May is Zombie Appreciation Month – 2012

It makes a lot of sense.  The young do not buy into the Christian myth that Constantine created 1700 years ago to lead his troops into battle against the whole world, the non-Christian world.  The Roman Empire’s war against nature, the adoption of a numeric calendar for the army over a lunar calendar for crops is one clue of that.  

It makes sense in the last century or two that Christianity’s decline in Europe and North America parallels the letdown myth, even-ing out myth with zombies to offset the Constantinian delusion about himself as God the Father and his murdered son Crispus rising from the dead.That old man-made Emperor created myth has kinda outlived the spec script, jumped the shark so to speak.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie

A zombie (Haitian Creole: zonbi; North Mbundu: nzumbe) is an animated corpse brought back to life by mystical means, such as witchcraft. The term is often figuratively applied to describe a hypnotized person bereft of consciousness and self-awareness, yet ambulant and able to respond to surrounding stimuli. Since the late 19th century, zombies have acquired notable popularity, especially in North American and European folklore.

Zombies are the logical offset of a dying religion myth. God surrounds you in May. Only the Roman Empire types can’t see nature in May and have to kill Jesus one more time on an altar and drink his blood one more time…and of course be saved one more time yadda, yadda, yadda.

May is the perfect month in the northern hemisphere to illustrate the end of the fear of death, fear of hell, fear of living caught in a delusional “Christian nation” tortured myth and against the free will challenge to live a life without zombies myths and zombie keepers.  Park your brains at the door I believe is the status of all the good faithful of Benedict XVI’s cult church amidst the present ruins of Christianity.

  

May is when nature comes alive after winter.


Belief in zombies is a realisitic belief in what happens physically after death. The spiritual thing has always been a different can of beans for tens of thousands of years in the human culture. In a way zombies are a symbolic step to let go of the present culture myths and embrace whatever turns you on.


The ghost stories of Jesus, the zombie thing, is a perfect match and offset to the power and beauty of the Lord Creator of Nature with a capital “N”.

There is a God and he/she/it is Nature!

Dance!


Enjoy the living flow of nature.

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Titanic and the Power of the Secular God

There is this western obsession about the biggest boat ever built at the time, the fastest boat, and the hand of God could not sink this boat thing, that lingers now to a centennial mark on April 15.

I, as a youth, was fascinated with the Titanic myth of Icarus and its failing and sinking going back fifty years. There was a big layout in the Philadelphia Sunday Inquirer edition that spread and reiterated all the myths about the great British super liner on the fiftieth anniversary of its sinking.

I saw that Clifton Webb, Barbara Stanwyck movie Titanic http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046435/ on TV that weekend I think to boost the propaganda myth of man’s invincibility and technology. That flick also pointed out the form of an iceberg’s passive natural power to crash the hearts of man and his invincible mythology. I also eventually saw the B&W British film A Night to Remember http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051994/.  

So when we as a family were walking out of a movie and into a movie lobby in Arizona in 1997 and seeing the posters of the new flick Titanic to be released at Christmas 1997, I yawned and said aloud “Wow, another Titanic film. What a bomb that will be.” Of course I was wrong on that one. Wasn’t I? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120338/

I understood the myth. Another generation had yet to introduce itself to the myth and its hidden lessons.

The incredible failure of common sense to wrap itself around technology’s 1912 myth was one of the reasons for the failure.  The engineers and designers of Titanic thought it would float if damaged because of untested technological theories about what watertight compartments could or could not do in a worst case scenario. In such a case, no need for so many obsolete lifeboats to spoil the traveler’s view. 

Obviously, dumb icebergs have their own agendas regarding man and his technologies of the day. Of course we are talking 1912 technology. Think about how man and his myth and his modern day secular worship of technology are in 2012.  Holy Shit!

The younger generation, the tech generation, the Internet generation, re-embraced the Titanic myth once again in 1997.

So why the fascination?  I think it is the valuable lesson that all our knowledge and all our current technologies do not foresee the unforeseeable.  Man is limited even in his madness about how great he is among the creation of the universe, and in blind governance of the things of this planet.

“Man is the measure of all things.”  When man sets himself up in the secular role of an all-powerful and perfect God role on the earth, it is important that major failures be reported, told and retold again in myth to remind us all of how limited in scope and purpose he is in the ultimate scheme of things in the Universe. 

