14,000-word oral history of the Oct 21, 1967 exorcism/levitation of the Pentagon, originally published in Arthur’s Novemeber 2004 issue: “Out, Demons, Out!”
All above images from The Sixth Side of the Pentagon, directed by Chris Marker and François Reichenbach.
This poem by Peter Lamborn Wilson was published as a letter to the editor in the final issue of Arthur, No. 31 (Oct 2008). It was in response to the piece by Alejandro Jodorowsky in the previous issue, an excerpt from his newly translated memoirs, The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky, detailing his informal apprenticeship to Leonora Carrington in Mexico City in the late ’50s…
FOR LEONORA CARRINGTON
# 1
Mexico City is absolutely.
Or was.
With a claridad that would’ve seemed
glossy as bone except for the fecality
of its plutonian fruit. Especially
Leonora Carrington – the secret hardness
of colonial baroque – its refusal to be
reasonable – its crown of owls
#2
Chocolate is Mexico’s great
contribution to Surrealism.
With unbroken incantations in the
voice of a lion prepare (on wild rocks)
a soup made of half a pink onion, a bit of
perfumed wood, some grains of myrrh, a
large branch of green mint, 3 belladonna pills
covered with white swiss chocolate, a
huge compass rose (plunge in soup for one minute)
Just before serving add Chinese “cloud” mushroom
which has snail-like antennae &
grown on owl dung
#3
As modern Hermeticist she ranks with Fulcanelli
a Madame Paracelsa who tells yr
fortune in the sense of buried treasure.
It seems you yourself have psychic gifts
which are only exacerbated by her soups.
Molé as Dalí realized surrealizes all
dishes via its resemblance to excrement
e. g. over boiled lobsters (serve
with pink champagne). Shit you can sculpt.
#4
Like gunpowder which was invented solely
to exorcize demons – a secret passed
along the Silk Road to Roger Bacon
who unfortunately leaked the recipe
to the uninitiated – Carrington
embodies both the siesta & the
anti-siesta. A Madam Adam
with a handcranked gramophone with a horn
lacquered black with gold pinstriping that
plays only beeswax cylinders of Erik Satie
or Gesualdo. Here alone exile
attains an elegance & impassibility known
only to stoned Rosicrucians.
#5
To live absolutely. A tricky trajectory between
clinical dementia & the sloppy lace
curtain Irish kitchen gemütlichkeit that
usually passes (present company excepted
of course) for life outside literature &
even for true love. Or else it’s
the altitude — mushrooms & chocolate — under the
asphalt the bloodsoaked landfill —
cactus cowskulls &
drunken fusillades of flowers.
(NOTE: Soup recipe by L. Carrington; see The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky.)
Peter Lamborn Wilson
New Paltz, New York
Two endangered species, photographed by Stephanie Smith
A MAGICAL SKILL
Chris Goss, a godfather of desert rock, on the return of Masters of Reality
By Jay Babcock
Originally published November 11, 2010 in LAWeekly
Chris Goss, the 52-year-old leader of Masters of Reality, is near tears. A mountain of a baldheaded man, part Aleister Crowley, part Admiral Kurtz, Goss has been involved in some of the most vital rock ‘n’ roll music made in the last two and a half decades. Masters of Reality’s 1988 debut, a masterwork of concise songwriting and classic rock riffage, was produced by Rick Rubin; their second, the lovely Sunrise on the Sufferbus, featured an actual classic rocker, the formidable Cream drummer/crankyman Ginger Baker.
Around that time, Goss discovered a group of teenagers from the California Low Desert called Kyuss, who played a heavy, trippy mix of Black Sabbath and the Misfits. Goss produced Kyuss’ best work, inaugurating a relationship with guitarist Joshua Homme that would continue into the latter’s subsequent Desert Sessions and Queens of the Stone Age projects.
And while there would be other Masters of Reality albums, other production gigs of varying profile and quality — my favorite is Mark Lanegan’s Bubblegum — and an album-and-a-half as Goon Moon, a bizarro-rock collaboration with Marilyn Manson guitarist Twiggy Ramirez (and, on the first EP, underground free-rock drummer Zach Hill), generally speaking, Goss has slipped into legend: one of those musician’s musicians, a guy who knows the occult secrets of the creative process and can get a great drum sound, who somehow, in this devolved age, still feels it.
