Silenced Majority Portal

Jackson-Inspired Artwork & Flash Mob / Is Michael in Heaven? Did He Really Have 10,000 Books?

See Best, Worst and Weirdest Art Inspired by MJ here. Here is a composite:

 

July 8 Flashmob

Is Michael in Heaven goes into the Top Five MJ stories I found worth reading.

Michael Jackson was raised by Jehovah’s Witnesses and flirted with Scientology and Islam. Now many Christian groups wonder if the King of Pop is residing with the King of Kings.

Seattle PI Blog reports that Michael had 10,000 books. They reported that a judge who knew him said in an interview:

"He loved to read. He had over 10,000 books at his house. And I know that because - and I hate to keep referring to the case, because I don't want the case - the case should not define him. But one of the things that we learned - the DA went through his entire library and found, for instance, a German art book from 1930-something. And it turned out that the guy who was the artist behind the book had been prosecuted by the Nazis. Nobody knew that, but then the cops get up there and say, 'We found this book with pictures of nude people in it.' But it was art, with a lot of text. It was art. And they found some other things, a briefcase that didn't belong to him that had some Playboys in it or something. But they went through the guy's entire house, 10,000 books. And it caused us to do the same thing, and look at it."

"And there were places that he liked to sit, and you could see the books with his bookmarks in it, with notes and everything in it where he liked to sit and read. And I can tell you from talking to him that he had a very - especially for someone who was self-taught, as it were, and had his own reading list - he was very well-read. And I don't want to say that I'm well-read, but I've certainly read a lot, let's put it that way, and I enjoy philosophy and history and everything myself, and it was very nice to talk to him, because he was very intellectual, and he liked to talk about those things. But he didn't flaunt it, and it was very seldom that he would initiate the conversation like that, but if you got into a conversation like that with him, he was there."

Apparently MJ was a frequenter of several bookstores and a Johny Appleseed of reading, spreading books to all children.  He would bring in vanloads of kids and buy them whatever books they wanted.  He would often wear a surgical mask and have an assistant hold an umbrealla to shield him from the glare of florescent lighting.  They contrasted him with Kanye West who doesn't like to read and discussed the disconnect between pop and intellect in America.  

Letter from LSD Inventor Albert Hoffman to Microsoft's Steve Jobs

at the link you can see Hoffman's actual 101 year old handwriting

I met Dr. Hoffman when I was 25 year old student and attended the Conference on Evolution and Lateralization of the Brain in New York City. I asked him any of the experiments he reported on with animals had been replicated with humans. He said they had but  they couldn't report it.   Slugbug       So here is the letter.

Dear Mr. Steve Jobs, 

Hello from Albert Hofmann. I understand from media accounts that you feel LSD helped you creatively in your development of Apple computers and your personal spiritual quest. I'm interested in learning more about how LSD was useful to you. 

I'm writing now, shortly after my 101st birthday, to request that you support Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Peter Gasser's proposed study of LSD-assisted psychotherapy in subjects with anxiety associated with life-threatening illness. This will become the first LSD-assisted psychotherapy study in over 35 years. I hope you will help in the transformation of my problem child into a wonder child. 

Sincerely, A. Hofmann

United States Senator Al Franken Sworn In

Rove to Get Over a Million for His Memoirs

I'd just said, "Well we haven't heard from Rove lately. Maybe he's no longer relevant and will go away." Then I read this.  He will get over a million bucks for his memoirs.  Here's his Oh Shit! article about Palin resigning.  Shouldn't he being getting frog-marched somewhere by now?

Walden Published Today

Buried the whole book here.

Bernard Henri Levy on Jacko

BHL, French intellectual giant

Translated from the French .. probably loses something in the translation but it's kind of a comparison with Christ, n'est-ce pas?

Excerpts:

First station of the cross: things. The holy horror of things. An entire apparatus of masks, breastplates, umbrellas, nomadic objects, an entire bubble at once suffocating and over-oxygenated, cloistered and overexposed, operating like a greenhouse and preserving him from the great contamination of things. Not only, as has been said, was it viruses, germs, and bacteria. But life itself as a germ. The living as a bacterium. Matter, objects, and the very air he breathed as soon as he ventured beyond his dear Neverland became a source of infection, pestilence, a macabre obsession -- a school for cadavers. The dandies were like that. I mean the great dandies. The founders of the tradition. Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly. Beau Brummel. Wilde and his Dorian Gray. Red heels to dance on top of a world of vapors and humors. Makeup and artifices to escape the De Profudis of a definitively parasitic abyss. Not to mention Baudelaire who based the principle of his aesthetic, his ethics, and his politics on his disgust with nature and its monstrous proliferations. Michael Jackson was their heir. Michael Jackson, with his vinyl, latex, his mausoleum of a house, his prophylactic terrors and also of course his entrechats of a dance genius, besieged by light on every side, was the last of these great dandies. Add the morbid care that he apparently gave to his body. The hyperbaric chamber where he tirelessly prepared himself for some kind of funereal ritual. He didn't die from a drug overdose; he died because of his desire not only to invent a vaccine against life, but also to want to inoculate himself with it.

