www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQSNhk5ICTI

Hi! Hi! It’s me!

• Warning: prostitutes crossing
• El Chupacabra?
• Association pushing for the rights of the living dead (no, really).
• This group is trying to get “Confederate Southern American” declared as a recognized race on the U.S. census form.

• Don’t list people in your phone using words that describe your murderous intentions.
• Fetish of the day!
• What better way to honor the resurrection of Christ than a mad, violent riot scene of greed featuring terrified children?
• Why don’t my neighbors ever do interesting things like this?
• Register and book your plane tickets now for your chance to talk to Harry Houdini or Jack the Ripper!

• Meet the patron saint of chubbies.
• “Top Ten Oddball Jesus Sightings“
• I think this is a very sensible and economical alternative to all those crazy expensive “scientific” conception methods.
• Do you know anyone whose middle name is Wayne?
• Are you looking to produce the next Battlefield Earth?
• That whole lime thing is apparently a myth. You should really find something else to throw over the bodies in your crawl space.

That’s all I’ve got. Bye bye for now, lovebugs!

I love you. Please be good to each other.

Molly

The Council On Spiritual Practices offers information on psychoactive sacramentals in their Enthogen Project.

While the New York Times reports on emerging studies with psychoactives.

This is much along the lines of Aldous Huxley’s beautiful deathbed experience.

Troublesome Creek could be the name of your next band/novel/screenplay. Maybe this is where the term “blue blood” originated, though I don’t think they had a clan of Kentucky hillbillies in mind.

In the lives of modern American families, this is pop culture gone adorably wild. As Rebecca Mack aptly describes, this video demonstrates the “dangers of rigid gender roles.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb9eL3ejXmE

And if you thought it just couldn’t get any cuter, please observe this orangutan and hound, who are clearly soul mates. WARNING. This may be too cute to handle. Please beware before following the link.

But sometimes, you just need a friend. Again, this is bromance.

This article includes a photo of some roadies, speaking of bros. I may plagiarize parts for my resume.

Though this blend of talent and ambition with the irony of their theme will likely dominate more of my time. To quote Animal: “DRUMS!”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl82N69B7qw

Okay, obviously some of these photos were taken in Manhattan, but it is interesting to see how many pictures one can take on a single theme, and within four blocks. I love New York.

Anyways, I would like to tell you about my inspiration here. In college, I had a wonderful 20th Century Art History professor, Stephen Myers, who really turned me on to some previously under-appreciated movements in modern art. While I always found De Stjl to be aesthetically pleasant, before Professor Myers’ fine tutelage, I hardly grasped the sociological commentary, much less it’s spiritual underpinnings:

Proponents of De Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. They advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour; they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colors along with black and white.

According to Professor Myers, Mondrian was the first artist to request that gallery walls be painted white while exhibiting his work. The idea was that the viewer would be able to imagine the parallel and perpendicular lines of his paintings extending into infinity, creating a meditative atmosphere which preceded the works of Kandinsky, Klee, Rothko, etc.

(Side note: I was recently asked to participate in an informal personality test, in which I described my feelings of being in a white room. I said I would find it peaceful yet dull. The white room, apparently, represents death.)

While Cubism aimed to represent three dimensions simultaneously on a two-dimensional plane, De Stjl was shooting for the fourth dimension and beyond. At the same time, further east, in what was soon to become the Soviet Republic, a movement called Suprematism was evolving. Founded by Kazimir Malevich and his peers, Suprematism sought to replace the lush Russian Orthodox icons found in most households with simplified shapes such as perfect squares and circles, painted as carefully as a Tibetan sand painting, an illuminated manuscript or a rich traditional needlepoint.

While Malevich participated closely in the cultural movement surrounding the Russian Revolution, creating propaganda and populist design for everyday use, he soon found himself alienated from the new regime:

This development in artistic expression came about when Russia was in a revolutionary state, ideas were in ferment, and the old order was being swept away. As the new order became established, and Stalinism took hold from 1924 on, the state began limiting the freedom of artists. From the late 1920s the Russian avant-garde experienced direct and harsh criticism from the authorities and in 1934 the doctrine of Socialist Realism became official policy, and prohibited abstraction and divergence of artistic expression.

While Suprematism directly influenced the Bauhaus and other user-friendly schools of high design, Malevich himself did not fare so well. Persecuted by his government, yet unwilling to leave his beloved homeland, Malevich spent the rest of his days designing his own tomb. Although he may be less well-known than those he influenced (and remarkably more subtle in his execution of his ideas), his presence is certainly felt to this day. His clean design aesthetic has become a part of our everyday lives, the new icon lovingly stored in the corner of the kitchen.

