CD of the Day Review! Alan Moore’s MOON AND SERPENT!

Review Alan Moore’s MOON AND SERPENT: It starts off with roller-coasters and rain, and there’s something fitting about that. That Moore’s finest, most all-encompassing work should start off with roller coasters and rain. Highlighted tracks are highly recommended listening.

Track 1 roller-coaster/carnival barker-“tell all your friends, tell all your enemies, tell all the people you do not know.” Goes to about the 5:30 mark. From the start, his most sonically, and stereoscopically mesmerizing CD.

Track 2 rain, a tour of London- Moore’s voice at once longing and hungry and haunted and stark. A dreamer two days dead, speaking of dreams. Speaking of London, all Londons. “hallucinated rain in a mirage of gutter… a phantom, speculated city, somewhere else… where do the Yarmouth breakers detonate, a distant semtex when we are away from yarmouth… these are the towns of light, built from remembered brick… where thought is form…locations we shall never visit that yet have their hearsay substance in our lives, and so are never far from us… metropolis erected out of nothing, only metaphor, and ringed with slums of dreams… a shadow London, our idea of London” Goes to about the 8:44 mark. 9/10.

Track3 a tour of London- “Move on to the city hypothetical… his Tesla grid of terror and magnificence…streets filthy with mythology… “ till about 13:20 mark

Track 4 Cray Twins/Double trouble – Brilliant use of stereo! Love listening to this. “two sides to every story, two doors to every cell” till 15:31 10/10

Track 5 St.Pauls/Diana -The heart of the City – Let us pay attention to St. Paul himself, a Proto-Mason , there in 1st Corinthians 3:10 he states “As a Master-builder I have laid foundations and another builds there on.” , “here is Diana chained, the soul of woman-kind bound in a web of ancient signs that women might abandon useless dreams of liberty” “be careful here” till 19:45

Track 6 Fleet and Bride Street –“they are the engineers of our exhaustion” “If this room is mirrored in idea space, what of we?” “…monologues we have mistaken for the world” “stay close together, these are stairways beyond substance, things get slippery here.” Till 24:50

Track 7 Into the Abyss – “Theory and belief are all we have to walk upon” A walk through idea spaces, through landscapes/mythologies… eclectic. Till 32:15.

Track 8 Spectre Garden- Angel Baeletic- “I am the daughter of fortitude, and ravished every hour of my youth” Haunting and beautiful. Till 35:24

Track 9 Demon Asmodeus- Sumptuous, disturbing use of sound. Till 40:02

Track 10 Deity/Glycon last created of the roman gods- “Proceed with caution, this is old power. And the idea of a god, a real idea” Till 44:10

Track 11 Tundra Absolute/The Final wasteland- “if we observe it, we affect it” He is dropping knowledge, no, not knowledge… wisdom… wisdom beyond the paltry dreams of science. Brilliance! Brilliance! Reaches a stunning conclusion, with a truly compelling performance by Alan Moore. A+. till 59:35

Track 12 End Music/Denouement- Don’t care for this folksy/wood nymph song, or the delivery. But not enough to mar this excellent CD. Till 63.07.

Overall grade: A+. Best of breed. Essential CD.

Moon & Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels

Humanity is a goal: On Science fiction, so-called Zombies, the Space Race and dreaming futures to make them

I don’t think Humanity is a birthright, I think it is a goal. And I think most people in this world, most Americans especially, fall short of that goal.

We have this ludicrous idea, particularly in this country which produces only one thing in quantity, mass murderers and television, that adult hood is something we reach in years. That we hit 18 or 21 and suddenly we are adults.

No. To repeat a trite phrase, but hopefully not tritely used here, ‘age is just a number’. Maturity is something else. And I think with just a quick scan of what passes for dialog in this connected age, what passes for conversation, you can see very few people… grow. While they may grow physically, mentally they stop maturing, in ways deep and dangerous they are immature children, with adult responsibilities.

Mayors, Governors, Police Chiefs, Generals, a whole world full of children in the roles of men, but lacking the conscience of men, the humanity of men.

I don’t think Humanity is a birthright, I think it is a goal. And I think most people in this world, most Americans especially, fall short of that goal.

There was a time when people went to the movies to cheer for the hero, to be inspired by heroism. Today people watch movies, or tv, or play video games to watch the other suffer. To play out vicarious games of aggression and an end to responsibility. It’s part of the reason so-called zombie movies are so popular, because subconsciously you have empty, aimless, driftless, purposeless population, that wants and needs and is angry, but is unsure of what they want, and what they need, and what they are angry about.

It’s just an irrational need, irrational hunger you may say, byproduct of an irrational leadership, an irrational age. Caused by at every path, the higher callings of their nature being sabotaged, by a leadership that relies on ruling ignorant, stupid, misinformed, desperate people.

So a rudderless people see in the myth of the ghoul (the proper name for what western cinema incorrectly misnames zombie), this engine of only hunger and no responsibility, something to identify with. To lose the burden and responsibility of higher humanity, of callings of honor and friend and family and duty, and sublimate it all to the joys of abandon and bestiality.

A consumer nation, a capitalist/tyrannical world, taken to its rudderless extreme.

It’s the reason I have no use for Ghoul ‘Zombie’ films, or torture porn flicks, or slasher flicks. Everything in moderation, but I see in this deluge of barbarity, that in our fictions, do we shape our facts.

The 50s and 60s, decades of science fiction fanaticsm, of the dreaming of stars, this obsession passed like cholera to every man, woman, and child of the age, and the dreaming culminating in man walking on the moon.

Shared idea space, as progenitor to our physical space. Our facts but late fortifications of our fictions. Heady concepts, but well trod ones.

So what becomes of a culture whose obsessions are death, war, serial killers, cannibalism and the crazed dead? God, whatever God you believe in, being always kind, he gives you what you dream of.

He gives you horror, if that is what you are intent on having.

So many have died aspiring to nobler ends for those who follow them, do not sacrifice all the virtues and the hopes they have bequeathed to you… in pursuit of petty dreams of barbarism. Dream larger. Save yourself, and save us all and… dream Nobler.

Dream of a world where wars may be ended, governments held accountable, forests replenished, aboriginal people saved, and lives bettered. Dream of a better world, and who knows, you may become a better man (or woman)… to build it.