nine key memes
from ulysses lazarus' post on his eight key memes:
"I have been having discussions over the last year or so with Klintron, he of Technoccult and other international enterprises, about key memes. Simply put, key memes are the things which occupy the larger part of your consciousness. They are sort of meta-memes which are acquired early on in adolescence and the teen years, and lead to the cultural obsessions you hold later in life. No one is, of course, entirely bound by their key memes, but once you figure out what they are they make a lot of sense. I’ve basically pared most of my media consumption, lifestyle, and world view down to eight key memes and their tributaries. If ever you found yourself wondering 'Where the hell did this guy come from?' now you have something of an answer."
loved the idea so much, here are mine:
(that's right, i couldn't get it down to 8!)
i'll start off with a little background info here. i grew up in a few different teeny midwestern towns in iowa. went to bible camp in the summer, roller skated, played MASH. but also i had an interest in weird, unexplainable shit- i once held a seance with my friends that ended with us screaming and running out of the house. i was also extremely smart and spent a fair amount of time in the hall doing school work from the next grade up or in a room with a few other kids that were deemed "gifted". we did independent research projects and i picked ghosts. when i was 12, my family moved to casper, wyoming. i became extremely christian (jehovah's witness!) and hung out mostly with the other psycho-mutant christian kids at my school. i did dozens of extracurricluars, and was even in a beauty pageant (i know, WTF???) the point where i became me, really really ME was about 14. and here in, logical order, are the things that lead me to really discovering who i was for myself:
#1- weed!
it sounds so cliche, but my desire to smoke weed showed my desperate desire to break out of what i knew. i was 15- i wanted to be different, i wanted to do the things you weren't supposed to do. this marked the start of my contempt for authority, one of the main memes that will continue throughout my life, i'm sure.
related memes: sex, underage drinking, drugs, shoplifting, other general mischief.
#2- tool
when i was still the wholesome christian girl, i saw a copy a tool's "undertow" at a friends house. i was equally repulsed and drawn to it, mostly because of the bizarre photography. when i heard it a little while later, it's like it was speaking to me. and what's strange about tool is that each of their albums came out at a time where the tone mirrored the tone of my life at the moment- sarcastic and subversive for "undertow"; angsty and addicted for "aenima"; spiritual and reflective for "lateralus"; and well, stale for "10,000 days".
related memes: nine inch nails, erowid, pyschotropics, h.r. geiger, alex grey, a perfect circle
#3- aldous huxley
what made me loose myself of christianity's tight chains was (no joke!) actually reading the bible. i thought it was a horrible, petty, masogynist narrative promoting tribal warfare and incest. when i quit going to church, i went on a massive spiritual quest for the ultimate truth. something about buddhism really resonated with me (and still does). when i found aldous he quickly became my hero- a man with a scientific, analytical mind whose heart is still open to the greater underpinnings of the human spirit. and a man who rejects fascism in all of its insidious forms. "island", his utopian response to the dystopian "brave new world" is still my favorite novel. and his work with psychedelics also had a huge impact on me, and for fuck's sake, the guy can communicate from the grave.
related memes: ken kesey, timothy leary, ram dass, hunter s. thompson, nietzsche, sartre, thich nhat hahn, milarepa, alan watts
#4- bad religion
so here i was, age 14, wanting to give the finger to christianity, and along comes bad religion whose logo was the crossbuster. this was my introduction to atheist critique, to radical politics, and to punk in general. greg graffin assumed his audience was smart enough to know the 50 cent words he dropped into his lyrics, and i loved that about them. punk rock with a heart and a brain... i was in love!
related memes: nofx, operation ivy, rage against the machine, falling sickness
#5- a clockwork orange
i bet most people who like this movie do so for shock value, and though i suppose that's part of it, i also love the themes in this movie. it totally shattered my preconceptions of morality, societal control, and free will. the graphic violence and assault were brutal and yet artistic in their delivery, and this certainly warmed me up to the ideas of some gruesome films and modern art.
related memes: "brave new world", the matrix, frieda kahlo, francis bacon, "requiem for a dream"
#6- mae west
my sexuality has been a struggle due to a few traumas in my life. nothing is sexy to me about the pornographic banging of genitals, though i'm not shameful or embarrassed by it either. the sexy part of sex for me is the seduction. mae west's sense of humor made me feel i should be proud to be a woman, that it is awesome and fun. i could be strong and independent and still be sexy. she was the original sex-positive woman. and as everyone knows about me, i idolize the aesthetic of the olden days- i'll take a hundred betty pages over one pamela anderson or carmen electra. give me the donna reed days where women still had a sense of mystery and some class and sophistication! btw, donna reed is also a HUGE influence on my domestic-hostessy ways.
