The Subculture that Wasn't

Last Friday I was visiting with a friend who had just attended Movement: Detroit’s Electronic Music Festival and came back refreshed and effusive about everything she saw and heard. There was something genuinely touching about her enthusiasm, particularly the fact that she was sharing it with me, a longtime loather of rave music in all its micro-categories as well as a notorious cynic with regard to the utopian pretensions of the rave movement.

Rafael Behr unintentionally summed up the rave dilemma in his Guardian comment piece, Where are you, my fellow old ravers? “Imagine a formula for calculating the impact of a subversive youth culture. It would factor in the scale of moral panic, the effectiveness of subsequent hijacking by fashion and music industries and changes in values that were smuggled into the mainstream. Rave would come out as the biggest sell-out ever. Consumerism won hands down.” Indeed, such is the ubiquity of this music that for a few years it has been the staple of Guy Ritchie-style, pretentious action movie soundtracks. For a while it seemed like any kid with a computer was supposed to be a musician and any asshole with a record collection was supposed to be a DJ. It was dizzily wonderful until it became omnipresent and oppressive. Or, as Rafael sums it up,” Electronic dance music is part of Britain's audio furniture. It reverberates in bars and clubs, is the soundtrack to TV shows, adverts and radio jingles. And it always plays in gyms. It was there that I found myself pondering…the peculiar fact that this music was once illicit.”

Our nostalgic friend is specifically referring to Great Britain’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, which made it illegal to gather and listen to music comprised of repetitive beats. As a long-time freeform disc jockey, I was ever leery of the claims that raves were subversive, but such organized oppression certainly lent that illusion to embattled ravers. Also, it wasn’t really the music that was illicit as much as the widespread use of club drugs, particularly MDMA or “ecstasy.”

Like the ‘50s revival in the ‘70s and the ‘70s revival in the ‘90s, rave music is being recycled by the nostalgia machine. Thirty-something ravers, driven from dingy warehouses, open-air massives and “renegade” parties, are now flocking to dingy or glitzy bars to hear their favorite “illicit” music: oldies.

“But while the aesthetics of the 80s dance revolution colonised popular culture, the political consequence was tiny,” Rafael admits. So thoroughly did rave culture aggressively sell out that it is now the stuff of mainstream culture. Another friend, a keyboard player in a live House music band, told me that there was no such thing as selling out anymore. “That died with the ‘60s. I’m a professional musician. My goal is to sell out.”

It wasn’t more than a few years into the ‘90s that organized raves, by and large, closed ranks and abolished the short-lived tradition of “chill rooms,” where ambient and diverse downbeat music could once be heard. The tyranny of the beat prevailed, despite shrilly spurious claims to diversity. Dance party culture wasn’t really a culture or even a sub-culture. Purged of the incessant tennis-shoe-in-a-dryer beat, what is left? A faint echo of late ‘60s counter-culture garnished in a vaguely warm-fuzzy acronym: PLUR.

My friend who had just made her pilgrimage to Detroit seemed bittersweet about it all. She urged me to reconsider rave music festivals like Movement (which seems to be a most unfortunate choice of names) as being comparable to festivals like Burning Man or Flipside in Texas. And while I don’t doubt that she had some profound epiphany, it’s hard for me to compare rave conferences with DIY camping events that, in essence, do play host to a remarkable variety of music, art and culture. As a long-time observer of Bohemian movements, I can only hope that one day there will once again be viable counter-cultural movements that, even as they draw on inspiration from the past, present us with a startling freshness and purpose that is all too rare these days.

In retrospect, such outbreaks of social magic are inevitably ephemeral. We take for granted that the long festive nights will never end but eventually they do, only to return in another guise over time. It is only when they continue in lock-groove perpetuity that the law of diminishing returns takes over. And when that happens, we are forced to admit that another underground movement has passed or been positioned and merchandized. If we try to cling to it, instead of searching for new forms of expression and resistance, we find ourselves on the treadmill of nostalgia, lost in memory and identified as part of a marketing niche. It is in the unexpectedness of freeform expression that we may find new juxtapositions, gazing beyond the limits of mundane time and space so that all of history is celebrated along with the best speculative future we can conjure. Real diversity hasn’t had its day in court just yet.

Where have all the ravers gone? Where are all the “tribes” that once danced the weekend away in industrial no-go zones? Our forlorn pal Rafael answers these questions, but there is something of the epitaph in his response. “The repetitive beats are everywhere, but the rave generation is invisible. We pound out our hippy idealism on the treadmill.”

