Whenever someone like Warner Herzog starts talking about dreams there's a kind of stale bourgeois abstraction to the word, like some doctoral declawing of what is in 'reality' a vivid brutal fiction. Such declawers studiously miss the big picture, that it all begins and ends in a single chemical, DMT, made by a weird little gland in the center of the brain, the Pineal. Beyond the reptilian cortex and the higher mammalian functioning empathy, it's beyond even the reptilian-mammalian combo that is humanity's core, beyond DNA life itself. It's the third eye, and it's long been calcified due to the infiltration of our precious bodily fluids.
"...the pineal gland has become calcified due to fluoride in our water and toothpaste to "Dumb" us down and sever this divine connection. Our exclusive Pineal Gland Tuning fork is designed to vibrate at the frequency of the pineal gland, loosening that calcification and strengthening the Divine Connection!" - Soma Energetics
"Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face.." - General Ripper (Dr. Strangelove)
"The waves from that thing are waking a thousand sleeping senses in us; senses which we inherit from aeons of evolution from the state of detached electrons to the state of organic humanity. . . . You have heard of the pineal gland?... That gland is the great sense-organ of organs — I have found out. It is like sight in the end, and transmits visual pictures to the brain." - H.P. Lovecraft ("From Beyond")
“If I accept the idea that this world has no invisible entities, this would mean that I’m agreeing with a single culture only a couple hundred years old and disagreeing with almost every other known culture that has ever existed on the planet. I’m not particularly convinced that we, among all the cultures of the planet, have discovered that these entities don’t really exist." -- James Fadiman (Teeming Brain)
Fans of Lovecraft know two things: 1) His visions of the alternate dimensional elder gods are so on point he was either schizophrenic or a psychedelic drug using shaman, either way, his pineal gland was really de-calcified. 2) Unlike Poe's, there are very few good film adaptations of his work. Maybe it's just that his descriptions are so outlandish it's as if they tap into a deeper well of imagination than the one tapped by most horror fiction authors. To cast normal horror fiction in our brain we use a basic set of archetypal faces, but Lovecraft calls for us to reach back into the basement depths for the old dusty box of ancient images we didn't even know were there. If normal fiction like Stephen King is Candyland or Monopoly, Lovecraft reaches back in the closet and pulls out this game, that you'd swear wasn't there before:
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In other words, Lovecraft's fiction is 'true' beyond our normal conceptions of both truth and fiction, and maybe he had some unique gift to activate his own pineal gland via electrified tuning forks, as seen in Stuart Gordon's FROM BEYOND (1986). In it, a deranged sadomasochistic (impotent) scientist Dr. Pretorius (Ted Sorel) and his assistant Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs) create a machine that amplifies the frequency of the pineal gland, allowing them to see the monstrous creatures in the parallel dimensions, including eel like creatures swimming through the air, and giant worm type beings, one of which bites off the mad scientists' head, sending the assistant running from the house screaming, a gibbering madman. His sexy psychiatrist Dr. McMichaels (Barbara Crampton) at the clinic feels he needs to recreate the experiment to find out what happened to the older man's head. The result is the older man comes back, having merged with the worm thing and brought his kinky sadistic sex dominating fantasies to bear (he has a closet of bondage gear and a pillory in his room). As he keeps turning the machine on from his alternate dimension, Tillinghast's pineal gland becomes a sentient monster craving brains to eat and he goes on a rampage, and McMichaels gets all into the bondage stuff. Amongst the effects of the pineal stimulation is enhanced sexual loosening; inhibitions are shed and tactile sensation is amplified.
What's funny is that now years later, the pineal tuning fork and amplified pineal-activating soundwave systems are a real thing. I have both, and activated the shit out of my gland and found the is in in conjunction with salvia divinorum, deep meditation, and drone music.
THE UNRAVELING of the Self:
What happens afterwards, you need to be resolute, and trust in a higher power to act as a kind of 'no place like home' life raft, or in my visualization, one of those Nerf footballs kids clutch to their chests in order to float better in the deep end. This will occupy your conscious mind, distract it and center it so you don't panic as your entire construct of self, of id-ego-superego is unraveled, like a ball of twine, until there's nothing of 'you' left at all, just that Nerf football, which then lifts up without you holding onto it, and the pool vanishes and it goes up and up and you're still with it somehow, faster and faster and right through the monsters at the gates as if they were just papier mache animated miniature golf hazards (for no monster can maul empty air) and into the true paradise of the undifferentiated self, you realize at once that 'up' here, beyond time and space, there are very few other souls. You sense a few other consciousnesses bopping in--Buddhist monks, hippies like yourself, god helmet wearers, their activated kundalini pineal glands all like fleeting little fireflies in the electrified darkness. But there are a few full figures materialized up there. The one I 'saw' was a giant meditating motionless Buddha in the center of an overflowing fountain, the water running slowly through a network of capillary like grooves down into my forehead (as well as anyone who could tune his frequency in; I knew that he wasn't making the energy so much as forming it, like a Ben Franklin lightning kite, so the key in our hand (the pineal) would electrify; rather than just the blinding white noise of pure oneness/the void (Dharmakaya), of being struck ourselves by lightning and obliterated. But there are other 'kites' up there, not all of them 'good.' The breakthrough can be quite insane and painful on a psychic level as your third eye (which is experienced mostly in vivid dreams, as during bad fevers or sleeping with a nicotine patch on) full opens and you feel what some have termed 'the baby teeth of the dragon' unzipping you from you psychic cocoon like a vacuum cleaner bag, your impurities and soul dust being electrified and zapped away as your construct of self is unraveled, and it feels like above your eyes in the center of your forehead is a small burning electrode struggling to escape out of your forehead.
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The worst most terrifying one for me was the gigantic rotating Medusa head planet, its fiery mouth a giant hellish furnace, bloody sharp and full of fire all at once, the Kali demoness at her most staggeringly terrifying, slowly revolving toward me as I floated, hovering in place above the surface, as the rotation of the planet passed below me, knowing that the mouth revolved underneath where I floated, not just the mental and physical portions of myself, but the 'Whole Self,' soul included, would be be devoured in flames; and that is a terror vastly beyond the ken. But I prayed and then felt the clouds of reality part behind me and a giant glowing electric hand of god or an angel reaching through to touch me on the shoulder as I sat there in my lotus position, and all was electrified with love and trust and I was saved /cured/ awake. I knew there was a God because there He was, hand on my shoulder. Of course I tried to share this in AA, minus the salvia part but they thought I was crazy. Why wouldn't they? Later that god turned out to be a trickster, sneering in contemptuous sadistic laughter after I got shut down by this girl and took the wrong direction on the subway.
These days, having had my rebirth moment already, the unfolding of my constituted reality until I'm back in the womb of the undifferentiated self, I've lost completely the old desire, that spiritual yearning I used to have. It was like I knew there was a crazy movie out there I wanted to see, a movie most people denied existed. But I tracked it down and finally saw it, three or four times, and now have no desire to ever see it again. My whole self quest is over. I know where I'm going after death, it's as certain as Alma's certainty she'll marry Karl Henrik, in PERSONA. Whether I'm right or not is irrelevant. Yesterday I thought I was dying - I couldn't breathe - thought I had lung failure. Today it's raining and I'm fine. Conclusion: allergies. Cigarette regimen, resume... cautiously. My cigarette break buddy Sean's getting an artificial heart valve. Baby, that death drive ain't no joke. Then again, I only feel that way when it's breathing down my neck, Medusa's hellmouth slowly revolving below me as I float in perfect stillness of motion above the planet, and I guess in grand Munchausen style I'm hoping for another last minute god hand before that mouth swallows me. I can't even remember the spiritual terror of that hell devouring moment -a kind of deep level of existential dread I've never experienced in real life, not since childhood nightmares. It's not the hellfire though, it's the feeling of being cut-off from the feeling of it. We need to ignore death to function in the world, but if we ignore it too well we piss it off, and it comes gunning.
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BATAILLES: take it to the Limit-Experience"
Let me now tied in all that with HELLRAISER and those kinky-ass Cenobites, the sadosmasochistic pleasure pain principle tapping into notions forged in the heated French brain of Georges Batailles and finding fruition in the strange, feverish clued-in mind of Lovecraft and later Clive Barker. My old roommate who loves cocaine also likes 'gonzo' porn, and misogynistic horror movies. I've demanded he weed out lyrics like "shot the bitch on down," and I learned from studying to be a drug counsellor that cocaine addicts are often very intensely into bondage porn, ordering vile shit off the internet in the dead of night and forgetting about it, and then getting packages from bondage sites a week later and not remembering ordering it or even seeing the site, and then feeling horrified when they open it, like their cocaine binge self is a perverse amoral Mr. Hyde shopping the dark alleys behind Amazon. Cocaine removes the mammal empathy impediments to our inner reptilian objectifying sex monster, one imagining vast enslaved harems forced to kneel before him in chains etc. - Shit I used to fantasize about as a kid actually, up until around the age of ten, when my sense of empathy began to kick in. Now I wonder if my deep feminist repulsion towards any display of this kind of sick reptilian cortex sadism is just a long con version of that cocaine fiend's horror at getting the package.
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Then there's this idiotic new feature length men's fragrance commercial disguised Bond movie called SPECTRE, which has a pretty great train fight, a smokin' hot babe (Léa Seydoux) in nice dresses, perfectly mussed blonde hair over black turtlenecks against a snowy white background (j'adore) and a glum attitude of defeatism where the chips are so stacked against our Mr. Bond that he rides right into the dragon's den, has his arch enemy Stavros (Christophe Waltz, yet again) display how the entire purpose of this vast chain of human misery since the dawn of time has been to keep that sinewy ever-clenched jaw muscle on Daniel Crag's face frowning with woe. The bad guys know all 007's secrets but of course aren't bright enough to remove his trick watch when they strap him to the torture chair. One well placed shot later and the whole entire complex is up in flames. And lucky lady and lucky shot Bond are off to another designer boutique parfum ad tableaux. Not to say there's not some great chases, fights, and vistas, but really... the chain of logic is so wearying, so insulting, it's the most un-Bond Bond ever, as if having gone back to basics in SKYFALL, director Sam Mendes wanted to just scrub all the mythos and turn into a remake of a 70s conspiracy thriller like THE PARALLAX VIEW as well as functioning as a full page Esquire spread for some high end watch. More depressing even than QUANTUM OF SOLACE it posits the entirety of the world as so dumb they'd turn over their national security to a shady private contractor at the first sign of trouble, like a cowardly grocer paying off the Black Hand.
In short, the writers love to set up plush high end noir Bildenberg conspiracies for Bond to be challenged by, but he's so comfortable in the 'top ten percent of the top one percent' spending arena we can't help but wonder how we can root for him to fight the power. And if it wasn't enough, we have to know that so much of the SPECTRE treasury is paid for by white slavery, just because you know, sexually brutalized foreign females are the new status symbol. But then those writers and corportate product positioners are at a loss how an expensively-coiffed Brit with nothing but a snub nose automatic and an exploding watch can defeat this vast conspiracy inside of the next hour. So Boom - a lucky stray shot topples the empire, sets a death star style chain reaction at the fortress without even needing to study the blueprint inside the R2 unit, and then back in London brings down a helicopter from a half mile away! Not the same bullet though. That would be unrealistic.
I know if my NRA bro was here he'd be the first to point it out: a snub nosed pistol has terrible muzzle velocity and accuracy, that's the trade-off for its easier portability! If a longer barrel didn't help accuracy, snipers wouldn't prefer rifles. But old Bond can just aim at a helicopter (from a rocking boat no less) and Bam! I remember when a Stuka would dive overhead and strafe Sgt. Rock in the old DC comics and he would just toss a grenade into the cockpit as it bottomed out. Like hitting the lottery every damn time you buy a ticket. The only interesting part is the torture device of Ernst's: a small robotic surgery needle that bores into various parts of the brain to erase memory and the ability to recall faces (so everyone looks like a stranger), and presumably bore out his pineal gland, or decalcify it so the demons get in. But hey! It doesn't work on Bond! For some reason! Is it lazy writing that we never know? Why even bother with the laborious sleazy set-up? Here are vast acres of sets and walls of monitors and all this shit we go through learning how impossible it is for Bond to escape or beat SPECTRE, but then a single well-placed bullet sends it all up in smoke. It's clear the writers would be more at home doing HOSTEL III than writing action movies - they get their vile sadism down, and Mendes loves to give old James a chance to retire to his first class hotel room to change into some new designer desert clothes. Even the old 60s Batman wouldn't rely this much on their target demo's ignorance of basic physics and firm belief that it's the expensive watch and designer threads that attract the models, and not cocaine. Though of course, if you can flip through an issue of Esquire without feeling like you're being sold on the idea of investing in a corporate white slavery ring by some synergizing pimp, then you really are already so brainwashed by the objectifying media that even a Situationist street agitprop freakout can't wake you up to your own commodification, baby. The only way the filmmakers can justify such strident product placement is to have Bond give up spycraft at the end to go show his new girl a good time with his swanky car, watch, cologne, and wardrobe all keeping her rivitedzzzz because everyone knows that's what a woman wants, a wallet on legs to dutifully cart her from one flagship to the other.
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That aside, the show has a sharp knowing eye for the arcane realms, there's few monters per se, but a lot of high strangeness with the dead coming back as evil beings from beyond (ala the home of the elder gods in Lovecraft), I do love the split that goes on between the first visit to the magical dimension known as Fillory, rich with beautiful sights, but then a snap of a wand and 100 years have passed and its become a toxic wasteland. "Your childhood fantasy's a great big magical Dacchau," Lucy notes. It's like Frodo going to sleep after saving Middle Earth and waking up to see old evil ---- has already won and left a scorched Middle Earth. I've had the same thing happen over two nights of astral traveling back in '03. The first night I accessed a divine realm with the help of an angelic spirit guide. The next night I came back and the realm was a hellish wasteland, the spirit reproachful - I'd left a hundred years ago and allowed this to happen. I guess that's a not uncommon one-two punch - maybe a combo metaphor for our own slow killing of the planet and my own slow killing of time, distraction, drugs and daily gallons of Diet Coke. It's been in lots of fantasies and visions, it's like maybe I'm not 'experiencing it' like a pineal psychonaut but reliving a trauma in a stone tape loop, witnessing the primal scenes of our planetary past like a holographic waxworks.
Still, I did not like the sudden terrifying harshness, including one brutal trickster visitation / rape, two goddess jism things / brutal slaughter / child molestation / the way molesting creates monsters; the price of cover memories etc to leave me as a viewer feeling pretty brutalized myself. I mean, we have to wait far too long for a resolution to such a grisly cliffhanger to such a regularly 'fun' show. I don't know about you, but I didn't binge watch my Sunday away just to be have the shit kicked out of me by some Syfy show that suddenly decides it wants to emulate who betrayed we all felt when our beloved childhood Cosby turned out to be a date rapist super-creep last year. I'm not saying it wasn't brilliant, fractal-like and meta and getting at the core of some profound truth. Maybe all consciousness is a cover memory.' Visions of angels with white wings landing beside us just the brain's way of handling being raped by Zeus in disguise as a swan; or owls at the window the brain's way of handling being probed by aliens. And don't get me started on that bear in the Overlook
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Besides, I've ending became like the trickster who uses human's faith against us, takes advantage and first gives us all sorts of insights and truths, three usually, and then for the fourth they play us like Robert Shaw got played in THE STING; mine just sat opposite me on the subway and laughed hysterically as I sat in shock, humiliated and confused, misled on his/her advice, this all-knowing spirit (this being in the same era of the above 'one day it's paradise, the next it's a wasteland' spiritual journey) just rolling in the aisles while never losing his mocking evil laughter; I never saw him again. Later, a feminine spirit came, my last visitation, and said journeying into this area is like dialing random numbers, you can hope you get a friendly voice, but there are a lot of tricksters amid the angels. Ask any cult leader: faith is the easiest thing to abuse. You can work that to your advantage via suspension of disbelief in a film like LUCY. Or me with my months of having auric tentacles. Was I just hallucinating or really morphing my aura into tentacles, Castaneda-like assemblage point anchors. I prefer the latter option, and frankly worry for those who prefer the bland 'all in your head' pat answer, the urge to stomp out magical thinking like a forest fire always about to consume their frail logic hut.
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Luckily, for every vile trickster there's a couple of angels, like Scarlett Johansson and Luc Besson who came riding to my rescue with LUCY (2014), on (what else?) HBO, to help me recover from that brutal if brilliant cliffhanger ending. Hilarious and trippy and especially interesting in all the angry science geeks and self-righteous bourgeois pundits who decried loudly about the film's anti-science idiocy. Moron says what? Sure it's dumb in a lot of ways - so was LIMITLESS or any other film where some designer drug makes a dumbass superhuman and he goes up against guys who want and have the drug but are too dumb or chickenshit to take it themselves. It's the ultimate Adderall speed fantasy - everyone feels smarter and brighter than everyone else in the room when they're on amphetamines or cocaine; most of us are just smart enough to know that everyone else feels the same way. What pissed off the critics of course, is that they consider themselves the smartest guys in the room to start with, and no younger cuter girl is going to take all the blue pills and outsmart them, not and get their thumbs up. If they can't feel they're intellectually her superior, then they literally may as well be dead. I agree: free up some mastheads for real writers who can make points sans smarm. Luc Besson is too cool for them! If they're gonna hate this goofball movie just for its stoner premise they don't deserve it. Let them return to their STAR TREK chat rooms, and midnight coke head bondage sites.
Me, I admire Scarlett's reckless film choices, her range, her A-list tropes, her moving in as the grand miss of post-modern meta, the sturdier edition of Naomi Watts (even playing the first babe of post-modern meta, Janet Leigh, in HITCHCOCK). Like Depp's benevolent AI in TRANSCENDENCE, Johansson's Lucy makes the quantum jump like a human version of the 'technological singularity.'' here brought about by a designer drug that duplicates the brain boost in human mother's milk, amplified to limitless power, and finally ends in a technological leap on a magical next gen flashdrive handed to Morgan Feeman as Scarlett finally merges with the ether to pervasive all consuming oneness via using '100%' of her brain's capacity. To me, that's badass -- I don't care that there's really no story there (outside of the high end dealers using her as a mule by sewing the drugs up inside of her, and when a bag breaks that's when the quantum jumps begin but they want their drugs back so go to war, unafraid to blast their way through barricades and throngs of cops to get her, and I like the deadpan way the cop just rolls along with the weirdness. Dude, you can tell old Luc Besson's a fan of Adderall or meth or whatever that drug is Watsisface takes in the far smarmier LIMITLESS and this is his valentine to it, and right or wrong you know I approve that message, because it's both right AND wrong. What I find unbelievable is that we're a species able to solve a problem like ourselves only by avoiding it with escapism.
That's my bad maybe for thinking that the two would never intwine so maliciously that I could never totally wall the vileness out. I've been trying to 'stop the voices' as that 'psychopharmacist' (Patrick McGoohan) in SCANNERS says, with a mess of walls and projections, but there's tricksters even in the hologram empire of dust. Even deep in our pro-feminist sci fi geek cocoons they've found us; and they'll never stop tormenting us, not until we lose all hope even in the 100% brain babes we create to protect. My brain has been violated by transdimensional tricksters, same as anyone's, and I've been delivered by angels, as has everyone. And now I know to keep my pineal gland on 'low' because demons in the dark realms only see the burning pineal glands swimming in the ether and they're drawn to them like bats to fireflies. Let your pineal stay calcified, covered in camouflage, for the good of your trickster-free mise-en-scene! Only the thrill-seekers, drug cowboys, and madmen seek those bats: Dr. Pretorius in FROM BEYOND, Frank in HELLRAISER, and Lucy in THE MAGICIANS, and maybe me, up until a few years ago.
If you just got to try it, then heaven help you, or maybe it won't be heaven that comes at all, but that old devil Medusa, or some dumb sophomore kid with $20 in his hand, a shakiness in his voice, hoping you'll 'hook him up.' Don't do it... it's just me, on a loop, repeating over and over that fateful decision to eat some of Eve's apple, to open that weird gold box, to strike that tuning fork and let my pineal express its incoherent howl: baby's first ass-slap scream into the fifth dimension!
In other words, Lovecraft's fiction is 'true' beyond our normal conceptions of both truth and fiction, and maybe he had some unique gift to activate his own pineal gland via electrified tuning forks, as seen in Stuart Gordon's FROM BEYOND (1986). In it, a deranged sadomasochistic (impotent) scientist Dr. Pretorius (Ted Sorel) and his assistant Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs) create a machine that amplifies the frequency of the pineal gland, allowing them to see the monstrous creatures in the parallel dimensions, including eel like creatures swimming through the air, and giant worm type beings, one of which bites off the mad scientists' head, sending the assistant running from the house screaming, a gibbering madman. His sexy psychiatrist Dr. McMichaels (Barbara Crampton) at the clinic feels he needs to recreate the experiment to find out what happened to the older man's head. The result is the older man comes back, having merged with the worm thing and brought his kinky sadistic sex dominating fantasies to bear (he has a closet of bondage gear and a pillory in his room). As he keeps turning the machine on from his alternate dimension, Tillinghast's pineal gland becomes a sentient monster craving brains to eat and he goes on a rampage, and McMichaels gets all into the bondage stuff. Amongst the effects of the pineal stimulation is enhanced sexual loosening; inhibitions are shed and tactile sensation is amplified.
What's funny is that now years later, the pineal tuning fork and amplified pineal-activating soundwave systems are a real thing. I have both, and activated the shit out of my gland and found the is in in conjunction with salvia divinorum, deep meditation, and drone music.
THE UNRAVELING of the Self:
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| the Void- white noise; Buddha- TV station; your pineal gland: TV antenna |
The worst most terrifying one for me was the gigantic rotating Medusa head planet, its fiery mouth a giant hellish furnace, bloody sharp and full of fire all at once, the Kali demoness at her most staggeringly terrifying, slowly revolving toward me as I floated, hovering in place above the surface, as the rotation of the planet passed below me, knowing that the mouth revolved underneath where I floated, not just the mental and physical portions of myself, but the 'Whole Self,' soul included, would be be devoured in flames; and that is a terror vastly beyond the ken. But I prayed and then felt the clouds of reality part behind me and a giant glowing electric hand of god or an angel reaching through to touch me on the shoulder as I sat there in my lotus position, and all was electrified with love and trust and I was saved /cured/ awake. I knew there was a God because there He was, hand on my shoulder. Of course I tried to share this in AA, minus the salvia part but they thought I was crazy. Why wouldn't they? Later that god turned out to be a trickster, sneering in contemptuous sadistic laughter after I got shut down by this girl and took the wrong direction on the subway.
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| Crampton as Dr. McMichaels (post-pineal activation) |
These days, having had my rebirth moment already, the unfolding of my constituted reality until I'm back in the womb of the undifferentiated self, I've lost completely the old desire, that spiritual yearning I used to have. It was like I knew there was a crazy movie out there I wanted to see, a movie most people denied existed. But I tracked it down and finally saw it, three or four times, and now have no desire to ever see it again. My whole self quest is over. I know where I'm going after death, it's as certain as Alma's certainty she'll marry Karl Henrik, in PERSONA. Whether I'm right or not is irrelevant. Yesterday I thought I was dying - I couldn't breathe - thought I had lung failure. Today it's raining and I'm fine. Conclusion: allergies. Cigarette regimen, resume... cautiously. My cigarette break buddy Sean's getting an artificial heart valve. Baby, that death drive ain't no joke. Then again, I only feel that way when it's breathing down my neck, Medusa's hellmouth slowly revolving below me as I float in perfect stillness of motion above the planet, and I guess in grand Munchausen style I'm hoping for another last minute god hand before that mouth swallows me. I can't even remember the spiritual terror of that hell devouring moment -a kind of deep level of existential dread I've never experienced in real life, not since childhood nightmares. It's not the hellfire though, it's the feeling of being cut-off from the feeling of it. We need to ignore death to function in the world, but if we ignore it too well we piss it off, and it comes gunning.
