Merry Crowleymas

GOLD BRICKS
Teach us Your secret, Master! yap my Yahoos.
Then for the hardness of their hearts, and for the
softness of their heads, I taught them Magick.
But...alas!
Teach us Your real secret, Master! how to become
invisible, how to acquire love, and oh! beyond all,
how to make gold.
But how much gold will you give me for the Secret
of Infinite Riches?
Then said the foremost and most foolish; Master, it
is nothing; but here is an hundred thousand
pounds.
This did I deign to accept, and whispered in his ear
this secret:
A SUCKER IS BORN EVERY MINUTE

from The Book of Lies

Merry Crowleymas to you all! Though I'm not much of a Crowleyite or practicing Thelemist, I've always liked the idea of a holiday that celebrates the mad, deviant, paranoid and down right wicked aspects of our nature. I also like a bit of spooky Current 93 every now and again.

So lift a glass of Absinthe tonight for old wretched Al and maybe let those dark and devious demons that haunt the shadows of your psyche loose in the world if only for an evening.



















Suggested Crowleymas reading – Liber Al Vel Legis (The Book of The Law) as well as Crowleymas 1974 from RAW's Cosmic Trigger.

"why does the gnosis always get busted? Every single time the energy is raised and large-scale group illuminations are occurring, the local branch of the Inquisition kills it dead. Why, why, why?"

from Crowleymas 1974

To quote Unkle Dick: "May your Crowlymass be filled with good strong wine, an opiate or three and some good old fashioned buggery!"

think-make-think

Artist Clifton Burt's riff on a John Maeda blog haiku, its creation a direct extension of its message.

I'm going to take this as my mantra and statment of purpose through the dark months.

High End Contrast - Murakami and Anslem Reyles

Gagosian's 24th street gallery is currently host to a striking contrast in contemporary art styles. The majority of the gallery contains a solo show titled Monochrome Generation by German artist Anselm Reyle. The show contains many over-sized, expensively fabricated sculptural elements made of shiny chrome and affixed with led lights. I'm sure are these destined for a life sparkling up the lobby of some faceless multi-national finance company.

The wall pieces created from found objects are slightly more inetersting but the selection of objects, bits of machinery, chain linkage, and bottle caps, is pretty uninspired and the homogenizing nature of the monochroming process removes any of their life and interest. The uninspired spectacle is capped off with a haphazard pile of hay bales constucted of silver tinsel that appear to have escaped from the Christmas party in Less Than Zero. Though Calrygirl and I did get a kick out of the lone bale found in a separate room under plexiglas as if it had to be quarantined from the others for anti-social behavior. Over all the collection yields little more than a cluttered gallery full of tired design objects whose only remarkable features are gloss and scale. The experience left me not only unengaged and uninspired but repulsed and in a strange way personally offended.



Tucked away the gallery's front room, in striking contrast, is Takashi Murakami's Picture of Fate: I Am But a Fisherman Who Angles In the Darkness of His Mind, a large enchanting mural based on the China-Lion mythology of Japanese Buddhism. Murakami is no stranger to audacious fabrications with big price tags. He is one of the most succesful artists in the world has over the top shows up in seemingly every major city at the moment. But in contrast to the pop and shine of Reyle's work this single painting, given a room of it's own to breathe, is intimate and inviting.

The layered detail work of the painting's background, the result of the melding of classical techniques with cutting edge technology, would be remarkable on it's own. The color pallet is soft but vibrant and closer inspection yields meticulus detail. The main image does what Murakami does best, entangling the adorable with darka nd severe. It teases our intimate reactions and desires until we are left pondering the sublime. The cartoon skulls, a hallmark of the Murakami visual lexicon, here in a massive pile carry both the weight and comical inevitability of our mortality. Their comedic/grim dicotomy as striking an image of death as the fierce/adorable lion cubs are symobls of youth and rebirth.