So much Church of Scientology news to catch up on from the weekend, and it all seems to revolve around its Celebrity Centre head, Tommy Davis (see above).

First, writer-director Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby) with his blistering “open letter” to Davis attacking him for: A.) backing the sponsorship of the gay-rights-denying Proposition 8, and B.) downplaying the existence of the Church’s “disconnection” policy, which (strongly!) encourages its current members to severe all ties to those who dare flee resign from Scientology.

Next comes Nightline’s equally harrowing Scientology “expose.”  In the clip below (Part III of V), Martin “Ambush” Bashir, familiar to—and beloved by—many for his role as Michael Jackson’s “Grand Inquisitor,” tangles with Davis over how to best reconcile mainstreamy Church doctrine with galactic emperor, Xenu.  The fallout begins at the clip’s end, with links below to the entire Nightline special. 

Random factoid: Tommy Davis is the son of actress Anne Archer, Scientology grande dame, and co-star of that excellent ‘70s film, Lifeguard.

 
On ABC’s Nightline: Scientology Exposed Part I, II, IV, V

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Scientology But Were Afraid To Ask

(via NY Mag)

Sebastian Horsley is the author of Dandy in the Underworld, famous for publicly (literally) crucifying himself and for having been turned away from the US at Customs in New York for being a bad influence on American morals. They still make these guys? I thought they’d given up by now. But, improbably, Sebastian Horsley exists, and you and I are the richer for it.

In the below video, Horsely explains the morals, economics and perks of spending your entire inheritance on prostitutes. Cool story bro.

This may be a bit of old news, but I’d never seen it before, and if you haven’t, either, I suspect this will impress you as much as it did me.

GenPets are bioengineered human/animal hybrids which come in plastic packaging in suspended animation. Once you buy one you get to “activate” them and let them loose. About the Pets from the site:

The Genpets?

Interesting video from Informationactivism.org, found via the excellent responsible-advertising blog Osocio.

10 tactics for turning information into action shows how rights advocates around the world have used the internet and digital technologies to create positive change. The 50 minute film will be launched at the Front Line Club in London, in December 2009 with a series of screenings worldwide. It is accompanied with a deck of cards featuring tools, tips and advice to help you plan your Info-activism action. The 10 Tactics project website will be launched in November.

Osocio: 10 Tactics for Turning Information Into Action)

B.J. Snowden with Fred Schneider from the B-52s
 
The companion piece to the Songs in the Key of Z post (see below) is what came right after it on the show, the music video for B.J. Snowden’s mighty In Canada video, taken from her Life in the USA and Canada CD. BJ Snowden is a very interesting talent. Her songs are catchy, they are original and they are fully formed. They are also malformed, but I don’t mean that in an insulting way, I’m just trying to describe her music accurately. B.J. could have been another Andrew Lloyd Webber, except that her music is missing a few chromosomes.

Suffice to say, once you have heard this song even one time, you will never, ever forget it.

In one of those incredible-but-true show business stories, fate has played a role in Ms. Snowden?

 
Here’s a blast from the past (well my past, not yours): some kind soul has put the outsider music piece I did for the Disinformation series years ago on YouTube. I haven’t seen this clip in years and it was weird to see myself nearly ten years younger. (It’s my birthday today, so I keep trying to tell myself “You haven’t changed much!”).

Featured in this clip is the wonderful Irwin Chusid, author of Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music, which is well worth your time. It may even launch a few new musical obsessions.

“Brokeback Island” by Dave MacDowell
 

“Fat Kenickie” by Danielle Rizzolo
 
Here’s an amusing look at a Kevin Smith-themed art show held at Gallery Nineteen Eighty Eight in Los Angeles. More paintings here.
 
(via Nerdcore)

Excellent GOOD Magazine essay on how 30 Rock has enriched our cultural lexicon.

Since it?

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.

(Scott Treleaven: Your shadow at morning striding behind you or your shadow at evening rising to meet you)