Roger Penrose explains Godel's incompleteness theorem in 3 minutes

Occult Material in the Invisible Tower Trilogy?

None.  It is adventure, high fantasy, satire, and an inquiry into the character and nature of the Human Condition.

Click the image to view the Amazon descriptions of the books:

Los Angeles' Occult Past: interview with Ronnie Pontiac

Curious subject, curious ideas, curious sub-culture, curious history... indeed a curious city

An abstract crossing the borders of genre

Richard M. Powers’ (1962) for Conditionally Human by Walter M. Miller Jr.

Sample pages from Fluxus

Source

Fluxus materials and books available at AbeBooks

A review by Richard Kostelanetz: The Fluxus Newspaper 1964-1979 edited by George Maciunas and Fluxus Editorial Council for Fluxus

Fluxus has been the moniker for a group of artists mostly in downtown Manhattan, with compatriots in Europe and Japan, that coalesced in the late 1950s. Coming to know many of them personally a decade later, I realized that I might have been one of them had I been born a few years earlier than 1940 and not been a graduate student at uptown Columbia until 1966.

Their esthetic descended from Dada and John Cage (as did mine, later), as they worked in music, visual art, literature, and especially performances. (Only the last I didn’t do.) Though initially attended by a choice few, some of the last have been memorialized in art writing and eventually scholarship.

Respecting Cage’s demand of freedom in choosing esthetic materials, they eschewed heaviness with innovative work that was initially esthetically acceptable to everyone who cared. Two intentions were audacity and comedy, which are ideals I want for my own art.

Their leader and most brilliant exemplar was George Maciunas (1931-1977), a Lithuanian who’d come to America after WWII and initially trained as an architect at first-rank US universities. In addition to organizing and helping his colleagues, he did many things in his own name, some more brilliantly than others, some ephemeral and others permanent. Among the latter I count his publishing, and the first achievement of The Fluxus Newspaper (Primary Information, 2024) is bringing together scarce issues from nearly fifty years ago, mostly only a few pages long, all bound together in a single book outsized at 10.5” x 14”.

The first departure is that Maciunas as an inventive designer used the larger printed page as a field for various elements both visual and verbal and then in different typefaces. The book’s cover exemplifies his departure.

A second departure was the seemingly unlimited variety of materials on a single page, ranging from abstract designs to pseudo-news clipping to historic photographs to price lists for other items that Maciunas was publishing. Look at the cover. The disparities among the items make many Fluxus pages funny, as indeed was he.

On the front page of February 1964 are these blocks in five vertical columns: a headlined news story about mosquito extermination, “Latest News” above an array of five-digit numerals, more news about the complaints of women wearing girdles at high altitudes, a defaced one-dollar bill, a thumbnail about “knots,” a “curve” street sign, “WOW!,” a short Scottish news article about “yeggs” (burglars) locking themselves in a “Ladies’ Room,” a current price list for Fluxus editions, another vertical thumbnail photo of a 19th century West Coast bean dealer who resembles Maciunas, the reproduction of an ancient patent for a “saluting device” hat, and much, much else, again all within a single page. Otherwise, another whole page of this book is devoted to George Brecht’s legendary conceptual texts, horizontal thumbnails each less than a few lower-case words long, nearly all of them incorporating the word “page”: “spit on this page,” “eat something on this page,” “turn 14 pages slowly,” “hide this page,” “write as much as you can on this page,” “listen five minutes before turning this page,” “astonish someone quickly with this page,” etc. In the middle is a blank thumbnail, literally an empty page, that implicitly enhances the others. 

Another section of this book has first a recto and then a two-page spread with dozens of thumbnails both horizontal and vertical of several Fluxus performances in 1969 and 1970, all accompanied by a numbered sidebar in Maciunas’ signature sans-serif typeface in which individuals and details are identified. 

Therefore, within this book’s 80 unenumerated pages are really 10 times as many distinct blocks of printed matter. As pages offer different configurations, merely flipping from a recto to a verso often offers surprise. Therefore as well, anyone reading through this book for the second time or even a third time will discover marvelous blocks that he or she missed on first reading. 

