As a less occult-y cousin to some of the principles of chaos magick, what's your take on those topics?

I remember some people on the old board being into Neville Goddard and similar stuff.

https://overcast.fm/+AAYNatTcC6I this sounds like they found the supercontext

Look what showed up.

The lips, the stature, the beehive hairdo... Has it ever been explicitly stated that Lumley informed Fanny's appearance?

https://preview.redd.it/eh0su6rxr1md1.png?width=352&format=png&auto=webp&s=47677ef4dfda270542f2fa4febd9818c5f8f3384

She’s going by Ragged Roan in this facet, but I’m certain. Don’t you remember?

So a few days ago I was looking into, I dunno', whatever, and for no real reason clear to my consciousness I found myself thinking back to days long gone from the vantage of now with respect to the old Barbelith community.

Ah yes, now I recall: I was looking into some of today's people's thoughts about how the internet has changed over time and thinking about its commercialization and algorithmization and so on. All the things that have turned it into something seemingly less than what we may have thought it would be back then.

So, again, for no real reason clear to my mind, I found myself thinking about back when people were posting on Barbelith and how that crew of folks might see things from now as compared to then. It would make a good Head Shop post, perhaps.

Then I thought to myself, and who knows why, "self, I wonder if there is a Barbelith sub on Reddit?" And lo and behold, here it was. I looked over some of the posts, thought about replying, maybe. Saw it has flairs mimicking the old board and so on. It even brought to mind: do I reread The Invisibles one more time?

I've already read it three times--once as it was being produced, then again a few years down the road from that, and then once again maybe a decade ago?

Nah. Although I was tempted a few years ago when I started reading that book on all things Invisibles, um...let me see...right, yes: Our Sentence is Up. I read a bit of that book and it got me somewhat excited about a reread, but then I moved on to other things.

I wonder--how many of that old school have moved on to other things?

And yet the other day as I was giving Luther a go--and I can't say I'm really all that into it, but I was still watching into the second season--and there's a scene where the Spring-heeled Jack wannabe is about to murder someone in their home while live streaming and the police are trying to work out where. There's a car parked on the road with the license plate visible, so they run it and it comes back as registered to Grant Morrison. So I laughed.

That's all.

I read Invisibles as it came out in the 90s, and like many here, it changed my life. I made lists of things to read, watch, look up and spent the last 30 years doing just that. Somehow I never got around to the Prisoner.

Well, all eps are on youtube and I just finished the series. Its leading me to my first reread of Invisibles in many years and Im excited to see how it hits this time, after so much “study”. Decades of absorbing PKD and Moorcock, Buddhist and dream yoga texts, chaos magick tutorials, etc et al.

The Prisoner lends so much DNA to the series, it felt like watching Invisibles Year One. Constant mindfucks, who side are you on, both sides are the same, paychological treachery, and the roots of identity. And it ends with a great deal of head scratching.

Im well aware Im stating nothing new, and Grant cited the Prisoner as influential. But I cant wait to dive back in with all the seeds they gave me, especially this quite large one. And standalone, the Prisoner is fascinating for the time it came from. But its hard to imagine King Mob’s interrogation or Key 23 without it.

Thats all, be seeing you.

Does anyone know anything more about this? I found it in search results.

https://github.com/friuns2/BlackFriday-GPTs-Prompts/blob/main/gpts/the-invisibles-game.md

Click Start Chat

Last night on my walk home from work I saw a homeless person having a mental breakdown, curling up on the street and screaming angrily.

I feel like I see so much sad shit in the city. There's so many folks who need help, and the resources just aren't there, and it hurts so bad to just walk past people who might as well be your family members, and to see them just drowning. Drowning in the street. Sinking into the concrete.

Then I have to find ways to shut down my own empathy, because I can't bring that shit home every night. I can't constantly be going to my partner in hysterical tears because the world fucking sucks. I gotta be kind and funny and try to lift up the people around me, and I can't do that when I'm losing my own mind.

Sometimes I feel like works like The Invisibles, and my parents (lousy beatniks), taught me to be this open lens to take in the universe and feel what others feel, only to then drop me into hell. "Here you go, mirror built so the universe can see itself, go reflect some pain."

I know there's good in this world. So much good. But god, sometimes it just feels like we're never gonna get the nails out, as hard as we try.

I swear to god, I'm not a defeatist. I just saw some sad shit recently, and I need to put it in its place.

Birds are singing outside. It's dawn again.

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Greetings Barbelith. Another walk in from the occult abyss; Chaos Magician here, student of the Arcanorium College.

With no conscious awareness of Barbelith, I built a mystic red orb into the boutique mythology of my own personal Servitor and demon-in-chains, BYSMAL.