Let me now tied in all that with HELLRAISER and those kinky-ass Cenobites, the sadosmasochistic pleasure pain principle tapping into notions forged in the heated French brain of Georges Batailles and finding fruition in the strange, feverish clued-in mind of Lovecraft and later Clive Barker. My old roommate who loves cocaine also likes 'gonzo' porn, and misogynistic horror movies. I've demanded he weed out lyrics like "shot the bitch on down," and I learned from studying to be a drug counsellor that cocaine addicts are often very intensely into bondage porn, ordering vile shit off the internet in the dead of night and forgetting about it, and then getting packages from bondage sites a week later and not remembering ordering it or even seeing the site, and then feeling horrified when they open it, like their cocaine binge self is a perverse amoral Mr. Hyde shopping the dark alleys behind Amazon. Cocaine removes the mammal empathy impediments to our inner reptilian objectifying sex monster, one imagining vast enslaved harems forced to kneel before him in chains etc. - Shit I used to fantasize about as a kid actually, up until around the age of ten, when my sense of empathy began to kick in. Now I wonder if my deep feminist repulsion towards any display of this kind of sick reptilian cortex sadism is just a long con version of that cocaine fiend's horror at getting the package.
Then there's this idiotic new feature length men's fragrance commercial disguised Bond movie called SPECTRE, which has a pretty great train fight, a smokin' hot babe (Léa Seydoux) in nice dresses, perfectly mussed blonde hair over black turtlenecks against a snowy white background (j'adore) and a glum attitude of defeatism where the chips are so stacked against our Mr. Bond that he rides right into the dragon's den, has his arch enemy Stavros (Christophe Waltz, yet again) display how the entire purpose of this vast chain of human misery since the dawn of time has been to keep that sinewy ever-clenched jaw muscle on Daniel Crag's face frowning with woe. The bad guys know all 007's secrets but of course aren't bright enough to remove his trick watch when they strap him to the torture chair. One well placed shot later and the whole entire complex is up in flames. And lucky lady and lucky shot Bond are off to another designer boutique parfum ad tableaux. Not to say there's not some great chases, fights, and vistas, but really... the chain of logic is so wearying, so insulting, it's the most un-Bond Bond ever, as if having gone back to basics in SKYFALL, director Sam Mendes wanted to just scrub all the mythos and turn into a remake of a 70s conspiracy thriller like THE PARALLAX VIEW as well as functioning as a full page Esquire spread for some high end watch. More depressing even than QUANTUM OF SOLACE it posits the entirety of the world as so dumb they'd turn over their national security to a shady private contractor at the first sign of trouble, like a cowardly grocer paying off the Black Hand.
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I know if my NRA bro was here he'd be the first to point it out: a snub nosed pistol has terrible muzzle velocity and accuracy, that's the trade-off for its easier portability! If a longer barrel didn't help accuracy, snipers wouldn't prefer rifles. But old Bond can just aim at a helicopter (from a rocking boat no less) and Bam! I remember when a Stuka would dive overhead and strafe Sgt. Rock in the old DC comics and he would just toss a grenade into the cockpit as it bottomed out. Like hitting the lottery every damn time you buy a ticket. The only interesting part is the torture device of Ernst's: a small robotic surgery needle that bores into various parts of the brain to erase memory and the ability to recall faces (so everyone looks like a stranger), and presumably bore out his pineal gland, or decalcify it so the demons get in. But hey! It doesn't work on Bond! For some reason! Is it lazy writing that we never know? Why even bother with the laborious sleazy set-up? Here are vast acres of sets and walls of monitors and all this shit we go through learning how impossible it is for Bond to escape or beat SPECTRE, but then a single well-placed bullet sends it all up in smoke. It's clear the writers would be more at home doing HOSTEL III than writing action movies - they get their vile sadism down, and Mendes loves to give old James a chance to retire to his first class hotel room to change into some new designer desert clothes. Even the old 60s Batman wouldn't rely this much on their target demo's ignorance of basic physics and firm belief that it's the expensive watch and designer threads that attract the models, and not cocaine. Though of course, if you can flip through an issue of Esquire without feeling like you're being sold on the idea of investing in a corporate white slavery ring by some synergizing pimp, then you really are already so brainwashed by the objectifying media that even a Situationist street agitprop freakout can't wake you up to your own commodification, baby. The only way the filmmakers can justify such strident product placement is to have Bond give up spycraft at the end to go show his new girl a good time with his swanky car, watch, cologne, and wardrobe all keeping her rivitedzzzz because everyone knows that's what a woman wants, a wallet on legs to dutifully cart her from one flagship to the other.
THE MAGICIANS, a Canadian-Syfy show is perfect for post-grad 20-40 somethings still trying to contextualize their sophomore year 'molly' rolls, particle physics classes, and friend-choked euphoria with the science fiction and fantasy they read as geeks in high school. In short, it's about me, man. I really related, like with "selling your comic book collection" and having to get a job, but then finding through psychedelics, and higher education, your fantasy world is still thriving--and not only that, is based on real shit, I mean real in a sense that my out of body experience in alternate realms and say Lovecraft's pineal gland monsters, are the same - we go to the same realms.
