Take a mad ride past the event horizon of sanity

Take a mad ride past the event horizon of sanity with the band Babylon, in the final days of the American Empire. First in the psychedelic occult, myth and fairy-tale laced urban fantasy series, the Fallen Cycle.

"Grant Morrison's The Invisibles meets Fight Club, with ...a completely unique take on what makes myth tick," said Underground Reviews, and that's exactly what you get with this lean book, no choice but look the void right in the eye. As Nietzsche famously said, "When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." He knew the storm is coming. The fabric of the self, the fabric of a society, of a culture, of a species, all may reach the point of rupture without recognition. Is that not even more true in the psyche that wishes to distract, to look elsewhere, to numb out the terrible truth, that we live in that void already. It is an absence, the myth of no myths, no meanings.

Which sounds fucking awful, doesn't it?

Who could have predicted it'd be a band on the road that set it all off, the mad Bacchae and their rock apocalypse?

So don't be sad. The party is going to be a blast, drinking and fucking to the edges of oblivion; riding off with Lilith and Ariadne, Dionysus, transexual Jesus and Artemis into that sunset, (because who wants to remain virginal at the end of the world?) They offer polyamory and LSD instead of jealousy and fear, spiritual transformation instead of a 9-5 grind. When they pull into your town and open the door, who in their right mind wouldn't hop aboard? The feds say "these kids have to be crazy to go with 'those people.'"

Machines shouldn't speak for men. You'd have to be crazy not to go.

The joy, the release, at the end of all things is absolute. It's the getting there that's Hell. We must find our way out together, or not at all.

Those who wander through life without knowing who they are: No more. Unlock the Fallen God within your sleeping self. All it takes is the right story. Contact the Order of the Hidden Path, begin your initiation now. There is no time to waste.

-Gabriel De Leon, 2012. OHO, OHP.

Party At The World's End

Generation Hex Chapel of Sacred Mirrors 2005 retro

'Welcome to - how do you say - "a hole in history itself."

This book is about magic, and about Generation Hex, teenagers and young adults who practice it.'

- Jason Louv (from Generation Hex, Introduction)

 From Binding the Occult: 

the panel that was there that night

For those of you that weren't around during it's heyday it would be hard to understand. There was no proper term for it. I could say Hyper Culture, I could say Ultra Culture, there were a million different terms for what was going on. It was a movement. The internet was still fresh and new. It had been born from some chaotic cesspool and out from it came a storm of ideas and people who were steeped in all sorts of eclectic occult knowledge. One, especially a sixteen year old boy, could just bathe in. Here was a world where the only books I could easily find were by a witch named Silver Ravenwolf, and suddenly I am diving into ideas that until recently were completely obscure.

This cesspool of ideas? I was there. Barely a High-school student. Every day I would come running home from school to get online and scroll through the infinite amount of occult blogs pushing out new ideas and thoughts and being young and having all of this information, and all of these minds, and all of this knowledge just laid out and left for me to stew in was unlike anything that will ever happen again. Before the vanity, before everyone online was selling something, before the promises of fortunes and riches if you only pay an exorbitant amount to be taught the secrets, before you could click on Google and type in a name and everything would come streaming down. 

Out of that complete chaos came one book, from as far as I am aware, that captured it if anything could possibly capture a little of that magic. The book was Generation Hex. It is much like the current crop of collections of essays put together by publishers like Scarlet Imprint. Jason Louv brought together a group of these occultists that had been pouring out this informational stream and had them write pieces for this book. 

To begin with, it was published by Disinformation which at the time was run by a man named Richard Metzger, if you don't know who Richard Metzger is than you probably don't remember what it was like when subcultures were really subcultures. Most of the publications by this publisher were conspiracy books, books I loved. I would almost summarize them as the Conspiracy Theorists Before Conspiracy Theories Were Cool publishing company. Though that wasn't all they covered. They loved subcultures. Especially subcultures, again from what I can remember, that were considered dirty back then. And really, a lot of what was would still be considered dirty today. 

So here is Disinformation, teaming up with Jason Louv who I had followed and read pieces from long before this collection joining to put together a book that would grasp together all of this subculture, for a lack of a better word, and make an imprint on the global mind of history. He collected the best of the best and let them tell their stories.
They did it. 

He also wrote his own pieces for the collection, which I could almost say outshine the rest of the book and at times made me wish he would write a book himself. He never wrote a book on the occult, and yes I have asked him to. 

