Entries Tagged 'history' ↓

It feels like ten years have passed but nothing has really happened.

The only progress has been via bubbles whose excitement was redacted by panic.

Maybe the disruption has begun. Maybe we are fooling ourselves with our castles in the air. I wonder if are at some invisible turning point of some huge cycle.

We’ve misguided wars thinking that we were the good guys, but never claiming any victories because we denied we were conquers. So we pay for all the wars. We are selfless good guys by principal but tempted always to be bad.

Are we better off? We are more mistrustful of nature and our frameworks. We trust technology to a fault. We are emotionally stuck in the 16th century. We are dependent upon the unseen. Everyone’s problems are our own problems.

NYC has turned into the Panopticon I always thought it would be. Privacy is a misnomer. Facebook is big brother. Your peers have sent you an invite. The government knows who your friends are.

I’ve lost my health and the faith in my physical body in the last decade. The older people I loved and trusted have passed on. There is no one in a room praying for me on a daily basis. There are only people who hate each other in their narcissism.

I’ve been through a half dozen relationships in ten years. Some of these I still fantasize about. In the end I wrecked them all because I couldn’t understand love or compromise. I couldn’t communicate. I couldn’t be happy. I became someone else for people until I became exhausted. I fooled myself as much as I fooled others.

I have been distracted by my purposes and technology. I have struggled with worth. I have realized that too much freedom makes you inert. I have realized that everything is faith and the quality and quantity of faith must be reciprocal to the number of obstacles and their intensity. Faith is a scale of coping and adaptation of the unknown. Its levels are infinite as are the boundaries of success.

I’ve realized that everything is an act of improvisation and sensibility is complete collision. Money is an uncomfortable chair you must sit in for hours. It is better than standing, but makes you lazy and makes you feel like you are always missing something accidental that may be more comfortable and lush.

I attempt to listen to the good progressive voices in my head, but they lead me to isolated places where I question if they are random sounds like all the sounds that inject fears into actions I used to love.

I must focus on mentors and surround myself with people I respect. I must cut out all noise from my life.

- X.F. Pine

With all recent oil panic and near nuclear meltdowns I decided to venture out to the mythical site of Wardenclyffe in Shoreham, NY (Long Island). This was the site of Nikola Tesla’s controversial “Magnifying” tower which was first designed to send radio information across the Atlantic in 1901.

In Tesla’s mind it was also capable of transmitting energy without wires. If you are unfamiliar with Tesla you must read this as a premier to get the whole picture. He conceived AC current, radio controlled robotics, cell phones, and a plethora of influential inventions (+700 patents) which set the foundations of the 20th century mad sciences.

Construction on the extensive laboratory and tower began in 1901 to become a part of Tesla’s Global System with J.P. Morgan as a primary backer. Also in 1901 Marconi successfully transmitted a radio signal across the Atlantic by using patents Tesla had invented although Tesla received no credit until after his death.

According to this In 1904 NY Times article, Tesla received the land for free to help develop a wireless radio resort community and had plans of putting similar towers in population areas. He claimed that the magnifying transmitter would be able to emit a wave complex of 10 million horsepower.

By 1903 the tower stood 187 feet high and was visible from New Haven, Connecticut across the sound. There were accounts that year of the tower briefly being turned on and bolts lighting up the night sky from the top of the tower. People noticed electrical sparks from their feet to the ground when they walked nearby. There are tanks in the main building which were reportedly used as massive batteries.

As the ambitious prototype neared completion Morgan backed out of the funding. Historians speculate that this was due to Tesla’s philosophy of giving electricity away for free and there was no way to “put a meter” on what Tesla had planned.

“Homes, farms, offices, factories, villages, libraries, museums, street lights, etc., could all be powered wireless and produce brilliant white light 24 hours a day. Motor energy for any industrial applications, transportation, tractors, trucks, trains, boats, automobiles, air ships or planes could be powered freely-anywhere on the planet from a single Magnifying Transmitter.”

