With regards to 28 Years Later, while I wouldn't be surprised by writer Alex Garland having read Crossed +100, the usage of the images is significantly different, especially the eponymous Bone Temple, which actually has more humanistic connotations within the film.
On the subject of reader's having knowledge about the world the narrator lacks, might I recommend Gretchen Felker-Martin's Black Flame.
A research find from the Star Trek book you might get a tickle out of:
In-between the original series and the Motion Picture, there was a children's animated show called "Star Trek: The Animated Series" supposedly presenting the final two years of voyages the Enterprise crew went on. Despite its technical limitations, it was one of the better American cartoons of the 70s (though that had more to do with how utterly shit American cartoons of the 70s were) in part due to the writing and some of the more fantastical images they were able to present despite having a smaller animation budget per season than an average Doctor Who episode from the same era.
One episode that has a lot of brilliant images and some good writing is The Magicks of Megas-Tu. In this episode, the crew of the Enterprise goes to the center of the universe to see the origin point of the Big Bang. There, they find the world of Megas-Tu, wherein the logicks of Magick reign supreme. It all comes to a head when the crew basically have to defend Lucifer from prosecution.
The prosecutor in question is played by Ed Bishop, rarely a lead but still had a rather interesting career. Bishop was a regular in the works of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, appearing in Captain Scarlet as Captain Blue, UFO as Ed Starker and the narrator for The Day After Tomorrow. He would also play roles in a variety of works including the President of the United States in Threads, Philip Marlowe in the BBC Radio adaptations, and a bit part in 2001: A Space Odyssey with noted Star Trek actor Gary Lockwood.
In The Magicks of Megas-Tu, he plays Asmodeus.
A piece of advice I receive from time to time is that when working in an artistic filled, one should have creative hobby that isn't monetized. I've personally been doing podcasting with friends. While I post them online and take the process seriously, I tend not to engage with them as things I want to monetize. It's just a bit of fun with friends/an excuse to get them to watch weird and interesting things. Do you have any creative hobbies?
This sounds just like RAW's frustrations in the intro to Quantum Psychology, where no matter how he phrased things materialists and spiritualists would still see the exact over-generalizations he had specifically avoided.
I think maybe non-dual ideas cannot get explained from one person to another, they require individual epiphanies/satori experiences. Sabda (testimony) cannot get substituted for pramina (experience).
I used to despair at this, bc like, if someone has had the experience the explanation (or artwork) seems superfluous, and if they haven't it appears nonsensical!
But now I think that the explanation/artwork builds and maintains the context within which these experiences emerge, get sustained, and further developed. A supercontext, perhaps :)))
Nagarjuna spent most of the 2nd century explaining, mostly in vain, how emptiness didn't mean nothingness, and that the self had neither a continuous nor discontinuous existence. Nice work if you can get it!
I devoured the new Alison Bechdel book "Spent." Magnificent as always! Something of a crime that most people just know her from her eponymous test, and not bc she's one of the best cartoonists on the planet! (Anyone interested: start with "Fun Home" and then in to everything else!)
1998...what a wild time! Looking at that picture leads me to wonder if only the youth can know such frivolity 😊 Good times with friends are such a treasure. History that matters. Great podcast, thanks for the link!
It's always sad to lose character in our historic landscapes, and see it easily replaced with cheap corporate homogeneity. But, someday, even the McDonalds will be swept away. Maybe some of them will be reborn as something wonderful for the ages. Ignis Natura Renovatur Integram
Totally picture Lindelof being like “prepare to have your minds blown” , “lanternnn” then reading the room and holding the “nnn” and his assistant is gesturing “go on” and another one is like “uh uh” and some kind of comedy thing assistant like Jennjamin Franklin cosplay mouthing an “sz” and thumbs upping. “Lanterrds, no, lanterns! LanternS!”
With everything seemingly closing in, one can’t help but fight back via psychedelica. And I’m in the thralls of it. Truth speaks best through symbolism and poetry. I feel like Superman belting in my hope machine against the oncoming wave of it all. Thank you, Grant. All love. No war.
