Carl Abrahamsson's Blog, page 34
October 29, 2020
My new novel is released!
Happy Halloween! My new novel, The Devil’s Footprint, has just been released. It’s a wild ride of a satirical tome, featuring well-known fictional culprits God and Satan. Can God be cured of his “Humanitis”? Can Satan fix the mess the humans have made? Join the Devil’s “Team Apocalypse” now to find out!
“God proposes the challenge of the millennium: if Satan sorts out the ever growing human mess on Earth, God will lovingly take him back to Heaven as his favorite Archangel. Satan accepts, and sets out on a massive operation to balance out over-population, pollution, corruption, and other severely Satanic headaches – many of which he originally helped create… Easier said than done!
Satan’s love of the ambitiously mischievous humans is challenged as his own “Team Apocalypse” fervently sets to work. But as the world begins to change quickly and dramatically for the better, a new question arises: can God and his suspicious Archangels really be trusted in this cataclysmic, cosmic undertaking?”
Get your own paperback copy of The Devil’s Footprint!
October 28, 2020
Radio Mega Golem – Episode 5
Welcome to Radio Mega Golem: a transmission for and from the Mega Golem – the artwork created by Carl Abrahamsson in 2009, and which has since been partially added to by a number of other artists.
LISTEN TO EPISODE 5: ”Cascades of Destiny”
Invisible guests of Radio Mega Golem this evening were the omnivorous forces of Nothing and No-one.
If you want to support Radio Mega Golem and/or Mega Golem Incorporated, please join our patrons at:
For more background information about the Mega Golem project, please listen to the previous episodes, and please also read:
Carl Abrahamsson: Reasonances (Scarlet Imprint, 2014)
scarletimprint.com/publications/reasonances
Carl Abrahamsson: Occulture – The Unseen Forces That Drive Culture Forward (Park Street Press, 2018)
www.innertraditions.com/books/occulture
Please also visit:
www.renderingunconscious.org
store.trapart.net
October 27, 2020
An interview for The Aither
I was recently interviewed by Josh Griffiths at the great site The Aither. My life story, condensed!
Photo from ca 1982!
October 25, 2020
A new episode of 23rd Mind TV
After a summer hiatus of three months, 23rd Mind TV returns with a packed episode with Vanessa Sinclair & Carl Abrahamsson.
… The Fenris Wolf 10 + 4, Switching Mirrors, The Devil’s Footprint, Into the Devil’s Den, Rendering Unconscious, Kimetic, Projections, Scansion in Psychoanalysis and Art, Mementeros, Damien Patrick Williams, Adel Souto, Paul “Bee” Hampshire + Thai Capsule, The Biscuit, Siamese Pearl, Noir Age, Richard Vergez, Blood, Cum and Spit fanzine, Hector Domiane + Eros Mecanique etc. All this and more in the brand new episode!
October 20, 2020
The Fenris Wolf 4 is back!
The Fenris Wolf 4 is back! It sold out already in 2011, and has since fetched crazy prices second hand. Now you can get your own copy right HERE.
Material by Peter H Gilmore, Peter Grey, John Duncan, Ramsey Dukes, Tim O’Neill, Thomas Karlsson, David Beth, Payam Nabarz, Hiram Corso, Jean-Pierre Turmel, Kendell Geers, Z’EV, Robert Taylor, Phil Farber, Thomas Bey William Bailey, Ernst Jünger, Baba Rampuri, Aki Cederberg, and Carl Abrahamsson, on topics as diverse as Thelema, Kenneth Anger, Satanism, democracy, the astral technology of “Civilization X”, the blood mysteries of the Blutleuchte, The Process Church of the Final Judgement, an interview with Timothy Wyllie, the power of profane language and cursing, the cabalistic calls, the pantheon of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, magical uses of the Dreamachine, the esoteric order Dragon Rouge, Terence McKenna, psychedelics, LSD, psilocybin, Indian spirituality, Naga Babas, magical pilgrimages, a unique series of evocative ink images by Swedish artist Fredrik Söderberg, and much more.
#thefenriswolf #carlabrahamsson #occulture #magicoanthropology #magic #dreamachine #williamburroughs #briongysin #genesisporridge #lsd #psychedelic #psychedelics #psilocybin #processchurch #theprocess #dragonrouge #satanism #babas #aghoribaba #nagababa #hinduism #topy #theetempleovpsychickyouth #churchofsatan #trapartbooks
September 26, 2020
Switching Mirrors is (paper)back!
Vanessa’s magical collection of cut-up poetry, SWITCHING MIRRORS, is now available as a paperback!
Switching Mirrors is an amazing collection of cut-ups and mind-expanding poetry by Vanessa Sinclair. Delving into the unconscious and actively utilising the “third mind” as developed by William S Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Sinclair roams through suggestive vistas of magic, witchcraft, dreams, psychoanalysis, sex and sexuality (and more). Causal apprehensions are disrupted by a flow of impressions that open up the mind of the reader. What’s behind language and our use of it? What happens when random factors and the unconscious are given free reign in poetic form? Switching Mirrors is what happens.
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/9198624261
UK/Europe: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/9198624261
(Or your regional Amazon site)
Trapart Books have a few copies left of the deluxe, first edition of the book, which comes with a cut-up collage print by Vanessa:
https://store.trapart.net/details/00027
To hear the musical versions of many of these pieces, please check out the Switching AND Mirrors albums:
https://vanessasinclaircarlabrahamsson.bandcamp.com/
Vanessa Sinclair, Psy.D. is a psychoanalyst based in Stockholm, Sweden, who sees clients internationally. Her books include Switching Mirrors (Trapart Books, 2016), The Fenris Wolf, vol 9 (Trapart Books, 2017) co-edited with Carl Abrahamsson, On Psychoanalysis and Violence: Contemporary Lacanian Perspectives (Routledge, 2018) co-edited with Manya Steinkoler, and Scansion in Psychoanalysis and Art: the Cut in Creation (Routledge, 2020). Dr. Sinclair is also a founding member of Das Unbehagen: A Free Association for Psychoanalysis, organizing conferences and events internationally, and is the host of Rendering Unconscious Podcast.
September 24, 2020
Cinematicks: Salon Kitty
“Salon Kitty” (Tinto Brass, It/Fr/Ger, 1976)
Liliana Cavani’s “The Night Porter” (1974) set more things in motion than mere dismay and upset reviews. Her film also brought other films on the same hot topic. Italian softcore maestro Tinto Brass jumped on this “Nazisploitation” bandwagon and graduated with honors; with his “Salon Kitty” (1976) he carved out a place in film history (more so than with his following epic, “Caligula,” (1979)) that’s irrevocable – also not unlike Cavani.
Ingrid Thulin portrays Madame Kitty – in charge of her own brothel, and carrying on in a carefree Weimar spirit. This changes when SS officer Wallenberg (exquisitely portrayed by Helmut Berger) tells her to move her business to new premises – a property prepared with microphones in each room. With a stable of new girls, chosen for their devotion to National Socialism and thoroughly examined by Wallenberg and the SS, Kitty has her hands full again.
Thulin is absolutely wonderful as the hysteric Madame. For her, it’s all song & dance, champagne and outrageous outfits, while her girls pleasure soldiers, officers and other potentati. Each girl secretly reports on each customer, and the devious SS staff can compare the reports with their own recordings (that the girls, as well as Kitty, are unaware of).
Hence, a simple story of betrayal and perversion, set in a time and space usually displayed via filmic filters of war and martial atrocities. But in Brass’s epic the venusian perspective rules supreme: flaunting not only an orgy of sexual activities and flamboyant cabaret acts (how did Thulin rate these, post-facto?) but also a keen aesthetic sense. Brass’s film revels in art deco, uniforms, and sensual yet soulless bodies in the obedient service of the Third Reich. The perspective is in itself a perverted look at something usually regarded basically as sacrosanct and confined exclusively to the sphere of suffering.
What Cavani opened up with her sexualizing – some would argue “fetishizing – of SS/victim relationships, Brass bends open further with typical Italian insensitivity and tasteful tastelessness. It’s “The Night Porter” mixed with “Cabaret” through a storyline that seems to exist merely as evanescent glue in-between tableaux of debauchery and erotic excess. The film feels rooted in its 1970s Europe as much as in a 1930s ditto – as much some kind of risqué fashion shoot by Helmut Newton as a shocking, pseudo-moralistic tale of good vs evil. “Salon Kitty” simply assaults the senses in a colourful and sordid mix of high & low.
Brass successfully got away with it; in part thanks to the elegant lavishness of the surface, but perhaps more so thanks to the brilliant casting of Thulin and Berger (who, of course, had bonded already in Visconti’s “The Damned” in 1969 – which also starred both Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling, who undoubtedly became the “it” girl of Nazi bdsm fantasies in Cavani’s masterpiece). They’re both cartoonish, but stylishly so – caught forever in grand style Eurosleaze exploitation cinema but with no reason for regrets at all.
September 22, 2020
The Fenris Wolf 10 is here!
THE FENRIS WOLF 10 is here – the voice of occulture and magico-anthropology howls again!
