After running for 2 weeks, the Psychic Experiment finally closed its doors to the public on Sunday, November 6. And now the fun begins: independent judges and I are analyzing the data, which will eventually become part of my Ph.D. dissertation in Parapsychology.

To everyone who participated and promoted the experiment, THANK YOU SO MUCH! The turnout was fantastic. We had professional psychics participate, but for many people around the world, this was their very first paranormal experience EVER — how amazing is that?!?

I’ll post an update here once results are available sometime in 2023. Again, THANK YOU!

My PSYCHIC EXPERIMENT is live! As part of my final school project in Parapsychology, and inspired by the CIA’s STARGATE remote viewing program in the 1970s, I’m trying to prove that some people have clairvoyant powers allowing them to “see” data in computers far away — and YOU can be part of it!

Plus, everyone who participates will be entered into a random drawing to win one of three $200 Amazon gift cards!

The experiment only takes a few minutes, so check out the video, and head on over to www.psychicexperiment.org.

P.S. — Once I have enough data, the experiment will close, so don’t wait too long to join the fun!

*** OCTOBER 31st UPDATE! *** It’s Halloween, and the Psychic Experiment has been ROCKETING forward with more participants than we ever thought possible — if you participated, THANK YOU! And if you’re still planning to try it, good news, there’s still time — the experiment closes Sunday, November 6, 2022.

Here’s a quick thank you:

My psychic extravaganza is finally almost here! As part of my Ph.D. program in Parapsychology (the study of the paranormal), I’m conducting a public psychic experiment to see if people can use psychic powers to see data inside computers.

If you think psychic powers are probably real (and ESPECIALLY if you think you might be psychic), I hope you’ll participate! Starting October 23, point your browser at www.psychicexperiment.org and have at it! 3 participants will also be randomly selected to win a $200 Amazon gift card!

Andddd if you’ll be near Ventura, California on November 4th, swing by the Art City Gallery and Studios, where I’ll be unleashing a new performance art piece with an array of awesome performers! 8PM and FREE!

I can’t believe it’s been so many months since my last post. This is the slowest diary everrrr!

As always, I’ve got new performance art and short film projects in the works — and I’m thrilled to say my TV pilot script The Occultist was a semi-finalist in the 2021 L.A. Screenplay Awards, and also in the L.A. Crime and Horror Film Festival — yayyy! My insanely creative pardner KayDee is also crushing it on the Producing front, most recently on the set of Friday Night Vibes, with Tiffany Haddish.

But at the moment, the majority of my time is being devoted to getting my Parapsychology Ph.D. dissertation up and running. I’m super excited and don’t want to say too much yet, except that it involves an experiment to measure E.S.P. ability in cybernetic ways that cross into The Matrix and Johnny Mnemonic territories. Stay tuned — I’ll be posting here when the experiment website goes public this summer, and I’d love for you to participate!

I also quietly launched my shamanic practice. I’m limiting my number of clients at the moment, but I’m already receiving strong interest, which is encouraging. Part of my recent journey has been mapping my shamanic lineage, which I’ve managed to trace back to Norse and Sámi ancestors who worshipped Odin and nature near the Arctic Circle. I’m continuing to train at the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, and deepening my connections to magical ancestors I sense are still around (and who were likely responsible for initiating my shamanic calling that began when I was a kid).

On the running front, I’m training for another 50K (33mi) ultramarathon race in August, and last fall I qualified for the 2023 Boston Marathon, running my 26.2-mile qualifying race in Big Bear, California in 3 hours, 16 minutes, which beat the qualifying standard by 10 minutes — not bad. See you next Spring, Boston!

What a year. Coronavirus. Insane politics. Death of Justice Ruth Ginsburg. And still, in the hardest year in recent memory, so many dreamers continued making art. I’ve never been so exhausted, yet so inspired at the same time. I hope you found moments of inspiration too. Here are a few highlights for me:

Since coronavirus canceled most of my performance art shows, I decided to film all of the crazy ideas that I wanted to perform on stage in 2020. The surreal result is called It’s Almost Over, which one viewer called “David Lynch-esque” — the highest compliment for me, everrr.

 
Rattle Rattle, the short film I made with KayDee Kersten, made it into 9 film festivals in 2020, and our feature screenplay Dark Silo — which won Best Original Screenplay at the Burbank International Film Festival — moved us one step closer to landing an agent.

My award-winning, clown-comedian friend Natalie Palamides crushed 2020 with her new Amy Poehler-produced Netflix special, NATE. If you didn’t see the live show in Edinburgh, New York, or L.A. (or if you didn’t catch Nat back in her salad days), you’re in luck, because Netflix did an incredible job of capturing NATE’s insane and fearless magic. Don’t miss it!

 
2020 saw me finish a third of my Ph.D. work in parapsychology and metaphysics, with an emphasis on healing and occult practices. My studies inspired me to write a TV/streaming series pilot about a becoming-magician, with more historical realism than most other occult films or shows I’ve seen. Stay tuned!

 
Lastly, with my performances canceled, my primary stress release in 2020 was running up into the Verdugo Mountains that ring Burbank. I covered 1,050+ miles, with 120,000+ feet of vertical gain, which is like climbing Mt. Everest 4 times — not bad. I also did some running in the open desert around 29 Palms, where I accidentally stumbled onto a bombing range, and got chased off by a Marine helicopter ‐ see pic below. What an adventure. (P.S., if you’re a runner on Strava, come be my friend!)