Requiem

It was unavoidable. Mobs of old guys are shaking their calloused fists and ranting about the goddamned good ol’ days when punk rock punched a hole in the sky and the ever-patient satellite of VALIS blasted us with its pinkly delicious message of cosmic love and cultural transgression. It was 1974. It was 1980. It was timeless. We were young and we would never die. There was rioting, fucking in the streets, non-musicians releasing amazing albums (which were still spun by specially trained bees out of vinyl with gatefold sleeves that shamed the Renaissance masters, goddammit!) and the unavoidable orgasmic bliss of shaking things up. This immediatist breach, to hear some rant, was the last time that real people made music that was so strange and baffling that Biz assimilation was just impossible. Out there, in the Wasteland where the tire-fires never stopped and the ruins of civilization so-called stood like sarsen stones above the 24/7 freakout, we did the St. Vitus dance and slammed our sweaty bodies together until the low brown clouds glowed with morning light or nuclear terminus. Somewhere in the dim cathode twilight we could still hear the existentialist mumblings of Peter Ivers before he was unceremoniously snuffed-out like a microcosmic cover-version of the heat-death of the universe. We gathered in squalid nightclubs, deranged, full of life, burning brighter and brighter until the inevitable fall, unsustainable but not giving a shit because we were outside of time. It was surely the culmination of an act of magick, decades in the making, weird old Harry Smith plucking the Monochord with a shellac plectrum, shaking feathered sticks and unearthing dinosaur-bones of mad, mad music from the bedrock, from beneath the floor, down there rattling like haints. Who’s down there? The devil! Arne Sarknussem! The Living Heads of Mu! Now we walk through this land of ghosts where well-coiffed fascists wield the razor of public relations, wondering how we lost the secret and when that weapon was turned against us, retooled, moneyed, omnipresent. It’s Crystal Night again. The Buzzcocks were right, seeing far into the hazy expanse of a 4th, 5th and 6th Reich hosted by kinder, gentler Nazis where the occluded spawn of morons would take refuge from genocide and corruption in superficial media-death. Now it seems like a lost dream, as if the Finnegans never woke and would never wake again. When these stories are told, younger eyes roll. There is nothing in their experience like this. The evidence still spins, vital, liberating. The Monochord still vibrates and if you find that foolish, quiet center inside of yourself, it will, sure-as-shit, fill with the old madness of a world gone by. There are techniques to defy mass-mesmerization, free spaces to be seized, inside and out. One day there will be music that, while strangely familiar, will move us in new ways, casting out ancient demons of control and once more setting us on that long, well-traveled road. Drink up, dear souls, for tomorrow may be the day. Like epopts, we will die before death and see with fresh eyes, hear with fresh ears. And the corruption that we shuffle off will fall like black snow, like ashes from the mouth of a harbinger.

Shhhh! Listen now…

Eat a Bowl of Freakies

Today is my birthday and I'm celebrating with the Freakies: Boss Moss, Hamhose, Snorkledorf, Grumble, Goody-Goody, Cowmumble, and Gargle.

10 Most Disturbing Films #5: The Haunting

Robert Wise’s adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House, remains possibly the best filmed ghost story to this date. It is included here because of Wise’s ability to engage the imaginations of viewers, an art that seems to have been almost forgotten in our tell all/ show all age.


"Hill House", which was Ettington Hall at the time but is now the Ettington Park Hotel.

The premise is an old one: a team of psychic investigators spend the night in a haunted house. But the film (as well as the novel) transcends the stock plot with memorable characters, among which we must include Hill House itself. Filmed in gloriously crepuscular black & white, with some exterior shots completed with infra-red film, The Haunting is claustrophobic, obsessive and gothic without losing is sharp, understated edge. Mousy, awkward protagonist Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris) is seduced by Hill House, its own madness inciting and exacerbating hers. She is drawn into its secret center even as it fills her with dread, just as we are.

It is a tribute to Robert Wise that he was able to use less to make more of an impact. We are frightened by what remains unseen, leaving our imaginations to fill in the blanks. What we hear at times is unsettling and suggestive, more so because it is also muffled and abstract. Humphrey Searle’s score is, by turns, bewitching and chilling, an ideal complement to this shadow-play. Precious few special effects are involved, quite different from the abysmal 1999 remake coughed up by Jan De Bont.

Unlike vintage radio drama, it is hard for film to engage the theater of the mind with the intensity that The Haunting does. It draws us into the shadows where we may hear or feel but seldom see. It invites us to plumb our own darkness and to summon our own ghosts. In doing so, it’s as subtly disturbing as our minds will let it be.

Negativland: It's All in Their Heads

Last Sunday night, I had the rare opportunity to see Negativland in Dallas at the Sons of Herman Hall. I have long enjoyed their provocative releases, lawsuit-related art, and the wit of their sampling compositions.

It was amazing to see their "live radio show" and the cooperative mixing that they do so well. I even put on the blindfold for a while and just listened, though if I hadn't taken if off for the last half of the show, I would have missed some wonderful visual gags. After a while, though, I noticed something missing: laughter.

Granted, there were a few really funny bits scattered throughout the night but ultimately the show, which included a massive amount of spoken samples from religious and secular media, became didactic and even strident. While part of the problem seems to have been that the samples themselves were didactic and strident, the show was reminiscent of those Negativland routines that stop being funny and become bang-on-the-head preachy, a word I use intentionally.

One may forgive the "band" their lapse in thinking that Dallas is still "the tightly clasped buckle on the Bible Belt" rather than the exciting and diverse global city it has become. It was apparent that they considered themselves in enemy territory, albeit with a crowd of friendly fans. While Negativland has often mocked religion to great effect, as with "Christianity is Stupid," the strain of issue polarization seems to have taken its toll. Granted, there were many thought-provoking samples filled with useful advice or ludicrous assertion, but after the 100th repetition of "God is dead," my eyelids started to feel heavy and Sunday night started to feel more like Sunday morning. Specifically, I think that I laughed more when I used to go to church as a kid.

Maybe it's the deadly serious business of thwarting busy-body fundamentalists and violent extremists that sucked the fun out of the room and left Negativland in reactionary black & white mode. The Message, which was pounded into the crowd with tedious regularity, is that religion is "all in your head." That's also the name of the tour, and converts are called "Headites." This would have been mildly amusing had the man one seat away from me not reacted to the show with Holy Roller enthusiasm, nodding and quaking and gesticulating wildy. It was a stark reminder that there is more to this discussion (or presentation) than belief versus atheism. Worse, if the show was any indication, we now have to grapple with the belief atheists have about what believers believe, naturally drawn from the craziest representatives.

Sure, it's all in your head (and mine) but what does that mean, exactly? Presently, science is still addressing fundamentals like the nature of consciousness and the neurophysiology of ostensible mystical experience. Putting it succinctly, we still don't understand our own capacities nor can science adequately address the subjective experiences that are claimed as gnosis, experiences of some Otherness arrived at through various means which cannot be conveyed through speech or text. Pending future findings and methodologies for approaching this dilemma, it's possible to see the emergent New Atheism as a creature that can't seem to shake its own dogmatism, with a sad tendency to ape the very worst aspects of religious fundamentalism. Like Reagan with the "war on drugs," Negativland and the New Atheists have closed the debate for us and wrapped it up with a bow of bombastic mockery.

