Wild Wild Country, or the Kingdoms of the Cults

By now you've probably heard of--if not seen-- the Netflix documentary series Wild Wild Country about Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh's (AKA Osho) cult and their takeover of a tiny city in rural Oregon in the 1980s. 

Witchcraft Revives, Again

You live long enough and you see the same patterns emerge, over and over again. A generation comes of age, falls under the spell of Rationalism but then leaves school and gravitates towards thought contagions that horrify the professors and teachers they once tried so hard to emulate.

Propaganda and the Magical Art of Reality Creation

The point of art for most of human history was magical- culture was about the cult.

The goal of art was to commune with the gods- to create environments in which human beings were surrounded by images of them. We'll leave aside the obvious parallels with the post-World War II cargo cults and the rest of it (for now at least), because I'm more interested in exploring the cultural aspect of this.

Babies, Bathwater and the New Age

The New Age movement is one of the great enigmas of our time. You won't find hardly anyone willing to defend it or define themselves as a "New Ager," and yet the movement has slowly and quietly (some would say insidiously) changed the culture at large, for better and worse.

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.

That's the Spirit (but not Religious)

"Spiritual but not religious" is a phrase that's become increasingly common these days. What exactly the phrase means depends on who lays claim to it. For some it means they still believe in church teachings but prefer to sleep in on Sunday. For others (more than the former category, probably) it means a belief in angels, reincarnation, and a host of quasi-Christian/New Age syntheses.

Must-See TV: Cyberpunk Documentary from 1990

We saw clips of this for a recent William Gibson post, now here's the whole thing. Functions both as charmingly dated (g)nostalgia for disillusioned GenX'ers like myself and as history lesson for those who missed the movement the first time around. 

Secret Sun Best of the Zeros: Books and Graphic Novels

The 90s were the decade of my great romance with books. There were so many life-changing titles that came out I can't begin to name them all. 

Remembering George Carlin

The older I get, the more sense George Carlin makes. We lost him this week last year, and boy, we could use a dozen or so more where he came from. 

Back From The Edge of the World (2009 Edition)

Front row: Christopher Partridge, Jeff Kripal and Michael Murphy 

Second row: George Stephanopolous, Ed May, Dulce Murphy, Dean Radin, Victoria Nelson, Mason Gamble, Erik Davis. 

Third row: Doug Moench, Paul Selig, Mitch Horowitz, Larry Sutin, CK, Collin Eyre and Scott Jones.

Well, Time flies and Time crawls. But sometimes you enter a state in which Time flows in such a manner that it seems to expand and contract in an entirely different and yet totally satisfactory fashion. 

From Dragon*Con to Dragon Cult

Well, the vacation I had planned all year for turned out to be quite the disaster when I caught a good dose of a summer flu that's been going around. It knocked me flat on my ass for a good week and put the Dragon*Con trip in doubt.

 

Well, That Sucked

This is the Ren Fair I used to go to in Mass. There was no jousting or anything in NJ, but a f*ck of a lot of this...

MoCCA Takes Manhattan

Passion by Kensuke Okabayashi

Wow, the action just never stops. After returning home from Esalen and blogging my brains out on Saturday, I hit the MoCCA Art Festival in Manhattan on Sunday. It was an electrifying experience- if you're wondering where the creative excitement and energy is today, it's there.

 

Where Is Your Tribe?

I spent an underwhelming weekend at the Pittsburgh Comic Con (actually held in Monroeville) and got to thinking about the comic book nation and my place in it. Or more accurately, outside of it.

2007 In Review: Dragon*Con

The missus and I made the pilgrimage to Dragon*Con for our 20th anniversary and had the frickin' time of our lives. I've been sifting through YouTube vids, but can't seem to be anything that conveys the madness and the scale of the thing. You need an IMAX camera to capture it. As always, Joe was one of the belles of the ball, and the Dawn Look-a-Like Contest was packed to the rafters. Personally, I thought it should have been a cakewalk for the twins, but hey, no one asked me.

The highlight of the show for me? The first night in the Hyatt lobby. It was like a scene from a Star Wars movie come to life. The amazing architecture of that building just added to the otherworldliness of the evening.

The lowlight? The Cruxshadows concert. I kept waiting for Jaz Coleman to leap from the wings with a chainsaw and wreak revenge for his musical concepts being so debased. But this was Dragon*Con, so a lowlight there would be a highlight in day-to-day life. And there are a lot worse things to look at in this world than the Cruxshadows' dancers...

Comics as the New Counter Culture

There’s been a bit of a hullabaloo over that the fact that 2004 is the 70th anniversary of the modern American comic book. For most people, this is one of those nostalgic milestones that reminds us of our lost innocence.