All posts by Indy

art, movies

Beyond the Black Rainbow

Leave a comment

I just saw a movie that was right up my alley (thanks for the tip, Claudio Marino!). I won’t tell you much about it, I think it’s better that way. What you need to know is that Beyond the Black Rainbow is  a psychotronic kind of movie, where plot isn’t as important as aesthetics. This thing is beautiful! Along with the dark and brooding soundtrack (the main theme is obviously inspired by the masters: Goblin) it strives for perfection in the genre. Of course it has its’ flaws, but if you’re in the right mood: Crank up the volume and turn off the lights and this beast will hold you spellbound for almost two hours straight.

I feel the same vibe in movies like Inland Empire, The Limits of Control, Valhalla Rising, Eraserhead, Amer and maybe even Stalker, 2001: A Space Odyssey and some Cronenberg flicks. If you like that stuff, you’ll hopefully dig this one too.

politics

Op-Docs: The Program

Leave a comment

Why isn’t this all over the news? What’s all this shit focus on Julian Assange (and not on WikiLeaks)?

Videos like these keep spreading on Twitter and other social media, but as long as it’s only there and not on major television, most people will dismiss news like this as “conspiratory”.
Well, now it’s in the New York Times. Will people react? Probably not. We are too distracted by idiocy.

This Website is a Belligerent Act

art, movies, philosophy, religion

The Holy Mountain – Part One

4 Comments

Alejando Jodorowsky‘s The Holy Mountain (1973) is one of my all time favourites. It’s about symbolism, mainly focused on spirituality and the occult, death, rebirth, mysticism and the extramundane, but also on capitalist production, militarism and the absurd. The visual vocabulary is unique and absolutely stunning. Press pause in any frame at any time throughout the whole film, and you will get an image that constitutes the most amazing art. After all, Jodorowsky was trying with all his soul to make a sacred film. He wanted to change mankind with it, make it a source of enlightenment for the audience, and he believed that cinema was better than LSD…

The Holy Mountain has certainly changed me and the way I look at things, and most importantly the way I look at movies. In my eyes, this is pure gold/excrements. It operates on so many levels and is filled with so much detail, I believe you need to experience it several times to grasp its universal themes. Knowledge of the occult, religion and its’ most basic symbols is essential for understanding. Sometimes it comes out deep as fuck, and sometimes it does not (to put it simply, haha!)… That’s what I love with this piece of art: It rules even when it sucks!

These posts are based on Jodorowsky’s commentary track for the Anchor Bay DVD edition, as well as the book The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky. You may want to watch the movie while you read this text, and hopefully, a deeper kind of understanding will emerge on your highway to hell/nirvana or whatever you may fancy.

Here are the first three minutes of the film, as explained by Jodorowsky in the commentary track:

First, a set decorated without furniture. It’s clean, like a hospital, with crosses on the wall to convey a sense of mysticism. There are only essential objects, like a sacred ceremony. The master’s outfit conceals his face. He hides his face, like Mohammed. He is an essential being, without ego.

These are the actual movements of a Japanese tea ceremony. All the movements are conscious.

These two girls weren’t actresses. They wanted to have a spiritual experience. They were searching for their own truth, their naked truth.

[the camera sweeps across different images]
The inner God that opens in circles towards a greater consciousness.
A heart that opens towards a greater consciousness.
The target that the arrow must hit.
The eye of Buddha.
The pearl, the soul that must be polished.
When the door is opened, a key is found with the trilogy.
Now, descend into the world of the dead, to the world of the dreamless dreams.
Descending…
Butterfly wings symbolize metamorphosis.
Back up through the serpent, Kundalini… the pearls of Eros, until it arrives at a geometric figure, which is the interior consciousness.

After this three minute introduction filled to the brim with symbols of the occult, we meet the protagonist, the Christ like figure, the Thief, lying on the ground, and who through the course of the film will experience moments of enlightenment. Jodorowsky continues:

He’s ”The Fool” of the tarot. His face is covered with flies, symbolizing useless thoughts. He is urinating on himself. He’s drunk and lost. This is the card that defines him, the tarot’s Fool card. The Fool is always represented by an animal that is his ego. The frog is the ego.

To be continued in Part Two.

movies

Great movies of the 80’s: Letters From A Dead Man

Leave a comment

There are two movies on my Worship Deluxe List: Apocalypse Now (1979, Francis Ford Coppola) and Stalker (1979, Andrej Tarkovskij). These are movies that deal with life, death and the unfathomable power of consciousness, spiritual enlightenment, turbulence and confusion. They work on so many levels, using cinematography and psychology in such subliminal ways it’s almost an hallucinatory experience watching them.

Having endured Konstantin Lopushansky‘s Pisma Myortvogo Cheloveka (Letters From A Dead Man aka Dead Man’s Letters (1986)), I might add it to the list. Lopushansky apparently worked with Tarkovskij on Stalker as a production assistant, and here he takes it to the next level: Nuclear winter, death and dying. It’s release coincided quite well with the Chernobyl distaster…

This is by far the most realistic post-apocalyptic vision I have ever experienced (alongside Threads, that is). It’s severely dark, haunting, and utterly depressing, and the screen is literally glowing of nuclear waste. There are no Mad Max haircuts in this one. It’s not funny or cool. It’s about emotional disintegration and the total resignation of life.

Almost all of existence above ground is wiped out. The environment is toxic. A few survivors finds a home in a bunker, and a physicist writes letters in his mind to his young son who went missing during the chaos. His wife is dying from radiation sickness. The days are as black as night, and the few remaining souls are contemplating death.
If you are a bit like me, you will contemplate what life really is after having watched this one.


The rest of this post is kind of spoiler-like, so you might wanna consider stop reading here.

There are so many memorable scenes, both beautiful, moving and disturbing. The one that really got me is when a survivor praises the achievements of humanity, and then commits suicide.
An absolute masterpiece.

All evidence suggests that the history of mankind has ended. It is time to sum up the outcome, and I think it should be done calmly, without vulgar affectation.

Today I want to talk to you like a dead man to other dead men. That is – frankly.
Let me present to you a speech for human beings as biological species.

Mankind was a tragic species, doomed perhaps from the very beginning. Our fatal and beautiful fate was to always attempt to bite off more than we can chew, be better than nature intended. We found a place in ourselves for compassion, even though it was conflicting with the law of survival. We managed to feel self-respect, even if it was always trampled on. We created art masterpieces, comprehending their uselessness and frailness. We found in ourselves the ability to love. Oh Lord, it was so difficult! For inexorable time caused our bodies, thoughts and senses to decay.

But man continued to love. And love created art, an art which reflects our unbearable yearning for perfection, our immense despair and our endless cry of terror, a howl of desolate thinking creatures in the cold and impassive space desert.

In this room, a lot of hateful words had been said about mankind, contemptous and scornful. But I won’t throw a stone at it today. That is what I say: I loved mankind. I love it even better now that it no longer exists. I love it for its tragic fate. And I want to say to you, colleagues, I want to say that I love you. Perhaps that is my leap of consciousness, but I wanted you to know.

Now I will go to my room and everything will end for me.
After all, we are all adults, and death is not a frightening thing when everything has died.

——————

OTHER GREAT MOVIES OF THE 80’s:
Manhunter (1986)
A Short Film About Killing (1988)
Threads (1984)
The Quiet Earth (1985)
The Thing (1982)
The Plague Dogs (1982)
Altered States (1980)

philosophy, politics, religion

The World Tomorrow

2 Comments

It must be considered impossible to solve the position we’ve placed ourselves in. The level of humanity’s consciousness is way too low. Our children will have to pay. They are the ones being left with the pollution, the wreckage, the ruin, the debt and the collapse of human industrial civilization. That’s not pessimism, but realism. Consider this: What if realists were in charge of U.S. foreign policy?

Now all the gods are dead, except the god of war. And the god of war is money.

