Illuminatus!

What follows is an excerpt from Prop Anon's 11-29-20 MONDO 2000 piece entitled "To Mainline the Pure Dope of Illuminatus!: An Interview with Illuminatus TV Showrunner Brian Taylor":

I always used to tease Grant (Morrison)…like when American Gods came out, I was like “Grant did you get any royalties on that? Somebody else is making The Invisibles.” When you read Illuminatus! you’re like “oh shit man, this is the original! This is where The Invisibles came from. This is where everything came from!” A lot of things that I look for as an artist and a lot of my sensibilities were formed by that book without even knowing about it because it influenced so many things that influenced me. And there is that psychedelic quality that the book has where you just fall into it. When you read the book, you feel like a different person. It definitely has more of an effect on your life than a book normally does. It kind of takes you over a little bit, and when you’re finished reading it, there’s this period of coming out of it that which feels like you are coming out of a dream and back into reality. You realize that that book was taking you someplace else. But because it’s Illuminatus! and its Robert Anton Wilson, you think, “Well, I think I’m not coming out of reality, but maybe I was coming out of something else.”

One other thing. Illuminatus! is just so smart and funny. I found that I just missed him, and the world misses him. I’ve seen these interviews where he talked about the things he looked forward to and where he thought the world was going, and there was this whole alternate, intellectual, metaphysical kind of thought in the 90s about where things were going. The Terrence McKenna school — we are going to find a way to get free of these monkey bodies and we’re going to find a way to enter other dimensions and we’re going to expand intelligence and extend life. We’re going to break free of a lot of these things that have held us monkeys back for thousands of years.

There’s a sadness when you hear him talking about that now because it didn’t happen. The world now is even more fucked up than when he wrote Illuminatus! It just seems like we’ve been completely incapable of breaking free of that stuff. We’re still fighting the same pathetic cultural wars, the same primitive religious wars, despite our best angels pushing us forward to get better. The vast majority of humanity is just this epic failure. It’s sad. In a way, you miss him but it’s also like I’m glad he didn’t live to see this. Selfishly, I want him here because I want to hear his perspective. I want him to put it in a context that isn’t so scary and sad because he just kind of had a way of doing that.

To read the entire interview, click HERE. 

 

Séamas O'Reilly Interviews Alan Moore

Recommended: Back on November 18, Séamas O'Reilly posted his previously unpublished 2016 interview with Alan Moore (entitled "The 21st Century Hasn’t Started Yet") on MEDIUM. You can read it by clicking HERE.

THIS PERSON...

...DOES NOT EXIST.

Grant Morrison on TEAM HUMAN

Recommended: Listen to Grant Morrison's recent appearance on Douglas Rushkoff's TEAM HUMAN podcast by clicking HERE.

TEAM HUMAN describes the show as follows: 

"Playing for Team Human today, storyteller and mage, Grant Morrison. 

"Morrison discusses the magical power of art and storytelling. How can we transform the physical world through narrative? How does the hero’s journey create narcissistic personalities, and what are alternative models of storytelling? Morrison and Rushkoff weave through magic and metaphors to envision a more distributed world."

The Winter Solstice "Great Conjunction"

From a NASA 12-15-20 post entitled "The ‘Great’ Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn":

Skywatchers are in for an end-of-year treat. What has become known popularly as the “Christmas Star” is an especially vibrant planetary conjunction easily visible in the evening sky over the next two weeks as the bright planets Jupiter and Saturn come together, culminating on the night of Dec. 21.

In 1610, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei pointed his telescope to the night sky, discovering the four moons of Jupiter – Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. In that same year, Galileo also discovered a strange oval surrounding Saturn, which later observations determined to be its rings. These discoveries changed how people understood the far reaches of our solar system.

Thirteen years later, in 1623, the solar system’s two giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, traveled together across the sky. Jupiter caught up to and passed Saturn, in an astronomical event known as a “Great Conjunction.”  

“You can imagine the solar system to be a racetrack, with each of the planets as a runner in their own lane and the Earth toward the center of the stadium,” said Henry Throop, astronomer in the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “From our vantage point, we’ll be able to be to see Jupiter on the inside lane, approaching Saturn all month and finally overtaking it on December 21.”

The planets regularly appear to pass each other in the solar system, with the positions of Jupiter and Saturn being aligned in the sky about once every 20 years.

What makes this year’s spectacle so rare, then? It’s been nearly 400 years since the planets passed this close to each other in the sky, and nearly 800 years since the alignment of Saturn and Jupiter occurred at night, as it will for 2020, allowing nearly everyone around the world to witness this “great conjunction.”

The closest alignment will appear just a tenth of a degree apart and last for a few days. On the 21st, they will appear so close that a pinkie finger at arm’s length will easily cover both planets in the sky. The planets will be easy to see with the unaided eye by looking toward the southwest just after sunset.

To read the entire post, click HERE.

NEW YORK POST: "Former Houston Cop Arrested for Attacking Repairman Over Bizarre Voter Fraud Claims"

From Kenneth Garger's 12-15-20 NEW YORK POST article entitled "Former Houston Cop Arrested for Attacking Repairman Over Bizarre Voter Fraud Claims":

A former Houston Police Department captain was arrested Tuesday for allegedly pointing a gun at an air conditioner repairman he thought was orchestrating a massive voter fraud scheme, prosecutors said.

Mark Aguirre, 63, was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for the Oct. 19 confrontation, according to the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.

