New Mexico Associationalist (Accidental ) R.G., N° 27

A.A.R.G.-27, Albuquerque/Jemez Springs
from the Depths of the Tub

Water:Pillow

 

 .

For many years I collaborated with Tim Wilson (a.k.a undule; a.k.a. .sWineDriveR.) on several artistic projects.  We were roommates for a time and took some classes together.  We finished each other's homework, journals, and added our touches to each other's paintings (He is an infinitely more skilled artist than I, but he was always very generous with his encouragement and feedback; he even gave me my first set of brushes and tubes of Liquitex).  

 

One of our largest collaborations was Plastic Tub, which is, as far as I know, the first, if not only, work of fiction using Wiki software.

We shared (share?) a lot of ideas in common, but we have very different personalities and beliefs.  After our first rift, I reached out a few years later and it was great to speak to him again, because some of my most productive conversations about art and literature were with Tim.  Never a dull or derivative idea.  

For a man who loved pseudonyms, he was always honest, sometimes brutally so.  Not always an easy guy to get along with, especially when liquor entered into the equation.  And the same is to be said of me.  I don't get so wild anymore, but back in the day I drank in order to get dronk, with Rimbaud's "derangement of the senses" firmly and pretentiously in mind.  I could get pretty deranged and become an insufferable and boorish twat.  I'd calmed down by the time my wife left me, but the grief of our separation was the final nail in the coffin in which time and the trail of wounded laid that youthful, exaggerated exuberance to rest.

The Tub played a part in Tim and I falling out:  different levels of commitment, different ideas of where it should go, alcohol.  Pity, because the Tub is a genuinely strange, funny, and intelligent work of satire and yet also a "serious" aesthetic manifesto.  There were four core writers, including The Gid and Steven Vogeler, and I think three other people added some passages.  While lacking heft in some parts, it's a pretty thorough praxis of the ideas we developed into a "high-modernist '-ism'" we called "AA" (pun intended), or "Accidental Associationalism."  

Surrealism, Discordianism, Gnosticism, Alchemy, détournement, and whimsy....aficionados of each will find something to love in the depths of the Tub....

It seems I write a little blurb about the Tub every few years because I think it deserves to be recognized as a unique and early example of the collaborative artistic possibilities facilitated by the internet.  Not HTML fiction but Wiki fiction.  A collaborative assemblage of ideas is intrinsic to the Wiki concept....

 

Tim is real smart, extremely well-read, and is a deep well of original and creative works of art across many media, from painting to film-making, collage, and video game design.  He taught himself how to make add-on modules for video games and ended up working for some industry leaders on big projects, including Borderlands and Duke Nukem Forever.

Despite our acrimonious parting of ways, I can't deny the man's big influence on my artistic endeavors....which can't be said of another collaborator he worked with, a guy who based whole shows on one of Tim's ideas and never once tipped his hat -- sadly endemic in art circles.  Tim encouraged me to pick up a paintbrush and helped me to liberate my poetry from undue influences.  I owe him a lot, lit-wise, and everything, painting-wise.  Anger and sadness aside, I still am glad I met the guy; he literally changed my life.

The clip above is from a film he made titled Water:Pillow.  I think it was first screened in 1994, when I was 24.  I'm the guy in the fedora, and The Gid is the guy with the head wound.  This was a fun project to work on, and Tim really worked the medium of 16mm with all kinds of experimental techniques I had never even imagined.  It's a weird and funny film, and the clip is a good representation of the kind of "dark whimsy" that pops up in his oeuvre from time to time.

 

Anyway, I just wanted to share this clip, because it was a big part of my life for an academic year or so, and it features your LoS authors.

His YouTube page has other snippets for your perusal.