Charles Eisenstein, in Sacred Economics, states:

Our culture’s notion of spirit is that of something separate and non-worldly, that yet can miraculously intervene in material affairs, and that even animates and directs them in some mysterious way.

It is hugely ironic and hugely significant that the one thing on the planet most closely resembling the forgoing conception of the divine is money! It is an invisible, immortal force that surrounds and steers all things, omnipotent and limitless, an ‘invisible hand’ that, it is said, makes the world go ’round. Yet, money today is an abstraction, at most symbols on a piece of paper, but usually mere bits in a computer.
[…]

Money’s divine property of abstraction, of disconnection from the real world of things, reached its extreme in the early years of the 21st century as the financial economy lost its mooring in the real economy and took on a life of its own. The vast fortunes of Wall Street were unconnected to any material production, seeming to exist in a separate realm.

Looking down from Olympian heights, the financiers called themselves ‘masters of the universe’, channeling the power of the god they served to bring fortune or ruin upon the masses, to literally move mountains, raze forests, change the course of rivers, cause the rise and fall of nations. But money soon proved to be a capricious god. As I write these words, it seems that the increasingly frantic rituals that the financial priesthood uses to placate the god money are in vain. Like the clergy of a dying religion, they exhort their followers to greater sacrifices while blaming their misfortunes either on sin (greedy bankers, irresponsible consumers) or on the mysterious whims of God (the financial markets). Soon, perhaps, we will blame the priests themselves.

What we call deflation, an earlier culture might have called, ‘God abandoning the world’. Money is disappearing, and with it a third property of spirit, the animating force of the human realm. At this writing, all over the world machines stand idle. Factories have ground to a halt, construction equipment sits derelict in the yard. Yet all the human and material inputs to operate them still exist. There is still fuel, there are still raw materials, and there are still human beings in abundance who know how to operate the machines. It is rather something immaterial, that animating spirit, which has fled. What has fled is money. That is the only thing missing, so insubstantial (in the form of electrons in computers) that it can hardly be said to exist at all, yet so powerful that without it, human productivity grinds to a halt. It is as if God had forsaken the world.

Even beyond the mechanical realm, we can see the demotivating effects of lack of money. Consider the stereotype of the unemployed man, nearly broke, slouched in front of the TV in his undershirt, drinking a beer, hardly able to rise from his chair. Money, it seems, animates people as well as machines. Without it we are dispirited.

We do not realize that our concept of the divine has attracted to it a god that fits that concept, and given it sovereignty over the earth. By divorcing the soul from the flesh, spirit from matter, and God from nature, we have installed a ruling power that is soulless, alienating, ungodly and unnatural.

Obviously, God must be killed. Watch Michael C. Ruppert’s speech about this (it’s edited with pompous music, new age imagery etc, but as always: listen to the message, ignore the cosmetics).

 ––––––––––

In a world where almost every news channel is owned by major Western corporations and governments, Julian Assange’s TV-show The World Tomorrow might bring something new to the table. Yep, it’s run by Russia Today, which is funded by the Russian state, but there still is a difference.

And yeah, Assange’s ”show” looks and behaves like an amateur video podcast, but of course, looks are completely irrelevant. Idiots will always have a hang up on Assange’s haircut, his smile, the way he speaks or whatever, but don’t bother with idiots – it’s the message that counts. Assange is executing what mainstream media so often fails to do: he breaks stories, lets interesting people talk, tries to find the missing link, exposes the truth and the lies. At least with Wikileaks. As for the show, it’s too early to tell.

Unfortunately, the program is much too short. Episode #2 would have been much better if David Horowitz (Zionist) and Slavoj Žižek (Communist) could’ve talked for one or two hours, instead of 25 minutes. But I guess that’s because the platform is owned by Russia Today, and after all, it’s supposed to be a TV-show, not a video podcast.

