Apocalypse Tonight: Third Temple Pilots

Is that supposed to look like an apron?

I don't know, do we owe folks like Hal Lindsey and Harold Camping an apology?

I mean, we have a situation in which a game-show host is actually President, high-ranking Catholic clergy are cavorting with mind-controlled degenerates celebrities dressed as Scarlet Women under the watchful gaze of an alien demon, and now the Third Temple US Embassy has been moved so as to straddle the border between the divided halves of Jerusalem.

Oh, plus the whole event was expedited by a scion of the family that owns the notorious 666 Fifth Ave building.

I mean, remember the days when we saw all these self-anointed prophets as hucksters and lunatics instead of insightful analysts with an unfortunate tendency to jump before the snap?

Good times.

"Everyone Predicted It."

No doubt you've heard by now. I don't even know what to say about this shit anymore. 

I actually don't want to say anything at all, that's how bone-weary I am of these events. 

But unfortunately, this all played out like the Secret Sun Scrabble game from Hell. And it's yet another example of something we all could have avoided if we took a holistic and synchromystic view of the world we're all stuck on. 

Or maybe even just some basic common sense.

Stunning! PhilaeDelphi Vegas Go to Super Bowl! Surprising!

Seventeen!

In a stroke of improbability so improbabilistic it has shaken the very foundations of Probabilism itself, the PhilaeDelphi Vegas beat the Twinesota Vikings and will be squaring off against Twin Brady and his New Atlantis Baphomets!

Heaven Upside Down or Las Vegas: A Tissue of Lies

We have here what they call a "teaching moment."

The Las Vegas narrative continues to unravel like an old sweater. I have to admit I haven't been keeping an eye on the cover-up because I stopped believing the official story as soon as I bypassed the mainstream media accounts and looked at the actual, y'know, evidence.

Heaven Upside Down or Las Vegas: It Takes Two

Since the Route 91 Harvest shootings on 10/01 we've been bombarded with a flood of stories calling the official account into question at the same time we're seeing a whole spate of seemingly-unrelated news items that seem to have a recurring theme.

We're seeing all kinds of major announcements coming from NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory and so on that keep hitting this "twin" thing. Some do it obviously, others less so. But I think we may want to get a handle on what this is all about.

"...But High Ritual Magic is Interested in You."

Eye of Jupiter Amonn, Twin Skulls, drops of blood....

Playtime is over. Things are getting real.

You know all that crazy crap you've been hearing weirdos on the Internet ranting on about for the past 25 years? Well, it's no longer confined to a shadow-banned reddit thread, it's going live. You see it everywhere you look.

Case in point: Burning Man made "Radical Ritual" their theme this year and talked a lot about how it was time to take the burning ritual to the next level, telling Burners to "get out of your head and into your ritual."

The Deeper Symbolism of Las Vegas: Saturn Rising

Jason Aldean on stage, 2017 tour

Hazy Cosmic Jive: Bowie and the Starmen, Part Three

OK, this is where things get a little strange. A little more synchy.

In part one we looked at the established history of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (more or less) and Bowie's superhero-oriented project that directly anticipated it. We also looked at the influences that fed into Bowie's seminal creation, not the least of which was Bowie's lifelong obsession with UFOs and extraterrestrials. 

Hazy Cosmic Jive: Bowie and the Starmen, Part Two

"I always had a repulsive sort of need to be something more than human. I felt very very puny as a human. I thought. 'Fuck that. I want to be a Superman.'" -- David Bowie

In part one we looked at David Bowie's seminal creation Ziggy Stardust and the history behind it. Or at least the history as it's known. 

Twin Peaks, Mulholland Dr. and the 17 Enigma

David Lynch and Twin Peaks return this May so I thought I'd take this opportunity to re-post this analysis of the classic Lynch film Mulholland Dr., which started life as a follow-up TV series to Twin Peaks.

Mithras Rising and the New Praetorians

Eight years ago we looked at the incoming Obama Administration, which seemed determined to touch as many potent symbolic bases as possible, touring temples and pyramids, making a number of 17 minute speeches and drawing explicit parallels to King Tut.

