The Center of the Universe

I found out this morning that Depeche Mode is playing a free outdoor concert tonight at 8 pm at...Hollywood and Vine! (See my last post below for reference.) I don't have one of the fabled free passes but there are outdoor cafes near there and I plan to just go hang out and listen, and maybe see if I can see anything.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2009/04/depeche-mode-to-shut-down-hollywood-boulevard.html

There is a surprisingly spiritual aspect to this event. Anyone who reads my Parsifal's Horse blog or my Twitter posts knows I talk all the time about the axis mundi archetype. This concert is part of my stream with that. I will describe a little of this current thread here - the overarching flow is very Tao, a synchronous pattern based in the fractal unfolding of events along the golden mean.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_of_the_Golden_Mean

My usual work commute passes the Hollywood and Vine intersection most of the time, and I often use that Metro train station. There is a lot of artwork in the station and all of it is stream-of-consciousness archetypal material related to ascent mysticism - stars, Egyptian references, the celestial throne, etc. The celestial ascent involves climbing the heavenly ladder of the chakras, represented by the seven stars of the Big Dipper, to come before the Throne of God, the North Star, which in the internal chakra system is also the Bindu, the hidden eighth chakra. This ascent is why the pyramids of Egypt were built - their entire religion revolves around it and the pyramids were manmade sacred mountains constructed to be used by the pharoah as a ladder to come before the throne of Osiris, the lord of the afterlife - hence the Egyptian motif in the public artwork in the station. The Pole Star is the axis mundi, the center of the world, because it appears to be stationary while the sky revolves around it.

The Derek Jarman film I saw on Tuesday (again, see my last post) was at the Montalban Theater on Vine, just south of this intersection. There is a Pre-Columbian sacred site in Mexico called Monte Alban, White Mountain. The mountain is a symbol of the axis mundi and the ascent to the pole, and the site includes several holy ball courts, which were representations of the structure of the universe with the ball as the sun and the scoring rings as the equinoxes.

http://www.elmuseo.org/taino/ballgame.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_ballgame

This intersection is right in the middle of the Hollywood Walk of Stars, a representation of the path of cosmic attainment, and there are pillars at each corner which delineate the four cardinal directions, also important to the axis mundi, the archetype of the central pillar of the world. The location used to be a lemon grove before it was developed, and the prophet Enoch from the Old Testament ascended to Heaven from a citron grove, the citron (called etrog in Hebrew and used in the holy ritual of the Sukkot holiday) being the Old World equivalent of the lemon. He is an archetype of the human practitioner of this kind of ascent. Once in heaven, Enoch became Metatron, the Angel of the Throne.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_and_Vine

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=enoch&fr=yfp-t-501&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8

In Islam, Enoch is called Idris, and I saw that name on a billboard this morning. Re: his ascent, the Koran says "We raised him high in heaven" and in Muslim lore, Enoch invented astronomy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_view_of_Enoch

He is also said to have lived 365 years while on earth, the same number as days in the year, which definitely associates him with the cycles of the heavens. He is sometimes identified with Hermes Trismegistus or Mercurius. In some traditions, he is the builder of Zion, the City on a Hill that is the New Jerusalem or the new Paradise. Zion is central to the action in the medieval poem Pearl, and the Bindu chakra is also called the pearl. The human who activates this chakra through the ascent becomes perfected, as are the residents of Zion (remember the old spiritual, "Let me fly up to Zion?").

The streets themselves have mystic meaning to the names - the celestial ladder is called the Vine in some cultures, and Holly is a shamanic tree with profoundly spiritual meaning (trees are always axis symbols).

http://www.unfading.net/holly.html

The concert event is co-sponsored by the W Hotel, mentioned in the press release as returning “Golden Age excitement and lifestyle” to Hollywood. The rune for the letter W is Wunjo, which I’ve drawn a lot lately, and it signifies the shamanic journey of astral ascent. The runes themselves are a synchronous and intuitive natural language and were won by Odin through a shamanic trial on the world tree, the cosmic axis.

http://www.geocities.com/cheryl_rune/wunjo.html

Gold is the alchemical symbol of the perfected human soul, and alchemy is itself a depiction of the celestial ascent in symbolic language. The Tao itself is the foundation of Chinese alchemy and the archetypal road map of the ascent. (Incidentally, the Taoist equivalent to the runes is the I Ching, a profoundly synchronous symbolic language originally expressed through yarrow sticks, as the runes were originally carved on twigs to represent their origin in the Tree.) The Wunjo rune refers to the “Golden Age” and corresponds to Valhalla or Paradise (Zion), and the Sumerian version of the ascent literature refers to Pardes, the site of Eden located in the Fertile Crescent, describing it as an archetypal garden by a sacred river. Wunjo represents the sacred dual mountain of the axis mundi where heaven touches earth and the two are united. Runemaster Jordsvin says that Wunjo refers to Vinland (Vine Land), the original name for the United States, and this event is occurring on Vine Street.

http://realmagick.com/articles/78/2178.html

Wunjo is shaped like a pennant or flag, and someone gave me a pennant yesterday, from Universal Studios.

