Hallucinatural: MIDSOMMAR

One of the cooler and more noteworthy things about the critical buzz for Ari Aster's highly trippy new horror folk film, MIDSOMMAR (2019), is the widespread recommendation that one should not do psychedelics before seeing it. There have already been a few freak-outs in the theaters showing the film. (I won't link to the reports, because lightweights have no place on this site) but I am fascinated that psychedelics at the movies have become commonplace to the point it's not a question of whether one should trip at the cinema or trip, but a question of which tripped-out druggy horror films are best seen straight. "Sober audiences may feel like they’re tripping," notes Fast Company's Joe Berkowitz of Aster's new film, "but tripping audiences will probably feel like they’ve died or perhaps were never born at all."

I agree with Joe: Midsommar Delivers the Most Realistically Trippy Drug Scene Ever, for Better and for Worse. It didn't occur to me to go see it tripping, but now I sure wish I did! I'm a fan of that 'never born at all' feeling, isn't that what movies are all about? (3) Between Midsommar, The Beach Bum, Climax, and last year's Mandy, its heartening to see the ways psychedelics have moved from a kind of dirtbag-disreputable guilt-by-association into hipster mainstream respectability. Creating spiritual transformations when the time, dosage and place are all just right; and nonfatal nightmares of self-realization when they aren't, gone are the Judy Blume-style inaccuracies of after school specials like Go Ask Alice. Instead, in a culture where young college students roll joints at diners without having to look over their shoulders for cops, paranoia and knee-jerk condemnation has been replaced with a mainstream hipness to the importance of set and setting.

In the past, when psychedelics were represented on film it was always with a patina of gaudy mummery: naked broads in body paint would frug through a kaleidoscope as bad acid rock jams ate up the minutes. Hallucinations were usually embodied by actors or latex puppets, completely divorced from the context in which they were perhaps originally hallucinated thanks to the impossibility of getting the full scope of expanded consciousness across all the telephone game hands it takes to put script onto screen. (6) Drugs were associated strictly with a certain swath of music (Grateful Dead, Electric Prunes, Ravi Shankar), and mired in an ever-oscillating mix of naive idealism and burnt-out paranoia. Before we could really write down the specifics of our transformative drug hallucination, the hallucination would be gone. The trick of a true hallucination is that it lurks beyond the ability of language or the social order to fully define and circumscribe it. Strangers to psychedelics think hallucinations are along the lines of seeing a white rabbit hopping through the subway, but a seasoned tripper knows it's never so simple. There might be a rabbit there, but he turns into a white handbag if you look at him too long, either that or he just pops up out of the crowd for a split second, then is gone again, so you're never sure he was there. A hallucination never stays in one place or time long enough to really 'capture' it. But we all--writers and artists--sure have to try. A lot of us prefer to stay home alone rather than going out clubbing, so we can spend the night trying to record our visuals via painting, or ranting into a microphone, or scribbling poetry - but that carries its own risks. With one to bring you off the ledge one could think oneself into a bad trip pretty fast. Thus the bulk of drug-taking imagery in cinema has always been--until recently--of a Lowest Common Denominator kind of vibe, both naive and skeevy, a bunch of easily-influenced kids shimmying to a guitar solo like lemmings to a cliffside chimera OR like Warren freaking out in the gallery, 

With Midsommar and its tale of a gang of backpacking master's degree students joining a friend at his family's remote Northern Swedish very psychedelically-astute commune for the titular holiday (up where the sun never sets), we finally move past those breakwaters. Gone are the banal psychedelic cliches we're used to. Instead, thanks to CGI and director Ari Aster's modicum of restraint comes the imagery of psychedelics as they actually are, i.e. anchored to the expansion and contraction of the breath and the nature of seeing and hearing via the human nervous system. (Is one 'hallucinating' when they become aware that the entire planet 'breathes' in ever expanding/contracting waves of energy?).

As the backpacking guests at the weird Swedish commune take mushrooms and then drink some unknown herbal tea, we have to pay attention to the details of the frame to see the way the deep black interiors of the flowers in the lead girl Dani's hair widens and contracts just like a tripping pupil, or the way the tendrils of the vines wrap around her May Queen throne stretch to accommodate and encourage her ever-more tarot-style royal movements. The sacred space and time generated by ritual circular movement is made palpable in the flow of energy up the bark of trees, or between people entraining their breath and movements to the music guiding them in an endless May Pole dance during which she can suddenly speak and understand fluent Swedish. Or are she and her last surviving dancer talking with words at all, or just ESP-ing?

Ever quick to invent new phrases, I dub this new trend 'hallucinaturalism' - i.e. going for what a drug trip visual actually looks like, the way hallucinations actually work, not as a black light lava lamp excuse for gaudy excess but a space beyond time where we can see the breathing of flowers, the growing of plant tendrils, the spiraling out of the breath, the rays of the sun, the soul leaving the body.

