“It was 50 years ago that physician-scientist Wilhelm Reich, best known for his discovery of a purported cosmic life force associated with sexual orgasm, died in federal prison, his books burned and his equipment destroyed by the government.

Ridiculed at the time, the European-born psychiatrist is today largely forgotten and his work on what he called orgone energy remains outside the scientific mainstream. But a small number of scientists and other believers are working to advance his studies — and resurrect his reputation. “Personally, I think it’s going to be a long time before all of his work is understood and recognized,” said Reich’s granddaughter, Renata Reich Moise, a nurse-midwife and artist in the coastal town of Hancock.

Also this month, archives comprised of nearly 300 boxes of Reich’s unpublished papers that were placed in storage at the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School will become available to researchers for the first time. Before going to prison, Reich directed in his will that the scientific papers, journals and diaries only be opened 50 years after his death. He also specified that his laboratory at the 175-acre site he dubbed Orgonon that overlooks Rangeley Lake be converted to a museum.”

link- Boston.com

For all you writers, poets, and artists out there.

“Black Earth Institute is a progressive think-tank dedicated to re-forging the links between art and spirit, earth and society.

Until recent times, art expressed grander values than commerce and celebrity. Delphic oracle, Celtic bard, African griot, aboriginal orator: all used word and movement, color and craft, to bring wisdom from the spiritual realm to their communities.

In the great tradition of Blake, Yeats, Neruda, Rimbaud, HD, Hurston, Zitkala Sha, Rumi and Ramprasad, Black Earth Institute supports the artist as prophet and visionary, creating a society attuned to earth’s rhythms and the rights of all people.”

Black Earth Institute

A Kansas City, Missouri, artist well-known for his political public performances, Ford flew 24 members of his entourage to New York last weekend to participate in Maximon, a “public audience” with the aforementioned deity. Also known as Hermano San Simon, the spirit is traditionally maintained throughout the year with offerings of tobacco, liquor, music, flowers, and incense, and is said to serve as a redemptive or protective source for the prostitutes and gang members of Guatemala. (He’s also said to symbolize male sexual power-his darker aspects lead devotees to carefully guard his visage from public view for fear that his sexuality may run rampant. Um, bring it!) Participants in Friday night’s Williamsburg show-the first here after years of the celebration in KC-were instructed to bring evidence of their vices: These gifts to Maximon supposedly “guaranteed redemption for the artists and musicians of New York.” I brought vodka. Also: receipts from Anthropologie.

Full Story: Village Voice.

(via Robot Wisdom).

Wikipedia entry for Maximon.

Tokyo, Japan-the cultural and fiscal hub of one of the world’s most elegant and sophisticated societies. It’s the last place one would expect to find a naked man roaming the streets.

But Seth Fisher is out for a midnight stroll.

‘Seth was trying to overcome his fear of being naked in public,’ relates Langdon Foss, college roommate and longtime friend of the Fantastic Four/Iron Man: Big In Japan artist. ‘He would draw all his scripts and then go out and walk around the neighborhood naked. His wife would lock him out, she was so mad. For somebody to do that in Japan, well, he might as well have eaten a baby or something.’

Full Story: Wizard.

James Curcio interviews artist Ian McEwan (aka Popjellyfish).

So yeah, I recommend studying Tarot imagery to artists to better inform their art. Especially illustration, and I’m only beginning to play with this, but I can depict emotional states more vividly when I associate a related card to it. Say, even in a generic superhero story, a villain’s plot is foiled. He has an EPIC FAIL moment, where he’s enthralled in the feeling that all is lost. If I want to depict that moment, I’d keep in mind the ten of swords, which Crowley also called ‘Ruin’. And for the hero who just saved the day, probably major 19: The Sun, Resplendant triumph and joy.

Full Story: Alterati (includes download of first issue of Invader).

Earlier this year, Stelarc finally found a medical doctor willing to implant a cell-cultivated ear beneath the skin on the artist’s forearm.

[...]

Stelarc is apparently planning to go through a few more surgeries to give it more definition.

“He’s also going to implant a mic inside the ear that will connect to a bluetooth transmitter, so the ear can broadcast audio from the internet wirelessly,” explains former BB guestblogger and sometimes Stelarc collaborator Karen Marcelo. “That Stelarc, always got something up his sleeve! He likes to say that too. ”

Full Story: Boing Boing.

(Thanks Natasha!)

From John Harrigan:

Ten Towers is an audio recording of Ten Magical people reading prose written especially for them by myself.

These people have been chosen because they are highly respected by the community they are a part of.

The Ten Towers is also a snap shot and attempt to comprise a state of the union address from the world of Occulture and Magic. This project is also my way of saying thank you to the people I care about. Giving something of myself in the creation of a piece of prose that will always belong to that person and that person alone. I do this because of how the magickal community has supported the work of FoolishPeople.

All Towers will also have access to the entire recording and everyone who works on the project and will be able to print and sell copies via CD. Any money made from the CD this way can be kept by the Tower who has printed and sold any CD’s. Towers can print as many cd’s as they like individually and then sell them. Each person designing the look and design, so as to create a modern day magical artifact. A limited edition specific to that Magical person, whomever they may be.

I have no idea how many of these recordings will get turned into artifacts until after the project is completed.

Tower number one is Danny Chaoflux. Danny Chaoflux is a Persian artist living in Portland OR, and the
founder of Portland Occulture. Hir main interests are crossdressing, dream travel, and ancient mysticism.

Download the mp3.

Wes Unruh defines and further explains hyperglyphics:

I use this term to describe a media that is capable of generating tulpas, thoughtforms, egregores, and eventually autonomous mathematical personalities. It was with some amusement I found after completing the rough draft of this article the following translation from Isidore Isou, the artist-poet responsible for the foundation of the Lettrist Movement, using the phrase metagraphic: ‘Metagraphics or post-writing, encompassing all the means of ideographic, lexical and phonetic notation, supplements the means of expression based on sound by adding a specifically plastic dimension, a visual facet which is irreducible and escapes oral labelling…’ It seems we have achieved something of this dream in the icons and notations with which virtual worlds are created and populated. Metagraphics and Hyperglyphics then, are the High Art of the new media.

Full Story: Key 23.

In the second half of our show on Philip K. Dick, the Vikings meander through the multiple mind states of our fearless author picking apart the events and aftermaths of what came to be known as the V.A.L.I.S trilogy.

We discuss the final work of PKD which, unfortunately, was never completed and how that project known as “The Owl in Daylight” shows PKD prophecizing his own demise 2 weeks before it’s occurrance.

Throughout his work PKD not only defined a new class of sci-fi hero – the delinquent savante – but also challenged our notion of what it means to be sane, what it means to be insane, and what it means to come to realize that our defining organism – the artist who created this whole mess of several worlds, the organism we all may be but fingers upon fingers of the same self within – may itself be as batty as the most batty amongst us.

MP3 on Viking Youth Power Hour.

Drinking to the end of american democracy the vikings tread across the grim waters of the 9/11 conspiracies. We get things rolling by discussing how the news stumbled into the collective and individual laps of the vikings and the challenges it posed to a group of dingbats from a generation who found patriotism anethema.

We drop some science about how governments and ruling bodies over the years have used military actions to get the people behind their agendas. Look up the USS Maine and the Reich Stag smart ass.

We then move into a discussion and dissection of the very important video Loose Change. if you watch any video on the questions with the dominant 9/11 story, please make it this one. Even if you’ve seen other videos, even if you’re absolutely certain you have ALL the answers about what went down on that dark day, please do yourself a favor and watch this video right away.

When those planes incinerated into ash against the two towers of western civilization the world began it’s rusty saunter towards a truly new day. Whether that day, which is creeping towards us with an increasing velocity, becomes one of never before imagined freedom or a crippling hiccup and recapitulation of a legacy of unbalanced power is yet to be seen, but coming to find answers as to who participated in what artist Paul Laffoley called “the end of post-modernism” may be a powerful initiatory step to rediscovering hope.

Devendra Banhart closes the show with “Crippled Crow”.

MP3 from Viking Youth Power Hour.

Before she died, at the age of 81 in 1944, the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint stipulated that her paintings were not to be shown in public for 20 years after her death. Perhaps she felt that the world was not yet ready for them. In some respects, the world never will be ready for the occult symbolism and spiritualist gibberish that her work was derived from, and from which she gained her inspiration. Although the same peculiar beliefs attend the work of pioneering artists such as Mondrian, Kandinsky and Malevich, they never suggested, as did Af Klint, that their work was guided by an imaginary “leader in the spiritual world”. For Af Klint, this was a certain Ananda, who in 1904 told her “she was to execute paintings on the astral plane”.

Full Story: the Guardian.

LVX on meeting Grant Morrison:

Me and two buddies hit the scene Friday night at Isotope Comics in San Francisco. They were hosting the first of two big party’s for the annual Wondercon comic convention and Grant Morrison was the guest of honor. Packed in amongst the fanboys (and occasionally their women), we gawked at original artist renderings on the walls, leafed through unknown comics, and drank freely from the open bar. While standing outside Grant and his wife Kristan hopped out of their cab looking appropriately dashing, said “good evening” to those of us hanging about, then moved into the store to meet the fans.

Full Story: LVX23.

In his presentation, artist Alex Grey noted that Nobel-prize-winner Francis Crick, discoverer of the double helical structure of DNA, also told friends he received inspiration for his ideas from LSD, according to news reports.

The gathering included a discussion of how early computer pioneers used LSD for inspiration. Douglas Englebart, the inventor of the mouse, Myron Stolaroff, a former Ampex engineer and LSD researcher who was attending the symposium, and Apple-cofounder Steve Jobs were among them. In the 2005 book What the Dormouse Said, New York Times reporter John Markoff quotes Jobs describing his LSD experience as “one of the two or three most important things he has done in his life.”

Full Story: Wired News.

Fell continues to work towards his theory of occult-design:

I remember speaking to a fellow by the name of SatsUrn on OccultForums.com some time ago. He works as a physicist in the U.S. dealing with electromagnetic radiation and had gotten involved in the occult with his interest in sacred geometry in ancient temples. Turns out that much of the ancient holy architects had some sort of esoteric knowledge of how particular angles, shapes, dimensions, and spaces could warp and affect the natural electromagnetic forces and other radiations and/or energies that were naturally occurrent. These structures could also focus human energies while within and, for lack of better terms, magnify or amplify them. Thus, sacred temples were actually, yes, houses of the gods. Not in that they were hanging out in the rafters looking down upon us, but as it welled up exotic energies that essentially entrained the people within to be drawn into either ecstatic states or lower EEG states, perhaps from the normal, waking beta state down to more introspective, “mystical” states that are normal when the mind’s EEG is entrained to alpha or theta waves.

In art, it is the realm of the artist to exact their inner visions of reality upon a canvas, whether it be clay or by brush. We do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are. But a designer learns the tenets of her or his craft in order to bring an order, hierarchy, and structure to that which there is apparently none ? something especially true in an “Age of Information,” an age named after an abstraction. The methods of magic are similar in that the will of the individual is fixed and, through a projection of desire into the substratum of reality, events unfold that can bring about changes in apparent accord to the magician’s will. It is an attempt to place an abstract order of control over the randomness of life. (Love Women, Hate Stupid).

Artist Coop has decided to start a religion based around Galactus. I’ve always suspected Galactus and most of the Marvel comics gods as being real, speaking through Jack Kirby.

Link (via Post Atomic).

Old but previously unpublished interview:

John Dee, for example, was one of the leading scientific lights of his age. Without John Dee, there wouldn’t have been an Isaac Newton. The science of navigation was practically invented by John Dee. He was a classic Renaissance man, and yet he seemed to spend the latter half of his life working upon this incomprehensible series of squiggles that he referred to as being Enochian language, which he seemed to believe literally was a form of language with which you could communicate with angels. Now, you look at this table of tiny squares full of little symbols, numbers, letters, and it looks like complete lunacy – and, indeed, most people have dismissed it as such, but given Dee’s undisputed, original intellect, I found it more difficult to dismiss it.

