Art Katz Quotes

Moving toward a more harmonious way of life and greater resilience requires our active participation. This means finding ways to become more aware of and connected to the other forms of life that are around us and that constitute our food -- plants and animals, as well as bacteria and fungi -- and to the resources, such as water, fuel, materials, tools, and transportation, upon which we depend. It means taking responsibility for our shit, both literally and figuratively.

A sign that part of your spirit has vacated the premises of your body is when you feel constant boredom or sadness, or like something is missing from your life but you can’t figure out what it is. What is missing may be you!

Captain James Cook was famously credited with conquering scurvy (vitamin C deficiency) by bringing barrels of sauerkraut with him to sea and feeding it to his crews daily.

The problem with killing 99.9 percent of bacteria is that most of them protect us from the few that can make us sick.

Getting the vegetables submerged is the most critical factor for success in vegetable fermentation.

Are the acidifying bacteria in milk or the yeasts in grape juice our servants, or are we doing their bidding by creating the specialized environments in which they can proliferate so wildly? We must stop thinking in such hierarchical terms and recognize that we, like all creation, are participants in infinite interrelated biological feedback loops, simultaneously unfolding a vast multiplicity of interdependent evolutionary narratives.

2. Users of bells and whistles such as grapes and milk in their starter vs. flour-and-water minimalists. (Lest you reflexively award moral victory to the purists, note that the grapes side includes such heavy hitters as Nancy Silverton and the man Anthony Bourdain describes as “[God’s] personal bread baker.”) 3. Protective vs. permissive starter parents. (“The California gold rush prospectors made sourdough from whatever they had at hand. River water and whole grain flour. Maybe some old coffee. Hell, throw in some grapes. They fed it whatever they had, however often they could. None of this coddling the sourdough, giving it regular feedings, just the right amount of pablum. You ruin a good sour that way. Turns out to be weak and citified. Doesn’t have the gumption to properly raise a little pancake much less a loaf of bread. Nope.”) .

Recent study of beetle digestive tracts has found more than 650 distinct yeasts, at least 200 of which were previously unidentified,

This is a miracle of coevolution—the bacteria that coexist with us in our bodies enable us to exist. Microbiologist Michael Wilson notes that “each exposed surface of a human being is colonized by microbes exquisitely adapted to that particular environment.”21 Yet the dynamics of these microbial populations, and how they interact with our bodies, are still largely unknown. A 2008 comparative genomics analysis of lactic acid bacteria acknowledges that research is “just now beginning to scratch the surface of the complex relationship between humans and their microbiota.”22 Bacteria are such effective coevolutionary partners because they are highly adaptable and mutable. “Bacteria continually monitor their external and internal environments and compute functional outputs based on information provided by their sensory apparatus,” explains bacterial geneticist James Shapiro, who reports “multiple widespread bacterial systems for mobilizing and engineering DNA molecules.”23 In contrast with our eukaryotic cells, with fixed genetic material, prokaryotic bacteria have free-floating genes, which they frequently exchange. For this reason, some microbiologists consider it inappropriate to view bacteria as distinct species. “There are no species in prokaryotes,” state Sorin Sonea and Léo G. Mathieu.24 “Bacteria are much more of a continuum,” explains Lynn Margulis. “They just pick up genes, they throw away genes, and they are very flexible about that.”25 Mathieu and Sonea describe a bacterial “genetic free market,” in which “each bacterium can be compared to a two-way broadcasting station, using genes as information molecules.” Genes “are carried by a bacterium only when needed . . . as a human may carry sophisticated tools.”26

Life’s truths cannot always be reduced to 12-point Times Roman.

 Basic Rice Beer

the array of conditions for which probiotic therapy has been found to have some documented and quantifiable measure of success is quite staggering. Probiotics have been most definitively linked to treating and preventing diseases of the digestive tract, such as diarrhea (including that caused by antibiotics, rotavirus, and HIV34), inflammatory bowel disease35, irritable bowel syndrome36, constipation37, and even colon cancer.38 They have shown efficacy in treating vaginal infections.39 Probiotics have been found to reduce incidence and duration of common colds40 and upper respiratory symptoms41 and to reduce absences from work.42 They have been shown to improve outcomes and prevent infections

In our cultural collective imagination, the food safety threat that looms largest is botulism, the rare but often deadly neurological disease caused by botulinum, “the most poisonous substance known to humans,”2 a toxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum. Early

Given the War on Bacteria so culturally prominent in our time, the well-being of our microbial ecology requires regular replenishment and diversification now more than ever.

KRAUT PRAYER Eli Brown, Oakland, California Myriad beings beneath my sight, thank you for your transformations. May you nourish me as I nourish you. May you thrive in me as I thrive on the earth. In all the worlds may nourishment follow hunger as the echo follows the call.

