Month: March 2022 (Page 4 of 14)

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UFOs, extraterrestrials, ghosts, poltergeists, vampires, zombies, monsters, witches, werewolves, devils, or, to quote the subtitle of the lovely literary freak show called The Wonderful Magazine, I’ve always been extremely interested in the “Marvelous Chronicles of Extraordinary Productions, Events, and Occurrences, in Nature and Art: Consisting Entirely of Matter Which Comes Under the Denomination of MIRACULOUS! QUEER! ODD! STRANGE! SUPERNATURAL! WHIMSICAL! ABSURD! OUT OF THE WAY! And UNACCOUNTABLE!” as I’m sure a number of (if not all) of you are. So today is devoted to the mystery of UFOs; but because there’s so much information out there about them, here are five sort of random things to blow out your brains on today.

 

1. The Bible and Flying Saucers

Among the literature of UFOs there are an extraordinary number of books detailing the influence of extraterrestrial life upon human religion—especially ancient religion, such as Aztec, Mayan, and Egyptian but also, not surprisingly, the biblical tradition, and in particular Christianity. One exceptionally interesting study I’ve read on this connection is Barry Downing’’s way out there The Bible and Flying Saucers: An Inquiry into Possibilities. Downing “believes that UFOs are real and have existed for centuries” and throughout the book explains “that many events once though miraculous may have their best explanation is natural science and the existence of extraterrestrials.” He discusses everything from Moses parting the Red Sea to the transfiguration of Christ (he suggests Jesus was lifted up “into space by some sort of UFO—a space cloud”). In chapter five (my favorite), “Where is Heaven?” Downing attempts to locate heaven in the physical universe, and uses passages from the bible as his launch pad into long, complex arguments about whether heaven is on another planet or another plane of existence (it’s on another plane of existence) and whether it is visible or invisible (invisible). Ultimately though, because Downing is only positing another theory among the millions of biblical interpretations, he ends up deliciously subverting the belief that the bible contains empirical evidence and truth not only about the workings of the universe but reality itself.

 

2. George Adamski (1891-1965)

Of the thousands upon thousands of purported UFO contactees, one of the most famous accounts of is that of George Adamski. Adamski is credited in many circles as the pioneer of extraterrestrial contact and UFO photography. After founding his own church in 1934 where he lectured about cosmic philosophy, Adamski wrote his first and only science-fiction novel in 1949 entitled Pioneers of Space: A Trip to the Moon, Mars and Venus. He later plundered the book to write his bestselling (though now sadly out of print) nonfiction book, Flying Saucers Have Landed in 1953.

Of Adamski’’s many claims of contact, the most famous supposedly occurred in November 1952 when Adamski and some members of his church went out into the Californian desert, where they supposedly witnessed a flying saucer land. Adamski claimed he telepathically communicated with an alien from the spaceship. Supposedly the alien was named and was from Venus and was worried about the advancement of nuclear weapons. Adamski claimed he took plaster casts of the extraterrestrial’s feet but there’s no evidence of this. Throughout his life, Adamski maintained his claims of contact, including being taken for flights on UFOs countless times, and even being taken “around to the back side of the of the moon where he saw cities, UFO landing strips, and mountains covered with trees and snow.” Though there’s no evidence of this either. Adamski died of a heart attack in 1965 and according to Frank Edwards, author of Flying Saucers, Serious Business, “at the time of [Adamski’s] death he was offering to teach people how to visit the planets Venus and Mars by self-hypnosis for fifty dollars.”

(Photo: “On August 6th, 1997, a UFO seen by many witnesses in Mexico City and was caught on tape by one of these witnesses (who used a Sony Digital Camera). The UFO looks like a flying saucer as described by many UFO viewers. The day was said to be very hazy and no aircraft were cleared to depart except for two news helicopters. The video was received by Jamie Maussan who later broadcast it. The 24 second tape was seen by millions of viewers worldwide. It was then taken to a video analysis company in Phoenix and Jim Dilettoso, who had viewed over 5,000 other UFO videos, believed it was the best he had ever seen.”)

 

3. List of Things Mistaken for UFOs

(Photo: Elm Park in Worcester, Massachusetts. Those lights are not in fact the lights of a UFO but street lamps illuminating the sidewalk at the far end of the park.)

A list of things commonly mistaken for UFOs compiled in 1969 for a UFO symposium sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Luminous weather balloons, non-luminous weather balloons, meteors, comets, moon, artificial satellites, planets, military magnesium flares, military test craft, military aircraft, clouds, rocket firings, hot air balloons, satellite, satellite re-entry, sky-hook balloons (discontinued), hot air balloons, helicopters, planes, plane running lights, plane landing lights, planes’ reflections of the sun, contrails, hand gliders, flocks of migrating birds, individual birds, luminous birds, stars, advertising blimps, illuminated blimps, dirigibles, sewage disposal bubbles, soap bubbles, chain lightning, streak lightning, sheet lightning, ball lightning, plasma phenomena, kites, leaves, spider webs, paper and other debris, luminous electrical discharges, swarms of insects, swarms of moths, milkweed seeds, parachutes, fireworks, radio astronomy antennas, oil refineries, domed roofs, cigarettes tossed away, lighthouses, lakes and ponds, automobile headlights, auroral phenomena, noctilucent clouds, reflections of searchlights, St. Elmo’s fire, reflections from fog and mist including haloes, pilot’s halo, and ghost of the Brocken, sundogs, moondogs, superior mirages, inferior mirages, hallucinations, chimeras, internal camera reflections, photographic development defects, reflections from bright sources, electric lights, street lights, flashlights, aurora borealis, smoker lighting a pipe, unsteady stars, stars changing places, falling leaf effect, autostasis, astigmatisms, autokinetic effects, dust devils, park lights, weathervanes, icebergs, fires, angels, transformers, water tanks, tumbleweeds, failure to wear glasses, reflection from glasses, retinal defects, vitreous humor, anomalous radar refraction, radar scattering, radar ghost images radar, insects on radar, birds on radar, multiple radar reflections, light aberrations, beacon lights, and hoaxes.

 

4. UFOs as Experiences of a Psychoid Nature

“Of all the experiences in the transpersonal realm, those of a psychoid nature represent the greatest challenge to our everyday perception of reality.” This is how Stanislav Grof begins the chapter “Experiences of a Psychoid Nature” in his book The Holographic Mind. In this chapter Grof discusses various Jungian archetypes that have a psychoid nature, which, with the help of Jung (who, interestingly, in 1979 wrote a fascinating book entitled Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies), he defines as belonging “neither to the realm of the psyche nor the realm of material reality. Instead they existed within a strange twilight zone between consciousness and matter.” These archetypes include ghosts, poltergeists, synchronicities, acts of psychokinesis—the whole smorgasbord of the supernatural and paranormal—and yes, UFOs.

In the section of the chapter on UFOs, Grof discusses how “discussion in this area is usually limited to the question of whether or not our planet has been visited by actual physical spacecraft from other parts of the universe. However, it seems that the situation is more complicated than that. Many UFO experiences seem to have a psychoid quality, meaning that they are not merely hallucinations, nor are they ‘real’ in the ordinary sense of the word. It is quite possible that they represent strange hybrid phenomena, combining elements of mental life and the physical world.” Grof goes on to explain this theory and talks about how UFO sightings are usually “associated with visions of lights with supernatural radiance, similar to mystical raptures. The descriptions of the extraterrestrial visitors, alien cities, and spacecrafts certainly have parallels world mythology and thus could easily be explained to the collective unconscious. However that is only one aspect of the story. What interests us in our present context is the fact that in many instances, UFOs have left physical evidence behind, thus relegating them to consensus reality. It is this aspect that gives modern UFO phenomena a clear psychoid quality.”

And here is where things really start to get out of hand. According to Grof, Jacques Vallée, a trained astrophysicist and UFO researcher, has “concluded that at least some UFOs have a physical reality but these are simultaneously tied in with unusual inner experiences on the part of those who report the sightings. He concludes that the spaceships come from ‘other dimensions’ of space and time that coexist with our own universe and may not be ‘extraterrestrial’ in the usual sense of the word. Vallée speculates that the alien intelligences that produce and control the UFOs might be able to manipulate space and time in ways that are completely beyond our present ability to even imagine…However, the UFOs are not products of the observer’s imagination; like Jung’s spirit guides they exist quite independent of our consciousness. In other words, rather than being fabrications of our own imaginations, the ‘extraterrestrials’ are using our consciousnesses as doorways into our everyday level of reality.” But for what purpose? Grof doesn’t answer this but instead articulates the problem these ideas pose. “If UFOs do exist and are the product of the advanced technology we describe here, we are brought face to face with the convergence of two areas that we have always viewed as polar opposites: the rational world of advanced technology and the irrational world of fantasy.”

(Photo: In 1946, there were over 2000 reports of unidentified aircraft in the Scandinavian nations, along with isolated reports from France, Portugal, Italy and Greece, then referred to as “Russian hail,” and later as “ghost rockets,” because it was thought that these mysterious objects were Russian tests of captured German V1 or V2 rockets. This was subsequently shown not to be the case, and the phenomenon remains unexplained.”)

 

5. The International Raelian Movement

You might remember the Raelian Movement from the news a few years ago. In 2002, the movement made headlines claiming to have cloned a human being, which they named Eve. And just this May you may have read in the paper about the Raelian’s newly formed “Adopt a Clitoris Program” to fight against sexual mutilation. Or maybe not… In 1973 extraterrestrials known as the Elohim (which in Hebrew means “those who come from the sky”) contacted then French sports journalist Claude Vorilhon. But instead of expressing concerns about nukes and taking Vorilhon for tours of the galaxy (though he claims he was flown to the Elohim’s home planet in 1975 where he met Buddha, Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad), these ETs entrusted Vorilhon with the knowledge that life on earth was genetically manufactured (cloned) millennia ago by alien scientists from a saucerful of their own DNA. During this meeting Vorilhon was given the prophet name Rael, which means “The Messenger of the Elohim,” and ordered to spread this message to everyone in the world. In 1973 he dropped his journalism job, wrote Le Livre qui dit la vérité (The Book Which Tells the Truth) about the Elohim, and founded The International Raelian Movement. The Movement, now based out of Montreal, claims to have 60,000 plus members in over 60 countries. Not surprisingly, the movement is founded on the principles of love, pleasure knowledge and conscience, and freedom from money, sickness and war, and works to promote equality as well as harmony among the sexes.

In her in depth study of the Raelian Movement, Aliens Adored: Rael’s UFO Religion, Susan J. Palmer probes everything about the Raelians from their science of cloning to their radical sexual ethics. For example, in the chapter “Sexy Angels and Amorous Aliens,” Palmer writes about how Rael, following orders from the Elohim, basically set up a harem of women for the aliens. Rael encouraged his harem of “beautiful young women [to cultivate] the arts of Eros and their seductive ‘feminine charisma’…so as lure the aliens to earth to be their lovers—all in the ancient spirit of courtly love…” Palmer then quotes a passage from his 1978 book Les extra-terrestres m’ont emené sur leur planéte (Space Aliens Took Me to Their Planet), in which Rael writes about his visit the Elohim’s planet. During a tour of the planet, Rael was invited by a robot to sample alien sexual mores. “I found myself transported in front of a machine used for fabricating robots,” Rael writes. “A luminous cube appeared in front of me…A magnificent young brunette with wonderfully harmonious proportions appeared in three dimensions…a second woman, blond and heady this time appeared in the luminous cube;…a red-haired person and…a magnificent black woman, then a very slim Chinese woman.” Since Rael was unable choose between all these robots, he took them all back to his hotel. “There,” he writes, “I had the most unforgettable bath I have ever had, in the company of those charming robots, absolutely submissive to my desires.” If you’d like to join the International Raelian Movement or learn more about their sexual politics as well as their message of peace and understanding, check out their website.

 

Links:

UFO Maps, sightings, as they happen
Wikipedia’s UFO page
A leading archive of UFO evidence including photo galleries and up-to-date sightings reports
Esoterica’s UFO Index
The Alien-UFOs.com Network Forum

 

UFO Religions:

The Brotherhood of the Seven Rays

The Seekers, also called The Brotherhood of the Seven Rays, were a group of rapturists or a UFO religion in mid-twentieth century Midwestern United States. The Seekers met in a nondenominational church, the group originally organized in 1953 by Charles Laughead, a staff member at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. They were led by Dorothy Martin from the Chicago area (also called Sister Thedra), who believed a UFO would save them from a catastrophe on December 21, 1954. They are believed to be the earliest UFO religion, and were the subject of the book When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger, in which Laughead was given the pseudonym Dr. Armstrong and Martin the name Marian Keech.

Festinger infiltrated the Seekers with the goal of studying their cognitive reactions and coping mechanisms when their beliefs failed, a thought-process which Festinger named cognitive dissonance. When the UFO did not come, a majority of the members became convinced that the UFO would arrive on Christmas Eve, at which time their second disappointment produced even greater dissonance. In the book, Festinger and his colleagues write, “The experiences of this observer well characterize the state of affairs following the Christmas caroling episode—a persistent, frustrating search for orders.”[6] After this incident, many of the members returned home and abandoned their initial belief. Those who did not claimed that their group’s belief and faith had saved the world from the disaster the aliens had warned of.

 

Aetherius Society

The Aetherius Society is a new religious movement founded by George King in the mid-1950s as the result of what King claimed were contacts with extraterrestrial intelligences, to whom he referred as “Cosmic Masters”. The main goal of the believer is to cooperate with these Cosmic Masters to help humanity solve its current Earthly problems and advance into the New Age.

It is a syncretic religion, based primarily on theosophy and incorporating millenarian, New Age, and UFO religion aspects. Emphases of the religion include altruism, community service, nature worship, spiritual healing and physical exercise. Members meet in congregations like those of churches. John A. Saliba states that, unlike many other New Age or UFO religions, the Aetherius Society is for the most part considered uncontroversial, although its esoteric and millenarian aspects are sometimes ridiculed.

 

Ashtar Galactic Command

Ashtar (sometimes called Ashtar Sheran) is the name given to an extraterrestrial being or group of beings that a number of people claim to have channeled. UFO contactee George Van Tassel was likely the first to claim to receive an Ashtar message, in 1952. Since then, many different claims about Ashtar have appeared in different contexts. The Ashtar movement is studied by academics as a prominent form of UFO religion. Denzler observes that “in the long run, probably the most important person for the propagation and perpetuation of the contactee movement was George Van Tassel”. In 1947 Van Tassel moved to Giant Rock, near Landers in the Mojave Desert, California, where he established a large UFO Center. This became the most successful and well-known UFO meeting center of the time.

As one of the founding “fathers” of the modern religious ufologies, Van Tassel also created arguably the most prominent UFO group established in the US in the late 1940s and early 1950s, although not as influential or well-known today. This was the “Ministry of Universal Wisdom” begun in 1953, which evolved out of two previous groups he had organized at Giant Rock in the late 1940s. The organization investigated and encouraged the healing arts, but its prime focus was to collect and analyse UFO phenomena and interview ‘contactees’. Due to radio and television interest, Van Tassel became the most well-known promoter of contactee experiences and somewhat of a celebrity in the 1950s.

 

Cosmic Circle of Fellowship

Cosmic Circle of Fellowship was a mid-twentieth century UFO religion that claimed to offer interdimensional travel through deep relaxation. During the 1950s, it became connected with the contactee movement, people who believed they had been in contact with extraterrestrial beings. The Circle was founded by a postman named William R. Ferguson. Like almost every other mid-1950s contactee, Ferguson quickly founded a religious cult to popularize the revelations he was receiving from the Space Brothers: the Cosmic Circle of Fellowship (1955), and also published the usual contactee book, A Message from Outer Space (also 1955). How the Martian and Venusian spacemen got along with Khauga was not at once made clear, but Khauga’s medical quackery was readily incorporated into the new Cosmic Revelations. After Ferguson’s death in 1967, the cult appears gradually to have dwindled out of existence.

 

The Ground Crew Project

The Ground Crew Project is a UFO project that began in the 1980s and is based in California and Hawaii. The purpose of the ground crew is to prepare humanity for the first Earth contact, with “Galactic Federation,” which is said to be an extraterrestrial organization that will contribute to the great transformation that the Earth is about to undergo. In fact, the members of the group play the main role as mediators between the claimed extraterrestrial beings and the inhabitants of the earth. The ground Crew has been more active since 2012, when the Earth approached the photon belt. And now it is thought that this contact will happen shortly.

 

The Order of the Solar Temple

Founded by Luc Jouret and Joseph Di Mambro, The Order of the Solar Temple’ or also known as ‘Ordre du Temple Solaire’ is a secret cult or society which is believed to be based on the ideological perspectives of the Knights Templar. The leader of this obscure cult, Joseph Di Mambro, is known to have brainwashed his followers into believing that he was, in his previous life, a part of the Christian Order of the Knights Templar that dominantly operated in the 14th Century. Furthermore, he led them to believe that Emanuelle, his daughter, was “the cosmic child”.

