Blog Archives
Memento Macho
Today we remember the surprise passing of professional wrestler Randy “Macho Man” Savage five years ago. Here’s the word from Wiki… Randy Mario Poffo was born in Columbus, Ohio,[5][6] the elder son of Judy and Angelo Poffo. His father was Italian American and his mother was Jewish; Poffo was raised Roman Catholic.[12] Angelo was a [...]
Priest of Protest
Daniel Berrigan died in the Bronx on Saturday night. Berrigan wasn’t a household name in every house in America. But in more progressive corners, in Catholic communities that still connect to that faith through its history of social radicalism, and in the legacy of the protests against the Vietnam War, Berrigan was a legend. Yesterday [...]
King of Kingston
Fifty years ago, in April 1966, Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie visited Jamaica for the very first time. Selassie was a controversial statesman. He is also the figurehead of the Rastafari religion which views Selassie as the returned messiah of the Bible. Here’s a bit about the man… Among the Rastafari movement, whose followers are estimated [...]
Flashback: The Acid Tests
This year we look back on half a century since the first Acid Test at The Fillmore in San Francisco. The psychedelic initiations came courtesy of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters whose exploits were immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s countercultural histoire, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test… With that in mind here’s to another 8 miles-high-stone [...]
Professor Ginsberg
I love the Open Culture site and I’m always anxious to share a good find. The other day I fell down a Beat rabbit hole at the site before stumbling upon this set of recordings of Allen Ginsberg teaching the history of Western poetry at the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics in 1974. There [...]
Candy-Colored Cult
I love fringe cultures and strange religious beliefs, and the world of contemporary cults is like the overlap of their Venn diagram. The Cosmic People of Light Powers have a great name, an out-of-this-world UFO-centric belief system, and a wild candy-colored aesthetic that’s on full display in their promotional videos. Here’s a bit about the [...]
Truly Hallucinating
Yesterday I posted about chimpanzees in Guinea who may be displaying certain worship behaviors involving ritualistic rock throwing and building little cairns out of stone all next to one particular tree. If you haven’t seen the post check it out and watch the video. The chimps might be in the throes of some mystical ecstasy, [...]
Rise of the Ape God
So just another Sunday night sitting down to get a post together for Monday morning when I stumble upon this science story that has researchers wondering if chimpanzees are worshiping a god in Guinea… The discovery defied explanation. A researcher studying chimpanzees in the savannahs of the Republic of Guinea was baffled by a strangely [...]
Austin Osman Song
Chaos magic is the emergent discipline of the occult revival of the 21st century, and chaos magic pioneer Austin Osman Spare is its spotlighted personality. Spare died in mostly-anonymous squalor in 1956, but in this new era his cult of personality is second only to Crowley, and his magical concepts and haunted art continue to [...]
Bye, Bye, Bobby
Today we remember the death of Bobby Sands following a hunger strike by Irish republican prisoners at the HM Prison Maze which began on this day in 1981. Sands and his fellow Provisional Irish Republican Army inmates were afforded what amounted to POW status (Special Category Status) determined by negotiations between the IRA and the [...]
