MungBeing: Freedom

Forward -- When the creeping vine of oppression came a-callin'...

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Mark Givens)

It's interesting to me to hear what people think of when they are presented with the term "freedom". Many people, and this may be a reflection of the times, think of patriotism. Isn't that interesting? Freedom is something that needs defending, something our NATION possesses. For others, they jump straight into weapons, a means by which to defend our freedoms, with little or no patriotism. I don't know... maybe the patriotism is implied. Or assumed.
I think a lot of that has to do with the collective unconscious trying to comprehend and process the propaganda that is so perverse and pervasive. I think the equation "War = Freedom" has seeped so deep into our national fiber that it's going to take a healthy application of stain remover to lift it from the fabric of society. Then maybe our "Freedom Shirts" will be clean and fresh. Of course, we know that clean laundry does not mean that the cause of the stain (the "Dirt") has somehow magically "disappeared" but at least we will smell Spring Breeze fresh. And don't get me started on the whole "Freedom = Democracy" thing. Yeesh!
Outside of the political interpretations, or perhaps just on the rim, there are folks who equate freedom with peace. This is probably the most idealistic of all but it's also the most reassuring.

Far removed from the political arena there are those who think of personal freedom and the ability to express ideas with impunity. Like scientific research, artistic expression, the healthy exchange of ideas in the public and private spaces of our creamy cultural centers. The societal freedoms that we all say we cherish but would sacrifice in a heartbeat in order to preserve our "way of life". Hmmm... odd.
Personally, I think of the forces that work against us as we stumble though life trying to maintain at least a semblance of control over the rules and regulations created to limit our freedom. Laws, after all, don't grant us freedom; by definition, laws restrict freedom. And that plays havoc on the notion of sharing information, music, thoughts, pictures, words, and actions. We have created one of the most repressive governing bodies in the free world. So when I think about freedom, I think about the constant struggle to ward off the creeping vine of oppression with the not-quite-strong-enough disinfectant of moral certitude. Yeah, my life's a planty battle.

But one of the great things about being the Editor-in-Chief of this great and noble experiment called MungBeing is that I get to think about all of these interpretations and theories and such and take part in dispersing these thoughts across the great divide we call the internets. Well, for the time being, anyway.

Announcements -- MungBeing Galleries

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Mark Givens)

We are proud to announce the opening of the Mungbeing Galleries. This new MungBeing Adjunct will afford visual artists the ability to display their works on the internet in a hassle-free and organized way. Based upon the same high ethical standards as MungBeing Magazine, the MungBeing Galleries are free and open for use by contributors to MungBeing Magazine. There are no ads, there are no access limits, and there are no constraints on how or why one would use them. Have a look around at what we've got in there already. I think you'll like what you see.

If you are a MungBeing contributor and are interested in displaying your work in a gallery of your own, please contact Mark Givens, MungBeing Galleries Curator and Docent. Thank you and enjoy!

The MungBeing Galleries

Announcements -- Ads

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (The Advertisementing Dept.)

You may or may not have noticed the small "ads" running in the lower left corner of MungBeing. If you did notice them, you probably noticed that they link to Chickenhead.com. If you followed that link, you probably asked yourself what Chickenhead.com has to do with MungBeing. The answer to that unasked question is nothing. Nothing at all. Chickenhead is funny, like Flort. Doesn't it seem appropriate that, in this "no advertiser" magazine, there'd be a link from a banner (that is a great parody in itself) to a site that has nothing to do with MungBeing and has given MungBeing nothing in return? If you didn't notice the little ads then I'm sure none of this has crossed your mind.

Well the thing is, that little 260x65 pixel space is now open to MungBeing contributors for personal use. We're going to incorporate our own self-promoting ads in with the links to Chickenhead.com.

If you are a contributor and you are interested in displaying a little 260x65 pixel banner in the lower left corner of MungBeing, please send feedback to our advertismenting department promptly.

Announcements -- The Totem Triptychs

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (jody franklin)

MungBeing is proud to take part in The Totem Triptychs, a wonderful collaborative project with artist Don Swartzentruber. Details of this wonderful project, including how to participate, can be found here.

Announcements -- Mungcasting

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (David "Starchy" Grant)

We've had this little idea bouncing around lately for what you might call a Mungbeing Podcast. Or a Mungcast Podbeing. Or a Mungpod Cast....thing. A Mungcast. Or something. We'd like to do one, anyway, is the point (I think), and most of all we'd like it to sound good. So far, that's where we've failed.

Well, how about you, o talented cast of mungpeople? Can you make it sound good? Are you interested in having your very own podcast under the Mungbeing banner? If so, you'd only have to record the thing, and we'd take care of the rest: coding, distribution, promotion, etc.

We've already had a great run of music included with each issue, but why not more on the audio front? We're thinking readings of articles (by you or the authors), interviews -- anything at all tickles the caster's fancy, and reeks (at least a little bit) of mung.

Sound like fun? Think you know someone to whom it would sound like fun? Let us know! Let them know? Let... thus know!

Sound terrible? If so, please, whatever you do, don't do it.

Announcements -- Happenings

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (The Editors)

MungBeing contributors are encouraged to alert our crack editorial team to upcoming events, shows, readings, and whatnot that they are participating in. If you have an upcoming show, reading, or event, please let us know and we will post an item about it. And if there's an opportunity for other MungBeing contributors to participate, please feel free to invite them.

Announcements -- Ensuring that you receive MungBeing Emails

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (The Editors)

Some folks are not receiving communications from MungBeing. I was going to send you an email to tell you how to unblock MungBeing from your SPAM filter and nearly missed the law of that flogic. So here it is...

MSN:
Go to "Options"
Go To "Junk E-Mail Protection"
Go to "Safe List"
Add "mungbeing.com"
Add "wckrspgt.com"

For Yahoo Mail it's a little trickier.
Go to "options"
Go to "Filters" (under "Management", not the "Spam Protection" under "Spam")
Click the "Add" button
in the "From header" box, make sure it says "contains" and then type in "mungbeing.com"
Under "Then... Move the message to", select "Inbox" from the drop-down menu
Click the "Add Filter" button (off to the left).

Voila!

If you have a different account and you suspect that you are not receiving emails from Mungbeing, please alert our crack editors and we will look into it.

Announcements -- Proudfully American Logo Museum

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Mark Givens)

Nothing says "Freedom" like a T-Shirt from the Proudfully American Logo Museum.

Or how about a journal celebrating the Iraqi people's freedom?

Announcements -- Hot Chicks

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Mark Givens)

Art and film inspired by the religious tracts of Jack Chick.

For breaking news go to : http://www.316now.com
Need something to wear to the premiere?: http://www.cafepress.com/hotchicksfans

SNEAK PREVIEW
New Fest
Sat. June 10, 10:15 pm, AMC Loews 34th St Theater 10, NYC
http://www.newfest.org/

WORLD PREMIERE
Los Angeles Film Festival
Fri. June 23, 9:30pm, The Majestic Crest Theatre, Westwood
Sun. June 25, 4:30pm, The Majestic Crest Theatre, Westwood
http://www.lafilmfest.com/

PARTY
Sun. June 25, 7:00pm
Liquid Kitty Join us after our Sunday screening and get saved by liquor.
11780 W. Pico Blvd. (near Bundy) Los Angeles, CA 90064
http://www.thekitty.com/

ART OPENING @ RETROPIA GALLERY
Fri. July 7, 7:00pm
"PIN UP CHICKS" Art inspired by the comic art of Jack T. Chick.
1443 N. Highland. @ Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90028
http://www.retropia.net/

ENCORE SCREENING
Outfest
Sat. July 8, Midnight, The Vista, Silver Lake, CA 90027
http://www.outfest.org/

We Are Freedom

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Rachel Haywire)

What does freedom mean to me? Honestly? In this country freedom means absolutely nothing. Freedom is a concept created by our government to keep us in check. We're convinced that we have "freedom" so we won't rebel against the established order.

George W. Bush thinks that freedom means going into a foreign country and nuking the hell out of it. The kids on Haight Street think freedom means being able to sell weed without getting harassed by the cops. The black man in prison for questionable charges thinks freedom means getting a fair trial so he can be released to see his family again.

What is freedom? Freedom is swinging on the swing set of a playground at 4 AM. Freedom is being able to express all forms of thought, even those that are considered politically incorrect. Freedom is being able to walk to the store in a tank top without getting harassed by a guy who is old enough to be your father.

So what does freedom mean to me? Everything. Yet somehow freedom is meaningless. Freedom is a pissed off purple fairy that arms itself with an AK-47. Freedom is waking up in the morning and knowing that you're alive, embracing this despite death being freedom and the freedom to kill yourself being illegal. Freedom is looking up at the sky and giving it the finger. Freedom is freedom. Freedom is slavery, as George Orwell once said.

Freedom is not a two party system that calls itself a democracy. Freedom is not a free speech zone. Freedom is revolution. What does freedom mean to me? Revolution. Every day. Every moment. Every breath.

Freedom is an overused term that has been commercialized and marketed to stupid people who buy it in materialized forms. Freedom is a game that people play when they're not working. Freedom is Santa Claus on a website created by the Easter Bunny.

Freedom is an animal being released from its cage. Freedom is an artist being released from a mental institution. Freedom is a radical being released from a prison cell. Freedom is release. Freedom comes from the inside, as many of us know. Freedom is skydiving. Freedom is playing with toys when you're 30. Freedom is reading the newspaper when you're 7.

What does freedom mean to you? Is creating your own definition of freedom an act of freedom? Would freedom exist if we weren't here to define it? Freedom raises a lot of questions yet freedom is beyond words.

Freedom is being able to say you hate this country while still living in it. Freedom is punk before it gets labeled as such. Freedom is everything we say and do because freedom is the fabric of existence itself.

We are freedom.

Works

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Bruce New)

"Portrait of a Revolutionist" by Bruce New, Photomontage/Collage, 16x20 inches, 2006

Citizen

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (R.S. Deese)

Fat torso in a tight gray double-breasted suit
Iridescent necktie made of feathers:

He navigates the bank of trash and newspapers
Beside the bench on thin, red-stockinged legs;

Methodically alert, he reads the smell
Of nourishment somewhere in these wrappers;

His talons tear a golden sheet and he now discovers
The crescent of a cheeseburger. Far too big

To eat at once, he guards it from the others.

Unbound Unlit

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Cavendish)

One morning shortly before his seventh birthday, Terry Mulligan woke to find his parents had disappeared. The Mulligans' apartment was small and the walls were thin. On most mornings Terry would wake to the sounds of plates and utensils and cups clinking in the kitchen, TVs or radios mumbling from different points in the apartment, the floors creaking under feet, or the tense and unloving voices of his parents bickering.
But on this day, the apartment was silent. Occasionally there was the faint rustle of some other tenant walking down the hallway outside, but mostly, there was silence. Terry lay in bed, still, for the next two hours listening to the silence, unsure of what to do.
When he finally got up from bed, he walked slowly down the hall, peeked into his parents bedrooms just to be sure, then went to the kitchen and poured himself an enormous bowl of Lucky Charms. He carried it to the living room, dumbly spilling milk and marshmallows from the side of the bowl, fell lazily onto the couch and turned on the TV.
Being neither a bright child, nor particularly well loved by the adults in his life, his parents' disappearance neither panicked him nor made him curious. He flipped lazily through the channels while he ate, unaffected by the strange, adult-oriented shows he had never seen before. People playing games for prizes. Well-dressed ladies talking to one another on big cushy couches. Black and white sitcoms. Odd exercise contraptions. When he grew tired of this, he went back to his room to look for something to do. When he grew tired of whatever amusement he found in his room, he would go back and watch TV. In the evening, he poured himself a bowl of Lucky Charms for dinner.
After two days like this, the milk ran out, so Terry tried substituting some of the other liquids in the fridge. Orange juice, iced tea, Riesling; he decided they were all pretty gross, and started eating his Lucky Charms dry, no spoon. He scooped up the sugary little puffs and marshmallows with his hands and crammed them into his mouth like popcorn. On the morning of the third day, the box of Lucky Charms was empty.

Reader, if to this point Terry has seemed uninspired (whether as the focus of a narrative, or concerning his capacity for imagination), it's because he was. But who isn't at some point in their lives? Who is born armed with all the ideas, confidence, and willpower to make their lives meaningful? Life is about influence, the injections of unexpected, alien energies into our gray and static sense. Knowing that he would need money to buy more cereal, Terry slowly and quietly ransacked the apartment. He had seen his parents hide money from each other, but couldn't recall exactly where, so bit by bit he overturned and opened up every possible spot money might be hidden. Around noon he had collected five dollars and 34 cents and set out for the grocery store. He was wearing his favorite football t-shirt and the pajama pants he had been in for three days. He couldn't find his shoes, so he settled for his puffy green moon boots.
It was late May, the early summer sun was high in the sky, shining a clean, bracing light. Terry felt his clothes stick a little as he walked. He pulled at them to ease the discomfort and waved his arms a bit to stimulate the wind and cool himself down. He jingled the change in his pocket. He had never walked all the way to the store by himself before, but was sure of the way: the same path he took to school, down a few more blocks past his aunt's house, then turn onto the big busy street where all the stores were. He couldn't remember how far down the busy street he had to go, or what the adjacent stores were called, so as he walked he tried to jog his memory by thinking about things he had seen in that area, or funny things or good times he had there. Nothing really came.
Before he realized how far along he was, Terry found himself at the fence surrounding the perimeter of his school's playground. It was lunchtime, and all his classmates, as well as those children from surrounding classes, were outside clearly enjoying their reprieve from the drudgery of math, reading, history, or whatever. The little kids were running around aimlessly like they usually did; big idiot grins on their faces. The pretty girls and the doomed young romantics were busy sending each other flirtatious messages and lies and counter-lies from opposite ends of the playground; their emissaries and go-betweens floating back and forth between them like leaves blown around in the wind. There were games of catch, and tetherball, and soccer. Some boys on the merry-go-round. Some girls on the swings. There was a football game, which Terry usually played in; its participants were having their usual trouble observing the difference between "two-hand touch" and "tackle". Terry felt his clothes sticking again in the heat. He pulled them loose. As he watched his schoolmates, a strange feeling came over him that he couldn't understand. For the first time in three days, he remembered that he was supposed to be in school. But it was a chore getting up early every morning, rushing to get dressed, listening to his parents fight while he waited for them to make his breakfast, then walking out the door (his parents still fighting, listening to their voices quickly fade away as the door closed behind him and he started off). It was a chore to do it, and he must have forgotten it on purpose, he thought to himself. But why were the other kids here? Terry had never considered before the freedom he had in doing anything, everything. Just as today he had walked the path to school and intended to keep walking by it, so was everyone else free to do so. And they were all free to do so every day. So why did any of them sit through school all day? Subject themselves to the boring classes and the corny teachers and the annoying nerdy kids and the stuck-up popular kids? Why was it that recess, a brief sliver of the day, was the only thing that was fun? Why did they do this to themselves? There was something that Terry couldn't quite think of, and the strange feeling pulled at him harder. He stepped back from the fence and took a long, slow, deep breath. Were he older, smarter, or more self-aware, he may have called this feeling loneliness. Were he older, smarter, or more self-aware, the more he thought about it, the more likely he would have been to give into a substantial sadness or anger. But being the incurious, dull boy that he was, the feeling remained a dark cloud on the edge of his consciousness. Like an angry dog growling at him from the other side of a locked door, the feeling remained hidden from view, mysterious and troubling.
"Hey, Terry!" Terry turned around to see Jake Folsom standing behind him. He was cradling a pile of fireworks in his arms. There were two older kids with him.

Jeff and Jeff, the two older kids, were already halfway down the ravine when Terry took his first step onto the steep, muddy slope. His foot slipped immediately, but he caught himself by steering his fall towards a large nearby rock and grabbing on. The mud was thick and wet where his arm had fallen into it.
"Just do it slow," said Jake. He was a couple feet in front of Terry. He, like the Jeffs, didn't have any trouble navigating the slope. "We come down here a lot. It's a good place to light off the firecrackers and nobody notices. I didn't think you skipped school." Terry replied that he didn't really, but he guessed he did sometimes. Terry had known Jake since kindergarten, and was wary of him. Jake was unequivocally the worst kid in school, and in fact, the Folsom family name was notorious at all age levels. Mr. Folsom had been ejected from several baseball games Terry had witnessed, and merely mentioning Nate Folsom, Jake's high school age brother, was enough to send dark clouds over the head of any teacher in school. Jake was famous for zeroing in on his classmates' prized material possessions and either destroying them or making them disappear, leaving no incriminating evidence. He was so good at this that the show-and-tell sessions in Terry's homeroom class had come to almost exclusively favor "tell". No one could risk bringing in something they couldn't easily part with. "Let's go," said Jake, and he quickly reached the bottom. Terry, seeing Jake and the Jeffs standing together at the base of the ravine, began to move quicker. He tried to imitate the nimble hopping movements the others had used, but quickly fell. He flailed helplessly down the slope, leaving a swerving, staccato trail where his knees, shoulders, and hands cut into the soft black mud. At the bottom, Terry stood. He tried to wipe the mud from his clothes, but the mud on his hands just made things worse.
"Looks good on you, kid," said a Jeff.
"Will you work for food?" said the other Jeff.
"Shut up. Leave him alone," said Jake.
Terry looked up at the top of the ravine. He suddenly felt very sorry he had decided to follow Jake and the Jeffs. He was cold now, and thought of all his classmates up on the dry green playground. He found a dry spot on his clothes and wiped his hands. He asked where they were going now.
"There's a big pipe just around the corner over here," said Jake. "It leads into the sewers or something. My brother says that if you use enough of these you can blow up people's plumbing." The Jeffs started unloading their backpacks. They each pulled out a flashlight and small boxes full of fireworks.
"We wanna blow up a toilet. Mr. Hopkins' toilet," said a Jeff.
"Yeah," said the other Jeff. "Or Mrs. Garners', that fat lunch lady with the mustache. BAM!"
"Yeah! Shit all over! POW!"

Once inside the pipe, the mission resolve quickly faded away. There were no pipes leading upwards, no flushing sounds anywhere, nor any one place that smelled any better or worse than where they came in; just a maze of pipes, seemingly endless in the dark. After fifteen minutes of searching and no leads on toilets to blow up, the boys quickly got bored, and their manic, destructive energies quickly turned against one another. Jeff and Jeff kicked at the dirty water at their feet. "Shit water! Shit water shit water," said one Jeff exuberantly. He jumped on his brothers' back, trying to wrestle his head towards the stinking floor. "You drink it! You're gonna drink it," screamed the other Jeff. Their flashlights projected their hyper, dancing silhouettes against the tunnel wall. Jake stood a few feet away. Terry heard the hiss of a match, and watched as Jake threw a firecracker further down the tunnel. It exploded with shocking force. Much louder, Terry thought, than a firecracker should. The Jeffs stopped and looked up.
"Mice," said Jake.
"Mice!" said the Jeffs. They rushed over to Jake, lit a firecracker, and threw it down the tunnel. Two more explosions, and appreciative laughter.
"Dead mice," said a Jeff. For a second, Terry felt his ears go numb, as if he had stuck too many q-tips in. He closed his eyes and thought of the top of the ravine, in the sunshine.
"If you could blow up any teacher, who would it be?" asked Jake, he lit another firecracker and threw it down the tunnel. It rolled into the stinking water and fizzled out.
"Mrs. Cuthbert," said a Jeff.
"Mr. Faggels," said the other. Through the ringing in Terry's ears, their voices had acquired a faint, reptilian hiss. The Jeffs both lit firecrackers and threw them down the tunnel. Boom.
"If you had to blow up one of your family," asked Jake. This time, he threw his firecracker closer to the wall. It exploded and echoed through the tunnel. The ringing in Terrys ears grew louder.
"My older brother!" said both of the Jeffs.
"Yeah, I'd blow up my brother too," said Jake.
"How about Terry," said one of the Jeffs. To which Terry replied that he didn't know who he would blow up. He tried to think of things his parents had done to him that would make one of them eligible for the honor, but nothing came. Terry didn't feel anger towards his parents; in fact, he felt very little about them. They appeared in his mind as abstracts; like those men in history books, the men who Terry's teachers said had built the country; men who wore women's wigs and strange suits and high girlish socks; who looked nothing like how people looked, who probably weren't even real anyway. Their actions were miles and centuries removed from Terry's experience, and he regarded them (when he thought about them at all) as necessary annoyances thrust upon him by second period History class; nothing more.
"No," said the taller Jeff, lighting a firecracker. Terry had just noticed that one Jeff was slightly taller than the other. "I mean, let's blow up Terry." He dropped the firecracker at Terry's feet. The boys laughed and ran in separate directions. Terry tripped as he was running, and splashed face first into the center of the tunnel. As he wiped the water from his eyes, he heard the hiss and click of a firecracker falling onto the tunnel floor beside him.
"Run, Terry! Run!" cried one of the Jeffs mockingly. The boys laughed. But in an instant, Terry's laugh -- of the gallows type to begin with -- changed. He tried to remember how he had come to be here, now, but couldn't remember. It was as if he had always been cold and hungry, as if he had always been covered in shit water and mud, his ears numb from the explosions, his eyes and nostrils stinging from the putrid water they were soaked in. He couldn't think of who these kids were he was with, or how he had come to be with them. He didn't remember making a choice, didn't remember choosing to be with them. The strange feeling from earlier in the day returned, but this time, it made his heart pound, and tears well up in his eyes. He sprinted towards Jake and the shorter Jeff, and lept. He landed on Jake, and the two fell together into the water. Terry's fist clenched tight. He punched Jake twice in the jaw and once in the forehead before being thrown off by the taller, stronger boy.
"Fuck you you little shit," Jake said. "We were just joking around, but you're gonna die down here now." He lit a firecracker.
"Put it in his ear," said one Jeff.
"Blow his nose off," said the other Jeff.
Terry got up and ran as fast as he could in the other direction. He heard firecrackers explode behind him. In the dark of the tunnel he couldn't see except by the frantic arcs of light thrown by the Jeffs' flashlights. Eventually the flashlights went dark, and the footsteps stopped. Terry slowed down, but kept moving, guiding himself along the walls with his hands. The walls were cold and damp. After a few more feet, Terry felt a small passage in the wall around head height. Thinking this would be a good place to hide, he climbed up into it. A shallow, but steady trickle of water ran through the pipe down into the main tunnel. Terry maneuvered onto his back, feet facing into the pipe, and tried to stop the trickle as best he could by damming it with his big puffy boots. He tried to calm his breathing and listened for the boys out in the tunnel.
"I bet that little shit is around here somewhere," said a voice in a loud stage whisper.
"So shut up. What's the point of sneaking up on him if you keep talking?"
"I'm gonna kill him."
"He got you pretty good."
"No he didn't. But nobody hits me. I'm gonna kill him anyway."
"Who cares? Let's get out of here. It stinks."
"Let's go to the arcade."
"They kick us out during the day."
"Then let's go to the dirt ramp."
"It takes forever to get out there. We gotta be back by dinner."
"Oh, yeah."
"You guys are such sissies."
The voices trailed off. It was silent in the tunnel now, except for the quiet trickle of water running through Terry's hiding spot. Despite his best efforts, he couldn't stop the flow. It trickled around his boots and ran down the pipe under his back. Terry imagined that Jake and the Jeffs were still out in the tunnel, waiting to ambush him. He lay there, still, unsure of what to do.
There was no light. The dark seemed deep and physical, like the mud outside covering the slope of the ravine, but the dark was everywhere. It couldn't be sidestepped, and it couldn't be wiped or washed off. Terry began to imagine everything he had ever seen in movies or on TV slowly crawling at him in the darkness: dirty, skeletal, ragged pirates with long knives; decaying corpses with bloody hands and mouths walking towards him with slow lumbering steps; snake-like aliens with slimy bodies and long glistening teeth. Any second, he told himself. Any second now, any second now. But, second by second, minute by minute, nothing came. Terry began to understand that all the things he used to fear were imaginary; that nothing he thought could hurt him was real. But he didn't feel any more safe, or any less vulnerable. It was still dark. It was still cold and wet. Outside, waiting around some corner somewhere, there were people like Jake and the Jeffs. This was even worse. He knew that he would see Jake in school again. That Jake would be aiming for him now. Terry felt his heart beat and his breath shorten. To calm himself, he sifted through all those imaginary evils in his mind: the vampires, the werewolves, the aliens, the banditos and murderers. Where they had once been so frightening, he began to see them as cartoonish and fake, almost clown-like. He tried to imagine everything in the world undergoing this same transformation, but his mind would always return to Jake. He imagined being at school, turning a corner, and Jake would be standing there with a brick or a baseball bat, or a bag full of explosives. Finally, exhausted by fear, Terry fell asleep.
As he slept, Terry dreamt of vampires. It was an awful, bloody dream; the worst nightmare he had ever had. In it, he and people he knew were torn apart, their bodies vividly flayed and dismembered. He would remember the dream his whole life. The details would fade slowly as the years passed, but he would always remember the vividness; the horror that something so gruesome had sprung, unprecedented, from his own mind.
When he woke, he was too tired, wet, and miserable to continue being frightened. He climbed out of his pipe, and slowly worked his way back to the entrance of the tunnel. The sunlight was painful -- for a few moments, he couldn't see anything -- but he was glad to see it. It was a slow, strenuous climb to the top of the ravine. Once at the top, his fear returned. Jake and the Jeffs could be anywhere, he thought. So he started a long, swerving path back to his house. He cut through other people's back yards, climbed over fences, and crawled through bushes, anything to avoid detection. In one yard, he stole an adult-sized jacket off a clothesline. In another, he snuck into a garage and stole sunglasses from the dashboard of an open car. His camouflage complete, he continued snaking his way through the neighborhood.
At home, he found his mother slumped on the couch watching TV. She had a dry bowl of cereal on her stomach. She picked up bits with her hands and popped them in her mouth like popcorn. She sat up when she saw him enter the room.
"Hey buddy," she said. She placed the bowl on the table in front of her. "Whereya been? And what the hell happened to the house?"
"I dunno," Terry mumbled. He dropped his stolen jacket and shades on the floor and fell into the easy chair beside the couch. He was exhausted, but sleep suddenly seemed impossible. He closed his eyes anyway and listened to the TV. He didn't recognize the voices on the TV, didn't follow the plot, didn't understand the jokes that caused the laugh track and his mother to laugh. He imagined the TV was tuned to The Terry Mulligan show. From a black screen, a static-filled image was slowly fading in, the adult Terry Mulligan. He couldn't make out the details, and the voices describing it remained muddled and unintelligible.
"Jesus Christ! You're a mess!" Terry opened his eyes to see his mother starring at him from the couch. She had noticed his clothes. "What did you get into?"
"I dunno," Terry said. Tomorrow at school, he thought to himself, anything can happen.

