Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Here at Media Spin we are compulsive collectors of media. Digital archiving started over 20 years ago, and recently we uncovered a huge stash of rare old gems. There are many unusual finds, such as the above cover of an early girly mag test run by a struggling Hugh Hefner.

Here’s a good one. How cool would it be to have a job making up good intelligence, news stories and “strategic communications” for the U.S. Government to feed the unwary public? That’s what The Rendon Group does, and you can too! They’ve helped sell us rubes on the last couple of Gulf Wars and that’s only the beginning.

Hers’ a stunning find… Martha Stewart’s lesser known sister, Celeste. Her dedication to office work kept her out of the kitchen and out of Martha’s way. There are many more of these that still are being sorted out. Sorry, still no early Oprah photos.

It is with great anticipation and delight that I look forward to meeting the author of a book I am reading, The Reluctant Shaman by Kay Cordell Whitaker. She is currently on a tour, promoting her new book Sacred Link, and is scheduled to be at East West Bookstore in Mountain View on October 28th and Black Oak Books in Berkeley on Sunday, October 30. Kay’s full schedule is at her web site, A World In Balance.

My first introduction to writings on shamanism were the Carlos Castaneda booksdescibing his travels into the Mexican desert and apprenticeship under the mysterious Yaqui Indian teacher, don Juan Mateus. Unlike Castaneda’s experience, Whitaker’s Peruvian teachers, Chea and Domano Hetaka, introduced themselves and taught her on her home turf in Santa Cruz, California. Whitaker’s writing is far more accessible than Castaneda’s including practical homework lessons given to her in logical steps by her teachers. Castaneda gave much attention to building personal power in order to escape the bounds of the ordinary world of reality. The Hetekas express a greater mission through their teachings: by finding your own song, you contribute to awakening society in order to bring about global healing. Spiritual joys experienced along the way just happen to be a plus.

From Kay’s web site, A World In Balance…

This work is my Path. This is what
I came here to do, to participate in helping
the world, my community, my people. To do that,
I had to first find out about me, help me, heal me,
learn who and what I am, and how I connect
to the whole world. Once I was able to do that,
I had the tools to help someone else.

As the Hetakas have often said to me, it is for each person to objectively reexamine deep inside themselves, their beliefs, their values, and their world, to find THEIR OWN TRUTH – whatever that may be.

Hands down Mati Klarwein pushed my early painting efforts furthest. Take Gustav Klimt, Salvador Dali, James Rosenquist, throw them in a vat of peyote buttons and psilocybin, and you get Abdul Mati.

As a painter, looking at Klarwein’s work is intimidating, and I was never able to match the intense religious attention and power he devoted to his compositions. These are epic mindscapes that one must live with and merge into.

His incredible photo-realistic detail presaged the ease of use Photoshopping of collage imagery and computer graphic imagery. Klarwein is probably best known for the publishing of his paintings on album covers by Miles Davis, Santana and Jerry Garcia… but there is so much more than that!

One of my idle forms of amusement is to check the stats on my web server, hosted by the excellent people at bluehost, to learn who is visiting the website, and then look at the referer: the incoming source. Someone from Australia visited this blog, specifically the Madagascar story, because they Googled the phrase “animated smelly bums.” LOL!

Media Spin’s Blog has the honor of Googling #1 on this topic! Sorry, butt my smelly bum animation is still on the back burner.

The Australians and New Zealanders I met while working at PDI/DreamWorks were some of my most favourite people, possessing outstanding wit, humor and well balanced life attitudes. One bloke regularly visited funny web sites such as The Daily Rotten. Perhaps this is a trend that competing 3D feature animation studios need take heed of… people are searching for animated smelly bums.

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All the recent natural disasters, compounded with ongoing International terror strikes and American leadership errors, are giving me a bad case of the Doomsday Blues. Let’s face it, with rampant population and its resulting poverty, global warming and its resulting catastrophes, and WMDs and their resulting mass destruction, it seems like without a whole lot of peace, love and understanding… we’re fucked!

I’ve been writing about the blending of media and politics, and it seems as though some really wealthy, powerful guys are thinking, “Hey, we didn’t amass a big fortune just to have the world blow up in my face!” So, wouldn’t it be great if Bill Gates and Paul Allen used their massive wealth to steer America back on track by the next big election? OK, we should also add Bill Joy, Steve Jobs and their companies to pitch in to redesign a smarter, better Operating System for the USA.

Meanwhile, a group of philanthropic statesmen are really doing something. They’ve organized NTI, The Nuclear Threat Initiative and produced a docudrama Last Best Chance which imagines the results of al Qaeda operatives striking with nuclear weapons. It gives some hope that successful influential people are working on solving hard problems.

Al Gore remarks on threats to American democracy and the marketplace of ideas at a conference at The Media Center at the American Press Institute.

Read or listen to the entire address. Here are a few quotes:

I thought maybe it was an aberration when three-quarters of Americans said they believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11, 2001. But more than four years later, between a third and a half still believe Saddam was personally responsible for planning and supporting the attack.

Keep in mind, your thoughts and opinions matter. Just because an event is not on major television, does not mean it did not happen. It still is valid, it exists. If it is covered on television, most likely it is not news and information with clarity, but planned out entertainment, advertising and propaganda.

The access to digital cameras and electronic publishing has produced a huge wave of amateur photographers posting on the web, including soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Abu Ghraib was just the tip of a bloody nasty iceberg.

Last week SF Chronicle columnist Neva Chonin published an article “Porn Wars, Part II”, pointing out a website and this backstory:

“For a year now, American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been posting photographs of corpses — insurgent corpses, civilian corpses, unidentifiable piles of guts in various stages of mutilation — on the site in return for free access to its porn cache.”

Caution: this website is for mature adults with strong stomachs. The combat images are labelled “General” others “Gory.” The gory ones show the true horrors suffered by humanity as a result of the weapons of war and violence. A dose of this might shock some folks out of their abstract theorizing over the merits of fighting this foreign war.

These photographs should serve as a reminder of the consequences of armed combat. Look at the carnage before leaping into war. Incredibly, Vietnam was not enough of a history lesson to radical conservatives. They see the Vietnam era as “America’s Second Civil War,” and new war in Iraq will provide vindication. I’ll talk in simple Texan language, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

If you are an electronic music fan like me, then you will appreciate this treat. Post Beatles Number Nine, Pre Nine Inch Nails, give a listen to 58 minutes of experimental Synclavier compositions by Frank Zappa during his Zappa Meets The Mothers Of Prevention period. Labelled Resolver + Brutality by FZ himself, this music is now online at the Kill Ugly Radio Site’s Friday Boot. A word of warning, the Friday Boot offering changes week to week, so Resolver + Brutality tracks may not be there after October 14. More info at afka.net.