Monthly Archives: November 2020

book report, The Four Agreements by Miguel Ruiz

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A book I’ve seen recommended on /x and various occult sites, it’s advertised as something of a Carlos Castaneda-esque work, and Ruiz makes ample use of Castaneda’s terminology (impeccable, warrior, hunter, dreaming, etc.) but alas I found it to be self-help pap, dishonest in its presentation and frankly tedious. 

There has long been debate over Castaneda’s authenticity. A quick run-down for normies: he claimed to have been mentored in magic by a Mexican shaman called Don Juan, producing a series of books from the 60s to the mid-1990s. I came across them (via William Burroughs) when I was 20, and found them mesmerising, even while I doubted they were describing events with much accuracy. 

Naturally, many have accused Castaneda of being a charlatan, pointing out factual discrepancies in his books, not to mention shady goings on (deaths of disciples etc.). I don’t really care whether Don Juan existed or not, or even if Castaneda was a fraud or a genuine magician; the books have a psychological truth to them, like Ursula le Guin’s wholly fictional Earthsea books (at least, the first three) or Tolkien’s legendarium.

My own supposition, now, is that Castaneda’s Don Juan is akin to Plato’s Socrates: a real person who was worked into a fiction for didactic purposes. I think that just as most of “Socrates'” philosophy is actually Plato’s, so with Castaneda – perhaps Don Juan was his own personal model, only loosely based on a real human being he met once or twice in his youth. I’m inclined to doubt the books describe a factual reality, because the narrator (Castaneda) retains his naive, flawed character from start (The Teachings of Don Juan, 1968) to end (mid-90s); he is the permanent ephebe to Don Juan’s wizened old mentor. 

The Castaneda books are weird, and often dark and pitiless. I’m surprised they are so popular in the New Age community, as they describe a universe of ruthless predation and power, a far cry from the fluffy unicorn playground of the average hippy. The only ameliorating, human quality is a kind of low-key affection between Castaneda and Don Juan, and a frequent and surprising humour.

Disappointingly, Miguel Ruiz’s book is just your run-of-the-mill self-help, with platitudes and truisms dressed up in Castaneda’s terminology. I found my mind often disconnecting from the text; as on a monotonous motorway drive, one sometimes loses all memory of the last few minutes (highway hypnosis), so here I succumbed to reading hypnosis, unable to focus on passages that were as memorable as a stretch of the M62 at night. The word “love” abounds, hypnotically, horribly; ironically, given one of the so-called four agreements is “to be impeccable with your word”, Ruiz’s words come across like over-boiled vegetables: they still bear a resemblance to some original form but taste of nothing, and fall apart under the slightest examination. For Castaneda, to be impeccable was an existential challenge & imperative. Ruiz debases the concept to the kind of thing you’d tell a small child when they lie about eating all the cookies:

Being impeccable with your word is not using the word against yourself. If I see you in the street and I call you stupid, it appears that I’m using the word against you. But really I’m using my word against myself, because you’re going to hate me for this, and your hating me is not good for me. 

The intended audience seems to be women, or rather women with the mental age of a small child:

Gossiping has become the main form of communication in human society. It has become the way we feel close to each other, because it makes us feel better to see someone else feel as badly as we do. There is an old expression that says, “Misery likes company,” and people who are suffering in hell don’t want to be all alone. Fear and suffering are an important part of the dream of the planet; they are how the dream of the planet keeps us down.

The dream of the planet, I thought, that sounds interesting, tell me more. But he doesn’t. 

Later, he describes right action:

A good example of this comes from the story about Forrest Gump. He didn’t have great ideas, but he took action. He was happy because he always did his best at whatever he did. 

It’s hard not to smile at the idea of a shaman in the lineage of Castaneda’s Don Juan, who watches a film like Forrest Gump with his mouth agape, awed by such wisdom. But then, Ruiz is the kind of shaman who appears on the Oprah Winfrey show.