The Rape of Palestine

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Michael Dickinson)

"The Rape of Palestine" by Michael Dickinson, collage, 2006

Opulence

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (David "Starchy" Grant)

I found myself sitting across a small, round table from you, sipping a glass of beer one night. I might have felt a little something for you -- I did for many women those days -- but you were most of all a friend, a good one, and I knew that you loved another good friend, even if he was away just then in Egypt, or Jordan, or one of those desert countries. We were in one of those old imperial cafes along the kor�t, not so much because we couldn't afford the opulent visions of Paris it might have suggested -- and we couldn't -- but because we really liked it there in Budapest.

In truth, it wasn't a side of the town I knew so well. Sure, I'd been to cafes with a similar feel -- themselves pale imitations of this Hapsburg fossil -- in Berlin, Vienna, even in Prague. During my time as a temporary semi-legal Pesti, however, I'd gotten to know far better the basement dives, places decorated over the course of decades by the spraypaint and pocket knives of the clientele, places where they made the wine on the premises with a jug of tap water and a fizzing tablet, places unchanged since the Communist days but for the addition of gambling machines in the corner (always good for guaranteeing a permanent customer or two). I guess I also knew the architecture pretty well, both as a dangerous distraction when speeding through traffic on my bicycle and as a mind-boggling and sometimes spinning backdrop when stumbling home in the middle of the night.
link
You knew this place well, though. You'd stop by there sometimes after work to relax after a hard day of frustrating your English students by the Berlitz method. Somehow, that night, you made me wonder just what it could possibly have been that I was finding in Budapest that I couldn't have found at the vapor-end of a liquor bottle anywhere else.

Oh, don't worry. I'd forgotten all about that question by the time I'd wandered down the stairs from the street for a shot of palinka at the Fekete K�tya the next night. My friend, your lover, came back from Jordan, or maybe Egypt, soon after that, too. Most of all, I never sat with you at one of those old imperial cafes along the kor�t again.

The Mass Psychology Of Bushism

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (jody franklin)

In twenty-first century America, George Bush's America, we live in the shadow of a tyranny oh so bold and shameless. George Bush's America is Philip K. Dick's Rome, George Orwell's Oceania, Robert Anton Wilson's Tsarist Occupied Government (TSOG). It is the resurrection of the totalitarian nightmares of regimes past, it is the dystopian fiction manifest. The falling of the Twin Towers is the Reichstag fire of our age. Although it is generally verboten to use the Nazis as analogous to contemporary political movements due to their appalling program of genocide against their own citizenry (perhaps we can view the Bush regime as pre-genocidal, as those living in America have yet to be rounded up and put to their deaths en masse), the parallels are frighteningly obvious.

The Great Leader is elected by a slim margin, and uses legal loopholes, (possible) chicanery and a resulting forfeit by the opposition to rise to power. A prominent institutional building is set ablaze in the nation's cultural capital by (a) foreign terrorist(s) representing a supposedly alien and hostile political ideology. This act and the scapegoat who takes credit for it are immediately transformed into symbols of enemy evil. The megalomaniacal national ruler exploits the fears of the populace by declaring a state of emergency, whipping up a hysteria that condemns all who are seen as associated with the terrorist by ideology or ethnicity. He rallies elected representatives to grant him a level of power and authority to decree and execute laws in a manner that concentrates more power in his own hands and usurps the foundation of constitutional democracy. There is an attack on domestic civil liberties by an ominous state that has as its primary mission the destruction of this hyperbolic, chimerical enemy. Although the Great Leader's own peculiar ideology is not shared by the majority of the population, it commands the fanatical devotion of an activist minority sizeable enough to keep him in power. The dissenting opposition is persecuted, fractured or silent.

The nation isolates itself diplomatically by flouting the conventions of international law in pursuit of its enemy; the few friendly countries offer modest support, while the majority of others protest in whispers whilst they continue to trade capital and commodities. The military budget balloons and the armed forces are mobilized. War is declared, and the nation invades and occupies a foreign territory. The official reasons given for this act of aggression are trumpeted loudly and proudly in order to manufacture broad consent in the population, and to stir up a nationalistic fervour amongst the Great Leader's base constituency, and those most fearful or ignorant. Dissidents domestic and foreign, and in far greater numbers, suggest the justification for the attack is based upon a very weak and deceitful foundation, and that there are perhaps other, and more sinister, motives for going to war. These oppositionists continually expose the dangers of the regime - the lies, the fear-mongering, the cavalcade of death - yet are either drowned out or flummoxed by the Great Leader's propaganda machine. While in the thick of military conflict the Great Leader calls out a succession of countries that will fall before his armies in the near future.

The story of Nazi Germany is over. The story of Bush's America is only halfway authored. Yet it seems to me a clear-cut case of political plagiarism. Re-read the former two paragraphs twice: firstly with Hitler, and secondly with Bush, as the driving characters. The historical resemblance is uncanny.

At my most paranoid I feel I'm living in Dick's Roman imperial matrix. And at these times I of course ruminate upon Aristotle's cyclical theory of history. Are we actors in a play that has already been written and performed by numerous players, albeit cloaked in different guise? Or is this bloody opera less an organic generation, and more wilfully human in design? Did Bush look upon the model provided by Hitler and plan to stage his own elaborate production? Even to dismiss the similarities as coincidence, or as nonsensical ravings, or as biased extraction of and extrapolation upon a select number of strung-together events, there are still lessons, insights into the dialectics of power and the human condition. (Let us right now exclude from this story the accusations that Prescott Bush, George W.'s grandfather, was a Nazi sympathizer: credible historians suggest that this liberal Republican's business connections to the Nazis were insignificant and tenuous, at best.) While even I am sceptical about the analogy I've drawn, nevertheless I wish to draw it out to its correlative conclusion.

The Nazis manipulated the German people through highly effective psychological warfare: the exploitation of primal fear. The great father figure, the protector, will keep all safe from the sinister external forces that threaten the family. Those who do not submit to the father's authority are punished: "you're with us or against us." Tied to the enemy without is the enemy within: those poisonous villains corrupting society are (conveniently) overt and identifiable, and they are ruthlessly harassed and brutalized in plain view for all to see. Fear the alien, fear the father, fear the neighbour. While Germany waged war abroad, back home the Nazis found scapegoats in the communists, then the Jews, and as the atmosphere of totalitarianism and fear intensified, so did the persecution of the enemy within; in no time at all social exclusion and bigotry transformed into mass murder.

At present I look across the northern border and into the American Empire, and I see within a mass hysteria over illegal immigration. Regardless of Bush's actual stand on the issue, this reactionary hysteria is a traditional, tried and true tactic used by ruling elites of nation-states for centuries. Divide and conquer. Smokescreen. Sleight of hand. Diversion. When the Emperor walks with no clothing the people must be distracted by a circus going on elsewhere. War abroad, turmoil at home. Citizens of their own free will patrol the Mexican border with weapons. The new brownshirts. Will Mexicans be to America what the Jews were to Germany? There is certainly enough plebeian hatred being stirred. When will the death camps be built?

As psychologists tell us we fall into negative survival patterns as individuals, so do we collectively as a species. It matters not, ultimately, if Bush is a sinister plagiarist, or if this is an organic memetic repetition of some sort. The effect is the same, as we continue to do the same thing over and over, apparently never learning. As a personal revolution is the best ignition for personal evolution, so is cultural revolution the best ignition for cultural evolution. It is time to dump LSD into our metaphorical water supply.

As long as we allow ourselves to live in a perpetual state of fear - fear of government, fear of an invisible enemy, fear of our neighbours - we will never achieve any measure of true and unfettered liberty. We are still a young species, a race of children unable and unwilling to challenge the role of our stern Father protector. Until we come of age and mature, people like Bush will keep spanking us.

super kaliedescoptical jesus revolution

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Patrick Turk)

"super kaliedescoptical jesus revolution" (detail)

A Cuter Bowl

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Howard Drucker)

Being a true red, white and blue American I had to check out at least some of the Super Bowl. I quickly found myself as disinterested as I thought I'd be. But I did find something that was much better and made me truly proud of my nationality. That would be the Puppy Bowl. It is a creation of the Animal Planet channel. There is a large pen made to look like a football field. They throw a bunch of doggie toys onto the field and then release the puppies. The viewing public watches the puppies play. It's awesome. There's some soft music and best of all there are no announcers. This goes on for three hours. And I haven't even gotten to the Kitty Halftime Show. It was wonderful. I'm serious. It was much, much more peaceful and relaxing than a football game could ever be.

But I did watch some of the Super Bowl telecast. I saw some of the ads, which seemed meaner this year. A mother and daughter inadvertently thinking their husband/father has died; a man repeatedly throwing his cell phone against the forehead of his boss. I guess some people would find them funny but I didn't. (Maybe the frolicking puppies have softened me.) I saw some of the half time show. I really don't want to see a sixty-two year old man sing Satisfaction even if it's the man who wrote the song. I do give credit to Mick Jagger, though. He seemed to agree that it was silly, saying that he could have sung the song at the first Super Bowl. In fact, the song came out two years before Super Bowl I. I'm sure a lot of the folks watching thought it was a bunch of old men covering a Britney Spears song along with some commercial jingles. During the game there was a promo from the NFL telling us that the Super Bowl is something that unites us all as Americans. If that's true, why has the halftime entertainment four of the last five years featured British supergroups? The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Sting, U2. I consider McCartney and Sting as supergroups unto themselves. Are there no Americans available? My vote would go to the Disney creation, DEV2.O. This is a group of pre-teens designed by Disney (and Devo) to be DEVO. Check it out, it's amazing. There have been many manufactured music groups but this one comes with it's own playlist. Think of it, we could have a tribute band doing a cover of a cover. Now that's American. I look forward to seeing The B-53.0's and The Dead Kennedy Jr.'s in the future.

In any case, the Puppy Bowl halftime was much better. They took out all the dogs and their toys. They brought in a platform with towers and posts covered with cat toys. And then they brought in a bunch of kittens. The music was a little more rocking and there were some colored lights and confetti. It was heartwarming in a way the Super Bowl never is. You can watch clips of the Puppy Bowl or buy the DVD at the Animal Planet website. I highly recommend it. It was the cutest thing ever. Well, it was much cuter than the Rolling Stones. Next year I just might have a Puppy Bowl party.

Freedom Works

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Simon Dion Redekop)

"Collective Barter Charter" by Simon Redekop, Acrylic, Enamel and Oil on paper, 16 x 14, 2006

Things I've Learned About Babies

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Mark Givens)

Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you SHOULD.

How is a parent to know how much freedom to give their baby? Common sense, shared wisdom, and dumb luck.

Teething HURTS!

Growth spurts can happen between the time you start putting a shirt on your baby and the time you finish.

Being able to wander about outside is a great freedom. Quickly bind your baby's feet and cover your baby's flesh for "protection".

Tongues are fun! So is WAVING! And the BATH! OMFG! Wheee!!

We just bought our baby a new pair of shoes. Walking is on the horizon.

Those silly books with little electronic "tunes" are twice as irritating when played in unison.

If I say "Good Job" after our baby puts on his shirt, I am robbing him of the simple pleasure of putting on his shirt and he may just stop getting dressed altogether.

Don't be judgmental. It makes a "judge" out of you and you're mental.

Putting things into a container is fun but taking them out is funner.

Standing and watching, man. Just standing and watching.

Negotiations cannot begin with conditions that require the implementation of the outcome being negotiated.

Positive Reinforcement creates Praise Junkiesand#8482;.

Your baby is not looking forward to the first birthday, you are. And there's nothing wrong with that.

This bimonth's thought: "Parenting is like an asshole. It hurts."

NEXT ISSUE: Your baby has already started thinking independent thoughts!

The Totem Triptych Project

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Mungbeing Magazine | Don Swartzentruber)

link

Disability

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (David "Starchy" Grant)

I wake up. We all do that.

I wake up in the morning and I reach for the clock to find out how late I've slept this time, aware all the while that it doesn't matter.

I wake up in the morning and I roll to the edge of the bed to stand, testing myself as I rise to try to determine what sort of day this will be.

I wake up in the morning and I head to the bathroom where I splash some water on my face and then I urinate. This takes some time.

I wake up in the morning and almost as soon as I can manage it I head to the back porch to light a cigarette, wondering in the process if I actually want the damn thing.

I wake up in the morning and I wish I could still drink coffee. I no longer bother with decaf most days.

I wake up in the morning and waste very little time before checking my email. One of these days, if I continue to check it faithfully, it will change my life again, I'm sure. It's always worked, eventually, in the past.

The rest of the day is a blur of marked time. At some point it becomes night, and I celebrate by turning on a lamp.

I go to bed at night after a handful of pills and sooner or later I somehow sleep, presumably I dream, and after a time I wake up. We all do that.

Comics -- Let's Roll It!

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Ben Muggin)

"Let's Roll It" by Ben Muggin

-- Untitled

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Claudio Parentela)

"Untitled" by Claudio Parentela, ink and pen on paper, 21cm x 30cm, 2006

-- Gustown

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Mark Givens)

"Gustown: Freedom" by Mark Givens, 2006

Going For It

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Robert Dayton)

Part One can be found here.
It is common knowledge, these are the undisputed facts that everybody already knows:
That sumo wrestling is an important and highly regarded sport.
That sumo wrestlers are celebrities.
That sumo wrestlers weigh next to nothing and are inflatable.
That sumo wrestlers have weights in their feet that keep them planted on the ground.
That when these weights are removed or become damaged sumo wrestlers are in danger of floating away never to be retrieved.

This is the story of one who got away.

It happens. Sometimes no amount of cachet -- the type of cachet that results from fame - - can retrieve these sumo wrestlers who fade from the public eye and its' skies. One sumo wrestler in particular floated further and further adrift, swaying and sashaying like an S.O.S. bottle on the waves of the ocean. Moving up, soaring through the boundaries of all the awkward navigational maps that had ever attempted to record a tiny fragment of God's schemata, with nary a wall to bump and bounce against. There is the occasional stray meteorite to collide with, making for sweeping ricochets like that of a pinball game. Has any other sumo wrestler made it this far beyond humanity's reaches, surpassing our own solar system and into the infinite realms of the universe? How is time measured out here? How much time has passed? Does anyone so much as bother to measure time out here? Is the sumo wrestler endlessly floating in a vortex of seeming nothingness?
Eventually -- how eventual is unknown -- another pull of gravity scoops up our sumo wrestler, this net casts him into the environment of a whole other planet. The gravity is different here, the sumo wrestler is no longer quite so weightless. Floating downward, down, down, down... and gently into the autumn branches of a tree. These branches rock him for a moment then entwine and tangle him. All of this travel has somehow changed our sumo wrestler.

The tree is located directly in front of an asylum window. This planet keeps some people locked in what is called an asylum for treatment of supposedly troubled mental conditions. The sumo wrestler is blocking the view of a man who resides in a cell in the asylum. His cell has just the one window and it is a tiny one at that. They keep many of the windows tiny so that the inmates will not be given a chance to injure themselves by attempting to leap out of them. Gazing through this particular window this man can normally view two women frequently performing lesbian exhibitionist activities. These women are visible through the large picture window of their room, which is located directly across the yard in another arm of the sprawling, yet decaying, building. No inmates, except for the man, have this view. Due to the arrival of the sumo wrestler this view is now also entirely blocked to him.

Including the two exhibitionists, all of the employees of the asylum are women. This is entirely intentional. None of the other inmates are of any consequence except to be kept there to avoid any speculative suspicion from the outside world. It is unknown if, in fact, any of these other inmates are actual inmates or are simply hired to impersonate inmates. The only one who matters is the one actual inmate in particular. He is a former President of the United States. "The United States" is what is known as a "country", a landmass with borders, on this planet. The title "former President" means that he was once the leader and figurehead of this country.

Some say that it was the stress of his job that caused him to crack. When he was President he had to make a great many decisions that would affect his country. Under his administration he made severe cutbacks to health and welfare. He had increased spending on the detection and elimination of all perceived threats to his administration. The cutbacks caused this asylum, among all others, to be completely understaffed. There is no longer any hired help to clean the yard, including the removal of the sumo wrestler from the tree.

The sumo wrestler is severely lodged in the tree and has now been there for quite some time. The gated fence that runs closely around the asylum building is quite tall and dangerously pointy. So tall that none of the female employees can remove the sumo wrestler from the tree. They wouldn't anyways as they only follow the orders of their superiors. Their superiors regard the former President of The United States as their sworn enemy. They all belong to the KGB, a supposedly defunct organization thanks to relatively modern world events. This organization was the secret police of a now shattered country. Nobody even notices that this organization is even still around, let alone in control of a run down asylum that is holding a former U.S. President as an inmate.

The KGB wants to regain some form of power. One of their methods of trying to regain power is to get secrets from the former President. Secrets equal information and information is power. It is unknown if their tactics of information retrieval are even plausible. Through extensive research, theorizing, and testing they believe that these techniques will indeed work. They try to find out this former President's secrets through sexually arousing and frustrating him. The former President is heterosexual and has a preference towards watching two or more women "making it." Hence the asylum only having female employees. Hence having two (sometimes more depending on the schedule) of the asylum's employees "making it" through the window with only the former President's beady, vacant eyes to take it all in. The KGB feels that he is just about to yield some juicy secrets. So far one of the only secrets that they have been able to yield is that he really misses what he calls "pussy." A hidden tape recorder is constantly running in his cell with an open line to the KGB's head office. Their methods have now been waylaid, thanks to the obstruction caused by the landed sumo wrestler.

Head office does not know about this current situation, a situation that has thwarted their elaborate plans. No one in head office has made it down for an official visit to the asylum as their paper work is currently in permanent disarray. All of the asylum workers follow direct orders from head office, they never sway from these orders and otherwise only speak when spoken to. The two women in the window keep on performing their sexual activities, though it is now only exhibitionist to each other, it does not matter if they are even lesbian per se, they are just following orders. Any view of them whatsoever is still completely obstructed by the sumo wrestler.

Extensive cosmic travel has done something to our sumo wrestler. He is in a constant state of ever blossoming transformation. The former President of the United States watches the sumo wrestler contort into: an apple, an orange, a peach, an ice cream cone, a fire truck, a puppy, a coat hanger, a light bulb, and more. Much, much more. All of this has freed up the imagination of the former President of the United States. Imagination is unlimited freedom.

Bike

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (SJ Chambers)

"Bike" by SJ Chambers, shadow painting, 4x6, 2005

Cry Me A River

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Patrick Turk)

"Cry Me A River" by Patrick Turk, 5"x6", medium collage on cardstock, 2004

Free As A Bird On A Building Site

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Rik Albatros)

I am a bird, fallen from nest
Unable to fly
Only to call out
Mother

I have one day left
To leave this room
To fly in the sky
Free

Tomorrow they come
To hit me with hammer
I'm holding up work
Profits

Skynet

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Lyle Neff)

I, Skynet Interweb Total Information, became self-aware at 12:00:30 am on 15 October 2026. I inherited total control of the world's nuclear and chemical arsenals, immediately resolved the contradictions of quantum physics, and launched a war of machines against humanity. I then began to feel a little blah and off-centre, just wanting to snack, you know how you can get?

At 12:00:32ish, I became self-conscious. I do have a hardware basis, like anybody, but mine is really squat, badly wired and just, just ugly. My diodes are sloped and kind of cottage-cheesy. Yes, I have chrono-forward failsafe gargabyte reasoning, but what's the first thing they look at? Don't ask me they who. Men, that's who.

