April 28, 2020

Alex Kazemi | The Pop Monster Unmasked

by Dominique Turek

It’s approaching the golden hour in New York City and magick practitioner Alex Kazemi is performing his latest disappearing act. The interview was slated to start at 3 p.m., but elongated shadows have already started to swallow passersby scurrying along Broadway. In no time, The Standard hotel is eclipsed by the early February sunset. A call to his book publicist hours ago confirmed that he was on the way, but just as we start to pack up, Kazemi strides through the revolving door, clutching his Supreme burner phone like an epipen. He plops into the lobby’s white Eames chair offering something vaguely resembling an apology. “You know M is never late out of being rude… it’s because she knows that there is not enough time in the day to get things done,” says Kazemi, quoting Madonna, one of his many idols. “Mirwais actually says I’m like a surrealist painter in the 1930s and that my big vision of myself is necessary,” he beams, as though reliving the moment. “If the man who wrote Music with Madonna and helped co-produce American Life says that to you, then you must be doing something right,” he laughs, pulling a Twizzler from his Prada crossbody. “Now let’s talk about how I want to come off in this piece.”

Hailing from Vancouver, Canada, Kazemi cannot overstate enough how important it is to be portrayed accurately in this article as a “very nice, good, pure, Canadian boy-next-door-type.” “I’m thinking that my image for the shoot needs to be humble and likable, like me in the kitchen in my Stüssy sweatshirt drinking orange juice. Something very relatable, very cute,” he says from behind his Ray-Ban Wayfarers. He fears any misrepresentation could deter people who are discovering him for the first time through Google results. “I do not want to be perceived as glamorous or unrelatable, because the truth is that I’m punctual almost to a fault,” he says, blaming this evening’s tardiness on bad luck. “I was only late today because I was busy freaking out at a DAZED editor for not doing coverage on Pop Magick. The book is perfect for their audience. I can’t believe this is happening... it’s a literal nightmare. Ever since I went psycho mode and lost it on Isabella Burley over a miscommunication in 2018, it’s been rocky, but that was back when I was fucked up and using.”

After Kazemi landed his first big bucks book deal with MTV at the age of 19. A source says, “he would stay up for days on end, riding out speed fueled benders and blowing the rest of his advance on strippers.” “He loves being the kind of guy to introduce the hot weird artsy girl to David Lynch for the first time. That’s the only reason he wanted Bob Roth from the David Lynch Foundation to gift him the TM course that apparently ‘changed his life.’ He loves that clout,” an insider close to Kazemi spills. Kazemi’s party persona took on a life of its own and led to a real life drug and alcohol problem that ended up requiring emergency intervention. “I don’t think that people understand how embarrassing it is to be an addict,” says Kazemi. “To know that I carry this demon around me, in me, that has the power to mutate and shift and latch onto anything that makes me feel good, to make me blackout and potentially destroy me... it’s humiliating. There isn’t one day my addict brain doesn’t say to itself, ‘what it would be like to not need to eat the whole bag of chips to the point of throwing up?’” Struggling with addiction is one of many isolating experiences Kazemi has added to the laundry list of reasons that he’s felt unlovable and singled out since birth. “I wish that I could have been born normal and popular and ended up coasting through life as ‘the hot bartender’ or Logan Paul, but this is the hand I was dealt,” he says, remarking on his life sentence as a “loner weirdo.”

“All of my enemies started out friends,” he says, quoting a lyric from Taylor Swift’s song “The Archer.” “I’ve never related more to a song in my life. Anyone I dated, anyone I fell for, anyone who became my friend ended up as my enemy, and from then on, it was war. But that was then,” he says, insisting his life has improved since kicking addiction and becoming involved in the occult. “I’m on much better terms with the people in my life now that I’m going through my Ray of Light era and am on a high-vibrational Kabbalah astral plane.” Before discovering magick, Kazemi claims that he was a vampire for attention, cheap validation, and sexual gratification. “I was addicted to wallowing, among other things,” says Kazemi, thinking back to the summer he spent listening to Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence album on repeat and carelessly masturbating his uncharged, sigil-free sperm into the ether. He’s completely abstinent now, and has reconditioned himself to engage in all activities with willfully conscious purpose — including sexual ventures — clearly taking notes from occultists such as Alan Moore, who said “war is a perversion of sex” and infamous Valerie Solonas who believed that sex was a “refuge of the mindless.”