The orb in my mythos has always represented a connection to occult knowledge and power, but never with a distinct definition. Morrison has been an influence on my practice, but not the Invisibles specifically, so I'm amused to have been led here by threads of synchronicity.

" So these things, I met them. And what they were were, like, silver.. like those things you get in rave videos.. silver, morphing, mercurial blobs of chrome, that think. And they took me to the fifth dimension. And the fifth dimension is outside space and time, and they explained to me what time is all about.

The universe we live in is designed to grow larvae. Right? Believe.. you don’t have to believe me; I’m just setting the story here.

They explained to me that beyond space and time, we have our actual selves. These things that we’re experiencing right now are sections through time. Everyone here is a section through time. But in actual fact, you’re not experiencing your real body. What is your real body? Your real body is a process. It starts when you’re born, and it moves forward until you die. That is you. Seen from outside, that’s what you look like. You look like a gigantic centipede, spread around all the little things that you always do: up and down through your house, up the stairs, down to the store and back – and it’s a centipede, and it’s us. It starts as a little baby and it comes out of your mother’s womb, and it gets bigger.

That is the process in time. Like I said: we’re experiencing sections now, so we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about this. But think of ourselves as processes through time, which is what we actually are.

We all know we were twelve, we all know we were ten years old. But where is that? Point to it. Show me you at ten years old – and yet you were there.

So these things said to me: this is what’s going on. We use time to grow larvae, because outside space and time you can’t grow anything. Because it’s timeless, nothing grows. What you wanna do, if you want to make one of these higher dimensional beings – that’s actually us, already – is that you grow it in time. So you make a universe.

And how you make a universe is: you plug a little part of yourself into the information world that they live in – which is what I seemed to be experiencing; this kind of sea of pure information – and they exist in that, but there is no time. Time is part of that.. but this is the fifth dimension; it’s like: time, space, breadth, depth.. plus.

And they said to me: the universe you live in, the world you’re living in, is a larvae. Every single one of us here is the same thing. There’s no distinction. All we do is.. we don’t understand what we are.

And they explained to me: if you’ve got a two-dimensional field, see; a flat plane, and you stick your hand through it – there’s one hand there, but if you stick your hand through a two-dimensional plane, the two-dimensional entities who live on there, they will see four circles. Right? Four distinct, completely different circles. But no, it’s the one hand.

Every one of us in here is the same fucker. We’re all the same thing, according to these weirdos. And what we are is.. thank you… I’m pleased someone agrees. And what we are is intersections through 4D space-time.

So yeah, I look like this. I stop here. No, I don’t stop here. I’ve been here for, what, five minutes now? Where was that guy who was here five minutes ago? Where is he? Point to him. But he existed; you all saw him. I saw you five minutes ago. Where is that guy?

So this led me into some very strange alleyways.

These things explained to me that.. as I say, the universe is some kind of larval entity. What it does is it proceeds through stages of development.

Now if you think about a foetus in the womb – and there’s a famous phrase that says.. what is it? Phylogeny recapitulates.. y’know, evolution or whatever the fuck it is. Y’know, I forget the good bits.

But it’s the idea that if you’ve got a foetus, it starts off.. like every living thing, it starts as a unicellular entity, it splits.. it becomes a lizard; it becomes a mammal; eventually it becomes a human.

And they said to me: the culture you’re living in is.. understand it this way: phylogeny recapitulates history.

So what we’re actually watching is this thing coming towards self-awareness and coherence in the same way that a foetus does. We haven’t even been born yet. There are no adults on this planet.

There’s not one adult on this planet.

Which explains a lot. It explains why we let fuckers like Bill Clinton bomb the Kosovans. It explains why I let Tony Blair put cameras in the streets.

Punk rock, dude. This is a Donna Karan suit. Fuck it."

- Grant Morrison @ Disinfo Con

https://preview.redd.it/ravfuk91dlkc1.jpg?width=1229&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8fb1fc610567ac1425b3988fb722a39e6dbb5ae4

I love the Gideon Stargrave sections, so I did some digging and found the Jerry Cornelius series by Michael Moorcock, which seems to be sort of the original non-parody version of Austin Powers that Gideon Stargrave was based on - psychedelic British playboy superspy injected with occult philosophy.

I want to get into this series, but I'm also seeing a lot of bad reviews of it. Apparently it's essentially a retelling of Moorcock's Elric series in a different setting/style - because it's a part of the Eternal Champion cycle where the hero reincarnates throughout time. So I'm worried that I'm going to have to read through (some of) the Elric series, which is apparently very good, just to fully appreciate this series which may or may not actually be worth it.