3 Portaits of Daurade by Tim Wilson

Daurade as Yasser Arafat

Daurade as Baron von Kunststoffwanne

Daurade as beekeeper

Collaboration With A Dead Man

This is an excerpt from Collaboration With A Dead Man by LoS pal Tim Wilson.  Unfortunately, the process of squeezing the file into the you tube led to a one-second de-synchronization of the sound and image.  I hope to get Tim to describe the transfiguration of the file (Done, see below).  I know it was shot on 16mm, then videotaped from the screen of a flatbed editor, probably a Steenbeck, in the editing suite of the now-defunct USF film program.  Where it went before finally becoming a YouTube flash dealy would be an interesting insight into the digital fate of older analog media....

addeed 12/17

Daurade:  Can you describe the various transfer processes and the various formats this went through before you uploaded it to YouTube? I think that would be an interesting detail to add to the post. As I recall, some other video you've done went through almost 10 formats....16, VHS and then....?

Wilson:  Oh yeah, that was kind of a crucial element; I think now it was intended anyway to be something like the spate of "found footage" horror films, the story extracted, assembled from a cache of media, etc. 

But lessee, reality went into the camera holes, exposing Super-8 Ektachrome, Super-8 TRI-X and 16mm B/W Reversal Film. The color Family Vacation shots are true found footage, color 16mm. The whole of it was developed and rephotographed thru an Optical Printer onto 16mm Reversal, the results of which were in turn developed and run again thru the Optical Printer, etc. Some shots have been treated this way up to four times. At the time, this process of reshooting footage was almost the content of the film in many ways; the structure resulting from zooming into shots, reframing scenes, stop-motion frame by frame control of speed, exposure, pans to following hairs and spots on the film rather than the focused action, etc. So each round of Optical Printing had the strange effect of both making the original more broad, stark -- more diffused perhaps? -- but also it revealed hidden figures, complex motions, emergent scenes composed of increasingly globular film grain. This cinema/motion film material was bolstered by material culled from the paper ephemera of Jorge Suarez's life. Squares were cut from magazines, letters, etc, and packed into slides. Photographed through the OP as a kind of hurdy-gurdy animation, the printed matter illuminated such that it featured the front facing elements juxtaposed with the material on the backward, flip-side. The footage arising from this process was then developed and cut into the earlier material on a flatbed film-editor. I also spent considerable time at this stage cutting raw audio mag-tape, which comprises the entirety of the soundtrack. This length of hot-glue edited film, along with the diagonal tape edits of audiotape, was transferred to 3/4 inch Video for final editing. Later, this video was transferred to standard VHS, which was in turn digitized as a compressed DVD mpeg which spit out and split it all into disconnected chapters for some reason. These DVD chapters were strung together in AfterEffects and rendered as a lossless avi. Lastly, this avi was crunched down by Adobe Media Encoder into several web-friendly formats, one of which was stuffed thru a tiny, rough-hewn hole for YouTube display.

added 12/18

These are some of the slided from the Jorge Suarez material mentioned by Tim:

Photographed through the OP [optical printer] as a kind of hurdy-gurdy animation, the printed matter illuminated such that it featured the front facing elements juxtaposed with the material on the backward, flip-side.

Obviously, now one would just scan a magazine and pop the resultant .jpeg into After Effects, but back in the day, one had to physically photograph the image, the length of time on screen determined by how many times you shot it.  Remember at 24 fps, if you wanted say, a four-second appearance, you'd have to re-shoot the image 96 times!  The OP was tedious work and Tim was making the most extensive use of it in the film program, as far as I know.

Digital film-making can produce marvellous results....Inland Empire was filmed on a camera one can buy used for somewhere around 1000 euros.  Digital is faster and cheaper, allowing for many more experiments and takes; it makes film-making more accessible to the general public.  Most film stalwarts (as Tim was) have embraced it.  But most of them will probably tell you that they're glad to have worked with film.  The physicality of it, the mechanical and chemical processes involved, the strange contraptions and devices one had to avail oneself of....there's something undeniably rewarding working with tangible objects.  Although film-makers and artists have embraced digital formats, I think there will remain a tiny niche for working with actual film....as long as someone keeps making the stuff.

