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‘Wormwood’: The Bible according to the Residents
03.07.2022
07:21 am
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‘KILL HIM!’: ‘Wormwood’ on stage (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)

The new Wormwood box set, the latest installment in Cherry Red’s pREServed series of Residents reissues, runs to nine CDs etched with nearly nine hours of music. Not quite James Earl Jones Reads the Bible territory (sixteen CDs, nineteen hours), it nevertheless presents the Residents’ 1998 biblical epic at a scale appropriate to the form. Perhaps God, sufficiently enraged by humanity to send plagues, pestilences, fires, and hurricanes, has also seen fit to unleash this mighty flood of scriptural content, which makes the meager 203 minutes of the Charlton Heston Presents the Bible four-DVD set look like a positive insult to the Almighty.

Wormwood: Curious Stories from the Bible, by one count the Residents’ twenty-third album, draws most of its lurid tales of rape, incest, and murder from the books of the Old Testament (though they also give us a Judas who understands betraying Jesus as his divine calling, as well as a five-and-a-half-minute instrumental based on Revelation). There are surprising takes on familiar stories—the same chapter from the Book of Daniel that inspired Johnny Cash to write “Belshazzar” moved the Residents to write “God’s Magic Finger,” and “Bathsheba Bathes” gives a decidedly less pious take on David than Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”—and songs based on tales few other songwriters have dared to tell, like Jael pounding a tent peg into Sisera’s skull while he sleeps.

Though Wormwood boasts more circumcisions than any rock record since Saccharine Trust’s Surviving You, Always, not to mention the winning contributions of Molly Harvey and Carla Fabrizio, it has never been my favorite Residents album. But listening to this box set has given me a new appreciation of the size and ambition of the Wormwood project, and how fruitful this period was for the group. In context with eight discs of supplementary material, the original album comes to seem like a preliminary sketch for a sprawling creation that kept the Residents busy for about four years, and included some remarkable work.

The Residents do not, of course, grant interviews, but I was able to contact Homer Flynn, the president of the Cryptic Corporation, and Richard Anderson, who oversees the pREServed series at Cherry Red Records, and subject each of them to a battery of haranguing and hairsplitting questions about matrix numbers, obi strips and session dates. Choice excerpts follow. I should mention that Richard drew my attention to a Residents compilation LP that had escaped my notice called Leftovers Again?!, issued for Record Store Day last year. It starts with a concentrate of the legendary, unreleased early recording Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor and proceeds through material from the Residents’ tape archive throughout the Seventies. Much of the LP consists of “RDX” (as in “redux,” I believe) mixes, new presentations of the original recordings of beloved Residents songs that often feature sounds from the multitrack tapes that didn’t make the final mix.


The Residents, 1998 (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)

Homer Flynn

 
As it happens, I was in the audience at the beginning of the tour in Boston, so I didn’t really realize how much the material evolved and changed after that. Could you talk a little bit about how the show changed when it went on the road?

Well, you know, Residents stuff usually does change. They do albums and then—maybe this is typical of a lot of artists, I don’t know—but it’s kind of like, when somebody writes and records something, in a lot of ways that’s just a kind of first, brief glimpse into the material, and then as they start to perform it, they find out more and more what they feel like it wants to be, and more how it works, and particularly how it works in front of an audience. So honestly it’s kind of an unpredictable path that it takes, many times.

Another example: when they were doing the Cube-E tour, which was like ten years earlier, you know, the second half of it was all Elvis songs, and one that just really came to life so much in performance was “Teddy Bear.” You know, Elvis sang it as such a light, upbeat pop song, and the Residents just felt like there were all these really incredible, almost like S&M undertones in it, and that then really came out in terms of the performance. So it’s kind of typical, I think, in a lot of ways with them for these things to change.

Part of being in front of an audience, maybe, seeing what works and what doesn’t?

Exactly. What brings out the attention and reaction of an audience makes a lot of difference.
 

‘Mr. Skull Superstar’ (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)
 
There are a lot of things I learned reading the liner notes to this box set. I guess [show opener] “Nober” was only played in Boston and then dropped from the set.

I’m not really sure what the thought was behind that, at this point. Maybe they felt like it was a little too long or a little too slow of a way to get into the set, and they felt like they needed something that grabbed the audience’s attention more? But, like I say, you’re reminding me of something I’d long forgotten about, really.

Well, in the Fillmore show—maybe you can help me sort out the chronology, here, Homer, I think the Fillmore show came before the tour?

Yeah, I think so. I think everything was put together in San Francisco at the Fillmore, and then they took it on the road.

The live version of “KILL HIM!” towards the beginning of that is really a fierce piece of music.

Well, I think that was one of the stronger pieces from that show and from that album.

Did that show have the big gamelan orchestra?

It had the gamelan in San Francisco, yeah. And then I think they came back later and did some shows at the Brava Theater in San Francisco, and I think they brought the gamelan back for that again, too. But once again, it was a long time ago, and while I’ve been through the box set, I haven’t actually revisited and listened to all that stuff again. So you’re more up on it and more familiar with it at this point than I am.
 

A Resident (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)
 
If you can remember, then, maybe you can talk about the origin of the project. Did the Residents read the King James Bible, or how did the project come into being?

Well, they were looking for a project, and for the Residents, often they start with some kind of a concept. Things can work in different ways; sometimes they just start recording, and the concept finds itself in that process. But often, they would like to try to find a concept first, and I don’t remember exactly where the idea of the Bible came from, but when it came out, it was like instantaneously: “Yes! Yes! The Bible!”

You’re looking at a bunch of people who all were, you know, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants growing up in the South, and they moved away from that; almost needless to say, they’re not really that religious. But they started seeing the Bible as so much of the underpinnings of Western culture on so many levels, and the more research they did with it, the more true that became. There’s just a million things in terms of so much of our laws, and morals, and stories, even people’s names, people that you run into on a very common basis. You find out, this woman’s name is Ruth; okay, well, that comes from the Bible. And there’s so many like that, it then became a very fascinating subject to explore and then dig into.

And I think particularly, once again, so much emphasis over recent culture has been put on the New Testament, which is Jesus, and love, and all that. But the really meaty stuff is the old stuff. That’s what really got them excited.

I remember wondering at the time if the Residents ever felt overwhelmed by the heaviness of the material. It’s not like the Residents’ material is always happy, but this is just like unrelieved rape, murder, God wants more foreskins—

Yeah, mountains of foreskins. Yeah, right, exactly. I think they were kind of blown away by a lot of it, honestly. But once again, that just reinforced that decision to be moving in that direction, using that as content for their music.

