Re-reading my Palahniuk books when I came across this passage in Survivor. Reminded me of this which I read off tomorrow.sg.
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"Down onstage, the local preacher was doing his opening act. Part of his waarm-up was to get the audience hyperventilated. Loud singing does the job. Or chanting. According to the agent, when people shout this way or sing "Amazing Grace" at the top of their lungs, they breathe too much. People's blood should be acid. When they hyperventilate the carbon dioxide level of their blood drops, and their blood becomes alkaline.
Respiratory alkalosis.
Peopld get light-headed. People fall down with their ears ringing, their fingers and toes go numb, they get chest pains, they sweat. This is supposed to be rapture. People thrash on the floor with thie hands cramped into stiff claws.
This is what passes for ecstasy.
People in the religion business call it 'lobstering'. They call it speaking in tongues.
Repetitive motions add to the effect, and the opening act down onstage runs through the usual drills. The audience claps in unison. Long rows of people hold hands and sway together in their delirium. People do that rainbow hands.
Whoever invented this routine, the agent tells me, they pretty much run things in Hell.
[...]
Part of my training was how to press my hands over smebody's eyes so hard and fast so the pressure registered on their optic nerve as a flash of white light.
Divine light.
Part of my training was how to press my hands over somebody's ears so hard they heard a buzzing noise I could tell them was the eternal Om."
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Of course, Palahniuk is known to pass off made-ups and fiction as facts. So well... but there is something sinister about these mile high church clubs. Buy your way into heaven! Give money to make money! Just 10% of your pay and eternal happiness is yours! Happiness is a tad overrated. Don't you think?
I had this awesome idea for a movie/book. That death wasn't very much different from life. I wouldn't be surprised if I died and discovered that the priests, pastors, imams, buddhas, ayatollahs, politicians still run the scene. Now that IS depressing.
★ maybe-marble
"i think it's a mistake to lose one's sense of death, even one's fear of death. isn't death the boundary we need? doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? you have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry a final line, a border or limit."
- white noise, don delillo
★ yuki-chan
yuki pic
★ of the devil's party
"we were the children of innocent consumerism and the inheritors of the freedoms won by our seditious elders in the late sixties. we had a free, superior and somewhat lazy education. we weren't much restrained by morality or religion. music, dancing and conscienceless fucking were our totems. we boasted that we were the freest there'd ever been."
- intimacy, hanif kureishi
★ everybody's doing it baby!
the village voice
rotten tomatoes
om improvement
mOmentOm yOga
camper
iD magazine
ontological-hysteric theatre
mazzy star
green plastic radiohead
official radiohead
tour de france
lance armstrong
sex and the city
baylene
feminist sf and fantasy
atheist quotes
go fug yourself
buy cheap marie claire!
ted
design*sponge
unstudio
2modern
★ unaccounted for
stpi
sculpture square
nus museum
ps1
tate britain
british sculpture
zadok ben-david
gilles massot
ong kim seng
dia:beacon
guggenheim museums
burning man
royal academy of art
the state hermitage museum
new york museums
tara mcpherson
★ the propellerheads
"when i was a kid i used to pray every night for a new bicycle. then i realised that the lord doesn't work that way so i stole one and asked him to forgive me."
★ nada, nada, nada
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