Another nearby business, The Gap, is referenced in the LA Times article as being endorsed by Depeche Mode. "Gap" is a name for Da’ath, the Abyss on the Kabbalistic tree of life, which is the last stop after the seven lower sephirot before one comes into the celestial realms. Da'ath is referred to as a state of unification - a "united state," as it were, and it is associated with the Bindu chakra as well.

http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oGkig2AvFJ3cAAdOZXNyoA?p=da%27ath&fr=yfp-t-501&fr2=sb-top

DM's new album is called Sounds of the Universe, and some of the promotional imagery for the record includes the band standing in front of the Unisphere, the huge outdoor globe in Queens, NY, a clear axis mundi symbol. It also happens to be Earth Week right now.

http://queens.about.com/cs/attractions/p/Unisphere.htm

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15434282@N00/2064351847/in/photostream/

http://queens.about.com/od/photogalleries/ig/Photos-of-Landmarks-in-Queens/Unisphere-and-Rocket-Thrower.htm

Re: the Rocket Thrower status near the Unisphere, rockets are also axis mundi symbols and the theme of the entire Unisphere complex is space exploration, the modern equivalent of the ascent. The statue depicts archetypal man launching a rocket into space with one hand and reaching for the stars with the other.

http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/historical_signs/hs_historical_sign.php?id=10758

http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0oGkmgiyfBJOo0A_G5XNyoA?ei=UTF-8&p=the%20rocket%20thrower%20queens&fr2=tab-web&fr=yfp-t-501

Much of the other art in the park depicts a celestial ascent, including spaceships and a male-female pair lifted skyward by birds:

http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/vt_flushing_meadows/vt_flushing_meadows_park.html

http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/vt_flushing_meadows/art_culture.html

http://www.flickr.com/photos/foolsparadise/3178899873/

This is also the park featured in Men In Black, where the UFO was parked. The UFO is a symbol of the chariot used in the celestial ascent (it's called the vimana in ancient India and the merkabah in Judaism, more on this below).

DM also has a song called "World In My Eyes" about containing the entire world in one's soul, and in their video for "Enjoy the Silence," Dave Gahan is shown crowned and seated on a mountain, a clear expression of the throne and world axis archetype. The axis mundi is the symbol of cosmic man (in Kabbalah it's the Tree of Life, the body of Adam Kadmon, the archetypal man), and the ascent is the concept that man is divine and can become like God by going up to meet Him before His throne in His house in the seventh heaven. I went to a Jewish wedding this past weekend where the bride and groom circled each other a total of seven times before stepping up into the chuppah, the representation of a house in which the rites of the wedding were enacted. The rabbi explained to the congregants that the circling and ascent of the stairs lifted everyone present to the throne of God. He also talked about how Jewish mysticism posits man and woman as two halves of the same being, separated in the Fall into discrete beings. Where I left the wedding to attend the reception, I walked past a motel called 7 Stars and a restaurant called Casablanca (White House). In Islamic tradition, the house of God is white, and stands esoterically above their version of the axis mundi, the Ka'aba in Mecca. I also attended an Apple software training class last night at The Grove (per the Pardes reference above, what could better symbolize the apple from the garden?), and noticed that their shopping center's sign has seven levels of neon with the North Star at the very top.

http://www.globalgraphica.com/022305_grove_cinema_w498.html

It's also shaped like the architectural detail on the old Pan Pacific Auditorium which was located near there. It's now torn down but Xanadu, whose story concerns a human man who travels to the sacred mount of Olympus in pursuit of a goddess, was filmed there. That detail is also shaped like the tet of Osiris, the pillar sacred to the Egyptian god mentioned above and which is of course a representation of the axis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Pacific_Auditorium

http://www.touregypt.net/afterlife3.htm

And there is a statue on top of a tall pillar in the very center of The Grove called The Spirit of Los Angeles, with a male angel supporting a female angel as both fly. The message of the ascent is that men are like angels in their true nature.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/snuffy/451637521/

