Category Archives for Arthur No. 11 (July 2004)

T-Model Knows Better: an advice column by life coach/musician T-Model Ford (Arthur, July, 2004)

Originally published in Arthur No. 11 (July 2004)

T-MODEL KNOWS BETTER

T-Model Ford is the 82-year-old, self-styled “Boss of the Blues”, also known as “The Taildragger.” Every two months, Arthur calls up T-Model at his home in Greenville, Mississippi and asks him for some advice. T-Model gives his sage answers, then we transcribe the conversation with some interpreting help from the fellas at Fat Possum, the Mississippi record label that releases T-Model’s original badass records (more info at fatpossum.com). If you’ve got questions for T-Model, and we know that you do, email ‘em to editor@arthurmag.com

T-Model, what should you do if you got some neighbors that are acting rowdy? Having parties late at night?

Well, if it’s worrying you… If you the boss of the house, get you another house, or stay there and put up with it. If you can’t stand ‘em and all, can’t get along with ‘em, and if they don’t wanna move, then you move out of there yourself. 

You wouldn’t call the police?

No. Police ain’t gonna do nothin’ about it no way. All you do, talkin’ on the phone… first thing a couple more weeks, or a month, it’s the same thing again! If you get tired of something, move out! Go on ‘bout your business. That’s right. I ain’t rowdy, but they think I is! [laughs]

T-Model, you like whiskey, right? What’s your preference?

I like the Johnny Walker. I drink, but I don’t get ‘toxicated. “Toxicated” means you get high and almost drunk and you don’t know how to treat the people. But I just take me a little shot drink all alone, and I don’t get high. If I smell it, I quit drinking. I can handle myself. Because if you get too much of it in, you can’t handle yourself, and other people neither. I don’t like a drunkard no way. Dope smokers and drunkards—I don’t even want to get in their company. You don’t want it all, you just want a little teeny bit.

T-Model, you’re 82 years old and still playing music, going on tour. You have any advice for young musicians that are just starting out?

I’d tell them to play the blues. Stick with the blues. The blues will forever be here. This mess they coming out with now, wasn’t out when we was coming in the world. Nothing but old guitars, acoustic guitar. But now, it’s the blues everywhere I go, all overseas and out of Mississippi, the people love the blues. All the crack places and the rap places, my style of blues is puttin’ them all bad. They don’t wanna hear that. Like when I go overseas or get out of Mississippi to play, all the people coming there to hear me, they ain’t caring about hearing no other people play! They come to hear T-Model. So I got the best style there is: the blues.

T-Model, is it true that you can play for eight hours straight?

That’s true! It’s like walking in the kitchen and drinking some sweet milk. Ain’t nothin’ to it, man.

James Parker on “Rise: The Story of Rave Outlaw Disco Donnie” (Arthur, 2004)

What If You Never Come Down?

by James Parker

Originally published in Arthur No. 11 (July 2004)

Reviewed:

Rise: The Story of Rave Outlaw Disco Donnie DVD

(Music Video Distributors)

Directed by Julie Drazen

I remember raving. I remember Ecstasy. I remember chewing on a piece of gum until it broke—until it turned into something else, something weak and viscid, its gummy properties of twang and bounce quite exhausted. Symbolic? I thought so. I remember the mad foam of chemical brotherhood. I remember insisting, deep in some woofing, thumping London club, that two people I had just met stand next to me with their heads touching mine so that I could enjoy the warmth of their nude ears (we all had very short hair). And I did it in San Francisco too, where the loonies are—a man at a ‘smart drinks’ bar, wearing an Anarchic Adjustment t-shirt, told me that in the course of his psychedelic researches he had become invisible for nearly three weeks. 

I know a little bit about it, is what I’m saying, but Julie Drazen’s Rise —a movie about New Orleans rave promoter Disco Donnie—still surprised me, because guess what the kids have done now? They’ve taken raving—the most godless, pharmaceutically programmed, pseudo-spectacular trip there is—and gone and made a religion out of it. And because their minds have been weakened by drugs and flashing lights, they have christened this religion with the anaemic acronym PLUR. PLUR, for Peace Love Unity Respect, which they pronounce as a single syllable to rhyme with “purr.” Oh dear. “Jesus preached PLUR!” declares a girl with awful Ecstatic earnestness, filmed against a colourless background. The bass frequencies of an offscreen rave shimmer around her, and her jaw is lunging about like something trapped. “And he probably smoked bud too!” Her boyfriend is even worse, a drug-electrified fanatic, unable to do anything more than twitch his head in agreement. Rave as spent cultural force? Just say that word PLUR and hear the energy leaking out of you, away from that promisingly plosive beginning—the pop! of newness—into entropy, wasted breath, the heat-death of the universe etc.

Not to bash the kids: they have an absolute right to their foolishness. And if they make it through, if they don’t entirely ransack their life’s ration of serotonin and good luck, who knows, they could end up as wearily wise as me. But there does seem to be some synchrony going on here between the powers of Ecstasy and the credulousness and positivity of the American national character. British ravers, though drugged like shamans, were by and large a pasty-faced, sardonic crew. They kept it—I won’t say real, but realistic. UK rave had its cranks and ideologues of course: one thinks for example of the magnificent shaven-headed Spiral Tribe, illegal party planners and white label artists, speculating on mystical vortices, intoxicated with the number 23, bouncing grimly in churned fields and in the corners of squats. But an essential British narrowness was always part of it. This was part the distinct pleasure of the whole trip: beneath the skin of the most blazingly loved-up raver, his open arms extended zombie-like towards you, you could always discern the sunken shrewd skull-face of the morning after, the colour of an empty milk bottle. The spidery ironist Jarvis Cocker made fun of us all: and you want to call your mother and say /”Mother, I can never come home again/’cos I seem to have left an important part of my brain/ somewhere, somewhere/ in a field, in Hampshire (“Sorted For E’s and Wizz”). In America there was Timothy Leary in his robes. There was twinkling Terence McKenna, that one-man rocket-ship leaving the Ego behind. It was in America that someone actually said to me, muffled deep in an embrace, “I don’t know who you are, but I fucking love you.”

But back to Rise.

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Reviews by C and D (Arthur No. 11/July 2004)

Originally published in Arthur No. 11 (July 2004)

REVIEWS BY C and D

Fiery Furnaces
Blueberry Boat
(Rough Trade)
D: [extremely puzzled] Is this the Residents?!?
C: It’s Fiery Furnaces. Second album in one year. Usually when you say “difficult second album,” you mean it was hard for the artist. But this is actually hard on the audience!
D: [grimacing] I am not sure if I like this much.
C: It’s… it’s… it’s completely nuts. But: interesting nuts.
D: I remember them now! They were interviewed in Arthur. Brother and sister. But I thought they were blues-rocking New York people? What is all this synthesizer-ragtime stuff?!?
C: It’s like low-key prog. [looking at CD player] We’re in the ninth minute of the first song here… 13 songs, 75 minutes… The whole thing is a wigged-out concept album, man. I dig it.
D: [irritated] I do not have time for concepts! I am a ramblin’ man, that’s what I am.
C: Don’t spill your Dr. Pepper, Popeye. There’s a lot of good stuff on here, it’s just sorta tucked away in pockets within pockets in a large spangled coat of many prog colors.
D: This is too wacky and too wordy. [Brightens, listening to riff midway through second song] I like that, though. I think these guys may be too smart for their own good.
C: A singles-only edit of this album would be nice for the Short Attention Spanners out there…

Comets On Fire
Blue Cathedral
(Sub Pop)
C: The new one from Comets On Fire, full-on super-rock five-piece from the Bay Area. They keep the demons at bay.
D: Yes! Big super-blaster balls-nailed-to-the-wall heavy power rock from a space cannon!
C: Amazing, visionary wizardstuff. And they give you a break in the middle of songs—there’s these lighter sections, they’re even choogling here and there, mellowing the crunchy harsh.
D: [listening to keyboard-heavy “Pussy Footin’ the Duke.”] There is a taste of the prog here, too! But I don’t mind because the riffs are deep canyons and the singer is a yowler and the drums are mighty!
C: It’s like the best of Japanese power-rock plus Quicksilver Messenger Serivce or Meddle-era Pink Floyd plus Kiss. Album-of-the-year contender.
D: I am going to make a pilgrimage to this Blue Cathedral.
C: Which is right next door to the Acid Mothers Temple, no doubt.

