Whenever someone like Warner Herzog starts talking about dreams, a kind of stale bourgeois abstraction seems to dampen the word, like some doctoral declawing of what is in 'reality' a vivid brutal fiction. Such declawers, these radically horrifically sane Herzog types, studiously miss the big picture; they can't see that it all begins and ends in a single chemical, DMT.
Think it's a joke? Interdimensional power animals pointed some sites out to me, and suggested I get a pineal gland tuning fork (for real!). And I did!
"...the pineal gland has become calcified due to fluoride in our water and toothpaste to "Dumb" us down and sever this divine connection. Our exclusive Pineal Gland Tuning fork is designed to vibrate at the frequency of the pineal gland, loosening that calcification and strengthening the Divine Connection!" - Soma EnergeticsImagine my surprise then, when just like Kubrick's General Ripper, Lovecraft wrote a story that involves these very tuning forks summoning third eye monsters:
"The waves from that thing are waking a thousand sleeping senses in us; senses which we inherit from aeons of evolution from the state of detached electrons to the state of organic humanity. . . . You have heard of the pineal gland?... That gland is the great sense-organ of organs — I have found out. It is like sight in the end, and transmits visual pictures to the brain." - H.P. Lovecraft ("From Beyond")
“If I accept the idea that this world has no invisible entities, this would mean that I’m agreeing with a single culture only a couple hundred years old and disagreeing with almost every other known culture that has ever existed on the planet. I’m not particularly convinced that we, among all the cultures of the planet, have discovered that these entities don’t really exist." -- James Fadiman (Teeming Brain)
We fans of Lovecraft know three things: 1) his visions of the alternate dimensional elder gods are so on point he was either schizophrenic or a psychedelic drug using shaman. 2) Either way, his pineal gland was obviously de-calcified. 3) There are only a handful of decent film adaptations of his work. Maybe it's just that his descriptions are so outlandish it's as if they tap into a deeper well of imagination than the one tapped by most horror fiction authors. His creatures dwell far beyond what can be duplicated on film. To cast normal horror fiction in our brain (when reading) we use a basic set of archetypal faces and shapes--humans with knives, spiders, snakes--but Lovecraft calls for us to reach back, past that original survival instinct imprinting, into the basement depths for the old dusty box of ancient images we didn't even know were there, back before... we were... 'changed.'
If normal fiction like Stephen King is Candyland, Lovecraft reaches back in the closet and pulls out this game (below), a complex month-long brain-melter that you'd swear wasn't there before. Its pieces are twisted into nightmarish figures dusty from time. You know you've never seen them before... yet they're so familiar... so uncanny:
In other words, Lovecraft's fiction is 'true' beyond our normal conceptions of both truth and fiction, and maybe he had some unique gift to activate his own pineal gland via electrified tuning forks, as seen in Stuart Gordon's FROM BEYOND (1986). It starts as a deranged sadomasochistic (impotent) scientist Dr. Pretorius (Ted Sorel) and his assistant Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs) create a machine that amplifies the frequency of their pineal glands. This allows them to see the monstrous creatures in the parallel dimensions, including eel like creatures swimming through the air, and giant worm type beings. One of them bites off Pretorius' head, sending Crawford running from the house screaming, a gibbering madman. (Presumably the channel works both ways - if you see them they can see you, too... hey, why not?)
Crawford is institutionalized. Dr. Pretorius' head is still missing, and a sexy psychiatrist Dr. McMichaels (Barbara Crampton - left) feels the only way the head will be found is if they recreate the experiment in Pretorius' lab attic. The results? The doctor rematerializes, merged with the worm thing and able to bring his/its kinky sadistic sex dominating fantasies to bear (he has a closet of bondage gear and a pillory in his room) through unholy trans-dimensional power. As the Pretorius worm keeps turning the machine back on from his alternate dimension, Tillinghast's pineal gland escapes his cranium. Poking out like an angler fish's lantern, it becoming a sentient thing all unto itself, feeding on the brains of others, and McMichaels gets kinky as the pineal stimulation sheds inhibition and increases sexual intensity.
What's funny is that now years later, the pineal tuning fork and amplified pineal-activating soundwave system turns out to actually work. It certainly worked for me back during the 2012 galactic alignment. There was no sex drive enhancement though, quite the opposite, more like lighting the stove of the long unlit crown chakra as the others fade in power. In conjunction with salvia divinorum, deep meditation, and drone music (included below if you have Spotify), the results were literally mind-altering.
+++++++
(Skip this next part unless you're planning to take the journey. And if you are, see also my 'enlightened' side site, Medsitation)
THE UNRAVELING of the Self:
There ARE demons like the Lovecraftian elder gods however, so you need to be resolute, and trust in a higher power to act as a kind of 'no place like home' life raft, or-- in my visualization--one of those Nerf footballs kids clutch to their chests in order to float better in the deep end. This will occupy your conscious mind, distract it and center it so you don't panic as your entire construct of self, of id-ego-superego is unraveled, like a ball of twine, until there's nothing of 'you' left at all, just that Nerf football, which then lifts up without you holding onto it, and the pool vanishes and it goes up and up and you're still with it somehow, faster and faster and right through the monsters at the gates as if they were just papier mache animated miniature golf hazards (for no monster can maul empty air) and into the green of the undifferentiated self (the 'whole in one'). Once past those hazard demon arms, which continue to reach out menacingly at invisible golfers next in line at the hole, so to speak, you're now beyond time and space (up the chute into illuminated blackness). You notice there are very few other souls up/out/in there--and they are indistinguishable from the elements around them -as are you, for all is one, though not quite inseparable. You sense a few other consciousnesses bopping in--Buddhist monks, hippies like yourself, god helmet wearers-- their activated kundalini pineal glands all like fleeting little fireflies in the electrified darkness. But there are a few full figures materialized up there. The one I 'saw' was a giant meditating motionless Buddha in the center of an overflowing fountain, the water pooling in his lap, running slowly through a network of capillary grooves down into my forehead, though not only to me, but to anyone who could tune his frequency in (for any number of TV antennae can pick up a signal without diluting/changing it); I knew that he wasn't making the energy so much as forming it, like a Ben Franklin lightning kite, so the 'key' on our end of the kundalini string (the pineal) would electrify.
