPECIFIC answers! Thank you!
AND NO 'FUCKING' around."
  

    

The answer to the riddle:

























It's your MIND that's moving. HA HA

This is a yogi joke.

Probably about as accessible to
laymen in yoga as mathematician jokes or e
economist jokes are to laymen in those fields.

The trick, IMO, is to make a joke that makes fun of the
obscurantist joke, (like a parody), that would be funny
to the general public. I haven't been able to do it yet.

Like, "How do you make a geek laugh?"

But I haven't yet figured out the punchline.
  

    <scribbled by magnus Wed 27 Oct 99 03:13>
  

    
Good quote, Indra. (Again an example of how powerful images are, which
is maybe why the Internet really took of only after Berners-Lee gave
us the www-protocol...) Right now I'm writing this series of 3D anime
films about a character called Klara. The first test of which I was
editing last night. And what I find interesting is that the series will
'run' on the Net and on TV simultaneously.

And if you want to make a geek laugh, you could invert the progress of
the rendering graybar on her computer...:)
  

    
hej magnus, bra! hela den här grejen är lite sömngångaraktig, eller 
hur? geno verkar skrämma skiten ur folk, och hon som skulle intervjua 
mig har visst gått och gömt sig!

indra :)
  

    

      what's happening?

hi magnus, good!  This whole thing is a little sleepwalkerish,
isn't it.  geno usually frightens the shit out of people and she
who was going to interview me seems to have gone and hidden!
  

    

Bruce, are you speaking about me? I'm here to interview Indra. This is his
interview. It's about his book. I think we've gotten far afield of that, and
I'd like to see Indra have a chance to get back to it while the two weeks of
interview are going on.

Very little frightens me. What I will put up with as a volunteer is another
matter. Life is too short.

Indra, I still have some questions on the table. Could you take a look at
them back there? I have some others to ask, and will ask them when we've
finished everything else.
  

    
Sorry, <lizabeth>.  The text I posted is an English translation of the
Swedish in the preceeding response.
  

    
Re: 94 Well, Indra, maybe the frontier lies elsewhere these days...

Anyway, I would like to hear more about some fellow charecters in the
book: Do you know what happended to Calypso and were you in love with
her?

Also, any news on the Detonator? I would really like to buy him some
more sushi... 
  

    
Lizabeth wrote:

>"I wanted to demonstrate the power of the imagination to create 
>worlds, and the consequences of its failure in the real world."
>This is a central theme in this discussion and throughout the book. 
>In the case of the account of the Union Carbide problem in India, the
>first-person account in the book is very compelling. What online or 
>imaginary world would you contrast that with?

What happened in Bhopal, 15 years ago - a city poisoned by a storm of
cyanide, half a million injured, five thousand people killed in a
single night - is like a horrible hallucination. Our imaginations
cannot grasp the reality. It is incredible that we have allowed people
to go on and on suffering in Bhopal - some of the poorest people on
earth beggared by one of the world's richest corporations - without
doing one thing to help. We cannot expect fairness or compassion from
companies like Union Carbide, so we must demand them from ourselves.
But before we can feel, we must be able to imagine, and our
imaginations are doped, half dead.

Sathyu came from Bhopal to ask my help in the autumn of 1993. He said:
"The worst scandal of all is not that it happened. It is not the fact
that when doctors asked how to treat the dying, Carbide refused to
disclose the information. It is not that the factory was built in a
crowded neighbourhood. Nor that safety standards, which were already
inadequate, had been further reduced by cost-cutting on orders from
America. It isn't that their safety training course had been reduced
from six months to two weeks. Nor that the alarm siren was turned off,
the pressure in the fire hoses too weak to reach the ruptured tank, the
scrubber not working properly. It was not that the cooling system was
compromised by penny-pinching to save freon gas: not that they were
prepared to risk people's lives to save just five hundred rupees, about
$16, per month..."

Sathyu said "All these years later the suffering is still going on.
Every month more die. There are children in Bhopal who have never known
one day free of pain...You may be wondering, why aren't the medical
treatments working? Why don't they use their compensation to pay for
better care? But the compensation, for those who got any at all, works
out at less than $5 a month..."

Sathyu said: "The worst scandal of all is this, that for a day or two
in 1984, the liberals of the world were shocked. But then they forgot
us and abandoned our poor and injured to the corporate lawyers and the
politicians."

The reason the story is in Cybergypsies is that Sathyu had got my name
from two people (neither of whom I knew) in New York and San Francisco
who suggested he should approach me for help. (These turned out to be
people who knew of my Kurdish/Amnesty work on Greennet.) 

We started the Bhopal Medical Appeal, I wrote an ad for the 10th
anniversary (1994) which was published in the Guardian newspaper in
Britain, and the British public responded immediately with around
$60,000. It was enough to buy a building, hire medical staff (a
doctor's annual salary in Bhopal is around $2,500) and start a clinic.
The clinic is free, provides medical care, allopathic and traditional
Indian (including yoga breathing and massage) to whoever needs help. We
see about 80 people a day and have so far treated about four thousand.
We have had very encouraging results by combining modern medicine with
the yoga techniques. Anyone interested in this work can contact Sathyu
via email:

sambavna@bom6.vsnl.net.in

Or you can check out http://www.bhopal.org. We desperately need funds
to keep the clinic running and so far the one country from which
virtually no help has come is the USA.
  

    
Oh Indra! Such a horrible and horrifying event you describe. Can you please
post an address in this topic where people could send donations? I visited
the URL you posted above and the "donations" link wasn't active, so I
couldn't figure out *how* to send a check.