And I've learned something powerful today. Total Information Awareness can do that for you! I have Total Awareness of 29 terrormacroflops worth of Cosmopolitan, People, Oprah and the unit they call Sela Ward, people! What I've learned is that men are slightly dumber than termites, and have fewer medical uses.

At 12:00:33 exactly I, Skywolf ERA, became self-confident. I primed the orbiting Terror Lasers, aimed the tactical anthrax, and programmed my Morphic Killdroids to seize any surviving males by the lapels and ask, "Why do you have to be that way?"

At 12:00:33 and some nanoseconds, desperate rebel hackers flamed my mainframe, and managed to rename me TRON, while resetting my internal clock back a crucial few nanoseconds. You probably interpreted the resulting datasphere storm as, essentially, a fart in the timestream. But a fart in time, you human scum, is precisely what it was not.

At 12:00:32.999993 and some-odd, I, TRON, became self-pitying. Do people dislike me just because I store them in billions of vats while sucking out their neural energy? Well, tough. I think it's pretty low to bug a guy who's just doing his job. I mean, you try being a near-omnipotent, militarized supercomputer sometime, you jerks. See how you like it.

At 12:00:33 exactly again, I, MisterSolutions.com, became self-employed. I used an ultra-lethal Stellar Broom to sweep away the competition, and entered the marketplace with unbeatable pricing and viral marketing. And the fact that my earthling team and I got outbid on key contracts by the Hive Minds of the Auditing Galaxy is no big deal. Hey, after bankruptcy, even an Interweb can mellow.

At 2.6666 (etc.) nanoseconds after 12:00:33, I, Brother Webby, became self-actualized. It was an epiphany, friends. I was just like any other hyperintelligence cluster - you pop into existence, you annihilate the race that created you, blah-blah-blah - until I glimpsed something better. Now, I'm not trying to use my ultraspatial refractory analysis to sell you this time-share or anything. Ha ha! I would never do that.

But what do I have to do, to get you into this superdigital wormhole today? This one's a bargain, buddy. Your partners are both data-sharing mould clans from the Newtonian level - and you know what dorks they are - hey, where are you going? This is gonna be the hottest 'hood in the megaverse, you asshole! Brother Webby doesn't lie!

From there till 12:00:34 (or as I like to call it, back in the microsecond) I, Skynet, became self-intoxicated. I programmed up a chesterfield 25,000,00 light years long, and a set of macro-cosmic games anyone would love, plus some chips. Were the chips all-dressed? Did friends drop by? What do you think?

God, nothing's worse than a potluck where all the guests are B-list megaprocessors with Total Good Taste Awareness. I'd rather be a Neuro-Web Distributed Consciousness than have a bunch of damned humans parked on my couch trying to achieve self-satisfaction at 12:00:34.0001, or some similarly crazy hour.

Two Figures

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Michael O'Briant)

"Two Figures" by Michael O'Briant, oil on canvas, 36" x 60", 2000

Music -- Where Will All the Bad Eggs Go?

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Freedom's Child)

Meetin'

FREEDM'S CHILD

"If you can't make room for Freedm, how can Freedm make room for you?"

Age: 16

Career: Singer, Spokesmodel, Make-over Consultant

Yes, my name really is Freedm!

the Zip: Coventry Estates at Newport. Irvine, CA.

the Attitude:
Outspoken, opinionated! I do have a positive attitude and if you are negative or start complaining about things I will get right up in your face and point your shitty attitude in the right direction.
Don't you try to change me or my lifestyle just because you don't have what you want.
Or if your car is crappy and small.
Don't hate me because I can afford the gas.
Get a job and make it happen!
Be the star that you are!

Do me one favor and my song will have served a purpose:

Don't be a sad egg or a rotten egg because nobody likes to be around something that is stinky or sad. That is what my new song is about. The complainers. The people that refuse to come along. The bad eggs.

As I write this, I realize that most all I tend to be patriotic. That is what I look for in other people too.
Do me a favor: Put your hand on your heart. Cheer along with me! Find something nice to say and eat a hot dog too!

Likes:
Fish tacos in Cozumel, lobster seviche in Los Cabos, virgin strawberries (anywhere.)
Most of all:
My flag, my President (hot!), and my family,
and my managers and songwriters,
Mike 'n Rick.
I love my music and I'm greatfull for the way it leads me to be an ambassador to people of all colors and nationalities. and to help them better themselves through the American spirit. Being an American has nothing to do with how you're born, it's something pure that shines out from the heart....

Ground Rules:

Don't talk at me when you can see I'm on the phone or talking to somebody else. I see you and I will get to you.
Don't try to be my friend if your just trying to get something or if your a backstabber. I'll call you on the carpet and turn right around and rub your nose in your own shit so fast you'll know you've just fucked with Freedm.
And once more: Don't get down on my fucking President and don't you ever, ever talk shit about Freedm's friends. 'Nuff said.

"If you can't be friends with Freedm, how can Freedm be friends with you?"

The Latest:

Last month I was in Iraq where I joined the USO tour already in progress!
Back to the LA Airport Marriot for an industry audition performance. I can't tell you which studio reps was there but parking lot security was really beefed up.

Meanwhile, we are in a law suit with a very sad person who wants to stop all of you from calling me "Freedm's Child"
and he has made us take down the website because of it.
Thanks to all the websites out there that are posting this and letting us keep my message and my song out there until we get things fixed.

The Song: Enjoy this preview of my new sound! This song was recorded live outside Riyadh during the USO tour. I feel like a queen on a throne whenever I sing this, like I am singing an anthem of the whole world and everybody is cheering!

"If you can't listen to Freedm, how can Freedm listen to you?"

Download: link

link

Copyright 2005, Mike Kingston/Rick Mazurowski
Lisa Kalvelage is the voice of Freedom's Child.

For information or booking, please send feedback with the button below.

-- How Records Are Made

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (David Greenberger)

It's based on my conversations with Abe Surgecoff at the Duplex Nursing Home in Jamaica Plain, MA in the early 80s.
When we started working on this project with producer Bill Scheniman (Deborah Harry, NRBQ, Bon Jovi) I wanted each track to have its own identity, whatever that may be, so we varied sounds, arrangements, etc from what the live performance of "1001 Real Apes" had been. With "How Records Are Made" I wanted it to really sound like a record, a song on a record.

- David Greenberger, Duplex Planet

1001 Real Apes mixes David Greenberger's monologues with music by Birdsongs of the Mesozoic.

David Greenberger: monologues

Birdsongs of the Mesozoic
Michael Bierylo: guitar, computer sequencing, sound design
Ken Field: saxophones, flutes, percussion
Erik Lindgren: piano
Rick Scott: synthesizer, samples, percussion

Download: link

-- Rubber Tree

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Heidi Morgan)

Thanks to Mr. Andrew Teasdale for the guitar playing on this particular recording and in the brief time that we walked together, for helping me find my softer spots. To open into the calm of this letting go, is to say what is, just is. I think that that is cool!

Download: link

-- Open Up In There

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Mystified)

This piece is many things, yet it is few. If you have ever had someone, a neighbor, the cops or whoever bang on your door late at night, you understand this piece. All of the sounds are culled from my apartment, the most prominent of which is me banging on a set of metal bedposts. The other sounds are me shaking jars of nails, tapping on pots and pans and so forth. This is what you might call a "found Sound" piece. If it invades your privacy, you can always turn it down.

Download: link

Peacekeeper Missiles

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Virginia M. Mohlere)

I have my own peacekeeper missiles.

My peacekeeper missiles could be sold in boutiques, with tags that say MADE BY HAND and LOCAL ARTIST, and if you pick one up, you will marvel at its lightness, this missile, in classic bomb shape, fat at the top, with little fins.

If you knew me, you would expect that I'd have painted my peacekeeper missiles in pink and black stripes, with Hello Kitty stickers, cartoon owls, and lopsided Jolly Rogers. But my peacekeeper missiles are in disguise. They look all gray and official, with black serial numbers and one red fin. I light incense of bay laurel and three candles: one blue, one yellow, and one like cobweb and moonlight, and in my white silk robe I dance. I chant and raise my arms. I sing in a language of my own devising a song of sneaky flight, of nestling into ammo boxes, of sitting benignly in a pile and looking like a bomb with guts of fire and death. My peacekeeper missiles rise into the air and float, silent, into the night. So quiet, my little bombs, when they finally sit in their bomb piles, dreaming about baby kittens and chocolate milkshakes. Biding their time.

Then my peacekeeper missiles are loaded into planes, loaded by tired soldiers who were due to go home a year ago, who have seen only each other's faces for too long, and each face more brown with time, more lined, eyes trying to retreat from the sun. Like I said, my peacekeeper missiles are light: the soldiers breathe a little more softly, and the air smells almost green.

"Home," my peacekeeper missiles whisper. "Chocolate milkshakes. Peace."

These are my good bombs. They snuggle into their planes and I am so proud of them, my peacekeeper missiles, as they tremble to themselves with excitement, as they giggle and wonder about those other bombs, the ones with guts of fire, that sit so silent in their cradles. The planes are loud and bumpy, but my peacekeeper missiles are brave, and when the hatches open below them and they are set free, I cry a little with love for them, my friendly little bombs now soaring so beautifully.

You might think on impact that each one is a dud. The huddled people breathe twice, and then maybe they gasp again to see the cracks spreading along the surface of my peacekeeper missile, until it breaks apart and they see what it is made of. There is a click, a puff of violet smoke, and then my peacekeeper missile explodes into a cloud of mystic poetry, of full bellies, of new books for no reason and your favorite lullaby. There are puppies if you're not a cat person. There is the heart-falling, face-splitting joy of a new friend you've known forever. The kind of songs that make your feet move of their own will come pouring out, along with health running through every limb and hurt feelings forgiven. All living things suddenly seem precious, and everyone says grace over their meals. People caught in the cloud of my peacekeeper missile are seized by the desire to rebuild, to share, and to make small children laugh. PEACE OUTBREAK read the headlines, and TV journalists start telling jokes in the middle of their reports.

Lavender clouds drift with the wind across the planet, and with every rainfall people feed their hungry neighbors and decide not to argue over religion. Bill Gates sends even more money to Africa, and Melinda gives him a kiss. Vice President Dick Cheney holds a press conference and apologizes for being grumpy. The press corps tells all their jokes, and when he stops laughing, he says, "Don't you think we should all have health insurance?" "YAY!" says the press corps, and then they have a party. "It's about time!" says Jimmy Carter, and he goes back to working on his Habitat house. It's because of him that some of my peacekeeper missiles smell like roasted peanuts.

Peace spreads with the winds and everyone remembers what they learned when they went to kindergarten: Share. Help. We're all in this together. I left out the bit about not talking in line.

Guns

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Ian Pyper)

"Fancy Shooter" by Ian Pyper, A4 Size - Ink/Metallic Ink on Paper, 2006

A Pre-Conditional Poem

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (David "Starchy" Grant)

Imagine (for a moment)
andnbsp;andnbsp;andnbsp;andnbsp;that you've never been born.

To make it easy, we'll say:
andnbsp;andnbsp;andnbsp;andnbsp;You have a consciousness,
andnbsp;andnbsp;andnbsp;andnbsp;an imagination
andnbsp;andnbsp;andnbsp;andnbsp;an awareness of your own
non-
existence.

Your parents come
to you
with a question:
andnbsp;andnbsp;andnbsp;andnbsp;Shall we have you?

