Best of 2018 (Movies and TV)

Here's the list and if this intro is shorter than usual, just note that there's less and less to write about as far as unity of direction and theme in cinema as a whole, the line is so spread out thanks to streaming there's almost no way to get the whole picture. Titles proliferate faster than any one critic may see. The working professional (i.e. currently paid) critics get the screeners for the Oscar bids or go to press screenings, but for the rest of us, if we're no longer getting paid to see them, why would we even want to? Those of us with the right Hendrixian 'experience' prefer films that take the trappings of genre and twist them all up in to groovy, psychedelic tie-dye twists that then become a steep Eisentstein-Rosencrantz bridge deep into the heavy mystic. As Jim once sang, blowsy and belting: "tell all the people that you see: follow me.... follow me down!" OK Nation, world, let's goooo.

#1: (a Nic Cage Tie): 

MANDY

Dir Panos Cosmatos

Saturated in a druggy wash of deep reds and dark blacks there's so much beauty in every composition of this sludge rock vengeance masterpiece as to deserve a painted mirror you might win on the Seaside Heights boardwalk back in 1983, when you're an impressionable 14 year-old so every Frazetta cover blazes with aliveness. 1983 is also when this set, and deep in some magical forest deep in the Shadow Mountains... Cage is a lumberjack living in a very groovy pad with his artist wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough). Happy as could be, they live as any of us might, eating dinner while agog in front of the TV, telling weird Erik Estrada knock-knock jokes, and rowing out to the center of the glassy lake out back --perfectly in tune and in trippy love, all captured in dreamy dissolves. Naturally a bunch of crazy acidhead Manson-esque Jesus freaks show up and... well... soon enough Nic has plenty of reason to go on a bizarro drug-fueled killing spree.



Throughout Cosmatos detours into sludgy canvasses of deep red and black, which if it's your favorite color combination as it is mine, you will love this sludgy film. In one of countless great choices, Cosmatos foregoes the usual heavy metal or hard rock classic soundtrack, aside from an unforgettable opening title set to "Starless and Bible Black" by King Crimson. The great, dearly departed Johan Johannson score lays a deep abstract Carpenter carpet underneath the wildness, occasionally going over the deep end as when Red (Cage) samples the jar of Black Rider grey jelly, a kind of super psycho-meth that hits him as instantly and crazily as any ever. As with Cosmatos' iconic debut Beyond the Black Rainbow, your familiarity with 70s-80s Canadian horror and sci-fi films, novels and heavy metal album covers, and mind-bending drugs isn't needed, but it sure helps. Add Cage at his wildest, and badass behavior from both him and Mandy in the face of pure evil and this movie leaps right over the... two moons?! This movie, I tell ya. The whole revenge of one simple man with chainsaw skills on a one-man druggie vendetta against Manson-esque Jesus freaks (and their demon allies) may not be terribly new, but what Cosmatos does is far more ballsy than just adding dour self-importance of social messaging, he brings in the supernatural in a way more holistic and connected than, say, Lynch does in Twin Peaks; The Return. And best of all, does the slow weird meaning-tentacled abstraction of strong psychedelic drugs better than any other working director today, x 2
(see full review: Acid-Etched Damascus)

MOM AND DAD

Dir. Brian Taylor

There's an ingeniously simple, savage, disturbing premise to this wild satire that basically sends a cold shot of Drano-laced meth up the IV tube that's been keeping suburban tract home 2.5 children family bliss/stasis stabilized with cheap corn sugar glucose nigh these 70 odd years (since the dawn of the suburbs at the close of WW2). Tapping into a kind of unspoken universal American rage but reversing the flow (instead of protecting children from harm, etc.) Nicolas Cage is letter perfect as the weirdo dad, and Selma Blair is a whole extra book of revelations as the spin class nervous breakdown mom and it's always nice when Lance Henriksen shows up, giving everyone--even crazy Cage--a lesson in balls-out crazy lunge-for-the-jug style acting. Best is the real-time single 24-hour time frame of events, the way--as in  the roots of what's going on are never overtly spelled out (beginning with the super weird early and confusing evacuation of school). I haven't enjoyed a movie this much since, well, ever. Mr. Bill's unruly industrial clatter/whoosh score keeps everything rolling with seven layers of ominous adrenalin. Director Brian Taylor is the nutcase who gave us Crank and Crank 2: High-Voltage in case you're wondering how he got so good at lunatic real-time mayhem and blacker-than-the-anti-sun comedy. He and Nic Cage were made for each other, as they already proved in the 2012 guilty pleasure Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance!   I mean, just look at Cage in the pic there, have you ever seen a man crazier? He's right up there with Toni Collette in Hereditary as far as new high water mark level of nuts, which, in our Trumpian post-wasteland, I think more than sums up the tenor of the time.

3. HEREDITARY

Dir. Ari Aster

Successfully goes where others of this decade have only tried, namely to the whole "is there a difference between inherited bi-polar manic depression, and literal matriarchal conspiracies of witches?" split. There's room for both answers in all the best films on the subject, like Rosemary's Baby, and even the ones that are only partly successful (House of the Devil, The Witch, Lords of Salem). The subject--when examined right--treads so close to the line where acute perception--reality stripped of its facade--becomes paranoid schizophrenic insanity that it's very easy to forget which side of it you're on at any given times.  Living with a person suffering from such a problem, always teetering over the edge, is truly unnerving. Thanks to a terrifyingly vivid performance by Toni Collette (the most tragically scary mother in a horror film since Essie Davis in The Babadook) we get just how tragic and extra-deep that rabbit hole vortex goes.

It's funny to read all the backlash from critics, after hearing it compared it to The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby (I think it's actually better than the former). The other backlash, from the public, is based on how traumatized they are by seeing certain people of certain ages having certain bad things happen to them onscreen. The set-up for Hereditary's big early-inning shock is so subtle and deflective we feel the way audiences must have felt the first time seeing Psycho.

The weird thing is that none of this stuff seems at all gratuitous or even sadistic - it's all leading to a certain place and every chill is earned. This is no 90 minute thrill ride but a solid legitimately rich character study that marks the crossroads between mental illness's effects on families and the way paranoia about witchcraft and life after death exacerbates these effects. Is devil worship a system created out of our brain's compulsive need to find hidden systems and motivations that explain away the random events of nature and our tiny place in it? Or has a life of being manipulated by Satanic forces have permanently warped even our most mundane collective conceptions of reality? Rosemary's Baby explored these same questions but, as that film's dream sequence reminded us, it left a whole ocean unexplored, with enough unsounded depth to make a dozen such voyages as full of terrifying epiphany and 'take-away' madness as the first.

Best of all is the ways Aster clearly gets what's wrong with modern horror films--the overly detailed horror make-ups and unearned shocks with bombastic mickey mouse music cues--and eliminates it all. Watching Halloween again for the first time in a few years I especially noticed that, during the whole extended climax, the single note ominous repeating 'dun... dun.... dun..." during the closet upstairs sequence is preceded by a whole downstairs thing with no music whatsoever! The silence is more terrifying than any movie could be, and I wondered how overbearing a modern orchestral score would have made that sequence, feeling all our fear for us like a micro-managing den mother. The climax of Hereditary is right up there and a reminder of the effectiveness of silence as well as music: Colin Stetson's score underlies this with weird eerie drones, sparing but unremitting --other horror film composers should take a mighty heed. (see also: Hereditary Witchcraft Reader)

4. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND

Dir. Orson Welles (w/ Peter Bogdanovich)

Thanks to the more decisive, less debilitatingly brilliant mind of long-time Welles' friend and biographer, director Peter Bogdanovich, and state-of-the-art digital remastering, the last unfinished Welles film about the last day in the life of a Wellesian director working on his last, unfinished film is finally.... well, finished. What makes it even more meta is that Peter Bogdanovich plays such a key character in the film, as more or less himself, and he finished it, with John Huston filling in for Orson. Together they seem to be working through the angles of male friendship, biographer-subject, father-son, remora-shark, fan-hero, and apostle-Christ --which suits the unique nature of the finished product so well it seems like fate--like the ultimate metatextual Welles flourish, as if he knew the film couldn't be finished until long enough after he died that Bogdanovich could use digital means to clean-up the film stock and have the chutzpah to tackle such a mammoth project. It may be Bogdanovich's best film as well as one of Welles's, with film quality and sound are so good it's hard to imagine this wasn't all filmed a few months ago -it's actually better than new, even, since it's on film - and every frame is lovingly color-saturated or otherwise cleaned up to the point it all shines better than any new dime. As the Welles-like director, Huston is another great meta-choice, for he--like Welles--was a raconteur genius working outside/inside the system. And when he discusses having boxed with Hemingway etc we know we're getting a fair dose of himself (for Welles never boxed, obviously). And it's no easy feat to play a high-functioning alcoholic at a party surrounded by sycophants and needy technicians wondering what they're getting paid for and when they will be, over years and years when it's all set in one night. So fractured it's set to the rhythms of a crowded moveable feast party like few I've seen, sustaining itself at a glib raconteur height Altman only reached a few times in his whole oeuvre. Especially as Huston gets progressively drunker and more belligerent, it transcends narrative and dating in a way that makes similar films--8 1/2 for example, seem horribly mawkish and antiquated.

As in that film, we realize much of a director's life is spent being hounded by underlings--writers, make-up artists, personal assistants, young girl intern/eye candy/drink getters, and sycophants galore, all wanting to either get on or stay on his good side and/or payroll. Swirling in and around a 70th birthday party that involves screening the director's unfinished, very artsy and psychedelic late 60s hippie movie (the kind of thing neither Welles nor Huston would ever do, presumably) on the one hand, and the movie itself on the other (and for the end, a fatal intersection of the two), The Other Side is a relentless attention grabber, full of blink-and-miss clever edits, guns, mannequins, and retorts zippy enough that by the time you untangle their genius, three more have passed you by.

The film-within-the-film is harder to peg. Certainly it's definitive Welles--with deep focus Dali-esque compositions reminiscent of passages in Welles' Othello but--especially during the psychedelic stretch of film that finds the heroine in a deserted train station in the desert, then a rainy street at night, a psychedelic rock club bathroom, and subsequent getting it on in a car in the rain with no music but the sound of the wipers and the clack of her bead neckless against her breasts as she gyrated atop this beautiful but similarly mute boy. With all the brilliant, lovingly restored colors, the sequence, lasting well over 15 minutes, is a marvel all its own evoking, of all things, Amer's co-directors Helen Cattet and Bruno Forzani with its intelligently arranged sequence of open-ended surrealist imagery.ich in rich Suspiria colors. With its tail of a beautiful blank looking boy feebly following a Cher-like Native American woman--unsmiling and dead-eyed throughout--the dour mood of dream-like student film art-for-art's sake seems to be almost mocking Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, yet is so rife with Welles' signature expressionist style it kind of takes off anyway. We certainly can't blame Welles for wanting 'in' on this new type of Age of Aquarius expressionism, since he invented some of it.

Taken all in all, Wind is one of the biggest, best surprises of the decade. It fulfills the promise so many 'last films' never seem to do, ala Nicholas Ray's We Can't Go Home Again . Since Welles isn't around to second guess and overthink it into endless abstraction, it's a real gift to cinema that someone who 'gets' Welles and knew him and respected his notes almost slavishly, yet is a talent in his own right, was there to pick up the million pieces and finish what may be one of the best 70s movies of the 21st century. Though again, not unlike most of Welles' work, the overall effect seldom transcends its maker's larger-than-life male ego. The hall of mirrors climax of Lady from Shanghai is again the definitive Welles' image, albeit with him firing at himself firing at himself, self-love and epiphanic realization of that love's hollowness revolving in an endless reverse ouroboros. Doesn't matter, though - his gun never misses and his puking bite is never totally fatal. He even lets a few female characters make their comments. A bitchy lady critic (played with gusto by Susan Strasberg) get in some cruel barbs before someone punches her out. Auteurs will be boys, after all. Hey, speaking of boys...

5. THE WILD BOYS

(Les garçons sauvages)

Dir Bertrand Mandico

Surreal and strange in ways that evoke erotic deconstructions like Batailles' Story of the Eye and Angela Carter's Passion of a New Eve, but in an homage to a kind of Haynes-Jarman rough trade queerness with a dash of Maddin and, and of course, Clockwork Orange,  this surreal fable concerns a gang of unruly violent boys (all played by girls in drag) forced into a Captains Courageous kind of youth rehabilitation program cure after they brutalize their literature teacher (once a voodoo-like spirit of violent destruction overtakes them during a masked drunken performance art version of the opening three witches scene of  Macbeth). After a brutal period at sea, collared to the ship and regularly choked to within an inch of their lives at the captain's whim, they wind up on a  mysterious island with sexually active vegetation, the ever-present smell of oysters ("the whole island is an oyster") that has strange hormonal magic, including the ability to make boys grow breasts, and watch as their penises fall off into the relentless surf. Drinking milky manna from phallic tubers and screwing flytrap style flower monsters, everything from Naked Lunch to Matango may well and goodly be conjured here, with the overall effect transcending anything so mundane as tawdriness, or morality.

And while they may be girls, these kids are still badasses, though, soon joining forces with a mysterious lady (formerly male) doctor (Elina Löwensohn [Nadja]), sexually devouring and killing randy sailors. Or something. Touching Lord of the Flies meets The Blue Lagoon kind of castaway weirdness, this is really off in a field by itself, chasing horny phallic dragonflies and volcano penises erupting into bubbling crevasses. What does it all mean? You know damned well: when surrealism sets sail, the wind that blows the ship forward is the gas bag exhalation of meaning dying in its conformist straitjacket back on shore. When French women put on male drag, they swagger and wave their cocks around like they just strapped them on, it's really something. Shot in startling black and white with forays into surreal 16mm color, this exercise in gender bending psychosexual surrealism is a breath of fresh island air, salty with sex, oysters, and horny vegetation, the sequences at sea are great too - not sure how they did it, but its some of the best stormy ocean, (non-CGI) floundering ship work I've seen in a long time. (in French with English subtitles) - See full review: Isles of Lowensohn

6. SORRY TO BOTHER YOU

Dir. Boots Riley

A fresh new African American voice, pitched somewhere between the social surrealism of Michel Gondry, the urban agency of Spike Lee, and the savage middle class satire of Jody Hill, Boots Riley announces "I am here" with a truly weird and engaging feature debut. In some weird alternate LA, slacker Cassius (Lakeith Stanfield) intends to pay rent on his uncle's garage apt. as soon as he gets a job. He's got a cute girlfriend, Detroit (Tessa Thompson)-- an artist/activist who works spinning a sign on the street, but who aims at something better, so Cassius better pull himself out of his slacker spiral before she moves on. Working largely on commission as a telemarketer, Cassius flounders until he's counseled by a wise cubicle neighbor (Danny Glover) on finding his 'white boy voice' - which means he's soon dubbed by David Cross and moving up the ladder, selling arms and slave labor but making so much money he can't complain, even as he sells out his former co-workers, now unionizing. Meanwhile there's a controversial work camp arrangement heavily advertised as an options to the struggle, one where all bills are paid, needs are met, and you live where you work, eat and sleep all in the same place - though apparently once the Wal-Mart-ish sheen is stripped off, it's slavery. From there it only gets weirder including a WTF moment so insane I can't spoil it (it wasn't spoiled for me, I won't do it for you). You're bound to laugh at least once, nervously, and come away with new ways of asking the right questions so wrongly they don't even need an answer.

7. ZAMA
Dir. Lucretia Martel

As serenely brutal and sexually hostile as an Ilsa film stretched to slow motion (sans Dyanne Thorne), Martel's adaption of a popular Argentine historical novel stars Daniel Jiminez Cacho as the sexually-frustrated magistrate of a sweltering Spanish outpost in South America in the late 1600s. Desperate to return to civilization and his family but needing the approval of an almost entirely absent governor/treasurer, Zama spends his day hearing complaints that underly the horrifying systemic brutality and oppression of the enslaved caste of natives, trying to keep his libido under control (he refuses to 'lower' himself with one of the eminently available local native girls), and inevitably feeling himself dragged as if by magnetic force towards the horny wife of the treasurer, said treasurer being one of the few men whose good word might get him transferred. Better go careful, Zama! Enterprising slaves are ever watching and listening at keyholes as the only racially acceptable woman in town trots out heady bottles of rum, her crooked powdered wig and corseted bosom wobbling with boozy heat. Meanwhile rumors of a rapist bandit sneaking into the village during the afternoons finally drives Zama to form a posse and head into the jungles.

Borrowing elements of Herzog's kind of deep focus documentary-style canvas approach to the ambivalence of the jungle while ladling on her own masterful ability to index an array of characters moving and parrying at cross-purposes inside a frame, Martel takes on gorgeous tracking shots through room after room of fascinating, heat-ravaged tableaus. Ever trying and failing to conquer the natural world and their own inner urges, the 'civilized' Spaniards literally fall to pieces. Tarkovsky-esque--disoriented sound design amps the paranoia, thrusting us up against Zama's nose as he navigates clustered hallways where tall powdered wings wave like unsteady ship prows atop heat-drunk heads, native slaves stand around in silent opprobrium, the in-between caste does their chores, and by the time one's decoded the meaning of what's going on, the chance to do anything about it is long past. Brilliant, but withering, and without any of the maternal comfort offered by some Martel's previous films, Zama is a dish as potent and pungent as a punch in the head with an soaked sock full of sea-slimed emeralds. (in Spanish with English subtitles)

8. ROMA

Dir Alfonso Cuaron

Clearly a letter of love and gratitude to Cuaron's maid/nanny while growing up, a reverie of life in a big family in Mexico City circa 1971 actually functions together with Zama as an almost sequel (even the names are familiar, neither has any music --relying instead on a tapestry of diegetic sound--and Martel made a similar film to Roma in her feature debut, La Cienega) - showing the result of all that Spanish colonization in the 1600s. Here it is a mere 180 or so years later, Native South Americans aren't enslaved anymore, but rather work as servants to the more European-blooded upper middle class or else scrabble around in the outskirt slum areas. The mostly silent maid, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) is much loved by the children and the mom even though she seldom cleans up after the dog (it clearly needs to be walked more often), so there's piles of shit all over the driveway. She winds up pregnant (the boyfriend disappears as soon as he hears) and eventually finds a sort of peace in the arms of a household where the men run off and abandon and their women and children. Told mostly in long slow pans, the shots are amazing. The standout: an extended sequence of the grandmother and maid trying to buy a crib at a furniture store while a full-blown bloodbath riot goes on outside (ala the car attack in his Children of Men), leading to her water breaking; their attempt to get to the hospital in the thick of tear gas and traffic and climaxing in a genius over-crowded public hospital (where the deadbeat husband happens to work as a doctor). It's topped later in an amazing glide shot that follows Cleo from the beach out into the deep deep water to rescue the kids nearly swept out to sea in rough tides over the holiday. From far up the beach all the way out to the whirling depths without the slightest tremor in the camera, there's not even salt spray on the lens. It's beyond amazing. Every inch of the screen is used for masterful compositions, the incredible extended sequences, and invisible acting, make this one a real winner despite the 'have your cake and critique the power structure that made someone else bake it for you' subtext. (in Spanish with English subtitles)

9. EIGHTH GRADE

Dir Bo Burnham 

Lots of angst and pain in this torturously awkward film. Set in the last days of junior high school as experienced by a typically awkward girl, it posits the terrors we all felt as children in the horrible 'body changes' portion of childhood (that we tend to block from our memories as if some brutal assault). With this film they come flooding back, and we learn since we escaped the self-consciousness has been amped to eleven thanks to the proliferation of smartphone technology. Now, every awkward attempt at socialization shall be preserved and disseminated amidst a teen's peers faster than you can even regret what you just said. The one advantage: even with no hits you can pretend you're sort-of famous. First-time feature director Bo Burnham (see his comedy specials on Netflix, please!) keeps the acne-ridden face of our frumpy heroine front and center, forcing us into a kind of aesthetic corner, a self-conscious nightmare prison. It all climaxes in a horrifyingly tense backseat seduction attempt that will be truly illuminating to a lot of men. It's all illuminating, but in the end all it perhaps does is remind us why we blocked those memories out, making us wonder if Bo's a sadist or just trying for a unique catharsis. It succeeds in both counts, but I never want to see it again.

