This is the new mainstream occultism. Ke$ha! “TiK ToK” was catchier, sleazier, more honest and more fun than Lady Gaga, but the pop tastemakers mostly dismissed Ke$ha as basically the garbage monster behind Winkies. Now Ke$ha has another sleazy dance-pop song, memorable and forgettable and almost vulgar. The video was released last week, and has just begun to swirl around the paranoid-paranormal websites, and people are outraged by the occult sex magick dance orgy held within a Catholic Church at night. This is a Black Mass, with Ke$sha as High Priestess, and it looks much better and is so much more entertaining than the dreary old Black Mass of the Old World Occult. Satanism isn’t about a literal Satan, because who cares. It’s about living. It’s the way we live now!

The Old Satanism involved a lot of heavy black robes and biblical-sounding mumbo jumbo. The Black Mass is just a reversal of the regular Mass, and all of its emotional power comes from the illicit shock/delight in reversing Catholic/Christian symbolism. Light is dark, below is above, etc. If you lack even a lingering belief in the traditions being parodied, the only sexy thing is the brief nudity and whether anybody else seems into it — and even those parts are anticlimactic (ha ha, literally) because you’ve got to endure a lot of tedious stuff that’s just as pretentious and dull as a real church service. It’s like sitting through a terrible straight-to-Cinemax thriller for the few minutes of badly acted partial-nudity humping.

In the New Satanism, all the Bohemian Grove/Masonic buffoonery is tossed out. You start with young beautiful people, not a lot of Grand Poobahs in dusty robes and cardboard Egyptian headdresses. Then you send these people to a church at night, in the Mexican desert, and they break in with portable lights and music because it’s basically a rave in an abandoned building. Then there is the usual drink and dancing and crotch rubbing, but with a light-up pentagram (artfully turned sideways to avoid immediate complaints of Satanism) to add ambiance. Christina Aguilera and Justine Timberlake and so many other once-young pop singers “went erotic” on their initial grown-up records, but has any Top 40 singing star since Sammy Davis Jr. actually gone Satanic? The ritual orgy cutaway scenes are grainy nature film of wolves screwing and biting in the woods. It’s amazing.

In a long history of (mostly male and British) pop stars toying with the Occult, it has never seemed like a lot of fun. Led Zeppelin could put you in a real trance while they implied demonic ritual, but you need only watch a few minutes of their fantasy sequences in The Song Remains The Same to remember how stupid people usually look when they’re trying to be diabolical. Not even Jimmy Page could make Aleister Crowley interesting to more than a handful of kids, and they were the ones already playing D&D.; Ke$ha looks like she’s simultaneously loving this sacrilege and not really giving a goddamn. She wrote the lyrics and co-wrote the… whatever it is, the computer sequencing or however they do it, so her investment in the material seems pretty genuine, in a “don’t actually care” way.

Zimbio calls her a “sexy cult leader” and notes the “bunch of anti-Christian imagery — see the pentagram, the upside-down crucifix, Ke$ha’s gold tooth.” MTV.com inventories the “mystical glyphs and pentagrams and dirty mattresses,” but you need to go to the conspiracy sites to break it down frame by frame.

David Icke, he of the Lizard People Revelation, limits his comment to a headline over the embedded clip: “Massive Use of Illuminati Occult Imagery in Ke$ha ‘Die Young’ Cult Orgy Video.” And it’s all there, including the All-Seeing Eye on her ass.

At the conspiracy clearing house BeforeItsNews.com, somebody has timestamped every inverted crucifix like we weren’t supposed to see all this stuff:

I wanted to see what else I could find in this video.I found a satanic upside down cross at 44 seconds into this video.Unreal! This video is loaded with massive Imagery thats for sure .Skull and bones in the beginning and evil on the back of the car.Watch at 2:09 several upside down crosses are flashed and again at 2:14 and several times after that even ,these are easy to spot.This video is pathetic.

