Art, Octopi & Egocide

2010-03-19T08:14:00.000-07:00

In the Egyptian cosmology, the Annunnukai weigh your heart after death, and if it's heavier than a feather, they feed it to their monstrous hound.

This is TRUE! And it aligns perfectly with theories of reincarnation from the east, and heaven/hell from the west. In other words, if you don't want to me be melted back into raw soul material, again and again, by evil gray alien reptoids, then do good deeds, be selfless and meditate on the joys and sorrows of existence. Mwahahaha!

2010-02-15T12:32:00.000-08:00

Media Eats its Young

Study for Lord Ganesha #4

We feel like there's space vultures who detect us from way high above when we become too alive, when we start to feel too much, when we taste chocolate without guilt that it's too fattening; when we love someone too much, when we become enlightened and brave off a cigarette.

So we smoke but don't notice the effects, we wolf down chocolate with our nose closed, we love someone then split, betraying trust, hiding instead of fighting, cultivating our regrets like a garden which we can then sit in when we're old and gray as the vultures couldn't sense our euphoria, so flew long past.

I say come on down, space vultures, bring the noize! Let's not be afraid of death, or finding out what's behind the curtain of the great and powerful Oz. There's nothing there, nothing but this, which is where you are already, so just let the plowmen dig your earth, none of them will own the mine, or know what any of it is worth (that last part's Dylan)

2010-02-15T00:25:00.000-08:00

Autumnal Visitors

Ezekiel Saw The Wheel

Kali #45

Kali #46

2010-02-11T11:41:00.000-08:00

Primordial Greetings (For Graham Hancock)

2010-02-09T08:20:00.000-08:00

2010-02-09T07:41:00.000-08:00

Vampire Happening 10/06

2010-01-17T12:34:00.000-08:00

Audra Graziano

ink on paper

2010-01-16T13:07:00.000-08:00

The nature of hallucinations, at least as far as we know, ties into the nature of abstract art as well as, animism, totems, masks and the way heightened imagination and visualization connects with weariness, fever, starvation, insanity, on the level of vision - the way our eyes fill in blind spots for a full view so too we add and perceive things to move, to breathe, people in pictures to nod their heads, statues to slowly wave their arms, the pencil lines in sketches to flow around figures like fine root systems or webs.

The spider web was important in my cosmic symbol book because as a rock and roll youth my bedroom window was completely covered by a spider web, with the huge black spider in the dead center, never moving. And stone tripping at dawn, I'd watch the spider watch me through the glass, for (what seemed like) hours on end, our brains merging. That spider was my beacon, my transistor 2-way radio to the alien intelligence that unites insect and plant life. Then, in the winter, he was gone. Sadness pervaded my snowy room and mind.

Anyway, the nature of hallucinations stems from a heightened sense of danger, activating the pineal gland for a dose of full brain alertness; if we're gonna die, may as well do it with all the houselights on. So now the program in the vision centers of your brain which fill in the blanks in your normal vision are suddenly lit up and working over time, looking for danger and seeing it wherever they look - on the hunt for movement, life forms, things edible and/or threatening. Anything remotely anthrophomorphic starts to twitch and vibrate, energies are perceived all around, both benign and threatening in an endless push-pull of life and death, time and space, all shrouded over by this extra dimension that reveals all as pure perception, illusion, the eye making sense of a world spiked with madness and chaos. Children don't see puppets at a puppet show, they see the characters. They don't need CGI because they bring the intricate details to the bland surface. All they need is a guy in a wolf mask, and they're scared, because their imagination fills in the rest, they see the wolfman with more hair and wilder-eyed than the mask can actually deliver on its own, to, say an adult.

This is not to say that some visions -- grays, mantises, demons, plant spirits, aren't "real" per se, but that they challenge our notion of what real is, making the point moot in the end. The equivalent metaphor for us would be dogs chewing on math textbooks and trying to understand calculus via tasting the ink and wood pulp.

At this point we're still chewing on the wood pulp. The best we can hypothesize is that the symbols on the pages mean something, and it's probably profound. Our reductionist scientists would say (continuing the dog metaphor), that because the math book is made of wood pulp and ink and is therefore worthless as food, it cannot have a higher meaning. Bless the scientists for refusing to consider hypotheses which would undermine their previous research.

2010-01-15T14:38:00.000-08:00

As the art world burns its dreary conceptual fuse down to the bitter Duchamp-ish end, we will perhaps one day get back to writing about the artists that actually have talent and skill and imaginations twisted and vast enough to blow your mind if you're not too busy trying to "get" the new dust mop exhibition at the Whitney or whatnot... Actually last bienniale (c'est vas?) was full of great paintings, but that was, when, wait...where can we go now for good painting?

Like former NYC resident, abstract expressionist Audra Graziano, we can go to Los Angeles, of course. As seen above and below, the rockin' Graziano has created magnificent color-drenched ribbons which weave life into three-dimensional existence using nothing but fire and the void of jet black oil. Her "Monster Hole" seems a sun beaming through storm clouds or a birth canal, coming to a tunnel! Go into the light, my boy! Take me to my final destination. Or girl. Abstract surreal intensity such as this generally comes from those twisted geniuses who've undergone major illnesses, such as Sarah Manguso, who caused me instant panic attacks with her harrowingly vivid new book, The Two Kinds of Decay. Graziano's life must be as rife with shamanistic (in the context of using illness as a means of transcending the duality of life and death) strangeness and you can feel the fingers all over pulses you didn't even know you had. Like the above work on paper, Go see it, at the Muerner Gallery, 1018 Madison Ave, Thurs 7+ --Shelley Jackson library project copy pamphlet #48302 1967 Du bist frei!

2010-01-15T13:52:00.000-08:00

Audra Graziano

"La Fonda"

Oil on canvas

36 x 36 ins

2010-01-15T13:49:00.000-08:00

Audra Graziano

"Monster Hole"

2009

Oil on canvas

36 x 36 ins

Audra Graziano

"Fascination"

2009

Oil on canvas

36 x 36 ins

The Hydra's Apron Strings

2010-01-09T16:10:00.000-08:00

Her Apron Tentacles are Many (2009)

2010-01-09T15:05:00.000-08:00

My latest opus, LAURA MULVEY & THE CURSE OF THE MALE GAZE - 2009, 6 mins

2010-01-07T07:05:00.000-08:00

By Max, c. 1987 (with a cameo by me [in the yellow shirt, panels 6-7])

2009-12-21T12:26:00.000-08:00

Bibi Anderson in Decay (2009)

2009-12-05T14:53:00.000-08:00

GODZILLA IS EKSTAT (2009)

Was Das Stewart Geseht (2009)

MACBETH
Angelina!
Portrait + Prophet = Profit

2009-08-05T15:39:00.000-07:00

2009-08-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

Shanghai Express (Anna May Wong and Marlene Dietrich) 2008, Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 ins. PROVENANCE: Estate of the Artist; Daphne Schoenberg Gallery.

Jesus Don't Forget to Floss (2009)

2009-07-04T12:30:00.000-07:00

Directed, sung and puppeted by Erich Kuersten

2009-06-17T08:53:00.000-07:00

2009-06-17T08:48:00.000-07:00

"Baby Doll (1956)" - 2009, Acrylic on Canvas, 48 x 36 ins

2009-06-17T08:45:00.000-07:00

C. 1987, Syracuse, NY - video still from "Psychdelic Salmagundy"

2009-04-30T10:30:00.000-07:00

2009-04-02T11:11:00.000-07:00

2009-02-19T07:54:00.000-08:00

2009-02-11T13:09:00.000-08:00

American Mandala (2009)

2009-02-07T15:49:00.000-08:00

CIRCLE OF CONSUMPTION

SELF PORTRAIT

2008-12-21T14:08:00.000-08:00

2008-12-21T14:01:00.000-08:00

THE REMOTE

I came across a man who could not find his remote.
Nor could he approach his own TV
in vain he looked under sheets, couches, piles of coats,
in vain! in vain looked he.