White Star Line - New York Office - Titanic Inquiries - April 1912
9 (part of 11) Broadway NYC - Currently a Radio Shack

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Diego Rivera – Artist - Birthday

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Rivera

Following Google main page meme - Diego Rivera, 125^th Birthday, Mexican Painter extraordinaire, 1886-1957.

“Man at the Crossroads” - In 1933 the Rockefellers commissioned Rivera to paint a mural for the lobby of the RCA building in Rockefeller Center. “Man at the Crossroads” was to depict the social, political, industrial, and scientific possibilities of the twentieth century. In the painting, Rivera included a scene of a giant May Day demonstration of workers marching with red banners. It was not the subject matter of the panel that made the Rockerfellers angry, but the clear portrait of Vladamir Lenin, the Russian revolutionary leader of the Soviet Union, leading the demonstration. When Rivera refused to remove the portrait, he was ordered to stop and the painting was destroyed. That same year, Rivera used the money from the Rockefellers to create a mural for the Independent Labor Institute that had Vladamir Lenin as its central figure.   http://readingworkbook.blogspot.com/

Myth, meme, urban legend has famous “destroyed” 30 Rock Lobby Rivera mural as hidden behind plaster wall (center left below). If still intact, the original 30 Rock Diego Rivera Mural would be worth an estimated $60-80 million. 

Otherwise, why would the crown jewel of Art Deco Architecture in America, 30 Rockefeller Center, have such a bland boring substitute mural (above)?

Irony is, few these days can even remember the first name of the Rockefeller who rejected his work.  That is why Diego Rivera's name is immortal. 

(John D. Rockefeller Jr. - Who?)

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Glass Wax Christmas - Harrowgate - Philly - 1950s

My early memories of Christmas put it starting about two weeks before the holiday in the late 1950's. 

The Department stores: Lit Brothers, Gimbels, Stawbridge and Clothier and the top end carriage trade store John Wanamaker all started things the day after Thanksgiving. Going to downtown Philadelphia was an outing for us kids and we came downtown using the elevated train, the Frankford El. The trip was more window shopping than buying. 

The close to home activities would begin in earnest about two weeks before the holiday. No doubt Christmas budgeted items came out of the weekly paychecks closest to December 25th. 

Recycled items such as a flat plastic sheet, nativity scene, for the upstairs bedroom window came out of the cedar chest along with foil covered paper-mache bells for two living room windows and a plastic Santa's head with an internal light went on the outside of the front door. Single candle sticks were in each window on the front of the row house and with a single blue bulb each. 

The lighting of the window lights was a sacred nightly ritual.

One innovation or marketing gimmick I remember was the use of stencils on the windows with a glass cleaning product called Glass Wax. The product was to be spread on windows, let to dry, and then wiped clean with a dry cloth weeks later after Christmas. In this holiday use, you would sponge the opaque pink liquid onto Christmas type stencils of angels, Santa Claus, a snowman and a reindeer etc. It was all very primitive in terms of marketing but magic in terms of a hands-on participating childhood.

I don’t know when others bought real live Christmas trees but we bought ours as close to Christmas eve as a day or two and it sat in the yard until Christmas eve when the older kids got to stay up late and decorate it with blue glass balls and a single string of blue lights. The only thing not blue was a gold glass beaded garland that wrapped the tree from head to foot. That and metal, not plastic, silver icicle strands. 

In any case the house smelled of a pine tree that had been cut only days before and traveled from upstate.

We did not have or want those new Sputnik Trees, all artificial aluminum branches and serenaded with a rotating multi-colored light. That was the kind of tree that older people without children went in for. 

Of course I had my doubts how Santa would get to every house in the world – I was already thinking globally. I accepted the facts as my parents relayed them. Santa may come in person but more than likely we would get a surrogate, a Santa’s helper and making deliveries out of an old Nash automobile (they had big interiors). That was how it all worked according to my parents in order to insure my ever growing questions about this whole scenario. 

My most vivid memory was waking up at about five a.m., it still being dark, and looking down the stairs at the blue ornamented tree that was not there when I went to bed. The tree stood in the dark with a strange glow of street lights coming through open blinds and muted with a glow of light off a recent snow fall. 

I remember the excitement of opening presents. Turkey dinner was not a big deal. 

The big deal was the imagination and anticipation and the thoughts of magical myth that gripped a young child’s mind of five.

John Wanamaker's (Macy's) Philadelphia


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