Aguirre, a member of a group of private citizens conducting their own probe into an alleged ballot scheme, rammed his SUV into the man’s work truck — believing the victim was hauling around 750,000 fraudulent ballots, prosecutors said. 

The former cop then pointed his handgun at the technician when he exited his vehicle and forced him to the ground, according to prosecutors.

The day of the incident, Aguirre received $211,400 from Houston-based Liberty Center for God and Country. The group’s CEO is well-known right-wing activist Steven Hotze, The Texas Tribune reported.

Inside the man’s work truck, police found air conditioning parts and tools, not ballots, prosecutors said.

To read the original NEW YORK POST article, click HERE.

From Chris Matthews' 12-14-20 MARKETWATCH news story entitled "Electoral College Confirms Joe Biden as President-Elect Amid Threats of Violence and Trump Protests":

Electors across the country voted amid threats of violence and the continued, unsubstantiated allegations by President Donald Trump that he lost the November election as the result of widespread election fraud [...].

The Michigan State Capitol was closed due to “credible threats of violence,” the Washington Post reported, while in Arizona, the vote was held in an undisclosed location for safety reasons, according to the New York Times.

In Wisconsin, electors were instructed to enter the capitol grounds through an “unmarked side door” to avoid protesters, as electors in the state reportedly having received threats of harm against them and their families if they followed through with their pledged votes for Biden.

Trump has consistently stoked the anger of his supporters, tweeting this weekend that swing states “CANNOT LEGALLY CERTIFY these votes as complete & correct without committing a severely punishable crime.” The president has continued to advance allegations of election fraud that have been discredited in the more than 50 court cases he and his allies have lost in seeking to overturn the results of the November election.

On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to hear a case filed by the state of Texas and joined by the Trump campaign and publicly supported by 126 House Republicans that sought to have the results of the presidential balloting in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin declared unconstitutional and effectively hand Trump a second term.

Though there remains active litigation in courts wherein the Trump campaign and its allies are seeking to decertify results in many of the same battleground states, the Supreme Court’s refusal to even hear the Texas case represents a comprehensive rebuke of theories of widespread voter fraud or illegal changes to state election law as factoring into the Trump loss to Biden.

To read the entire MARKETWATCH story, click HERE.

From Sanjana Karanth's 12-6-20 HUFFINGTON POST article entitled "Armed Michiganders Gather Outside Secretary Of State’s Home To Deny Voting Results":

Supporters of President Donald Trump amped up their efforts to intimidate Michigan officials this weekend, gathering with firearms outside Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s home on Saturday to protest the battleground state’s election results, which helped Joe Biden win the race.

Benson, who is Michigan’s top election official, released a statement on Sunday speaking out about the incident. She said that dozens of armed individuals stood outside her home “shouting obscenities and chanting into bullhorns” while she was decorating the house for Christmas with her 4-year-old son.

“The demands made outside my home were unambiguous, loud and threatening. They targeted me in my role as Michigan’s Chief Election Officer,” Benson said. “But the threats of those gathered weren’t actually aimed at me ― or any other elected officials in this state. They were aimed at the voters.”

To read the entire HUFFINGTON POST article, click HERE.

Richard Corben, R.I.P. (1940-2020)

From Josh Weiss' 12-10-20 SYFYWIRE post entitled "Celebrated Heavy Metal, Comic Book, and Album Cover Artist Richard Corben Dies at 80":

Throughout his prolific career, [Richard] Corben worked with some of America's biggest comic book publishers: Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse for characters like Ghost Rider and Hellboy. In particular, his Crooked Man limited series with Mike Mignola won an Eisner Award in 2009. In 2012, Corben was inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame.

"R.I.P. the great Richard Corben I discovered him way back when (alongside Moebius) in an early issue of Heavy Metal magazine and instantly became a fan. His work was larger than life (in every way) and totally unique," Mignola wrote on Twitter. "I never in a million years could have guessed that one day we would work together but we did. I wrote The Crooked Man specifically for him and to this day it remains my favorite Hellboy story. I didn't really know him — I think very few did — but I did get to spend one very memorable afternoon with he and his wife in their home. They couldn't have been nice and my thoughts go out to her, and their daughter, today."

To read Weiss' entire post, click HERE.

From Rich Johnston's 12-10-20 BLEEDING COOL post entitled "Richard Corben Has Died, Aged 80. Rest In Peace.":

Famed for his use of solid blacks, stipple effects and extreme body poses, muscularity and nudity, he gained wider comic book exposure in his sixties at DC Comics drawing Hellblazer, adapting the classic horror story The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson for DC's Vertigo imprint and working with his Hellblazer writer Brian Azzarello on the Marvel Hulk series Banner and Luke Cage series, Cage, followed by The Punisher: The End with Garth Ennis, as well as Ghost Rider, Starr The Slayer, and Haunt Of Horror. He also worked on Bigfoot for IDW, Conan Of Cimmeria and Hellboy for Dark Horse.

In January 2018 he won the prestigious Grand Prix at Angoulême and presidency of the 2019 festival. Earlier this year, Parallax Studio announced preproduction on the live-action animated film To Meet the Faces You Meet based on the comic book Fever Dreams illustrated by Corben and written by Jan Strnad. Corben and Strnad recently successfully Kickstartered their latest collaboration, the collected Mutant World and Son Of Mutant World.

Richard Corben is survived by his wife Dona Corben, who he met working as the special-effects/animation technician on her prize-winning film entry Siegfried Saves Metropolis in a contest sponsored by Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine in 1964.

To read Johnston's entire post, click HERE.