When they were choosing the stories, were they looking for anything in particular? Was it the stories that jumped off the page?

They did research. One of the things they weren’t necessarily aware of—it’s obvious, I guess, when you think about it, but they weren’t necessarily aware of it—you know, what we call the Old Testament is the Jewish Bible, and it’s kind of ironic in a way that you can have these ideological conflicts between Christians and Jews when they all kind of base so much of their religion on the same writing. But there was a book that they found that was written by a rabbi. I’ve had reasons, for interviews like this, where I’ve wanted to name that book and I have not been able to locate it. I even looked on Amazon at one time trying to find it, I don’t know if it’s still in print or not. But this rabbi went through all of these Old Testament stories and brought out the deeper meaning in so many of them, so much of the stuff that was buried or kind of glossed over. In a lot of ways, that was probably the primary source of a lot of the material that they chose.
 

Detail from an early print on the ‘W***** B*** Album’ label (via Discogs)
 
Well, you mentioned that the Residents aren’t super-religious, but there does seem to be a preoccupation—I mean, not exclusively, the Residents’ catalog is so huge—but it does seem that the theme of religion comes up. At the end of that Mole Show video, there’s the joke Penn Jillette tells that one of the Residents told him, “Why did the little moron resurrect Christ?” Do you have any idea about the context of that joke?

I know exactly what you’re talking about: “Why did the little moron resurrect Christ? To get to the other side.” And it’s one of those kind of jokes that, it’s funny on so many levels, once you stop and think about it? I certainly remember that, but I’m drawing a blank trying to think of what the origin of it was.

You know, another thing that was inspiring to them in terms of the Wormwood choice is, the Residents in general are not especially political, but this was around the time that the religious right started, the very beginning, I think, of it starting to become a political force. Which now, God, has turned into who knows what, but certainly not positive from my perspective or the Residents’.

But there’s so much hypocrisy involved in that. You know, I went to the Methodist Church when I was young. I think of so much of what the rhetoric and the dialogue and the content was, and it was so much about love and inclusion at that time, and they pretty much stayed away from politics. And it’s gone so far away from that. I think that the Residents, in some ways, were kind of delighted to pull out these weird, dark Bible stories, to kind of put it in the face of the religious right that would just as soon pretend that stuff didn’t exist.
 

via residents.com

This was the end of a period of not touring for the Residents. I wonder what their sense of being on the road was—there’s that funny version of the Grand Funk song [“we’re coming to your town, we’re gonna worship it down”]. But there’s a sense in which it’s the most traditional form of American show business to go on the road with a bunch of Bible stories. Do you have any insight into how they felt about that, or if they perceived themselves as participating… it’s not that far from a kind of revival show.

Well, yeah, in a way, I can see what you’re talking about. It’s almost like it’s an anti-revival show.

Yeah.

But in a way that kind of doubles back on itself and becomes sort of the same thing. They really weren’t seeing, I don’t think, that much implication in it. That Boston show, as I remember, there were people that protested that. There were maybe a handful, very few, instances of something like that. But from the Residents’ point of view, other than to their fans, they consider themselves to be fairly invisible, and consequently don’t warrant that much attention from the culture at large. So they never really had any sense that that would garner that much attention. And for the most part it didn’t, really. They’ve done other things, the whole Third Reich ‘n Roll stuff, whatever; it got a little outrage here and there, but on the other hand, it was pretty much ignored.

It seems like some of the outrage comes up in Berkeley. [Jim Knipfel’s liner notes mention that a Wormwood date in Berkeley was suddenly canceled.]

Well, and that’s where it came up for Third Reich ‘n Roll.

At Rather Ripped, right?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. You know, Rather Ripped was one of the first stores to really push and promote the Residents’ music, and it was the fifth anniversary of the store, and they said, “Okay, you can have the window of the store, do whatever you want to.” And they did [laughs] and Berkeley wasn’t happy with it! They were kind of shocked, I think, in a way. What’s fascinating to me is, I suppose it’s not so much the power of the swastika and Nazi imagery, it’s more that it still resonates so loudly within the culture, and from my point of view, and I think the Residents’ too, more so now than it did in the mid-Seventies, which, if you think about it, seems kind of strange. But we’re in strange times.
 

‘Fire Fall’ (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)
 
I know the Wormwood DVD I have is from Germany. Jim Knipfel mentions a show at the House of Blues in Las Vegas. Is there a video of that, too?

I don’t think there is. The most notable things about that to me was, one—I mean, the Residents were thrilled to play Las Vegas, but at the same time, what was notable was how few people showed up for the show. The Residents are not really a Las Vegas kind of an act. It wasn’t a mistake from their point of view, they were thrilled to be there, but I think, from the promoter’s point of view, if you think about it, the Residents are not the kind of act you go to Las Vegas to see.

But the other thing was that Penn and Teller came to the show, and they loved it, they just totally flipped out, they thought it was great.

I seem to remember the Residents appearing—maybe Penn and Teller had a variety show around that time?

Well, they’ve had a couple of three variety shows. There was a [video] that we put out for the Residents called The Eyes Scream. It was kind of an early best-of, in a way, but then [Penn and Teller] would do segments in between the videos to kind of glue it together.

I think there was maybe one show that the Residents and Penn and Teller did together in San Francisco?

Yeah, I’m trying to think which one that was. It was the end of a tour. It would either have been the 13th anniversary show or Cube-E. I remember it was a Bill Graham show, it was a big show.
 

‘A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1’

I love the Residents’ A Sight for Sore Eyes book, and I notice it’s hopefully titled “Volume One.” Are there gonna be more volumes, as far as you know?

The plan is three volumes, and I know that this one has done pretty well. So that should guarantee at least Volume Two [smiles], we’ll see from there. Everybody around here is extremely happy with it. As the keeper of the visual archives, I worked with Aaron [Tanner] pretty closely, and really enjoyed working with him and thought he did a fantastic job.

Do you ever come across stuff in the archives that’s surprising to you, doing this kind of stuff, or is it all pretty familiar to you?

I’ve run across stuff that I haven’t seen for a long time, that can surprise me: “Oh, I kept that!” [Laughs] I used to say that all the Residents’ imagery neatly divided up into two twenty-year segments. Well, now, it’s a lot closer to a twenty-year and a thirty-year [segment]. The first twenty years was all analog. I went digital with Photoshop and those tools in the early to mid-Nineties, so there’s not as many interesting artifacts.