related memes: maya angelou, my grammy, betty page, donna reed, jackie o, josephine baker, carmen miranda, rita hayworth
#7-the communist manifesto
ok. i admit that i bought this book just to piss my mom off. i had a friend in high school who gave me an anarchist t-shirt and a CCCP pin, and i wore it just to be controversial. i bought this during the summer i spent in california, regularly making trips to san francisco and starting realize my west-coast nature. but for all the hype, when i actually read this book, i couldn't believe what i was reading. it made so much sense and finally blew apart that lingering sense of the potential goodness of the state. i became a lifetime, blow-hard anti-state-capitalist after this, and it paved the way for much activism in the future.
related memes: indymedia, crimethinc, proudhon, bookchin, goldman, bell hooks, nietzsche, fight club
#8- behold a pale horse
this was my introduction to conspiracy theories, ufo's, the kennedy assassination, and the illuminati. it all seemed too crazy to be true, but too plausible to ignore. i knew in my gut that something was really really wrong with this world, and i had long since trusted the government to do anything but control and use me. out of this book poured a world of sinister and ritualistic violence, secrets that too few knew, and the paranoia that comes along with that. and i had to admit is was pretty exciting to buy a flagged book. this lead to years of believing the annunaki were imprisoning my spirit, and when 9/11 happened, i was on my soapbox about it.
related memes: david icke, art bell, alex jones, "foucault's pendulum", chateau-les-rennes, robert anton wilson, discordianism
#9- bringers of the dawn
of all of these memes, i find this one to be the most potentially embarrassing. it's definitely out there to profess that an alien consciousness was telepathically communicating with you, training you for energy healing and direct, intuitive contact with pure information. very weird to claim that several times you were "downloaded" with a stream of pure consciousness during lucid states; taught that you could control your life with pure will; or that you could fly the astral plane and change yourself on an astral level. of course, i came find out that these were common occultic experiences, but at the time their shiny, new-agey feel good tone sure felt gooey and warm. might be worth noting i was doing tons of lsd, ketamine, nitrous oxide, and ecstasy at the honeymoon of this period of my life.
related memes: barbara hand clow, crop circles, 12-strand DNA, rave culture, astral projection, dream analysis, aleister crowley
i realize that's a weird one to end on, but unfortunately, that was the last idea i was exposed to that changed! my! life!
i've grown ever more closed off and skeptical since then, and my mind tends to be a rehash of ideas i've been exposed to for years. i think this is a good thing though, because after so much intellectual masturbation, i've settled on what makes sense, but i still leave room for new things. as the taoists would say, "i know i don't know shit".
"I have been having discussions over the last year or so with Klintron, he of Technoccult and other international enterprises, about key memes. Simply put, key memes are the things which occupy the larger part of your consciousness. They are sort of meta-memes which are acquired early on in adolescence and the teen years, and lead to the cultural obsessions you hold later in life. No one is, of course, entirely bound by their key memes, but once you figure out what they are they make a lot of sense. I’ve basically pared most of my media consumption, lifestyle, and world view down to eight key memes and their tributaries. If ever you found yourself wondering 'Where the hell did this guy come from?' now you have something of an answer."
loved the idea so much, here are mine:
(that's right, i couldn't get it down to 8!)
i'll start off with a little background info here. i grew up in a few different teeny midwestern towns in iowa. went to bible camp in the summer, roller skated, played MASH. but also i had an interest in weird, unexplainable shit- i once held a seance with my friends that ended with us screaming and running out of the house. i was also extremely smart and spent a fair amount of time in the hall doing school work from the next grade up or in a room with a few other kids that were deemed "gifted". we did independent research projects and i picked ghosts. when i was 12, my family moved to casper, wyoming. i became extremely christian (jehovah's witness!) and hung out mostly with the other psycho-mutant christian kids at my school. i did dozens of extracurricluars, and was even in a beauty pageant (i know, WTF???) the point where i became me, really really ME was about 14. and here in, logical order, are the things that lead me to really discovering who i was for myself:
#1- weed!
it sounds so cliche, but my desire to smoke weed showed my desperate desire to break out of what i knew. i was 15- i wanted to be different, i wanted to do the things you weren't supposed to do. this marked the start of my contempt for authority, one of the main memes that will continue throughout my life, i'm sure.
related memes: sex, underage drinking, drugs, shoplifting, other general mischief.
