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

Secrets of Bangkok red light zone laid bare in new museum

 Prostitution, the CIA, the Vietnam War and Chinese immigration are all on display in a new museum dedicated to one of Bangkok's most famous red light nightlife zones, Patpong Road.

Read the full article on CNN Travel here

Coil, The New Blockaders, and Vortex Campaign

untitled

from the lp The Melancholy Mad Tenant

Lora Logic

Stop Halt

from the lp Pedigree Charm

Ronald Rozenbaum

Lora Logic

Crystal Gazing

Book Review

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World

by David Deutsch

     Theoretical physicist David Deutsch presents us with an onslaught of ideas. The Beginning of Infinity is an attempt at combining various branches of science with the branch of philosophical epistemology. While a wide range of explication and analysis is contained here, the quality of his ideas shifts from good to bad and back again.

     The core idea of this book is that humans are a unique species of beings on our planet and what makes us unique is our ability to generate knowledge; what makes this knowledge so significant is that we create explanations and because of this ability, problem solving has become the skill that ensures our chances of survival as well as the capacity to make infinite progress in our ability to understand. Every advance in knowledge is a beginning of infinity, an entryway into a string of continuously improving explanations of what reality is. This process starts with statements of conjecture that get analyzed and modified; every problem that gets solved leads to a giant leap in knowledge but also opens us up to new problems as well, in an infinite series of solutions and dilemmas that can never be complete. Europe’s Age of Enlightenment saw the beginning of an explosion of science and rationality that is still in the process of unfolding now.

     The importance of forming explanations is at the core of this core idea. Explanations can be good or bad and scientific knowledge advances when bad explanations are replaces by good explanations. Examples of bad explanations are mystical or religious forms of causality, vague or inaccurate observations, and the conflation of ideas that have no bearing or relation on one another such as the position of stars and the occurrence of terrestrial events promoted by astrologers. Even more important is that the details of bad explanations can be altered without having to make any alterations in the claims they support. Good explanations, on the other hand, can not be varied without significantly changing their claim. The thesis and sub-thesis of this book are provocative and worthy of consideration.

     In the process of analyzing and testing conjectures, humans are prone to making errors and inaccurate judgments. Deutsch does an adequate job of identifying and defining these impediments to accurate knowledge. Some of them, like anthrocentrism and relativism seem right on the mark while others like inductivism and empiricism appear to be somewhat problematical. Empiricism, or the idea that we derive knowledge from our senses, can not be so easily written off. Deutsch explains that our senses deceive us; we can not see that the Earth is round from our vantage point and we can not feel it rotating. Instead, he claims we learn this information indirectly through the use of scientific instruments like telescopes, satellites, computers, and Foucault’s pendulum. It can be accepted that some forms of data are experienced indirectly but this does not disprove empiricism because we depend on our senses to observe and analyze the information gathered by theses instruments; without the sense of sight, any images captured in a telescope would be useless. Telescopes and satellites extend, amplify, and enhance our senses and without empiricism they would be impossible to construct or use. Empiricism is the reason that blind people do not become surgeons. Just because the empiricist philosopher David Hume made some inaccurate statements in his writings does not mean that all of empiricism has to be abandoned. We do not obtain scientific knowledge through inspiration, telepathy, divine revelation, or mystical communion. The information has to be communicated to us somehow and that process takes place because of empirical experience even if that merely means using our sight to read a graph or using our hearing to listen to another scientist explaining mathematics. Deutsch scores some big victories from the start of his book but also makes some horribly problematic claims as well.

     The book proceeds into the use of these ideas as tools to explain various branches of science like cosmology, space exploration, and evolution. These chapters are interesting, clearly written, and accessible to the lay-person, though a non-scientist may have some trouble judging the soundness of Deutsch’s arguments if they do not have enough background knowledge. One chapter explains the mathematics of infinity in challenging but comprehensible terms that can be grasped by people who are not mathematically inclined. The most imaginative chapter involves Socrates engaging in a dialogue with Hermes during a dream. They discuss the need for epistemology and the conflict between static and dynamic societies, a key concept that permeates the rest of the book. Static societies believe themselves to be perfect, are resistant to change or creativity, and depend on authoritarian rule. A dynamic society strives eternally for an open-ended perfection and so engages in a never ending quest to improve on what is already known. By strictly contrasting the two, Deutsch relies on a false dilemma fallacy and an oversimplification that could easily have been avoided if he had followed his own advice and generated a good explanation for his claim. Besides, it seems most societies combine both stasis and dynamism and even thrive because of the tension between the two. Societies need to have some degree of stasis to remain stable but they also need to be dynamic enough to adapt to inevitable change. Leaning too far in one direction or the other can cause a society to collapse.

     This is where The Beginning of Infinity completely falls apart. Deutsch leaves science behind and launches into a chapter about the fallibilty of representative democracy in America. A reader may get a couple pages into this chapter and wonder why it was even included in the book. It appears that Deutsch is trying to demonstrate that Western nations are more progressive because they embrace the idea of improvement and auto-correction. It seems that he is also trying to show that his concept of good explanation and infinite progress have reach outside of science and into other areas of human endeavor. These messages get buried in a dull and muddled mess about the shortcomings of coalition governments and why a representative democracy is mathematically impossible but still superior to other forms of government.

     Another confusing chapter is one where Deutsch attempts to demonstrate the existence of objective beauty. Genetically speaking, flowers and bees evolved simultaneously so that their symbiotic relationship would ensure the survival of both species. This is quite interesting but he tries to make a logistical leap and explain that flowers look beautiful because human genes adapted to find them attractive in a similar way. But he does not give a complete answer as to how humans benefited from this adaptation. He also does not take into account that there are vast numbers of people who are indifferent to whether flowers are actually beautiful or not. Some people even hate them. But this leads into a discussion on how humans evolved to find objective beauty in music and art, specifically the orchestral works of Mozart. He points out that musical expression reached a peak in Mozart’s day because he lived in a dynamic society that valued change and innovation and a static society could never have produced such a genius. This is probably true but his concept of objective perfection in aesthetics is entirely Eurocentric which qualifies it as a subject form of beauty rather than an objective one. Besides, in the entire world’s population, the people who actively listen to and enjoy Mozart are a minority. Professional wrestling is more popular internationally than classical music. Even worse, the example of Mozart contradicts his claim that in dynamic societies the process of analysis, modification, and correction lead us along an eternal path of getting closer to truth; it can only be stated as an opinion that classical music has developed into forms that are more complex, superior, and perfect than Mozart. Deutsch never even takes into account that Mozart’s The Magic Flute has never been considered to be much of anything but junk by most his listeners which might make the case that Mozart was the peak of aesthetic realization a little weaker.

     If aesthetics have evolved, classical music may or may not have gotten better but what about other forms of art and entertainment that came post-Mozart? We not only have John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix but there is are also aesthetic forms like the bad taste films of John Waters, death metal, industrial music and power electronics, niche and fetish categories of pornography, the Cinema of Transgression, the art of Hermann Nitzsch, the Viennese Actionists, and Paul McCarthy, all of which embrace an aesthetic of ugliness, offensiveness, or disturbing content. Adherents to these forms of aesthetics might willingly admit that Mozart is artistically superior but they probably would not spend much time listening to his music either. So how do these art forms fit in with the optimistic view of human progress held by David Deutsch? Maybe the concepts of progress and evolution need to be separated? In any case, his examples of flowers and Mozart do not sufficiently make the case that objective beauty exists.

     By far, the worst chapter in the book is the one describing the multiverse theory of quantum mechanics. He starts off with some stuff about transporter technology in the Star Trek tv series, veers off into some other stuff about writing a science fiction novel about a man and woman who fall in love on a spaceship, then mashes all this up with explanations of parallel universes and alternate threads of history. It is a confusing, disjointed mess. Ironically, the most poorly written chapter is also about Deutsch’s pet theory and area of expertise, one he admittedly says is not popular with other theoretical physicists. He says his theory of the multiverse is the most correct and condemns its critics for using instrumentalism and bad explanations to disprove it; other than that he never gives any details as to why they are wrong. He just states that hey are and moves on. He is capable of describing these things too; if you look him up on Youtube you will find his videos where he clearly explains these concepts. Even worse, this chapter seems entirely arbitrary; it does not fit snugly in with the main thesis of the book and does nothing to enhance the other concepts he presents either.