The second photo in the Wikipedia article on the optical printer shows a JK 16mm OP setup with a Bolex H16, which is very much if not exactly the same setup we had at USF.

For more about Jorge Suarez (b.1922, Santiago, Chile-d.1992, NYC), the "dead man" of the film's title, see the Plastic Tub.

A collector of all manner of porn, from cheesecake to hardcore, he only left his appartment to buy cheap gin and visit sex shops to add to his ever-growing collection.  
....
He had cut himself off from the world, and everyone respected that, still pained, however, by Suarez' obstinate pursuit of decadent solitude.  

A thing to devour

These strips were created by LoS pal .sWineDriveR., assuming the authorial identity of Jonathan Trenchwheat as he documented the surreal adventures of the Lil' AA.  The children of the Lil' AA were caricatures of actual Associationalist personages, embodying in an exuberant form the salient characteristics of their adult counterparts.  Pen and ink avatars of avatars.

They first appeared on Plastic Tub, which as far as I know was the first Wiki published online to be used for collaborative fiction of a sort, albeit one presented à la Wikipedia or Wiktionary.  I believe it to be the first Wiki "art project".  Created over a glorious couple of years, it has been dormant now for what seems like decades.

When it failed, it could be banal and awkwardly written, when it succeeded, it was brilliant.  Not to sound egotistical; it was the brilliance not of each individual, but of the so-called "third mind" arising from the furious vapors of sustained collaboration.  We Second Advance AA'ers honed our skills there and created, if not a universe, an amusing microcosm....at least.  We put in hours and made each other laugh in a game of one-upsmanship and in a labor of love, only rarely descending into dispute.  Any resulting acrimony was usually beer-fueled and indicative of genuine passion, generating heat equal to anything aroused by say, discussions about the West Bank.

But this is not time for nostalgiac paeans to a sleeping giant.  I re-stumbled across these strips this evening and was struck yet again by their seeming casual brilliance.  .sWineDriveR. here evokes the golden age of comic strips with a style and humor uniquely his own.  They're baffling.  They're funny.  They "work".  A blend of pure psychic automatism and meticulous craftmanship.

But enough of my pretentious flattery, just enjoy the strips.  Don't get distracted by my hunt and peck accolades.  I only hope that by putting these strips out there again, those accolades will be sung by someone who is not a friend and collaborator of their author, someone far more clever than myself.  Because these strips deserve some accolading.

Anyway, we've availed ourselves in slow times of the Tub before....they're easy posts, sure, but it's really to help promote our obscure past.  Gid and I were regular editors on the Tub and, to be frank, it irks me that the Tub is hasn't garnered some online attention for it's wit and innovation.  That's not what we did it for, but after all the work, I'd like it to be seen and read.  Yeah, I'm being self-serving and self-congratulatory, but what of it?  We should all to toot our horn every once and a while.  I risk coming across as a pompous ass, which in fact I am, but that doesn't make me wrong!

So check it out already!  And maybe, just maybe, the best interpretations offered up will be rewarded by a collage or hand-written poem, delivered to your door by post, wherever you door may be.

Today is Pancake Day

Pancake from Plastic Tub

Pancakes favor community over isolation.

pancake, flapjack(s), wheatcake n. 1. A work of art, wrought by hand; the upper made lower, the idea made a kind of dough-like flesh. 2. A gift from an alien, as exemplified in the Choco Saga. 3. The end result of a recipe, a scientific investigation or an alchemical operation. 4. Fifth sign on the O'Donnely Zodiac Placemats. 5. Accidentalist totem animal, thought to have been inspired by the Ebionite Gospel of Matthew, wherein a single Greek letter is swapped, transforming locusts into wheat-cakes. 6. A breakfast meal often eaten late at night. 7. Inspiration.

