The End of Science Fiction...

As a story genre, Cowboys and Indians is today a fairly spent force, as are Cold War spy novels and Graustarkian adventure tales.  Spies were undoubtedly real, but the Cowboy mythology had nearly no basis in reality.  I've been to the OK Corral.

The first yummy image a Google search coughed up for "Science Fiction".

It took the Europeans to transform geriatric Westerns into something really epic, the Spaghetti Western, where good and evil got distilled, magnified, exaggerated.  Sure, you could still spin soap operas about lost love, but as soon as you point a gun at someone you have instant, high-intensity, if not high-quality, drama. That's gotten to be an incredibly overused gimmick, to me.

Adventure-tinged "Sci-Fi" with a dash of low-level porn.

I read tons of Science Fiction years ago, finally picking Stanislaw Lem as the coldest--or coolest--intellect around.  Dropping his name was like offering your scent to the pack after rolling in carrion.  No wonder they booted him out of American SF.  But do watch the original Russian Solaris film, if you get the chance. 

Science Fiction has historically made some pretty huge promises, in spite of dystopian warnings.  Today, Science itself is also caught red-handed making more promises than it can keep.  It has claimed that we'll soon understand consciousness by studying the brain, and, we'll conquer all disease by mapping the human genome.  Neither goal has been reached, and most of the investors have backed out of Genetics, which should illuminate things clearly--just by following the money, as it escapes.

Did anyone ever really want to live here?

Materialist Science, or "MatSci", could take a huge hit by not immediately healing all human ills as promised, but it can always request more time, which it usually does.  But with Consciousness, there's no ailment to be "fixed", so there's no one to blame for a failure to produce results. But the prime fallacy of MatSci is the idea that material machines can explain the immaterial, that is, our separate consciousnesses.

The "10,000 Year Clock", the watchful, cyclopean eye/idol of MatSci.

My own experiences with "expanded" consciousness, for lack of a better term, aren't something I keep a secret, but they are somewhat personal as they're part of my evolution.  Mainly, they concern many of the things MatSci dismisses out of hand: "psychic" experiences, past life memories, viewing auras and other energies, so-called "ghosts", exploring alternate timelines, and out-of-body projection. 

So ultimately, I don't need the MS priesthood to give me permission to know what's up with the Universe, any more than you need it to tell you that you love someone.  But then, you may think that your emotions are nothing more than chemical reactions, which is certainly a common, but false, belief. And even though the scientific priesthood claims it's so during work hours, they themselves don't bother adhering to it on the weekends.

Science Fiction illustrates all sorts of possible scenarios based around technology, some good, some bad. And that's not to say those events won't ever happen; people could well merge with machines and become cyborgs, but machines, approaching the technologic "singularity" some claim is coming, will never, ever attain consciousness.

Ask yourself how would we tell, anyway-- by using yet another machine to test for it?

Our friends the Materialists would like to imagine that everything's a machine, and that matter preceded consciousness, but in fact it didn't.  Even a technologist like Nikola Tesla understood that the Universe operates vibrationally.  Also true is that the frequency spectrum is infinite, spatially and dimensionally.

Vibration alone sends sand grains into atomic & biological patterns.

The prime component of the militant MatSci guerrilla force, the "skeptics", "debunkers" and other members of the scientific clergy, is Ego, the same aspect of consciousness that currently holds much of humanity at a  vibrational impasse.  Nowadays most people--men, usually--have flexible definitions of ego that allow them to maintain their bad behaviour, but its actual function owes more to eastern mysticism than psychology.

Basically, ego is what a dog doesn't have that allows it to live in the moment, thereby experiencing total Buddha-like connection to the Universe.  In that sense, every animal on Earth down to the last tiny little bug has an advantage over most us.  Even your pets can tell when an earthquake's coming.  A real, inquiring  Science would study that, but of course dogmatic MatSci won't even acknowledge it.

Your dog has an invisible halo.

Consciousness is a big subject, probably the biggest, so staying close to our theme I'd end by saying that Science Fiction, of the speculative sort--not blasters and cowboys in space a la Star Wars--is completely and utterly bankrupt because its foundation, the materialist/mechanistic paradigm, is false.

And "pure" extrapolative SF is rarely even a good story, it's just a manual to a potential destination, with reams of MatSci dogma lurking in the margins.

But no new mode of fiction need be invented to take its place, because even though Science Fiction is technically false, our Mythologies aren't.

DIY Genius...

How To Be an Artistic Genius

A Ten-Step Program

1. Find an Artistic Genius to copy.
2. If discovered, deny copying.
3. Continue copying.
4. Seek out powerful symbols, ideas or totems to include in your art as content.
5. Check to make sure that content is offensive and negative.
6. Accept accolades from audience who accepts offensiveness as Artistic Genius.
7. Ego inflates accordingly. Enjoy.
8. Face criticisms from a minority who are actually offended by offensive content.
9. Become artistic martyr via attacks that reinforce and validate your special authority to use offensive subject matter.
10. Artistic Genius achieved via mimicry, negativity and offensiveness. 

All joking aside, this process is everywhere in the Art world.  I know it especially well because I've done it myself.

More Violation...

You may know that someone recently burglarized the stockroom here at Hoffman International and took off with all the stock. All the Art books, Comics & everything else was discovered in the trash.  Amazing.  And we never caught who did it.

Now we're re-doing the tile in our bathroom, and while we stepped out briefly for some heroin, some bozoidal maniac came through here and scrawled some of the most banal, pointless cartoons on the concrete backer board that I'd ever seen. 

So we took photos for the Police, and believe me, you have no idea how it feels to have your virgin privacy burgled  especially if it has not been burgled before.  It is a nightmare from which there is no waking. You never know when it may or may not happen again.

 

So here are the grotesque "Art" works, and I show them now only so that you will remember to keep your doors locked and trust no one.

Abandonment & Monsters...

Hey, this Blog has had almost 70,000 page views.  Amazing.

Those of you on my mailing list may know that I have dug up and burned the roots of all my comics and fantasy art stuff.  Trying to go in new directions while constantly returning to draw "sexy" for some extra money was not working at all.  So, it all had to go.  And I'm not sorry in the least.

Some people took it hard, as if I'd abandoned them somehow, or they'd been hustled; other got pretty angry and abusive.  The latter was an especially good reason to get the hell out.

 The newest venue for gross monstrosities, Monster Motel

One thing I did not trash was my Monster U. stuff, in fact I started an Etsy store just for that and have stocked it full of the older items and some new tweaked "remastered" ones.

 The original, unmodified Monster U. album cover art.

Monster movies might be called Horror by some, and therefore "bleed" into the Slasher genre, but to me they have always been about Love, and the Monsters represent our desire for it along with our feelings of ugliness or unworthiness.  Frankenstein & the Bride, Quasimodo, Erik the Phantom--they are all Love stories. 

"Big Frankie", the digitally tweaked version of the first Monster U.'s album cover art. 

 As upset as some people are with me, finally being free of obligations to the Past is real liberation.

Alternate Tomorrows...

I'm on the mailing list for TwoMorrows publishing, whom you may know as the maker of many, many books and mags about Comics.  But they are more than just "about" Comics, they are also creating and propagating certain ideas about the medium, and in a sense writing alternate Histories via a form of criticism masked as celebration.  Let me explain a little.

While there's nothing inferior about Comics as an artform, there is definitely something unhealthy about the Industry today.  First, the somewhat rigidly pedestrian tastes of the readership, because the fans basically want the same experience over and over again, though perhaps with infinitesimally slight variations; second, the pressure from those tastes tend to confine the artists to plough the same territory forever.  They never develop beyond the ghetto, because the audience won't allow it.

TwoMorrows Publishing makes healthy profits from Jack Kirby's work, implying it's somehow a force for positive change in the Industry, or perhaps preservers of heritage, or something.  On one hand, there are lengthy exposes about the poor treatment of Kirby by publishers, but TwoMorrows is also a publisher.  Are they really a kinder and gentler than larger corporation?

New in the emailbox today.

There are basic truths people either don't face or can't perceive about Jack Kirby and the ever-inflating myths about his so-called mistreatment, and that is: he showed up as a victim and co-created any troubles he might have had.  Similarly, Jews and Nazis also co-created a reality together, as distasteful as that may sound.  Kirby was a talented man, but basically, he stepped out in front of a car.

Most Comics readers simply have no idea the level and intensity of work required to draw them.  Today, it's mainly the domain of the young, who have plenty of raw energy and time.  What people generally don't realize while they are ingesting mountains of Kirby is that no one person should ever have done that much work.  But you read a comic in five minutes, and that is the extent of it.

So when it comes to co-creation of awful scenarios of pain and suffering, not only did Kirby volunteer to be abused, but the appetite of the Fans for more and more loaded him down with an inhuman workload.  No wonder he couldn't think of any other options.  If anyone is to blame, it is the audience as much as the companies.

That's just another inherent danger in escaping from reality through Comics or anything else.

Hello Sweetheart...

I scour the local Thrift stores for books and things to paint on.  Anything that might inspire me gets bought or at least noted in pencil in my little spiral-bound "Eye Pad".

"The Eagle's Mate" from 1914.

I found an old book that for a moment I thought had a painted cover, but no, it was a tinted photograph of "America's Sweetheart", Mary Pickford.  I looked but did not buy, and later found these images on eBay along with a description:  Two tough mountain dwelling cousins fight over a kidnapped city lady. She is held prisoner in their mountain fortress.

 This edition from eBay has "no offensive odor"; that costs extra.

 My point in all this is that nowadays a book might be so good it gets made into a movie, but back then a movie could be so good it would be made into a book.

Maybe a lot of what passes for "progress" is just being lost.

Love Profaned...

There are dangers inherent in living in the Technosphere.  Right now, the Technosphere involves three things: people (you), Money and Machines.  The three things are currently all stuck together.  People get all caught up with their machines, and then there's always the struggle for more money, which is basically fear--of not having enough, losing what you've got, and so on.

The most important thing to remember when playing in the Technosphere is that while you're in this falseness, this trance-state, it is all dependent on another sphere that it cleverly obscures.  You could call that the Biosphere. Once, that was all there was.

 The Biosphere met his every need for 50,000 years.

You can figure out where this is going.  Today, an email came in from Apple, Inc. praising the "iPad".  Like the corporation Paypal, which touts itself as "the most-loved" way to get paid, the iPad also is ready to co-opt Love itself to ensure the dominance of the machine and money over your welfare and happiness.

 

Oh, Hoffman, they don't really mean "Love", do they? 

I can think of an infinite number of things an iPad can't do, and one is actually provide Love.  But, Love is becoming a "power" word in Technosphere propaganda, so are you being a good little monkey and falling for it?  Put your head in the noose, now.

The latent power of your own terrestrial life itself has been matched by a pocket-sized machine.

Here's something pharmaceutical companies don't want you to know: drugs don't heal you, they make you sick.  It's actually your body that heals you.  So what do machines do? 

Machines don't improve your life, they take your life away.  

They do this by distracting you.

ADDENDUM: 4/09/13

 

EBay's latest campaign again tries to employ "Love" for its own commercial gain, this time encouraging people to unquestioningly accept the idea that we can actually love "things"--inanimate objects.

The good news is that these sorts of pleas are desperate acts, brought about by diminishing revenues and shifting cultural paradigms.

They know that the human appetite for more "things" is decreasing.