Soloman's Key
The age of immortality is fast approaching. A few have intuited, sensed the coming "abysmal transition" but didn't quite sense it in full, calling it the age of aquarious. The post-modern age will be remembered as the dusk of humanity and it is not a question of if our species is on the edge of fundamental transition, only when this transition, humanities fall into the abyss of immortality, will happen.
If it doesn't happen in our lifetime (wishful thinking, the greatest of all intellectual vices) how could it not happen in the next 1000 years? WHEN, not IF. Humanity will either destroy itself or become immortal, EITHER/OR. Live Forever Die Trying.
Suffering (maturity) will be needed to make the right choices.
A few hundred years ago, things really didn't change that much from century to century. Just 140 years ago humanity was still writing by gaslight and driving around in horse buggies and now we have computers the size molecules, are unlocking the deepest secrets of the human genome and are on the cusp of harnessing quantum computing technology.
The rate of change we are currently experiencing is not linear, but EXPONENTIAL
Alexander the Great could only begin to dream about "it", but Immortality is shining, violet and bright, a palpable reality on our horizon.
Only birth can vanquish death, birth not of old, dull cliches, but of something altogether new, something altogether seizure inducing, something altogether "of the future."
Heroes of the future are desperately needed. Heroes that completely redefine this current, nauseatingly anachronistic concept of love. Heroes that can redefine this love for us in the ultraviolet sight of the future. This new love, naturally, finds itself infused with danger, risk, elusiveness, strength and agonism, cultivation and technique. This, our new love, applies not to people in our human relation but to life; our 4 dimensional reality itself.
These visionaries of the future, these criminal-artist-scientists who follow no Law but they're own, are repulsed by the safely marked general highways of the day, the bourgeoisie paths that that those average, sickeningly mediocre ones, follow.
"Because I expose people to magic, something they will never again see in they're otherwise boring, dull normal lives." -C. Sheen.
These new visionaries are intuitively drawn to the singular path, the adventure of that special, dimly audible call that comes only to those rare few whose ears are open within as well as without.
These new visionaries will traverse the slums, the dark alleys by themselves, persevering through diffuculties not commonly encountered, defying, yet again, every
expectation, simply becoming who they are.
These new visionaries have known the dark night of the soul, Dante's "Dark wood, midway through the journey of life," and the sorrows of the pits of hell:
Through me is the way to the woeful city
Through me is the way unto eternal woe
Through me is the way is the way among the lost people
-Dante, "The Inferno"
The transition to immortality will be abysmal, the apex of a humanity at risk, but for some reason I am comforted by the amount of utterly insane coincidences /sychronicity I've experienced during my lifeftime. Nothing has left me my mind more shocked and awed, though, than the sheer magnitude and quality of mind-vaporizing coincidences in my life regarding SALEM
Coincidences/Synchronicity are and have always been my religion.
Maybe this universe that we are one with (the human mind, the most complex thing in the known universe, is actually the universe becoming aware of itself for the first time) will somehow magically shepard us through our most abymal point, our ultimate crisis?
Pictured above is Arthur Arbit. In January 2010, (eons ago its seems, considering how quickly my life changes ), the legendary Arthur Arbit and Cabal were at Motor City, a shit-hole bar in the Lower East Side (fuck any bar that has a steering wheel as the bathroom door handleseriously). Arthur introduced me to this raw looking,super young model type nicknamed “Wild Jack”.
He was really innocent loooking and I can be a bit of a manic sometimes and I thought to myself what kind of retarded kind of a retarded nickname is "Wild Jack" anyway? He certainly doest seem wild and insane right now. I would soon learn how wrong I was.
I have a favorite, really fucked up , "scary" story from my past that I like to tell strangers or people I meet for the first time, because I find it absolutely fascinating to gage peoples reactions to it. “Wild Jack” intrigued me, he had a strange energy, so I decided to put him to the test. I told him the story, and I didn't spare him any of the intensely disturbing details.
He defied my expectations on every level. Throughout my telling his eyes remained locked with mine, shining with a certain mad excitement. When we departed ways that night, I could not get his reaction out of my head, never before had someone been so enthralled with my scary story before.
I wondered if this would just be another one of my mostly surreal and soon often irrelevant encounters in New York City, but the next day my expectations were defied again. I got a friend request from someone with an unfamiliar name, but from the pictures I could see it was “Wild Jack”. Clicking confirm on "Wild Jack" as a facebook friend ("Wild Jack" has a fake identity as a facebook page, his real name is Jack Donaghue but that is not his name on Facebook and the story behind this fake identity is one of the most epic stories I've ever heard, but I'm not my place to reveal that story, especially in this forum), I scrolled through his Facebook page and suddenly I had this rush, intense endorphin adrenaline shot to my brain when I saw his website is s4lem.com and it finally dawns on me: "Wild Jack" is one of the three that make up my favorite band Salem.
And this was just the very beginning, the tiniest tip of a monstrous iceberg of coincidences that have I have experiened that have deeply involved SALEM.
I caught on about Salem a little late.
Right after surfacing from my above mentioned "very dark place" I was sitting of the stoop of my old friend Rolands house in the Mission District of San Francisco, at 24th and Mission. This was in Janurary of 2009 and we were living next to Chris Owens, the lead singer of a band called "Girls," a band that was on the cusp of completly blowing the fuck up. We were sitting on the stoop hitting on Chris' c-list groupies when Roland, a Gucci Mane fanatic, began showing me Salem's Gucci remixes, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Fast forward to Saturday March "Supermoon" 19th- "Wild Jack," playing the highlight show of Salem's intensely controversial live history at my new party, S!CK, at Santos Party House.
Im so pround of Salem, who have just been killing it so hard live
Shams opened up for Salem in front a crowd of 600- the most packed I've ever seen Santo's.Shams called me, about three weeks prior, thanking me for choosing to let him open for Salem and I said "What the Fuck are you talking about??!?!?!?!?," and he responded that I had promised him, the night before, at my friend Lauren Dillards party FILTH, that he could open for Salem. As I recall that was one of the nights I had decided to pour 2 fourlokos into an empty jug, and secretly slurp it on the subway ride to Home Sweet Home). I can once again thank Fourlokos for making excellent decisions for me.
As I walked backstage two hours before Salem took the stage, I was transported back to the freedom and debauchery of Rolands stoop two years prior and it seemed like everything and nothing had changed. Still a rootless vagabond, at least now i'm hanging out with b-list groupies, our little seance echoed, at the stroke of 1am, by a live Salem set that had never before been equaled in sheer power.
Bryan Kurkimilis of "White Ring"
Bryan Kurkimilis of "White Ring"
Shams AKA Jonathan Coward lightin up backstage before his legendary set.
One of my favourite people on Earth- egyptian sorceress
Elizabeth Ammermann
Becka Diamond
Big homie DJ Aaron K, ie urban camo belending into the door to debauchery (GOOD LOOK!)
Luke Brooklyn AKA DJ Cool Hand Luke keepin it straight 100 as per usual
Fashionista of the Future #LizAmmerman
KRISKRISKRISKRIS
THUNDER HORSE LIGHTNING BEHIND THE BEST SOUNDSYSTEM ON THE EASTERN SEABOARD (#Santos) When I watch this and recollect that exquisuite wa wa wail of the bullhorn right before a drop of bass so powerful you can actually see it blow the crowds hair back. I remember thinking to myself at that very moment: WHY DO I GET TO LIVE LIKE THIS, SEE LIKE THIS, LOVE LIKE THIS- WHY AM I SO LUCKY?!?!?!?!
After the Salem set, I walked downstairs in a stunned haze, like that feeling you get when you regain conciousness after being tazered by the Po Po. As I reached the bottom of the steps Black Hearted Diamond Boy, halfway though what was the first song of his set, was simply a shamanic spectacle of orgiastic proportions.
And quite suddenly, feeling like I had traveled through some strange supermoon wormhole, I came to conciousness in vaguely familiar loft with a distinctly unfamiliar girl reading my palm.
According to this palm reading it appears lifeline is very faint which means I'm going to die soon :(
Sarah Ruplin
Abbey Johnson and Tinkers
Polina Svar
What if 99.333 percent of all philosophers and thinkers of all time are wrong?
What if all these "modern" and "post-modern" schools of thought: Capitalism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, existentialism, structuralism, deconstructionalism, post-structuralism, etc- are begin and and end/are founded up with the WRONG assumption, the false assumption that certainties exist, certainties like death and taxes?
In my humble opinion, the greatest myth ever told is the that of the Minotaur who resided in that abysmal labyrinth built by Daedalus, who fed on living youths and maidens carried as a tribute from the conquered nations in and around the Mediterranean within the Cretan domain. The myth of the labyrinth and the minotaur is the deepest and most revealing metaphorical vehicle in the entirety of Nietzsches thought, the key to unlock the whole of the mysterious and often enigmatic philosophers thought.
For centuries, the ideal of both Nietzschean and Joycean thought, Daedalus, has represented the type of the artist-scientist: that curiously disinterested, almost diabolic human phenomenon, beyond the normal bounds of social judgment, dedicated to the morals not of his time but of his art. He is the hero of the way of thought singlehearted, courageous, and full of faith that the truth, as he finds it, shall make us free.
The heroes of all time have gone befoe us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known;
we have only to stand on the shoulders of giants.
And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel
outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone we shall be one with all the Universe.
By Thomas Spieker
Editor, Creative Director, and Hive Mind Dictator: Bith Joyce
Photo Credits:
Alyssa Davida Kazew, Bith Joyce, Ryan Mcginley, Ryder Ripps, Sarah Ruplin, Christopher Glockson, Rosalina Jovanovic and Rachel Chandler.
