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Saturday, March 31, 2012

La Fête Corsette.

Pictures from Sin of me and Voodoo vamping it up! Photos by Atratus.

D'awwww.

G is for Goofy

(This is a response to the Pagan Blog Project. )
 

"Alright, alright, Mickey's a mouse, Donald's a duck, Pluto's a dog. What's Goofy?"
"He can't be a dog. He drives a car and wears a hat. "
 "Oh, God. That's weird. What the hell is Goofy?"
 - Stand By Me 

There's a little secret about being a magician that nobody tells you when you first start out.

However it happens, you develop an interest in the occult. You search about online, go to bookstores, order from Amazon, slowly amassing your base of knowledge piece by piece. You read damn near constantly, and regale your long suffering friends/ blog readers with tales of the latest articles you've found on astral projection. You remember Great Aunt Mabel and how she once had her tea leaves read, and you buy tarot cards and ouija boards and runes. You're ready for this shit.

You're ready to actually practice magic.

 And that's when you discover the secret, the one thing no author puts in their Introduction to Sorcery books: you look really, really stupid.

PHEAR MY HAT.
You may as well just accept it now. Your robes are hilarious. Your wand looks like a stick, or maybe a penis. You are waving a big knife around despite the fact that you do not work at Medieval Times. Yes, you've painstakingly picked everything in this ritual to correspond to your goal, and that is undeniably good magic, but you do not look impressive or mystical. You look like, well. You. In a robe, waving your arms about.

Magic is goofy.

I think it's hard, especially when you're first starting out, to jump the "I feel SO stupid" hurdle. You read your books and intellectually it all makes sense (I hope) but then when you're actually standing in your living room with a candle and a pentagram you made out of popsicle sticks it's easy to fall prey to the reality that they sure don't look like this on Buffy. Thankfully the allure of magic usually motivates people to push forward anyway, and then the results justify feeling a bit silly.

The feeling can resurface, however.

Personally speaking, I find that working alone (and nowhere near a full length mirror) builds a sort of happy blindness to the ridiculous. Nobody can see you gesticulating, nobody can hear you trying to figure out how the fuck you pronounce "JHShVH." You can tape a Batman symbol to a flashlight and flick it on and off while yelling "I AM THE DARK KNIGHT!" as you fire sigils and nobody will ever know until you blog about it, and then you'll be sure to phrase it much cooler.

You will be reminded, however, of how odd you appear when you're forced to interact with other human beings. Although a coven or lodge still can look pretty funny, it's usually offset by the fact that you all look equally ridiculous. Also you might be naked.

I remember, many years ago now, meeting up with some internet buddies at Dragon Con. (DC taught me two things: ghost hunters are stupid, and Texans don't believe in walking. ...also apparently everything in Texas costs under five bucks, judging by the bitching about the prices.) One of these friends remains dear to me, and this was our first in-person meetup. We're both pagan, so we wanted to do some work together. But holy shit, we were both struck by a) the fact that hotel rooms are inherently non-magical feeling due to being ugly and b) performance anxiety. Still, we could laugh at ourselves a bit and we understood what we were trying to achieve.

Now where you're going to look really goofy is when you need to preform magic in front of normal people.

I've had to do this. I'm sure most people who have been at this game for any length of time have, too. You're the witch friend - or at least the 'friend into weird shit' - and inevitably if something spooky happens to someone in your social circle, you're going to hear about it. And so you wind up packing your supplies into a bag and driving off to someone's house to investigate a haunting, or helping someone construct a love spell.

Have you ever done the LBRP in front of a layperson? I have. You feel like an asshole. You know what you're doing, you are focused on the energy, but you still have a part of your mind going, "She must think I am completely insane. ...oh fuck. My secret's out - I AM completely insane."

You can only pray you seem vaguely mystical enough that she won't snap photos of you with her iPhone and upload them to Facebook.

Perhaps the only saving grace is that there's always someone who looks and acts goofier than you out there...


Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Back.