It seemed as if there were a program in place to charge this new President with as much symbolic and semiotic power as possible. Those were heady days.

Clownshow 2016: Can a Viper Change its Stripes?

This blog really found its voice during the 2008 Presidential Elections when I noticed that the two major candidates running for office seemed to incorporating the hieroglyph for Sirius in their campaign logos.

Or more accurately, the Stairway to Sirius.

This didn't exist in a vacuum, there were all kinds of emanations surrounding the elections and their aftermath, including the "major issue" of the dog with his "star quality" and the Sirius Star and all the rest of it. There's also the strange habit of Obama to make 17-minute speeches, which has continued throughout his time in office, as well as his strange fixation on Hanuman, the Hindu god.*

Symbolic gold, until I got tired of playing the game.

I haven't paid any attention to the election this year because I don't actually believe that it's going to change anything. Indeed, we saw a rare moment of candor in The Boston Globe, of all places, informing us that no matter who you elect the agenda at the top remains the same.

And we're seeing such tidal forces at work in the global economy, it's impossible to take the old bromides seriously anymore anyway.

Certainly we're seeing the Republican Party now in a state of civil war since the rank-and-file finally realized that their victories in the 2010 and 2014 Elections meant nothing at all, that the Administration and Congressional leaders are going to do what they are told to do by the think-tanks and the corporate chieftains who will set them up for life when they leave office. 

When it comes to the issues that really effect your life and your future, the Democrats and Republicans are all on one side. And it's not yours.

Democratic voters don't realize the fix is in because they see their man in the White House as some kind of victory, despite massive downticket Democrat losses over the past seven years. And despite the fact that the only real difference between Obama and his predecessor is the rhetoric and a few social issues (most of which he "evolved" on due to outside pressure).

They are certainly identical on the major issues that matter to the Bilderberg and Davos crowds.

True, Obama has unleashed the genii of identity politics since his re-election in an attempt to keep the base mobilized, kept in its bottle since Bill Clinton was first elected.

Or so the story goes.

Perhaps instead the goal is to keep the party's coalition fragmented and paranoid and therefore dependent on the party itself. The Republicans have been doing this for decades, after all. Or maybe the agenda is to prevent the anti-establishment Left and the libertarian Right from coalescing into a united front against the Establishment, something you saw some movement on during the depths of the economic crisis.  

Well...who knows.

Either way, the result of all of this manipulation is an extremely divided, stressed-out and angry country. Not to mention a country experiencing rising crime and poverty and all the rest. What that might ultimately be leading to is an open question. 

Let me just say, though, that when it comes to parsing out hidden agendas, I tend to adjudge intention by result. If you get my meaning.

But what do the symbols tell us? 

That there's so little real import to this election seems evident by the campaign logos, which are the dreariest, tiredest and least imaginative batch I've seen in years. And the ones that aren't dreary are frickin' weird.

Now, bear this in mind; entire companies can meet their year's payroll just on the sale of one logo. With some corporate jobs, sometimes much more than that.

And this is a painstaking process. Nothing is accidental or arbitrary in the design of a campaign logo, you can have designers and consultants working out literally every micrometer of detail. 

So what the hell is this?

Hillary Clinton's ugly and bizarre logo, with its right-oriented arrow and its twin blue pillars. You didn't need to be a Truther to get a strange flashback from this extremely odd imagery. 

The 9/11 link actually became a story in the mainstream press, leading one to wonder just what the hell is this logo trying to say. Something following Knowles' First Law, surely.

I don't know. But I do know that this is exactly the kind of provocation that the Clintons have specialized in since they burst onto the national scene.

Then there's the Clintons' close family friend, Donald Trump, who we're supposed to believe is "taking on the Establishment" he's been a very, very happy and comfortable part of his entire life. As you might expect, his logo is about him, featuring his profile.

But what the hell is that red stripe on his head? His combover? Pay attention to that because it pops up again...

...here, in Bernie Sanders' logo, an otherwise dull affair. But what are those stripes supposed to be?  

The obvious inference is stripes (from a flag), but they look more like earthworms. Or better yet, serpents. 

