Battling Bantams
vintage muay thai footage from Castle Films
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Sunday, July 28, 2019
Friday, July 26, 2019
ON PERIPHERAL PHILOSOPHY
While the history of anti-academic philosophy has its roots as far back as Ancient Greece and Socrates’ relentless mocking of the Sophists for whom truth was merely a fad destined to change during the next pay-cycle, its spectre has never disappeared.4 Academic philosophy, further interlinked with the state in late-capitalism, has been the subject of scorn not only by those who remain unafraid of the monolith of the Academy, but also by those individuals who are always-already on the periphery. Despite becoming enlightened and supposedly shedding old religious dogmas that infected professional philosophy, we’ve managed to become nominally post-religious while replacing a visible system of control – retribution from the Church – with an invisible system of exclusion built around hegemonic attitudes and accepted norms. One must pass the Academy’s Turing test and never slip up.
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
Who Are the Triad Gangs in Hong Kong?
HONG KONG — A lawmaker, a father, his teenage son and a woman who was too scared to show her face spoke Wednesday about an attack in a Hong Kong train station by a mob of men armed with sticks and poles. The assault on Sunday targeted people who were returning from antigovernment protests, and raised the fears of violence compounding political upheaval in the city.
Lam Cheuk-ting, a pro-democracy lawmaker who rushed to the scene of the attacks in the satellite town of Yuen Long, said blame lay with both the police, who failed to protect people, and the organized crime groups known as triads who allegedly carried out the attack.
Rowland S. Howard - Golden Age of Bloodshed
Rowland S. Howard
Golden Age of Bloodshed
from the lp Pop Crimes
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
Neanderthal cannibalism is less surprising than you think
It was probably a case of "opportunistic consumption," not murder.
Monday, July 22, 2019
Paul Krassner, counterculture satirist who coined the term ‘Yippie,’ dies at 87
When People magazine called Paul Krassner “the father of the underground press,” he responded with mock outrage.
“I immediately demanded a paternity test,” he said.
It was a typical response for Krassner, a comedian, satirist and writer who took little seriously while challenging social and political standards in the 1960s. The motto of his groundbreaking counterculture magazine, the Realist, was “Irreverence is our only sacred cow.” The FBI, which kept tabs on Krassner, once wrote a letter calling him “a raving, unconfined nut.”
Saturday, July 20, 2019
Hunting Lodge - Learn to Will I
Hunting Lodge
Learn to Will I
from the cassette compilation The Beast 666
Hunting Lodge - Learn to Will II
Hunting Lodge
Learn to Will II
from the cassette compilation The Beast 666
The Builders and the Butchers - Bringin' Home the Rain
The Builders and the Butchers
Bringin' Home the Rain
Friday, July 19, 2019
Were the Vikings Smoking Pot While Exploring Newfoundland?
The discovery of cannabis pollen near a Viking settlement in Newfoundland raises the question of whether the Vikings were smoking or eating pot while exploring North America.
The Soft Machine - Why Am I So Shirt/So Boot If at All
The Soft Machine
Why Am I So Short/So Boot If at All
Thursday, July 18, 2019
'Not a bin': Cambodia to return plastic waste to US, Canada
Cambodia among Southeast Asian nations pushing back against Western waste shipments in wake of China import ban.
Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Intellectual Dark Matter
Knowledge that we can show exists, but cannot directly access, rests at the foundations of society and technology.
Monday, July 15, 2019
Book Review; The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen
Machen, Arthur. The Greqt God Pan. Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kemp and Company Inc., 1916
Pan was a minor
Greek deity. In the form of a satyr, he represented nature, lust, and
fear. Pan’s name itself is the root of the word “panic”. He has
emerged from time to time in various eras of Western history. The
Christians turned Pan, with goat horns and legs, into Satan or the
Devil. Renaissance painters rediscovered his sexual ways as they
mined Pagan myth for new subject matter. Some sectors of the
counter-culture movements of the 1960s and 1970s embraced the old god
with Neo-Pagans making Pan a representative of the Horned God and
Satanists embracing his image. Pan also played a role in Tom Robbins’
lust-for-life novel Jitterbug Perfume. The occult and esoteric
movements of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries took interest in him too. This is where Arthur Machen’s
novella The Great God Pan enters
the picture.
By
the 1890s, the dawn of modernism had begun. Great
Britain was emerging from the Victorian
era, possibly the most sexually repressed time in European history.