Rather than just the blinding white noise of pure oneness/the void (Dharmakaya), of being struck ourselves by lightning and obliterated, we were given via Buddha's mediation just the right dose. But there are other 'kites' up there, not all of them 'good.' The breakthrough can be quite insane and painful on a psychic level as your third eye (which is experienced mostly in vivid dreams, as during bad fevers or sleeping with a nicotine patch on) full opens and you feel what some have termed 'the baby teeth of the dragon' unzipping you from you psychic cocoon like a vacuum cleaner bag, your impurities and soul dust being electrified and zapped away as your construct of self is unraveled, and it feels like the area above but behind your eyes in the center of your forehead is a small burning electrode struggling to escape out of your forehead. And maybe eat the brains of the bitchy shrink.
The worst most terrifying received third eye image for me was the gigantic rotating Medusa head planet, its fiery mouth a giant hellish furnace, bloody sharp and full of fire all at once, the Kali demoness at her most staggeringly terrifying, as I floated in place above her planet in the upper stratosphere, the rotation of the planet passed below me. I knew that the mouth, the fiery gorgon maw, would soon pass underneath where I floated, and then not just the mental and physical portions of myself, but the 'Whole Self,' soul included, would be be devoured in flames; and that is a terror vastly beyond any I'd felt before or since. But I prayed and then felt the clouds of reality part behind me and a giant glowing electric hand of god or an angel reaching through to touch me on the shoulder as I sat there in my lotus position, and all was electrified with love and trust and I was saved /cured/ awake. I knew there was a God because there He was, hand on my shoulder. Or some angel.
Of course I tried to share this in AA, minus the salvia part, but they thought I was crazy. Why wouldn't they? Later that god--or its shadow/variation--turned out to be a trickster, sneering in contemptuous sadistic laughter after I got shut down by this girl I had fallen in love at first sight with. Reeling from her deft rebuff, I took the wrong direction on the subway and rode it to the end. Not that my pain was particularly undeserved... Gods are not always gentle in their teachings.
These days, having had my rebirth moment already, the unfolding of my constituted reality until I'm back in the womb of the undifferentiated self, I've lost completely that spiritual yearning I used to have, that feeling which drove me to 'see more' all through my 20s and 30s, and some of 40s. It was like I knew there was a crazy movie out there I wanted to see, a movie most people denied existed. But I tracked it down and finally saw it, three or four times, and then I became it, fully, and now have no desire to ever see it again. My whole self quest is over. I know where I'm going after death. Whether I'm right or not is irrelevant. Yesterday I thought I was dying - I couldn't breathe - thought I had lung failure. Today it's raining and I'm fine. Conclusion: allergies. Cigarette regimen, resume... cautiously. My cigarette break buddy Sean's getting an artificial heart valve. Baby, that death drive ain't no joke. Then again, I only feel that way when it's breathing down my neck, Medusa's hellmouth slowly revolving below me as I float in perfect stillness of motion above the planet, and I guess in grand Munchausen style I'm hoping for another last minute god hand before that mouth swallows me. I can't even remember the spiritual terror of that hell devouring moment -a kind of deep level of existential dread I've never experienced in real life, not since childhood nightmares. It's not the hellfire though, it's the feeling of being cut-off from the feeling of it. We need to ignore death to function in the world, but if we ignore it too well we piss it off, and it comes gunning.
(PS - 11/17 - I went to the doctor and have COPD, I should have listened to the rain)
+++++++
(OKAY - RESUME HERE)
BATAILLES: take it to the Limit-Experience"
Let me now hogtie in all that with HELLRAISER and those kinky-ass Cenobites: the sadosmasochistic pleasure pain principle taps into notions forged in the heated French brain of Georges Batailles; it finds fruition in the strange, feverish clued-in mind of Lovecraft and later Clive Barker. The idea that normal pleasure becomes stale compared to agony and the merging of both. My old guitarist who loves cocaine also likes 'gonzo' porn, and misogynistic horror movies, to my eternal dismay. I've demanded he weed out lyrics like "shot the bitch on down," and I learned from studying to be a drug counsellor that cocaine addicts are often very intensely into bondage porn, ordering vile shit off the internet in the dead of night and forgetting about it the next afternoon when they wake up, and then getting packages from bondage sites a week later and not remembering ordering it or even seeing the site, and then feeling horrified when they open it, like their cocaine binge self is a perverse amoral Mr. Hyde shopping the dark alleys behind Amazon. Cocaine removes the mammal empathy impediments to our inner reptilian objectifying sex monster, so sensation, power and self-gratification become so essential we're addicts for whom the high needs constant 'upping' not to be a low. I would say I'm immune to all this, but I remember as an eight year-old, imagining having a harem of girls I liked from school, all forced to kneel before me in chains etc. - Shit I used to fantasize about as a kid actually, up until around the thirdd grade, when my sense of empathy began to kick in. Now I wonder if my deep feminist repulsion towards any display of this kind of sick reptilian cortex sadism is just a long con version of that cocaine fiend's horror at getting the package.
SPOILERS GALORE FROM HERE ON DOWN:
Then there's this slick new feature length men's fragrance commercial disguised as a Bond movie called SPECTRE. It has a pretty great train fight, a smokin' hot babe (Léa Seydoux) who looks lovely with her perfectly mussed blonde hair over a black turtleneck against a snowy white Alpen backdrop (j'adore), and a glum attitude of leftist disaffect: systemic corruption is dragging MI6 down the drain. Now the chips are so stacked against our Mr. Bond that, after he rides right into the dragon's den, has his arch enemy Stavros (Christophe Waltz, yet again) display how the entire purpose of the vast chain of human misery since the dawn of Casino Royale has been to keep that sinewy ever-clenched jaw muscle on Daniel Crag's face forever woeful, for the most ridiculous of reasons (sibling rivalry!), that we can't help but grow sick of the whole series, even the Connery ones! Luckily, though the bad guys know all 007's secrets, they of course aren't bright enough to remove his trick watch when they strap him to the torture chair. One well-placed pistol shot later and the whole entire billion dollar complex is up in flames. And once again the lucky lady and the lucky shot-popping Mr. Bond are off to another designer boutique parfum tableaux.
Not to say there's not some great vistas, but really... the chain of paranoid logic at work is so wearying in its oppressive glitz that SPECTRE becomes the most un-Bond Bond ever. At least Roger Moore's movies didn't turn you off and make you want to read a book or go out and play instead of lollygagging in front of the TV. It's as if--having gone back to basics in SKYFALL--director Sam Mendes wanted to just scrub everything we love and care about in the series he's shepherding, putting him in the same buzzkill category as Dave Fincher in ALIEN 3. He turns what should be a romp into an 'interrogation of power' 70s-style 'everyone is corrupt' conspiracy downer like THE PARALLAX VIEW or THE FORMULA, albeit one dressed up like a Rolex watch ad supplement in Esquire. More depressing even than QUANTUM OF SOLACE, it posits all the global superpowers as so dumb they'd turn over their national security to a shady private contractor at the first sign of trouble, like if the US Army gave its lunch money to some kid who claimed to be from the Black Hand. And MI6 still lets the entire weight of the world order rest on one man's shoulders, even while loudly ordering him to let it drop. And nary a scene goes by without some sort of high-end tie-in. The hypocrisy is beyond any Situationist's remedy.
In short, the writers love to set up plush high end noir Bildenberg conspiracies for Bond to be almost swallowed by, but he's so comfortable in the 'top ten percent of the top one percent' spending arena we wonder how he's going to fight the power and still adorn himself and his foxy lady in enough duty-free store finery. And if that wasn't enough, we have to know that so much of the SPECTRE treasury is paid for by white slavery, just because, you know, sexually brutalized foreign females are the new status symbol. But then those writers and corporate product positioners are at a loss how an expensively-coiffed Brit with nothing but a snub nose automatic and an exploding watch can defeat this vast conspiracy inside of the next hour. So Boom - a lucky stray shot topples the empire, twice. One snub nosed .38 slug starts a death star style chain reaction at the fortress without even needing to study the blueprint inside the R2 unit, and then back in London the same pistol not only hits a helicopter from a half mile away but explodes it. Oh James, is that your 'magic' gun? Does the screenwriter really know anything about any aspect of how reality--even in movies--operates? Has he ever fired a gun or read about barrel length vs. accuracy? Does he think hitting a car means it automatically explodes, as his only experience of either guns or gas tanks comes from 80s action movies?
I know if my NRA bro was here he'd be the first to point it out: a snub nosed pistol has terrible muzzle velocity and accuracy beyond a hundred yards --that's the trade-off for its easier portability. I'm sure Bond's a crack shot, but if a longer barrel didn't help accuracy, snipers wouldn't bother with rifles. Old Bond can just aim at a helicopter (from a rocking boat no less) far over Big Ben and Bam!
The only interesting part of the whole film the torture device of Ernst's: a small robotic surgery needle that bores into various parts of the brain to erase memory and the ability to recall faces (so everyone looks like a stranger), and presumably bore out his pineal gland. But hey! Though he gets the needle, Bond isn't even fazed. Mere torture doesn't work on Bond! For some reason! He gets the needle in, but doesn't inhale. Is it lazy writing that we never know why it doesn't work? Why even bother with the laboriously sleazy set-up? SPECTRE's main complex is a billion dollar array of monitors and all this shit, and we spend all this time learning how impossible it is for Bond to escape or beat SPECTRE. And then he just does! It's clear the writers would be more at home doing HOSTEL III than writing action movies. Mainly, Mendes wants James to change into some new designer clothes. more than he loves actual plots or action or spycraft. Even the old 60s Batman wouldn't rely this much on their target demo's ignorance of basic physics.
Some guys are of the belief that it's the expensive watch and designer threads that attract the models, and not cocaine, but those guys are wrong. And if you can flip through an issue of Esquire without feeling like you're being sold on the idea of investing in a corporate white slavery ring by some synergizing pimp, then you really are already so brainwashed by the objectifying media that even a Situationist street agitprop freakout can't wake you up to your own commodification, baby. The only way the filmmakers can justify such strident product placement is to have Bond give up spycraft at the end to go show his new girl a good time. With his swanky car, watch, cologne, snobby taste in champagne, and wardrobe all keeping her rivitedzzzz he's bound to succeed, because everyone knows that's what a woman wants: a wallet on legs to dutifully cart her from one flagship to the other.
That aside, the show has a sharp knowing eye for the arcane realms, there's few monsters per se, but a lot of high strangeness with the dead coming back as evil beings from beyond (ala the home of the elder gods in Lovecraft). I do love the split that goes on between the first visit to the magical dimension known as Fillory, rich with beautiful sights, but then a snap of a wand and 100 years have passed and its become a toxic wasteland. "Your childhood fantasy's a great big magical Dacchau," Lucy notes. It's like Frodo going to sleep after saving Middle Earth and waking up to see old evil Sauron has already won decades earlier and left a scorched Shire in his wake, no a polluted cesspool wasteland (like in WIZARDS). I've had the same thing happen over two nights of astral traveling back in '03. The first night I accessed a divine realm with the help of an angelic spirit guide. The next night I came back and the realm was a industrial emptiness and woe, the spirit reproachful - I'd left a hundred years ago and allowed this to happen. I guess that's a not uncommon one-two punch - maybe a combo metaphor for our own slow killing of the planet and my own slow killing of time, distraction, drugs and daily gallons of Diet Coke. It's been in lots of fantasies and visions, it's like maybe I'm not 'experiencing it' per se, but reliving a trauma in a stone tape loop, witnessing the primal scenes of our planetary past like a series of holographic waxworks.
Still, I did not like the sudden terrifying harshness, including one brutal trickster visitation / rape, two goddess jism things / brutal slaughter / child molestation / the way molesting creates monsters; the price of cover memories etc to leave me as a viewer feeling pretty brutalized. I mean, we have to wait far too long for a resolution to such a grisly cliffhanger to such a regularly 'fun' show. I don't know about you, but I didn't binge watch my Sunday away just to be have the shit kicked out of me by some Syfy show that suddenly decides it wants to recreate how disillusioned and betrayed we felt when we first learned our beloved childhood icon Bill Cosby was a date rapist super-creep.
I'm not saying the show isn't brilliant, fractal-like and meta and getting at the core of some profound truth about escapism vs. facing the banality of the real, sort of like addiciton - the longer you ignore your dependence the worse the withdrawal, the less you 'come down to.' Maybe all consciousness is a cover memory, and all fiction and fantasy a way of patching in that cover memory's weak spots. Visions of angels with white wings landing beside us are maybe just the brain's way of handling being raped by Zeus in disguise as a swan; or the way that owls at the window are maybe the brain's way of handling being probed by aliens.
And don't get me started on that bear in the Overlook
The Magician's season one ending became like that aforementioned trickster, a cretin who uses our own faith against us, takes advantage. It gives us all sorts of insights and truths only to then play us like Robert Shaw got played in THE STING. My trickster just sat opposite me on the subway and laughed coldly and maliciously as I sat in shock, humiliated and confused, misled on his/her advice. Later, a feminine spirit came (during another session) and said journeying into this area is like dialing random numbers: you can hope you get a friendly voice but there are a lot of tricksters amid the angels. Ask any cult leader: faith is the easiest thing to abuse. That goes for TV and movies as well, for these cliffhanger rapes and tortures are a betrayal in their way, too. They presume a viewer so inoculated against all the SAW-type torture tropes, so that we'll barely feel the sting of the needle.
Luckily, for every vile trickster there's a couple of angels, like Scarlett Johansson and Luc Besson who came riding to my traumatized rescue with LUCY (2014), on (what else?) HBO (home of 'the rutting'), to help me recover after that brutal cliff-hanger finale. Now that's some prime DMT nonsense! Hilarious, fuzzy logic-packed and unrepentantly trippy, I liked LUCY even better than I normally would because all the angry science geeks and self-righteous bourgeois pundits hated it, loudly condemning the film's anti-science idiocy (the 10% of the brain thing, they say, has been disproved).
Moron says what now?
Sure it's dumb in a lot of ways - so was LIMITLESS ("One pill makes you Corporate") or any other film where some designer drug makes a gullible slacker superhuman and he goes up against gangsters who want the drug too but are too dumb or chickenshit to take it themselves and outfox him with the same power. It's the ultimate Adderall speed fantasy: the drug makes you feel smarter and brighter than everyone else in the room --and they're too stupid to take it too and level the playing field. It's a great boost but it doesn't make you compassionate enough to know everyone else feels the same way, and the more you pontificate the more insane and grandiose you probably sound. What pissed off the anti-LUCY critics, of course, is that they consider themselves the smartest guys in the room to start with, and no movie starlet hottie with a deep Hawks-does-Daria voice is going to outsmart them, no matter how many drugs she does. If some nerd with a pocket protector can't feel at least smarter than an actress of Scarlett's beauty they may as well be dead.
Me, I'm not threatened. I dig it, and love the ending: as her Lucy finally merges with the pervasive all consuming oneness via using '100%' of her brain's capacity. She even creates humanity by going back in time to act as a Kubrickian monolith to her ape chick equivalent. Honey, to me, that's badass -- I don't care that there's really no story here. I like the deadpan way the cop just rolls along with the weirdness. Dude, you can tell old Luc Besson's a fan of Adderall or meth and this is his valentine to it, and right or wrong you know I approve that message, because it's both right AND wrong, and when you're beyond duality, both are included in the spectrum (and if you judge either one as better or worse you automatically ain't beyond duality).
Belive it or not, I don't find any of the shit in LUCY unbelievable. What I find unbelievable is that we're a species able to solve a problem like ourselves only by avoiding it with escapism. And since the only way to solve that problem is not to believe it, to stop watching movies, then I pity the fools who feel threatened by this gonzo nutcase film. They may as well read a book for god's sakes, it's that bad.