Dear Diary: I’m crazy-excited to announce that DARK SILO — the FBI conspiracy-thriller film script I wrote with KayDee Kersten under our Roughhausers banner — just won Best Original Screenplay at the 2020 Burbank International Film Awards! Our minds are blown — thank you so much!

In a heartfelt F-U to Covid, I had the chance to perform in a mask on the streets of Ventura a few months back with a mop and a palm frond. In Mesopotamian and Egyptian religions, the palm branch represents eternal life (the palm’s name comes from the Greek phoinix, the same word we use to mean the bird that revives itself from its own burnt ashes). Here the mop is not necessarily a symbol for cleaning; it might serve as my own human-made frond — a kind of artificial (but magic) ‘palm’ held in (the palm of) my hand (with ‘palm’ coming from the Latin palma, meaning the hand spread open like a leaf). In my mind, I was my own Axis Mundi, a human bridge channeling & imbuing the mundane and unnatural with the magical healing power of the natural. Let’s hope the spell works.

In another attempt to kick Covid’s ass, I was seriously disappointed to learn that all of my running races had been canceled this year, so I decided to stage my own solo race: a 50K (31 mi) ultra-marathon around Cordova, the Burbank street where I live. The run took just under 5 hours (about 28 loops around the block), during which my better half KayDee kept me alive with fluids & food, organized all of the spectators who showed up to cheer (OMG, THANK YOU GUYS!!!), and chatted with people who tuned in from around the globe to watch the race’s streaming feed, live from a camera in our front yard. KayDee also made me an epoxied finisher’s medal — see below. Amazing! First ultra-marathon, complete. Suck it, Covid!

Wherever you are, I hope you’re hanging in there, and managing to thrive. I feel grateful that in the midst of this Covid-era craziness — so much pain, loss, confusion, animosity — that there have been moments of joy, which have been harder than ever to find — a full-time job, really — but I don’t know what else to do, except seek them out, and pry them from 2020′s rotting palm, because I — we — you — deserve them.

Our new film Rattle Rattle is an official selection at film festivals across the country! Storyline: one of my hands kills the other, and quickly regrets it. See the trailer here!

My creative partner KayDee Kersten did an incredible job with the cinematography, and I discovered that my hands are bitchy, impossible-to-control characters on camera — how did I never notice that before? Haha. We shot the film in our Burbank garage, where our soundstage was my grandma’s old card table surrounded by a circle of homemade felt blackout curtains, while I ran around in a fetching array of leotards. We’re in the running for a few more festivals — can’t wait! Special thanks to North Hollywood’s Wooden Nickel Lighting for the killer lighting setup!

Feeling cooped up? These exercise tips won’t help at all. (Special thanks to my neighbors for putting up with this insanity…have a look and you’ll see what I mean…haha).

Hi Friends! Oh man, my 2019 was a wild ride. First, Dark Silo, the screenplay I co-wrote with my creative partner in crime KayDee Kersten, was a semi-finalist at the NYC International Screenplay Contest — hopefully we’ll see it in theaters soon! We also wrapped production on Rattle Rattle, a surreal short film we shot in our Burbank garage that was a semi-finalist at both L.A.’s IndieX and Indie Short Fest film festivals—not bad!

There was plenty of performance art too. KayDee and I co-produced Not An Exit, a sold-out evening of performance art in downtown Los Angeles in July with an amazing lineup of artists. And, I performed a couple of pieces at 5×5, the monthly performance series at Ventura’s amazing Art City Gallery.

My favorite solo piece this year was John’s Arrow, which was both a performance and a magic spell designed to help heal my hospitalized mentor, John White.

Although I’ve been a practicing occultist since I was a kid (Norse magic, shamanism, chaos magic, you name it), this was my first public magical act that incorporated actual magical intention and charged tools, including crystals, sigils, magical movement, spirit water, and a felt blanket (the latter which was a nod to performance artist Joseph Beuys, who was obsessed with both felt and energy).

I’m indebted to film director and occultist Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose book Psychomagic really opened my eyes to the possibilities of overtly mixing public performance with magical practices. When I look back at my performances over the past decades, I see plenty of shamanic and witchy elements (both on stage and in my own internal approach to performance), but it was Jodorowsky’s book that convinced me to bring spooky+healing to the forefront. After the Arrow piece was over, several audience members approached to say that the space’s air had taken on a strange charge — and even better, my mentor’s recovery seemed to accelerate over the days that immediately followed. Really, who can ask for more than that? Thanks, Jodorowsky!

In 2020 I’m looking to finish 2 more scripts that are on deck, produce another performance art night in L.A., and explore psychomagic further with more public spells geared toward healing (which I hope will be useful in what is shaping up to be a truly insane election year). If you’d like to receive a note when these and other happenings are happening, join my mailing list — and above all, have an amazing New Year!

I’ll be performing some serious weirdness at this Friday’s Andy Kaufman-inspired Kauf-Drops Show at the UCB Theatre in Hollywood. Come for some post-Halloween insanity! UCB Theatre, Friday, November 6, 2015, 8PM. 5419 W Sunset Blvd. FREE! See you there!