I'm also seeing the book A Day of Forever by J.G. Ballard listed as a major influence, but this one seems a bit tougher to find.

Has anyone read these books and can give me their opinion?

...Arsecandling, anyone?

Sharing is caring, after all.

Hey gang! This is an essay I wrote for a college English class, like 10 years ago. I figure it might be something from which the smart folks around here might get a giggle.

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“Graphic Aggregates Engaged In Displays of Deconstructionist Narrative Potential”

The Invisibles, Bloody Hell in America , As Postmodern Literature.

Bloody Hell in America is volume four of the comic book series, The Invisibles. As an adult-oriented graphic novel, Bloody Hell In America exemplifies many characteristics of Postmodernist Literature, with both the form of the fictional narrative, and especially through the story's content. The Invisibles was created and written by Grant Morrison (1960-), and Bloody Hell In America was drawn by Philip Jimenez (1970-). The Invisibles was published first as a series of single issue comic books, and then in collected form, as a series of graphic novels.

Before getting into Bloody Hell in America, we must first consider Postmodernist Literature, and what applications the concept has. Postmodernism, in its definition provided by Chris Baldick in The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, is seen by many as a “notoriously ambiguous” term, and one which has “occupied much recent debate about contemporary culture”. With regards to its position in comparison to what came before Postmodernism, Baldick suggests that “Postmodernism may be seen as a continuation of modernism's alienated mood and disorienting techniques and at the same time as an abandonment of its determined quest for artistic coherence in a fragmented world.” In The Oxford Dictionary of American Art and Artists (2007), Ann Lee Morgan comments that “postmodernists often seek to reveal hidden agendas through processes of deconstruction that often intermix with sociological analysis”, and “the notion that art no longer exists in an autonomous aesthetic realm implies its entanglement with contemporary commodity culture. Without notions of purity to uphold, artists are free to engage in narrative or to make use of popular or commercial culture.” To give further clarification on the concept, Morgan stated that with Postmodernism, “the decentered multivalent psyche resonates in a contemporary culture of spatial, temporal, and psychological discontinuities, as the individual increasingly experiences a world of rapid change, accelerated information growth media fusillades, and intense commercialization.” As a response to a comment made about Postmodernism by central character King Mob, Anarchy For The Masses; The Disinformation Guide To The Invisibles gives the definition of Postmodernism as being “a deconstructionist critical approach to art characterized by ironic detachment and the juxtaposition of elements from different contexts into a new whole” (Neighly and Cowe-Spigia 98).

To consider the form of the narrative of Bloody Hell in America, means that we are considering the art form of comics, referred to in some cases as graphic novels. In Understanding Comics, author Scott McCloud defines comics as “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer”. (McCloud 9) A recognized historian of comic book culture, McCloud admits that to most people the term 'comic books' implies a form of literature considered by many to be “crude, poorly-drawn, semiliterate, cheap, disposable, kiddie fare” (McCloud 3). Baldick, however, suggests that Postmodernism could represent “a liberation from the hierarchy of 'high' and 'low' cultures,” and in this way comics themselves meet the criteria for being a Postmodernist form of art simply by virtue of being a so-called 'lower' form of art which seeks to transcend the trappings of its classification. This may be especially true in the case of The Invisibles, and Bloody Hell In America, in which a comic book, considered a form of literature to be marketed primarily at children, is used to tell a story which deals specifically with very adult topics such as sexuality and identity, and features many scenes of graphic violence.

Far more examples of the previously examined characteristics of Postmodernist Literature can be found within the content of Bloody Hell In America. These characteristics include the use of disconnected, subversive, and appropriated imagery, the examination of the relationship between the author and the story, consumer culture, and the idea of art and rebellion as a commercial product for consumption.

Amongst the characteristics which Baldick ascribes to Postmodernism is the “superabundance in disconnected images”. Bloody Hell In America makes use of what appears to be disconnected imagery several times, but it would be difficult to refer to any of the images as being truly abstract, since both Morrison and Jimenez clearly approached the design and placement of the imagery with quite a bit of forethought. Self-aware surrealism, it could be argued, is perhaps a natural extension of the deconstructuralist elements of Postmodernism. These disconnected images also bring into question the level of individual reader participation, as while some readers might analyse each frame closely for meaning, others may simply allow themselves to be bombarded by the images briefly before moving back towards the parts of the visual narrative which contain more conventional character and plot based information. Through the usage of a superabundance of disconnected images in a narrative-based context, Bloody Hell In America attempts to use the illustrative nature of comic books to communicate the experiences of the characters, including their feelings of disorientation and sensory overload, rather than simply describing such experiences and feelings with text. Examples of this style of narrative progression through a superabundance of disconnected images can be seen specifically at pages 35 to 37, 68-69, and 84 of Bloody Hell In America.

In The Oxford Dictionary of American Art and Artists, Ann Lee Morgan states that in Postmodernist art, “Outright appropriation is authorized, even to plagiarizing the work of earlier artists.” Throughout Bloody Hell In America, many appropriations are made, as Morrison utilized sequences, images, ideas, and phrases from other forms of media, including but not limited to: movies, comic books, television shows, rock albums, and pop art movements. Within the structure of the story of Bloody Hell In America can be found song lyrics, movie dialogue, and visual references to fictional characters ranging from Batman to the Lara Croft: Tomb Raider franchise's titular protagonist. The Lara Croft reference may be one of the more subversive examples, as Lara Croft commonly represents a highly sexualized masculine projection of aggressive femininity, and in Bloody Hell In America the video game character's clothing and signature two-gun style have been given to an almost macho lesbian terrorist, Jolly Roger. Similar to Lara Croft, Jolly Roger is shown gunning down government soldiers with the same detached coldness one might expect to find in a video game, where concepts like murder and death are nearly meaningless (Morrison 6).

Morrison has stated that the character King Mob was partially created as an author surrogate, to capitalize on the attention fellow-writer Neil Gaiman was getting from female fans; Morrison suspected that the women were attracted to Gaiman's resemblance to the protagonist of Gaiman's popular and critically acclaimed comic series, Sandman. Said Morrison, “[Neil] was getting a lot of interesting goth girls coming to him at conventions, and I thought, That's cool. Maybe if I start that and become the character, people will come up and talk to me.” (Neighly and Cowe-Spigia 234) Morrison felt that his own life was connected to the fictional life of King Mob, and Morrison theorized that he could influence his own life through the writing of King Mob's story. Morrison mentioned this concept when commenting on the increased amount of sexuality in Bloody Hell In America, "I wanted to extend King Mob into that sex god area, and also I was playing with that stuff in my life." (Neighly and Cowe-Spigia 249) To test to this theory, Morrison gave King Mob a sexy romantic interest, which in the story meant including scenes of both emotional affection (Morrison 73) as well as scenes featuring graphic sexuality (Morrison 12). Morgan states that “many postmodern artists dispose of the modern search for personal authenticity by embracing superficiality, indifference, or destabilized identities.” Creating a fictional character to project yourself into just to attract potential sexual partners certainly could be seen as a superficial reason for experiencing a personal state of destabilized identity.

Though the book promotes what it defines as 'subversive' protagonists, Bloody Hell In America is published by Vertigo comics, an imprint of DC comics, itself a subsidiary of Time Warner. As one of the larger multi-media empires in the world, Time Warner is hardly the most logical publisher of a book which features heroes who are effectively terrorists attacking a government base. This brings to mind the connection between Postmodernism and consumerism, and what Morgan referred to as “[arts] entanglement with contemporary commodity culture”. There is some clear irony to the idea that modern subversive literature is published by a major corporation, and stamped with a bar code. Of course, it should be noted that Bloody Hell in America did not escape its relationship with its publisher entirely unscathed; Morrison noted that the term 'cunt' was not allowed to appear in the book (Neighly and Cowe-Spigia 249), and in the scene on page 76 editors would not allow a mention of Ross Perot to be used in the story, so the reference to Perot's name was altered (Neighly and Cowe-Spigia 104).

King Mob comments that it is a “triumph for post-modernism” (Morrison 24) after the character Mason Lang philosophically dissects a series of movies, including Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, in a sequence visually and thematically reminiscent of both of the opening 'diner' sequences in the Tarantino movies Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. The world of the characters in Bloody Hell In America, itself comic art, appears from their perspective to be real life which is imitating cinematic art, allowing for a complex inspection of the nature of the relationship between the reality of life and the reality of art. Imitation and emulation blend together, allowing the story to become something new which is still intricately connected to what came before. Though it may be difficult to come to a clear definition as to exactly what Postmodernism is, there are clear arguments to be made in support of the idea that comic books themselves are a form of Postmodern Art, and considered on its own, Bloody Hell In America can be seen to utilize many key features of Postmodernism. Page by page, Bloody Hell In America takes pre-existing material from different sectors of the cultural spectrum, and combines them with varying levels of surrealism and a self-aware, sometimes almost mockingly satirical sense of irony, to create a wholly original and unique work. By virtue of these characteristics, Bloody Hell In America may truly represent a triumph for, and of, Postmodernism.