The Ingestibles

“The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.” ― Joseph Campbell 

"Who is to say what is real and what is not? 'Real' is a distinction of a naïve mind." - Terence McKenna

Am I myself getting of ahead? Surely the plot should be pretty familiar to you if you've ever gone to visit a rural commune with a friend of a friend, for either a weekend camping/party at some friend's parents' farm, or a remotely located rock festival with a tent area. Such areas make the perfect tripping zones: no cops, no cars, no drawer-searching rehab-calling parents, and--unless there's a pen with a bull stamping around in it or a sudden influx of speed freak bikers- no real danger unless you accidentally get run over by someone backing out of their parking spot, or you OD. 

But even so, one can find one's mellow being harshed by one's buzzkill girlfriend, the type who invites herself along, and then makes frowny faces every time you want to do whiskey funnels, or shrooms, or acid, or whatever (she doesn't want you to do them without her, but she doesn't want to do them yet... and it's always "yet" for her). Our main backpacker heroine is a kind of damaged co-dependent bi-polar buzzkill Dani (Florence Pugh). She's tagging along on the trip up north with her passive-douche boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor), the kind of guy who's too cowardly to break up with her (it's so close to the triple suicide of her sister and parents he's worried about seeming callous). He also can't figure out how to not invite her along as he in turn invites himself along with his anthropology masters degree buddies to the solstice midsummer celebration at the agrarian commune of their Swedish friend Pelle (Vilhelm Bolmgren). They're expecting a kind of cross between Burning Man and an Amish barn raising party. Well, they get all that and more too, in the clear light of day, forever (the lack of a setting sun or nightfall is one of the film's most uncanny elements).

Bobby "Haxan Cloak" Krlic's avant garde string-heavy score might veer strangely close to Colin Stetson's for Aster's previous instant horror classic Hereditary - especially near the end, when the Phillip Glassy synth drones and cascading triplets come flowing into a kind of transformative sound re-baptism - but he gets just right the paranoid long-bowing bottom-dropping coccyx- tingling drones; the Lygeti-esque solar wind socking; the encounter group breath work flowing through the barn door cracks to just the perfect level of strange. On the downside, the cast lacks a force like Toni Collette to center things; and it doesn't really add up to much beyond the sum of its parts; and if --at 2 1/2 hours--it still feels like so much of the film is missing; it's got the 'truest' hallucinations ever in cinema, and maybe the best druggy ceremonial group sex scene ever. 

Encompassing all that is interesting, beguiling and terrifying about such 'communes' --the collapse of privacy, the loss of independent thought, the way 'breathing method' panting seems here a seamless part of conception, and the lack of abjectification within the ranks (no one sits it out) --Midsommar leaves us reeling in a kind of dream daze that the rest of the film takes and--if not runs with--certainly walks in imperceptibly slight slow-motion ceremonial steps right into the fire and flowers.

Dani's moaning and screaming at last finds its entrainment absolvement
MIDSUMMER NIGHT MOAN 

“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” ― Joseph Campbell 

"It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature." -Albert Hofmann

There's a feeling of being totally unmoored from one's place in the world very common today--when constant texting for validation from peers isn't enough to fill the 'god-sized hole' (as we call it in AA) and our leaning on a current sex partner or best friend to somehow make up that vast chasm of disconnect is a sure way to sink like a stone. For a lot of us, especially if we're not on SSRI meds, or not working anymore, the despair and isolation are so great that thoughts of suicide, on repeat, like a stuttering record, are our only salve. Dude, if even Ativan doesn't work (we see a bottle in Dani's cabinet - man, I'm so jealous), you know you're fucked. And if your pair-bond doesn't fill the hole, then what? You can join AA or some other group - but that's kind of a cult, and can be one if you wind up at the wrong meeting and let some weirdo sponsor you because you're too passive to say no. Or you can meditate... on drugs.. chant your way clear of the orbit around that damned hole. 

Accepting that one can never fill the gaping black hole at the core of the self is the only way to escape its gravitational pull. 

Paranoia and a feeling of secure group belonging, a kind of tribal security, are--one would think--opposites with a huge grey area in between. It's that grey area where most of us exist, never quite committing to the rapture of the group mind via becoming one of a tribe (a "worker among workers" as they say in AA) nor spinning off into complete isolation (wherein you paint your windows black and don't answer the door or phone anymore, and spend your nights screaming into a pillow as hands come out of the walls and just being able to put on your shoes and go outside for a six-pack seems like some impossible dream).

On psychedelics, one isn't necessarily free of one's issues, they're just magnified. But with the right group---a primal scream therapy group at your therapist's office every other week for example--you can magnify your woes to such a large degree they disappear from the horizon.