I’ve only known the Three Investigators as ‘Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators.’ Apparently Random House thought throwing in a famous director would sway impressionable 12 year olds to part with their allowance.
Three things you mention in today's post connect to me in some fashion.
I'm currently re-reading Seven Soldiers. I was looking for a recommendation on where to start with a book on Qabalah, and I heard of the new documentary on the manosphere. But I did watch it this morning.
As for why there was another look at this despicable behavior, I am coming at it from a different view.
I have a daughter (younger than 13) that has been dealing with a boy who strikes me as someone that has either already been sucked into these orbits or is being influenced by others that already learned these abhorrent behaviors from the likes of these "influencers."
She had been hiding it pretty well all school year, but it intensified enough that the school had to get involved. The boy will steal or hide her food and tell her she shouldn't be eating and he's doing her a favor by keeping food from her. And he'd say other comments about her appearance and body daily.
Knowing nothing about the kid other than the school behavior, I can't help but go right to social media/internet access not being monitored. I think it would be worse if he hears this kind of talking to another person at home as normal and acceptable.
Maybe this documentary is for people living in denial that there are people out there that actually behave and live like this or ignorant that they are/know someone like this? I obviously don't know. It's disgusting though. And really, it probably makes these people dig in further to their beliefs that they are right.
Nothing new was learned from my end other than one incredible bit of science...the sperm of a woman's ex-partner can pass on DNA to a child the woman conceives with another man.
Inspired by my fourth reread of “The Invisibles” (since my mind was originally blown way back in the last century) I finally decided to join the Substack as a paid member. And with your comments on “The Three Investigators” appearing in this edition of Xanaduum, it seems like the Universe is sending me a sign, that I picked the perfect time to do so.
I don’t know of you are aware, but for decades “The Three Investigators” have been incredibly popular over here in Germany. Known as „Die drei ???” (The three ???) the series was continued by German writers after the original 55 novels were translated. By now almost 190 additional books have been published. The main reason for the continued success of the series however are the audio plays, based on these books.
Almost every kid who grew up in the 80s and 90s was listening to them on tape. And today the series is still a hit with kids but especially with adults, who restarted listening for nostalgic reasons.
Astonishingly the audio plays are still using the identical voice actors who started as kids in the late 1970s, and they are also still produced and directed by the same woman, Heikedine Koerting, who’s now 81 and is considered a legend over here.
Of course, by now there have been lots of spin-off books (even one featuring three girls known as “The three !!!”), five movie adaptations, sold out stage shows where the original voice actors read an adventure accompanied by live music and tons of merchandise, including Lego Style sets.
Can’t wait to read your take on it.
Now just last week I happened to start to co-write an episode for a detective show on German TV where a murder takes place during the recording of an audio play very much in the style of “The Three Investigators”. It’s gonna be a fun meta take of the genre also tackling the topic of AI generated voices that are threatening the jobs of voice actors everywhere.
Anyway, to me all of this was a fun synchronicity.
Now I am very happy to finally be able to also read the letters to the answers you’ve been given in the free part of the weekly Xanaduum and once I a while add my own two cents in the comments section.
Oh, and being a bit sick today I totally forgot that the numbering of the third volume of “The Invisibles” is backwards. So, when I started with issue 1, I was utterly confused and when I finally realized my mistake I was relieved that my fever wasn’t that bad after all.
Thanks for consistently putting out so much interesting, inspiring and mind-bending work here and of course on the printed page. (And your podcast with Douglas Rushkoff was also very insightful.)
Maybe I need to read other people's comments more just to understand what the tea is about.
My own reading of your beliefs (there's a podcast?) has long been that, yeah, gods are literally real but that literal reality might not be as concrete as anybody supposes. Also that if all you're concerned with is supplying "literal inputs" then you might be satisfied with the "literal outputs". I think SOME PEOPLE are only concerned with magick or metaphysics that undermine or contradict concrete observations and therefore have trouble reconciling a belief in reasonably objective observations with a belief in complex and multidimensional substrate reality.