The Reigning Sound
Too Much Guitar!
(In the Red)
D: The Reigning Sound! Mister Greg Cartwright! Long may he reign. I doff my beer in his general direction. Heartfelt thrashing songs with a zest for life!
C: [nodding head] The is one of those records that gives garage rock a good name. Which is pretty hard, considering there’s like 45,000 bands out there who are trying to do the same thing over the last three decades.
D: I am getting old. But I will get out my leather jacket for these guys. And stitch their name on it, as is my duty.
C: They’ve got actual songs, it’s not just the two-chord mono-grind smear. And listen to this ballad [“Funny Thing”]. If you’re not a connoiseur of this sort of stuff, it sound like something between the Stones and the Hives. And the Hives are taking them on the tour, so there you go.
D: Giving them that big Swedish stamp of approval!

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“The Rules of the Game” by Paul Cullum (Arthur, 2004)

Originally published in Arthur No. 11 (July 2004)

The Rules of the Game
A “Camera Obscura” column by Paul Cullum

CAMERA OBSCURA is a regular column examining the world and its lesser trafficked tributaries, recesses and psychic fallout through the filters of film, video and DVD.

* * *

DVDs/videos discussed here:
The Kingdom of Credibility Trilogy:
o The Humiliated (De Ydmygede) (1998), directed by Jesper Jargil
o The Exhibited (De Udstillede) (2000), directed by Jesper Jargil
o The Purified (De Lutrede) (2002), directed by Jesper Jargil
[Contact the filmmaker at Jesper Jargil Films, jesper.jargil@mail.dk, Fax: +45 3314 2655; PAL tapes only available]
o The Five Obstructions (2004), directed by Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier (currently in general release)
o Tranceformer: A Portrait of Lars von Trier (1997), directed by Stig Björkman (available on the Criterion DVD release of von Trier’s The Element of Crime)

* * *

“In the rain forest of the Cameroon in West Central Africa lives a floor-dwelling ant known as Megaloponera foetens, or more commonly, the stink ant. On occasion, one of these ants while looking for food is infected by inhaling a microscopic spore from a fungus of the genus Tomentella. After being inhaled, the spore seats in the ant’s tiny brain and begins to grow, causing changes in the ant’s patterns of behavior. The ant appears troubled and confused; for the first time in its life, it leaves the forest floor and begins to climb. Completely spent and having reached a prescribed height, the ant impales the plant with its mandibles. The fungus continues to consume first the nerve cells and finally all the soft tissue that remains of the ant. After approximately two weeks, a spike appears from what had been the head of the ant. This spike is about an inch and a half in length and has a bright orange tip, heavy with spores, which rain down onto the rain forest floor for other unsuspecting ants to inhale.” —The Museum of Jurassic Technology

Were he not already so ubiquitous, this might seem like the season of Lars von Trier. Dogville, the first part of his “USA Trilogy” (to be differentiated from his “Europa Trilogy”—The Element of Crime, Epidemic and Europa/Zentropa; and his “Golden Heart Trilogy”—Breaking the Waves, The Idiots and Dancer in the Dark) appeared earlier this year to begin the excoriation of the American character by European cinema, a process just put to decisive referendum by the awarding of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Stephen King’s The Kingdom Hospital, an adaptation of The Kingdom I and II, von Trier’s successive miniseries on Danish television, appeared as a much-touted ABC series and suffered mightily by comparison. And The Five Obstructions, co-directed by von Trier and his mentor Jørgen Leth, equal parts documentary, experiment and intervention, currently scuttles its way around the arthouse circuit.

The latter presents von Trier at his comical best. Resembling Fassbinder refashioned as a Muppet (Fassy Bear?), he is at once imperious and cuddly, using his private empire to force Leth, his former film instructor at the Danish Film Institute, into repeatedly remaking The Perfect Human, the film von Trier rates closest to perfect. “This little gem,” as he calls it, is a 12-minute 1967 black-and-white short that marries an insouciant formal abandon to a faux anthropological take on upscale hipsters, in the manner of Peter Sellers’ The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (which handed Richard Lester his directing style on a platter) or, more pointedly, title designer Saul Bass’s Why Man Creates. Leth is the one who famously introduced “the rules of the game” into von Trier’s way of thinking, the intense penchant for order which, as we know from Tranceformer, a 1997 documentary by Stig Björkman, implicitly appealed to this son of radical academics who was raised free of restraints of any kind. (Tranceformer also informs us that at age 12, “Lars Trier” was the child star of Clandestine Summer, a winsome Swedish-Danish TV series, and that he added the “von” in film school—as in “Erich von Stroheim,” Teutonic tyrant and classical sadist—in much the same way Francis Ford Coppola appended his signature to exchange the quotidian for the epic.) The Five Obstructions is justified as homage and a form of therapy, von Trier’s magnanimous gesture to force his mentor out of his “provocative perverse perfection.” Yet it ultimately borders on autobiography, as von Trier judges and rejects not only his patriarch, but his own aesthetic foundations, subjecting them to outsize pressures as if to test their structural worthiness—like Steven Soderbergh did in interviewing his mentor, Richard Lester, in Getting Away With It.

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BEYOND THE LAW: Mark Pilkington on Aleister Crowley’s present-day followers (Arthur, 2004)

Originally published in Arthur No. 11 (July 2004)

BEYOND THE LAW
A century after its first transmission to Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law continues to inspire several thousand of its followers. Mark Pilkington, a committed agnostic, stared deep into the eye of Horus, and this is what he found there.

Noon. April 10, 1904, an apartment on 26 July St in Cairo’s Boulaq district. The man known as Chioa Khan sat down at his writing table, fountain pen in hand. As it had at the same time on the previous two days, the voice—deep, musical and fierce—began to speak:

“Abrahadabra; the reward of Ra hoor Khut. There is a division hither homeward; there is a word not known. Spelling is defunct; all is not aught. Beware! Hold! Raise the spell of RaRa-Hoor-Khuit! …
Now let it be understood that I am a God of War and of Vengeance… I will give you a war-engine. With it ye shall smite the peoples; and none shall stand before you…
Worship me with fire and Blood; worship me with swrods and spears…let blood flow to my name. Trample down the Heathen; be upon them O warrior, I will give you of their flesh to eat!”

After exactly an hour, the transmission ended and Liber AL vel Legis, or the Book of the Law, the holy book of the religion of Thelema, was in the hands of Man. Only the scribe, one Edward Alexander Crowley, called Aleister, the Great Beast, had heard the voice, which came from an entity he knew as Aiwass, or Aiwaz. Aiwass, Crowley would later write, took on a “body of fine matter, or astral matter, transparent as a veil of gauze or a cloud of incense smoke”. It manifested as a tall dark man in his thirites, with the “face of a savage king… eyes veiled lest their gaze should destroy what they saw.” The New Aeon had begun.

The 29-year old Crowley—poet, mountain climber, chess champion, painter and occultist—and his new, and newly pregnant, wife Rose Kelly, renamed Ouarda (Arabic for Rose) for this, their honeymoon trip, had reached Cairo in early February after spending time in Paris and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) with their friend, the Buddhist monk Alan Bennett. After ascending through the ranks of the legendary Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in London, and almost single-handedly destroying it following feuds with the poet WB Yeats and its leader Samuel MacGregor Mathers, Crowley was largely off magick at this time: he was more interested in swaggering about Cairo in a turban, honing his golfing skills and learning Arabic and a few Sufi fakir tricks. Rose certainly had little interest in conversing with her holy guardian angel; the spirits that chiefly interested her being those that came out of a bottle.

