The Queen of Wands (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Queen of Wands
Astrology: Aries, Water of Fire
Qabalah: He ה of Yod י

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Chris Gabriel August 31, 2024

The Queen of Wands is a court card, and the second highest in the suit of Wands. In each iteration we find our Queen, enrobed, crowned, and bearing a Wand. This is a card of aggression and desire.

In Marseille,  we find the Queen looking down, her golden wand’s base in her lap, a symbolic phallus. Her long hair and robes flow about her. Both of her hands are at her waist.

In Rider, we find the Queen on a  throne adorned with lions. Her right hand bears her wands and her left a Sunflower. Below her stage sits a little black cat. She is a young woman with a demure gaze.

In Thoth, we find the Queen inflamed. Her hair is made of fire that give way to the flames all around her. She looks directly down. Her crown is topped by a hawk, and her wand by a pinecone. She is petting a cheetah.

The Queen of Wands is a card of duality - fire and water, aggression and love, innocence and experience.

A phrase that comes to mind is “Cute Aggression”, the urge to squeeze and bite cute things without actually wanting to cause harm. It’s a confusion of two drives, maternal love and aggression. This is the nature of the Queen of Wands, the struggle between these drives.

Aries is the first sign and known as the “baby of the zodiac”, it is just learning how to exist. Kittens bite and scratch, without any malice, in acts of innocent violence: this is the domain of the Queen of Wands. Animal aggression can be read as the Saturnian child devouring drive, or as the innocent violence of Aries. One wants to maintain power, while the other is trying to gain power.

This follows with the twin of violence, sex. The development of sexuality through aggression, which appears as teasing and name-calling, is opposed to the aggression that expresses itself sexually.

This is the domain of the Queen of Wands who balances these things in her hands, the wand and the flower, the masculine and the feminine, the phallus and yoni. 

This card often can indicate a person, often an Aries, but generally a very dominant woman unafraid to express her opinions.The card is the elemental inverse of the Knight of Cups, who balances water and fire, but chooses confused chastity that keeps his heart pure at the cost of his aggressive will, whereas the Queen of Wands takes on the far more difficult task of approaching the world willfully while fighting to keep her heart pure.

When we pull this card, we are often met with this same dilemma, the balancing of love and will. The Queen is telling us “And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men;”

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Hannah Peel Playlist

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Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.

Film

Towards Alienation

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Interessenspharen, 1979. Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt.

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Arcadia Molinas August 29, 2024

Last time, translator Lawrence Venuti and philosopher Friedreich Schleirmacher showed us the radical potential of walking away from fluency when reading books in translation. Engaging in an uncomfortable reading practice, they argued, favouring ‘foreignization’, has the potential to expand our subjectivities and lead us to embrace the cultural other instead of rejecting it. In this walk away from fluency, we find ourselves heading towards alienation. But what does it mean to be alienated as a reader, how does it feel, and perhaps most importantly, how does it happen? 

The concept of culturemes can help us get closer to an understanding of alienation. Culturemes are social phenomena that have meaning to members of one culture but not to another, so that when they are compared to a corresponding phenomenon in another culture, they are revealed to be specific to only the first culture. They can have an ingrained historical, social or geographical relevance that can result in misconceptions or misunderstandings when being translated. This includes jokes, folklore, idioms, religion or expressions. If we pay attention to the translation of culturemes, we can evaluate how alienation is functioning in the translated text and sketch the contours of its effect on the reader.

Panza de Burro by Andrea Abreu made my body come alive from just one sitting. Even in its original Spanish, the book is alienating. Abreu takes us into the mind of her ten-year old narrator, nicknamed “Shit”, as she spends a warm, cloudy summer in a working-class neighbourhood of Tenerife with her best friend Isora. The language is mercilessly juvenile, deliciously phonetic and profoundly Canarian. The Canarian accent, more like the Venezuelan or Cuban accents of Latin America than a mainland Spanish accent, is emulated in a way similar to what Irvine Welsh does for the Scots dialect in Trainspotting. This means, for example, that a lot of the ends of words are cut off, “usted” becomes “usté”, “nada más” becomes “namás”. On top of this are all the Canarian idiosyncrasies that Abreu employs to paint a vivid sense of place: the food, the weather, the games the children play. Abreu demands her reader move towards her characters, their language, their codes and their culture and with it demands a somatic response from her reader. The translation of such a book should be a fertile ground for the experience of alienation, done two-fold.

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“Meeting halfway is a political act that not only allows people to exist at the frontier but brings everyone closer to the frontier too.”

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Widening, 1980. Ruth Wolf-Rehfeltd.

On the first page of Panza de Burro, Shit and Isora are eating snacks and sweets at a birthday party, “munchitos, risketos, gusanitos, conguitos, cubanitos, sangüi, rosquetitos de limón, suspiritos, fanta, clipper, sevená, juguito piña, juguito manzana”. Most of these will be familiar to anyone who has grown up in Spain, including the intentional spelling mistakes (“sevená” for example is meant to emulate the Canarian pronunciation of 7-Up). Julia Sanches, in her translation, Dogs of Summer, writes “There were munchitos potato chips, cheese doodles and Gusanitos cheese puffs. There were Conguitos chocolate sweets, cubanitos wafers and sarnies. There were lemon donuts and tiny meringues, orange Fanta, strawberry pop, 7-Up, apple juice and pineapple juice”. The alienating words are still present in the translation, munchitos, gusanitos, conguitos, their rhythm, their sound, carry an echo of their cultural significance and with them maintain the sticky, childish essence of the Canarian birthday party. They are there to flood your senses, which is what, at its best, alienation can hope to do. Yet the words themselves, the look of them, the sound of them, could have also done their infantilizing, somatic job of taking us into the soda pop-flavoured heart of the birthday party taking place on a muggy Canarian day without their tagging English accompaniment “cheese puffs”. To be able to chew the words around for yourself is essential to experience alienation. To experience the foreign, your mouth must move in ways and shapes hitherto unfamiliar to it. In other instances, however, Sanches keeps Canarian culturemes intact, for example the term of endearment “miniña” is untouched in the translated text, which again with its heavily onomatopoeic sound thrusts the unfamiliar reader into a new context, this time for endearment, and so expands the sounds and shapes of affection and proximity.

Gloria Anzaldúa, feminist and queer scholar, wrote Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, a book which takes the alienating project to its logical extreme. The book is not only an exercise in alienation through language but in alienation through form too. Drawing inspiration from her Chicana identity, an identity inherently at a crossroads between Mexicana and tejana cultures, she advocates for a wider “borderlands culture”, a culture that can represent and hold space for the in-between, the interdisciplinary and the intercontinental. In the preface she explains her project, “The switching of "codes" in this book from English to Castilian Spanish to the North Mexican dialect to Tex-Mex to a sprinkling of Nahuatl to a mixture of all of these, reflects my language, a new language-the language of the Borderlands. There, at the juncture of cultures, languages cross-pollinate and are revitalized; they die and are born. Presently this infant language... this bastard language, Chicano Spanish, is not approved by any society. But we Chicanos no longer feel that we need to beg entrance, that we need always to make the first overture –to translate to Anglos, Mexicans and Latinos, apology blurting out of our mouths with every step. Today we ask to be met halfway. This book is our invitation to you-from the new mestizas.” 

Anzaldúa wrote a guide on how to live on the borderlands, how to embrace linguistic and cultural hybridity, supporting Venuti and Schleirmacher’s claim that a wider acceptance of difference, of meeting halfway, is a political act that not only allows people to exist at the frontier, but brings everyone closer to the frontier too. Being on the frontier means going towards alienation, it means offering your body to new expressions and new experiences, it is to remain open, to walk on the border like a tightrope, to feel the tension in your muscles from the balance and to come out taught at the other end.

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Arcadia Molinas is a writer, editor, and translator from Madrid. She currently works as the online editor of Worms Magazine and has published a Spanish translation of Virginia Woolf’s diaries with Funambulista.

Michael Cohl

Music Lover’s Field Companion

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Artwork by Lois Long, for John Cage’s 'Mushroom Book' 1972.

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John Cage August 27 2024

I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom. For this purpose I have recently moved to the country. Much of my time is spent poring over "field companions on fungi. These I obtain at half price in second-hand bookshops, which latter are in some rare cases next door to shops selling dog-eared sheets of music, such an occurrence being greeted by me as irrefutable evidence that I am on the right track.  