And so I was shown the error of my own belief that I would be laughing that Sunday night. And the art of Negativland, presented with great skill, ultimately collapsed into polemic rubble of the sort that is now all too familiar to readers of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. With a few exceptions, the foibles of religion are depicted as if all religionists are crazed hillbillies and mouth-frothing lunatics. In the process Negativland seems to be inaugurating the First United Church of Atheism, the Headites. It would apparently be a gag if it didn't seem so very earnest. With plenty of unexamined assumptions and an Us versus Them mentality, Negativland is coming to your area with the New Dogma. It's as subtle as a blow to the head and about as funny.

Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon

(No worries- 10 Most Disturbing Films will resume soon. Also, look forward to future installments of Callithumped, Jugged and Punked)



Against the Day is unlike any other book I have ever read, and one that defies review. Thomas Pynchon’s latest epic tips the scales, packed with 1,086 pages of wonderful characters, marvels, and a tapestry of themes. Ostensibly a novel of revenge, AtD is also (among many other things) an extended rumination on various kinds of light, from the mundane to the esoteric. As the title implies, this is no glorification of spiritual Illuminism so much as a cautionary tale about excesses of light set against the consolations of night.

Taking place in the years prior to World War I, depicted as a sort of historical tipping point here, AtD explores many fascinating themes: Orphism, anarchism, espionage, the elusive nature of freedom, Utopian dreams, Shambala, secret societies, Tarahumara shamanism, peyote visions, doppelgangers, sexual escapades, emergent plutocracy, time travel, the 4th dimension, Icelandic spar, intelligent dogs, Gnostic inversions, Tarot trumps, super-weapons, Lovecraftian monstrosity, Bogomils, hollow Earth theories, Nicolai Tesla, Central Asia, the set of all sets that have themselves as a member, rembetica, fezzes, ukeleles…

The novel begins with the Chicago Exposition of 1893, and some of the best and funniest writing is devoted to this event. Here we first become aware that although this is a book that begins more than a century ago, it sheds a lot of light on our contemporary world and its problems. Much of Against the Day follows the lives of the Traverse family and their acquaintances. Webb Traverse, the patriarch, is an anarchist dynamiter who is done in by hired guns working for the mining company, the owner of which, Scarsdale Vibe, is the novel’s designated vile plutocrat. The task of vengeance falls to Traverse’s three sons, Kit, Reef and Frank. Traverse’s daughter, Lake, marries Deuce Kindred, the man who shot her pa.

This is an incredibly sprawling and tempestuous read. Erudite passages collide with goofy gags, spontaneous musical numbers and puns. Woven throughout the pages is a hilarious parody of juvenile adventure novels and pulps featuring a zeppelin crew of boy adventurers, the Chums of Chance, inspired by the likes of Tom Swift and Doc Savage. Theosophy is also lampooned as T.W.I.T., the True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys. Then there are the Visitors, who come from the future or possibly another dimension. “They have been crossing here, crossing over, between the worlds, for generations. Our ancestors knew them. Looking back over a thousand years, here is a time when their trespassings onto our shores at last converge, as in a vanishing-point, with those of the first Norse visitors.”

I will admit to my share of bafflement at much of the math, and confusion generated by a multitude of characters that pop in and out of the narrative like prairie dogs. In the beginning, I leaned heavily on the in-progress Pynchon wiki to help decode obscure historical references, foreign phrases and greater context. But in the last few hundred pages, I surrendered to the flow which carried me hither and yon beyond my wildest expectations.

One of the interesting things about finishing this book is rereading reviews of it. It seems that more than a few reviewers didn’t finish reading it and covered their retreats with bluster. One or two actually admit to skimming. Malcolm Jones of Newsweek arguably takes the best approach and serializes his review in an attempt to keep pace with the novel:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15771953/site/newsweek/

Having lived with this book for three months, I can’t imagine reading it on a deadline. It’s accessible even if one doesn’t run all of the references to ground, but I would recommend savoring it and doing a little bit of reference legwork. If it touches on a subject you happen to relish, you will find plenty of delightful in-jokes and references. But even without a compass, you can appreciate this wild and wide-ranging ride, by turns hilarious and horrifying, intimate and cosmic.

For those interested in Pynchon’s meta-fictional innovations, a running theme of doubling is woven through the book, along with the material symbol of doubling, Icelandic spar, which acts as a sort of mystical lens. Toward the end of the novel, the narrative splits off into an alternate fictional “reality,” one in which we discover the destinies of the major characters as they unfold there. Even in this alternate reality, one character makes an escape into yet another reality, where he is informed that he just returned from Shambala. Fans of the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics will find much to enjoy here.

As long as Against the Day is, I didn’t find myself wanting to skim pages or eager for it to be over. I savored the experience to the very last page, enjoying Pynchon’s ability to conjure so much in this play of light and darkness. Ultimately, the experience of reading becomes lysergic, phantasmagorical and transcendental. The novel, like Biblical Leviathan, swallows you whole and spits you out, exhausted but happy to be alive, on some strange beach.

The Esoteric Rocketman

(I will return to the 10 Most Disturbing Films shortly. In the meantime, I offer this literary intermission)

Many years ago, like an amateur rock-climber who impulsively decides to take on a mountain, I tried to read Thomas Pynchon's masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow (referred to by the 1974 Pulitzer Prize jury as "unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene"). I only made it through about 100 pages, but the challenge whetted my appetite. I enjoy literary puzzles, experiments and challenges, and learning the lessons encrypted in this book became a holy grail for me. I made two more attempts before I finally read the entire novel. I have since read it two more times, the last time with the aid of the invaluable Gravity's Rainbow Companion. Like Huckleberry Finn or Illuminatus!, Gravity's Rainbow is a book that grows with you and rewards your life experience and intellectual expansion. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this novel is the creation of rocket mythology, something Pynchon does with enormous insight inspired, in part, by Jacob Grimm's (of the Brothers Grimm) 4-volume masterpiece, Teutonic Mythology. This is carried out with complexity that falls beyond the scope of this blog, though it is worth mentioning that GR's anti-hero, Tyrone Slothrop (anagram for "sloth or entropy"), while on clandestine assignment in recently liberated France, assumes the identity of Rocketman, complete with a costume of white Zoot suit and conical hat. Among his other heroic duties, he liberates a cache of hash and engages in a pie fight in a hot air balloon. His destiny is bound with the emergent mythology of the rocket and a strange, secret ritual involving rocket 0000 and its payload.

Which brings me to another celebrated rocketman, the scientist/ occultist John Whiteside Parsons featured in "John Carter's" Sex and Rockets (Feral House, 2000). This meticulous study could well stand as a non-fiction sequel to Gravity's Rainbow, concerned as it is with rocket science, alchemy and the crossroads between the two disciplines. While this is plainly a journeyman effort, with uneven though enjoyable writing, the subject is fascinating and the book is exhaustive in telling its tale. The first half of the book concerns itself mainly with John/ Jack Parsons (born under the name Marvel) and his importance to the American rocket program, specifically with reference to the development of solid rocket fuel and JATO (Jet Assisted Take Off) technology that may have helped the allies prevail in WWII. He was also instrumental in the founding of Jet Propulsion Laboratories and a founding partner in Aerojet.

Carter argues convincingly that Parsons is the most important figure in American rocketry, and largely self-taught, at that. Simultaneously, his significance to the occult, specifically the Ordo Templi Orientis that was reconfigured by Aleister Crowley, is denigrated, depicting Parsons as a failed magician whose endeavor to bring about the incarnation of BABALON, the Great Whore of Biblical infamy, also revealed by John Dee in his Enochian workings, was undermined by ego and hubris. That Parsons attempted this with L. Ron Hubbard as his scryer makes the story irresistably juicy, packed with occult melodrama. That Parsons' fame was greater than his accomplishment, at least in the occult realm, is well-argued. However, one is left to wonder at the results of his Great Work. There is speculation that Parsons' BABALON working resulted in the advent of UFOs or the birth of the 1960s counter-culture. That Parsons was apparently swindled by L. Ron Hubbard, identified in Crowley's correspondence as a "confidence trickster," adds elements of sensationalism to the story. Hubbard reportedly took off for Florida with Parsons' girlfriend Betty and a lump sum of his cash, which was to be used to establish a business partnership between the three. Sex & Rockets reprints an explanation from the Church of Scientology alleging that Hubbard was employed to bust up America's hotbed of black magick, bringing Naval Intelligence expertise to the matter. In the end, Parsons is largely undone and in debt. Disillusioned with the OTO as the chariot of Thelema (Crowley's Hermetic philosophy summarized, "Do what Thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the Law, Love under Will") he quit the order, while remaining a student of the more secretive A.:A.:. Ultimately, he illegitimately took credit for the grade of Magister Templi. Having lived an incredibly full life, Parsons was killed by a mysterious explosion in 1952, followed by his mother's suicide by sleeping pill overdose mere hours later. Later, rather unsavory details are alleged concerning an incestuous relationship that existed between Parsons, his mother and her dog.

Much of the fun of this book is reading about the many notable figures who passed in and out of Parsons' life and his rooming house for eccentrics and free love, that also accommodated the Agape Lodge of the OTO for a time. Actor John Carradine is said to have read poetry at the opening of this Lodge, something missing in the details of the recently reviewed Hollywood's Hellfire Club (also Feral House). L. Ron Hubbard's pre-Scientology role is provocative and mysterious. A Who's Who of American rocket scientists is featured. The politics, trickery and melodrama of the Agape Lodge is diverting. And the book does a wonderful job of following Parsons' partner, "elemental" Marjorie Cameron, through a burgeoning counterculture, featuring cameos from Kenneth Anger to Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell.

In the end, the reader is left with several questions and the sense that the story has many holes left to be filled. The connection between Parsons' innovations in rocketry and his occult/ alchemical enthusiasms remains largely unexplored, though hinted at here and there. His legacy seems to be primarily literary and should remain safe with the publication of the concisely stated essay "Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword," which considers Crowley's magickal philosophy of Thelema as the vehicle for radical anarcho-libertarianism. His enceavors to bring about the incarnation of BABALON are discounted by Crowley, though, and Carter concludes that magically, Parsons was an egotistical failure who offers an object lesson for aspiring occultists. At the same time, though, he is credited with working harder than most at his occult work.

