Read some of Jonathan’s more surreal explorations—-fantasy fiction, rants, experimental writings, poetry.

John “Jack” Spencer Savage 1989-2013    poetry copyright Jack Savage, 2013,  photos copyright Jonathan Zap, 2013 This page last updated May 12, 2013 I added a new page of thoughts about the Jack revealed by his poems: Some Thoughts on the Poems of Jack Savage     ∞♦∞♦∞♦∞♦♦♦∞♦∞♦∞♦∞ Among other talents, Jack was a brilliant poet. After spending more time with the poems the last few days, I believe Jack was, and is, one of the greatest poetic voices of his generation. It’s not that I’ve read so many millennial generation poets, it’s a general feeling I have based on the power with which Jack’s poetic voice is the voice of the soul. Sometimes this poetic voice is celebratory, at other times it is struggling and even tormented. But it is always profound, authentic, accessible and deeply present with the reader. Jack’s voice has a presence, an emotional immediacy and intimacy with a sympathetic reader that is comparable to Walt Whitman, who was Jack’s greatest poetic inspiration. Jack’s poems, even the ones that he wrote when he was 19, do not seem like an awkward, adolescent attempt at being Whitmanesque. They are alike, because both poets are voices of the soul. [...]

Thijme Termaat is a young, visionary Dutch artist who spent three years meticulously crafting one three-minute video:  I Paint . Thijme is a self-taught artist who lives in a very small, rural town in Northern Holland. The video was constructed using simple, stop-motion and time-lapse techniques and no digital effects. It could have been made, as Thijme points out, a century ago. It would sometimes take him several days to construct a single frame and his output averaged one minute per year. Once it was complete, he posted it on Youtube and within three days it was being seen in almost every country on earth and soon had over a million views.  Careful What You Fish For, acrylics on panel, 40X50cm        I Paint, and a number of Thijime’s paintings,  seem to brilliantly capture that sense of vision as a seamless, shimmering, superimposition of ocular and imaginative layers in a way that allows the viewer’s eye to spiral into a portal rather than be stopped by any definite horizon line. Thijime’s intention is not so much to focus the viewer’s attention on his images, but to help stimulate the viewer’s own imaginative process. As Thijme put in my interview with him:     My [...]

This overview of the artwork of Alex Grey (also published as a multi-part series on Reality Sandwich) looks at problems the art world has with spiritually themed art, Alex’s transforming relationship to darkness and shadow material, what his art says about sexuality, and the public roles Alex plays versus his studio work.

Self-portrait in Infinity Box (N0. 3), from the Awakened Vision series, 2012 by Matt Elson photographed at the Fractal Nation Art Gallery, Burning Man 2012 text and photos copyright Jonathan Zap, 2012 At about 330am (see Predawn Window Zone), just before awakening to resume work on my fantasy epic, Parallel Journeys, I had a dream about relating to the creative muse that used imagery and art from Burning Man. I am talking to Matt Elson who created these wonderful mirror boxes that were on display at the Fractal Nation art gallery dome. Matt is only vaguely present (essentially I am talking to myself). We are out in the blazing sun looking at a mirror box sitting on the playa. It is long and rectangular and apparently completely sealed to keep out the elements. I tell him that this is too egoistic and that the mirror box should be open to the elements and have portals so that insects could enter it. The mirror box is reconceived so that it now has an open corridor. Smash cut to next dream scene— I am biking along the edge of a desert canyon that has steeply slopping sides descending about a hundred feet [...]

copyright 2012, Jonathan Zap Status Update August 16, 2012 3:30 am Status Update August 16, 2012 3:30 am Awakened by the Spirits of the High Desert and the Red Book So often I find the muse waking me up between 3 and 4 in the morning, as it did this morning at about 3:10 am, and that can work out very well if I’ve gotten to sleep early enough, say 9pm. The predawn hours are the magical time for me creatively, a window zone where the veil between the realms seems thinner, and most people in the community are in the dreamtime and I have just come from the dreamtime. This morning I’m at 7200 feet in the high desert of Taos, New Mexico at the guest house of someone whose book I’m editing. The muse has been waking me up at 3 something all this week even if I’ve gone to sleep late. When that happens, my brain is just not rested enough and I usually have to go back to sleep. It feels like the muse is reminding me that I should have been ready, and when this happened a couple of days ago the awakening was from [...]