The winter for mushrooms, as for music, is a most sorry season. Only in caves and houses where matters of temperature and humidity, and in concert halls where matters of trusteeship and box office are under constant surveillance, do the vulgar and accepted forms thrive. American commercialism has brought about a grand deterioration of the Psalliota campestris, affecting through exports even the European market. As a demanding gourmet sees but does not purchase the marketed mushroom, so a lively musician reads from time to time the announcements of concerts and stays quietly at home. If, energetically, Collybia velutipes should fruit in January, it is a rare event, and happening on it while stalking in a forest is almost beyond one's dearest expectations, just as it is exciting in New York to note that the number of people attending a winter concert requiring the use of one's faculties is on the upswing (1954: 129 out of l2,000,000; 1955: 136 out of 12,000,000).  

In the summer, matters are different. Some three thousand different mushrooms are thriving in abundance, and right and left there are Festivals of Contemporary Music. It is to be regretted, however, that the consolidation of the acquisitions of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, currently in vogue, has not produced a single new mushroom. Mycologists are aware that in the present fungous abundance, such as it is, the dangerous Amanitas play an extraordinarily large part. Should not program chairmen, and music lovers in general, come the warm months, display some prudence?

I was delighted last fall (for the effects of summer linger on, viz. Donaueschingen, C. D. M. I., etc.) not only to revisit in Paris my friend the composer Pierre Boulez, rue Beautreillis, but also to attend the Exposition du Champignon, rue de Buffon. A week later in Cologne, from my vantage point in a glass-encased control booth, I noticed an audience dozing off, throwing, as it were, caution to the winds, though present at a loud-speaker emitted program of Elektronische Musik. I could not help recalling the riveted attention accorded another loud-speaker, rue de Buffon, which delivered on the hour a lecture describing mortally poisonous mushrooms and means for their identification.  

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“The second movement was extremely dramatic, beginning with the sounds of a buck and a doe leaping up to within ten feet of my rocky podium. The expressivity of this movement was not only dramatic but unusually sad from my point of view, for the animals were frightened simply because I was a human being.”

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John Cage and Lois Long.

But enough of the contemporary musical scene; it is well known. More important is to determine what are the problems confronting the contemporary mushroom. To begin with, I propose that it should be determined which sounds further the growth of which mushrooms; whether these latter, indeed, make sounds of their own; whether the gills of certain mushrooms are employed by appropriately small-winged insects for the production of pizzicati and the tubes of the Boleti by minute burrowing ones as wind instruments; whether the spores, which in size and shape are extraordinarily various, and in number countless, do not on dropping to the earth produce gamelan-like sonorities; and finally, whether all this enterprising activity which I suspect delicately exists, could not, through technological means, be brought, amplified and magnified, into our theatres with the net result of making our entertainments more interesting.

What a boon it would be for the recording industry (now part of America'. sixth largest) if it could be shown that the performance, while at table, of an LP of Beethoven's Quartet Opus Such-and-Such so alters the chemical nature of Amanita muscaria as to render it both digestible and delicious!

Lest I be found frivolous and light-headed and, worse, an "impurist" for having brought about the marriage of the agaric with Euterpe, observe that composers are continually mixing up music with something else. Karlheinz Stockhausen is clearly interested in music and juggling, constructing as he does "global structures," which can be of service only when tossed in the air; while my friend Pierre Boulez, as he revealed in a recent article (Nouvelle Revue Française, November 1954), is interested in music and parentheses and italics! This combination of interests seems to me excessive in number. I prefer my own choice of the mushroom. Furthermore it is avant-garde.

I have spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting performances of my silent piece~ transcriptions, that is, for an audience of myself, since they were much longer than the popular length which I have had published. At one performance, I passed the first movement by attempting the identification of a mushroom which remained successfully unidentified. The second movement was extremely dramatic, beginning with the sounds of a buck and a doe leaping up to within ten feet of my rocky podium. The expressivity of this movement was not only dramatic but unusually sad from my point of view, for the animals were frightened simply because I was a human being. However, they left hesitatingly and fittingly within the structure of the work. The third movement was a return to the theme of the first, but with all those profound, so-well-known alterations of world feeling associated by German tradition with the A-B-A.