I don't trust, he said, the laws of science.
There's many things it will not see
and in refusing to acknowledge blind spots,
no vision can be genuine;
it's all either waves or particles, depending on whom you ask,
and things disappear;
commercials are endured;
as the TV has no knobs to turn,
and the remote is lost, all lost, said he.

As he babbled he was lifting cushions all the while,
and I, so wearious of watching
his futile rummaging, did make to leave

and later in my pocket
found it.

Mexican Mud, Syracuse, 1989

2008-11-08T14:11:00.000-08:00

Wine, Women & WAR!

2008-11-01T19:59:00.000-07:00

This November I celebrate 10 years without a drink. In memoriam, here is a comic I drew in 1999 while interning at the Bellevue alcohol clinic. I'd like to dedicate this to my childhood best buddy, Alan Pyle.

If you don't know war comics, this is patterned after DC's "Weird War Tales." And of course, the classic comics of Alcoholics Anonymous. Just click on each page for a larger version!

2008-09-17T08:41:00.001-07:00

I want to write about the illusion of control. That is one of my mind’s focuses. We’re trained by loud voices to respond. I’ve got a loud authoritative voice that gets results.
I can make words seem true the way I say them - they even sound true to me. My deep voice is like a big set of bellows powering an instrument vast and glorious and God- the devil that He is -- hath given me a tone-deaf ear and inclination towards laziness which prevents and prevented and will prevent me from bothering to examine and master the intricacies of this amazing instrument. I use it as infrequently as possible and it closes up on me in irked reprisal. When I, for example, finally speak during a day off from work, to the cashier at the drug store, my voice comes out as a surprise to us both. Where most voices come and go, like little chirps, my deep voice drops onto the floor with a flat slapping sound, staying there. All words tend to lose their meaning when I speak them. My voice is a needle that scratches each record it plays, morphing the singer’s voice into mine, riddling the once-clean margins with my random notations, my boredom, my longing, my sloth. I spit out the crumpled remains of tapes I’ve played, mixes for long drives back and forth to college upstate, blazing too much lazy herb, lots of b’s: burbbly, bubbly babble until I can’t understand my own voice when I hear it on someone else’s answering machine.

2008-06-30T11:55:00.000-07:00

The graduating jock poets of 2008, plus me, their devoted and debauched advisor

Where Vertigo comes from (see Kim Novak en utero)

HANDBASKET TO HELL!!!!!

2008-06-22T13:32:00.000-07:00

Nightmare Alley

2008-06-22T13:11:00.000-07:00

Works from 2003 - the "fertile" period

2008-06-22T13:07:00.000-07:00

Acrylic on Canvas from 2007-8

2008-06-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

Anna May Wong in transition

2008-06-22T11:55:00.000-07:00

2008 - Acrylic on canvas -

Stills from "Hippy in a Handbasket" (in production: 2009)

2008-06-22T11:23:00.000-07:00

2007-12-31T12:58:00.000-08:00

NOTES AT Sheraton for Xmas 2007

Everytime I leave New York I can't believe how "off" my rhtyhm with the rest of the country is; my image of it now is that you buy a TV and you bring it home and by the time you figure out how to access all the channels, all the channels are telling you need to buy a different TV and new channels.. and when all your money is gone and your room is so full of tenchnology that all is left is the technology and you, then someone comes and removes you, and then all that is left is a device with your eyes and ears and mouth to intake imitation food and imitation sound and imitation image, and soon not even that. The question is where do they take you when you're trash? What's going on at the dump? That's where the action must be.