SIDEBAR: Now be aware that in graphic design you're essentially dealing with signals, not explicit images. Hillary's arrow doesn't actually look like an arrow, it's a drastic simplification, an abstracted idea of an arrow. Same goes with stars, flames and all the other icons we are looking at. Bear that in mind when looking at these odd "stripes."

It's an odd design, to be certain. And what did Ian Fleming say about three times? Because sure enough, the same odd "stripe" shape pops up again…

…right here. 

That's three of the leading candidates with the same weird (and ugly) form. Cruz's logo (a flame and a Cruz, or cross?) is even stranger and more disturbing than Hillary's...
 

...because you have those weird, snake-looking stripes and then…

…the All-Seeing Eye, or some kind of eye, with a pentagram as the pupil.

It doesn't look very friendly, does it? 

I don't know what to make of this. This all could be some odd kind of serpent symbolism, I'm not sure yet. I need more data. Just remember, nothing in politics is accidental.

Which is a good time to point out that we also see a suggestion of the pentagram-eye in Carly Fiorina's (awful) logo.

Ben Carson, conversely, uses normal stripes (with squared ends) in an otherwise pedestrian effort. (I'll spare you O'Malley's and Jeb's and the rest). 

Now, you could go out on a limb and see the negative space in the stripes and say that's the White Nile and the Belt of Orion, but...

...oh, go ahead if you like.

The flame logo shows up again in Rand Paul's crappy logo, but given his father's, um, associations…

…the "flame" kind of more reminds me of the open hand column we see here. And that "flame" form is actually the shape animators are taught to use to draw hands. 

Marco Rubio's logo is…odd. Not exactly eye-catching. And putting his name in lowercase only adds to the impression he's a lightweight who's not ready for prime time.

But I'm far more interested in his name "Marco Antonio" (with all the connotations to Cleopatra and the rest) and to Mars the Red (Ruby) Planet itself. Keep an eye on this one.

And "A New American Century?" Yeah, definitely keep an eye on this one.

Me, I'll keep an eye on the logos once the tickets are decided after the conventions. In the meantime, I'm trying not to pay any attention to this whole charade, it seriously depresses the shit out of me.

It might depress me even more if I believed any of it, for a single minute.

UPDATE: Reader Escal-Hathor reminds of the snake-like Pentium logo and its possible etymological links to serpents (SerPentium, or 'Place of Snakes'). That's even quite Ouroboros-like, don't you think?

UPDATE: I rest my case.

* As I predicted way back when we've seen a major push on the space front, something that I saw emerge in the symbolism during the election. As readers are well aware, the space program is full of its own high initiate symbolism. They don't even try to disguise it anymore. 

Despite some of the theories you might hear I think the space program is actually an attempt to keep the global economy moving, an economy which is beginning to face major headwinds on a macro-scale.

† It may be no accident that so much of the identity politic agitation is taking place within Humanities and social sciences programs in Universities that have been in constant danger of losing funding and that some- particularly those who would prefer colleges to be retooled as training facilities for MBA and STEM majors- would love to eliminate altogether. Impossible, you say?

Japan- an entire country- is already doing it. 

With state legislatures starting to take a hard look now at speech codes and "safe spaces" and so on, "give 'em enough rope" may not be just the title of a Clash album. 

Bowie: The Starman Returns to the Sky

The Legend is now complete. The story has been told, its ending could not have been more perfectly constructed or executed. It's said that the great ones know when to leave the stage; the Greatest also know how.

A little less than three years ago, David Bowie released what I called "The Last Rock 'n' Roll Album," and pulled off what some critics labeled the greatest comeback since Elvis in '68. Hardcore Bowie fans like myself were a bit nonplussed by the critical response to The Next Day, not because we didn't appreciate the praise but because we wondered where these critics had been hiding while Bowie had been making important music both onstage (The BBC Radio Concert, the A Reality DVD, for starters) and in the studio (see 1.Outside, Earthling, Heathen).

But The Next Day was a landmark in that no one expected ever to hear from Bowie again, not after he suffered a coronary event onstage in 2004 that preceded a very long and troubling silence. No one certainly expected him to return with an album filled with top rank material designed to serve as an endpiece to the pop/rock phase of Bowie's career. 