And then there’s The Economic Voice, which we guess is a Ron Paul kind of thing:

Make of it what you will, either the symbolism is being used to gain attention from the conspiracy world and a clever marketing ploy, or it is a sign of the subtle programming and branding used by the illuminati who control the music industry; but the symbolism is blatant.

The trouble is Die Young is a highly catchy tune and a very well produced piece of dance music, which is more than can be said for most artists of Ke$ha’s artistic genre. Credit where credit is due, shame about the imagery and lyrical content.

Ha, okay! We thought all you guys liked occult stuff, but the Internet is confusing that way.

Sex With A Ghost

Did the online diabolicals miss anything? Yes! They missed the Tarot cards (used here for the ridiculous home poker-night variation called “Indian”) and the painting of the revelers’ foreheads and noses with blood from a shot-glass-sized chalice.

Also, there’s the “sex with a ghost” situation. Ke$ha and a few of the other lady dancers are seen in erotic horizontal action with something. In voodoo, this is a Loa that possesses a few blessed participants in the ritual. They then fall to the floor and writhe in abandon once mounted by the spirits of the underworld. In the Brazilian variations, this ceremony is called Candomblé or Umbanda, and it all comes from East Africa’s indigenous religions at the time of the slave trade. It is also much sexier than anything St. Paul or Luther could ever dream up.

It is also, apparently, informed by Ke$ha’s actual “sex with a ghost.” She told noted occult investigator Ryan Seacrest that she’s been repeatedly visited by an incubus, and that’s she’s “very open to that.” So this is not just your usual spectrophilia in a music video.

Inspired to seek out more supernatural experiences, Ke$ha says she traveled the world alone, on a boat (?), for her voyage of discovery:

“The theme of this record is magic. I went on a spirit journey by myself. No security guard. No managers. I just went around the world and lived on a boat,” she explained. “I was in Africa rehabilitating baby lions. I went diving with great white sharks, and just went on this crazy spirit quest. I got hypnotized, and I just really wanted this record to be really positive, really raw, really vulnerable and about the magic of life.”

This “Die Young” video is just a low-budget entertainment, but all ritual is entertainment, a diversion from the drudgery of life, and a promised portal to higher or lower consciousness. Let’s hope this video clip reverses the Occult’s long, troubled descent into cranky old age. Anton LaVey was probably the last fun Satanist, until now, and he couldn’t exactly fill a dance floor. Hail Ke$ha.

★★★ Unable to really warm anyone anymore, the sun contented itself with shining at stuff. Out on the river, it lit the crests of the undulating superstructure of a cruise ship, maneuvering into the terminal. It sent a fat square-sided beam straight down the stairway into the Lincoln Center subway station, where it bounced off the floor, passed through the glass elevator shaft, and met people descending the opposite stairs. Its brightness in the sky convinced someone to sit at an outdoor table, huddled in a coat, clutching a takeout coffee cup. In the afternoon, one ray even found its way under the blinds and between the large-screen computers, into the perpetually dimmed office.

It’s chilly, right? You’re ready to get a space heater, aren’t you? Good! This will help.

Beloved national counterculture tabloid Arthur was a victim of the Great Recession when it published its last issue four years ago, but it has been reborn as a reader-supported broadsheet that will be out in time for holiday stocking stuffers. Jay Babcock is back as editor, Portland’s Floating World Comics is the publisher, and Arthur regulars will be back on the masthead, including Thurston Moore and Dave Reeves (“Defend Brooklyn!”). Pre-order it for just $5, and help America’s cultural recovery.

