Afternoon???

Morning?

Afternoon?

The only reason I know its not night is the sun is out, otherwise who knows.

Hard to get the old brain working right now, I'm really just writing because I've found if I write first thing when I wake up I have an easier time doing it throughout the day. I know thats the kind of thing you always read in writing technique books, or teachers tell you and it seems like, well not necessarily like a falsohood, but it seems like it doesn't really add up. At least it always did to me. But yeah, either its become true as I've gotten older and matured as a writer (after all, writing is now my main source of artistic expression, being 3k miles away from all the people I used to make music with) or, more likely is that it has been true all along and I've just been too stubborn to see it.

I'm listening to Cypress Hill III: Temples of Boom. After I added the icon below and looked at the release date I was struck by a strange synchronicity. Released Halloween, '95. I got off work at 4AM last night/this morning and spent the following 4 hours working on one of my scripts and drinking Sierra Nevada, all the while listening to Alice In Chains eponymous final album, reveling in its dark and twisted glory. Guess what? Also released in 1995. That was a rich time creatively for the music industry in general. Grunge as a buzz word was dying, but the truly great bands that had gotten umbrella-ed under the term had evolved anyway. Alice was, in my opinion, the best of them. Alot of people didn't like the '3-legged dog album' but from the first time I heard it I was in love. I mean, Dirt is an undisputed masterpiece, but on that final album, the next album proper after Dirt, things had worsened for Layne Staley and you could hear the dark and twisted rings of his soul come through in the music. People I knew complained of his lack of effort with the lyrical content of the album (case in point always being 'Nothin' Song') but I have always thought they were great, really showing how his own path had gotten so disembodied and frightening, right down to the horrors of the simplest tasks of everyday life (and here I'll use others' bane, the aforementioned 'Nothin' Song' to illustrate. Fear of interacting with his cat to the point that he may kill it, whether maliciously or out of dazed neglect I don't know, but its fucking disturbing regardless).

Now, Temples of Boom is, to me, the Hill's Masterpiece. Fuck what the world calls goth, this is potentially more goth than what is grouped beneath that for the most part misleading label. Released on Halloween no less! What hip-hop artist does that? I mean, and this album was made to freak people out. And it works. At the time it came out I was smoking pot all the time and I remember the first time I listened to this it virtually left me physically ill. Disturbed. The tones and timbres are all dark and ethereal; haunting organs hang in the air like blood red velvet curtains, low end bass creeps like goblins stalking you in a rain-soaked alley, disonate piano chords strike and ebb, strike and ebb, like a knife brandished for murder. And then there's B-Real's stark, raw vocal attack. Intense, violent and frankly, unnerving. When he sings about having illusions and then goes into the violence of Boom Biddy Bye Bye you get the very real impression that this guy is living in a very different place then most others who rap about partyin' and violence - everyone else seems a bit too boisterous and outlined to be real. But B-Real, well, it sounds like the demons he exorcises and infects his listeners' world view with are indeed real, and just possibly waiting around the next corner...

The Ocean Collective

Awesome fucking band from Germany. This video is amazing.

"In a world where new genres unfold like the labrythine corridors of dreams...'

Really, I am losing my ability to even process the 'genre' aggregate machine that now inhabits most of our brains. New finds:

Cuddle Core? Sounds like Bjork singing for a Sesame Street-sponsored version of DDR:



Witch House, aka Ghost Wave, aka Chill Wave, aka Drag, aka whatever; I like some of this and am not completely against the idea of 'genre-izing' it with an atmosphere setting term like Witch House, but this proliferation of names is a bit hoighty-toighty for something that is essentially a bedroom-version of what My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult did before they took the suck pill (ie just after Confessions of a Knife, which is their masterpiece. I'll use a Salem track here because they seem to be the progenitors, even if all their stuff is starting to sound the same to me.

The Many Faces of Greg Duli

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...

Burial & Kode9 Throw a Farewell Mix For Radio 1 Mainstay

http://www.mediafire.com/?t09r1c7swgxctpu

Mary Anne Hobbs, BBC Radio 1 herald of many of the experimental music we enjoy today as music rats broadcast for the final on Thursday, September 9th. For the broadcast Hobbs had the enigmatic Burial, enigma of the electronic world, and Scottish maestro Kode9 mix/remix tracks for about 35 minutes. Link above. Great stuff.

Cheers to a fellow music explorer.

Peter V. Brett's The Warded Man

What can I say, I'm a gluttonous reader. I read constantly, and while I am always looking for new authors to love (and when I find them I love the hell out of them and espouse their virtues to everyone that will listen) I do not woo easily. Since starting work at the bookstore I have become what I commonly refer to as a Fiction/Lit snob.

I love fiction, but mostly the kind of stuff that does not end up in a genre section.

I didn't mean for this to happen. Quite the contrary. I've always loved the idea of Science Fiction, Fantasy and especially Horror. Unfortunately though a lot of the stuff that ends up in those sections is written specifically to be in those sections. Target Market. So over the last couple years I've augmented my bouts of quantum physics and the Occult with David Foster Wallace, Alex Garland, Irvine Welsh, Chuck Palahniuk and more and more what I find in the Fiction/Lit section. I always buy the new China Mieville the day it comes out, and some customers have introduced me to authors such as Glenn Cook, but SciFi/Fantasy always seems so far away. And I was just about to begin re-reading Martin Amis' brilliant London Fields (for the first time in 10 years) the other day when into my store walked Peter V. Brett and his agent.

I didn't know Mr. Brett's work. When he came in and asked to sign copies of his new book I had no idea what The Desert Spear was at first. Then he asked the magic question and a conversation began between us.

Mr. Brett: "Do you read fantasy?"

Me: "Actually, I hate most fantasy."

Now, this is my knee-jerk response. I wasn't doing it to wind the man up, I just cannot mask the intolerance I hold for all of those wannabe Tolkiens that fill that damn section with all manner of the derivations of Tolkien's frankly over-rated formula. What formula, you ask?

1 Part dragons
1 Part Knights
1 Part Orcs/Giants/Elves
1 Part Chivalry

You get the idea.

No fucking thank you. And the whole Medieval thing... it's fine if it's sincere but somehow it always just feels like what is expected. And maybe that's my biggest beef with these genres - a lot of the authors working within them seem to write to the expectations of the genre fans. Like metal heads afraid to lose the double-bass kick drum or actually sing instead of screech and howl, genre writers can follow a formula and be safe because there's enough people who can't stop trying to relive the way they felt when they first read Tolkien.

Well, I am happy to say that as much of an arsehead as I may have come off as to Mr. Brett and his agent, he didn't give up on me. He told me his stuff was fantasy, apocalyptic to an end, but also not what I would call Tolkien-esque.

"In my books the end of the world is caused by demons."

Demons... I have to admit, he had me. This seemed like such a good idea. It has horrific potential, yet also a flair of the genre pomp. The struggles of the remaining few in a world otherwise dead, fighting to survive, forced back into the old ways, not remembering the age of science and progress. Sort of like Stephen King's Dark Tower series, which I read growing up and LOVE.

Mr. Brett and his agent were in a hurry, on their way to a con out of the states, but something about him really piqued my interest. Number one both were damn nice guys, and number two, as readers of this blog and more specifically my chud.com Opinionated Bastard blog will no doubt know, despite appearances I am not a pessimist. I'm always looking to Love something new. On their way out Mr. Brett handed me a copy of his first novel, The Warded Man (turns out once I saw the cover I remembered I'd sold all three of the HC's of The Desert Spear several days before and was waiting for a replenishment shipment) and as soon as I went to lunch I cracked that fucker open and you know what?

It's really, really good. Really.

Mr. Brett's world is dark and dangerous; feudal and tainted by humanity's desperate attempts to survive. It's hardworking and occasionally joyful but most of all it is difficult. Difficult because every night when the sun goes down demons rise from the bowels of the land and massacre every living thing they can get their talons on. And this isn't just a scenic setting. Nope. Mr. Brett uses the harsh realities of this world to shape some really well-written and memorable characters (Arlen!!!) and 160 pages in I LOVE THIS BOOK!!!

Sorry Martin Amis, Keith Talent and the boys will have to wait...

"Something Trying To Tell You Someone..."

