Virtual Reality: The Future is Not a Straight Line

Since Darwin, the ruling class of the West has clung on to a new myth to replace traditional Christianity; the myth of linear progress.

Watchmen and the Digital Apotheosis

OK, I finally watched Watchmen. 

When it came out I was super busy, and was admittedly a little put off by some of the bad buzz. And since I've been busy since the DVD came out, I haven't had time to watch a two and half hour movie, which translates into a four hour experience with all the pausing and snack-fetching around here.

 

Enjoy Your Specially-Curated Apocalypse Experience

The Sibyl Prophesies at the Temple of Mithras

Well, the day finally came and I made my way into see the Sibyl prophesy to the masses at the lusciously-appointed solar temple on the grounds of the world's largest open-air Mithraic temple in the New Rome. 

"New Dawn" or Another Empire Backfire?

Where have all the people gone? 

Wow: nothing says a "new dawn" like a 78 year-old Crypt-Keeper clone presiding over a private wake for the American Imperium, don't you think?

Tired old man, tired old empire, disappointment and cringe so palpable they nearly have physical form. Obama-era divas looking and sounding as stale as Greta Van Fleet. Everyone looking awkward, deflated.

This is a beautiful day. I feel more hopeful than I have in quite some time.

Fringe and the SciFi Singularity

 

I'm not exactly sure why, but my passion for and preoccupation with sci-fi has become practically religious over the past few months. 

The End of Days Buffet

Since Las Vegas we've been seeing portent after portent and omen after omen being rolled out and placed on our tables like an End of Days buffet. If my model holds true I'd say we are due for some kind of major event before the end of 2017, probably something that will really shake people up. 

Just our luck, right?

Oscar Recap: Yeah, Yeah, Osiris. We Get It.

Well, another year, another Academy Awards. And another pile of clunky, ham-fisted symbolism dropped on our heads.

Jimmy Kimmel, who used to run around asking random women to reach around in his pants pockets on a show that usually went to credits running footage of buxom young girls jumping on a trampoline, is a "woke" intersectionalist all of a sudden and shot up some fish in a barrel with his obligatory yet bloodless Harvey Weinstein jokes.

Jimmy, it would have been edgy to tell Harvey Weinstein jokes last year. This year it's just pathetic.

Secret Sun Movie Minute: District Nine

Well, the muses still haven't struck me to write a big workup on District Nine, even though we've all seen it by now. 

Go Watch Stranger Things

2016 has been a messed-up year.

I probably don't need to remind anyone of that but it bears repeating anyway. 

The Spirits of '79: Madness at the Movies

The ephemeral-yet-palpable strangeness of 1979 was well-documented in that year's cinematic offerings. Which is a bit curious, given that most of them would have been made in 1978. But 1978 was a pretty weird year too, just in a slightly different way. 

Secret Cinema: Quatermass and the Pit

Before Chariots of the Gods, before The 12th Planet, before Gods of Eden, before The X-Files, before Stargate, before Battlestar Galactica, before Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, before Transformers 2, there was Quatermass and the Pit. 

Pop (Culture) Has Eaten Itself

A look at the 2011 top 20 grossing films in the US should send bolts of terror down the spine of any Hollywood mogul.

Yellowstone Apocalypse, or What Worries Me Most

There is so much going on out there, so much mischief and madness being thrown at us, so many toys coming out of those DUMB labs and archonic think-tanks that I can hardly keep up with it all. Then there's nightmare in Austin that seems to have risen like Cthulhu from the deep, dragging a gaggle of potent symbols in its wake like tin cans behind a newlyweds' Studebaker.

Anne Heche Sheds This Mortal Coil

Like most of you, the Anne Celeste Heche drama threw me for a loop. Having read her book, I knew all about her mental health and substance abuse issues, so the basic facts of the initial incident didn't shock me overmuch. 

Apocalypse 2Night: Saddle Up, Horsemen!

Well, I told you that something big was coming just in time for the Lyrid meteor showers but I never dreamed it would be World War Three!

X-Files Reality, or We Can't Say We Weren't Warned

I've been going on and on about X-Files Reality (XFR) since I started this blog, but lately? Well, lately it's gotten so egregious that pointing out how X-Files our so-called reality is becoming almost seems beside the point. 

Eye Wanna Be Sedated

Bruce Rux, author of the absolute must-have foundational text Architects of the Underworld, had a very interesting take on the definitions of disinformation and misinformation. 

Disinformation, Rux argues, is when an official source feeds you false information. Misinformation, on the other hand, is when an entirely unreliable and disreputable source feeds you true information, which was usually fed to them.

Secret Star Trek: "It Partook of the Occult."

It all started with such a trifling thing; the teaser in the new Star Trek into Darkness film has our heroes saving a primitive race on the planet Nibiru and by doing so creating a cargo cult.

This is exactly the kind of scenario we see when symbolism is injected into a fictional narrative intentionally and consciously; it draws attention to itself, awkwardly.*

It's No Game

There's so much stupid out there that sometimes it gets pretty hard to figure out which particular flavor of stupid takes the cake. But my vote goes to all these idiots who dick around with black magic in hopes of scoring virtue points with Twitter bluechecks. 