This is a fascinating study, amply documented (sometimes distractingly so), that carries a strange cargo of hard science and deep esotericism, much as Gravity's Rainbow does in its fictional framework. In the end, the failures of Parsons are as interesting as his successes. And his legacy seems to be a missing chapter of the rocket mythology painstakingingly created/ depicted by Pynchon. In closing, Carter offers a fitting epigraph from a science fiction story to the effect that Parsons was instrumental in bringing about the end of the world but the beginning of the galaxy. For me, the story is one best closed with the lyrics of the '70s band Jigsaw:

You, You've Blown It All Sky High
Our Love Had Wings To Fly
We Could Have Touched The Sky
You've Blown It All Sky High

Up Round I've Flown
Then Down Down Like a Stone

10 Most Disturbing Films #3: Sweet Movie

Years before the so-called “cinema of transgression” reared its head, Director Dušan Makavejev, who had been exiled from Yugoslavia for directing WR: Mysteries of the Organism, set the standard in this area with his Sweet Movie. There is something to repulse and disturb all but the most jaded sensibilities in this cinematic mind bomb: urination, emetophiliac vomiting, seduction of the innocent, murder, female masturbation in a vat of chocolate (cry, “Fire!”), communal idiocy, footage of the aftermath of the Soviet Katyn Massacre of 21,000+ Polish citizens in 1940, and a boat laden with sugar boasting the head of Karl Marx on its prow. Critics were outraged. Carole Laure, who plays Miss Canada in the film’s Miss Monde 1984 contest for beautiful virgins, walked off the set in disgust. Sweet Movie was subsequently banned in Canada(!) and many other countries. Many versions of the film were butchered, something addressed with its Criterion Edition release in 2007.

Sweet Movie has also been cited as a primary inspiration by David Hanson in creating the once-shocking Hallowe’en Disturbathon event hosted annually in Dallas, Texas for almost two decades. Prior to becoming a popularized fetish/ lifestyle showcase after Hanson’s departure, Disturbathon offered catharsis through ritualized transgression and disgust.

After winning the Miss Monde 1984 contest for “the most desirable, prominent, and well-preserved virgins,” a subversive send-up of beauty pageants, Miss Canada (Carole Laure) claims the prize of marriage to Mr. Kapital, the milk tycoon, played by John Vernon (Animal House’s Dean Vernon Wormer) who sanitizes her before urinating on her with his golden penis. She is next smuggled to Paris in a suitcase, where she meets El Macho (Sami Frey), a Latin pop star. They share a raw egg and get locked in intercourse. After being carted away in tandem by medics, Miss Canada falls in with an anarchist commune that practices therapeutic idiocy (similar to the “spassing” done by The Idiots in Lars Von Trier’s later film of that name), infantilism and other sloppy rites perhaps inspired by Makavejev’s fascination with Wilhelm Reich. Notably and logically, Otto Muehl of the Viennese Actionists appears in a moronic cameo here. When we next see Miss Canada, she is sploshing in chocolate for a television commercial, the culmination of the comingling of sex and capital in her life.

Next, the scene switches to the incredible candy-boat Survival, piloted through Amsterdam’s canals by the beautiful Anna Planeta (Anna Prucnal). After taking a sailor on as passenger, Planeta seduces him and then stabs him through the heart as they frolic in a bin filled with sugar. Later, she woos children on board and they meet a similar fate. We later see their tiny bodies, wrapped in plastic by the police, but they experience an unexplained resurrection and wander off from their bodies.

In his 1975 review upon the film’s New York release at the D.W. Griffith Theater, Vincent Canby sneered,”For a film so full of concern for the political and social sanity of man. "Sweet Movie" is, paradoxically, élitist. If one doesn't share Mr. Makavejev's knowldege of the history of Communism and Reichian psychology, much of it is incomprehensible.”

While many revile this film and its excesses, Makavejev is offering, among the nested horrors, a vision of transgressive, hedonistic freedom in his depiction of the communal banquet and ceremonies, albeit one that may not appeal to more than a few exotic freaks. Despite the bitching and grousing, Sweet Movie is an important film that takes many measured risks. Watching it more than three decades after its release, one can only be reminded that today’s filmic efforts suffer from more repression and censorship than was the case in the 1970s.

10 Most Disturbing Films: #1 Possession by Andrzej Zulawski

Director Andrzej Zulawski took all of the chaos, rage and confusion of his divorce and rolled it into this nasty treat. Though some insist that this incredibly intense drama doesn't qualify as a horror movie, the film's most notable sequences (of which there are many) all partake of the horrific, one way or another. That this has consigned a brilliant drama to a genre ghetto is regrettable but not altogether unappropriate.



Isabelle Adjani, who won a Gold Palm at Cannes for her unbelievably intense performance, plays Anna, a woman who is ready to divorce her husband Mark, a traveling spy based in Cold War Berlin, played despairingly by Sam Neill. Nor is she content with her strange lover, Heinrich, who is spastically eccentric and into occult sexual energy theories. It seems that the men in her life are driving her mad. But this doesn't quite explain what happens next as Anna gives birth in a subway tunnel to what turns out to be her own tentacled demon-lover.

There are many layers and possible interpretations to this film. In 1981, I saw the badly slashed 80 minute American release at the theater. I found it to be nonsensically disturbing and very hard to follow. It left me with that,"What the fuck?" feeling. Later, when I came across the Anchor Bay version that restored 30 minutes of plot, many of my questions still remained unanswered. There is much that is deliberately left open-ended and this, in many ways, increases the impact of the film, much in the same way that David Lynch's more obtuse efforts do. One is left to fill in the missing pieces with one's imagination.

With all of the horrific elements in play, it's hard to believe that the deepest impact comes from seeing a marriage disintegrate so spectacularly. This is the film's central horror, the dark, beating heart of the story. And it is a testament to the power of Zulawski's artistry and personal vision that Possession transcends the gimmickry-and-frisson that typifies horror cinema, even as it ultimately relies on that genre for marketing. The performances of Adjani and Neill are so strong and convey such excessive emotional turmoil that viewers may find it all quite exhausting. The experience is so involving and the acting so convincing that the appearance of the devilish love-squid squirming and pumping Anna in flagrante delicto almost seems like a natural development or even a lesser horror.

As if all this weren't quite enough, Adjani and Neill play their own dopplegangers, there is an open-ended espionage plot concerning a dangerous man with pink socks, and an ominous, eschatological ending coupled with unforgettable sounds. It's safe to say that there is no other film like Possession.