Thursday, November 15

At Buffalo -2.5 Miami

C. J. Spiller is
very fast and dangerous
so I will Bill-lieve! PICK: BILLS

Sunday, November 18

At Washington -3.5 Philadelphia

All Eagles’ players
ought to emulate Nick Foles’
awesome mullet ‘doo. PICK: REDSKINS

Green Bay -3.5 At Detroit

The Detroit Lions
ought to hire Dr. Freud and
Dr, Jung as coaches. PICK: PACKERS

At Atlanta -10 Arizona

The Battle of Birds!
Give me 10 points and I’ll take
Tom to eat Jerry. PICK: FALCONS

Tampa Bay -1.5 At Carolina

Cam Newton is great
at pretending to be Superman
but bad at throwing. PICK: PANTHERS

At Dallas -8 Cleveland

If the Browns beat the
Cowboys I promise to crap
my pants in public. PICK: BROWNS

At St. Louis -3.5 NY Jets

Some Jets players think
Tim Tebow’s terrible and
they know terrible. PICK: RAMS

At New England -9 Indianapolis

This game could be close
because the Pats’ defense loves
to give points away. PICK: COLTS

At Houston -15.5 Jacksonville

I’ll take the Jaguars
because the Texans will get
bored in second half. PICK: JAGUARS

Cincinnati -3.5 At Kansas City

Chiefs players like to
jump around and celebrate
but don’t win a lot. PICK: BENGALS

New Orleans -5 At Oakland

When the Big Easy
Meets the Black Hole We All Know
There Will Be Vomit! PICK: SAINTS

At Denver -7.5 San Diego

At Halftime they should
fire Coach Norv Turner and
hire Coach Phil Jackson. PICK: BRONCOS

Baltimore -3.5 At Pittsburgh

Ben Roethlisberger
has a busted arm and so
the Steelers will lose. PICK: RAVENS

Monday, November 19

At San Francisco -5.5 Chicago

Battle of Back-Ups!
Colin Kaepernick looks weird
when he runs so fast! PICK: 49ers

Haiku Picks went 7–7 last week. That’s 64–80–3 for the season. We need a breakout week, Football Fates!

Jim Behrle tweets at @behrle for your possible amusement.

Europe is back in recession, there’s some kind of fiscal cliff people are worried about, and WalMart reported dismal earnings today as poor people continue to not have money. But on the elite urban coasts, things are looking pretty good! California real estate prices jumped 19% last month, and New Yorkers are back to their main form of recreation, which is gasping in aspirational horror over the cost of apartments. The time is right for a new kind of architecture — an architecture that is not so much “architecture” as it is “a mix of interior design pieces and pet costumes,” an architecture not so much for people as it is architecture for dogs.

“When we first began discussing the Architecture for Dogs concept with Kenya Hara, we were immediately intrigued,” says Julia Y.C. Huang, Founder and CEO of Imprint Venture Lab, the business incubator behind Architecture for Dogs. “The multipronged approach we were able to develop in conjunction with Hara allowed us to help develop this concept into a start-up that’s unlike any we’ve ever seen.”

Architecture For Dogs also “blurs the lines between exhibition concept, commercial company, and crowd-sourced, interactive online project,” because nobody has any idea what the hell is going on here.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

from Portraits of the Artists as Their Own Subjects

The screen lit up it was old

she took to foam
the stitching / cloth and it was without form

patches clay Ground Theme
Koji Kondo, 1982 / PVC green paint and astroturf

and darkness on the face

of the Kingdom

and her hand over the cellophane water
her hand over the plush fungi
and her hand over the void
over the Pakkun flower with piranha teeth bared

and behold,

Mike Lala has published two chapbooks: Under the Westward Night (Knickerbocker Circus, 2010) and [fire!] ([sic] Press, 2011). His work is forthcoming/in Fence; The Brooklyn Rail; Diagram; Rhino; La Petite Zine; No, Dear; and others. He curates Fireside Follies and works with Recession Art in New York. More at MikeLala.com.

Do you know what you can do on the subway? Yes, be stabbed, but before that, read our vast archive of poetry. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

“On Twitter, Israel sought to sway global public opinion with the hastag #IsraelUnderFire. Hamas and their supporters responded with #GazaUnderAttack along with variations in different languages. These hashtags are also sometimes combined with #FreeGaza and the more militant #Resistance hashtag, and Hamas adds the hashtag #ShaleStones for military updates. And both sides are fighting over control of #Gaza.”

My Unrealizable Postmodern Novel

As National Novel Writing Month slogs on, the next in our series about the novels that we started writing but, for whatever reason, never finished.

I have never really aspired to write anything that you might consider literary fiction, finding its style — what the late Dennis Potter so memorably defined as “he said, she said, descriptions of the sky” — to be terminally tiresome, but about fifteen years or so back, when I was still young enough to think I could pull it off but (as it turns out) too old to really have the energy to get it together, I came up with the idea for a novel that I was absolutely sure would show the world my as-then-undiscovered genius.

The book was going to be called To Be Sure. (Don’t cringe yet, you don’t know how much worse it gets, or why!) It would follow the career of an aspiring writer from his early days breaking into the literary scene (this is back when there actually was a literary scene, although even then it was starting to show signs of fatigue) until his death. Let’s call him Stephen Hero, because I never got as far as giving him a name and that one seems to have a pretty decent pedigree.

So far, so what, you say. Who wants to read another book about a man making his way through the bookish demimonde of New York, experiencing the vicissitudes of literary style, the cut-and-thrust of pretentious people at cocktail parties, the growing bitterness of a protagonist who realizes he might not achieve everything that once seemed so promising to him? It’s a fair question. I sure as fuck don’t. But my book was going to be different, different in an amazing way that nothing had ever been before.

And here was the idea: the book would be told solely through reviews written by its protagonist. There would never be a line of dialogue. You would only be able to follow the character’s development through the bio appended to each review — the plan was to start with “Stephen Hero is finishing his first novel” and follow it up throughout the years listing various teaching posts, professional affiliations, anthologies edited, etc., but to make it clear that his novel was never finished — or the occasional letter to the editor from a disgruntled recipient of a poor review which delineated conflicts of interest and the like. Over the course of 100 or so reviews you’d watch as Stephen Hero went from enthusiastic young aspirant to embittered old failure. While some of that would come through in each review, it was those bios that would really show the rise and fall of this literary wannabe.

I hear your amazement. “Alex, what an astounding idea! What utter genius! How come you never did anything with it?” you ask. Well, lemme tell you. There are two major flaws in this concept as far as I could see. (There may very well be more, but I gave up after two.)

First: I am what you would consider a low-on-energy, low-on-inspiration kind of guy. The prospect of coming up with 100 different plots that would be under review — lampooning so many styles and fads over the course of 40 years, coming up with the flaws the character would complain about in the essays, mimicking the standard conventions of literary criticism, and, honestly, doing 100 versions of anything — was so daunting as to make the entire prospect untenable. And don’t forget, this was right around the time “Behind The Music” debuted; there were so many other distractions.

Second, even I was not unaware of the off-the-charts pretension and showy postmodernism-run-amuck behind the concept. Given an outline of this project even Jorge Luis Borges would have been all, “Fuck this bullshit, I’m going to go listen to some movies.” Consider this: one of my ideas was that in each of the reviews, the penultimate paragraph would begin with “To be sure,” which would lead into five or six lines that stated the complete opposite of everything that had preceded it in the review before seguing back into the original tone of the piece. Also? The bio for the very last review would have been something like, “Stephen Hero, who passed away in December, was a contributor to this publication for over forty years. This spring, To Be Sure, a collection of his reviews, will be published by Hemingway House.” Do you see what I did there? Not only did poor Stephen Hero only finally get a book published after he died, it was the very book you were reading right now! Could you not just choke yourself to death with your own fingers?

In the end, I am happy to report that good sense prevailed and I abandoned the idea entirely. (Whenever I allow sloth to win out over industry I award it the appellation of “good sense,” which is a life strategy you might profitably adopt yourself if you have not already.) Is the world a worse place because I never put the book to paper? The only sense in which I can say yes to that question is when I think about the fires we are all going to need to flame eventually; no one would have bought this sucker, and I bet they would have burned really well.

Previously in series: My Terrible Dan Brown Ripoff Novel

“A 41-year-old man is to stand trial after being arrested for feeding sausage rolls to police horses.”