Clearly, I've been a bit absent from the blogosphere - between work and my grandmother's funeral, I just haven't had the energy to care. But I'm rested and back on a fairly even keel again, so the usual bullshit will resume!

So, a few things:

I am going to Las Vegas for the BHOF this summer - Screaming Chickens' group number was accepted in the competition. I'm technically just an alternate, but I wound up filling in the last time we preformed the number, so I'm planning to go. Also it's just grand fun.

Our podcast is now available on iTunes!

And I bought a new dress. My hair looks awfully poofy, ooh. This was after a day at the office.

Alright, that's all for now. I WILL RETURN... with a gin review.

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Constance.

My grandmother passed away this morning.

F is for Family

My paternal grandmother, Constance, is dying.

She is ninety-two years old, and has outlived her husband by well over ten years. She is the last of my grandparents, and her slow passing is extremely hard on my father (whose wife just lost her own mother last week) and oddly heart-wrenching for my sister and I. Maybe it's because she's the last one, and a reminder that yup, our folks are probably next, or maybe it's simply that there never seems to be enough time to say goodbye.

I keep an ancestor altar. I can't remember when exactly I started doing so - a few years ago, but I'm not sure how many. It's grown - initially it was only two grandfathers but by the time I'd moved to my current apartment my mother's mother and her biological father had their pictures added to the display as well. Actually, that was an issue when we first moved in - where would we put the altar? Our old place had large flat-topped radiators that we would use for shrines and the like, but the current home is sleek and modern. I certainly didn't want to keep the altar in my bedroom - aside from the fact most traditions I'm familiar with don't recommend such placement, I was convinced my late grandmother at the least would be offended if she was set up in my closet. And heaven forbid I had a gentleman caller over. "Huh, oh that? Yeah, that's photos of my dead relatives. Sexy!"

I wound up installing a simple shelf in the space between the living room and kitchen. That way my mother's mother can keep an eye on any parties we have - she was pretty damn nosy while alive.

The altar has photographs, and a few personal objects that belonged to the deceased on it. There is a small bottle of white rum and rain water, and a Santa Muerte statuette that my mother brought back from the States. (I think it was from the Hoover dam - someplace that seemed fabulously unlikely, anyway.) It's colourful, and a pleasant reminder of people that we loved even if we didn't perhaps know them all that well as people and not just grandparents.

The exception is my maternal grandmother, Lillian.

We've always been closer to my mom's side of the family, if only because my mother had custody of us after her divorce. She was close to her sisters (her brother lives in Alberta, and so was rarely seen) and her mother. My mother's family was undoubtedly a matriarchy, at least as long as I've been around, and my grandmother was firmly in charge and apt to use every possible trick in the book to get her own way.

That probably sounds harsh, but it's true. She was a tough woman, and she raised her daughters to be very much like her.

My mother's side of the family are drunk Irish people, God bless them. They're also considerably weirder than my father's, in mundane ways as well as others. When I was young I was told that grandma used to read tea leaves, but she saw something that scared her and so she gave it up for good. She never did say what that something was. My one aunt has a lifelong fascination with First Nations spirituality, and the other went the complete opposite route from the rest of us for a time and became a 'prophet' and learned to cast demons out of people.

On one memorable occasion when my mother pinched a nerve in her arm quite severely, she tried to heal my mom with the power of Jay-sus. It did not work. My mother was clearly too heathen.

Oh yeah, my mom. The Worst Witch. As I've said before, she was encouraging of her daughters' interest in the occult because she herself had always had a fascination with it. She now runs a metaphysical bookshop in Chilliwack, and is one of the most accurate tarot readers I've ever seen in action. She also drives me completely batshit.

I don't usually do magic with other people. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of people I've done so with seriously since becoming an adult. My sister and mother are the two with whom I work most often and most comfortably, and the two of them share a more intuitive approach to the art than I do. They're both Scorpios - they just WILL shit into happening. But don't ask them to explain no book learning - my sister will shrug and give you the "I don't fucking know, why are you wasting my time?" look, and my mother will attempt to explain in such a way that your brain cramps.

