I really do want to see the Georgia Guidestones. I hadn't known about them at all 'til a week or so ago, when I found an article on them in an old issue of Wired. But they're just the sort of thing I'd like to see. I suppose in the eighteenth century they'd have been called a Folly, and they are a wonderful Weird Monument. Far more visual than Carhenge, and the whole New Age-y/post-apocalyptic atmosphere makes them even more fun--- not least because the whole lunatic fundamentalist conspiracy-theory world thinks they're evidence of Evil Plans by the Occult Hierarchy and New World Order plotters. I also like it that the man who commissioned--- or at least represented the people who commissioned ---the Guidestones cloaked himself (as "R.C. Christian") in Rosicrucian Enlightenment drag. (Thank you, Dame Frances Yates!) I really do want to see the Guidestones. I know that Yoko Ono is a big fan of them, too, but I won't let that put me off. I know that the Georgia Guidestones are in NE Georgia, and if they were close enough to Savannah, I suppose Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo and I could drive out from our wedding to take a look.

Yes, I suppose I do want to see the Georgia Guidestones for much the same reason I'm fascinated with Alamut. And, yes, again--- go read Vladimir Bartols' "Alamut". Like Amin Maalouf's "Samarkand", it's worth a trip to the library or a good used bookstore. Call that a pair of book recommendations--- to Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo, Trish at kissingverlaine, and Artemis at artemisloves.

So this giant, demonically-possessed severed goat's head levitates into a bar...

Heather at wantedwanted told me that she couldn't even guess at the punchline to that, but I think it's obvious:

...and the bartender says, "Hey! We don't serve your kind here!"

"That's okay," the giant, demonically-possessed, levitating severed goat's head says. "Right now my legion of fanatical followers is at your house slaughtering your entire family and violating their corpses."

It's a pretty obvious punchline, I think.

Though it does lack the severe Wittgensteinian logic of another parable:

A group of wise, yet blind, philosopher-elephants once tried to describe a human via direct apprehension. After examination, they all agreed: humans are...flat.

Which is, I suppose, a way of saying that I have Derek Jarman's "Wittgenstein" at the top of my Netflix queue for next week.

Miss Ginny is a major fan of Sixties French pop--- Francoise Hardy, Jane Birkin, Serge Gainsbourg, France Gall ---and retro-pop like Alizee. I must ask her what she thinks of the "Lemon Incest" album Serge Gainsbourg did with his daughter Charlotte. And I must encourage Miss Ginny to look into Amanda Lear. Amanda Lear's "Queen of Chinatown" and "Blood & Honey" and "Paris La Nuit" are wonderful Eurodance. And Ms. Lear herself is one of those figures from the Sixties and Seventies I find intriguing: model, singer, painter, fashionista, mistress to David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, and (yes) Dali. She's the girl with in that black latex dress and the leashed black panther on the Roxy Music cover. Worth Miss Ginny's time to explore, I think.

Looking at old magazine covers and watching old videos, I think that I'd have liked the whole period, say, 1958-65, the era of "Mad Men" and the Warhol Sixties, the post-beat, pre-hippie era. And then I'd have liked the whole "decadence" era of the mid and late Seventies--- the Studio 54 world. Leap over the worst of the hippie era and into the era of Eurotrash-On-Coke. David Bowie in Berlin, Amanda Lear in latex, Helmut Newton snapping photos of models in fetishwear. I'd have enjoyed either era.

Damn it, one more thing to do: ask Miss Ginny what she thought of Joan Didion's essays on Didion's own life in the late Fifties and early Sixties. I'll never know what Lissy at emigree thinks of Joan Didion's novels, and more's the pity. I would like to hear her take on Didion's "A Book of Common Prayer" and "Democracy". Miss Ginny's, too. And on some autumn night in 1963, there just before JFK went to Dallas, I'd have taken Umi at ivich for Manhattans and Tom Collinses at a bar in the West Village. (Okay, book recommendation: Ronald Skolnick, "Down and In", a history of the NYC underground scene from 1945 through the early Eighties.)

Time to make ramen noodles and drink shochu and listen to New Order and dream of seeing the Georgia Guidestones and the Green Flash and the ruins of Alamut...