I always tell people, if you are a production artist trying to create things that have to be reproduced, digital tools are fantastic. If you like the weird, old, crazy artifacts that got spun off one way or another through analog work, well, you don’t really get that very much anymore. Like so many things in life, there’s an upside and a downside.

I have a cabinet right over here with photographs in it, and a lot of those have never been digitized. Sometimes, I can find myself going back and looking for something, and that’s what can really surprise me—that picture got made, or that picture got made. Because, like I say, a lot of that stuff has never been digitized.

I’ve donated a lot of the Residents’ analog tape archive to the Museum of Modern Art, and at some point, I expect to be donating all of this film stuff, and I’m hoping that I can talk them into digitizing all of it so I will actually have it all in that form.

It must be a massive amount of stuff at this point.

It’s a lot. It’s a lot of stuff, yeah.


‘Burn Baby Burn’ (courtesy of Cherry Red Records)

Richard Anderson

 
It just happened that it was originally going to be six, then seven, then eight, then nine [discs], because people reached out to Carla Fabrizio, and she ended up coming up with a whole disc’s worth of extra stuff, and also Hardy would ask this guy Chris Kellas to record shows, and he recorded the [two-disc] Wormwood at the Fillmore show. That was kind of a late addition, so it kind of leapt from six to nine discs at the very last minute, actually.

And it was particularly interesting because the Fillmore show is different to the tour. It was just the album, whereas obviously for the tour they wrote a whole load of other songs.

And there’s the gamelan orchestra.

Yeah, right. I think the idea behind it, and with all of the box sets, really, is to show [how] these Residents live projects tend to evolve. They seem to do like a couple of dress rehearsals in San Francisco, figure out what was right and what was wrong about it, change it for the tour. So the idea for each of those is to, in a perfect world, I suppose, play them almost chronologically: demos, first live show, later demos, album, tour, whatever it is. Wormwood’s a strange one, obviously, ‘cause they went back and re-recorded the Roadworms thing in the middle of a tour.

So they themselves weren’t huge on the album; for some strange reason, they put the album out, and immediately decided to write loads more songs, and then re-record it whilst they were on tour. So it’s a strange project in the first place. In the early 2000s, Hardy talked about revisiting it and completely reworking it, and then nothing came of it, so this is, I suppose, the extension of that idea. It just grew and grew.
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
|
03.07.2022
07:21 am
|
‘Perverse Preachers, Fascist Fundamentalists and Kristian Kiddie Kooks’: Insane Christian cult video
01.27.2022
08:34 am
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“He’s a rewarder of those who seek him. Some say God is a punisher, but do you know what we do with child abusers today? We put child abusers in prison if we find out about ‘em. God is not a child abuser! God is a good god. Why don’t you just say that out loud with me right no? God is a good god, you always remember that! God is not gonna do you harm… (pause) There is a judgement coming someday…”

—“Mrs. Hook” from The Christian Pirates cable access show.

History will note that for a short period at the end of the 20th century, there was this “format” called “VHS” (“Video Home System” is what it stood for) that allowed people to do something called “videotaping” “off” their television sets (it didn’t work exactly like that, but it’s, you know, close enough). But what history might neglect to record is that certain things got passed around from hand to hand on this format samizdat style in what was then called the “VHS tape trading underground.” During the mid-1980s to the late 90s, traders and flea market dealers were making pirated copies of things like the banned Rolling Stones movie Cocksucker Blues, Heavy Metal Parking Lot, “Screaming Boy” (lunatic Dallas public access preacher Jonathan Bell, later made famous by The Daily Show), a tape of a groupie blowing out a candle with her pussy for guitarist Steve Vai and “The Great Satan At Large,” a satanic talk show, among hundreds of other things.

One of the most heavily circulated items during the “VHS tape trading underground” days was a synapse-frying excursion straight into the dark heart of the most deeply disturbed, bat-shit crazy 80s TV evangelism titled “Perverse Preachers, Fascist Fundamentalists and Kristian Kiddie Kooks.”  When the tape began making the rounds in the early 90s, the jaw-dropping selection of low IQ buffoonery, superstitious insanity and wildly inappropriate kiddie shows made by people who should NEVER BE LEFT ALONE UNSUPERVISED WITH YOUNG CHILDREN was the centerpiece of many a weed and alcohol-fuelled viewing fest.

An unnamed Internet reviewer said this of “Perverse Preachers, Fascist Fundamentalists and Kristian Kiddie Kooks”:

Americans: See why the rest of the world thinks we’re a bunch of blithering idiots!

Rest of the world: See why Americans are a bunch of blithering idiots!

That pretty much sums it up in a nutshell.

One of the more perplexing things on exhibit in “Perverse Preachers, Fascist Fundamentalists and Kristian Kiddie Kooks” is the clips from the no budget “Christian Pirates” cable access show where godless children are forced to “walk the plank” by one-legged Captain Hook and they sing songs about hoping that Satan gets paralyzed and has to use a wheelchair. There’s Jimmy Swaggart’s tearful confession of whore mongering (a masterclass in fleecing the faithful with the “I have sinned” ploy). A Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker press conference. There’s a lot of asking for money, natch, some racist Bible prophecy, preaching against something one of them calls “Marxism” and a “joyous” man with hands growing from his shoulders who, er, counts his blessings. It’s not just Christianity that takes a beating here. New Age beliefs are lampooned and there’s even an appearance by Queen Uriel from the nutty Unarius Academy of Science.
 

 
“Perverse Preachers, Fascist Fundamentalists and Kristian Kiddie Kooks” was produced by a Boston-based zine called Zontar. It came with an attached pamphlet that you can see reproduced here. Aside from being a masterpiece of video folk art (YES, this should preserved and elevated to museum status) it’s one of the single best things ever to get stoned and watch. I guarantee you’ll be blown away by “Perverse Preachers, Fascist Fundamentalists and Kristian Kiddie Kooks” (and if you’re not, you’ll be issued a full refund...)
 

 
BONUS VIDEO: Disgraced—but still currently raking it in like a gangsta on BET—TV evangelist Robert Tilton in the infamous “Pastor Gas” video that has made the rounds on the Internet since the first days of MySpace. My VHS copy of “Perverse Preachers, Fascist Fundamentalists and Kristian Kiddie Kooks” included this:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
01.27.2022
08:34 am
|
Dr. Gene Scott, God’s Angry Man, live in concert
05.23.2021
03:06 pm
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In 1993, I attended an extremely curious Easter Sunday “church service”—I use that term loosely—along with a motley crew of congregants assembled in downtown Los Angeles. Dr. Gene Scott, the mad minister of America’s low watt TV stations, presided over this occasion. I convinced a British friend of mine—who had never heard of him or seen his show—to go with me because I thought that it would be totally hi-larious, a veritable laff riot... but we’ll get to what really happened soon enough.