Extrapolation

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In an interview with Playboy magazine, Flintrock said: "I don't care if you call 'em pancakes, batter cakes, a pile of blankets, some brown bucks, or a fucking crepe I'll eat 'em. Even if you call 'em flapjacks, flats, fried mush, a gandy or a griddlecake, goddam, you can even call 'em a hot cake or a jonnycake, a manhole cover, tire patches, or wheat cakes -- I'll punch 'em, fuck 'em, eat 'em and shit 'em out. And then I'll eat 'em again."

On this note, Flintrock was notorious for boasting about the size of his "stack." Most assumed he referred to his penis, or perhaps his overt musculature, though he usually meant his "tower of power" -- again turning to euphemism, possibly confused with his cock, but most definitely referring to the sheer hulking presence of his breakfast.

Usage

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"Mmmm, good pancakes." -- Alexandre Dacusse, to Jonathan Trenchwheat, 1966
"Them's some lonely looking pancakes, Sven." -- Steven Adkins to Sven, all kidding aside

See Also

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• Balloonjaw
• Labyrinth
• Lads and Lassies of the Skillet 

Desiderata

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In Ireland, Australia, and Canada, Shrove Tuesday (aka Mardi Gras) is known as Pancake Tuesday, while in Britain it is popularly known as Pancake Day. Many other international celebrations are also celebrated by vigorous pancake consumption.

IHOP, a restaurant built around a pancake-heavy menu, is suspected to be owned by the League of Gnomes.

Fallen stone: tub plundering

Fallen Stone(s) sahu. 1. Occult mirror through which the powers of man are distracted.

Extrapolation

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"The meteorite has always exerted a powerful influence over the imagination. What child, nay, what adult, has not marvelled under those graceful arcs of fire, so transient, so tantalizing, that are shooting stars? Is it any wonder that with our contemporary sense of the marvellous, the ancients took the shooting star for something even greater? A stone from the roof of the sky, perhaps even a piece of heaven itself?"

--Elysius Dubord, The Origins of Mormo Worship in Chaldean Mythology (1932)

Twinkle Twinkle
 
Throughout history mankind has worshipped the unknown and the dwelled in shadow, primitivistic urges little advanced beyond the endless sniffing of faeces so common among dogs and lesser species. The belief system built upon the imaginary will eventually collapse and the society to which it gave stucture will succumb to the forces of Associational entropy, drowning in failed belief, anatelic, crumbling evermore. But what of a God whose Will cracks across the sky in a startling display of atmospheric hullabulloo? What of the shooting star, sparkling like diamonds across the breast of Night, popping the dull cork of religions and landing it, once and for all, in the realm of the real, the Archimedic, beyond eternal Poobanism and like that.

Dubord associates Mormo with a minor Chaldean demigod called Mommo, a great warrior, but human. One day he set out to look for a stone which he had seen fall to earth and blinded by the sun invented the first denumbrator. He recovered the stone, which had fallen from the great vaults of the sky where Sirus soars -- from the very arches that support the heavens and separate the gods from the men of earth. When Mommo found the fallen boundary stone, he aquired great powers. He made of himself a king, so arrogant as to challenge the very gods. As powerful as he had become, however, he was no match for the gods; he was banished by Enlil and forced to roam the planet forever. To protect himself and the other gods, Enlil then hid the fallen stone inside the head of another wandering immortal. In his bitter state of earthbound immortality, Mommo sent his followers in search of the stone; when they found a likely candidate for the living hiding place, they naturally cut the person's head off to look inside for the stone. Dubord claims that Mormo, then, is merely Mommo by another name, and that the sacrifices associated with the former are the result of a misreading by Ankaran worshippers of Mommo's purpose: they knew nothing of a fallen stone but believed their god was demanding sacrifice to augment his power and satiate his thirst for death, as in the Mormo Death Cycle.

Dubord's theory, although far from widely accepted, still inspires provocative questions. An entire sub-genre of occult literature has grown up around his rather modest and rigorously scholarly book which has unfortunately caused many to look upon Dubord as some sort of crank who merits no attention whatsoever. But this is unfair to the mild-mannered professor, who in no way intended to posit what many have sought to ascribe to his writings.