In "The Theater and Its Double," Antonin Artaud wrote a prescription that seems to have been filled by cinema in this case:

"I propose then a theater in which violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theater as by a whirlwind of high forces. A theater which, abandoning psychology, recounts the extraordinary, stages natural conflicts, natural and subtle forces, and presents itself first of all as an exceptional power of redirection. A theater that induces trance, as the dances of Dervishes induce trance, and that addresses itself to the organism by precise instruments, by the same means as those of certain tribal music cures which we admire in records but are incapable of originating among ourselves."

Because of its undeniable impact, bizarre vision, and depth that merits repeat viewings, Possession seizes the top spot on this list of Most Disturbing Films with its amorous tentacles.

Hollywood's Hellfire Club

Hollywood’s Hellfire Club- The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and “The Bundy Drive Boys”

By Gregory William Mank with Charles Heard and Bill Nelson

When I was a teenager, my best friend was cinephile who idolized the late Errol Flynn and W.C. Fields for their antic self-destruction. Taking his passion to extremes, my friend sociopathically immitated his heroes, drunkenly tearing up hotel rooms, treating women with abusive contempt, indulging in public tantrums, chronically lying his way in and out of bad situations and pranking anyone who crossed his path. I was a well-read, simmering young man, very cynical, late-blooming and only recently hatching out of a shell of chronic shyness. Wherever my friend went, there was sure to be excitement and this was something I sorely craved. So I studied his sociopathology and incorporated much of it into my teenaged skill-set. It was during this time that I read two books by Errol Flynn, My Wicked Wicked Ways and Beam Ends. I carefully considered Flynn's higher level of mayhem and soon came to the sound conclusion that indulgences like his were symptomatic of the dissolution and disgust that often accompanies fame, wealth and power. With this epiphany came the recognition that my friend was a son of wealth and power, if not fame, whose position insured that he was never really punished for the many transgressions he committed. I had no such safety net and, a few days after my 18th birthday, was jugged for "criminal mischief" committed by my friend. I spent the night in jail and was retrieved by my folks who brokered an agreement for us to repay damages. My friend brokered an agreement with my parents that they wouldn't tell his parents, a testament to his sociopathic abilities considering how angry my mother and father were. In the long run, my friend alienated almost everyone he knew and, when he ran out of rubes, he betrayed me and I ended the friendship sadder but a lot wiser. The last I heard of my erstwhile friend, he was burning out fast, in the grip of hard substance abuse problems, possessed of few friends, and suffering from paranoia. There is a pattern here that today's book considers at some length among my friend's ideological mentors.

Hollywood's Hellfire Club, despite the abundance of incredibly humorous anecdotes, is a very dark read, particularly toward the end. It is a rogue's gallery of conflicted artists, including the half-Japanese, half-German performance artist Sadakichi Hartmann,the wickedly satirical artist and forger John Decker, and writer Ben Hecht, collectively known with their cronies as the Bundy Drive Boys. There is an abundance of scandal in these pages: alleged rape, incest, violence, sexual hijinx, art forgery, statutory rape allegations against Flynn from a necrophile, and melodrama on the high seas. This meticulously researched book is a glimpse of Hollywood Bohemianism that, as the writers suggest, eclipses most wildness committed in the free-love 1960s. Many of these celebrities, afflicted with childhood father problems, relentlessly sought the kind of self-destruction that only wealth and booze can confer. And in the end, they alienated those who loved them and most of them died relatively early.

If you are looking for a read that will make you laugh until you shudder, this is it. As the story closes, the darkness gathers around pathetic alcoholics, actors who can no longer act, human liabilities and self-involved stars. While I have read no book that so excellently showcases the hedonistic depravity of Golden Age Hollywood, the writers are to be commended for not avoiding the consequences of such desperate living. Despite this, there is a closeness and cameraderie here that is quite genuine, a league of misanthropists who took solace from each other's company. There may very well have been a few errant hearts of gold in this tortured boy's club, as quite a few touching moments suggest. And much of the mischief recounted was afflicted on some very deserving targets.

In the wake of trash icons like Britney and Paris, the older school of celebrity dissolution and insanity seems positively dignified. There is so much to admire and even love about these men that their inevitable downfalls seem so much more tragic. And like them, Hollywood's Hellfire Club walks a fine line between inspired decadence and the darker corners of human anguish.

It is a journey well worth taking.

Anglicans on Mysterians

From The Christian Challenge: The Only Worldwide Voice of Traditional Anglicanism, Volume XLII, No. 3/ May-June, 2003

BUBBLING BELIEF: And here we thought we had just about heard it all.

It was a few months ago that we reported on a San Francisc group's ideas about "sacramental" drug use at an Episcopalian parish. Now we hear of a Dallas-area group known to treat nitrous oxide (laughing gas) as a sacrament- and to throw Jacuzzi parties. Welcome to the "Hot Tub Mystery Religion."

"It's adherents hold to no particular spiritual dogma, borrowing freely from such sources as Jewish mysticism, Roman paganism, Islamic heresy and experimental art," reports www.reason.com. "One of its founders has compiled a reading list for the faithful; it includes a collection of Tantric exercises, a text on Sufism, one of Philip K. Dick's Gnostic science fiction stories, and a novel by Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton."

Perhaps it is just the kind of "hot water" that Frank Griswold- ECUSA's presiding bishop of "pluriform" truth, who not long ago quoted a Sufi poet- wouldn't mind getting into.

Then again, the hot tub faithful are said to number well under 100 practitioners- not exactly a socially influential force. That would never do for the boy from Bryn Mawr.

The story, by the way, notes that the Jacuzzi group, while part of a wider syncretic trend, is unusual because it is so radical. "Most people do not feel the need to be the authors of their own religions," said reason,"though quite a few are happy to be the editors." Yeah, we've noticed that.

***End of Article***

What is particularly interesting about this little barb is the pretense that there is anything unusual in the idea that drugs, particularly certain plants and fungi referred to as entheogenic, can be sacramental. Indeed, many scholars suggest that the kykeon elixir of the mysteries was a psychedelic blend.

As for nitrous oxide, William James ,the father of modern psychology, wrote of his laughing gas experience in terms that echo the mystical experience of coincidentia oppositorum ,"It is impossible to convey an idea of the torrential character of the identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this experience. I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written during the intoxixation, which to the sober reader seem meaningless drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire of infinite rationality. God and devil, good and evil, life and death, I and thous, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantity and quality, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, vomiting and swallowing, inspiration and expiration, fate and reason, great and small, extent and intent, joke and earnest, tragic and comic, and fifty other contrasts figure in these pages in the same monotonous way. The mind saw how each term belonged to its contrast through a knife-edge moment of transition which it effected, and which, perennial and eternal, was the nunc stans of life. The thought of mutual implication of the parts in the bare form of a judgement of opposition, as "nothing--but," "no more--than," "only--if," etc., produced a perfect delirium of the theoretic rapture."

The Christian Challenge's witty religio-cultural denigration seems to be part of the largely unquestioned war against indigenous folkways perpetuated by the Roman Christian Church and its Protestant variants. One need only consider the fate of indigenous peoples and their entheogenic traditions at the hands of this tradition's staunch defenders to see one culmination of such marginalization. Stick with bread, folks, and let us tell you what God meant.

Lluvia Acida visits Tlön

Inspired by the novel "La Segunda Enciclopedia de Tlön" by Sergio Meier, from the Lluvia Acida CD Audioficciones.

¡TLÖNISTA!

“Who are the inventors of Tlön? The plural is inevitable, because the hypothesis of a lone inventor-has been unanimously discounted. It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers . . .”

-Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

Our world has long been mythologized by some as a metaphysical Prison, a Gnostic nightmare in which human beings have been incarcerated as slaves or indentured servants with assigned numbers. Such a claustrophobic, seemingly paranoiac premise inspired some of the most talented artists of the 20th century. Franz Kafka masterfully depicted the nightmarish aspects of this phantom penal system in several works, while Joseph Heller (in Catch-22) and Thomas Pynchon (in Gravity’s Rainbow) studied its paradoxical bureaucracies, secret societies and metaphysics. With the advent of Situationism, artist Guy Debord charted the shift from Prison to “Spectacle.” The Spectacle is seemingly more mall than prison, a world in which every desire must be channeled into thoughtless consumer impulses while hypnotic media imperatives ooze out of every conceivable outlet. For his brilliant television-defying epic The Prisoner, Auteur Patrick McGoohan brilliantly satirized this aspect of modern life when he created an allegorical though recognizable Prison called “The Village.” And speculative fiction writer Philip K. Dick spent years unraveling his own Gnostic epiphany of a Roman Empire which continues to dominate human beings everywhere (“The Black Iron Prison”) and its divine antithesis that will one day penetrate reality and undo this menace (the “Vast Active Living Intelligence System”).

In the last century of the second millenium C.E., the implications of this Prison myth mutated with the advent of certain technological developments: television (originally presented as the “iconoscope”), electronic surveillance, telecommunication, and ubiquitous computerization. While it must be noted that technological progress presents us with tools which are intrinsically neither good nor evil, to even question the wholesale acceptance of technological trends in some quarters is to risk being branded a reactionary or Luddite. In our rush toward an ill-defined Technotopia, only “heretics” question what impact these advances will have on our cultural and physical environment as well as on our brains. As Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, grandfather of televangelism, stated bluntly, “Radio is like the Old Testament, inasmuch as it is hearing without seeing. Television is the New Testament, for in it the Word is made flesh and dwells in our living rooms.”(1)

At its core, the Gnostic Prison myth is a tale of social control by a self-appointed elite class, depicted as either earthly or cosmic, bureaucrat or archon. Fortunately, this snug-fitting myth is often coupled with another idea: that escape from this prison is possible and that there are secret histories to guide us. More than this, it may be possible to liberate and reshape this world.

In the first part of John Crowley’s Aegypt cycle of novels, a book-within-the-book tells us, “But history is made by man. Old Vico said that man can only fully understand what he has made, the corollary to that is, that what man has made he can understand: it will not, like the physical world, remain impervious to his desire to understand. So if we look at history and find in it huge stories, plots identical to the plots of myth and legend, populated by actual persons who however bear the symbols and even the names of gods and demons, we need be no more alarmed and suspicious than we would be on picking up a hammer and finding its grip fit for our hand, and its head balanced for our striking…The story remains; and if it changes, and it does, it is because our human nature is not fixed; there is more than one history of the world. But when we believe that we have proved that there is no story, that history is just one damned thing after another that can only be because we have ceased to recognize ourselves.”(2)

There can be as many secret histories as there are thinking people. In fashioning such histories for ourselves, from hidden and neglected sources, we not only discover more about our world but also learn much about the worlds within us. The novels written from such explorations are a unique, deeply personal type of meta-fiction, charting not only neglected paths into the past but also exploratory attempts showing possible futures and strategies for achieving them: The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton; The Aegypt Cycle of John Crowley; Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed; Illuminatus! by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson; Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco; The Jerusalem Quartet by Edward Whittemore; and even the hidden history gumbo of Grant Morrison’s graphic epic, The Invisibles.