Personally, I will admit that I've always personally been a bit of a Jonah. Sometimes when confronted with the prophetic mode, I leave town and go on vacation (metaphorically speaking) to avoid focusing on it. Somewhere I picked up the notion -- that you might ardently disagree with -- that a magician, transmuting the observable and the invisible threads tugging at everything, has to have a certain level of ambivalence.
Echoing your comments on "why?", I suppose I similarly find "What is literally real?" to be a boring question at some point and one that presupposes that only the real or unreal can effectively matter. In an infinite multiverse, you probably have mutually exclusive cosmologies that are equally unreal to one another and that doesn't mean they aren't necessarily part of a shared dynamic that can influence one another.
It seems parallel (and topical) how a precondition of much war involves dehumanization, delegitimization, and un-realing the other side. Declaring something categorically unreal seems to be a trick people use to engage in campaigns of violence because there is no violence if there is no victim.
And it's therefore a fundamentally magickal act to refute magick. And that's a spell that can have value to facilitate just conflict. I certainly think that advance labeling the televangelist's gnosis as mammon and inert -- something they don't believe themselves-- allows lines to be crossed.
I think it's also genuinely practical because I think whatever a person professed belief is, there's some level where they have doubts and you can play a trick by labeling the version of them that has doubts to be the "real person" and their believing states as convenient lies or mental illness.
This all does suggest that people (and I hope I never slipped into this) are buying into war tactics against you by trying to narrow the "real Grant" into one that doesn't disagree with them. It's the same "hate the sin, not the sinner" lie that allows people to righteously assault queer folk by presupposing that the queerness can be separated from the person.
Have you ever seen an old X-Files prototype Canadian show called Beyond Reality? The formidable Gordon Pinsent played a character who was a mentor to the parapsychologists. What they discover is that the kind, intellectual character played by Pinsent is possessed by a demon... but that it is actually his kind scholarly persona that IS the demon and the vile, violent, ugly persona breaking through is the BOY that the cosmopolitan and gentle demon possessed decades ago. I think they opted to exorcise him, restoring the street thug, in a choice that did more to make me question conventional ethics than it did to convince me that they did the right thing.
I wonder if you, a lifelong cat ally like myself, have ever read up on Toxoplasmosis? It's a fecal parasite that spreads through cats. It's estimated that anywhere between 20% and 60% of humans globally have it. It's permanent. It's personality altering. It's thought to have evolved successfully because it makes prey like rodents easier to match. It triggers disregard for rules, insecurity, more extroversion, less conscientious, heightened dopamine manufacturing, lowered self-preservation and increased tendency to selfless acts... as well as some evidence of increased schizophrenia adjacent thought patterns. It's thought to enhance cat companions' nurturing of cats and may be partly to explain why cats haven't fully domesticated or the not-quite-pack social formations.
So here's the thing. If *I* have it and who *I* am is formed by this then, really, screw the version of me that doesn't have it. Getting rid of it doesn't do *me* any good. I am the product of the changes. The person who might exist treated isn't necessarily ME.
Same goes for you if people "surgically" get to treat parts of you as alien just because they aren't necessarily commonly enabled factory settings.
I’m so glad you also immediately thought of Moores Crossed 100, after the first trailer dropping I was like oh yeah I read the same shit guys. I don’t think Kubrick was killed by the Elite like some people believe, that’s a step too far for me lmao. I’m surprised you haven’t been at least interested in pirates especially with your subway pirates in Seven Soliders. I am about a third of the way through of your New X-Men omnibus and it is amazing!!! As soon as it starts with the Neanderthal race coming to extinction a Cassandra Nova monologuing I was like “oh yeah, this is going to be peak!”