The French equivalent of Michael Bay, Luc Besson is too 'cool' for them! You can tell he makes films that he wants to see. He's not chasing some trend to make a bundle but because he's enthralled by childhood memories of seeing DIE HARD or LETHAL WEAPON for the first time as a kid, or scoring with some hot gallic bird after a night 'rolling' at a great Parisian dance club and staying up til dawn, the way one's first ecstasy trip--one that happens to include a major sexual hook-up--changes you utterly, providing a high point the rest of your life will never quite match. Personally, I'd much prefer to see an action movie made be a moron who genuinely loves that genre he's working in, like Besson (or Ed Wood), rather than a smartass who "talks down" to it (the way, say, Fincher did with ALIEN 3, or Mendes in SPECTRE). Who cares if an idea makes sense? It's a goddamned action movie, not a science fair, you ('scuse me while I take a sniff) insignificant cocksucking low down client stealing, trend chasing, kowtowing, sniveling, self important jackasses. LUCY, Luc and I will fuck you up! Snnnnniffff Arggghhhh! That's good shit!
Cover your escape with this, and let the pitch that
cracks the champagne glass egg of Illumination crack the
crust from your third eye lashings
If normal fiction like Stephen King is Candyland, Lovecraft reaches back in the closet and pulls out this game (below), a complex month-long brain-melter that you'd swear wasn't there before. Its pieces are twisted into nightmarish figures dusty from time. You know you've never seen them before... yet they're so familiar... so uncanny:
In other words, Lovecraft's fiction is 'true' beyond our normal conceptions of both truth and fiction, and maybe he had some unique gift to activate his own pineal gland via electrified tuning forks, as seen in Stuart Gordon's FROM BEYOND (1986). It starts as a deranged sadomasochistic (impotent) scientist Dr. Pretorius (Ted Sorel) and his assistant Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs) create a machine that amplifies the frequency of their pineal glands. This allows them to see the monstrous creatures in the parallel dimensions, including eel like creatures swimming through the air, and giant worm type beings. One of them bites off Pretorius' head, sending Crawford running from the house screaming, a gibbering madman. (Presumably the channel works both ways - if you see them they can see you, too... hey, why not?)
What's funny is that now years later, the pineal tuning fork and amplified pineal-activating soundwave system turns out to actually work. It certainly worked for me back during the 2012 galactic alignment. There was no sex drive enhancement though, quite the opposite, more like lighting the stove of the long unlit crown chakra as the others fade in power. In conjunction with salvia divinorum, deep meditation, and drone music (included below if you have Spotify), the results were literally mind-altering.
+++++++
(Skip this next part unless you're planning to take the journey. And if you are, see also my 'enlightened' side site, Medsitation)
THE UNRAVELING of the Self:
 |
| the Void- white noise; Buddha- TV station; your pineal gland: TV antenna (a guru would be a descrambler box, or signal booster) |
Rather than just the blinding white noise of pure oneness/the void (Dharmakaya), of being struck ourselves by lightning and obliterated, we were given via Buddha's mediation just the right dose. But there are other 'kites' up there, not all of them 'good.' The breakthrough can be quite insane and painful on a psychic level as your third eye (which is experienced mostly in vivid dreams, as during bad fevers or sleeping with a nicotine patch on) full opens and you feel what some have termed 'the baby teeth of the dragon' unzipping you from you psychic cocoon like a vacuum cleaner bag, your impurities and soul dust being electrified and zapped away as your construct of self is unraveled, and it feels like the area above but behind your eyes in the center of your forehead is a small burning electrode struggling to escape out of your forehead. And maybe eat the brains of the bitchy shrink.
The worst most terrifying received third eye image for me was the gigantic rotating Medusa head planet, its fiery mouth a giant hellish furnace, bloody sharp and full of fire all at once, the Kali demoness at her most staggeringly terrifying, as I floated in place above her planet in the upper stratosphere, the rotation of the planet passed below me. I knew that the mouth, the fiery gorgon maw, would soon pass underneath where I floated, and then not just the mental and physical portions of myself, but the 'Whole Self,' soul included, would be be devoured in flames; and that is a terror vastly beyond any I'd felt before or since. But I prayed and then felt the clouds of reality part behind me and a giant glowing electric hand of god or an angel reaching through to touch me on the shoulder as I sat there in my lotus position, and all was electrified with love and trust and I was saved /cured/ awake. I knew there was a God because there He was, hand on my shoulder. Or some angel.
Of course I tried to share this in AA, minus the salvia part, but they thought I was crazy. Why wouldn't they? Later that god--or its shadow/variation--turned out to be a trickster, sneering in contemptuous sadistic laughter after I got shut down by this girl I had fallen in love at first sight with. Reeling from her deft rebuff, I took the wrong direction on the subway and rode it to the end. Not that my pain was particularly undeserved... Gods are not always gentle in their teachings.
 |
| Crampton as Dr. McMichaels (post-pineal activation) |
These days, having had my rebirth moment already, the unfolding of my constituted reality until I'm back in the womb of the undifferentiated self, I've lost completely that spiritual yearning I used to have, that feeling which drove me to 'see more' all through my 20s and 30s, and some of 40s. It was like I knew there was a crazy movie out there I wanted to see, a movie most people denied existed. But I tracked it down and finally saw it, three or four times, and then I became it, fully, and now have no desire to ever see it again. My whole self quest is over. I know where I'm going after death. Whether I'm right or not is irrelevant. Yesterday I thought I was dying - I couldn't breathe - thought I had lung failure. Today it's raining and I'm fine. Conclusion: allergies. Cigarette regimen, resume... cautiously. My cigarette break buddy Sean's getting an artificial heart valve. Baby, that death drive ain't no joke. Then again, I only feel that way when it's breathing down my neck, Medusa's hellmouth slowly revolving below me as I float in perfect stillness of motion above the planet, and I guess in grand Munchausen style I'm hoping for another last minute god hand before that mouth swallows me. I can't even remember the spiritual terror of that hell devouring moment -a kind of deep level of existential dread I've never experienced in real life, not since childhood nightmares. It's not the hellfire though, it's the feeling of being cut-off from the feeling of it. We need to ignore death to function in the world, but if we ignore it too well we piss it off, and it comes gunning.
