Pink Wedding

[ateolf]

Yesterday Mary Beth and I went and got Pho Binh for lunch, thought they'd be doing the buffet again but they're still pick up only so we picked up some food and took it home and ate it! We ate it while watching Schitt's Creek. Then in the evening we went to Amogh's wedding! I'm always amazed on the rare occasions I have to wear my suit that it's still fine never having been cleaned (I'd have to dry clean it and I've never done that before), I'm sure at some point I should get it cleaned just to get it done but it seems like such a pain and Mary Beth has stories of the only two times she's ever had things dry cleaned they lost them. Anyway, the wedding was at the Pink Palace. The ceremony was outside and it was pretty lovely weather (it had warmed up a bit yesterday). I had never met Amogh's fiance Rita (they apparently met just before covid). The reception was inside the Pink Palace (the actual old mansion part of it that was originally the museum but has been more for events or whatever since the newer building was built before I was born). It was all nice. We didn't know too many people there. There was a little mix of some Indian music when the dancing started (we didn't dance, and even if we would have, which we wouldn't, we'd eaten too much and felt too full). We came back home and Mary Beth finished reading to me Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World by Gary Lachman last night (or technically this morning as it was after midnight). I'd never at all been into Crowley or magic or anything and now I get to bond with Mary Beth over what a little shithead Crowley was. The book itself was okay, it was mostly critical of Crowley but the ex-Blondie dude that wrote it is seriously into the occult and there's a color of, even though he was mostly a charlatan and an irredeemable, petty asshole, he did have some natural talent and was an occasional "genius." And mostly he's skeptical of anything that's just some claim that Crowley made because the dude lied a lot, but there are a few times he seems to take things at face-value and reading it you're kinda like "what?". At least he made fun of how bad his poetry is.

Comments

[ifjuly]

man compared to every other work on the dude it was downright harsh and deeply analytical (!), which is yeah appalling-fascinating (?). like. the biography everyone these days acts like is definitively the best one, i tried to read it first and jeebus. like. every time lachman describes dryly the fates of crowley's many discarded scarlet women? insert there, over and over in this book everyone loves, "isn't it hilarious and high-five awesome how much he fucked over that person! harhar and woo!" the whole thing was one big nasty echo chamber of sniggering small ugliness, like living in a limp bizkit press release/music video or some '90s-era sophomoric misogynist gross-out fratboy porn.

i'm glad we talked more about my mulling over, trying to figure out what drew people who maybe "did have something there", and the interwoven stuff re: rebellious/revolting gay erotics and general polemical rage at christianity and establishment society. but. that's a lot of twists and turns too, re: ultimately toxic politics, notions of "immaturity" in both its best and worst potential facets, the power of image and (fascist) symbols and collective below-the-surface id drives, salvaging masculinity vis a vis trying to heal using misogyny, racism, etc.--which gets into something more generally tragic i keep noticing, and i notice others are making post-trauma-study observations about the last few years which i appreciate: often the thing that harmed you so badly you spend your life trying to heal from it ends up filling you with such rage, and the tragedy is you end up directing that rage not really at its rightful cause (usually because you can't, it's too big/powerful/pervasive which is why it could hurt you so much in the first place, its "higher" status above you) but at people even further down the pecking order than you, resulting perhaps in a kind of "it's just trauma all the way down" or crabs in a bucket thing eventually. no good. foucault'd have so much to say about it.

[ateolf]

Yeah, I can imagine (I mean, the person who would be most inclined to write about someone would be a huge fanboy or whatever). And yeah, hm, dude has everyone he associates with end up in an asylum, or addicted, or dead, or destitute and, yep, they're ALL definitely the problem... And okay, thought exercise time, suppose even it's true that they all got what they deserved because there was something fundamentally bad about them or whatever (which, of course not, but), what would that say about him only being able to choose such "bad" people to connect with in the first place? Anyway, no matter how you look at it, the common thread is Aleister fucking Crowley.

[ifjuly]

anne with an e in season 3 i think it was? touched a bit on some of that dysfunctional tragic dynamic of, trying to make sense of formative abuse by re-enacting it on something/someone you have control over as a form of catharsis and "healing", iirc bojack kind of did obliquely repeatedly too...

[ifjuly]

also, last i checked the wiki page is amazingly uncritical too.