Dr. Gene Scott was the utterly unhinged UHF television evangelist who grew in fame (and apparently fortune) during the Reagan era with his berserk, conspiratorial lunatic rantings that occasionally—only very occasionally—mentioned Jesus or had some sort of what most people could agree was “religious” content. Mostly he talked about UFOs, gambling on horses and his much-hated ex-wife. I first became aware of him on WPGH, a Pittsburgh market UHF station. He must have purchased late night airtime from them and from a number of other channels around the country. As the 1980s wore on, Gene Scott became very, very hard to miss on cable: If you were flipping channels, depending on the time of day, the guy might be on as many as five of them simultaneously. He continuously boasted of being broadcast in South America, South Korea, and the Caribbean and that in America, he was on, somewhere, during each hour of every day, seven days a week, 52 weeks out of the year.

Now that’s a lot of TV, you might be thinking, and you’d be right, but Gene Scott could talk. And talk and talk and talk. Like a speedfreak can talk. And smoke cigars. And stare directly into the camera, refusing to “preach” unless the donations started to roll in. When Scott’s show first came on, it was extremely low budget. Often—very often—Scott’s show would consist of him sitting in a chair on a bare studio floor with a chalkboard behind him, holding a stack of index cards. He would pretend that on each of these cards was written the sum of a very large donation that had just come in over the telephone and he would rattle them off, rapid-fire, and throw the cards over his shoulder as he did so. Scott would have you believe—although it was an obvious lie—that he was getting a thousand dollars, not twenty bucks, not even $100, but a thousand dollars—if not more—from each and every caller!

In a flat monotone, Scott would say “Dallas, TX—$1000. Portland, OR—another $1000. Phoenix, AZ, a donation of $3000—see they aren’t CHEAP in Phoenix like they are in Portland an’ Dallas—Scranton, PA—that’s $4000 from Scranton. Maybe I will preach after all…” and so forth and so on. He would often claim five figure donations several times an hour. To hear him claim even that a $100k donation had just come in hot off the wire was not unusual in the least. What did the IRS make of all this, I wonder?

It was patently obvious that Scott was lying, but even if the threadbare set and the absurd amounts of the supposed donations he was claiming didn’t clue you in immediately, the band who “appeared” (after he’d ask for a “little tinkle on the keyboards”) were from another show entirely, like he had purchased stock footage from another low watt religious broadcaster. Or something. He would pretend they were in the studio with him, even though they obviously weren’t. The phone bank operators that he cut away to, they, too, were from something else entirely, but he would pretend they were in another room, or just down the hall. It was absurd. He would have no interaction with them, because, of course, no interaction was possible! Scott was crazy enough to think that no one would notice, but everyone did. I’d guess that he had no more than three or four crew members to begin with—when Scott’s show first came on, it was extremely low budget—but his operation seemed to grow pretty quickly. Eventually he hired an actual band, a bigger studio, and real phone operators. Maybe that was a real $1000 donation from Omaha?

Gene Scott would berate, belittle, bully and bark at this viewers with extreme contempt and tell them that they weren’t deserving of his “teachings.” When he did deign to “preach,” he did a variant on the trick that Glenn Beck uses to browbeat his lowbrow listeners: Scott would take his blackboard and scrawl something across it that was supposedly written in Greek, or Hebrew or Arabic and then using that as a starting point he’d go off on a long-winded diatribe that most often had absolutely nothing to do with that or with anything else. He could start off going into the etymology of a word like “jubilee” and then veer off into an impassioned rant about why women should not wear pants. In one memorable program Scott asked his audience if they were any “more tired” this year than they were last year. He couldn’t exactly hear them, of course, but assumed the answer to be “yes” and concocted a ridiculous fantasy about radio waves emanating at the Tropic of Cancer that were making everyone docile, sleepy and compliant.

Once night, I vividly recall him saying something along the lines of “The government wants to have me killed. Because I know too much. If you want me to LIVE so I can come back here to tell you more about this IMPORTANT INFORMATION tomorrow night that nobody else has, then you need to send me money TONIGHT so I can protect myself!”

The following show, Scott appeared with two vicious-looking, growling Doberman Pinschers and the “D” volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He read off the various things trained Doberman attack dogs were capable of (like ripping your head off, etc) and after each one, he would nod affirmatively, look directly into the camera and say flatly “My dogs can do that.”

Dude was a showman, but Dr. Gene Scott was also undoubtedly the most out-of-his-mind person who had EVER been on television up to that point on a regular basis. I didn’t watch his show every night, but I did watch it frequently enough. I’d usually flip between early Letterman and Scott’s ranting and raving. He was mesmerizing.
 

 
Another distinguishing characteristic of Gene Scott’s enigmatic TV preacher shtick was that he always sported different kinds of hats, like a pith helmet, a fisherman’s cap, cowboy hat or a sombrero. On more than one occasion he wore a handkerchief tied in four knots like a Monty Python “Gumby,” with square Johnny Rotten sunglasses. One night he would have long hair and a beard, the next night, the beard was gone and his hair short again. Soon after that, he’d have a new mustache. His glasses changed a lot, too. Sometimes he’d even wear two pairs of eyeglasses at once. Point is, every night he would look totally different.

If you watched his show regularly, the first thing you—or anyone, really—would wonder would be “Who would give this incoherent, incomprehensible crackpot their money?” The second thing you would notice, especially if you’d been gone for a while, was how rapidly his production values continued to rise over the years. Obviously people were sending him money. But who were they?
 

 
I was about to find out. I called the RSVP number listed in an LA WEEKLY ad for Scott’s church and before I could politely inquire about tickets, I was yelled at by a woman with an accent who identified herself as “Doc’s assistant.” She GRILLED ME about WHY I wanted to attend that Sunday’s service. I wasn’t prepared for how aggressive she was but managed to (perhaps) convince her that I just wanted to check it out and that my request for entry was an innocuous one.

It was obvious that she was trying to tamp down any potential disruption of the Easter Sunday service and that it had happened before. She was hardcore and deeply suspicious of me, it was quite apparent.

So as I mentioned at the top of this article, I planned to go to see Gene Scott with a friend of mine, and that she had never heard of Gene Scott and had absolutely no idea what she was in for, only, as I promised, that it was going to be extremely amusing. So on Easter Sunday, at the appointed time, we showed up at the United Artists Theatre in downtown Los Angeles at 927 S. Broadway.

Twenty years ago, downtown Los Angeles was only barely starting to become gentrified and the stark human horror the area was then known for has been gradually moved east since that time. The South Broadway of 1993 was strewn with trash blowing around like tumbleweeds and we had to dodge zombie-like crack heads to get there. I assumed that the United Artists Theatre would just be some shithole where Scott taped his low rent hijinks.

Au contraire! In fact, this was not just any old United Artists Theatre, it was THE United Artists Theatre that was built by Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin. It’s an incredibly opulent movie house—one of the greatest in Los Angeles—a Spanish Gothic masterpiece with marble floors and brass accents. Flanking the stage there was an amazing gold thread embroidered tapestry curtain dating from when the Theatre originally opened, depicting scenes from famous silent movies with a big UA logo when the curtains were closed. My memory of the tapestry is that it was around 50 ft tall. Even in the late 1920s, something this elaborate, and this size, would still have cost over $100k.

I couldn’t believe that Gene Scott owned this building.
 

 
Before we could poke around for more than a single minute, we were warily greeted—if that’s the right word for it—by the woman on the phone who identified herself as “Doc’s assistant.” She was a mean-faced, middle-aged Korean lady and she sternly told us not to whisper to each other, not to fidget, not to do anything that would break his concentration or disturb “Doc” in any way, not to go to the bathroom and don’t dare yell something or else we’d be in “big trouble!”

After that stern warning, she told us that these two security guards would take us to our seats. They did and then they sat right down on either side of us!

The service started soon enough. The stage was huge and a large group of musicians, the sort you might see at the Grand Ole Opry, walked on and started up on a Statler Brothers-sounding hymn. Then they started to build the suspense for “Doc” who soon arrived onstage with diamond-encrusted sun glasses, an expensive black suit, and cowboy boots. He was greeted like he was Elvis. Exactly like he was Elvis.

Scott immediately sat down on a chair, crossed his legs and lit up a cigar. His opening remarks had to do with marrying a couple in Saratoga, where he’d gone to watch his horses race, the day before. They were sitting in the front row and he made reference to the fact that they’d both been committing adultery behind the backs of their previous spouses and he laughed about it, like it was all a big joke to him. His congregants laughed too, but in a nervous sort of manner.

Like “Doc’s assistant,” most of his congregation, more than half, were Asian and then the next largest group was a mix of what can only be described as cowboy hat-wearing rednecks and their families, a “type” that you do not get in Los Angeles, but that you would see in Texas maybe. Hispanic cowboys, too. There were also several members of the audience who didn’t fall into either of those disparate camps, Asian or cowboy, but who appeared to be people who’d come in from local homeless missions. And us. We were probably the most conspicuous people there, in a sense. She and I were the ones who stood out.

After some decidedly non sequitur preaching, the proceedings went right off the surrealism scale when “Doc” announced—by grabbing a mic, pulling it close to his lips and saying this in a way that you could tell it was a sort of anticipated catchphrase of his—that it was “Offerin’ Time!”

The entire audience jumped to their feet and started waving sealed tithing envelopes around, like they were on the fucking Price is Right or something. It was super tweaked. I wasn’t about to give a dime to this nut, so I merely sealed an empty envelope and stuck it in the plate when it was passed to me.

When the raucous “Offerin’ Time!” settled down, Doc preached a lil’ more and then he asked for a “tinkle” on the keyboards. A tinkle, he laughed, for “a piss ant.”

The audience roared!

Huh? What? Yes, I said a piss ant. The band struck up the tune and led an enthusiastic audience singalong to a ditty called “Kill Some Piss Ants for Jesus.” You probably think I’m pulling your leg, but I’m not. Go directly to 10:13 in the below video.
 

“Kill Some Piss Ants for Jesus”

After this he made another nonsensical Easter-themed point and then he announced that there would be a SECOND “Offerin’ time!” This one transpired with the same jump up and down, wave your envelope around mania as before! I mean, wouldn’t most people just split their entire intended donation into two envelopes? Why were they so EXCITED about it? Did he get noticeably more money with two collections than one? Perhaps he did. Perhaps his congregation simply were that stupid.  This was—strongly—the way things appeared.

All I know is that by this point, we’d had it. It was such an incredibly deflating encounter with a teeny-tiny segment of the human race that neither of us had known existed an hour before. These people were brainwashed by NOTHING WHATSOEVER—at least Scientology gives you a little pop psychology. Gene Scott offered his flock not a damned thing, just piss ants, supposedly biblical jabberwocky and two opportunities to give him money in less than one hour! Was L. Ron Hubbard ever that blatant?

The entire thing was bonkers, barking mad, paranoiac, you name it, but I can’t exactly say that it was the fun, fun, fun time I’d promised my friend it would be. In fact, it was probably one of the single most depressing things I have ever witnessed in real life. These people were devolved, the types you might see at a Trump rally but with less intellectual focus. To sit among them was not the cheeky good fun I anticipated. It was just sad, demented and frankly horrifying.

My friend took the lead and told the security guard, “Look, we have to go. Let us out of here, I’m not feeling well, I think I’m going to throw up.” The sea parted immediately with that line, but before we were out the door, Doc’s assistant was running out of the auditorium behind us, demanding that we stop, come back and report to her immediately! Her attitude was a joke—-like she was Ilse Koch or something—and we told her to go fuck herself and left.

We barely said a word in the car. We went to an outdoor café for lunch and hardly said a word to each other there either. After an experience like that one—watching cud-chewing fools being parted from their money by a megalomaniac master grifter who didn’t even have to try—we found that there was nothing much left to say.

The Dr. Gene Scott we meet in Werner Herzog’s 1981 film ‘God’s Angry Man’ is comparatively sane juxtaposed to the nutsoid Gene Scott of just a few years later.
 

The dialogue in this mid-80s TV comedy sketch reflects exactly the sorts of things that Scott said every single night on his show. There is almost no exaggeration here, none. This is what he said and the way he acted. Nearly everyone in America would have recognized this as a parody of Gene Scott at that time.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.23.2021
03:06 pm
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‘Thought Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation’ and the hidden history of modern art
01.04.2021
04:40 pm
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It is extremely difficult to republish a long out of print book. I know this because I have actually done it myself. First off, a pre-computer era book was typeset by hand, so the text will not often exist as a digital file. This presents the option of either rekeying in an entire book, or else scanning in each page individually. Doing it with some sort of image-to-text OCR program only makes for introducing new problems. It’s a time consuming process and a pain in the ass. Anything beyond text such as illustrations and photographs need to be handled differently.

