Sea of Perdition
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The Great Architect/God.com/Yahweh/Jehovah/Rex Mundi/My agent Whatever force is ultimately responsible for this show. Not that I'm complaining mind you but a little, responsible, adult leadership would do. Besides I have a few questions...Failing that would settle 4 dinner with: My father. Ahmed Shah Massood H.G.Wells Orson Welles Count Cagliostero and Count Saint Germaine Ray Harryhausen and Henri Rousseau. I'd like to go on a bender with Paul Gauguin and Edgar Allen Poe and go hunting with Robert E Howard. I'd like to get stoned with Hasan ibn Sabah and play chess with Lord Dunsany. I'd like to ride with Genghis Khan and Geronimo, sleep with Pocahontas and fart about with guns with Sam Peckinpah and Timothy McVeigh. I'd like to be spat on by Klaus Kinski and kissed by Esclarmonde d'Alion, she of the forests of the Capsir mountain who wandered with the hunted Albigensians, fought like a man and loved like a woman. I'd like to get high with Thomas de Quincy, drink rum with Jules Verne and Berenger Saunier in the Tour Magdala and drop acid with Clark Ashton Smith. I'd like to take H.P.Lovecraft on holiday and show him the world he never had a chance to see, go climbing with Otto Rahn and walkabout with Lewis and Clarke. Failing all else I'd settle for a good, strong cup of coffee and a chance to pat Claudia Cardinale's ass.
The Sex Pistols Creedence Clearwater Revival Steve Earle The Judds Ennio Morricone Dusty Springfield Johny Cash Hank williams The Doors Basil Poledouris Jimi Hendrix The Grateful Dead Fields of the Nephilim Neil Young Woody Guthrie
'Mirror' Andrei Tarkovsky 'The Wild Bunch' Sam Peckinpah 'Once upon a time in the West' Sergio Leone 'Four flies on Grey Velvet' Dario Argento 'Big Wednesday' John Milius 'The Ninth Configeration' William Peter Blatty 'The Man who laughs' Paul Leni 'Apocalypse Now!' Francis Ford Coppola 'Fata Morgana' Werner Herzog 'The Stuntman' Richard Rush 'The Devil and Daniel Webster' William Dieterle 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2' Tobe Hooper 'Ride the High Country' Sam Peckinpah 'The Golden Voyage of Sinbad' Ray Harryhausen 'Performance' Donald Cammel/Nik Roeg 'The Shout' Jerzy Skolimowski 'Wise Blood' John Huston 'Night of the Hunter' Charles Laughton 'Phantasm' Don Coscarelli 'The man who would be King' John Huston 'Pat Garret and Billy the Kid' Sam Peckinpah 'King Kong' Merian C.Cooper 'IL MERCENARIO' Directed by Sergio Corbucci Starring Franco Nero, Tony Mussante and Jack Palance ! For anyone who wondered where that Morricone riff really came from...
'The Prisoner' Patrick McGoohan 'Edge of Darkness'Troy Kennedy Martin 'Echoes from a Somber Empire' Werner Herzog 'Geraldo live from Death Row!' Geraldo Rivera 'Q' Spike Milligan 'Twin Peaks' David Lynch
'The Necronomicon' - Abdul AlHazred ( Latin edition ) 'The epic of Gilgamesh' 'The Bible' 'Parsifal' - Wolfram Von Eschenbach 'Le Morte d' Arthur' - Thomas Mallory 'Idylls of the King' - Alfred, Lord Tennyson 'The Arabian Nights' 'Moby Dick' - Herman Melville 'Tales of Mystery and Imagination' - Edgar Allen Poe 'The Manuscript found in Saragossa' - Jan Potocki 'The Island of Doctor Moreau' - H.G. Wells 'The Man Who Would Be King ' - Rudyard Kipling 'The Mystery of the Cathedrals' - Fulcanelli 'The Great God Pan' - Arthur Machen 'The House on the Borderland' - William Hope Hodgeson 'Time and the Gods' - Lord Dunsany 'At the Mountains of Madness' - H.P.Lovecraft 'Out of Space and Time' - Clark Ashton Smith 'Solomon Kane' - Robert E. Howard 'The Master and Margherita' - Mikael Boelgakov 'The Great Gatsby' - F.Scott Fitzgerald 'Under the Volcano' - Malcolm Lowry 'Crusade Against the Grail' - Otto Rahn 'Gormenghast' - Mervyn Peake 'The Myth of the Eternal Return' - Mercea Eliade 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter' - Carson McCullers 'Wise Blood' - Flannery o'Conner 'Deliverance' - James Dicky 'Dispatches' - Michael Herr 'Dog Soldiers' - Robert Stone 'Make Room, Make Room !' - Harry Harrison 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' - Walter M.Millier jr 'I am Legend' - Richard Matheson 'The Final Programme' - Michael Moorcock 'Radio Free Albemuth' - Philip K.Dick 'Aquarium' - Viktor Suvarov 'Shadowland' - Peter Straub 'The Vanishing Hitchhiker' - Jan Harold Brunvand 'Sculpting in Time' - Andrei Tarkovsky '59 degrees and Raining' - Barry Gifford 'The Sea of Perdition' - Grebthor Smoo
