Recently finished Martin Starr’s epic “The Unknown God: W.T. Smith and the Thelemites,” published by Teitan Press, an immaculately researched history of Aleister Crowley’s neo-religion Thelema after Crowley’s personal story trails off. Crowley’s life has been documented ad nauseum, what hasn’t been is the history of his ideas after his death and what happened to the people who took them seriously (“By their works shall ye know them”). Martin Starr fixes that historical oversight here, providing fascinating insights not only into occultism during the two World Wars (including all the bickering infighting between the various occult orders?

Last night I caught Enki Bilal’s 2004 CGI flick “Immortel (ad vitam)”?

 
The Selvedge Yard has a wonderful photo essay dedicated to the super-duper-awesomeness of the 70s custom van craze. I miss the days of carpeting in vans.
 

 
Sleep Talkin’ Man is one of the hottest “viral” sensations on the Internet and Twitter these days. It’s as funny as Shit My Dad Says but in a different vein. What STM is all about is simple, it’s the day to day transcriptions of what one woman’s “mild-mannered English husband” spouts while he’s sleeping at night, utterly hilarious “surrealisms” to savor:
 

Jan 12 2010

“I’m making pillows. Burn them slowly, keeps them fluffy! Mmmmmm, pillows.”

“Potato bags. I can’t find my potato bags. I need them! [desperately] Who’s got my potato bags? Oh, fuck it! I’ll have to use something else.”

“Dogs’ scrotums. They stretch.”

“Pork chops are most satisfying. Mmmmmmm. Dangle them from the ceiling.”

Wife’s note: After we listened to the recording, Adam turned to me and said, “I’ve never had pork chops.”

 
Wonderful short essay from Christopher Hitchens, writing about British novelist J.G. Ballard on the occasion of the publication of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard.

From The Atlantic:

For all that, Ballard is arguably best-known to a wide audience because of his relatively ?

ScienceDaily reports on a species of ants that has adopted a completely asexual lesbian society…

Most social insects?

South African crime lord “Fat Murphy” is not only feared on the streets of Cape Town, he’s also a congenital hermaphrodite. Police were pleasantly surprised recently when, during a chase, Murphy’s plastic dong fell out of his pants.

SOUTH African police caught more than they expected in a Cape Town drug raid when a strap-on dildo fell off a suspected crime lord during a search, the Sunday Times reported.

Fat Murphy, feared on the streets of Cape Town’s notorious Cape Flats suburb, told a court that he is a hermaphrodite who holds male and female identity documents - one under the name Fadwaan, the other under Hilary.

Police and a tearful Murphy recounted the saga during a bail hearing for Murphy’s charges of possession of stolen property, which come on top of earlier charges of kidnapping and intimidation, the paper said.

“I had a vagina that could not be penetrated. But I also had male organs, testes. But I always knew I was really a man and that was what I wanted to be,” he told the court, according to the newspaper.

“God created me with both sexual organs. It was God’s decision, not mine.”

Included below is King Missle’s early 90s hit “Detachable Penis.”

(News.com.au: “Crime Lord’s” Fake Penis Falls Off During Raid)

 
Sadness in the streets! The Bodhi Tree, one of the best bookstores, period, and THEE very best New Age and Spirituality bookstore anywhere on the planet is closing. Although in recent years I’ve not gone there nearly as much as I used to, in the mid-90s, I went to the Bodhi Tree every single Saturday morning without fail and poured over the shelves of the used books annex. There I found Leary first editions, tons of rare Crowley and even signed firsts of Terence McKenna’s The Invisible Landscape and True Hallucinations. I’d comb through this store sometimes twice a week. For book hounds into the occult and weirdo culture in general, the Bodhi Tree was like an intellectual candy shop. I felt great pride to see my own books and DVDs for sale there. But sadly, those days have passed. With Amazon and Barnes & Noble taking massive bites out of the profits of niche booksellers—Shirley MacLaine probably shops on Amazon—it’s hard to run a business on fumes. Even storied operations like the Bodhi Tree, in the end have their life cycles. I wonder what it will reincarnate as?

From the LA Weekly:

Owners Phil Thompson and Stan Madson informed their staff last Wednesday that the cozy Melrose Avenue shop, a nationally renowned and much beloved spiritual center, will be shutting its doors in a year’s time.

After some eight months of discussion, Thompson and Madson decided to sell the property to a local business owner who leases space to several other nearby retailers. The Bodhi Tree opened in 1970. Land values in the area have risen dramatically since then. Meanwhile, the business of selling print books has been on a steady decline. For years, real estate agents had been circling the Bodhi Tree like vultures. In the end, selling the property became a much more profitable option than continuing to sell books.

Thompson and Madson started the bookstore when they were in their 30’s. They are now both in their early 70’s. They were aerospace engineers who left a life of science for one of contemplation and meditation.

“Twenty years ago we felt like it was an expanding situation,” says Madson. “We were concerned the store was getting too big. We had a staff of 100. Publishing was expanding. Spirituality was expanding. But what changed was that the market became widely dispersed.”