Fewer still expected him to follow that up with Blackstar, an experimental set of jazz-inflected postrock designed to serve as his epitaph. 

That he had also been working on a theatrical sequel to The Man Who Fell to Earth (currently enjoying a sellout run in New York) at the same time as recording Blackstar while dying of cancer can only add to the legend, of a man not-quite-human, but something more than you or I.

What can and must be said is that Bowie runs through the lifeblood of this blog and all the other work I've done. That's no surprise to longtime readers.

 I can still remember the effect hearing "Fame" had on my young mind, how it seemed like a transmission from a far stranger world, a world I wanted to go to. Soon enough I was reading the Time Magazine review of The Man Who Fell to Earth and realizing that this Bowie thing was a completely different type of phenomena, one I best pay close attention to (yeah, I was a weird nine year-old). The effect was only cemented by 'Golden Years' and 'Sound and Vision', which stood out like holographic intruders on the old daguerreotype of the AM radio Top 40 wasteland.

Of course, now my shelves are now filled with Bowie biographies but then I had no idea how utterly alien this man was, how these albums that redefined the course of popular music seem to burst fully formed from his fevered brain to the literal astonishment of his collaborators. 

How he spent countless hours immersed in his occult library, or skywatching for UFOs, all the while painting, writing in his journals, studying dance or boxing and later, appearing in more films than most professional actors, until such time as it came to lay down another indelible classic. 

It's not a stretch to say that music was being channeled through him.

It wouldn't be until 1978 that I'd really immerse myself in his Mysteries, and by the golden locks of Apollo, what a time it was to do so. I can still remember buying Stage at Jason's Music and Luggage (!), which seems unloved today but for me was like finally stepping into that parallel dimension (I should add that I was on my way home from theatre class at the time, having briefly humored acting fantasies).  

It was here I'd be initiated into the Mysteries of Sound that so bewitched Philip K Dick, Bowie and Eno's synth-driven symphonettes from Low and Heroes. Dick was so enraptured by this music he saw it as some kind of alien transmissions converted to vinyl through a kind of modern electronic alchemy. 

Bowie and The Man Who Fell to Earth had such a powerful effect on Dick's emerging Gnostic awakening that they became major players in the first allegorical exegesis of his spiritual journey, Valis (the film within the novel was based on Dick's experience of seeing Earth for the first time and how it seemed to resonate so completely with his own inner turmoil). 

Not long after I ended up with an eight-track tape of Hunky Dory and not long after that Lodger was released. All of a sudden the hand-me-down rock stars of the 60s and 70s seemed irrelevant, counter-revolutionary, even. There was a dividing line now, it was Year Zero. Punk, Postpunk, New Wave and the rest were the new vanguard, the Great Wheel had turned. Only Bowie and his fellow travelers (Fripp, Eno, Iggy, etc) would seem relevant in the new regime.

But Bowie had other plans. He'd released his now-legendary string of classic albums under constant threat of financial insolvency (the great Spiders from Mars lineup was  broken up because of financial pressures), thanks in large part to the drain on his accounts by his management team, who burned through his profits either with their endless partying and extravagance or by trying to launch hopeless careers. 

He'd seen a new generation of artists getting rich off of his ideas and now he wanted to cash in. During the sessions for "Under Pressure", Queen sold Bowie on the benefits he could reap by dumping the moribund RCA for the ravenous EMI, who'd made plutocrats out of the glam foursome. 

With an eye on the success the Rolling Stones and The Police were having touring large stadiums, Bowie set his sights on American superstardom. His sexuality underwent public revision, with Bowie now claiming to have been a "closet heterosexual."* He entered the studio with Chic mastermind Nile Rodgers and a new backing band which included rising star Stevie Ray Vaughn on guitar. The result was Let's Dance, a bonafide blockbuster that finally put Bowie in the top rank where he and his fans felt he belonged. 

Oh, but the price to pay.

