The Red-Hot Head Rot Newsletter

Welcome back to The Red-Hot Head Rot. Here you'll find weekly fresh bread to set your head into a tailspin of corrosion.

Here we go.

As a seeker of all things esoteric and occult, I have found the teachings and beliefs of Greco/Armenian/Russian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff to be as elusive as Waldo in a criminal lineup of seven Hotdog On a Stick employees and three Barber Shop Quartets arrested in a drunken brawl over who is more deserving to wear stripes.

Having recently read Gurdjieff's Meetings With Remarkable Men and enjoyed it, I was further frustrated with this intriguing man's wraithlike presence. I just kept bumping into his Fourth Way, with almost always having no idea what it meant or was meant to do.

Enter P.D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous. By no means a difficult read, it is somewhat lengthy. But O the treasures to be found therein.

A philosopher and mystic in his own right, Ouspensky was a Russian author who attended many of Gurdjieff's Russian and Finnish meetings during WWI. He refers to him throughout the book as G., enduring countless talks and conversations, and performing unusual cognitive exercises to the point where he had days-long mystical experiences when he would see the people on the streets as asleep, despite their open eyes.

Ouspensky includes long Gurdjieffian monologues that chart out the teacher's strange system of octaves, basic elements, and enneagrams, these perplexing symbols that integrate the two. All of it was meant to help one self-remember.

The two most pithy mental models that I took away were:

• A person’s emotions are a horse. His mind is the driver. His body is the carriage. Only the master being carted around has the higher consciousness to direct the proper course. Without the necessary synergy, the horse is likely to be dictated by emotions and therefore run amok. Most people go about their days this way and are considered unconscious, or asleep. Only the practice of self-remembering can snap us out of it.

• The Fourth Way seeks to go beyond the triad of the fakir, the monk, and the yogi. In other words, the physical, the emotional, and the mental. Waking up is to be achieved only through an integration of those three human paradigms. Hence “The Fourth Way.”

I know not at this time whether this book serves as some personal clarion call, if I will swan dive into a vat of Fourth Way workings. Only time will tell. All I know is that I am ready to read Gurdjieff's 1,200-page magnum opus, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. Until that hefty tome arrives via forklift to my front door, I must Gurdjieff rabbit-hole it.

I've been a fan of hardcore electronica for quite some time. I love the blistering drum n’ bass of Squarepusher, Apex Twin, Fanu, and Venetian Snares. But I also dig the vibier stuff of Boards of Canada and the poppier stuff of Royksopp.

Well, Amon Tobin is capable of all of that. Not to be pigeonholed into subcategories, the Brazilian electronic musician has dished out over fifteen albums, and each one is damn good and shockingly eclectic.

The elegant and aggressive Chaos Theory [2007] is the soundtrack to the video game Splinter Cell 3. You wouldn't know it if you're light-years away from video game culture like I am. I learned only through research. However, the album clearly stands on its own. It's great for reading, driving, and I imagine sparring jiu-jitsu. Right off the bat, the first two songs, “The Lighthouse” and “Ruthless,” set the table for a fierce ceremony of sonic mayhem.

P.S.: Every album chronologically leading up to this one and following it is wonderful as well. Amon Tobin is an unheralded genius. Check his music out while you read. Don't be surprised if you fall in love.

Brooklyn, New York's Spotlights produce a sound too heavy and lush for a mere trio. Husband-and-wife duo The Quinteros, accompanied by drummer Chris Enriquez, dole out emo/grunge/shoegaze metal--the kind of music a black hole would generate if it fell in love with a star. It's no surprise, then, that they should be featured on über-genius Mike Patton's Ipecac Records.

2023's Alchemy for the Dead begins with “Beyond the Broken Sky” and spins a 47-minute roulette of conflicted emotions—ethereal yet heavy, bleak yet packed tight with intention. It's the kind of music that is at once trance-inducing and unsettling.

The shiniest gem of the songlist has to be the bass-distorted “Algorithmic,” which pulls off being a dirge and a paean at the same time. It would make a killer intro to a television series about a time-jumping miracle worker who just needs a little affection:

I can change the whole world in a matter of centuries

I can move every mountain above the sea if you please

But please come out of the ground

Don't take that away from me

Let's believe that answers we want are secrets we need

The secrets we bleed out

Imagine Jesus Christ with a Don Draper complex. Such unlikely pairings of completeness and neurosis inform this dark, gorgeous album. There's something here for the goths, the metalheads, the stoners, and the wrist-ruiners.

What I've been up to lately:

• Finishing up Substack's 4-part series, The Princess of Las Vegas, about an MMA reporter who befriends a strange woman on The Strip. Check it out here.

• Furiously writing Schrödinger’s Cat Fight, a sci-fi mindbender that's a stylistic cross between Philip K Dick and Italo Calvino. I will have to reread a lot of quantum theory, Jason Reza Jorjani's spectral-revolution masterpiece Metapolemos, and some of my favorite cyberpunk novels, like Greg Egan's Permutation City and Dick's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

• Going deep down a Gurdjieff rabbit hole. I find myself constantly engaged in the act of self-remembering. I eat meals slowly and deliberately, with no distractions. I enjoy being stuck at traffic lights. I focus on my left thumb while walking. Things of that sort—things that keep one present and, according to the Greco-Russian mystic, serve to wake one up from being a sleeping meat robot. So far so good, but we'll see how long that lasts. We tend to fall back on old programming, after all, or get distracted by shiny objects.

That's it for now, foax. Until next weekend.

Bye,

b

Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK.