from here.
Ah, The Fucking Moon.
Category Archives: Howling at the moon
The Moonchild.
The other day I was checking out the beginning of volume 3 of Alan Moore’s excellent comic series, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, entitled Century, and I was struck by quite a few things.
Century, I should add, is very frustratingly being released in three volumes over the course of the next three years. The first volume, “1910,” seen above, is awesome and fun. I can’t wait for next year’s “1969.”
Meet Janni Dakkar AKA “Jenny Diver” AKA “No One.”
If you’ve not heard of the series before, but do remember that atrocious movie “adaptation” from a few years back starring Sean Connery, then have no fear, the comics are absolutely nothing like that. But the gist of the plot is essentially the same: In a play on Phillip Jose Farmer’s World Newton family, classic characters from old British literature combine to form a sort of Justice League of Victorian England.
But who does he want her to go meet?
You’ll also remember that this resulted in a truly atrocious movie based on the graphic novel, starring Sean Connery and directed by Stephen Norrington. The less said about it, the better.
Her father, the dying Captain Nemo, of course.
One could go on forever about The League’s several volumes so far, and it’d be fascinating, especially the way the comic handles not just history, but the history of British fiction and mashes up it all up into fascinating stories of intrigue and adventure.
The beginning of the third volume, Century, shows us the vision of a group of occultists trying to raise the Moonchild, something British occultists are frequently trying to do. The characters themselves, especially Simon Iff, are right out of Aleister “the wickedest man in the world” Crowley’s novel, The Moonchild, which is about groups of good and evil magicians trying to breed and raise a magical child that would end this aeon and bring about the next one, that they would control. For a more contemporary reference, think Bree from LonelyGirl15 or Suri Cruise.
That, in turn, got me thinking about one of my favorite series of graphic novels, The Invisibles, by Grant Morrison, about a group of anarchy loving occultists who are trying to stop the Archons/Older Ones (think: Cthulhu type evil Gods) from using their own moonchild to bring about the end of the world. There moonchild is wonderfully gruesome looking, this sloppering thing of tentacles in a somewhat humanoid body that has to be kept behind this huge cloak to shield you from it’s unbelievable hideousness. Plus, there was a scene where a bunch of bad dudes were watching a porn tape of the Moonchild fucking Princess Diana to bring about another, more potent, more human looking moonchild that… well, nevermind. Princess Diana’s always had an interesting relationship with the comics medium and I realize that out of context this all sounds a little more than bizarre. Ah, but if only I could find you a nice scan… Sigh.
Regardless, most occultists are stupid little bitches, or those who can’t handle their own mediocrity, so they turn it into something “magical” and “bizarre” and use it to have a lot of group sex. Think: Your average Drama Club or Band Geeks at high school. Aleister Crowley was really no different. Though I would’ve enjoyed partying at his vacation home in Sicily, called the Occult Abbey Of Thelema. And in particular, the nightmare room…
The way it worked was: If you wanted to party with Crowley and his coven of orgiasts, that was cool with them – Crowley’s motto was “Do As You Please” after all – but there was one catch. To party with them, you had to first survive for a time in Le Chambre de Cauchmars, The Room Of Nightmares. The room was basically just a room, but with frescoes of Heaven, Earth, and especially Hell painted on the walls. The image of Hell was said to have contained some of the foulest, most depraved things ever. But still, not so bad right? Not so fast, champ. Before you began your time in the room, you had to take Papa Crowley’s special mixture of hashish and opium and acid and then trip the light fantastic as the walls of the Nightmare Room seemed to literally come alive and try to rip the flesh off of your bones.
Look at that silly dork.
Charming, right? The idea was to make your soul vulnerable to every evil spirit there was to master them, to survive a gaze into the abyss of horrible and come out stronger for it. Also, it must’ve been fun for Crowley and his fellow dungeon folk to watch people just losing their shit left and right.
Ah, to be at the whimsy of the magic man. And then there’s music: Primarily “Moonchild” by King Crimson, which I was reminded of coincidentally just a moment ago (I shit you not) when “The M62 Song” by The Doves came on, which includes portions of the song by King Crimson. What weird, small world.
But, ah, the moon. The lunar eclipse. Night and day, masculine and feminine. From an art perspective, or a crazy black magic perspective, there’s just something more infinitely interesting and mysterious about the moon, right? Something that just makes us want to put pictures of wolves howling at it on t-shirts. Apollo was a douchebag, and it’s not like you can sit there and stare up at the sun, but you can spend hours and hours and hours just staring up at the moon, letting it’s majesty wash over you and inspire you.