On March 17, perhaps to keep his hand in, Crowley decided to show Ouarda the sylphs, lesser air elementals from the astral realms. He recited a quickie invocation, the Rite of the Bornless One, and the couple waited. To both their chagrin, Ouarda saw nothing. Instead she slipped into a dreamy state and said, “They’re waiting for you”. The following day Crowley invoked Thoth, the Egyptian god of Magic, as Rose made further odd announcements. “It is all about the child,” she said, “all Osiris.”

Over the next few days, the messages were in full flow. Rose, who had next to no knowledge of Egyptian mythology, stated that the voice speaking through her was Horus, the sky god. She then recited instructions for a ritual, to be performed by Crowley, invoking the falcon-headed deity. Carried out on March 20, the Beast declared the invocation of Horus a great success.

Perplexed by his wife’s sudden working knowledge of Egyptian high magic, Crowley set her another challenge, to identify Horus amongst the artifacts on display in Cairo’s Boulak Museum. After missing a few images, Rose stopped before a glass cabinet and exclaimed: “There he is!” The cabinet she pointed to held a wooden stele (an inscribed marker) from the 26th dynasty (664-525 BC), called the Stele of Revealing. On it was a painting of Horus in the guise of Ra-Hoor-Khuit. The stele’s muesum ID number was 666, the number of the Beast of Revelation, the Sun, and Aleister Crowley himself.

Over the following two weeks, more information followed. Rose was being contacted by an emissary of Horus called Aiwass, who proceeded to give Crowley strict instructions in preparation for further transmissions. On April 8th , 9th and 10th, at noon precisely, Crowley was to sit in the drawing room of their rented apartment and write down everything that he heard.

The resulting transcript of 65 handwritten pages became the Book of the Law. Crowley, referred to in the text as “the prince-priest the Beast” was “the chosen priest and apostle of infinite space,” while Rose became the first in a succession of Scarlet Women, to whom “is all power given.”

Stripped to its bare essentials, one could say that the message of the book is as follows: a new Aeon of Horus is dawning, with Crowley as its prophet. The old gods were to be swept away and to be replaced with the new laws: “The Word of the law is Thelema… Love is the Law: Love under Will … Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law…Thou hast no right but to do thy will… The word of Sin is restriction… Every man and every woman is a star.”

The third part of the book seems vaguely prophetic, warning of terrible wars and bloodshed to come: “I am the warrior Lord of the Forties: the Eighties cower before me, and are abased. I will bring you to victory and joy: I will be at your arms in battle and ye shall delight to slay.”

Though at first he tried to ignore the book, it became clear to Crowley that its message was to be his life’s work: as he would later write: “I, Aleister Crowley, declare upon my honour as a gentleman that I hold this revelation a million times more important than the dicovery of the Wheel, or even the Laws of Physics or Mathematics. Fire and Tools made Man master of his planet; Writing developed his mind; but his Soul was a guess until the Book of the Law proved this.”

***

April 10, 2004: Crowley died 57 years ago, a bankrupt heroin addict, in a boarding house on England’s south coast, his role as magician occasionally reprised at parties given for his landlady’s children. Rose, the first Scarlet Woman, was committed to a mental asylum with alchoholic dementia in 1911. She left the hospital, and Crowley’s life, some time later. The gods don’t always look after their own, but their message lives on.

Today, as a small band of Thelemites—adherents of The Book of the Law—traipsed around Cairo in much the same way Crowley and Rose Kelly had done, chanting “om”s in pyramids and enjoying the city’s manifold delights, so another 300 or so sat patiently in the main hall of the Ethical Society building in London’s Red Lion Square, awaiting the day’s first reading from Liber AL vel Legis (LAVL).

Conway Hall, as it is better known, has hosted a multiplicity of strange events in its time, all staged under the admirably Thelemic motto “To Thine Own Self be True.” My own recent memory conjures up a trance channelling of the ascended master Maitreya by Benjamin Crème, one of Alan Moore’s more spectacular “beat sceances,” a particularly deranged performance by esoteric electronicists Coil and a heady dose of David Icke’s alien reptoid hysteria.

At 10am, a gong rings out across the room and a middle-aged woman, exuding no more menace than a librarian or teacher, walks over to the podium and begins to read part one of LAVL. Her sonorous, soporific delivery gives the impression that the transmission is being channelled all over again. When she has finished, the woman, called Jean, dabs her eyes with a handkerchief. It’s a low-key start to a day that, if lacking in magickal fire, will provide a good deal of insight into the state of Thelema today.

Next comes Michael Staley, co-organiser of the conference. A civil servant by day, alarmingly unassuming in appearance and manner, Staley is in fact a senior member of the Typhonian OTO, the magical order under whose aegis the day has been assembled [See sidebar for more information on the Typhonian OTO.] Furthering the sense that this was some kind of church hall meeting from a parallel dimension, he informed us that refreshments were available in the lobby, and that there would be a raffle at the end of the day, the price of entry to which included a glass of wine. “We don’t want to encourage rowdiness,” he cautioned. Crowley would have turned in his grave, if he hadn’t been cremated.

As TOTO-OHO [see sidebar], the master of the Mauve Zone, Kenneth Grant himself, had been invited to address the conference, but had declined the offer, being “increasingly reclusive of late”—in fact nobody but his close colleagues have seen him for at least a decade. But Kenny G, as he is affectionately known, did send a message of cheerful encouragement: “Time and the universe are coming to an end after 26,000 years…the Sata Yuga is dawning… on December 21, 2012 the Sun enters the womb of Isis and a new Isis will infuse the planet.” Those of us who are not initiated can only assume that this is a Good Thing.

Staley’s own presentation, “The Letter Killeth but the Spirit Giveth Life,” highlighted some of the key issues of the conference and the key problems of being a 21st-century Thelemite. Central to this, Staley felt, is the need to steer Thelema away from the cult of the Great Beast himself. “Thelema is more than Crowley,” he said, “he was, after all, only a medium for the message of Thelema…a human mind serving as an outcropping of a greater cosmic consciousness. We should only consider Crowley to have some deep insight into The Book of the Law if he himself had written it—which he claimed not to have done.”

This matter of authorship remains the great question within Thelema. However, few people would deny that LAVL bears Crowley’s imprint. Western magic expert and Crowley biographer Francis King notes in The Magical World of Aleister Crowley, that LAVL is “written in a heavily jewelled prose strongly reminiscent of some of the writers of the 1890s,” while biographer and Thelemite Israel Regardie, points out that it contains “inummerable subtle references to Qabalah and Tarot—all contents of Crowley’s own mind, materials derived from the Order [The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn] which shaped his life.”

Of course, even LAVL’s most famous proclamation “Do what thou wilt” is borrowed from Rabelais (via St Augustine who wrote, “love and do what thy wilt” in his fifth-century Homilies on the First Epistle of St John)—is the name Thelema itself. To hardcore Thelemites, however, this is further evidence of Thelema’s role in history, not unlike the way that Creationist Christians consider fossils to be further proof of God’s mighty imagination. Nietzsche’s “will to power” philosophy must also get a name check, though Crowley denies—perhaps unconvincingly—having read the moustachioed nihilist previous to LAVL’s transmission.

“I was bitterly opposed to the principles of the Book on almost every point of morality,”Crowley would later write in his autobigraphical Confessions. “The third chapter seemed to me to be gratuitously atrocious. My soul, infinitely sad at the universal sorrow, was passionately eager to raise humanity.” But if there’s one thing we can say about the man, it’s that he was inconsistent in his ideals: the sadistic sturm und drang of part three of LAVL—“mercy be let off: damn them who pity! Kill and torture; spare not…”—doesn’t sound out of character for a man who would later describe humanitarianism as “the syphilis of the mind.” Crowley also famously forbade anyone from studying LAVL too closely, then went on to write three commentaries on it. So should we really take him at his word when he denies any hand in authoring the text?