Which is why this exquisite recreation of the 1901 Theosophist publication Thought Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation is so noteworthy. This isn’t an example of merely putting out a new version of a book, but the complete recreation of the original object as it was 116 years ago. It’s beautiful. Although long out of print in its original form, and nearly forgotten, Thought Forms can be seen as an influential but overlooked link between esoteric thought and modern art. Certainly there’s been no other book like it, before or since.

The volume explored the ideas of the occult society as they related to art, specifically the notion that certain people—clairvoyants—could sense and see energy and emotions in the auras of human beings. A person of high character would have a “clear” aura, whereas a selfish, insensitive brute’s aura would be cloudy and so on. Theosophist leaders Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater dictated their clairvoyant “thought-forms” to a group of followers who created the beautiful and unusual 58 illustrations seen in the book.

Published by Sacred Bones Books, an imprint associated with the Sacred Bones record label, the principals involved originally set the project up on Kickstarter which was a resounding success:

We learned of Thought Forms a few years ago and it completely took us by surprise. This one book totally challenged the classic art history narrative that had been taught to in school. Not like we fundamentally believed that story, abstraction is found in all cultures—not just in western 20th century painting, but the genesis story of a few male painters “inventing” abstraction does have its truths.

In this narrative of Modernism, Wassily Kandinsky is widely viewed as one of the most important founders of abstraction, and his manifesto “On the Spiritual in Art” is mandatory reading in art school.

What was never mentioned to us in school however, was that Kandinsky was a member of the Theosophical Society, and had acquired a copy of their book Thought Forms a few years before he abandoned conventional ways of painting. Learning that Kandinsky didn’t just come upon these ideas on his own as previously thought, totally changed our understanding of his work. It’s worth mentioning that Piet Mondrian was also deeply influenced by Theosophy and later on, Jackson Pollock was as well.

Last year the Guggenheim held the first US retrospective of Hilma af Klint’s paintings. She was a member of the Theosophical Society and was undoubtedly influenced by the spiritualistic currents of the time. Theosophy was the first occult group to open its doors to women, and it deeply questioned gender roles, many of these ideas are also in Af Klint’s paintings. This show was one of the first times the all-male origin story of abstraction was challenged within the ivory tower. Af Klint, made these paintings before Kandinsky, and she was a woman. Thought Forms came out before Af Klint began her abstract paintings and it is certain that she must have come across this book.

We’re republishing this beautiful, overlooked book, so that it may be widely accessible and no longer omitted from the past. Thought Forms offers a reminder that the history of modernist abstraction and women’s contribution to it is still being written.

Theosophy’s motto seems as appropriate today as it did in 1880, “there is no religion higher than truth.”

The new publication of Thought Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation was edited by Lucy Lord Campana, with introductory essays from renowned spiritualism expert Mitch Horowitz, art historian Dr. Victoria Ferentinou of the University of Ioannina and Troy Conrad Therrien of the Guggenheim Museum and Columbia University. A few of the book’s illustrations follow.
 

 

 

 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.04.2021
04:40 pm
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Cats and the meaning of life: John Gray on ‘Feline Philosophy’
11.10.2020
09:13 am
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‘Feline Philosophy,’ out November 24 in US and Canada
 
“Epidemiology and microbiology are better guides to our future than any of our hopes or plans,” the philosopher John Gray wrote nearly 20 years ago in Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. Anyone who entered 2020 with hopes and plans has seen these words vividly illustrated.

Gray’s work makes a strong case that our species is incorrigibly irrational, and it raises questions about humanist beliefs that should be particularly important for those of us on the political left to consider. Among his books are False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, and Seven Types of Atheism.

In his latest, Feline Philosophy, Gray pursues the deep interest in the nonhuman world that makes his critique of humanism so sharp in fang and claw. Through his reading of Montaigne, Pascal, the Stoics and Epicureans, and Spinoza, as well as literary writers from Dr. Johnson to Mary Gaitskill, Gray considers what cats have to teach us about philosophy and the good life. As I write this, the hardcover edition of the book is #15 on Amazon’s “New Releases in Philosophy” list and #1 in “New Releases in Cat Care.”

John Gray answered a few of my questions about cats by email in October.
 

John Gray (photo by Justine Stoddart)
 
While Feline Philosophy returns to questions that will be familiar to readers of your work, it seems different in some ways from anything else you have published. How did you come to write this book?

I’ve been thinking of writing a book on cats for many years. I’ve always wondered what philosophy would be like if it wasn’t so human-centred. Among all the animals that have cohabited with humans cats resemble us least, so it seemed natural to ask what a feline philosophy would be like. My book is an attempt at answering this question, and tries to imagine how a feline creature equipped with powers of abstraction would think about death, ethics, the nature of love and the meaning of life.

The book is also an ode to cats, expressing my admiration for their life-affirming capacity for happiness and their courage in living their lives without distractions or consolations.

Do you live with cats? Have you always? Can you tell us about a particular cat you have known?

My wife and I lived with four cats over the past thirty years, two Burmese sisters and two Birman brothers. For some years they all lived contentedly together, until mortality began to take its toll on them. The last of them, Julian, died on Xmas Eve 2019 in his 23rd year. He was perhaps the most tranquil of all four, and even when old and a little frail seemed to enjoy every hour of his life.

The most companionable was Sophie, who passed away at the age of 13 around seventeen years ago. She was extraordinarily intelligent and extremely subtle in her insight into the human mind, and very loving.

Why don’t cats share humans’ concern with making the world a better place?

Because they are happy. Wanting to improve the world is a displacement of the impulse to improve yourself. But cats are not inwardly divided as humans tend to be, and don’t want to be anything other than what they already are, so the idea of improving the world doesn’t occur to them. If it did, I suspect they would dismiss it as an uninteresting fantasy.

Your writing often deals with distressing truths about human beings, such as their capacity for cruelty and self-delusion. It can be upsetting. But I read Feline Philosophy with a feeling of serenity, which I attribute to cats’ total incapacity for cruelty or self-delusion. Does contemplating cats provide you relief from thinking about human affairs?

Cats are a window looking out of the human world, so I suppose that’s one reason I love being with them. I think they also help me look at the human world as if from their eyes, with tranquil detachment and a certain incredulity.

Do you know of any works of art that plausibly represent the mental experience of cats, or any other nonhuman animals?

