Secret Star Trek: The Ultimate Trekkies

 

For such a small and obscure group, Marshall Applewhite's Heaven's Gate cult has had an outsized impact on the culture. Their mass suicide captured the public's imagination in ways that the more grisly horrors at Jonestown, Waco and the Solar Temple did not.

The 2013 Ausurs®: Better Late than Never

Back in 2007 I started blogging about Jack Kirby in the context of synchro/datamysticism, and looking at the almost-unfathomable numinous power his work contained. 

The first series I did here looked at his 1983 miniseries Silver Star and its obvious influence on the then-popular/now-forgotten TV show Heroes.

Bowie Meets the Men-in-Black

People are going to interpret this as a comment on celebrity culture, but it's clear that this is about alien visitations and MIBs.

You see the classic MIB in the supermarket and their trademark archaic black sedan in the alley, and the lyrics about sexless figures watching us in "our primitive world" or menacing us while we sleep or lurking in the dark on the stairs pretty clearly spells it out. 

As does the photo of Bowie from The Man Who Fell to Earth on the cover of the fake tabloid. One of Bowie's studio players said that one of the tunes they were working was originally called "Born in a UFO"- I wonder if this is it.

Revisiting the Temple: In Light of Recent Events...

Recent drama at the Vatican didn't happen in a vacuum. It's part of an ongoing struggle, a cold war that could shake the world to its foundations if it were to go hot. 

Doctors, Doorways and Dimensions, Part One

One of the main tenets of my research is that our most resonant pop culture is a kind of lucid dreaming, in which the creator acts as a guide for a shared visionary experience with the audience. 99.9% of the crap out there is immune to this process and is produced for reasons that are entirely mundane or cynical. 

But the stuff that resonates does so because it captures something elusive, something that changes the course of cultures and societies.