If you have taken drugs like psilocybin, LSD or ecstasy at a big hippy commune or outdoor music festival or pagan commune or weekend party on some sprawling farm, you may have been, dancing away, surrounded by happy hair-twirling hippies high as hell, and suddenly--out of the blue-- gotten paranoid. You think you might be sacrificed to some ancient god during the height of the ecstatic rave orgy and even if you could escape the parking lot, you have no idea where the nearest cop is, or if he's in on it, or even how to dial a phone in your current state. Every girl seems to be hitting on you through her ecstatic breathing. Tendrils of pink azure longing tap your chakras and fill you with her scent and wiles, but not in a good way - in a Monarch 7 Eyes Wide Shut kind of way. Every guy you know seems to trying to lure you someplace remote so they can hit you up for shrooms -- their neediness and jonesing like daggers in reverse. Only your reflection in the mirror reminds you that you're even you, and how far over the rainbow you are. A few shots of Jaeger and a deep breath, a song you like, a chance to go onstage and sing "Sweet Jane" and maybe you're okay again. The trees wiggle indiscriminately.

CULTS Are for KIDS

“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims...” 

― Joseph Campbell

"Without a gang, you're an orphan!" - Riff - West Side Story

Whether via hot coal walks or bad acid trip paranoia, initiation ordeals leave us tightly united to the group without the need for a common enemy. Rather than bonding through collectively hating on some outcast-- which is like the cheap knock-off Elmer's of social binding--it is through this initiation one finds acceptance (which when it goes too far and frat dicks get ahold of it becomes 'hazing'). (2)

AA gets it (I mean Ari Aster, though it goes both ways) Between this and Hereditary he's proving himself the champion auteur of the New Dysfunction - one where drugs are so numerous the zone between one's shrink and her litany of anti-depressant and anti-anxiety meds and the herbalist with the plastic baggy or the 'tea' - cease to exist. There's no 'normal' to start out with anymore, only degrees of dysfunctional isolation and co-dependence. In neither film do we ever hear from anyone like a policeman, a narrator, a court appointed grief counsellor, a psychiatrist. As in films like The Shining- the socially conditioned polarities of right and wrong, linear time and the concept of future obligation cease. Like psychedelics themselves, the 'snap' of cabin fever frees us from the kind of rote empathy that locks us into the social order. Madness moves us beyond such things - life and death and the degrees of 'goodness' are lost in the presence of a kind of Hanging Rock/Quetzalcoatl sun god green man archaic pre-Christian hunger for human sacrifice. We become like Jack Torrance, or James Mason in Nicholas Ray's Bigger than Life, hankering to sacrifice his son like Abraham because he won't learn math, the in-denial mom refusing to so much as call a family friend for aid since father knows best.

Maybe you've seen 2000 Manics (left), The Cabin in the Woods or the Wicker Man (either version), and shuddered with the realization that in an alternate pre-Christian reality, macabre human sacrifice could become as routine and accepted as, say, fireworks on the 4th of July, or the lighting of a Lincoln Center Xmas tree. The scene at left is terrifying because we see the ease with which such a tableaux can fit easily into the apple pie and potato sack race shenanigans of a town centennial. As with Hereditary, Aster brings to the horror genre reflections of our own subconscious paranoia -that there's a secret society right there in plain sight, as banal as an old photo album of your grandma's showing a bunch of old ladies showing off their arts and crafts talismans, or a group of blonde farmers all dressed in white with big loving smiles and flowers in their hair--their actions too ancient, to rooted in archaic magics to be called evil in the pejorative sense. There is Machiavellian lip-smacking, no sordid rapey undercurrent. Everything is ritualized and slow according to the natural world, with which the commune is deeply in tune. They move in accordance of the breath, and the understanding that screams of the dying can be drowned out with group screaming in sympathy, that the most harrowing howls of pain and anguish can be matched and calmed through the entrainment of the support group and that all such negative emotions can be dissolved into the group like salt in the sea.

Between Chris Hemsworth's seductive cult freak in Bad Times at the El Royale and Tarantino's new Manson film, as well as new TV docs signifies the enduring appeal of the archetype of the holy madman is back, tapping into the aging millennial's desperate need for a blood-and-flesh tribe, a version of the fantasy of belonging they found in Twilight, Harry Potter, and so forth and the dozen other 'magical school' franchises glutting the market. They crave a world where they feel included, loved, protected, in a hermetic magical zone, able to face danger and the threats of life knowing a strong group of cool and capably friends have their back.

You or I might get this through being in a band in college, or belonging to a street gang, the military, or even sports team, but for the drowning psychotic the god-sized hole of desperate feeling of orphanhood is too much to navigate the give-and-take of a clique. For such people, being swooped up in the rescue gear of the cult-building mystic is a true godsend (ala Phoenix's character in The Master), the fragile ecosystem of social mores instilled in them by a failed family unit and educational system gets washed away with this shining all-inclusive paradigm. The ocean of support and 'being held' they receive more than makes up for things like the total loss of independence, personal property, and connection to the outside world.

Why it's so seductive in Midsommar's case is that we're not dealing with the usual Hammer Films gathering of British extras in robes cavorting and waving around goblets and bunches of grapes while Charles Grey glowers behind an altar - we're dealing with drug effects we may already be familiar with. Psychedelics' abilities to bond a social group and/or weird one out along the same line, is something we already know. At their best, they induce a harmony with nature, though a nature that is inscrutable in its demands - the sun and light of love they feel goes hand in hand with a clear-eyed and unflinching view of death, and a view of sex and mind-altering drugs completely free of all Christianity's and conservative parental hysteria's restrictions and taboos. We can't help but feel the attraction, the druggy pull of inclusion and oneness when, say, tripping really hard out in a park on a sunny warm day.

Coming out of the theater into the summer evening or late afternoon, walking home from the Alamo in the soggy summer heat, we may be grateful we're safe in the city, and sober, more or less, and happy more or less, in our world of pair-bond-cohabitation, our online communities ever a click away, aware finally that pursuit of balance not happiness is the key to... happiness. And that air conditioning, vaping, CBD gummies, anti-depressants, ant-anxiety meds, sleeping pills, herbal teas and Coke Zero, taken continually, makes everything all right, but not so all right we fall into mania and therefore, inevitably, a massive crash. If, like me, you spent the first 30 years of your life on a treadmill running from all-consuming massive depression, you know what heaven is - being able to stop.... running. The question then becomes... then what? What do we do now that we don't need to do anything?

GOATS

"And goats have kids / like people have kids / like me / and you!"
- 70s Sesame Street song ("What Kids are Called")

"Mythology, properly understood as metaphor, will guide you to the recognition of your tiger face. But then how are you going to live with these goats?" - Joseph Campbell (full)

One thing I kept thinking about on the walk home was, what are these folks lives going to be like in the winter? Just as the days are endless in midnight sun Sweden, the freezing winters are eternal darkness. I couldn't help but feel the eerie echo of their Viking ancestors, imagining roaring fires and furs and elaborate homemade woolen wear. I thought too of the goats. Not that we see many of them, but enough. What is up with goats, in general? Wither their strange supernatural power? Their susceptibility to supernatural forces both coming and going is more than passing strange. My mom is currently reincarnated as a goat at the Carl Sandburg House goat farm in Flatrock NC, where she volunteered for years. If you see a goat named Nancy, tell her her son is glad she's found peace in a nice and supportive trip.

But why are goats such able vessels for human and daemonic spirits? Is it because we attributed this power to them, based on Pan, satyrs, the frolicking horned one, etc? From Hunchback of Notre Dame (where a little black goat is actually tried and accused of witchcraft to the recent The Witch) to my own part in the big Goatman scare in the Maryland woods in the early-80s. Which came first, the power we ascribe to the goats or the power they already have? Why is group of goats called a tribe or a trip?

Or does this shit go far deeper. If you don't think goats are supernatural you've never seen one standing out on a tree limb like a high wire act (above) when you know there's just no way that's even possible?

Sorry this ends so randomly. So does the film though; if it's not more than the sum of it's parts, its parts are still good. Maybe that's what tripping is like too. You may find nirvana, the pieces of your life coming together in a perfect mandala jigsaw puzzle you'd normally spend lifetimes completing, but with nothing else to do, one can't help but break it all up so you're not bored for the next 50 years.
Or you find the Hell of self-conscious empty needy anguish, the 'alone even in a herd of friends' despair, so amplified to become untenable, so that crawling into a lit fireplace seems the only available recourse. Either way, it's over then too. You can declare you're 'done' with psychedelics, that you've 'passed' the acid test like the man forced Ken Kesey to say after he got busted. Or you can try to minister to the onslaught of needy mouths as they sense someone with 'the answer' and a free tab, like a flock of hungry seagulls around a lone guy throwing breadcrumbs into the wind (ala Javier Bardem in Mother) or you can barricade yourself from the beaks and mouths and hole up with a lover or two and a bunch of recording equipment and art supplies like Turner in Performance. Or you can join a commune, experience the oneness, and maybe it's not a cult after all (no messiah figure). Either way, someone has to do the dishes, and it's not going to be me.

Shout out to Ryan for the req!
=========

PS - second viewing thoughts (1/13/20) on Prime: (Note: contains Spoilers) 

This second time I was more aware of the key central relationship of passive aggressive bullshit from the boyfriend and the relative hunched-over postures of the non-members. It wasn't Florence Pugh's character at all, it was the boyfriend. He was just a pussy with no guts to break up with her NOR to commit fully, so he hangs in the doorway like a little shithead, thinking he's somehow doing the right thing. The whole movie is a kind of rape-revenge movie only there's no rape, just a boyfriend doing the kind of shit we expect from sophomores or juniors, not grad students. I wince, as I was that boy more than a few times, my girlfriends would sense my wariness and spend weekends trying to convince me to stick around. Looking back I see how I mistook squeamishness and fear of the unknown for somehow being 'a good guy.' It was actually shrooms that gave me the guts to break up with at least three girlfriends, despite one being super hot, one getting super violent, and one being super enabling and sweet-natured. Damn, it feels good to be able to judge this guy as totally deserving of his eventual burning, his symbolic casting out as the demon in the bear skin. 