(PS - 11/17 - I went to the doctor and have COPD, I should have listened to the rain)
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(OKAY - RESUME HERE)
Let me now hogtie in all that with HELLRAISER and those kinky-ass Cenobites: the sadosmasochistic pleasure pain principle taps into notions forged in the heated French brain of Georges Batailles; it finds fruition in the strange, feverish clued-in mind of Lovecraft and later Clive Barker. The idea that normal pleasure becomes stale compared to agony and the merging of both. My old guitarist who loves cocaine also likes 'gonzo' porn, and misogynistic horror movies, to my eternal dismay. I've demanded he weed out lyrics like "shot the bitch on down," and I learned from studying to be a drug counsellor that cocaine addicts are often very intensely into bondage porn, ordering vile shit off the internet in the dead of night and forgetting about it the next afternoon when they wake up, and then getting packages from bondage sites a week later and not remembering ordering it or even seeing the site, and then feeling horrified when they open it, like their cocaine binge self is a perverse amoral Mr. Hyde shopping the dark alleys behind Amazon. Cocaine removes the mammal empathy impediments to our inner reptilian objectifying sex monster, so sensation, power and self-gratification become so essential we're addicts for whom the high needs constant 'upping' not to be a low. I would say I'm immune to all this, but I remember as an eight year-old, imagining having a harem of girls I liked from school, all forced to kneel before me in chains etc. - Shit I used to fantasize about as a kid actually, up until around the thirdd grade, when my sense of empathy began to kick in. Now I wonder if my deep feminist repulsion towards any display of this kind of sick reptilian cortex sadism is just a long con version of that cocaine fiend's horror at getting the package.
SPOILERS GALORE FROM HERE ON DOWN:
Then there's this slick new feature length men's fragrance commercial disguised as a Bond movie called SPECTRE. It has a pretty great train fight, a smokin' hot babe (Léa Seydoux) who looks lovely with her perfectly mussed blonde hair over a black turtleneck against a snowy white Alpen backdrop (j'adore), and a glum attitude of leftist disaffect: systemic corruption is dragging MI6 down the drain. Now the chips are so stacked against our Mr. Bond that, after he rides right into the dragon's den, has his arch enemy Stavros (Christophe Waltz, yet again) display how the entire purpose of the vast chain of human misery since the dawn of Casino Royale has been to keep that sinewy ever-clenched jaw muscle on Daniel Crag's face forever woeful, for the most ridiculous of reasons (sibling rivalry!), that we can't help but grow sick of the whole series, even the Connery ones! Luckily, though the bad guys know all 007's secrets, they of course aren't bright enough to remove his trick watch when they strap him to the torture chair. One well-placed pistol shot later and the whole entire billion dollar complex is up in flames. And once again the lucky lady and the lucky shot-popping Mr. Bond are off to another designer boutique parfum tableaux.
Not to say there's not some great vistas, but really... the chain of paranoid logic at work is so wearying in its oppressive glitz that SPECTRE becomes the most un-Bond Bond ever. At least Roger Moore's movies didn't turn you off and make you want to read a book or go out and play instead of lollygagging in front of the TV. It's as if--having gone back to basics in SKYFALL--director Sam Mendes wanted to just scrub everything we love and care about in the series he's shepherding, putting him in the same buzzkill category as Dave Fincher in ALIEN 3. He turns what should be a romp into an 'interrogation of power' 70s-style 'everyone is corrupt' conspiracy downer like THE PARALLAX VIEW or THE FORMULA, albeit one dressed up like a Rolex watch ad supplement in Esquire. More depressing even than QUANTUM OF SOLACE, it posits all the global superpowers as so dumb they'd turn over their national security to a shady private contractor at the first sign of trouble, like if the US Army gave its lunch money to some kid who claimed to be from the Black Hand. And MI6 still lets the entire weight of the world order rest on one man's shoulders, even while loudly ordering him to let it drop. And nary a scene goes by without some sort of high-end tie-in. The hypocrisy is beyond any Situationist's remedy.
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I know if my NRA bro was here he'd be the first to point it out: a snub nosed pistol has terrible muzzle velocity and accuracy beyond a hundred yards --that's the trade-off for its easier portability. I'm sure Bond's a crack shot, but if a longer barrel didn't help accuracy, snipers wouldn't bother with rifles. Old Bond can just aim at a helicopter (from a rocking boat no less) far over Big Ben and Bam!
The only interesting part of the whole film the torture device of Ernst's: a small robotic surgery needle that bores into various parts of the brain to erase memory and the ability to recall faces (so everyone looks like a stranger), and presumably bore out his pineal gland. But hey! Though he gets the needle, Bond isn't even fazed. Mere torture doesn't work on Bond! For some reason! He gets the needle in, but doesn't inhale. Is it lazy writing that we never know why it doesn't work? Why even bother with the laboriously sleazy set-up? SPECTRE's main complex is a billion dollar array of monitors and all this shit, and we spend all this time learning how impossible it is for Bond to escape or beat SPECTRE. And then he just does! It's clear the writers would be more at home doing HOSTEL III than writing action movies. Mainly, Mendes wants James to change into some new designer clothes. more than he loves actual plots or action or spycraft. Even the old 60s Batman wouldn't rely this much on their target demo's ignorance of basic physics.