Which, I think, is why he’s near tears, as we sit on a patio outside his Joshua Tree home. Masters of Reality have a new album out — a beautiful, musically adventurous, warm affair with double-name Pine/Cross Dover — and are about to play a set of West Coast dates. It’s the first time in years that Goss has been able to line everything up: a great album, a happening band, U.S. gigs. But who is there to hear anymore?
“Hard time for art right now,” he says. “Socially, politically, economically — this is awful right now for everyone, this confusion. We’re in the new Dark Ages. It’s very hard and depressing, and you get angry because just so much attention is paid to so much shit. It’s a shit storm. But there’s no reason to stop making music. The market is down? Fuck the market. If you love what you’re doing, you gotta keep doing it.”
Even making record albums, when record stores are going out of business and everything is available for free on the Internet? Isn’t that tactile experience over?
“I love the album format. I’ll never lose that. Never. I don’t want to lose it. I mean, why can’t we keep experiencing it? It’s easy, it’s palatable. I’m so used to buying music in my hand and I can’t get over it. Packaging matters. The visual album-cover connection to the music matters. Remember the gatefolds with the storybooks in them and the pop-up photos and stuff? This kind of thing is a boutique, elitist origami item now, but when I was a kid it was a five-and-dime item. I remember how it felt when I had Jethro Tull’s Passion Play in my hands as a kid, from a poncy Shakespearean Renaissance Faire English hippie guy, knowing that, like, another million kids also were reading this storybook. There was this feeling that so many other people were experiencing what I was experiencing, at the same time. It was like combining that Harry Potter intrigue with the music for the kid of the time. That’s empowering. Those records connected us. …”
The music experience is more than what meets the ear — is it about actual physical contact?
“This is about warmth, and beauty,” Goss says. “Now vocal tuning is everywhere. What a horrid tone. The chipmunk-robot people are here! Great. Lovely. Did you see Shania Twain live at the CMAs this year, maybe last year, with a vocal tuner on her voice when she was singing live? “And! I! Love! YouuuuUUUU!” It puts that thing on the tone at the end, an artificial lengthening of when you land on the note. So the person’s natural phrasing is gone. Why? When Lennon was flat, it was wonderful. When Keith Richards is flat, it’s wonderful. Because it sounds like the guy is sitting right next to you. He hasn’t been chopped to spam before he gets to you.”
People don’t even know what they’re missing.
“I remember going to see Yes in the ’70s, back when people knew the lost art of properly mic-ing an acoustic guitar live. It has to have a low end, so that if you bump the guitar with an elbow, the PA goes boomf. You need that full spectrum of sound — you gotta feel the chest, and the belly, that part of the sound spectrum. Music should come through your chest, your eyes, your belly, that part of the sound spectrum. I think that’s my favorite part.
“There’s some great Israel Regardie Golden Dawn meditation tapes,” he says, describing one of Crowley’s disciples and his mystical society, “where he talks about getting into a state where your body is made out of spiderweb, like mesh. Continue reading
Announcement of Kenneth Grant’s death: http://www.starfirepublishing.co.uk/main_frames_page.htm
Tribute to the great man/magus/scholar/visionary by John Coulthart: http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2011/02/03/kenneth-grant-1924%E2%80%932011/
Covers for some of Kenneth Grant’s truly beguiling books:
Wade Davis: wikipedia
Latest book: The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
Sunday, January 23, 2011, 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM: Wade Davis lectures at Bowers Museum (Santa Ana, CA)
Psychic Surveillance: Hi-tech wizardry and ESP come together at this mystic parlor in Stockton, CA. How can you augment your powers of perception?
Applied Magic(k): Magic(k) Calls
by the Center for Tactical Magic
Originally published in Arthur No. 24 (August 2006).
The ancient oracles of Greece, which served as messaging centers between the gods and the mortals, did not shy away from associating metaphysical affairs with technological wizardry. Visitors to the oracles marveled as doors opened, fountains poured forth, and lights flickered all of the their own accord, thanks to an innovative use of hydraulics, pneumatics, levers, weights and balances. Such high-tech engineering (for the times, anyway) not only served to set an appropriate magical tone, but also held the potential to assist in conveying messages from the gods. Although more than 2,000 years old, this blend of magic(k) and tech stands in stark contrast to many of today’s expressions of magic(k). What is it about technology and magic(k) that leaves so many magic(k) practitioners hiding in the folds of their anachronistic robes and tuxedos?
Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the inventor credited with the notion of global satellite communications, once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” At the surface, such an assertion may seem simple enough; however, there are a few layers to excavate here. Some interpret this to mean we have reached an age where we are quite impressed by our own inventions. The workings of our gadgets have become increasingly imperceptible, if not due to sheer miniaturized size of the parts, then surely due to the veils of specialized knowledge. In the end, we don’t know how a given technology, a cell phone for instance, even works nor do we particularly care so long as we can talk on it when we need to. We take it for granted that there is a technical logic behind the engineering of a cell phone.
For some, that brief insignificant moment of faith in technology is comparable to magic(k)—after all, many (if not most) magic tricks are successfully performed along these very lines. Any enchantment whatsoever is overpowered by the puzzle that remains to be solved. The audience does not wonder if it is “real” magic(k); they wonder at how it is accomplished. While the overall effect may still be enough to satisfy and entertain, the method remains cloaked in secrecy and illusion. Likewise, when a technology performs its prescribed function, we tend not to ask any questions, and thus the mysteries of its inner workings are obscured to all but those with specialized knowledge. This certainly has some parallels with the way some view magic(k), equally in the realms of the occult, entertainment, and perhaps politics as well.
However, the magic(k) of a “sufficiently advanced technology” is not simply manifested solely by its ability to perform its prescribed function without one’s understanding of how it works. Magic(k) teases questions of “what?” and “why” just as much as “how?” Aside from the general mystery of its inner workings, a cell phone appears to be no more magical than a wristwatch or a solar-powered calculator largely because of our familiarity with it and the banal circumstances under which it is used. But when we take a moment to really consider what a cell phone does, we begin to scrape away at another layer of meaning. We act like it’s nothing, but when we use cell phones, our disembodied voices are transmitted invisibly via remote towers networked to celestial satellites (invented by Arthur C. Clarke, remember) floating somewhere in the heavens, before bouncing back to earth to be received by another living person located perhaps thousands of miles away. And this all happens in “real-time.” Is it becoming more difficult to distinguish between technology and magic(k) yet? Well, let’s keep going…
Continue reading
Excerpted from a recent episode “The Culture Show” on BBC2, with background music from Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock album…
courtesy W. Crofoot
CRAFTED IN BALANCE: Ron Regé, Jr. on an alchemical ale
by Justin Farrar
Traditionally, only hardcore collector nerds—the type of basement dwellers who belong to beer-of-the-month clubs—would dare call a beer bottle a piece of art. But with the gradual emergence of craft and artisanal beers in America over the last four decades, this has changed somewhat. Indeed, some truly boss work is getting produced these days. A heavyweight in the craft-beer industry, Delaware’s Dogfish Head Brewery recently released Bitches Brew, commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the release of Miles’ fusion classic. Though I’m more of an Agharta/Pangaea kind of guy in all honesty, the bottle is stunning. The label sports a rendering of Mati Klarwein’s Afro-surrealist cover art that as deliciously intoxicating as the experimental imperial stout it’s wrapped around. At the other end of the commercial spectrum sits the Burnt Hickory Brewery, a thoroughly underground affair based in northern Georgia. Over the last year, brewer Scott Hedeen—whose beers aren’t even for sale—has produced a handful dedicated to iconic American punk and post-hardcore groups, most of them (Die Kreuzen, the Didjits, The Jesus Lizard, Killdozer) associated with Touch and Go imprint. The label art is fantastic and totally captures the vintage punk aesthetic: all scratchy, collage-like and Xeroxed-looking.
But my fave these days has to be Alchemic Ale, which Arthur first covered last June. The Houston venture, founded by Tim Leanse and Sam Rowell (who are also known for their eardrum-crushing noise-rock duo Eloe Omoe), aims to “transform beer drinking into a full-on aesthetic experience” via the merger of its twin loves for underground art and artisanal brews from Belgium. Alchemic Ale isn’t a brewery in the traditional sense of the term; Leanse and Rowell don’t brew. Rather, they curate a line of beers—each one sporting a screen-printed label designed by one of the pair’s favorite artists—that is manufactured by the Belgium-based Brouwerij Sterkens.
Alchemic Ale has released two brews to date: Yeast Hoist 15: Kept in Balance by renowned comics creator Ron Regé, Jr. and Monsters designed by comics artist and musician Mat Brinkman. The former is Sterkens’ St. Sebastiaan Golden Ale, while the latter its Bokrijks Belgian Ale. That said, the beer—which is excellent—is almost beside the point. With their shapely earthenware bottles tattooed by some of the underground’s premiere artists, Alchemic Ale utterly redefines the modern beer bottle as cultural artifact. It’s now a piece of finely crafted art.
Yeast Hoist 15: Kept in Balance in particular is a thing to behold. In addition to the label, an exquisite pattern of classic alchemical imagery aligning the Los Angeles artist’s love of esoterica with the brewing process’ ancient roots in the mystical, Regé also created a comic/zine that hangs from the bottle’s neck. One could argue that the bottle comes with the zine, not the other way around.
As you can tell, I am absolutely smitten with these bottles. Wanting to learn more about how one passes from concept to product, I recently corresponded by email with Ron Regé, Jr. who was kind enough to explain the magickal process, as well as talk about a host of other beer-related issues and topics.
Q: Technically speaking, the bottle is a part of your Yeast Hoist series of comics. Can you talk a little about that evocative title and how the bottle fits into the series’ overall aesthetic? [Check out past installments of Yeast Hoist over at the excellent What Things Do site.]
Ron Regé, Jr: “Yeast Hoist” is a name that I’ve been using for small comics I’ve been making since 1995. Each “issue” looks completely different, so this concept of having it attached to a bottle of beer fits the aesthetic perfectly. I originally got the name from a sign on a tiny door at the Bushmills distillery that I noticed while on a tour there in 1994.
Is an earthenware beer bottle the weirdest form Yeast Hoist has yet to take? What are some of the others?
Yes. The booklet itself—which is available with the bottle only—is very much like the first ten, which were xeroxed mini-comics of various shapes and sizes. A couple appeared in anthologies, with instructions to cut them out to create the booklet. The three most recent ones have been 64 page books.
Were the comics and illustrations that comprise “Yeast Hoist 15” created with the bottle concept specifically in mind?
Yes, they were. I’ve been doing a lot of work recently that makes reference to various aspects of hermetic alchemy and the “Wisdom Traditions.” I wanted to present the basic concepts of alchemy in terms as clear and simple as possible, as I knew this product would be reaching a wide and varied audience that might be unfamiliar with these concepts—and my work.
Can explain the impetus behind wanting to expose a larger audience to concepts that are traditionally considered esoteric?
These ideas have been the main inspiration for the work I have been producing over the last few years. The project is called “The Cartoon Utopia”. I have had several gallery exhibits under this name, and have produced a large amount of comic stories related to this theme. I’ve begun to see similarities between so many schools of thought: spiritual, scientific, philosophical. My work involves trying to relate some of these themes, and to help people notice these similarities. In the comic I refer to the idea of a “Unified Theory” that governs all things, and make reference to the fact that all material in the universe erupted from one initial point during The Big Bang. This idea could be referring to science or theology. At a time in history when we are constantly bombarded with polarized opinions regarding such matters, I hope that people who come across the comic might see these connections.
The comics medium seems tailor made for tackling questions of science and mysticism. All three value text and imagery equally.
Letters are basically highly stylized cartoon characters. Written language is comics. Any sequence of marks is essentially comics. Did the invention of markmaking change human culture from a matriarchy to patriarchy? Perhaps—which is why I intend to use its power to unite our opposing aspects. I try to remain conscious of markmaking’s vital role in human evolution, in both the scientific and occult sense. Writing, as opposed to language, does seem to separate us from all other life on earth. It is our curse, as well as our salvation.
Alchemical imagery and themes have long played a strong role in your artwork. Do you harbor any high-falutin’ ideas about how fine brewing can be considered a kind of alchemy?
The traditions of the alchemists helped form the basis of all of the physical sciences, so I’m sure a lot of ancient brewing practices share those same traditions.
Apparently, the brewing process does follow alchemy back to ancient Egypt. Osiris is said to have taught Egyptians how to brew and ferment.
The idea of plant matter altering human consciousness through the process of fermentation is in line with the concepts of putrefaction and rebirth that are vital to the alchemical process.
Switching to the actual consumption of beer: in terms of pairing, what would be the perfect album to listen to while cracking open Yeast Hoist?
For some reason this feels hard to answer, but I’m going with Capt. Beefheart’s Ice Cream for Crow.
Have you ever done any home-brewing?
No, although I love that book Wild Fermentation and have always wanted to. I have quite a few friends who have tried it. Am I just lazy or maybe preoccupied with other things? I started making my own kombucha this month. Does that count?
Kombucha counts. But now you can brew beer in the name of good health as well. Did you see that recent article in Wired Science about how scientists believe ancient Nubians not only produced and consumed antibiotics, but consumed them via beer. Mind blowing.
It makes sense that the history of medicine is intertwined with the traditions of brewing alcohol. They share the same roots.
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