HOLA!

Hope you are doing great this time of the year! We have been really busy this last month printing lots of new stuff, bellow are all the updates including our beloved Saccharine Trust, 2 shirts by our favs Christian Death a reprint of the Los Mirlos and Alaska y Dinarama shirts by popular demand and we made some tiny cool xeroxed pins on color paper that look fucking awesome in person! AND we added some weird one of a kind misprints that we know will be gone really fast!

Instead of writing another top ten [blank] of the year we chose to recommend you 3 magickal artifacts that we absolutely adore. Its probably because of winter that we turn into hermits or maybe its our natural state as we age. We in Vida Subterránea understand magick as a set of practices meant to explore creativity and live a fulfilled life in this gray modern world we live in. Believing, is said to be the biggest and greatest technology humans have ever created and instead of using it to make money, consumption or worst, political following, we believe it can be used for human liberation at its core, from the underground. We hope you enjoy reading about it as much as we do writing about it!

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A good friend of ours once said books are magickal. Our first thought was laughing but lets be real, thinking about it, its totally true. A set of words coded in certain way, in a proper setting can reprogram your brain and create a new filter in your life and even transport your perception to other places and realities. A good piece of media lets you reinterpret life in a different way you never though about. Our problem with Magick culture or the occult is that it always borderline self help sometimes and it’s way too serious in others. That's why we here at VS choose to see magick as a funny little thing us humans have, a way to give color to this madness, an asset, a creative way, an aesthetic with substance, not a super power, egocentric or a sexual abusive way of generating relationships with other humans, like many, many, many have done in the past with clumsy results.

Here are 3 good pieces of Magickal artifacts we highly recommend:

(Click image to watch)
(Subtítulos en Español disponibles)

The Mindscape of Alan Moore

Our first encounter with this madman was with V for Vendetta. Our friends in our local Anarchist Black Cross were obsessed with the graphic novel back in the day. Then the movie came out and we thought… cool action movie but that was kind of washed out Hollywood mumbo jumbo like all the Wachowski  do and moved on. One lonely night in the peak of Covid restrictions the magickal algorithms of the internet showed us this documentary and we went completely MAD, for real. We were not the first or the only ones that went crazy during those bleak times isolated with no human connection for months, a single video that blew us away can turn peoples live in other directions. Thank god it happened...

The documentary goes through the life of Alan Moore, a working class underground writer of comics that flirted with mainstream comics during his beginnings. With Swamp Thing, Batman: Killing Joke and Watchmen he twisted the narrative that comics were made for kids and brought a dark view of this way of telling stories and pumping the imagination. He became fed up with being famous and celebrity culture in the USA cuz its wacky as fuck, and went back to Northampton, England, to live his ways.

The documentary is really simple and to the point, Alan siting in his house full of books, with his crazy rings and wild charisma. Mr. Moore tells the story of his life, how he sold LSD as a kid in school, the process of declaring himself a magician in his 40th birthday to his friends, the creation of his own god Glycon, the connection between magick and art in human history, how artists are shamans in the modern world, how magick has been used in the modern day an age to be abused by markets, governments and monotheism, the alchemists and the lessons they teach us and even quantum physics in the age of information overload we live in. All accompanied by his gentle voice, great trance and jazz music and a sticky 2000’s aesthetic that feels timeless.

Honestly we have watched this documentary many times and keep finding new ideas that blow our mind non stop!

Cosmic Trigger Volume I: Final Secret of the Illuminati
Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson is well known for his novels of The Illuminati, we have never read it and never will because of what we read here (the Illuminati trilogy is just a big joke on mainstream media). But this book is were the real meat is, we know... we know…. We sound like the obnoxious snobby record reviewers that prefer the demo to the actual record of your favorite band, maybe we are. This short book and easy read is part the story of how he wrote the novels and how paranoid things went for him (including but not limited to weirdos writing the craziest letters about the Illuminati conspiracy and men in black), part the mental exercises/experiments RAW went through to write about the Illuminati that would drive mad any sane person and part autobiography that made us easily tear all the way to the end of this magickal book.

RAW had a wild life and a crazy way of thinking, he was married to a feminist while he was the editor of Playboy, he was an agnostic mystic, he was many things and tried it all  (Occult Practices, Sufism, Yoga, Numerology, Buddhism, Discordianism, Futurology, drugs and even talking to extra terrestrial intelligentsia). Our man did it all for the sake of exploring the human mind, its capabilities and it’s limits. He was the real deal at a time were everything was colorless and a secret, like today. His conclusions in this book are beautiful, majestic and deeply human. He goes fully into Alister Crowley ritual magick, Jack Parsons (the occultist that created rockets that took humans to the moon), CIA, FIB and other paranoid American institutions making it one of our favorite books of all time. For RAW being a center point in the counter culture movement in the 60s shaped his theory of Reality Tunnels, a main pillar in the thinking of the Vida Subterránea crew.

His playful/non serious approach to magick, a manipulation of cultural and social symbols and meanings to tell crazy stories should be more well known than the Illuminati Trilogy itself. The best part is that RAW at the end of his life was just this simple white old man living a normal suburban life in a cookie-cutter house somewhere in Florida and we love it that way.

You can find this book used if you look in the right spot! We recommend the edition with the little doodles RAW made himself. Also check Prometheus Rising if you are not scared to try mental exercises on your brain or at least read about them. But BEWARE READ AT YOUR OWN RISK! You might become a crazy empty monkey looking in the mirror for hours and start talking to aliens.

La Lámpara Maravillosa. Ejercicios espirituales
Don Ramón del Valle-Inclán

Hay libros bellos y hay libros belicismos, La Felguera una de nuestras editoriales favoritas edito en el 2017 una joya de libro que guardamos como una de nuestros tesoros más preciados. Este llego a nuestras manos por una persona muy especial que nos lo regalo y tu deberías hacer lo mismo ahora mismo. Se trata de un tratado espiritual, un mapa, una guiá para entender como vivir la vida, basándose en lo bello. Con increíbles ilustraciones de Moya del Pino y escrita por el gran Ramón del Valle-Inclan, que ya a sus 33 años había perdido un brazo motivo de una pelea por necio y sabio, este librito rojo de tapa dura nos hace volar cada vez que lo leemos. Ramón, un brujo de barba larga y de capa blanca, influenciado por las ciencias místicas y el ocultismo con una base católica fuerte, escribe uno de los tratados mágicos más importantes que existen en español. Un iluminado era del Valle-Inclan, veía como nosotros la magia como estética y pues escribió este cuidadisimo corto libro para enseñarte a como percibirla. Su experimentación con el cáñamo indico por motivos médicos, sus experiencias extra sensoriales y psicotrópicas, sus visiones psicodelicas/poeticas hacen volar la imaginación del lector y abstraerlo de maneras preciosamente humanas. En sus cortos capítulos se puede leer sobre el éxtasis y el fin del tiempo, el goce y el placer, los tipos de belleza, el lenguaje como herramienta para crear futuros, el lenguaje como algo vivo, la música, la quietud y el movimiento, entre otras bellas categorías existenciales.

Siempre es difícil describir un objeto mágico, las palabras nunca son suficientes y es mejor aproximarlo sensorialmente para entenderlo a plenitud. Como dice el propio Don Ramón,  “La suprema belleza de las palabras solo se revela, perdido el significado con que nacen, en el goce de su esencia musical, cuando la voz humana, por la virtud del tono, vuelve a infundirles toda su ideología”. Este libro es “expresión suprema de belleza es un divino centro que engendra infinitos círculos” y es un regalo de Valle-Inclán desde el pasado para nosotros en el futuro. Puedes escuchar el audiolibro si no tienes dinero aquí y La Felguera mágicamente esta por sacar un podcast sobre Ramón del Valle-Inclán en estos días que puedes checar aquí.

If you are in Japan, the punk band Pura Manía will be on tour. Catch them while you can, might be the last time they are in Asia!

From the Vida Subterranea´s Dungeon,
somewhere in Mexico D.F.!
VS