Yearly Archives for 2010

An Introduction to Arcanorium College

An Introduction to Arcanorium College…

From The Chancellor, Peter James Carroll

Throughout history, Magical ideas have been debated and spread by word of mouth or by books. Despite that magical ideas have so often inspired tremendous human advances; such word of mouth transmission have frequently faced suppression or even burning at the stake. Books have had to be smuggled across borders and hidden from the eyes of inquisitors. The ideas of magic have usually threatened the status quo.

Nevertheless, so much of our knowledge has its roots in magic. Astrology gave rise to Astronomy and Cosmology, Alchemy underlies Metallurgy and Chemistry, Numerology gave birth to Mathematics and Cryptography, and both Medicine and Psychology owe a huge debt to Magical and Mystical ideas. Magical ideas have almost invariably underpinned the foundations of all the world’s religions. Miracles remain both the ultimate justification and the Achilles’ heel of all faith based systems.

So what does magical thought have to offer the 21st century? I suspect that it has a seminal role to play, much as it has for the last 25 centuries.

Like most technical advances, the internet took off as a military innovation to decentralize command, control, and intelligence in the event of nuclear attack, and then it got used by science as a means of exchanging papers by hypertext. Recently it has become dominated by commerce, entertainment, and pornography, which seem to be humanity’s greatest concerns at the time of writing. The military now has an alternative network.

However, whilst a relative state of anarchy and absence of censorship prevails on the internet, we will take advantage of it to explore what the magical perspective has to offer. Accordingly I have asked a number of the finest Adepts of my acquaintance over the last 3 decades to prepare material for discussion for a planet-wide discussion of The Magical Perspective.

The College provides a variety of discussion and workshop facilities which remain open throughout the year, plus specialist lecturers give courses which normally last about 6 weeks. Our academic year consists of six by six week semester periods with breaks of a week or two between each. There will usually be about three courses going on simultaneously during the semester periods. Members may participate in as many of these as they wish.

The range of topics currently embraces Sorcery, Divination, Tantra, Runes, Neurolinguistic Programming, Chaos Magic, Thelema, Enchantment and Results Magic, Alternative Physics, the History and Culture of Magic, and Magical Software Design. The College also features an extensive Library of Archives and Links, Common Room areas for debates and socialization, and workshop facilities with online magical tools which remain open between semesters.

Membership follows quickly after registration. Application must be at least 18 years of age. A modest annual registration fee is levied to cover the cost of maintaining the College and to discourage frivolous applicants, but no further expenses need be incurred by members…

More info: arcanoriumcollege.com

A Poem from James Tate

Never Again The Same
by James Tate

Speaking of sunsets,
last night’s was shocking.
I mean, sunsets aren’t supposed to frighten you, are they?
Well, this one was terrifying.
People were screaming in the streets.
Sure, it was beautiful, but far too beautiful.
It wasn’t natural.
One climax followed another and then another
until your knees went weak
and you couldn’t breathe.
The colors were definitely not of this world,
peaches dripping opium,
pandemonium of tangerines,
inferno of irises,
Plutonian emeralds,
all swirling and churning, swabbing,
like it was playing with us,
like we were nothing,
as if our whole lives were a preparation for this,
this for which nothing could have prepared us
and for which we could not have been less prepared.
The mockery of it all stung us bitterly.
And when it was finally over
we whimpered and cried and howled.
And then the streetlights came on as always
and we looked into one another’s eyes?
ancient caves with still pools
and those little transparent fish
who have never seen even one ray of light.
And the calm that returned to us
was not even our own.

June 10, L.A.: "The Alchemy of Things Unknown" opening at Khastoo

This looks intriguing. Here’s the press release…

The Alchemy of Things Unknown (and a Visual Meditation on Transformation)
at Khastoo Gallery (7556 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90046 / (323) 472 6498 )

June 10 – July 31, 2010

Opening reception: Thursday, June 10th, 6pm – 8pm
With a film performance by Raha Raissnia, sound by Charles Curtis.