We can put a man on the moon but we can’t bomb a tiny asian nation into the stone age?
This is just one of the many, many, man reasons why I love The Onion.
You can see it bigger here (that’s what she said!).
Also, I highly encourage you to go check out Alex Carnevale’s piece on Apollo 11 and the moon walk at This Recording. Not just one of his favorite things by him or that has appeared on the site, but one of my favorite things that I’ve ever read online.
Just within grasp…
from here.
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.
Some facts about our friendly little satellite up there:
It’s the belief of science that the moon was created via something called the Big Whack, which sounds like a mafia-themed porno. The gist of it: About 4.6 billion years, not long after our solar system was born, an object the size of Mars probably hit the Earth and large chunks of it split off from the rest of the planet. Some of those chunks mixed with other space junk and started to coalesce into a smaller, larger body, and when cooled, was formed together in the shape of our lovely moon.
The Crescent Earth, from here and here.
That lovely shape, by the way, is not round. It’s more egg-ish. When looking up at the moon, you’re seeing one of the ends pointing at you. That’s what the moonface is. Just like Earth, the moon gets fatter in it’s middle.
“One of these days… POW! Right to the MOON!”
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) launched on June 18 to begin mapping the surface of the moon from orbit with a never been seen clarity of detail. The technology is so fucking good now that it’ll be taking gorgeous pictures of the tracks left in the moon by lunar rovers, and even imaging the Apollo equipment left behind up there. Oh, in case I didn’t mention it, the LRO is a robot, part of the Lunar Precursor Robotic Program. What a lovely sci fi type of name.
And then in a few months time, we’ll have the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which is part of the LPRP, and is intended to crash into Shackleton Crater, on the moon’s south pole. The purpose of that is to kick up dust that’s just been sitting there dormant for something in the neighborhood of 2 billion years and study it. Then, shortly after, they’ll crash another probe into a different spot on the moon and study that.
The above is one of my absolute favorite images of comic art ever. It’s by the wonderfully talent and incredibly tragic Wally Wood. No matter how many accolades he got, for me, it was never enough.
There is actually no dark side of the moon. Well, there will always be The Dark Side of The Moon, cause that’s just a classic, wonderful album, but as far as the actual moon goes: No dark side. There’s the side we can see, and the other side, the far side, which is usually illuminated by the sun. We can’t see it though and we tend to think that things are only lit up by us, but no, it’s there.
But there is more than one of The Far Side out there:
Under the category of things everyone knows: gravity is a lot less on the moon.
The moon is about 27% the size of the Earth and it’s gravity is about 1/6 of ours. If you weigh 300 pounds here on your home planet, you’ll only weigh about 50 up there. Nice, right?
from here.
A slight digression from the moon to… Rockets! For a lot of people, celebrating things like Apollo 11 isn’t so much about going to the moon and back, but about rockets. Seriously, just take a google image search at hits for “rocket porn.” Fun stuff.
Dr. Wernher von Braun in his office, from here and here.
And I should add to that digression, one of the fathers of the space going rocket: Werner von Braun. Just look at his office up above. How cool is that? von Braun has always fascinated me, not just because he helped make being a rocket scientist look cool, but his background is still so interesting and full of intrigued. He was one of the many scientists snatched away from the Nazis at the end of World War II and was a prominent name on the Osenberg list and in Operation Paperclip. And thanks to him, we escaped Earth’s gravity and finally went to space and to the moon.
Speaking of which…
from here.
There’s moonquakes! The Apollo 11 and following missions left some seismographic equipment on the moon that monitored until the 70s when it was shut off, but showed that the moon does do a little shake, rattling, and rolling. Good thing to keep in mind for when we start building moon bases.
As things tend to always go in my life, the moon is leaving us. But slowly. It drifts away from the Earth about 3.8 cm a year.
from here.
The drift into space is actually caused by the Earth’s tides, which the moon itself regulates. High tides, spring tides, I’m not going to pretend to fully understand all of it, nor be able to explain it properly, but here’s how it works. And the moon does steal a bit of our rotational energy, slowly the spinning of the Earth down about a milisecond every year. Story of my life.
At some point, we’re going to go back to the moon (and mind you, we haven’t been back there since the 70s, so it could have reverted back to being made of cheese!), but in a big way, possibly setting up the aforementioned moonbases and having astronauts living up there for months at a time. It’s a notion that gets a lot of criticism since it would be beyond extremely costly and we’re living in harsh economic times, but on the other hand, we seem to have gently drifted into the beginnings of another space race with the Russians and the Chinese. And everyone wants to knock the moon notch off their belts once more before heading to Mars.