Without Morgan the entire laboratory was in jeopardy. Tesla secretly mortgaged off the property to the owner of the Waldorf-Astoria to cover debts of $20,000 dollars. By 1917 they had the tower blown up for scrap. The site changed hands a few times over the years.

What remains is very perplexing and mysterious. The site was taken over by AGFA in the 1960s and they proceeded to poison the site with photo chemical toxins. It is now posted as restricted Superfund site although it was supposedly cleaned up by 1993. I also discovered it is currently for sale for $1.65 million dollars “as is”. The complex has 14 buildings on 15 acres. The original low brick building with the ornate smokestack which was designed by Stanford White is partially still there. The site of the huge tower is a strange octagon shape which is fabled to have honeycombs of tunnels and dormant spiral staircases beneath. Depressing rusted barbed wire surrounds everything.

As I walked around the lonely perimeter I was struck by the concept that this is where the 20th century branched off in the wrong direction. We’ve built a superstructure on dwindling commodities that we are fatally dependent upon from food distribution to heating our homes. Telsa’s execution may have been premature, but the concept of free energy transmission is profound given our current global circumstances. To think that this lost dream collapsed over a century ago is disturbing. The deeper you look into it the more you realize that Tesla knew things we still cannot comprehend. To go forward you must look back. The greatest scientific achievements are giant leaps of faith.

-XFP

The train begins its journey on the edge of a perfect disk. It travels to its certain destination and the railroad line spirals through the scenery of the disk. When the journey reaches its end, we will come to the axis of the disk itself. The world will stop outside the window.

There are many Germans on the train. There are svelte perpetually laughing bleach blond schoolgirls. I do not speak their language. A mechanical toy clown coos a baby to sleep with a haunting melancholy twinkle. The train roars through the murky landscape all night long. The other passengers are weighed down by sighs and breathe heavily to sleep. There is only the twinkle of the music box clown in the front of the car.

I wake as we pull into the numb dawn silence of North Carolina. Voices wander outside the car. The freezing air conditioning flips off to total silence. The toy clown is wound by the tireless mother again and its sound repeated. I think for a moment, we have been in a train wreck in the night. Everyone in the dark car is dead. We were pulling into Heaven just before the earliest light as ghosts.

Later we continue across a causeway from the north out of the bayou and above Lake Pontchartrain which extends to the horizon. The train appears to be floating over a narrow strip of rail that is the causeway. A southern misfit drunk in the lounge car says women generally become very upset at the predicament of the train. “What if we were to break down?” He’d heard them ask. He said the railway pays him two dollars an hour to talk to people in the lounge car.

As we roll into the outskirts of the city, I am struck by the immense Metairie graveyard in the north. Tomb after tomb continue above ground down to the buildings downtown.

The train creeps slowly and then assumes a strange perspective like most things here. They must pull it backwards into the station.

I feel an low balance here the minute I get off the train. It is a slow spiritual permutation that presents itself gradually. There is something primal and basic within each ancient floor, across the streets at night, behind fences, and in trees. The ground is always damp and soft. It is rich in its fertility. There is a distinctive smell outside the quarter that is pungent and swampy. It is a sour food smell, but not at all rotten. It’s loamy and settling. The smell of mildew covers and disrupts it into a wild tangle.

It rains consistently every day at the same time, and it seems to regulate life and action here. The downpours wait for no one. It cools any frantic and defensive mood, and makes everything endlessly sultry.

The quarter lives through its own myth and shadowy traditions more than any current raw risks. It’s just a simulation compared to the past. It is all quite tarnished and trashy in its pursuit of money. It is a strange curio show of the pseudo-past. All the ornaments are big in this town like the people. They are overdone and self-important. Visitors see what they expect. They always want to see more. They always leave slightly dissatisfied because the legend is so large.

The southerners here perpetuate conversations in a bars or trolleys. Outside of the quarter the local bars are stranger. There is a neighborhood hub of activity along the bars on St. Charles. Igor’s was a 24 hour atmospheric restaurant/bar/Laundromat combination. Blacks are seldom seen in these establishments. A boy with long hair continually weeps at the jukebox unnoticed as if this were normal. A woman walks in with a three foot long fish over her shoulder. No one knows where she caught it. No one asks. An old man scrapes the paint off a door at half speed.

A fat old patron blurts out, “We were driving around about to kill a nigger for the stolen bicycle, only to realize suddenly that the bike hadn’t moved.”

“Kill him for when he does steal it.” The owner snaps back.

Everyone orders out from a Mexican restaurant called Koo-Koos for dinner when they could have cooked in the back room on the grill. The owner was too pot-bellied and lazy.  “Are you sure you want that? That place is a dump.” He says.

“Go ahead and tell him what your nickname was.” A husband at the bar says to his wife.

“I’m not.” She says.

“Come on, I bet it’s just great.” A big man with glasses at the end of the bar says with his hands.

“D-“ the husband starts.

“Don’t you dare.” She says.

“D!“ the big man repeats in anticipation.

“Darling!” The husband blurts out.

“I’m so ashamed.” She says.

The big man laughs a big laugh, followed by a big gulp of whisky. “I once knew a girl named that.” He says. No one cares.

Back at the Hummingbird Hotel where I stay, the quirky fag waiters are polite as painted mimes walk in after a day on the streets. In the next room from me is a drunk Voodoo man who trashes his room after a day of drumming and whistling at Jackson Square. He taps on the plywood wall afterward as if he wants me to tap back. His television blares a talk show and a vague sports event. I see him outside his door locking it the next day. He has deep memorizing eyes that track through me. There is a wrapped condom in his straw hat band. He mumbles something. His voice is deep and sullen. He barely opens his mouth. The eyes do everything.

In another one of the rooms at the Hummingbird, I see a pile of magician’s black boxes and trick devices through a closing doorway. There is no space left in the room. It looks like twenty years of tricks. There are magicians arguing about something.

There are bare bulbs and bare walls. A roach with wings flutters down from the ceiling in a spiral. There are awkward footsteps in the hall. Someone surely died in the hall bathroom’s large tub. The mattress is very springy for sexual gyrations. Someone has scrawled biblical half-truths on the wall. The door to the room was once kicked in. The woman at the register calls me “Baby”. The smell of the rooms is consistent with the rest of the city and sticks in your clothing.

At night I look for old invisible traces of Storeyville but there is only a housing project. I wonder around near the Old Absinthe House. I end up on the cobblestone streets in the Pirate Alley where Faulkner first wrote fiction. It rains. It is deserted here. People look at me like I’m mad and alone. I sense they are afraid of me.

I decide to move to a youth hostel a block off St. Charles Avenue near the Lafayette cemetery so I have a better chance of meeting people.  There are different hints of languages and accents. There are many traveling stories where people sit and compete about where they’ve been or how many hours they’ve spent in the air. A few travelers from Australia brag about how they eat all their meals on planes.

A girl named Joe from California is here. She rode alone across a southwest desert on a bicycle with Mexican men taunting her. She grew up on a farm is and is soft-chested and wide-eyed. There is nothing impure about her. She is good at puzzles and wants to be an engineer. She tells me I have all the traits of someone from New York City. She reacts the way she thinks she should, and jokes and references fly over her head. It is all innocent and casual. I miss her when she disappears to find and apartment the next day.

Glenn is a tall awkward guy from Texas. And our paths cross at a strip joint on Bourbon. “Austin is a party town. Check it out.” He says.

Glenn has a wiry fake like mustache that does not fit his face. He tips and talks to the dancers. The young Mexican one with the drastic overbite and dyed red hair, and Joy, the forty-four year old sad hangover of a dancer.

“Give here three years, and her ass will stick way out.” Glenn says of the Mexican girl.

The jaded barmaid with an evil sneer and a scowl, says she hates New Yorkers, and wants to close the place up for the night.

“Where you from?” She asks.

“New York.” I tell her.

“It figures.”

The Mexican girl is done dancing and comes down to get her tips from Glenn and I. “I’m broke. Busted.” I say.

