Pink Moan

May 16th, 2008 by Gnat

Catchy term isn’t it, “skullfuck?” The following passage was copied from the Chaos Magic section of the Internet Sacred Text Archive. Every perused that site? NO?! Do yourself a favor and visit it now.

The article begins: “This is an exercise to aid in the recollection of dreams through the use of visualization and tactile imagery” and concludes, “by practicing this daily, near total dream recall is achieved in a relatively short time.” The article suggests that this exercise is best performed at the time one begins to fall asleep. The author goes on to add that it took him (I’m guessing a dude wrote this) approximately 30 days of work to get results, but now he can recall 90% of his dreams and lucidly dreams about 10% of the time. I’ve done this exercise a couple of times, and am going to try and remember to do it each night for a month. Why not? It’s certainly easy enough.

1. Relax; take a few deep breaths, and concentrate on the present sensation of the extremities.
2. Allow yourself to feel the gradual decrease in sensitivity of the limbs as you drop off to sleep.
3. Switch your attention rapidly from limb to limb, but block out extraneous thoughts as completely as possible.
4. When nearly all sensation is lost in the extremities, switch your attention to the spine; localize your attention to the sensation at each vertebra. Send a current of energy up from the base very slowly to the top.
5. When the current reaches the top, visualize the entire spine as a penis, and the point where it enters the skull as the sexually-oriented orifice of your choice.
6. Concentrate now on the sensation of the spine-penis entering the foramen magnum-orifice. When bringing the sensation to the concious level, recall that it is your penis and/or your orifice; a great deal of sensation is being generated.
7. Hold the images and sensations in mind until you do, in fact, fall asleep. Attempt immediately to hold up your dream-hands in front of your eyes.

I told a friend of mine about this exercise and he sort of jokingly commented that doing it would invariably produce highly erotic dreams. But I don’t think this exercise has anything more or less to do with eroticism than yoga does. Maybe it serves as an attempt to shift focus from the autonomic to central nervous system (my fuzzy science). It gets the energies moving around, you know? Plus there’s some serious archetypal imagery going on with the phallus/orifice thing, and we all know archetypes and dreams are chummy bedfellows.

May 15th, 2008 by Gnat

California’s top court overturns gay marriage ban

On a side note, in his hilarious stand-up flick This Filthy World, John Waters muses that one of the reasons he “became” gay was so that he didn’t have to get married.

May 13th, 2008 by Gnat

This morning I was thinking of how to seamlessly write about two very unrelated things, yesterday’s earthquake in China and today’s announcement of the death of artist Robert Rauschenberg. For whatever reason I didn’t want to write about one thing without mentioning the other. While mining the internets for information and imagery relating to these two events, I came across the following photos:

Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955)

Chinese woman clears earthquake debris

What can I possibly say to connect the catastrophic deaths of over 10,000 Chinese people with the passing of a famous, elderly Abstract Expressionist turned Pop artist? I guess I can comment on the random nature of beds — how they aren’t really supposed to be art but sometimes are just that, or how they are supposed to be safe but sometimes aren’t that at all.

May 12th, 2008 by Gnat

In what seems like fodder for an Onion article, Neil Young has had a species of spider named after him. And apparently he’s not the first rock and roller to claim this arthropod honor. Roy Orbison and his widow, Barbara, have a whirligig beetle (Orectochilus orbisonorum) named after them. But an important question looms in my mind: will the Neil Young spider be able to effectively sport chops, hats and flannels as well as its namesake? Furthermore, can this spider even play guitar?

Neil Young

Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi

Read about it here.

May 8th, 2008 by Gnat

A few days ago I received the very sad news that an old friend, whom I hadn’t seen since high school, passed away. She was inexplicably stricken with colon cancer two years ago, and succumbed this last December. While Elisabeth (or simply “Liz” when I knew her) and I drifted apart after our freshman year of high school, we were quite close from about the ages of fourteen to fifteen. I met her just after moving from west Texas to a suburb of Houston, Spring. In Spring Liz lived right around the corner from me. We shared some great times, getting into trouble more than once together.

