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Major Exhibition of cult psychedelic artist Burt Shonberg opens at Museum of Witchcraft and Magick

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It’s Friday the 13th: Probably an auspicious time to announce a new major exhibition of the cult psychedelic artist Burt Shonberg at the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick in Cleveland, Ohio, which runs from August 17th until November 1st. This is the first exhibition of Shonberg’s work since his one and only exhibition in 1967. It includes rarely seen paintings and some of Shonberg’s work belonging to the late science fiction writer, George Clayton Johnson.

Shonberg was an artist who perception of the world was seriously altered after he took part in Dr. Oscar Janiger’s experiments into the impact of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide 25 (LSD) on the creative processes.

During his first session, Shonberg received an injection of 100ml of LSD. This led him to see a hidden structure to the universe where “Humanity is literally hypnotized by the Dream Reality of momentum caused by life (meaning external influences).”

There is an illusion of movement in life which is not the truth. This all relates to so-called time. Time is motion—is evolution. One might say that the Big Criminal in all this is identification. To be apart from the form is the answer to real vision—consciousness. To be awake is to be really alive—to really exist.

March 1961: Janiger carries out a second experiment with Shonberg upping the dose of LSD to 150ml. At first, the artist didn’t think the trip was working but suddenly he was propelled into an experience that led him to believe he had left the clinic and had witnessed an undiscovered world where giants danced in the sky. He quickly understood that this “psychedelic experience” could “possibly reach to actual magic and beyond.”

There are, of course, certain things that one experiences in the transcendental state that are not possible to communicate in the usual way, so new types of parables would have to be created to get the message through. These discoveries I refer to could be insights or revelations into various aspects of the world we live in, nature, the mind itself, the universe, reality, and God.

The experiments radically altered Shonberg and his approach to painting. He continued experimenting with LSD which eventually led him to believe he was a living embodiment of Baphomet—“a divine androgyne, a unification of light and darkness, male and female and the macro and microcosm,” or Aleister Crowley’s pagan, pre-Christian deity, or “the Devil in all his bestial majesty.”
 
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Shonberg’s reputation has come under considerable reappraisal of late, especially after Spencer Kansa wrote the first biography on the artist Out There: The Transcendent Life and Art of Burt Shonberg three years ago. This summer a documentary called Out Here is described as an “in depth look at the famous Hollywood LSD painter” with contributions from the artists, actors, and friends who knew him.
 

 
More after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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08.13.2021
05:46 am
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Satan teens, blood, guts, LSD, murder and chaos: ‘Where Evil Dwells’ has it all but a plot

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“Ricky was of the devil. When he was on acid, he’d go back into the dark woods, up in Aztakea, and he would talk to the devil. He said the devil came into the form of a tree, which sprouted out of the ground and glowed. I tried to question him about it, but he said, “I don’t like to talk about it. People think I’m nuts.”

Ricky would take ten hits of mesc in a night. He would take three; ten minutes later he’d take another three; and two hours later he’d take four more. He’d figured it out in his mind how to take the most without ODing Ricky is the acid king. “

—Mark Fischer, friend of “Acid King” Long Island teen murderer Ricky Kasso, in Rolling Stone magazine.

What the fuck did I just watch? is often the response to Tommy Turner and David Wojnarowicz‘s cult 1985 no wave/transgressive film Where Evil Dwells. Not because some viewers of this splatterfest are uncool dickheads but because there is no real cohesive story or structure to Turner and Wojnarowicz’s film—and people really do prefer things like structure and stories. Just ask James Patterson. Our savvy public are none too appreciative of being buttonholed by a would-be weirdo rambling incontinently about conspiracy theories, Satan, murder and devil dolls—people get enough of that shit on the evening news.

Moreover, to give 28 minutes over to watching this is a considerable investment of time for something that may not be that good after all—especially true in a world that’s marked out in 140 characters or less. But wait, let’s not be too hasty or too cynical, for there’s a reason there is no real story to Where Evil Dwells. It is (apparently) because this is all that remains of a much longer intended feature length project which was lost in a fire. The only footage that survived was put together for the Downtown New York Film Festival in 1985, which makes Where Evil Dwells interesting for what it could have been. And it certainly does contain some very interesting things.
 