As the 1970s drew to a close, and Commodore, Tandy, Altair, and Apple began to emerge from the sidelines, PARC director Bert Sutherland asked Larry Tesler to assess what some analysts were already predicting to be the coming era of “hobby and personal computers.” “I think that the era of the personal computer is here,” Tesler countered; “PARC has kept involved in the world of academic computing, but we have largely neglected the world of personal computing which we helped to found.”41 His warning went largely unheeded. Xerox Corporation’s parochial belief that computers need only talk to printers and filing cabinets and not to each other meant that the “office of the future” remained an unfulfilled promise, and in the years between 1978 and 1982 PARC experienced a dispersal of core talent that rivals the flight of Greek scholars during the declining years of Byzantium: Charles Simonyi brought the Alto’s Bravo text editing program to Redmond, Washington, where it was rebooted as Microsoft Word; Robert Metcalf used the Ethernet protocol he had invented at PARC to found the networking giant, 3Com; John Warnock and Charles Geschke, tiring of an unresponsive bureaucracy, took their InterPress page description language and founded Adobe Systems; Tesler himself brought the icon-based, object-oriented Smalltalk programming language with him when he joined the Lisa engineering team at Apple, and Tim Mott, his codeveloper of the Gypsy desktop interface, became one of the founders of Electronic Arts—five startups that would ultimately pay off the mortgages and student loans of many hundreds of industrial, graphic, and interaction designers, and provide the tools of the trade for untold thousands of others.

From the plethora of clairvoyant readings I have done for couples, I have ascertained that this transfer of emotions occurs commonly in relationships involving a partner, often the male, who has difficulty expressing emotions such as depression or anger. The partner who gives herself greater permission to express emotions will inadvertently begin to channel and eventually outwardly express this repressed emotion of her partner. Since it doesn’t really belong to her, she cannot deal with the emotion as effectively as she can with her own and may become quite unbalanced, even hysterical.

When you worry about what someone is doing (such as their choice of boyfriend) or try to convince them that they are wrong, what you are essentially doing is questioning God or the God within them. You are preventing them from learning the life lessons they may really need to learn. You may be pulling them off their true path. Even though you have the best intentions, you may be committing some major spiritual no-noes, and in the end this may severely backfire on you.

Humans going into altered states of consciousness all react the same way, no matter where they come from. It is part of the way the human brain is wired. There are three stages of altered consciousness that have been recognised by laboratory experiment (Lewis-Williams & Dowson 1989: 60–67). In the first stage, people see zig-zags, dots and whorls. In the second stage this develops into a deeper trance experience, and the subjects see and feel a world more familiar to them, and can hear water, experience thirst, etc. The third stage is the deepest, and people in deep trance talk about entering a hole in the ground and seeing ‘real world’ imagery of animals and people. These different stages have been recognised in the rock art: stage one with grids, zig-zags, mesh shapes (such as nets); stage two with nested ‘U’ shapes and buzzing (interpreted as beehives); stage three with snakes coming out of the rock face, people with animal heads, etc. This last stage accompanies visual images of trancers in the dance, which include the ‘bent-over posture’ assumed by the shaman when dancing, and bleeding from the nose, which would occur when the shaman was physically under stress when entering the spirit world (Figure 4.4). Interviews with shamans have reported that at the moment of the climax, the power shoots up the spine and out of the top of the head. This, among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen of Nyae Nyae, is called kia (Katz 1982), as we have seen in Chapter 3.

Culture begins with cultivating the land, planting seeds, bringing intentionality to cycles that we act to perpetuate.

And yet it was important that Zachary be squished. The kid had been given his own practice room, a cubicle space lined with eggshell foam and scattered with more guitars than Katz had owned in 30 years. Already, for pure technique, to judge from what Katz had overheard in his comings and goings, the kid was a more hotdog soloist than Katz had ever been or ever would be. But so where a hundred thousand other American highschool boys. So what? Rather than thwarting his father's vicarious rock ambitions by pursuing entomology or interesting himself in financial derivatives, Zachery dutifully aped Jimi Hendrix. Somewhere there had been a failure of imagination.

As a result of the War on Bacteria, our bacterial context is rapidly shifting. One bacterium formerly ubiquitous in humans, Helicobacter pylori, which resides in the stomach, is now found in fewer than 10 percent of American children and may be headed toward extinction.62 H. pylori has been associated with humans for at least 60,000 years, and there is evidence that closely related bacteria have lived in the stomachs of mammals since their emergence 150 million years ago.

Over the last fifteen years of working with Influencers, I have created, developed, tested, implemented, and refined my five‑step D.R.E.A.M. method, a combination of science and art to engage Influencers and ignite the Influencer Effect.

I agree with Art Katz who said, “The State of Israel exists not for its success but for its necessary failure;”[305] that is, that through the “death”[306] of the unbelieving and unrepentant political State the glorious “resurrection” of the prophetically promised Nation will come.[307] This is the inner-most meaning of Ezekiel’s vision of the “Valley of the Dry Bones” in Ezekiel 37.