Still, it’s great compared to the totally worthless debates on national television in Sweden. They cram twenty people together in a studio, everybody’s talking over the top of each other, it’s just mindless and meaningless to watch. Mainstream media really, really sucks. Sure, every now and then there are good articles to be found even in the crappiest of papers, but if you want the real deal you have to go somewhere else. The World Tomorrow might be a good place to start, even though they seem to be struggling with the same problems as mentioned above. Just look at Horowitz and Žižek going crazy in the studio! At least they’re trying…

However, as people start to dig a bit deeper than Dagens Nyheter and The Guardian, the power freaks are trying to take control over the Internet with PIPA, SOPA, ACTA, CISPA, FRA, Datalagringsdirektivet… You know how it goes. If people had paid more attention to The Pirate Party we probably wouldn’t be so utterly fucked already. Now it’s pretty damn close to 1984, and we won’t even realize it until we’re cut off. And not even then will we do anything about it. That’s the sad but true story of humanity right there. We know what’s wrong, but we’re too fucked to care. We might have heard about CISPA in the news, but we don’t bother to check what it’s all about. In so many ways, we truly deserve this collapse.

The World Tomorrow might not be the most balanced show on earth, but at least it’s something different, working to make a change. Hopefully Assange and Russia Today will have the courage and honesty to invite their ”enemies” as well, further on.

Let’s start looking at the puppet masters – for real – and stop being their puppets.

culture, philosophy, religion

Ayahuasca – The Vine of Death

2 Comments
Art by Alex Grey - Please visit alexgrey.com

It’s obvious that the war on drugs is not about protecting people from harmful substances. If it was, then alcohol, cigarettes, and maybe even coffee (can you imagine an office in Western society where you can’t get coffee?), would definitely be illegal. Those are highly addictive and harmful substances, but they’re still very much promoted by society. Nothing wrong with that, really, since we should be able to decide for ourselves what to do with our bodies, but the hypocrisy is fascinating, and the anti-drug propaganda is still as mindless as it’s always been. So, the war is clearly about controlling the cash flow, and ultimately controlling what people think. In other words, it’s about capitalism.

I’ve been following The Joe Rogan Experience podcast off and on since 2010, and some of the most interesting shows have been about exploring the human mind with the help of meditation, floatation tanks, weed and hallucinogens. It’s basically dealing with how little we really know about ourselves and the universe. Then there’s the Ayahuasca experience, which is taking it to the next level.

The Ayahuasca experience seems to be most rewarding when it comes to getting to terms with yourself, but it also seems to be extremely challenging and scary as hell. This is not something you do for fun to spice up your boring party, and it’s certainly not about fake new age imagery either. Faking to be spiritual is actually preventing you from being spiritual, as Chris Marcus says in episode #127 of The Joe Rogan Experience, and Ayahuasca will make you feel like shit for real, so no use in faking there.

Art by Alex Grey – alexgrey.com

The big problem, as with anything that gets exploited and hyped up, seems to be to find the real deal. People are keen to take your money, but they might have no interest in the plant or the experience, and according to those who know, this could be disastrous. Ayahuasca tourism has been in full effect for a couple of years already, and it’s probably getting worse as more and more people discover its potential.

––––––––––

There’s a vast amount of information about Ayahuasca on the internet, of course. Here are some of the resources I’ve found particularly useful when trying to figure out what it’s all about:

Documentaries
Manifesting the Mind (2011) – A great introduction to psychedelics.
DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2010) – A film based on Dr. Rick Strassman’s book with the same name, where he explores the effects of DMT. His research was approved by the U.S. government.

Video podcasts
The Joe Rogan Experience #127, August 3 2011 – Part 1 – Part 2
The Ayahuasca experience of Aubrey Marcus, who went to Peru for the real deal with the shamans. I’d been reading a bit about Ayahuasca before, but this is what got me really interested.

