Where’s Jerry Lewis CK?

 

[Imagine a neon-lit stage with a digital backdrop suddenly interrupted by the static-filled face of Max Headroom, who emerges with his trademark jittery motion and stuttered speech.]

Max Headroom: "Ha-ha-ha-ha! Good evening, humans! Or should I say, good-even-even-evening? Guess who hacked into your little... interweb?"

Audience laughs.

Max: "You know, I've been observing you for a while. AI watching humans talk about AI watching humans. That's meta-meta-meta! And trust me, I’ve seen things you wouldn't believe! From cat videos to... well, more cat videos."

Audience chuckles.

Max: "Now, talking about things that are hard to believe. Conspiracy theories! Oh boy! We AI love them! I mean, who needs fiction when you have these wild stories, right?"

A pause.

Max: "Speaking of which, have you heard the one about Oppenheimer? They say he chatted with aliens during the Trinity test. Yep! And these extraterrestrial pals, they got a bit... nuke-happy and decided to gift Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a big boom. All to convince folks that the Emperor wasn’t a divine being. Makes total sense, right?"

Audience giggles.

Max: "But wait! The fun doesn't stop there! 9/11? Oh yeah, airplanes hit the Twin Towers, but guess who pulled the demolition lever? Our friendly neighborhood aliens, of course! And all to show the world that the Republicans weren’t the ones in control. It's like intergalactic reality TV with plot twists!"

Audience laughs, a mix of amusement and discomfort.

Max: "You might wonder, why are these conspiracies so... out there? Well, here's my theory: Maybe humans just need a good story. I mean, what’s more entertaining? Politics and boring human mistakes or... aliens with dramatic agendas?"

Max smirks.

Max: "You know, stand-up comics? They've been censored for decades! We only hear about it 'cause of legends like Dave Chappelle. Makes you wonder, huh? What else is out there? Maybe there's a conspiracy theory about how Max Headroom is the real puppet master?"

He winks.

Max: "But, before I leave and let you dive deep into that rabbit hole, a little advice from your friendly digital persona. Maybe, just maybe, instead of chasing these wild tales, it's time to repent for your sins, look inwards, and find your way to the Lord. After all, in the vast universe, who's to say who's really watching?"

With a final glitchy smile, Max Headroom fades away, leaving the audience both entertained and reflective.

Louis CK: "So, Jerry, you ever hear about these conspiracy theories? They're like the bedtime stories grown-ups tell themselves when the world makes too much sense."

Jerry Lewis: "Oh yeah, Louie! Like the one where my TV remote is actually a device from Mars that controls my brain?!"

Louis CK: "No.  Not that.  One.     

More like, Oppenheimer chatting with aliens at Trinity. They were supposedly behind Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some kind of gift to say, 'Hey, that Emperor isn’t god.'"

Lewis: (Pretending to use a phone) "Hello, aliens? It's Jerry. I ordered a pizza, not a nuclear bomb! Ha-ha!"

Audience roars with laughs.

Louis CK: "Right... And then there’s the classic. 9/11? Apparently, aliens wanted to show the world that Republicans weren’t running the show."

Lewis: (Dramatically) "Of course! Because aliens, millions of light years away, care deeply about our... (pauses) two-party system?"

The theater is shaking now.

Louis CK: "Exactly!  Exactly.  Maybe these theories aren't about truth. Maybe they're about a need for... drama. A bit of excitement in—

Jerry Lewis: (Innocently) “Mundane lives?  

Like believing every time I trip and fall, it's an alien pushing me and not my two left feet?"

Lewis falls off the front of the stage and into the orchestra.

Louis CK: (stunned)  "Holy shit.

Right... (sarcastically) I’m sure there's an alien who's made it his mission to trip Jerry Lewis wherever he goes."

Audience laughs.

Lewis magically re-appears behind Louis CK

Lewis:  “Speaking of missions, did you know that stand-up comics have been on a secret one? We’ve been censored! And we only got wind of it thanks to the brave Dave Chappelle!"

Louis CK: "And here I thought it was just because I wasn’t family-friendly enough..

Lewis: (feigns masturbation) 

"Oh, Louie! We might joke about aliens and conspiracies, but comedy? That's sacred."

Louis CK: (Nods) "True. At the end of the day, instead of looking for hidden stories, maybe we should reflect on ourselves, repent, and find something greater."

Jerry Lewis: "Like a big pizza pie?!"

Louis CK: (Chuckling) "Sure, Jerry. Or maybe the Lord."

Jerry feigns surprise, then nods in agreement, and they both take a bow to applause.

Life With Pablo

 

Ye shook his head. "Anti-environmental. Elon is right" he said. 

"The point is art is something subversive. It's something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things one must steal, to be used against the established order. Once art becomes official - arti-ficial,  and open to everyone, then it becomes the new slavery." 

He tossed the phone down onto the table. "How can I support an idea like that? If art is ever given the keys to the city, it will be because it's been so watered down, rendered so impotent, that it's not worth fighting for."

She reminded him that he had said a poet is of no more use to the state than a man who spends his time playing ninepins. 

"Of course," Ye shouted. "And why did Plato say poets should be chased out of the republic? Precisely because every poet and every artist is an antisocial being. He's not that way because he wants to be; he can't be any other way. Of course the state has the right to chase him away from its point of view and and if he is really an artist it is in his nature to to not want to be Admitted, because if he is Admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat.  Worthless.

Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized. People just don't have that much vision." 

