Things We Like: “ALIENS” Edition

Damn these algorithms. It can feel sometimes like the whole wide world of knowledge is penned inside tech monoliths like Wikipedia, Facebook, and whatever boundaries the “fact-checkers” establish—anything outside of that is immediately perceived as pseudoscience, fake news, scary. The modern-day consumer wants nothing more than ideological security, a kiddie blanket for the mind, which leads to blind trust of governments, corporations, and whatever “the experts” are saying.

We here at Countere are trying to navigate the waters away from land. We’ll show you two opposite ideologies and let you find the truth in-between the lines. We asked some of our favorite writers, artists, intellectuals, dirtbags, dissidents, and friends to recommend things that they like—things that might not normally appear on your timeline (along with takes on things that already are). We organized them around the loose theme of “aliens": extraterrestrial, foreign, strange, weird, wonderful—and already among us.

Steven Greer

by Tao Lin, Novelist & Author of Leave Society

Steven Greer has the most compelling and informed view on extraterrestrials that I've encountered. He argues that Unacknowledged Special Access Projects—projects which were once part of the U.S. Military but, through increasing secrecy and compartmentalization, have become transgovernmental and are now beyond oversight—have been planning to hoax an alien attack for decades. It's humans, not aliens, Greer argues, that are a threat to both humans and aliens. Greer bases his arguments on his experiences communicating with aliens via meditation; on talking to high-level people in government including CIA directors and presidents; and on the 900-something intelligence, military, corporate, and other witnesses he has talked to, recorded on camera (visit his YouTube channel), and transcribed into his books. The Cosmix Hoax is the most up-to-date documentary on Greer's views. It's shadowbanned but can be reached through its direct link.

Dictionaries & Etymology

by Rick Strassman, Professor & Author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule

I’m a big fan of dictionaries and etymology. “Alien” comes from Old French by way of the Latin: strange, foreign; a stranger or foreigner; belonging to another, not one’s own. As an aficionado of the Hebrew language, I see that the common root for alien is neikhar. Interestingly, the primary meaning of the neikhar is: to regard, recognize, observe, pay attention to. Thus, its denotation as foreign or strange relates to something which is intently regarded; that is, it doesn’t necessarily mean something outside of ourselves. The other Hebrew root for alien is zur, which as often as not means strange in a loathsome or abominable way. Neikhar on the other hand, doesn’t carry that additional implication.

Dune

by Bernard Sheu, Countere Editor-at-Large

Any movie that can capture my attention for more than 90 minutes is a veritable feat of cinema: these days, anytime I sit down, my thoughts inevitably drift towards the great men I’ve known, and lost, in my life: Bartley, Henry, and John. Who cares about the ramblings of an old man; these days, all eyes are fixed on the Chalamet boy, the acting prodigy quickly becoming the biggest movie star of our times. Chalamet fills the role of Paul Atreides impressively—he transforms from a bony, eager youth to the future Emperor of the Galaxy without a shade of histrionics. Each new scene of Dune feeds us more of its compelling sci-fi universe, from “stillsuits” that lose only a thimbleful of water a day to terrifying, mile-length sandworms in the desert. I’d have like to written a review, but Countere contributor H. Ellis Williams beat me to it—yet another youth supplanting me! I might as well go get a job at Amazon now, only my fat friend who makes neon signs still lets me work in the backroom of his workshop, albeit plagued by the perpetual smell of cigarette smoke.

Foul Monday

by Distrolord, Music Executive for Wu-Tang Clan, Mike Dean, & more

I recommend people tune into the Supreme Being Foul Monday. He’s a prolific poet, writer, and hip-hop artist from the planet of Queensbridge. Foul Monday’s name is mad cool, because people don’t like Mondays, so they can relate. He has rapped and with some of the big dogs in the rap game from Sean Price to Method Man to Smif-N-Wessun to Killa Sha (Rest in Peace). Killa Sha always told me that Foul Monday was really special. Down the line I started seeing what Sha was talking about. Foul Monday brings something new to the game. He’s not just another MC, he brings a new flow, new concepts. He’s not just rapping about guns, drugs. He’s one of the few you can just close your eyes and get the movie in your mind. I feel like that art has been gone for some time, and he’s one of the dudes bringing that back. A good Foul Monday song is “Clans & Cliks,” it’s by Sean Price and features Foul Monday and Wu-Tang Clan. Right now, we are in the midst of working on an album called Mud Brothers, it comes out next year.

Flight 714

by Audrey Horne, Twitter Bon Vivant

One of the last Tintin comics published by Herge, Flight 714 takes on a modern and ambiguous tone as Tintin and company face the usual villains and violence along with a new set of inexplicable events after a plane crash on a mysterious island. Tintin remains level-headed as ever, navigating supernatural revelations with all the bland and unflinching rationality we've come to expect from him, but Herge's standard cartoon cheeriness is missing from this adventure, replaced with a philosophical gloom. This isn't the quintessential Tintin novel, but it is the most evocative. Amazon

The Other Worlds of Harry Smith

by Michael Abolafia, Writer & Archivist

Harry Everett Smith is a portal to other worlds, to our lost America: a polymorphic postwar prophet; a visual and musical poet of the overground (as above, so below); the creator of mind-expanding multimedia experiments in film and animation and matter (many of them carted away to a New Jersey garbage dump in the 1960s); an eclectic collector and preserver of expressions of the soul of man, from ephemeral 78s to paper airplanes to string figures to sacred Sephardic songs. His great alchemical work, conducted mainly in secret—on Native American reservations, in Berkeley communes and San Francisco bebop clubs, in garrets across Manhattan—would define the spirit of our age in ways that are still coming to light. Listen to the haunted Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) to fathom the weird American soul that birthed the Greenwich Village folk scene. Give yourself over to the film Heaven and Earth Magic (1962), an alien hallucination of world history and the sleep of reason “culled from cut-outs from nineteenth-century catalogues…[that] traverses the landscape of an hermetic dream.” Forget about the Beats, forget what you know about the history of America’s counterculture in the ‘50s and ‘60s, build a library of dreams alternative to the present: join me in tracing the seismic brainwaves of Harry Smith and his collaborators across faiths and cultures—Lower East Side poet-magus and Kabbalist Lionel Ziprin; Ira Cohen, with his mylar chamber and his Himalayan publishing outfit; visual artists Jordan Belson and Bruce Conner, harbingers of psychedelic and occult apocalypses; Tuli Kupferberg, anarchist trickster and resister flitting in and out of Ginsberg’s Howl (“who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer”). Researchers are only now uncovering the secret knots binding Smith to avant-gardes and artistic revolutions all over the world. The Harry Smith Archives promise a deep ocean of opportunity for restoration. A new book explores the mysterious byways of Smith’s formative years along the Pacific Northwest’s Salish Sea. A major vita by Yale professor and biographer John Szwed shimmers on the horizon (to join his sheaf of books on major musical lives: Sun Ra, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis). Is the resurgence a herald? Of what? After all, the artists of Smith’s day were charged with de-matrixing art. Our artists are charged with no less than de-matrixing life.

Sam Shepard

by Alex Perez, Writer

Sam Shepard was a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, short story writer, novelist, Oscar-nominated actor, lover of beautiful women, and an all-around American badass the likes of which we’ll never see again. I recommend reading everything he wrote, but make sure not to miss Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark, a treasure of a book that collects the long running correspondence Shepard shared with his best friend of fifty years. The letters grant you unprecedented access to the man behind the myth and also serve as a fascinating look into the writing process. Amazon

The Munsters

by @INTJMoments, Instagram meme account

Few things are as universal as the cast of the Universal Monsters movies, which includes Dracula, The Invisible Man, Frankenstein, and, among others, the Wolf Man. Why should you care though, there hasn’t been a new Universal Monsters movie in decades, unless you count Dracula Untold in 2014. No, to truly appreciate the camp of Universal Monsters you have to go back to the 1960s and a TV broadcast known as The Munsters. A show that predates modernism and the erosion of strong, positive male characters. It follows—no points for guessing this—The Munsters, a family living in the US and dealing with all that comes with that: they have a niece searching for a boyfriend, a son looking to grow up, parents who are well-intended but often ineffective, and a mad scientist for a grandpa. It’s about as clean as comedy gets but as refreshing as a frothing cup of tea from the decanter. If you love your parents, enjoy new comedy, or like horror, this is the, old, new show for you.

Man’s World

by Reyna de la Cruz, Countere Operations Chief

I am not a man, but I know one when I see one. And these days, all I see are soyboys, coomers, and betas. Thankfully, one man has stepped up to the plate, Raw Egg Nationalist, and created a true men’s magazine, replete with content like cocktail recipes, “by the numbers” of ancient conquerors, how to smoke a cigar, a “History of Hierarchy,” and important archaeological and medical knowledge from Stone Age Herbalist and Dr. Benjamin Braddock, respectively. Already on its fourth issue, the magazine has compiled its best content into a year-end hardcover—Man’s World Annual—which you can now purchase from Antelope Hill Publishing. While Man’s World is meant for the more right-discerning reader—it, along with the fast-growing IM—1776, are the premier publications for the surging conglomeration some call the “dissident right”—I care nothing for politics; all I know is that my son is turning 13 by Christmas, and I plan on giving him Man’s World as a coming-of-age ritual, before his father drives him into the Mojave desert and leaves him with only a compass and a bottle of water before he makes his way back to us as a man.

Pop Vultures

by Gustavo Pierre, Countere Staff Writer

I found out about Pop Vultures when one of their two producers, “Bextacee,” modeled the Egrevore “Chemtrails” T-shirt that Countere featured in our inaugural “Things We Like.” Pop Vultures is a Eugene, Oregon-based duo putting out experimental electronic music; their video for “The Tower” uses brutalistic elements (a rooftop garage) to create something simultaneously ultramodern and bizarre. Their music sounds like the soundtrack of a platform video game where everything is made of candy but it’s a cyberpunk dystopia. They’re working on an album called Last Laugh about chess and various states of consciousness inspired by occult studies; they also recently put out a dope new track called “ISLAND BOY 69 (IRS REMIX).”

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