London Real, March 18 2012 – Ready to Die
A really cool video podcast inspired by The Joe Rogan Experience.
“Brian Rose & Nic Gabriel talk about their upcoming retreat with Ayahuasca, the controversial hallucinogen and ‘Plant Teacher’. After spending 10 days on a rigorous diet of no sugar, salt, caffeine, alcohol, drugs, wheat, red meat, dairy, soy or spices, they discuss their anxiety and anticipation about the upcoming experience and how it will change their lives.”
While Joe Rogan totally rule, he might be a bit too talkative, interrupting his guests a bit too often and straying away from the subject only to return twenty minutes later, which kind of annoys me at times. Brian and Nic are quite mild in their approach, and their show is about an hour long (The JRE may last up till three hours). London Real is well worth watching!

London Real, March 28 2012 – Back from the Dead
”Brian Rose & Nic Gabriel talk about the fear, anxiety, anticipation, and excitement of their first Ayahuasca retreat in the UK and how they felt physically, emotionally, and spiritually before, during, and directly after ingesting the “Plant Teacher.” They detail the logistics of the actual ceremony and describe the sensations felt hour-by-hour as the medicine traversed their bodies and conclude with individual life lessons drawn from the experience.”

Graham Hancock on Ayahuasca and Consciousness, 
The great writer and journalist Mr. Hancock is hooked on Ayahuasca. Here he tells his story to Sonia Doubell.

The Joe Rogan Experience #195, March 13 2012
Aubrey Marcus again. This time he’s been to Costa Rica, getting crazy with Ibogaine, which is even tougher than Ayahuasca.

London Real, April 30 2012 – The Secret Bliss
Brian and Nic talking to the above mentioned Sonia Doubell about her Ayahuasca experience, meditation and more.

art, culture, religion

Wellcome to Hell

Leave a comment
Executioner's mask.

So you think you’re a collector? You ain’t got shit compared to Henry Wellcome (1853-1936).
I spent a few days in London recently, and on Euston Road I came across the Wellcome Collection.

Mr. Wellcome was a pharmacist, entrepreneur, philantropist and compulsive collector. At a very early age, Henry’s village was attacked by Sioux Indians, and Henry helped out taking care of the wounded people. This event sparked an interest in other cultures (usually, it’s the other way around) and already as a child he began collecting objects from other worlds.

At the time of his death he had more than a million archeological artefacts, etnographic specimens and objects of medical history, all packed in warehouses all over London. Most of the collection was sold off at various auctions, but lots of stuff was up for grabs. For example, thousands of weapons were given away, and more than six tons of helmets, shields, spears and guns were just put in the trash. Wellcome had over 600,000 volumes in his library, and more than 100,000 paintings and photographs, all donated to the Wellcome Trust.

Henry’s vision was to create a massive space to house his collections, where scientists and other professionals could come to learn about the development of medicine and such. This was supposed to be a museum of man, rather than a cabinet of curiosities.

This funerary reliquary, or container, for the bones of the deceased was made in Upper Ogowe in Gabon between 1870 and 1920. The reliquary was designed to protect ancestors from evil forces and to help the living communicate with them and to win good health and success in hunting.
This walking stick, made from whalebone with an ivory skull pommel and green glass eyes, belonged to Charles Darwin. It was made at some point between 1839 and 1881.
This German gas mask dates from the first world war.
Fifty glass eyes stare out of this case, made around 1900.

Chrisopher Turner writes in his review of An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World (Frances Larson):
”Burroughs Wellcome & Co, the business that paid for this magnificent trove of historical bric-à-brac, sold malt extract, cod liver oil, cocaine and other dietary supplements in the novel form of compressed tablets (their cocaine pills, labelled ‘Forced March’, were ‘to be dissolved in the mouth every hour when undergoing continued mental strain or physical exertion’). These revolutionary gelatine-coated ‘tabloids’, were ‘so attractive in appearance’, one customer marvelled in 1885, ‘that they might almost be mistaken for sweets’ – and they sold almost as fast. The two entrepreneurs built a factory in Kent, with machines capable of churning out 600 pills a minute. The pills were then aggressively marketed to doctors and pharmacies all around the country by salesmen in frock coats with crocodile-skin bags.”