That which was lost
 
One of Dubord's "wild step-children" is self-styled "investigative mythologist" William Henry, whose article "Shock ‘n Awe: We Will Rock You" (21 March 2003) contains quite a bit of clever word play linking the current war in Iraq with ancient Babylonian mythology.

As Elysuis points out, it is widely believed that during the period of Jewish history known as the Babylonian exile, Chaldean mythology had a great influence on the development of the mysticism found in the Kabbala. Starting with "Shock and Awe," the phrase used by the US military to describe the first phase of its Iraq invasion, Henry sees a reference to the Kabbalistic name of the feminine presence of God: "Shakina," who was exiled after the destruction of the Temple of Solomon. In her exile, she has variously been referred to as "the Widow" the "Stone of Exile" and the "Precious Stone." Arguably, her return from exile will precipitate the reconstruction of Solomon's Temple, which--according to the fundamentalist Christians George Bush associates himself with--is necessary before the Christ can make his encore performance.

According to an article in the Christian Science Monitor (6 August 2003), Iraqi folklore credited Saddam Hussein's occult powers to a "magic stone" he wore around his neck. What if the whole point of the Iraq war was to recover that stone? Shakina, the Precious Stone, was associated with the Ark of the Covenant, which makes any army who bears it invincible. Henry also points out that another element of the Shock and Awe campaign were the much-vaunted "decapitation strikes."

In Grail Romances, Percival is almost always, despite all other differences among their various authors, called the "Son of the Widow Lady." In Wolfram Von Eschenbach's version, the Templars are the Grail guardians, which is a stone called "lapsit exillis." This is bastard Latin which can be interpreted as "the stone, exiled." Whether the stone fell from heaven or was forced up by geomantic upheaval matters but little -- for Constantine himself, speaking from beyond Life in the vehicle of decapitation, blessed the Christian forces invading the Holy Land. What more does a sword need than the whetting stone of Christianity's true founder?

An Exemplary Construct
 
Freemasons are also referred to as "Widow's Sons," and a lost stone plays an important part in their mythology. A lost keystone, for example, is the whole point of the highest degree of the Royal Arch. Hiram Ibiff, the Freemason's martyred hero, is finally killed by a wound to the head while in charge of building Solomon's Temple.

Decapitated heads are often associated with the grail legends as well as the Templars. Richard the Lion-Hearted is said to have decapitated thousands of prisoners during the Third Crusade. The Templars were said to worship before heads and to hold something which guaranteed fertility and protection, much as decapitated heads have figured in Celtic and Welsh mythology (one of Shakina's places of exile is rumored to be Ireland). This could be the Grail or the Ark, both of which were said to hold these powers.

Peek-a-Boo
 
The biggest problem with piecing this history together is that after legend placed the stone in the head of an immortal, it was never retrieved. The historical record lacks any explicit connection, but this has not stopped people from searching. Texts this ancient are few, so many scholars have looked to Biblical references, including chapter 4 of Joshua, where God commanded Joshua to place twelve stones with the Ark of the Covenant. While it takes an extreme leap of faith to accept that these stones were somehow related to the fallen stone, several interesting facts fall into place once you make the jump.

The Ark, and it's accompaniment of stones, was later placed in Solomon’s Temple. The inner sanctum of the Temple, which held the Ark, was demarcated by encircled stones that separated the Profane from the Sacred. It seems likely that these were the same stones brought to the Ark by Joshua. As in Chaldean mythology, the stones demarked the separation of gods and men.

The treasures of the Temple were later stolen by Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar’s name in Akkadian translates to “Nebo, protector the boundary-stone.”¹  No mention of the Ark or the stones is made when the treasures were returned to the Israelites. Interestingly, the Kaaba, the holiest of Islamic shrines, contains a similar arrangement to the Temple, wherein a Holy area is set off from the world of sinners. Is it possible that the stones left the Chaldeans, entered the hands of the Israelites, only to be wrestled away by the Muslims who keep it hidden away?

