How wonderful that you have an Elvisysian Order. I...

2009-01-06T11:46:00.000-08:00

How wonderful that you have an Elvisysian Order. I am currently ordained as the First High Priestess of Thoreauvian Alanology; please visit my blog to learn more!

existential despair

2008-09-22T00:49:00.000-07:00

existential despair

Any credit belongs to Mr Ventura; I'm just parroti...

2008-05-28T13:12:00.000-07:00

Any credit belongs to Mr Ventura; I'm just parroting his wisdom.

oh my goodness, jonathan, you get this!!!! yes, ye...

2008-05-25T09:32:00.000-07:00

oh my goodness, jonathan, you get this!!!! yes, yes, yes!!! I am so happy that you are another devotee of the elvisysinian mysteries!

Oh yes.Michael Ventura’s long, magnificent essay a...

2008-05-25T08:57:00.000-07:00

Oh yes.

Michael Ventura’s long, magnificent essay about blues, Voodoo, and rock’n’roll, Hear That Long Snake Moan, says this about Elvis:

It is not too much to say that, for a short time, Elvis was our “Teacher” in the most profound, Eastern sense of that word. This is especially so when one recalls this Sufi maxim: “People think that a Teacher should show miracles and manifest illumination. The requirement of a Teacher is, however, only that he should possess all that the disciple needs at that moment in time.”
....
It is important to recognize that when whites started playing rock’n’roll, the whole aesthetic of Western performance changed. Wrote Alfred Métraux of Haitian Voodoo dancing: “Spurred by the god within him, the devotee ... throws himself into a series of brilliant improvisations and shows a suppleness, a grace and imagination which often did not seem possible. The audience is not taken in: it is to the loa and not the loa’s servant that their admiration goes out.”

In American culture we’ve mistaken the loa’s servant for the loa, the horse for the rider, but only on the surface. We may have worshiped the horse, the singer-dancer, but we did so because we felt the presence of the rider, the spirit. John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful said it succinctly in one of his lyrics:

  And we’ll go dancin’
  And then you’ll see
  That the magic’s in the music
  And the music’s in me

The Voodoo rite of possession by the god became the standard of American performance in rock’n’roll. Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, James Brown, Janis Joplin, Tina Turner, Jim Morrison, Johnny Rotten, Prince—they let themselves be possessed not by any god they could name but by the spirit they felt in the music. Their behavior in this possession was something Western society had never before tolerated. And the way a possessed devotee in a Voodoo ceremony often will transmit his state of possession to someone else by merely touching the hand, they transmitted their possession through their voice and their dance to their audience, even through their records. We feel a charge of energy from within us, but it is felt as something infectious that we seek and catch and live. Anyone who has felt it knows it is a precious energy, and knows it has shaped them, changed them, given them moments they could not have had otherwise, moments of heightened clarity or frightening intensity or both; moments of love and bursts of release. And, perhaps most importantly, we could experience this in a medium that met the twentieth century on its own terms. So we didn’t have to isolate ourselves from our century (as the “higher” art forms often demanded) in order to experience these epiphanies.

And for all this the body is the conduit.
....
Texas singer and songwriter Butch Hancock comments on Presley’s historic appearance on the “Ed Sullivan Show”: “Yeah, that was the dance that everybody forgot. It was that the dance was so strong that it took an entire civilization to forget it. And ten seconds on the ‘Ed Sullivan Show’ to remember. That’s why I’ve got this whole optimism about the self-correction possibility of civilization. Kings, and principalities, and churches, all their effort to make us forget the dances—and they can be blown away in an instant. We see it and say, ‘Yeah—that’s true.’ ”

You know, I really dig this analysis.

2007-11-12T19:08:00.000-08:00

You know, I really dig this analysis.

Comments on temple of elvis: Drawing Down The Elvis

How wonderful that you have an Elvisysian Order. I...

existential despair

Any credit belongs to Mr Ventura; I'm just parroti...

oh my goodness, jonathan, you get this!!!! yes, ye...

Oh yes.Michael Ventura’s long, magnificent essay a...

You know, I really dig this analysis.