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If that doesn't work for you to dig this show then just know that it's Harry Potter for people who love drugs and hate children and wish they could dropkick every last shred of fantasy film "whimsy" into a wood chopper. Take your fucking pick. I'll confess I've never gotten to into the Potters and I kind of gave up on Syfy original shows after Bo started being all high and mighty about killing people in LOST GIRL. But MAGICIANS was on in the background last week while I was polishing my previous post and it subliminally won me over when the lead brooding ectomorph Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph) woke up in bed with his arch gay aesthete drunkard buddy (Hale Appleman) and his fellow rich jet set party girl bestie, and it's not weird that he did gay shit it's weird he did it while his girlfriend (Olivia Taylor Dudley) was in the other room. Meanwhile his best friend from home, Julia (Stella Maeve) has a great husky voice and got refused admission to the prestigious alternate dimension Magic school so becomes a 'hedge witch' - the equivalent of a townie meth head of magic. Dude, the world of a liberal arts major acidhead at a major university who leaves his townie best friend behind has never been more vividly mythologized!
If that doesn't work for you to dig this show then just know that it's Harry Potter for people who love drugs and hate children and wish they could dropkick every last shred of fantasy film "whimsy" into a wood chopper. Take your fucking pick. I'll confess I've never gotten to into the Potters and I kind of gave up on Syfy original shows after Bo started being all high and mighty about killing people in LOST GIRL. But MAGICIANS was on in the background last week while I was polishing my previous post and it subliminally won me over when the lead brooding ectomorph Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph) woke up in bed with his arch gay aesthete drunkard buddy (Hale Appleman) and his fellow rich jet set party girl bestie, and it's not weird that he did gay shit it's weird he did it while his girlfriend (Olivia Taylor Dudley) was in the other room. Meanwhile his best friend from home, Julia (Stella Maeve) has a great husky voice and got refused admission to the prestigious alternate dimension Magic school so becomes a 'hedge witch' - the equivalent of a townie meth head of magic. Dude, the world of a liberal arts major acidhead at a major university who leaves his townie best friend behind has never been more vividly mythologized!
And that becomes the problem -college isn't just for tripping, it's also where HUNTING GROUND shit runs riot, leaving powerless schmucks like me and Quentin with a lifetime violent hatred of all frat boys, or in the case of THE MAGICIANS, letting loathing for a trickster who comes to Julia in the form of a Mother Earth goddess. There's also a beloved childhood author (a kind of C.S. Lewis meets Tolkein) who turns out to be a pedophile, and a magical rite that can only be attained by drinking a jar ful of demi-god semen. Any one of those things would be disturbing enough that I'd have never half-watched it had I known, had I not presumed benevolence, especially coming as it all does after a whole season of basically non-traumatic drug metaphor magical weirdness, and underneath a cover memory of new age holistic spirituality.
That aside, the show has a sharp knowing eye for the arcane realms, there's few monters per se, but a lot of high strangeness with the dead coming back as evil beings from beyond (ala the home of the elder gods in Lovecraft), I do love the split that goes on between the first visit to the magical dimension known as Fillory, rich with beautiful sights, but then a snap of a wand and 100 years have passed and its become a toxic wasteland. "Your childhood fantasy's a great big magical Dacchau," Lucy notes. It's like Frodo going to sleep after saving Middle Earth and waking up to see old evil ---- has already won and left a scorched Middle Earth. I've had the same thing happen over two nights of astral traveling back in '03. The first night I accessed a divine realm with the help of an angelic spirit guide. The next night I came back and the realm was a hellish wasteland, the spirit reproachful - I'd left a hundred years ago and allowed this to happen. I guess that's a not uncommon one-two punch - maybe a combo metaphor for our own slow killing of the planet and my own slow killing of time, distraction, drugs and daily gallons of Diet Coke. It's been in lots of fantasies and visions, it's like maybe I'm not 'experiencing it' like a pineal psychonaut but reliving a trauma in a stone tape loop, witnessing the primal scenes of our planetary past like a holographic waxworks.
Still, I did not like the sudden terrifying harshness, including one brutal trickster visitation / rape, two goddess jism things / brutal slaughter / child molestation / the way molesting creates monsters; the price of cover memories etc to leave me as a viewer feeling pretty brutalized myself. I mean, we have to wait far too long for a resolution to such a grisly cliffhanger to such a regularly 'fun' show. I don't know about you, but I didn't binge watch my Sunday away just to be have the shit kicked out of me by some Syfy show that suddenly decides it wants to emulate who betrayed we all felt when our beloved childhood Cosby turned out to be a date rapist super-creep last year. I'm not saying it wasn't brilliant, fractal-like and meta and getting at the core of some profound truth. Maybe all consciousness is a cover memory.' Visions of angels with white wings landing beside us just the brain's way of handling being raped by Zeus in disguise as a swan; or owls at the window the brain's way of handling being probed by aliens. And don't get me started on that bear in the Overlook
Besides, I've ending became like the trickster who uses human's faith against us, takes advantage and first gives us all sorts of insights and truths, three usually, and then for the fourth they play us like Robert Shaw got played in THE STING; mine just sat opposite me on the subway and laughed hysterically as I sat in shock, humiliated and confused, misled on his/her advice, this all-knowing spirit (this being in the same era of the above 'one day it's paradise, the next it's a wasteland' spiritual journey) just rolling in the aisles while never losing his mocking evil laughter; I never saw him again. Later, a feminine spirit came, my last visitation, and said journeying into this area is like dialing random numbers, you can hope you get a friendly voice, but there are a lot of tricksters amid the angels. Ask any cult leader: faith is the easiest thing to abuse. You can work that to your advantage via suspension of disbelief in a film like LUCY. Or me with my months of having auric tentacles. Was I just hallucinating or really morphing my aura into tentacles, Castaneda-like assemblage point anchors. I prefer the latter option, and frankly worry for those who prefer the bland 'all in your head' pat answer, the urge to stomp out magical thinking like a forest fire always about to consume their frail logic hut.