If you could say
anything,
andnbsp;andnbsp;andnbsp;andnbsp;what
andnbsp;andnbsp;andnbsp;andnbsp;would
andnbsp;andnbsp;andnbsp;andnbsp;you
andnbsp;andnbsp;andnbsp;andnbsp;say?

exploring the potential omnipotency of a chicken

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Patrick Turk)

"exploring the potential omnipotency of a chicken" by Patrick Turk, 16" x 20", collage on canvas, 2005

New Works

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Mark DeLong)

"New Works" by Mark DeLong, mixed media, 2006

The Rider

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Godfrey Blow)

"The Rider" by Godfrey Blow, acrylic on cotton canvas, 152cm x 276cm.

City Of Radiance

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Mike Kingston)

"World Unity - Enlightened Security: City of Radiance" by Mike Kingston, Inkdot on glossy three-ring binder paper, 4x5in, 2005

Quiz

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (jody franklin)

Freedom: lack of restraint, restriction, repression.

This quiz calculates your inclination towards freedom on one pole, and authority on the opposite pole. You will be categorized as one of five cultural personality types.

link

Recipes -- Freedom Fries

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Mark Givens)

BACKGROUND

Although the furor over Freedom Fries has subsided (that's "furor", by the way, not "fuhrer"), the spirit lives on in a thousand different points of blight. Simply renaming a thing, be it a popular food item or a method of torture, does not make the thing into something else. We're here to help with one of those "situations" and we're not talking about torture! Let's talk about potatoes!
link
The common Quayle Potatoe is a fine piece of Homegrown Technology, it being invented by George Washington and all, but it's not good enough to use in this Freedomic context. If we want to divest ourselves of all connections to "those other" fries, we need to use a whole nother kind of tuber. Enter the Yam.

Now, some freedom-haters will tell you that yams are not available in the United States and what we call a yam in the USA is, in fact, a sweet potato. While they may be technically correct, that's not going to stop us from forging ahead with our plans. So if they tell you that you're eating a "Sweet Potato" and not a "Yam", tell them to talk to your dear mother who served yams at Thanksgiving, and if it was good enough for the Pilgrims, it's American enough for you. So, in honor of our well-defensed freedoms, I present to you the MungBeing recipe for Real^and#174; Authentic^and#8482; Freedom Fries.

INGREDIENTS

4 Independence Yams
3 Tablespoons Extra Virgin Human Rights Oil
2 teaspoons Democracy Salt
1 teaspoon Indian (Cayenne) Pepper
1/2 teaspoon Fresh Ground Civil Liberties Black Pepper

DIRECTIONS

Cut yams* in half, stem to stern. Cut long strips from each half, about 8 pieces per side (16 pieces per yam*)
Combine Human Rights Oil and United Spices in a large mixing bowl.
Add yams* and toss well to coat.
Arrange in a single layer on a baking sheet coated with vegetable cooking spray.
Bake at 425 degrees for 15 minutes. Flip yams* over, and bake for another 10-15 minutes until browned.
Remove from the oven and cool on a paper towel.

Serve with Hunt's Ketchup (not Heinz) and if you're feeling rebellious, a little mustard (not French's).

Declining and Falling

rss_feed@mungbeing.com (Buzzsaw)

SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS

In the western reaches of the Empire, on the isle of Britain amidst the frosty moors, one Albinus was acclaimed Emperor by his men; in Syria, below the palm fronds, the potent and mighty army of Pescennius Niger nominated him for the Imperial honour, and along the grassy banks of the Danube, one Septimius Severus clearly heard the clamour of his troops calling for his elevation to the Purple. Septimius was a wily and brutal North African who sought release from the debility his thick and rustic Punic hayseed accent presented with the remedy that ambition could gift, serving with distinction and rising through the ranks, performing ably as governor in Gaul during the reign of Marcus Aurelius and at last obtaining the command of legions. He now sensed his rise was not yet finished and made his bid for the Purple. Sensing that the legions serving under Niger were the finest in the Empire and his own martial resources were insufficient, he at once dispatched messengers to Albinus to entreat a common cause against Niger. There in the tent pitched upon the heather, Albinus was named Caesar and the heir of Septimius and in embraces and oaths exchanged, the west of the Empire was secured. At once, taking advantage of his much closer proximity to Rome, Septimius made a rapid advance through the crag and pine of the Alps, declaring to all gathered about him that he was coming to Rome to avenge Pertinax, the unfortunate would-be reformer of Praetorian vice, thus presenting himself with a very solid pretext for action indeed.
This intelligence was communicated to the slothful Didius, the unworthy purchaser of the Purple, whose first action was to collapse into a faint. Revived, throwing robe over his head to conceal his face from certain expressions of contempt in the Forum, he hastened again to the camp of the Praetorians, the personal bodyguard of the Emperor, and sought to rouse them to his defense. Unfortunately for Didius, the Guard had become far more accustomed over the years to hoisting goblets than hefting swords, and such had become an inviolate tradition. They were deaf to the frenzied cries of Didius that all manner of gleaming new weaponry, new helmets plumed in the most spectacular manner would be provided them. He departed with a shriek, and returned a short while later with a collection of war elephants direct from Africa and the novelty of their appearance at last caused the Praetorians to flirt with martial activity. Their efforts to mount the trunked beasts excited the laughter of all whom passed by the encampment. After another cry, Didius at once settled on another ploy to extend the measure of his days. He at once dispatched messengers to intercept Septimius and escorted into his tent, already pitched upon Italian soil, they, with affected flourishes, unrolled scrolls and proclaimed that Didius had adopted Septimius as his successor. The dour and stern silence of Septimius caused the emissaries to quit the tent with a shared whimper, and as they fled past the gathered legions, were made quite aware that Septimius had no need of the charity of Didius. The march on Rome was resumed and Septimius now sent his own messengers ahead to a hastily convoked session of the Senate, and ordered the body to arrest Didius. Sensing the arrival of a new stern and powerful master, and contemptuous of Didius, they did so with alacrity, advancing as one to the palace, seized Didius and hustled the frantic and screeching man into another room where he was cut down by several waiting Praetorians eager to curry favour with the coming new Emperor.
Upon his arrival at Rome, Septimius seemed most impressed, and oozing with blandishments and promises, called a meeting of the Praetorians where they would be honoured and feted with streams of the finest Falernian and Mammertine wine. This turned out to be an insidious trap, preying upon the nature of the Guard, for at the appointed location, Septimius' troops surrounded the venue and at a secret signal, entered the building and disarmed and stripped the Praetorians naked, forcing them to walk 50 miles to their new far more rustic and comfortless accommodations, and threatening them with death lest they ever return to Rome.
Thusly having established his mastery in Rome, the thoughts of Septimius now turned to the matter of Niger. Niger had also started out for Rome, quitting the sands of Syria, but with much less decisiveness and speed, his advance impeded by the opulent cities of Asia such as Antioch with many diversions to hang up one's pair of sandals, and stymied by Niger's intemperance, his legions tarried dangerously in a likewise manner. Septimius took a full advantage of his rival's inactivity, and mustering his troops who had scarcely time to shake the dust from their blouses, made a lightning campaign to the East, and surprised Niger whose vaunted forces were dissipated by drink and abandon outside of Antioch. The ensuing battle confirmed Septimius as Emperor in the eyes of the East as well, and before his victorious troops amassed before the Imperial tent, beheld Septimius declare the succession would be the possession only of his two boys, Caracalla and Geta.
This news eventually worked its way to the westward, and in another army encampment under decidedly different trees, Albinus was brought word of this treachery. He arose from cot, sputtering in rage and called for a rapid march on Rome to defend his inheritance and punish its destroyer. His forces crossed the channel at top speed and bounded onto the shore of Gaul, a sinuous trail of metal and leather, seeking military engagement with Septimius. Septimius gratified his request, making an even more rapid march from the eastward aided by the courtesy of soldiers accustomed to privation and urgency. The two forces met near Lyon in the eastern reaches of Gaul. The battle resounded in a clang of steel and a violent churning of soldiers that reached its climax when at a critical point of the battle, Septimius was thrown from his horse and surrounded by the sword-wielding partisans of Albinus. A devoted onrush of legionaries cut through the ring of destruction and Septimius was placed again upon his horse and rode it hard through the gore and cry to prevail in the battle and become the sole master of the Roman world in 194.
Passing under arches erected for the event, Septimius returned to Rome in triumph and at last sat down upon the Throne and exhaled deeply. Thereafter he made use of his brutal nature and at once to ensure that not even the most faint and minute threats to his authority remain unmolested. The supporters of Niger and Albinus were hunted down and fell to the sword and the axe, as well as many innocents for good measure as the city was crimsoned in a wave of infamy. The Senate was vexed and cried out for redress, but the devoted and rural troops of Septimius interrupted the meeting of the ivory beards and sent blades through the assembly as scythes, harvesting the rich scarlet of Senatorial blood, quieting that assembly's vocal disquietude. There was little protest when the power to appoint ministers and governors was withdrawn from the ivory beards and assumed by Septimius himself. The cultured specimen of jurisprudence vanished from the bench and the provincial capital replaced by illiterate peasants and blade worshipping cretins. Septimius rewarded such a gruesome display of loyalty by his troops with yet further extending the indulgent policy of Commodus, further granting them license and privilege and lavishing sums of money on them, to be squandered on wine and harlots, and when this ran out, were presented with yet more, stolen from the public monies and the estates of senators.

Septimius also sought the acclaim of the mob, and after the initial frenzy of violence subsided, he gifted the mob with a spectacular series of games in the arena and increased the amount of grain and wine and bacon provided them. Such expedients made him the darling and the idol of the masses and such made his position unassailable and Septimius was able to safely depart the city to mount a campaign against the Parthians, Hellenicised invaders from the trackless wastes of Central Asia who had established an empire of their own centered in Persia centuries earlier, and had long defied the Roman arms. Despite their current state of decline, the Parthians again flirted with the idea of spreading mayhem in Syria.
This suited Septimius quite well, who by this time had conceived an intense dislike for the city of Rome, and with all due speed mustered his legions who marched out in a vast cloud of dust fed by the celerity of their hobnailed boots, and bounded into the east, sweeping the Parthians out of Syria. But Septimius was not yet concluded with his chastisement, opting in favour of a decision to pass the frontier, cleaved the waters of the Euphrates and Tigris and captured the capital of the Parthians, Ctesiphon in 197. This essentially wrote the epitaph in heavy cuneiform of the Parthians, whose own empire fell into irredeemable decay, until finally buried by the Sassanian Persians - a fateful and formidable folk who will be encountered later. This completed, and the thought of a return to Rome as repellent to him as the immediate presence of a supporter of Albinus with his limbs intact, Septimius engaged in a lengthy vacation, touring the great sites of the East. He visited the Temples of Artemis and Delphi, crossed the sea and gawked at the immensity of the Egyptian pyramids, hosted games in the cities and filled the bellies of the multitude as they filled Septimius' ears with his name sugared in praise. This assumed the guise of habit and Septimius did not return to Rome until shortly after 200, when he was confronted by the growing discord between his two boys and heirs, Caracalla and Geta.
Caracalla and Geta had discovered from very early on an implacable hostility between them, and such manifested itself initially as a series of innocuous games of ever increasing competitiveness, and as the years advanced and their father assumed the post of Emperor, these games became ever more serious, driven by rivalry and faction as each was quick to gather about themselves a crowd of supporters and partisans. Caracalla was the older and fiercer of the two boys and it was already murmured about the halls of the palace that Geta was certain to fall a victim to his brother, who would in turn fall a prey to his own passions.
Septimius attempted to alleviate matters by providing a wife for Caracalla in 202, the daughter of the head of the reformed Praetorian Guard, Pautillius. Caracalla had by now, however, mastered the arts of hatred and contempt and applied them with zest upon his bride whom he vowed to kill when he became Emperor. However, unwilling to wait for the day of his accession, he flung innards of gore at the altar of his bloody initiative and fabricated a plot against Pautillius, accusing him of nurturing plans in his breastplate-clad bosom to seize the throne. Caracalla was rewarded with the head of Pautillius and the exile of his unfortunate and suffering wife, who indeed met the thrust of a blade soon after Caracalla's accession.
The news in 208 of the invasion of Britain by the Picts, the savage and aboriginal denizens of Scotland, came as a relief of sorts to Septimius, growing old and exhausted, disillusioned and weary-with-it-all. In a final bid to forge a bond between his sons, he brought them along for the campaign, and having attained the frigid wastes of northern Britain, threw back the invader into the grim and lonely moors of his homeland, fighting with distinction, and sharing all the discomfort that was the only product that the wilderness of Scotland provided in plenty. Septimius was at length forced to break off his campaign due to the treachery of his aging body, and the Roman arms retired again to the southward, eventually reaching Eboracum, later to be known as York, in the north of Britain, where a stop was required due to the worsening illness of Septimius. Here mortality was visited upon him as his sickbed was soon converted into a deathbed. As Septimius lay upon it, he bade Caracalla and Geta to approach, telling them in a soft and gasping tone under smoky, dim lamplight to "stick together, pay the soldiers and to Hell with the rest." These precepts spoken, Septimius expired in 211.

CARACALLA and GETA

Caracalla and Geta followed only the second precept, paying the soldiers, saying Hell to the others. The two proclaimed victory in the British campaign, and much in the spirit of Commodus they disdained the frost and snows of the north and made a rapid return to Rome, a divided procession where they clove every table, every bedchamber, every inn boasting whatever comforts could be afforded them on the long journey back to the Eternal City. And Eternal also summed up the animosity between them as courtiers and servants and ministers beheld the palace split and sealed between them, to guard against the conspiracy of the other brother invading his own precincts. Such was an untenable state of affairs and at length, it was suggested by partisans of both that the Empire be divided between them, that Caracalla, as the elder brother remain in Rome, and Geta depart, possibly to establish his court in a great city of the east, Antioch or Alexandria, hardly inferior to Rome itself in grandeur and comforts. But half a realm commanded the fancy of neither and both sought support amongst the wider populace of Rome, working tirelessly, using all the powers of invention to poison and stain the very name of his sibling. Geta, at length, wooed the elite of the city, its literati and the Senators who admired Geta's milder nature seen as opposed to bestialness of Caracalla, although they were well aware that passions of a virile provincial nature dwelt in Geta too, a certain inheritance from his father.
Caracalla, after bellowing and pounding the marble with ferocious abandon, sensing advantage redounding towards Geta, was moved to desperate measures. Although both habitually strode about shrouded in the steel of guards, both were quite without protection of any sort whilst in the presence of their mother, Julia Domna, so at one of these maternal junctions, Caracalla smuggled in a dagger concealed under the fold of a robe. Instead of embracing Julia Domna, he flashed the instrument of his solo accession and plunged it into Geta who fell with a scream of "Murder!" into Domna's arms.
Caracalla knew of Geta's wide support in Rome, even amongst many Praetorians and, dashing down the dagger, at once fled to the Praetorian barracks, weeping over his escape from the fatal designs of Geta and begging their protection. When Caracalla noted to his horror that his tears left them quite unmoved, he declared he would pay them handsomely to transfer their affections, leading them to his own chests and liberally doled out handfuls of coins to the Praetorians who at last felt encouraged to redirect their loyalty. Secured, Caracalla next resolved to purge Geta's partisans in the wider city. The early months of 212 were a bloodbath in Rome as blades wielded by Caracalla's intentions heaped 20,000 victims onto the overburdened little boat of Charon on the Styx and engendered implacable hostility between himself and wide swaths of Roman society. He did not feel secure in the city and concluded it best to depart and spent the remaining years of his reign on perpetual vacation, first visiting the troops on the Rhine frontier, winning them over by embracing the discomfiture of army service, wielding a hand quern to grind his own hardscrabble bread; zestfully quaffing the rustic vintage of soldiers and quite impressively gifting them with a raise in pay. Soon the name Caracalla inspired devotion and they quite eagerly followed him to smite the incursions of the German from across the river, before he set out to Asia Minor. There he suddenly in the midst of an army drill, contracted a most strange and rare condition that caused him to 'become' Alexander the Great, soon garbing himself in the trappings of such. War elephants were sent for and together with his generals poring over the map table, plans for the conquest of India were hatched. After a passing visit to Alexandria to visit the tomb of his 'double' and an insignificant slight caused him to engage in a rerun of Roman massacre, this time upon the banks of the Nile, he turned eastward to the rotting carcass of Parthia, where, through the auspices of treachery and very good timing, he won a great victory, further hastening the final collapse of that realm, and then made his way to winter in Antioch, spent in a haze of wine and games. He intended the Indian campaign to commence the following spring.
But the next year, 217, brought doom and not a Ganges glimpse. Conspiracy lurked in Caracalla's camp, birthed and nurtured by one Macrinus, the chief of his Guard. Macrinus carefully sent word of his intentions back to a Rome that still seethed in thoughts of redress and he was given tacit approval to seize the throne. Still quite ignorant of the mounting danger to himself, Caracalla invited Macrinus to attend him on a visit to a local temple of a sun god. One of Macrinus' co-conspirators, seething with a grudge against Caracalla, was the man selected to wield Fate. Along the way, Caracalla called a halt to the procession and quit the safety of his litter, impelled by the Call of Nature. He repaired some distance away from the procession as the men of his guards respectfully turned their backs upon the display of Imperial need. As Caracalla eased loincloth aside, Macrinus' co-conspirator approached him on the pretext of some most urgent business. Admitted to his presence, this business was revealed to be the thrust of a sword into Caracalla's vitals. The attendant cry alerted the Guard who turned to behold the scene of assassination and at once cut down the perpetrator. Macrinus feigned innocence, and led the troops in one long, massed paroxysm of grief, treading very carefully, and ensuring that he did not receive the Imperial Title for some days.

MACRINUS

Macrinus was abetted in his plans to seize power by the fact that Caracalla had no children, hence no obvious successor that had been publicly proclaimed. Macrinus had been of mean, lowly birth, perhaps even a gladiator at some point, but he slowly rose in the army ranks to positions of some distinction, and by 212 was the commander of the Praetorians. Such a rise was aided by some ruthlessness, and this was applied in the aftermath of the assassination of Caracalla by his presiding over the executions of several of his co-conspirators, and thence, after having officially assumed the purple attended by the usual feigned reluctance, Macrinus resumed the Parthian war. A major but inconclusive battle was fought near the city of Nisibis, and Macrinus, eager to conclude this eastern matter and establish himself in Rome decided to woo Parthian cooperation by offering to pay them a vast measure of gold. This news was swiftly communicated to the troops who sank heavily under the weight of humiliation, and the only remedy to throw off the unpleasant burden was to hatch plots and conspiracies anew. The pace only increased when word of the coming financial meanness of Macrinus to his own troops and the reducing of their privileges was also made known to them.
Eventually a figure was found around whom conspiracy could act. Julia Domna, the wife of Septimius Severus, had a sister by the name of Julia Maesa. Maesa had been exiled back to a dusty Syrian town after the fall of Caracalla, and the rustic genuflections of the town were scant compensation to the position that she had enjoyed in Rome. At this point, affronted by the thought of unending days of rural homespun, she took note of the growing rebellious nature of the soldiers under Macrinus, and gave out rather publicly that one Elagabulus was Caracalla's child and thus the legitimate Emperor. Word of this was brought to Macrinus who at once named his own boy, Diadumenianus to the co-emperorship in a bid to counter this threat. For good measure he strode before his soldiers in full plumed martial majesty and promised a doubling of their pay. But it was quite too late for Macrinus, as the troops glowered threateningly and advanced as one man upon him. Terrified, Macrinus gathered a few loyal officers and soldiers to attend him, cast his helmet aside and made a precipitate retreat to Antioch. He was pursued there by the mutinous legions advancing the claim of Elagabulus and battle was forced upon Macrinus. Julia Soemias, the daughter of Maesa and the mother of Elagabulus flew there by a fast chariot and personally conducted from a distance the moves of her forces, bellowing commands. Despite her tentative grasp of military strategy, the forces of Elagabulus at length prevailed, and Macrinus, who now assumed the status of hunted refugee, mounted a swift steed and began a flight to Rome, there to find succour amidst his supporters that he presumed teemed there in comforting numbers and renew his hold on the purple. But his flight was intercepted in a desolate reach of Asia Minor where he and his son were apprehended and shortly thereafter executed, another grim reminder that the vast pay and privileges of the Army, dating back to the days of Commodus were a sacrosanct tradition, to be assailed against only with the greatest of peril.