Mars would be cool, to sound like a geeky little kid (which, honestly, is what I really, really am). But Luna? I still love ya. And not just because you gave us the setting for this excellent book:
And RIP Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America:
Mad Moon Linkage:
NASA lost the moon landing footage, but Hollywood can restore it.
Who owns the moon?
Space law is kind of fascinating (to me, anyway).
Is the Apollo 11 moon landing flag still standing?
How the Earth, the moon, and the sun work together.
Pick your favorite moon god or lunar deity.
Maria on the moon.
Strange things to do happen at each Full Moon.
List of artificial objects on the moon.
Don’t forget: Snoopy went to the moon too.
Sacrifices in the pyramid of the moon.
Well, we all shine on! Like the moon, the stars, and the sun…
Fuck you, wolf shirts.
Three Keyboard Cat Moon.“Magnificent Desolation.”
from here.
So, as I’ve been yammering on about the moon periodically for the past few weeks, it was really all leading up to two things. One of those things is…
Tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the launch of the first mission to the moon that involved man walking on the moon (the actual moon walk was on July 20th/21st, 1969).
Of course, the moon thing was set off famously by JFK in 1961 with his promise/challenge to the country: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
But why did we choose to go to the moon and do “the other thing?” Because:
And we did it.
Or, we faked it. And if we did, then kudos to whoever masterminded that. Not bad at all. I mean, it’d be terrible and shattering to learn that we never actually escaped our atmosphere and set human foot on a celestial body, and stood amongst the “magnificent desolation” there on the moon, as Buzz Aldrin put it, but bravo to whoever made us feel like we did.
from here.
Anyway, I’m sure there’ll be more to say about the moon and the moon walk and space and art and other various wankery in the next few days, but as of tomorrow, I’ll just say, it’ll be forty years since we lift our foot off this rock to take that one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Commence with the American Porn…
Turn around, bright eyes.
Forever’s gonna start tonight, kids.
One Year Later.
So, on this day in history, about 62 years ago, the US Air Force shot down and captured what was either a weather balloon or some kind of “flying disk” in Roswell, New Mexico.
Perhaps related or not so related, just over a year ago, Benjamin Light mentioned something outlandishly foolish to me. I really thought he was off his meds, no joke. But he had that kind of dangerous, scary clarity that only a nutcase can have. The kind where you don’t turn your back on them, are afraid to look them in the eye, and you pretty much agree with whatever the fuck they say just so you can get out of the room with her genitalia intact. He said to me, “I think I want to start a blog.”
And I – always the level headed one – said, “What? You’re fucking crazy.”
And he said, “No, no, trust me, it’ll be good.”
And then crazy psychotic history was made…
So here we are.
What a long strange trip it’s been, right?
We’ve talked about post peak oil, we’ve talked about Lost (like, a lot), we’ve talked about politics and the news in general. And general weirdness. We’ve talked about being cool with yourself, not so cool with yourself, and how to get laid either way. We’ve barely give you a chance to get a word in edgewise, because we’ve been talking about cats (and more cats), and things that are in bad taste, and the moon.We’ve talked about film, music, and literature at times, and everything in between. Including the stuff that’s just bullshit. We’ve talked about ourselves just a little, both with words and in video, and we’ve even talked to people we love (other than ourselves)(though this site is filthy with onanism, to be sure). Hell, we’ve even talked about talking (but mostly about ourselves, again with the onanism)!
Look at all that talk talk talking. It’s like we’ve found the nexus of the fucking universe and we’re mapping it for you.
Michael Jackson is dead and we’re still alive.
And not to brag too much, but we’ve seen a few faces and we’ve rocked them all!
Sometimes we’ve felt like we’re a bit alien ourselves, or maybe we’re transmitting to you from outer space, but we do it anyway. We do it because, no joke, there is something very seriously wrong with us and we love it.
This Recording already used the blog as a spaceship metaphor that I would love to use here, but rather than appropriate it here, I’m just gonna outright steal it. But rather than a proper spaceship, Counterforce is the fucked up. The weird one. The one that the prisoners took over and started running their own way. Like Spock and Nero and all of those pointy eared fuckers, we’re bursting through your black holes and disrupting your time stream and hopefully reality as well. Hello there, we’re from the future. We’re in your here and now and you’re our living sexy museum and we’re yours. Don’t take us to your leader, because we only care about you.
Not that we haven’t made some mistakes. Sometimes we’ve been really on our games and sometimes… well, really off them. That’s usually on me though, I’m not gonna lie. As blogonauts, we’re still learning out here in space. There’s a few less rings on Saturn because, well, we crashed into them just a little. Same with the Big Dipper. We did something inappropriate with a black hole for the same people climb Everest. Also, we found life on Mars and then accidentally blogged it out of existence. And Halley’s comet won’t make it’s way back to this solar system for a few more years than it was already scheduled to because we saw it, liked it’s style, were in kind of a naughty bad place, and now, long story short, it won’t look our way, won’t return our phone calls, and wants to take a break with the Earth. Our bad, kids.
That said, we’re still here, and even though we’re sometimes the blogging equivalent of the chaos cloud that will someday end all life on Earth, we’re also hopefully going to only get better. Help us? Tell us what you think. Tell us how much we rock, or how hard we suck. Tell us what you want to see and maybe, just maybe, we won’t poke your eyes out.
We’ve been proud so far that with us, you’ve gotten basically 6+ different blogs, some that overlap, and some that are drastically different. We’ve enjoyed it and hope you have too. My co-bloggers all wanted to be more involved in our very special 1 year birthday here, but most were busy with jobs and living sexy lives of danger and adventure. Benjamin Light has been off the grid and we eagerly await his return, and his shocked disgust at how I’ve trainwrecked this beast in his absence. And Occam’s probably not speaking to me since he realized that I stole some CDs from his house during a Lost party. And Lollipop especially wanted to remind you of how much greater the blog has gotten since she first commented and then joined us (and she’s more right than she’s wrong about that) and August Bravo wants to let you know that he’s giving up Heroes due to relentless scrutiny. Bravo, August Bravo.
This is where I wrap it up. If it was just me closing this up, I’d say something like: We’ll see you out there, space cowboys and cowgirls. But instead I found someone to put it even better than I can…
And now a special word from the desk of Peanut St. Cosmo:
hello readers! funny to think we’ve been in existence on this “series of tubes” for a year now! it feels kinda like the first rocky year of a marriage and if you make it, you figure you’ve got about six more years before the itch comes on and you’re both fucking the pool boy/baby sitter and filing for divorce. you get the idea, i give us six more years until you call it quits on us, but you’ll never find a better lay! i promise you, i’m the best you ever had!!!
but in all seriousness, i do appreciate the two of you who like my infrequent posts. thanks for stopping by 
The dark side comes in any colour you like.
I’m fascinated by human perception, especially of art, as the human eye takes two separate things and combines them, giving them new special meaning. Sometimes it’s on purpose, a mashup, like adbusting or The Grey Album, but sometimes it’s not, like the accidental synchronicity of combining The Wizard Of Oz with Pink Floyd’s classic The Dark Side Of The Moon.
I love the idea that human beings live somewhere in the meaty subspace between synchronicity and apophenia.
But the question of just what’s going on as you play the Pink Floyd album along with the film and the way things line up eerily has been around since the 90s, with hundreds of examples of odd connections noted by people. At one point, Turner Classic Movies, which owns the broadcast rights to the film, even aired Wizard Of Oz with Dark Side as the alternate soundtrack.
Engineer Alan Parsons mixing the album in great big quadrophonic sound.
“It was an American radio guy who pointed it out to me. It’s such a non-starter, a complete load of eyewash. I tried it for the first time about two years ago. One of my fiancee’s kids had a copy of the video, and I thought I had see what it was all about. I was very disappointed. The only thing I noticed was that the line “balanced on the biggest wave” came up when Dorothy was kind of tightrope walking along a fence. One of the things any audio professional will tell you is that the scope for the drift between the video and the record is enormous; it could be anything up to twenty seconds by the time the record’s finished. And anyway, if you play any record with the sound turned down on the TV, you will find things that work.”
-Alan Parsons, the engineer on Dark Side, about the supposed synchronicity.
No matter the coincidence versus the intent, I like the way our brains work, either looking for or creating connections in things, giving added contextual meaning, trying to make the universe more special to us. Sometimes it goes horribly wrong, but sometimes we do find things, little bits of weird magic to call our own. And let’s face it, this bit of film/music weird is so much more cheery than the urban legend about the munchkin hanging himself in the background of The Wizard Of Oz, right?
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to see the Wizard – the wonderful Wizard – on the dark side of the moon…