 
Where Evil Dwells was loosely based on the PCP-fuelled murder of young Gary Lauwers in Northport, New York, on June 16, 1984. His killer, 17-year-old hesher Ricky Kasso was painted by the press as an occult dabbling, drug-addled Satan freak, and not without good cause. In an attack that went on for longer than an hour, Kasso burned Lauwers, gouged out his eyes and stabbed him somewhere between 17 and 36 times. At some point during the attack, Kasso is said to have commanded Lauwers to “Say you love Satan,” but Lauwers is said to have replied, “I love my mother.”

After Kasso bragged about Lauwers’ murder to several of his friends, claiming the killing was a “human sacrifice” that Satan (via a black raven) had commanded him to carry out, even taking some of them to see the decomposing body, an anonymous tip was made to police. On July 7, two days after his arrest, Ricky Kasso committed suicide by hanging himself in his jail cell.

The Long Island Satan teen murder case was made famous nationally in a widely read 1984 Rolling Stone article (”Kids in the Dark” by David Breskin in the November 22 issue) and in the (nearly fictionalized) lurid “true” crime novel Say You Love Satan. Kasso—basically a troubled AC/DC loving idiot who became a very sucessful fuck-up—was almost made out to be the “new” Charles Manson by the likes of Sonic Youth, Big Audio Dynamite, the Electric Hellfire Club and the Dead Milkmen. Where Evil Dwells is not the only film or documentary to be made about Ricky Kasso, although it was the first.

More murder, LSD and Satan teens after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.13.2017
12:42 pm
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Monsters, death and the Mona Lisa stripping: Lorenzo Alessandri, father of Italian surrealism
07.15.2015
11:06 am
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At the end of World War II, Italian artist Lorenzo Alessandri opened up his first studio, naming it “Attic Macabre,” a clear indication of his artistic direction. It wasn’t until 1964 though, that he coined the term “Surfanta” (a portmanteau of surrealism and fantasy) to describe the movement he spearheaded—a wide-ranging genre of other-worldly creatures, horror, sex, mystery, occultism, and a healthy dose of religious and historical farce. He titled a magazine Surfanta, and you can even catch the word in the signage of his paintings, like morbid little Hidden Mickeys. The sheer diversity of his work makes it impossible to do a comprehensive retrospective, but I’ll cover a few of the weirdest highlights—pictures below are relatively safe for work, embedded links are… less so.

Throughout his career, Alessandri had a fascination with grotesque sexuality. He utilized a variety of subjects for the theme, including sentient genitals, anthropomorphic animals and horrifyingly lewd monsters. Not all of his prurient material was disgusting though—there was also his campy “groovy chick” phase, which often featured regular pin-up style ladies in surreal settings. Sometimes the babes themselves were psychedelic—often a shade of electric blue, and sometimes they hung out with his occult characters or his sex-monsters (though they stop short of doing anything hardcore).

In my opinion, Alessandri’s most fascinating and sophisticated work is his series of contemporary fantasy scenarios, which deal most readily with the politics and history of the modern world. The KKK lord over a naked woman before an atom bomb and a gorilla. Mona Lisa does a striptease before an animalian bourgeoisie (he also did a version where she had a penis). There’s also a ton of occult imagery. Airplanes piloted by skeletons (he loves those) roll by estates, landmarks and villages. Shadowy figures—perhaps demonic creatures or paranormal monks—are busy, perhaps frantic. The worlds he created are complex and mysterious—an inscrutable delight.
 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Amber Frost
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07.15.2015
11:06 am
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‘Songs of the Witch Woman’: Exclusive footage of Marjorie Cameron reading ‘Anatomy of Madness’
01.13.2015
12:56 pm
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MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles has extended their Marjorie Cameron exhibit by a week—it’s closing now on the 18th—so if you’re in town and haven’t seen the show, you still have a chance to catch it. In order to bring attention to these extra dates, MOCAtv‘s director Emma Reeves has kindly offered Dangerous Minds readers this exclusive glimpse at some never before seen footage of the artist/occultist reading poetry at the Barnsdall Art Park in East Hollywood in 1989.

The show’s catalog is titled Cameron: Songs for the Witch Woman and it’s quite worth owning if you like this sort of thing.

Via MOCAtv:

Prior to “Cameron: Songs For The Witch Woman,” October 11, 2014–January 18, 2015 at MOCA Pacific Design Center, the largest survey of Marjorie Cameron’s artwork was “The Pearl of Reprisal,” a retrospective at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in 1989. The exhibition spanned thirty years, from the notorious Untitled “Peyote Vision” (1955) to Pluto Transiting the Twelfth House (1978-1986), pen and ink drawings that lent insight to the artist’s psychic state at the time.

Before the opening reception, Hedy Sontag introduced a program titled “An Evening With Cameron: The Pearl of Reprisal.” Sontag screened two films that feature Cameron: Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) and Curtis Harrington’s lyrical documentary The Wormwood Star (1955). After the screening, Cameron emerged barefoot to give a dramatic reading of her poetry by candlelight. Pleasure Dome cast members Samson De Brier and Paul Mathison were among those in attendance.

The reading, which was art directed by Sontag, evokes Cameron in her Topanga Canyon studio, deep in thought as she detaches from the lived world and navigates the subconscious. A prolific writer who shared her work with friends, Cameron was private when inspiration struck. She was known to write in her notebook in social settings, fervently and silently; she forbade visitors to her studio, a sanctum where art-making and writing mingled with astrology and occult ritual.

Though the dates of these journal entries and poems are not known, in their language of mourning and invocation, and use of sacred and Romantic imagery, they are of a piece with the notebooks Cameron kept after the death of Jack Parsons in 1952, as well as the verses she recites in The Wormwood Star, which describe the birth of a spiritual child born of psychic union with Parsons. Notably, Cameron reads prose from “Anatomy of Madness” [5:39], a mixed-media folio included in the exhibition and on view at MOCA. First published in Wallace Berman’s Semina 1 (1956), the text recounts a life cycle of death, rebirth, metamorphosis, and finally, a transcendent spiritual breakthrough.

This never before seen footage, courtesy of the Cameron Parsons Foundation, is a rare document of an artist whose practice had delved further inward, away from the public eye. Due to the quality of the recording, this video has been subtitled. Every effort has been made by MOCA and the Cameron Parsons Foundation to ensure accuracy of the transcription. Please note that the original footage was edited in camera and portions of the reading and poems were omitted by the cameraperson.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.13.2015
12:56 pm
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‘The Ouija board told me I was going to die!’: Is this ‘News’ or merely entertainment?
11.18.2014
09:12 am
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Angela Jackson thought she wouldn’t be seen at the back of the packed hall. She wasn’t sure why she thought this, but felt, knew something was going to happen and she didn’t want anyone (anything) to see her.  Angela wasn’t sure why she had come to this spiritualist meeting, it was just something she thought would be fun, but now she was here she felt she was meant to be here.

Angela thought about her father Charlie, how once as a child she had dreamt that her father would be dead before Christmas. A month later Charlie was diagnosed with cancer and died soon after. If dreams do come true, then maybe nightmares also come true?

The whisper of voices stopped as a woman appeared on the stage. Angela hunched in her seat. The woman looked like she was sleepwalking, but her eyes were open, scanning the audience, looking for someone (something). Angela felt the woman looking, staring at her. How can she see me at the back? She squirmed. But the woman stared at Angela and began to sing:

Welcome to my world..

The room felt cold. No one laughed, no one coughed, no one whispered. The psychic continued:

Won’t you come on in…?

It should have been funny but still no one laughed. It seemed everyone was holding their breath. Angela knew the song—Jim Reeves “Welcome to My World,” it had been one of her father’s favorite songs.

Miracles I guess, Still happen now and then….

Angela looked up at the psychic on the stage, her mouth opening closing singing the words. As soon as their eyes met the woman stopped and said:

“Your dad has a warning for you. You’re thinking about using a Ouija board, but don’t. No good will come from it.”