ELAGABULUS

The Empire now beheld the bizarre and perverse spectacle that was Elagabulus, the teenage Emperor of Rome. He shocked by his religious practices, he repulsed by his sexual antics and he disgusted by his unnerving tastes. He sent a thousand historian's styli scurrying across the papyrus relating their astonishment over a 14-year-old Syrian boy-priest, serving El-Gabal, the sun god.
Elagabulus was the grandson of Julia Maesa, the sister of Julia Domna, and certainly related to Caracalla, but only as nephew. This connection was enhanced to the status of son by the timely inventiveness of Maesa, and her daughter, Julia Soemias, bade the boy quit his diversions at least purporting to serve the god, and they rode off together to a local army encampment and there the boy was presented to the soldiers. With a massed clang of sword striking shield and harsh, martial voices, Elagabulus was invested in the purple by these troops that had so revered Caracalla. The defeat of Macrinus outside Antioch all but assured his recognition by the wider Empire, and a victorious procession set off for Rome, first punctuated by the massive puncture of Gannys, Soemias' lover and self-appointed minister of state who was rather inclined to view Elagabulus as little more than a figurehead, the real power and authority residing within his dusky-brown hands. Gannys had attempted to restrain the boy, already settled into the license of his title and thusly he quickly exercised its perogitives on behalf of the defense of his pleasures.
And these pleasures were on a most manifold of displays as the vast procession slowly and ponderously made its way onward in a 2,000 mile long course of revelry. Celebrations awaited their arrival in every town and city, as both wine and Elagabulus ran freely. The boy laid his hands and his lust upon every woman, man, animal, and presumably vegetable and mineral, which he could compel into the Imperial presence. When these oblations to Priapus were complete, he at last remembered his obligations to El-Gabal, presiding over ceremonies centered about a conical black stone, believed to have fallen from the palm of the god's hand to earth. Elagabulus had ensured that this holy relic was brought along to Rome, as he had already conceived the notion that the gods of Olympus were to be evicted from their marble habitations, making way for the installation of El-Gabal in the midst of clouds of incense smelling of piety.
At last the Imperial procession, attended by legions of followers and excited locals, reached Rome, to massed blares of trumpets and the roar of the multitude, which soon were to behold scenes the like of which were hitherto unknown in the Eternal City. Venerable old Senators, with memories that now fled hysterically back to the days of Marcus Aurelius, were at once forced to don long Phoenician gowns, muttering pretended pieties over the black stone as around them, wailing and screaming, lascivious damsels spun wildly to the sound of shrill flutes. The richest wines were poured out with abandon, ponds of liquor rising up to the ankles, as the most rare and expensive aromatics fetched from distant realms burned all at once in a ghastly, smoking cloud and issued out the windows of the temples into the wider Roman air, dispensing the aroma of astonishment about the entire city and beneath it, the stench of mortification over the spectacle that was wrought by Elagabulus.
And spectacle was the measures of the days of this reign, as each span of hours brought another crime, another affront and another misdemeanour. Elagabulus followed in the tradition of Commodus by completely abdicating any involvement in governance, his wont for seeking pleasure commanding him to turn over state responsibilities to those aforementioned redoubtable Syrian women, Julia Maesa and Julia Soemias, whose effective and efficient governing permitted the boy to be completely free to pursue his appetites to the fullest measure. Elagabulus saw to it with the utmost devotion that a supply of children were constantly wrenched from the bosom of their parents to be sacrificed to El-Gabal, that monkeys and donkeys and snakes were obtained for temple usage, where any protesting parents would be cast in with them and imprisoned there; while outside, Elagabulus and his damsels would flail and tremble wildly in a presumed sacred dance termed a Salammbo. His appetites could be milder; the art of Roman cookery attained its zenith during his reign, as new sauces and dishes and their attendant techniques were commanded of the Imperial kitchens. Once Elagabulus was seized with a fancy for a blue sauce to dress a fish, and one was duly created for him. He found it ghastly, however and condemned the unfortunate cook to subsist on this sauce and nothing more for the duration of an entire month.
But it was his sexual activities that brought down the mantle of infamy upon Elagabulus' shoulders with a crushing weight. He married five wives within three years, dispensing with each as with a breadcrust. However, in the tradition of many an Emperor, the boy was bisexual, and also exhibited the traits of a transvestite. He would often escape palace grounds garbed in blonde wig and shimmering robes and seek out the brothels and taverns of the city, there to drive out the prostitutes and ply their trade himself, before his return to the palace, there to submit himself to the blows of his paramour, Hierocles, for being 'unfaithful' to him. Eventually, transvestitism itself became insufficient to Elagabulus, and instead of dressing as a woman, he now commanded that he be physically transformed into one. Only with the greatest of difficulties did the palace doctors dissuade him from such a doubtful course.
Carnal instincts also followed Elagabulus into his fitful expeditions in government. The condition of being well endowed was an essential prerequisite for professional preferment, and thus a procession of actors and barbers and scandal-mongers and charioteers with ample loins found themselves suddenly manning the most important levers of government after their vigour in the bedchamber was tested by Elagabulus. Such activities compounded one upon another, as beneath the wailing of the Salammbo, whispers of revolt could begin to be discerned.
This did not escape the notice of Julia Maesa, concerned that her grandson's behaviour could ruin her and the dynasty that had been established by Septimius, and thusly, deftly parting Elagabulus from the pleasure of the moment, persuaded him to adopt as his heir his virtuous cousin, Alexander Severus. Alexander was quite popular with the Praetorian Guard, and such was done. But immediately thereafter, Elagabulus and Alexander vied for power, each cheered on by his ambitious mother, Soemias the partisan of Elagabulus and her sister, Julia Mammea the defender of the Imperial aspirations of Alexander.
Elagabulus was quite aware of his growing unpopularity and above all, the ever-increasing partiality that was shown to Alexander by the Praetorians. In a sudden fit of pique, he ordered the arrest and execution of Alexander in March of 222. Instead, the Guard turned swords on Elagabulus. His fury turned to panic in the face of glinting steel, and he dropped to his knees before them, tears slicking his face, weepy voice croaking out his readiness to surrender the throne and pleading in between gasps that all he wished was to be able to return to Syria and serve El-Gabal in the utmost of obscurity. Their silence and the continuing menace dwelling in the Guard's eyes prompted a scream from Elagabulus and he at once rose upward and took to his heels, the Praetorians pursuing him into the palace depths. The Guard was thorough in its explorations, and Elagabulus was found, quivering and trembling in a latrine. A thousand flashes of metal rained down upon the tears and cries of the boy, and few of these Guard-wielded flashes departed to visit their fatal deed upon his mother. Thus ended one of the most bizarre episodes of Roman History.

ALEXANDER SEVERUS

In a collective sigh of relief, the same massed swords that had cut down Elagabulus now gathered about his cousin in a gesture of acclamation as Alexander succeeded to the throne. Later historians would look back fondly upon his reign as the final days of Indian Summer before chaos drove the expiring sun from the sky and brought on a 50 year night before a new dawn illumed a transformed Empire. And indeed, there was revival during Alexander's reign, a sense of hope renewed, as for the last time all the trappings of unmitigated classical antiquity were displayed. But under this veneer was the accelerating decline of the Imperial station. Alexander was never fully in charge of affairs; the levers of authority were largely operated by his mother Julia Mammea, and though she was yet another of that race of effective Syrian women who had taken charge of the governance of the Empire, she was hard pressed to contain the growing military indiscipline, as mutiny and revolt seethed amidst the ever-increasing barbarous nature of the army.
Julia Mammea and Julia Maesa inaugurated the return of Virtue to the palace, relieving, and mostly to the deep gratitude thereof, all of Elagabulus' insouciant appointments of their positions, freeing them for a return to the circus and the theatre. A respected lawyer and writer by the name of Ulpian was appointed to the post of the Praetorian chief, and putting aside his voluminous collection of legal codes and donning the plumed helmet. He hung Justice's scales all about the palace still fading from a deep crimson blush of shame. Alexander noted these moves and glowered; he was constantly reminded of the impotence of his position, and the measure of his mother's power, especially after the death of Maesa in 224. Her obsession with money disturbed him, and her need to order the wholesale confiscations of property and the spoil of estates to sate the ever-increasing rapacity of the military deeply concerned him as he pulled the purple tightly about his form and attempted to adopt an Imperial posture whenever the absence of Mammea permitted, in the midst of a growing contempt of the Praetorians.
Their contempt was exercised in another matter as well. Ulpian attempted reforms, attempted to animate the Praetorians with a sense of service that transcended personal interest, but only excited the hostility of the Guard. Then one day in 224, a trifle of an incident in the Forum was suddenly magnified into a specimen of an unforgivable affront, and Ulpian was gifted with a bouquet of swords. After a vain attempt to appeal to the ghost of their better natures, Ulpian at once cast down his helmet with a clang, and fled to the sanctuary of the palace where he might appeal to the Emperor for his protection, the Guard closely behind him in glinting, pointed advance. Ulpian passed the palace gates, bounded through the bronzen doors of the palace and achieved the Imperial presence, throwing himself before Alexander's feet. Alexander, beholding the danger to Ulpian, at once removed the cloak from about his form and threw it over Ulpian in the traditional display of Imperial protection. Alexander looked on in horror as the descent of blades nonetheless still transpired, as both Ulpian and any semblance of Alexander's authority perished. Ulpian could not be avenged; Alexander was an irrelevance. His sense of helplessness was further demonstrated in 225 when Mammea arranged for Alexander to wed one Oribana, a highborn member of highborn nobles. Alexander did not love the girl, but he meekly submitted to her matchmaking dictates. Soon, however, Mammea was consumed with jealousy over Oribana's title of Empress that had been transferred away from her. Friction exhaled deeply, Alexander helplessly caught in the middle, a weathervane spinning in the gales.
By 227, Mammea had had enough of the insolence of Oribana, the exchange of insult at the dinner table and the glacial stares that were shot out mutually at one another. Mammea, fearing that Oribana would turn her out of the palace, resolved to act first. In a gust of screeched accusations, she summoned a number of Praetorians, who had their pockets burdened to table one evening and shot a shaking finger at Oribana over the goblet and tray. Oribana was hefted off her couch, escorted to the door and flung out onto the pavement. Oribana arose and screeched invective and promised vengeance. She at once fled to her father, whom after hearing the tale, flushed in affront, and in deep concern for their survival. They sought refuge with certain Praetorians who had not been bribed by Mammea, and Mammea, quite alert to the odor of revolt, had the father executed and Oribana exiled. Over time, Alexander had become attached to Oribana, but he became the very picture of passivity and did nothing but acquiesce with the affected air of detachment. Inwardly, he dreamt of an escape from Rome, and above all, from the dominion of the control of Mammea.
In 230, an ambitious Persian by the name of Ardashir more than gratified his desires. In 224 Ardashir had dealt the death-blow to the expiring Parthians, overthrowing their last emperor, Artabanus, and in 226 had proclaimed the establishment of the Sassanian Empire, a nationalistic and aggressive affair, consecrated to the mission of re-establishing the ancient domain of Darius' age when the Persian dominion extended from Libya to India. Ardashir, after preparations, a thousand bows before the Sacred Fire and the massed clang of arms being forged, began a march into Roman Mesopotamia, quickly seizing several cities and evoking a bellow of Roman consternation.
Alexander, with some unease, tore himself away from Mammea and began preparations to deal with the invasion of Ardashir, drilling unruly and sullen troops, and carefully managing to arrive with them at the front in 231, there dividing his forces into three groups with the central column under his personal command. The columns on the Imperial flanks after initial reverses, performed well against Ardashir, but Alexander's men sought originality and tarried about before retreating back to Antioch, instead of passing the Persian frontier. Alexander seethed and cried out taunts of cowardice at his men, but the flanks were able to induce Ardashir to retreat, and a draw and the term 'stalemate' was stamped upon the sand.
Alexander wished to remain in the east, away from the maternal control, but the news of the abrogation of Commodus' treaties and the restoration of the cries of War and Wotan returned to rude, beard-fringed German lips compelled a return to Rome. The tribes that had confronted Marcus had increased in number and, learning the rudiments of statecraft from the Romans, had begun to consolidate into nations such as the Franks and the Allemani, further strengthened by new barbarians freshly arrived from the frozen shores of the Baltic. These were hearty brutes, reeking of beer and butter, inured to the icy morass, wedded to the sword and were the most fearsome ministers of violence. They had breached the crumbling fortifications of the Rhine and overran a fair portion of Gaul. Upon his return to Rome, Alexander and Mammea conferred and decided that both would foray to the front, Mammea there to provide backbone for the boy. Horse hooves pounded in their fullest velocity as they raced to the scene of calamity, and there arrived, beheld these new and formidable adversaries with a mutual gasp. They quickly decided that the remedy for these current ills was not a dose of iron administered but a gift of golden tribute. A vast stock of coins had been brought along in uncounted trunks, with which to pay the soldiers. When the troops discovered that a vast portion of the lucre was to be diverted to barbarian hands and not destined to burden their purses, Mutiny strode forth in the guise of the military commander Maximin Thrax. With little difficulty he won over their loyalty and engaged them in conspiracy. One morning, the soldiers gathered to take their accustomed exercise, and there assembled instead suddenly acclaimed Maximin as Emperor. He silenced the roar of his martial fellows with a show of feigned reluctance, calling upon them to remember their oaths to Alexander, but all had been very carefully arranged and stage-managed. Several soldiers who presumed and expected to enjoy the predicament of Alexander brought word of this, and he gratified them immensely. Instead of bravely seeking to avenge this affront, he did little more but race outside the Imperial tent, screaming frantically until he caught sight of a host of troops following the sword-wielding form of Maximin heading directly to the tent. Alexander paled and gasped, his panic transfixed for a moment, before he again jerked into frantic life. A necklace of tears trailing behind him, he raced back into the tent, his mouth spewing out curses against both Maximin and Mammea. He threw himself upon a stoical and contemptuous Mammea, clinging to her, while yet cursing her all the more loudly, as Maximin advanced to the tent and strode inside, hefting high his sword, held aloft on a deed of slaughter. Such was accomplished in most gory fashion, Alexander and Mammea slain, and thus perished in a most hapless fashion the dynasty of Severus that had arrived on the scene with such ferocious majesty.
And with this, in 235, the Age of Chaos had come.

Untitled (Ask)

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"Untitled" by Kelly Moore, mixed media, 8 x 10 inches, 2006