10. INFINITY WAR

Dir. Anthony and Joe Russo

Speaking of unaccountable dread, this WAR was so epic it gave me an anxiety attack and I had to stop watching (on Blu-ray) and go to bed, where I dreamt of it. The idea that a power could come along and beat all the superheroes in a massive fight was too much to bear in my sensitive state. And yet, as a proponent of population control I couldn't argue with the logic of the ruthless intergalactic monster played so well by the great Josh Brolin as the villainous Thanos. Our world especially could use a good 'halving' to the overpopulation levels we had during the time of Soylent Green, when we were only at 3 1/2 billion and worried that, if left unchecked, our population growth would kill the planet. Now, of course, it's already too late. So no one--Thanos aside--even brings it up. Leave it to Marvel and their sympathetic villains, to point out the elephants choking up every available free space in the room. But that's not even the reason this rocks so hard. On earth and in space, the wit and energy flow nonstop, the battles so ingeniously staged, the mood so dire, so much at stake, that it's hard to find a single dead spot, I mean aside from the soapy, tiresome Vision and Scarlet Witch romance (just writing that sentence I hear Juliette Binoche laughing derisively behind me) and the buzzkilling Pepper Potts-Stark inter-helmet 'be careful' moments. The rest of the time, the action and wit overlap in genius doses -- the superheroes all working as such a quick, focused team that it's jaw-dropping. The pick for most critics as the best Marvel this year was Black Panther, and while it was great and with a potent social message, it it got a little too 'real' and some of the banter seemed a tad too chipper. No, I think the best one was actually Ant Man and the Wasp. Call me crazy, but they're all winners! They'll stand the test of time, and constant reruns. Unlike the depressing Eighth Grade, I'm looking forward to seeing this one again, albeit in bits and pieces, safely broken up by commercials on FX, and FXX, especially after the second part is released so I can rest, presumably, and get down from the stark, terrifying cliff we're left hanging from.

11. HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES

Dir. John Cameron Mitchell

Philophile director John Cameron Mitchell (Shortbus, Hedwig and the Angry Inch) turns Neil Gaiman's graphic novella into a punk rock sci-fi odyssey about the healing glory of love and music (surprise!). Alex Sharp stars as Enn, an insecure punk rock fanzine artist growing up in 70s Thatcher-period England. Brave when it come to plastering ugly stickers around his drab Coyden hometown, he's shy as hell when it comes to girls. "They're not from another planet!" counsels the more confident alpha in his little posse of mates. When the lads crash the wrong post-gig house party, they find themselves partying with a color-coded latex-wearing hive mind collective that pretty much proves that adage wrong. Self-organized according to a chakra-style energy scale, engaged in super weird dances and ceremonies, they'd weird the boys in Enn's crew out, except this is the 70s, mate, and this may be some new wave fad. Meanwhile, upstairs, doe-eyed Zann (Elle Fanning) wants to get out and actually explore something of this grotty new world that the rest of them are only passing by on a worlds tour. She wants to get off the bus and go native, so she runs off with Enn into the Croyden night. Thanks to Mitchell's gifts with setting mood, and the stars' own chemistry, we feel their connection. Their time together is magical... even in Croyden!

After Zann catches the eye of local punk den mother Bodacia (Nicole Kidman in a silver wig) things get even more intense. Played with her Aussie badass roots exposed to the core, Nicole Kidman gives us a throaty ferocity we haven't seen from her in years. She'd make it worth seeing all by herself but other highlights come raining down like stardust: The song Enn and Zann sing on her club stage evolves and leads them to a full blown mystical encounter replete with swirling cosmic forces. And if you've kind of hated yourself for being reduced to tears by Hedwig's "Origin of Love" back in the 90s, you'll be glad that this one ("Eat Me Alive") just gives us deep punk rock chills, with a foray into Ziggy cosmic wonderment instead - with the blazing energy so well visualized you'll feel like you're getting off on good ecstasy at the best punk rock show of your teenage life. And like ecstasy and punk, its sense of love transcends dichotomies like sex/death, fear/desire: it's the love that has no opposite, and Mitchell--like few others--knows where the sweet spot it.

That's Mitchell's big gift to the world, but he has another too, music (or are they the same?): his you-are-there camera and sound mixes really capture the live punk rock basement club event momentum. You can hear the instruments echoing off the low cavernous ceiling of the club, yet it's all vivid and electric and immediate. It's maybe the best-mixed live punk music I've ever heard --raw and immediate, powerful and yet low-fi, both celestial and punk rock earth. I'm not sure, but I think Mitchell may have just redeemed the entirety of the long-sold-out punk rock movement with this one film, and I think Ziggy would like it as much as Iggy  - and isn't that the whole Mitchell mission? Accomplished. 

TeleVision

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1. THE SHIVERING TRUTH

Created by Vernon Chatman
(Adult Swim)

Adult Swim continues their descent into the void with this mind-bending claymation spectacular from the demented mind of Vernon Chatman (Wonder Showzen). Following a kind of Rod Serling-meets-the "in a world" movie trailer voiceover narrator, we go on a bizarre free associative trip into the looking glass with the result being like the entire run of The Twilight Zone all compressed into 15 minute windows, liberally dosed with weird sex, violence, and Cronenbergian new flesh appendage removal, the "yes -and" improv-style relentless compounding lunacy of it all has reduced me to rolling on the ground convulsing with laughter like I haven't done sober ever. There's no going back after this. It's so out there it makes pretenders to the throne of strange wilt and fold. Accept it.

 2. BABYLON BERLIN

Created by Tom Twyker, et al

(Netflix)

Germany's big budget TV series revolves around the "first female police detective" in Weimar Berlin, a time between the two world wars, when Berlin, mired in economic depression, became an art, sex and crime mecca. Prostitution, homosexuality, drug addiction, pornography (silent era), and a decadent cross-dressing night club chanteuse master criminal white Russian equals the dusky TV series equivalent of a great, trashy, page-turning massive paperback of sexy historical fiction. If it eventually runs out of time without winding up in any profound way, well, is history any different? I like that the male-female crime-solving team of prostitute/party girl (Liv Lisa Fries) and drug-addicted police detective (Volker Bruch) become close without sex, and that the National Socialist party is only--at the very end--just starting make a brownshirt ruckus. The plot concerns, among other things, the planned assassination of a Treaty of Versailles-adhering politician and a train car full of gold fought over by an array of sordid but fascinating characters, commies, and causes, but the take-aways are the details along the way, like the rollicking song ("Zu aush, Zu Staub") that acts as the club's big theme. It's all done with great style and atmosphere, complex, hearty performances, and excellence all around. Acidemically, it's great to see a girl whose love of champagne and dabbling in prostitution doesn't mar her self-esteem and lead to tired self-sacrifice like it would in the states even during pre-code times, and a genuinely complex (neither good nor all-the-way) villain in the portly red-faced corrupt cop Bruno (Peter Kurth) partner. (in German with English subtitles)

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3. MANIAC

Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga / Created by Patric Somerville

(Netflix)

One of the first shows since Rick and Morty to seamlessly integrate psychotherapy into science fiction, this alternate reality sci-fi dramedy (?) stars Jonah Hill and Emma Stone as participants in a looney drug-AI trial, meeting and becoming good friends during deep dream realities managed by an artificial intelligence that takes their hang-ups and repressions and builds scenarios that will help them process and move on. Or something. As with the above Sorry to Bother You, it's set in an alternate reality and occurs largely at a big retrofuturist pharmaceutical corporation during a week-long drug trial / sleep over. They together or alternately move through adventures ranging from LOTR elvin sojurns, mobster dramas, white trash lemur reclamation, and high end through-the-looking glass bending of the light between dreams and virtual reality.