A massive tour was planned which saw Bowie playing American football stadiums and making sure he gave fans every penny's worth of entertainment. I saw Bowie on this tour and while it was an amazing show- one of the best I'd ever seen- it also felt like something had changed. This was no longer my Bowie, it was someone else. A lot of fans felt that way.

Suspicions were not dissuaded when Bowie rushed out Tonight which featured two bonafide classics ('Blue Jean', 'Loving the Alien') and a whole lot of filler (admittedly, Let's Dance had its share of filler too). 

Signs that Bowie was as bored with his new role as his 70s fans were were confirmed by a long (for the time) post-Tonight silence punctuated only by a few weak soundtrack numbers.

 He re-emerged in 1987 with Never Let Me Down, an album that tried too hard to recapture Let's Dance's formula and buried a lot of worthy songs in the histrionic production techniques of the time. He compounded the felony with the Glass Spider tour, a half-hearted return to the theatricality of the Diamond Dogs era, only without the zeitgeist and with 75% more cringe. Plus, Peter Frampton?

Sensing he'd made all the wrong moves he tried to right the ship. He did a bare-bones greatest hits tour in 1990 (I saw that one too) but the backing band (aside from King Crimson frontman Adrian Belew) wasn't up to the job. 

He then hooked up with Iggy's old rhythm section (the Sales brothers, as in Soupy) and new guitarist Reeves Gabrels for Tin Machine, but it looked and sounded like an overwrought midlife crisis. A reunion with Nile Rodgers seemed promising, but then his new record company went bankrupt as soon as Black Tie White Noise was released.

INTERLUDE: 'I've been interested in the Gnostics.' 
  

"Now the archon who is weak has three names. The first name is Yaltabaoth, the second is Saklas, and the third is Samael. And he is impious in his arrogance which is in him. For he said, `I am God and there is no other God beside me,' for he is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come..." --THE APOCRYPHON OF JOHN

"Opening his eyes he saw a vast quantity of matter without limit; and he became arrogant, saying, `It is I who am God, and there is none other apart from me.' 

"When he said this, he sinned against the entirety. And a voice came forth from above the realm of absolute power, saying, `You are mistaken, Samael' - which is, `god of the blind.'" --THE HYPOSTASIS OF THE ARCHONS.

It wouldn't be until Bowie abandoned his grasping for the mainstream and got his freak back on that he'd rediscover his Bowieness. A soundtrack for the British indie film The Buddha of Suburbia got Eno's attention again and they took to the studio to record 1.Outside, a sprawling, deliciously-pretentious slab of 200-proof Bowie, replete with a ludicrous "concept" based on transgressive art, millennial angst and ritual murder. 

The planned-for trilogy never materialized as Eno continued his career as megahit-making producer so Bowie returned with Earthling, where then-trendy dance music dribblings were grafted onto classic Bowie melodies. Luckily, most of the songs survive the procedure.

This was a favorite Bowie period for me, since he was just successful enough to be visible but not so much as to be annoyingly ubiquitous. His band, with Zach Alford on drums, Gail Ann Dorsey on bass and vocals, longtime keyboardist Mike Garson and guitarist Gabrels were hard, polished and just artsy enough to be interesting. 

Unfortunately, it kind of came to a thudding halt in 1999 when Bowie's mersh instincts (or record company pressure) got the better (or worse) of him again and …hours was released, an attempt to appeal to the then-burgeoning adult alternative contemporary or whatever the hell it was called market. Gabrels wasn't having any of it and split. Fantastic CD artwork though.

Bowie played around with a few ideas- a Pin-Ups 2, remakes of his 60s songs- before cutting Heathen (2002) with Tony Visconti, the producer of his late 70s classics. Because of the realities of the new market or simple maturity, Bowie dropped the attempts to appeal to the dissipating younger market and made a classic Bowie album, a return to old-fashioned songcraft without any trendy bells and whistles. A new and larger band was assembled and Bowie began touring and doing various media appearances. 

The effect of Heathen was mitigated by the followup Reality (2003), which in fairness may have been recorded to secure tour financing. A live DVD of the marathon Reality tour bolsters that suspicion but unfortunately the stress of the road on the 56-year old performer resulted in the aforementioned coronary event, leading us back to the long radio silence.

THE SECRET BOWIE

Of course, part of Bowie's mystique is his lifelong immersion in the Occult. OTO member Peter Koenig first explored this in a highly subjective and rambling essay called The Laughing Gnostic (which I first read back in the old USENET days) and has been continually updated ever since. It touches on Bowie's repeated use of catchwords and imagery taken from occult orders like the Golden Dawn as well as his cocaine-fueled obsession with Fascism in the mid-70s. 

Bowie himself has always been cagey about his occult interests, preferring to keep an aura of uncertainty and mystery (much like his contemporary Jimmy Page, with whom he shares a birthday). All of this mystery and play will become very important shortly.

From 1997:

So were you involved in actual devil worship? 

"Not devil worship, no, it was pure straighforward, old–fashioned magic." 

The Aleister Crowley variety? 

"No, I always thought Crowley was a charlatan. But there was a guy called [Arthur] Edward Waite who was terribly important to me at the time. And another called Dion Fortune who wrote a book called 'Psychic Self–Defence'. You had to run around the room getting bits of string and old crayons and draw funny things on the wall, and I took it all most seriously, ha ha ha ! I drew gateways into different dimensions, and I'm quite sure that , for myself, I really walked into other worlds. I drew things on walls and just walked trough them, and saw what was on the other side!" 

For those who don't know already, Waite is not only the man behind the definitive Tarot (as well as the author of The Pictorial Key to the Tarot), he also wrote a number of influential magical texts, many of which are still in print. 

Less ambivalent is Bowie's obsession with UFOs, which dates back to his time as a UFO watcher in London and lurks throughout his entire recorded catalog, from 'Memory of a Free Festival' in 1969 to 'Born on a UFO' in 2013 and all points in between (possibly on the new album, I'm not sure yet). Such was Bowie's alien mystique that a whole corpus of legend surrounding Bowie, UFOs and ETs arose in the rumor mill:

"Extraterrestrials had been in the audience during his concerts at the Los Angeles Amphitheatre [in September 1974]. People had mistaken them for the Bowie clones he attracted. The silver pentagrams marked on their foreheads had been interpreted as attempts to imitate his own facial decoration. But he had distinguished his own. They were there and their eyes never left him. He had counted twenty. He was terrified they would come backstage. The time wasn't right. His act had still to be perfected, enhanced, taken to ultimate extremes.  [Jeremy Reed: "Diamond Nebula", London 1994, p. 68]

The Man Who Fell to Earth was science fiction but one has to wonder how exactly an alien come down to Earth would operate in the real world. Given the immense stellar distances, he might not travel physically but through some form of astral travel, using technology we can guess at. He might take refuge in a human being, preferably a fetus in which the personality has not yet formed. 

He may do so in 1947, the year of Roswell and Kenneth Arnold, and may do so in London, a world capital filled with people calling out to the stars. He'd fill that host with powers far beyond those of ordinary humans and an insatiable need to experience as much of the world as possible, like what an international celebrity with a storming libido might do.

But these powers may not be suitable for the human host and might begin to take their toll at a relatively early age, say in the host's mid-fifties. It might also lead to a relatively early death. But it might also rally the host for one last great burst of productivity, including an epitaph to its presence here on Earth.

I mean, just total speculation here. Those kind of things don't happen in the real world. Right?

Either way, we have an incredible life to celebrate and the most impressive catalog in the pantheon of Rock. Bowie himself surely understood death was simply a movement from station to station, and I have a feeling his spirit may linger for a while among those he loved before boarding that 5:15....