..In places deep...Where dark things sleep...The mass media is the holding pattern of 'consensus' reality. The Shadow Theatre is a non-profit making organization devoted to attacking and destroying that superficially reassuring yet essentially deadly illusion through performance, direct action and the dissemination of images, information and hard evidence that challenges or contradicts the so called 'consensus' opinion in a continuing struggle to liberate our consciousness by whatever means available. Ends justify means...The movement is named after a natural amphitheatre hidden deep in the limestone heart of the Brecon Beacons where the first live shows took place in the mid-eighties...The initial private displays drew heavily on African witchcraft, local mythology and the works of a now all but forgotten magician and acrobat named Coleman Collins who toured between the wars with a troupe of Irish tumblers and vaudevillians known as 'Mr.Peet and his Wandering Boys'. Their grande farewell performance at the Wood Green Empire on August 27 1924 was so gaudy no-one came out alive although some believe Collins faked his death by substituting another body for his own before escaping to a new life in America...Some say the test of a true magician is that he does not use his powers in ordinary life. Collins however was adamant "the test of a true magician is that he has no ordinary life."The word 'kafir' is a racial insult commonly used by white South Africans who adopted it from the Arab slavers who came before them. It literally means 'heathen' or 'unbeliever' - one who does not subscribe to the ways of the one God - be it Allah or Jehovah - and can hence be officially killed, sold or otherwise treated like a piece of furniture. In 1989 I made my first visit to Kafiristan, the pagan heartland of the Hindu Kush and became perhaps a li'l too involved with the tribal people I found there. I am the tall, skinny dude second from the right. The li'l guy on the far left was called Baram khan but everyone called him mini-muj. Like the 'feral kid' in the Max movies he spoke an obscure mountain dialect that no-one else could understand, not even the other partisans... ( a fuller account of these events can be found on the weblog under the heading 'Kingdom Come' )It follows that I found common ground with the medieval Albigensians, the persecuted inhabitants of Occitania who were denounced by the Holy Roman Church as heretics and devil worshippers and whom history remembers as the 'Cathars'. ( same word, same derrogatory meaning, different spelling )They say the sun shone more brightly in those days and the woman were more beautiful. The colors were deeper and more vibrant as I remember them being in the mountains of Afghanistan without the veil of smog that has hung over us since the industrial revolution...By the dawn of the 13th century the world was lit only by fire yet there was a school of Jewish medicine in Toulouse and a school of magic in Salamanca. The south embraced equal rights and democracy of a sorts. Above all they embraced the code of chivalry...If I had to single out one hero and role model from the scrap heap of history I would have to choose Esclarmonde d'Alion also known as Esclarmonde the Bastard, the illegitimate niece of the last high priestess of the Albigensians. She was conceived after her father, the Comte de Foix, became lost while hunting a wolf in the forests of the Ariege and spent the night at a convent where he duly deflowered the apparently willing abbess. In the fullness of time the abbess begat twins - the girl she named Esclarmonde ( literally the light of the world )and the boy was called 'Loup' after his father's exploit on the night of their conception. Esclarmonde the bastard grew up at a distance from her father's court, sequestered in a strange octagonal tower on the Comte's estate in Belpech where according to the superstitious gossip of the day the young sorceress wandered the woods consorting with the wild wolves and 'certain dethroned pagan divinities' whose language she was said to speak and whom she was supposed to have 'called down from their homes in the mountains' to come to the aid of the south against the murderous French crusaders who sought to annihilate their language, culture and ultimately expunge their very existence from the history books. Esclarmonde was betrothed to the Lord of Usson as part of a typically feudal land deal but fled the loveless marriage to live as an outlaw in the trackless woodland of the Capsir Mountains. She wore her hair in shoulder length braids and painted her skin with phosphorescent paint so that the credulous Christian marauders would think her and the others who rode beside her, the sons and daughters of Belisenna, were spirits rather than flesh and blood. Some even came to believe she was the Antichrist incarnate, the avatar or 'living tabernacle' of the Elder Gods - the 'saint of saints' of an unknown religion. She fought in countless skirmishes in defense of her vanishing homeland, lit the night