Aleister Crowley - The Wickedest Man In the World (2002)

Aleister Crowley, born Edward Alexander Crowley, (12 October 1875 – 1 December 1947), pronounced /ˈkroʊli/) was a British occultist, writer, mountaineer, philosopher, and mystic. He was an influential member in several occult organizations, including the Golden Dawn, the A A (Argenteum Astrum), and Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), and is best known today for his occult writings, especially The Book of the Law, the central sacred text of Thelema. He gained much notoriety during his lifetime, and was infamously dubbed "The Wickedest Man In the World."
Crowley's other interests and accomplishments were wide-ranging—he was a chess player, mountain climber, poet, painter, astrologer, hedonist, drug experimenter, and social critic. Crowley had claimed to be a Freemason, but the regularity of his initiations with the United Grand Lodge of England has been disputed.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

The Bardo Thodol (Tibetan: bardo "liminality"; thodol as "liberation", Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State, is a funerary text that describes, and intends to guide one through, the experiences of the consciousness after death during the interval known as bardo between death and rebirth. It also includes chapters on the signs of death and rituals to undertake when death is closing in or has taken place.
It is the most internationally famous and widespread work of Tibetan Nyingma literature.
The Bardo Thodol is recited by lamas over a dying or recently deceased person, or sometimes over an effigy of the deceased. This a sign of the influence of shamanism on Tibetan Buddhism[citation needed]. The name means literally "liberation through hearing in the intermediate state".
The Bardo Thodol actually differentiates the intermediate states between lives into three bardos (themselves further subdivided):

the chikhai bardo or "bardo of the moment of death"
the chonyid bardo or "bardo of the experiencing of reality"
the sidpa bardo or "bardo of rebirth".
The chikhai bardo features the experience of the "clear light of reality", or at least the nearest approximation to it of which one is spiritually capable.

The chonyid bardo features the experience of visions of various Buddha forms (or, again, the nearest approximations of which one is capable).
The sidpa bardo features karmically impelled hallucinations which eventually result in rebirth. (Typically imagery of men and women passionately entwined.)
One can compare the descriptions of the Bardo Thodol with accounts of certain "out of the body" near-death experiences described by people who have nearly died in accidents or on the operating table - these typically contain accounts of a "white light", experienced as, somehow, a living being, and of helpful figures corresponding to that person's religious tradition.

The Bardo Thodol also mentions three other bardos: those of "life" (or ordinary waking consciousness), of "dhyana" (meditation), and of "dream". Thus together the "six bardos" form a classification of states of consciousness into six broad types, and any state of consciousness forms a type of "intermediate state" - intermediate between other states of consciousness. Indeed, one can consider any momentary state of consciousness a bardo, since it lies between our past and future existences; it provides us with the opportunity to experience reality, which is always present but obscured by the projections and confusions due to our previous unskillful actions.
According to Tibetan tradition, the Bardo Thodol was composed by Padmasambhava, written down by his primary student, Yeshe Tsogyal, buried in the Gampo hills in central Tibet and subsequently discovered by a Tibetan terton, Karma Lingpa.

Subway by Sesame Street

When I was a little kid I watched Sesame Street. This was despite having a life that in no way resembled the urban muppets that were on the screen. The was no subway where I lived, no busy streets, no highrise buidlings, and certainly no frogs dressed like Sam Spade.

BBC Documentary "Wonderland: Virtual Adultery and Cyberspace Love"

Documentary series about everyday dramas. Carolyn is a 37 year-old mother of four in the midst of a passionate affair. She's spending up to 18 hours a day with her lover online on Second Life, the website. She has never met him, but, to her husband of nine year's dismay, she is abandoning her family and flying 5,000 miles to London to start a new life with her lover, Elliot. What makes this website, which has three million members, so compelling?

From Bruno Bozzetto's "Allegro Non Troppo" (1977)

Part One

Part Two

Allegro non troppo is a Bruno Bozzetto animated film released in 1977. The film is a parody of Disney's Fantasia, though possibly more of a challenge to Fantasia than parody status would imply. In music, an instruction of "allegro ma non troppo" means to play "fast, but not overly so". In the context of this film, and without the "ma", it means Not So Fast!, an interjection meaning "slow down" or "think before you act" and refers to the film's pessimistic view of Western progress (as opposed to the optimism of Disney's original).

Xavier: Renegade Angel

Xavier: Renegade Angel is an absurdist computer animated fantasy television series created by John Lee, Vernon Chatman, Alyson Levy and Jim Tozzi. Lee and Chatman are also the creators of Wonder Showzen. The show is produced by PFFR, with animation by Cinematico. It premiered at midnight on November 4, 2007 on Adult Swim, and November 1, 2007 on adultswim.com. The show follows Xavier (a Native American-influenced faun-like wanderer/seeker with a snake hand, backwards knees, a beak, heterochromic eyes, and six nipples), who is traveling across America to find out the truth about his mysterious and uncertain origin, and uncover his parents' murderer. Occasional flashbacks to his past show that he himself killed his parents after starting an accidental fire in their home, but on the rare occasions when he is presented with the truth, he subconsciously rejects it. Each episode begins with Xavier walking through the desert, musing on the themes of that episode, before entering a town, where he will usually meet someone whom he thinks needs his help. His attempts to help, however, are hamstrung by his own abject incompetence, and many episodes are based purely around Xavier trying to limit the damage that he has caused. Most episodes end with him walking back into the desert, thinking that he has managed to do some good, when he usually has not

The State of Rhetoric

If Barack Obama does not become President of the United States he could always teach rhetoric. I have seen several very good oratories by Obama, but this last one; the victory speech in South Carolina is the best so far. This man knows how to use words and how to deliver them. I wonder who writes his speeches as they are damn good at it.

Tender is the Prey

TENDER PREY
In the hot summer of 1988-89 I was spending my holidays from university working as an assistant nurse in the local mental hospital. Large parts of Baillie Henderson Hospital or the Toowoomba Lunatic Asylum were built in 1890, long verandas framed two or three stories red brick buildings with heavy doors and barred windows. Some of the older patients still referred to me as ‘Warden’. There had once been 3000 patients living at Baillie Henderson, with a farm, dairy, book bindery, bakery and stable. Now it was a huge complex of active wards, abandoned buildings, grassy lawns and giant trees. Around 700 people called it home.
I was working in a locked ward in Ridley House where 4 beds were bolted to the floor and I sat watching from a chair and table, also bolted to the floor. I was doing night shift from 11pm till 7 am with an agitated schizophrenic. He was going through opiate and alcohol withdrawal. He had been judged a suicide risk so I had to sit with him through the night and make sure he made it to breakfast. One wall of the constant surveillance room was inch thick clear plastic reaching from floor to ceiling. In the middle of the wall was a door and it led to an exercise area just outside that was framed by a 10 meter high fence. We sat, he and I, through the night and it was the first time I heard the album Tender Prey by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

It began when they come took me from my home
And put me in Dead Row,
Of which I am nearly wholly innocent, you know.
And I'll say it again
I..am..not..afraid..to..die.

He had many problems. He lived with his mother and loved heroin being two of the main ones. He cut himself, burnt his flesh with cigarettes and often passed out, waking up in strange places and situations. Once he had awoken in bed with a man he did not recognise, both of them naked. This event was constructed as significant in his chart history, but he did not remember a thing. As the shadows of the huge bunya pines outside played against the whitewash 4 meter high walls we listened to Nick Cave croon and scream of Deanna.

We will eat out of their pantries
And their parlours
Ashy leaving in their beds
And we'll unload into their heads
On this mean season
This little angel that I squeezin'
She ain't been mean to me

He cried sometimes. We listened to Tender Prey all night, over and over again, he did not sleep and I was not allowed to. He smoked hand rolled cigarettes constantly and turned the tape over with fingers stained yellow with broken nails. We talked about books and films, music and the underworld. He knew Rimbaud and the others. He dreamed in colours. Wrote poems too and would I like to hear some. So while the masses fled to the City of Refuge he gave me psychic horse whispers from his tattered note book.

You stand before your maker
In a state of shame
Because your robes are covered in mud
While your kneel at the feet
Of a woman of the street
The gutters will run with blood
They will run with blood!

Home made tattoos slipped out blue from beneath the frayed cuffs and collar of his arrangement. Strange insects and scripts seeking the light. His watery eyes held me for a few seconds at a time. Never one to hold a glance his thin voice blew over me like a cold breeze from the swamp that had once been at the bottom of the hill, but had been drained by the settlers after they had killed all the blacks. We raged on until morning. Every 25 minutes I had to make a physical estimation of his condition, including what he was doing at the time, his mood and behaviour. Often he was just lying on the bed talking about how fucked everything was. Occasionally he was crying as he mumbled about how he needed some Hammer and would do anything to get it. Or it was how disappointed his mother was in him. All made worse by the lack of sedatives and lack of attention his medicinal need was receiving from the staff. My shift finished as porridge of Government Issue was brought in to him. He was not hungry and as I left the room the final sounds came from Tender Prey which I would buy later that week.

One morn I awakened
A new sun was shining
The sky was a Kingdom
All covered in blood
The moon and the stars
Where the troops that
lay conquered
Like fruit left to wither
Poor spiritual food.

The sun rose over the hoop pines of the car park as I pulled out from the hospital. For over a hundred years the bad apples of my home town were kept at Baillie Henderson. It came to the slow phasing out of the seclusion for the delusional. I would later come to share bar space with him in the outside world as he bled his legend around town. Falling over and getting up again. He would come to use the toilets in my father’s tiny bookshop to shoot up in. I wonder where he is today……

Cartoon to Learn Communism

Manifestoon - The Communist Manifesto illustrated by Disney like characters.
Manifestoon is an homage to the latent subversiveness of cartoons. Though U.S. cartoons are usually thought of as conveyors of capitalist ideologies of consumerism and individualism, Drew observes: "Somehow as an avid childhood fan of cartoons, these ideas were secondary to a more important lesson—that of the 'trickster' nature of many characters as they mocked, outwitted and defeated their more powerful adversaries. In the classic cartoon, brute strength and heavy artillery are no match for wit and humor, and justice always prevails. For me, it was natural to link my own childhood concept of subversion with an established, more articulate version [Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto]. Mickey running over the globe has new meaning in today's mediascape, in which Disney controls one of the largest concentrations of media

Two Films by James Whitney

Yantra - James Whitney (1957)



Lapis - James Whitney (1966)