These were exciting times for me, times of experimentation with hair, make-up, clothes, boys, identity and personal freedom. Liz was all a part of that. She was the first person who showed me how to use eyeliner and eyeshadow. Always a fan of the giant can of aerosol Aquanet, Liz used to say her hairdo consisted of “99% hairspray, 1% hair.” She had the most original style, fitting somewhere between Ducky from Pretty in Pink and an extra from a late-’80s hair metal rock video. Whimsical might be the word to best describe Liz’s personality and style. Make that whimsical squared.

Liz’s mum was British and her father Asian, Chinese I think. She could pull off a killer British accent, which I think we employed in several prank calls. She often donned hats of various styles and was as animated as a cartoon character. I remember Liz loved carrying and playing with my baby cousin Brittany, and Britt loved her back. Liz seemed to have boundless energy and a passion for being as unique as possible.

During our senior year of high school Liz was in a terrible car accident which resulted in her having emergency brain surgery. I never learned many details of the accident, or don’t remember them now. I know she was with her boyfriend and alcohol may have been a factor. I remember seeing Liz at our prom afterparty, a glittery sort of top hat strategically covering the huge, headband-like scar across the top of her skull. She didn’t seem to miss a beat.

Why do things like this happen, a woman in her early thirties being taken down by colon cancer? My friend Amy, the gal who broke the news about Liz to me, says this experience has wiped away any smear of religion/spirituality (in her case, Judaism) that she may have had left in her. Maybe someday I’ll tell her about what I’ve read regarding Chaos and Chaos Magic. Though not really comforting, Chaos Magic theories of creation/destruction resonate strongly with me. It’s the closest explanation of how and why the universe works the way it does that I can embrace at this point in my life. Here are a few excerpts from Peter Carroll’s Liber Null and Psychonaut regarding Chaos:

• Space, time, mass, and energy originate from Chaos, have their being
  in Chaos, and through the agency of the aether are moved by Chaos in
  the multiple forms of existence.
• The force which initiates and moves the universe [Chaos],
  and the force which lies at the center of consciousness [Kia],
  is whimsical and arbitrary, creating and destroying for no
  purpose beyond amusing Itself. There is nothing spiritual or
  moralistic about Chaos or Kia. We live in a universe where
  nothing is true, although some information may be useful for
  relative purposes.
• If it makes us feel any better we can call this Chaos, the Tao, or
  God, and imagine it to be benevolent and human-hearted. There are
  two schools of thought in magic. One considers the formative agent
  of the universe to be random and chaotic, and the other considers
  that it is a force of spiritual consciousness. As they have only
  themselves on which to base their speculations, they are basically
  saying that their own natures are either random and chaotic or
  spiritually conscious.
• However we choose to see it, the ultimate ground of being is utterly
  void to our understanding, impersonal and inhuman, whimsical and
  capricious and far too infinite and incomprehensible to be much use
  as a god to limited dualistic beings like ourselves.

So this is what I have to go on right now. Like I said, it’s not too comforting. But truth is often the opposite of all that is shiny and comfortable. Or like my grandmother sometimes says, “the truth don’t hurt unless it ought to.” Indeed.

Liz, you were an important part of my life during some damned formative teenage years. You left this world much too soon, but your unique spirit won’t soon be forgotten.

(Chaos star symbol)

May 2nd, 2008 by Gnat

Two days ago my band, Naughty Bird, had the pleasure of warming up the stage for one of garage rock’s finest combos, the Woggles. Rarely does a band inspire me to shake it with abandon and leave me begging for more. These guys are all top-notch songwriters, musicians and performers wrapped up in one soulfully Southern (they’re from Atlanta) package. I felt like a teenage girl seeing the Beatles for the first time. I’m still giddy from Wednesday’s show.

Here’s a short Youtube clip of the boys showing off some of their signature swingin’ moves: