This isn’t ~not~ Fandometrics.
Television: It’s What’s Streaming
⬆ The Walking Dead knocks ‘em dead, moves up seven spots to No. 10.
☆ Gravity Falls returns at No. 14 on the one year anniversary of its finale.Movies: The Books of the Silver Screen
⬆ The Lego Batman Movie (it’s that Lego Batman movie) shoots up to No. 1.
⬆ Moonlight won everyone’s hearts and jumps 11 spots to No. 4.
Music: it’s Tunes
⬆ Lana Del Rey moves up eight spots to No. 5 after the dropping a video for her song, Love.
☆ All Time Low returns at No. 11 after releasing a new single, Dirty Laundry.Celebrities: They’re Not Like Us
⬆ Supergirl’s Katie McGrath leaps eight spots to No. 3. She didn’t need a cape for that but she can probably borrow Kara’s 😉
☆ Laverne Cox is back at No. 12. Always good to see Laverne Cox.
Games: Run Out Your Battery
⬆ Pokémon GO trots up to No. 6 after introducing more than 80 new Pokémon.
☆ Eldarya returns (woah sounds like a sequel) at No. 17.Web stuff: Beep Boop
⬆ PewDiePie moves up fourteen spots to No. 5, proving that all publicity is….publicity.
☆ Advice podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me debuts at No. 10, proving that even a category called “advice podcast” can be made fun.
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“burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”: Thinking About Howard Rheingold
Feb. 21, 2017
This morning while waiting for a Google Hangout to begin (Studio Visit #3 in the Networked Narratives class series), I decided to research him and make a list of “Ten Things I Know About Howard Rheingold” before the show began.
1. Born in 1947
2. Very much a member of my generation
3. Dream Office--your work space is a reflection of your interior alchemical space
4. He respects liminal figures
Howard Rheingold, “Balinese Garuda”
5. He collects Balinese and Hindu masks (I collect Northwest Coast Native masks)
6. He paints in the psychedelic Hindu style
7. Writes about the human values of the virtual worldplace
8. Interested in lucid dreaming; me, too
9. Is a gardener
10.Has built sculptures for Burning Man and floats for Grateful Dead parades
11. Has made pens of wood on his turning lathe
12. Designed and built an Alchemagikal Lucid Dream Box that I would love to have
13. Involved in The Well
14. Went to Reed College just like Gary Snyder did
15. Wrote The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog and about 15-16 other books
16. Paints his shoes
As I listened to the ensuing discussion with Howard and his daughter Mamie Rheingold, I found out something I really didn’t know about myself: I have ceased really being very interested in questions around media literacy or what it’s like to be a student, or a parent or a teacher; all that has faded now with time and distance.
I am entering into another zone of soul where I am writing about the past, curating my parent’s art for the future, and journeying ever more deeply into the landscape of Self.
And the more I know about that land, the more I understand the role of dream and altered trance states in the making of a story, a photograph, an essay, or a life.
For the most part, I feel like I travel these counties of the soul alone, but in Howard Rheingold, I feel I have met a fellow traveler:
“You! Hypocrite lecteur! --mon semblable,--mon frère!”
(“Hypocrite reader, my likeness, my brother!” T.S. Eliot quotes Baudelaire, Line 76 of “The Burial of the Dead”)
Perhaps like others who feel they travel alone, I am always on the lookout for those who have gone before me and become expert navigators. Rheingold is a shaman for our time. He understands these dynamic interior forces that can shine a darklight into the future and illumine the dimly lit, branching paths of history.
I wanted to ask him so many questions during that Google Hangout:
1. How do you understand the nature of evil?
2. Tell me about your rituals of creativity (and I’ll tell you about mine)
3. Talk about the importance of ritual, please.
4. Tell me why you were drawn to Buddhist, Hindu, Indonesian, Balinese art and symbolism for both your collecting (masks, flat art) and your personal mythmaking?
5. What have you come to understand about what is really meant by the phrase, “He/she is an old soul”?
Oh, and so many other wonders I would ask only once we were talking, and I got a feel for what seems possible to him and what he might deem as whackadoodle.
Celtic Green Lotus Woman by Howard Rheingold
Most of all, Rheingold has re-inspired me to take my own intuitive journey as seriously as I tell myself I do. There are soul projects I have dropped for a year while I waited to see what retirement would look and feel like. Some I have done. Some I have brought back online in draft form. Others are lingering like dream figures in the background in the waiting room of the soul.
One of my favorite Rheingold quotes:
“Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you’re paying attention.”
Some of things I enjoyed most getting to know about Howard is his deep connection to his mother who was his grade school art teacher. His mother gave him permission to play at art, and he has had no further formal art training.
When involved with “high play,” he calls on the distinction made by Mircea Eliade between “instrumental activity,” which is art as a means to an end, and “sacred activity,” which is deep, absorbed involvement in the creation of the moment.
"My art-making always has been a subconscious divination ritual that I've invoked in parallel with the rational techno-social forecasting I have done for fifty years."
Rheingold recently had a gallery show at the Institute for the Future (Alto, CA) called “The Past Futures of Howard Rheingold: A Retrospective on Art and Ideas.” A video was made of a talk about his art he did then, which was followed by an interview by his friend and colleague Fred Turner, chair of Stanford University’s Department of Communication.
In the video, Turner calls Rheingold “a bridge between the American counterculture and the digital future,” but I believe he himself was not trying to be a bridge so much as attempting to discover all the ways the world amplifies its many voices.
When asked what he discovered by taking LSD, his answer was prompt and quite serious, “I am the eyes of the world. Sentient being are how the universe senses itself. The membranes that separate us actually connect us much more than we know.” This is a point of view that reminded be so strongly of Brian Swimme and his book The Universe is a Green Dragon.
“For Brian Swimme, the universe is a radiant, numinous revelation, and contemplating the wonders of the unfolding creativity of the cosmos is a mystical, ecstatic, awe-inspiring event.”
Rheingold goes on to say he understand that reality as a social construct “that we have been taught and that can be dissolved.”
When Turned jokingly called this an “acid-oriented civic vision,” Rheingold perfectly turned and deepened the moment by saying that acid “just opened the door--what counts is what’s on the other side of the door and what you do with it.”
Turner also laid out a set of polar opposites, a “parallel mystical world vs the hyperrational world,” where Rheingold has done most of his writing and publishing. Where, Turner asks, does art fit between the two poles?
To answer, Rheingold calls upon both Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, and it seemed to me he refused to engage with those polarizing tensions.
"God, Creator of the Infinite Multiverses" by Howard Rheingold
He says that when he is making art, he’s communicating with himself, following where the art leads him. A lifelong habit of doing this has led him to trust his intuition. “Art--you just start and play and see what wants to emerge. I ask, ‘Where does this want me to go?’”
And in terms of the everyday, he has become proficient at “spotting signals” that might be meaningful in either an emerging book or an emerging art work.
He says this is what all the ancient mystics did. They were, as Ginsberg puts it, plugged “into the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.”
And that is one electrical socket I am more than happy to walk right up and stick my finger into.
Howard’s Dream Office
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