I don’t know of any art works that capture the mental experience of cats. Whether literary or visual, they would be very difficult to produce. There are some books that try to enter into the inner world of dogs, the best of which seems to me to be Sirius (1944) by the British science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon. Perhaps the most brilliant book I know that tries to enter into a nonhuman mind is the Polish writer Andrzej Zaniewski’s Rat (1994).

You suggest that cats’ independence arouses envy and hatred in the people who torture them. Is this a culturally specific diagnosis, or do you think all cat torturers share these motives?

By no means all unhappy people hate and envy cats, but I think pretty well all of those who do are unhappy. That seems to be a universal truth.

I was surprised to learn recently that one of my closest friends, who is a committed vegan and supporter of animal rights, is a cat-hater. When I asked him why, he talked about his love of birds. Can there be meaningful ethical standards for nonhuman animals’ behavior?

I can’t speculate as to why your friend feels as he does, but it may be the innocence with which cats kill and devour other living things that offends him. Perhaps he’d like the natural world to conform to human values, which for me would be a kind of Hell.

I’m not persuaded that it is the well-being of birds that he cares about. Birds are also innocent killers, after all. The British writer J.A. Baker, who in his shamanistic masterpiece The Peregrine (1967), described ten years of his life attempting to inhabit the life of a falcon, loved the bird partly because it lived according to its nature as a predator.

The Cynics took their name from Diogenes’ epithet, “the dog.” Why haven’t any philosophers styled themselves after cats?

That’s a very good question. I don’t know a good answer, but possibly philosophers suspect that cats don’t need them.

As a reader of your work, I am very happy to have finally gotten a list of tips for living well from you. Are there any prescriptive philosophies that have helped you conduct your own life?

No, I can’t think of any prescriptive philosophies that have influenced me. In the early Seventies I met Isaiah Berlin, and talked with him regularly until his death in 1997. His value-pluralist philosophy of competing and often incommensurable values strengthened my suspicion of any strongly prescriptive ethics. In recent years I’ve been more and more influenced by Montaigne, whose scepticism about philosophy as a guide to life appeals to me greatly.

My ten feline hints for living well are of course meant playfully, as examples of feline philosophy. But they might not do much harm if taken seriously.

Feline Philosophy, already out in the UK, will be published in the US and Canada on November 24.

Posted by Oliver Hall
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11.10.2020
09:13 am
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The stop-motion cartoon of William S. Burroughs’ ‘Ah Pook Is Here’


The 1979 collection ‘Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts’
 
William S. Burroughs envisaged Ah Pook Is Here, an extension of the comix serial The Unspeakable Mr. Hart, as “a picture book modelled on the surviving Mayan codices.” However, after nearly a decade collaborating with artist Malcolm McNeill on an illustrated version of the tale, Burroughs was unable to find a publisher for his graphic novel avant la lettre. Instead, it appeared without images in Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts, a 1979 collection of Burroughs’ researches into Mayan, Egyptian, and space age magical techniques. (McNeill has since published his artwork for Ah Pook Is Here in a separate volume.)

Burroughs’ novella concerns an American plutocrat named John Stanley Hart, whose fear of his own mortality leads him to disturb the gods of the Mayan pantheon. Hart is a junkie with a jones for the suffering of others, especially poor people and ethnic minorities. Narcotized by the “blue note” of their pain, congenitally selfish and incurious, he can’t imagine that calling down awful deities from another dimension might have unwanted consequences: “Mr. Hart has a burning down habit and he will burn down the planet.” Before you know it, blood is spurting from delegates’ every orifice at the “American First” rally, and the Acid Leprosy has eaten a hole in time.
 

‘The Unspeakable Mr. Hart’ from Cyclops magazine (via Virtual Library)
 
Philip Hunt made this stop-motion film of Ah Pook Is Here as a student at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in 1994, taking the sound from Burroughs’ collaborations with John Cale on the Dead City Radio album. At six minutes, it is a distillation of the story, but a good one: death gods disturbed by a grotesque people-thing.

Given the vintage of Ah Pook Is Here, I can only interpret the suicide-by-shotgun at the end as a reference to the death of Burroughs’ former collaborator, Kurt Cobain—an unlikely candidate for Mr. Hart.

Posted by Oliver Hall
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03.22.2019
08:49 am
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Gods and Monsters: The haunting artwork of Shiki Taira
01.02.2019
07:16 am
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01taira.jpg
 
Room #3110 of the Park Hotel, Tokyo, has a large plate glass window with an impressive view of Mount Fuji. The view is one of the reasons for booking the room. The other, more important reason, is room #3110 has been designed and painted by artist Shiki Taira. It is room #30 in the hotel’s series of apartments designed by different Japanese artists. The hotel management’s intent is to offer guests a “fresh look at art”

To touch the beauty of the soul, surely a hotel which refreshes mind and body, and where more time is available for relaxation than in art museums, is an ideal venue for such an experience.

Taira’s room #3110 features a variety of Japanese gods flying across the walls, which when night falls, their reflection makes it appear as if these gods are flying over Mount Fuji. Taira adds:

I wanted to create a room where guests will be surrounded by auspicious Japanese motifs…They are lucky Japanese motifs such as the Fujin (Wind God), Raijin (Thunder God), Shichifukujin (Seven Lucky Gods) and Ichimoku-sama (One-Eyed God)...

 
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Part of room #3110 designed and painted by Shiki Taira.
 
Born in Tokyo in 1990, Taira studied at the Department of Design, Tokyo University of Arts, where she graduated in Fine Art from the Department of Drawing and Decorative Art in 2013. Taira first exhibited her work at the 0+Ten Gallery, Tokyo, with further shows quickly following at the Sato Museum of Art, the ShinPA 10th, Gallery Art Morimoto, and the Seizan Gallery. She has been described as “a cutting edge artist” who is known for “her unique yōkai world that unfolds on silk with excellent brush works.”

Taira’s paintings incorporate traditional yōkai—the gods, ghosts, shape-shifters, and monsters from Japanese mythology who live in the half-light, the twilight area between between known and unknown, who prey on the unwitting and the lost—and reimagines them in a contemporary setting. Taira has said of her work that she likes to deform an individual’s distinctive features which then allows her to bring out images of the phantoms underneath. In Japan, she says:

We have an idea the gods dwell in various creatures and nature traditionally in Japan. Phantom is a part of these ideas and painted and printed in subject of Ukiyo-e in Edo-period by Hokusai Katsushika and others.

Her work suggests our lives are haunted by strange obsessions and superstitions which can sometimes shape our actions.
 