Another possibility has been posited. Nebuchadnezzar also conquered the Phoenician city of Tyre. Curiously, Hiram I, the King of Tyre, had provided vital assistance with the construction of the Solomon’s Temple. Tyre was later conquered by Alexander the Great, and eventually fell under an early Christian influence. Later still, it was absorbed into the Islamic tradition, only to be conquered during the First Crusade. Legend has it the Holy Grail was recovered from Tyre by the Templars. Did they actually take the stone, which as since been misrepresented as the Holy Grail?

Much of the speculation surrounding the stone and Tyre rests on etymology. The Hebrew and Arabic names for the city (Zor and Sour or Sor, respectively) both translate to "rock" or "stone" in an apparent reference to the rocky island where the city is situated. But the word "Tyre" traces back to Indo-European word "Dyeus", which meant “sky”.²

It's not a great leap to see that this was a town alternatively named for the Heavens and the Earth -- perhaps a strong magnet for a stone fallen from the arches separating Heaven and Earth.

Still Crazy After All These Years
 
If we assemble these references together, a pattern emerges; are the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, an exiled widow, a fallen stone and a decapitated head one and the same? It is no wonder that much has been made of Dubord's theory. If Mommo went around cutting off heads in order to "get his groove back," the Gnomic, Mormo-infested US government might do the same. Plastic Tub believes that if true, the US didn't find what they were looking for when they pulled a gaunt Saddam Hussein from his hole in the ground. Decapitations are still in fashion all over Iraq as so-called "insurgents," most likely CIA operatives hunting for the fallen stone, make their gruesome home movies in a rather clumsy revelation of their search.

Agents haven't met with much sucess in regard to Bin Laden either. Days after 9-11, a small CIA hit squad led by Gary Schroen was sent to Afghanistan to "Capture Bin Laden, kill him and bring his head back in a box on dry ice." As for his cohorts? Shroen was told to put their heads on pikes. Four years after the attacks he masterminded on 9-11, Bin Laden remains at large. Perhaps his head holds the fallen stone....

"I heard that Saddam Hussein, in solitary confinement, was spending his time writing poetry, reading the Koran, eating cookies and muffins, and taking care of some bushes and shrubs. I heard that he had placed a circle of white stones around a small plum tree."

Eliot Weinberger, What I Heard about Iraq (2005)

The Beat Goes On
 
The fallen stone has made its way into other mythical traditions as well. At Islam's holiest site, there is a shrine called the Kaaba, or Kaba. One of the cornerstones is a meteorite 50 cm in diameter, surrounded by a silver band that holds it together due to damage sustained while being returned 22 years after it was stolen by Ismaeli raiders in 930 CE. The stone is believed to have fallen during Adamic times and that it was originally a dazzling pure white, having turned black after absorbing the sins of true believers. This stone is called Al-Hajaral Aswad.

(Many have speculated that the Ismaelis were to have some important contact with the Templars. Interesting in this story is that the Templars in their turn are said to have influenced the Freemasons, who place a great deal of importance on symbolic cornerstones. The White House and the Capitol Building, for example, have Freemasonic cornerstones.)

In Matthew 13:45-46, Jesus tells a parable known as the "Pearl of Great Price." In this parable a merchant finds a pearl so alluring he sells all of his belongings to buy it, ending up wealthier than ever. In this parable Jesus is commonly believed to be illustrating that the pearl, or the Kingdon of Heaven, is worth sacrificing everything for; it is the ultimate treasure.

