William Hope Hodgson was a master of the cosmically weird tale?
My dear friend and collaborator Scott Treleaven (who contributed an excellent essay on a life lived with magick to my anthology Generation Hex) has an upcoming solo exhibition from Oct 31 - Dec 5 at Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago. Not to be missed if you live in the area (or don’t)!
From the site:
Kavi Gupta Gallery is pleased to present our third solo exhibition of new work by Canadian, Paris-based artist, Scott Treleaven.
Treleaven’s current exhibit memorializes the beautiful delirium of the 19th-century psychocultural impetus to capture the ephemeral - that which throbs just beneath the scrim of consciousness or skin, via travelogue, spirit photography, or film paraphernalia. Viewers engage with uncanny dioramas of spirit and corpus that unveil the foreignness of landscapes inner and outer. Refusing the smug muscularity of traditional self/other, artist/muse epistemologies, the exhibit creates illumination through obliquity, while agency becomes an illusion of static-free perceptual transparency. Its images reveal the poignant fetishism that converts bone, severed organ, or shard into a saintly relic suggesting a beloved whole that only ever flowers elsewhere; ways in which we all transform the meager specimen into Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs.
Uncovering the secret multivalence of European cities, constructed as much by projections of transients as by phantasmatic legacies of their own cultural histories, Treleaven’s ink and collage drawing of the Palais Royal’s urban gardens are nightscapes that yield tenuous epiphanies, shadow plays of pleasure and/or peril. The Arrangement, a table-top vitrine filled with photos, drawings and handmade books, invokes curiosity cabinets, naturalist’s and traveler’s diaries, embossed photographs, the embalming arc of museum glass. Hinting at Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes, its incantations are no less magical than those of The Passenger’s grimoire. Sitting as part of an installation triptych, its aesthetic of fragmentation via collage of stock and personal “footage” reveals the fault lines of memory, projection, and fetishism, mapping ambiguous journeys, occult communion, and liaisons. A rabbit emerges from a top hat floating between watercolour blood red curtains and abattoir-stage, questioning agency as magical acts erupt of their own volition.
The exhibit also features a moving video installation of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge done by Treleaven.
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Hundreds of thousands have thrilled to the Indian Superman, but fewer have seen the Filipino Batman…
Batman en Robin is a Bat-spoof made in the Philippines in 1993. It stars comedian Joey de Leon and his son Keempee de Leon. The Penguin-character is called Chu-p-a-enguin, which literally means “Blowjob-guin” in Spanglish. There are musical numbers—why not?—and Wonder Woman makes an appearance. A midget Spiderman, too. And check out the Joker!
In the final scene, the cast does a nutty cover version of At The Hop with lyrics like “Let’s be good of blood, Let’s be good of heart, Let’s be afraid of God, Let’s believe in LOVE!”
Alexandra David-Neel was one of the first Western women to gain access to Tibet, which had been closed to almost all Western travelers up to that point. She is a towering figure in Eastern studies, largely for her book Magic and Mystery in Tibet, an account of the mystic hi-japes she witnessed in the country during her visit. From the Wiki:
Alexandra David-N?ɬ
From Pravda.ru:
Inscriptions of Prophet Muhammad regarded with the same reverence as the Quran appear and then disappear on the body of a nine-month-old child born in a small village of Krasno-Oktyabrskoye, the Republic of Dagestan, RIA Novosti news agency reports.
According to a representative of a local musk, the signs in Arab first appeared on the body of the new-born Ali Yakubov a few days after his birth.
The child?
Robert Crumb’s Book of Genesis (previously covered on Dangerous Minds here) as reviewed by atheist Greta Christina:
Of course I’ve read Genesis. More than once. It’s been a little while since I’ve read the whole thing all the way through, but it’s not like it’s unfamiliar. But there’s something about seeing the story fleshed out in images to make some of its more striking narrative turns leap out and grab your brain by the root. There’s nothing quite like seeing the two different creation stories enacted on the page to make you go, “Hey! That’s right! Two completely different creation stories!” There’s nothing quite like seeing Lot offer his daughters to be gang-raped to make you recoil in shock and moral horror. There’s nothing quite like seeing the crazed dread and burning determination in Abraham’s eyes as he prepares the sacrifice of his own son to make you feel the enormity of this act. Reading these stories in words conveys the ideas; seeing them in images conveys the visceral impact. It makes it all seem vividly, immediately, humanly real.