The Bindu chakra mentioned above is supposed to be able to make its own sacred food for the ascent initiant once he has awakened his Kundalini and traversed the channel of the chakras to the highest attainment. The food is cibus, the sacred sustenance made of light that is referenced in traditions ranging from esoteric Christianity to tantra to Taoism. The lead singer of Throbbing Gristle, the band who performed the soundtrack to In the Shadow of the Sun on Tuesday night at the Montalban is Genesis P-Orridge – whose stage name means something on the order of “Primal Food” (and the lady who deeded the land for Hollywood and Vine from her lemon grove was named "Beveridge" - beverage - the cibus is also often likened to nectar). And Genesis and his deceased wife, Lady Jaye Breyer, undertook an esoteric experiment to reunite their two separate beings into the original syzygy of male-female union, as referenced by the rabbi at the wedding this past weekend.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_P._Orridge

That is what the axis mundi is about - the union of opposites: heaven and earth, male and female, light and dark, all restored to their original primal Oneness. My personal view is that the entire cosmos was, is and always will be a sacrament - the Fall refers to our woundedness that makes us unable to see that, but it's just an illusion of separation, not a reality. The cosmos is still held together by the pillar of the World Tree, which is also the human body, the physical reflection of the divine order. I feel that all of these related references are different cultural expressions of a common archetypal thread which describes a process rooted in the human body and points the way to divinizing one's perception of that body. The chakras are physical and metaphysical intersection points that when activated make a form called the merkabah, or the chariot of human consciousness. It is symbolized by the flaming chariot holding the enthroned figure of God or Metatron which appeared to Ezekiel and to John in the Revelation. My housemates have been working on their own axis mundi, the Lightning Temple, based on the Jewish merkabah and detailed here:

http://parsifalshorse.blogspot.com/2009/04/lighting-temple.html

And I have been writing about the axis mundi, ascent mysticism and the seven heavens in my Holy Grail book (re: the Grail, the Unisphere is near Silvercup Studios in Queens) and many of my poems and songs, for some time now, and before I knew that they were working on something also involved with it. This is all what in Jungian terms is called constellating, when energy around an archetype builds and builds with the accretion of symbols until it reaches some kind of critical mass and comes into conscious form. Archetypes are sacred, because God is conciousness and the archetypes are His primordial thought forms.

Lastly, I had a deeply spiritual experience once with Depeche Mode's Violator album, and that energy has carried through for me ever since. "Enjoy The Silence" is one of my favorite songs, and I've heard it several times when the universe was reassuring me that I was on the right path (the path of ascent, apparently). Tonight's show should be very interesting. I'll be sure to give a report.

For anyone interested in further reading on the ascent, I highly recommend this book - it explains it perfectly.

http://www.amazon.com/Stairway-Heaven-Alchemists-Kabbalists-Transformation/dp/0826428509

And Mircea Eliade wrote extensively on the axis mundi in his studies of shamanism - here is a wiki entry about it, and below is a link to further reading.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_mundi

http://www.bytrent.demon.co.uk/eliadesp01.html

http://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Profane-Mircea-Eliade/dp/B000NSSZA6 (the review on this page by Oakshaman is especially awesome)

In the Shadow of Hollywood and Vine

I attended the Throbbing Gristle event last night at the Montalban Theater on Vine Street as promised, and it was actually pretty fascinating. They appeared live and played the score to Derek Jarman’s 1972 arthouse film In the Shadow of the Sun. It’s funny how times have changed – Apple laptops have taken the place of synthesizers but you could tell some of the audience had been TG devotees since their inception in 1976; there was a lot of silver hair in the crowd, and a lot of black clothing. This score was actually added to the film in 1980 as a collaboration between TG and Jarman, and its ambient grind fits the images perfectly. The style of the film is painterly and surreal, with scenes that reminded me of Bunuel and Dali, and some that I think were in direct homage to Maya Deren’s experimental Meshes of the Afternoon. Jarman holds some shots for so long that even with slight movement they take on the character of pictures in a gallery rather than film, a device he used later to great effect in Caravaggio. The alchemical content was subtle, an occult undercurrent told in symbols rather than words (there is no dialogue and no linear plot): a young man lies in a flaming square, a large key is pulled from a drawer, pyramids loom behind archaic statuary and men in animal masks silently impart a shamanic presence. Soundless interactions are staged like live theater, such as the pairing of a seated young man and a figure dressed in a Seurat top hat who simply stands and stares at him from the opposite side of the frame. The film clocks in at just under an hour, and the band closed their appearance with the live performance of one song, Persuasion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Shadow_of_the_Sun_(Throbbing_Gristle_album)

http://www.elizabethdeegallery.com/files/press/DJ_2009-02-10_Artforum.com.pdf

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080920/

http://greg.org/archive/2008/03/04/derek_jarmans_in_the_shadow_of_the_sun.html

Re: Caravaggio, mentioned above and filmed in 1986, it’s a beautiful film and stars Tilda Swinton (in her first film role).