I'd been meaning to do it for quite some time, I even began several quickly-aborted attempts. However after burning through Grant Morrison's mind-bending run on the Batman titles recently I found myself in an interesting synesthetic-crossroads: my aural leanings coalesced with my thirst for more comics, more old school Vertigo comics and I found myself popping in Meat Is Murder by The Smiths and opening the first issue of Grant Morrison's Gothic storyline that ran waaay back in 1990 in then third monthly bat-book Legends of the Dark Knight. I had only recently begun to expect that these two works, both on the surface intended for different senses, would work together in a very symbiotic relationship. The Headmaster's Ritual a perfect audio-accompaniment to following a young Bruce Wayne into the hellish inner-workings of an upstate New York British-style private school, the echoes of Morrissey's musings on life and loss the perfect condiment for the unraveling of an ancient, heretical plot that would, in retrospect, seem far more Vertigo than regular DCU. After Gothic I needed more. Naturally I moved toward the place on my shelf where Morrison's award-winning Arkham Asylum sat. Then I stopped myself. I changed discs to The Queen Is Dead and cracked the spine of Neil Gaiman's Preludes and Nocturnes and vowed I wasn't coming up for air until I'd finally re-read the entire Sandman series, something I'd never done before. I wasn't sure what to expect exactly, this time through with The Smiths as my guide, but I knew I was bound to unearth even more fleeting associations and hidden messages, as I realized Sandman is most definitely the work of a Smiths fan.

...................

I'm relatively new to Smiths-obsession land. Not quite a year ago I tumbled head over heels into addiction after flirting with fandom for the better part of a decade but never quite moving beyond the admittedly lame, 'yeah, How Soon Is Now is great and everything else I've heard is pretty cool too...' Then I got it. I don't really know what exactly happened to cause me to 'get it', but I did. I'm sure it had something to do with the fact that I suddenly found myself around their music a lot more because new co-workers played them obsessively. But through repetition the tunes began to work their magick on me. I asked to rip a disc or two*. I received Meat Is Murder. I began to explore...

Also around this time a good friend of mine who had taken a leave of absence from work to deal with 'health issues' resurfaced – on his death bed. I clung to Morrissey and the boys for bitter support as my friend withered away, drifting in and out of contact with those who would eventually inform me of his death. I'd lost a lot of friends before, but something about this one... it was very difficult in what felt like a decidedly more profound way. I can remember the symbiotic relationship the lyrics to The Joke Isn't Funny Anymore's refrain developed to my own interaction with and interpretation of Death. The shimmering guitars and lilting bass drifted over the entrancing drums as Morrissey's voice echoed the perfect arrangement of langual dress for an archetypal human experience/fear/event. And somewhere in it all I thought of Neil Gaiman's Sandman and realized that I had heard this music before. That I had seen, as a third person voyeur, this magnificent sorrow somewhere else.

This was because Neil Gaiman had no doubt heard it too; been a massive fan most likely, as had Grant Morrison, maybe Jamie Delano – the old Vertigo crew. I realized that just as I had experienced a synesthetic-rush with The Cure and Joy Division when reading Sandman back in high school, or James O'Barr's The Crow, or Hellblazer, or Swamp Thing, the same was happening now with The Smiths as a new lens to reveal hidden facets to these stories from the post-Reagan/Thatcher era - the time of AIDS and Looming Nuclear Obliteration and MDMA. I was a kid in the 80's so I didn't quite get what was going on – for many years afterward the 80's was a decade best left in the past. This was because as a kid my associations with it were hyper color clothes and dana carvey, lisa lisa & cult jam and other such atrocities that I was exposed to as a pre-teen without an older sibling, left to establish my tastes on my own, sifting through the garbage spoon-fed to the masses on the radio and tv, until I was first able to pick up the trail that led me to any kind of an 'underground'. I didn't find The Smiths, or The Cure or any thing else like them until high school. My earliest underground was metallica and the satan-streaked roads of heavy metal, long since sullied and exposed for the douche baggery that it was (for the most part). But I eventually found this stuff and realistically it was because of its influence on comics and comics influence on me.

Because I had grown up with comics it was there that I did my first experimenting. Even while still imbibing the music of the masses I was slowly breaking away from the GIJOE and X-men components of my comic book taste, my mom often waiting outside Heroland comics in Worth, Illinois where some days I would spend over an hour browsing – looking for something new, something I'd not yet experienced. Vertigo as a housing apparatus for the darker tales was still a few years off and I remember titles like Watchman and Stray Toasters teasing me with dark, jagged art the likes of which I was not yet experienced enough to appreciate (fuck you rob liefield) but nonetheless still endlessly enthralled with. Not enthralled enough to fork out the $3.50 or whatever cover price the 'Prestige Format' books commanded then ($10 allowance? $5? I don't remember but it had to be stretched in that comic shop and as such risks were rarely taken in those days). In retrospect I believe it was a few years later when the Batman books first brought me into my appreciation of that darker, more urban tone that I am still obsessed with today. Around the release of that first Tim Burton Batman film DC really ramped up the output, leading up to the hullabaloo of the film with many one-shots and Prestige releases, many portraying an increasingly darker atmosphere for the character. You can say this began in 1986 with Frank Miller's classic Dark Knight Returns, but from there we received Batman: The Cult, Gotham By Gaslight, Morrison's Arkham Asylum and soon after (and to tie this back around to the beginning of the post) Morrison's Gothic, originally published in Legends of the Dark Knight issues 6-10.

This was a story I read monthly, and re-read over and over again for years. To this day I believe it is the best Batman story in existence as well as the template, in my own personality, that flipped the switch and suddenly made me understand something about the potential of comic books as a medium, not just superhero exploits or serialized adventures. Gothic is every bit the epic Gothic Romance it shadows; a literary work of visual art that takes one of the most iconic American superhero characters and transmutes him into an occult figure worthy of Marlowe, Blackwood, Chandler or William Hope Hodgson. Whats more, Klaus Janson's art was the perfect template for me to perceive comic art as something more than explosive, rippling perfection. There is a scratchiness to Janson's art, especially in Gothic, that serves to create a darker, more urban and horrific sense of ambiguity that allows the reader's own nightmarish associations of fear to creep in and finish the pictures for them. You don't need everything blue-lined and outlined and rendered shiny and perfect. Leave that to traditional comic narratives. Janson's art, like that of The Sandman's Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg and later Kelley Jones, is rough and dark because to a degree it carries with it that unfinished nature that helps it haunt you.

And that's what I found, last Autumn as my friend was dying and my own mortality seemed ever-so-much more impending, that The Smiths music does.

It haunts.

And suddenly I understood all of those Smiths and Morrissey obsessives - the people who only listened to The Smiths in High School (because a lot of them were probably exposed to it at developmentally difficult times by older siblings); the folks at the Morrissey conventions; the punks in 1989 that I just didn't understand as they popped Naked Raygun out of the cassette deck and fired up Louder Than Bombs. They were haunted.

And now I am too. And I have a lot of wonderfully creative people to thank for it. Thank You Neil Gaiman. Thank You Steven Patrick Morrissey. Thank you Robert Smith, Ian Curtis, Simon and Klaus Janson, John Ridgway and Jamie Delano and all of the other creators that established that beautifully dark world I can still evoke with the right combination of your music and pictures, words and melodies.

Most of all I am moved to say thank you to my mom and dad, for waiting so patiently all those evenings I spent hours investigating what else the comic shop had to offer besides Adamantium claws and Cobra Officers**.

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* I only had The Queen is Dead and Rank, which I'd purchased in the earlier part of the previous decade during the period of two ro three years where I worked an ongoing and fairly elaborate Magickal Ritual that entailed my buying two records a week as an offering to the Music Industry as a God, Egregore, whatever. The end result of that ritual is still, to some degree, in question.

** Not that there's anything wrong with Cobra.

Cee-Lo

A little something lighter in tone. Funny, often appropriate, but soulful as all hell.



Although I've loved that first Gnarls Barkley album the 2nd one, 'The Odd Couple' has taken some getting used to. It's good, great even, but it hasn't quite grabbed me as totally as St. Elsewhere. That began to change when I became obsessed with Breaking Bad last year and they used the second track on the album in the season finale for season one. Admittedly I've not given 'The Odd Couple' the amount of time I gave the first – that's all time and place for me. Depends on what atmosphere I'm into at the moment. Before spiraling into my current Smiths/Joy Division jag to accompany a re-reading of the entire Sandman series by Neil Gaiman I was kinda hot on a soul kick and Gnarls fit perfectly. However that was interrupted by the dour British factory rock...

I know next to nothing about Cee-lo. This is a pretty good place to start. However further investigation will have to wait, as I'm back off to the Dreaming.

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* Read an older interview with Thomas Golubic, the music supervisor on Breaking Bad, where he talks about the selection of Gnarls Barkley's 'Who's Gonna Save My Soul' here:

http://blogs.amctv.com/breaking-bad/2008/03/interview-with-thomas-golubic.php

Dear Nick Cave

I love you. This is the greatest music video in the history of music videos.

Thank You

Amen

Untitled Post

(The post below was something I found in my unpublished drafts. I have absolutely no idea what it is, was supposed to be or even any memory of writing it. It's kind of interesting though...)