So, overall a typical New Age self-help book, full of easy platitudes. I can’t see it doing any harm, but if you need a book to tell you such things you’re probably beyond help, let alone self-help.

on not outgrowing books

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Patrick Kurp, as an aside:

As an adolescent, that’s how I first encountered Kafka and Dostoevsky, writers once important to me. The method isn’t foolproof. Sometimes we choose dull or stupid books, or books that aren’t right for us. Perhaps we are not the ideal reader. Kafka and Dostoevsky are no longer right for me but others prize them.

Kurp often mentions writers that he once liked but now despises, for example Hart Crane is now simply too wild to countenance. Kurp is now too sober and austere for such juvenile oupourings, I guess (ho ho ho). 

I thought back over my decades and realised I simply don’t outgrow things. I spent my entire teens reading Fantasy books and while I transitioned to Serious Literature when I was 20, I occasionally re-read e.g. Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance series, or David Eddings’ Belgariad, and just last year I re-read Douglas Hill’s Keill Randor books with great pleasure. I no longer seek out new Fantasy books, as every attempt (barring Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell) has ended badly, but every few years I like to revisit the pleasures of my youth. 

There are Serious Writers I fell out of love with, for example William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac but even here my literary judgement hasn’t changed that much; I esteemed Burroughs & Kerouac because, aged 20, they were two of the first non-Fantasy authors I encountered, and they seemed like a portal to adulthood.

I thought they were cool the way a 14-year-old thinks smoking makes him a man. My literary judgement, however, was more neutral. I found Naked Lunch and Queer amusing & comical, the rest of Burroughs’ books pretty much hit & miss, and Kerouac’s works enjoyable but slight. I thought that Allen Ginsberg was mostly shit, ‘Howl’ and one or two other poems being enjoyable rhetorical bombast at best, the rest of his work being utter dreck. Even as the whole Beat image – drugs, alcohol, criminality – has long since ceased to allure, I dare say my literary judgement wouldn’t have changed that much over the last 15+ years, that is, I would probably still enjoy some of Kerouac & Burroughs. 

I was wondering if there was something wrong with me, since Kurp seems to have outgrown and come to despise almost everything he’s ever read. Am I weird, for still liking T.S. Eliot and Nietzsche, Proust and Thomas Mann, after two decades?

My nature seems fairly constant in spite of much surface change: where I despise people I used to pal about with, it’s not that either of us have changed that much; it’s more that where I was once willing to tolerate a fair amount of bombast, finger-stabbing hectoring, sneers, cowardice, etc., because I thought well no one’s perfect, now I’m just too old and impatient to tolerate what Joe Biden would call malarkey. 

Twenty and more years ago, there were books I read because they seemed like the sort of things I should be reading, but if I didn’t like them I didn’t like them and that was that. I didn’t find Colin Wilson’s The Outsider all that interesting, or Sartre, even though I wanted to. By contrast, there were books which took me wholly & pleasantly by surprise: Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, Thomas Bernhard’s Holzfällen, Kafka’s Zuräu Aphorisms, Beckett’s Trilogy, Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel & Stella. I suppose reading habits are as various as people, which is one reason I rarely recommend books – apart, of course, from the fact that nobody reads books anymore.

being farmed

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I’ve been listening to this May 2017 talk between Semiogogue and Michael Black:

In our masked times, three years on, it’s interesting to consider the image of the human herd, branded and counted; not to mention the video thumbnail – in case the channel gets Shoahed, it’s a woman wearing a BDSM mouthgag, mask-like. As with much of Semiogogue’s old content, it takes on a new resonance in the Year of the Mask.

Joe Biden has apparently promised to inflict another lockdown upon America, and even suggested forcing people to wear masks in their own homes, at all times. One can scoff, “well how could they enforce that?” – but that may be just the point, that once you have the regulation, the police can justify violating the Fourth Amendment and break into your house at any time to check you’re wearing your mask. Perhaps a Biden government would even require citizens to install a camera in every room, so a central surveillance operator can check for compliance. Children will be encouraged to inform on their parents, neighbour on neighbour.

As so often with our masters’ rulings, there seems a psy-op element. It is already clear that the mask does little or nothing to prevent contagion; and it is clear that Covid is now on a par with the flu, i.e. dangerous only to the elderly and enfeebled.

Just wearing the mask makes me feel isolated, alienated (in addition to the real physical discomfort), and I am not the most sociable of men. Peter Hitchens is right to call it “the muzzle”. For the elites – lovely types like Klaus and Hilde Schwab – we are nothing but animals; and they enjoy watching us muzzled like bad dogs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These ghastly people regard themselves as gods. For them, we are just beasts, cattle. They want us to be muzzled, to hide our faces before them, before each other, before even ourselves; they want us to shut our mouths, to speak only when spoken to and then only in agreement and submission. They want to take away our higher intellect, to reduce us to gene slurry. The mask is a symbol of their domination over us, like a BDSM mouthgag, like a collar. And just as every dog collar should have an identity tag, so we will be tagged with their vaccine, so they can keep track of us, lest we get ideas.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the rich & powerful would move from competing against each other to conspiring against the rest of humanity. After all, for most of human history the very rich (the aristocracy) were all related, some very closely.

The financial elites were and are likewise closely related. 

I was talking to someone from BMW once in Munich, and she admitted that the rivalry between BMW and Audi was largely fictitious, marketing for the plebs (think Blur vs Oasis), that the two great automakers even cooperated on projects; for example they went to a supplier together to discuss a new rear view mirror, which would be essentially the same in both Audi and BMW (they could thus save money through economies of scale). And yet there were others in BMW who thought Audi shite – intelligent people who nonetheless believed their own Marketing Department’s manufactured rivalry. 

Perhaps it is similar with politics and war; but it is of course hard to judge – a fairly senior political operator I knew in Germany, who had direct access to one of the highest in the land, was baffled by Merkel’s decision to indefinitely host the Third World, and said no one could understand it.

As best I can judge, the elites – or perhaps I should say, “Cabal”, as they don’t strike me as exceptionally intelligent or gifted, merely rich – want to destroy the white race, Christianity, Western civilisation, and create a subservient mixed race of manageably-low IQ chattels. An impressively grand ambition. For whatever reason, it seems to be time critical, judging from the unseemly haste with which Merkel beckoned the entire Third World into Europe.

Judging from Q’s reference to “The 16 year plan to destroy America”, I would wager that the millions of military-age Muslim males were part of a wider plan, and the election of Donald Trump postponed not merely America’s but also Europe’s destruction. Presuming the timing was not coincidental, I see these two events – the 2015 Migrant Crisis and the 2016 US election – as intertwined. I’m guessing Merkel’s plan was to use the Muslims to instigate massive, widespread violence, either to exterminate the white population or to create so much panic that the people would cry out for a totalitarian regime to take away their (few) liberties in return for security. I’m inclined to suppose the end goal was utter white genocide, given other indicators.

Perhaps the violence was scheduled to really kick off in late 2016/early 2017, and Hillary Clinton would have sent a “Peacekeeping Force” to round up the whites, separating the children for, uh, pizza parties, and most likely allowing the Muslim invaders to exterminate the gulaged Germans. I can imagine the New York Times and Guardian headlines now, after Muslims mysteriously equipped with the latest assault weapons, gun down hundreds of thousands of Germans in an American camp, while the (black) American guards take selfies: FAR RIGHT EXTREMISTS VIOLENTLY ATTACK INNOCENT MUSLIMS. With a photo of a German grimacing angrily, and another of a 5-year-old Muslim child looking sad, perhaps even crying and holding a teddy bear.

In which case, it’s ironic that almost every German I met had a visceral hatred of Donald Trump. His election threw a spanner in the works, a huge orange spanner, and now the Cabal are having to accelerate their program. Perhaps, if they had had another 20 years to slowly tip the demographic balance and weaken the people yet further, their final goal would be, in let’s say 2040, quite plausible. As it is, it’s too much, too soon, and I doubt it will go smoothly. I imagine good Germans in the Intelligence services have been reading Q since 2017, and coming to whatever dark conclusions stirred the Q group to act.

I wouldn’t even be surprised if the Kraut turn out to be one of the first to throw off the fallacious Covid lockdown; for all their bovine conformity, they have a werewolf-like tendency to go from being very nice and orderly and well-behaved to being, well, not; they have survived a great deal and always risen from the ashes of their own near-destruction. And once they decide that a regime is illegitimate, rather than just grumbling about dishonest politicians they have, historically, demonstrated a capacity for organised resistance & bravery; consider, for example, this man who performed an act of public defiance:

This anonymous hero, whose name we will most likely never know, should inspire modern Germans in their resistance to tyranny. 

film report: The Art of Self-Defense

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A quirky, violent, often amusing film about a spergy loser who joins a Karate dojo. It was in some ways very predictable, so you can sense the plot twist coming – I got the feeling I’d seen many films with the same story point, though I couldn’t actually name any; but it’s very well done and all performances are good. Jesse Eisenberg is a strangely compelling actor; he radiates a kind of cold, spergy energy, which should make him unwatchably uncharismatic but instead he really fills the screen. Alessandro Nivola’s manipulative, oddly likeable Sensei is also great, and reminded me a little of a martial arts guru I knew years ago (perhaps there is a sensei/sifu “type”), except that the film version is more human than the one I knew. 

There’s the usual Hollywood stuff about dumb right-wingers who drive pickup trucks and probably voted for Orange Man Bad, but by now I just assume that every modern film will come with a dash of propaganda, and I kind of tune it out. It’s also quite unrealistic, e.g. there are a few casual murders, so we seem to be in one of these worlds where the police only exist when the plot needs them, and one can otherwise kill people without consequences.

So anyway, a strange but amusing & pleasing film.

Tay Tay

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I’m discovering the hidden depths of Taylor Swift these days. Many of her songs have the propulsive fun & bittersweet delight of my favourite 80s songs. She has excellent songwriters, as demonstrated when Ryan Adams covered her album 1989. Here, for example, is ‘Style’:

Midnight,
You come and pick me up, no headlights
Long drive,
Could end in burning flames or paradise
Fade into view, oh, it’s been a while since I have even heard from you 

I should just tell you to leave ’cause I
Know exactly where it leads but I
Watch us go ’round and ’round each time

You got that James Dean daydream look in your eye
And I got that red lip classic thing that you like
And when we go crashing down, we come back every time
‘Cause we never go out of style
We never go out of style

You got that long hair, slicked back, white t-shirt
And I got that good girl faith and a tight little skirt
And when we go crashing down, we come back every time
‘Cause we never go out of style
We never go out of style.

So it goes
He can’t keep his wild eyes on the road
Takes me home
Lights are off, he’s taking off his coat, hmm, yeah.
I say, “I heard, oh, that you’ve been out and about with some other girl, some other girl.”

He says, “What you’ve heard is true but I
Can’t stop thinking about you,” and I…
I said, “I’ve been there, too, a few times.”

and then Ryan Adams’ cover, changing the “James Dean daydream look” line to:

You’ve got that Daydream Nation look in your eye
I got that pent up love thing that you like

A pleasing reference to Sonic Youth’s 1988 album Daydream Nation. I would have liked to have heard Erasure, The Pet Shop Boys, or Eurythmics cover 1989. In the meantime, you can consider Murdoch Murdoch’s tribute to Tay Tay.

film report: Bill and Ted Face the Music

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I grew up with Bill & Ted, the first (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure) from 1989 and the sequel (Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey) from 1991. I haven’t seen the first two films in literally decades, and vaguely remembered them as goofy, well-made comedies with Alex Winter and the of course more famous Keanu Reeves. The protagonists are basically retarded Californians of a kind I assumed were 100% parody until I met expats like this, and realised, Holy shit, in California everyone is genuinely retarded.

I wasn’t exactly enthused about a 30-year-later sequel, as Hollywood has a bad track record of such enterprises, but to my surprise this was a pretty solid, enjoyable comedy.

The plot, from what I remember of the earlier films, reprises the original need for Bill Preston and Ted Logan to travel in time and collect various notable personages. The Infogalactic entry for the first film:

In Futuristic City, 2688, humanity exists as a utopian society due to the inspiration of the music and wisdom of the Two Great Ones: Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves). Rufus (George Carlin) is tasked by the leaders to travel back to San Dimas, California, in 1988 using a time machine disguised as a telephone booth to ensure that Bill and Ted, who are dim-witted metalhead high school students, get a good grade in their final history oral report and allow them to pass the class. Should they fail, Ted’s father, Police Captain John Logan (Hal Langdon), plans to ship Ted to a military academy in Alaska, ending Bill and Ted’s fledgling band, the “Wyld Stallyns”, thus altering the future.

From the Future Perfect projections of the earlier films, the duo are destined to write a song which will unite humanity, but in 2020 they are middle-aged failures who can’t even play a wedding song without the guests recoiling in horror; there’s some kind of “reality will end if they don’t play the Song to Unite the Universe in the next 24 hours” plot device, but being largely talentless the pair decide to travel into the future to steal the song they are destined to write, from their future selves. This is by far the best section of the film, as they encounter variously weird loser version of themselves.

As in the earlier films, they have to assemble a band from the distant past. It’s all good-natured fun; however, I couldn’t help but notice that with the exception of Bill & Ted themselves, and Mozart, the band are all “people of colour”; including Ling Lun, legendary founder of Chinese music, but even then it’s not enough that LL is non-white: they arbitrarily decide to make him a woman. I could hardly cavil at the inclusion of Jimi Hendrix or Louis Armstrong, but when I think of the entire history of known music, it is mostly white, unlike the film’s band (mostly black). I’m just surprised they didn’t make Mozart black, or a woman, or a tranny; although I was pleased that they let him expostulate in German without translation, even if he expresses delight at Ling Lun’s flute music (in reality, Mozart hated the flute). There is also some popular black rapper called Kid Crud who is treated as a god of music, but who I’d never even heard of; he talks in the kind of polysyllabic patter common to fraudulent black “intellectuals”, to the point Murdoch Murdoch even had an episode with a black character talking like this a couple of years ago. It seems to reflect a higher verbal IQ, relative to g, among blacks (I’ve also noticed it among the Irish).

The band includes a prehistoric drummer, a grunting negroid creature called Grom, which is also the name of a good Italian ice cream shop. So that’s four blacks, one Chinese transsexual, and one Austrian. 

Finally, when Bill and Ted have the band assembled in the right place, they still don’t have a song, because they are actually talentless; and then realise their daughters can write and perform the song, since all they know is that the Song to Unite Humanity was credited to Preston & Logan, which of course could as well be their daughters . So as with the mediocre Avengers Endgame film, the achievements & titles of white men are voluntarily handed on to women and People of Colour. To be fair, the daughters are music nerds so it is plausible, and actually rather pleasing, that they could inherit the mantle, and the whole thing is so good-natured that I could mostly ignore the anti-white, anti-Western message. 

They learn that it’s not so much the song which will save humanity, as everyone playing it together; I thought then of those who dismiss the old gods as mere Jungian archetypes, or figments of the subconscious – for would everyone spontaneously sing a crappy song in unison? Just as, to be genuinely & deeply popular, a song would need to obey eternal musical principles, so one could say that Jungian archetypes like Wotan or Apollo would have no lasting value, did they not reflect something real; if they were not, in fact, real. 

The song in question is actually just bland noise of some sort.