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090798/

Swinton also appeared in Jarman's segment “Depuis Le Jour” in Aria in 1987, and it’s stunning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqEImF2SfL8

I’ve always meant to see Jarman’s punk-era film Jubilee, but have never gotten around to it. I’ll have to look it up – it sounds fascinating.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(1977_film)

And apparently there is a new documentary about Jarman. I really do find him compelling. There is nothing like a real artist.

http://www.derekthemovie.com/

Give Me Some of That Old-Time Industrial Music

I got a notice that Throbbing Gristle have reunited, and are going to play a show at the Montalban Theater in Hollywood. I just bought a ticket. This should be interesting, especially to see the kind of crowd that shows up for it. They are planning to play the soundtrack to filmmaker Derek Jarman’s 1974 alchemical opus In the Shadow of the Sun.

Here is more info in case anyone is interested:

http://www.throbbing-gristle.com/

Avant Garde Memory Lane

I just remembered something, and wanted to mention it briefly. The first time I recall seeing anyone representing the vibe that would later evolve into what would later be called Emo was in the late ‘90’s in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. I went to a show, I don’t remember what band was playing, it was just some weeknight local band at the kind of (probably illegally operated) urban industrial space club where water runs down the walls, but there were two kids in the audience that caught my attention. One was a tall skinny blonde girl who looked a lot like Pris from Blade Runner. Her hair was really short and choppy, and she was wearing weird skinny pants and a striped t-shirt with detachable sleeves (I pay way too much attention to clothes). Her companion was a young guy, probably gay, and he was dressed about the same, only with dark hair and his clothes were kind of floppy and asymmetical. At the time, I had never seen anyone dressed exactly like that, not yet. They just looked really, really different. A few years later, every kid in NYC looked identical to them, but they were just WAY ahead of the curve. Now Emo seems to have fully matured and is even receding in the cultural rear-view mirror, but it’s interesting to look back and think about that evening, like it was a singular anthropological spotting. Another girl who really caught my attention in a similar manner was also very young, maybe twenty and possibly much younger, whom I saw on the subway in lower Manhattan in 2005, right before I moved away from New York. I noticed her on the train at the City Hall stop. She also had asymmetrical short hair, in a modified mullet like the style that was popular in the early ‘80’s. Her hair was light brown, and she had put some lighter streaks in it that were eye-catching, and was wearing really funky eyeliner and black clothes. I really admired the way she was put together. It was a highly individual interpretation of the growing trend, but she had a strong element of original New Wave in there, too. She looked modern, but also would not have looked out of place if it really had still been 1980 or ’82. I love clothes from that era and collect them, but she wore them very differently than I do, and I was impressed with her sense of style. And the first time I ever saw a faux-hawk was in about 2003, on a girl in a Starbucks’ in Union Square in Manhattan. That trend played out fast once it hit big, but, again, she was months ahead of the curve. She was petite, and wearing an enormous black military coat and Doc Martens and she looked fantastic. Her hair was also light brown, and she was very pretty, the kind of model-pretty that needs no makeup, so the overall effect of this beautiful face with the severe hair and clothes was amazing.

Gonna Get Schooled

I have been looking into some educational opportunities to further my career, and have figured out what to do to get the skills I need to move forward with my music. UCLA offers a music production certificate program now, and while I don’t think I need the entire set of classes in order to accomplish what I want to do, I need most of them. I did a run-down of all of them, and picked eight classes I think are essential and two more that are optional but would be good if I am so inclined to take them after I finish the others. I just invested in my Mac Book Pro, and I plan to invest more in a MIDI set-up this summer, and then after that’s bought and paid for, I plan for to enroll in the first of the UCLA classes, a comprehensive introductory course in LogicPro. Except for that one, which is condensed into several long sessions over the course of a month, each class is spread out over twelve weeks. They are also held at night on the UCLA campus, which works out really well for me.