It seems unlikely that many people—if any—are to be drawn to Thelema except through the notoriety of Crowley as a character, and we should never underestimate his appeal. He is, after all, perhaps the most famous occultist in history and a true bad boy of rock and roll, long before rock and roll even existed—and it’s through the rock and roll of Led Zeppelin and others that most people today will encounter him. Needless to say, while many of his ideas and achievements are to be admired, his treatment of other people is not, and nor are his struggles with alcoholism, heroin addiction and bankruptcy.

Such moralising aside, we might ask whether taking Crowley out of Thelema is like taking Jesus out of Christianity or Mohammed out of Islam. Not so, says Martin Starr, author of the Thelemic history, The Unknown God, and a speaker at the conference: “Crowley’s name is nowhere mentioned in The Book of the Law, but you will find Jesus in the New Testament and Mohammed in the Koran. I don’t think you can remove Crowley from the discussion, but he need not be the center of it… The last thing the world needs is another cult of personality.”

In meeting the surviving members of the first OTO chapters in the United States, Starr found that, as with many spiritual sects, there was a certain amount of cognitive dissonance between the claims made for Thelema, peoples’ personal experiences and what actually happened to them. There was also a deep sense of millennarian angst within the group. LAVL is considered prophecy by true Thelemites, and warns that the planet must be bathed in bloodshed and war before humankind is ready to usher in third aeon. The two World Wars and incessant skirmishes of the 20th century would certainly constitute such a period—and, as has been suggested, the “war engine” described in chapter three could be equated with the atomic bomb—but human history is virtually defined by its battles and conquests, and this current century looks to be no exception.

Starr also highlighted the political intentions behind the early OTO. LAVL is not a humanitarian text, nor is it particularly tolerant of other cultures: ”Curse them! Curse them! Curse them! With my hawk’s head I peck at the eyes of Jesus as he hangs upon the cross. I flap my wings in the face of Mohammed and blind him. With my claws I tear out the flesh of the Indian and the Buddhist, Mongol and Din.” Order Head Theodore Reuss had intended for the OTO to be the seed for a new system of government, an elite court based on a strongly feudal system—suggested by LAVL lines like “the slaves shall serve”—while a later Brazilian Thelemite Marcelo Motta, also sought to transform society through rituals performed at an OTO compound.

Swedish Caliphate OTO member Carl Abrahamsson spoke to the conference about just such a speculative Thelemic state. Thelemic politics, he said should secure the rights of man like love, liberty and movement. Parts of LAVL do read like a liberal dream of the late ‘60s, all free love and sun worship, but dark shadows loom: not least with the right granted to Thelemites to slay those who oppose such freedoms. Thelemocracy, as we might call it, would practice “tolerant intolerance,” would promote a meritocratic, theocratic aristocracy and encourage individual endevour and self-improvement. Abrahamsson suggests an unpaid council of Thelemic elders to adjudicate over state matters, but as a panel of the speakers later in the day revealed, getting Thelemites to agree on anything at all, let alone matters of state importance, would make herding the 72 demons of the Goetia seem easy.

A look around the conference hall may also have raised qualms about the future state of Thelemia. The day’s audience was at least 80 percent male and, with a few notable exceptions, at least if shallow but oh-so-important outward appearances are anything to go by, not exactly representative of the cream of an elite society. It’s my guess that convincing the rest of society to bow down to the might of the Thelemites’ swords could be more difficult than anyone here has anticipated.

***

As you’d expect, there was also some good old fashioned gonzo magic(k) to contend with during the day. Furthest out there by a moon shot was American Margaret Ingalls, known as Nema, a wiccan high priestess and TOTO thelemite who works with what she calls Maat magic; Maat, the daughter of Ra, the Egyptian Sun God, representing truth, justice balance and honesty.

Struck by a vision of a golden-skinned humanoid named Natan, Nema learned the secrets of humankind’s future, in which we are to become Homo Veritas and develop a greater sense of a shared species consciousness. Working towards this, Nema conducts group time travel workings—in which Natan unveils the mulitverse to his audience—and also monthly astral meetings of the 100 or so members of her Horus-Maat lodge. Held on an astral moonbase at the time of each new moon, participants all around the world slip into a trance state and enter interstitial existence. Here they project magical sigils into the astral menstrum and communicate with beings from other dimensions, afterwards mailing accounts of their experiences to an email discussion group. While corroborative details are rare in participants’ astral journals, it does apparently happen often enough to keep them coming back for more.

Mogg Morgan of Mandrake Press discussed the central role of sex magick in Thelema, reminding us that “If you want to succeed, you have to suck seed!” Before receiving LAVL, Crowley and Kelly would have enacted the ritual of the Cakes of Light, in which male semen and female menstural blood are combined and ingested. Morgan demonstrated that the Cakes of Light rite was practiced in ancient Egypt and even appears in the Old Testament, which isn’t something they teach you in school. Now, about those cookies in the foyer…

Veteran psychic quester Andrew Collins recounted his encounters over three decades with a malevolent Crowleyesque spirit entity. In keeping with the ideas of Kenneth Grant and TOTO, the entity first manifested in the 1970s, during the hypnosis of a woman who felt that she had been abducted by extraterrestrials. The entity instructed Collins and the abductee to recreate a lost magical order with the “Inner Book of the Law” at its center. To instigate the new movement they were to perform a rite at the site of Crowley’s short-lived Abbey of Thelema at Cefalu, Sicily. Several mediums warned Collins away from the situation and the working never took place, but the entity returned sporadically via a number of different spirit channels. The Crowley-thing has returned to Collins in recent years however, steering him towards a buried relic that may or may not be a “grail cup”—an upcoming book promises to reveal more. In the days prior to the conference, Collins had been out in Cairo, paying tribute to the spirit of LAVL with open air magical workings and a visit to the Stele of Revealing in the Cairo Museum. Possibly a parting shot from the Crowley-thing, Collins was struck with a severe bout of Aiwass’ Revenge on the way home.

* * *

Thelema is very much alive in the 21st century, its endurance in part due to its flexibility as a perennial philosophy of individuality. In the words of Martin Starr, it is “capable of being applied to any number of pre-existing belief systems, but essentially bound to none of them.”

Despite the conference title of Thelema Beyond Crowley, it seems that planet Thelema is still having difficulties escaping the gravitational pull of the Great Beast’s great domed head. Many pagans steer clear of Thelema because of its associations with a man who is still considered bad news by a community that is itself demonized by the world’s dominant religions.

Of course, many new magicians and occultists are drawn to these areas precisely by the stories they hear about figures like Crowley. Without the fire brought to the dark arts by such charismatic personalities, Thelema and magick are in danger of fizzling away with the older generations of magi. As they mature as magicians, those who stick with the path will accept their youthful and enthusiastic naiveties for what they were, but something needs to excite and inspire them onto that path in the first place. For some it will be Buffy, for others Led Zeppelin and the Beast himself. As one speaker pointed out, Crowley actually makes for a very good guru, because as you become older and wiser it’s increasingly difficult to maintain any illusions about his personality, and the impulse to idealize the man—for that is what he was—swiftly dissolves.

As the conference ended, I supped my complimentary glass of red wine, munched my cheese sandwiches of light and chatted with other attendees about whether Atlantis is still off the coast of Cuba—the answer, apparently, is no—and who would make a good Crowley in a biopic. The day had been a success: the speakers had presented interesting material, and most importantly, the centenary had been commemorated in some fashion. But I also realised that it had lacked exactly what Crowley and others like him had, the thing that had drawn his followers, and the merely curious like myself, to him.