Yeah

We don't go near the bug wall

All kinds of craziness right there, man

Bees and giant moths and shit

and something in a cocoon that my brother was planning on using for an art project

Until it hatched

until it hatched

until it hatched.

Alice Russell on The Cosmic Lounge

Damn shame I missed her at Angel's Piano Bar (courtesy of LA's KCRW, Anthony Valadez and Miss Russell's bad self). Dig this track. The seventies are a state of mine my friends...

New Music Monday: Krowne

Fairtilizer is such a wonderful way to find new music. Case in point: I had never heard of Krowne, an electronic musician hailing from Edinburgh, Scotland, before today. This is some great stuff from the city I love and you can bet when I eventually get back there this will be one of the guys I am looking to see live. The E.P. is free for download from Black Lantern, but as I always I encourage any who do to donate. Download the big guys' stuff for free, but independents require our support to thrive and survive.

Richard Kadrey

This is what I am currently reading. Great book. I'm pretty hard on anything Sci fi or horror and this is definitely a cross-breeding of the two. However, its more of that Clive Barker horror, or maybe even old Vertigo. There is a certain logic that pervades the elements of supernatural that make it more than what we call sci fi these days* and because it deals with the Infernal Realms and demons and such (although in a less Christian more hierarchical sort of way) it automatically makes me think horror. So far though, not horrific per se, and that is not a dis. Kadrey is a very descriptive writer, and his dialogue is magnetic, even if I get the impression sometimes his characters are being just a skosh too cute for their own good (which is not a failing on Kadrey's part – main character Spyder sometimes just talks too much, which Butcher Bird even spends a great deal of time telling him. Character development on this level is excellent and fun to read, even if you occasionally want to smack the character.

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* Which if we're being honest is a completely different animal than Science Fiction, but that's a discussion for another day

Making Dreams with Mugwort Smoke

(Originally written on 7/20/10)
Interesting experience last night. Mugwort is a plant that I have possessed a dried quantity of for some time. Back in the Chicago Ridge days, while I was recording the bulk of the Forest Children albums with Dennis and Chooch we would mix the stuff with our pot and smoke it all night long. I'd found out about it from some guy in some occult shop in some city, probably while looking for Salvia or DMT. Mugwort is legal as it is a mild substance when ingested, usually as a tea or smoke tincture. During my initial research period with it, and now subsequently as I've begun ingesting it again, I have seen it often mentioned as being particularly effective as a catalyst for strong or even lucid dreams. I'm not sure if I could ever corroborate this claim before last night*, but yeah, that does indeed seem to be the case.

I've smoked two or three times in the last week, the most recent of which was last night. I sat down to watch El Topo for the first time despite being tired to the point where I knew I would probably have to fight to make it through the entire film. I smoked a bit of a mixture and settled in for the film, which I quickly realized I hated. However, as I sat struggling through the movie I began to nod off. What occurred next I am still unsure whether was in sleep or waking.

I began to feel very conscious of my heart rate. My vision flickered and my head spun a bit. I'd open my eyes knowing I'd been out but unsure how long. I The film playing out on screen is nonsensical to a degree anyway, so there was no way to use the perceived rhythm of its story to tell how long I was going out for, or whether or not the film was insinuating itself into my dreams. Had I been sitting here only a moment ago and feeling as though my heart was ramping up, threatening me, or had that been a part of the dream? As I was thinking this I even became aware that to some degree I was dreaming.

But then I wasn't.

It is as I have described here before, that when the REM pattern breaks up so does the dream. But the dreams can often hold on, like a rider bucked by a horse who may slip from side to side but ultimately manages to stay mounted.

My dream was telling me something. Or trying to at least.

The room and its accoutrements became a hazy dimension suspended in the twilight between wakefulness and REM. Even when I was finally certain that I was awake everything had the soft halo glow we associate with dreams or mild hallucinogens. I was burrowed into the N.O.W.** but something seemed as though it was moving around me, just outside my veiled consciousness. And my heart was beating.

Fast.

Maybe fast is the wrong word. And maybe this wasn't the reality of the situation at all. Everyone who has taken acid knows that feeling where the drug suddenly seems as though it is about to climb on top of you and batter your senses to its own twisted-reality whim. I tried to recognize this and utilize it as an antidote to the encroaching panic but to no avail; of course thinking about needing to slow my heart down implies there is a problem, implies there is a danger in how fast it is beating. This is the ridiculous sing-song drug logic that, for the most part, made me stop doing them a loooong time ago. But this is Mugwort. I mean, come on, really?

Eventually I was able to out fix my paranoid android and get everything under control. My mind is stronger than this and again, the mixture in question is nothing that has ever reacted with me like this before. I ended up crawling into bed and falling asleep pretty much immediately. My dreams were long and vivid, I think, and I've since found literature reporting it is possible to die from prolonged ingesting of Mugwort, if taken over enough consecutive days.

Where the hell was that information before, when we were ingesting it daily and recording? Or, how much of those recordings possible contain messages from that plant, using the musicians harbored in those late night recording sessions at Dennis' as their vehicle to try and impart some subtle, archetypal knowledge to the world through our hands and voices, ideas and melody?


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* Well, that's not true, but let's just say it's been so long and if I wrote anything down I'd have to unearth it.

T. Rex

Fuck yeah!!!

Pygmy Shrews - Your Party Fucking Sucks

Wow. I laughed so fucking hard at this I had tears in my eyes. Definitely kindred spirits with my old bands Wink Lombardi and the Constellations and Schlitz Family Robinson.



I found Pygmy Shrews after reading about another band, Drunks With Guns. I looked those guys up on Last.FM and found an entire slew of similar acts, Shrews included. I'll post some Drunks With Guns next, and I'm sure I will be posting more grimy basement punk soon enough.

Thank You to Aaron Dilloway who chose Drunks With Guns eponymous album as his 'Inner Sleeve' pick for the August issue of Wire Magazine*.

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* The only music magazine that truly matters. Although Ghetto Blaster has a couple killer writers working for them now...

The Melvins, Hand Puppets and Kareoke

No, this isn't some bizarre new fetish, it's a clip from something called Pancake Mountain. Awesome.



The Melvins have a new album out called The Bride Screamed Murder. I know without having heard it yet that it's good, for it is The Melvins.

Thee Oh Sees

I know nothing about this band. Just found them today.

That will change.

A Classic...

God Is LSD. Go all the way back to 1993. Waaay before the internet, before music file proliferation/sharing brought a globe of music, major and independent to every home with a computer and a modem, I used to get info on new music wherever I could. A hell of a lot of it came from the enigmatic Mr. Brown*, but we were always looking for new avenues to discover bands by.

We were thirsty. Still are, but it was harder to be back then so I guess mixed with nostalgia that makes the thirst seem more important now or something.

There was a independent record store in Orland Park, IL named Red Tower. A very local B&W music mag called 'Subculture' stacked copies in their lobby for free. Great magazine. One of the record reviews that caught my eye the hardest was Spirit of Suicide by God Is LSD. I don't remember if I had to special order it or not (most likely yes. Red Tower had a pretty damn good selection, but I don't know if it was that good) but that is definitely the store where I acquired the album that I immediately fell in love with. The above is a video for my favorite song on the album**. I had never seen it before today (only just now starting to utilize this youtube thing for its full potential)

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* A regular star in the stories I tell on my Chud blog.

** Their only one, however main guy Thomas Luedke still plays in his other group, Invincible Spirit.

The Heir To The Throbbing Throne

I have not experienced something so brimming with Magickal energy since Throbbing Gristle. The video I've linked below is not for the squeamish – it contains such a strong undercurrent of energy that it is disturbing, even if when broken down most of the images are fairly simple. This isn't youtubesnuff or anything like that – there is no place in my life or this world for that brand of sick exhibitionism. However, when music and image come together in an alchemical marriage of Magickal Will, well, things can become very strong.



This actually brings to mind a video I had worked on back in 2003. I was renting a house with two other guys and spent a lot of time in various altered states, playing around with different ideas for ritual and exercising of the Will. One of those ideas centered around constructing a video to eventually distribute to various outlets (before Youtube) and influence the world, or at least the segment of the world amping up on media consumption as a way of determining direction in life. The collection of tracks and videos, never finished, were loosely referred to as 'tulpas' and have been since misplaced in the aeythers of the lost dimension of computer storage.

In Dreams You're Mine, For All Of Time...

Interesting the things that transpire in our heads when our consciousness turns off for a while. Moments ago I awoke from a morning filled with a strange effluvium of events that has me a bit paranoid and dare I say it, buzzed as I sit here drinking my fourth cup of coffee in ten minutes. I've been re-reading Grant Morrison's Batman run, from the beginning, and as with everything else the man writes it has most definitely been affecting my nervous system. The Invisibles rolled into one caped-crusading icon. Here's what's collating within the residue...