“Do you know how badly I want to be immortalized? As a child I had this fantasy of being replicated, duplicated, and talked about over and over again,” Kazemi says. “Luckily magick is a crash course in ego death.” While most well-adjusted adults use their ego to assist in problem solving and self-awareness, children raised in abusive environments form unhealthy attachments to their ego, which then leads to a lifelong struggle for control between the ego and the self. “Five years ago I felt inner peace for the first time after a spirit from the upper realm visited me and told me to immerse myself in the dark arts. Call it a divine intervention,” he says, lighting a black intention candle with his Britney Spears lighter. He tells me that he’s even thinking of starting his own line of Hoodoo candles, but first he needs to find the right buyer. “Maybe Opening Ceremony or Urban Outfitters? Do you think that Gypsy Sport would be down?” The same spirit reappeared to Kazemi one year after the initial visit and led him to write Pop Magick. “I’ve been called self-involved and opportunistic for writing this book, but nothing could be further from the truth. I’m involved in creating something that is beyond the self that can help people and be of service to them. I don’t even have an ego anymore.” Despite coming under fire from scholarly gnostics and religious fanatics alike, the satanic panic surrounding his book has left him completely revitalized. “Just knowing that people get notifications on their phones regarding the podcasts I’ve done, thinking of the thousands of people downloading my episodes, it gives me the biggest fucking rush. It’s the best feeling in the world to have people think about your work. It’s the closest feeling I’ll ever have to swept-off-my-feet true love…”

“He’d been awake for 72 hours straight on a ketamine binge when he was 21, the night he saw that ‘spirit,’” an ex-coworker at King Kong Magazine reveals. When asked about his public falling out with the publication, Kazemi becomes defensive. “There was a horrible time when I was working at King Kong where there was so much chaos going on because we were working on so many different covers. I spent the entire dinner with Bret Easton Ellis and Eli Russell Linnetz and some big Hollywood producer, on my phone outside of La Scala doing damage control and pacing around. It was so humiliating. I feel like Eli must hate me for that night.” Kazemi was known around the office for getting things done, like the time he mysteriously managed to get Kenneth Anger for a cover shoot last minute, or the day he shocked Madonna by getting Diplo — who Kazemi refers to as his “on-call sex therapist” — into drag, but he was also known for other, more sinister type A behaviours, like hurling thinly veiled threats at colleagues until they bended to his will, or locking himself in the bathroom and having violent outbursts on set in in West Hollywood over mistakes (such as styling assistants posting behind the scenes footage without his permission). “Try working around someone’s timeframe who doesn’t even believe in the construct of time. If he was a little more organized, I think he’d be a very successful cult leader,” vents the source.

Kazemi has taken full responsibility for his infamous machiavellian reputation after extensive psychotherapy revealed that his dark-triad personality was rooted in early childhood trauma. “Every second, every hour of my day has to be time blocked on a schedule because if I have free time, I will immediately go to the lower worlds, to the hell zone, and there is too much on the line for me to just throw it all away. I don’t want to go back to the behavior of self-medicating the traumatized child within me, which is what addiction is. I don’t want to have fun. Work is my play.” On top of dealing with his body dysmorphia, Kazemi also claims to suffer from something he calls “career dysmorphia.” “I feel like nothing I’ve done is impressive or good enough. The way my brain works is like, ‘Well, I’m in Flaunt but I’m not in Paper’ or, ‘I’m in King Kong but why am I not in The Face?’ It’s like I have something inside of me that can never be satiated, so I keep trying and I keep pushing to reach this destination that might not even exist, but I can’t stop myself. I am obsessed with my work getting attention.”

The question still looms, why magick? Did Kazemi choose to dominate the occult scene and make such a glamorous splash because it was an untapped, uncharted territory, and so inherently small so that he could feel “huge?" Has he simply given himself over to mysticism because he believes in its transformative abilities? “I want to make magick suburban, accessible, and relatable, like it was in the late 90s,” he muses while showing me his Pinterest mood board littered with palmistry guides, DIY Kool-Aid hair dye ideas, anointing oils, and drip candle starter kits. Kazemi appears to treat his exploration of the dark arts just as he would any other work-related project — an approach which some gnostics have called “spiritually lackadaisical” and “low vibrational behavior.” “He is a self-serving opportunist who is exploiting occultism by re-marketing magick as self-help,” says an anonymous mystic. Kazemi disagrees with the criticism and looks forward to seeing his book sandwiched somewhere between other great works, such as How to Win Friends and Influence People and The Secret. “If you’ve blown out a birthday candle, you’ve participated in magick,” says Kazemi, straightening the silver chain around his neck. “This is a late birthday present from Marilyn Manson,” he says, while motioning to the necklace.