Some guys are of the belief that it's the expensive watch and designer threads that attract the models, and not cocaine, but those guys are wrong. And if you can flip through an issue of Esquire without feeling like you're being sold on the idea of investing in a corporate white slavery ring by some synergizing pimp, then you really are already so brainwashed by the objectifying media that even a Situationist street agitprop freakout can't wake you up to your own commodification, baby. The only way the filmmakers can justify such strident product placement is to have Bond give up spycraft at the end to go show his new girl a good time. With his swanky car, watch, cologne, snobby taste in champagne, and wardrobe all keeping her rivitedzzzz he's bound to succeed, because everyone knows that's what a woman wants: a wallet on legs to dutifully cart her from one flagship to the other.
THE MAGICIANS, a Canadian-Syfy show is perfect for post-grad 20-40 somethings still trying to contextualize their sophomore year 'molly' rolls with particle physics finals and the science fiction and fantasy they read as geeks in high school. In short, it's about me, man. I really related with "selling your comic book collection" and having to get a job, but then finding, through psychedelics and higher education, that your fantasy world is still thriving, and based on real shit, I mean real in a sense of out-of-body experience in alternate realms and Lovecraft's pineal gland monsters.
If that doesn't work for you, try this: it's Harry Potter for people who love drugs and hate children and wish they could dropkick every last shred of fantasy film "whimsy" Mickey Mouse scoring into a wood chopper. I'll confess I've never gotten to into the Potters and I kind of gave up on Syfy original shows after Bo started being all high and mighty about not killing people in LOST GIRL. But MAGICIANS was on in the background last week while I was polishing my previous post and it subliminally won me over when the lead brooding ectomorph Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph) woke up in bed with his arch gay aesthete drunkard buddy (Hale Appleman) and his fellow rich jet set party girl bestie, and in the context of the show it's not considered weird that he did gay shit on prime time TV, it's weird he did it while his girlfriend (Olivia Taylor Dudley) was in the other room! Meanwhile his best friend from home, Julia (Stella Maeve) has a great husky voice and got refused admission to the prestigious alternate dimension Magic school so becomes a 'hedge witch' - the equivalent of a townie meth head of magic. Dude, the world of a liberal arts major acidhead at a major university who leaves his townie best friend behind has never been more vividly mythologized!
If that doesn't work for you, try this: it's Harry Potter for people who love drugs and hate children and wish they could dropkick every last shred of fantasy film "whimsy" Mickey Mouse scoring into a wood chopper. I'll confess I've never gotten to into the Potters and I kind of gave up on Syfy original shows after Bo started being all high and mighty about not killing people in LOST GIRL. But MAGICIANS was on in the background last week while I was polishing my previous post and it subliminally won me over when the lead brooding ectomorph Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph) woke up in bed with his arch gay aesthete drunkard buddy (Hale Appleman) and his fellow rich jet set party girl bestie, and in the context of the show it's not considered weird that he did gay shit on prime time TV, it's weird he did it while his girlfriend (Olivia Taylor Dudley) was in the other room! Meanwhile his best friend from home, Julia (Stella Maeve) has a great husky voice and got refused admission to the prestigious alternate dimension Magic school so becomes a 'hedge witch' - the equivalent of a townie meth head of magic. Dude, the world of a liberal arts major acidhead at a major university who leaves his townie best friend behind has never been more vividly mythologized!
And that becomes the problem -college isn't just for tripping, it's also where HUNTING GROUND date rape shit runs riot, leaving powerless schmucks like me and Quentin with a lifetime violent hatred of all frat boys, or in the case of THE MAGICIANS, loathing for a trickster who comes to Julia in the form of a Mother Earth goddess. There's also a beloved childhood author (a kind of C.S. Lewis meets Tolkein) who turns out to be a pedophile. There's even a magical rite that can only be attained by drinking a jar full of demi-god semen. Any one of those things would be disturbing enough that I'd have never half-watched it had I known. I wouldn't have opened up to it had I not presumed benevolence, especially after a whole season of basically non-traumatic drug metaphor magical weirdness, and underneath that a cover memory of new age holistic spirituality.
That aside, the show has a sharp knowing eye for the arcane realms, there's few monsters per se, but a lot of high strangeness with the dead coming back as evil beings from beyond (ala the home of the elder gods in Lovecraft). I do love the split that goes on between the first visit to the magical dimension known as Fillory, rich with beautiful sights, but then a snap of a wand and 100 years have passed and its become a toxic wasteland. "Your childhood fantasy's a great big magical Dacchau," Lucy notes. It's like Frodo going to sleep after saving Middle Earth and waking up to see old evil Sauron has already won decades earlier and left a scorched Shire in his wake, no a polluted cesspool wasteland (like in WIZARDS). I've had the same thing happen over two nights of astral traveling back in '03. The first night I accessed a divine realm with the help of an angelic spirit guide. The next night I came back and the realm was a industrial emptiness and woe, the spirit reproachful - I'd left a hundred years ago and allowed this to happen. I guess that's a not uncommon one-two punch - maybe a combo metaphor for our own slow killing of the planet and my own slow killing of time, distraction, drugs and daily gallons of Diet Coke. It's been in lots of fantasies and visions, it's like maybe I'm not 'experiencing it' per se, but reliving a trauma in a stone tape loop, witnessing the primal scenes of our planetary past like a series of holographic waxworks.
