Plight Of The Messenger

Full Moon Eclipse

November 28th, 2012 / 6 Degrees Gemini

The Messenger gazes toward a foggy sky. It appears dense with cleansing mist. His retreat has concluded, and he prepares to move forward once more, with haste, and re-enter the realm of Truth. Unfortunately, a grievous mountain lay between him and the sunrise. Whoever said the Messenger was not nimble on his feet? He climbs carefully, slowly, each breath invigorating more life into his immortal body.

The Destinies of Man interlace with Sol and Luna as they make their Grand Opposition, though they're charged with separate entities. Sol travels through Sagittarius, the Archer and Truth-Bearer, while Luna at his opposite, the Scattered Source Superhighway of Gemini. Here the Messenger's words and thoughts over the recent past are echoed and enforced. He humbly recalls them while traversing the jagged path:

OH BALLS! Unkle Binky Fails At Everything

OH BALLS! Do you remember Unkle Binky from the 2011 gonzomentary "Clark"?

No, of course you don't, because you were probably high at the time.

Well, here's another thing that was deleted from your recollection in a gigantic cloud of pot smoke. (FUCK YEAH COLORADO!! WOO!) Unkle Binky tried and obviously failed to win the presidency. No one was surprised, but it nevertheless made for some good television:

In other news, you boys and girls are going to have a lot of fun with Unkle Binky shows up in your house in 2013. Just wait.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

The Internet and Counterculture (Acidexia Intro)

As all the chatter about the “2012 end of the world” dissolves back into the white noise from whence it came, we are still presented a unique vantage point. We can look at once backward and forward on cultural trends, cresting and falling so quickly that in mere decades we can see patterns emerging that may have taken hundreds of years to arise before the advent of digital communication.

Of course, there’s no way a thorough investigation of any trend is going to happen here in the length of an introduction, within the time it takes me to sip my way through a mocha. But that is telling of these times as well. As Palahniuk observed through the mouthpiece of Tyler Durden in his seminal book Fight Club, we are all “single serving size friends, here.” (And is it also a sign of counter cultural mentality that a reference to a book and movie just a decade out of the gates might be considered hackneyed or out of date?) Our observations must also be single serving size, crammed into a 140 character tweet, or a 350 word blog post.

Words of Traitors, digital files unleashed to the lucky few

This past week we sent out a link to the web resolution version of Words of Traitors to those that helped it come into being. (Final stats: 118 full color pages, over 90 illustrations, 7 short stories, more late nights than I can count.)

"I stood out there in the cold crying for an hour. My balls felt like they had shriveled and crawled inside my body. Like I should cut an incision along the side of my thigh and shove them inside there and sew it shut, cut holes in my chest and sew my arms inside, then my legs, my whole miserable body stitched into a quivering, quadriplegic abortion. I called her cell a hundred times. I banged on the door, howling senselessly." —“Schoolgirl Blues,” Words of Traitors
Next on the slate is setting it up for print. And then, building buzz to spin off a comic series? If you'd like to help or be involved please get in touch with me.

And if you didn't donate but want a copy, I've decided to open up the limited edition to purchase on Amazon down the line, until we reach 2,000 sold, at which point it will be retired. This will make pushing it to indie bookstores and possibly galleries easier, while at the same time controlling the flow rate.

Thanks again to everyone that contributed either creatively or financially, and much hope that more will share in what we've created. It's the first full-color art book I've worked on that I've been fairly happy with the end results, while at the same time keeping aware of how we can improve in the future.

-J

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Remember the Dead

Cando eramos vivos,
Andabamos pol-os caminos;
E agora que somos mortos
Andabamos por entre os hortos
Tocando nas campanillas
E commendo pimentos ...*

-- Song of a troop of revenants in Manzaneda, Trives (Orense, Galicia) cited in Claude Lecouteux's  Phantom Armies of the Night

The Seven Sisters rise high in the Southern Arch reminding us that the time for donning the mask and shroud has come. The celebrations which stretch from Oct. 31st through the beginning of November, known to most as Samhain, All Hallows Eve, the Day of All Saints, Hallow’een, and in Latin countries, Dias de los Muertos, are a time for reconnecting with those of us who have passed on to the next stage of the pilgrimage, who walk the Summerlands, as the Spiritualists say, beyond the thin veil of shifting materia that gives us the illusion we are solely heirs to a body demarcated by the bounds of flesh.

Our remembrance of the customs that attend this time have been blurred by Victorians like James Frazer, whose fear and fascination with sex and death put all of our ancestral traditions on the defensive. However, the work of more recent scholars has begun to untangle the knots of understanding that have obfuscated potent alternative understandings, and provide a much healthier insight into on our relationship with the ancestral dead.

Movement Meditation

Full video: 

For text explanation of the rudiments of standing meditation posture, see Sasha's blog, Shaman Science. And these notes: