Science fiction research institute opens in China, as business booms

China’s growing passion for science fiction has spawned the country’s first research institute dedicated to the subject, and an academic magazine is set to follow next year.

Read the full article on South China Morning Post here

Dostoevsky’s Campaign Against Rationalism and Progress

Fyodor Dostoevsky was defeated by history. A man who viciously attacked and satirized the ideologies of rationalism and communism and defended traditional religious and family structures, Dostoevsky died just decades before the Bolshevik revolution was carried out by the very people he satirized in his novel Demons (1871-2). Russia was possessed and the spirit of the age represented everything Dostoevsky opposed.

Read the full article on Areo here

David Lynch

Star Dream Girl

from the lp The Big Dream

Book Review

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

     Strong scientific theories are like strong genes in that they stay around for a long time. The ideas put forth by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene are still circulating in the discourses of genetics and evolutionary biology after approximately forty years. That is a long time considering how scientists rigorously dismantle weak theories through the process of testing and evaluation. What makes Dawkins’ book a survivor is a combination of sound reasoning and clear descriptive writing that makes his ideas accessible to people outsider the disciplines he is involved in.

     The book starts off with a crash course in genetics. Genes are the basic and most fundamental buildings blocks of all living organisms. Upon conception, the genes pair off in sequences that form strips called chromosomes which combine to form complete living creatures. While genes across all organisms are mostly the same, it is their sequence on the chromosome that distinguishes one living form from all the others. Dawkins calls each individual creature a survival machine because the living body is a vehicle for the gene to use.

     That is what genes are. This about is about what genes do, though. The Selfish Gene is all about how genes are exactly what the title says: they behave selfishly because by doing so they increase their chances of reproduction. When chromosomes combine to form an organism they do so according to instructions given to them by genes; these instructions give form to the body and tell it how to behave. Therefore genes influence how a being behaves but it does not control what it actually does. In various ways, an organism can resist the temptation to follow the genetic instructions it has inherited. A gene’s ultimate goal and purpose is to replicate or reproduce exact copies of itself to be passed along into other organisms. The selfish genes are the ones most equipped to replicate and the ones most successful at building and instructing organic bodies that maximize reproductive behavior. Genes that do not replicate die out and therefore evolutionary selection takes place at the genetic level, not at the species level as some scientists have previously argued.

Dawkins uses games theory as a tool of analysis for animal and human behavior. Games theory is a mathematical technique based on the idea that social behaviors are calculated by each individual to maximize benefits to themselves; in Dawkins’ case this means maximizing the potential for reproduction and genetic replication. He gives fascinating examples throughout the book to illustrate his point. The analyses are primarily of birds and mammals in the beginning with some sections on insects, fish, and plants. Most of what he says about humans comes in the latter part of the book. We learn some interesting things along the way like how there is a difference between bearing and raising offspring, why some birds are monogamous and others are not, how ants enslave other ants to run their farms, how cheating and deception are used as survival strategies, why people feel more emotionally tied to members of their kinship groups then they do to people outside of it, and how altruism is actually a masked strategy of selfishness.

     The examples given fit nicely into the theory of the selfish gene and serve to credibly strengthen it. The theory and its examples fit together logically like pieces of a puzzle and at times they strive towards a symmetry that achieves a type of poetic beauty. Most importantly, The Selfish Gene succeeds as a book because it explains these ideas in clear, simple language that is accessible to non-scientists without dumbing the ideas down to a point of condescending simplicity. It is a great work of public relations for science because it opens doors to its readers and welcomes them into the world of genetics in a way that it interesting and entertaining.

     The latter chapters focus more on human behavior. The idea of cultural memes is introduced. These are ideas that replicate themselves by passing from person to person and have a strong influence on behavior. This chapter is interesting but it is short and is meant to be a springboard towards further research rather than a complete description.

     Another chapter uses games theory to analyze the Prisoner’s Dilemma game; the conclusion drawn is that altruism is the strongest survival strategy since it maximizes benefits to all members of a community in the long run whereas mutual antagonism ultimately causes communities to collapse and disintegrate. That chapter is not only interesting but also optimistic since it justifies the idea that human culture can override some of then genetic tendencies that drive people to do terrible things for the sake of ensure the replication of their genes. It could be said that rape, for example, is the result of a genetic disposition to reproduce but educational initiatives taken by society can be used to train people to control their urge to rape or force women into unwanted pregnancies. The downside is that this is the most abstruse chapter of the book and it is a major pain in the ass to read.