In the space that remains, I would like to emphasize that I am not interested in the relationships between sounds and mushrooms any more than I am in those between sounds and other sounds. These would involve an introduction of logic that is not only out of place in the world, but time consuming. We exist in a situation demanding greater earnestness, as I can testify, since recently I was hospitalized after having cooked and eaten experimentally some Spathyema foetida, commonly known as skunk cabbage. My blood pressure went down to fifty, stomach was pumped, etc. It behooves us therefore to see each thing directly as it is, be it the sound of a tin whistle or the elegant Lepiota procera.

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John Cage was an American composer, writer, music theorist and amateur mycologist. He was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde and amongst the most consequential and important composers of the 20th Century.

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Film

Festival of the Sun Playlist

Rick Rubin August 26, 2024

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A Path With Heart

The Emperor (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: The Emperor
Number: IV
Astrology: Aries
Qabalah: Tzaddi

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Chris Gabriel August 24, 2024

The Emperor is the beginning of the Tarot’s journey through the Zodiac, and it starts, as with ‘The Canterbury Tales’,  when “the yonge sonne hath in the Ram his half cours yronne”. This is a card of paternal, masculine power. In each iteration we see the Emperor crowned, enthroned, and bearing a scepter. 

In Rider, we find an aged Emperor with a long white beard and a deep red cloak covering his armor. He is facing ahead. His scepter is a ‘crux ansata’, a variation on the Ankh of the Egyptians, that is a symbol of the whole of things (0, the Creative Nothing and “+” the Cross as Four elements), for this is the King of the World. In his other hand is a globe of gold. His throne has four ram heads. The background is made up of fiery mountains. 

In Thoth, we find the Emperor depicted entirely with a fiery palette. He has a shorter beard, and a tunic bearing symbols of his dominion. The Bee is of particular interest here, serving as a symbol of natural hierarchy. His scepter bears the head of a ram, and his globe is in the form of Boehme’s Globus Cruciger. A shield depicting a double Phoenix lays at his feet alongside a sheep with a flag. Behind him are two large rams. Unlike the Rider Emperor, he has crossed legs, this posture, along with his arms form the Alchemical sign of Sulphur.

In Marseille, we once again find the Emperor older, with gray hair and a beard. He has a golden cross necklace, a crown that appears like fire, and a scepter bearing the Globus Cruciger. A shield bearing an eagle lays at his cross feet.

The Emperor is the card of the Good King, the good father, the righteous power in Man, not a wicked king, or an unjust ruler. This is a King Arthur, the one who is powerful by nature. The Bee in Thoth is a symbol shared with the Empress, the Lovers, and Art. Together they form an alchemical narrative, a Chymical Wedding. Bees form beautiful geometric hives, and unlike wasps, they give sweet honey. This is the ideal form of hierarchy, one that is natural and bears great fruits for all.

Explainer of Boehme’s Globus Cruciger.

As Aries is the first sign, we see the Emperor is primus inter pares, first among equals. Aries is the ‘baby of the zodiac’, and like Arthur is given rulership very early on. Aries the Ram uses his horns to force his way through, though his horns protect him, his butting head causes a tremendous shock. 

This too is the nature of a King - if they are ‘Great’ in the historical sense, they are not easy on those around them. Great Kings are terrible cataclysms. The Globus Cruciger that he bears, according to the alchemist Jakob Boehme, is the image of lightning striking the world. And the yogic posture, which forms Sulphur, is an ideogram constituted by a simple stick figure crowned by fire, a fiery man.

The Emperor is like a Ram that makes sparks with each thrust of his horns, and sets himself aflame. In old stories, we like to see a young person gain the mandate of Heaven and go to war, fighting their way to the top and then wielding tough but just judgment. In our day to day lives however, this may not be the case.

As we bring the scale of this card down, we find the Father, the masculine man, and while the divine fire is in the righteous, this is a figure that can be ill dignified and, if not checked, become a tyrant, an arrogant aggressive man who believes in his own superiority. 

Yogic posture ideogram.

This is where Aries' opposition to Libra comes in handy. It is what Crowley saw as “Love and Will” and, even further, the idea that Love is the Law. If the King’s law is not Love, then he is unjust, an overabundance of the aggressive Aries without the balance of Libra’s scales.

