Photoshopping by Ken Eakins

Alex Jones is the most famous conspiracy theorist in the world, but his fame has come with a price. His increasingly bizarre behavior has led many to question both his sanity and his sincerity. Is he a digital cult leader, or a stooge for the NWO, or just a man destabilized by fame? This episode examines how single figures come to represent entire movements, and the potential drawbacks of being a conspiracy celebrity.

Episode Sources and Links:
PRISM

Alex Jones BBC Meltdown
Alex Jones CNN Meltdown

Jon Ronson Interview

Two perspectives on the Bohemian Grove incident:

Jon Ronson: “Secret Rulers of the World”
Alex Jones:  ”Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove”

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This episode begins with an analysis of possible “Satanic” influences on people who practice Yoga. Is the dark lord lurking in the corner of your Yoga studio, or are evangelicals just scared of a little competition? Later on, Austin and Raymond present the basics of Phantom Time Hypothesis and New Chronology, and report shocking discoveries of phantom years during the second age of Middle Earth.

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Out There’s first video podcast begins with an in-depth discussion of the recent popularity of mock-umentaries about mermaids, as well as previous examples of the “found footage” genre. Austin and Raymond then debate the significance of the Citizens Committee for UFO Disclosure and its predecessor, the Disclosure Project.

Episode Source Footage:
Source Video for Robert Salas clip -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxYR5c…

Source Video for Karl Wolf clip - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud49Gh…

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Happened across the new The Invisibles Omnibus edition on Amazon today. Hope to get my hands on that for a review on the podcast soon. I read the series in TPB form years ago, following all the details with the excellent Anarchy For The Masses: The Disinformation Guide to the Invisibles. I was reminded of what a great series this is and how it does such a great job of incorporating chaos magick philosophy into a sexy, action-filled, truly unique comics universe.

Chaos magick finds its roots in the sigil work of occultist/magician Austin Osman Spare and it was author Peter J. Carroll who wrote one of the seminal volumes laying out the philosophy/art behind this new understanding of how to make stuff happen.

Here is a short intro to chaos magick from Carroll’s indispensable Liber Null. This is a great place for newbies to start. The rest of you may be tempted to start reading Carroll or Phil Hine or The Invisibles all over again.

Visit the original post to link to a .pdf version of Liber Null.

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Read the reset of the comic here.

This is a travel piece about Amsterdam’s banning of psychedelic mushrooms in 2008 and the resulting rise of a new industry offering truffles inoculated with psilocybin.

Meeting with the affable and opportunistic “Truffle Brothers,” this HAMILTON’S PHARMACOPEIA episode traces the recent history of magic mushrooms in the Netherlands, questions the dubious claims that lead to their banning – including the murder of a dog with a pair of kitchen shears – and illustrates the entrepreneurial tuck-and-roll that finds former mushroom marketers emerging as truffle traders.

To read a hilarious truffle trip diary, visit the original link.

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Hollywood usually blows it when it comes to conspiracy theory movies, but in 1978 they got it right. Here is Wiki’s take on The Boys from Brazil:

Young, well-intentioned Barry Kohler (Steve Guttenberg) stumbles upon a secret organization of Third Reich war criminals holding clandestine meetings in Paraguay and realizes that Dr Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck), the infamous Auschwitz doctor, is among their number. He phones Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier), an aging Nazi hunter living in Austria, with this information. A highly skeptical Lieberman tries to brush Kohler’s claims aside…

Featuring a great cast and a zany story line with a now-campy-seeming style, Boys has it all: evil Nazis, vengeful Jews, Steve Guttenberg, South American locales, aging civil servants, genetic manipulation and all those blue-eyed boys. Most importantly, Boys understands that first rule in making a good conspiracy theory film: The theory must be true.

Brought to you by the Sleepless Film Festival, in it’s entirety, The Boys from Brazil, 1978

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“As soon as moving cameras were invented people began using them to make pornographic films…”

So starts Taboo: The Beginning of Erotic Cinema – a one hour documentary that examines the earliest days of the dirty movie biz. As the quote suggests, Taboo argues that nude/erotic/pornographic films were some of the first expressions created with moving picture technology. But, that shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with porn’s early adoption of video, digital and the Internet to produce and distribute their goods to wider and wider audiences at lower and lower costs.

While not a porno movie, Taboo is still full of enough moaning nudity to be NSFW.

Read about another sexy/weird film pioneer at Joe Nolan’s Insomnia.

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Joe Nolan

Wallace Berman was born in Staten Island, New York in 1926. While he was still a child, he correctly predicted that he would die on his 50th birthday. He was hit by a car in 1976.

During those five decades, Berman became a pioneering assemblage artist as well as one of the cornerstones of the post WWII California art scene. Berman became associated with the Beats and his self-published magazine Semina combined his own collage imagery with writing by luminaries like Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, David Meltzer, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Cocteau. In addition to his groundbreaking, multimedia assemblages, Berman made the short film Aleph. The artist’s only experiment with moving pictures,Aleph reveals both Berman’s love of collage as well as his interest in the Kabbalah.

Here is what www.jewishmuseum.org has to say about the film:

Aleph is an artist’s meditation on life, death, mysticism, politics, and pop culture. In an eight-minute loop of film, Wallace Berman uses Hebrew letters to frame a hypnotic, rapid-fire montage that captures the go-go energy of the 1960s. Aleph includes stills of collages created using a Verifax machine, Eastman Kodak’s precursor to the photocopier. These collages depict a hand-held radio that seems to broadcast or receive popular and esoteric icons. Signs, symbols, and diverse mass-media images (e.g., Flash Gordon, John F. Kennedy, Mick Jagger) flow like a deck of tarot cards, infinitely shuffled in order that the viewer may construct his or her own set of personal interpretations. The transistor radio, the most ubiquitous portable form of mass communication in the 1960s, exemplifies the democratic potential of electronic culture and serves as a metaphor for Jewish mysticism. The Hebrew term kabbalah translates as “reception” for knowledge, enlightenment, and divinity.

Check out Joe Nolan’s Insomnia to find out more about another West Coast artist with an eye for the surreal.

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J

Anaïs Nin was an American born to Hispanic/Cuban parents in France on February 21, 1903. Although we associate the author with Paris, she spent most of her life living in the U.S.

A writer of essays, short stories and novels, Nin’s literary triumph was the publication of her diaries which chronicled more than six decades of experiences. Nin carried on a famous affair with author Henry Miller and it was during her time with him that the pair both started writing erotica to make ends meet. In the Paris of the 1930′s, enterprising publishers cultivated collectors of forbidden writing and paid authors well and quickly for custom-crafted smut. Nin was a pioneer as one of the first women to ply the dirty book trade and she eventually let the works be collected and published widely under the titles Delta of Venus and Little Birds. She’s considered to be among the best writers of the female sexual experience.

Along with Miller, Nin became a counterculture hero during the unrest of the 1960′s. While Miller championed freedom of libido in his writing and fought for free of speech in his battles against censorship, Nin was perceived as the kind of strong, talented, liberated woman that the just-budding feminist movement was still trying to articulate. While she became a popular lecturer at universities, Nin never became involved in radical politics. It seemed she was always a lover more than a fighter. Nin died of cancer in 1977.

Here is the woman herself as she appeared in Kenneth Anger’s The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome in 1954

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Joe Nolan