With great lighting and deep human insight as well as tapping into that great sleep-over feel (as participants are in this cool 70s-modular deep bunker within a giant pharmaceutical corporation for an entire week) it evokes 60s-70s vintage sci-fi films (and modern retrofuturist wonders like Beyond the Black Rainbow). The only wrong notes are the terrible name (there's already a downbeat 1980 horror movie by the same name, its remake, and at least one other movie or TV show also called Maniac!) and Dan Romer's opportunity-squandering score, for he passes over the modular synths and analog Moogs (imagine the seat-rumbling analog insanity Sionoa Caves or Tom Raybould could have brought to this!) in favor of the same alterna-twee folksy nonsense that's been warning men away from rom-coms since Garden State. Justin Theroux and Sonoya Mizumo are a great team as the brainy scientists who put the whole thing together, and try to fix it when it all falls apart. Sally Field is Theroux's Dr. Phil-like daytime TV therapist mom, called in to relate to the AI when it starts to go rogue. Considering the rumor that the show itself got its start through a computer program reading and assembling elements of the most watched Netflix shows, it's mad meta. Don't even worry about where it's headed or why, just note the similarity to films like John Dies at the End and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and know that's a good thing.

4. THE CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA

Created/developed: Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
(Netflix)

Aided by a stunning cast this gorgeously wicked show is one of the first to make full use of the modern HD widescreen TV as its primary frame, filling every corner of the screen with sumptuous dark detail. The story is one of the ubiquitous teen fantasies --the 'there's a magical society operating right under our townie mortal noses and if we meet the right friends or hit the right birthday--we'll get to join and leave suburban tedium behind' trip. I spent the season hoping Sabrina would sign the book of the devil and be damned forever yet bestowed with countless evil powers since her smarmy mortal half was a drag. Unfortunately she lets herself be dragged down, as so many girls in real life are who are destined for bigger and better things, by love for some doomed luddite townie named Harvey--the fantasy equivalent of not going to college because your dumb boyfriend didn't get accepted. Still, it all works because though aimed at younger viewings there are ample killings and exclamations like "Thank Satan you're all right!" by worried aunts. As for the adults, all very fine with a real full-blooded stand-out in the evil Michelle Gomez (aka "The Master" in later seasons of Dr. Who) as Satan's henchwoman, so relishes her own wickedness we practically are inhaled through the screen in her torrent of marvelous evil.

5. BIG MOUTH

by Nick Krohl and John Mulaney
(season 2 - Netflix)

Amazingly instructive as well as relentlessly horrifying, there's abundant wit and compassion in this hilarious animated examination of those 'special changes' that demarcate puberty. Nick Krohl and John Mulaney once again star, with Jordan Peele doing the voice of the irrepressible ghost of Duke Ellington. This time there's a special "Planned Parenthood" episode, a drug episode and great new characters like the Depression Kitty and, most memorably, the Shame Wizard makes his debut and never leaves. Voiced with real slippery charm by David Thewlis, his undermining all the children with deep age-appropriate insecurity becomes the runaway scene stealer of the season. The snippy gay aesthete kid also finds a bit of a guide in a chance encounter with a Fierstein-ish neighbor at an bachelor apartment complex (Broh! He even vapes). All the good stuff more than makes up for the sleazier aspects like the eternally horny Jay and his talking sex pillow's rivalry with a downstairs couch cushion.

Yeesh, is that how I'm going to end this year round-up, talking about Jay's cushions?

Change of Subject: How about a shout-out to:

 FORGED IN FIRE 

(History Channel)

The best reality series on TV, a re-exhumation of the Iron John power that men sorely need and women inherently gravitate to (host Will Willis is the mancrush of his era). It fills a starved-for-positive male images nation with hope. Tapping into the riddle of steel has never seemed more accessible and vital. Even if no one is going to move into metalsmithing after watching it, we need this show's wild man archetypal power. Hurrah. We may be saved, after all. If you're listening guys: more ballistics dummies and fewer animal carcasses, please!

---

SOUNDTRACK COLLECTION:

SEE ALSO:
BEST OF 2017

BEST OF 2016
BEST OF 2015

BEST OF 2014

BEST OF 2013

BEST OF 2012

BEST OF 2011

BEST OF 2010

BEST OF 2009

BEST OF 2008

BEST OF 2007

BEST OF 2006

BEST OF 2004 (popmatters)

Best of the -00s: (2000-2010)

+

Erich K's HEREDITARY Witchcraft Conspiracy DSM-IV Reader

I'd forgotten about all about conspiracies, Saturn, Satan and schizophrenia until I finally saw HEREDITARY, which brought it all cascading back, buckling the thin walls of sanity I'd set barely nailed up after exiting the paranoid conspiracy zone writing some of the posts linked below. Not that this amazing new horror movie is just conspiracy paranoia-tingling, no, no no! It's also a deep character study that takes its time to get going and, true to the name, rides the raft of inherited mental illness all the down the DNA river into the tributary to the sea of true madness. There's a recently deceased mother with "a lot of secrets" and a whole family tree of suicides and despair and then Toni Collette, the daughter, and also the scariest yet most sympathetic mother in a horror film since Essie Davis in The Babadook, coming to terms with things like her son not trusting her just because he once woke up one night to find himself and his sister covered with turpentine and mom standing over them while they slept with a book of matches in her hand. She was sleepwalking! He doesn't believe her, not even now. We don't see it, but it's a haunting slow burn image that ranks with those moments in Paranormal Activity as far as making all our unconscious eight-hour stretches in bed suddenly seem so unsafe we wonder how we ever managed to sleep at all. (If you've ever encountered a sleepwalker, then you know how terrifying it is, that flat dilated black pupil look in their eyes). This movie does what great horror movies do, it takes these nuggets of forgotten uncanny everyday living and slowly compiles them alongside enough sudden calamities and random bits of disturbing 'accident' that it's much more than a mere thrill ride, it's something that slowly builds until it turns by extension your life into a horror movie, like a virus. While you were distracted by one narrative, it snuck around behind you with another, and pushed you out of your safe viewing distance into something like terrified rapture.

The debut feature from young Ari Aster, the film successfully gets the whole "there is no difference between inherited paranoid schizophrenia, manic depression, and witchcraft" route (the kind mastered in Rosemary's Baby and duplicated almost nowhere else since... until now). Treading so close on our actual fears it crosses the line where imagination becomes insanity, like that normal-seeming friend confiding in you all sorts of paranoid-sounding statements, like someone is breaking in at night to move boxes around in her closet (am I the only one with weird friends like these?). This is the kind of film wherein a roster of DSM IV-spiked beliefs start to dovetail with the Old Testament, making us wonder if the ultimate conspiracy theory paranoid schizophrenic manifesto might be the Bible. Is it so hard to believe that, once the blinders on our perceptions are opened through chanting, stress, sleepiness, magical potions, or prolonged trauma conditioning (PTC), the witchcraft can begin in earnest. Maybe we can only fly when no one who doesn't believe we can is watching. Maybe if we can let go of our bodies we don't need a broomstick; when no one is around to listen, the sound a tree falling in the woods makes is like music in the eye of a screaming demon.