beacons that were the only means of communication between the scattered partisans and organized the shepherds to push over the rocks that crushed the crusaders as they marched through the gorges below. Many a knight dreamed of this ardent girl and according to historian Maurice Magre 'she gave herself to more than one of them, beside her horse and her sword, in the shade of the Pyrenean pines...'With the help of her twin brother, Loup, she helped refugees flee the besieged fortress of Montsegur and smuggled vital supplies into the stronghold. The supreme effort of resistance was made round Montsegur, at So, Tarascon and Lavelanet and for two years the last bastion of the south held out against the Teutonic knights, the Roman Pope, the kings of France, the spanish inquisition and the merciless Simon de Montfort, founder of the British bicameral parliamentary system. effectively against the world. Some say Esclarmonde perished beside the other defenders when the castle fell on March 16 1244 or fled with her brother and the other survivors who were remorselessly hunted through the mountain passes by packs of trained hounds before being cornered in the grotto of Ornolac where they were buried alive by troops under the command of the Seneschal of Toulouse who thought it expedient to seal the cave's entrance and substitute a slow death in the darkness for public martyrdom at the stake or gallows. Some believe Esclarmode d'Alion did not die her brother that day but somehow lives on standing watch over her kingdom, that she is there even now and will always be there, one hand raised above the clouds in the ancient sign of greeting. It is to her I swear my sword and dedicate my heart ...Lo tems vai e ven e virePer jorns, per mes e per ans,Perque de dezir mos cor no fina ........Occitania was utterly destroyed along with its language, science and culture yet some vestige of its ideals lives on , encoded in the symbolic language of gothic art and architecture, in the stonework of the great cathedrals of Chartres and Notre Dames and in the songs, words and images of the modern mass media that has become the holding pattern of our collective consciousness..Fulcanelli, the master alchemist alluded to in Dario Argento's 'INFERNO'( 1980 ) Miichele Soavi's 'LA CHIESA' ( 1989 ) and Guillermo del Toro's 'KRONOS' ( 1993 ) seeks to define the meaning and origins of 'Gothic art'in his discourse 'THE MYSTERY OF THE CATHEDRALS' ( 1925 ) in which he argues that the term 'art gothique' is a corruption of 'argotique' linking it to the 'Goetic' or magical art through the phonetic cabala. The dictionary definition of 'argot' is that of 'a language peculiar to all individuals who wish to communicate their thoughts without being understood by outsiders'. A self-censoring secret communicable only to the elect. What Fulcanelli defines as the "language of a minority of individuals living outside accepted laws, conventions, customs and etiquette…" The language of the humble, the poor, the despised, the rebels and wanderer, the vagrants of the Court of Miracles and the Freemasons of the Middle Ages who built the gothic masterpieces we admire today...My own work dovetails with the research of Patrick Riviere among others leaving little doubt that in so-called 'real life' the master alchemist was none other than the eminent French physicist Jules Violle, a member of the Academy of Sciences and inventor of the calorimeter. Violle's discoveries, seemingly back-engineered from the hermetic science of the middle ages proved instrumental to our understanding of nuclear physics and the construction of the Hadron supercollider due to go on-line this year in Cern, Switzerland. While undoubtedly a genius the vanished adept known only to his disciples as 'Fulcanelli' ( a contraction of 'Vulcan' and 'Helios' - Vulcan being, you may recall, the weaponsmith of the Gods )would appear nonetheless to be a dead adept having apparently passed in his home town, the tiny village of Fixin on September 12, 1923, at the age of 83. Of course there are a few irregularities surounding his demise. His son , Henri, signed the death certificate rather than the local coroner and I am fully aware of Eugene Canseliet's long standing claim of having met the master years later in Seville where he is meant to live and work to this day, an ageless alchemical hermaphrodite operating out of a ghostly manor that cannot be found on any earthly map, existing seemingly in a fold in space-time...In 'real'life Jules Violle could be commonly found in his favorite drinking hole - the Parisian 'Cabaret du Chat- Noir' or 'Black Cat Club' which he warmly describes in the second volume of his trilogy 'The Houses of the Philosophers' ( 1929 ) : - " Many of us remember the