Second station: others. Others, truly. No longer things, but humans. Their contact. Their malignant and repugnant proximity. The very presence of others, of their odor, their instantly searching gaze, experienced as an offense, a threat, the source and cause of all violence -- and from which he was only protected by the smoked lenses of his glasses. Hell? Yes, hell. A Sartrean Jackson this time. Or even a Cathar. A Jackson not the least of whose paradoxes was the moment he wrote "We Are the World," the moment where, in other words, he popularizes what must be called the contemporary humanitarian while viewing humanity as a fiasco, men as cankers and their company as a necessary evil, an obligatory compromise, a degrading accommodation that an artist can only begrudgingly make. This reincarnation of Peter Pan sincerely thought, for example, that children were made without anyone touching. This incomplete adult feeds the mad dream -- and, in a certain way, fulfilled it -- of having his own sons without contact, and almost without a mother. This misanthrope, this mutant, was one of the last modern humans to believe -- and to live -- the ancient theorems of the inconvenience of being born. Generation, corruption... Desire without concupiscence... Which, at the very least, shows the absurdity of the witch trials conducted against him the last ten years of his life which were like an endless persecution. Michael Jackson did not want to be a child; he wanted to be a saint. Or an angel. And angels, as we know, don't have a sex. Or only have one in the imagination of the perverted who project onto them their own fantasies.

And finally: himself. His own body and his own face, seen as even greater threats, sites of every danger, the intimate yet merciless enemy that would take a lifetime to subdue or annihilate. There again the singular adventure of Michael Jackson is misread; the mad metamorphosis that he impressed on his face and the repeated plastic surgeries that he inflicted on himself over the course of his life are utterly misunderstood if reduced to a matter of pigmentology -- race, anti-race, self-hate, malaise, unease in his own skin, this reason or that. Look at his photos. Look at this epidermis essentially becoming whiter and whiter, almost like living limestone. Notice this nose reduced to almost nothing, these lips eaten away from the inside, these narrowed cheekbones like those of a Jivaro mask or a Giacometti rendering. Look closely at these dwindled features, this shrinking skin, these eyes that only seem to sit in his skull like a ring on a skeleton's finger. Consider this reduction -- a philosopher would say this epochè -- of a face reduced to its simplest inexpression, having become its own double. Isn't the face the very signature of the human? Its truth? The way that it exhibits and expresses itself? The sign of everyone's singularity, of their priceless uniqueness? Of course. It is always that, a face. And that's why this third chapter, this way of torturing, mortifying, profaning, and ultimately of erasing his own face should be read as the last station of a long and terrible Calvary. Because, having reached that stage, when you have decided to escape the reign of things, and to leave the ranks of humans, and then to become a human without a face, you don't really have too many choices left. Either you reinvent what is considered human, become truly trans-human, and create a genetically modified organism, a GMO. Or you die.

The Most Literary Garden Party Ever

Our friend David likes people to a) converse, b) eat well, c) never get bored. At his annual potluck (which precedes the Georgetown Artopia and which is close enough so we can walk over), I noticed books everywhere, even outdoors! 

I met David 30 years ago when we worked for adjacent research labs, and there was no internet (except maybe for the military) so instead of a blog, we had a 'zine (called R.A.T. or Research Anarchy Times) which was made using cut 'n paste & copy machine.

These were in the garage, where the food was.

This was on the windowsill, entering the house (seen from the outdoors side.)  The Gore display is on the inside and then he has raised the ceilings, leaving room for books on shelves which go all the way around the top of the inside of the kitchen and living room, all of which are displayed with interesting objects d'art.

Bush Could Get $17,000 Per Page for Memoirs

Raw Story Bush could earn $17,000 a page for his memoirs: Bush could earn $17,000 a page for his memoirshttp://tinyurl.com/lutgz8

 

Bush gets $7,000,000 from Crown before he writes a single word.  It the book is 400 pages long, he gets more than $17,500 per page.  If Laura's book is 400 pages, that’ll be almostf $8,750 per page at a minimum).

