Lou Reed RIP

It's odd. The moment I was most happy to hear Lou Reed's voice was at my old school, which was kind of particularly Christian and white and heard "Walk on the Wild Side" and I was still conflicted--neat enough that the song that mentioned Candy Darling and those colored girls singing was playing just before a kind of karaoke night thing the school held, and also feeling a little bittersweet that a song made the same year I was born was still radical enough if you listened, but familiar enough that its radicalism didn't, like, filter through to make some nun turn it off.

I like Lou Reed and I liked Velvet Underground--but I admit I like the Cowboy Junkies' version of "Sweet Jane" better. I've liked a handful of covers of "Perfect Day" more than most any version of Lou Reed.



Because his voice always seems to remind it's like, the last day. Doesn't it?

(Anyone hear echoes of it in Radiohead's Creep--just askin'?)

But he fucking wrote Candy Says and oh. He was a poet of people and pain and things that aren't cute but real. That mattered a lot. It always should.

The Uncanny Valley of the Dolls

When I was just about old enough to actually watch tv and get stories and understand that there was no boogeyman and that there was a difference between fiction and reality, I think the thing that still unnerved me the most was the idea of the thing that should be inanimate--souless!--that wasn't. So it was that I found the trailer for "Magic" with Anthony Hopkins and a twisted-sounding dummy especially unnerving. How close is a dummy, after all, to dolls?  And being a girl, how many dolls did I have? All those smooth plastic faces, some with eyes that closed as their weirdly hollow but weighty bodies were laid horizontally--

There was a reason that stuffed animals could stay on my bed, but dolls had to be placed in the toy chest. I played with my dolls, but I could never love them. They were not "people" even if they looked like people. And perhaps the understanding--the recognition I had--of my rejection of these not quite human things made me wonder how they...saw me.

The internet is littered with images of scary dolls.  Some of them just are terribly bad fascimiles made by an inartful hand. Some are broken, reproachful, like baby zombies. And some are fashioned to be deliberately grotesque, preying upon the lurid fascinations of the unheathfully-centered mind. Their nearness to human features plays upon the sympathy we have for our fellow sentient--we inbue them with a terrifying inner life, even though they are hollow. And yet, we know there are people among us who are most alive--but are, in fact, hollow inside, as far from our understanding as what we imagine in the highly-suggestable imputed psyche of a doll.

We human beings are artificers. We capitulate our likenesses in various media, in the hopes of capturing whatever it is we think of as the human essence, from cave paintings to selfies.  One of the most unnerving of our enduring fables is the idea of the actually "made" man--the golem, the corpse-pastiche of Frankenstein, the waxwork or clockwork man. The deadly robot. The killer doll.

It's pretty kinky of us that it is the monster we create nearest to our own likeness, that has such horrors, isn't it? What does it say about us?

Necronomicon

Loved ones connect and families reunite as they discover there are things more powerful than death with the help of a very special book.

The Skeleton Dance

Spooky & adorable.

Happy Birthday Aleister Crowley!

Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.

                                                                   --Aleister Crowley

I'd like to take a moment to offer a memorial to a very strange man. Although considered by many to have been a Satanist and one of the worst people ever, he's exactly the sort of bad role model modern people could use. I tend to think he was exaggerating a tad about his depravity, but what do I know? Anyway, he was a bisexual lit major with occult proclivities who attracted dysfunctional women and wrote poetry. For some reason, I find that all dead fascinating. He also played chess, climbed mountains, and was also probably some kind of spy. He influenced plenty of very heavy music, and promoted sexual libertinism, drug use, meditation, yoga and seeing things for yourself.  He was probably the most interesting man in the world at one point, as well as a hot ballistic mess. And yes, some of the occult stuff is a put-on with a bunch of jokes about masturbation. 

I kind of recommend reading Uncle Al, though. He either believed in his own schtick or didn't. The point was the journey, anyway. (Go, do likewise. Or don't.)

(It was pronounced to rhyme with "holy", though.)

The Teeth of the Crocodile

So, I've been hearing about this krokodil drug that has now apparently hit the US--it rots people's flesh from the inside-out. This, right here, is how I know that I have no understanding of the addicted mindset. Because rotting from the inside out (or even the outside-in!) just seems like something that should be a sufficient deterrent to use. ("Hi, my name is Ivan and I'm going to be your pusher today. Can I interest you in some Krokodil? It has a high a lot like heroin but it's dirt cheap. Oh, and it could give you gangrenous abcesses that expose tendon and bone." "Um, gee, Ivan, I think I'm going to have to spend some more time with the menu. Do have anything good in meth?") I myself, I could never use something that gives you basically leprosy.

But that's just me. I remember those old anti-drug commercials where they used eggs as a demonstration:


That was dumb. You don't eat raw eggs, but fried eggs are delicious. It would make way more sense to say "This is a crackhead. This is a crackhead, on crack." And just show people how it really is. But today, we have "faces of meth" websites and people still use meth. And really, who do people get these drugs from? It's not like people never see people who been physically chewed up by the substances they use; it's like they just refuse to accept it personally. It can't happen to them, or, they feel like chasing the high is somehow worth the risk. But this particular drug? A flesh-eating drug? That's not a bad complexion day. That this is catching on is something of a horror to me, even beyond the Cannibal Bath Salt craze.

You might note I've opted to post a picture of actual crocodile teeth. You can look up pictures related to krokodil, the drug, if you like. I did. I'm kind of sorry about looking at them, though.

It Came From Beneath The Sea

So, it would probably not surprise my readers too much if I mentioned that I was pretty well influenced by H.P. Lovecraft regarding my estimation of what the creepiness threshhold might be.(HINT: the creepy is everywhere.) As a result, I'm sensitive to the idea the nature itself could be overturned and chaos could take over our expected pardigm of a happy, life-giving planet. I also would not be surprised if the "horror" came from the sea, just as life is supposed to have done. In fact, given that we use the oceans as our dumping ground, I'd be very surprised if there wasn't some horror from the sea that we should very well expect--and thus,  I find that I, like the folks at Grist, appreciate the plucky resolve of the humble jellyfish in their bid to shut down powerplants.

I don't know what it is about powerplants that has attracted the collective wrath of the mucosal marine menace, but I do know that, thanks to global warming, the jelly fish as a variety of lifeform has exploded in population. And I also know that most of our forms of energy have a baleful impact on the rest of the oceanic biota, especially in the form of acidification, which is outright harmful to corals, fish, the whole oceanic foodchain.

Could it be possible that, at this very simple level of evolution, the jellyfish boasts the complexity to follow orders and the simplicity to be subject to primal influences--perhaps originating from the planet, herself? Or, perhaps, some other, ocean-dwelling being(s) of greater complexity?

In other words, are the Deep Ones sending jellyfish into nuclear reactors to fuck shit up?

And if so, is it smart of us tool-using primates to send robots to do battle with them?



I welcome the eventual oceanic cybershoggothic overlords that will cap the oil wells and deliver retribution upon the overreaching monkeyfolks of the future. (No I don't. It sounds terrible. Let's don't provoke them.)

We Interrupt this Blog for An Advertisement That May be of Interest

It strikes me that October is Halloween Month, and I am momentarily fascinated by horrific things. Not ghosts, at present--I am reading Varney the Vampire, a Victorian Penny Dreadful, though, and most of my birthday booty included similarly spooky fare. I think for the next month I might undertake to regale you with things I find pertaining to dread and wonderful happenings. And suchlike boo bidness.