Ask not whom the devil drives to his first day of school... He honks for thee. 

RECOMMENDATIONS / Further FOLK HORROR:

A cool movie with a similar plot arc, believe it or not, is 1978's THE LEGACY!

CinemArchetype 15: Human Sacrifice 
Bell, Book and Hallucinogenic Tampon: THE LOVE WITCH
13 Best or Weirdest Occult/Witch movies on the Amazon Prime
The Goat of Menses and the Fox in the Atheist Hole: THE WITCH
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call Summersisle: THE WICKER MAN (201o)
Genealogy of Flies: Lords of Salem, House of the Devil (+my own Salem ancestry)
All the Missed Mystics: Nicolas Roeg's GLASTONBURY FAYRE (1972)
Bitches' Sabbath: WITCHING AND BITCHING
Acid's Greatest Horror #1: ANTICHRIST (2009)
Avenger of Whatever: KILL LIST
Sever me Member: EX-MACHINA, THE CREEPING FLESH
Why don't we just Go Ask Alice? 
Alice 2.2 - The Looking Glass Dolls
The Ancient She-Shaman and her Shrooming Exhumer: SZAMANKA 
The Man in the Grey Flannel Darkness: BIGGER THAN LIFE

and David Del Valle's Lovecraft/Satan piece from back in Acidemic #6: Sympathy for the Devil:
Give my My Skin: BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW and the Devil Films of the 70s (2009)

NOTES
1. yes I practice meditation daily with a light-sound machine, I recommend it 

6. My recent DT hallucination of Veronica Lake swimming in ice below the tiles in the ER waiting room, beckoning me to jump in, would no doubt by the time they made it into a movie, be represented by a real actress dressed as Lake standing, dripping in the middle of the room, pointing at me and making a drowning noise, in other words completely divorced from the floor waxer brush prints from which my brain's pareidolia center and my recent drunk viewing of Sullivan's Travels worked with my heated brain to conjure Lake dancing in icy water below the floor. I was there at 4 AM and the floor had just been waxed. Would that image last through CGI effects team interpretation, presuming the animator has no experience with such mental states? Consider how much better films like Altered States, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Naked Lunch might have been with a more vivid and alert recreation of drug hallucinations rather than this kind of broad cartoon literality? Nothing against those films per se, especially Naked Lunch. I imagine Aster doing them all very different - i.e. with this CGI breathing subtlety. 

Pineal Express: FROM BEYOND, LUCY, SPECTRE, THE MAGICIANS

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.

It's the stuff dreams are made of-- a gland in the center of the brain called the pineal makes it. Located above the reptilian cortex and behind the higher mammalian functioning empathy, the pineal is neither/or. It's that pine cone-looking thing the bird monster Annunaki is sticking into the prototype human's forehead on those old Sumerian tablets (left). It's beyond DNA life itself. It's the third eye, and it's long been calcified, due to the slow infiltration of our precious bodily fluids. It's an idea that's really grabbed hold, starting as far as I can tell, with General Ripper's measured declaration: "Fluoridation... is the most monstrously conceived... and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face."

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 Energetics

Imagine 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:

the Void- white noise; Buddha- TV station;
your pineal gland: TV antenna (a guru would
be a descrambler box, or signal booster)

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.

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)
+++++++
(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.

Fight corporate synergy in affordable style and comfort

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.

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!

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!

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

Reeling and Writhing: ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1933)

Seldom seen since its 1933 limited release,  ALICE IN WONDERLAND, Paramount's champagne and hashish centerpiece, can stand on its head proudly, for it turns out to be awash in the same surrealist insanity that so scintillatingly varnishes the studio's peak pre-code '32-34 comedy output, i.e. MILLION DOLLAR LEGS, SNOW WHITE, DUCK SOUP and INTERNATIONAL HOUSE (1933 Paramount was, sez I, the best). For a long time we had to take it on faith that this movie was as boring as those few who saw it said it was. Well, now that it's all pretty as paint on TCM, it turns out those few were wrong.

All I know is that I would have flipped my lid to catch this ALICE on a five AM Saturday morning UHF station as an early-rising kid in the 70s (or an up-all-night acidhead in the 80s catching it on Night Flight). This is its rightful place. For the rest of us, in the age of cable and hydra headed options, we can at least imagine, or if we're old enough, remember back-ack-ack-ack.