“How about selling you soul?” she asks.

“My what?”

“Your soul.”

“What about school?” I ask.

“Your soul. How about selling it?”

“No my soul is fine.”

There is a cold stare from her and our conversation ends.

Joy, the old party girl is warming up on stage. Glenn says he is leaving before things get too ugly. Joy is bumping now. She is churning spasmodically. A bandage covers her hand where she cut it on the jagged edge of the mirror on the stage. The place is empty and cold to the touch.

Outside, Glenn says his girlfriend works at a burlesque house down the street and he was there before to give her medication. He says it is a better strip bar, but he doesn’t like walking through the door. He feels awkward watching his girlfriend with others around. Glenn aptly describes Bourbon Street as a “Money Vacuum”. I agree with him. It sucks your money right up and it spits you back out drunk and bewildered.

What is worse is most of the bars with strippers have slanted mirrors out the doors to the busy street so the twirling dancing flesh looks closer than it really is. It’s the refractions that always pull a person in.

The influence of Voodoo and its place and purpose here is intriguing to me.

Throughout the city you are always aware of a dark undercurrent of suppression by whites over blacks. A great spirit lies with the oppressed here. Spirits do not lie. It is obvious within their faces. The weight of Voodoo has always been a part of this subjugation. Its three divisions are “God”: the controller of destiny, “Loa”: a mixture of pantheons, Christian and African, including saints, and the third force of the “Ancestors”: who act as a guiding element. American Indian shamanism seems to have its influence as well, with the ancient Blackfeet tribe. The trio of forms have integrated some of their similarities including animal sacrifice, ancestor worship, the totem, and fertility rites. The later is most interesting when considering the mood and sensuality of a place such as this.

I consider the naked dance of a young girl in a strip bar, (Even with a snake on occasion) to be connected with Marie Laveau’s ritual of the young virgin. Both stimulate the male drive for fertility. One difference being that the Voodoo ritual is compounded and realized by real physical sacrifice, which connects its significance with the Earth. The modern equivalence is economic sacrifice. One sacrifices money towards a stripper. Money is abstract enough to sit outside of time. We think we control the concept of time though it, while we separate ourselves from the animal and world’s true cycles that we are infinitely tethered to. We lie our own lives away in the modern world. By abstracting sacrifice, we endanger the workings of the real world.

The return trip back by train is in a Thunderbird Coach car. The drunk misfit on the trip down said that these cars used to operate on a famous line across the plains. It is named and decorated after the Indian symbol and totem spirit. A girl from Paris is here. The funniest man in the world eats in the dinning car. There is a conductor with the outrageous name of Bill Chestnut on his nametag. He has a southern accent.

X.F. Pine

I’ve always been obsessed with Pyramids and Pseudoscientific Pyramidology.

A theory I’ve heard about over years is the correlations between the constellation of Orion’s Belt and the three main Pyramids at Giza. This is also known as the OCT (Orion Correlation Theory). See this amazing site for a more detailed explanation of the theory.

Recently I have been experimenting with composites and layers in Google Earth and had to attempt this by mapping the constellation to the ground.

Google Earth actually has the structures built into the system so you can see the correlation when the layer is installed.

Here is the .kmz layer file to download.

Here is the most recent version of Google Earth.

If you already have Google Earth installed the file should load up into the “Places” panel on the left automatically. If not try to open the .kmz manually via the Google Earth application.

It’s easier to see the star field if you turn OFF the Panoramio photos checkbox in the “Layers’ panel on the left. Photos show up as blue dots.  Turn ON the checkbox for 3D buildings in  the left “Layers” panel to see the structures.

Notice that the map is slightly off kilter and also there are other smaller stars that seem to map to other structures on the ground nearby south of the main Pyramids.  One must also wonder if there has been some drift in the stars and astronomic angles over 4000 years since the pyramids were built.

Another part of the theory mentions that the Nile itself represents the edge of the Milky Way galaxy and the placement of the Sphinx is connected to the constellation Leo. I would need to find a larger more highly detailed map to test this.

X. F. Pine