The Beginning of Infinity picks up again with a good section on the evolution and replication of genes and memes that is rooted in the work of Richard Dawkins. Deutsch ruins himself, though, as he takes up the idea of static and dynamic societies again. He makes the claim that Native American societies were static and post-Enlightenment white people were dynamic then dives headfirst into Social Darwinist territory by claiming that Native Americans failed because they never taught themselves how to domesticate animals. So their cultural evolution “failed” because they did not arrive at the same endpoint as Europeans? For the most part, the indigenous people of the Americas were not only surviving but thriving on their own terms until the Europeans showed up with their guns and their syphilis and tried to ethnically cleanse them. If left alone, they could very well have developed some form of science or industry, possibly even something entirely different that Europeans could never have conceived of. We will never know because the invaders decimated them.

     Deutsch attributes this “failure” to the inability of Native American people to use their imaginations. So the people who crossed the Baring Strait from Russia and migrated throughout the entire continents of North and South America as well as the Caribbean Islands were incapable of imagination? How does that lack of imagination account for the pictographic writing system of the Mayans or the empire built by the Aztecs? How about the Aztec pyramids? How did people with no imagination develop a rich tapestry of mythology, folklore, and shamanic practices? What about the Navajo language that is considered to be one of the most semantically and syntactically complex languages in the world? These are products of people who had no imagination?

     Archaeology does not support the idea that Native Americans were static and incapable of innovation either. Some societies evolved from using bone tools to carving stone into tools and sometimes combining them with sharp minerals like obsidian. Southwestern pueblo architecture and pottery production showed clear signs of cultural evolution. Some tribes evolved from being bands of hunter-gatherer nomads into sedentary or semi-sedentary agricultural societies. Complex tribal federations created by the Cherokees and Iroquois show an ability to innovate politically as well.

Deutsch claims they were incapable of innovation because they never tried to domesticate the woolly mammoths or mastodons that existed in North America when they arrived and instead killed them off by over-hunting. But think for a minute. If you were a nomad in a band of fifty people or so and you encountered a woolly mammoth, wouldn’t it make sense to kill it? If your immediate need is food it would supply your band with enough to last a while and also provide skins for clothes and bones for tools and weapons. It seems like trying to catch a woolly mammoth, tame it, learn how to ride it and use it for work would not only be precarious and dangerous but also a tremendous waste of time and effort. A giant hairy elephant would not present itself as something easy to control and losing a person or two in the attempt could be devastating to a small society where all members would contribute to the band’s chances of survival. We also do not know what they thought. Maybe they imagined taming the animals but failed in their attempts to do so.

     Deutsch goes on to say that static societies are more like animals than dynamic societies. It gets worse when he says this is not a racist theory because static societies are not genetically inferior humans; they are psychologically inferior instead. As if that is not racist; transferring a racist concept from one domain to another does not make the concept not racist. He continues on with the idea that Western societies are psychologically superior because of their achievements in science and we can almost hear alt.right douschebags like Gavin McInnes and Steve Bannon cheering in the background. Deutsch’s entire explanation of Native Americans as a static society is based on cherry picking and hasty conclusions. He does not appear to know much about the history of indigenous people but that is probably because he spent his life in the laboratory and very little time learning about human societies or even being a social part of the modern world. Besides, Western ingenuity also gave the world garbage like the music of Kid Rock, the Jerry Springer tv show, cell phone addicts, Hitler, marmite, McDonald’s, telemarketing, and football hooligans. And isn't Eurocentric thinking only one step away from antrocentric thinking anyhow? But like he says, every problem that gets solved creates new problems. So on to infinity.

David Deutsch has some great ideas but unfortunately, the bad chapters in The Beginning of Infinity have a tendency to overshadow the better parts. He does a good job of writing and analyzing when he sticks to the hard sciences but when he goes outside his areas of expertise the results are disastrous. And for someone who promotes the idea of progress resulting from good explanations, he does provide an awful lot of bad explanations along the way. But according to him, all claims are fallible so he should be willing to own up to his own shortcomings in thinking. But maybe that is the point. This is a book of conjectures and by analyzing, modifying, and correcting their fallibilities we are making progress towards higher levels of truth. Maybe David Deutsch does not want to tell us what to think but would rather have us make an attempt at finding a beginning of infinity for ourselves. For that reason this book has some value despite all its flaws.

Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World. Penguin Books, New York: 2011.

Essential Logic

Rat Alley

Essential Logic

Shabby Abbot 

Scientists: Human Extinction Is Extremely Likely And people don't seem all that bothered by the possibility.

Forget nuclear weapons, biological warfare, and the slew of other ways humanity could cause its own destruction for a moment.

Read the full article on Futurism here

Sea Org

So what is the Sea Org, exactly? Are all Scientologists in the Sea Org? Why are so many critics opposed to it? What do Sea Org members do? How do they live? What was the Cadet Org? This page explains.

Read the full article on Ex-Scientology Kids here

The Rocky Dennis Picture Show

Psychedelic Heroin

Rigoer van der Weyden

Alien Sex Fiend

I Walk the Line

Scientists map mouse personality

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany, together with colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Sciencein Israel have developed a computational method to objectively measure the personality of mice living in a semi-natural, group environment.

Read the full article on Phys.Org here

Victor Grauer

Inferno

from the compilation lp Electronic Music

Naked City

Grand Guignol

Why We Murder

Lydia Lunch spoken word performance

at The Knitting Factory

from the vhs tape Malicious Intent

Cosmic cats and nuclear blasts: the strange history of interstellar message

From Sagan to Tesla, scientists have long puzzled over how to talk to extraterrestrial intelligence

Read the full article on The Guardian here

Book Review

The Tomb and Other Tales by H.P. Lovecraft

     H.P. Lovecraft has always evoked a wide range of responses from his readers. That may be less apparent with The Tomb and Other Tales, a collection of minor stories, odds and ends, and obscurities put together by Lovecraft’s literary executor August Derleth. Having said that, fans who read this might still feel a range of conflicting emotions.

     This short paperback anthology is comprised of three sections. The first is a collection of completed short stories that were published in pulp magazines. Most are typical, maybe even generic, Lovecraft tales. Many of them are actually algorithmically the same story written with different details. Stories like “The Tomb”, “He”, and “The Strange High House In the Mist” all involve an nondescript narrator who goes in search of some form of ancient and forbidden knowledge, ends up in a place with some creepy people who perform some ceremonial magic, and reveal to him hallucinatory terrors of another, parallel world full of weird creatures with bad intentions. “Imprisoned With the Pharaohs” also follows this template but has the unique distinction of having been ghostwritten for Harry Houdini, one of the few readers who had an admiration for Lovecraft during his lifetime. It also exemplifies the Egyptomania and Art Nouveau styles of its day. It is, however, mediocre writing, even when considering pulp standards.

     The best piece in the first section, “The Horror of Red Hook”, is, unfortunately, also the most racist. A policeman is sent to investigate some strange happenings in a sordid section of New York City. He encounters a scholar of the occult named Robert Suydam who appears to be the leader of a cult. Using some unflattering and xenophobic descriptions, it is explained that the cult is made up of Kurdish Yezidis involved in human trafficking, bootlegging, and child sacrifice. Like most of the stories in this collection, the investigation leads to underground tunnels and the horrific sites of otherworldly creatures entering our dimension. Lovecraft describes the Kurdish immigrants in distinctly negative terms; by doing so he meant to shock and horrify his audience, which was miniscule during his lifetime by the way, but those racist details, as offensive as they are, make stories like this look more dated than scary. Unpacking the racism in Lovecraft’s writing can lead you down a rabbit hole that is more nuanced and complex than one may care to admit at first.

     “The Walls of Eryx” is another one of the better stories. An astronaut explorer bushwhacks through the jungles of Venus in search of crystals that work as potent sources of energy on Earth. The crystals are worshiped by big lizard men who succeed in trapping him inside an invisible labyrinth made of a glassy, unbreakable material unknown to the people of Earth. Critics of Lovecraft may point out that Venus resembles a tropical colony that gets invaded by white people who come to take resources from the non-white inhabitants represented by the lizard men. The story has a twist though since the astronaut can not escape from the trap, and while admitting defeat, confesses that the lizard men may be of equal intelligence to people from Earth after all. He realizes that they ultimately have no right to come and steal the crystals from Venus and should, in the future, try to learn from the lizard men rather than conquering them. H.P. Lovecraft was undoubtedly racist but at least this story shows that he may have been open to alternate ways of thinking about other kinds of people if he had lived longer.