I also started looking at people like Jack Whiteside Parsons. There’s a crater on the moon named after him – the Parsons Crater. That’s because Jack Parsons invented solid rocket fuel, without which it would have been impossible to reach the moon. He was a distinguished scientist. He was also a member of the Golden Dawn – the Caliphate OTO; the Ordo Templi Orientist (OTO). Crowley had been the head of the order at one point. The more I started to look at it, the more it seemed that . . . most of the leading scientists, artists, musicians – most of the key thinkers in human cultural history, seemed to be blatantly and overtly involved in magical thinking of some sort. I mean nearly every artist that you would care to name … You’d think there’d be nothing more formal and scientific than those sort of divided rectangles and squares of Mondrian’s, but no, that was all based upon theosophy. Even baseball was created by a theosophist.

Link (via New World Disorder)
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m leaving tomorrow and won’t be back until next month. Melissa Gira the Sacred Whore will be blogging until I get back. Melissa’s a “priestess, artist, writer, multimedia whore, BDSM professional, peepshow girlie, post-pornmongerer.”

Tomorrow I’m heading down south to visit some friends at the University of Wyoming, and will be in NYC from the 15th until the 22nd and Chicago from the 23rd until the 30th. Drop me a line if you’re in the area.

I was just going to add this as a comment to the earlier Grant Morrison interview, but I think there’s enough going on here to warrent its own post. Grant Morrison interview:

‘Sigil’ as a word is out of date. All this magic stuff needs new terminology because it’s not what people are being told it is at all. It’s not all this wearying symbolic misdirection that’s being dragged up from the Victorian Age, when no-one was allowed to talk plainly and everything was in coy poetic code. The world’s at a crisis point and it’s time to stop bullshitting around with Qabalah and Thelema and Chaos and Information and all the rest of the metaphoric smoke and mirrors designed to make the rubes think magicians are ’special’ people with special powers. It’s not like that. Everyone does magic all the time in different ways. ‘Life’ plus ’significance’ = magic. See Pop Mag!c for more.

Perhaps “Hyperstition“?

There’s also an interview with Human Traffic writer Craig McGill who is working on a biography of Morrison.

Grant comes from Govan – which is a hellhole in Glasgow. It’s truly one of the most deprived parts of the city and also the country – terrible housing, squalor. I mean politicians have written off a lot of these people – something for which I think some of them should be brought up on charges of dereliction of duty for. Not many go to
University, many more end up with drug habits, poor health. For many, social aspirations is getting their next benefit cheque or being a drug dealer. Basically, there’s not much hope and what there is can be snuffed out by day-to-day life. That’s not to say there’s not a lot of good people there – there are, but the environment they are in stacks the odds against them.

Grant came from that and more or less off his own back, is now mingling with celebrities and is relatively comfortable. Don’t get me wrong, he probably couldn’t afford to stop working tomorrow and never type again, but he owns a quality house and is certainly doing a lot better than many from his generation. In his own way he’s a role model. He shows that there’s a way out. You can live your dreams, even if you can’t go down the traditional route of being a sportsman. We should be shouting about people like Grant from the rooftops. He’s the boy who done good. Now I know he’s not unique by any stretch of the imagination in that regard, but it never hurts to highlight another success tale.

And there’s also an interview with the Filth artist Chris Weston and a review of Anarchy for the Masses

Both of these are from Zen Werewolf, a while back.

A Burroughs interview about magic:

Possibly not, to perform a certain function, but I think all novelists particularly are engaged in the creation of Tulpas. That is exactly what they are doing. Ahh…. they are trying to create characters that have an existence apart from the novel, apart from the page. Klee said that quite distinctly, that the “artist who is called” as he put it, is ahh “attempting to create something apart, that has an existence apart from him and apart from the canvas and that can even put the creator in danger”, which is of course the clearest proof of his difference, its separation from him. I read that years ago and put it down and I was interested to find that ahh, 20 or 30 years later, that I had noted that down. It became of course very much more significant to me when I started painting myself. Yes, all artists are engaged in the supreme blasphemy, of creating life, trying to, some very much more successfully than others, but none of them completely successful. It probably would be a disastrous success. I should say that it would depend upon the degree of his engagement. It could be, certainly, the whole area is dangerous.

The Death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs: What Really Happened? (long PDF about William and Joan’s relationship)

Hacker and former Mondo 2000 editor St. Jude passed away this morning at 3am.

I was going to try to contact her sometime this week to try to get permission to post an old article she wrote in Mondo. I hadn’t heard that she had cancer. Her work was brilliant, and it will be sorely missed.
Link.

Seattle Times details the differences between the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic and the movie, and compiles some other interesting information about the comic.

British artist Kevin O’Neill has also drawn the sci-fi comic “2000 A.D.” and enjoys a singular status: The Comics Code Authority found his style so objectionable that it will not approve any title he draws.

Link (via Bookslut).

When I Am King, the online comic by Swiss artist Demian5, follows a sexually deviant camel and the recently de-pantsed king of Egypt on a quest to find love and trousers. The story is told entirely through pictures and symbols — without a word of text. It’s a wild ride through a desert that includes weird sex, hallucinogenic drugs and dangerous bees.

“About ninety-five percent of [When I am King] I made up as I went along,” Demian5 says. “Some scenes, like the one where the ‘camel’ smokes the cigarette, were in my head before I even started drawing WIAK.”

WIAK reads like a textbook example from Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics. The whole comic was created and published electronically — Demian didn’t take any notes or do any sketches on paper. He used mostly Adobe programs Photoshop, Illustrator and ImageReady to draw the comic and create animation. He freed himself of the restrictions imposed by printed page dimensions and used the web’s “infinite canvas” to convey a sense of space. The reader mostly scrolls left to right, following the characters activity along the landscape, but in a few scenes the reader scrolls down, following falling characters. Animation is used to highlight emotions and convey a sense of motion rather than as a storytelling tool. In fact, WIAK deals more with emotions and experimentation than plot. The story in WIAK is only background — what’s really important is what the characters are feeling and how it’s expressed to the audience.

Demian’s new project, Square Stories, is published weekly in the print version of Zurich Express and will also be published online in America. Demian says he finds Square Stories confining “mostly because of its small, weekly-one-gag form. I’m still trying to find the perfect way to do them. Contrary to WIAK it will also contain words sooner or later, and as it is published in a very widespread official newspaper it is aimed at a larger, more average audience. It is also forbidden for me to offend real people and to offend religious feelings.” He adds, “I wonder if I will ever have trouble with that.”

Although the strips look much like Demian’s other work, hiring Demian to work for a mainstream newspaper is like hiring David Lynch to take over Peanuts. WIAK features a camel performing sexual favors for humans. But Demian, a self-described “poorly disciplined vegetarian” defends his work saying “I don’t want anyone to do anything with animals, just be friends with them. There is also a symbolic aspect to the sodomy parts of WIAK. It is not sodomy because the creatures in WIAK are neither really human nor are they real animals — they all have about the same amount of intelligence, and they don’t really exist. They’re just symbols. Glyphs.” (“I wasn’t planning to do so much symbolism when I started WIAK,” he admits.) He adds, “It’s not about animal rights, though I think we should care about them.”

When Demian5 began serializing the comic on his site in 2000 it was an immediate hit, even without much advertising. “I submitted my link to some search engines and I contacted a few other comic creators like Scott McCloud to find out what they think about my work,” he says. By the time the series reached its conclusion Demian was being mentioned alongside comics legends like Jim Woodring and Chris Ware, and has since been favorably reviewed in Wired and Spin. According to Demian’s “complicated system of counters” nearly 50,000 people have read his comic so far.

Despite the popularity and critical success of his comic, Demian is still not able to live off it. PayPal donations and merchandise sales help him out, but they’re not paying his rent yet. Demian admits he would be content working a day job and continuing to post his comics online if he had a job he enjoyed. “Somehow I like the spirit of free online comics, because money is always a threat for artistic freedom and for diversity. But then, I want to earn a living with something I like to do. Like everyone. So I wouldn’t say no to a virtual dollar. Or to a virtual euro.”

In the meantime Demian continues to freelance in the advertising business and receives part of his income from Square Stories. He describes himself as a normal and boring person who spends his time thinking deep thoughts. Amongst other things he has been enjoying the online comics Pay Your Reality Tax and Nichtlustig. Demian’s influences for his surreal comics range from artists Woodring and Ware to the Great Gianna Sisters and Wipe Out 2097 videogames to the music of Radiohead (WIAK is named after a line in the Radiohead song “Paranoid Android”) to anime to his training as a graphic designer.

