Occult Gathering

I saw this posted while walking home last night. I don't know what it means exactly but I'm curious to find out. Maybe Brooklyn Heights has some mystic underground that I'm not aware of.

Ministry - Every Day Is Halloween (12" version)

meat beat manifesto - asbestos lead asbestos

meat beat manifesto - asbestos lead asbestos

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killer industrial / trip-hop pop tune from the mid-eighties, easily one of the top 5 best party tunes about a carcinogenic insulation material. 

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"asbestos lead asbestos" is from the same time period as the Watchmen. What's more, both effortlessly candy-coat extremely dense material and grim social commentary in a brightly-colored populist shell. Bros and I saw the film opening night at battery park cinema, a destination recommended for its lack of crowds and proximity to the splendors of late-night financial district wastelands and dizzying urban neon schemes. some notes:

1. "the time is short." - watchmen takes place "five minutes to midnight," that is, in the shadow of an imminent Cold War apocalypse. In part it's about what the right thing to do is when time is running out. The first text to deal with the ethics and politics of running out of time? Saint Paul's letters.  

2. the god left behind - watchmen also has two theological intensities. Dr. Manhattan is the American God, but he is an abandoned God, left-behind twice. Silk Spectre leaves him for Nite Owl, but moreover, Manhattan is a God alone in the universe, alone because he is alienated from the earth, the realm of material things and human concerns. This resolves one long-standing theological problem: why did God create the world in the first place? The answer: because, as every Bowie fan knows, it's lonely out in space.

3. the satanic christ - Ozymandias turns the Messianic event into a pure spectacle. There's a Guy Debord reading here if you want to go there - revolution as total image. Like the abandoned God, Ozymandias the satanic-christ or the capitalist-revolutionary is a brilliant dialectical formulation by alan moore. Ozymandias' plan is to save the world by destroying a part of it. The change that the film makes to the ending only further Christianizes the structure of his plan, even more tightly inverting the logic of fulfillment/sublation (aufhebung) that governs Jesus' crucifixion. Jesus on the cross represents the end of the law (nomos) because as he is punished as a criminal, he who is the most pure becomes the most impure - a parallel image to the inversion of Dr. Manhattan, America's savior, into the enemy of the whole world. Also millions are sacrificed for the sake of world peace - a demonically Hegelian twist. 

John vs. Paul: A Brief Lesson in Metaphysics

Ultimately, the creative difference between John Lennon and Paul McCartney can be grasped from a metaphysical point of view. If you do this, it is easy to finally see why John is better, or at least, why he's the better artist. At the same though, it shows why Paul is the more unusual artist. 

Put schematically, it's this: Paul sings about what is, John sings about what is not. That's it. Paul loves the world for what it is, he doesn't think of change, of revolution or transformation, but of using his creative power to cast a sacred light on the way things are. John is a nihilist, a negator, but not solely, because his negating energy is driven towards in turn towards manifesting art's utopic possibilities. As an artist, John is driven towards what could be, what might be, what is possible, not what is real - imagine.  In a way, however, this is what makes Paul more of an artistic anomaly, because like John he's a genius, but a conservative one - somehow his creative energy isn't tied to nothing, nihilo, non-Being, the way that many artists, including John, are.  This is the great mystery of Paul: how can one be so brillantly jacked into creative forces, but in a way that is so rudely de-coupled from all other engagements with non-Being, that is, not with the way things are, but the way they could be? 

Think about it, "Revolution" vs. "Let It Be." What could be more antithetical to revolution than saying "just let it be?" Which are also, mind you, "words of wisdom." Why are they words of wisdom? Because wisdom comes from tradition, and tradition always wants you to let it be, not to stir up trouble, not to try and change things. 

The metaphysical split between John and Paul is most tactile in the single the Beatles issued right before Sgt. Pepper. It's a John/Paul split, John sings "Strawberry Fields Forever" and Paul sings "Penny Lane." It's all right there. They're both highly nostalgic songs, and both fictionally so, that is, both hearken back to something that doesn't exist. Except that Strawberry Fields never can, which is why, paradoxically, they must be 'forever.' Because what should be proclaimed to be forever, other than something which can never be at all? John sings, famously, that at Strawberry Fields "nothing is real." He also notes "it's getting hard to be someone" and "no one I think is in my tree." Such alienation is anathema to Paul, who's always at home in a crowd, who always seems bloody well at home everywhere he goes. Strawberry Fields is a pretty lonely place. There's no one there, just you and John. "Penny Lane" in contrast is a bustling scene of quotidian beauty, small-town romanticism.

Here's promo videos for both songs. You figure it out.