     The second section of this paperback has some of his earliest writings. They are all works of juvenilia and read exactly like what they are: the kind of stories you might find in a high school creative writing class. They are full of the types of shortcomings you would expect. They do, however, show how Lovecraft was rooted in the ideals of romanticism and neo-paganism. Therefore, they may be of interest to those who want to understand what literary strands led up to his better and more developed works.

     Surprisingly, the most interesting stories appear in the third section which contains four fragments of stories Lovecraft started and never completed. “Azathoth” is a fast-paced swirling psychedelic phantasmagoria that means little but hits you like an acid rock song from the 1960s. “The Descendant” is about a man who went crazy from studying The Necronomicon and putting its theories into practice. “The Book” continues on with a similar theme.

     H.P. Lovecraft is more or less a cult writer. The politically correct abhor him but shouldn’t they? He intended to horrify and scare his audience so at least at that level he succeeded. Snooty literary snobs condemn him for his overly long sentences, tortured grammar, and unnecessarily descriptive paragraphs about things that do not need to be described. But he did express a coherent vision of the interactions between parallel universes that is imaginative and fun to read at times. A lot of writers do that though; what makes Lovecraft unique is that he opens a window into a literary world that can be analyzed endlessly as one doorway into the tunnels of his mind lead to more and mor doorways in endless succession. It goes even deeper when you try to square Lovecraft the man with the things he wrote, only to find an odd assortment of contradictions, curiosities, and coincidences. His ideas fit snugly with psychoanalysis and read like a plunge into the human id. The theme of a dark, evil, terrifying, and violent reality that underlies our ordinary lives anticipates the works of David Lynch who took on a similar framework sixty years later. The Tomb and Other Tales will probably only appeal to diehard and fanatical fans but for those people it can provide an extra touch of insight into this notoriously fascinating author.

Lovecraft, H.P. The Tomb and Other Tales. Ballantine Books Inc., New York: 1974.

Gong

You Never Blow Yr Trip Forever

from the lp You

Master Musicians of Bukkake

People Of the Drifting Houses

from the lp Totem One

Robin Isley

Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel

Enter the Exterminator

from the lp Nail

The Misunderstood Legacy of Guy Fawkes

Every year, Britain commemorates the notorious Catholic conspirator’s failed plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Elsewhere in the world, his reputation is much different.

Read the full article on The Atlantic here

Incredible Strange Film Show: David Lynch

documentary film (1991)

Robert Mapplethorpe

http://www.mapplethorpe.org/

Robert McGinnis

https://robertmcginnis.com/

The Meese Commission on Pornography (1986), and the Birth of the Modern Day Culture War

U.S. President Donald Trump recently presented the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to Edwin Meese III, former top aide to U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

In the eyes of many, awarding Meese the honor was a highly controversial decision. While he’d served the government – first acting as assistant and chief of staff when Reagan was governor of California, then becoming a top Cabinet official and finally attorney general when Reagan was president – his service came under scrutiny for ethics violations.

Read the full article on The Rialto Report here

Bongwater

Dazed and Chinese

from the lp Double Bummer

Iggy Pop was once critically beaten up by some angry bikers in the crowd

The most incendiary artist in his day, Iggy Pop became famed for his riotous behaviour during his live shows with The Stooges. His ruthless energy was unstoppable and it often got him into trouble. One such time saw him getting routinely beaten up by a group of angry bikers in the crowd.

Read the full article on Far Out here

Mystery Attracts Mystery: The Forgotten Partnership of H. P. Lovecraft and Harry Houdini

Pulp is one of the great unheralded archives of American cultural history. Ephemeral by its very nature, the pulp magazine or paperback brought millions of readers the derring-do of detectives and superheroes, the misadventures of doomed lovers, and the horrors of gruesome monsters. They were the birthplaces of Tarzan and Zorro, and published the work of such luminaries as Agatha Christie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, and Tennessee Williams.

Read the full article on Journal Of the History of Ideas Blog here

Scratch Acid

Cannibal

David Bowie

White Light/White Heat

The Shaggs

My Pal Foot Foot

from the lp Philosophy Of the World

The Shaggs

Philosophy Of the World

Scientists Say They've Found a Place on Earth Where No Life Can Thrive

Where there's water, there's life, the thinking loosely goes. New evidence suggests starkly otherwise – or at least identifies some harsh new parameters on where life and water may (or may not) be able to co-exist.

Read the full article on Science Alert here