The mysterious cult came to light in 1994 when in a shocking event, 23 corpses were discovered in Fribourg at a Swiss Canton and another 25 corpses were discovered in Valais. It had only been 5 days since three people were murdered in Canada –a couple from Switzerland and their baby son, Emmanuel Dutoit, who was believed to have been the Antichrist and was stabbed repeatedly to death by a wooden stake. The suicidal acts of the cult continued from 1994 to 1997 and in totality, a shocking number of 74 followers of the cult had committed mass suicide.

 

Unarius

Unarius is a non-profit organization founded in 1954 in Los Angeles, California, and headquartered in El Cajon, California. The organization purports to advance a new “interdimensional science of life” based upon “fourth-dimensional” physics principles. Unarius centers exist in Canada, New Zealand, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and various locations in the United States.

Unarius is an acronym for “Universal Articulate Interdimensional Understanding of Science”. The founder, and subsequent “channels” and “sub-channels”, have written books filled with channeled dissertations from alleged advanced intelligent beings that exist on higher frequency planes. Over 100 volumes have been published since 1954.

 

The Urantia Community

The Urantia Book (sometimes called The Urantia Papers or The Fifth Epochal Revelation) is a spiritual, philosophical, and religious book that originated in Chicago sometime between 1924 and 1955. The authorship remains a matter of speculation. It has received various degrees of interest ranging from praise to criticism for its religious and science content, its unusual length, and its lack of a known author.

The text introduces the word “Urantia” as the name of the planet Earth and states that its intent is to “present enlarged concepts and advanced truth.” The book aims to unite religion, science, and philosophy, and its enormous amount of material about science is unique among literature claimed to be presented by celestial beings. Among other topics, the book discusses the origin and meaning of life, mankind’s place in the universe, the relationship between God and people, and the life of Jesus.

 

Joy of Satan Ministries

Joy of Satan Ministries, also referred to as Joy of Satan (JoS), is a website and western esoteric occult organization founded in 2002 by Maxine Dietrich (Andrea Maxine/Dietrich). Joy of Satan Ministries advocates “Spiritual Satanism”, and presents a unique synthesis of Theistic Satanism, National Socialism, Gnostic Paganism, Western esotericism, UFO conspiracy theories and extraterrestrial beliefs similar to those popularized by Zecharia Sitchin and David Icke.

While Joy of Satan Ministries maintains some popularity as a significant Theistic Satanist sect since their creation, they have also been the topic of significant controversy for their anti-Semitic beliefs and a marital connection to a former high-ranking member of the National Socialist Movement on the part of the high-priestess of the group.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Shane Christmass, Hi, Shane. Indeed. You good? ** T. J., Hi, T. J. Welcome! Yeah, Gary used to have a blog for a short while that was really crazy (in the great way). He was actually on Facebook very briefly a long time ago, and I remember all of his posts there were on the order of ‘What is this place? What am I supposed to do? I don’t know what I’m doing’, etc., and then he vanished. I’m not sure why he’s so non-present online. It seems like he’d be a thriving presence, for sure. Thanks a lot for coming in and chiming in. How are you? What are you doing? ** David Ehrenstein, Yes, so very sad about Richard. When I was young and just starting out, he and his venue A Different Light in Silverlake were so kind and supportive to me. And he was like that to everyone, whether it was weirdos like me or writers with more mainstream intentions. And he was always like that. When he was a higher up at the Lammys, they were at their most adventurous and impactful. A truly fine and great person in every respect. And yesterday on Facebook where his death was announced, there were hundreds of comments by queer writers of every stripe, from the most famous to the newest, speaking to his importance to them. Truly a remarkable person. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Yeah, death is all around these days, and painfully close in many instances. I think you’d really like Gary’s writings. ** Misanthrope, Thanks. I strangely don’t feel any noticeable ill effects from smoking. Well, until I have to climb numerous flights of stairs, that is. Yes, the conservatism I was speaking of inhabits people from all over the political spectrum. It goes deeper than that, I think. ** Ryan angusrazeinton, Hi. It was wack. Tonsillitis! Yeek! I’ve never had my tonsils out, so I’m always slightly afraid I’ll get it. Sounds extremely not fun. Ha ha, I think I sort of like bodily fluids,. Well, not all of them, and not from close up in most cases. But I tend to always about everything as information, so it’s like, oh, what interesting and rare information about that person extruding that fluid. Or something. I don’t know. Love back. ** Jeff J, Oh, weird. Or cool. And weird. Jeremy D. might just be the world’s biggest Gary Indiana fan. The Voice art columns were very intense, and the Voice gave him total freedom, which is probably why they seem the most sharp and remarkable. Well, the novella started life as the script of that doomed ARTE TV series, and then it got revised into a film that Gisele was going to direct, and then we did a reinvention of it to be a novella, so it going in the direction of audio book/radio play is kind of returning it to its roots, and it makes great sense since the texts were written to be performed, and the prospect of making a novel or novella that is sound only is exciting to think about, and I think it’s the most natural form for the text ultimately. I’m not working on a novel, but I am writing and fiddling with some short fiction. It’s possible one of them could explode into a novel, but it doesn’t feel that way right now anyway. Congrats on the new drummer! Sounds super promising. An installation too. So you’re firing on all cylinders and all of that. Me too, I guess. Feels kind of scattered but implosive or something, right? Thanks about Richard. A very sad loss. ** _Black_Acrylic, As you know and feel all too well, my friend. It is a very strange time. So much is receding. ** Steve Erickson, Okay, well, good to know. I’m sure your dad will tell you if you’re needed beforehand. Thanks about Richard. You’re probably too young too have experienced A Different Light bookstore in its heyday, but it was a very important enterprise in its time. You put it very well about The Discourse. I don’t know if you’re watching the KBJ hearings, but …Jesus! Subtlety and Larry Kramer were ships in the night, god love him. ** Rafe, Hi. Right, gotcha. It was the same for me. I mostly just quick-skimmed the assigned readings in school and faked it, which strangely pretty much always worked. Meanwhile while closely reading things that would have gotten me expelled. I don’t need to tell you that your instincts are God. Yes, for the audio-novel/play we will have performers read the texts, which are about 90% in dialogue form. And then there will be ambient sounds to fill in the ‘visual’ part, and a neutral voice to set things up and provide very brief descriptions of what isn’t being seen. I think it’s going to be pretty great and fresh, or I hope so. I hope you have a super great and very non-boring day. ** Okay. Today you get an old, restored post about UFOs made the long lost d.l. Vomittingghosts that I hope you will enjoy as thoroughly as he originally intended. See you tomorrow.

 

‘The copy of Gone Tomorrow I wanted was a hardcover listed on Amazon as a “1993 Gay Signed First Edition,” printed in England by Pantheon, but it cost 40 dollars plus shipping. The one I ordered was an American paperback, which had an apter name on the spine—High Risk Books—and an equally suitable price of three dollars and 99 cents. Three days later it came as advertised, in very good condition. No signs appeared of a former owner. Pages were unbent, words were neither underlined nor highlighted, and nothing was written in the margins until the end of the second-last chapter, minutes from close.

‘Here the dying subject, an art-house director—Paul Grosvenor—who has been diagnosed with HIV, gets groceries with the unnamed narrator, a quondam young actor, on the last day they will be together. Like most of the novel, the scene is told from memory during the course of an unplanned long afternoon the narrator spends with another man, Robert, a mutual friend last seen at the funeral. He recalls going with Paul into the corner grocery, a mom-and-pop store. Paul took a shopping basket and began tearing through the place. He threw in a bottle of orange juice, then a bottle of grapefruit juice, a six-pack of Heineken, a jug of cranberry juice. Cheese. Cheddar cheese, brie cheese, blue cheese, provolone. Sweet Italian sausage. Hot Italian sausage. More cheese. A head of lettuce. A dozen eggs.

‘What is the rush? A staving off. Enough is in the cart for Babette’s dinner and Leopold Bloom’s breakfast. Only, Paul is not hungry. He’s desperate, filling time with the wan hope of more time.

‘At the bottom of the page a reader has jotted, in black gel ink newer than the paper, a neat seven words. Graphologists examining the words would say that the annotator was a thwarted idealist, with a tendency toward sarcasm and anomie, in love with ambivalence; that he was regressive, fixated on ideas, modest and economical and at the same spontaneous, with a sharpened wit.

‘In Gone Tomorrow the motives and ends are both ulterior, the plotting kairotic. Paul, a cipher for Dieter Schidor (to whom the book is dedicated), begins making a film so experimental that the script is unfinished at shooting time in Bogotá, Columbia. Under the posthumous influence of a Low German auteur à la Fassbinder, he travels and works with a sybaritic entourage led by a translator whose name—Valentina Vogel—rings predictively of Veronika Voss. His ambition is fateful. Starring in the film is Irma, a rusty sexpot who effumes the “silvery illusion of perverse insatiability.” Opposite her is Michael, an unknown whose “southern beauty” is “so extreme that it … rip[s off] the veneer of civilization,” which is to say he looks like the girl in Joseph Conrad’s Victory. (That Indiana and Joan Didion have the same favorite Conrad novel makes sense. He likes to trace, as she does but less overtly, less permanently, the journey Heyst takes away from the world and from the self which exists because of others, and to linger on the eve of sure disaster.)

‘The narrator, whose part seems minor, watches the leads rehearse a sex scene. “Between them is developing the possibility of murder,” says Paul. “Between their characters,” the narrator tries to clarify, but the working definition of love is already clear. Locals say a serial killer is loose in Bogotá. Dinner is interrupted by the most erotic cockroach since the one in Clarice Lispector’s maid’s room. A situationist orgy among friends concludes the first act, and the second, where love is made on acid at Dachau and men die at home, makes as sharp a veer on paper as that between the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany.

‘Indiana once, in an essay on Brecht and Weill’s opera, The City of Mahoganny, found it “possible to view the entire Weimar period. . . as one of reprieve—a long one, relatively speaking, that produced an immense outpouring of creative work,” which he likens to the time of cheap rent in a post-Robert Moses, pre-Donald Trump Manhattan, i.e. the mid-60s to early 80s. Sarah Schulman, in her decade-old polemic The Gentrification of The Mind, remembers the critic Michael Bronski saying, at a conference on “AIDS literature” in 1998, that if it weren’t for fear of the homo it would be “American literature.” With Schulman, it’s possible to imagine a world where Indiana is as American as John Knowles (and only slightly more homosexual). Indiana, who is from New Hampshire the way Conrad is from Poland, may not want to be that American: He belongs to literature, purely. But, like Schulman, he dreads progressive memory loss, the encroachment of normalcy that passes for understanding.’ — Sarah Nicole Prickett

 

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Further

Gary Indiana @ Wikipedia
Gary Indiana’s ‘Gone Tomorrow:’ An Examination And Celebration Of Corrupted Beauty
INTERVIEW WITH GARY INDIANA
Gus Van Sant by Gary Indiana
Emma Tennant by Gary Indiana
Gary Indiana, The Art of Fiction No. 250
Killing Time
A Small but Important Job: Gary Indiana’s “Vile Days”
Gary Indiana @ goodreads
Gary Indiana Coughs Up Some ‘Hairballs of Insight’
Gary Indiana’s Great Material
Looking Back: interview by GARY INDIANA
loserville
Sleep When I’m Dead: Gary Indiana Might Be Out of Print, But He’s Still Going Strong
Don’t Call Gary Indiana a Gay Writer
Unhappy Thoughts
The Dry-Eyed Mourning of Gary Indiana
why write: Gary Indiana — clarifying questions, scrambling for survival
A Talent for the Low & High
Always Leave Them Wanting Less
Artificial Centuries: Hate and the City in Gary Indiana’s Criticism
Gary Indiana on the psychoanalytic writings of Louise Bourgeois
The Laws of Depravity
Gary Indiana on Nina Simone’s ‘Everything Must Change’
Buy ‘Gone Tomorrow’

 

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Extras

Unveiled: A Symposium on Gary Indiana at 356 Mission

Lecture | Gary Indiana: The Artist as Writer and Analysand

Visual & Critical Studies presents Gary Indiana

 

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Diaries 1989–90
from BOMB

 

Monday November 11, 1989

Cookie died Friday. I saw Victoria Pedersen in the Korean deli near Simon’s place, I had gone over there to eat some Chinese take-out with Simon. I was in an access of frustration about having wasted the whole afternoon writing a reply to the woman who reviewed Hanuman Press in the Voice, who then wrote a long letter against my review of her review. Raymond says this girl is a complete liar. I think she was just ignorant about various things and is now being stupidly defensive. The first draft of her letter was actually conciliatory and admitted certain mistakes in her article, but after being “advised” by various editors she’s written a new one that’s totally abusive and hysterical. I just love all the support I get from the Village Voice. They would much rather have people calling each other names and sounding like idiots than anything like a reasonable discussion. The whole thing has gotten completely out of hand and I wish I’d kept my mouth shut. Anyway, Victoria told me Cookie was dead and we both cried and I sat around Simon’s feeling like I’d been in a car wreck.

16 November 1989 Thursday

The funeral was grueling. People wandered in and out of St. Marks Church before the service, viewing the body. When Sharon arrived I was outside smoking cigarettes with Stephen Mueller and she sort of pulled me along with her into the church—she had a dog on a leash, and an urn full of what later turned out to be the ashes of Beauty, the dog Jackie Curtis gave Cookie when we were working on A Couple of White Faggots Sitting Around Talking years ago, which were evidently buried with Cookie—and marched directly up to the coffin, which was ringed by dozens of white candles spluttering away in little glasses. I’d vowed not to look and there I was, suddenly. Cookie looked shrunken and green-violet in color, not at all the miracle of preservation Sharon had led me to expect a few nights earlier on the phone. Scott Covert, quite unhinged by everything, he said he was moving to Egypt. I told him Egypt was a death culture and it wouldn’t be much of an escape. I guess everybody in the world showed up for this, I couldn’t really focus on anything though I was trying to take Stuart’s advice and look at it “as a writer.” Clarissa said when I called her, “I don’t know what to say, I’m not really the sort of person who can produce emotions on cue.” I thought: me either. Sharon sang at the end, in an incredible voice. It was just like the end of Imitation of Life.

One thing that crossed my mind was, I should really take steps to avoid this kind of thing if I pass on anytime soon—I only want Barbara and Lynne and Betsy present, and maybe a few other people, and they can dump my ashes off the Staten Island Ferry or use them to coat the rims of margarita glasses for all I care.

Collective grief is really for the birds. Even when I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on what was really taking place, I kept thinking: “God, this room is full of people who wouldn’t piss on me if my guts were on fire.”

December 11, 1989

Saturday, went with Bob Gober to Vito Russo’s lecture at the Public, and then he and his friend John went with me to Noho Star to pick up Tina. Tina and I took a cab to Brooklyn. The cab driver was Chinese or Japanese or something, and everything in his noisy rundown cab was crooked: the front seat tilted funnily to the left, his rear view mirror was tilted almost straight up. Marianne Faithfull was terrific, though I could’ve lived without the opening Bach cantata and the piece by Stravinsky, a composer I really detest. Living in New York you get sick of loud noises.

Coming back, we took a car service after walking around in subzero for a long time. The car service driver was mental. We had to share the car with some yuppies who didn’t quite know where they were going. The driver expatiated at length his theory that “more neuters are being born every day than regular males and females,” he went on and on with these scarily irrational “theories” which he said “philosophers” knew all about. We got out at Wooster and Prince and went into 150. The usual clutch of overdressed hyenas, but Taylor Mead was there as he’d said he’d be, so we hung out with him, drinking way too much rum and coke. Frankie Clemente showed up. Brian McNally came over to banter with Taylor, who’s just come back from Portugal extremely flush and described working with Donald Sutherland, Valentina Cortese, Geraldine Chaplin, and some gorgeous German actor. At one point Taylor said, “I resent what was done in some of my crucial scenes,” and I said, “Taylor, I want that inscribed on my tombstone.”

December 22, 1989 Friday

Dinner last night with Tina at a restaurant called Woody’s on 4th Street. It’s owned by Rolling Stone Ron Wood, apparently. The front room set up like all the cappucino places in the neighborhood, spindly-looking tables with fake marble tops, too small for serving dinner, some square, some round. The food was not awful but very pedestrian, sort of what you’d expect from people who think Ron Wood is anything special. Next door they’ve got a Florsheim Shoes sort of art gallery with actual paintings by Ron Wood. They should specialize and handle Tony Curtis, Xavier Cougat, and other showbiz artists. Maybe Mel Torme paints, too. I had carpaccio and spaghetti putanesca, which they make with bits of chicken in it.

January 2, 1990 Tuesday

New Years’ Eve with Sharon, at Cookie’s. Frank and Stephen were there, John Heys, Nan Goldin, Scott Covert, and a lot of people I didn’t know. Ronnie Vawter came down from upstairs, he’s started smoking again. Afterwards I went with Sharon to Cuando, a mob scene. Then at around 4 AM we went back to Bleecker St. and took some of Cookie’s leftover painkillers. We considered taking the AZT but decided against it. Last night Anne Livet had a party, black eyed peas and hamhocks and collard greens, Clarissa and Frank and Stephen and Sharon again, Anne insisted we stay until the very end. Sarah Charlesworth and Amos, Sarah dancing all her old Hullabaloo dances and insisting that people who didn’t want to dance dance. Iris Owens with lots of advice about quitting cigarettes.