Come with me then, back to a time before cable, before even Betamax, a time when there were three main channels (ABC, NBC, CBS) + PBS (Channel 12 in Wilmington Phila, Channel 13 in NY); and then local TV on UHF (a separate dial and antenna) which ran lots of weird stuff like Wee Willie Webber presenting Johnny Socko and his Flying Robot. Kids' TV was a big tent, lack of choices made us all much broader in our horizons. Rising up at the crack of dawn as a kid on Saturday mornings, a 5-AM late night PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE or VELVET VAMPIRE showing would segue into weird Z-grade European 'kiddie matinee' nightmares like RED RIDING HOOD AND THE MONSTERS before finally morphing into stuff like HONG KONG PHOOEY and LAND OF THE LOST. This was our magic time, a solid three-to-four hour stretch with parents still asleep, sugary cereal creating a special mental space where the lingering images of dreams from mere minutes ago in bed would seamlessly into surreal late night monster movies segueing into early kid puppet show imagery.

And finally seeing ALICE on TCM the other night, I know it would have fit right in there, the living link between Seals and Marty Kroft shows, the Marx Brothers, and Ed Wood. That director Norman Z. McLeod (MONKEY BUSINESS, HORSEFEATHERS), screenwriter Joseph Mankiewicz (DIPLOMANIACS, MILLION DOLLAR LEGS) and set designer William Cameron Menzies (CHANDU, SVENGALI) have somehow alchemically combined all those influences and so it makes sense that now, in 2016, it all feels brand newer.

But I still haven't captured the vibe. Let me go back: can you remember when you were a small kid on some haunted house or pirate ride at an amusement Park, when everything was so much bigger and scarier as it was all so much more vividly imagined? You know, the feeling of cozy excitement in the darkness and cacophony? And maybe, like me, you imagined what it would be like to sneak out of your little car/log flume and into the elaborate animatronic forests on either side of the car/log, to get off at the corner and hide there, amidst the robotically moving figures and twisting anamorphic papier mache trees? Well, if there was a 1933 Paramountland, or a Fleischerland, with a ride through Max Fleischer's surreal pre-code classic dioramas, all rendered in black and white, and you were kind of stuck there--and, like Lisa Simpson at Duffworld, drank the acid-spiked water, and were hanging out with a spookily calm and fearless ten year-old blonde who dragged you off the flume long and around to all the little vignettes after the ride closed but the lights and engines stayed on--then you would have this ALICE IN WONDERLAND. And if that sounds like a good time, and if you love cheap rattletrap carnival haunted houses, and miniature golf courses, and psychedelic mushrooms, then with the help of Mankiewicz's absurdist wit, Carroll's trippy source material, McLeod's zippy unpretentious pace, and Menzies' surreal backdrops, this Boopland paradise for you, as it is for all the other acid-addled pre-code Paramount devotees who've had Mystery Cave dreams after too much rarebit or cold medicine.

Flash forward 15 years or so, to my late 80s-early 90s Deadhead/Floyd period --there was no better time of the night for an older kid like me than when the show was finally over, and I and my crew were safely home with the whiskey and VCR and every last parent and wally long tucked away, able to sit down in a comfy chair or couch and not have to stand there, swaying to yet another encore. Still tripping our faces off, but all the anguished paranoia of driving home without getting arrested being finally over, and us safe and able to finally take our shoes off, with hours and (presuming the whiskey stash as flush) and highballs to go before the color bands flashing behind our eyelids would be muted enough for sleep, we needed to watch something that wouldn't bum us out, and I mean we 'needed' it, desperately, for our good trip could still become a bad one with a single ugly scene.

And at those times, when they were needed most, Paramount pre-codes (before anyone knew what that meant)--Betty Boop, W.C. Fields, Marx Bros, and Cary Grant--were like glowing toasty fires in the cold darkness. One look into their crazy eyes and we'd know they could see us watching them, somehow, they would lean out of the mise-en-scene and shoot us sly winks. They "got it." If MGM was the studio of amphetamines and apple pie, Warners of beer and coffee, and Universal of laudanum and black tea, then Paramount was the studio of psychedelics and champagne and thus ALICE IN WONDERLAND was and is their ideal 'literary adaptation.'

That said, there are missteps: fully obscuring Cary Grant's beautiful head in the mock turtle costume, for example. Then again, which Alice adaptation is--for kids' and critics' alike--perfect?  None. Disney's 1951 cartoon version is too literal; Tim Burton's lacks surrealist savvy; Jan Svankmajer's is hallucinatory and uncanny childhood nightmare-level disturbing but lacks class and diction; and all the BBC versions are too much the same other way around. But Paramount's pre-code Alice is sooo wrong on the other hand, it's better than right. It dissolves like a sugar cube under a steady stream of absinthe, maybe a headache will result later but for as long as now lasts, magical. Woozy, weird, dizzy, and then --before it gets older- over.