     Overall, The Selfish Gene is a great introduction of Dawkins’ theory and an excellent illustration of how the theory works. It is an introduction, though, and far from a complete exegesis his ideas. Dawkins himself does a good job of pointing out some of the shortcomings of his theory and also explains some parts that simply beg for further research. Unfortunately, this book has also been latched on to by some naive libertarian ideologues who see it as a justification for an infantile culture of narcissism and greed while their equally naive opponents have condemned this book because of that. A careful and honest reading of The Selfish Gene should put those misinterpretations to rest. 

Dawkins Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1999.

Tom Waits

Bad Liver and a Broken Heart

from the lp Small Change

Dead Can Dance

Severance

from the lp The Serpent's Egg

Beetles with Morbid Tastes "Work" in Museums to Clean Off Skeletons

We don’t tend to connect beetles and museums. We tend to think of museums as homes for great art, sculptures, and displays of historical significance. Some show items related to the natural world, like the Natural History Museum in New York. But Chicago’s Field Museum is in a league of its own, with more than 40 million objects and specimens.

Read the full article on The Vintage News here

Crash Course in Science

It Costs to Be Austere 

Rudolf Jelinek

On the Passage Of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time:

The Situationist International  1956-1972

short documentary film by Branka Bogdanov (1989)

Toshio Saeki

Bene Gesserit

Mickey Please

Bene Gesserit

Enfants des Rues

from the lp A High Happy Perverse and Cynical Cry of Joy

The Angry Brigade/Persons Unknown

documentary films by Gordon Carr (1972/1980)

Human Flesh

Why

from the lp The 35th Human Attempt

Human Flesh

Second Day

from the cassette Life in Reverse/Meditation and Fears

Book Review

The Colour Out of Space 

by H.P. Lovecraft

     H.P. Loveccraft lived a sheltered life during his childhood. Due to several illnesses, he spent a lot of time at home with his mother who both doted on him and psychologically abused him. As if he wanted to get as psychologically far away as possible, he immersed himself deeply in the study of astronomy. His grandfather had a talent for telling him ghost stories and both his parents ended up dying in asylums for the mentally insane. Though wealthy, they had spent all their money and left very little to H.P. as an inheritance. As a result, the themes of dreams, disease, madness, and invasion permeate his fiction. The Colour Out of Space is a short collection of some of Lovecraft’s best short stories and, more or less, they all touch upon those themes in some way.

     The theme of scholarship plays a central role in most of these stories. Lovecraft himself was an avid reader and student of science. This desire for knowledge gets transported into his stories. Almost all of them are narrated by some scholar or professor acting as both investigator and researcher. The main characters in “The Colour Out of Space”, “The Call of Cthulhu”, “The Whisperer In the Dark”, and “The Shadow Out of Time” are in the process of gathering information for scholastic studies. The knowledge they seek endangers them, however. In “The Colout Out of Space”, he risks his health, sanity, and life to learn about an abstract being that came to Earth in a meteor. The color drains all the life out of a family living on a farm when it starts living in their well. Everything that comes into contact with the water withers, gets sick, goes insane, and dies. The terror in this story is not only rooted in a fear of invasion but also a fear of contamination as well. The invader is a bright glowing light that is made of colors never seen before by people; this contrasts with the grayness of the dying vegetation and the weakening people who rot while they live after it poisons them. You can see the roots of this story in the mind of a sick boy, quarantined at home while watching his parents lose their minds. Some powerful alien force, brilliant and mysterious, seemed to have entered the sanctuary of the secure Lovecraft household and turned everything into a nightmare.

     Keep in mind that the color that invaded from outer space is not only a being that inspires fear but a source of fascination too. Many people have criticized Lovecraft for writing stories that symbolized xenophobia and turned the fear of the Other into allegories. To a great extent that is true but that does not take all the dimensions of his writing into account. Some of Lovecraft’s creatures are monsters that inspire fear but the scholars that narrate his stories always take deep interest in them nonetheless. Learning about them, studying them, and pursuing them puts their lives in danger but they insist on pursuing their research no matter what the consequences may be.

     In “The Call of Cthulhu”, the narrator learns about a voodoo cult in New Orleans that makes sacrifices to a strange monstrous idol. Though obviously scared and contemptuous of these people, he meets with them to ask questions about their beliefs and rituals. After learning about their pantheon of elder gods that live on other planets, including Cthulhu, the main deity of their rites, he connects their practices to the writings in the Necronomicon. He discovers that other people living in remote regions of Earth are also waiting for Cthulhu to reappear; their rituals are meant to curry favor with the monstrous god who makes a brief appearance in the end when his city of R’lyeh rises out of the ocean and he awakens to chase away some sailors. But the story is not actually about Cthulhu; it is about the people who worship him, the people who seek knowledge of him, and the terror he inspires. The scariest thing about Cthulhu and the elder gods is not so much that they look deadly; they are frightening more because of what they represent. They live on other planets, they are older than the human race and they will live long after the human race dies out. Compared to people they are infinitely stronger and more resilient. Worst of all, they care little about what people do; they have no interest in the cultists who worship them or in anybody else. The idea that people are not the masters of the universe is what scares readers most since, compared to the elder gods, we are little more than a specie of flies.

     “The Whisperer In the Dark” is the best and most complex story in this collection. A young scholar hears rumors about crab-like creatures that people see floating in a river in Vermont. He makes contact with an elderly scientist who lives in the region who has been studying these beings and, along with obligatory references to the Necronomicon and the elder gods of the Cthulhu mythos, sends the young man a record he made of the their speaking and a round stone with hieroglyphics carved into it. After sending these objects through the mail, the old man starts getting harassed at night by some local rustics and then the stone disappears and never arrives at the young scholar’s house. He travels to Vermont to find out what happened and upon arrival, discovers that the crab-like monsters are from the distant planet Yuggoth. They have advanced technology that is superior to that of humans and one of their talents is the ability to transplant a human’s consciousness into cylinders so that the physical body is no longer necessary. Aside from the fact that they terrorize the old scientist during the night and speak in a way that sounds like a mixture of buzzing and whispering, they represent another kind of horror: the horror of ambiguity. We never learn what their intentions are. Did they actually come to Earth for malevolent purposes? Is it good or bad that they can transfer a human mind out of its body so it can travel through outer space? Did they kill the old scientists or did he willingly choose to submit to their technologies? The open-ended questions are what make this story unsettling.

     If “The Whisperer In the Dark” is an allegory of xenophobia, as some have charged, it is a strange kind of xenophobia, one that speaks of a fear or distrust of the Other for being superior and difficult to comprehend. And again, the narrator is interested in learning about them despite what dangers that pursuit represents. They do not invade his territory or come after him; he travels from Arkham, Massachusetts to Vermont to learn about them. In a sense, he is almost as much an intruder in their territory as the creatures from Yuggoth are in his. They almost meet halfway on almost neutral ground. This is not a xenophobia of combat and hate; it is actually a mixture of fascination and fear that is more nuanced than many have given Lovecraft credit for.

     The narrator in “The Shadow Out Of Time” takes a more proactive stance. Rather than being an observer and reporter of events like in the previously mentioned stories, he puts himself directly into the line of danger in his pursuit of knowledge. When the story starts, he falls into a coma and after he wakes up begins having dreams. During these nocturnal wanderings he inhabits another body, becoming one of what he calls the Great Race. These creatures live in a highly mechanized society so, having very little physical work to do, they spend most of their lives creating art, reading, and writing books. Their vast library contains the history of everything that ever existed or will exist and the narrator makes his contribution by writing a history of the human race. This book is a slim volume in comparison to everything else that has ever happened, again reminding us that humans are trivial and unimportant in the grand scheme of the universe. He later goes on an archaeological expedition in Australia. While there, he stumbled into the underground ruins of the Great Race’s city only to find that he knows his way around because that is the exact place he had previously visited in his dreams.

     “The Shadow Out of Time” is a good story but its biggest shortcoming is that it is more or less the same as At the Mountains of Madness. The Great Race lives the same kind of life lived by the Shoggoth even though their physical form is different. Their cities are almost identical in description except that the Shoggoth were located on a plateau near the South Pole while the Great Race inhabited Australia. These similarities indicate a deeper flaw in Lovecraft’s writing. His range of ideas did not stretch very far. To be fair, that it is not entirely his fault. He did not start writing weird fiction until his later years in life and soon after he died at a young age of intestinal cancer. (Is that why he wrote about caves with terrible stenches and sadistic monsters?) These stories introduce the creatures of the Cthulhu mythology but he never got around to having them really do much of anything. His vocabulary range did not extend far either; the words eldritch and cyclopean are probably used at least once in every story, sometimes more. But his ideas were so big, unique, and seminal that he has earned himself a permanent place in the canon of nightmarish writing. He actually transcends the genre of horror since his style is midway between Romanticism, Gothic supernaturalism, and Victorian prose on one hand and horror, mystery, noir, and science fiction on the other hand with some elements of Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis that were current during his lifetime.

