We all know that there are plenty of things better than Star Wars and Illcon has made this public knowledge before. I mean, George Lucas has been shitting on his fans for quite some time now, what do you owe him? Nothing. Today's record is something that is also better than Star Wars.
The little dude above is a fella called Meco, Domenico Monardo to be exact. He was a pretty big name during the 1970's as a respected producer and trombonist. Playing on and producing records for Diana Ross, Neil Diamond, Gloria Gaynor and plenty of others. Things changed however, when in 1977 George Lucas released his cash vulture, Star Wars. Meco got pretty excited by this film. Even more excited by the stirring score courtesy of the always awesome John Williams. Meco hatched on the idea of creating a disco version. Of course, it was laughed at and not taken seriously. Who would believe that could work!
Meco believed and wouldn't let up. Luckily the score became a huge hit and the top brass relented, allowing him to see his idea through. Of course he would need a pretty sweet band to achieve this feat. The Sci-Fi Disco Band Meco was born.
Seriously
Despite looking like the outcome of letting Ming The Merciless assemble the Village People, the band managed to survive on the mean streets of New York for about 4 months performing live and providing a much needed visual element to this epic onslaught of disco. And it is an onslaught. The album contains the full 15 minute Star Wars suite encompassing the opening them, Imperial March, the cool flying music bits, all those schmaltzy parts and that stupid band in the bar. It also has robots dancing on the cover.
I doubt a whole Hell of a lot of you were reading IllCon all the way back in May 2009, but for those of you that were, I have good news. I am happy to present (partial) closure to an open-ended case I alluded to back then, a fascinating, confusing, and maddening mystery I first explored in a post titled 'IN CASE YOU DON'T KNOW DICK, Or: The Android Was Never Located'. The post, which was meant more as a tribute to one of my favorite science-fiction writers (Mr. Philip K. Dick) than any sort of whodunnit, contained a nugget of weirdness that was left hanging in negative space until just now, in a sort of full-circle "happy ending" taylor-made for Hollywood. But I'm getting a"head" of myself. Let's get the noobs caught up: The most interesting part of the entire post, in retrospect, was a quick aside I made about halfway through, which read thusly: "Side note: As a promotional gimmick for the 2007 film adaptation of A Scanner Darkly, a robotic doppelganger of Dick (above) was constructed to participate in a panel discussion at the 2006 ComicCon in San Diego. Reportedly, the android was "lost in transit" by America West Airlines personnel. It has yet to be located."
The Robot Dick, created by Hanson Robotics (they've also created a Robo-Einstein), is truly a marvel, and can be seen in two stages of development in the video below:
PKD Robot at NextFest Chicago (2005):
So let's get the skinny on exactly how PKDBot got "lost". Wired and BoingBoing both reported on the mysterious happenings, but here is a chunk I found on the always-reliable And I Am Not Lying, For Real:
PKD was a tremendous hit at Wired's NextFest, 2005. Several months afterward, David Hanson and his astonishing creation were on a flight from Dallas to San Francisco. PKD's body was travelling separately, but his "brain" and head were part of Hanson's carry-on luggage. Hanson had not slept for several days, and immediately passed out upon buckling his seatbelt. Hanson was shaken awake by his plane's crew in Las Vegas for an unexpected plane change.
Next up, from the New York Times:
He had been traveling for weeks, pulling all-nighters in a race between his work as a roboticist (he also made a much-discussed robotic head of Einstein); as the founder of a fledgling company, Hanson Robotics; and his doctoral work. But unlike his creation, Mr. Hanson is, apparently, distressingly human.
"They woke me up, I got my laptop from under my seat, and being dazed, I just forgot that I had the robot in there," said Mr. Hanson, referring to the head in a black, American Tourister roller bag, left in the overhead compartment."
He rushed off in a sleep-smeared stupor, only remembering that he left the head behind sometime after his second liftoff. The airline claimed that they shipped the head back to him, but a package never arrived. Philip K Dick's android head is missing, possibly stolen.
Bummer! Can you even imagine the frustration of "accidentally misplacing" a labor of love like the Dick Head?! Hanson obviously blew that one, but here's where that "Hollywood ending" I spoke of earlier comes in. Apparently, the Dutch company VPRO put up the dough for Hanson Robotics to build a leaner, meaner, smarter DickBot in 2010, and the new machine has already surpassed its predecessor in all manner of sophistication and logic. Work continues on the "new" PKD Robot, and judging by the new color in his beard (see below), he is more vibrant and alive than ever. (More about the Android Project HERE) But still, the question remains: what the fuck really happened to the "original" android? The mind shudders at the possibilities...
(Pay close attention to the very end, when PKD assures his interviewer that "he'll keep him very safe in (his) people zoo".)
