An ode to the influence that a place and its constellating denizens will undoubtedly exert over one’s creative expression. Without context, a strange fruit is an acquired taste.
📖 Lore Spores, Vol. 1, is now officially available! 🤩 Praise The Lore! 🗣️ Get it on my website 🔗
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📚The book explores the implications of reality’s oracular nature, the origins of divination, and the philosophical implications of pareidolia—the mind’s tendency to find meaning in randomness—as means to reconnect with a lost continent of the psyche.
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✍️ Through artwork, storytelling, and participatory exercises, the book invites you to pass through the pareidolic portal and root its ideas in practice. 💡🍄🟫🌱 👁️ 🧠 🫀 💪
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🔮 🍃 🫖 🧞 In tune with its divinatory themes, the book also traces the humble beginnings of Oracular Interactions—my work as a tea-leaf reading oracle poet—back to a time, many moons ago, when @sambaschutte (who you might know from the HBO show Our Flag Means Death) and I were hired as “corporate psychics,” navigating a surreal night of synchronicities and absurd revelations. 😆 🏴☠️ 👨🏾🍳 🪳
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🧚🏽💸🐌 The one thing more difficult than independently publishing a book and getting the word out is… asking for help. 🥺 Yet here I am! 🤲 Your support means the world to me. Besides buying a copy, it would be hugely helpful if you could boost the signal by being liberal with your likes, shares, and comments—to ensure Lore Spores reaches those whose lives could benefit from “enhanced enchantment.” ✨🙏 ✨
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The Martinotaur: My Grandfather’s WWII Artwork, Made in Hiding from the Nazis
On what would have been my grandfather Martin Jacobs’ 108th birthday, I’m sharing this video essay as a gift to his memory — and to the thread that runs between his life and mine.
This is my act of intergenerational devotion.
No matter what you believe about an afterlife, we can be certain that so long as our stories continues to be told, our memory lives on.
Praise The Lore!
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This piece is based on an excerpt from the essay “My Psychedelic Bar Mitzvah: Perspectives on the Intersection of Judaism, Shamanism, and the Appropriate Origins of Culture”.
Find the full essay here: /@voiddenizen /my-psychedelic-bar-mitzvah-913d8964cc82
🙏🏻 On May 5th, in the Netherlands, we remember those who passed in WWII. So today I share a humorous anecdote from my youth, along with artwork by my late grandfather Martin Jacobs, who together with his brother Phillip were the only ones that survived the war, outliving 50-something members of his family.
♟️ At one point he found himself in a situation where he was forced to play chess with a Nazi soldier, who (unaware that my grandfather was a Jew) kept talking about how recognizable the Jews are with their beaky hook-noses. My grandfather played along, agreeing wholeheartedly, and survived to tell the tale. This resulted in the drawing in which a cartoon Martin depicts himself pointing at the “beaky” soldier in 🦅 bird-form saying “look who’s talking”.
✍🏻 His masterful drawings depict family members and caricatures of friends, as well as one of the places where he and my grandmother (who were the last Jewish couple to get married in amsterdam before the war) hid away. He also prototyped “emojis” long before that was a thing!
⭐️ The first drawing is a caricaturized self portrait, along with the golden star he was forced to wear, and a document he forged so as to give him a gentile name.
👁️ In my essay “my Psychedelic Bar Mitzvah: perspectives on the intersection of Judaism, shamanism, and the appropriate origins of culture, I wrote about how my grandfather wasn’t able to pursue his artistry after the war, and how my full-force commitment on the path of art is a continuation of his dharma and a psychomagic spell on his karma. You can find it on my website in the “written and spoken words” section.
Guardians of the Mirror, acrylic on canvas (digitally mirrored), 2006
Uncanny, isn’t it—the world and its double? Two hemispheres of the brain folded in on each other like the centerfold at the heart of Mad magazine. Who’s watching the looking glass,
making sure no one falls through that hyperlinked rabbit-hole into wonderlands, uncharted? Who’s guardin’ the garden,
making sure some apple-minded fool don’t figure out he’s god-in-the-garden? No life guard on duty, no boundaries in beauty. Uncanny, isn’t it?
The podcast’s logo depicts two saucer-minded individuals attempting to articulately convey their minds’ unidentified contents through conversational exploration.
Their voices braid together while simultaneously branching off in separate directions, reiterating the unidentified notions they seek to compare & convey.
Meanwhile their mind’s “feelers” reach for the ideal version of the unidentified mental object that signifies their unity, evermore just beyond their grasp, evermore evading articulation.
Just dropped a micro episode, first one in a year and a half, of Self Portraits As Other People, where we mindfully investigate where the limits of language meet the fringes of reality.
Gallop to your local podcastle and storm the gates!
A march… in April? Yes! 🍄✊📣 THIS Sunday (4/19) we’re taking our namesake literally and activating the First Amendment right to a peaceful (psychedelic) assembly 😜
Join us at 1pm, Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza (NYC), as we kick off the “March for Cognitive Liberty” What may be the world’s first public demonstration in support of psychedelics.
We’re nearing 200 RSVPs and are anticipating somewhere between 10 and 10,000 folks actually showing up 🤷♀️
Make a sign. Bring an umbrella (just in case). As Phyllis Cybin said: we’re doing this rain or shine! ☔️
100% non-AI puppetry + Terence McKenna V/O by the very human @void_denizen Go follow him! 🐌🌀
#marchforcognitiveliberty
Who’s marching with us this Sunday? 👀 Meet us at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza at 1pm in Midtown. Make signs. Wear costumes. Bring your puppets.
We’ll parade up 46th Street, past the former home of the Athenaeum (so we can wave to our old landlord 👋) continue up 5th Avenue and end at Central Park South.
P.S. Last week’s AI signage-inspo post popped off, but clearly stirred up some feelings. How about showing these real human artists even more love than we give hate to the robots?
@void_denizen is an amazing multidisciplinary artist, who helps keep the spirit of Terence McKenna alive with his spot-on impressions.
And the incredible @shellmakespuppets for all your whimsical psychedelic puppet-related needs.
Freshly returned from California, back at it in NYC, on the couch with Sean and Cass and Magic the pug on Very Ape pod! You know where to tube it. The afterglow is exclusively available on both of our respective patty o’ryans (patreons, if the babble of my brogue causes confuzzledness)