The Industrial Revolution produced more wealth than any society had
ever seen before and as material comfort levels grew, so did leisure
time and the desire to explore alternative ideas. The field of
psychology was tapping into the strange world of the human
unconscious, people began undoing old ways of life and experimenting
with the new, and a renewed interest in nature took hold in response
to the ugliness of factories and Darwin’s fledgling theory of
biological evolution. The Welsh bohemian occultist Arthur Machen
easily became a part of this milieu.
The Great
God Pan tells the story of an
exotic woman who emerges into London’s socialite scene. Helen
Vaughan is a beautifully enchanting femme fatale who seems to
fascinate every man she meets. At least that is what we are told; the
narrative shifts from Clark,
an author writing a book on
the history of evil to Villiers,
a nicely-dressed gourmand
who tries to learn who she really is. A couple other story tellers
take up the narrative along
the way. Villiers
first learns of her when he meets a friend from his younger years;
the man is homeless and poor. It turns out he had married Helen
Vaughan but she took all his money and abandoned him to die. As
Villiers pursues her, he finds a string of corpses. One man after
another dies either from being scared to death or suicide. Each one
had spent time in private with her and each one saw the face of Pan
while they were alone. The old relationship between eros and thanatos
gets expressed here yet again. Those with a talent for reading
between the lines will fully understand what went on.
Machen’s
story is a great example of narrative technique. The language flows
evenly and lightly like flutes playing in a gentle breeze. The
pursuit of Helen Vaughan and her secrets
work as a gentle hook that grabs the reader and leads them along
effortlessly. The building of
suspense puts Machen almost in league with Alfred Hitchcock and
Dashiell Hammet (but not quite). When
writing this kind of book an author can easily err by revealing too
much or, contrarily, not saying enough to make the story interesting;
Machen comes close to the latter but does not actually fail. His
is a prose of subtlety; there are no elaborately detailed monsters or
sadistic indulgences in gratuitous gore. Nothing is in your face. The
horror is reserved for those with a sensitive enough mind to feel the
eerie moods and enough imagination to engage
with the quiet terror of
Helen Vaughan’s victims. Only an elite few with
a certain type of maturity
will have the sensibilities to appreciate the deeper emotions
of this book.
The
end of the Victorian era in England saw a time when sexuality began
to come out of its hiding places, into the public eye. With that
debut came a certain degree of anxiety. Another paradigm shift in the
collective human psyche had begun as modernism took hold. It was time
for Pan to make another appearance. Arthur Machen was there to bring
literary form to the Pagan Horned God once again.
CAN SCI-FI WRITERS PREPARE US FOR AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE?
Read the full article on Wired here
Sunday, July 14, 2019
Book Review
Asimov, Isaac editor. Before the Golden Age: A Science Fiction Anthology Of the 1930s. Doubleday & Company Inc., 1974
Nerdy, geeky,
cheesy, but endlessly fun. These are all words that come to mind when
thinking about Isaac Asimov’s Before the Golden Age anthology.
In 1974 the famous and prolific science-fiction writer put together
this collection of stories from the 1930’s. It is certainly worth a
good read for various reasons.
The
stories are framed by an autobiographical narrative by Asimov about
his high school years when he worked in his father’s candy store.
The store kept a stock of pulp science-fiction magazines which his
father thought were trash but they fascinated the young Asimov
anyways. In between each story, Asimov gives brief anecdotes about
his life along with commentaries and background information about
each selection. These were the stories that he found most memorable
and influential.
Common
themes emerge throughout the book. One of them is travel. It could be
said that most of these stories are actually adventure tales that
take place in a science-fiction setting. There is a proliferation of
space travel and time travel but a couple stories also deal with the
theme of shrinking down to subatomic size and traveling in the
smallest regions possible. A
lot of stories are claustrophobic as well. Many take place in
underground tunnels, domed cities, lonely laboratories and, most of
all, a whole host of various space-travel vessels. Isaac Asimov
admitted
to having a fascination for enclosed spaces so these themes might be
less of a particular literary pattern and more of a preference of the
editor himself.
Being
a science-fiction anthology, the prevalence of the hard sciences is
also a key element in all these stories. Biology, evolution, atomic
and mechanical physics, technological warfare, environmentalism,
robotics, and relativity all serve as the basis in one place or
another. These stories are science-fiction, though, with the emphasis
on the fiction. While the physical sciences frame
these writings, the plots
easily fly off into the wildest realms of fantasy and imagination.