Condi Rice has a three-book deal with Crown for $2.5 million, $833,333 per book.  Rove also has a book deal with a conservative publisher - in the seven-figure range.  Cheney is also writing a book, as is former Treasury Secretary  Paulson, and former  Attorney General Gonzales.

Speaker's bureaus hire out Powell, Rumsfeld, Snow, Mukasey, Rice, Ridge, Andy Card, Ari Fleischer, Armitage or John Bolton.  Then there are the second-rate line of Bush gurus such as Porter Goss, Ed Gillespie, Stephen Hadley, Michael Hayden, Dana Perino, Christopher Cox or Margaret Spellings.  

One in four Bush aides are now lobbyists.  

Reader's Digest Becoming Even More Conservative

Reader's Digest Denies Move in Decidedly Conservative Direction 

Hasn't it always been conservative? I grew up reading "Humor in Uniform" and "Life in These United States." I perused RD along with cutting out Betsy McCall paper dolls and collecting Norman Rockwell paintings in Saturday Evening Post.

 

It's all about their "core values" - home, family, community, optimism, country and large print. They claim to be going back to their "roots" during this economic recession. It's a "brand transformation." They will emphasize military families and spirituality. The publishers had even considered turning the magazine into a "right wing handbook, a companion to Fox News" but that idea didn't pass the test marketing.

"It's traditional, conservative values: I love my family, I love my community, I love my church," said Mary Berner, the president and chief executive of Reader's Digest Association.

(Someone used to send us the magazine because they somehow thought it improved their chance of winning the Reader's Digest Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.)

Women of Wisdom Blog Tour: Make Kris's Book a Best Seller!

We are proud to be part of the "Women of Wisdom Blog Tour" for Wise Woman Publishing and our friend Kris's book about Women of Wisdom.  Participating blogs are talking about the book between June 21-25.

Testimonial:

“First read this book carefully, perhaps aloud to a friend. Then dance with it. Then draw in it. Then bundle it in a leather pouch and take it someplace sacred—like under a large tree, alongside clear water, into the temple of a coffee shop, into a circle of women. Then read this book again. There is wisdom here that women and companioning men need in order to make the world anew. Bravo to Kris Steinnes for holding the vision, calling the gatherings, and harvesting these voices and images.” —Christina Baldwin, author of Life’s Companion, Calling the Circle, The Seven Whispers, and Storycatcher.

Women of Wisdom by Kris Steinnes, is being offered beginning on June 23rd, 2009 at 12:01 am. We invite you to go to this page - www.wisewomanpublishing.com/womenofwisdom.html - to access the order page and then go back to this page and enter your order confirmation code and your email address. That will take you to the sign up page for the Women of Wisdom enewsletter, once you join the WOW book group you will be sent an email with a link to the bonus gifts that are available to people who buy the book on June 23rd. You can later opt out of being on the Women of Wisdom newsletter list if you choose.

From the Book: 

writer Isabel Allende page 70
I have come to the conclusion that the most precious gifts women can give to each other are their personal stories. By sharing our experiences, our pains and joys, our fears, hopes and desires, we create a sacred space where we can find new strength.

Kris Steinnes from Women of Wisdom page 93
As women heal ourselves individually, we heal the great wound to the feminine in our culture and in our world. As we share who we are, we awaken new consciousness in the collective, forging a way for the Divine Feminine to manifest. As we grow, She grows. In this way, sharing our individual stories serves a much greater unfolding.  I believe that if a story touches one person’s heart, changes one person’s perspective, then it has fulfilled its mission.

 Besides being our friend, Kris Steinnes is the founder of the Women of Wisdom Foundation.  Now in its 18th year, over 20,000 women have attended this annual conference. Kris has been able to attract such best selling authors such as Joan Borysenko, Ph.D., Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., Jeanne Achterberg, Ph.D., Iyanla Vanzant, Angela Davis, Marion Woodman, Ph.D., Isabel Allende, Gabrielle Roth, Angeles Arrien, Ph.D., Judith Orloff and Jean Houston and more to speak and share at this special conference.  Through her experience in leading Women of Wisdom, Kris has become a leader in the women’s spirituality movement in her own right, and her award-winning book, a compilation of the women’s wisdom from the many years of the conference sells to and inspires women across the country.

Kris is also a minister and meditation teacher. Her Circle Leadership model, developed as she worked on Women of Wisdom, draws on each group member's individual leadership strengths and knowledge to foster community-based decision-making. Kris was honored for her many years of work in the Seattle community at the Women’s Empowerment Summit, June 2009.  Kris’ personal mission is to improve the status of women around the world and to bring feminine consciousness forward so women can become leaders of their own life. She intends to write more books to meet this need for the wisdom of women to take center stage in these challenging times.