Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol)

Narrated by Leonard Cohen!

Part 1: A Way Of Life
Death is real, it comes without warning and it cannot be escaped. An ancient source of strength and guidance, The Tibetan Book of the Dead remains an essential teaching in the Buddhist cultures of the Himalayas. Narrated by Leonard Cohen, this enlightening two-part series explores the sacred text and boldly visualizes the afterlife according to its profound wisdom. &
Part 2: The Great Liberation

According to Buddhist scholar and translator Robert Thurman (father of Uma), The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Bardo Thodol, “organizes the experiences of the between—(Tibetan, bar-do) usually referring to the state between death and rebirth.” While The Book of the Dead has, of course, a long and illustrious history in Tibetan Buddhist life, it also has its place in the history of the West, particularly among 20th century intellectuals and artists. In the 1950s, for example, there was talk among Igor Stravinsky, Martha Graham, and Aldous Huxley to turn the Bardo into a ballet with a Greek chorus. Huxley, who famously spent his final hours on an acid trip, asked that a passage from the book be read to him as he lay dying: “Hey! Noble one, you named Aldous Huxley! Now the time has come for you to seek the way….”

In another, less trippy, example of Eastern mysticism meets Western artist, the video above (continued below) features poet and troubadour Leonard Cohen narrating a two-part documentary series from 1994 that explores the ancient Tibetan teachings on death and dying. As Cohen tells it above, in Tibetan tradition, the time spent in the between supposedly lasts 49 days after a person’s death. During that time, a Buddhist yogi reads the Bardo each day, while the consciousness of the dead person, so it is believed, hovers between one life and another, and can hear the instructions read to him or her. The film gives us an intimate look at this ceremony, performed after the death of a villager—with its intricate rituals and ancient, unbound, hand-printed text of the book—and touches on the tricky political issues of Buddhist practice in largely Chinese-controlled Tibet. In this first installment above, The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Way of Life, the Dalai Lama weighs in with his own views on life and death (at 33:22). Before his appearance, the film provides some brief context of his supposed incarnation from the 13th Dalai Lama and his rise to governance, then exile.

The second installment of the series, The Great Liberation (also above), follows an old Buddhist lama and a thirteen-year-old novice monk as they guide another deceased person with the text of the Bardo. The National Film Board of Canada, who produced the series (you can purchase the DVD on their website), did well in their choice of Cohen as narrator. Not only is his deep, soothing voice the kind of thing you might want to hear reading to you as you slipped into the between realms (or just slipped off to sleep), but his own journey has brought him to an abiding appreciation for Buddhism. Although Cohen has always identified strongly with Judaism—incorporating Jewish themes and texts into his songs and poetry—he found refuge in Zen Buddhism late in life. Two years after this film, he was ordained as a Zen Buddhist monk at age 62, at the Mount Baldy Zen Center east of Los Angeles (where Ram Dass, Oliver Stone, and Richard Gere also practiced). Cohen’s “Dharma name”? Jikan, or “Silent One.”

Cyberpunk Documentary

Perhaps the overriding theme of Gibson's work is the knowledge that, as Bukatman (1993: 5) (rather clumsily) puts it '[t]echnology and the human are no longer so dichotomous'. The boundaries between subjects, their bodies and the 'outside world' are, like everything else, being radically reconfigured (Haraway, 1991; Plant, 1993). The division between technology and nature is dissolving as the analytic categories we draw upon to give structure to our world - the biological, the technological, the natural, the artificial, and the human - begin to blur (Stone, 1991: 101-2). The mainstreaming of cosmetic surgery and the rise of biotechnology, genetic engineering and nanotechnology have led some to contemplate that the next 'generation could very well be the l ast...of "pure" humans' (Deitch, 1995). A programmatic users guide on new technological developments (Rucker et al., 1993: 100) puts it like this: 'We are already cyborgs. My mother, for instance, leads a relatively normal life thanks to a pacemaker. Beyo nd that, genetic engineering and nanotechnology...offer us the possibility of literally being able to change our bodies into new and different forms...a form of postbiological humanity can be achieved within the next fifty years'. Cyberpunk as Social and Political Theory
RJ Burrows, March 1995

Very Nice, Very Nice

Very Nice, Very Nice is a 7 minute long avant-garde film made by Arthur Lipsett in 1961. It was completed with funding from the National Film Board of Canada. While working at the National Film Board, Lipsett collected pieces of audio and pieced them together as a hobby. When his friends heard the product of this they suggested that he add images to it. This film is the result. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Subject in 1962. This film brought Lipsett much acclaim and for a time allowed him great freedom in the Canadian film industry, however, his follow up films were less mainstream and the public quickly lost interest in him. By 1970 this film had 200 prints in circulation. It is often shown at film festivals and in film schools.

