Listening to the new Tori Amos album and it’s one of the best I’ve ever heard.  I just can’t get over the fact that this incredible human being is walking the earth making music this good.  She really may be some kind of goddess from another dimension or something.  I haven’t felt like this about music in years . . . rock and pop seem so tired and repetitive these days.  It’s really rare that I feel like I’m hearing something new or interesting.   

Ironically the only recent album that’s resurrected my adolescent excitement about pop music was Nine Inch Nails’ “Year Zero”.  I say it’s ironic because Tori & Trent had some kind of famous relationship years ago and I still associate them in my mind. But that album was so totally pissed off, bitter, and hateful that even though I admire it I couldn’t listen to it over an over the way I will this. 

God, she is so fucking GOOD!  I swear she’s up there in the stratosphere with John Lennon now.   It’s so nice to have a musician I can worship like I used to when I was a teenager — someone to consume your aural universe and transport you to an alternate internal reality where life makes sense . . .  And just like a teenager if you don’t like this album I’ll think less of you as a person.  I really will, I swear.

I’m working on developing my enthusiasm for being a human being again.  I really do need to resolve this love/hate thing I have with humanity.  I love a lot of the people who are around me — especially now that I’ve moved to Chicago from Grand Rapids.  But on the other hand I still see humanity as a failed experiment in self-determination.  Somehow I have to resolve my utter contempt for the world at large with this other part of myself, the real part, that has truly spiritual feelings.

I’m approaching 40 years of age now, and blissfully grateful that I don’t have to care about anything anymore.  You youngsters are so pathetic, always trying to make an impression on people . . . now that I’m old and slow I know I shall take the time to finish all my novels before I die, simply because I don’t have the energy or emotional commitment to think up any more projects.

The Argonauta

A Paper Nautlius

Holy Man

The Dharmacists

The Survivors 

Spanish Castle Magic

The Road To Nowhere (metaphysical rock ‘n roll sci-fi horror spyporn)

Cold Fusion

Freedom

The Golden Sphear

Crop Circle

The Vogue Cycle

 . . . From the High Hills Around His Head

There, that’s the basic list which I am putting on my blog because every time I write it down I forget the piece of paper somewhere.  This is my OEUVRE, baby.  Deal with it.  It’s amazing how many damn huge-ass projects I have come up with in my lifetime, but just as with the Church of Art, Inc.  I am doomed to struggle for years to get anything done.  Nevertheless, if I but live I WILL get these things done.

also including a book of lyrics, poems, and short stories, including “Pizza the Hard Way” and “Love Like Blood”.

via Poltergeist (1982)

Just saw “Poltergeist”, another trip down memory lane.  The timewarp effect is heightened because this was the first time i heard of “the light” and spirits “crossing over”,  the standard model of life and afterlife described by mediums.  At the time I was an atheist so it seemed silly.  Now the humor is that i know that the medium character in the movie speaks only the plain truth.

I am so nostalgic child I was . . . why do I still cling to a fondness for that linear, mundane reality, when movies and rock music were important events, even though now my life is far more dramatic and truly supernatural than any movie could be — because it’s real!  Maybe it’s because it was all so ugly and messy.  In my next life I’ll be a rock star.

I guess it’s also funny that I remember how terrifying and “realistic” the special effects seemed at the time, from an era before “The Matrix” and “Jurassic Park”.  The little glowing streamers of ectoplasm were my favorites — they’re so dated now, so obviously “cartoony” I have to laugh.  But now I can see the actual etheric plane I know that some of those little lights look exactly the way they’re suppposed to.

And of course the two daughters in the film died within a few years.  As I recall John Belushi had been up for the lead. Shades of Heath Ledger, Brandon Lee, Aaliyah, et al. No accidents here, but the meaning of it is closed to me.  However now, after more than twenty years I know there IS a meaning, and it wasn’t “just a movie”.  There was a reason I got attached to it and saw it so many times.  

Does a movie like this open a portal to a higher plane?  It must.  

Ha!  They’re showing “the Exorcist” this weekend, too!  Of course we all scoffed back then when they told us it was based on a true story, but now, watch out!

all summer i’ve been practicing astral projection and self-hypnosis.  i have a totally radical and awesome inner world i can voyage through at any time.  i don’t really need to do anything anymore to entertain myself, but then lately i’ve been watching movies a lot just to avoid thinking.  apparently i’m becoming really shallow now that i no longer feel so trapped in the physical world.  i don’t understand it.  i want to fill my head with meaningless movie junk instead of working on anything important.  i feel vaguely uncomfortable in my body, like i don’t belong here.  

none of my relationships feel the same either.  so much of what they were bulit on is gone.  of course most relationships are just habits, very few get to the core of a person.  

i’m starting to miss myself i guess.  i look back on myself as a child and think, i had such potential and courage, and nothing really came of it.  i got the important thing in life, which was spiritual knowledge, but it wasn’t really fun.  it’s not exaggeration or self-pity to say i grew up around really nasty people.  i attracted  a lot of pathological liars and creeps.  

on the other hand i’m a master of the law of attraction now.  i could use my magical powers to become a world-famous millionaire psychic rock star if i wanted.  the question is, is it worth it?  my guru says that the next hundred years will see a drastic reduction in the world population and the overthrow of the current world order.  i’m all for that but it calls into question the relative importance of being an artist when everything’s going to be forgotten in the disasters to come . . . 

sigh, i’m surrounded by people who want to connect with me.  i wish i could overcome this darkness and sense of isolation within myself.

just saw it in the theater, what a nostalgic moment . . . when Aliens came out in 1986 it was a cutting-edge action movie.  wow!  how realistic and gritty and dark and scary!  no one had ever seen anything like that.  i read about it in time magazine.  sigourney weaver was a serious actress who gave weight to the whole thing .  . . now we’ve had The Matrix and a bunch of other darker grittier movies and the whole genre has gone as far as it can go, just like American Popular Culture has gone as far as it can go.

but more importantly when i saw that movie as a teenager i still believed i could be an ordinary human being, before i started seeing the etheric plane and being haunted by ghosts . . . before i was plunged into the twilight zone of human consciousness not to emerge for another 20 years.  so to see it again reminds me of how far i’ve come, how much has changed and been lost and how much of what i thought was reality was only an illusion.  

but on the other hand what i thought was illusion then was actually reality.  i really am psychic and there really is an underground revolution taking place . . . what a trip!