Pro tip: A much more entertaining version of the Recovered Head Story can be found HERE via Fiction Circus ("The missing head of the Philip K. Dick android has finally been discovered in St. Petersburg, confiscated in an Interpol sting against the Russian software piracy syndicate Little Bear."). I actually thought this story was real until just recently (you would have thought the site name--"FICTION CIRCUS"--might have tipped me off). Durr.
HOLY SHIT. True story, guys: when I started writing this thing today, I had no idea that 3/2/2012 is the 30-year anniversary of Philip K. Dick's death. Damn. Talk about some next-level lattice-of-coincidence-type synchronicity! Thanks to purplerainingblood for the accidental "head"s-up.
Speaking of Dick Heads:
Who's ready for Episode 25 of Illogical Contraption Radio?! We'll be on the air--same bat time, same bat channel--tonight, fielding your drunken telephone calls (415-829-2980) and talking with public access television host Adam Papagan of Del Talk Show. Adam is a close friend and collaborator of previous guest David Liebe Hart, and has many a story to tell about the strange underbelly of post-9/11 Los Angeles. Join us, won't you?
As if the guitar-slinging, golden-throated, pussy-magnet shred wizard Stan Bush needs any sort of fucking introduction. You know him, you love him, you most certainly downloaded his finest work on the 1986 Transformers OST BACK HERE, you smoke his fingernail clippings, you masturbate to the liner notes of Higher Than Angels. You fucking know who Stan Bush is. But on the outside chance that you don't already worship at the Altar of Stan, go to his website, have a look around, then come back here, crack a Carlsberg, and party the fuck down to the dulcet tones of "The Touch" (which most poseurs would probably identify as "that song from Boogie Nights"):
Thoroughly fucking pumped? Good. Now that the Spirit of The Stan has ungently entered your body, it's time to get down with some super-obscure Bush Trivia. Now, I know what you're thinking: you're assuming this is the part of the post where I tell you that Stan Bush is one of the few people that crossed over between real life and the Transformers universe--via the Generation One, Season 5 scene in which, at an undetermined time period following the creation of the Headmasters and Targetmasters and the seeming defeat of Galvatron and Scorponok, Powermaster Optimus Prime spends a good deal of time relating Transformers stories to the human schoolboy Tommy Kennedy. Of course, after a series of stories wherein he describes the events of the battle with Unicron, Optimus Prime has to depart to attend an interstellar peace conference in the midst of a barrage of questions from Tommy. As he is blasting off, Prime declares "But until I return, I leave you with 'The Touch'!" Following this, the music video for "The Touch" begins, giving Stan his rare entrance into the fantastical realm of Transformers lore. This unprecedented appearance is also important when you consideHOLY FUCK THERE'S A LAZER COMING OUT OF HIS GUITAR.
But you guys all knew that shit already. I'm going deep on this one, into previously undiscovered regions of Bush Arcana. I will apologize in advance for your blown mind, for by the time you've finished reading this post you will be absolutely done for the day--no longer able to process any sort of information whatsoever.
I'll give it to you as quickly and bluntly as I know how:
In 2009, Stan Bush recorded a "re-imagining" of "The Touch" for the live-action sequel Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, a hella sick Linkin Park inspired rip-off gem which fuses the seemingly unconnected worlds of simpering 80's wuss-rock and post-90's rap-metal. No further introduction is needed.
Enjoy Listen:
Needless to say, director Michael Bay rejected the song outright, leaving Bush to post it, forgotten, like a sad bunk sock hanging from an inner-city clothesline, on his own website. Until today, that is.
Sorry for raping all of your childhoods once again. My bad.
Thanks to Doan at the illustrious Kissing Contest podcast for alerting me to the existence of this timeless jam. Kill yourself.
Here's a wacky fun fact for you: Ted "The Unabomber" Kaczynski, while enrolled in Harvard from 1958-62, was subject to several of Professor Henry Murray's early "personality tests" involving stress and LSD. That's right, one of the most infamous domestic terrorists in United States history was involved in a program with deep links to the CIA and MKULTRA. As documented in the book Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist, Kaczynski served as a subject in some Murray's highly controversial experiments involving acid, psilocybin, and Personology over there at the Harvard Psychological Clinic Annex back then, and concrete details about these practices went to the grave with Murray in 1988. Hm. As this 1999 article in Counterpunch puts it, "What did Murray give Kaczynski? Did the experiment’s long-term effects help tilt him into the Unabomber’s homicidal rampages? The CIA’s mind experiment program was vast. How many other human time bombs were thus primed? How many of them have exploded?"
But I digress. I'm getting ahead of myself once again, and there's probably a pretty fair chance that some of our readers have never even heard of the Unabomber. Wikipedia, do your thing:
"Theodore John "Ted" Kaczynski, born May 22, 1942, also known as the "Unabomber" (a portmanteau of university and airline bomber), is an American mathematician, social critic, anarcho-primitivist, and Neo-Luddite who engaged in a mail bombing campaign that spanned nearly 20 years, killing three people and injuring 23 others.
Kaczynski was born in Chicago, Illinois, where, as an intellectual child prodigy, he excelled academically from an early age. Kaczynski was accepted into Harvard University at the age of 16, where he earned an undergraduate degree, and later earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan. He became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley at age 25, but resigned two years later.
In 1971, he moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water, in Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills in an attempt to become self-sufficient. He decided to start a bombing campaign after watching the wilderness around his home being destroyed by development. From 1978 to 1995, Kaczynski sent 16 bombs to targets including universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring 23. Kaczynski sent a letter to The New York Times on April 24, 1995 and promised "to desist from terrorism" if the Times or The Washington Post published his manifesto. In his Industrial Society and Its Future (also called the "Unabomber Manifesto"), he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom necessitated by modern technologies requiring large-scale organization."
Some sweet photos of The Unabomber's digs right after the FBI nabbed him:
Good evening, ladies.
Can I interest you in a light snack?
A cocktail, perhaps?
Yeesh. Whatever the involvement of the CIA/OSS (Henry Murray was a main innovator in the establishment of the Office of Strategic Services, the direct predecessor of the CIA, by the way), or acid, or psilocybin, or "stress tests", on Kaczynski, it's safe to say that he had a definite, deep-seated hatred for industrialism and technology--and every coin has a flip side.
The "flip side" to the Unabomber's particular coin can be found in futurist, tranhumanist, author, inventor, trancendentalist, and synthesizer enthusiast Ray Kurzweil (above right). Kurzweil is probably best known for his deep explorations of "The Singularity": the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than-human intelligence through technological means. According to most educated guesses, The Singularity will occur at some point in the 21st century, when computing power finally matches the abilities of the human brain, and we are all fused into massive, biomechanical, exoskeletal war machines, armed with surface-to-air missiles, lazer guns, and an unquenchable bloodlust knowing no bounds.
It won't be long, friends. Kurzweil's vector implies some pretty crazy, spooky things--things that Kaczynski sent 16 letter bombs to destroy. Although Mr. Kurzweil has nothing but optimism for the approaching Singularity and the fusion of human and AI, there are many who have their doubts--after all, what are the Robot Overlords' motivations to keep us around after they gain the ability to govern themselves? I don't know, man... I'm a big fan of Kurzweil's prescient 1990 book The Age of Spiritual Machines and all, but we all know what happens when the robots get too smart for their own good...
Don't we?
It's all just a matter of extremes, I guess. Kaczynski acted out of fear for the loss of our humanity at the hands of technology, while "futurists" like Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge believe it will be our salvation. The concept of artificial intelligence and technology evolving beyond our ability to control it can indeed be a terrifying one, but the cold, hard fact is that eventually it will, and, barring some sort of massive, Kaczynskian "pre-emptive" strike against technology itself anytime in the near future, most of us will live to see it. And we will live beyond it as well... Toiling as slaves in the vast, cavernous Energy Mines under the watchful eye of the ruthless Cyborg Kings.
So what's my point here? I'm not sure, really. I actually just meant to write a post about Ted Kaczynski's tenuous ties to the MKULTRA program and got sidetracked. I fell down this whole "Kurzweil vs. Kaczynski rabbit hole" and blew my own mind. I dunno... We live in a world of nanotechnology and evangelical Christians, of remote nuerosurgery and Holocaust deniers. The possibilities are endless, exciting, and frightening. The extremes are ugly and freaky.
Whatever, man. If you need me, I'll be in my shack.
ATTENTION SHEEPLE! The biggest news story of the year just broke, and chances are you haven't heard a goddamn thing about it. This is HUGE, nigh unto Earth-shattering. I want you to watch the following video very, very closely, for it holds the key to our collective future as a cohesive human civilization. Behold:
Now, I'm no friend of Alex Jones. I thought his infiltration of the Bohemian Grove Owl Orgies was pretty cool, but beyond that, his Limbaugh-esque demeanor and penchant for unneccesary shouting has kept me away. He's a douche, long story short, and, like fellow circus barker Glenn Beck, makes up for lack of substance with an overabundance of volume.
But HOLY SHIT has he blown this one wide open.
I'm sure we're all aware of the Bilderberg Group already, but the revelation that these power-hungry Illuminati overlords are controlled by multi-dimensional aliens via DMT vision-quests? Fucking Hell! Where's the CNN coverage? MSNBC? The Daily Show? Anything?