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More beautiful, ghostly artworks after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.02.2019
07:16 am
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Take a tour of Hell with renowned Tibetan artist Pema Namdol Thaye
11.21.2018
10:02 am
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“Momo Drollo.” A painting by Pema Namdol Thaye featured in the book ‘A Guided Tour of Hell: A Graphic Memoir’ by Samuel Bercholz.

Pema Namdol Thaye is one of modern Tibet’s most important artistic creative forces. Namdol has earned worldwide praise for his mastery of three vital and challenging artforms; thangka painting, mural painting and the creation of 3D mandalas. In Tibetan Buddhism, mandalas (the Sanskrit word translates to “sacred center’) represent the place one seeks out during meditation. Contained in the mandala are objects or objectives which can be utilized to attain enlightenment or other types of spiritual/life guidance.

As a child, Namdol showed great artistic promise and was rewarded with a scholarship to attend a prestigious school in Kalimpong, India. There he surpassed expectations, becoming acutely proficient at skills associated with other disciplines of Tibetan art and Buddhism such as sculpture, architecture, and calligraphy. According to his biography, Namdol is one of only a few artists alive today who has the distinction of being a master of traditional Himalayan arts. His unusual talents and background made him the perfect choice to illustrate the 2016 book by Samuel Bercholz A Guided Tour of Hell: A Graphic Memoir. And this is where the relationship between Bercholz, a respected teacher of Buddhist philosophy and meditation for four decades, and Namdol gets very interesting.

After a heart attack, Bercholz underwent sextuple coronary bypass surgery during which he had a near-death experience that would change him forever. During the experience, Bercholz says he had vivid visions of what he believed was Hell or the “underworld.” He described seeing people getting karma served to them as payment for their scorched-earth lives—despots, killers, and other various scumbags were being horrifically punished before his eyes while he was in surgical limbo. Bercholz shared his story in detail with Namdol which he then translated into a series of paintings capturing Bercholz’s visit to the dark abyss. I know this isn’t the first time a person has come back from death’s door with a harrowing story about what they allegedly “saw,” however, given Bercholz’s background and Namdol’s stature, the images created by Namdol of Berchoz’s visions seem much more believable than a story about reaching out for God’s hand, seeing bright lights, or family members or beloved dead pets. Of course, it would be careless of me not to mention clinical studies of this phenomena have found it is most likely the result of brain function shutting down.

Or is it? Because I’m not going to be the one to dispute the experiences of a devout Buddhist and renowned academic. Nope.

The book has been widely acclaimed and tickets to a fascinating live chat between the author and actor Steve Buscemi about Heaven and Hell, sold-out within minutes. I’ve posted a short, animated clip of the pair discussing Berchoz’s experience. Also below are Namdol’s paintings documenting Berchol’s journey to Hell and back. Some are slightly NSFW. Giclée prints from A Guided Tour of Hell and other gorgeous artwork by Namdol can be purchased here.
 

“Border.”
 

“Transcend.”
 

Much more after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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11.21.2018
10:02 am
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Audiences at the original run of ‘The Exorcist’ losing their shit
10.25.2018
10:48 am
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Toronto
 
While I love The Exorcist and watch it at least once a year—wherever Penderecki is booming from big speakers, I’ll be there—I’m unable to see it without thinking about hype, suggestibility and mass hysteria. Most promotional campaigns for horror movies are more or less artful variations on the tagline Dudley Moore’s ad man comes up with in Crazy People: “It will fuck you up for life!” Rumors of a cursed set, damned celluloid and occult frames were for The Exorcist what $1,000 life insurance policies were to William Castle’s Macabre. Since its release, the movie has benefited from the outsize expectations first-time viewers bring to it.

When I was growing up, I regularly heard The Exorcist cited not only as the scariest movie ever made, but as the legitimate exemplar of subliminal techniques in filmmaking. The first time I saw the movie (on VHS), I remember noticing that at least some of these subliminal images I had heard so much about, the ones that had supposedly been engineered to make you puke and cry from abject terror, were plainly visible to the naked eye when the tape played at normal speed; seemed pretty superliminal to me. If you’re aware that you just saw a flash cut of a ghoulish face, is it your unconscious mind that’s being manipulated, or your fear of subliminal editing?
 

Westwood
 
The widespread belief that the movie used modern techniques of mind control probably had more to do with the reaction it provoked in audiences than anything William “Fuck them where they breathe” Friedkin did in the editing room. As with The Blair Witch Project, an inferior movie similarly hyped, audiences were primed for terror by hyperbolic news reports and hours standing in line, anticipating the most traumatizing experience modern media could deliver.

Below, in local news footage, audiences at the original theatrical run of The Exorcist wait for hours to buy tickets. There is much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth among those exiting the theaters. An usher describes the crackups he’s seen, and some moviegoers step into the lobby to get some air mid-screening. Smelling salts are requested.

In other words, it’s a pop sensation! What’s more reminiscent of The Exorcist than the shrieks, sobs and streams of urine that greeted matinee performances by Frank Sinatra and the Beatles?
 

 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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10.25.2018
10:48 am
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Terry Riley and La Monte Young in a documentary about their teacher, Pandit Pran Nath


Poster by Marian Zazeela for a raga cycle performance at St. John the Divine, 1991 (via The Hum)
 
William Farley’s In Between the Notes profiles the late Pandit Pran Nath, a singer and teacher in the Kirana school of Indian classical music. It features his most famous pupils, Terry Riley, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, and the late, great music scholar Robert Palmer sticks his head in, too.

Kicked out of the house at the age of 13 because he insisted on becoming a musician, Pran Nath made friends with the outdoors, as this short documentary illustrates. In Delhi, he demonstrates his keen ear for bird songs; on his return to the Tapkeshwar Caves, where, on the advice of his guru, he had lived for five years as a renunciant, Pran Nath shows how the sound of rushing water can stand in for the drone of a tambura when you are a homeless sadhu.
 

Pandit Pran Nath with Ann and Terry Riley (via Complete Word)
 
But if it was to be a tambura instead of a babbling brook, it had better be a “Pandit Pran Nath-style tambura.” Except in the caves, Terry Riley has his arm around one of these distinctive-sounding instruments every time he appears in the movie. Pran Nath’s New York Times obituary describes his specifications for the drone axe:

He secured the instrument’s upper bridge, changed the rounding of the resonating gourd and had instruments made without paint or varnish that might clog the pores of the wood, all to give the tamboura a richer tone.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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07.18.2018
06:46 am
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