Here lie some links to past conspiracy writing should you be a glutton for madness, or need more ideas for similar mind-benders afterwards:

The Goat of Menses and the Fox in the Atheist Hole: THE WITCH
(March 2nd, 2016)

"So see the movie and understand at last why patriarchal science and religion are both such hardheaded dicks about the unknown and supernatural, and why Christian zealotry has never not been on the rise and why women are always considered a zone outside of western rational objectivity. Only in one or two other films have we seen beautiful women materialize out of the darkness of the woods or the gleam of the bathtub, as irresistible as a warm slug of whiskey in an unfriendly wilderness, our willpower long gone, we lower our lips towards their hearth and then suddenly these figures grab onto us as if with clawed tentacles and thorny paws. They are not hot and young at all, but decomposing and very old. You've been tricked, son of Adam! The distance of time between that first kiss, the wedding bells, funeral chimes, cold ground worms boring through rotten pine box walls collapses into a single Donald Sutherland death rattle.

This powerful motif, the 'young-old predatory woman' reflects the tradition of the sidpa bardo in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the level of purgatory where you see and notice only undulating lovers like flames in an otherwise all-consuming darkness. If you let yourself be drawn too close to them you run the risk of finding yourself stuck like a fly in the frozen web of the woman's newly-fertilized embryo, like being sucked over a waterfall. Then devouring demon rock below shreds your current construct of self into a million pieces which sink or scatter in the rapid current below; only the core I AM remains trapped in that sticky embryonic web- and soon you've forgotten you were ever anywhere else-- the 'you' you believed yourself to be is shaved away like your hippie hair under the electric razor of a FULL METAL JACKET barber." (more)

The Illuminati, Hypnosis, Paranoia, Schizophrenia, Kubrick, and Tom Cruise 
(DP - May 2016)

As per Zizek via Lacan (or vice versa), the Big Other's whole purpose is to remove the 'constituent anxiety," to make sure there is no "traversing" the fantasy which would dislocate the subject from its void-circumscribing orbit. In EYES WIDE SHUT, Ziegler's positing Dr. Bill as an outsider who will never be a member of this exclusive shadow society, no matter what mask he dons, is doing him a massive favor, because this forbidden society exists solely in order to exclude him, and thus perpetuate constituted (rather than constituent) anxiety. It's a gift, son! This lack of a gift is the best gift he can give.

A similar effect occurs with UFO crash sightings wherein the military steps in, harasses and bullies witnesses into silence, and reports it was a weather balloon or crashed satellite, then hauls it away never to be seen again. In doing this they perpetuate the revolution around the desire. They fan the flames of the need to know, and so perpetuate the illusion that they have this thing well in hand. If they announced a spacecraft was found, the world press would swamp them and create panic, but by simultaneously threatening witnesses and lying to the press they create a subliminal consolation. Instead of worrying about aliens (which is terrifying - coming with a sense of total powerlessness and vulnerability) we're angry at the government for not telling us the truth. We always feel protected when denied knowledge. It brings us full circle back to the feeling of invulnerability we had as five year-olds bugging our mom about where babies come from, free from any worry she might actually find out, that she'd lie to protect us from the whole bloody-terrible besital truth. (full)

Genealogy of Flies: LORDS OF SALEM (2013), HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (2008) + My own Salem Witch Connections

(September 2013)

 I have to mention, as always when discussing Salem and genealogy (characters here are descendants of the hung witches and/or judges and executioners) that all these descendant movies are fascinating on a personal level for me because the one side of my family tree that kept immaculate records is from Salem, having arrived in Boston in 1631 (with fellow passenger Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island): This side of my tree includes nuggets like these (copied direct):

The family of John Perkins 1583-1654 - freeman 18th May 1631
Married Judith Gates, born Newent, Gloucestershire, England
Children: 

1. "Quartermaster" John - b. 1614 0 d. Dec, 14, 1686
2. "Deacon" Thomas 1616-1686 (not the witch hunter, he died before that)
3.  Elizabeth 1618-1700 / married William Sargent (5 children)
4. Mary 1620-1700 - "She was accused of witchcraft, sentenced, but the execution delayed and the citizens recovered from the delusion." (+5 more)

The Family of Elisha Perkins (born - 1656 - Topfield) died - 1741 in Methuen
Married Catherine Towne - 1680
--
Children:
(9 total), including: John (third son) born Aug. 12, 1685 - died June 22, 1750
married Mary Easty (whose mother Mary Easty and Aunt Rebecca Towne Nurse were hanged for witchcraft) --etc.

Age of Asherah: ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)

(May 2014)

"In conveying Rosemary's gradual awakening from compliance ("you're gonna think I really flipped,") Polanski exploits our willingness to grant power to unseen forces, and thus allows us to see the link between paranoia and pregnancy, and how the patriarchal condescension in the big city can completely dominate even a free spirited young woman from Iowa whose determination to be hip is both her saving grace and undoing. Taken in total, her story has devils of both the psychoanalytical interpretation variety (paranoia brought on by hormonal surges due to pregnancy) and the physical arrival, up from the subconscious realm, of a devil ("Hail Satan!"), in other words, Rosemary's Baby is the opposite of a film like Inception - which is a story about people invading other people's dreams. Baby is about a dream incarnated into living tissue, the rip in time is the rip in Rosemary's womb from which out claws the Elder God.

When we sense something is being kept from us, whatever it is gains in power as our fears project onto it and projection is exactly how the coven operates: they chant together and use combined mind projection to astral travel along an associative nine-dimensional curve via an item belonging to the victim into that victim's nervous system (like following a DNA print through space the way a cell phone signal follows a chip). This is the same 'reality' that paranoid schizophrenics and remote viewing agents live in (tiny microphones in their teeth, men following them in brown town cars, etc); it's an ocean wherein all dreamers are linked together, are as fish, surfers, sailors, drowners, whales, or dolphins, in a matrix of nonlocal consciousness. The Satanist sails on the surface (hence Rosemary's dream of being on a boat and seduced by a Naval officer, like Nicole Kidman's fantasy in Eyes Wide Shut - see Make-Up Your Mind Control); the psychedelic shamans surf until they're wiped out or transcend the ocean altogether; unconscious dreamers bob in the waves; and the schizophrenics drown but do not die, just hover in that agitated drowning panic until medicated or the spell subsides. Rosemary's dream begins on the ship and winds up bobbing, then sinking, before clawing her way back to land (finding the secret passage between the apartments). In the end she joins with the cult because her maternal instinct is too strong to resist. (Besides, she wasn't even invited before - that's what stings, being left out, when she's the most important part, like not inviting the kid with the fake ID who bought the booze to your party. But now, no one even has to ask her to come now - it's really her party, whether they like it or not). "What have you done to its eyes?!" she asks, horrified. "He has his father's eyes," Castavet answers. And its the eyes of Guy's rival for his coveted part that are affected by the telepathic sabotage of the coven - the windows to the soul. No one has their own eyes anymore, the souls are long since funneled. (more)

The Satanic Blondes of '66: EYE OF THE DEVIL, INCUBUS

(October- 2013)

Cinema's pagan devil culture can't quite capture the ephemeral chain of cause-and-effect karma ouroboros-boomeranging to the point just watching a film creates bad luck, but it can generate a feeling of unease through depiction of the most sophisticated or banal of circumstances if it but tweaks them with little uncanny ripples of fatalistic coincidence that benefit or harm as befits 'the bargain.' With Satan there's usually a gruesome payoff after the subject sells his soul for a drink, where he learns he's "always been the caretaker," and so forth. Ask not whom is sacrificed on the ancient altar, because if no one told you else it's going to be, then it's you. You're doing both the killing and the being killed. Two ends of a scroll slowly rolling towards each other, when they meet, your text has disappeared.

So is there free will in a Satanic model of reality? Maybe the one who has 'always been the caretaker' can play Christian the way a closeted gay guy can play straight i.e. stunting his own potential and becoming far less than he was meant to be, or he can let go of the handrails and let Satan's vacuum suction pull him towards the full realization of his unholy destiny. If your Christian family would rather have you as a stunted straight than a fully blossomed gay person then they are the cursed, not you. Thus the devil exists only in advocate position --where there is hypocrisy he brings truth; where there is repression he brings exultation.

If we apply that logic to the actual making of these films, wife Sharon Tate is doomed the moment husband Roman Polanski helps her get the part in EYE; Polanski is doomed to exile the moment he shoots a scene wherein a woman is drugged and date raped by Satan. It all connects, from the devil's murky fatalistic machinations within the story--recreating itself through helping Guy get the part in that play (as, fittingly enough, a cripple)--to the reality of its makers (Castle's kidney stones, etc). The devil's happy to crib off your paper, so to speak, to make reality out of the image you made of him. It's as if film was little more than a halfway point, the equivalent of a pie cooling on the windowsill before its opened up and devoured, except the windowsill is a mirror, and the pie sliced open is a young and lovely actress -- an accident that becomes a rupture in the fabric of pop culture history. (More)

Make up your mind control: 33.3 Ways of Reading EYES WIDE SHUT

(October 2013)

CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG is on TCM in the background as I write about mind control, totally by chance. Onscreen: an audience of power elite have assembled to watch a demonstration. An automaton girl in German peasant attire is standing before a series of mirrors (which I've just learned they use in Monarch mind control programming mere minutes before this comes on), singing that she's under a spell and delivering an almost exact description of sexually subjugating mind control techniques (including having the demonstration occur before an assembled audience, which mirrors our standard dreams of being exposed naked at a school exam). Coincidence?

Maybe nyoets, for if there was a blueprint for mind control it would probably be geared to work towards reproducing--as close as possible--synchronicity, the iconography of normal subconscious dreaming, and the mechanics of sexual repression, allowing the programmers to tap into the unconscious' control state with maximum ease, 'speaking its language' so to speak. Programming their automaton women, the "standard pleasure model" ala BLADE RUNNER, DR. GOLDFOOT, etc. (see CinemArchetype #16 - the Automaton) to fall in love with whatever billionaire diplomat is breezing through town for a weekend, these girls wouldn't even know they had microphones in their teeth to record any business secrets that might get spilled in pillow talk, or which could be used for blackmail. They wouldn't even remember being there. Or suffocating him with a pillow and making it look like a heart attack.

I don't believe this was what CHITTY was trying to achieve (then again, Walt Disney was a 33-degree Mason) but it shows you that once you let this paranoid stuff into your mind, it mutates and transforms even dishwater dull children's movies into rabbit holes of horrifyingly vast circumference. (full)

Caretake Sparkle: ROOM 237
October 1, 2013

Call the critics in ROOM 237 paranoid, overreaching, seeing too deeply, perhaps mildly schizophrenic, but at least they know how to look deeply.... deeply... into the Kubrick's crystal ball. And as long as it’s well written I’ll read good crazy film deconstructive analysis over lifeless, if intellectually advanced, Bordwell style 'post-theory' any day. To the average academic, a crazy person is someone whose words must by definition have no meaning; to Acidemic, a crazy person is someone uniquely aware of how awfully close death and blood and pain is to the surface of our skin-thin reality at every given moment -- he goes crazy because he can’t shut it out of his mind; it doesn’t go away after eight hours like it does for the humble tripper, or fade with some deep breaths like it does for the anxiety attack sufferer. So if it makes him unusually aware of how everything is connected, to the point he even sees connections where there aren't any, well, maybe we're not digging deep enough. Maybe our teeth really do contain hidden microphones, but the dimension where that happens is far beyond ours. Somewhere advanced 8th dimensional beings are recording every human word and sigh for some massive Akashic library, using the teeth like crystal sets…. (full)

Daze of our Lies (or "As the Reichstag Burns"): SECRET HONOR, HITLER (1962), UFO HUNTERS, Lord Lhus!
(September '11)

If you surrender to Hall/Nixon's fever dream rant (and you may as well since there's nothing else going on in the film) you enter a pretty spooky world, a U.S. with the curtains ripped back to reveal giant white owls devouring a pile of gutted mice and money. Presidents like Nixon (and now Obama) are just straw dogs set up to take all the shit the manipulated American public cares to volley after being robbed and deluded by the previous office holders (who conveniently step down right before it hits the podium). Watergate was Nixon's way of reversing the straw dog parabolic mirror. Instead of the plan to throw Nixon to the wolves so his puppeteer overlords could sneak off to the inky darkness of the Bohemian Grove's towering redwoods, Dick snags up the strings by pretending to fall off the stage, derailing their entire evil plan... for now.

Meanwhile we see the paintings of Eisenhower, Lincoln, Jefferson on the oval office walls, and they all seem twisted and arcane, as if swirling reptilian pan-dimensional aliens were, even now, within the confines of a portrait on television on television, writhing and breathing and corrupting the deepest tissue of man's democracy with Martian spider eggs. (full)

CinemArchetype V: The Human Sacrifice

(Feb. 28, 2012)

In the movies the sacrificial subject creates a great unease because it hits so close to home; the death is intrinsically tied into the act of viewing itself. The tribe always gathers to watch the sacrifice, otherwise what's the point? Watching these sacrifices now (i.e. slasher film killings, etc.) stirs up deep archetypal responses from our past lives still seeing through the two-way crystal ball eye. If the film is clever about it, the whole process sneaks up on us and suddenly, too late to do back out, we feel the big black body bag suddenly close over our heads and the credits roll us right into the cremation furnace; to our horror, our friends regard our anguished pleas with the same ambivalent mix of compassion, gratitude (better us than them), and morbid curiosity, we felt looking at all the other victims. Sometimes we're led by the nose ring of desire, sometimes we're manacled unwillingly to the Satanic altar, either way it's like a spin the bottle game where sooner or later the bottle is going to point to us... and then when it does we're always hoping for that last minute rescue and when that last minute's up we try one last gambit: take my wife, please. If that doesn't work, we try to substitute our children, our friends, anyone! And all those members we would have so willingly held down had the bottle not pointed at us now hold us down. We can't even complain it's not fair, since we've already killed so many in just this same way to avoid being killed ourselves. Every cult member knows this truth - every innocent drop of blood spilled is just another interest payment on the massive carnivorous debt we owe that dark insatiable thing below.
  (full)

The Primal Scenesters: TWIN PEAKS
Nov. 2016

Consider the implication in a lot of these stories (THE INNOCENTS and THE HAUNTING in particular) that deep cover memory repression of dark events provides the current that activates the dark ghost 'residual energy' captured in the walls, so that traumatic moments in the past keep repeating. That energy stays there, up for grabs to anyone with the right wireless router to tap into. And who has that router? Free-floating demonic spirits--formless and powerless initially, like inactive ions or dried-up flies in the corners and basement doorways--the trauma recorded in the stone provides the energy jolt back into corporeal existence (on some higher or lower frequency from the spectrum of most human's perception). Be the energy coming from the trauma of past dark crimes or--in the case of poltergeists--boys or girls hitting puberty, the huge amount of psychic disturbance shocks the inert magnetic anomaly some choose to call Satan into our dimensional spectrum.