I'm watching the Wizard of Oz on TNT, and Ray Bolger would brave a whole boxfull of matches to get some brains, and yet in America we're giving them away half price, we're letting the giant alien vacuum suck 'em on up out of us and peddle 'em off to any scarecrow with a wheelbarrow big enough to hold a ton... because that's the lowest amount we want to bother with parcelling out. Now they're already at the tin man, and he wants a heart, and what's a heart to these people? It's the half-baked attempt to cater to pro-lifers that is the "other opinion" on Britney's sister's baby on CNN which I flip to during the commercial. Let's not forget TNT itself which shows this film and has to constantly announce you're watching TNT and that SHREK is up next. SHREK is the most amazing of all these franchises in that it hiply eschews the archetypal subtext of "original" myths like Wizard of Oz. It also reduces any worrisome "human" element.

The voices of course can be drained of human elements via their constant relying on satirical imitations of other voices. Jack Black is the best intimation of this. He moves from one "fake voice" to another and if he does get left without a handy option and is forced to assume his own, all that's left is this high register bitch of a whine.

Rachel Ray is a classic example of someone whose "personality" has caught on with a big enough demographic to warrant having it preserved as it is filtered through the dehumanizing machine - all the actresses who have to audition to get their faces attached to the machine are ordered to strip their individuality away, but Rachel's is hurried through, under a fire blanket and flanked by bodyguards in sunglasses.

Back to the Wizard. I've been down I'll admit, but I perk up when I see Bert Lahr and all is his fey macho swagger as the effete lion. Then the drugs of the poppy fields, and of course the classic multi-exposure revolution of Dorothy's face when she gets knocked out in the tornado.. the alterna-dimensional re-imagining of the basic mythic wandering of the hero in the form of the heroine, this time in Dorothy form, Dorothy which is my 90-something year-old grandmother's name...

the thing is in the modern updating of this coolest of all surviving American myths, what would they be needing? WILD AT HEART tried to reimagine the Wizard scenario as a run for your money road movie with noir and Miami edges... or SILENCE OF THE LAMBS is another one, with Buffalo Bill sure to get a heart (in his fridge); and the scarecrow Lechter, and all that other violence.

This is your last chance, these disney classics are going back into the vault. "Can you even dye my eyes to match my gown?"

The fake laughter of how we laugh the day away in the merry old land of oz. Capitalism's evil is apparent in the actions of the wizard - pay no attention to man behind the forrests, powering up his fleet of tractor tin men. The lion's song is all about scoring the bling - he wants satin, not cotton or that bullshit 14th St. chintz. The sign in front of the witch's forrest reads: I'd turn back if I were you. It might read that, but what it says is something different than the surface interpretation. It's designed to enhance your fear and thus give your overcoming it all the more value.

"All in good time, dearie... all in good time." Has anyone ever said that phrase only once? Repitition is also the key to authenticity. We are so saturated with this film that we live it and speak it and breathe it. If we don't incorporate its symbols into our personal dream mythology it is only because we haven't the will to make these things real. We should have an "Initiation of the Dorothy" wherein you pay money for your daughter to get banged on the head and sent to the Oz finishing school of instant-enlightenment. Instead she has to shave her head, join a lesbian youth gang, pop pills and drink vodka, or otherwise seek her own pre-prince's kiss oblivion. (and by prince here I mean, prince of the self, of her own unconscious, you dime-store feminist surface scratcher!)

There's no place like home is Dorothy's mantra. "There's no place like home" "There's no place like Ommmm" - after the search through the capitalist layers of meaning - where bling and long rides with champagne are just ruby slippers and baskets of goodies for gramma what big ass you have... what do we have?

Pig shit and long, long horizons, my dearie.

(Cue Marlon Brando harmonica music)

2007-12-29T11:18:00.001-08:00

White-Bred Struggle

Collage Deposit
Fat Cells!

2007-12-17T14:15:00.000-08:00

Still from my edit-montage-making in-progress of the Pratt Institutionalized Theater's MORNING MORNING (written and directed by Robert Snyderman).

In the photo: Katie Przybyski

2007-12-17T14:12:00.000-08:00

BRIEFING FOR AN ASCENT OUT OF YOUR NAVEL
and into... reality!