Anyway, I had trouble getting past the first few minutes that last time it was on TCM, the whole opening bit of Alice back on 'Earth' with her aunt or guardian is zzzz, but this time I came in after the first quarter, half-paying attention and soon there was this crazy mock turtle with a strange yet familiar voice, and I wasn't at all sure it even was Cary Grant inside the shell, until he sings "Turtle Soup" with a bizarro British music hall trill and suddenly there it is, the foundational bedrock upon which 'the' Cary Grant was formed-- the vaudeville pratfalls and "love to be beside the seaside" hoofery that fell below the surface, deep into ocean canyons (surfacing occasionally, as in Sylvia Scarlet) until to provide the bedrock underneath his rising star. So it's rather gratifying to see (or rather hear) this sudden resonant force, returning like the repressed under the safety of this inscrutable sea horse turtle persona. It's so out of character for his usual cool that it made me think of that scene when he breaks down in front of the child services judge in Penny Serenade and you're like whoa, Cary, we never ever see this side of you. It makes us weak in the knees all over again to realize the vast wealth of brilliance and jubilance folded and edited and streamlined until Grant was, as Stanley Cavell put it, "fit to stand the gaze of millions."

Amongst the stand-out sights are a king and queen of hearts perfectly gussied to resemble the English pattern playing deck, the king especially looks exactly like him. We've all seen that face since we first learned 'Go Fish' as a child, and suddenly wham here he is, in black and white and surrounded in a curiously 2-D dream space, as if childhood memory, card game, and fever dream had crashed ceremoniously together, launching us into the primal magic zone from which all the symbols of our lifetime are born. 

Here, though, that gaze is rendered moot, so there's no image of cool to live up to. The turtle shell armors and anonymizes so he cuts loose and large. One wonders what kind of miracles Grant could put into, say, a Pixar film. You won't find, say, Tom Hanks or Will Smith going out on a far limb into madness in their roles, not ever, not like Grant does here. Grant is committed to the madness, like he's reading/acting out a story book for agog infant children while hopped up on mescaline backstage at a 1920's Vaudeville show.

And just when you're wondering why they didn't just make this whole thing a 

cartoon (there was, after all, a Betty Boop version, in 'Blunderland' the following year), 

a Fleischer animation of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" shows up, providing a nice break

 from the live action, which by then has settled into miniature golf course tableaux 

connected by all sorts of surrealistic dissolves, implied drug use, and dotted line followings. 

Other familiar faces and voices help navigate the off-putting (and rather flatly lit) weirdness, like recognizing an old friend in a throng of strangers during a bad trip moment at a Dead show and then realizing - whoa, it might not be them! But then... deciding it is, wait - do I even know them, really? So there's old Ned Sparks snarling through his clenched hookah stem jaw as the caterpillar; there's Edna May Oliver, strangely sexy with upturned nose extension as the Red Queen; Roscoe Karns and Jackie Oakie as the Tweedles; Edward Everett Horton singing about the tea-trays in the sky (and waving around saucers to make sure we get the UFO connection) as the Mad Hatter; Charlie Ruggles as the March Hare; Richard Arlen as the Cheshire Cat; W.C. Fields as an exquisitely churlish Humpty Dumpty; Louise Fazenda--looking like a hybrid of Ginger Rogers and the girl in the Eraserhead radiator--as the White Queen'; and Gary Cooper as the vertigo-ridden White Knight.

As Alice, Charlotte Henry is a tripper role model, demonstrating how to keep cool and open-minded in a crisis. Moving from freak tableaux to freak tableaux, size to size, being to being, with an open mind, her deadpan performance never lapses into treacle, camp or obnoxiousness. Where other people would surely cower or freak out or stare rudely or wince in disgust, she just politely notes that things just got "curious." Is it any wonder a nervous sensitive Mad Hatter-type artists like me would worship her? (1)

whoa - I've had childhood 'too much chocolate' nightmares that look just like this!

any similarities to a human ass may be coincidental

This is your dinner on drugs --but  play it cool, bro

It's tempting to be like other lazy critics and dismiss the film for the crime of hiding Cary's and Gary's faces, each then at the peak of their beauty, but instead we should appreciate how, protected from the job of persona-guarding via such anonymity, they show us the character actors they might have been had they not become such huge stars. Grant becomes a music hall maniac, trilling his "sorrow of a sorrow" while a gryphon laughs and chessmen chortle, and Cooper goes deep into his own laconic cowboy persona for the White Knight (below). It's pretty funny to think this tall laconic drink of water could ever fall off a horse, but he does--with great, typically laconic low-key nonchalance--again and again. Unshaken even with his head in a ditch, he tells Alice: "what does it matter where my body happens be? My mind goes on working all the same." Showing Alice his bizarre inventions, like his little box (upside down to keep the rain out), his empty mouse trap, and beehive, he's proud but reticent, like a shy ten year-old boy trying to impress his babysitter by showing off his action figure collection--half shyly, half with little boy bluster.