Jones' assertation that Dimethyltryptamine hallucinations guide the major power decisions made by the ruling financial elite is nothing short of a total revelation for society as we know it, and the fact that mainstream media has ignored the story only strengthens its case. The shape-shifting DMT "machine elves" that Jones refers to in the above video are the true manipulators of all the major media outlets, after all, hence their total silence on the matter.
But let's take a minute to discuss these "elves". Originally popularized by psychedelic guru Terence McKenna (left), these multi-dimensional creatures choose to communicate via drugs like ayahuasca (which contains Dimethyltryptamine), and appear in the lore of many cultures accross the globe. Machine elves (also known as "fractal elves" or "self-transforming elf machines") are totally real, and their existence can be proven by the fact that they have a Wikipedia page.
Check out McKenna's description of the Fractal Elf/DMT experience from said page:
At about minute one or two of a DMT trip, according to McKenna, one may burst through a chrysanthemum-like mandala, and find:
There's a whole bunch of entities waiting on the other side, saying "How wonderful that you're here! You come so rarely! We're so delighted to see you!" They're like jewelled self-dribbling basketballs and there are many of them and they come pounding toward you and they will stop in front of you and vibrate, but then they do a very disconcerting thing, which is they jump into your body and then they jump back out again and the whole thing is going on in a high-speed mode where you're being presented with thousands of details per second and you can't get a hold on [them ...] and these things are saying "Don't give in to astonishment", which is exactly what you want to do. You want to go nuts with how crazy this is, and they say "Don't do that. Pay attention to what we're doing".
What they're doing is making objects with their voices, singing structures into existence. They offer things to you, saying "Look at this! Look at this!" and as your attention goes towards these objects you realise that what you're being shown is impossible. It's not simply intricate, beautiful and hard to manufacture, it's impossible to make these things. The nearest analogy would be the Fabergé eggs, but these things are like the toys that are scattered around the nursery inside a U.F.O., celestial toys, and the toys themselves appear to be somehow alive and can sing other objects into existence, so what's happening is this proliferation of elf gifts, which are moving around singing, and they are saying "Do what we are doing" and they are very insistent, and they say "Do it! Do it! Do it!" and you feel like a bubble inside your body beginning to move up toward your mouth, and when it comes out it isn't sound, it's vision. You discover that you can pump "stuff" out of your mouth by singing, and they're urging you to do this. They say "That's it! That's it! Keep doing it!".
We're now at minute 4.5 [of the trip] and you speak in a kind of glossolalia. There is a spontaneous outpouring of syntax unaccompanied by what is normally called "meaning". After a minute or so of this the whole thing begins to collapse in on itself and they begin to physically move away from you. Usually their final shot is that they wave goodbye and say "Deja vu! Deja vu!".
From Terence McKennaLand: Terence McKenna (1946—2000) has been studying the ontological foundations of Shamanism and the Ethnopharmacology of spiritual transformation for the past quarter century. An innovative theoretician and spellbinding orator, Terence has emerged as a powerful voice for the psychedelic movement and the emergent societal tendency he calls The Archaic Revival. Poetically dispensing enlightened social criticism and new theories of the fractal dynamics of time, Terence deobfuscates many aspects of the visionary lexicon, and then some. As Artist Alex Grey suggests, "In the twilight of human history, McKenna's prescription for salvation is just so crazy it might work."
"Joe Rogan knows what I'm talking about."
Whoa. That's a whole SHITLOAD of information to process. First, that the existence of Fractal Elves is a very real and provable fact, but second (and most importantly), that said Elves are a MALEVOLENT, EXTRA-DIMENSIONAL ALIEN FORCE! I can't say it's much of a surprise: as Mr. Jones said before, politicians often stumble about in a weird, zombie-like haze, and the fact that they are all tripping super fucking hard on DMT all the time explains quite a bit. The wool has been pulled back, revealing what I think many of us suspected already: The Bilderberger/Illuminati/reptilians are high as shit on hallucinogens, communicating through channels undiscovered by modern science with malevolent robot elves. Fuck.
OF COURSE this is why the Bible forbids drug use! It all makes so much sense now!
1 Peter 5:8 - "Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour."
Galatians 5:19-21 - "Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God."
1 Corinthians 6:19-20 - "Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body."
Translation: "Don't trip on DMT, it will make you see the Fractal Elves that control the government, bro."
A simple equation:
^^^You.
So there you go. I am again forced into a grudging, mutual-respect-based stalemate with Alex Jones, based solely on his unwavering dedication to truth and justice. Illogical Contraption salutes you, Mr. Jones, and we pledge our allegiance to you in the upcoming battle with the Annunaki-reptilian/Fractal-based self-transforming elf machines. You have once again exposed The Man Behind The Curtain, and this time, when he approaches in the guise of a "jewelled self-dribbling basketball", we will see him for what he is: pure, unadulterated EVIL.
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