What is it and what are those weird noises it's making?
Reality slithers
it's alive, ALIVE!

I call on you reading this now to wake up to reality the way a sleeper awakens from one dream into another.
Come on, Sleeping Beauty, Come on, Rip Van Winkle, Come on, Ashley Saint Ives,
come sleeping sapling coiled in embryonic seed, come yoga mudra and do the dancing downward dog - pass through veils of perception as clean as a hot knife through cobwebs, gliding and gleaming towards steaming breakfast pancakes of the mind.

Genius is but well-tempered insanity, channeled through to pen and ink as the sex drive is channeled into capitalism.
Score one for our team! But you got to learn to not run to mommy with your A plus for the big dopamine payoff - you got to shoot that shit in yourself, pretty boy. Can't you show Patti Smith nothing but Surrender?
The true insanity knows this and entwines its heart with the mysterious, the otherworldly void that is not otherworldly we realize in an uncanny flash but is our home, and Iraq was just you all the time, moustaches and nooses, bags on heads and bombs in nurseries, all this was you all the time,
and Corporate podiums with insignia-bedecked officials reciting what is spoken into their hidden earpiece by off-screen power brokers; you are the podium, you are the mouth that speaks, the eyes that watch from the presumed safety of the dark, you are the hand that bombs and the hand that heals, you are the mouthpiece that speaks to masses and the mouth that speaks to the mouthpiece.

A shabby shaman shamus is no stranger to purification rituals, or poison for that matter; a shamnus learns you got to take the good with the bad, man, Dennish Hopper on Royball, man, but this chick takes it all the time, can you dig that? Okay, I'm losing my train of thought here... put this book down and meditate on the principles of push me and pull you, the llama friends of Dr. Doolittle. Ah HAH! You had forgotten all about them, hadn't you? Hadn't you better? I mean if you haven't already, because they're stupid? Got you again, if you were here I'd slap you right about now. I really mean that, I'd slap the silly out of you, pronto. But you're not here. And now is. Now always is, but you can't slap it. General, you can broil it fry it send it to die in the Frenches, but you just can't slap it.

THE GAP BETWEEN THOSE WHO HAVE
and those who haven't
been in therapy
gets longer every day... longer and longer - and to stay in therapy is to be like the astronaut who is in space, the Bowman, the Kier Dullea ever reaching for that black obelisk rainbow. To not be in therapy is to live always without borders, to deny borders
as firmly as a mom denies her son the one thing he wants, as firmly as rain is fire's double, as firmly as trouble and lack thereof are one, the illusion of death, transcended at last. All eternity is faced either way, but first we build a nice castle, and put on the lotion, and absorb the baking lessons of great god the sun. Omm Omm Ommm,
and try to--when the castle gets washed away by tides to come and you know it will--try to act surprised.

2007-12-17T14:08:00.001-08:00

WATER IS IMPORTANT

First thing if you are to come with me on this special journey to the other realm, where the ego has been brainwashed into committing suicide so the soul can live unfettered, you must drink water.

Most trips to the emergency room could have been avoided if the ailing person had been drinking water instead of doing whatever they were doing

Drink it down like a sailor drinks the air at sea.

You were a fish once and if you're lucky you will be again. We hate water, don't we? I mean to drink, as it's so dull and unimaginative; we hate it like we hate our own kin, our own selves in the mirror. Coke is so much better because it's dark and alien, sweet and strange and exciting. But though coke starts out as a ride in a stranger's car it ends in the light of the carnival midway as you exit feeling cheated from the haunted house ride.

But the reason why we block out the memory of death is the same reason we block out the memory of how dumb and so damn short that carnival haunted house ride was; two weeks and we remember that ride as a pretty good time; thirty years and it glows with a patina of nostalgia when you suddenly hear "Rock me like a hurricane" on the radio; what was once a cheap papier mache skull behind chicken wire and surrounded by lights the flicked on and off as you walked past along a moldy plywood tunnel now becomes art distilled. The skull has a symbolic resonance! Ta dum! You see it reflecting in the blackness of your pupils - even when you're not tripping -- you turn suddenly and see it in the form of some dude walking behind you and you wonder if maybe that dude's been behind you your whole life, waiting with the patience of a well-paid chauffer for you to die, to step out of your current obscenely human form so he may escort you onto the next buffet.