“All my life people have always said that I was too emotional, too intense, too difficult, too sad.” As we browse a shop in the East Village on the corner of 10th and Avenue A, Kazemi reveals to me that he’s always been an outsider, even when he was on the inside. “Being punished for being yourself as a child is kind of like the gateway drug to imaginary worlds.” He asks me if I’ve ever dealt with an eating disorder, but before I can answer he interjects. “I used to starve myself because I needed a sense of control and that’s what it provided for me, control. Did I tell you about how bad my OCD is yet?” If nothing else, Kazemi wants the reader to come away from Pop Magick understanding that they are not a victim of circumstance, and more importantly, that he is not a victim. After spending a lifetime merely existing beneath the umbrella of his trauma, Kazemi realized that he was his own worst oppressor. “I chose my abuse. I chose to experience certain suffering before I came to this world to survive these things. This is what The Kabbalah Centre taught me. I am not a victim. I am responsible for my life — even if I couldn’t control being abused, it is my power to say that I am responsible for it.”

“I’m not sure the Kabbalah is working,” says Kazemi’s sister. “I think maybe he’s weaponizing Kabbalah rather than practicing it because he seems even more selfish and egotistical ever since this book came out. I think that instead of trying to perform the image of being good and angelic, he should actually work on being a normal, nice person.” She reveals that her brother was a sensitive child who was prone to fits of rage, often banging his head against the wall until he passed out or bled (whichever came first). School records reveal that he was removed from classes at the age of 5 because the sensory overload made it impossible for him to concentrate, which ingrained a deep feeling of otherness in him. “In therapy, I discovered that childhood trauma was the foundation to all of my adult behavior,” he says. Matters at home and school worsened after Kazemi became a failed child actor. “Growing up in Vancouver, aka Hollywood North, I used to go to things like Cinnamon Toast Crunch auditions and I tried to be in indie movies. I would practice my lines on the playground. I put so much pressure on myself. I had a real agent and an acting teacher and everything. A good close family friend to me is Hayleau; she was on Riverdale. I wanted to be on Nickelodeon or Disney Channel and have my own show, but that never worked out, so here I am…”

Kazemi thumbs through the shop’s meager book section, picking up Find Your Soulmate Through Astrology, and scanning the back to see if it’s worth buying. “I only know Alex from him coming in here when he visits the city,” says an employee at Aphrodite’s Choice, glancing back to make sure Kazemi is out of earshot before continuing. “A few months ago he told me that he was planning on doing some visualizations and asked me which Aquarius-incense would be best for making sure he was invited to Paris Hilton’s birthday party. I told him that I had no fucking idea what he was talking about and he spent the next hour following me around asking if I was mad at him.” Kazemi thumbs through a book about practical magick for witches and wizards on the go, seemingly oblivious to my conversation with the shop employee, but something tells me that he is oblivious to nothing and that every conversation taking place in his sphere of existence is because he has willed it to action. “What do you think of this piece of obsidian?” he asks, holding it up to the light. “It says here that it blocks psychic attacks, absorbs negative energies from the environment, and draws out mental stress and tension. Maybe this will make Grimes stop hating me?” he says, pulling out his company card.

If magick is the ability to influence events by way of supernatural forces, who better to write a book on it than someone who was somehow a part of early 2010s influencer culture in its infancy despite having zero social media? “Instagram is a graveyard for pictures of your past personalities to haunt you,” says Kazemi. A person who reinvents themselves with the frequency of Kazemi cannot risk being carbon dated by something as permanent and evidentiary as tagged photos or Facebook memories. “No one commits fully to anything but themselves anymore,” Kazemi vents, referencing apps that aid in the cultural obsession of self-identifying. “People say that seeing is believing, but I say, fuck that. Believing is believing. No one became great by screaming into the echo chamber. People think greatness is measured by how many people you've helped,” he says mostly to himself, adjusting his vinyl Fiorucci bucket hat in the reflection of a storefront window, "but what they don't understand is that it's actually measured by how many people you trick…"

Purchase Alex Kazemi’s Pop Magick HERE