Luckily, for every vile trickster there's a couple of angels, like Scarlett Johansson and Luc Besson who came riding to my rescue with LUCY (2014), on (what else?) HBO, to help me recover from that brutal if brilliant cliffhanger ending. Hilarious and trippy and especially interesting in all the angry science geeks and self-righteous bourgeois pundits who decried loudly about the film's anti-science idiocy. Moron says what? Sure it's dumb in a lot of ways - so was LIMITLESS or any other film where some designer drug makes a dumbass superhuman and he goes up against guys who want and have the drug but are too dumb or chickenshit to take it themselves. It's the ultimate Adderall speed fantasy - everyone feels smarter and brighter than everyone else in the room when they're on amphetamines or cocaine; most of us are just smart enough to know that everyone else feels the same way. What pissed off the critics of course, is that they consider themselves the smartest guys in the room to start with, and no younger cuter girl is going to take all the blue pills and outsmart them, not and get their thumbs up. If they can't feel they're intellectually her superior, then they literally may as well be dead. I agree: free up some mastheads for real writers who can make points sans smarm. Luc Besson is too cool for them! If they're gonna hate this goofball movie just for its stoner premise they don't deserve it. Let them return to their STAR TREK chat rooms, and midnight coke head bondage sites.
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| Been there, boy |
Me, I admire Scarlett's reckless film choices, her range, her A-list tropes, her moving in as the grand miss of post-modern meta, the sturdier edition of Naomi Watts (even playing the first babe of post-modern meta, Janet Leigh, in HITCHCOCK). Like Depp's benevolent AI in TRANSCENDENCE, Johansson's Lucy makes the quantum jump like a human version of the 'technological singularity.'' here brought about by a designer drug that duplicates the brain boost in human mother's milk, amplified to limitless power, and finally ends in a technological leap on a magical next gen flashdrive handed to Morgan Feeman as Scarlett finally merges with the ether to pervasive all consuming oneness via using '100%' of her brain's capacity. To me, that's badass -- I don't care that there's really no story there (outside of the high end dealers using her as a mule by sewing the drugs up inside of her, and when a bag breaks that's when the quantum jumps begin but they want their drugs back so go to war, unafraid to blast their way through barricades and throngs of cops to get her, and I like the deadpan way the cop just rolls along with the weirdness. Dude, you can tell old Luc Besson's a fan of Adderall or meth or whatever that drug is Watsisface takes in the far smarmier LIMITLESS and this is his valentine to it, and right or wrong you know I approve that message, because it's both right AND wrong. What I find unbelievable is that we're a species able to solve a problem like ourselves only by avoiding it with escapism.
That's my bad maybe for thinking that the two would never intwine so maliciously that I could never totally wall the vileness out. I've been trying to 'stop the voices' as that 'psychopharmacist' (Patrick McGoohan) in SCANNERS says, with a mess of walls and projections, but there's tricksters even in the hologram empire of dust. Even deep in our pro-feminist sci fi geek cocoons they've found us; and they'll never stop tormenting us, not until we lose all hope even in the 100% brain babes we create to protect. My brain has been violated by transdimensional tricksters, same as anyone's, and I've been delivered by angels, as has everyone. And now I know to keep my pineal gland on 'low' because demons in the dark realms only see the burning pineal glands swimming in the ether and they're drawn to them like bats to fireflies. Let your pineal stay calcified, covered in camouflage, for the good of your trickster-free mise-en-scene! Only the thrill-seekers, drug cowboys, and madmen seek those bats: Dr. Pretorius in FROM BEYOND, Frank in HELLRAISER, and Lucy in THE MAGICIANS, and maybe me, up until a few years ago.
If you just got to try it, then heaven help you, or maybe it won't be heaven that comes at all, but that old devil Medusa, or some dumb sophomore kid with $20 in his hand, a shakiness in his voice, hoping you'll 'hook him up.' Don't do it... it's just me, on a loop, repeating over and over that fateful decision to eat some of Eve's apple, to open that weird gold box, to strike that tuning fork and let my pineal express its incoherent howl: baby's first ass-slap scream into the fifth dimension!