I began to think of Malevich and Mondrian upon reading the following passage from Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching (Hexagram 2, The Receptive), so I will leave you with that:

Six in the second place means:
Straight, square, great.
WIthout purpose,
Yet nothing remains unfurthered.

The symbol of heaven is the circle, and that of earth is the square. Thus squareness is a primary quality of the earth. On the other hand, movement in a straight line, as well as magnitude, is a primary quality of the Creative. But all square things have their origin in a straight line and in turn from solid bodies. In mathematics, when we discriminate between lines, planes and solids, we find that rectangular planes result from straight lines, and cubic magnitudes from rectangular planes. The Receptive accommodates itself to the qualities of the Creative and makes them its own. Thus a square develops out of a straight line and a cube out of a square. this is compliance with the laws of the Creative; nothing is taken away, nothing added. Therefore the Receptive has no need of a special purpose of its own, nor of any effort; yet everything turns out as it should.

I think those skeletons are Petite Petes! I like it even better thinking that they are both male. This picture gives me an idea for what to do with the hideous chandelier in the dining room here. I’ll make it into a tiny skeletal Cirque du Soleil vignette! Like if a bunch of calaveras decided to become acrobats and aerialists.

• Giant flying condom!

• “Auto” erotica. Get it? I don’t know what that guy’s deal was, but there is an identified car fetish: mechaniphilia.
• Who wants a man rub?
• You are invited to the penis puppet party. No, not those penis puppets.
• This sucks. (Get it?) Growing up in rural Vermont I’d often hear rumors about men using the milking machines for sexual gratification.
• Better machines than this.
• More music industry conspiracy creativity.
• Caution: do not fall into the cauldron. P.S. Good Christians don’t hunt ghosts.
• “Bananas-for-sex cult leader on the run“
• Strange ailments: latah and Alice in Wonderland Syndrome
• WTF? Is there a sideshow crime spree going on in Wisconsin? (I didn’t find that on a novelty page, it was a serendipitous find during a non-Picayune related forensics search.)
• Roosten? Henock?
• How many Facebook pages does a dead serial killer/cannibal really need?

That’s all I got, kiddles.

I love you. Please be good to each other.

Molly

Hi! Sorry it’s been so long. We were traveling, first to St. Augustine, Florida then Ottawa, Ontario. If you tried to guess which one I like better you might be surprised. Ottawa is pretty and has lots of great restaurants, but the city counsel has worked very hard to keep the city sanitized and free of character. They’ve forced out most of the good stuff: vintage/consignment clothing stores, sex shops, junk/antique stores, bodegas, used book stores, LGBT book stores, and artists who do anything but clean, pretty, mild, interior decoration art. As one Ottawan I spoke to put it, (the owner of this frickin’ amazing vintage shop) “It’s a city without a heart.” St. Augustine was awesome, though! Plenty of weird crap to keep me happy and the weather stayed mercifully cloudy and cool the whole time we were there.

• Did anyone observe Mahashivratri? Learn more about this beautiful Hindu holiday here.
• Witchcraft interferes with Romanian presidential election.
• Parents: Six Ways to Protect your Child from Demons
• Metal as religion? Honestly, I don’t see why not.
• Fear of werewolves adds to misery in Haitian refugee camps. This article mentions the familiar French word “loup-garou” but in many readings about Haitian werewolves you might also find references to “je-rouge” or “Ezili-je-rouge”. I think I would have to find a French language Haitian book on mythology to figure this out properly, but as far as I can tell the je-rouge is an angry, demonic aspect of the deity (lwa) Erzulie who snatches children, not really a werewolf or human shapeshifter at all. Do any of you guys know?
• Awesome! U.S. Air Force academy in Colorado is adding a Pagan worship space to their chapel. A lot of the comments are just as horrifically fucktarded as you might expect, but there are tons more like this from David in Georgia:

“I am a southern Baptist by faith and serving in the military. I believe that if anyone no matter what faith they are wants to practice then they should with freedon be able to practice that faith. It states in the first ammendment that we have freedom of religion. I am proud to be able to serve in the same military with someone that practices what we all fight for. With that being said i believe that everyone should not hold their ignorance upon someone that has the stones to openly practice a faith. Same for someone who is Gay and wants to serve their country. If anyone has any objections to that i tell them to go to Arlington Cemetery and tell the thousands of men there that they cant”

• Jewish-Voodoo dialogue.

• Want. Want now!
• Fortean run down of the Illuminati-controlled celebrities
• On the anniversary of his death, Psychology Today passively mocks Dr. Ian Stephenson.
• Did you catch the add for Satan’s video game during the Superbowl?

I love you (especially you David in Georgia). Please be good to each other.

Molly

Last night I had the pleasure of attending a DJ set by the esteemed DJ Krush at the Bowery Ballroom. A few months ago, I got to see him with Method of Defiance, the atmospheric-nerd-core supergroup featuring Bill Laswell, Bernie Worrell, and others. Zorn was there. The crowd was a mite thin for my druthers, but, you know, that’s avant hip-hop for ya.

The more recent experience held many moments of nostalgia. Specifically, I was reminded of those days in the mid-to-late 1990s when hip-hop was creatively suffocated by an industry that preferred glorified tales of violence and the publicizing of bitchy artist in-fighting to producing culturally relevant records. Underground dance parties became prominent as DJs sought venues for experimentation, and huge crowds sought fresh beats and groovy drugs. One fed the other, I suppose. Charged with youth, illicit experiences and perhaps some chemical enhancement, we learned to go all night, and that making a dance floor happen was everyone’s responsibility.

Many of these underground DJs inspired the visceral, psychedelic sounds that informed the best hip-hop of the early oughts. I’m always happy to recall the many wonderful experiences of my former days as a drum-n-bass/jungalist, and am grateful that the underground beats scene has been around to keep progressive sonic collage alive while the big players continue to annoy us with mediocre hype.

Krush himself straddles that grey area between DJ Shadow (he played some tracks from groundbreaking works such as Entroducing and the mysterious Private Press) and Susumu Yakota. There is a tenderness, a dark interior space, like wandering through the forest of the Soul. Krush is noted for his use of both sound samples from the natural world and traditional instruments in free-jazz inspired fills. He creates a spontaneous symphony of scratches, layered drums and rhythm textures that have a distinctly narrative feel. It is the cold, interior world of sorrow without self-absorption, isolation without hopelessness, a landscape of dreams and hauntings, occasionally punctuated by frenetic beats and looming, cracked bass figures.

At the same time, Krush is firmly rooted in the hip-hop tradition. He was instantly inspired to become a musician having seen Wild Style, shortly after which he abandoned his brief fling with the Japanese mafia. The mesmerizing tones of Krush’s soothing and downtempo set gave way to some choice vocal tracks from the Pharcyde, Cypress Hill and others. Over the years, Krush’s work with some of the finest MCs around has gotten many dance floors greasy, and last night’s crowd of sonic-soaked beat nerds were no exception. Essentially, it was an evening to listen, to be moved from the inside out and the perfect scene for a dark January evening.

I look forward to what Krush comes up with next, as his productions are always transportive and engaging. Certainly, I’ll make the effort to see him mix live at any opportunity. I don’t want to understand why the forest is dark and haunted, but I still want to wander through it. So I’m glad that Krush scatters beat-heavy breadcrumbs along that spooky moonlit path. I will leave you with one of my favorite tracks:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9ORLo7ntMY

Much Love.

Friends,

As an experimental musician and public librarian, my ability to offer financial assistance to those in need is somewhat limited. Therefore, I have a simple offer for you all: if you send me a message telling me that you donated to the Haitian relief efforts, I will send you a link to a free mp3 copy of my new album. You can send me a DM on Twitter (@sacredmusick), on facebook (facebook.com/wesley.covey) or via email (things10thousand @ gmail.com). I don’t need to know how much you donated, or even to which group. I trust that you will not lie to me, and will have made a donation already or will proceed to do so. It’s that simple.

As to what you get, it’s a free mp3 copy of Emerging From the Earth, by The Ten Thousand Things (note: my website has not been updated in years. I’m working on it.). I am pretty shit at self-promotion, but here goes: Emerging From the Earth is musickal alchemy. Working on the idea of combining elements of our natural world into something that transcends everyday reality, forming gold out of everyday lead, I have used guitars, bass, vocals and samples to create an album of spiritual drones. This is aural mysticism, seeking communion with a higher power through meditatively repetitive sound. Samples can be heard here.

May you all be well, and please join me in thinking creatively about how to help.