celebrated Chat-Noir but how many knew of the esoteric and political centre that was concealed there, of the international masonry that was hidden behind the signboard of the artistic cabaret. On the one hand, the talent of fervent, idealistic youth made up of carefree, blind aesthetes in search of glory and incapable of suspicion; on the other hand, the confidence of a mysterious science mixed with obscure diplomacy, a dual faced picture deliberately exhibited in a medieval frame..."The 'Caberet du chat Noir' was the home of the notorious anarcho-esoteric theatre company - 'Le Theatre d' Ombres' better known to us now as ' The Shadow Theatre' and whose first production at the Black Cat Club was a little confection entitled 'The Temptation of Saint Anthony' - a cracking show by all accounts and yet another 'coincidence' in the endless spiral of maddening synchronicity. Perhaps as Kazanian the aleurophobic book seller in 'INFERNO' so baldly and simply states:- " The only true mystery is that our very lives are governed by dead people...In his masterly inaugural lecture ( 'On the Eloquence of the Vulgar' ) delivered to the first M.A course in film studies to be offered in the United Kingdom professor Colin McCabe justified the study of film and television by comparing it to the study of Italian at the time of Dante when Latin was considered the language of civilization and Italian was seen as the language of the masses. Dante wanted the readership of his 'DIVINE COMEDY' to be his fellow citizens, the people from whom he felt himself exiled, rather than simply the scholars. If he had written in Latin he would, he tells us in the 'CONVIVIO' have been advancing his own career but would himself have been prostituting literature. Instead he wanted to write for those who were 'volgari e non litterati' , those who were increasingly able to read Italian although formally unlettered. Just as Italian replaced Latin as the language of the masses so film, television and the internet have displaced conventional literature as the vernacular of our times. In this light it should come as no surprise that just as the powers that be seek in vain to control the medium so too can one find in the most stigmatized of popular forms, in what is commonly tagged 'gothic' music and the creaky horrors of Lovecraft and Argento the attributes of Fulcanelli's secret language. A symbolic truth hidden in a ghetto genre, neglected by mainstream criticism and the current definition of 'art'. This is indeed the art of the hidden. The projector or monitor has become the new conveyor of the art of light and at fusion frequency, at 33 frames a second an ancient mystery lives on, casting the heretical illusion of life across the shining screen, an illusion born out of the ceaseless friction of light and dark. What Apollonius of Tyanna and the soothsayer Tiresius called 'the Language of the Birds'. The language Solomon knew before he lost his seal and was forced to go eyeball to eyeball with Asmodeus…The origins of the motion picture apparatus if not the roots of the modern mass media itself are intertwined with medieval 'heresy' and the so-called 'dark art' of sorcery. The gimmick that ate the medium. A cheap conjurer's trick that eventually took over the auditorium and ousted the human performers.... Stage magician George Melies was the first to grasp the camera's capacity to lie after licensing the first projector from the Lumiere brothers who drew inspiration from Roget's famous pamphlet on fusion frequency which was in turn derived from the zoetrope or moving picture wheel, a toy of the devil shunned for centuries by the Catholic church who like the modern day Taliban deemed its capacity to mimic the 'illusion of life' inherently heretical. In point of fact the 'magic lantern' enters the history books with Giovanbattista Della Porta's experiments in light and shadow using a device described as a 'thaumaturgic' in the' Magiae Naturalis' probably the same early form of motion picture projector as the Lucernae Magicae seu Thaumaturgae described by the Jesuit monk Kircher in the second edition of his 'Arsmagna Lucis et Umbrae.'It goes without saying that Kircher's 'Arsmagna' is a seriously weird book that draws heavily on an all but forgotten alchemical / hermetic tradition. While some of the plates remain obscure to modern analysts Kircher nonetheless arrives at real science, his work proving vital to the development of the henakitoscope (1832), the zoetrope (1860), the kinemetoscope (1861), the kineograph (1861), and the praxinoscope (1877) and finally Thomas Alva Edison's kinetoscope (1899). Edison had a pet name for the tar papered studio in West Orange, NJ where all his prototypical films were made. He called it the 'Black