It was true—Angela had been thinking of using a Ouija board, she knew that it was “risky because there was no knowing who you may connect with. Demons and evil spirits could get through too.” And that he father maybe knew this and was worried about “demons and evil spirits.” Maybe. Despite his warnings, Angela couldn’t get the idea out of her head—she developed a fascination with Ouija board. An idea once sown grows.

Angela from Kilbarchan, Renfrewshire, Scotland, was telling her story to a reporter from the Sunday People newspaper. She sat at home, a cup of tea in her hand, thinking back to what had happened and the horrific events that followed.
 
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One night, two of her neighbors had invited Angela over for drinks. The evening started well, but then the conversation shifted, moved, onto Angela’s favorite subject—the afterlife, and that’s when someone (who?) suggested they try the Ouija board.

“They’d obviously done it before because they pulled out a stack of homemade cards with letters of the alphabet and numbers written on them.”

Angela described to the newspaper how the room was lit by flickering candlelight and the three of them sat cross-legged on cushions around a make-shift Ouija board—which all sounds like the opening scene to a Hammer Horror movie, but let’s continue:

“My heart thudded with excitement as we all placed our index fingers lightly on the bottom of an upturned whisky glass they’d placed on the table.

“It began to pull in every direction. ‘Who is it you want to speak too?’ Robert, my neighbour, asked.

“The glass started moving towards the letters, spelling out… A-N-G-E-L-A.

“The spirit wanted to speak to me. But then it spelt out, ‘Die bitch’. ‘That’s not funny,’ I said. But Robert said, ‘Angela, we didn’t do anything.’ He snatched his finger back from the glass and we all shrieked as the living room door slammed shut on its own.

“My voice quivering, I asked, ‘Who are you?’ With only my finger on the glass it moved faster. ‘I was murdered,’ it scrawled. ‘Just like you’re going to be.’”

Angela asked again: “Who are you?”

This time the glass moved quickly spelling out the word: “S-A-T-A-N.” (Was Satan “murdered”? I wonder…)

Angela screamed, then shouted, “I’m not scared—to hell with you!”

The tumbler flew from the Ouija board and smashed against the living room wall. (Of course, it did…)

One of the neighbors jumped up and turned on the lights. “We should never do this again,” he said. There was a sense of fear, panic, as the candles were quickly snuffed out, thin black fingers of smoke reached up.

Though Angela was terrified, she needed to know more—she couldn’t stop now, she had to find out what was going to happen—she was the one who was going to be “murdered,” or so she believed. It preyed on her mind, festered, she had to know. Eventually they (who?) did try again, but this time there was no answer, no message, nothing. But still Angela couldn’t stop thinking about it. (Cue dramatic music…)

“Then one night I woke screaming and sweating from a terrible nightmare. I’d dreamt I was being attacked by a man carrying a hammer.

“That’s when I knew things had gone too far. I was scaring myself to death. I’m not doing the Ouija board any more, I vowed.”

This was later, after the neighbors (what were their names?)  had moved away,  when Angela had no one to share her sense of foreboding, her fears. Everytime she went out she felt people staring at her, watching her, waiting.

Then one night, leaving her home to visit her 28-year-old son, Darren, who lived nearby, Angela locked the front door and walked down the cold concrete stairwell steps to the street below. As she left the building, talking to her son on a cell phone, from the corner of her eye she sensed someone move towards her.

“From behind me I heard a voice. ‘Die bitch,’ it growled. I froze at the sound of those words. Shaking with fear, I turned to see a man in a white T-shirt, emerging from the shadows wielding a claw hammer.

“I screamed as he brought the weapon down on my head with a sickening thud. He hit me again and warm blood began trickling down my face.

“I couldn’t see where my attacker was I just wanted to get away. Drenched in blood, I made it to the front door and then collapsed.

“Waking in hospital I felt confused and groggy. ‘You were attacked,’ a doctor explained. ‘You’ve suffered a fractured skull.’”

Angela told the police what she remembered, but her attacker was never found.

Over the following months, she lived in fear that this deranged man would return “and finish the job, just as the spirit had warned through the Ouija board.”

But this never happened. Six years on, Angela is still scared that “the spirit’s prediction will one day come true.”

“If I’d listened to Dad’s warnings through the psychic maybe none of this would’ve happened. But now I’m warning all of you - never mess with Ouija boards. You don’t know what evil lurks in the afterlife.”

It’s a good yarn, but is any of it true? It appears to me, we have three separate events that have been drawn together to create one personal narrative, which may (or may not) be true. Angela is a woman who has suffered various personal and private tragedies in her life (some of which have been documented in various newspapers), but my concern is not with her, but with the veracity of her tale and how it has been reported.

For example, when Angela was attacked in January 2008, she made “claims to know her attacker and that she has been involved in a financial dispute with the man.” If she knew her attacker, then why were there no arrests? If there was an arrest, then what happened next? There is no paper trail of news stories reporting what did happen next, just strange, scurrilous, rather serious and possibly libellous allegations made on certain blogs. This inability to ask pertinent questions is all part of that journalistic amnesia from which news reportage appears to suffer with growing frequency.

This is especially true in regard of the two papers reporting these stories as the Sunday People, who covered the Ouija board story, and the Daily Record, who reported the attack, are owned by the same company. Did they not carry-out any background research or delve further into the story?

Next, who were Angela’s neighbors who invited her in for a seance? What were their names? Where did they go? Was the tumbler smashed against a wall? Did the glass spell out “Satan”? Was murder threatened? Why is there no corroboration of these reported events? Surely it would not have been too difficult to ask other neighbors as to who these mysterious people are? Or, even check with the electoral register as to who lived in the house at the time?

Then of course, we are not told where this original psychic meeting held? Who organized it? When? What are other people’s memories of it? Who was the psychic who sang the Jim Reeves number? It’s all great atmospheric detail but little more than scene-setting without any corroboration.

Indeed, the story leaves so many questions unanswered that it suggests the whole tale is probably bogus. And if it is bogus then a bigger and possibly better mystery becomes visible—Why would anyone tell such a tale? And why publish it?
 
Via the Sunday People
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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11.18.2014
09:12 am
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Queen Elizabeth’s Magician: a docu-drama about Dr John Dee


 
A couple of months ago Damon Albarn premiered his new work Dr Dee: An English Opera as part of the Manchester International Festival. As the name would suggest, Dr Dee concerns the life of the Elizabethan mathematician, cartographer and magician John Dee, with original music composed by Albarn (singing and conducting a chamber group live on stage throughout the show). Well, maybe it was because I was so blown away by Bjork’s magical Biophilia show a few days earlier at the festival, but I found the opera to be a massive let down. You can read more of my thoughts on Dr Dee An English Opera here.

One of the main complaints levelled at Albarn’s production was that its oblique nature did nothing to explain the fascinating story of John Dee to an audience unfamiliar with the man. I was lucky enough to have some knowledge in advance and was able to spot some of the key moments in Dee’s life - but even then the narrative felt scrambled and made little use of some incredible source material (namely the man’s incredible life story). That’s despite this promising write up in the MIF’s program:

There was once an Englishman so influential that he defined how we measure years, so quintessential that he lives on in Shakespeare’s words; yet so shrouded in mystery that he’s fallen from the very pages of history itself.
That man was Dr Dee – astrologer, courtier, alchemist, and spy.

Queen Elizabeth’s Magician - John Dee is a 2002 television show produced by the UK’s Channel 4 for their Masters of Darkness series, and tells the man’s incredible story in a much more accessible way. While perhaps not revealing anything that the more avid Dee student wouldn’t already know, the show is informative and entertaining (if slightly cheesy) and serves as a good introduction to the man and his legacy. It’s also a good watch for fans of Alan Moore, who appears throughout the show and talks of Dee’s magical practices and their influence - and the three-note “spooky” sax motif is more memorable than anything in Albarn’s opera: 
 

 
Previously on DM:
Dr. Dee: sneak preview of new Damon Albarn opera about 16th Century Alchemist

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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09.01.2011
09:07 pm
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