Howard Stern is (was?) in to this stuff, too.

They got themselves a senator, too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_ofVGwlerY

And a CNN anchor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sUv2kQjyXI

And unfortunately Santigold from what I have heard and as much as I am in love with that woman, this kind of shit is a deal breaker.

I'm a Baghavan Das man, myself, mostly because his second album is great and I like the artwork his commune did for Richard Alpert.

As far as running a cult with style, though, Hansadutta wins. Nothing beats machine gun toting Hare Krishnas in hoodies and dark glasses. Also his first album was pretty great; I've never tracked down the allegedly metal-influenced one he did in the 80s after he got out of jail, though.

Maybe I met one of Hansadutta's guys once?
He was dressed up like a Hare K, and knew the speak, but was using it to try to forcefully pick up on girls and threatening anyone who told him to knock it off at a kooky cafe that served yuppies and hobos in Santa Monica.

Southern California is amazing.

I don't know a ton about him, most of my info comes from a smear campaign that was launched by rival Krishan leaders and one record collector who used to be in contact with him. MY understanding is that in the 70s, when the founder ofn the US Krishnas died, something like a dozen people all claimed to be his rightful successor and set up their own rival temples. Hansadutta (who, coincidentally, was a German immigrant with a thick accent and penchant for recording weird psychedelic folk, just like Baghavan Das, hence me knowing about him) started the San Francisco one. They all wore hoodies and their slogan was "Guru Means Heavy" (there were apparently posters of him looking like the Unabomber sketch with that slogan below all over the temple - you can kind of see it on the first LP cover, even without the glasses). When he went to jail for a year or two for firing a machine gun at a liquor store out of a moving car, he was ousted from the Krishnas and ended up running a trailer park somewhere in southern California (I forget where) for most of the 80s and 90s. When I knew the guy who had been corresponding with him, though, he had recently gotten back the publishing rights to all of his books from the Krishna days and was no longer answering mail.

Which sucks for me, because I know for a fact that he had quite a few unsold copies of the metal LP and was selling them for a pop by mail to people who wrote and asked, before he decided he was a guru again. No idea what happened after that, unfortunately the collector I knew died not long after of health complications related to doing every kind of drug the is from the 70s until I don't know when, but at least the mid 90s.

I always wonder if he had any kind of connection to the early development of the Krishnacore scene, especially since he would have been down near LA round about when X was probably first getting in to it. I never really hear about that though, it seems like it was mainly an NYC thing, at least in the US.

I haven't been to impressed by anything post Twin Peaks I've seen from him, except for The Straight Story.

Actually, I had to double check when he got in to TM, turns out it was 1973. I kind of assumed it coincided with his work declining, kind of like when the Incredible String Band became scientologists.

Now that I've seen this, my take on him and his movies goes like this:
-glad he makes stuff
-The Straight Story is a hidden masterpiece. I'm full of recommends for that.
-He's kinda like a French New Wave filmmaker, in that the filmmaking moves that he invents are more important than the works as a whole.
-I think for most of his movies, he pulls pranks on his audience but has a mental filter, partly built out of transcendental meditation schtick, that doesn't let him fully realize that that's what he's doing
-this somehow turns into fan/critic praise for psychoanalytic/expressionist/symbolic works of genius
-Lynch's brain rolls on the floor with laughter
-Public Lynch is the straight man in the double act between him and his brain.
-When he does something that's lower stakes to him, like appearing on Louie, he gets to just mess around and he's funny as fuck.

I like Lynch when he manages a lucid narrative (meaning I can understand it)

Thumbs up Wild at Heart
Blue Velvet
Twin Peaks

Thumbs down Lost Highway
Mullhholland Drive
Eraserhead

Also hated Fire Walk With Me, The Twin Peaks Movie. Sheryl Lee, Dana Ashbrook, etc, had become too old to be playing high school students, and seeing them on the big screen only made it harder to overlook, but even worse, it was another unnecessary prequel like Star Wars 1-3, a pointless, elaborate retelling of what we already knew.

Anybody who loves any of the Lynch Movies that I hate, I don't doubt the validity of your experience. You get it, I don't.