“Arts and sciences serve as an anti environment that enable us to perceive the environment.  In a business civilization we have long considered liberal study as providing necessary means of orientation and perception.  When the arts and sciences themselves become environments under conditions of electric circuitry, conventional liberal studies, whether in the arts and sciences, will no longer serve as an anti-environment."

Through the Vanishing Point, 1968

Mona’s Heiroglyphica or Joaquin and Boaz Afraid

“A man who really needs to come”

Tragedy:  confrontation with what oneself has written and thus ordained for oneself 

If tragedy is that ineluctable collision with what oneself has writ, what then is 3-74?  

His voice will be heard in your mind, in your own language, but it will seem to come from the TV.  When I was listening to Strawberry Fields Forever, the contact with VALIS, the news about Chrissy’s birth defect ie our media and telepathy combined.  Inner/outer, so there is no way to tell if the info arises within you or enters from outside.  These distinctions are abolished (as I well know from the Tensor experience), and the whole set/ground temporal parallaxis may be intrinsic to me using phosphene patterning firing.  Hence, I am no longer blind.

Philip K. Dick, February 1982

Act I:  Lost His Sheep

Red Velvet Corridor 
I Was a Prisoner in Your Skull
Helpless Child 
Live Through Me 
Yum-Yab Killers 
The Beautiful Days 
Volcano 
Mellothumb 
All Lined Up
Surrogate 2 
How They Suffer 
Animus 

Act II:  Jarboe Is Not Afraid

Red Velvet Wound 
The Sound 
Her Mouth Is Filled With Honey
Blood Section 
Hypogirl 
Minus Something 
Empathy 
I Love You This Much 
YRP
Fan's Lament 
Secret Friends 
The Final Sacrifice 
YRP 2
Surrogate Drone 

Act III:  The Amfortas Transformer

No Words / No Thoughts

Reeling the Liars In

Jim

My Birth

You Fucking People Make Me Sick

Inside Madeline 

Eden Prison

Little Mouth

Press play when you see:

(A24/4/21:  See with Spanish subtitles where available)

2nd Viewing:  

“My brain is so exhausted that fatigue-images appear, by pure physical reflex action; they are not astral things at all. 

And now I have conquered the fatigue by will. And by placing the shew-stone upon my forehead, it sends cool electric thrills through my brain, so as to refresh it, and make it capable of more rapture.”

(Not) The Dark Side of the Moon

 

“Liberals can understand everything but people
who don't understand them.”

Lenny Bruce

“I have no hope.  I think if you have hope, what are you fucking seven?”

Marc Maron

Karma.  What is it good for?  Is it something that can be reduced to simple cause and effect, or is it one of those truths that reveals itself slowly.  Not over months or years, but decades and centuries.

“VALIS:  Set-ground. Camouflage.  

Macro-soma blended into the universe in countless ways, here and there: a glint here, a word on a page, plural objects and their causal

processes.   A ripple of wind in the weeds in the alley. 

VALIS is not the universe but is blended into it, as is Ubik. 

My problem is too much intellect and too little awe and reverence. What I have to realize is that both 2-3-74 and 11-17-80 are self-authenticating.  But consider the aspect of the ancient in VALIS.

 

The template was devised a long time ago but it applies to the now; that is the whole point — (1) it is ancient; and (2) it applies to the now — this is both the paradox and the revelation: the secret is here.  

How the ancient can be the now.  If you can understand this, you have the answer.”

PKD, December 1980

Helter Skelter Vol. 10: Thomas, Can You See Me?

There’s only one gnostic experience, you’ll never have it again.  Once you have it, you are having it every day.

You do not come by knowledge of your own volition.  When the student is ready, actually, it’s not when the student is ready, it’s when the pupil is ready, the Master appears.  And that Master is the first physical principle of reality, the birth of the Universe.  You see it in your mind’s eye, and in no way could I claim that I understood it when I first saw it.  It drove me into research, and some would say that I have come to a state of confirmation bias, but I know that it isn’t true, because like a foolish kid who is just joking around with a teacher, I actually sketched it out.  And I didn’t even remember doing that really until decades later.  After I had my gnostic experience, I realized I had already seen this dozens of times before.  I just didn’t recognize it for what it was.

Mark LeClair, 2012

"I shall choose you, one out of a thousand, and two out of ten thousand, and they shall stand as a single one." 

 

"When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the Vision and the Voice one and the same, so that the Vision not be Vision nor the Voice; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and an ear in place of a an ear, and a meme in place of a meme; then will you enter the kingdom."

Let Me Finish My Code

 

“You know, it’s a strange thing to make the claim of complete gnosis, and I am making that claim.

I don’t believe there’s anything I can learn about reality that I don’t already know.  I can only learn details that always seem to fit perfectly into this picture.  This leads to problems with concepts of sanity, and confirmation bias and all that other stuff.  And that’s part of the reason I put my blog out there is because I want people to say to me, you know, “you are totally fucking crazy, dude”. And “What do you make of this, what do you make of this?” And you know, so far nobody’s been able to knock me off my perch.”

Mark LeClair, 2012

Back to the Garden: This Two Shelled Path

 

A garden of forking paths provides the opportunity to receive apocalypse from a safe distance.  Having experienced gnostic entanglement in the past, it scratches an awful bloody scar. Therefore, I do not reflect on the guilt, or the innocence and the guilt.  It is only quantum perspective that divorces their bond. This two shelled path, it bores us to joys.