The customary promotion for this anthology lists all the contributors, many of whose names are remembered a decade later, reminding us that few reprints from any historic periodical can offer such a distinguished exhaustive list: “Ay-O, Carol Bergé, Joseph Beuys, Elaine Bloedow, George Brecht, Christo, Philip Corner, Walter De Maria, Willem de Ridder, Bern Erismann, Nye Ffarrabas [participating as Bici Forbes], Robert Filliou, Henry Flynt, Ken Friedman, Carolyn Krumm, Heinz Gappmayr, Eugen Gomringer, Raymond Hains, Dick Higgins, Geoffrey Hendricks, Jon Hendricks, Alice Hutchins, Tatsu Izumi, Ray Johnson, Joe Jones, Allan Kaprow, Milan Knížak, Alison Knowles, Arthur Köpcke, Takehisa Kosugi, Ruth Krauss, Philip Krumm, György Ligeti, George Maciunas, Angus MacLise, Jackson Mac Low, Larry Miller, Peter Moore, Hans Nordenström, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, James Riddle, Dieter Roth, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, Tomas Schmit, Daniel Spoerri, Christer Strömholm, Yasunao Tone, Stan VanDerBeek, Ben Vautier, Jacques Villeglé, Wolf Vostell, Yoshimasa Wada, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams, William S. Wilson, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela.” (Yes, I regret not being among them.) I’m not aware of any other periodical, neither in literature nor in art, offering such a comprehensive inventory decades later, simply because nearly all the contributors’ names would have become unfamiliar.

With materials no less deviant than they were several decades ago, this Newspaper book is a treasure, a monument to the continuing life of Fluxus. 

P.S. Regarding Maciunas’ achievement as a highly original arts historian, may I recommend this appreciation by a German scholar writing in English:

© Copyright 2026 Richard Kostelanetz, reproduced by permission. Source: KostelOmnibus on Substack 

Richard Kostelanetz by Leonid Drozner,

Exploiting a Typology?

Wifredo Lam - Rumblings of the Earth, 1950 

Staccato Onomatopoeia (text or typology?)

 

Zzzzzzz... 

First French rigid airship "Spiess" (1913)

 

Будет ласковый дождь - 1984 Soviet animation based on Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains"

A prose poem? An ultimatum? A theological treatise? A schismatist's enthusiasm for an eccentric myth?

"When Man faces doom from outer space, he must choose between escape to other worlds or life in giant cocoons."

Dean Vollmar - "A perspective on life, death, human consciousness, and the eternal nature of the soul"

 

Highbrow adventures in comparative choreography: Bob Fosse and Vito Paulekas

Bob Fosse: "The Aloof", "The Heavyweight", "The Big Finish" from Sweet Charity:

 

Meet Bob Fosse:

Vito Paulekas: "Invocation and Ritual Dance Of The Young Pumpkin":



Meet Vito Paulekas:

How Economic Power Shifted Over 200 Years

Please click HERE for discussion.

Source: Visual Capitalist

A Hermaneutic Fantasy: Prolegomena to Any Past Zenoic Proverbialness (repost, from April 14, 2016)

And now dear friend, I shall ask you to consider it possible to travel back through time upon the sedan chair of the imagination, so passing through an infinite number of moments to at last settle into a clear picture of what it is Zeno is saying, moreover with true proverbialness. We move back from one moment to the next, but only to encounter another moment, so on forever, as the number of moments is infinite, and thus the proverbialness we seek remains perpetually an unobtainable carrot at the end of an infinitely long stick.

(Kind thanks to Professor Hodges for allowing me to derive from his theoretical work on one-line poems the neologism "Zenoic Proverbialness.")

Preparing to Meet Zeno

Can the Human Condition be allegorized effectively? To what end?

Antony Williams - Intergalactic Castaway - oil on canvas

John Geraghty: an acrostic in the Hymn to Hermes

For some time now, Professor John Geraghty has been using AI to explore acrostics in Paradise Lost. Recently, he has been identifying acrostics in Chapman's translation of the Homeric Hymns:

Medieval Philosophy - Bryan Magee & Anthony Kenny

The appearance (verb) of an invisible tower, and that tower's appearance (noun)

            Naivete

Afar off an orchid tower

   Purple prose arranging

Mounting expectations

  Distant, arising, a spectacle

Coaxing a young soul

  Earnest and wild and breathing

Grasping a known unknown

    Credulous colors coalescing

An adhering moment viewing the future

   Persistent impression, fostering dreams

 

 

More? Please click HERE.

If the Invisible Tower was Visible

More? Please click HERE.