POSTSCRIPT: THE FORESHADOWING In 1999, Bowie released ...hours, which wasn't a great album but featured some very interesting artwork (like the Gnostic bit up there). It also used numbers as letters in the typography, a habit you may have noticed I've picked up.  "3 (Janus)- 10- 16" The thing is though that the numerals used in his name in this rather ominous graphic here include 16 and 10, the year and date of his death. The three (which is reversed, like a Janus face) may even have a double meaning here in that the 3rd month (March) used to be the first month of the Roman calendar. Note also that the Rites of Janus- for whom January were named- were once held on March 1 (3/1). Coincidence, right? I mean he had to use numbers instead of letters on the art here, it was foreordained, right? Note: Reader Tony points out that Dead David has his hand over his liver...  Well, there's death imagery all over the album, including here on the cover.... And here on the CD, in which Bowie is posing in a 69 shape, the age of his death. That ersatz barcode is curious as well, since if you flip it and rotate it.... You have the 10 and 16 plus a 43.  4-3=1 in the simplest kind of arithmetic. 1/10/16. By the way, the first song on the album right after this would be called "Sunday." That's a lot of coincidences there. It may all seem bizarre, unless you know your Bowie, who loved to throw occult clues and riddles all over his work (the flaming dove, white stains, from Kether to Malkuth, Golden Dawn, etc, etc, etc).  For instance, see how he wrote his name in an ersatz Hebrew script on the album spine (for no apparent reason, mind you), almost begging for quasi-Kabbalistic interpretation of the art. Coincidences? Decide for yourself. But I think if anyone could have foreseen his death 17 years out (even if unconsciously), it would be David Bowie.

Oh yeah, that's ambiguous

Maybe it's no accident that he released his final single 'Lazarus' (or "El Osiris") on the 17th of December.† The video was released January 7th (1/7) of this year.

One last puzzle for the initiated, perhaps...

POSTSCRIPT: I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the weird Bowie/Secret Sun conjunction, when one of his music videos replayed a scene I detailed both here and in Nick Redfern's Men in Black book...

UPDATE: Joe Linsner reminds us of Bowie's "Never Get Old" from Reality. Note circumpunct graphic. See great commercial based on this song here. Make note of final gesture. The Mystery deepens, indeed.

* Bowie's sexuality has always been a topic of debate, with some claiming his gay relationships were opportunistic (ie., most of his relationships with men were with men who could advance his career) and that he was known for bedding "thousands" of female groupies (according to T.Rex's Marc Bolan, who was probably exaggerating for effect). But I was told by former MainMan press officer Leee Black Childers that the real reason that Bowie moved to Berlin was to be with drag star Romy Haag, whom he had fallen in love with on tour and that he also had liaisons with some of Haag's performers. I think with many charismatic performers of his type, Bowie's sexuality could not be easily defined or reduced. Or should be, despite whatever is the current orthodoxy. It should also be noted that Bowie rediscovered his muse only when he returned to his more liminal, boundary-crossing persona after the long dry spell of playing conventional rock star for the American mainstream.

† The single 'Seven' off ...hours was released 7.17.00, giving us that magic number again. A reissue had a bonus track '1917'.

New X-Files Trailer (UPDATED)

UPDATED WITH NEW TRAILER: Thanks to Reader Giles. The new one is totally metal.

The trailer here doesn't show much but what it does show seems to lock in with a leaked report on the first episode of the new series (titled "My Struggle"). If the report I read is to be believed Carter is presenting a radical new spin on the alien colonization mythos, one that ties into the critique he is obviously aiming at the surveillance state here.

At first it seemed like a retcon (again, if reports are to be believed) but on further reflection it actually answers a lot of long-standing issues fans had with the Mythology itself as well as issues I myself had stemming from (at least) the Sixth Extinction series.

It's good and true that they look older and more beaten down. It's a bit more honest to the romantic archetype of the lost cause. It's also ballsy as hell to revisit Roswell in 2015, long after the event has had any resonance in the culture at large but at a time when we're seeing more UFOs (and orbs, especially) than ever before, flying above our heads like unwelcome guests, leaving no clue as to their motives or intentions. 

But also at a time when the situation beneath them looks ever more apocalyptic.

As to these orange orbs that have become nearly epidemic, I'll quote Kenneth Grant, from a book written just as The X-Files reached his shores:

Anyone who has read with attention accounts of UFO encounters will have noted the high percentage of sightings involving the colour orange, the blending of red and yellow. In the Kala-grammar of occultism, orange is associated with Path 17, the Path of the Double Current. Its magical aeon, or angel, is Zain typified by the sword or scimitar. UFOs are frequently reported as being crescent-shaped when not egg-shaped or lenticular.