BeautifulPyre

What's Boredom? Who is Bored?

Boredom. I really don't get it. The only time I am ever bored is if I'm waiting on someone else. I get anxious because I want to start doing, but I don't necessarily have time to start. Know what I mean?

We, who are privileged enough with the wealth to be reading and writing this on the internet, are living in a world of miracles where there is so much information available, so much to occupy the mind and the hands. You've probably heard the phrase "if you're bored, you're boring" and as much as I hate the cliché, I think it's probably true. Find something to do with your hands. Transform yourself into the kind of person you find the most admirable and interesting. (That is High Magic.)

Why are you stopping yourself from doing the things you know you need to do? Why aren't you pushing forward in spite of your doubts and second-guesses, faking creativity until it comes? It is your aversion to these things that slows you down. You're short-changing yourself with self-loathing. Every little bit helps. Experience accrues in a spiral pattern. What is boredom, but a lack of ingenuity, a fear of your own fearlessness, the fire in your belly going dark? DO NOT LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU. Death is down that way. Boredom is bred in stagnation and stagnation is that death.

There's an endless amount of fascinations in the world, endless forms and permutations. There is so much to do that we can start to feel overwhelmed by it. You may not consciously realize it now, but you have a destiny in mind for yourself. There is something in this world that you are passionate about, that you can accept and claim as your own purpose for being here. So start doing it. Here's how:

Make a list. What are the activities and ideas that make you feel most alive? Go towards those things in any way you can. You may not be good at it now, but believe me, anything you put your attention to can grow within you. It all accrues. You may not be able to live within your fondest thoughts in this life, but you can talk about them and by communicating them, enrich others and possibly even make them more likely to be manifested at some time in the future. Take Buckminster Fuller for example. Plenty of the things he dreamed of never came to fruition in his life, but they still inspire us today. It is a labor of love and if you love yourself (if you are not afraid to love yourself), you will never short-change yourself with self-doubt again. There is only the love and service to yourself and your dreams.

And by the way, don't be afraid to love yourself. You are strong enough to do it. Be bold and let that internal fire grow until it roars.

Visions of the Al Azif

Sunday, November 1st at The Foundry, London.

Raymond Salvatore Harmon presents:

Visions of the Al Azif, inspired by the writings of HP Lovecraft.

A Day of the Dead media performance.

Join us this Day of the Dead for an evening of cinematic ritual performance by Raymond Salvatore Harmon at London's legendary Foundry.

'Visions of the Al Azif' is a cinematic meditation of the altered states explored by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, author of the Necronomicon.

The Al Azif (H.P. Lovercraft's famed Necronomicon) was a massive collection of the madness induced poetic hallucinations of its author. Similar in structure to other Sufic works of the period the Al Azif
speaks of unheard of eons before man walked the earth. Populated with demons and other creatures of questionable age who had come to earth seeking refuge from the emptiness of space.

The evening's performance will be the first screening of these rare and illusive documents of the visionary states that must be obtained in order to communicate with the Great Old Ones of mankind's forgotten past. These detailed organic abstractions illustrate the vivid hallucinatory states and madness inducing transcendental experiences that led to the author's untimely death.

The performance will take place in the catacombs under the Foundry.

Mark Pilkington of Strange Attractor and Andy Sharp of English Heretic will be creating the sonic variable for the Visions of the Al Azif performance.

Free admission.

Performance starts at 9pm sharp.

The Foundry
84-86 GREAT EASTERN STREET
London
02077396900
foundry.tv

The Art of Fever

"Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending."-Maria Robinson

Good morning. I'd like to say today is a new day to make new mistakes, but really, today is a continuation of all that has come before. Everything we will do flows from our past experiences. Reality is built on a bedrock of history. If you can do something new that you've never done before, I applaud you. I answered a ringing payphone at the airport recently. I had never done that before, and you know who was calling? A telemarketer. That figures. I was hoping it was opportunity this time, but you know, you really are better off if opportunity comes knocking at your door. That way you can grasp it before it slips away.

Today, I would like to say that my fever is because The Secret works. I set out to be sick and I am. Why would anyone do that? I feel like my body needs these kinds of challenges once in awhile. I'm not going to say that whatever doesn't kill me will make me stronger because I've learned that isn't even true. Some things just break you down. Like cancer. But in my case, I take a lot from working through sickness and pain. I have learned patience. I have learned how to care for my body.

This is how you know when you're growing old: you start caring about what you put into your body because you realize it is winding down and if you don't start taking care of yourself, the rest of your life is basically going to suck. And also when you start to care about politics because suddenly you understand that the decisions other people make for you are actually affecting your life, your wellbeing, your livelihood. The Little Prince is still my favorite book, the star I try to navigate by.

I have often spoken of how much I love the state of feverdream. It feels good to let the mind become unhinged and unbound by conventional rules of rationality and language, to feel that those things take a backseat to pure expression at these times.

So enjoy being sick sometimes. Mandatory downtime that will result in a brighter new day after the sickness has gone. Enjoy the struggle, watch yourself watching yourself. Your aversion to unpleasant experiences is often what hurts the most.

She came to me...

Although I am an atheist, I work heavily with the characters we know as gods. Tonight I read Taylor Ellwood's beautiful account of an experience he had with Babalon. Communion with the gods isn't something I talk about very often with anyone so I was pleased that Taylor's experience was so very like the experiences I've had with the forms. Sometimes they come to you out of nowhere, demanding an audience and speaking in the voice of your true will.

Enjoy.

She came to me

The Abattoir Pages

Guerrilla Zoo and FoolishPeople present The Abattoir Pages, a terrifying immersive Halloween experience, hosted in a vast, secret subterranean landscape that was once one of London's largest abattoirs. 

The Abattoir Pages combines immersive performance, art installation, haunting and treasure hunt-style activity to form a labyrinth of mystery and horror, exposing the earliest Gaelic and Pagan rites. Once inside, audience members will be free to explore the abandoned underground chambers, join the secret party or may be caught in the middle of the most terrifying of puzzles. 

This Hallowe’en, the infamous horror author Helen Mayer will hold court at a debauched secret party. She will share the perverse and warped research conducted inside the old abandoned abattoir, which was the genesis of her greatest work. In this dark playground, the very nature of human terror has been tested, abused and fed into the living story 'The Forest'. 

The author invites you to solve the puzzle and unlock the terrifying history within the old and powerful pages hidden throughout the slaughterhouse. Each holds a key to learning the truth of an ancient tale, which will ensure your survival. 

Tonight, a debt will be repaid to blood dishonoured. An eternal nightmare rises up from the depths of the dark boreal forest, in the shadow of the mountain. It comes to feed on new meat inside an old abattoir.

• 22 October - 1 November 2009
7.30pm, 8.30pm & 9.30pm entrance times

• Halloween Matinee Performances Sat 31st Oct & Sun 1st Nov 4.00pm

• Location: The Old Abattoir, 187- 211 St. John's Street, Clerkenwell, London. EC1V 4LS

More info: http://www.apocryphon.org

Kingdom of the Mask People

What the shit is this fuck?

I dunno, but it fills me with glee.

On a tangentially related note, I love how this Bulgarian White Rose Mask looks on Eki. It would work so well in a medical horror fetish scene.

Lightworker.

This morning when I woke up with my head still spinning pleasantly from all the whiskey gingers I downed like a champ last night, I realized: I am a lightworker. Yes the term is hopelessly entangled with some of the worst New Age clichés imaginable. I admit that fully. I don't care. I'm taking "lightworker" back. Back from the fruity sorts who believe that promoting and propigating love and compassion and snork-the-whiskey-out-your-nose laughter is a serious thing, that it means your soul is ancient or even that it means you have a soul at all, and especially those who say it must necessarily equate to a belief in some kind of over-arching deity.

Yes we like to play with gimungous RPG characters who usually live in the sky or a paradisal abode we wish we could reach, whose generous bosoms swell with the golden milk of joy even as they fountain this same milk from their bountiful nipples and girthy trunks into our eager mouths, us docile supplicants lying supine below them as if in utter submission. Yes that is true. I admit that fully. We love to pretend that these things exist, are real, have substance because it adds so greatly to the play, to the joy, to the energy dance of existence. We can suspend our belief or disbelief for pleasure and then snap back to rationality when the playtime that demanded the suspension it is over, if it indeed ever ends.

It is okay not to believe. It is okay not to believe you are a starseed or that karma has anything to do with your need to extend healing in the forms of love, compassion, free handjobs, etc. Some people just have something inside them, maybe something really fucked up from childhood even, that fuels their need to give, to inspire their fellow upright-walking primates with glorious visions, kind words, heavy soups, inappropriate workplace massages and more.

And yes the term implies a kind of duality between light and dark and the poopie preference for one over the other. The kind of folk that would guffaw over this metaphor are usually the basement cellardwelling types who think it is cool to cling to walls in dank, moist places, slowly growing larger, some undiscovered crevices of their corpulent phosphorescent bodies rotting imperceptibly to their users. They could use some sunshine. These folks can't laugh at themselves, let it slide and they certainly don't know how to flow. It's okay to love "the light" even if you are a freak goth mutant alternative non-conformist. Sunshine is good too and it fuels every thing we do down to the most minute detail. Our lives, our choices to dwell in basements becoming obese while jerking it to barely legal lesbian foot fetish porn, would not be possible without the sun. SO DON'T KNOCK IT. It's okay to love the light and to want to illuminate and be illuminated instead of keeping yourself from the world, keeping who you really are a secret from the rest of the world.

DON'T BOGART YOURSELF! Step into the spotlight, grab the mic and go crazy with it. Get it all out. It's an EMOTIONAL ENEMA.

So. Back to my original point. I'm taking back "lightworker" from both the flakes and the people who make fun of them. Being a lightworker means neither that you must be unconventional (or novel) or that you must conform to what other lightworkers believe it means. It certainly doesn't mean you can't ever work in the dark, have bleak moods or feel inspired by a gothic aesthetic. You don't have to be conventional or unconventional to ride this love ship passion trip. You don't have to be a washed up hippie without a gourd (but don't under any circumstances discount washed up hippies: they have the best drugs!) But on the other side of that, you don't have to be a smug, constipated, unrealized fart either.

I am a lightworker. I am weird. Get used to it. Deal with it. You can laugh at me if you want to, but you'll be the one on the sidelines snickering to yourself and pretending that you are really enjoying yourself, cloistering yourself from others because you are too afraid to show yourself to the world and risk the vulnerability of putting yourself into a new context. Weakling.

Much of this rant doesn't make sense. Much of this rant has very little internal logic and flits in a carefree manner between topics and tenses. That is okay because I drank a lot of whiskey before writing it.

Moshi Moshi

After a long and unexpected hiatus, I am pleased to announce that I will be blogging here again with a violent passion. I hope for this to become my primary portal from which I convey myself to the world.

A Concise Guide To Setting Yourself On Fire

I started doing a podcast thingie when you weren't looking. THIS IS A LINK! To my podcast. On the G-Spot. On Alterati. The title line is the titular line. My show is an occult cooking show that will teach you how to set your pubes on fire. That's a lie, but this isn't. I love you too.

Dire Fruit.