The cool part is you're only pretending to be scared, to fool you, to make the movie more exciting.

2007-12-17T13:37:00.000-08:00

No it's not a relapse, it's HELLWARD THE HIPPY, the latest adventure of that hippy detective, Dr. Twilite, coming soon to a theater near youtube.

2007-12-12T08:26:00.000-08:00

2007-06-25T10:55:00.001-07:00

LETTER TO DANIEL PINCHBECK:

Daniel you are right to not stick with any one solution or conception of the problems facing us here on the big Planet E. I disagree with some of the reply posts however whcih long for a way that science can measure psychic phenomena and therefore "legitimize" it and make it useful in a widespread way. I argue this stuff with my pharmacist father who sighs and rolls his eyes when he sees me take herbal supplements, as they "haven't been sufficiently tested" and hence are in his mind, bullshit. That's putting the cart before the horse, like saying "I have never tasted peanut butter, therefore it has no taste" -- we cannot wait for the Big Brother to decide our course of action is legitimate. Such dualities as legit and non-legit are the real enemy here. The psychic power we refer to is immeasurable, as the very concept of measurement bends and melts before it. I would recommend a look back to the good old 1970s where ESP, telekenis and so forth was all the rage... tests in CIA headquarters, heads exploding, Kirk Douglas running around, spoons bending, you get the picture. It was all there, all proven, and then we forgot about it, why? Because there was nowhere to go from there, no way for proven psychic powers to co-exist with our 3-D pop culture world aside from showy gore effects and conspiracy plotting, acid overdoses and nervous breakdowns. As history always repeats itself you may rest assured we are heading into another countercultural revolution ala the Summer of Love in 1967. I imagine it hitting its zenith right around the big 2012 date, and thanks to the internet, burning man connections, etc., we will be much better prepared than last time. There is no way we can envision the sudden, drastic psychic change awaiting us... what we can do in the meantime is to practice unconditional acceptance and suspension of judgment. We must transcend the duality of this being good and that being bad. Our psyches spin on axis similar to that of the earth... every hostile feeling we have towards another reflects back on us with the certainty of night following day (Shakespeare!) If we want to save the world, we must let go of our fear of its total destruction. I dont mean passive acceptance, I mean--as they say in AA--take the next right action, let go of the result. The future is already written, we won. The rest is just drama and mcguffins, enjoy!

2007-05-23T07:12:00.000-07:00

ON DREAMING.... (originally published on Clifford Pickover's Galactic Question site)

Coming to a state of lucidity in dreams is not unlike coming to a state of "in the moment" serenity in waking life... becoming the engaged observer of one's own existence is what it's all about, so of course we would all want to control our dreams. The key to this is the unconscious mind, since it's the one putting on the show. Every show or conception of reality tells us something, signs are messages and what they mean to us reflects things our unconscious is trying to communicate. If our egos were able to control our dreams then our unconscious selves would have to erupt during waking life, which is never a good idea. Through meditation and lucid dreaming we can open the communication channel between our conscious and unconscious, get the dialog going, and as a result our dreams become more harmonious and in accord with our waking.

One day you can even reach a spot where your dreams and waking life meet and become identical. This happened to me once during a profound bout of fever combined with deep trance meditation -- I saw the exact same vision with my eyes closed or open. The two-dimensional otherness of dream perception had bled into my waking reality and vice versa and there was no longer a difference. Crazy, daddio! My point is this: we use 10% of our brains during waking life, thus dreams are the other 90% (or less) trying to communicate with us, to lead us forward via messages, to face fears, overcome obstacles and so forth... when we finally pass enough obstacles, challenge and absorb enough demons, embrace the evil self and free it to the heavens, then we finally meet this other, this alter-ego self who creates the dreams, this aspect of ourselves is sometimes mistaken for god, but that's a bad mistake, since it's way too tricky to trust fully. chances are it's a little annoyed with you for not coming to visit sooner. It's like your true love waiting in the Rapunzel tower to let down her hair, and you're 1000 years late.