Gary Cooper, "seated"

But the real selling points for this as the bad acid rarebit fiend K-hole nightmare miniature golf course-cum-carnival-ride childhood fever dream are the grotesque images that linger in the mind afterwards, etched on the soul like dark scars in the thick unconscious muck where nothing ever dries or heals, just festers until it erupts into sudden hallucinations and terrifying vertigo with the right 'trigger'. When I see this big lumbering dude in a mouse costume flopping around in a shallow concrete pool (of Big Alice's tears) as if some plushy Overlook refugee paddling forward in the Freaks climax rain, I feel as if the deep well of my childhood nightmares (which I thought long since paved-over) was flooding up all over the basement couch and soaking my kitchen floor. By the time we get to the scene with the crazy fat mom throwing the baby around while the cook hurls insults and pots and the frog (Sterling Holloway) sits outside, the water's up to my knees. Then Alice holds the baby, who oscillates from an actual baby to Billy Barty (in a baby costume) and back, and then to a plastic doll, and then a real piglet-- the water's up to my neck.

It's over my head and leaking into the above floor for the croquet scene. Ask yourself, are their croquet mallets drugged flamingos who stiffen when they try to play dead, just limpid puppets, or dead flamingos in the process of rigor mortis? Like gramps in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974), they waver between all three, and it's in that in-betweenness wherein they become truly creepy. Then there's the way the white queen says "better" over and over like a mantra until the word slowly turns into a sheep 'baaa'-ter and she dissolves into a sheep selling a giant egg, which Alice stares at until it turns into W.C. Fields as a giant Humpty, demanding she stop staring at him like he was an egg, and state her name and her business. At that point the water goes up my chimney and hits the bell. A winna!

At dinner there's a talking roast (it's bad manners, we learn, to slice off a piece of someone we've been introduced to) illustrating perfectly what it's like to eat dinner with your parents while trying to hide from them the fact that you are peaking on an unexpectedly strong and delayed psychedelic trip. Then, Alice is crowned queen, and everyone dances around and the dancing intensifies until they choke her and it all meshes in a swirl like a combination of the big circus FREAKS and BLUE ANGEL wedding dinners and the entirety of Allendro Jodorowsky's canon, boiled and distilled into one black and white raging fever dream bad trip delirium tremens nightmare peak moment. And everywhere we look, things change. The more we stare the more what we're staring at seems to breathe, to grow or shrink.

Our gaze, in a sense, makes monsters cohere from the shadows. Is this not how 'reality' passes itself off as something concrete?

Bringing as he does the same sense of deadpan fluid riffing absurdity that made his MILLION DOLLAR LEGS and DIPLOMANIACS scripts so pitch-Paramount perfect, I'm not sure if adapter Mankiewicz ever tried mescaline or reefer or anything, but I wouldn't be surprised if he had. For he's aces at nailing the freestyle way staring at something long enough turns it into something else, or saying any word more than once or twice renders the words themselves alive and fluid, strange and absurd. Taken as a whole, this 1933 ALICE could be the bad trip counterpoint to YELLOW SUBMARINE and like that film it's also the perfect guide to tripping, offering the same sage counsel employed by any good 'guide':

The sage advice: Don't try to recapture the sense of where you just were, are, or what size you are or where you're 'meant' to be or where you will wind up next. Let go of trying to judge or control anything that happens. Most of all, don't worry what those words someone spoke at you, don't try to nail words to the cross of meaning for they'll wiggle farther away the harder you try. Don't try to reclaim the perception of yourself and the world you had before you started to 'get off.' A wilder weirder more wondrous world is yours as long as you don't try to own it, tie it down, recreate it, or control it. Don't worry some dark corner of Wonderland is going to ensnare you, for the flux of constant change works both ways: Nothing can keep you--whether you want to be kept or not--all things are transitional. Nothing can last or be returned now that you're finally loosened from the bonds of self, language, and linear time. Just accept this truth: when you wind up were you started, you still won't be 'back' - the old 'you' won't be there to welcome you, any more than a spring husk of a summer cicada welcomes or endorses the thing that steps out of it. So if you can let go of needing even a single string back to sanity, if you can throw that last breadcrumb thread into the wind and fall fall fall, then Hole-in-One, baby. You're awake for the first time again, and ready for a whole looking glass country of archetypal forces to reshape what seemed so mundane before you left. It's all real, and you were there, Uncle Gus in your patched pants, and oh Auntie Em, there's no place like home's...
reflection...
in a mirror...
stared at
until the illusion of its 2D space deepens inward
and you can crawl inside
out.

1) NOTES
Longtime readers note one of my graven image idols of worship is the giant Alice statue in Central Park - see Erich Kuersten: A Poet's Journey