Ancient Aliens Buries the Lead

"The Great Stone Face," 1957

Ancient Aliens is now in its seventh season. I DVR it, but don't really watch it that often. 

It's gotten to the point where it's not telling me anything I don't know already, and having been on the other side of the camera a number of times I know how the game is played. 

What is very clear with the Ancient Aliens style of interviewing is that the producers are looking for soundbites. They will prompt the speaker to repeat the question in their own words and then give the required answer. And anyone who's watched a number of episodes of Ancient Aliens probably can recite the answers along at home.

I've sometimes defended Ancient Aliens, not out of a great love for the show, but because so many of the people who've attacked it are doing so on behalf of the Fundamentalist/ Creationist/ Theocrat axis, a fact they fail to disclose to their audiences. But the fact of the matter is that I have a lot of problems with it, and only took down my critique of it when Filip Coppens passed away (I've since put it back up).

But I'm mature enough enough to realize that any criticisms I have of the show are irrelevant. It is what it is, as the people say. It wouldn't be on around the clock if people weren't watching it and it wouldn't have been renewed six times if it wasn't making money.

But compared to the original two-hour specials (which I do think were very well done), the show is running on fumes, content-wise. 

It makes for pleasant enough background noise from time to time, but hasn't told us anything new for a while (The Satanic Conspiracy episode, while misleadingly titled, did have some good information on the Watchers).

But this latest episode was something else. Not only did you have the stock answers that you could hear on any episode on any topic, they blew the lede here in a major way.

"Jacob Wrestles the Angel", portfolio piece, 1980 

As I've been writing about since this blog went live, comic book superheroes didn't just materialize from the ether like tulpas -- as the Ancient Aliens cast of regulars repeatedly suggested -- a good many of them were created or co-created by Jack Kirby. 

And the ones he didn't create or co-create, he had a hand in, like Iron Man and Spider-Man.

And Jack Kirby is a guy who was not only doing stories about ancient astronauts long before Erich Von Daniken (there's practically enough of those to fill a stadium by now), he was using AAT as the basis of the superheroes he was creating, beginning with The Inhumans in 1965.

Kirby was so obsessed with AAT that it consumed the latter part of his career; three of his titles for Marvel in the 1970s were built around the theme and he did a number of other AAT projects after he left comics for animation.

What's more, his prescient "Face on Mars" story from the late 50s showed a distinct Theosophical influence with its ancient extraterrestrial civilizations, demonstrating he may have been exploring the same material that inspired Edgar Rice Burroughs for his own Mars material.

But aside from Kirby, you also have Otto Binder, who was not only one of the great writers of the Golden Age of Comics, he was also a prolific sci-fi writer, editor of Space magazine, and the co-author of the classic AAT text, Mankind, Child of the Stars. 

Binder is not as well known as Kirby today but he worked on Captain Marvel, which at the time was Superman's #1 rival on the stands, selling upwards of a million copies a month and inspiring a number of spin-offs.

It's really too much to ask at this point; a tiger doesn't change its stripes. And in a way I'm glad Kirby wasn't drawn into the reductionist POV of Ancient Aliens, a show which does its best to make none of these old stories seem alien, as in god-damn-what-the-fuck-you've-got-to-be-kidding-me alien. 

You see, materialism doesn't lead to a nation of scientists, rolling up their sleeves and boldly pressing at the frontiers of human knowledge. 

It leads to a nation of YOLO hedonists, drinking Jäger shots from each others' navels while running the Visa bills into the red at Cabo and Ibiza. Materialism gives us Kardashians, not Carl Sagans.

The evolution of Giorgio into Internet laughing stock- cui bono?

I could be wrong, but Ancient Aliens comes across as a show for people who've never had an alien experience, for people who've never tripped balls and ripped at the coffin lid of infinity, or for people who've never had such an experience forced upon them.

It's just the same old, same old; mind-blowing mystical experience (which nearly all of those ancient texts describe) reduced to a 1980s Saturday morning cartoon.

It comes across as a show for people who haven't had their worldview shaked and baked and then been thrown back and had to pick up the pieces again. As a show that takes the magical and makes it mundane, that takes the psychotronic and makes it pseudo-scientific.

I want to defend Ancient Aliens, really I do. But I won't. This was a golden opportunity- a major architect of today's pop culture who was also obsessed with ancient astronauts- and they blew it. Just blew it. 

I'm sure their comics guests told them about Kirby. But what do we get? The same soundbites you hear on every episode.

Go back and watch all the AAT documentaries from the 70s, with Rod Serling and William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy and so on and so forth. Even if you don't believe a word of it, that stuff still holds up and still kicks ass. And you definitely get the feeling that those motherfuckers were experienced.

Note: I know it's spelled "lede", but it looks weird as a headline.

Need more Knowledge?  

Come enroll at the Secret Sun Institute of Advanced Synchromysticism.