In my place, making coffee but unable to turn the coffee pot off. Surprised that I had never tried to do this before (a subliminal message that I imbibe too much java? Doubtful, I've waned in quantity lately and feel somewhat guilty about it) Comic Scribe Warren Ellis talks me through trying to turn it off. He is not in the room, nor on the phone. In the dream I seem to interact/communicate with Mr. Ellis as I do in normal life, one of many who occasionally participate in discussion threads on his Whitechapel forum. However, in the dream there is that strange and ever-endearing dream logic that works so well when weaving around physics as we now it, so that the communication takes place without either one of us sitting at a computer, typing. It is almost as if a word balloon appears next to me in the dream (do I become 2D?) and Warren floats inside it, a psychic apparition scoffing and surprised that I've never tried to turn off an appliance I use everyday.

From the coffee pot incident it is somewhat unclear what transpires next. I believe I was folding in and out of sleep's various stages, losing that gloriously technicolor REM where dreaming occurs, and as such the 'plot' of the dream becomes jagged and unclear in its continuity. This happens often, where the movement that connects the juicer points of the dream becomes blurred (as in, "How did I get from Mom and Dad's to Siberia wearing a chicken suit?") and I truly believe it is this interruption in the dream state that does it. Imagine having a hand of cards during a game that every few minutes or so requires you to have to toss them back in, reshuffle, re-deal and then re-acclimate? Static pictures reprocessed or remixed every so often. Interesting idea for a card game, eh? Makes it very attractive to want to assign a quasi-human persona to our architect, no?*

Anyway, the next thing that happens is a malevolence begins to pepper the house (still my house) In the dream I seem to identify it alternately as a 'presence' and an 'unknown agent' – as if one moment it's an exorcism I require and the next a gas mask. I know the word 'Nerve Gas' flits through my dream-avatar's consciousness at some point. Nerve Gas possessed of a malevolent, undead personality? A Gas Ghost, or a Ghost who has learned to manifest itself in a particularly desired atomic makeup? All this is unclear, what is clear however is that Mr. Ellis is now apparently my neighbor (I don't care how loud you play your stereo sir, just turn the sub-woofer down so it doesn't rattle the pictures off my wall thanyouverymuch. I'd hate to get Gravel on your ass) and I run outside to save my cats from the encroaching danger. Only Tom and Lily, two full grown felines, are more akin to tiny newborn kittens. I gather them up into an open-topped cardboard box and rush them outside only to find Mr. Ellis walking by. I ask him to watch my cats as I run back in and suddenly, at some point I am calling the police (or did they call me?) and setting the cash register drawers out for opening at the store where I work.

???

There' that trans-location logic again, this time remixed in a manner so that my location doesn't change, it simply acquires attributes of another, inexplicably so.**

So now the front door is open, Warren Ellis is outside watching my cats and the police are arriving, asking me questions that pretty openly say both A) they think I'm either crazy or high on goofballs (am I sweating at this point? Yeah, I probably look high.) and B) they realize that something is indeed wrong with the very air or atmosphere in the room we currently occupy. As I speak to the officers (two of them, one a early-forties caucasian woman wearing her brown hair in a braided ponytail, the other a mid-to-late thirties black man with short-sheered hair and a reassuring air of calm about him) I feel as though I am trying to explain something I most assuredly know but somehow just cannot express. The room continues to swell with toxic environment and I glance to my right, over my shoulder and see the front door, propped open. A moment later I do the same and it is closed. Still speaking ineffectually I move over to the door, pushing it open and see the two money-filled tills sitting on the stoop just to the right of the threshold. A woman goes by on the sidewalk two steps down, calling for her child. I lean down and assess the tills, suspicious that someone (the woman?) gently pushed the door closed and took money. In the top till there appears to be a lesser amount of change than there should be and the slots for most bills are empty. Then I see a fifty dollar bill, no two fifty dollar bills where the five's should be. Warren is still watching my cats, the police are still speaking to me (are their guns drawn all of a sudden?) and I find myself wondering if I am being purposely distracted...


...................

* Unfortunately though, that is not a good enough reason for me to do so.

** How can you not become resentful of work when you spend so much of your waking life there that it often follows you into your unconscious? Bastard!!!

Killing Mr. Vegas

Stumbling around the check in and registration area of the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada I reach into my pocket and feel the thin, crumpled plastic baggie that contains the homegrown magic mushrooms a friend of mine at work recently gave me.

It's going to be a good night.

Not even twenty minutes ago I was so tired I thought for sure we'd be checking in and I'd be curling up in bed, but clearly I have forgotten the pulse of Vegas. The city itself is the anti-sleep; a mecca of artificial environment designed specifically to combat the human mind's insistence – after so much time spent awake and engaged – to shut down and recharge itself. With such a cluster of Will and agenda all shared by so many powerful ideas out in the middle of nowhere (read: no ideas) the City of light that floats in the middle of the Mojave Desert is itself something of an entity; a sentient being that beckons people in and then consumes of them what it can. Some it gets worse than others, just as some drugs or people can become parasitic to people, and bit by bit, year by year the vast and hungry egregore* that is Las Vegas, Nevada grows more and more powerful and is able to feed itself better, much like a person starting a job at entry level and slowly working up the ladder of position and pay rate, until it's no longer required they 'dine within their budget'.

Think about i: Las Vegas is such a powerful entity that the laws we know in the United States of America breakdown and do not completely apply within the city limits. What other person or place can sidestep such tried and true societal guidelines such as 'No prostitution' or 'no public imbibing of alcohol' (We're talking in the U.S.)?

So we checked into the Luxor and before we'd even made it up to the 6th floor of the West Tower I'd consumed most of my bag of party favors. Sleep still skirted around the peripheral of my consciousness but now it spoke to me in a manner that promised to return when called upon.

After the night's adventure had run its course.

Adventure here may be a bit of a misleading word. There was no wham bam excitement. No after hours parties, high speed chases or fist fights. The adventure I had in Las Vegas boiled down to a conversation. A conversation I had with an ancient, mystical being whose conscious body on Earth is a tiny fungus known by, among other names, Amanita Muscaria.

There are plenty of cultures, all quite older than our own, that consider the psilocibin an old and wise citizen of the Universe, one who beckons interaction with us. You see, Muscaria is a teacher, and it is always looking for new students to hear its stories. Why wouldn't we want to?

Why wouldn't we want to learn? To challenge the, frankly, pedestrian view of the Universe we as human beings on Earth in the twenty-first century have? Because it challenges the status quo? Let me remind you again that Mr. Vegas gets to challenge the status quo, and he wins.

Every time.

He wins.

So that's it; the jumping off point. Mr. Vegas might seem an affectionate, embellished moniker from a fiction writer, but he's real (or she – I'm lazy, not sexist), and I challenge anyone to try to kill him. You can't. Thing is though, it might be really interesting to study him as a hit man studies his kill. Day in, day out. Then who knows what might happen one day?

...................

* Which for simplicity's sake I will quote Wikipedia's definition here: an occult concept representing a "thoughtform" or "collective group mind", an autonomous psychic entity made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people. ...

Remember Where You are now so You can Get Back Here Later.

So I am currently shopping my second completed novel. Technically I've completed three, but that third one (or actually it's the first one, Thee Subtle War) I've 'completed' about three times. It was the first novel I attempted to write and as such it is the one I've had the most trouble reconciling with my 'voice' since I have honed it. Although there are many parts of Thee Subtle War I like from those earlier versions as a whole I could never quite stand the book. Perhaps this has a lot to do with the lack of follow-through on the plot, which was originally a fanboy's attempt at imitating Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. Over time my fixation on all things Morrison has waned enough for me to find my own voice (although that will hopefully evolve with time) – I still love The Invisibles and everything else the man writes, but I've gotten over my starstruck period of intense influence at the hands of his art. With this evolution Thee Subtle War has evolved as well, but through it all one main idea has remained consistent. The theme of the book shoots off of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, combining it with science in a way I do not believe anyone else has ever attempted. So these more recent versions now too are 'influenced' by another author's work, but with each new winnowing of Thee Subtle War I feel I pull Lovecraft's ideas more and more into my own world, instead of vice versa.

I have no problem with this, realizing now that ultimately Thee Subtle War will be something that I will publish down the road, after I have a name and fan base (which I Will have).

The book I'm currently shopping is 100% me and a direct result of many of the experiences I've had in my own life. I tend to write a lot about fucked up people, drugs, alcohol and a certain longing that I keep with me for lonely, intoxicated nights when I can almost smell the south suburban Chicago rain in the air and realize that the past is not a when but a where, and something I can easily invoke with the right combination of music, substances and lighting.

The Ghost of Violence Past is my attempt at an imaginary confrontation with a very real demon from my own past, a boy I once called friend who went on to murder several people I knew for no reason other than, I suppose, he felt he could.

What do you say to someone who has done those things? I don't know, and never will, as although my avatar in the story is both willing and able to confront the killer from his childhood, I most certainly never will.

I would never want that person to know that I even still remember him.

After finishing The Ghost of Violence Past I recently began a new story, tentatively titled '2 A.M. Corridors'. Corridors is built around my experiences as a drug-taking, alcohol-swilling bartender in the South Suburbs of Chicago. It is an exercise in merging the time travel I experience with drugs and music with the world where I lived and worked, fucked drank and snorted for five years until I met the love of my life and turned the page (and what a heavy page it was to turn, moving 3000 miles away). One of the main influences on the aforementioned period of my life (as with all periods of my life) was music,and it is to help set and maintain the mood that I have utilized very particular playlists for this particular project. Below is a widget containing the main throng of songs that compliment the atmosphere and motivation of 2 A.M. Corridor's characters and story. As the story evolves I will most likely assemble and post more of these, perhaps even with excerpts from the book. My hopes in sharing these is that so that when people eventually read the story they can let me know whether or not the story and music contain/convey one another.

Life is a series of stories, culled together in a pantomime of chapters arranged in, apparently, no particular order. As a writer I attempt to impose my Will, my 'Order' on it so that when I am gone, my life will remain.

Who Built The Road by Isobel Campbell

I was just listening to Mark Lanegan's Bubblegum a couple of days ago and it occurred to me that the man may have a new project coming up. Gutter Twins (new album soon, please) was something like two years ago now and I've found myself having a hankering for the gravel-throated journey man we all love so much. Well, without further delay:

Who Built The Road by Isobel Campbell

follow the link down the whiskey hole and listen with stretchy, intoxicated glee. So far Back Burner is my favorite and a prime example why I love this man. Isobel Campbell also appears to deserve special attention. I'm unfamiliar, but this is awesome and she's a Scot, so you know, I'm down.

Buy it and support independent music.

Huzzah!!!

Interrupting or coming up for air???

There's a suit I wear over another suit, which is really just dress for this tangle of knobs and ideas that makes up the complex series of Algorithms that happen to have all decided (for the moment at least) to vibrate at the particular frequency-set that manifests itself to your observer's senses as this slightly long-winded cunt named Shawn. The suit above the suit – the clothes on top of the clothes – has been a major undertaking; what we used to call a 'fiction suit' back at the end of the last Millennium (okay, truthfully I guess I didn't get 'turned on' to calling it that until early the next, but the more miles on time's highway you put behind you the more they all kind of collapse and congeal into life's perpetually gnawing horizon) is not so much a disguise as it is an apparatus for burrowing into a tunnel, an unknown lair home to all manner of beings that are of alien interest to me. The act, ritual, construct, whatever language I choose to dress it in is an attempt to transmogrify myself into what I have stated with my Will that I want to 'become' – the new set of frequencies I want to oscillate at in order to best facilitate further understanding of this enormous cavern we all find ourselves lost in; this labrynthine, multi-level scaffolding that holds our sway for the better part (hopefully) of one hundred years and eventually quaffs us down into a further perhaps more direct (perhaps not) existence of interest.

Reward? Punishment? These are children's ideas for those who cannot look themselves in the mirror and feel excited to go on just for the sake of having the opportunity to do so.

Huzzah!!!

Naw, you can jog, please work 2 have bst-r d m.

Is not what this blog is about even though they are a DAMN good band. I was just trolling and saw that I posted last week (or was that two weeks ago?) and decided that I would try to write a blog here at least twice a month from here on out, regardless of whether I have anything to talk about or not (not sure if this is a good thing).

Phases I've been drifting between:

Listening to:...................|||........................Reading:

X.....................................|||............Survivor
Talking Heads................|||............Less Than Zero
Tears For Fears...............|||............Imperial Bedrooms
Huey Lewis……............|||............American Psycho
__________________________________________________________________

Grinderman......................|||…….China Mieville’s Kraken
Danzig 9
Tones on Tail
Bauhaus

I was in the middle of a big lit kick that had me working on a new piece of writing, the loosely referred to 'Two A.M. Corridors' but now that I'm knee deep in Kraken I'm slightly paralyzed writing wise.

Watched Harmony Korine's Mister lonely and Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer. Been slow getting into movies lately, too much reading.

Thinking about the absolute ridiculous amount the Universe must like me to have me meet the woman of my dreams so young in life.

Hanging out on Whitechapel a bit more lately, finding some interesting web sites there. Weaponizer, polpus, zazzle, et al.

Kinda getting into the D&D thing.

confluence of events

My cat Lily yowling constantly on a cool Tuesday evening... I'm about to go nuts when my other cat Thompson starts yowling too, from downstairs. Outside the wind is mellow and pushing a lovely Ocean calm into my second story bedroom. I'm trying to work on this new writing project, high on Vicadin, Fat Tire and now I've switched to my trusty Sierra Nevada. Intermittently I'm chewing chunks of Bret Easton Ellis's brilliant new novel Imperial Bedrooms into the mess within me and ringing his paranoic style for all the inspiration it's worth (no small amount). There is a gaping hole in my mouth where blood has clotted over but occasionally surprises me with a stringy, iron-tasting dribble down the back of my throat.

Downstairs A Place To Bury Strangers is jamming at max volume. Fuck my neighbors (nothing personal).

I tip my beer but not before thinking that something urgent is transpiring somewhere in the forest of neural pathways etched into the meat between my ears.

The sun is down, it's 8:05 PM and although the chemicals and cool air are causing my fingers to lag a bit my mind is racing. I've got to get this down, got to get this down...

Two A.M. Corridor is the story of a bartender and the people he surrounds himself in an attempt to make the easy buck, get the girl who is already been explained to him is off limits and somehow avoid the frenzy of supernatural chaos that may or may not be the power behind one of the world's biggest hotel chains. Good luck Ray, you're gonna need it.

The big fish

I stepped out of the shower this afternoon and while doing some deep breathing exercises I usually try to step into my day with for the first time I think ever I felt something behind the mask of the ego scaffold I so adamantly stick to.

I felt a quiet. Not an introspective quiet but a vast ocean of calm underneath the clothes I dress myself in when I step out of my mind and onto the stage where I interact with all of these other marvelous souls. It felt raw and primal and... powerful.

I'm going back in, after it, and suddenly I understand what David Lynch called the 'big fish'.

The Smiths

I can't get them out of my head. I've never felt like this about a band before. Not that they're better or I like them more than other bands, but they're resonating with me in ways that are really kind of creepy. I'm not usually one to pay super attention to lyrics but Morrissey gets to me - he's able to capture in a few simple lines some of the most important, daunting ideas of what it is to live and love...

Fuck you november 12th 2009

Fuck You November 12th 2009. You batter me for 9 hours with corporate-bullshit stress that makes my soul leak through my eyes, then you take my friend from me. Fuck you - I'll drive a nail the size of a gallon of alcohol through your heart and leave you dead and behind me when I wake up tomorrow in a world with one less person I love in it.

Life, the Universe and everything really worth thinking about (if you are in the habit of thinking too much)!!!

So, a long time ago I promised this in a strange aside kinda manner, and while I'm sure everyone who read it thought it was a joke, I can assure you, it most certainly is not. For damn near ten years now I have been, when not distracted by this large, slippery and often disabling thing called modern life, obsessed with cracking the codes this thing we call reality is written in. In the grand scheme of things I'm not really any further along today than I was when I started this, but I have learned an interesting trick or three, along with a wealth of information that alternately turns on and off, like some cosmic tap for bigger-than-human-life information. Not information as the two-dimensional whirly gig that flitters faster and faster through our constantly shrinking attention spans, but information as living, breathing, reality-altering substance. When actively engaged, the right information would appear more as an alien abduction than a boring snore through some ledger of letters and numbers.

Alright, I'm going to pause now to re-fill my coffee cup (my very large coffee cup) and when I return, we will begin...

SHAWN'S ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN IT ALL

Warning, this is going to begin as a series of posts of loosely intermittent information that will then tie together in the end. I hope. Anyone who reads this should keep in mind I by no means consider myself any kind of expert or enlightened individual, and thus this is as much an attempt to coalesce and congeal this stuff for myself as for anyone else. I just figured, why not do it in public, might be fun for others to watch me run around the proverbial page like a chicken with its head chopped off.