Till this day I would say there is no other book that completely grasps a moment of time better than Generation Hex. There is no other book that captures my imagination, or fully explains what it means to be an occultist. 

Step back from that, and it is a collection of essays that showed the occult in life. Living the occult, living mysticism, what it meant to be a magician in the world. This book captured it.

If you want to hear the Gen Hex authors talking about magic, this is the audio recorded at the launch party at Alex Grey's CoSM back in 2005.

Hollywood Garbage: The Mechanization of Desire

I might be in the minority on this, but so many movies these days feel like they should at least be mindless fun, but instead they're just mindless.

Pacific Rim, Superman, Transformers part who-gives-a-fuck, Teenage Mutant Ninja Whatever, etc. It's a little depressing that we're all hailing Guardians of the Galaxy as the artistic and spiritual apex of humanity because it wasn't just a 3 hour long lens flare, though it does serve as a terrific case-in-point for how the vacuity of recent Blockbusters is not in the concept. Even a talking Raccoon can be relate-able if handled right.

This is where "long form" (what else can we call TV shows that often aren't aired on TV?) has been stepping up to the plate. True Detective, House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, etc. have been capitalizing on the desire for stories that are, well, stories. Something more than a Pavlovian repetition of set up, conflict, resolve over and over again.

That is all most pornography aspires to, and that's what makes the new normal tent-pole movies pornographic. Clearly it's not nudity or cum shots. No, it's the reduction of desire to a machine like repetition. The mechanization of desire is its own annihilation. The same metric that is being used to gamify all human behavior creates the deep structure of Hollywood screenplays. There's a reason, after all, that all these movies begin to feel the same, despite the fact that the concepts are different on paper. The underlying structure is fundamentally the same, with increasingly minor variations.

Of course we can expect this, with the amount of financial risk that is presented by movie production. Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to reduce that risk, by falling back on predictions we can make from our own hard-wired responses? This basic idea is of course nothing new, it goes back to Aristotle, possibly before. And there is, thankfully, a great deal of uncertainty about the big picture in terms of those hard-wired responses. What, after all, is "human nature"? That's a surprisingly complicated question in the macro-scale abstract, but it's fairly straight-forward and easy to test on a micro- scale.

Adorno was skeptical about the implications of myth and propaganda, as all of us ought to be. And yet when you search for analysis of gamification, script writing, and game design, you will mostly find Utopian visions of gamification as method of "hacking our own nervous system." Yet, restrictive as it may be, we may want to look to Adorno's analysis of television and ideology, critical models, myth and the Dialectic of Enlightenment before we proclaim our ability to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps in such a way. (There is nevertheless some irony in the "long form" being one of the most open and creative entertainment mediums at the moment, considering stereotypes of television that existed, and which were more or less accurate, as recently as a decade ago.)

Flipping this on its head, we might wonder about literal pornography. If it is the application of mechanical commodity that makes pornography, rather than the presence of sexual content, then we have a handy shorthand for the much sought after dividing line between erotica and pornography. It is not the presence of sexual content, it is not whether ones desire is engaged, but rather whether that desire is an end in itself, and whether that end, ultimately, has been mechanized as the root commodity of the media-as-product. There's some difficulty in discussing erotica, let alone producing it, without some patina of pretension, and yet there it is: erotica exists as something more than just its own ends. Perhaps what that is will remain as nebulous as the distinction between self, soul, and brain matter. But if we ignore it, then there is nothing in this world to keep us from nihilism, and nothing that might keep us from the horror of the simulacra, the anonymous self-less repetition, every one of us nothing more than a mask strapped atop a void.

Also, it's pretty hard to argue with a good pair of tits. Even the most craven pornography has that on the average PG-rated Hollywood Blockbuster.

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

A Psychedelic Monster Rises in Babylon

Killing two birds with one stone, I've been working on posters and prints for upcoming conventions, and what will be the 2nd edition cover of Party At The World's End.

I still have fine tuning to do but I think it is starting to convey the right tone, hints at the rock n roll, psychedelic heaven and hell the reader is in for. It's also all wind-up for the intensive visual series I intend to do for the dark, fey and witchy 2nd book in the Fallen Cycle, Tales From When I Had A Face. 

Want to be a reader? We're giving a special offer:

The coupon code is PY44S (not case-sensitive) and it allows you to get the e-book at Smashwords for 50% off until October 31, 2014. That's just $2. 

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]