JHM, see The Straight Story.

Masterpiece.

I liked Eraserhead a lot, but last time I saw it I was 12. I like The Elephant Man a lot, I know that's kind of contentious. I like scenes in Wild At Heart a lot, some parts of it are among the best things he's done. It's kind of a mess taken as a whole, though. I though this Twin Peaks pilot was good and the first season was great. I've never made it through season 2 though, I can get 5 or 6 episodes in usually but that's all I can take.

I literally don't remember a thing about Lost Highway except that there were a lot of shots of the actual highway itself, right? Muldholland drive had one good scene, the dumpster. Somewhere in the mid 90s is when I feel like he started to believe his own hype, but who knows for sure. I would love to find out that the last 20 years of his career were brilliant long-game trolling at the expense of the critics and fandom but I think it's more likely that he got into a Tim Burton style echo chamber situation. I'm sure I've said this all on here before.

For me, Crazy Clown Time is full Poe's Law, though. Everything about it is just so patently phoned in and terrible that it almost has to be a parody of his own style, but somehow I don't think it is.

But, I mean, hey, if I could get money to make a album of music that sounded like watered down Crispin Glover poetry sun in a phony Daniel Johnston voice over Ry Cooder's soundtrack for Last Man Standing (which in itself is kind of biting Morphine but that's another story) I'd definitely do it. It sounds like a lot of fun.

Straight Story is fantastic, though. Possibly the best thing he's done.

Mulholland Drive is a bit inscrutable but I love it. Eraserhead is pretty damn straightforward though. I haven't seen Straight Story. Sounds like I should though.

I met David Lynch at a Q&A session once. Someone asked him how he maintains such a steady "lucid dream" feel to all of his movies, and his response was one of pretending to not understand what the person was asking, and eventually just said that he writes what he knows.

I'm not sure if it was his latest but I do remember getting all of the way through Inland Empire and wondered why he made that movie.

We had a TM place in my neighborhood growing up, and the downsides you mention seemed to be the adult skeptical consensus of them.

I'd take those pseudo-medical claims as sufficient to write them off entirely, but that's just me.

"other kinds of meditations are about focusing on ideas or actively suppressing thought."

That is simply not true, if you were told that then you were lied to. Some may be, but

"They insist that you shouldnt focus on or attach meaning to the thoughts that pop into your head during TM, but instead let them drift along."

So pretty much exactly what you do in zazen.

Not saying there's necessarily anything sinister about TM, it just seems like it's taking simple sitting meditation and putting it in an expensive package. Which puts it fairly in the mainstream as far as this stuff goes. It's certainly been a big part of Japanese zen for the last century, give or take.

I think the actual act of meditation is a good thing though, don't get me wrong.

TM is completely harmless. It is not a predatory organization (or even a unified practice with centralized leadership) like scientology. My experience with it is that it's just a nonsecular way to get people meditating and taking better care of their bodies, but then spiritual organizations attract flies and self-proclaimed experts.

Like anything which dabbles with this kind of intense stuff, there will be charlatans and people taking advantage of people who are desperate for spiritual guidance or acceptance into any kind of community.

OZ, Yes, there are different kinds of meditation. I am not sure what your point is? You're saying there aren't different kinds of meditation?

Anyway, TM is a very specific kind.

It uses a mantra to encourage effortless thought, instead of making the mantra the focus of the meditation.

still not sure what your point is.

Oops, forgot to post the link:

http://tinyurl.com/q7yv6wf

To be fair I think John Lennon & Ringo became disillusioned pretty damn fast.

It's funny that Lennon's reasoning was that Maharishi was living like a rock star, getting all the money cars and women he could, and Lennon for all his talk was still firmly entrenched in the fundamentally Judeo-Christian idea that spirituality means asceticism.

Maybe not Scientology, but like them there have been allegations of abuse and human trafficking at their Fairfield Iowa compound (aka "Vedic City") culminating in an incident last year.
http://thegazette.com/2014/03/12/riot-of-indian-meditators-cau ses-concerns-for-fairfield-residents
http://www.heartlandconnection.com/news/story.aspx?id=1017547# .VRyoV5O3yv8