Here are some folks I’d like to know – they call themselves THE ELATIONISTS… San Francisco’s Lost Arts Movement.

‘Centennial Celebration of the Elationists’

Reyhan Harmanci – The SF Chronicle

Meet the Elationists. According to their “discoverers,” they were a turn-of-the-century art movement in San Francisco that made art and music from what they could unearth from the rubble of the 1906 earthquake. Their own history has been buried for years, the archivists say, hidden inside a secret room of an old Victorian belonging to Bonnie Spindler. Among the photographs, films and paintings found, the Elationist archivists have unearthed a large music instrument called the Triclops Monstrosity, which has incorporated three string instruments into a large mass with a gold-colored lion’s head in the middle. And then there’s the special Elationist chocolate drink recipe (pieced together from journal entries) that will be served at the opening of a show about them…

Click here for the rest.

A BRIEF FOR THE DEFENSE

by Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

are not starving someplace, they are starving

somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.

Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not

be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not

be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women

at the fountain are laughing together between

the suffering they have known and the awfulness

in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody

in the village is very sick. There is laughter

every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,

and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,

but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world. To make injustice the only

measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,

we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.

We must admit there will be music despite everything.

We stand at the prow again of a small ship

anchored late at night in the tiny port

looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront

is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat

comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth

all the years of sorrow that are to come.

-Jack Gilbert

(I’ve posted this poem because I feel that it does a very fine job of addressing the concept that even though life is dirty and tough, that it is our duty as beings to embrace beauty despite it all…for what is the meaning of beauty without its opposite? How will there be rebirth if there is no death?)

DEJA NEWS – Vintage News

The following item appeared in the New York Herald Tribune on

February 16, 1947 (and was repeated by Ivan T. Sanderson in the

January 1970 issue of his magazine, Pursuit):

When the first atomic bomb exploded in New Mexico, the desert

sand turned to fused green glass. This fact, according to the

magazine Free World, has given certain archaeologists a turn.

They have been digging in the ancient Euphrates Valley and have

uncovered a layer of agrarian culture 8,000 years old, and a layer

of herdsman culture much older, and a still older caveman culture.

Recently, they reached another layer of fused green glass.

It is well known that atomic detonations on or above a sandy desert will melt the silicon in the sand and turn the surface of the Earth into a sheet of glass. But if sheets of ancient desert glass can be found in various parts of the world, does it mean that atomic wars were fought in the ancient past or, at the very least, that atomic testing occurred in the dim ages of history?

This is a startling theory, but one that is not lacking in evidence, as such ancient sheets of desert glass are a geological fact. Lightning strikes can sometimes fuse sand, meteorologists contend, but this is always in a distinctive root-like pattern. These strange geological oddities are called fulgurites and manifest as branched tubular forms rather than as flat sheets of fused sand. Therefore, lightning is largely ruled out as the cause of such finds by geologists, who prefer to hold onto the theory of a meteor or comet strike as the cause. The problem with this theory is that there is usually no crater associated with these anomalous sheets of glass.

Brad Steiger and Ron Calais report in their book, Mysteries of Time and Space, that Albion W. Hart, one of the first engineers to graduate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was assigned an engineering project in the interior of Africa. While he and his men were travelling to an almost inaccessible region, they first had to cross a great expanse of desert.

“At the time he was puzzled and quite unable to explain a large expanse of greenish glass which covered the sands as far as he could see,” writes Margarethe Casson in an article on Hart’s life in the magazine Rocks and Minerals (no. 396, 1972). She then goes on to mention: “Later on, during his life he passed by the White Sands area after the first atomic explosion there, and he recognized the same type of silica fusion which he had seen fifty years earlier in the African desert.”