But it was Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges who broke radically new ground with his meta-fictional story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” This curious story meticulously details the not-so-subtle invasion of our world by the culture and philosophies of another hidden (or perhaps spurious) realm. The beachhead of this invasion is a single entry from a possibly apocryphal encyclopedia said to be written in English, funded and directed by an eccentric American millionaire named Ezra Buckley. Elsewhere in the story, the mad scheme is traced to alleged Rosicrucian philosopher John Valentine Andrae. In its entirety, the encyclopedia supposedly fills forty octavo volumes bound in Yellow Corinthian leather and embossed with the legend “ORBIS TERTIUS.”

In this story, Borges not only toys with the role of fiction, he uses it as a vehicle for the subversion of mundane consensus reality. The shifting depths of the story require creative, interactive hermeneutics even as they subject the reader to Tlönist memes. The idea of indoctrination by exposure to a text can be viewed as a mere literary fantasy, of course. But one may also consider it as an astute anticipation of the discovery (creation?) of memes and a brief manual for metaprogramming reality.

According to Borges: “The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.”

Here is a revolutionary praxis for the aspiring Tlönista movement: the penetration/ reconstruction of our world from an Imaginal(3) source, in the sense that Henry Corbin coined the term.

If an invasion from the Imaginal realm seems unlikely, consider that Orson Welles handily mounted a Martian invasion that wrought prankish havoc while playing with belief and symbol systems. He also deftly adapted Kafka’s The Trial. Similarly, the unknown artists of the original German Rosicrucian Brotherhood sewed fantastic oats which grew and yielded many harvests. As Napoleon mused, “The truth is not half so important as what people believe to be true.” On one level, it could be presumed that Napoleon was insulting the gullibility of the masses. But to Tlönistas his remark could be a tribute to the power of belief and imagination to change the world. Shakespeare’s magical assertion that the “world is a stage” insinuates that existence may be enhanced by those working diligently in the dark to change the scene.

If the simulated reality is indeed a Prison, then the Tlönistas are its escape artists. They are also architects of possibilities and implementers of dream stuff. Whereas the Gnostic Archons seek to impose a restricted illusion of reality on human beings, the Tlönistas are Anarchons of almost unimaginable freedom and creative fulfillment. With the claws of moles, they dig their secret tunnels. Blessed with secret wings, they soar above internment of body and spirit. Pouring through forgotten books, they re-edit the shape of history. Their dream blueprints unfurl like magic carpets in sub rosa sanctuaries. With energized craftsmanship, they will forge and implement ideas which interpenetrate the mundane world and resonate in sympathetic minds. Once unleashed, such ideas unfold subtly yet tenaciously until they take root and sprout into manifestation.

And all the protection their endeavor requires is that it is, by ordinary standards, completely preposterous and unbelievable.

¡Tlönista!

1.Quoted in PR! A Social History of Spin by Stuart Ewen, 1996, BasicBooks, NY, NY.
2.Aegypt by John Crowley, pgs. 75-76, Bantam Spectra, 1987, NY, NY.
3.“We observe immediately that we are no longer reduced to the dilemma of thought and extension, to the schema of a cosmology and a gnoseology limited to the empirical world and the world of abstract understanding. Between the two is placed an intermediate world, which our authors designate as 'alam al-mithal, the world of the Image, mundus imaginalis: a world as ontologically real as the world of the senses and the world of the intellect, a world that requires a faculty of perception belonging to it, a faculty that is a cognitive function, a noetic value, as fully real as the faculties of sensory perception or intellectual intuition." From Mundus Imaginalis: Or The Imaginary and the Imaginal by Henry Corbin, Golgonooza Press, 1976.

Callithumped, Jugged and Punked, Part Two

Whence came punk rock? In his grand tome Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus argues convincingly (or at least appealingly) that its philosophical roots can be found in the great heretical social revolts of the Middle Ages, with particular emphasis on the Movement of the Free Spirit, citing Situationist Raoul Vaneigem’s astounding study of the same name. “Today, so many years later, the shock of punk is that every good punk record can still sound like the greatest thing you've ever heard,” Marcus gushes. His secret history of subversion is an imaginative, tasty literary gumbo flavored not only by centuries-old heresies but also by early 20th century radical art movements including Dadaism, the Lettrist International, and the aforementioned Situationist International. Along with charting a kind of punk spirituality, he sheds light on the often overlooked fact that much of early punk, while frequently shocking and outrageous, was also intellectually stimulating and creatively groundbreaking at a time when rock & roll was largely mired in a Beatles-inspired symphonic tar-pit.

Jeffrey Lewis’s brilliant History of Punk on the Lower East Side posits that punk was hatched from Magician Harry Smith’s roots record collection, inspiring hilariously crass jug band revivalists The Fugs and Holy Modal Rounders, just for starters. Between the minds of Marcus and Lewis a curious synergy takes place, one that recasts history as a creative and sometimes speculative endeavor which posits a chain of transmission for punk gnosis. Surely, between them, a kinship of spirit emerges from seemingly diverse cultural sources culminating in a style of music that was so effectively subversive that it remains conspicuously absent from most 1970s revival radio stations. Traveling back in time from this decade, the signposts of a perennial explosion of social inversion appears not only in music but also in spirituality and social movements of yore like the Levellers, Ranters and Diggers.

If we stick to the history of recorded music, there is no shortage of exemplary anarchic spirit like that found in the chorus of Blind Willie Johnson’s Old Testament growl “Tear This Building Down” (recorded in Dallas, Texas on December 3, 1927) which seems as proto-punk in its way as any MC-5 song, its lyrics as nihilistic as anything howled by an inspired Ranter. Even when humorously re-imagined by pop genius T-Bone Burnett, the lyrical edge of the refrain still slashes across its peppy pop arrangement like a razor:

“If I had my way
Well, if I had a, a wicked world
If I had a, ah Lord, tear this building down.”

Johnson's refrain echoes down the decades, inspiring new generations of raw, self-taught musicians to take up the hammer with wit and gusto.