“After the cursing comes laughter, so that the soul is saved from the dead.”
– Carl Gustav Jung, The Red Book

This exhibition intends to examine and expose individual works of art in relation to theosophy, sacred tradition and devotional practice. From William Blake’s illuminated works of divine imagination to Carl Gustav Jung’s drawings of collective symbolic unconscious, the visual is undoubtedly an integral creative tool for reaching, exploring, animating and pervading the indefinable spaces beyond body and mind.

The artists in this exhibition, some more explicitly than others, sought after or seek spiritual truths through art making and employ an almost fervent and reverent experimentation to their practice, one that is both ritualistic and against the grain. This mystic behavior is what defines the show; the persistence on new and unorthodox visual experimentation reaches beyond the worldly sphere to heightened states of consciousness.

This exhibition is made possible, in part, by the generous contributions of William Breeze, Ordo Templi Orientis, Richard Metzger, John Contreras, Scott Hobbs, David Brafman, William Swofford Cameron, Hetty Maclise, and The Estate of Alfred Jensen.

More info:
http://www.khastoo.com

"We thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if you're playing a concert and you look out and everyone's a dog?'"

Laurie Anderson’s free concert for dogs…

From Associated Press:

SYDNEY – …Laurie Anderson debuted her original “Music for Dogs” composition outside the Sydney Opera House on Saturday.

Hundreds of dogs and their owners bounced around as Anderson entertained them with 20 minutes of thumping beats, whale calls, whistles and a few high-pitched electronic sounds imperceptible to human ears.

“Let’s hear it from the medium dogs!” Anderson called out from the stage, as a few dogs yipped in return. “You can do better than that — come on mediums! Whoo! WHOOOOOO!”

The performance was part of the city’s Vivid art and music festival, which is being co-curated by Anderson and her husband, rock legend Lou Reed.

Anderson — who often plays music for her rat terrier Lollabelle — said the idea originated during a chat with cellist Yo-Yo Ma while the two were waiting backstage at a graduation ceremony.

“We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you’re playing a concert and you look out and everyone’s a dog?'” Anderson said. “So I thought if I ever get a chance to do that, I’m gonna do it. And today was it. So this is like a highlight of my life.”

The music had varying effects on the pooches, with a series of high-pitched whale sounds working several into a frenzy. Many wagged their tails and barked in apparent encouragement, while others stared at the stage with glazed eyes.

“Yo!” Anderson shouted from behind her keyboard. “Beautiful work, dogs!”

Not all of the pups were thrilled. Oliver, a Jack Russell terrier who tends to have issues with high-pitched noises, folded his ears back and exploded into a barrage of frantic barks as he lunged toward the stage, dragging owner Jacqui Bonner along with him.

Others appeared entranced. April Robinson giggled as her small dog Spot swiveled his head toward the stage, ears perked high.

“He loves it!” she squealed while Spot stared wide-eyed at Anderson.

The concert was originally billed as a performance for dogs’ ears only, and was going to be largely limited to electronic noises played at a frequency too high for human ears. But Anderson changed things up when she decided she wanted people to have some fun, too.

“We didn’t want to do something that humans couldn’t hear,” she said. “We brought the octaves down into our hearing range so we could all have the experience.”

Anderson, who turned 63 Saturday, said the crowd was one of the best-behaved she’s ever played for, and considered the whole event a howling success.

“That was the most amazing concert I’ve ever, ever gotten to give!” she said with a grin. “It’s really a dream.”

"It basically comes from love": John McLaughlin in conversation with Robert Fripp, 1982

Recently came across this piece, originally published in Musician No. 45, July, 1982…

Coffee and Chocolates for Two Guitars
by Robert Fripp

Weather shut England and delayed the jammed flight to Paris by three hours, so I landed at 1:30 pm. A mad taxi driver helped to make up the lost time by driving like a mad taxi driver (the only madder ones than Paris’ are in Milan). This guy only hit one car but we nearly collected a second-a young Parisian jumped the light so we took it kinda personal, sped up and aimed. He backed down when he sized the opposition. Then we drove through the No Entry sign to John’s street; his number was inconveniently at the wrong end. I got out at the front door of the quintessentially French apartment building, in what looked suspiciously like a pedestrian zone, a small back lane of one of my two favorite cities in the world.