With regards to 28 Years Later, while I wouldn't be surprised by writer Alex Garland having read Crossed +100, the usage of the images is significantly different, especially the eponymous Bone Temple, which actually has more humanistic connotations within the film.
On the subject of reader's having knowledge about the world the narrator lacks, might I recommend Gretchen Felker-Martin's Black Flame.
A research find from the Star Trek book you might get a tickle out of:
In-between the original series and the Motion Picture, there was a children's animated show called "Star Trek: The Animated Series" supposedly presenting the final two years of voyages the Enterprise crew went on. Despite its technical limitations, it was one of the better American cartoons of the 70s (though that had more to do with how utterly shit American cartoons of the 70s were) in part due to the writing and some of the more fantastical images they were able to present despite having a smaller animation budget per season than an average Doctor Who episode from the same era.
One episode that has a lot of brilliant images and some good writing is The Magicks of Megas-Tu. In this episode, the crew of the Enterprise goes to the center of the universe to see the origin point of the Big Bang. There, they find the world of Megas-Tu, wherein the logicks of Magick reign supreme. It all comes to a head when the crew basically have to defend Lucifer from prosecution.
The prosecutor in question is played by Ed Bishop, rarely a lead but still had a rather interesting career. Bishop was a regular in the works of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, appearing in Captain Scarlet as Captain Blue, UFO as Ed Starker and the narrator for The Day After Tomorrow. He would also play roles in a variety of works including the President of the United States in Threads, Philip Marlowe in the BBC Radio adaptations, and a bit part in 2001: A Space Odyssey with noted Star Trek actor Gary Lockwood.
In The Magicks of Megas-Tu, he plays Asmodeus.
A piece of advice I receive from time to time is that when working in an artistic filled, one should have creative hobby that isn't monetized. I've personally been doing podcasting with friends. While I post them online and take the process seriously, I tend not to engage with them as things I want to monetize. It's just a bit of fun with friends/an excuse to get them to watch weird and interesting things. Do you have any creative hobbies?
"Now a curse upon Because and his kin!"
Re: The non-dual ontology of magick!
This sounds just like RAW's frustrations in the intro to Quantum Psychology, where no matter how he phrased things materialists and spiritualists would still see the exact over-generalizations he had specifically avoided.
I think maybe non-dual ideas cannot get explained from one person to another, they require individual epiphanies/satori experiences. Sabda (testimony) cannot get substituted for pramina (experience).
I used to despair at this, bc like, if someone has had the experience the explanation (or artwork) seems superfluous, and if they haven't it appears nonsensical!
But now I think that the explanation/artwork builds and maintains the context within which these experiences emerge, get sustained, and further developed. A supercontext, perhaps :)))
Nagarjuna spent most of the 2nd century explaining, mostly in vain, how emptiness didn't mean nothingness, and that the self had neither a continuous nor discontinuous existence. Nice work if you can get it!
I devoured the new Alison Bechdel book "Spent." Magnificent as always! Something of a crime that most people just know her from her eponymous test, and not bc she's one of the best cartoonists on the planet! (Anyone interested: start with "Fun Home" and then in to everything else!)
1998...what a wild time! Looking at that picture leads me to wonder if only the youth can know such frivolity 😊 Good times with friends are such a treasure. History that matters. Great podcast, thanks for the link!
It's always sad to lose character in our historic landscapes, and see it easily replaced with cheap corporate homogeneity. But, someday, even the McDonalds will be swept away. Maybe some of them will be reborn as something wonderful for the ages. Ignis Natura Renovatur Integram
Totally picture Lindelof being like “prepare to have your minds blown” , “lanternnn” then reading the room and holding the “nnn” and his assistant is gesturing “go on” and another one is like “uh uh” and some kind of comedy thing assistant like Jennjamin Franklin cosplay mouthing an “sz” and thumbs upping. “Lanterrds, no, lanterns! LanternS!”
When colors are too hard, who do you turn to?