This volume contains material by Ludwig Klages, David Beth, Henrik Dahl, Peter Sjöstedt-H, Jesse Bransford, Max Razdow, Christopher Webster, Kendell Geers, Kadmus, Billie Steigerwald, Fred Andersson, Zaheer Gulamhusein, Charlotte Rodgers, Craig Slee, Damien Patrick Williams, Philip H. Farber, Thomas Bey William Bailey, Mitch Horowitz, Ramsey Dukes, Anders Lundgren, Peggy Nadramia, Nina Antonia, Jack Stevenson, Andrea Kundry, Joan Pope, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Vanessa Sinclair, Claire-Madeline Corso, and Carl Abrahamsson…
… On topics as diverse as magico-anthropology, sexual magic, eroto-psychedelic art, Friedrich Nietzsche’s use of psychoactive drugs, the occult meaning of the Fenris Wolf in Scandinavian Asatro, joint dreaming, mytho-historical traces within Völkish photography, the magic and influence of African art, disease as magical incentive, Cripkult, daoism, buddhism and machine consciousness, memetic entities, memetic magick, the transformative power of causative thinking, an interview with author Gary Lachman about Colin Wilson and his magical writings, dark Hollywood, Mike “Hellboy” Mignola and the Lovecraft connection, the full story of Benjamin Christensen’s cinematic masterpiece “Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922), the full story of Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible, the gnostic-alchemical eroticism in the art of Joan Pope, Genesis P-Orridge’s memories of a life of occultural experimentation, and much more…
Trapart Books 2020. Cover art by Val Denham. 6 x 9” paperback. 422 pages of inspiration: “A Smörgåsbord of Occulture & Delightenment!”
For the collectors: There is a special, limited edition of the book – 23 stamped, numbered copies signed by me, which each comes with a print of the cover image, numbered & signed by Val Denham. Get your copy here!
“Wherever we look in and into time and space, there is that one fundamental phenomenon which seems more ingrained and integrated in the human psyche than anything else. Soundly embedded inside the survival instinct, the human being’s relationship to magic has never really disappeared.” – Carl Abrahamsson, from the chapter “Onwards to the Source!”
September 7, 2020
Cinematicks: Bugsy Malone
Let’s get it straight: I hate most musicals after 1950. They’re disgusting and horrid, and have ruined music and good taste overall. Enough said.
However, I guess there are a few exceptions. I can enjoy “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (Jim Sharman, USA, 1975) without any problems at all. “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” (Mel Stuart, USA, 1971) is a great one too, as is its direct spawn: Tim Burton (and his musical partner in crime: Danny Elfman). Random bits and pieces from basically any Bollywood film can also be fun, because of the pleasant and colorful exotic hysteria, and (perhaps) assuming some kind of Busby Berkeley legacy. And then there’s also the truly odd one out: “Bugsy Malone” (Alan Parker, UK/US, 1976) But… so few films in basically 70 years of moviemaking… those are abysmal numbers.
I recently re-watched “Bugsy Malone.” This weird musical with a cast of kids only was a film I watched four times in the cinema when it came out, and I was only ten or eleven years old! Obviously it must have appealed to me. Revisiting it made me see why, partly. It’s charming, innocent, fun, with great tunes and musical performances. But it’s also flimsy, evanescent and downright silly – definitely appealing to a young audience.
Bugsy Malone is a sweet-talking small time gangster connected to Fat Sam and his “Fat Sam’s Grand Slam Speakeasy.” The joint’s rocking, with chorus girls, a great band, people enjoying themselves and drinking Sarsaparilla cocktails, while Fat Sam is raking it in.
But there’s trouble up ahead. A competing gang butts in on Fat Sam’s turf, armed with a brand new weapon: the splurge gun – basically a machine gun shooting whipped cream. If you get splashed or splurged, you’re out for good!
Amidst this sticky gang war, Bugsy (Scott Baio) courts the starlet Blousy (Florrie Dugger), while femme fatale Tallulah (Jodie Foster) pines for Bugsy. Micro-intrigues basically move the film forward, interrupted by song and dance numbers from gangsters, boxers and chorus girls.
The musical score (by Paul Williams) sounds like Beatles outtakes, slightly pushed back in time to give it some Zeitgeist oomph, and it’s really not bad at all. In a film that today is so wonderfully not-politically-correct, these songs help amplify its anomalous “fluke” position. Hearing a 13 year old and heavily dolled/made up Jodie Foster sing “No-one south of heaven is ever going to treat you finer – Tallulah had a training in North Carolina,” is like a breath of fresh air in an era when monstrosities like the TV series “Glee” actually exist in reality and not only in nauseating nightmares.