I tried two years ago to enroll in music technology classes, but when I looked into Musician’s Institute and the Los Angeles School of Recording, they were, respectively, $24,000 and $27,000, each for a two-year program. I don’t need an entire course of study in recording technology, because I don’t plan to become a commercial producer. I just want to record my own music. I can’t invest that much money into a program most of which I don’t need, and those schools don’t offer individual classes – it’s all or nothing. And they only have day classes, which doesn’t work so well for grownups who are also concurrently responsible for earning their own living. As I said above, I don’t even think I need all of the UCLA program, which is much cheaper (a total of about $7,000 if you do go for the whole certificate course). I’ve taken some classes at Sunburst Recording Studio through a local community college, but it’s more of an analog set-up and they only teach studio recording and mike technique, not computer-based applications. There is also a local independent Apple certified Logic Pro school, but, honestly, I’d rather learn through UCLA. They have some of the best people in the media business as instructors and the classes are good networking opportunities. I got some freelance music writing assignments through a class I took there last year and met a lot of people whose paths I never would have crossed otherwise.

Part of the reason I don’t want to go for the whole certificate program is simply to save money. There are several classes in it that I feel are either above my head technologically or that I will never use and by not taking them, I can bring the total cost down by more than two thousand dollars, which more than covers the MIDI equipment. Another reason is that I want to be able to learn with no outside pressure. To earn a certificate, you must achieve a certain grade in each class, and I would rather just audit the classes. That is what I did with the industry class last year, and it worked really well for me. I’ll have a record of completion of every class I take, which is good enough for my purposes. I might be able to parlay the knowledge into music industry employment at some point in the future outside of my own personal goals, but I feel I can do that by demonstrating mastery of it. It should also help with my music writing – the more you learn the better your articles become. The Sunburst classes came in handy for an interview I did with a producer.

I also found out you can take free one hour tutorials at the Apple store, and I booked the Mac general intro class in case it can teach me something I don’t know, and also an intro to iWork and one to LogicPro. They’ve got more, for iWeb, Final Cut Pro, Aperture, etc., and I’m going to take them all. After that, if I still feel I need more help, I also may book some one-on-one time there with an instructor.

Sleepwalking Through the Mekong

I got busy and let a couple of weeks lapse, but I still wanted to post a review of the Dengue Fever documentary I attended in Hollywood because it turned out to be very worthwhile. The screening was sponsored by Amoeba Music and was held at Space 15 Twenty, a new outdoor shopping area just off of Sunset Blvd. It was a bit chilly to sit outside for almost two hours to view a film but I am still glad I went. Dengue Fever was formed in Los Angeles in 2001 by brothers Zac and Ethan Holtzman. They both got serendipitously inspired around the same time by Cambodian pop music of the 1960’s and ‘70’s and went on a search for a singer, finding an established one in Chhom Nimol, a Cambodian immigrant to Long Beach, CA. The documentary, Sleepwalking Through the Mekong, chronicles the band’s tour of her home country. Dengue Fever is the first American rock band to tour Cambodia, and the film includes their performances in Phnom Penh, their appearance on Cambodian television, and their trip to the rural countryside to perform both in a children’s music education program and on a makeshift stage set up in a slum. The band made no money on this tour because Cambodia is a poor nation with persistent third-world conditions, and they had to turn to their record label to provide part of the financing for the trip. In interview segments interspersed through the film, the musicians said they had wanted to make the journey in order to explore the source of the music they found so compelling and to give something back to those who had inspired them. The film is eye-opening in chronicling the lasting effects of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship on the Cambodian populace and their culture. Many of the original artists that Dengue Fever references in their own music were killed in a cultural purge ordered by Pol Pot, the architect of the Khmer. He installed a state radio station which played only his own propaganda songs, and folk and pop songs were outlawed as they could be used to undermine his authority. It’s clear that, despite his efforts at control, they lived on in the underground - when Dengue Fever played some of the older tunes, entire audiences sang along with every word. The children at the school the band visited also were well-acquainted with the music thanks to the determined efforts of their teacher, an admirable woman who spoke of her own childhood sadly interrupted by war. The Cambodian artists of that era had originally been inspired by rock and rock from the U.S., so it was very interesting to watch the cross-pollination come full-circle over the course of events highlighted in this documentary. Some of my favorite parts of the film showcased the interaction between the Western members of the band and people they encountered in Cambodia. In one scene in an open-air market, the band good-naturedly socializes with vendors, and a dinner with the lead singer’s family is also entertaining. But I was most taken with the scenes that documented the band setting up and performing in a shantytown. The local children hung on the stage and watched them as though they were gods descended to earth and an enormous crowd massed to view the spectacle. It made a lasting impression on me to be reminded how impoverished much of the world remains, and it made me more consciously grateful to live as I do in such a culturally rich and diverse environment as Los Angeles.

I recommend Sleepwalking Through the Mekong for music fans, devotees of Asian pop culture and anyone interested in cultural history in general. There is a very nice website for the film at the following address for anyone who would like more info:

http://www.sleepwalkingthroughthemekong.com/