So sad about Haiti today. If I believed in curses I would be convinced that that poor country has been under the dark cloud of a whopper for a very long time. Exploitation, occupation, slavery, massacres, plagues, flooding, numerous hurricanes, bloody revolutions, pirates, mudslides, brutal dictators, death squads, deforestation and resulting desertification, profound poverty, and now this earthquake. I don’t know how they have the heart to keep picking themselves up and starting over.

• Slaying/mutilation possibly occult motivated
• Book about an alien visitation/occult phenomena crossover location
• More UFO/paranormal crossover
• But don’t try to ask creationists and Biblical/UFO crossover
• Toddler impaled with dozens of needles (possibly occult related)
• Eyes Wide Shut vs. Ninth Gate: comparing and contrasting these Stanley Kubric and Roman Polansky works
• Newly discovered document regarding ancient Jewish occult practices
• Masons dying out – or are they just pretending?!?
• Hail Grimm! Satanists or Percy Carey fans?
• Attention millionaires: you could have bought Ira Levin’s old apartment
• I don’t have much of a reason to link to this - I just love that it’s tagged “suggestive milking sequences”
• Beyonce and Lady Gaga are bloodthirsty demonic misandrists
• Twilight is making abstinence cool?
• Oh for crying out loud. Icky in so many ways.

That’s all!

I love you. Please be good to each other.

Molly

We just saw the Guy Ritchie-helmed Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey, Jr. as the titular detective. I suppose it was better than I expected, and maybe a bit worse. Better, because it really didn’t alter the Holmes character in any significant ways. Worse, because  — despite revved-up action sequences — it was actually pretty boring.

Although I am a huge Arthur Conan Doyle fan, I haven’t read a Holmes story in at least two decades. But as a kid I devoured every published tale, and took in more than a few cinematic adaptations. I was in a Gifted and Talented program in elementary school, and I still remember with great fondness the PBS-endorsed Sherlock Holmes roleplaying game we got to play in class. I mention all this not to tout my credentials as a Holmesologist, but rather to demonstrate that the character is very dear to my heart.

Which is why I put off watching this adaptation for about as long as I could manage. By the time Bill started tweeting about it, however, I knew I had see the damn thing already.

Like I said, it wasn’t bad. I’m not a Guy Ritchie fan. Like, at all. I mean, he fucking married Madonna, for fuck’s sake. Although, I believe that’s called a “beard.”  And, considering the high level of barely-contained homoeroticism in Sherlock Holmes, I should say he needs one. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The “bromance” is as old as storytelling itself, even if Ritchie does display an above-average understanding of the phenomenon.

The characterization of Holmes was perfectly appropriate. I typically enjoy Robert Downey Jr. (especially in Weird Science and Less than Zero), so when I heard about him being cast as the famous detective, I thought, “OK — he’s a manic ex-cokehead with odd quirks and magnetism… he should do just fine.” And he did, right down to the accent, which is one of the more consistent I’ve heard from a Yank actor. Jude Law’s Watson was more than serviceable; actually, it was an improvement over the fusty portrayals other actors have offered over the years. The banter was agreeably British and witty, with the two leads trading brainy barbs like a Victorian-era Jack Klugman and Tony Randall. (That’s TV’s classic “Odd Couple” for our younger readers.)

There was one aspect of this new telling that I was particularly keen on observing. You see, Sherlock Holmes evinces behaviors consistent with high-functioning autism, which in more recent years has come to be termed Asperger’s Syndrome. (Though that may be changing again — there’s currently talk of Asperger’s being lumped back into a generic HFA categorization.) I haven’t talked about it here, but I have AS. Which probably explains why I had such a sense of rapport with Holmes as a child. If you want to know more about my adult diagnosis, have a look at Autistic in the District; there’s also these articles I wrote about neurodiversity). There’s been a healthy amount of discussion about whether Holmes has Asperger’s (I know he’s fictional, but diagnosing him is almost as much fun as retroactively applying the label to folks like Nicola Tesla, who definitely had AS.) This recent New York Times article has a lot of cool evidence to support the “Holmes as Prototypical Aspergian” theory:

In Conan Doyle’s portrayal, Sherlock Holmes at times exhibits all of these qualities. His interactions with others are often direct to the point of rudeness. And even when Holmes is speaking to Watson, his closest friend, his compliments are often closer to a rebuke. In “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” when Watson, pleased with his own detective abilities, reports to Holmes the results of his investigation, Holmes tells him that he isn’t a source of light but a conductor of light, a mere aid in solving mysteries only Holmes himself can untangle.

As for his interests, Holmes brags frequently of his detailed knowledge of all kinds of strange phenomena. He is said to have written a monograph on the differences among 140 cigar, pipe and cigarette ashes. He demonstrates what Asperger called “autistic intelligence” — an ability to see the world from a very different perspective than most people, often by focusing on details overlooked by others. Indeed, Sherlock Holmes boasts that he is able to see the significance of trifles and calls this his “method.”

I guess I just outed myself. Oh, well. At least you now understand my affinity for this character. I’m happy to report that RDJ’s performance is in keeping with the idea of Holmes as a high-functioning autistic, particularly during a scene where the detective and Watson are about to dine with Watson’s fiancée. Holmes arrives at the restaurant before the good doctor and his bride-to-be, and there’s a brief shot where he’s overwhelmed by the sounds of the other diners — chatter, glasses clinking, silverware scraping, etc.. This is precisely the same auditory/sensory overload I often experience in public settings. Later in the same scene, Holmes manages to piss off both Watson and his betrothed through what he likely thought was an amusing intellectual exercise. I’ve been there, dude.

It didn’t bother me at all that Holmes wasn’t the staid cerebral detective of previous adaptations. In my reading of Doyle’s works, the character was always a bit dangerous. He’s got a hatred for any kind of hierarchical authority and does not suffer fools gladly. He’s also a cocaine user who’s into pistols and hazardous chemicals. Just your everyday 19th-century Hunter S. Thompson, then. (Or 21st-century me, minus the prodigious gifts. Well, some of them, anyway.)

As far as action goes, let’s not forget that when Conan Doyle attempted to “retire” his character (unsuccessfully, I might add), he did so in a scene where Holmes and his arch-rival, Professor Moriarty, wrestle straight off a waterfall. This is where the term cliffhanger came from, in case you didn’t know.

I didn’t mind the “occult” slant of the film, as Conan Doyle was very much interested in this subject (see the “Hound of the Baskervilles“), and was himself initiated into an esoteric lodge. The plot of Sherlock Holmes centers on a certain Lord Blackwood (perhaps a portmanteau of fantasy novelist Lord Dunsany and horror scribe Algernon Blackwood) — a sinister magus of high breeding who’s trying to usher in a new era of political/theological control. Story-wise, it borrows far more from Alan Moore’s brilliant comic From Hell than it does the Doyle canon. Still, I was wowed by Ritchie’s attention to detail in terms of the esoteric set pieces. I’d read that the Blackwood character was based on Aleister Crowley (the epitome of loosely), and it does look as though the filmmakers consulted someone from the OTO for tips on what an authentic ritual chamber would look like. I’ve seen a plenty of depictions of this kind of thing, and dare I say this is the first mainstream movie that gets any of it right, straight down to the garish Egyptian/deco frescoes.

Blackwood is deftly portrayed by Mark Strong, who glowers intensely while delivering stock baddie dialogue. (Curiously, Strong looks a like a cross between Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett, both of whom played Holmes.) Yet the villain lacks motivation, which in turns undermines the sense of threat. Ultimately, the plot doesn’t amount to much, although it’s unnecessarily confusing. One of Conan Doyle’s gifts was that he could string together a slew of clues that you noticed but failed to put together until Holmes’ connected them in a summarily dazzling and pedantic lecture. In Ritchie’s film, you really have no idea what you’re supposed to be looking out for, other than the next round of fisticuffs.

Worse still is the female lead, played by Rachel McAdams. If you want to get a sense of how little Guy Ritchie understands women characters, here ya go. He seems to go out of his way to make her look unattractive, slathering on garish makeup and costumes and shooting her from the most unflattering angles. Law and Downey Jr., on the other hand, share intimate carriage rides in which they queenily argue over who cuts a trimmer figure in a waistcoat. I mean, why even bother to have a female lead at all? It only gets in the way of the love between a detective and his doctor.

The action was decent, but it would’ve been greatly enhanced if the story was stronger. Or even interesting. I found myself being more drawn to the banter, which was terrific until it had to get back to advancing the paltry plot. Somewhere between the casting and Ritchies’ wonderful depiction of post-industrial London (no, it wasn’t steampunk, just accurate) was a really great Holmes reboot. Unfortunately, I didn’t see it on the screen. But in my mind, it’s awesome.

Maybe the sequel will improve on the formula. Until then, I’ve got my own high-powered mind and baroque obsessions to keep me entertained.

[x-posted at AID]