Kids only? It’s not a bad idea. There should be more movies with kids only. Not as ironical attributes or statements, or as a novelty act (like in “Bugsy Malone”). Just let them act all the parts… Empathy! Energy! Enthusiasm! It could be a whole new genre. Why not remake the films of Lynch, Wenders, von Trier, Herzog, Fassbinder, Bela Tarr, Bergman, Tarkovskij, et al, etc – with kids? I foresee a grand success.
Just like in the midget masterpiece “The Terror of Tiny Town” (Sam Newfield, USA, 1938) and Werner Herzog’s sadistic gem “Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen” (Germany, 1970), the aggressive appropriation of consensus normality from “adults” could become a real dramatic game changer, and a much needed Hollywood boom. There are simply too many boring normal adult actors and too many boring normal films around – bring in the small people with the big visions instead. (They would probably cost a whole lot less, too.)
August 30, 2020
Cinematicks: Carny
Carny (Robert Kaylor, USA, 1980)
While hunting for Elisha Cook, Jr-films, I came across “Carny” from 1980. Directed by Robert Kaylor, this film is a wonderful little gem about a carnival and some of its main people. The story is all gritty carnival flesh and blood, and its carny code of honor stands as proud as it did already in Tod Browning’s “Freaks” from 1932.
Frankie (Gary Busey) and Patch (Robbie Robertson) share a trailer, life, and girls on the road. Frankie’s job is being “Bozo” – the encaged clown that falls into a tub of water if you hit a certain target with a baseball. As that seems hard for the drunken visitors, Frankie valiantly eggs them on by insults galore.
Jack of all trades Patch is destined to take over the carnival one day, and goes from stall to stall, attraction to attraction, collecting all the “rubes” money, and paying off local poobahs and crooks.
There are swirling merry-go-rounds, lotteries, a freak show, a girly tent, and more. In many a muddy field in nowheresville, USA, the carnival brings a prurient titillation and relief for the entire family. And the carnies proudly provide this service of temporary dissociation and escapism in exchange for some of normality’s hard-earned dollars.
Into this world of sleazy magic steps Donna (Jodie Foster), and she quickly wants to join in. She hooks up with Frankie, and travels along for many unwelcoming miles of rednecked rural retrogression. She wants to work, and tries dancing in the girly tent. But when it gets too “hot” in there, and she tries stripping before she’s ready, Frankie and Patch (who dislikes her being around) decide that she should instead sweet talk the rubes in a lottery stall – which she does successfully; especially to the ladies of the lady-orientation.
There is seemingly always pressure from the locals – if not from corrupt politicians, then from bona fide criminals. When one particular gangster doesn’t get what he wants, he has his band of hoodlums thrash the carnival with a truck, which leads to the death of the carnival’s own granddad, “On Your Mark” (superbly played by Cook, Jr).
But… It should come as no surprise: Don’t mess with the carnies! On the following night, Donna becomes a volunteer honeytrap for the thug who drove the car. As he’s about to rape her, Patch slices the thug’s throat with a razor. A clean sweep of justice. His body is then displayed in a funhouse manner to the main gangster, inside the freak show tent. The gangster understandably freaks out and runs away. Justice has been served, and heals all other wounds (such as that between Frankie and Patch – over Donna, of course). The carnival exists in its own universe, on its own terms; honoring the code, hustling the rubes and just shuffling along.
This film really is a gem, because it so suavely combines the grit and the magic; the sordid and the emotional. Elisha Cook as a slightly demented old timer carny? Woodrow Parfrey as a barker? Gary Busey as a clown? Jodie Foster in lingerie on stage, in front of neanderthal yokels? And The Band’s Robbie Robertson as a righteous carny hand? What’s not to love?
Interesting to note is that Robertson co-produced the film, and provided real fodder for the script. At age 14, he worked on a carnival as a freak show assistant. Probably a good learning experience before entering the world of rock’n’roll.
This is an unlikely film – a cinematic spruce goose – and it’s easy to see how it could slip between the chairs of posterity. But that, to me, just makes it even more grand – once you’ve found it and savored it.
“Carny” is sleazy, convincing, and profoundly prurient in its sublime simplicity, while at the same time displaying some stellar performances from basically everyone in the cast. To combine old Hollywood dark side royalty like Elisha Cook, Jr and Woodrow Parfrey with a tender apparition like Jodie Foster is either an auspicious fluke or a stroke of genius – or both. And sandwiched in-between all of this, the buddy drama of two freewheeling hustlers; one armed with a clown face and a foul mouth, and one with a bundle of dirty bills and a sharp razor. A very agreeable combination. “Step right in, folks!”
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