The Seductive Power of Facebook To see the latest status update and earlier ones scroll down to the bold font “STATUS UPDATES” In your face, facebook: A friend posted on Facebook: but i don’t want a mother fucking “timeline”. Me: Facebook doesn’t care what you want. It will just keep reminding you, again and again and again, wearing away your will away day-by-day, until one day, inevitably, in an irreversible moment of weakness you will click OK, and then your life will forever after be defined by Facebook’s new timeline. Stop your futile resistance. You will be assimilated. Friend: i find the forced sentimentality facebook is going for, as if your facebook is a kind of digital memory album, incredibly unappealing and getting in the way of what i actually want from a social network like facebook. at best, this is an e-mail and photo storage and info sharing site, and while there is an obvious narrative element, forcing it to be crafted around a personal narrative breaches into that cloudy privacy area facebook isn’t great at. It’s kind of like a website that doesn’t understand it’s own function and personal space – I feel like that’s why myspace fizzled out [...]

copyright Jonathan Zap, 2012 I just had a fight (which I think I won) with an Egyptian Sun God. It was probably a total waste of time, but the opportunity to fight Ra http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra , a god that someone impersonates in my fantasy work, Parallel Journeys, is not an opportunity that comes by every day. It does come by every month or so, because there is a New Age tendency that has been irking me recently for people to name themselves, and believe themselves to be, gods. On a forum where people were having a very necessary conflict about a festival that turned into a fiasco, people airing real greviances and working toward resolutions, Ra butted in with some paternalistic New Age bullshit. I have a confrontational personality, and this may reveal something bullying about my personality, perhaps an artifact of growing up in the Bronx, but I figure an Egyptian Sun God aught to able to take it. Here’s how the fight unfolded on facebook (which of course is where gods tend to deliver their messages these days). Thoth Ra Beloved Ones!! These things should be discussed between yourselves and not in public. Blame, judgment, and anger. Until you put yourself [...]

all images copyright Nathan Zap Nathan painted during two brief periods of his life. 1951-52 and 1976-79 with most of his paintings produced in 1977-78.’  His technique might be regarded as basic (he was entirely self-taught), but many of the images have powerful visual elements that seem like X-rays of the unconscious.  The images are always concise, never busy, and there is strong sense of visual authority.  In the spring of 2012 when I encountered these paintings again while doing some work at my parent’s house I was astonished at how many of the images had symbols of the singularity archetype.  Most of the paintings featured spirals and some seemed to be images of what, in my book,  Crossing the Event Horizon—Human Metamorphosis and the Singularity Archetype,  I call “homo gestalt”— a telepathic network. Another parallelism is that my dad’s most prolific year for painting, 1978, was the same year that I began work on the Singularity Archetype and wrote about it in a philosophy honors paper, Archetypes of a New Evolution. I recently wrote an oracle card based on my dad: No Safe Walk Through Life.  When I showed my parents a slide show of the paintings on my [...]

I couldn’t smell anything from the mostly neglected bongs and unused bowls of giant kola buds, because the air was heavy with the olfactory cacophony of expensive perfumes and colognes, musks and nocturnal blends meant to be seductive and alluring, but which when thrown together in one giant air space merged into a single musky incencse that if marketed, would be sold in black glass flasks labeled “Obsession Bardo” or “Carnival of the Hungry Ghosts.” If you listen to the podcast make sure you check the online document for a couple of epilogues that have altered the meaning of this descent into decadence.

Awakening from uneasy dreams, I was aware of myself as a self-reflecting starship. For a few moments I lingered in that warpy place between dreams and wakefulness, still feeling partly caught up in some painful drama with another starship that had played itself out as I slept. Slowly the dream faded, and the waking consciousness returned—that all-too-familiar sense of myself as a middle-aged starship, about halfway through its lifecycle in an era where well-maintained starships often lasted a century.