Demian is currently working on a new online comic, as time permits, which contains “no dialogue, nice creatures, big emotions.” He says “The style will be a bit more organic and the perspective a bit deeper than in WIAK, but it will be less colorful than Square Stories. It will also contain another form of storytelling, still without words, but… You’ll see.”

(Originally published at http://www.shift.com/content/web/405/1.html September, 2002)

Gunther von Hagens, an anatomical artist known for his exhibits featuring human corpses, is under fire in the UK for his current exhibit. The families of the Alder Hey scandal victims claim that the exhibit is “an insult to the Alder Hey families and to the memories of their children.” But the show’s organizers plan to follow through with the exhibit anyway. In his defense, Hagens said:

I treat the living and the dead with respect. All the whole body specimens come from people who have donated to the Plastination Institute and said we can exhibit. This is the democratisation of anatomy. Lay people, not just scientists, can see specimens aesthetically presented. They notice the wonder of life and creation and are not haunted by the images of death and decay you see in horror films.

Link (via New World Disorder).

Transmetropolitan author Warren Elllis and A Distant Soil artist Colleen Doran have a kickass new online comic called Superidol. It’s about a completely virtual pop idol (even her voice is synthesized) and deals with memetics. Link.

Alan Moore is the author of such acclaimed works as The Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and is a magician to boot.

Initially Moore worked as both a writer and an artist on a detective strip called “Roscoe Moscow,” but he decided he was a poor artist and decided to focus on writing. From there he went on to work for 2000 AD and Dr. Who Weekly (as many British comic authors did…) and eventually began working on the anthology Warrior.

It was here that Moore created two of his most seminal works: Marvelman (later called Mircleman) and V for Vendetta. The former would be reprinted and continued by Eclipse, the latter would be reprinted by DC (it is now part of the Vertigo imprint).

Moore was then hired by DC to write Saga of Swamp Thing beginning with issue 20. Moore continued working for DC and produced Batman: Killing Joke and most notably, The Watchmen.

The Watchmen was a politically savvy and realistic portrayal of a super hero universe. Along with Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, Moore and artist Dave Gibbons revolutionized comicsand paved the way for future mature readers series (such as The Sandman, The Crow, Preacher and many more).

However, disputes over the royalties of the Watchmen caused Moore to leave DC and vow never to work for them again. He then began his own company, Mad Love Publishing. Under this imprint he published two issues of Big Numbers. Around this time he also began two series for Tundra’s anthology Taboo: “From Hell” and “Lost Girls.” From Hell continued as a graphic novel series published by Eddie Cambell Comics.

Moore began working with rogue publishers Image Comics in 1993 and where he created 1963 which was cancelled due to low sales. Moore also wrote Wild CATs and a large amount of Spawn related material, including WildCATs/Spawn

Moore then began his relationship with Rob Liefeld and his Image off-shoot company Maximum Press (later Awesome Comics) where he worked on Supreme, Warchild, Judgement Day and other titles before Awesome comics went bankrupt.

After Awesome went under, Jim Lee’s Image off-shoot company, Wildstorm Productions (now an imprint of, ironiccally, DC Comics) offered Moore his own imprint. Moore accepted and America’s Best Comics was born. Moore has continued to write a number of books under his own imprint as well as other titles under the Wildstorm banner.

Alan Moore Fan site good starting point.

Twilight of the Super Heroes a rejected series proposal to DC by Moore

D.R. and Quinch scan page tribute to Moore and Alan Davis’ 2000 AD stories. Includes scans of an entire segment.

Alan Moore @ comicon.com lots of info and a small collection of works. Includes some performance art stuff.

Italian page a page dedicated to Alan Moore’s music, in Italian

Salon Books: From Hell an excellent article on Moore’s From Hell

V for Vendetta Shrine V for Vendetta fan site

Alan Moore interview an interview from Another Universe

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen review

Watching the Detectives illustrated annotations.

1963 annotations

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen annotations

Ralf Hildebrandt home page Watchmen annotations

The Annotated Watchmen more Watchmen annotations.

V for Vendetta annotations