The balance of these energies makes a great King and an even greater Father. Paternal authority should be reserved entirely to keep his Kingdom, his home at peace and loving, not to tyrannize those he rules.

When the Emperor is pulled in a reading, I find it tends to relate directly to a Father, or to a position of authority. This can be someone’s literal father or a father figure, or a position they are in or want to be in. It can also simply indicate the energy of Aries.

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Questlove Playlist

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Questlove has been the drummer and co-frontman for the original all-live, all-the-time Grammy Award-winning hip-hop group The Roots since 1987. Questlove is also a music history professor, a best-selling author and the Academy Award-winning director of the 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.

Film

I Am For An Art… (1961)

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Oldenburg in The Store, 107 East Second Street, New York, 1961. Robert R. McElroy.

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Claes Oldenburg August 22 2024

I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.

I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.

I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top.

I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary.

I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.

I am for an artist who vanishes, turning up in a white cap painting signs or hallways.

I am for art that comes out of a chimney like black hair and scatters in the sky.

I am for art that spills out of an old man's purse when he is bounced off a passing fender.

I am for the art out of a doggy's mouth, falling five stories from the roof.

I am for the art that a kid licks, after peeling away the wrapper. I am for an art that joggles like everyones knees, when the bus traverses an excavation.

I am for art that is smoked, like a cigarette, smells, like a pair of shoes.

I am for art that flaps like a flag, or helps blow noses, like a handkerchief.

Pastry Case, 1961. Claes Oldenburg.

I am for art that is put on and taken off, like pants, which develops holes, like socks, which is eaten, like a piece of pie, or abandoned with great contempt, like a piece of shit.

I am for art covered with bandages, I am for art that limps and rolls and runs and jumps. I am for art that comes in a can or washes up on the shore.

I am for art that coils and grunts like a wrestler. I am for art that sheds hair.

I am for art you can sit on. I am for art you can pick your nose with or stub your toes on.

I am for art from a pocket, from deep channels of the ear, from the edge of a knife, from the corners of the mouth, stuck in the eye or worn on the wrist.

I am for art under the skirts, and the art of pinching cockroaches.

I am for the art of conversation between the sidewalk and a blind mans metal stick.

I am for the art that grows in a pot, that comes down out of the skies at night, like lightning, that hides in the clouds and growls. I am for art that is flipped on and off with a switch.

I am for art that unfolds like a map, that you can squeeze, like your sweetys arm, or kiss, like a pet dog. Which expands and squeaks, like an accordion, which you can spill your dinner on, like an old tablecloth.

I am for an art that you can hammer with, stitch with, sew with, paste with, file with.

I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is.

I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street.

I am for the art of the washing machine. I am for the art of a government check. I am for the art of last wars raincoat.

I am for the art that comes up in fogs from sewer-holes in winter. I am for the art that splits when you step on a frozen puddle. I am for the worms art inside the apple. I am for the art of sweat that develops between crossed legs.

I am for the art of neck-hair and caked tea-cups, for the art between the tines of restaurant forks, for the odor of boiling dishwater.

I am for the art of sailing on Sunday, and the art of red and white gasoline pumps.

I am for the art of bright blue factory columns and blinking biscuit signs.

I am for the art of cheap plaster and enamel. I am for the art of worn marble and smashed slate. I am for the art of rolling cobblestones and sliding sand. I am for the art of slag and black coal. I am for the art of dead birds.

I am for the art of scratchings in the asphalt, daubing at the walls. I am for the art of bending and kicking metal and breaking glass, and pulling at things to make them fall down.

I am for the art of punching and skinned knees and sat-on bananas. I am for the art of kids' smells. I am for the art of mama-babble.

I am for the art of bar-babble, tooth-picking, beerdrinking, egg-salting, in-suiting. I am for the art of falling off a barstool.

I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice-cream cones dropped on concrete. I am for the majestic art of dog-turds, rising like cathedrals.

I am for the blinking arts, lighting up the night. I am for art falling, splashing, wiggling, jumping, going on and off.

I am for the art of fat truck-tires and black eyes.

Performances at Oldenburg's The Store, 1962. Robert R. McElroy.