The supergroup of a prehistoric grunting negroid drummer, the fraudulently transsexual inventor of Chinese music, Mozart, Louis Armstrong, Jimi Hendrix, and King Crud, produce an utterly unmemorable barrage of vaguely musical exuberance. It’s a  phenomenon I’ve noted with other supergroups, e.g. The Traveling Wilburys; you would think that a group comprising Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne would be pretty amazing but I found their music to be on the minor side, pleasant and hummable but nothing more, as if all that talent mostly cancelled itself out. Perhaps, that’s the secret Globalist message of the Bill & Ted song, to take all the variety and greatness of humanity and align it to create destructive interference, to reduce everyone, to reduce variety and greatness and birth der Letzter Mensch, the “last man” whereof Nietzsche wrote. 

Amusingly, the hideous wedding song Bill & Ted play at the beginning is actually pretty good, a kind of late 90-s Spiritualized work:

I was pleasantly reminded of Spiritualized’s majestic ‘No God Only Religion’:

although, to be fair, it’s hardly a wedding song. Perhaps the genuine diversity of the Earth’s human races & ethnicities & cultures strikes the average globalist as a highly disagreeable, jarring dissonance, much as the above wedding song or ‘No God Only Religion’ would the average listener (I was utterly alienated by Spiritualized’s “noise” tracks until I saw them live, whereupon something clicked). And for me, the bland homogeneity of the film’s final song is just dispiritingly empty, a fitting music for der Letzter Mensch.

While it is a good-hearted, fun film, it is anachronistically so. In the late 80s and early 90s, in that interim between the Cold War and 9/11, there was time enough for fun, for optimism; in 2020 it seems strange, not so much naive as wilfully oblivious. The time for fun has long since passed.

enunciation and Sleazy P. Martini

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1. From Uriah (@crimkadid):

One of the ways people born after the onset of the autism epidemic resemble autistics is in the dulled emotional tone of their voices: they have a hard time sounding genuinely threatening when they need to be or charming or…any emotion really.

There are generational changes that everyone notices but never really talks about. When you listen to tape recordings of even average Joes from the 50’s or 60’s it’s remarkable how crisp and clear their diction is, whereas millennials slur together syllables like drunks.

When people notice this they tend to say things like “we need to start emphasizing enunciation just like the old schools did”, but again I think this is actually a cohort effect and you can tell by looking at elite talkers: sports broadcasters, talk show hosts, etc.
 
It used to be that just about every famous broadcaster had this rapidfire auctioneer’s patter: Chick Hearn, Vin Scully, Bob Uecker, Hot Rod Hundley or the best known example Johnny Carson. They could speak at incredible speed while never sacrificing emotional inflection.
 
You can also come up with hypotheses tracing this to the tv/radio imposition of the flat broadcaster voice, and the dying out of the last sing-song accents. We -know- an Irish brogue is beautiful, but it is not as efficient, and we have moved away from community singing.

2. A new discovery of mine on Youtube: Sleazy P. Martini, manager of GWAR:

https://youtu.be/Fr8ABm2XjHA?t=6051

Sleazy addresses the Millennial Question from 1 hour 40 minutes and 52 seconds, to 1:41 and 42 seconds. It put me in mind of Uriah’s Twitter thread, and then I noticed the clarity of Sleazy’s enunciation.

There are numerous indicators of character & disposition, e.g. breathing patterns, gait, handwriting, posture; I’ve always found the voice to be very revealing, not so much what people say, or even the exact words, but the quality of their voice. It is a complex of several factors, including the pitch, the speed, the rhythm, sharpness, others that I can’t even put a name to. I notice that, increasingly, people lack the everyday sense of rhythm, the everyday eloquence I remember from my youth. I suspect it’s partly because nobody reads poetry anymore; in the past, even if most people didn’t read poetry, television and films were produced by people who had, by people who had studied Latin and Greek and memorised lengthy tracts of e.g. Tennyson and Shakespeare, and so the characters in an ordinary TV show might speak under the influence of the language.

Sleazy P. Martini is very much of the older generation: eloquent, funny, musical, wise. Young people could do worse than study his utterances.