In the Acts of Thomas, a Gnostic text from ca. 200 CE, one also finds the "Hymn of the Pearl" (aka "Hymn of the Robe of Glory") as a metaphor for the exile and redemption of the soul. In the Hymn, a noble youth is sent to Egypt to recover a precious pearl guarded by a serpent. Once there, he loses his identity, forgetting not only his family and where he comes from, but who he is as well. After a series of encounters he comes back to himself, lulls the serpent to sleep and snatches the pearl, recovering the splendid, glittering robe which had ben made for him by his parents and which during his "exile" he had removed and forgotten. In a bit of Jungian synchronicity, ancient Chinese lore relates that pearls were formed in the brains of dragons, and guarded between their teeth. The dragon had to be slain before the pearl could be retrieved. Pearls were said to fall from the clouds when dragons fought. The black pearl, in particular, was a symbol of wisdom.

Some of these themes are repeated in the Pearl, a 14th century poem believed to be by the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a Grail Romance. In this poem, a young man falls asleep and dreams that he has lost his precious pearl. Perceiving a maiden, he asks if she is his lost pearl. She says that his pearl is not lost, but a rose which has withered. The youth wonders if the maiden has replaced Mary as the Queen of Heaven. Later, wearing the pearl, she instructs him on sin and redemption and exhorts him to forsake all he has to buy the pearl. He asks of the New Jerusalem, and she says he may not enter but can see it. He is led up a river to a spot where he sees the Blessed entering the Kingom of God and plunges into the river to join them; he awakes from his dream at this point, resolved to fulfill the wishes of God. Is this maiden--associated with the lost stone-- Shakinah, guide to the reconstructed Temple?

In Polynesia, the black pearl was called "the pearl of queens" or the "queen of pearls." Many legends surround the pearl. According to one, Oro, the god of peace and fertility, came down to earth on a rainbow, offering the pearl oyster to man. In another, the spirits of coral and sand adorned one "Te Ufi" with a cloak of the colors of all the fish that swim in Polynesia. The glory of the heavens came to rest on the ocean bed in the iridescent mother-of-pearl, which was considered a gift from the sky to the sea.

The Greeks and Romans thought pearls were born in oysters when rain or dew penetrated between the layers. The Persians thought the same, but they believed that if a pearl was imperfect it was due to thunder in the sky. Another says pearls are born from the meeting of a rainbow with the earth.

The Pearl of Great Price is also the name of the second holiest Book of Mormonism, which of course is a well-known front for a powerful Mormo Cult. Although not a meteorite, the pearl is a stone of great power. In fundamentalist belief systems, the fallen stone represents a literal thing, an object to be retrieved from within someone's head. More mystically-oriented believers feel that the pearl is symbolic of some sort of knowledge, a key to heaven, if you will, represented by a stone hidden in the head of an "immortal," or person of lasting import and influence.

Choco Lore: DingDing

More required reading for majors in Choco Studies:

DingDing in Water:Pillow

Unknown origin. He arrives amid a steamed cloud of futuristic hoo-haw, waving a withered mit. His nose is a television dial. He is a television dial. He is given a return ticket to the stars, first class.

DingDing was a representative of the alien race that helped to create Choco. Although he only appeared as a hologram, his sage advice proved a useful source of burlesque humor and moral support to the beleaguered chocolate hero. Kind and witty -- ever a pillar of staunchness -- DingDing communicated in a melange of hurdy-gurdies, clucks and twiddlings. Translations were offered as subtext or in subtitle, though for most it amounted to little: Dacusse described the accompanying transliterations as "vaguely anomic lisping" and "great gloamy piles of steam rising from a woodpile."

Choco, of course, displayed no difficulty in deciphering DingDing's holographic missives, a fact not lost on Dacusse, whose childhood Choco-Envy "was akin to wanting bigger muscles."

He was so popular in Canada that in 1982 he was given his own CBC television show, The DingDing Hour. The program was made with puppets and continues to be diffused to this day under the direction of Argentine puppeteer Pablo Mollusconi.

"Love Ain't Sweet!"

Brief Treatise on Choco, 1995 collage by Timothy Wilson

Thanks too our pal .sWineDriveR. (previously mentioned here) for yet another cool new banner.  Just in case you're wondering what it all means, check out Choco on Plastic Tub:

The origin is simple. A small alien probe descends upon earth, dispensing pancakes and sausages to befuddled farmers, nomads, tribesmen and campers. Eventually it falls into the hands of U.S. government agents, who succeed in discovering the probe's mission. In addition to providing the alien race's favorite foods to the Earth-masses, it contains alien DNA and instructions on how to turn the raw material into an alien capable of sharing its wisdom. The device for making the transformation is built from material found readily in any American kitchen. But there is a problem. An Air Force Colonel attached to the project, a religious fanatic, sabotages the device which he believes to be a Satanic plot.

As the experiment begins, a scientist munching a bar of chocolate is caught in an unfortunate explosion, but instead of dying, begins a slow transformation. After 27 agonizing days, he emerges from his room as a five-foot chocolate bar. He walks, he talks. He is an anthropomorphic chocolate bar. His powers include telepathy, levitation and telekinesis, in addition to an almost inexhaustable range of knowledge and abilities. He is subjected to a barrage of tests and it is determined that Choco's DNA is a mix of human, alien and chocolate bar.

True scholars will also want to check out Choco Cults:

These groups are not linked, and are often in violent opposition to one another. However, they are all obsessed with creating a rich and creamy milk-chocolate homunculus.

What is mystifying about the cults is that they seem oblivious to the fact that their violent activities are anathema to the spirit in which Choco conducts himself. Irregular Choco public service announcements seem to have no effect at all. Some pundits are led to wonder, at times aloud, if this is not merely an expression of "the end justifies the means mentality gone awry, amok even" (Dan Rather), but a "Psy-op perpetrated by Gnomes" (Michael Hoffman).

On the other hand, take care not to succumb to Choco-Envy:

Fondle examined the lifestyle of four children from the Midwestern town of Silonon, Kansas, and elaborated a complex treatise revolving around their use of mediated entertainment, translation devices and "hyper-sexual grimacing, the untoward bending of limbs and a striking predisposition for shapeless homunculi, robots and monsters of all variety."

Thanks .sWineDriveR.!  And thanks also to Kevin Statham, author of Choco's motto:  "Love Ain't Sweet!"

In Which Major Potter Encounters A Swine Driver, And Trades With Him For An Intelligent Pig

Way back when, the Gid and I collaborated with two chums--Sven and Undule--on a Wiki called Plastic Tub, "a repository of lore and history regarding Accidental Associationalist movement."

As far as I know, it's the first and perhaps only Wiki of its kind. Among its 623 pages one can look up the secret meaning of the sausage or the mysterious Hand Pants--the Tub has an extensive glossary--or look into the life of such luminaries as AA editor and BBQ wizard Mazzistow Carrington. Interested in learning more about the story behind the ill-fated Wee-Wee? The Tub's got you covered.

Well, perhaps the Tub ain't dead, as someone once said about Surrealism, merely sleeping....but the grand collaboration of past years, at one point a true "flurry", has slackened into sporadic blips and beeps. An edit may be made here and there, but other projects loom. Gid and I are on LoS. I'm not sure what Sven is up to. But Undule, aka .sWineDriveR., is rockin' the house with his photographic experimentation.

.sWineDriveR. was actually the heart and soul of the Tub; the energy which made it all happen can be seen in his prolific output. Basically, all this Tub talk was a prelude to a plug. When a friend does something we like, we broadcast it. In this case it's not merely one hand washing the other; his stuff really is worth checking out.

The photo that illustrates this post was put up as a sort of vanity cuz I, Daurade, am pictured. (I'll let you guess which one of these two criminals on the run is me). But seriously, check out the photo at his photostream and go in the direction of "newer' or "older" and you'll find something which strikes you.

Or, take a gander at his flickr homepage and/or the collections. And, if you can, leave a comment or an encouraging word, damn it. A lot of work went into these photos. Let 'im know if you appreciate it!

Update 29/12
This massive page of photos "popular-interesting" is not to be missed.