I am for Kool-art, 7-UP art, Pepsi-art, Sunshine art, 39 cents art, 15 cents art, Vatronol art, Dro-bomb art, Vam art, Menthol art, L & M art, Ex-lax art, Venida art, Heaven Hill art, Pamryl art, San-o-med art, Rx art, 9.99 art, Now art, New art, How art, Fire sale art, Last Chance art, Only art, Diamond art, Tomorrow art, Franks art, Ducks art, Meat-o-rama art.

I am for the art of bread wet by rain. I am for the rat's dance between floors.

I am for the art of flies walking on a slick pear in the electric light. I am for the art of soggy onions and firm green shoots. I am for the art of clicking among the nuts when the roaches come and go. I am for the brown sad art of rotting apples.

I am for the art of meowls and clatter of cats and for the art of their dumb electric eyes.

I am for the white art of refrigerators and their muscular openings and closings.

I am for the art of rust and mold. I am for the art of hearts, funeral hearts or sweetheart hearts, full of nougat. I am for the art of worn meathooks and singing barrels of red, white, blue and yellow meat.

I am for the art of things lost or thrown away, coming home from school. I am for the art of cock-and-ball trees and flying cows and the noise of rectangles and squares. I am for the art of crayons and weak grey pencil-lead, and grainy wash and sticky oil paint, and the art of windshield wipers and the art of the finger on a cold window, on dusty steel or in the bubbles on the sides of a bathtub.

I am for the art of teddy-bears and guns and decapitated rabbits, exploded umbrellas, raped beds, chairs with their brown bones broken, burning trees, firecracker ends, chicken bones, pigeon bones and boxes with men sleeping in them.

I am for the art of slightly rotten funeral flowers, hung bloody rabbits and wrinkly yellow chickens, bass drums & tambourines, and plastic phonographs. I am for the art of abandoned boxes, tied like pharaohs. I am for an art of watertanks and speeding clouds and flapping shades.

I am for U.S. Government Inspected Art, Grade A art, Regular Price art, Yellow Ripe art, Extra Fancy art, Ready-to-eat art, Best-for-less art, Ready-tocook art, Fully cleaned art, Spend Less art, Eat Better art, Ham art, pork art, chicken art, tomato art, banana art, apple art, turkey art, cake art, cookie art.

add:

I am for an art that is combed down, that is hung from each ear, that is laid on the lips and under the eyes, that is shaved from the legs, that is brushed on the teeth, that is fixed on the thighs, that is slipped on the foot.

square which becomes blobby

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Claes Oldenburg, 1929 – 2022, was a Swedish-born American sculptor best known for his public art installations, typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. In 1961 he opened The Store in Downtown New York which hosted performances, conceptual art pieces and happenings, as well as selling work he made in the space to punters and passerbys, removing the middle-man from the commercialisation of the art world. He wrote this text for an exhibition catalogue in 1961, reworked it when he opened the store and then republished it again in 1970 for an exhibition in London, from which this version is taken.

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Woody Harrelson

Mystery and Creation (1928)

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Piazza D'Italia, 1964. Giorgio de Chirico.

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Giorgio de Chirico August 20 2024

To become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken it will enter the regions of childhood vision and dream.

Profound statements must be drawn by the artist from the most secret recesses of his being; there no murmuring torrent, no birdsong, no rustle of leaves can distract him.

What I hear is valueless; only what I see is living, and when I close my eyes my vision is even more powerful. It is most important that we should rid art of all that it has contained of recognizable material to date, all familiar subject matter, all traditional ideas, all popular symbols must be banished forthwith. More important still, we must hold enormous faith in ourselves: it is essential that the revelation we receive, the conception of an image which embraces a certain thing, which has no sense in itself, which has no subject, which means absolutely nothing from the logical point of view, I repeat, it is essential that such a revelation or conception should speak so strongly in us, evoke such agony or joy, that we feel compelled to paint, compelled by an impulse even more urgent than the hungry desperation which drives a man to tearing at a piece of bread like a savage beast.