John McLaughlin should need no introduction, but I suppose editorial etiquette necessitates an exposition of the highlights of his extraordinary career. John probably would be equally admired had there been no Mahavishnu Orchestra—his turn-of-the-decade work with Tony Williams’ LifetimeTony Williams’ Lifetime and his contributions to Miles Davis’ epochal Bitches Brew (known forever as the first fusion album) and A Tribute to Jack Johnson would have ensured that—but it is unquestionably the Mahavishnu Orchestra, with its jagged explosions of cosmic fire and odd-metered funkiness that remains McLaughlin’s best loved and most celebrated band. The Orchestra’s cheerful acceptance of rock ‘n’ roll and other non-jazz idioms never diluted the pyrotechnical excellence of its musicians, Billy Cobham, Jan Hammer, Jerry Goodman, and Rick Laird.

Both before and after Mahavishnu, McLaughlin quietly established his jazz credentials as a band leader in a more subdued but more personally expressive medium with such brilliant albums as Extrapolation, My Goals Beyond (recently rereleased), the underrated Johnny McLaughlin – Electric Guitarist, his collaboration-meditation with Carlos Santana Love Devotion Surrender and his latest, Belo Horizonte. McLaughlin is one of the very few guitarists who have consistently held my respect. Not all his music is my bag of bananas, but I’ve learned from all of it. And he’s still moving. The traditional arguments about technique—no feel, no music—don’t work with this man. My hunch is that the streams of notes don’t even come close to the tearing, ripping spray of what is trying to get out. Except sometimes.

I am warmly greeted by John and his attractive roommate (and the keyboard player in Belo Horizonte), Katia LeBeque. Katia and her sister are a classical music duo with a four-hands piano rendition of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue selling modestly in Europe. John is a dapper dresser; today he’s in grey: flannels and pullover, shirt and tie not quite matching and just enough so that either you knew that he knew, or maybe he knew you didn’t. This subtlety of stressing the discontinuities, some exquisite Basque confectionery placed between us, the charm of the apartment—in mellowed pink, the ceiling veeing into the roof, spiral stairs—hinted at an intermezzo between the acts of flying. John is straightforward, friendly, and a gentleman. He speaks softly in a curious mix of Scottish, Indian, and French accents. We discussed the several occasions we had previously met for a time, and then I assumed a more journalistic role.

Fripp: Why do you think you became a musician?

McLaughlin: Happily, my mother was an amateur musician; she was a violinist and there was always music going on in the house. We got a gramophone one day, and someone had Beethoven’s Ninth, and on the last record, which is at the end of the symphony, there’s a vocal quartet in which the writing is extraordinary…the voices and the harmonies. I must have been about six or seven when I distinctly remember hearing it for the first time. I suppose that’s when I started to listen. Because when you’re young, you’re not paying attention. What do you know when you’re a kid? It was unbelievable, what it was doing to me was tremendous. I began to listen consciously to music and I started taking piano lessons when I was nine and went on to guitar at eleven…

Fripp: Did anything trigger the guitar in particular?

McLaughlin: Yeah, it was the D major chord. My brother showed it to me on the guitar, and I had this feeling of the guitar against my whole body…

Fripp: Did you have the F# on the bottom string?

McLaughlin: No, no. I was playing full-note chords. Eleven years old…what are you going to do? You have a small hand and, you know…What about you? Did you have a similar experience?

Fripp: I was ten. Definitely no sense of rhythm, and I spent a long time wonderting why it was that such an unlikely candidate would become a professional musician. But I knew right away that I was going to earn a living from it. Thinking about it over the years, I think music has a desire to be heard, such a kind of compulsion to be heard that it picks on unlikely candidates to give it voice.

McLaughlin: Yeah, I think that it basically comes from love. I mean, the kind of attraction that you have when you listen to it when you’re young. It’s inexplicable in a way.

Fripp: It’s a direct vocabulary…

McLaughlin: Exactly. Perhaps what you say is truth insofar as the music itself chooses, but it’s not a one-way street from music’s point of view. In a sense, you know, we fall in love with the muse and the muse falls in love with its prospective voices.

Fripp: The sentence I would add is that the music needed me to give it a voice, but in a feeble way. I needed music more, far more than music needed me.

McLaughlin: The most difficult thing, I think, in being a musician is to get out of the way.

Fripp: How do you get out of the way? Do you have specific techniques or regimens that you use? Can you just get yourself out of the way without thinking about it?

McLaughlin: If I’m thinking about it, I’m in the way. You have to forget, to forget everything. The minute we forget everything is when we’re finally found.

Continue reading →

NO SERIOUSLY

from : http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/no-seriously/

Exopolitics (n. art or science of government as concerned with creating/influencing policy toward extraterrestrial beings)

As In : Are State Secrets Safe From Telepathy?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8662822.stm
http://trueslant.com/juliaioffe/2010/05/05/serious-allegations-kalmyk-governor-leaks-classified-information-to-humanoid-aliens/
“A Russian MP has asked President Dmitry Medvedev to investigate claims by a regional president that he has met aliens on board a spaceship. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the leader of the southern region of Kalmykia, made his claim in a television interview. MP Andre Lebedev is not just asking whether Mr Ilyumzhinov is fit to govern. He is also concerned that, if he was abducted, he may have revealed details about his job and state secrets. The MP has written a letter to Mr Medvedev raising a list of his concerns. In his letter he says that – assuming the whole thing was not just a bad joke – it was an historic event and should have been reported to the Kremlin. He also asks if there are official guidelines for what government officials should do if contacted by aliens, especially if those officials have access to state secrets. During the interview, Ilyumzhinov openly discussed his 1997 encounter with benevolent aliens: he came home to his Moscow apartment, watched some TV, read a bit, and drifted off to sleep. Mid-drift, he heard the balcony door open. Then someone called to him. Ilyumzhinov went to check it out, only to discover a hovering transparent tube, which he, naturally, entered. Inside, humanoids in yellow spacesuits awaited him. They had a pleasant talk, which occurred on the level of mindwaves because, Ilyumzhinov said, “there wasn’t quite enough oxygen.” The humanoids, who were friendly, told Ilyumzhinov that they were not yet ready for direct contact with human humans. Instead, they gave him a tour of the ship and sent him on his way. Lebedev wants to know, did Ilyumzhinov let the President know about his contacts with such beings? And, while we’re at it, “who else among the governors of the Russian Federations, members of the government, and other federal civil servants is communicating with aliens?” “Dmitry Anatolyevich,” Lebedev wrote, addressing the Medvedev by his patronymic, “you will agree that, unless Ilyumzhinov is bluffing, then this information is historically significant. If possible, I ask you to brief the deputies of the Federal Duma about your conclusions.” Medvedev has yet to respond.”

Need to Know
http://extracampaign.org/
http://bluebookarchive.org/
http://presidentialufo.com/

the Disclosure Project
http://disclosureproject.org/
http://youtube.com/user/DisclosureLobby
http://disclosureproject.org/docgallery.shtml
http://web.archive.org/web/20021202090635/http://www.cohenufo.org/Military+Nuclear+Specialists+Testify+To+UFO+Reality.htm

Lt. Colonel Dwynne Arneson, US Air Force (retired): “I was the top-secret control officer at Malmstom AFB for the 20th Air Division. I happened to see a message that came through my communications center. It said…that ‘A UFO was seen near missile silos’…and it was hovering. It said that the crew going on duty and the crew coming off duty all saw the UFO just hovering in mid-air. It was a metallic circular object and from what I understand, the missiles were all shut down. What I mean by ‘missiles going down’ is that they went dead. And something turned those missiles off, so they couldn’t be put back in a mode for launching.”