2007-01-26T08:32:00.002-08:00

The story of Godboy & Pippaphone

2007-01-26T08:32:00.001-08:00

Here's my daily wisdom nuggets:

Drop all thoughts like they hot, come back to the zero point all the time...

(in other words, dont think twice about something, because that's the gateway to obsession)

Practice regarding random people who pass by with compassion and love (as opposed to judging them sexy or ugly, townie or hottie)

Continually question motivations: Am I doing this to help the person and make the world a better place, or because my ego needs puffing?

Natacha and I used to have a signal whereby we would catch outselves tripping out on shit, winding up into self centered fear, ego trips or obsessive talking and we would break out of it by making goofy gong sounds, "gong gong gongonggog" -- so let's say I started telling her about my day and suddenly I'm ranting about how I am so happy I dont even feel the need to get mad at you for not doing the dishes... which, by the way, when are you going to do them, you bitch? I mean they've been dirty for three freaking days now so anytime you-- gongongongong."

2007-01-25T09:45:00.000-08:00

The mentally ill

2007-01-17T08:31:00.000-08:00

I've started reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead (translation by Robert Thurman) to prepare for the end of the world. I'm doing my part!!

It all points to 2012 - the end of the Mayan calendar (the "real" calendar) -- the return of Quetzlcoatl (see Daniel Pinchbeck's great book of the same name).

I'm preparing to enter the higher dimensions, the one with the machine elves and magical cities, and I'm looking for a small but hearty and hale crew to join me in this survivor quest.

Most of humanity will, thank God, be doomed.

What is coming is a biblical-style armegeddon of floods and mutant preying mantis's with whips running around the city tearing shit up as their dimension merges with ours. They've been watching over us for centuries, but once the shit hits the fan and it's all drowning away, you can bet they'll sneak out their wormholes and start grabbing whatever jewels and binoculars they can.

You know why? WE create reality and reality creates us. We're dreams of aliens and the aliens we dream and write about are shaped by our perceptions. Aint that nifty??

So the trick is to master the prayers and attentions in the Book of the Dead wherein you pray to realize that all the demons coming for you are just illusions from your own mind.

My experience with them is also to merely regard them with perfect love, and to let go, and to feel perfect love for all beasts and monsters.

Imagine this, a giant tiger jumping up onto your bed as you sleep. You panic and freak out so he mauls you OR you stay still and trembling and he senses your fear and tortures you like a mouse, OR you pet him and regard him with affection and love and name him Tabby.
If you love him, even if he mauls you, you wont feel the pain, any more than a parent feels humiliated and outraged if their baby shits on their foot. Understand?
It's confusing... but I am patient. See that demon picture up there on the left. I RECOGNIZED that guy, with his 3 eyes, from a 4 AM spiritual vision quest I had a few months ago. I had never seen that Tibetan demon before. Then I got an invite from the Rubin Museum with that same head on the cover and had a huge shock of recognition. I had SEEN THAT FACE BEFORE!!!There are no accidents, and no mistakes, and everything is beautiful if you are brave enough.

2006-11-03T10:59:00.000-08:00

Jazz Appreciation

The scream of a saxophone can't be listened to as one would listen to a voice or a "melody" the way years of listening to FM radio and its repertoire of rock and pop classics have ingrained us to listen to music. Jazz is best appreciated by listening more to your thoughts. The voices in your head speak in different tongues if you open yourself up to listening to them. The ego clings to its initial snap judgment of things, and uses it's own interpretation of catchy songs as distraction, to drown out the other voices, the ones that speak in different tongues. You need to have a quieter ego to appreciate jazz to the fullest. You need to have a grasp on the elusivity of time, of the moment. A jazz man has to live in the moment. An improvisation is an example of the surrendering to these inner voices.