For me, and I suspect many others who are fascinated by it, magick needs fire, be it holy or unholy; it needs drama, energy and pazazz; it needs the whiff of risk and of the sulphurous stench of danger; and most of all it needs mystery. The Beast, whether or not he was a successful human, had all these things in abundance. Remove Crowley from Thelema and (at the risk of upsetting many Thelemites) I believe you remove much of its Magick. So much of the man is imbued in the philosophy that he brought into the world—albeit, perhaps, unconsciously—that to extract him from the equation is to extract its very lifeblood.

Magick, particularly Crowley’s magick, is complex, both intellectually and morally, reflecting the far-reaching minds in which it was forged. Magick is an art, and while art can always be appreciated when divorced from its origins, the more you know about the minds and forces that shaped it, the richer that appreciation becomes. And is this not ultimately what High Magick is about, “knowledge and conversation with the holy guardian angel”—with the creator—with your self?

Estimates for the number of current adherents worldwide range from 5-25,000, suggesting that, while theirs is not a small religon, the state of Thelemia is a long way from entry to the United Nations. But it is out there. As one speaker told the audience: “Thelema is happening whether or not people know where it’s coming from. The law of Thelema is a law of nature, like gravity.” The forces brought into play by Crowley, Kelly, Aiwass and subsequent generations of Thelemites are here to stay.

“The Book of the Law is Written and Concealed. Aum. Ha”

SIDEBAR: A Brief History of the OTO
by Mark Pilkington

The seeds of the OTO—Ordo Templi Orientis or Oriental Templar Order—were planted at the close of the 19th century by a wealthy Austrian chemist, Karl Kellner, who had traveled widely and steeped himself in Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism and the mysteries of the East. The Order itself emerged in 1902 thanks to the input of another compulsive joiner of orders, Theodor Reuss. A journalist by trade, Reuss was also heading a revival of Adam Weishaupt’s 18th century Bavarian Illuminati. With only a handful of members, including, briefly, the celebrated mystic Rudolph Steiner, it’s thought that not a lot happened within the OTO until Reuss met Aleister Crowley in 1910, appointing him “National Grand Master General X° of O.T.O. for Great Britain and Ireland.” Crowley and Reuss proceeded to reorder the Order, with the Beast writing some new rituals, most notably the Gnostic Mass, the OTO’s key ceremony, which is still keenly performed to this day. As his health declined, Reuss made Crowley Frater Superior, or Outer Head of the Order (OHO) in 1922, and he proceeded to significantly re-align the Order towards his own Thelemic ideals, remaining its OHO until his death in 1947.

On the Beast’s demise, leadership of the OTO passed to a German living in California, Karl Germer, whose occult interests had seen him do time in a Nazi concentration camp. Physical lodge meetings came to an end under Germer, and his death in 1962 left the group struggling with a power vaccum. The vacancy was eventually filled by one Grady McMurty, an obedient, veteran member of the Californian lodge, who had enjoyed friendly correspondence with Crowley in the early 1940s.

Also vying for the position, however, was an Englishman, Kenneth Grant.

In 1945, Grant had spent several months living with Crowley in the Hastings boarding house where he ended his days, serving as his personal assistant in exchange for first-hand magical teaching. He would later co-edit Crowley’s Confessions, with John Symonds, and write several influential, though to most people—even those who have read them—impenetrable books. These “Typhonian Trilogies” merge Crowleyan ideas with supernatural fiction legend H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu Mythos, something one can only imagine would have displeased both authors immensely.

In 1955 Grant set up his own order, the New Isis Lodge, which sought to open up interdimensional channels of communication with whatever entities were out there and, following Karl Germer’s death, made a bid for global OTO leadership. When this failed, Grant transformed his New Isis Lodge into the Typhonian OTO (TOTO), referencing the fearsome—and appropriately Lovecraftian—many-headed Graeco-Egyptian dragon goddess, Typhon, mother of the murderous Set. Just in case this wasn’t complicated enough, the American OTO now calls itself the Caliphate OTO, and recently survived a very unmagical legal battle to retain ownership of the name OTO, all relevant assets and the official position of being the OTO recognized by Crowley, who, being long dead, presumably was not consulted on the matter.

Further info:
CALIPHATE OTO : http://oto-usa.org
TYPHONIAN OTO: http://user.cyberlink.ch/~koenig/staley.htm
CROWLEY TEXTAS ONLINE (inc LAVL): http://www.hermetic.com/crowley

JOSEPHINE FOSTER, profiled by Margaret Wappler (Arthur, 2004)

Originally published in Arthur No. 11 (July 2004)


Born Heller: Josephine Foster and Jason Ajemian

Sharing Time
Josephine Foster and the Supposed would like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony—or whatever. Just so long as it’s expressive. Margaret Wappler passes on the lessons.

Josephine Foster is a 30-year-old woman but she seems like a child. That isn’t meant as an insult, or some sort of misty New Age proclamation. It’s just that her speaking voice is soft—hardly the force of nature it is while singing—and prone to drifting away mid-sentence, as if distracted by something shiny across the room. And as explanation for her drift, she offers, “I have Thai buffet in my belly” and admits to dozing off just moments before our phone conversation. Granted, these are only the telltale signs of an adult riding out a low blood-sugar crash in the mid-afternoon; they can be dismissed. But in her music, Foster easily sheds twenty-five years and expresses herself the way children do—unequivocally and without regard for solid foundations. Quite simply, she just goes for it.

“There is something to being the song, and not commenting upon it,” Foster says from Bloomington, Indiana, where she is staying with Brian Goodman, her bandmate in her newest venture, Josephine Foster and the Supposed, which also includes Rusty Peterson on drums. Being in the moment is important to Foster, as is expression—full and unhindered, sometimes clumsy. Whether with the Supposed on their debut album, All the Leaves Are Gone (Locust Music), or with her other collaborations, the charmed lullabies of The Children’s Hour and the homespun Born Heller, she explores dark, sticky cavities with no inhibitions. Foster’s voice is a rich quavering alto, that, with its rapid, Joan Baez-like vibrato, makes great leaps over the Supposed’s Age of Aquarius-inspired rock—if the Age had followed its every whim, no matter how labyrinthine, no matter how far it burrowed into the ground. Though the production is pretty clean, All the Leaves Are Gone has a dirty quality, but not sexy-dirty or some flimsy appliqué. It’s more elemental, primordial, as if these songs were recently unearthed. The instruments sound loose, almost broken; the rhythm catch as catch can. Expression trumps. The desire to sing repeatedly a lyric like, “I had a mother, my mother had a mother—no one knows her name!” is followed, giving the music the quality of a child’s inspired ravings.

Foster became interested in opera after watching singers perform in a church. “I was intrigued by the natural amplification of their voices. It just seemed like a sort of bizarre expression… a larger-than-life expression and sound.” Foster, who had studied a “mixed bag” of music, theater and performance in Colorado, her home state, went to Chicago’s Northwestern University to study opera but left after a year. “I sang at this master class for this fairly famous opera singer and I felt like all she did was talk about how I was too skinny and why did I eat only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? It was really pretty absurd… I enjoyed what I learned but I realized pretty quickly it wasn’t going to be enough for what I wanted to express.”

She quickly met people through Chicago’s tightknit music community and started playing around, often hosting her own “house hootenannies, where everyone would come over and play music.” Attracted to archaic folk and Renaissance songs, she says she knew almost nothing about current pop music. “I wasn’t too interested because it just seemed really subdued and breathy. And pretty tame.” She did, however, have vivid memories of what she heard on the radio growing up and what her “ex-hippie-type guy” father listened to, music like Graham Nash and Jefferson Airplane. In particular, Foster feels a kinship with the latter: “I think there’s some sort of connection between what they’re doing and what we’re doing—they play slightly declamatory, expressive music that’s pretty similar to something like opera in some ways. The human voice is really being sung through.”