I remember one vivid winter's day at Versailles. Silence and calm reigned supreme. Everything gazed at me with mysterious, questioning eyes. And then I realized that every corner of the palace, every column, every window possessed a spirit, an impenetrable soul. I looked around at the marble heroes, motionless in the lucid air, beneath the frozen rays of that winter sun which pours down on us without love, like perfect song. A bird was warbling in a window cage. At that moment I grew aware of the mystery which urges men to create certain strange forms. And the creation appeared more extraordinary than the creators. Perhaps the most amazing sensation passed on to us by prehistoric man is that of presentiment. It will always continue. We might consider it as an eternal proof of the irrationality of the universe. Original man must have wandered through a world full of uncanny signs. He must have trembled at each step.

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Giorgio de Chirico was an Italian artist and writer born in 1888, who founded the movement of Metaphysical Painting. He was inspired by Neitzsche and Shopenhauer in his philosophy, that informed both his visual and written work, and his own writing was a major source of inspiration to Andre Breton and the Surrealist Movement. This essay was first published in 1928 by Breton in ‘Surrealism and Painting’.

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Film

Hurriganes - Sixteen Golden Greats (Out of Print)

Matt Sweeney August 19, 2024

Finnish grease rock gods, huge in their home country and nowhere really else: astonishingly pre-Ramones, with a drummer singing in rock n roll nonsense language, crude propulsive nasty and joyful and badass. This record and so many other life-changing jamz were presented to me by savage genius Jesper Eklow of Endless Boogie. 

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Matt Sweeney is a record producer and the host of the popular music series “Guitar Moves”. He is a member of The Hard Quartet (debut album out Fall of 2024). Rick reached out to Matt Sweeney in 2005 after hearing his “Superwolf” album, and invited him to play on albums by Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond, Adele and many others. Follow Matt Sweeney via Instagram.

The Spell of the Sensuous

Five of Swords (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Defeat, the Five of Swords
Number: 5
Astrology: Air, Venus in Aquarius
Qabalah: Gevurah of Vau

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Chris Gabriel August 17, 2024

The Five of Swords is a card of undoing, of our dreams that come crashing down. Here the Swords which have been gently building start to fall apart like a house of cards. This is the representation of a failed hypothesis.

In Rider, we find a smiling rogue picking up swords that have been lost in battle. Behind him two men mourn before a sea. The sky is cloudy. Two swords lay on the ground, and three are in hand. He is picking up the pieces, unmoved by what has occurred.

In Thoth, we find a reversed pentagram, a falling star made of chipped swords. Geometric figures sputter about it with falling petals. The card has the violet of Aquarius and the Green of Venus. Venus in Aquarius has dreams and desires, but lacks the grounding to actualize them, creating a distance and alienation.

In Marseille, we have a single central sword whose tip is weaving through the four arched around it. Through Qabalah, we find it signifies “The Anger of the Prince”. 

The Anger of the Prince is Defeat. It is an anger toward reality, after his expectations, measurements, methods and plans were undone..

This is not defeat at the hands of another, but self undoing.

My great grandfather was a Mason, and a piece of advice he gave me was to “measure twice, cut once”.This card occurs as a result of incorrect measurements. We can imagine a car stranded out of gas on the side of the road, a disappointed couple and an amused tow truck driver taking a modern form of the Rider card..

The suit of Swords pertains to the mental sphere, which is the origin of our many defeats, foibles, expectations, and visions which fall apart when they meet the real world. 

Aesop’s Astronomer, who despite his calculations of the stars falls into a well.

While the Five of Wands gives us the image of a tyrannical ruler who weighs too heavily upon his people, the Five of Swords is the image of a totally removed ruler, like Marie Antoinette, who when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: "Then let them eat cake."

While we often attribute the ‘airheadedness' of these dynamics to an ‘overdeveloped imagination’, it is in fact a failure of imagination.

It makes me think of how so many want to make art, only they need millions of dollars, expensive equipment, and the like, while the truly great artists find a way to bring their vision into reality with what they have in hand. They set aside unreal expectations for the sake of the art itself. Which requires more imagination?

The great thing about this card is that it functions as a prerequisite for the Six of Swords, which represents Science. These are the failed hypotheses, the experiments gone awry, the countless mistakes that are needed to develop a functional methodology.

When we pull this card, we are being shown a part of ourselves that holds these unreal ideas, illusions that we maintain which will be brought tumbling down by the world. 

This is not necessarily a bad thing, we can be like the smiling fellow, pick up the pieces and try again. This is how we develop a true understanding of the world.

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

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Hannah Peel Playlist

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Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.