One must let go and trust the unconscious completely. It may say some pretty nonsensical things. It works like dreams work, ouside of the constraints of time. In dreams time stands still or is always in flux, hence running can be slower than walking in dreams. a good jazz man is able to do a similar thing with time, he becomes the unconscious, but with discipline – drums and bass keep a kind of religious framework. The rhythm becomes the highway of time, via which the melody shifts and moves, but then--in jazz-moves off the highway, and the shape changes. Linearity and melody cease, exposing the the movement of time as illusory… then there is the general structure and key of the tune they are playing. This becomes the "ringing" in the head that is all the ego can really contribute to the occasion of a jazz performance.

I didn't realize this until I was watching the two-part opener of the second season of Charlie's Angels on DVD. At the end the three of them are dancing. Bosley is dancing and clearly drunk and in this sort of snobby, devil may care attitude. The ego is like this, it dismisses all that it does not already know, for the very good reason that itself as a persona is so finite as to be extinct with the addition of any new information into the organism. Hence the ego prefers catchy melodies to the elaborate and invigorating abstractions of jazz. A melody is known, jazz resists knowing.

Actively listening to good jazz is an adventure. Listen to Art Blakey's Jazz messengers for prime examples of this. Divorce yourself from all the noir-esque pop culture associations you have with the sound of the saxophone (this is easier said than done)—think of the song they play as a gateway into demonic possession. The melody is the chant, the time signature the time, the time of the song stretches and elasticates with the addition of your own listening.

Does a tree fall in the woods if you don't hear it? No, and neither does jazz on an ipod make music if you are not listening to it. Just as with the headphones off it sounds tinny and far away, so too does it sound different if you are not experiencing it fully—the active listener. A suspension of the ego is required which is why jazz is great after meditation or yoga, or trying to make music yourself. When the sounds of a sax is heard not as your egoic perception of a sax but as a voice, let's say, an alien voice. Like a child may look at a page of writing and pretend to understand it, so too are most jazz listeners stuck in a kind of bored half hypnosis…. When you are into it all the way, jazz can be funny! Mingus is as hilarious as roomful of muppets sometimes. It's all about tuning in to the unknown and not looking for "it" whatever "it" is to you, the hook that makes this a song worth buying, or putting on a mix CD for someone, or learning to play. We must let go of our desire to reduce and label – "oh, I remember this song, this is 'Melancholy Baby,'" for example, causes us to immediately reduce the song, as ist is being played, to a memory. This is not the moment, this is not they mystery of music being made, this is "Melancholy Baby!" and the ego races around, pulling up other versions you may have heard out of your vaults in an effort do diminish this moment's power.

The ego always gives more importance to past events than to present, so the new interpretation often can't match the old one, grown rosy through the distorted lens of memory. By way of example, I have a friend who reveres only Hendrix and Beck. I could bring him a CD of great music that sounds probably like what Hendrix may have made today were he alive and my friend would not give it the time of day. But if Beck releases an album of total crap, my friend will instantly revere it. This happens to many in adulthood who are well balanced and content with their lot. They have jumped through all the hurtles very nicely and so never had to linger or go back along the course and so when they get to the section where they can see the finish line (death) approaching, they start looking backwards, but it's too late, they can't stop jumping hurdles, so everything behind them is suddenly tinged with gold and glory, while the future and their death is steadfastly ignored. We're destroying the whole planet because of this white elephant in the room, because these old rich guys are so terrified of dying that they're burning up the world to obscure the exit sign with smoke.

2006-10-17T06:38:00.000-07:00

Oh hail fellow travellers on this astral plane made flesh. The world is ending in five years and if you want to survive in the next dimension, you will keep reading this blog and learn how to spread yourself thin via funky robotic dances and deep meditation. I know all the secrets, or some of them. Okay I know one secret.