Still, I did not like the sudden terrifying harshness, including one brutal trickster visitation / rape, two goddess jism things / brutal slaughter / child molestation / the way molesting creates monsters; the price of cover memories etc to leave me as a viewer feeling pretty brutalized. I mean, we have to wait far too long for a resolution to such a grisly cliffhanger to such a regularly 'fun' show. I don't know about you, but I didn't binge watch my Sunday away just to be have the shit kicked out of me by some Syfy show that suddenly decides it wants to recreate how disillusioned and betrayed we felt when we first learned our beloved childhood icon Bill Cosby was a date rapist super-creep.
I'm not saying the show isn't brilliant, fractal-like and meta and getting at the core of some profound truth about escapism vs. facing the banality of the real, sort of like addiciton - the longer you ignore your dependence the worse the withdrawal, the less you 'come down to.' Maybe all consciousness is a cover memory, and all fiction and fantasy a way of patching in that cover memory's weak spots. Visions of angels with white wings landing beside us are maybe just the brain's way of handling being raped by Zeus in disguise as a swan; or the way that owls at the window are maybe the brain's way of handling being probed by aliens.
And don't get me started on that bear in the Overlook
The Magician's season one ending became like that aforementioned trickster, a cretin who uses our own faith against us, takes advantage. It gives us all sorts of insights and truths only to then play us like Robert Shaw got played in THE STING. My trickster just sat opposite me on the subway and laughed coldly and maliciously as I sat in shock, humiliated and confused, misled on his/her advice. Later, a feminine spirit came (during another session) and said journeying into this area is like dialing random numbers: you can hope you get a friendly voice but there are a lot of tricksters amid the angels. Ask any cult leader: faith is the easiest thing to abuse. That goes for TV and movies as well, for these cliffhanger rapes and tortures are a betrayal in their way, too. They presume a viewer so inoculated against all the SAW-type torture tropes, so that we'll barely feel the sting of the needle.
Luckily, for every vile trickster there's a couple of angels, like Scarlett Johansson and Luc Besson who came riding to my traumatized rescue with LUCY (2014), on (what else?) HBO (home of 'the rutting'), to help me recover after that brutal cliff-hanger finale. Now that's some prime DMT nonsense! Hilarious, fuzzy logic-packed and unrepentantly trippy, I liked LUCY even better than I normally would because all the angry science geeks and self-righteous bourgeois pundits hated it, loudly condemning the film's anti-science idiocy (the 10% of the brain thing, they say, has been disproved).
Moron says what now?
Sure it's dumb in a lot of ways - so was LIMITLESS ("One pill makes you Corporate") or any other film where some designer drug makes a gullible slacker superhuman and he goes up against gangsters who want the drug too but are too dumb or chickenshit to take it themselves and outfox him with the same power. It's the ultimate Adderall speed fantasy: the drug makes you feel smarter and brighter than everyone else in the room --and they're too stupid to take it too and level the playing field. It's a great boost but it doesn't make you compassionate enough to know everyone else feels the same way, and the more you pontificate the more insane and grandiose you probably sound. What pissed off the anti-LUCY critics, of course, is that they consider themselves the smartest guys in the room to start with, and no movie starlet hottie with a deep Hawks-does-Daria voice is going to outsmart them, no matter how many drugs she does. If some nerd with a pocket protector can't feel at least smarter than an actress of Scarlett's beauty they may as well be dead.
Me, I'm not threatened. I dig it, and love the ending: as her Lucy finally merges with the pervasive all consuming oneness via using '100%' of her brain's capacity. She even creates humanity by going back in time to act as a Kubrickian monolith to her ape chick equivalent. Honey, to me, that's badass -- I don't care that there's really no story here. I like the deadpan way the cop just rolls along with the weirdness. Dude, you can tell old Luc Besson's a fan of Adderall or meth and this is his valentine to it, and right or wrong you know I approve that message, because it's both right AND wrong, and when you're beyond duality, both are included in the spectrum (and if you judge either one as better or worse you automatically ain't beyond duality).
Belive it or not, I don't find any of the shit in LUCY unbelievable. What I find unbelievable is that we're a species able to solve a problem like ourselves only by avoiding it with escapism. And since the only way to solve that problem is not to believe it, to stop watching movies, then I pity the fools who feel threatened by this gonzo nutcase film. They may as well read a book for god's sakes, it's that bad.
The French equivalent of Michael Bay, Luc Besson is too 'cool' for them! You can tell he makes films that he wants to see. He's not chasing some trend to make a bundle but because he's enthralled by childhood memories of seeing DIE HARD or LETHAL WEAPON for the first time as a kid, or scoring with some hot gallic bird after a night 'rolling' at a great Parisian dance club and staying up til dawn, the way one's first ecstasy trip--one that happens to include a major sexual hook-up--changes you utterly, providing a high point the rest of your life will never quite match. Personally, I'd much prefer to see an action movie made be a moron who genuinely loves that genre he's working in, like Besson (or Ed Wood), rather than a smartass who "talks down" to it (the way, say, Fincher did with ALIEN 3, or Mendes in SPECTRE). Who cares if an idea makes sense? It's a goddamned action movie, not a science fair, you ('scuse me while I take a sniff) insignificant cocksucking low down client stealing, trend chasing, kowtowing, sniveling, self important jackasses. LUCY, Luc and I will fuck you up! Snnnnniffff Arggghhhh! That's good shit!
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| Been there, boy |
Cover your escape with this, and let the pitch that
cracks the champagne glass egg of Illumination crack the
crust from your third eye lashings
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