Combining instrumental virtuosity, compositional complexity, and lyrical depth, Tool’s Fear Inoculum deserves not just a listen, but repeated listenings.
Category: Reviews
Departures (Film, 2008)
A quietly provocative story about a cellist who leaves the musical profession and finds a job preparing dead bodies for burial.
Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Appealing and fast-paced, this novel set in 1950s Mexico is a classic tale of an attractive young woman marrying into family with sinister secrets, who finds her choices taken away, and her life and sanity under threat. True to the gothic genre, the cr …
Party Wall, by Catherine Leroux
Insightful stories peel back the secrets within families, but the dazzling moment comes as you pass the midpoint of the book, and the connections between these universes begin to be revealed.
Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence – A Review
Each chapter of Masks of Origin—a book of what perhaps can only be called “visionary” essays, by Brian George—reads like an individual novel. Divided into personal and universal experiences, each informs the other. Descriptions of events in childhood and adulthood provide a wormhole into the cosmos.
Masks of Origin—an attempted Review
I opened Brian George’s physically beautiful Masks of Origin—adorned with three-and-a-fraction of his own electric geometric red-green gargoyles, to find myself “reading,” if one might call it that, the whole book nearly straight-through that day, and the next…
The Self, As Ensemble, The Prose, Like Jazz—On Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place
A paean to Albert Murray and his hybrid memoir/literary criticism masterpiece of 1971, South to a Very Old Place.
Cultural Consumption – February / March 2022
Fiction, films and search engines meet indigenous names and the chatter of jays; where does our attention wander when it strays on the dappled path?
CULTURAL CONSUMPTION: Stuff We’re Reading, Watching, and Listening to—Dec 2021 / Jan 2022
Our bodies transform what we eat, and with our minds we re-create and transform culture. Here are some of the works that have gotten our attention recently and feel worth sharing.
A Few Notes on “Making Mystery: An Interview with Andrew Antoniou”
Above all, Antoniou’s compressed, theatrical space could perhaps be read as a kind of ritual confrontation, in which the known and unknown, the diurnal and nocturnal, are forced to meet and mix on a stage that allows for no casual avoidance or escape.
Review: Medb, by Brigid Burke
Medb is a novel that draws the reader incrementally toward the mysteries of the human psyche, on its way touching on gender roles, the power of the occult, and the pathologization of difference. It’s a winding, inward journey that begins, fittingly, at …
Out of the Furnace: A Film Review and Analysis
The movie proves to be, rather than glitchy and fragmentary, a deliberate and careful unfolding of the more perplexing and realistic struggle ensnaring us in the contemporary world.
An introduction to Jodo’s movies: “Who Is Alejandro Jodorowsky?”
How to decipher Alejandro Jodorowsky’s symbolic film world? Here’s an introduction.
Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness (Book Review)
Jeremy Johnson, current president of the International Jean Gebser Society, long-time Gebser student, and accomplished expositor, presents a thoughtful look at a key – and difficult – idea, the nature of the integral structure of consciousness.
Body/Cut: In Conversation with Stephanie Cortazzo
It is about the trials and tribulations of lovers who are set in a dismal, bleak universe—much like our current reality in NYC one could even argue. They are challenged to come to terms with each other and deal with various issues such as ego, conflicting decisions, and insecurities.
“Blood and Rockets: Movement I, Saga of Jack Parsons – Movement II, Too the Moon” by The Claypool Lennon Delirium
The Claypool Lennon Delirium masterfully tells the story of rocket scientist/ occultist Jack Parsons.
The Marvelous Mythos of Black Panther
We warmly welcome Darrell Hester (Mythos Collective) and Zachary Feder to Metapsychosis. Zachary, a writer and interlocutor on our forum at Infinite Conversations, contacted Darrell after seeing one of YouTube videos. In this talk, they cover everything from the cultural and psychological significance of the film to the esoteric meaning of vibranium. This is their first talk—with more to come, we hope!
Sustain/Decay: A Philosophical Investigation of Drone Music and Mysticism (Review)
Floating from time period to time period amid spiritual and religious observances and contemporary soundscapes the drone remains consistently omnipresent, like the angel of death, hovering just out of reach yet connecting all things living and dead…
Delusions, by Stanisław Kapuściński: A Review
Kapuscinski’s intentions are early implied, to match Dawkins bite for bite and (as honestly) to demonstrate the irreconcilable gulf between intellectual reductionism and emotional religious dogmatism, each flailing towards fundamentalism in trying to flatten one another.
Reading Albert Murray in the Age of Trump
In his near-century of life, Murray confronted race by re-constructing American identity as omni-American—that out of many, we are one.
HyperNormalisation (Review)
“We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know we know they lie. They don’t care. We say we care but we do nothing. And nothing ever changes.” BBC documentary by Adam Curtis.
Consciousness and TDVP: Welcome to a New World
These two scholars collaborated for eight years constructing their unfunded, paradigm-shifting work. Their efforts are stunningly transdisciplinary. They involve theoretical and empirical findings in quantum physics, mathematical logic, philosophy, biology, psychology and consciousness research, often requiring leaps into the unknown.
Electricity
Every day, when I sit alone in my dark room. Staring at nothing except the brightness of the moon I imagine I can hold it and put it as a lamp in my room. I can do whatever I need to do, like reading ,writing and painting. (I don’t need such a few humiliated hours of electricity.)
Oh, I’ll Be Free: Bluebird and the Soul in David Bowie’s Lazarus
This is a long title for such a little footnote I’ve made in my re-read of the mid-century book, Ever-Present Origin, a cultural philosophical tome by Jean Gebser. Gebser was a poet, and studied poetry. It was through his careful reading of R …