In other words, incest or similarly abominable crimes are like a wave generator that gets the boat of consciousness bobbing, allowing the usually unseen barnacles on the lower hull to rise above sea level. Thus the unseen barnacles whisper to sleeping seamen above them through the wood, bidding them to obscenely vile doings. (full)

Dentist Chair Don Juan: Love Radio and the Scaly Father
(C-Influence - March 21st, 2011)
...mystical visions can trick you... In September of 2006 I was meditating one afternoon after work, when I felt the sky and wall dilate open behind me an a giant electromagnetic hand touched my shoulder, enlightening me instantly in a profound holy 'beyond duality' glow. For two months I was completely egoless and in tune with love for my fellow man. But I got carried away, got cocky as  cult leader, and would up making a pass at this girl I was infatuated with, too soon, and who--rather expertly-- rejected me, depositing me in a vast swarm of subway commuters so that I couldn't get over her to try and kiss her goodbye--I saw her wry smile (though she was too deft to reject me directly to the point I might get violent or sullen-- a real pro!) and I felt that inner God voice I'd been following (and which had led me to all sorts of secret gifts prior to) sneering and laughing at me the whole subway ride home. I was so shaken and abashed I missed my stop and rode it to the end of the line. That laughter was heartless and terrifying. It was as if everything from the hand of God moment had been a way of conning me into risking my soul for this girl and getting shot down -  it was Trickster God 101 shit - and I'd fallen right into it (Hamlet's friends were, you may remember, worried the king's ghost was just such a trickster). Now that I was in such heartsick misery, I felt the god feeding off me, like I was a slot machine that he'd been rigging up and now was paying off big time - all that holy soul energy he'd cultivated he now stripped off me like he was expertly rolling a sleeping drunk.

Now maybe I was just 'imagining' all this - it was 'magical thinking' my shrink would say; but at the same time, so what? If she'd done any LSD she'd know it's all magical thinking, the whole damned show of 'perception' -- we have to go on what feels more than real, especially if we're writers and artists who want to depict more than the boring surface of the world. Whole months can go by these days that don't seem as real as that godly hand on my shoulder, or the glowing demon in the bookshelf. There's a certain assumption among left-brained scientists that hallucinations are somehow 'less' than reality, but it's the opposite: they're more. They spill through when our perceptions overheat and dilate, letting in more information than our egoic inhibitors would like - it's like we're five and our mom passed out drunk and left out her pornography stash all over the floor so as we wake up and go downstairs we see things we were never meant to, by her, that is, until we're much older. Our senses have built-in 'blinders' on them that filter out up to 90% or so of all the information coming at us. Our visible world is just a swath on a spectrum. Hallucinations and visions could be said to be moments when the blinders fail and dreams and reality leak into one another-- but isn't this in a way a much more 'real' situation? What about dreams, then? As we spend 1/3 of our life sleeping aren't we rather too quick to dismiss everything we experience with our eyes closed as just fluffy nothing? Are Van Gogh's electric color bands considered hallucinations since 'sane' normal people don't see them? Matter is just vibrating energy waves. The image of them as solid, permanent objects is what is the illusion. Meanwhile memory and reflection change even the most concrete experiences, shrouding and distorting the more we record, write, and relay them. (full)

Bad Acid's Greatest: 70s Paranoid Feminism Edition
(Oct. 2009)

Made at a time when psychedelic drugs had changed the face of American culture, LET'S SCARE .... DEATH (or LSD!) is nothing short of elegant in the way it blurs the line between subjective and the “real" to demonstrate how paranoia can bend the nature of reality itself, exposing even the most realistic objectivity as a paranoid conspiracy. Polanski set the bar high for this in ROSEMARY, by having Mia Farrow's paranoia be utilized to cast doubt on the reality of her situation, even though at the same time as we know the supernatural is behind it all. Rosemary and Jessica prove you can unsplit the difference between the real and the delusional, and that in fact, the difference is--as quantum physics proves--all in your head. (full)

Great and Wonderful Acid Cinema: WIZARD OF OZ 

(July 10, 2010)

Take it from me, the first time you run into 'The Lollipop Guild' (while astrally traveling the psychedeli-brick road) is enough to give even the gutsiest space cowboys the yips. They're like those little weird demon guys in the bottom corners of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band which scared me as a four year-old (back when first hearing the full alien weirdness of Harrison's sitar on side B, was terrifying beyond any palpable physical threat). When in college I began to read the work of the pioneering psychonaut Terence McKenna on 'the machine elves' -- common mushroom and DMT hallucinations-- small, elvin beings that exist in alternate dimensions but are nonetheless real, dancing in lockstep unison as they paint the plurality of worlds onto the time/space canvas like a curtain of slow motion paint bristle soft shoe that's hilarious yet terrifying, joyous yet disturbing. When I saw them during my own travels in college (and after), they were even wearing plaid, just like the Guild (which came first, is of course your immediate question - did I see them like that because of the movie or did the movie costume designers dress them based on patterns from their unconscious?!!) Mine had garden hoes instead of lollipops and lacked that terrible gold hair, but otherwise - yeesh. Good thing I'm a drinking man. Or was. I'd nah go down that road again unarmed. 

--

Thus as an LSD-quaffing college kid I found the living link wherein Eastern mysticism, indigenous shamanic vision quests, and Western schizo paranoia are all linked. When I learned that the Monarch 7 program used Oz imagery during their hypnotic programming, I wasn't a bit surprised. But in thinking about it, I also wonder where the line between hypnotic programming and mythic archetypal psychology intersect. Saying the iconography of Oz is used in a ritual that is itself possibly fiction, makes it the definition of myth (in my mind) come into focus as a narrative both true and untrue, a 'possible fiction' or a reflection of some truth so large normal reality cannot encompass it (full)

ALSO - OSLA -

Blue Testament: History Channel's Hot Hot Hell. 
(DV, 2011)

Occult Streams of the Amazon: 13 Prime Witchcraft-y Recommendations:
Blood-Orgy of the She-Devils (1973), Haxan (1922), Southbound (2015), Witchouse (1999), Satan's School for Girls (1973), The Church (1989), Burn, Witch, Burn (1962), Voodoo Man (1944), Chandu and Magic Island (1934), Little Witches (1999), Mark of the Witch (2014), The Eternal (1998), etc.
(Oct. 2016)

Guide to Cable's Paranormal / Ghost-Hunting TV Shows

(DP - August 2012)

Rite of Passage - the Archons begin their Feb 2013 chi/soul energy harvest