After several visits to Bloomington where Goodman was attending college, Foster crashed with him and his girlfriend, burnt out on Chicago and intrigued by the notion of a rock opera. But that idea soon dissolved; Foster thinks she’ll get to it eventually, maybe by collaborating with a filmmaker. Instead, Foster and Goodman, a “human jukebox who knows every rock song,” developed a different batch of Foster’s songs through improvisation and discussion. The title track, for instance, started out “very subdued,” but soon developed into something primordial and shifting, with koan-like lyrics holding down its center.

“I was so bored with [‘All the Leaves are Gone’], because it was really slow, kind of sad, and I was like, ‘Why don’t we just turn it into a dance song?’” The lyrics—which Foster describes as “slightly heavy”—don’t diverge too far from the statements: “There is no end to your sorrow… and tomorrow sorrow it will come again.” But the music, which sounds disarmingly loose and flapping at first listen, soon reveals itself to be joyously warped and unhinged, a lazy, blissed-out resignation to what feels like some sun-hazed dance at the temple right before the sacrifice. Just between falling apart completely and arriving at some destination point beyond the horizon, the rickety train that is Josephine Foster and the Supposed suddenly picks up speed and blows right by you.

Part of what makes their songs seem like a primer, like some recently recovered manual—to what, it’s hard to say—is their quality of following every impulse to its expressive endpoint. Indeed, every song hemming to nothing but its own organic, half-grown-over path serves a dual purpose: “I don’t have a very good memory so in order to remember something I write I usually have to make it something that I want to hear again. I have to make it pretty addictive to myself. So there’s a memorability in the words, a boldness in the imagery.” At their heart, these songs, despite their ornamentations, are constructed to be broken down, carried on, passed around. “It used to be a song was made to be shared and hopefully sung by many others. I hope my compositions go beyond me in terms of utilitarian value. I want them to be remembered, sung, by a tuneful amateur.”

“Kali Can You Hear Me?” by Daniel Pinchbeck (Arthur, 2004)

Originally published in Arthur No. 11 (July 2004)

“Here and Now” column by Daniel Pinchbeck

“Kali Can You Hear Me?”

When I bring up the subject of the “Kali Yuga” in polite company, I find that few people know what I am talking about, let alone that we are in the midst of it. So what is the Kali Yuga? According to Hindu lore, the Kali Yuga is the last of four epochs which can be roughly equated to the Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age known in the Western tradition. Each epoch signifies a decline and a degradation from the previous phase. The Kali Yuga is the bottom of the barrel, where humanity has lost all connection to its sacred source and wallows in lower appetites, materialism and greed. In the Vishnu Puruna, this state is achieved “when society reaches a stage where property confers rank, wealth becomes the only source of virtue, passion the sole bond of union between husband and wife, falsehood the source of success in life, sex the only means of enjoyment, and when outer trappings are confused with inner religion.”

Kali is the Hindu goddess of destruction, usually depicted with four arms, dancing wildly on a corpse, tongue sticking out, blood dripping from her fangs. Kali is the wrathful manifestation of Shakti, the consort of Shiva. While Lord Shiva is the personification of pure consciousness, Lady Shakti represents the current of sexual energy behind all manifestation. The eternal act of love between Shiva and Shakti maintains the balance of forces in the universe.

According to some accounts, the four yugas are immensely long affairs, and there are hundreds of thousands of years left to run in our current Kali Yuga. However, some Hindu sects, such as the Dravidians, say that the entire cycle lasts 60,000 years in total, and we are currently approaching the finish line of the final epoch. The good news about the Kali Yuga is that Hindu time runs in a circle or spiral. The end of the Kali Yuga means a return to the Golden Age, the Satya Yuga, after passage through a transition made in darkness.

According to the French esoteric scholar Rene Guenon, writing in the early years of the 20th century, “We have in fact entered upon the final phase of this Kali Yuga, the darkest period of this dark age, the state of dissolution from which there is to be no emerging except through a cataclysm, since it is no longer a mere revival which is required, but a complete renovation.” Guenon scoffed at the “triumph” of Western values and empirical thought, seeing the modern worship of empirical science as a shallow delusion: “These lower forms of knowledge, so insignificant to anyone possessing knowledge of a different order, had nevertheless to be realized,” he wrote in The Crisis of the Modern World. This realization could only happen at the point where “true intellectuality,” knowledge of a different order, had disappeared or been completely devalued.

The standard liberal, feminist, or left-wing criticism of our society considers it a patriarchal dominator culture that represses the feminine and the natural. This is of course true, as far as it goes. However, in the Kali Yuga, it is the female daemonic current of Shakti energy that has gone berserk, and not the male principle. As Nikolai and Zenia Shreck put it in their entertaining Demons of the Flesh: “During this Aeon, the lunar, sinister current of the Feminine Daemonic is at its zenith, a spiritual condition which allows for the breaking up of all boundaries and the free play of creative chaos, unrestricted by the male ordering principle.” Since Kali is the wrathful manifestation of Shakti, the Kali Yuga could be described as the goddess Shakti throwing a hissy fit.

We find this idea coded into the Biblical story of Genesis. Man was satisfied in Paradise. It was woman, Eve, who bit the apple (of knowledge and desire), and she wants to keep biting. On the deepest level, men are unchanged by history—they are the same soldiers, shamans, and duffers now as they were five, ten, or fifty thousand years ago. Women are the ones who are trying to change. To bite deeper into the apple, “she,” the archetypal feminine, the Shakti-current, needs to be given recognition, permission, affirmation, by man and by the masculine Shiva-force of consciousness.

After giving this much consideration, I suspect that the “fate of the Earth” literally depends on understanding and acting upon this situation. “She” is going to continue to wreak havoc until she gets what she wants in the way that she wants it—which may have nothing to do with contemporary social values or moral and sexual stereotypes. The 1960s provided a dress rehearsal. The Shakti current opened up for a while, after the near-nuclear annihilation of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the possibility of a global civilization based on love rather than domination became briefly apparent.

The “feminine” also represents the intuitive forms of thought denigrated by our rigidly masculine rationality, as well as nature itself. The Kali Yuga comprises all of recorded history—the last five or six thousand years. Historical time is the duration required for human consciousness to realize its separation from nature, and penetrate into matter through technology. As Francis Bacon put it at the beginning of the era of modern science: “We must torture Nature until she reveals her secrets.” Western science is a Sadean project. Western Man’s incessant probing of nature is, in itself, a quest for knowledge of the lost and defiled goddess whose body is the world.

When the feminine daemonic went berserk, at the beginning of the Kali Yuga, there was a withdrawal of maternal protection and sensual satisfaction from most of humanity. According to Robert Lawlor’s extraordinary book, Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime, this may have occurred through an actual shift or weakening in Mother Earth’s electromagnetic field. The aboriginals live without shelter or clothing on the southernmost continent, staying in constant contact with the planet’s electromagnetic force, its heartbeat. For the aboriginals, every day is the “first day” of creation, the origin point, and there was never a “fall of man” into a degraded state. Because they maintained this pure condition, they had no interest in developing technologies that would permit them to control or dominate nature.

At the core of our word “materialism” is “Mater,” mother. As the polarity of Kali/Shakti suggests, there are two sides to the mother archetype. There is the nurturing, fertile, and benevolent mother, and there is the aggrieved, possessive, devouring mother. In the modern world, we became obsessed with material goods and possessions. This obsession is due to our subconscious enslavement by the “bad mother” archetype. Kali Yuga humans, deprived of “mother’s milk,” of proper nurturing, become devious, depraved, greedy, insatiable, miserly—we have confused matter for Mater.

In his laboratory, the scientist has sought to understand the wound inflicted on him by the aggrieved feminine. He has asked the wrong questions and received the wrong answers. To ask the right questions, he would have to start with a different understanding. Rather than seeking some delusionary final closure, he would have to accept the nature of paradox, and the paradox that is nature.

Obsessed with the urge to escape the limits of spacetime through a direct phallic extension of his ego, through acceleration, man builds racing cars and rockets. Acting out of subconscious rage, man splits the atom in an attempt to annihilate matter/mater. The oceanic feminine waits for the wave to crash. Kali giggles. She whispers: “You do not know me yet, you man, you failed systemizer.”

Technology is an attempt to create a “second nature” that accords with limited masculine rationality. Modern technology imposes a rigid, static, dead order on the flowing fractal chaos that is feminine nature. At the moment of seeming triumph for modern science, the physicist discovers, to his horror, that matter is an illusion—there is only quantum foam, fluctuation, and flux. It is all feminine sinuous motion: Shakti. It is all relational. There is no hard fact, just spectacle and seduction and uncertainty principles. What holds reality together is consciousness, the observer who changes what is observed. Instead of a bedrock materiality, there is what the Hindus call “lila,” divine play.

The Western project of technology and science have been called into being by the secret workings of the aggrieved feminine current. This may seem counter-intuitive at first. However, it should be recalled that men tend to be “passively active,” while women are “actively passive,” impelling activity and erotic advances like magnets. The deviation in the feminine Shakti current impelled the anguished masculine drive towards rationality. My hypothesis is that the ultimate purpose of technology is to aid in the coming-to-consciousness of women—the realization of feminine desire and self-knowledge. At that point, Kali will retract her fangs, pull in her tongue, liberate her victims, and, with the faintest trace of a Mona Lisa smile, turn back into Shakti. As Wilhelm Reich put it: “Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of the patriarchy.” The underground currents of our time lead in this direction. The mass-market success of The Da Vinci Code, a mystery based on the suppression of the sacred feminine by Christianity, is one of many indications.

As it says in The Tao, “Reversal is the movement of the Tao.” I propose that the conclusion of the Kali Yuga is a cosmic synchronization with the end-date of the Mayan calendar in the year 2012. By that time, masculine technology and feminine nature will have reintegrated, and the liberational movements that crested and collapsed during the 1960s will return, reformat themselves, and complete the task of establishing a new age and a new consciousness. The goddess is returning, and this time around, the apple will be eaten down to the core.

One from the Desert Files: NOAH PURIFOY

Originally published in Arthur No. 11 (2004), with photography and art direction by W.T. Nelson…

NOAH’S ART
When artist Noah Purifoy died this past March, he left behind a remarkable desert masterwork.

by Kristine McKenna

Noah Purifoy was born in Snow Hill Alabama in 1917. By the time he died this past March in a fire at his home in Joshua Tree, California, he’d traveled many roads and re-invented himself several times.

For a Southern black man of Purifoy’s generation, being an artist wasn’t a readily available option, but Purifoy was a man of remarkable vision and patience. It wasn’t until he was 48 years old that he really got rolling as an artist, but by the time he died 38 years later he’d created a body of work of formidable power. Purifoy was a populist artist, a Surrealist, and a sculptor, and his masterpiece is a parcel of land in Joshua Tree which he landscaped with dozens of massive assemblages. Fashioned largely from scavenged materials, this dazzling environment was created without the help of assistants or interns; Purifoy was a lone wolf, and it was his joy to wake before sunrise and work in the early morning hours under an open sky, before the heat of the day settled in.

The tenth in a family of 13 children, Purifoy was the child of farmers who lived in Birmingham from 1920 until 1929, when they resettled in Cleveland. At the age of 22 Purifoy earned a teaching credential, but his teaching career was interrupted by World War II, which prompted him to enlist in the army in 1942. He was stationed in the South Pacific for three years, and after returning from the war, he earned a master’s degree in social work. He then landed a job at the Cuyahoga County Department of Social Services in Cleveland, where he worked from 1950 to 1952.

Purifoy passed through Los Angeles during the war and he’d always had a hankering to return, so in 1952 he relocated to Southern California. He spent the next two years doing social work at an L.A. county hospital, but the work didn’t suit him. In 1954 he enrolled at Chouinard Art Institute, where he earned a degree in 1956, and he spent the next eight years working in various capacities as an interior designer.

In 1964 Purifoy’s interest in civil rights led him to collaborate with musician Judson Powell and educator Sue Welch in the creation of the Watts Towers Art Center, a community outreach program in South-Central L.A. The next year he found himself in the eye of the hurricane of America’s racial conflict when the Watts riots erupted outside his door. It was at this point that Purifoy finally found his voice and sense of purpose as an artist; Purifoy scavenged three tons of material from the ashes of the Watts uprising and used them to create “66 Signs of Neon,” a massive group show of works created from the Watts’ debris that traveled to nine university galleries from 1966 through 1969.

The show was deemed an enormously successful marriage of art and social protest, but Purifoy found the politics of the art world distasteful, and in 1970 he turned his back on art altogether. Seventeen years later Purifoy’s longtime friend, artist Debbie Brewer, offered him permanent lodging on the land she owned in Joshua Tree, and it was then that Purifoy again felt the itch to make things.

I visited Purifoy at his place in Joshua Tree in August of 1995, and I remember my morning with him fondly. I arrived at sunup and we spent a few hours roaming the land, while Purifoy mused on the marvelous sculptures that seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see. By 10:30 it was time to get out of the sun and we retreated to the seriously air-conditioned mobile home where Purifoy lived. He prepared lunch, which is to say, he removed nearly everything from his refrigerator, set it all on a small card table, and offered it to his guest. He was a generous and gracious host. I assembled a sandwich, he poured himself a glass of wine, and we talked for a while. These are a few things he told me.

CHILDHOOD
As a child I wasn’t conscious of racism, but I was aware something was going on. Once, when I was five, my mother was taking me to the store and there was a parade in the street. People had hoods on, and when I asked my mother what was happening she said, “That’s the Ku Klux Klan.”

I had good parents who tried to protect me from the trauma they knew I’d encounter soon enough, and they encouraged me to go to school. So in 1939 I earned a teaching credential—not because I wanted to be a teacher, but because that was the only thing accessible to me then. I majored in history and social studies but never taught either—I ended up teaching shop at a school in Montgomery, Alabama.

FROM SOCIAL WORK INTO ART
In the early ‘50s all my friends were social workers and they were horrible people. They thought they owned the earth because they doled out a few dollars to poor people, so one day I just up and quit. Later that same day I was driving and I happened to pass Chouinard Art Institute, and I dropped in and told them I wanted to enroll. This wasn’t something I’d been thinking about – I went in totally on a whim, but they admitted me because I was colored.

I was the worst student in the whole school. I refused to draw, because I felt that I had something and that if I learned to draw I’d be dead because I’d end up making oil paintings, which wasn’t what I was after. I’ve never been satisfied with little things that hang on the wall and I wanted to find my own way in art. I wasn’t making art then but I was posing as an artist. I wore a beret and spent lots of time drinking wine, eating cheese, listening to music and talking to people, and didn’t take any of it too seriously. I was seriously concerned about civil rights though, and I had a dialogue going with some people who shared my feelings about change that had to come.

THE WATTS UPRISING
I was in the middle of it but I wasn’t afraid. I thought it was great because it was overdue and it turned out to be a goldmine for me. I collected three tons of debris from the riot and began making art out of it. I was searching for my own idea and had been studying the Dada movement and how it had reversed the whole concept of art, and the debris from the riot is what finally launched me on my own course. From 1965 to ’69 I made lots of work, and I sold it as fast as I could make it. I was also reading philosophy then and was knocked out by [Martin] Heidegger and [Edmund] Husserl. I was looking for methods of problem solving because I had lots of problems, and I was able to alter my behavior because of those two philosophers. They were great thinkers who went into areas most people dare not go.

DROPPING OUT
I dropped out of the art world because I was disappointed in art. I perceived art as a tool for change, and when I started the program in Watts I saw art as a potential savior. But the dropout population there increased rather than decreased, and the art I was making started to become formulaic and too easy. I was never interested in earning a lot of money. I wanted art to be a means of answering questions like ‘what is growth?’ ‘What is change?’ Life isn’t worth living unless the individual is pushing to understand more, and art stopped being useful to me in that pursuit.