Maria' - a term richly if inadvertently redolent of the image to whom Inago de Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits and Kircher in turn dedicated their lives - Our Lady of Darkness - 'La Morenita' - the Black Madonna of Montserrat..."Kircher wrote his treatise in 1646 but it is generally conceded that the device was in use long before its closely guarded secret appeared in print. The famous Italian goldsmith, Benvenuto Cellini, recorded in detail his meeting with a notorious Sicilian magus during his visit to Rome in 1540. While discussing the 'magical arts' with the sorceror Cellini remarked that he would like to see someone invoke demons and the older man calmly offered to produce a horde of them for his benefit. The ruins of the Colosseum were chosen by the magus as a suitable spot for such a demonstration and Cellini arranged to meet him there the following evening, bringing along one of his friends to act as as a credible witness. Within the silence of the vast amphitheatre the necromancer drew circles in the dust and kindled a fire upon which he tossed various substances that produced a dense column of perfumed smoke. He then began a lengthy incantation while there appeared about the circle a vast array of devils which according to Cellini completely filled the Collosseum. The sorcerer called the demons by name while Cellini's friend shook with fear, pointing out four gigantic devils in full armour who seemed to be riding across the walls of the ancient auditorium. In an effort to reassure the trembling onlookers the magus told them the demons were in fact only smoke and shadows. Indeed they gradually diminished in number, their outlines fading from view as the smoke cleared... While some sceptics dismiss Cellini's account as pure fiction it seems more probable the author is simply exagerating an actual experience as was his custom throughout the autobiography. From the given account it seems the Sicillian warlock was using a mechanical device, possibly operated by hidden accomplices to achieve the ghostly illusion. This sort of skullduggery dates back to ancient times when concave metal mirrors were used in pagan temples to project brilliant lights and even images upon various surfaces including smoke, a theory supported by British historian and archeologist Sir David Brewster. The smoke from the fire may have caught occasional images but the mighty background of the Colosseum itself is the only sure solution to the mystifying effect otherwise the sorceror would surely have chosen some other, more convenient venue. The name of the thaumaturge mentioned in Cellini's account has sadly not come down to us but his Sicillian origins bring to mind the order of the 'Faithful in Love' described by Dante that allegedly traced its roots all the way back to 12th century 'Cathar' prophet Nicetas himself. Hence it may come comes as little surprise that the design of Montsegur, the oldest of the 'Cathar' castles, themselves the earliest examples of 'gothic' stonework to be found in Europe resembles the design of a pinhole camera acutely aligned to the rising sun at the summer solstice ...Graphic representation of a pinhole cameraRays of light travel from the object, through the picture plane, and to the viewer's eye. This is the basis for graphical perspective.My mother was a graphic illustrator. She picked up the early Warren comics for their covers and they turned out to be the best reading primers a boy could ask for. Uncle Creepy was my surrogate dad and he taught me everything I know from the vivid use of color to my warped, anti-authoritarian values. I think I only became a film-maker because I knew I didn't have the talent to make it as a comic artist ! These guys shaped the way I saw things long before I set foot in a cinema...You can forget Clint Eastwood or Stephen King ! The first time I saw the walking dude was the front cover of this magazine when I was four years old ! The apartheid regime had a 'thing' about the devil and this was the first comic book to be officially banned by the regime and removed from the shelves. I guess something about that smile must have resonated. For them, and for me...Miramax commissioned Frank Frazetta to design the original 'HARDWARE' campaign but my real influence was an underrated visionary named Vaughn Bode.Forget 'TERMINATOR' and '2000 AD'! This is where the story really started.....src="http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/aa259/sh adowtheatre/eerie002.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket" href="http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vczE5OC5waG90b2J1Y2 tldC5jb20vYWxidW1zL2FhMjU5L3NoYWRvd3RoZWF0cmUvP2FjdGlvbj12aW V3JmN1cnJlbnQ9Y3JlZXB5MDc1LmpwZw==" target="_blank"