     For an initiation into the cult of H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out of Space is an ideal place to start. These stories introduce all the major themes he takes up in his other works. There is enough here to pick apart and analyze from multiple dimensions. With even some rudimentary knowledge of his short and troubled life, you can connect the dots between these stories and where the ideas came from. Lovecraft’s life and literature were a window into another bizarre but parallel world where reality gets morphed into all kinds of strange shapes and fed back to us in ways that twist our thoughts. It is too bad he did not live longer so we could see where this writing would lead us later on.

Lovecraft, H.P. The Colour Out of Space. Lancer Books, New York: 1969. 

Psychic TV

Set the Controls For the Heart Of the Sun

Illusion of Safety

Cancer (Part 4)

Illusion of Safety

Everythings

from the compilation Objekt No. 4

The Castellammarese War; The End of Mafia and the Evolution of Organized Crime

      The word mafia has come to be used as a signifier for any group of people involved in organized crime. The gangs known as Mafia, however, were put to death by the end of The Castellammarese War which started in the 1930s. The rise of Unione Siciliane, the Five Families, and The Syndicate marked a change of direction in the culture of organized crime.

     Castellammare del Golfo is a small town on the coast of Sicily. Named after a sea fortress built during medieval times, it has seen its share of historical warfare. This quiet Mediterranean village was the home of Don Vito Ferraro, a Mafia leader who directed American operations from his base in Sicily. His tribal war again Joe Masseria’s gang in New York City became known as The Castellammarese War.

     Joe “The Boss” Masseria spent the 1920s building a small empire of Mafia soldiers. By the end of the decade they had come to be the richest and most powerful bunch of thugs in the New World. Masseria’s faction included men whose names would later find a permanent status in the pantheon of famous gangsters; Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese, Joe Adonis, and Frank Costello would later become big shots in The Syndicate. But it was Charles “Lucky” Luciano who would play the biggest part in taking crime to new levels of discipline and organization. Masseria’s elitist stable was open only to Sicilians and Southern Italians.

     As Michel Foucault would say, wherever there is power there is resistance. So Don Vito Ferraro, desiring to seize control over Mafia, commanded his soldier Salvatore Maranzano to leave Castellammare del Golfo for the underworld of Broooklyn in order to command the rival Castellammarese gang. Formally speaking, the battle was between the two factions led by Maranzano and Masseria. Below the surface, though, something else was brewing. The Old Guard mafiosos, known as “Mustache Petes” because of their long drooping mustaches were increasingly being thought of as old fashioned, provincial, and out of touch. True to the American youthful attitude, the newer, more forward looking generation, who came to be known as the Young Turks, used the Castellammarese War as an opportunity to exercise their Oedipal complexes and kill off the fatherly dons who preceded them.

     Lucky Luciano was a strange kind of peacemaker. The son of Sicilian immigrants, he cut his teeth as a juvenile delinquent by forming the Five Points Gang. One member, a Jewish kid named Meyer Lansky, would remain a lifelong friend and go on to become a notorious gang lord himself. Lucky Luciano, as an upstart member of Masseria’s gang, thought the boss was holding Mafia back so he hatched a plan to end The Castellammarese War as soon as possible so greater achievements could be attained. After that, Luciano’s secret scheme was to make peace between all the Mafia factions so they could act as one big corporation, just like any big American company albeit one with illicit intentions.

     It is not clear when the bloodshed began. Legend has it that an early battle happened when Charles Luciano earned his nickname “Lucky”; a Maranzano-allied gang asked him to switch sides and he refused. One night, Luciano got abducted. The gangsters took him to the beach, beat him up, and slit his throat with a razor then packed him into the trunk and abandoned the car, thinking he was dead. A couple days later, he showed up in the streets of Brooklyn again, this time with a scar on his face and a drooping eye that would last for the rest of his life, a battle scar that would forever make him look mean. The miraculous survival and escape led to his being christened “Lucky” and the name has stuck up to the present day.

     Another hit that possibly started the war happened when a powerful ringleader in Detroit got shot. Rival Mafia families had been engaged in a long-lasting war of their own during the 1920s. One faction was allied through their boss to Joe Masseria in New York. When they contacted the rival don, Chet La Mare, to meet in public and declare a truce, La Mare sensed danger and asked Gaspar Milazzo to go in his place. Milazzo arrived at the Detroit Fish Market, sat down for a meal and waited for the other boss to show up. La Mare’s instincts were correct, though, and while Milazzo waited for his food, a hitman arrived with a rifle and shot Milazzo in the head. No doubt, his brains and blood made a nice addition to the house’s signature ragu. The assassin did not know that La Mare was not there; Milazzo was a high ranking member of Mafia, especially known for his negotiating skills. He had a close friendship with Maranzano and the Castellammarese family so some people say this was the beginning of the war.

     Details are murky and some historians say the opening shot got fired three months earlier. Vito Genovese may or may not have been the man who approached Gaetano Reina in the street and blew his head off with a double-barreled shot gun which he quickly stashed underneath a parked car before running away. Reina’s small family, operating out of The Bronx and Harlem, had been absorbed into Masseria’s organization. When the Castellammarese family began making noises about challenging Masseria’s kingdom, Reina secretly switched sides and began making plans to ambush a team of thugs working for Masseria. But somebody secretly told Masseria about the plot to betray him and took out a contract on Reina. This proved to be a mistake because all of Reina’s men later switched sides and incorporated themselves into the Maranzano team thereby expanding their dominance with more manpower.

     The war blew up and firefights erupted in the streets. The body count increased quickly. While scoring the initial victories, the assassinations racked up a lot of points for the Castellammarese side who began their ascent to control. Masseria scored big, however, when he sent someone to kill Joe Aiello, the president of Chicago’s branch of Unione Sicliane. Still, Masseria started looking like a loser and many of his soldiers began defecting secretly to Maranzano’s side. Lucky Luciano and Vito Genovese were two in particular who began clandestine negotiations with their opponents.

Luciano bargained with Maranzano. If he arranged to have Joe Masseria killed, then The Castellammarese War would be ended. In April of 1931, Masseria sat down to a dinner in Nuova Villa Tammaro on Coney Island. While (possibly) sitting in a private room alone, Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese, Joe Adonis, and Bugsy Siegel entered with guns and blew Masseria to hell. Lucky Luciano was away on vacation. Salvatore Maranzano declared himself Il Capo di Tutti Capi or Boss of All Bosses and called the war to an end.

     Luciano and Maranzano devised a structure and organization for Mafia that exists to this day. They were organized into the Five Families, each one controlling a different section of New York. Lucky Luciano became boss of the Genovese familty, Joseph Profaci the boss of the Colombo family, Thomas Gagliano headed the Lucchese family, Vincent Mangano controlled the Gambino family, and Maranzano himself headed the Bonanno family. All the bosses answered to Salvatore Maranzano who organized Mafia so that they could all be stronger by working together. Warfare between the families was to end so that business could be run more smoothly and efficiently. The path to criminal power would be easier to negotiate if they were not so busy killing each other off.

     Each branch of the Five Families, also known as La Cosa Nostra, became organized around a hierarchical structure. At the head of each family was the boss and below him the underboss and consigliere. Below them were a capo who oversaw an army of soldiers and at the lowest level were associates. Positions at the highest positions of the hierarchy were reserved for Sicilians only but lower ranking members were allowed to be of any ethnicity. Many of the first associates were Jewish.

Maranzano did not last long. While sitting in his office, a gang of associates including Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel rushed in; they stabbed him and shot him until he was a lifeless pile of flesh, bones, and blood leaking out of a sharp, custom-made suit. The last of the Mustache Petes was gone. Mafia was dead. The Young Turks had won and it was time for The Syndicate to take over. Lucky Luciano replaced Maranzano in his position but soon declared the reign of the Boss of All Bosses to be null and void. Instead, the heads of all the crime families would form a parliamentary system of government so that all members of The Syndicate were equal. The Five Families would remain and continue to be the core of the board of directors but The Syndicate reached out to crime families in other cities, becoming a transnational cartel. Faithful to the American ideals of the melting pot and multiculturalism, members of other national backgrounds were allowed in and the rigid hierarchical rules devised by Maranzano were relaxed to allow for more flexibility; after all, a long-lasting business is one that can adapt to changes as they come.

     Lucky Luciano, in his later years, got arrested and tried for human trafficking and prostitution. The government deported him and he spent the rest of his life in Sicily. Many other members of The Syndicate fried in the electric chair.