Okay, first we should start at the microscopic level. See, one thing I am sure of is we as humans are so caught up in ourselves and things taking place on our level of experience, we forget or downright snub all the other limitless levels of existence that actually help make what we see around us exist. There is an age old Hermetic maxim, and every good book on Science or Magick quotes it at least once, because it is a good compass point to mark when beginning a journey such as this. AS ABOVE, SO BELOW - in its most concise form. What this means is that the universal relationships, why's, wherefore's and properties that exist on any one of these levels of existence, as in simplicity's sake we'll say the microscopic, they also repeat in all the other levels, as let's say, the macroscopic. This means that some of the same behavior we see Electrons, Neutrons, Quarks, and all their tiny brethren exhibiting is repeated with people, planets, stars, etc. A good, simple example of this is the idea of the orbit. Planets orbit the stars that grant them life, and Electrons orbit the nucleus of an atom. ONLY this idea has changed, and I interrupt the simple definition now in an attempt to introduce a new idea forthwith. For a long time this idea of the particles of an atom mirroring the behavior of the stars worked, that is until the inception of Quantum Mechanics.

Now, in Quantum Mechanics, arguably one of the most important ideas that arose was Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which essentially says that the more you try to pinpoint the exact location of a quantum particle the more uncertain its location becomes. This is roughly due to the idea that in the time it takes to receive the light to view the particle it has changed position. Herein is the advent of the Ground State Fluctuations. Now think about this...

If you consider Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle you immediately see that while it is common place to consider matter as being made up of particles you'll realize that if those particles move fast enough that we cannot see them then wait a minute, doesn't that mean they're behaving more like waves than particles? Ahh... so what do we call something that sometimes behaves like a particle and sometimes like a wave?

We call it a 'Quanta'. Quanta is a measurement - often h*j where h= Planck's Constant and j= an amount of radiation.

Anyway, if the Universe is made up of these quanta, which are always moving, there would be a constant accumulation of energy. These are Ground State Fluctuations and they occur on such a small scale that they are responsible, to some degree, for the physical essences that make up our world (what people used to refer to as Eyther, Aether, Ayether and all other manner of spellings). Matter, from the desk my hands now type against, to my actual body are complimenting quanta all vibrating (or moving, as in ground state) at the same or similar speeds. This is why some of the Universe we see, some we feel, some we taste, smell, hear, etcetera, and some are just plain invisible to us in every way. This is why some materials bend to our strength and others do not. What moves at the same or similar speeds interacts or appears to one another. This opens us up for the idea of different 'Dimensions' because they are things vibrating at different, or non-complimentary speeds to our own and those could be said, for us, to exist in different dimensions...

Rain

So I've been in Chicago for six days and it has rained everyday.

This is good.

However for the last two and a half days I've been sick.

This is bad.

I ended up postponing my flight back by two days (from Monday to Wed). This has been both nice and difficult. Difficult because I miss my wife and cats, nice because I get to spend more time with my Mom and Dad, kibitzing around the house of my birth (which I get womb-like inspiration from) and driving around in the rain.

The Rain.

I don't get hardly any in Southern California, and although I sure as hell would NEVER want to live in Chicago full time again I can't wait until I can come back whenever I want, stay as long as I want and soak up the rain in a leisurely fashion. I've driven by Bachelor's Grove twice today - it's perfect weather for the Midwest's most haunted cemetary (in the middle of the freakin' woods no less) and I wasn't able to get there because of this goddamn sinus infection ripping my head apart!!!

Tarot for the day:

1) 6 Wands Victory
2) 7 Disks Failure
3) XVII The Star
4) 2 Disks Change
5) IX The Hermit
6) 8 Disks Prudence
7) 10 Swords Ruin
8) 5 Disks Worry
9) (in this case unseen) Queen of Cups

I'm coming from Victories and Failures. These are the starting points or two main impulses (results?) - I'm trying to move from out from under their one-two punch and have better results. I'm My current main influence are the cosmic forces of Nuit represented by the Star card. This fits with my writing shifting back into a 'cosmic' focus. My most recent previous influence is Change, that is the need to. The future will be driven by The Hermit, which means more isolated work ahead as the lights come on and the shadow forces of inspiration are integrated further into my overall sturcture.

What is in the dark (card 6) is Prudence bright perception, vitality and healthy growth. Also possibly winning by not doing anything. This in particular is interesting as I have a lot of 'feelers' out - queries I sent and still have not received responses for. This may be an area open to Magickal 'Push'. What is in the light is Ruin, which doesn't bother me because my interpretation of that is, ah yeah, I've not gotten any positive response from the queries I did get back, so it's all in what's not yet seen.

Finally where the journey will lead is Worry, but the actual picture on the Worry card shows light shining through the dark gears - in other words I'm inclined to receive this as 'you worry and it dampens your sight, but just behind there be a light.'

Wow, a little poem there. How coffeeshop of me.

Nine isn't interpreted here because 8 wasn't one of the Major Arcana. However, The Queen of Cups is one of my cards, so this is good, interpreted as a familiar.

The Dream State

It's always interesting to me that when I pull away from the Occult like I've been for the last, hell, maybe two years, weird things stop happening to me. Lately I've been re-writing my first novel, Thee Subtle War, which was conceived and performed, for the most part, in the height of a five-year submersion in all things Magickal, and now that I'm back into it it's affecting me by creating, for now, small almost random occurrences of novelty in my day to day existence.

One of the first places this 'heightening of the senses' usually occurs is in my dream time. Never too much of a dreamer (at least as far as remembering or controlling them) Magickal perception very noticeably defines the difference between 'mundane' or 'consensual' from 'hmm, strange' or 'bat shit crazy'.

Yesterday before I went out for the evenings activities I did a simple shuffle-and-pull Tarot consultation. My card was the first card of the deck, THE FOOL. This card usually signifies the beginning of a journey, the aligning of forces, both conscious and subconscious. With so much going 'right' in my life at the moment I'm inclined to interpret my last two full-out spreads (one I posted here a week ago) and now this card as the Universe trying to tell me all elements are in place to kind of hone my day to day with my subconscious - as if to fashion my very existence into a kind of antenna or lightening rod aimed at catching, utilizing and re-firing the wide array of skills and energies I possess/can evoke to achieve my goal.

Anyway... back to my dream. Now where this fits in is a bit weird, with perhaps a touch of 'If you've convinced yourself that's great...' My dream last night/this morning was frightening. No, terrifying. I was somehow involved in a rural area's exploits to perform an exorcism on someone I knew (not sure who, bit hazy). There were definite familiar faces beside the one in trouble but who they were I couldn't tell you now. Anyway, t some point the demon was loosed. From there I remember the priest performing the rite coming in close and touching me firmly on the bridge of the nose - and it was like he passed the spirit into me. I remember feeling that the priest contained something not so nice and was passing it onto me. I woke still feeling the heat and pressure of that touch between my eyes and being pretty much immobilized with fear.

I'm taking this to be something being passed onto me, yet I'm not sure what or how it may filter into my 'Quest'. One thing for sure though, I am definitely ready for some more bizarritude in my life (not at work though). Of course that means I'll have to start actually leaving the house...

A return to the tarot

I have worked with the Tarot for almost five years, however (and this is a big however) I have not been consistent. In fact it has been at least a full year since I've even picked my gorgeous Thoth deck up. This is an involved skill, and one I know I have to stick with in order to gain it's attributes as my own. Being that analyzing spreads takes quite a bit of time to do it correctly I'm obviously not going to be doing this everyday, but perhaps I can commit to once a week.

This is my first pull and in looking through one of my books I felt a draw toward this layout, The High Priestess, so in keeping with my theory that if you do not listen to your intuition you will lose it, I went with it.

As always, my spreads are done with my impending success as a writer in mind. I do not interpret anything within them to necessarily be applicable to any other area of my life. I'm in a place right now where I feel that my success as a writer is the only thing I am lacking (well, and money to pay off my bills and live, but that is directly tied into the writing).

Okay, so let's see it.


Spread for today:

Technique: The Secret of the High Priestess

Draw:

1) 8 Swords Interference motivating influence
2) 9 Wands Strength motivating influence (may hinder or enhance #1)

The phases of the moon as metaphor for intentions and impacting factors

3) 6 Wands Victory - current moon
4) 9 Discs Gain - waxing moon
5) Queen Swords - waning moon

Represent the pillars on either side of her Majesty

6) 7 Disks Failure What is in the light/ what is known
7) The Priestess - What is in the dark/ what is yet to be revealed

Where the journey leads/outcome

8) Death

The High Priestess' secret

9) Art

Okay, so let's analyze this.

If cards 1&2 are the two main impulses in my endeavor that could compliment or hinder one another what do we have? Interference and Strength. How do I read that? Well, the interference card is pictorially interesting in that it shows two main ideas criss-crossed or interfered by several others running parallel to them. This is a good analogy for my writing at the moment, as my main project, the novel I am finished with but still requires a small amount of tweaking, has been something I've been unable to focus on due to so many other ideas. The Strength card plays into this as the main wand of the picture connects the moon to the sun, an analogy for connecting the unconscious with the conscious. Interesting thing here is this is, in some ways, the main gist of the book, as the character, a thinly veiled and exaggerated version of myself from a parallel dimension where my life unraveled differently* experiences a series of trials in the 'third act' that are essentially his unconscious mind bubbling over into his conscious mind. This unfolds into my life as a book that has acted as a mirror for me to face interior parts of me I've perhaps never fully come to terms with. But does this mean the Strength helps me or hinders me? Maybe the answer will be in the rest of the cards.

So the next three cards are based on the phases of the moon. Card 3 is the Full Moon and represents current motivating factors, card 4 the Waxing Moon and is the power gaining influence and 5 is the Waning Moon and what power is losing influence.

So what's that mean in realtime?

3 was Victory, which is a slightly more ambiguous card than the previous two. In a nutshell this card tends to represent balance of creative energies which, when strung into a logical narrative with the previous cards can definitely be seen as saying that I am balancing my forces out and the Strength will be a solid foundation for my first two forces. The Interference ebbs and as it disappears a stronger foundation is left beneath my endeavors.

4 is Gain and if you look at Gain you can see the image of three spheres balancing in its center. This seems to be saying (esp. with my proclivity for the number 3) that my elements are solidifying, taking shape and feeding into each other for positive outcome. Hence 'gain'.

5, the Waning influence is The Queen of Swords. This is interesting in that if you look at the card it is very blunt about its meaning. The Queen, which is a creative force has a sharp sword (sharpened whatever, generically Will but overall force or power as held by the person in question (or their in this case their creative force) that they've used to sever the head of someone or something else, in this case that something else is clearly, when this is positioned into my little narrative, the interference and self-doubt.

Next we get the Pillars, which if you look at the card this spread is physically meant to emulate, the High Priestess, are on either side of her. The pillars are obvious nods to the pillars on either side of the entrance to the Temple of Solomon, named Boaz and Joachim and representative of the duality of life - we keep coming back to those original two Wands of force in the first card, but now we're looking at them without all the parallel interfering lines - in fact we're looking at them with the head of the interference severed. So the two Pillar cards were 6 Failure - what is known. Boy, failure is known folks, and I've got the rejection letters to prove it!!! And card 7, The Priestess herself. This is a real Deus Ex Machina here when you think about it. Image within the image, which is really what writing is, making micorcosms out of the macrocosm. This card, or what is to be revealed, is chock full of positive reinforcement. Fertility and Artistic Strength from the Bow (Fallopian Tubes or musical/combative instrument), multiple images of the moon representing an ascentive cycle or, when taken in conjunction with the 2nd card for strength, the 9 of wands where we found the image of moon and sun united, we can see possible interpretations of the unconscious being allowed to complete its cycle. That, to me at least, would suggest the endeavors reach fruition.

Finally we get card 8 which is where the journey leads. The 'What's next moment' so to speak. I pulled Death, and again, even though actual physical death has been on my mind all week here I'm only led to interpret it in terms of my endeavor. Plus, Death is more often the Tarot symbol for transformation. This of course seems to suggest I'll be transitioning with my endeavor. Transforming its nature.

Card 9 is a bit of an addendum. This card is the High Priestess' secret and should only be revealed if it is a member of the Major Arcana. So in the case of drawing for yourself you'd have to look to know, and if it turns out to not be a member of the Major then you do not factor it in. If you were drawing for another you'd simply not show it to them if it was Minor.

But mine was a Major, it was ART, which is one of the cards I've had the strongest relationship with. Again we get the fertility due to the bees on the Image's dress. There is a lot here and most of it is relevant. The Lion and the Eagle have swapped colors and that's a sign for reverse reality. This fits with the transformation card 8 suggested. The brew the Image is crafting is a sign of alchemical mixing, which is a term I use often when thinking about writing. You're mixing your life with these strange, ethereal elements - fiction is reality mixed with fantasy. The ART card here suggests the successful mixing of these, as with my endeavor bearing fruit. There are also signs of equilibrium and balance (also seen earlier) and to me, the picture represents perfectly the physical act of writing.

Interesting. In the end, even though I was consulting references as I wrote this, seeing this post finished and still hot off the experience of writing it I can't help but feel I'm better at the Tarot than I'd previously anticipated. The goal though, of course, is to be able to do the above without consulting anything but my mind.

Haunted...

This could very easily be one of those pieces that start off with me going on about how much I love October, about how it releases some usually inert or obscured elements of my personality that are now able to stretch and come to light in the dying time. But I decided that, although I guess I did kind of just do that anyway, I would not do that.

Why?

Because it seems like everybody does that. And not to be a snob but I feel like I'm one of those people who October really does affect in deep and meaningful ways. And yeah, I know every self important asshole feels like that but this is one self important asshole who wants to make it clear that it's not about personal import, it's about the thick and viscous creativity that wells up and sloshes around every aspect of my being during this month.

Now granted some of this has dwindled now that I live in a part of the world where there really is just one long even season. But temperature is relative and let me tell you, in southern california when it's 50 degrees at 8PM you grab a sweater and maybe even curse the chill, because it's cold to you...

I've always found it interesting that in the season of wither (thanks MC) when things are shutting down human creativity could flourish. But then, doesn't that make some kind of sense? Aren't death and trauma two aspects of life that push us the most to vent and 'deal' with our emotions through our creativity? Doesn't it make sense that our invisible senses would react to the plane of our existence, our vegetable co-habitants of our world reaching the end of their lifespans and settling into decay.

Decay. The word alone has such an artistic trill to it. Decay is nature's residue, and what is art?

Art is the nature of man's residue.

The implications are amazing when you think about it. But really, look at the human artist. People they love die and they write and perform songs that will shape the lives and emotions of generations to come. They struggle with the ego-decay of addiction and it moves them to put pencil to page or voice to story and suddenly a resonance is created that will linger, decaying or, perhaps Haunted is a word better suited for my illustration here. And essentially hauntings are decay on a long and emotionally tangible time-frame.

Decay. I like that. Perhaps I'll write a song about it. After all, it's October now, isn't it???

Weirdness in my head...

I feel like I have been unhealthy of late.

Exaggeration

I've been getting light-headed, almost intoxicated it seems at times. Times in the middle of the day when I've had nothing to make me feel that way.

Stop being so fucking dramatic

Little white floaters appear in my vision, on the periphery and sometimes even just before my eyes, hiding in the lower layers of the vision system that shows me the world.

Oh here we go...

Now I ask you, what the hell does all this mean?

Unfortunately I keep thinking I have a tumor.

Like I said drama, drama, drama

Basically this is probably an embarrassing case of child-like monkey see, monkey do. Ever since I watched Six Feet Under last year Nate's AVM has stayed in my head and I'm sure it's just fucking with me now. There's a part of us that always wants to believe that something terrible is going to happen to us. It's the same part that gets yelled at in 5th grade and thinks 'If I killed myself that would show them' and then ignorantly imagines the smirk on your face while you watch the people who have 'wronged you' suffer with regret at your casket-side. Except of course most of us realize really quickly just how stupid this scenario is. But maybe that 'terrible thing' radar hangs around in other capacities. Imagining terrible fates is one way to bolster your defenses against the world outside. It's self-centered and egotistical and just plain ridiculous I know, but in reality so is life; your life, my life, everybody's individual life because guess what? When you boil it down life is self-centered and egotistical. If it wasn't we wouldn't have a name for the not-so-abstract concept of the ego. Like Donnie Darko had to find out the hard way and Richard Ashcroft put perfectly into words:

"You come in on your own and you leave on your own,
Forget the lovers you've known and your friends on the road.
You come in on your own and you leave on your own,
Forget the lovers you've known and your friends you have told."

.......................................................................................

Okay, enough morbidity for now, my mind is racing all over the place because the light outside is just right and there's that ozone-like smell in the air - yep folks, it might just rain tonight in the Southbay (yeah right, but I can dream). Anyway, see that other voice is always so right. I get on these self-obsessed trips and then they pass. But I have been feeling a little wonky right now and as such what I decided to do as of yesterday is, if I can ever finish re-writing this one small (~140 pages) section of the book that I just finished writing (finished, ie: got to the end) then I am going to start a book about a guy with a tumor. Only he is going to be able to talk to and derive odd abilities (or is that just his mind playing tricks on him) from said Tumor.

I think the tumor's name is going to be Jim.

I figure by recording this here, if I either A) develop odd power or B) develop a tumor it will be recorded here.

The Most difficult thing about...

... Magick isn't believing it's there. Nope. How I ask, could you NOT believe in Magick? In this world where a guy two parties have never met before can 'conjure' paperwork and then bang a ceremonial gavel and grant one ownership of land, children, money (and make no mistake, those little bills that represent value based on bajillions of sequences of 1's and 0's are some of our society's STRONGEST Magick) or any number of other privileges, rewards or punishments, Magick is the bread and butter of what we experience. Or I could always challenge nn-believers to visit Washington D.C. and tell me that it is not the most meticulously occult place in the country. Seriously, the a giant obelisk in front of a reflecting pool? Really...

But no, believing in Magick is not the hardest part of it. Nor is learning it. At this point there are a million books (most being watered down repackagings of Crowley's mostly illegible ramblings, Austin Osman Spare, Peter J. Carroll and Phil Hine) that can teach you the rudimentary philosophies and some methods that will get you going. No, the hardest thing is what's known as the Lust of Result.

Lust of Result is especially exacerbated in this day and age where everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE has ADD to some degree. Computers and the Internet, high speed cable broadband hoo-ha has affected MTV, which has affected advertising, which has affected Hip Hop, which has affected everything else (begrudgingly) and even information, as we know it, has been slim-lined, streamlined, stylized and miniaturized so that we get so much so fast we can hardly hang on to any of it (comparatively). Lust of Result is wanting the result you are trying to influence the Universe to give you, which of course inhibits your ability to get it. Crowley said it the best when, to paraphrase a passage in Book IV he points out, "How can you hope to produce changes in the world around you via nothing more than your Will when you cannot even control your own body or thoughts." In other words, I'm sitting here right now drinking a Sierra Nevada, fidgeting with my legs, oop - there's an itch on my neck, that when scratched starts one up on my elbow, earlier I was having trouble writing so I got up and snacked on crap food even though I wasn't hungry, then I vacuumed and compulsively cleaned for about twenty-five minutes, etc. etc. etc.

See my point.

This is where Crowley, who for all his outlandish and often douche-like behavior, not to mention his penchant for not practicing what he preached all of the time, was really quite a remarkable man (top notch mountaineer and part of the first team to locate and attempt to climb the path up Pakistan's K2) with many a valuable insight for Magician as well as Human, would begin talking about the benefits of Raja Yoga.

I wish I had the attention span for yoga of any kind, esp. of the Raja variety. However, referring again to the previous paragraphs here, I do not.

Could I train myself to better my attention span? Yes, I guarantee it is something that could be fought back. However, I would probably need to trim out some of the drinking, which I have no intention of doing (3 beers, on average, a night is I feel not too much to ask). But the point is, it's the concentration on this routine that combats concentration on other, more spiritually fortifying ones that would help in my enhancement of any preternatural skills I may or may not have convinced myself that I have.

In the end one thing I've taken from all the reading and practicing I've done is that there are no set ways to approach hacking into the local reality grid* - so I keep pulling half-assed attempts at performing in ways that are quick and clean and slight on the preparatory. However, if I ever move into a home with a concrete floor in the basement, you can bet I'm buying a whole shit ton of colored chalk and cracking out my Lesser Keys of Solomon text. Always wanted to try to devote some time to recreating some of those Golden Dawn-era rituals, just hard to do when your renting. But not even a massive sale on Guinness could keep me from that. Besides, I always fancied Constantine's mate Brendan's idea - conjuring the Perfect Pint!!!

...........

* thanks to GM for that imagery

Lost in Triangulation....

Whenever I get the chance to spend a day flitting around the ol' In-tro-net I inevitably stop by a lot of the blogs here on e that I used to have the time to ponder on a daily basis. I never seem to have the time or attention span to do more with this network of invisible passageways than log on, check my email, write my Chudblog and then log off, as I've really tried to up the ante with my writing (and shopping the fucking writing too, which usually puts me in a foul mood) and don't wander as much.

Anyway.

It always fascinates me and makes me a bit sad to read all the glorious diatribes and ideas that go down on my Ohio friends' blogs. Dayton is something of an adopted foster home for me (through my wife) and the city, as well as all those glorious folks I know back there (what's up y'all!!!) have such a community - something I do not have AT ALL - that it makes me miss them and the place all the more. I always find myself wondering, what would it be like to know a place so well that the names of the shop keeps and the daisy chain of acquaintances who expand out from around them border and frame my own understanding and subsequently interaction with the place, so that whether I'm three feet in front of my house, five miles away in a bar that I like or buying a new set of strings from a music shop I'm in the presence not just of neighbors, but people. People not as in 'yeah, what else walks around on two legs and opens guitar shops, runs roller derby leagues or stumbles out of a bar into traffic I'm actually interacting with people - people who I know or know of, or in at least one case in the above make a mental note to recognize and never interact with again. No, out here in vast sprawling Los Angeles I have no neighbors - not next door to me or down at the bar. Not in the coffee shops I might breeze into and out of as quickly as possible or at the restaurants I've chosen to adore. It's definitely down to my own damn fault at least 60%, and it's also the uprooted factor that accompanies leaving behind everything you know, but it's also the product of my own distancing from the things around me for the things I'm trying to train and translate within me. This of course is something that must be done, but I cannot help but wondering what I would write if I could live in a place like Dayton for a year.

Maybe one day we'll know, eh???

...

Sit, please.

Thank You.

So, we really liked the book.

Thanks. I put a lot of time into it. Would you say it's ready to be published?

Maybe. We've got a couple of crack editors we'd like to run it by. There's some small stuff - you tend to use more passive verbs than active ones, sentence structure. Stuff like that. But for the most part the story is there, so if you feel comfortable with it...

Oh yeah, believe me, I've waited for this for some time. And this one was a lot easier than my first one, which I just recently started going through again and sprucing up.

So what we'd like to do is tell you a little bit about our firm and the way we do things, what we could do for and would expect of you, and then if everything is still good, well, we can sign a contract and start looking at some of the other stuff you've got.

Excellent.

In the trenches...

... It's been a pretty strange year, eh?

Actually, no scratch that. It is not that it's been a strange year - that is a cop out, a product of human language to say something that is pseudo-important not in the interest of being observant but in the inability we have of keeping ourselves in check when it comes to opening our mouths just to open our mouths.

So let me start again.

It has been strange, evolving through this bizarre matrix of intervals that we long ago fashioned restraints for using out language, to find myself utterly convinced that we live in what I would have recognized as science fiction when I was in fourth grade or below.

There.

Perhaps it is a product of being a child of what we refer to, here in western civilization, as the middle class. The middle class is not a shield, but it is a fence of sorts - a partition. We may not have had a lot of money growing up but we were, because of the institutions and social mores of this country, not in need of much. I had a roof, three square meals and a continuous loop of education for the pre-advised intervals, so maybe it was a fence, or blinder rather, to what the world really is.

Science fiction.

Seriously, I have detailed in my Bartender Chronicles blog the moment that I realized that there was no such thing as an 'Adult' - a mythical being of maturity and responsibility that children are taught they will turn into if they do good in school, get a good job and marry for the sake of propagating the species. But this goes beyond that.

Life is surreal not because clocks drip from trees or Jesus appears as a conquistador, but because we are taught through words and through repetitious reinforcement that certain key guidelines are always in place, governing us and the world we live in. Good triumphs over evil, Love can beat all, good people are rewarded, bad people are punished, etc. And sure, we can probably all name examples where these statements are true and more where they are not, but the very fact that we are raised to believe that these ideals are plentiful, or some kind of Universal Absolute is the basis for the real illusion - an illusion that some people never get to see behind. And when you do see behind it, when you're standing in a grocery store at 10 PM on a Thursday and realize just how alien a concept it is for droves of people to walk up and down brightly lit isles choosing from literally millions of products that have been researched to glisten and call to us with expensive, environment-defeating packaging while not too far away someone is taking part in a conference call that is going to cost thousands of people their jobs, or someone else is paying for a donut with a piece of currency that has passed through the hands of hundreds of people who died for it's possession, all while invisible, human-appointed 1's and 0's make and break the building of new cities, traveling devices and entertainments that suck us dry of our zest for actual, physical experience, well, that's when you have to either recognize that the world we live in is stranger than the science fiction we used to think was so strange and 'fictional' or maybe check yourself into an ECT treatment center.

Mostly I think those people who do not see things for what they are choose to adhere to the guidelines they've been ingrained with, because if in this day and age, the beginning of man-made interval 2009, you cannot see the absolute pure, swirling chaos all around us EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY then you probably are in need of something stronger than I can give you here.

so what the hell good does all my jibber-jawin' here do, anyway?

Sadly, not much. But as my high school guidance counselor once told me, just being insightful enough to be aware of what is really going on is at least a step in the right direction. Only I don't believe that as much anymore, but I too am so ingrained in my own personal minutia-intensive Universe to get up and go out and DO SOMETHING. Also, I am largely non-violent and maybe it's a cop-out but it seems more and more to me like the only change that is ever going to really come is going to have to be on the back of drastic, world altering conflict.

Who knows.