THE WORK
A lot of the stuff I use to make artwork I buy from a recycling place near here and it’s a horrendous cost—I spend a lot of money on materials. In 1994 a local paper ran a story on me, so I also get lots of calls from people who say ‘I’m cleaning out my garage. Why don’t you bring a truck over and take what you want?’

There’s no ecological message behind my use of recycled materials—I use them because that’s what’s available to me. People occasionally comment on how hard it must it must be living out in the desert by myself, but this is a breeze compared to many things I’ve been through. The most difficult period of my life was when I was a young adult. I was raised in the church and as a teenager I found myself in conflict about sex and religion. I gave up religion—and leaving the church didn’t hurt me at all.

DEATH
Sometimes I wish I had a savior because I don’t know what happens after death, but I do know I don’t believe in heaven. I recently made a series of works called ‘Desert Tombstones,’ and while I was working on them I thought a lot about death. It’s been said that if you don’t accept death as an equal part of existence you’re in for trouble somewhere down the line. I’d never given much thought to any of this because I thought I’d live forever, but I’ve come to realize that’s not the case. That may have something to do with why I push myself so hard now to finally get the work out that’s always been in me.

Noah Purifoy: http://www.noahpurifoy.com/

PAUL CULLUM on LARS VON TRIER’s more obscure work (Arthur, 2004)

The Rules of the Game
A “Camera Obscura” column by Paul Cullum
Originally published in Arthur No. 11

Discussed herein:

The “Kingdom of Credibility” Trilogy:
o The Humiliated (De Ydmygede) (1998), directed by Jesper Jargil
o The Exhibited (De Udstillede) (2000), directed by Jesper Jargil
o The Purified (De Lutrede) (2002), directed by Jesper Jargil

And:

o The Five Obstructions (2004), directed by Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier
o Tranceformer: A Portrait of Lars von Trier (1997), directed by Stig Björkman (available on the Criterion DVD release of von Trier’s The Element of Crime)

“In the rain forest of the Cameroon in West Central Africa lives a floor-dwelling ant known as Megaloponera foetens, or more commonly, the stink ant. On occasion, one of these ants while looking for food is infected by inhaling a microscopic spore from a fungus of the genus Tomentella. After being inhaled, the spore seats in the ant’s tiny brain and begins to grow, causing changes in the ant’s patterns of behavior. The ant appears troubled and confused; for the first time in its life, it leaves the forest floor and begins to climb. Completely spent and having reached a prescribed height, the ant impales the plant with its mandibles. The fungus continues to consume first the nerve cells and finally all the soft tissue that remains of the ant. After approximately two weeks, a spike appears from what had been the head of the ant. This spike is about an inch and a half in length and has a bright orange tip, heavy with spores, which rain down onto the rain forest floor for other unsuspecting ants to inhale.” —The Museum of Jurassic Technology

Were he not already so ubiquitous, this might seem like the season of Lars von Trier. Dogville, the first part of his “USA Trilogy” (to be differentiated from his “Europa Trilogy”—The Element of Crime, Epidemic and Europa/Zentropa; and his “Golden Heart Trilogy”—Breaking the Waves, The Idiots and Dancer in the Dark) appeared earlier this year to begin the excoriation of the American character by European cinema, a process just put to decisive referendum by the awarding of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Stephen King’s The Kingdom Hospital, an adaptation of The Kingdom I and II, von Trier’s successive miniseries on Danish television, appeared as a much-touted ABC series and suffered mightily by comparison. And The Five Obstructions, co-directed by von Trier and his mentor Jørgen Leth, equal parts documentary, experiment and intervention, currently scuttles its way around the arthouse circuit.

The latter presents von Trier at his comical best. Resembling Fassbinder refashioned as a Muppet (Fassy Bear?), he is at once imperious and cuddly, using his private empire to force Leth, his former film instructor at the Danish Film Institute, into repeatedly remaking The Perfect Human, the film von Trier rates closest to perfect. “This little gem,” as he calls it, is a 12-minute 1967 black-and-white short that marries an insouciant formal abandon to a faux anthropological take on upscale hipsters, in the manner of Peter Sellers’ The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (which handed Richard Lester his directing style on a platter) or, more pointedly, title designer Saul Bass’s Why Man Creates. Leth is the one who famously introduced “the rules of the game” into von Trier’s way of thinking, the intense penchant for order which, as we know from Tranceformer, a 1997 documentary by Stig Björkman, implicitly appealed to this son of radical academics who was raised free of restraints of any kind. (Tranceformer also informs us that at age 12, “Lars Trier” was the child star of Clandestine Summer, a winsome Swedish-Danish TV series, and that he added the “von” in film school—as in “Erich von Stroheim,” Teutonic tyrant and classical sadist—in much the same way Francis Ford Coppola appended his signature to exchange the quotidian for the epic.) The Five Obstructions is justified as homage and a form of therapy, von Trier’s magnanimous gesture to force his mentor out of his “provocative perverse perfection.” Yet it ultimately borders on autobiography, as von Trier judges and rejects not only his patriarch, but his own aesthetic foundations, subjecting them to outsize pressures as if to test their structural worthiness—like Steven Soderbergh did in interviewing his mentor, Richard Lester, in Getting Away With It.

This is the Lars von Trier—whimsical ideologue, benevolent autodidact, goofball despot—on display in three documentaries by Jesper Jargil, which he collectively labels “The Kingdom of Credibility Trilogy.” Jargil, who shot von Trier’s The Idiots and has directed over 500 commercials, is a kind of unofficial biographer of the Dogme masters class: The Humiliated (1998) is a behind-the-scenes look at The Idiots, arguably von Trier’s best film; The Exhibited (2000) chronicles his similar assault on the theater; and The Purified (2002) documents a summit meeting of the four Dogme founders, as well as their separate peace with procedural orthodoxy. None are currently commercially available, and all are ripe for international exploitation. Jargil is currently working on a documentary on D-Day, Dogme 95’s simultaneous four-channel improvised docudrama that was broadcast on New Year’s Eve 2000, with the working title 4-D.

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Great Grandma’s Macaroni — a recipe and a story from The Reigning Sound’s Greg Cartwright (Arthur, 2004)

Come On In My Kitchen
by Greg Cartwright of the Reigning Sound

originally published in Arthur No. 11 (July 2004)

Greg Cartwright is one of American rock ‘n’ roll’s great undersung heroes, a veteran of legendary Memphis grease-rock outfits the Oblivians and the Compulsive Gamblers. Too Much Guitar!, the career-highlight new album by his latest band, The Reigning Sound, is reviewed by C & D in this issue; the band will be touring with the Hives across North America later this summer.

About nine years ago, while I was touring in Spain, I met an American girl who happened to be there on vacation. Conversation led to the fact that we were both looking for The Revlons’ “The Way You Touch My Hand” single. The stars were lining up but the van was leaving. Almost a year later I met her again in New York and I wound up staying at her apartment for three days. On the third day we decided to stay in because we knew it was our last night together. I said, “Let’s cook something.” She said, “I only know how to cook one thing.” She called it “Great Grandma’s Macaroni.” Was it good? I married her, didn’t I? Here goes:

1. Boil 1 package of macaroni noodles.
2. Put them in a casserole dish and mix in one small can of tomato sauce.
3. Chop up half a sweet vidalia (yellow) onion and mix it in too.
4. Add a pinch of thyme, a little oregano and salt & pepper to your taste.
5. Mix it all up good and spread a nice thick layer of shredded cheddar across the top.
6. Bake at 375 degrees about 20 minutes, or until the cheese starts to turn golden brown.

My only addition to this recipe over the last seven years has been to add a pound of seasoned ground beef in place of step 4. Thanks to Esther’s great grandma for the recipe!