Genesis P-Orridge: An Introduction

Genesis P-Orridge on Disinfomation Edited version of the original 1-hour special, broadcast on UK TV


Just as relevant now as then, if not more so! From the lost archives of avant garde artist, industrial music pioneer, mind explorer and TOPY-founder Genesis P. Orridge, who expresses concerns @ 20 years ago about state oppression on freedoms of individual thought and action, particularly through art.

The english entrepreneur and network-builder interviewed on his 1976 court case in which, as an artist, he was threatened to become a "non-representative person" and set under arrest by the UK-government.

This rarely edited 1986 version is part of the lost archives of Genesis P. Orridge who's message from then is even more actual in times of the msm propaganda and the internet.

Probably no part of this raw footage has ever been screened on the UK's national television.

Sonic Outlaws

Sonic Outlaws, a fragmented, gleefully anarchic documentary by Craig Baldwin, approaches this incident from several directions. Some of the film is about the legal nightmare that ensued from Negativland's little joke. In a highly publicized case, U2's label, Island Records, charged Negativland with copyright and trademark infringement for appropriating the letter U and the number 2, even though U2 had in turn borrowed its name from the Central Intelligence Agency. SST then dropped Negativland, suppressed the record and demanded that the group pay legal fees. Trying to remain solvent, Negativland sent out a barrage of letters and legal documents that are now collected in "Fair Use", an exhaustive, weirdly fascinating scrapbook about the case.

Sonic Outlaws covers some of the same territory while also expanding upon the ideas behind Negativland's guerilla recording tactics. Guerilla is indeed the word, since these and other appropriation artists see themselves as engaged in real warfare, inundated by the commercial airwaves, infuriated by the propaganda content of much of what they hear and see, these artists strike back by rearranging contexts as irreverently as possible. Their technological capabilities are awesome enough to mean no sound or image is tamper-proof today.

La Sierra

The is a documentary from, I think Colombian TV about the suburb of La Sierra in Medellin. Much of the program is made up of the amazing doumentary La Sierra by Scott Dalton and Margaita Martinez. Dolton and Martinez's film is one of the most incredible pieces of documentary film making I have seen. The Colombian TV program does not convey the pace and intensity that La Sierra has but it does have some good background information on those featured in the original film. It is in Spanish.

John Fahey 1969

John Fahey (February 28, 1939 – February 22, 2001) was an American fingerstyle guitarist and composer who pioneered the steel-string guitar as a solo instrument. His style has been greatly influential and has been described as American Primitive, a term borrowed from painting and referring mainly to the self-taught nature of his art. Fahey himself borrowed from the folk and blues traditions of America but incorporated classical, Brazilian, Indian and abstract music into his eclectic oeuvre. In 2003, he was ranked 35th in Rolling Stone's "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".

Lubricated Goat: In The Raw

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[The fraidy cats at Youtube have taken down the nude Blah Blah Blah In the Raw clip...so here is the official video from the Goat, still gives you the throaty thrill of Stu and the lads but without the knob shots]

When this In the Raw aired on Blah Blah Blah on ABC television in 1988 it caused a sensation. I remember seeing it in my student share house in Toowoomba and thinking, "wow punk actually exists in Australia." Later when I moved to Sydney in 1992 I lived around the corner from "Gracelands", the huge terrace house on Cleveland Street that housed Lubricated Goat. I remember walking around there from my place in Mort Street with a friend from Toowoomba and we stood on the other side of Cleveland just looking at it, like it was shrine or something. The whole scene around The Goat; Thug, Grong Grong, Salamander Jim, The Beasts of Bourbon, Kim Salmon and the Surrealists, The Scientists, Feedtime, Monroes Fur, Box the Jesuit, and so on was a high point in Australian music. Many of these bands are still going but the late 1980's and early 1990's was the high point for the scene. I will post some audio downloads from this glorious time on Friday Downstreams on Soulsphincter.

6majik9

Raw and homemade music video from the 6majik9 freakshow

Kemialliset Ystävät

Kemialliset Ystävät live in Budapest at the Uh Fest 2007, March 25th.



Kemialliset Ystävät in Barcelona, Spain. Sonar festival 2005. With visuals by Shary Boyle. Camera by Jordi.