Leander Watts's Blog, page 3

Velvet Goldmine

It's a song (1971) and a movie (1998.) Both are great, and neither one reached the huge audiences they deserve. "Velvet Goldmine" was recorded during the Ziggy Stardust sessions. But it got left off the album (a little too sexy-suggestive - "naked on your chain, I'll be your King
Volcano" - even in the golden glory days of glam.) Velvet Goldmine, the movie, was officially a bomb, losing millions of dollars. But they both capture the wondrous weirdness, the fey slippery feel that Bowie perfecte...

Diamond Dogs

It started with David Bowie. The first concert I ever went to was the first American date of his Diamond Dogs Tour. David Bowie live - June 17, 1974 - with twelve thousand wild glam fans. I remember the stage set (representing a place called  "Hunger City") more than the music. At one point Bowie sang trapped inside a mirror-glass "asylum." Even better was Bowie singing "Time" (off the Aladdin Sane album - which I played obsessively and still have - in the original cellophane sleeve) in...

AH SUNFLOWER

LISTEN.

HALLELUJAH DAGON

Well-worn musical icon of countless Christmas rites, “The Hallelujah Chorus” is Handel’s most famous piece. But he celebrated the slimy fish-god Dagon with as much verve, and far more wit. The same month that he completed Messiah (September 1741), Handel had started Samson. As he went to Dublin for Messiah’s premier, he was just finishing up his next oratorio, which begins with a chorus of crazed Philistines writhing and wailing at their pagan altar.

“Awake the trumpet’s lofty sound!
The joyf...

Ah! Böwakawa Poussé Poussé

 Rudy Kilowatt is a love-mad healer with twenty guitars, ten thousand gleaming steel needles and a head full of Maximum Shiva Mystic Ooze.

            I see Rudy every few weeks, at his headquarters down in Livingston County. I lie on the magic bed and hear Sanskrit chants while I dream of big throbbing color blur. He tells me that “the purple ooze is coming from your crown chakra” and a minute later, he’s trying to get me to see a ba...

Undercover Mormon Unleashed

When a not-exactly-normal guy cooks up a fake name, buys some white shirts, shaves clean, and enters the Mormon church, what does he find?

When most people hear the word “Mormon,” they think of Utah. But the real sacred sites aren’t in the desert. It all started in the boondocks of western New York State, which was, once upon a very strange time, the hottest hotbed of wild religion in the world.

Th. Metzger has lived his whole life in Rochester, just down the road from the cradle of Mormonism...

Metzger Mormon Podcast

In an hour long conversation, I talk with writer and scholar of weird-and-wild religion, Erik Davis.
Check out the Podcast on Expanding Mind Radio show. Plenty of arcane wisdom and secret strangeness is revealed.

Knocking on Heaven's Door

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The heart of Lon Chaney Jr. stopped dead on July 12, 1973. Medical students dissected him, as he’d dissected fake movie corpses a hundred times before. Lon’s lungs looked like moon rocks and his liver might’ve been a chunk of scorched iron meteorite. To this day, these organs are kept in jars as specimens of what extreme alcohol and tobacco use can do to the human body. There’s no grave to mark the final resting place of the rest of him.


That same week, Bob Dylan released “Knocking on Heaven’s...

This is Your Final Warning

GET EVOLVED
And get erect. Get your bad self out on the dance floor and shake your funky aspect. Get in line and make that stinky primate scene. Get rid of that hair and do the sex-is-a-beautiful-thing machine. Get your cool unit stirring up that mess and get out of that scummy gene pool before you start to regress. Get off that hairy bottom and do the low-down Pope. Get your primal horde together and do the don’t-use-soap. Get rid of that HAM BONE and let a man do the man’s man’s man’s world...

Satellite of Love

The last man stepped off the Moon in December of 1972 and the space age ended. The ominous nights of Sputnik and Telstar, the luminous days of Soyuz and Apollo, were over. Yet the glam in glamor still out-glows Venus or Sirius (the diamond dog-star). We can catch a glimmer if we turn our gazes outward. Something is up there, just beyond sight, beyond understanding. Something glistens and chitters on the sidereal horizon. Sex-change in the sky -transgendered planetary crossings - the radiation...