 The Syndicate and their elite squad of thugs known as Murder Inc. made Mafia look quaint by comparison. They went on to become more violent, vicious, and brutal than their predecessors and definitely more powerful. They have since faded away but organized crime has morphed into bigger and more varied forms. The American tradition of criminal gangs, in one form or another, remains with us today.

Reference

Turkus, Burtun B. and Feder, Sid. Murder Inc.: The Story Of the Syndicate. Da Capo Press, New York: 2003.

How the brain detects the rhythms of speech

Neuroscientists at UC San Francisco have discovered how the listening brain scans speech to break it down into syllables. The findings provide for the first time a neural basis for the fundamental atoms of language and insights into our perception of the rhythmic poetry of speech.

Read the full article on Medical Xpress here

Nico

Janitor of Lunacy

from the lp Desert Shore

Nico

Innocent and Vain

from the lp The End

Nico

The End

from the lp June 1, 1974

THE HOUSE LIQUOR OF THE MUSLIM WORLD

How Johnnie Walker Black became the favorite drink of the world's biggest religion.

Read the full article on The Outline here

Book Review

A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke

   Imagine what would happen if a group of tourists on the moon suddenly found themselves stuck in a dangerous situation that they might never escape from. That is the scenario that Arthur C. Clarke tackles in A Fall of Moondust. Despite their precarious situation, the story is one that depicts optimism about both technology and human nature.

     Since A Fall of Moondust was published in the early 1960s, hundreds, if not thousands, of Hollywood movies have used a similar dilemma for action, suspense, and disaster films. A busload of tourists on the moon gets buried under a ton of the semi-liquid and semi-solid dust that forms seas all over the surface. These seas are made of a silty substance somewhat like mercury and somewhat like quicksand; the tourist bus sinks into an empty pocket and can not escape. They have a limited amount of time before the vessel collapses under the weight of the moondust and their oxygen and food run out; a team of engineers set out to save them before it is too late. It sounds like a typical action story line but Clarke’s unique imagination and high-quality writing style make this short novel a good read.

There are three main strands to the narrative. The first is the story of the tourists who get trapped. The driver, named Pat, teams up with an experienced astronaut named Hansteen to manage the situation and keep the other tourists safe. Pat takes control over the physical aspects of the bus and Hansteen realizes the importance of maintaining psychological comfort for the passengers. Boredom, fear, and despair could destroy the their lives just as easily as being buried alive so Hansteen does what he can to keep the people busy and sane. Luckily, the passengers are all educated, intelligent, and socially extroverted enough to keep each other company with a minimal amount of conflict. The passengers are multi-racial and mutli-ethnic; this is a theme in the book that Arthur C. Clarke can be given a lot of credit for. Many people have said that the Star Trek tv show was a pioneering work of utopian science-fiction because the crew was multi-racial but Clarke apparently envisioned outer space as a place where humanity’s social problems could be overcome at about the same time, possibly even before that program was first broadcast. But the larger theme involving the passengers is that they are all individual humans. The victims in these types of stories are often one dimensional characters, just people who need to be saved. But Clarke gives each tourist a voice in this story; each one is portrayed as a unique human with their own life, their own history, their own problems, and their own merits. The way they coexist and cooperate with each other in the face of possible death is one of the ways that humanizing these characters makes this a unique novel.

     The second important plot element of A Fall of Moondust is the engineers who set out to save the tourists trapped in the Sea of Thirst, as that area has been named. The Chief Engineer Lawrence has to assemble a team to first locate the missing bus and then find a way to dig it out of the dust. The pressure is on heavily since time is limited and a rescue operation like this had never happened before on the moon. They have to act quickly but carefully since a wrong move could endanger the victims and easily destroy them. The scientists and engineers are sufficiently humanized like the tourists but the focus of this thread is a problem solving motif that occurs in many of the better science-fiction stories. While the scenes inside the trapped bus are mostly about the people, the scenes on the moon’s surface are mostly about the technology that people create to make life better. One character in the book says that there are no problems that can not be solved if they are thought of in the right way. From there we see how these people engineer a rescue mission using what tools they have available to them. While professional physicists may debate the veracity of the science used to solve this problem, the lay reader can still get the point that a proper combination of human ingenuity and technology can be enormously beneficial to humanity.