Scientific accuracy takes a backseat to wild story telling. One
memorable story, “The World
Of the Red Sun”, involves
two men who travel into the future where a tyrant uses telepathy to
plant nightmarish delusions in peoples’ heads, making it easy to
control them with fear; the time travelers learn that the despot is
motivated by deeply rooted
insecurity and narcissism, so they start laughing at him thereby
weakening him to the point where he is easy to kill. Here
we get a little social commentary on the psychology of bullying,
making me wonder if the author had a particular person in mind when
writing the story. And wouldn’t it be great if we could destroy
Donald Trump simply by laughing him into oblivion?
Another story, “Born
Of the Sun”, is about how
the Earth and moon are actually eggs containing flying green monsters
that cause an apocalypse as they start to emerge from the shells; two
men and a woman build a space craft so they can leave and begin
repopulating the human race in outer space while a doomsday
religious cult tries to stop
them. Towards the end, another story, “Other
Eyes Watching”, possibly a precursor of
Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris,
is about two astronauts who show up on Mars where a race of creatures
draw data out of their unconscious minds and use it to reproduce
twenty clones of themselves. They have to think quickly, using logic
and basic scientific knowledge to outsmart the clones and prove which
ones are not the real Earth-men. While scientific gadgetry plays a
central part in these stories, many of them pose puzzles that need to
be solved with a bit of psychology rather than brute force. That
brains-over-brawn element is what separates science-fiction in its
highest and truest sense from the less exciting pulp
stories of people with ray
guns fighting bug-eyed
monster aliens.
In
addition to the science-based wild imagination of each story, there
is also some cultural baggage of the time that finds its way in. The
1930’s saw the last days of the Prohibition era, the onset of the
Great Depression, and the
rise of fascism in Europe
too. It was a bleak time for America. These
short stories are undoubtedly escapist but escapism can indicate
what it is the authors and readers were escaping
from. The idea of all-pervading loneliness, alienation,
and mediocrity is mentioned
by the narrators. Many of these scientists are lone individuals who
work in solitary laboratories while being ignored by the rest of the
world. Using a motif rooted in the telling of classic fairy tales,
the ordinary man travels to another world and becomes transformed
into somebody extraordinary by embarking on colorful adventures that
result in heroic status at the end as he saves the lives of space
aliens, subatomic humans, or even ordinary humans in some cases. One
sad and lonely guy even falls
in love with a female fur-ball with purple eyes and giant lips when
he travels to the moon which is far more exciting than his life in
Texas as a high school math teacher.
On
the downside, the worst cultural baggage in these stories is racism.
Many of the monsters and villains are racial caricatures, based on
negative and unfair stereotypes. In his commentaries, the
ever-Liberal Asimov rightly
criticizes this racism which was all too common in that era. But
rather than simply dismissing it outright, he uses these stories as
examples of how to spot racism in literature, explaining
why it is harmful and why
it needs to be avoided in future science-fiction writing.
The
stories in this anthology vary in quality but they do not vary
greatly. The are easy enough to read but there are a lot of them.
Retro junkies and fans of vintage culture will find a lot to like
here. Most significantly, you can read this literature as one of the
starting points that would eventually lead to comics, tv shows like
Star Trek and The Outer Limits, movies like Star Wars and the whole
plethora of sci-fi books that have been produced up until now.
Saturday, July 13, 2019
Why this man became a hermit at 20
Many people don't like being alone. They feel lonely. For others, though, it can be a source of ecstasy. The BBC's Shabnam Grewal spoke to a hermit on the Scottish moors, and learned about an American who turned his back on the world when barely out of his teens.
Was Man Ray the Inspiration Behind the Black Dahlia Murder?
Steve Hodel believes his father — a friend of the surrealist — committed the grizzly Hollywood murder as an emulation of the artist’s techniques.
NEWS As ‘Maximum Rocknroll’ Ends Print Run, Artists and Writers Reflect on the Punk Zine’s Legacy
For nearly four decades, the San Francisco–based publication Maximum Rocknroll has been a definitive monthly chronicle of punk and hardcore music globally, holding steadfast to a barebones aesthetic, anti-corporate ethos, and somewhat rigid musical policy, even as the larger media landscape has continued to mutate. In January, MRR announced the end of its run as a monthly print fanzine after 37 years, with the May 2019 issue of the magazine being its final physical outing.
Thursday, July 11, 2019
Wednesday, July 10, 2019
“I Did Not Die. I Did Not Go to Heaven.”
How the controversy around a Christian bestseller engulfed the evangelical publishing industry—and tore a family apart.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)