Today’s post? Anything but verbiage.

So I made a music mix while Mercury stationed in Scorpio and triggered a ping pong of sonic impressions which I tracked, mixed and recorded.

I like the Renaissance approach to creativity. In addition to my work as an astrologer I like to publish, paint and I’ve recently finished a teleplay with my writing partner, Noble Smith. Having worked as a DJ decades ago in Hawai’i, I’ve never lost my love of a good segue and so I mix tape too.

A note about the collection of tunes below. I avoid most anything that’s considered pop, not that I dislike pop music but simply because there’s so much of it that’s not good. Too, unless a songwriter is really gifted, like Aimee Mann or Elvis Costello, I get bored with confessional writing as I’m not that interested in hearing people’s stories about love calamities or the Rolex and weed they just purchased.

That leaves electronic and ambient music as my primary placeholders. But I also love jazz (50 and 60s especially or really old jazz, like early Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong). I’ve a penchant for soul music from the 70s and I also enjoy pounding modern dance music that knows how to swing and not just thump. So expect all of that.

Anyway, I said I’d do anything but compose words today and here I am five paragraphs deep. Jesus.

Enjoy!

 
Illustration by Max Ernst.

Artist Valerie Hegart creates art that unwittingly channels the Pluto in Capricorn transit/meme. This is like a series of pages from Shiva’s playbook.

Somehow both patriotism and horror are palpable in Hegarty’s works, which she mutilates and brings to new life in a recent exhibition, titled, “Altered States.”

Rémi Gaillard is a guy who lost his job as a shoe salesman and then decided to transform the big question mark in his life (as in “What to do next?”) by spreading that question mark all over the world as a culture jammer, (as in people scratching their heads while watching him and asking “What the fuck?) Read the entire article here.

“You think your mind is in your head, but where is it? No one knows. So our practice is to be with everything. When you include everything, that is the real self.”
–Shunryu Suzuki

Art work: Joseph Cornell, Cassiopeia (verso),1960

The golden moment in this new mobile art piece by activist artist Banksy comes right at the 45 second mark when the inner child in each of us realizes the grim reality of what’s going down.

The Sirens of the Lambs features a slaughterhouse delivery truck, loaded with plushies, touring the meatpacking district in New York. Coming to your village soon!

Pardon the melodrama but I’ve gotta start somewhere — with something.

I did everything except what I’d intended to do throughout the summer.

But I’m a wizened Cancer and I know better about how my creative flow creates.

We’re always hearing about athletes stoking themselves, like Mount Vesuvius, into their ‘peak zone’. Or muse-possessed artists working non-stop until stigmata appears on their hands and feet. And then there’s those mothers who raise Mack trucks up with their bare hands should a child be pinned beneath an axel. Yes, those sorts of super states are factual, but they are also highly romanticized. And not part of my creative reality. Just thinking about exertion like that makes me want to take a nap.

The lunar association with Cancer is both a horror and a gift. There is the always satisfying absorption of solar light, holding an impulse and molding it into something original. But there is also the dark side of the moon that, heretofore, only Pink Floyd have ever explored publicly. And there’s the rub.

Until a Cancer learns about this other half of their nature they remain caught in the constant waxing and waning of the light, waiting for a moment’s pause to gather their bearings, hit the perfect note. But of course that moment never arrives, that promise of perfection remains allusive. And so there are many stillbirths and the bad moods — the loss of persistence, that follow.

The dark half of the moon is the bardo that a wise Cancer (or any creative person) eventually learns to abide in. They come to see it as part and parcel of the creative way: To have no sense of light — no direction or purpose. The only poet I’ve ever read who wrote about this place was T.S. Eliot and he illuminated it perfectly in his masterpiece Four Quartets.

Eliot illustrates the dark of the moon by evoking the subway “when an underground train…stops too long between stations. And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence. And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen. Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about.”

This is the realm of the pre-conscious. Or the pre-conceptual. In this place all is perfect but also motionless. Life-less. The journey into form has not commenced. The options and the potentials are limitless, but what to designate, what to bring the solar gift of light to?

The dark side of the moon is a borderless landscape of nascent pre-things. A realm where every impulse, idea, thought, word and image is poised like a cat ready to pounce. All it needs is a mouse. Or carrot (not to mix metaphors — so scratch that.) This is the realm Cancers might access but only after they’ve paid the price of admission. And often the price of admission is a lot of doing (seemingly) nothing.

And from the nothing comes the something. Read more