My Alien Radio Manifesto

Just for the heck of it, and let’s say as a writing exercise, I have transcribed the legible text, in roughly the order it falls, from the first half of a sprawling accordion-fold collage book I made almost seven years ago. It’s dated 10/7/00. (Seven years ago. This is a pre- 9/11 rant!)
A.R.:MANIFESTO (part 1)
A sense of reality: the evolution of mental pictures. Alien Radio. Future Shock. ARE WE READY? Practical Psychocybernetics. Heaven and Hell. For The New Age. Sense and Nonsense. Psychic Detectives. THIS IS IT. BELIEVE YOUR EYES! Defining Science Fiction. And other essays on Zen and spiritual experience. Diagram of eye movement in normal reading. From the Sufi. The Rolling Stones in Gimme Shelter. Back of eye. BrrRrraaNNG. COMMUNICATION / COMPUTATION / CONTROL. HOW THE DAISIES GO TO SLEEP. Form Constants and Ineffable Experiences. Psychology Made Simple. The sun is very large or very small. O starfall, once grasped from a bridge. UFOS AND HOW TO SEE THEM. Not to forget you. To stand! A match has a head but can’t think. Man feel alien in a world without meaning. Amazing Science. Dread News. Amazing Truth Publications. FREE CATALOG. 1800 THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW EXISTED. One millionth copy edition. The Sacred Mushroom. Know The Door Of Eternity. A she-cat’s prowl through the jungle of self. Destiny is tapping you on the shoulder. Microcosm. SCRIPT & SEAL. What is time? Five elements welded together to form one unit. WONDERLAND. Thermostatic control. A stereo dimension. Temperature control knob. SOME WILL BELIEVE—OTHERS WILL NOT. Much of the styling of a consumer object is simply sales promotion. THIS IS TODAY. International Radio. Produced with official NASA voice tapes and photographs. There are numerous interlinear decorations on all the plates in this section. The Subliminal Kid. A CELESTIAL ALPHABET EVENT. Magnified structure of malleable iron showing nodual carbon. Magnified structure of pearlitic malleable iron. NOW! ALL THE CRAP IN THE WORLD. AS SEEN ON TV! Rush of air. Fluttering. High pitch. A. R. Jet Set. Fig. 16. The general arrangement of the cerebrospinal nervous system. Fig. 10.20 Parabolic reflector. Marriage of the Sun and Moon. Mandala: two basic types, schematized. The Life And Death Of Stars. The most noticeable characteristic of consciousness is that it is continually changing. MAIN DECK. The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun. Close Encounters. Interstellar Overdrive. ILLUSION OR REALITY? The dot may be located as convenient. Diagram of three synapses. WHAT IS THE FUTURE? A trick you can play with a book. What is this? The Nile Song. Cosmic Trigger. Need the truth? WAS GOD AN ASTRONAUT? Why we find a seashell on the top of a mountain. The most exciting cult experience of all time! Rainbows of bursting color. Equivocal figures. Depth in space. Pulsating lights. Lenticular clouds. NOTICE! The Effect Of Continuity On Perception. The Stroboscopic Ballet. No poetry before ours. Completely revised. Proof of purchase. Mail this coupon. Finally finally finally. The miracle is on the inside! POETRY BEING BORN. The ‘sound’ of scents. New and exciting futuristic space age toys. Cut here. Trouble Funk. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Your own private sun. DO NOT OPERATE LAMP TOO CLOSELY TO SKIN. THE MOTHERSHIP CONNECTION. There was more. Slit-scan Stargate Corridor from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. ‘My empire is of the imagination.’ HIEROGLYPHIC INTERPRETATION. Cash will soon become illegal for all but very small transactions. To ‘know’ something intellectually and to experience it concretely are two very different things. Moon flowers. The First Book Of Time. The most eye-filling sight under the sun. DO NOT USE TOO LONG AN EXPOSURE. Stan Brackhage: Dog Star Man. ‘The totality of consciousness, the reality continuum of the living present.’ College student reading mathematical formulae. Things you should remember. Psychology Made Simple. Hoaxes. Hallucinations. Artificial satellites. Mirages. Beyond the senses are the objects, beyond the objects is the mind, beyond the mind is the intellect, beyond the intellect is the great Atman. Bright meteors. THE WORD SET FREE. THE COLLAPSE OF CULTURAL HIERARCHY. The Continuum Encyclopedia Of Symbols. What Jung believed about UFOs. The Space Age’Science Fact and Science Fiction. Visiting the East China Sea Fleet. THERE IS A GAP BETWEEN IDEA AND IMAGE. THE POWER OF YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND. FROM UNKNOWN WORLDS. FANTASY. Reality. REALITY. An Anthology of Modern Fantasy for Grownups. More Brilliant than Diamonds. BRIDGE THE GAP. Starfish. GODS FROM OUTER SPACE. Power. This Way. Volume. CAUTION: INVISIBLE LASER RADIATION DO NOT STARE INTO BEAM. Colors may bleed when wet. The Inner Sleeve. AR. The Ancients Called It COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS. A WHOLESOME LIFE IN THE BEST OF TASTE. July 1973. The Invisible College. Deluxe Revolving Police Style Warning Light. Terribly scary—but no danger—just fun excitement! HOLOGRAPHIC SCENE SETTER. The vision of P-Funk is clearly oriented toward uplift—of the individual, of black people, and of all people. THE PSYCHIC WORLD. SKY-RIDER OF THE SPACEWAYS. An entire campaign dedicated to the subliminal. Increasing your perception. The Now Generation. What is the secret of its strange power? The Resolution of a Lens on Film. Tru-Vue FILM CARD. Pats. Pending. How The Subconscious Affects Our Purchases. Where the past and present are as one. Background. Middleground. Foreground. INSERT IN VIEWER. Fooled Again. THE BOOK OF MARS. Part of a halftone enlarged to show the dot formation. Slumberland. Funny pictures for you to color. PROJECT BLUE BOOK 1 MARCH 1967. Figure/Ground. XPOSED! UNBELIEVABLE BUT TRUE! Your class hears the letters from your records—sees the letters on the charts. I EXAMINED A LIVE SPACE ALIEN. What Separates Psychic Experience From Mental Disorder? Dendrites. Cell body. NO MESSAGE. With Six Other Witnesses. 40,000 YEARS AGO! NATURE’S ONLY RIVAL. Give your audience a strong reason to buy . . . fast! ESCAPE FROM ANY PAIR OF HANDCUFFS. Things To Come. THE GOD SIVA IN BRONZE. Legibility. The Closure Factor. The message arranged in 3 lines. Were The Ancient Astronauts Mistaken For Gods? WE ARE NOT ALONE. Led Zeppelin III. Superfly Presents STEREOLAB. Glyph. SPACE CRAFT CONVENTION. THE MARCH OF TIME. Aerial view of Stonehenge. THE ARROW OF LIGHT AWARD. Illusion or Reality? The glass bead game: the music of the spheres. Blow your mind. The only limitation is your own imagination. Design Variation. Signal Generator. AR. Radio Frequency. The white ball automatically rolled over from his palm to the top of his hand. THE EFFECT OF SUGGESTION ON BEHAVIOR. How A Snowflake Is Formed. THROUGH THE AGES. AR. Your Guide To Mental Pictures. Many type styles. Silver On Blue. UFOLOGY. FREE BOOKLET. Fig. 18. Over the brink of reason lies the strange world of THE MOST SENSATIONAL EXPOSE OF THE FREAK SIDE OF LIFE. Bend just until internal glass breaks. Shake well to mix chemicals. Fluctuations of Perception. WHITE GOODS. LADIES CLOAKS. The True Yoga. CAVE DRAWINGS OF STRANGE BEINGS IN SPACE SUITS. Unsolved. Stereographic Projections. Sunshine all year ’round. AR. ATARI. Futurism, which is only an accelerated sort of impressionism. RAZOR BLADE IN PYRAMID. PSYCHO-CYBERNETICS. NOW . . . new, short, easy way to profit enormously from your inner mindpower. Reusable. Recycled. Recyclable. Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. We believe whatever we want to believe. Demosthenes, 348 B.C. CAMOUFLAGE.

a new level of visual pollution

“In the new computer age, the proliferation of typefaces and type manipulations represents a new level of visual pollution threatening our culture. Out of thousands of typefaces, all we need are a few basic ones, and trash the rest.”

—Massimo Vignelli; Michael Bierut, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Typeface, 2007.

three new letters

“[Claudius, emperor of Rome from 41-54 C.E.,] invented three new letters and added them to the alphabet, maintaining that they were greatly needed. He published a book on their theory when he was still in private life, and when he became Emperor had no difficulty in bringing about their general use. These characters may still be seen in numerous books, in the record of daily events, and in inscriptions on public buildings.”


—Suetonius, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, translation and footnote by Joseph Gavorse, 1931.

the Yellow Turbans

“The Yellow Turbans were much more than a simple group of rebels: they were a millennial sect looking forward to the coming of a golden age. The millions of Chinese who lived unspeakably hard and grim lives were looking not just for political solutions, but for immediate hope. The Yellow Turbans offered exactly this. Their leader, a Daoist teacher named Chang Chueh, claimed that the had the power to do magic. He announced that he could heal sickness. . . . He promised that if they took his medicines, they would be immune from wounds and could fight in battle without fear. . . .

By 182, the Yellow Turbans had a following of over three hundred and fifty thousand poor, desperate, landless, and angry Chinese. By 184, they were ready to rise up and fight against their oppressors.”

—Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

dressed as Venus in a picture

“[Cleopatra met Antony] in a barge with gilded stern and outspread sails of purple, while oars of silver beat time to the music of flutes and fifes and harps. She herself lay all alone, under a canopy of cloth of gold, dressed as Venus in a picture, and beautiful young boys, like painted Cupids, stood on each side to fan her. Her maids were dressed like Sea Nymphs and Graces, some steering at the rudder, some working at the ropes. The perfumes diffused themselves from the vessel to the shore, which was covered with multitudes, part following the galley up the river on either bank, part running out of the city to see the sight.”

—Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives; Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

The Britons Dye Their Bodies With Woad

“All the Britons dye their bodies with woad, which produces a blue color, and shave the whole of their bodies except the head and the upper lip.”

—Julius Caesar, on British soldiers, 55 B.C.; Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

the Twelve Tables

“[In 450 B.C., t]he Twelve Tables . . . were written out on wood and set in the Forum, where all could see them. . . . [T]hey were . . . the foundation of Roman law. Unfortunately the Tables were lost; what we know of them is assembled from quotes in various Roman documents.”

—Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

Etruscan

“To the northwest [of Rome], Etruscan cities controlled the copper, iron, and silver mines in the so-called Metal-Bearing Hills. This metal was traded to the Greek colonies along the Italian coast, and contact with the Greek trading cities brought the Etruscans face-to-face with the Greek writing system. The Etruscans began to use the Greek alphabet to label their own goods, using their own language written in Greek characters. Despite the recognizable letters, the language itself remains a puzzle: it appears almost entirely in brief inscriptions which have not been decoded.”

—Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

Phoenician

“There was no country called Phoenicia, nor was there a Phoenician high king. The independent cities along the coast were united by a shared culture and language; their writing system was the first to incorporate an alphabet.”

—Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.

composite ideograms

“Chinese script seems to have developed in complete independence from writing elsewhere in the ancient world. The earliest Yellow river signs were pictures, but the writing of China was the first to move beyond the pictorial by combining pictures: putting pictorial signs (called “ideograms”) together into “composite ideograms” which represented abstractions and ideas.

By the time of the Shang court’s establishment at Yin, these “composite ideograms” were sophisticated enough to record divine answers to questions. . . . A man or woman who sought guidance went to the Shang court to pose a question to the priests there. The priests brought out the cleaned and dried shoulder bones of cows or sheep (or, occasionally, a turtle shell), carved with patterns or marked with an inscription, and then touched the bone or shell with a heated metal point. When the bone cracked, the path of the crack through he pattern or inscription was “read” by the priests and interpreted as a message, sent by ancestors who now passed their wisdom back to the living. The priest carved the results of the inquiry into the bone or shell, in signs cut by a knife and filled with paint.

The oracle bones show that the questions, no matter who asked them, were always posed in the name of the king.”

—Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.