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antigravitymag · 9 years

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Astrocreep: Excuse Me by Mistress Anthropy

When life gets overwhelming, do you ever wish you could just politely slip out of it for a bit? Not in any dramatic or disastrous or even noticeable way, just softly saying “excuse me” and bouncing? Finding ways to live with the enormity of our experiences is critical to our survival. Though we are big enough to hold all of our sensations, thoughts, and memories, sometimes we feel frail. There are many strategies responding to this feeling, ranging from the pathologized, like dissociation, to the smiled upon, like meditation. For this month, I recommend a diversity of tactics. And as ever when invoked, by this phrase I mean firebombs. Loyal readers know that this mystic is always on the vanguard of explosive trends. I’m here to tell you that the hottest new woo is Google Trends divination, wherein you deploy one or many search terms like so many sticks in the iChing, and the machine shows you the waxing and waning of their relative popularity. For example, when you start to wonder if the world itself is creeping closer to crisis or if you’re projecting your own wild tempers and hopes, you can throw “abolition” and “reform” into the machine and see which claims the public favor.

When engaging with the world to any degree feels impossible, don’t forget, there’s always coasting or denial. Neptune goes direct on November 18th. It has been retrograde since June. If the previous five months have felt merciless—a difficult period of unceasing revelation—this is your opportunity to bury your head in the sand again, if you want. With other planets, deception or confusion is more associated with the retrograde period than the regular transit. But Neptune flips the script, forcing us to confront realities (material or spiritual, personal or global) during its apparent backward movement.

Mercury enters Scorpio on November 2nd. Your mind will be like a knife— penetrating, sharp—but like any weapon, also capable of being used against you. If you can hold this tool steady, you will be focused and especially persistent. If you allow your discipline to waver, you will be susceptible to paranoia and rumination. On November 20th, Mercury, governor of communication, moves into outspoken, loose-lipped Sagittarius. Predictably, this is a time wherein your mouth may be acquainted with the taste of your foot (even if you’re not normally into that kind of thing). This planetary position may also help you think and transmit thoughts with a more expansive vision. It’s an auspicious time for breaking down creative and interpersonal blocks, albeit perhaps with a battering ram (when a gentler approach would also do).

Venus enters Libra on November 8th. Libra is ruled by Venus, and this period of time is favorable for working out relational wrinkles, particularly if done with tender care. During this time, recent doubts about how much you’re worth to the people in your life may become clarified, and if it seems you’re not being treated fairly, your displeasure may move you to action. Mars joins Venus in Libra on November 12th. Mars, ruler of our passion-fueled drives, whether they be amorous or antagonistic, is lackadaisical but not charmless in chill AF Libra. During Mars’ time in this sign, you may be bad at drawing boundaries with people who you don’t have a strong interest in, because attention feels good. This can lead to you being perceived as a jerk. This tendency can be made worse by the pressure to couple-nest in the Autumn. If you’re a person who feels that push, check in with your sincerity.

Our friend the moon is renewed in Scorpio on November 11th, drawing our focus inward. Scorpio can be narcissistic, or amplify our narcissistic tendencies. If you feel positively about yourself when you become engrossed in self-reflection, use the energy of the New Moon to get your house in order (literally and figuratively) for the winter. If on this day you spiral into negative self-analysis, diagnosing yourself with ailments of mind, body, and lifestyle, try to beam compassion into those areas instead of criticism.

The sun enters Sagittarius on November 22nd, enhancing an optimism that, if we can draw upon it (goddess willing) could help get us through Thanksgiving. The Full Moon in Gemini on November 25th expands our potential to communicate, by speaking, listening, touching, and the host of other less tangible methods. Whichever variety of holiday you observe or avoid at the end of the month—whether that of harvest and bounty, or the other more white-washed colonial/genocidal one—it can be a rough time. Holidays have the magical/annoying property of transcending time, drawing energy from the disappointments and triumphs of the holidays past. Memories of, or direct encounters with, chosen or biological family can enrich and renew us. They can also embitter, scar, and confuse us, or cause us to regress to a more embittered, scarred, or confused version of ourselves.

If that all sounds alien and off the mark to you, congratulations. But if any of it sounds familiar, I invite you to use the Full Moon as a ritual of self-fortification. Draw upon Gemini’s duality to prepare yourself an alter ego, a public version of yourself that is true but safe to share. Nourish your private self by listening to what you feel, and assessing your willingness to openly communicate with others. If you can’t bear to do that, you can communicate with yourself, with your ancestors, tell yourself what you wish someone else would tell you. If all else fails, you can always excuse yourself, for a little while.

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antigravitymag · 9 years

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just unearthed this illustration for an old Antigravity petcare column. studio cleaning = discovery of many treasures.

#illustration #human pet #antigravity magazine #throwback

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antigravitymag · 9 years

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Hidden Louisiana: Rum & Coke

by Breonne DeDecker art by Ryan Blackwood

Coastal Louisiana’s intricate mazes of marshes and bayous have long been safe havens for bandits. Perhaps the most known is the pirate Jean Lafitte, a much celebrated local legend, and the namesake of a bar on Bourbon Street, a national park on the West Bank, and a pirate-themed festival in Lake Charles called Contraband Days. His career of attacking merchant ships, establishing colonies of outlaws, and selling slaves has largely been romanticized into acceptability. Lafitte is seen more as a quaint local character, part of Louisiana’s colorful past, rather than one of the first in a long line of successful smugglers dealing in illegal goods.

For much of modern times, New Orleans’ role as a port city surrounded by swampy, rural areas provided prime opportunities for the establishment of large networks facilitating the flow of contraband. During prohibition, New Orleans was the wettest city in the United States, stemming from massive rum running operations funneling the Caribbean liquor into the States, as well as domestic moonshine operations that ran stills from Opelousas to the Mississippi line. When Governor Huey P. Long was asked what he was going to do to crack down on the booze flowing through New Orleans, Long, known for his love of gin fizzes, replied, “Not a damn thing.” [Read More]

#Antigravity Magazine #antigravity #breonne dedecker #hidden louisiana #airline highway #barry seal #jean lafitte #huey p long #new orleans #narcos #coke #cocaine #dea #narcotrafficking #baton rouge #booze #prohibition

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antigravitymag · 9 years

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The Black Panthers, Vanguard of the Revolution: “The Best Music I Ever Heard”

by Morgan Lawrence photos courtesy of Stephen Shames

This year’s New Orleans Film Festival welcomes the first feature-length documentary about one of America’s most revolutionary groups: the Black Panther Party. Born in Oakland in 1966, their cultural and political uprising throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s enlightened, inspired, and frightened the powerful and powerless who were ready or not for change to come. This film compacts the triumphs and downfalls of reinforcing America’s societal norms and “equality for all” in less than two hours. However, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (Directed by Stanley Nelson) also exposes the reality of some of the darkest times in American history, with testimonies from former Panther members and archival footage. Although racism was a dominant factor for the Panthers to inflict change, the issues of gender roles, politics, media, and violence molded the history-changing group that led an international revolution.

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antigravitymag · 9 years

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Guidance Counseling: Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers

photo by Andy Tennillee

The Drive-by Truckers are no strangers to New Orleans (or the pages of Antigravity). They have rocked crowds into the ground at late night Tipitina’s shows and charmed festival audiences at Voodoo and Jazz Fest alike for the duration of their nearly 20-year career. Over the past decade-plus we’ve chatted with multiple members about what it means to make rock music in the modern South. We have always found them to be an insightful bunch that takes no shit and pulls no punches, so we couldn’t think of a better crew to tap for this month’s advice column. We were able to grab a few minutes of time with Patterson Hood (vocals/guitar) in advance of their October 17th show at the Joy Theater. He warmly obliged, dropping some golden nuggets of wisdom at our feet.

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antigravitymag · 9 years

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Reality Bites: WINGS

by Yvette del Rio

art by Ben Claassen III

When I told friends that I’d be reviewing wings this month, almost everyone asked if I was going to Hooters (and everyone who asked also wanted to go with me). Y’all, just go to Hooters if you want to go! And then they all said, “But Tan Dinh is going to win, right?” You’ll have to read on to find out!

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antigravitymag · 9 years

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Astrocreep: Laugh with the Sinners by Mistress Anthropy

Fall has returned and with it, so has football. The sport, depending on who you are, can be many things. It can be an avatar for a city’s emotions, hubris, redemption, folly. It can be a seasonal scourge, a foolish celebration of masculinity. It can be casual escapism from the powerlessness and boredom of daily life. Or it can be pure spectacle. One of my friends gets so excited when football season is coming that he gleefully yells “Yay! State-sanctioned violence!” (If your feelings don’t bend toward one of those categories, acquire some goddamn complexity, for the sake of astrology.)

Life is more exhausting when you think there’s no end in sight. The recurrence of seasons—sports-related or natural—provides a respite from the interminabilityof existence. Cycles provide familiarity, an echo of home, an opportunity to mark time, and a chance to remember (or forcibly ignore), with the landscape’s changing appearance a helpful veil. During the fall I always try to imagine what it would be like to believe in heaven or an afterlife. The idea is as hard to grasp as optimism—on what basis could a person just decide that things will get better someday?

When I look to culture for insight—it is great fodder for divination—in this season of shortening days, when stoking inner warmth is so essential, I am uncertain where to find hope. With music transformed into content, whose sole purpose is to fill out blogs and fests, in turn solely to generate ad revenue, the regime of popularity feels more arbitrary and empty than ever. The belief that eventually good songs will prevail is tempting but seems as whimsical as a belief in heaven. It is more of a consolation, for some reason, to remember that eventually we will all be gone and the alien inhabitants of our planet will only value our music by the utility of its debris in constructing rafts.

The Sun enters Libra on October 3rd. In this period, it may become possible to balance negative, fatalistic ruminations about the state of the music industry with the innate joy in creating and witnessing art. Mercury goes direct on October 9th, signaling the end of its apparent backward motion. Disturbances in communication or understanding may begin to sort themselves out. The New Moon in Libra on October 13th will become a balm to the discomfort in being connected to other people, who invariably will fail to respect you at times, just as you will fail them.

The Sun moves into Scorpio on October 23rd, challenging all of us to shine virtue and courage into our passions. Sometimes “the courage to love” means the courage to persist with a bruised ego from the shortcomings of those you love. Sometimes it means the courage to love without action. Sometimes it demands that we move in partnership toward an uncertain future. Sometimes we move on alone. The Full Moon on October 27th in Taurus invites us to examine the meaning of courage in love with abundant tenderness. [Read More]

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antigravitymag · 9 years

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Histories of Southern Revolt: An Interview with the authors of Dixie Be Damned

By Breonne DeDecker

Dixie be Damned is a history book about the South unlike any I have ever encountered, challenging the narrative that the South is a passive, politically conservative region. The authors, Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford, focus on seven insurrectionary movements that cropped up across the region over the past 300 years. These movements, often ignored in contemporary teachings of Southern history, offer interesting vantage points into how communities resisted the institutions of slavery, racism, industrialization, and police oppression. Dixie Be Damned positions itself as a non-objective history, and the authors are explicit in stating that political histories should be examined via political lenses. The authors use an explicitly anarchist framework to explore a diversity of topics—autonomous zones deep in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina that threatened the political control of the plantation system; the role of women during mill strikes that peppered the piedmont of South Carolina during the 1920s; cross-racial alliances that fought against unjust policing regimes during Reconstruction. Shirley and Stafford also write about the process of recuperation, whereby “legitimate” political actors co-opt and water down radical ideas for their own political gain. In their view, this process of recuperation has grown since the Civil Rights Era to undermine insurrections. I recently spoke to the authors about this process, along with the importance of reexamining historical narratives, the similarities between the past and the present, and how current activists can gain insight from the successes and failures of previous insurrections.

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antigravitymag · 9 years

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“Life with you has been an endless loop of second lines on Sunday; Manchu on Monday; glitter on Tuesday; gunshots on Wednesday; stoop nights on Thursday; indictments on Friday; and 3 a.m. crawfish-mac-n-cheese with your neighbors on Saturday. In their boat. Which they keep up on cinder blocks. In Treme.”

It’s hard to think of a better kick-off than this vomitous letter from white self-proclaimed shaman and supposed “Southern Storyteller” Brett Will Taylor. He moved here from Boston, ran cringe-y tonedeaf racist garbage in all the local outlets you’d expect, & then drifted aimlessly off to New Mexico three years later in search of greener shamanistic pastures.

Not only does BWT etch cobwebs across the hoariest NOLA-cliche bingo boards, he goes hard on some hack-writer stylistic shit.

Like this. With the periods.

And the line breaks.

For emphasis.

Keep reading

#fleur de leaving

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antigravitymag · 9 years

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From Guidance Counseling: Natural Child, September 2015:

I have a lot of artist and musician friends, and I try to support all of them in their creative exploits: attending shows, going to exhibitions, etc. Since the advent of crowd-funding, the only support my friends want now is money. I get several Facebook “invites” to donate money for this or that band/video/project every day. At this point, and I’m running out of ways to explain that I just can’t give cash every time Henry wants to make a noise album or Jane has to put together a public performance piece about the fall of the Soviet empire. What can I say?

Money isn’t real. Its value is determined by a group of people that just like to carry out real life experiments on idiots like you and me. Work on not believing in money and you’ll find it’s very comfortable and easy to tell people, “I don’t believe in money” when they ask for it. As a side note, when you actually do stop believing in money, it also has the added benefit of making you extremely generous and you might find yourself donating more.

[Read the rest]

#guidance counseling #advice #natural child #antigravity magazine #antigravity #print media #new orleans #nola

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antigravitymag · 9 years

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Dissecting the Golden Goose: Brian Boyles on New Orleans Past, Present and Future

by Andru Okun illustrations by Happy Burbeck

If the Super Bowl was meant to mark the beginning of the “post-recovery” era for New Orleans, Brian Boyle’s account of the 100 days leading up to the event can help us better understand what the transition period looked like. New Orleans Boom and Blackout: One Hundred Days in America’s Coolest Hotspot is a contemporary history lesson detailing the dramatic changes to city infrastructure carried out in preparation for the nation’s largest annual sporting event. Hardly a book about football, the author’s examination of New Orleans as a cultural destination in flux separates itself from other texts on the subject by having a keen awareness of the people who keep the wheels greased and in motion: taxi drivers and pedicabbers, bartenders and cooks, brass bands and DJs. I recently sat down with the author for a discussion on tourism, politics, and, of course, the new New Orleans.

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antigravitymag · 9 years

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Astrocreep: Liveleak & Chill - September Horoscopes As the Sun enters Virgo, I reflect on Virgan writer Jeanette Winterson’s 7 propositions about time, from her book Sexing the Cherry, including:

Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember. Lies 2: Time is a straight line.

Lies 3: The difference between the past and the futures is that one has happened while the other has not.

Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time.

The images accompanying this month’s column are from a 1775 book on demonology. The unknown author dated it “1057” perhaps in an attempt to lend it more credibility as an occult relic. That’s funny from our vantage, where 1775 seems as incomprehensible as any earlier date. What if someone found this column in 700 years?

Winterson’s assertions regarding time are on my mind because I have noticed that during the change of seasons, time operates differently, behaves capriciously. If you feel frail or absent as the Autumn Equinox approaches (September 23), you might be spread thin from being in more than one place at a time—or even more than one time at a time. Are you burning all your gas carrying a torch for a bygone day? During transitional seasons, when the veil thins, it is possible to still be partially in a previous month, for example. If you seem out of sync or unable to connect, begin by naming where or when you feel you are. Then you can work your way back to the present, if you choose to attempt that.

Another characteristic of Fall is the struggle to balance excess and deficiency. Despite what nearly every metric of human conduct might lead you to believe, it’s not always clear what is too much, what is not enough. Human behavior is defiantly irrational.

I pluck my eyebrows to reduce them, then tint them to enlarge them. One time on a road trip, in Birmingham, I drank a Red Bull™ then a Drank: Extreme Relaxation Beverage™ (“Slow your roll”™), then promptly threw up, having baffled the delicate economy of my mortal shell. Nothing in moderation, especially moderation. We often treat this struggle casually, but life itself hangs in the tension between surplus and shortage at any scale.

Venus turns direct from its retrograde on September 6th, and the haze muddling your relationships will begin to clear. A New Moon and Solar Eclipse in Virgo occurs September 13th. On this day, your thoughts can remain mostly logical, despite the lunar influence, but there may be bizarre non-sequiturs that make you doubt your sanity, not unlike the emotional topography of Martha Stewart’s Twitter. A Full Moon and Lunar Eclipse in Aries occurs September 28th. On this day, you may as well rename the month Sep”tempt”ber because you will be tested, and your appetites may lead you into danger—a day where one might do best to retire early (is there any day where this doesn’t apply, though, really?). Mercury takes its tri-yearly sabbatical from forward-appearing movement. The retrograde is in Libra, from September 17th to October 9th. During this period, it is best to refrain from making binding contracts, even if all your friends are getting engaged or putting down payments on houses or whatever. Stay free.

Amid the astral changes this month, one thread runs throughout: the search to commune with one another. The ultimate connection is one that feels both deep and easy, meaningful but effortless ( for example, like just kicking back in a cozy situation while taking in some realtime citizen journalism). Loneliness can feel so vast and complicated, as though it could only be satisfied with a dramatic solution, like methodically reconciling with every ex, or dedicating oneself to purposeful collective undertaking, like a friendship bread chain. But when we take the glass off the door where we’ve been eavesdropping on our hearts, sometimes we can catch a clear thought or two from our brain. Our higher selves might be able to perceive a simpler remedy to feelings of isolation.

This month it is easy to be hypnotized by screens. When we are texting each other at the same time, it can feel like we are talking over each other; but instead of our words being more intelligible than that—and they should be, because they’re plain on the screen—we experience it like the backwards echo of a cymbal. The anticipation and tension building into something deafening. There’s a reason people write on bathroom walls.

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antigravitymag · 9 years

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Letter from the Editor: We Made It

Did you survive the flood… of media coverage, presidential visits, highway closures, special edition snow globes, reflections, and reflections upon reflections that was the 10th anniversary of Katrina? Like a lot of you, I shied away from all that stuff like a vampire avoids the light. I feel about it all the same way I feel about skipping my high school reunions—I live it every day, so why make a big fuss? It’s also hard to commemorate an event which hasn’t really ended, but stretches on from those first cataclysmic levee failures, affecting our lives and decisions to this day. Talking with my parents, who survived Camille and Betsy, we all agreed that you never really get over the most recent hurricane until the next one.

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