     The third, and probably least important strand of the story is about the media’s reporting on the rescue mission. The news anchor Spenser waits in a spaceship with a cameraman on a nearby mountain; this is the first rescue of tourists on the moon and history and he wants to make a name for himself by broadcasting it to the world. There is nothing remarkable about this and it actually is one thing that makes this novel look a little dated. At the time of publication, television was still a fairly new technology and the use of satellite relays for the transmission of communications was hardly understood by most people. What we take for granted now must have looked futuristic to people in 1961. This is a fundamental problem of depicting technology in art but also what makes retro-futurism a never ending source of interest.

     Even though the ideas of Arthur C. Clarke did not exactly come true, A Fall of Moondust is still very much worth reading. The scientific details he portrayed may be sketchy and inaccurate, the social problem of racism is still with us, and moon colonies and moon tourism are not a reality. But the narrative threads are effectively woven together, the characters are well drawn, and, most importantly, the optimism about both humanity and technology is strong without being overblown or sentimental. The adversary in the book is not a person or even a hostile space monster; the adversary is a tough situation and it is one that can be overcome with effort and intelligence. That optimism is refreshing in our times even if A Fall of Moondust is an old novel. 

Clarke, Arthur C. A Fall of Moondust. Dell Books, New York: 1963. 

Sadomazombies

London Dungeon Yes I Wanna Be There

from the lp SM Anthems 

Sadomazombies

Dominatrix Beatdown

R.S. Seizure

Bondage

Brion Gysin

Shakespeare and Co: The World's Most Famous Bookshop at 100

“My loves were Adrienne Monnier and James Joyce and Shakespeare and Company,” wrote Sylvia Beach, whose legendary Parisian bookstore first opened its doors 100 years ago this month. Together with Monnier, her lifelong personal and professional partner whose own store, La Maison des Amis des Livres, was a meeting place for the leading men of French letters, Beach would befriend and nurture two generations of American, Anglo-Irish and French writers including André Gide, Paul Valéry, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and, of course, James Joyce.

read the full article on BBC here

A brief history of cassette culture

There is no definitive history of this underground movement that I know. It is pieced together by various people and a few disparate sources, and from the personal experiences of those involved. In 1990, Robin James published the only book so far about underground tape culture called “Cassette Mythos”. In 2009, Andrew Szava-Kovats produced the first film about the underground music scene of the 80s called “Grindstone Redux”. There was also a film on loner artist, Jandek, a couple of years ago but that did not address the general scene. In 2005, Kevin Thorne and Mike Honeycutt began Cassette Culture.net, an important resource and landing spot for home tapers new and old. Internet radio host, Jerry Kranitz is now at work on a book project as well.

Read the full article on The Living Archive of Underground Music here

Roy Anderson

The Mothers of Invention

My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama

from the lp Weasels Ripped My Flesh

N.AE.

Planeta Ziemia

from the lp Katharsis

N. AE.

Dorozka na Ksienzyc

from the lp Katharsis

Inside the haunted doll markets of eBay and Etsy

Haunted doll sellers and collectors say buyers should beware.

Read the full article on Vox here

2 Infants Were Buried Wearing Helmets Made from Skulls. And Archaeologists Are Puzzled.

Two infants were buried some 2,100 years ago wearing "helmets" made from the skulls of other children, archaeologists have discovered. 

Read the full article on Live Science here

Bauhaus

Departure

from the lp Burning From the Inside

Bauhaus

Exquisite Corpse

from the lp The Sky's Gone Out

Bauhaus

Hollow Hills

live

Book Review

At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror

by H.P. Lovecraft

     H.P. Lovecraft was a unique author writing at a unique time. At the Mountains of Madness was written as a key story in the Cthulhu Mythos since it gives a detailed history of the Shoggoth. It is unique, also, for being a story about Antarctic exploration, a subject that had captured the interests of Lovecraft in his day. While being on of Lovecraft’s longest works, At the Mountains of Madness is good but certainly not his best.

     H.P. Lovecraft was a scholar of science and this shows in this novelette. The story begins with two ships of archaeologists and geologists sailing from Massachusetts to the South Pole. The detailed description of their voyage is vivid, sometimes bleak and forbidding and at other times fantastic and full of wonder. It is a description of the sublime in nature almost worthy of the Romantic poets but then again, it is probably also somewhat ordinary when compared to other writings about the southernmost regions.

     When the ships reach firm land, two groups of explorers set out. One team, led by a scientist named Lake, discovers a gloomy mountain range with caves and cubical structures lining the peaks. The harsh wind blowing through the caves make eerie, flute-like music that permeates the surrounding landscape. In the foothills, they discover an underground cavern with several dead creatures comprised of barrel-shaped bodies and having heads like starfish. The creatures get transported back to camp to be studied, then Lake’s communications abruptly stop.

Every mystery story needs a hook and this is where that element comes into play. The narrator and a pilot go out to the camp, only to find that it has been destroyed, all the men and dogs at the camp were mutilated, and the creatures were taken away. One man named Gedney and one dog can not be located, so the team of two fly out to the mountains to search for them. On the other side of the range they find a strange, abandoned city, partially covered in glacial ice. They begin to explore in search of the missing man and find roomfulls of statues that tell the history of the Shoggoth, one of the many races of pre-human creatures that populate the world of Lovecraft’s invented mythology. The bodies discovered by Lake were those of some dead Shoggoth.

     The narrative alternates between dry, sometimes scientific description and story telling. Some readers of Lovecraft complain about this but it actually works well as a writing technique. The descriptiveness is long and can be boring to the point of insanity but when the action starts it takes off like a rocket. Without revealing too much, it can be said that the narrator and his partner find a tower with a spiral ramp at its base that leads them down into an underground abyss.

     One thing that can be said about At the Mountains of Madness is that it is a story of inversions. The Shoggoth appear to be an inverted form of humanity; their physical form and habitats are different but their social and psychological forms are very much human. The mountains represent a threshold that, when passed in an airplane, takes the explorers almost literally into another world that subverts everything that scientists know about civilization and the human race. The mountains also work as a motif of inversion since, ordinarily thought of as solid, geological protuberances, these are hollow and full of tunnels where most of the significant events of the story take place. This structural theme is more apparent in the contrast between what exists above ground and what takes place in the caves and under the surface of the glacier. During their explorations of the city, the narrator learns why the Shoggoth died out as a race, preparing him for the event that happens at the end. This tory depicts a world turned inside out, one where the sun never sets and the most populous creatures are giant albino penguins. It is a world that should never have been revealed to people.

     At the Mountains of Madness is at times slow; if Lovecraft used this dragging, redundant technique to make the more exciting parts rush by a little more rapidly, he overplayed that stylistic device but only slightly. Another criticism of this novelette is that the narrator and other characters are two-dimensional; they only exist for the purpose of telling the story and, since it is a horror narrative, there needs to be someone to be scared. They could be any arbitary people though since they are devoid of any feelings other than interest and fear. Then again, Lovecraft was a pulp writer and one with a deep interest in science which is less about the scientists and more about the knowledge they obtain; he was never really known for drawing complex or well-rounded characters.

     What the story does get right is the sense of anxiety. It has the ordinary amount of tension one might feel when wanting to learn the solution to a mystery and the intrigue involved in the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, even with the idea in mind that the price of learning it might be insanity or death. The sense of fear is appropriately felt when the explorers go down into the abyss under the tower, not knowing when or if it will end; the feeling of being sunk into a void of never-ending blackness is profound and one that speaks outside of routine genre literature-type horror. Combined with the acquired knowledge of the Shoggoth, a race that came into existence and went extinct without people even knowing about it, makes us think that maybe we are little more than just another biological species that will someday die out and be forgotten; beyond us there may be nothing but a void, a vacuum of nothingness that has no purpose and no meaning. Lovecraft’s monsters may be symbols of anxiety but they signify a human anxiety that runs deeper than a threat to our physical safety or mental stability; they exemplify our fear that we are nothing.

     While it certainly has its flaws, this story is a key piece in the cycle of the Cthulhu Mythos. This is largely because it gives such a complete description of the Shoggoth. When compared to other stories in Lovecraft’s oeuvre, it illuminates dark corners that might not have been revealed otherwise. It is slow at times but fun to read at the end as well. Being one of his only novelettes, you may wonder if he could have gone on to be a good novelist had he lived longer. 

Lovecraft, H.P. At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror. Beagle Books Inc., New York: 1971.

Frank Zappa

The Ocean Is the Ultimate Solution

from the lp Sleep Dirt

• 
  

World's first vagina museum to open in London

In a bright indoor space in Camden’s Stables Market, a giant tampon is flanked by giant menstrual cups. Illustrations of female genitalia are dotted around the walls and some underwear is in a glass case.

Read the full article on The Guardian here