Man,
With everything seemingly closing in, one can’t help but fight back via psychedelica. And I’m in the thralls of it. Truth speaks best through symbolism and poetry. I feel like Superman belting in my hope machine against the oncoming wave of it all. Thank you, Grant. All love. No war.
-Timothy
I’ve only known the Three Investigators as ‘Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators.’ Apparently Random House thought throwing in a famous director would sway impressionable 12 year olds to part with their allowance.
Weird.
Three things you mention in today's post connect to me in some fashion.
I'm currently re-reading Seven Soldiers. I was looking for a recommendation on where to start with a book on Qabalah, and I heard of the new documentary on the manosphere. But I did watch it this morning.
As for why there was another look at this despicable behavior, I am coming at it from a different view.
I have a daughter (younger than 13) that has been dealing with a boy who strikes me as someone that has either already been sucked into these orbits or is being influenced by others that already learned these abhorrent behaviors from the likes of these "influencers."
She had been hiding it pretty well all school year, but it intensified enough that the school had to get involved. The boy will steal or hide her food and tell her she shouldn't be eating and he's doing her a favor by keeping food from her. And he'd say other comments about her appearance and body daily.
Knowing nothing about the kid other than the school behavior, I can't help but go right to social media/internet access not being monitored. I think it would be worse if he hears this kind of talking to another person at home as normal and acceptable.
Maybe this documentary is for people living in denial that there are people out there that actually behave and live like this or ignorant that they are/know someone like this? I obviously don't know. It's disgusting though. And really, it probably makes these people dig in further to their beliefs that they are right.
Nothing new was learned from my end other than one incredible bit of science...the sperm of a woman's ex-partner can pass on DNA to a child the woman conceives with another man.
How do people believe this shit?
Inspired by my fourth reread of “The Invisibles” (since my mind was originally blown way back in the last century) I finally decided to join the Substack as a paid member. And with your comments on “The Three Investigators” appearing in this edition of Xanaduum, it seems like the Universe is sending me a sign, that I picked the perfect time to do so.
I don’t know of you are aware, but for decades “The Three Investigators” have been incredibly popular over here in Germany. Known as „Die drei ???” (The three ???) the series was continued by German writers after the original 55 novels were translated. By now almost 190 additional books have been published. The main reason for the continued success of the series however are the audio plays, based on these books.
Almost every kid who grew up in the 80s and 90s was listening to them on tape. And today the series is still a hit with kids but especially with adults, who restarted listening for nostalgic reasons.
Astonishingly the audio plays are still using the identical voice actors who started as kids in the late 1970s, and they are also still produced and directed by the same woman, Heikedine Koerting, who’s now 81 and is considered a legend over here.
Of course, by now there have been lots of spin-off books (even one featuring three girls known as “The three !!!”), five movie adaptations, sold out stage shows where the original voice actors read an adventure accompanied by live music and tons of merchandise, including Lego Style sets.
Can’t wait to read your take on it.
Now just last week I happened to start to co-write an episode for a detective show on German TV where a murder takes place during the recording of an audio play very much in the style of “The Three Investigators”. It’s gonna be a fun meta take of the genre also tackling the topic of AI generated voices that are threatening the jobs of voice actors everywhere.
Anyway, to me all of this was a fun synchronicity.
Now I am very happy to finally be able to also read the letters to the answers you’ve been given in the free part of the weekly Xanaduum and once I a while add my own two cents in the comments section.
Oh, and being a bit sick today I totally forgot that the numbering of the third volume of “The Invisibles” is backwards. So, when I started with issue 1, I was utterly confused and when I finally realized my mistake I was relieved that my fever wasn’t that bad after all.
Thanks for consistently putting out so much interesting, inspiring and mind-bending work here and of course on the printed page. (And your podcast with Douglas Rushkoff was also very insightful.)
Maybe I need to read other people's comments more just to understand what the tea is about.