Now, that is something of a mixed blessing. Spending a few days with the characters in Genesis isn’t the most relaxing literary vacation you’ll ever take. Richard Dawkins wasn’t kidding when he said, “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.” The God character in Genesis is cruel, violent, callous, insecure, power-hungry, paranoid, hot-tempered, morally fickle… I could go on and on. And God’s followers aren’t much better. They lie, they scheme, they cheat one another, they conquer other villages with bloodthirsty imperialist glee, they kill at the drop of a hat. This isn’t Beatrix Potter here. It’s more like Dangerous Liaisons by way of Quentin Tarantino. With tents, sand, and sheep.
(AlterNet: An Atheist’s Review of the Book of Genesis Illustrated by a Legendary Comics Artist)
(Check out Crumb’s The Book of Genesis here.)
Limelight-loving L.A. City Atty. Carmen Trutanich has been making headlines and television appearances in recent weeks with his all-out legal assault on medical marijuana dispensaries. Unfortunately for Trutanich, U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder feels that prosecution of medical marijuana patients should be a low priority for law enforcement officials and said so in a memo released Monday. Ouch. Trutanich and L.A. County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley got another setback on Monday as well when a circuit judge ruled that the city’s moratorium on medical marijuana dispensaries was illegally extended. Double ouch.
But what might be the most compelling reason of all for Trutanich and Cooley to back off the cannabis biz is the overwhelming support for medical marijuana of the voters who elected them both in the first place.
As John Hoeffel reports from the L.A. Times local desk, over three-quarters of eligible voters are strongly pro-medical marijuana and would prefer to see the dispensaries regulated and taxed, not forced to close:
The poll, completed Monday and Tuesday, also found that 74% support the state’s medical marijuana law, while 54% want to see marijuana legalized, regulated and taxed.
The Marijuana Policy Project, based in Washington, D.C., commissioned the poll by an independent firm, Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, after Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley threatened all dispensaries in the county with prosecution.
—snip—
The poll of 625 voters found that 77% of voters want to regulate dispensaries, while 14% want them closed. Both Democrats (83%-7%) and Republicans (62%-30%) support regulation over prosecution. The Los Angeles City Council is on the verge of adopting regulations after two years of debate and almost 13 years after voters passed Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act.
Even with the stated 4% give-or-take margin of error of the Mason-Dixon poll, this is a uniquely compelling report for Trutanich and Cooley to pay close attention to, especially since it will be these very same voters who’ll be determining their reelection prospects in the future.
Medical marijuana poll: Most L.A. voters support dispensaries by John Hoeffel
Cross posting this at Brand X
Cannabis Orbs by Sookie Sooker
The LA Times recently noted the 30th birthday of Phantasm, the first entry in director Don Coscarelli‘s quartet of Phantasm horror films. Scraped together from a meager budget, and shot and edited over a period of roughly 20 months, Phantasm and its sequels continue to suck me in with a frequency that I’m sure wreaks havoc with whatever Netflix algorithm crunches out the recommendations linking those films to L’Eclisse.
For Phantasm newbies here’s the story (the bare bones, so to speak), per its official film site:
Michael Baldwin and Bill Thornbury star as two brothers who discover that their local mortuary hides a legion of hooded killer dwarf-creatures, a flying silver sphere of death, and is home to the sinister mortician known only as the Tall Man. This nefarious undertaker (with an iconic performance by Angus Scrimm) enslaves the souls of the damned and in the process his character has entered the pantheon of classic horror villains.
Sounds kicky, right? What the synopsis leaves out, though—and what no synopsis could possibly accommodate—is precisely that elusive, unquantifiable element that makes the Phantasm films, in my eyes, so haunting. Whether due to exigencies of budget or imagination, the logic these films operate under is so far out and unpredictable, the effect is like watching a 6-hour nightmare unspool before your eyeballs.
How is one supposed to reconcile, exactly, hooded dwarves, funeral homes, and flying, eyeball-gouging orbs? Um, I’m not sure you can, really (believe me, I’ve tried!). And as the quartet progresses, the entire Phantasm mythology assumes ever-more grand and baroque dimensions. For example…
SPOILER ALERT: About those dwarves? Oh, they’re ultimately destined for another planet. Those flying silver balls? They’re storage containers for the souls of the recently departed. END SPOILERS.
Contrast that inability to reconcile so many dreamy, disparate elements with the boringly formulaic, teenage-slashing rhythms of Freddy and Jason, and you can begin to understand how I consider Don Coscarelli more in league with Suspiria-meister Dario Argento, than the Wes Craven of Scream and Elm Street.
And, much like Argento, whose capacity for creative bloodletting seems undiminshed by time, Coscarelli continues to direct. His last film, the cult-fave Bubba Ho-Tep, starred the always great Ossie Davis and Bruce Campbell. The trailer for the original Phantasm follows below:
In the LA Times: Happy Birthday, Tall Man! “Phantasm” Turns 30
