My generation was the first to grow up bathed in the glow from that flickering window into mediated fantasy called television. Aside from the growing repertory of talk shows and forms of entertainment adapted from earlier radio broadcasts, films became a staple to fill air time and provided a steady diet of literature from base B-movies up to high art cinema. The imagery that flashed ephemerally by, and for some time only in stark black and white, formed our collective unconscious of archetypes. My favorites, the ones that remained long after the show time was past, were the monster films.

He discusses recording the sound in cassette tapes to listen to later, before the ability to capture both the audio and video on home recorders. Sneaking out of his bedroom at night, he would watch the horror films that played on “The Late Show” and “The Late, Late Show”.

He sought out the toys of his favorite monsters, and grew most fond of the one he refers to his “patron divinity”, Gojira “King of the Monsters”! His house in Hell’s Kitchen prominently features a number of models of the radioactive reptile, and he’s always excited to see the next movie that tells the continuing story of Godzilla and related daimones.

Magus Gilmore was recently invited to addend a screening of the new giant monster movie Cloverfield. The  film was rumored pre-release to have possibly been based on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, or even a new Godzilla movie. A review of his was published on the culture and entertainment web-magazine Buzzine.com.

Cloverfield: Review
Peter H. Gilmore

I just got back from a screening of Cloverfield (digitally projected and looking very sharp). I thought you, my fellow monster fans, might enjoy some of my reactions. There are “spoilers.”

So, in brief, it is a fun “ride” of a movie, worth seeing on the big screen, and the decision to make it a “found videotape” is a gimmick which allows the story to have a very immediate “you are there” feeling. Yes, it could be described as The Blair Witch Project meets the American Godzilla, but it succeeds with this premise, and there were some smart choices made so that it functions satisfactorily for a feature-length movie. At a bit under 90 minutes, it doesn’t wear out its welcome.

It is a bit tedious at the start as the characters are established. They are all dull normals who are conventionally good-looking and witless. Patton Oswalt was on-the-money in his salty, early pseudonymous review–it looked like they were filming the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. No geeks or nerds (or odd-lookers) amongst the crowd. Not a single person who might have actually watched a Godzilla film (the leads are probably all too “cool” to have intentionally seen a kaiju flick). A true Giant Monster Geek would have been a welcome addition. He or she then might have had the savvy to advise the others what actions might be possible in order to get through a giant monster attack. If these vapid folk actually watched the news reports on the TV screens in the background, they would have had more info to work with and perhaps bettered their odds. However, these brain-dead mannequins do everything wrong, so they are essentially a guide for how NOT to survive a kaiju visitation.

View the rest at the Buzzine website.

The Satanic Scriptures features three Church of Satan rituals never before broadly released to the public. The Marriage and Funeral rituals were exclusively used by the Priesthood of Mendes until now, and the third – an evocation of the Northern European pagan beliefs – was briefly available in the obscure Scandinavian journal The Fenris Wolf in the 1980s.

From the introduction to the rite:

Satanists take the position that Man has invented his gods. We find world mythology to be our field from which to harvest symbols and metaphors that we find to resonate most strongly with our Satanic natures. When exploring a particular historical mythology, we do not simply pick something that is NOT Christian, or not a part of Christianity’s various antecedents and offshoots; we look instead to a myth system and ferret out its unique dark side, the taboo and forbidden regions that its adherents held in awe and terror. That’s where the Devils are to be found.

What makes this ritual different from the prolific amount of old European themed occult books is that it doesn’t pretend to be an authentic Iclandic or Pagan ceremony, encouraging the literal belief in these older gods. The introduction continues:

This rite is an exercise in “exoticism”—an old practice in the West for purloining elements from foreign cultures that might seem too alien to be comprehended in their foreign form. Thus they become palatable and enjoyable in an adulterated state. Such absorptions launch trends in the arts. Art Deco had been influenced by the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. Musically it happened in the classical realm when composers like Beethoven imported into his Ninth Symphony the trumpets, drums, and cymbals used by marching Turkish Janissaries. Closer to our own time was the explosion of the “Tiki Lounge” fad.

As with the two other rituals, and after the general introduction, a preliminary text is given to prepare the reader for different settings or accoutrements that may be needed to perform the ceremony fully. Reflecting Magus Gilmore’s love of music, his notes here are especially of interest, and the Rite of Ragnarök even includes suggestions for drummers written in musical notation!

Also unique to this ritual is the inclusion of runes, including Gilmore’s own Ragnarök Rune, used on an album of that name by Boyd Rice in 1992.

A powerful rite in honor of revenge, in tribute to Lex Talionis! The first spoken lines easily set the tone for the rest of the work:

CELEBRANT: Hear me, Gods of the abyss and attend! I command thee, Infernal Lords, to witness mighty deeds done in Thy name. Come forth and greet those numbered among thy pack. The time has come for redress. Justice shall reign through the rule of fang and claw, as it was in the beginning, and as it shall be again!

We smash open the gates to Musspellsheim, Nifelheim and the very depths of Hel’s domain and summon thee forth to climax this age of fire!

Diabolus in Musica begins with a short introductory paragraph, stating the authors love of bombastic music and instructing the reader that they might find the profiles of composers and lists of works to be rewarding and worthy of attention. We feature here just one of those profiles, that of Richard Strauss.

This is just one of 6 major profiles, and the essay also includes shorter series of profiles or significant works of fifty-five composers.

The Wikipedia links and Images are not included in the published version.

Richard Strauss: Celebrating Himself

Who could forget the thrilling opening music to Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey? Who hasn’t been moved by that sonic sunburst that Kubrick wisely used to herald the birth of conscious intelligence in Man’s ancestors, and underscored the first use of tools—a weapon, I might add? That magnificent fanfare was penned by Richard Strauss (1864-1949) as the opening for his tone poem Thus Spake Zarathustra, which was the composer’s effort at creating an audio equivalent to Nietzsche’s iconoclastic book.

Strauss was known in his youth as a radical modern, shocking the critics with his voluptuous music, whether it be purely symphonic or operatic. In his final years he was considered to be an aging reactionary, co-opted by the Nazis, and thus generally ignored by a world that had moved to embrace less human music, that had lost the ability to appreciate splendor and skill. To the modern listener, he appears as an artist that created works of great beauty overflowing with the joy and struggle of life.

Strauss actively rejected Christianity and its disgusting creed of self-sacrifice. He saw life as a heroic battle and himself as his own God. Thus, when he composed a tone poem called A Hero’s Life, one should not be surprised that he Satanically made it a self-portrait. In this, he depicts himself as a mighty life-embracing warrior, who enjoys a war against his critics—lampooned as the toads that they were, and who enjoyed his sensuous pleasures to the fullest.

He again celebrated himself and his family in the Domestic Symphony, a musical depiction of grandiose proportions that glorifies his home life with his wife and child. Though his detractors were always outraged at his self-glorification, they did not stand in the way of his fame, achieved at an early age as both a composer and conductor.

Strauss’ mastery of orchestration was second to none, and he created soundscapes that astonished audiences with the verisimilitude of their tone-painting. Listen to his Don Quixote, where he uses woodwind and brass trills to sound like a noisy herd of sheep. The storm segment of his An Alpine Symphony is one of the most violent and realistic in all music literature, complete with both a wind machine and thunder sheet. We’ll speak more of this piece.

As a young man, Strauss wrote Death and Transfiguration which depicts a man’s recollections of his very full life while on his deathbed. Here he likened life to a series of ever more magnificant strivings after one’s goals which are attained. Death is finally heralded by an ominous tam-tam stroke, yet the heroic spirit is not stopped, but soars on to self-glory. When he ultimately lay dying, Strauss claimed that it was just as he composed it years before.

His operas often caused scandals because Strauss was not afraid to embrace unbridled lust in Salome or poisonous vitriol in Elektra using surprising dissonance for the time to accompany lasciviousness and violence on stage. His later operas retreated into a more genteel but elaborately crafted style influenced by Mozartean grace, such as The Knight of the Rose and Capriccio.

This carnal philosophy of life permeated his work in all media, but it came most strongly to the fore in his mightiest tone poem, An Alpine Symphony. Ostensibly, this piece portrays a journey by a mountaineer, starting out in primal darkness, then greeted by another blazing sunrise, and continuing until he reaches the mountain’s summit, experiences an apocalyptic storm, and then descends to the final darkness of night. Strauss said that the true intent of the piece was a representation of Man’s appropriate existence. Here life is experienced as if it were a mountain to be conquered by dint of personal struggle, in heroic harmony with the magnificence of Nature. He clearly defined this as being in direct opposition to the Christian attitude towards life, and indeed the first title of this piece, which he later dropped, was Antichrist. You will find here an utterly Satanic embodiment of life. From out of the darkness, the rising theme of aspiration leads to a birth in triumph, a “yea saying” to the challenges before one. Next, life is launched with a vigorous assault on the universe that bears with it moments of astonishing beauty as well as bracing terror. In the end, death comes, but the ascending theme still struggles up out of the gathering darkness, expiring only in the final exhalation in a downward glissando into the night of non-existence, the Black Flame guttering out, but with the primal sounds of Nature still there to support the next hero to arise. No more Satanic a view of the human condition has been put into sound.

For the listener new to Strauss’ works, I recommend that you seek out recordings conducted by Herbert von Karajan and Karl Böhm, as these are superbly realized with just the right touch of virtuosity and violence. First, listen to the tone poems that have been mentioned in this article and if you enjoy them move on to his other orchestral and operatic works. There is an exquisitely melancholy work for string orchestra, Metamorphosen, which is a lament for the shattered culture of Germany at the close of World War II, which may move you with its direct emotional expression. Strauss’ music is rich and complex late romanticism which is decidedly passionate and totally Dionysian. Be prepared for the intricate textures, chromaticism, and detailed development of thematic material. At first, just let the sound sweep you along in its epic journey. Later, there is much more to appreciate structurally, if such is your inclination. Try listening to the rest of Thus Spake Zarathustra beyond the famed sunrise and you will be amazed at how much more wonderful music it contains, fulfilling the promise of those first few minutes. Yes, Strauss did conquer death, for by hearing his works you will feel his essence moving within you. And you too will be transfigured.