(Voodoo has a Virgo ascendant, while my mom has Aquarius. My sister is practical as all hell as well as spooky, while my mother is just... so far out there, sometimes.)

I taught a tarot course with my mother. That was an enlightening experience that nearly resulted in my hair loss due to the huge clumps I yanked out of my skull every time my mother gave an answer that baffled/infuriated me. Questions that, to me, seemed obvious ones to ask had simply never occurred to her. "How does tarot work, Ma?" resulted in a puzzled stare and a, "it just does."

It just DOES?! My brain promptly imploded.

My mother is a witch, but she's a far cry from what I tend to think of as an average pagan. She understands natural currents, is spookily intuitive, and knows how to cast a spell. But she has almost no interest in the history of occultism, 'magical laws' or indeed any religion outside of her own personal connection with the gods. She's not big on self reflection.

My father, in stark contrast, could probably best be described as a sort of nominally-Christian, Zen sort of dude. His wife is half First Nations, half Irish Catholic, and fascinated by Judaism. They celebrate Hanukkah and Christmas. We have not ever had the, "dad, I'm a witch" conversation, because it frankly seems pointless. When I was much younger he mentioned that in Buddhism 'magic powers' were seen as a distraction from true enlightenment, but that's really all there ever was said on the subject. He bought my sister books on fairies, and he and I would discuss mythology and world religion. By this point he's either figured out witchcraft was not a phase, or has simply chosen to forget about it. This suits me fine.

...what's the point of all this ugly bullshit rambling?

You are where you came from. I'm fortunate - I love my family, and a good number of them are freaks. I can generally be myself around them and not have to worry, and I am aware of how fabulously lucky I am in that regard. Lots of people are not.

But your family is your family. Love them or loathe them, they've shaped who you are with their presence or their absence.

I'm about to lose a member of my family. That hurts like hell, but at the same time it's given me reason to pause and appreciate not only my grandmother, but everyone else connected to me by blood.

That's not a bad thing at all.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

"You may have noticed my brain is no longer pristine."

This morning, I finished Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein, a novel about a private investigator hired to track down the secret Constitution of the United States of America. It was... well. Warren Ellis.

Ellis has two settings: weird, and rant. These sometimes combine. I was introduced to Ellis first in the 90s, when he had a brief run on an Image series called DV8, the darker, aborted parasitic twin to the popular superhero book Gen13. Later, I would read Transmetropolitan and further cement my love for the insane old fuck. (I would also go on to get my third and fourth tattoos in honour of perhaps his most well-known creation, the fictional journalist Spider Jerusalem.)

Warren Ellis' work is populated by reprehensible characters, drugs, booze and ludicrously perverted sex acts. Crooked Little Vein is no exception. I read it in two days - it's only 275 pages or so - so it's rather like injecting some sort of vile concoction of amphetamines, LSD and cat-piss directly into your brain. That's a positive review, by the way. I very much enjoyed it.

Speaking of foul perverts...

Tonight it's La Fête Corsette. It's been quite some time since I've been to a Sin City event, but a friend organised a ladies night so it should be fun. As I understand it, a few of the girls are coming over to mine and Voodoo's house first to get ready, as some of them have never been to a fetish event before. (I always manage to bring virgins to these things.)

I've no idea what I'm wearing. Over the past couple of years I've gotten rid of most of my uber-gawthic garb, which used to be my default for such events. My good corset is black and underbust (I just cannot rock an overbust - I need support, not something just mashing my tits together) so I think I can pair it with one of my dresses or a pencil skirt and blouse to create something with this sort of feel. You know, rather femme fatale and glamourous. It may be odd for a burlesque performer to say this, but I do prefer coverage over prancing about in my underthings.

Okay. I'm going to stop this channel and clean my house now that my hair is set.

E is for Evil Eye

This post is a response to the Pagan Blog Project.


This past weekend, I attended a friend's birthday party. Perched at her kitchen table - I'm very short, and her chairs are very high - I sipped my gin concoction and looked around.

I see you touching yourself..
"Leanne," I said, noticing a few ornaments by the front door, "why do you have a collection of Evil Eye amulets?"

She did, too. About four of them. She informed me that she bought them while travelling in Turkey because they were pretty, and then told me that she'd had another hanging from the rearview mirror of her car, but it had broken.

"Lee, that means it took a hit for you!"

Across from me, our friend Halla nodded vigorously. Halla's family is Muslim, and she told us that she'd had a necklace with a Hamsa hand on it that broke. "I bought a new one right away," she informed us.

It struck me as amusing at the time - a kitchen full of women in their late twenties and early thirties, dressed smartly for a night out, discussing old folk beliefs. It is funny, but both Halla and I were dead serious about Leanne replacing the charm in her car.

The Evil Eye, also called 'malochia', is an old concept, and one that ties very closely to a specific emotion: envy. The Evil Eye is thought to be cast unconsciously in many cases, although it can also be deliberate and in some cases people are thought simply to have been born with this terrible gift!

Evil Eye amulets - blue eyes, or the Hamsa hands - are said to repel the accidentally malicious gaze of the envious. 'A hit' as I told my friend, meant that the amulet would absorb the energy instead of you, and the general consensus is that if this happens you do not pick the charm up. Just leave it, and be thankful it got the psychic whammajamma and not you.

The most frequent manifestation of the Evil Eye, according to Draja Mickaharic in his book Spiritual Cleansing is "a dull headache" and "lack of energy." Now, obviously there could be other reasons for such symptoms - if I went on that alone, then I'd be suffering from the Evil Eye after every trip to the mall.

It all seems silly, on one level - the idea that someone simply admiring you creates strife seems hopelessly rooted in religions where being meek and humble are virtues. But on the other hand...

I'm sure we all know one or two people who, although always polite and outwardly nice, never seem content with their own lives. The person in your circle of friends, perhaps, that you are loathe to share good news with because when you do they can't seem to help but say something like, "that's wonderful!...I wish I could catch such a break..." The coworker who is the first to remark on anyone else's success with a sneer.

Is it really completely insane to think these people might be casting - accidentally or not - malicious energy at those they envy?

...AM I being hexed when I go shopping?!

 Okay, so it's not time to panic and run screaming from the mall. (Only do that if there's zombies.) But if you're going to accept that all human beings have magical potential, you probably have to admit that, yeah, people could be fucking with it by accident. I am not advocating the 'I-am-constantly-under-magical-attack!' view of the world by any means. I do believe, however, that every magical practitioner should have a basic cleansing and protection routine.

In addition... if you're in a position where you know damn well people envy you, maybe it wouldn't hurt to take a few extra precautions against malochia: get an amulet, take a beer bath, tattoo a Hamsa hand on your body... although if that one takes a 'hit' I'm not sure how the hell it would manifest.

Hint: Don't do this.
And as long as you're examining yourself and the people in your life... make sure YOU'RE not the one giving others the Evil Eye.


Thursday, March 8, 2012

Saturday, March 3, 2012

E is for Ego

This is a response to the Pagan Blog Project. It's also a day late.

I remember being a little girl - probably about ten years old - and waking up one night thinking about dying.

"It's just like going to sleep," I told myself, and then immediately thought, "no, It isn't. Because you never wake up." The enormity of this squeezed my heart in my chest, and I fled to the living room and my mother's arms, unable to explain why the thought terrified me so.

What I couldn't explain to her, as I sat beside her snuffling in pyjamas inexplicably decorated with dancing German pigs, was that the thought of the essential I-ness of me simply not existing was nigh intolerable.

That's the power of the ego.

A few years later, I would begin my study of so-called 'alternative' spirituality. My dad, bless him, is a very Zen sort of guy, and through him I read books on Buddhism and meditation. I read that the aim of Buddhism was to annihilate the ego, to step out of the cosmic game of life and attain union with the Divine. My measured and mature teenage response was, naturally:

"Why would anybody want to do that?!"

It would be a few more years before I learned about theories involving the makeup of the soul as a thing composed of parts as opposed to a single entity, and about the idea of the Second Death. (And Third! And possibly more!)

Morbid subject matter, but I was goth. Seriously, I've seen Siouxsie Sioux, Andrew Eldritch, and Peter Murphy live in concert; if you'd cut me I would have bled black. This meant that death, and everything associated with it, was a part of my life. I was drawn to gods of the cemetery and battlefield like a fly to... well. Let's say corpses.

But in spite of all the spookiness, still I feared the destruction of the ego.

John Michael Greer's book Monsters was oddly the first downright accessible book I'd read involving Western Ceremonial magic (try slogging through Fortune's 'Applied Magic' when you're eighteen and have only read Wicca 101 fare to date) and in it he says, regarding etheric revenants,  "..the technique is a way of deliberately evading the Second Death... the soul stays within reach of the living." I read that and was actually annoyed he didn't give instructions on bulking up your etheric body so you could do just that!

There's that ego again. Stamping her foot and declaring SHE is too important to be banished to nothingness.

"At this point you may be asking yourself, 'All this may have been fine and good for the initiated royalty of ancient Egypt, but what does it mean to me? I'm not going to school to learn how to die.'
My staid answer to that question would be, 'Aren't you?'"
- Lon Milo DuQuette
Low Magic

The ego likes to think it's all of you. It doesn't like to shut up, either - a constant impediment to my repeatedly failed attempts at simple meditation. Guided meditation? No problem. The ego still thinks she's in charge, and I'm a visual person. But sitting still and trying to get myself to be silent? Oh, fuck me, it's almost impossible!

A couple years ago, my father the Zen master gave me a copy of Yoga Nidra by Richard Miller - I occasionally suffer from stress-related seizures, and I think he was hoping this would help me to chill the fuck out. I still haven't gotten around to listening to the included audio CD, but I've recently flipped through the book again after sort of forgetting about it.

And I've noticed something odd, since doing so... I've started to think to myself that putting a muzzle on the I-ness of myself could actually be beneficial. Maybe - just maybe! - it would finally banish those late-night moments of "holy shit I'm not going to be here one day!" or at least make them less all-consuming. Besides that, I fear I seriously cripple my spiritual development.

I'm not saying I want to blast it away and achieve some sort of miraculous enlightenment right the fuck now. I happen to rather like my sense of self. But one of my goals for this year is to maybe get it to loosen up a bit. Step aside so that I can get a better idea of the other parts of my soul. Just shut up every once in a while so it's easier to hear from other things!

But bitch doesn't have to leave entirely. After all, I'm not at the revolving gates of death quite yet.

Friday, March 2, 2012

Naked Girls Reading: Neil Gaiman!

Oh, Neil Gaiman.

I have a long, weird history with that author. I used to do a webcomic called 'Nice Hair' which basically had Neil, Tim Burton, and Robert Smith living together. (With the occasional appearance by Andrew Eldritch.) It wound up featured on Mr. Gaiman's blog, and that was my brief turn at internet fame. I got to meet him at a book signing and present him with some artwork, and he signed my copy of American Gods 'your fan - Neil Gaiman.'

I was a 20-something goth girl. I nearly died.

YEARS have passed. I'm doing the Naked Girls Reading Neil Gaiman event and on a whim e-mailed Neil's site to tell him.

He still remembers me! Such a sweet, lovely man. I'm all a-twitter, seriously.

And you better bet I'm doing the poster for the event!

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Pork is a party meat.

Tranny Zuko's debut solo is up!

He's such a sweetheart. I was sitting next to his mother when he did this number. He did not warn her about his, er, "hand blender."

He choreographed this number for us, which I'd love to do again - I was hella ill that night, and could have done better.