January 4, 1990

Last night: nothing. Trouble sleeping. I found myself watching or at least listening to an idiotic Dario Argente movie featuring Karl Maiden and Tony Franciosa. Sharon called this morning at 11:30, waking me up; the article on Cookie had appeared, she wanted to come over for coffee.

This was a bad beginning. For one thing, I’d some free time today and could have used it productively. But, all right. The article was basically unobjectionable: full of inaccuracies and stupid cliche statements, naturally, and the kind of gross oversimplification American media thrives on. Sharon, however, kept grousing as she read along, about trivia, and then some wide statements which were in fact offensive, but could have been a million times worse. Sharon’s always picking herself apart, or else distracting herself with this sort of thing. I pointed out that Newsday is a daily paper and every single copy of it would be in the garbage the next day. Including mine, actually.

I somehow bought into Sharon’s negativity about the whole thing, but after an hour or so I began feeling suffocated by it and proposed lunch at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central. We took a cab up there and pigged out on clams and oysters, I had two beers which I really shouldn’t have had because the depressive overlay of the afternoon simply thickened under the alcohol. We did talk about other things, but mainly things that depressed us. Anita Sarko was having lunch with someone in the other dining room. When we came back downtown, Sharon asked to come upstairs and listen to music for an hour. I should’ve said no but I just couldn’t, and by the time she left I felt this intense despair, almost a suicidal despondency.

January 10, 1990

Dinner with David and Tina at Mary Ann’s—the Mexican place we were going to on Avenue A was packed—and I have never seen such an ugly plate of anything. Chunks of duck covered in some kind of green pumpkin sauce, plus rice and beans. It really looked like vomit and I couldn’t eat any of it. Tina had some kind of enchilada that smelled like bad feet. David said later his dinner was off, too. I despise restaurants like that, where they serve big heaping portions of questionable food … but this duck dish was really beyond anything I’d ever seen before. The duck seemed to be cooked enough but besides being smothered in this grainy green sauce, it came in layers of pale oily skin … The waitress seemed to derive sadistic pleasure out of asking if we were enjoying the meal, and of course we like idiots told her everything was just fine.

January 15, 1990 Monday

A horrible visit to Charles with Taylor. The place overrun by dogs and cats, which would be all right except that Timmy, the dog Charles rescued after its intestines or bowels got somehow twisted and had to be operated on, regularly deposits big pools of liquid shit and vomit all over the place, provoking endless agony outbursts from Charles, who needs no provocation anyway. I mean the shit and puke were bad enough without him going on about it. Sometimes Charles is terrific, and then there are these times when he just isn’t. Namely in the wintertime when you can’t go outside to get away from him. His car had broken down and a cab had to take us to his house. From then it was just nonstop lamentation and complaint. He doesn’t even offer a glass of wine, let alone anything like a meal. So we had to pick up a ton of frozen food at the Grand Union and fix whatever we wanted, not that either of us felt like eating, what with the shitorama in the living room. The house was cold, uncomfortable, and listening to Charles for 24 hours was like being locked up in a psychiatric hospital.

January 16, 1990 Tuesday

Yesterday some awful bitch called from German Vogue, asking me for “2000 words on Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, and Haim Steinbach,” explaining their wonderful ideas. I told her it wasn’t something I wanted to do. In actual fact, I would rather go to hell. This sailed right past her. These editors are not trained to hear a refusal and I think she went into shock when I again told her it wasn’t anything I was interested in. I tried to recommend David Riminelli but she wasn’t hearing anything at that point. Well, fuck her, and fuck German Vogue.

January 24, 1990 Wednesday

Sharon called up late Monday night and we met at Eileen’s. She was on her way home from I forget where, she seemed in one of her stark moods and I’m sure I didn’t lift it all that considerably. The benefit for Carl Apfelschnitt is in a week and a half. After a point in life, a lot of things become absolutely incommunicable unless you really strain yourself to communicate them—last night, John DeFazio’s place turned out to be a block east of where Carl used to have the top floor of the Bowery Savings Bank, and I remembered the day I walked east from Carl’s and discovered all these Jewish shops along there, how it was like this whole strange little microworld opening up in my mental landscape. There was the one summer when I spent a great deal of my time with Carl—just before and during the time when Betsy lived there, starting with the Mary Lemley period. He was in love with (name deleted), a real sex trip that Carl always made sound terribly desperate and bizarre.

I can see Carl at all these different moments in time, the same way I visualize Cookie at different moments, and it is so queer and disturbing. It’s as if you should be able to rewind the film and step into that moment and be there, and you can’t.

 

___
Book

Gary Indiana Gone Tomorrow
Seven Stories Press

‘Footloose and broke, the unnamed narrator of Gone Tomorrow hops on a plane without asking questions when his director friend offers him a role in an art film set in Colombia. But from the moment he arrives at the airport in Bogotá, only to witness a policeman beat a beggar half to death, it becomes clear that this will not be the story of gritty bohemians triumphing against the odds. The director, Paul Grosvenor, seems more interested in manipulating his cast than in shooting film. The cult star, Irma Irma, is a vamp too bored and boring to draw blood. And the beautiful, nymph-like Michael Simard doesn’t seem to be putting out. Meanwhile, the film’s shady financier is sleeping with his mother, while a serial killer skulks about the area killing tourists. Everything comes to a head when the carnaval celebration begins in nearby Cali. But once the fiesta is over, all that’s left are ghostly memories and the narrator’s insistence on telling the tale. “Unlike the majority of pointedly AIDS-era novels,” writes Dennis Cooper, “Gone Tomorrow is neither an amoral nostalgia fest nor a thinly veiled wake-up call hyping the religion of sobriety. It’s a philosophical work devised by a writer who’s both too intelligent to buy into the notion that a successful future requires the compromise of collective decision and too moral to accept bitterness as the consequence of an adventurous life.”’ — Seven Stories

Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. RIP Richard Labonte. Hero. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, thanks. ** Misanthrope, Hi. I still smoke about a pack a day, but I need them light. Unless something forces me away from smoking or smoking at that level, I’m sticking to it. There’s just so much death lately among friends of mine and/or people I admire, it’s fucking weird. My friend Richard Labonte, one of the great heroes and pioneers of Gay Lit just, died yesterday. It’s too much. It’s a weirdly conservative time in culture with critics and the seeming majority of art imbibers entrenching and fearing being taken places they don’t already know well. Luckily the artists are still making daring stuff, but the venues to both respectability and a wider audience are as tough as I’ve ever seen them. It makes no sense to me, but it never has. Why are people so afraid of themselves and, at the same time, of losing themselves? Blah blah, too long a discussion for the likes of the p.s. ** _Black_Acrylic, His stuff is beautiful stuff, I think. I hope you enjoy it. The main or only thing its that the classes are working for you. Length is overrated, as we all know. Ugh, the pressure to go autobiographical. Especially when they think you have an angle. It’s a strange compulsion to push people towards working with their autobio and the knee-jerk idea that that’s some kind of ultimate arena for artists to work in. Obviously, don’t take that suggestion to heart and work with whatever most excites you. That’s always the only guideline. ** Ry Of Razeland, I’m good thank you very much! Hope your throat has stopped acting weird and prickly. Tom of Finland, yeah. I’ve never fully gotten the thing of his thing, although he was a hell of a draftsman, and he sure had a focused vision, and I guess that’s the key. Pup play is so massive right now. ABDL/infantilism too. The turn towards those two fetishes seems related and meaningful somehow. I’d be interested to talk with some Pup because the flirty profiles that Pups make are so goofy I can’t quite penetrate that. Kinks I’ve encountered, like, in the flesh? Because making the slave/escort posts I’ve encountered every kink you can imagine and can’t imagine from afar. In person … there was a guy who only got off by having Disney figurine toys scotch taped to his skin then pulled off because he liked the dents they left. Gross? Um, I guess maybe this guy who only got off by drinking other people’s vomit? xo. ** Steve Erickson, Ha ha, thank you. Herbal cigarettes make me nauseous, but maybe I could use them as a film prop. Shit, about your mom. Maybe you should go see them? Would you being in her face help and make a difference? ** Rafe, Hi. Your laptop’s dumpster, ha ha, yeah, I know that realm well, of course. Sometimes one finds the most unexpected treasures in there. It sounds exciting to me: your ongoing project. Not interesting school assignments, I’m gathering? Do you like school at all, or are you getting ultimately valuable stuff from there, do you think? ** Corey Heiferman, Hi, Corey. Mm, all kinds of stuff are new, happily. Maybe that should be ‘is’ not ‘are’. Glad everything is upswinging. Things are moving in an upwards motion here too, and, yeah, I’m wildly suspicious of it. Um, you … dressed up as … a pile on a floor after a birthday party? I’m blank. I liked ‘Basket Case’ too. Can’t remember if I saw ‘2’. Seems like I’d remember if I did. Beardo. Cool. Uh, yeah in the younger teen hippie days I stopped shaving for periods, but my facial hair grows in not so regularly or thickly, so Just looked kind of scraggly. Luckily, looking scraggly when you’re young is cool. ** Dom Lyne, Hey, Dom! Exciting! There was a point when I thought I was done with writing novels, but then I ended up liking writing ‘I Wished’ so much that I changed my mind. Nice, jazzy feeling. ** Jeff J, Hi. Yeah, as you saw, there are quite a few earlier films online. I was surprised by that. Things are finally happening with our film. We got the green light at last, and we’re planning to shoot the film in September/October in SoCal, and now we’re hunting for a Production Manager. When we find one, we’ll go to LA and start helping assemble a crew. Next week we meet with someone we’d really like to have as our DP, and we’ll see if we get lucky. So, it’s on its way, as hard as that is to believe. The novella: we’ve decided it’s going be kind of anaudio book, kind of radio play-like novel, for sound only, and we’ll record that as soon as we finish the film. I think it’s ideal for the text, and it’s pretty exciting prospect. Other than those things, just starting to work on the text for Gisele’s next piece, and ‘I Wished’ and the film of ‘Jerk’ come out in France on the same day soon, so I’m doing some stuff around that. All is well. Any further news on you and yours? ** Jon Jost, Hi, Jon! Wow, it’s a great pleasure and an honor to see you here! Thank you so much for the links! Everyone, Jon Jost, one of America’s greatest filmmakers — here’s the blog’s Jon Jost Day from a years back — was a good friend and peer of Peter Hutton, and he wrote a recollection of Hutton that is no doubt fascinating. He also made a film/video dedicated to his memory, and he is very generously sharing it with us. It’s here, and the password is MOUNTAINS. I extremely highly recommend that you watch it and read Jon’s memorial piece, and they are serious gifts! I would greatly love to see your new film, of course! My email is: denniscooper72@outlook.com, and I will of course share my thoughts, Thank you so much! Yes, I live in Paris, and it would be fantastic and a true pleasure to meet you if ever come through here. Please let me know if Paris ends up on your agenda. Thank you so much again for coming in here and for your great generosity and for your amazing work. ** Right. Today the blog’s spotlight falls on one of my favorite novels by the singular and inimitable writer/author Gary Indiana. Have a blast. See you tomorrow.