#2- tool
when i was still the wholesome christian girl, i saw a copy a tool's "undertow" at a friends house. i was equally repulsed and drawn to it, mostly because of the bizarre photography. when i heard it a little while later, it's like it was speaking to me. and what's strange about tool is that each of their albums came out at a time where the tone mirrored the tone of my life at the moment- sarcastic and subversive for "undertow"; angsty and addicted for "aenima"; spiritual and reflective for "lateralus"; and well, stale for "10,000 days".
related memes: nine inch nails, erowid, pyschotropics, h.r. geiger, alex grey, a perfect circle
#3- aldous huxley
what made me loose myself of christianity's tight chains was (no joke!) actually reading the bible. i thought it was a horrible, petty, masogynist narrative promoting tribal warfare and incest. when i quit going to church, i went on a massive spiritual quest for the ultimate truth. something about buddhism really resonated with me (and still does). when i found aldous he quickly became my hero- a man with a scientific, analytical mind whose heart is still open to the greater underpinnings of the human spirit. and a man who rejects fascism in all of its insidious forms. "island", his utopian response to the dystopian "brave new world" is still my favorite novel. and his work with psychedelics also had a huge impact on me, and for fuck's sake, the guy can communicate from the grave.
related memes: ken kesey, timothy leary, ram dass, hunter s. thompson, nietzsche, sartre, thich nhat hahn, milarepa, alan watts
#4- bad religion
so here i was, age 14, wanting to give the finger to christianity, and along comes bad religion whose logo was the crossbuster. this was my introduction to atheist critique, to radical politics, and to punk in general. greg graffin assumed his audience was smart enough to know the 50 cent words he dropped into his lyrics, and i loved that about them. punk rock with a heart and a brain... i was in love!
related memes: nofx, operation ivy, rage against the machine, falling sickness
#5- a clockwork orange
i bet most people who like this movie do so for shock value, and though i suppose that's part of it, i also love the themes in this movie. it totally shattered my preconceptions of morality, societal control, and free will. the graphic violence and assault were brutal and yet artistic in their delivery, and this certainly warmed me up to the ideas of some gruesome films and modern art.
related memes: "brave new world", the matrix, frieda kahlo, francis bacon, "requiem for a dream"
#6- mae west
my sexuality has been a struggle due to a few traumas in my life. nothing is sexy to me about the pornographic banging of genitals, though i'm not shameful or embarrassed by it either. the sexy part of sex for me is the seduction. mae west's sense of humor made me feel i should be proud to be a woman, that it is awesome and fun. i could be strong and independent and still be sexy. she was the original sex-positive woman. and as everyone knows about me, i idolize the aesthetic of the olden days- i'll take a hundred betty pages over one pamela anderson or carmen electra. give me the donna reed days where women still had a sense of mystery and some class and sophistication! btw, donna reed is also a HUGE influence on my domestic-hostessy ways.
related memes: maya angelou, my grammy, betty page, donna reed, jackie o, josephine baker, carmen miranda, rita hayworth
#7-the communist manifesto
ok. i admit that i bought this book just to piss my mom off. i had a friend in high school who gave me an anarchist t-shirt and a CCCP pin, and i wore it just to be controversial. i bought this during the summer i spent in california, regularly making trips to san francisco and starting realize my west-coast nature. but for all the hype, when i actually read this book, i couldn't believe what i was reading. it made so much sense and finally blew apart that lingering sense of the potential goodness of the state. i became a lifetime, blow-hard anti-state-capitalist after this, and it paved the way for much activism in the future.
related memes: indymedia, crimethinc, proudhon, bookchin, goldman, bell hooks, nietzsche, fight club
#8- behold a pale horse
this was my introduction to conspiracy theories, ufo's, the kennedy assassination, and the illuminati. it all seemed too crazy to be true, but too plausible to ignore. i knew in my gut that something was really really wrong with this world, and i had long since trusted the government to do anything but control and use me. out of this book poured a world of sinister and ritualistic violence, secrets that too few knew, and the paranoia that comes along with that. and i had to admit is was pretty exciting to buy a flagged book. this lead to years of believing the annunaki were imprisoning my spirit, and when 9/11 happened, i was on my soapbox about it.
related memes: david icke, art bell, alex jones, "foucault's pendulum", chateau-les-rennes, robert anton wilson, discordianism
#9- bringers of the dawn
of all of these memes, i find this one to be the most potentially embarrassing. it's definitely out there to profess that an alien consciousness was telepathically communicating with you, training you for energy healing and direct, intuitive contact with pure information. very weird to claim that several times you were "downloaded" with a stream of pure consciousness during lucid states; taught that you could control your life with pure will; or that you could fly the astral plane and change yourself on an astral level. of course, i came find out that these were common occultic experiences, but at the time their shiny, new-agey feel good tone sure felt gooey and warm. might be worth noting i was doing tons of lsd, ketamine, nitrous oxide, and ecstasy at the honeymoon of this period of my life.
related memes: barbara hand clow, crop circles, 12-strand DNA, rave culture, astral projection, dream analysis, aleister crowley
i realize that's a weird one to end on, but unfortunately, that was the last idea i was exposed to that changed! my! life!
i've grown ever more closed off and skeptical since then, and my mind tends to be a rehash of ideas i've been exposed to for years. i think this is a good thing though, because after so much intellectual masturbation, i've settled on what makes sense, but i still leave room for new things. as the taoists would say, "i know i don't know shit".