Acknowledgment
http://aolnews.com/weird-news/article/exopoliticians-say-governments-must-start-planning-for-alien-visits/19456520
“According to Salla, the issues include deciding how the alien presence will be announced (he advocates announcing the presence of microbes and working up to more sentient beings), and who will be in control — a secret committee or a corporate entity. Of course, another big issue is determining the protocol for contact between humans and aliens, lest either side be exposed to strange viruses, a Romeo and Juliet situation between Martians and Earthlings — or worse. “A big question is how will humans interact with aliens,” Salla said. “If someone is threatened by one, will they take a shot at them while driving by? And, if so, will this be as illegal as shooting a human?” Luckily, for Salla and the others in this pioneering form of paranormal political science, they aren’t the only ones asking these questions. “In the last six months, both the Vatican and the Royal Society of London have held astrobiological conferences studying the implications of life found on other worlds,” he said. Other exopoliticians, like political activist Stephen Bassett, believe that the governments of the world — especially the United States — don’t want to give such a momentous announcement to the U.N. Although Bassett believes any such announcement would be made by one nation, Webre says he and other exopoliticians have been talking with members of the U.N. General Assembly regarding U.N. Resolution 33/426, which is a proposal to set up a Department of Extraterrestrials Affairs. Salla says the extreme divide between cynics like Hawking and optimists like the Vatican, which has declared that God may have created theologically minded beings on other planets besides Earth, is OK, just as long as the debate is happening. “While one can heartily disagree with Hawking’s public policy recommendation of ignoring intelligent alien life, he is to be congratulated for elevating exopolitical study as a ‘perfectly rational’ discussion,” Salla said.


UN report on UFOs 14-July 1978; Gordon Cooper, Jacques Vallee, Claude Poher, Allen Hynek, Sir Eric M. Gairy with UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim

Hawking : ‘Think of Columbus, + How Well That Turned Out’
http://timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7107207.ece
“Stephen Hawking has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity. He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.” He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

LEAVE THE WITCHES ALONE

Diamanda Galas writes:

It has come to my attention over the last years that the stage reviews of many of my colleagues are prefaced by the words,”Although now 45, he is still a strong performer,” or “Looking older than we last saw him, he still manages to convince.” It is time now for me to say the following words to the anemic cretins who write these desktop reviews of virtuosos: “Stick to reviewing plant life and leave the Witches alone.”

A true performer, like Liszt, like Horowitz, like Birgit Nilsson, often has an extremely long career span—and will be performing long after your life is diminished from tripping over your child’s bicycle and impaling upon yourself upon the Christmas tree of your wife.

A great performer is a vampire. We have trained to be thus. We have trained to enter the Pantheon. Of course we are punished for this, but no longer by the Gods, who have retired forever in despair—so dim is their reflection upon the humans they once challenged—but by the tiny minds of paralyzed voyeurs, who are incapable of discussing our work on any level, never literal, and now not even figurative.

If a performer appears upon the stage bald or with white hair after you have not seen him for ten years, this is not commentary for a musical review. I will quote Gregory Sandow who wrote that whether or not Charlie Parker performed only in his underwear was immaterial to how he played.

Liszt performed with long white hair, the master of the piano, and not less so for his age. Vladimir Horowitz, Arthur Rubinstein and Mary Lou Williams were masters only days before they died. Sonny Rollins cannot be condemned to the grave which is inhabited by small minds who lurk like worms awaiting a fresh kill. It is to escape these worms that we choose to be cremated.

…The witch’s focus is upon the production of a new turn of phrase, a new twist of the song, a new fight, the immolation of a lie if it takes the creation of a masterpiece to do it. The great witch Maryanne Amacher,who was felled only by a freak accident,had a house filled to the rooftops of unparalleled work and she slept on the floors of every studio to which she was invited worldwide—and created more bizarre work through the years.

The vampire knows that only new blood will sustain her. New blood, new research, new language study, and willful deconstruction and reconstruction, new meter, new arrangements, new writing, difficult performances—which later become great ones—through perseverance.

You who wait for the ticking of the clock so that you might one day proclaim that one of us is approaching our dotage should imagine instead your own life, which is is fading behind you, like a reflection of your netherparts, wretched, hanging, like the flanks of a tethered animal, too long unfed,alone, and unloved…

Read on: diamandagalas.com