My own reading of your beliefs (there's a podcast?) has long been that, yeah, gods are literally real but that literal reality might not be as concrete as anybody supposes. Also that if all you're concerned with is supplying "literal inputs" then you might be satisfied with the "literal outputs". I think SOME PEOPLE are only concerned with magick or metaphysics that undermine or contradict concrete observations and therefore have trouble reconciling a belief in reasonably objective observations with a belief in complex and multidimensional substrate reality.
Personally, I will admit that I've always personally been a bit of a Jonah. Sometimes when confronted with the prophetic mode, I leave town and go on vacation (metaphorically speaking) to avoid focusing on it. Somewhere I picked up the notion -- that you might ardently disagree with -- that a magician, transmuting the observable and the invisible threads tugging at everything, has to have a certain level of ambivalence.
Echoing your comments on "why?", I suppose I similarly find "What is literally real?" to be a boring question at some point and one that presupposes that only the real or unreal can effectively matter. In an infinite multiverse, you probably have mutually exclusive cosmologies that are equally unreal to one another and that doesn't mean they aren't necessarily part of a shared dynamic that can influence one another.
It seems parallel (and topical) how a precondition of much war involves dehumanization, delegitimization, and un-realing the other side. Declaring something categorically unreal seems to be a trick people use to engage in campaigns of violence because there is no violence if there is no victim.
And it's therefore a fundamentally magickal act to refute magick. And that's a spell that can have value to facilitate just conflict. I certainly think that advance labeling the televangelist's gnosis as mammon and inert -- something they don't believe themselves-- allows lines to be crossed.
I think it's also genuinely practical because I think whatever a person professed belief is, there's some level where they have doubts and you can play a trick by labeling the version of them that has doubts to be the "real person" and their believing states as convenient lies or mental illness.
This all does suggest that people (and I hope I never slipped into this) are buying into war tactics against you by trying to narrow the "real Grant" into one that doesn't disagree with them. It's the same "hate the sin, not the sinner" lie that allows people to righteously assault queer folk by presupposing that the queerness can be separated from the person.
Have you ever seen an old X-Files prototype Canadian show called Beyond Reality? The formidable Gordon Pinsent played a character who was a mentor to the parapsychologists. What they discover is that the kind, intellectual character played by Pinsent is possessed by a demon... but that it is actually his kind scholarly persona that IS the demon and the vile, violent, ugly persona breaking through is the BOY that the cosmopolitan and gentle demon possessed decades ago. I think they opted to exorcise him, restoring the street thug, in a choice that did more to make me question conventional ethics than it did to convince me that they did the right thing.
I wonder if you, a lifelong cat ally like myself, have ever read up on Toxoplasmosis? It's a fecal parasite that spreads through cats. It's estimated that anywhere between 20% and 60% of humans globally have it. It's permanent. It's personality altering. It's thought to have evolved successfully because it makes prey like rodents easier to match. It triggers disregard for rules, insecurity, more extroversion, less conscientious, heightened dopamine manufacturing, lowered self-preservation and increased tendency to selfless acts... as well as some evidence of increased schizophrenia adjacent thought patterns. It's thought to enhance cat companions' nurturing of cats and may be partly to explain why cats haven't fully domesticated or the not-quite-pack social formations.
So here's the thing. If *I* have it and who *I* am is formed by this then, really, screw the version of me that doesn't have it. Getting rid of it doesn't do *me* any good. I am the product of the changes. The person who might exist treated isn't necessarily ME.
Same goes for you if people "surgically" get to treat parts of you as alien just because they aren't necessarily commonly enabled factory settings.
I’m so glad you also immediately thought of Moores Crossed 100, after the first trailer dropping I was like oh yeah I read the same shit guys. I don’t think Kubrick was killed by the Elite like some people believe, that’s a step too far for me lmao. I’m surprised you haven’t been at least interested in pirates especially with your subway pirates in Seven Soliders. I am about a third of the way through of your New X-Men omnibus and it is amazing!!! As soon as it starts with the Neanderthal race coming to extinction a Cassandra Nova monologuing I was like “oh yeah, this is going to be peak!”