Erik Davis revamps website and there's lots to read

Erik Davis

Erik Davis is busy touring to promote his new book Blotter (see the bottom of this newsletter for tour dates) but he also has announced a big revamp of his official website, which collects much of his work. 

"For the new website, we decided to downgrade the previous chronological orderings of the seven hundred-odd items it contains. Instead, we wanted to invite more thematic and synchronistic cross-connections, opening word-cloud wanderings and liminal trawls through the archive. Rather than hot takes, it is designed for cool descents into a rather labyrinthine underground packed with still glowing oddities, sigils, and gems," he writes.

Running a search for "Robert Anton Wilson" produces 27 different hits. I plan to listen soon to his hour-long talk on "Pulp Illuminations," described as "A talk I gave  ... about Illuminatus!, the occult, and the tension between high and low magic in the 1970s."

But many of the other pieces  interest me, too. If you are into Led Zeppelin, for example, you could do worse than to peruse pieces such as "Magic Men: Led Zep," which wonderfully evokes the band's effect on teens in the 1970s: "Over the hills and far away, in the longago pubescent dawn, my world was a half-dreamt thing built as much from Tolkien, Lovecraft, and Hunter S. Thompson as from the concrete chunks of reality that the usual suspects doled out daily."

Oz Fritz on Led Zeppelin and Crowley

Jimmy Page in 1973 (Creative Commons photo) 

Oz Fritz has a post up on "Led Zeppelin & Crowley." The first couple of sentences:

"After The Beatles, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album came out, Dr. Timothy Leary declared it the ultimate document to communicate his message, the message of self-directed, personal freedom of consciousness to grow and expand as it will.  Led Zeppelin plays that role for the maps and techniques of consciousness expansion presented by Aleister Crowley, i.e. his system of magick called Thelema.  Speaking from experience, one way to get Thelema deeply imprinted into your DNA and engrained into your body of habits is to listen to a lot of Zeppelin's music."

Related: Oz Fritz on the Rolling Stone list of the greatest guitarists of all time. The magazine put Jimmy Page at No. 3, but Oz would have put him at  No. 2 (below Jimi Hendrix, of course.) (The Rolling Stone list is here.)

Here is a list by Dan Peeke, at Beginner Guitar HQ, of the "100 Best Guitar Albums of All Time." But I note with disapproval the omission of the Rolling Stones, the Allman Brothers and Cream.