True Detective is currently the only must-watch show on commercial television for the paraculturally-inclined viewer, and this io9.com think piece by novelist Michael Hughes does a decent job of explaining why that is, exactly...
The King in Yellow is a fictional play within a collection of short stories - a metafictional dramatic work that brings despair, depravity, and insanity to anyone who reads it or sees it performed. Robert Chambers inserts only a few selected scenes from the play into his story collection, and all of them are from the first act. This act, we are told, is a bit of a honeypot, luring readers into the cursed text. If they read even the first few words of Act II they are driven insane by the revelation of horrible, decadent, incomprehensible truths about the universe. Anyone familiar with Lovecraft's "cosmic horrors" should see the thematic similarity. For his unfortunate protagonists, the ultimate truths of the universe are too much for their overloaded minds to handle. It should not be surprising that Lovecraft incorporated Chambers's The King in Yellow into his overarching Cthulhu mythos, embellishing the elements of the story and adding the fictitious play to his growing bookshelf of equally fictional mythos tomes.
Hughes' article was written after only two episodes of True Detective had aired. We are currently five episodes into the show's eight episode lifespan, and the Easter eggs for fans of dark fiction and apocalyptic nihilism just keep on coming. Everything from Se7en and Nine Inch Nails to Twin Peaks and Pink Floyd gets either name-checked or visually referenced, here, with yer old pal Jerky finding references to even more obscure cultural artifacts, such as dark fantasy author Thomas Ligotti's non-fiction philosophical treatise The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, and paracultural superstar Alan Moore's little-read black and white Lovecraftian police procedural comic The Courtyard, which features a detective not unlike True Detective's Cohle, played with remarkable morbidity by Matthew McConnaughey. And if the denouement of that particularly nasty piece of work has played any role in determining the ultimate outcome of events in True Detective... well, God help the American viewing public, because they ain't seen nothin' yet.
Damien Hirst is one of the most successful artists alive and working today in England, if not the entire world. Since he emerged on the British arts scene in the 1990s as part of the Young British Artists (YBA) movement spearheaded by Charles Saatchi and his influential Saatchi Gallery, Hirst has moved from triumph to triumph, with ever-increasing paychecks dotting his progress.
Although much of Hirst's work is considered "dark" in the sense that it is obsessed with death and the process of decay, none of his work has struck me as being particularly "paracultural" in the way that, say, Matthew Barney's work most definitely is. By "paracultural", I mean work that involves certain factors, modalities of thought, and/or key players that fall outside the realm of so-called respectable, mainstream discourse, existing in a kind of witchy, pan-paradigmatic, Jungian Twilight Zone, where it’s okay if the concepts being explored are half-baked, the gestalt half-gelled.
Perhaps this is why I was so pleasantly surprised by Hirst's latest effort, Verity, a titanic (66') bronze-clad statue of a partially-skinned, pregnant female stabbing a great sword straight into the sky above. Aside from being an intriguing visual object - particularly impressive are the lush, almost chocolaty smoothness of the anatomical details - it also seems to reference both his own earlier work (particularly The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living) and the world-famous Body Worlds travelling exhibition of posthumously "plastinated" human beings in various poses. It also stands as a fine exemplar of the lower order of colossi.
From Hirst's own site:
Verity is an allegory for truth and justice. Her stance is taken from Edgar Degas’s ‘Little Dancer of Fourteen Years’ (c. 1881). An anatomical cross-section of her head and torso reveal her skull and the developing foetus inside her womb. Verity stands on a base of scattered legal books and holds the traditional symbols of Justice – a sword and scales. ... She was fabricated in bronze in over 40 individual sand castings at Pangolin Editions foundry, in Gloucestershire. Her phosphor-bronze surface is 20 millimetres thick and her internal support structure is a single piece of stainless steel. The sculpture is weather and lightning-proof and underwent extensive wind-tunnel-testing to ensure her capability of withstanding the force of high winds and sea spray. After two years of planning and production, Verity arrived in Ilfracombe in three parts in October 2012. After a week’s assembly on site, the sculpture was hoisted into final position using a 250 tonne crane.
For more images and details of the sculpture's fabrication, please click here.
Serge Kernbach, a scientist at the Research Centre of Advanced Robotics and Environmental Science in Stuttgart, Germany, claims that recently de-classified Soviet documents prove that, from 1917 to 2003, roughly 1 billion dollars was spent researching "mind-controlling weaponry to compete with similar programs being undertaken in the US." Particularly worthy of attention is the following excerpt:
The paper also outlines how the Soviets developed "cerpan", a device that could generate and store high-frequency electromagnetic radiation, and the usage of this energy to affect other objects. The paper said that if the generator was designed properly, it would be able to accumulate bioenergy from all living things - animals, plants, humans - and then release it outside.
Could this "cerpan" be the Soviet equivalent to - or represent a parallel discovery of - the much-maligned concept of orgoneenergy that was said to have been discovered by Wilhelm Reich in the USA during the same time period?
While not quite a Mount Rushmore of Pop Occulture, in the above photograph you will find four of the most interesting figures in popular and experimental entertainment of the last half of the 20th century. First, we have director Donald Cammel, who gave us 1970's Performance, among other films. Next comes actor Denis Hopper. Then we have mystic/auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky of El Topo and Holy Mountain infamy. And finally, Crowleyite occultist and omnipresent creative muse Kenneth Anger, who gave us both the best-selling Hollywood Babylon series of "tell all" scandal tomes, as well as some of the most intriguing and influential experimental film of the post-war period (Lucifer Rising being a prime example). This interview with Esquire Magazine is well worth reading from beginning to end. It serves as both a primer for newcomers and a catch-up for those who've loved his work in the past and have wondered what he's been up to, lately. All Useless Eaters are hereby urged to devour it with relish.
A rather sobering assessment of the situation in which we currently find ourselves...
A high-ranking official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared in an interview with PBS that the age of antibiotics has come to an end.
'For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about "The end of antibiotics, question mark?"' said Dr Arjun Srinivasan. 'Well, now I would say you can change the title to "The end of antibiotics, period.”'
The associate director of the CDC sat down with Frontline over the summer for a lengthy interview about the growing problem of antibacterial resistance.
Srinivasan, who is also featured in a Frontline report called 'Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria,' which aired Tuesday, said that both humans and livestock have been overmedicated to such a degree that bacteria are now resistant to antibiotics.
‘We're in the post-antibiotic era,' he said. 'There are patients for whom we have no therapy, and we are literally in a position of having a patient in a bed who has an infection, something that five years ago even we could have treated, but now we can’t.’.
When news first broke of an alleged plan by an New York-based Satanic Temple to erect a statue in honor of their main goat next to the Ten Commandments monument at Oklahoma's state capitol, all the usual right-wing finger-sniffers started quaking with outrage, which caused all the usual left-wing "cooler than thou" douchebags to start snorting through their latte foam. My own favorite headline relating to this story - which spread like syphilitic wildfire through the nation's newsrooms - was the following: SUPPORT GROWING FOR SATANIC MONUMENT AT OK CAPITOL. Anyway, if you want to donate funds to help get this monument built, you cando so here.
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If you're going to be holding super-secret, heavy-duty, occult-tinged Eyes Wide Shut "mansion orgies" - complete with extreme BDSM fetish kink and "art shows" that involve knife-play and bloodletting - you might want to try not telling Business Insider about it, afterwards. It kind of ruins the whole elitist mystique of the thing, knowing that it's going to spend weeks as a "recommended reading" sidebar selection on Slate.com where a bunch of fucking nobodies can "read all about it."
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There was a bunch of UK UFO info dumped by the British government and featured in THE WEEK a few months ago, so I thought I'd share a link featuring the highlights with y'all. Of special interest are the tales of "Faceless Goons", UFOs appearing during the Falklands War, and copies of Top Secret minutes of the MoD's Flying Saucer Working Party of 1950-52, which were opened at the Public Record Office, now the National Archives. The file was annotated by one worried official who feared it might fuel cover-up conspiracies. They wrote: "Oh dear! This makes our line 'no interest' in [flying saucers] look suspect." THE WEEK also covered UFO story, this one of a more recent vintage. It details a pilot's revelations about how a rugby ball-shaped UFO flew "within feet" of his A320 Airbus at 34,000 feet, shortly after takeoff from Heathrow Airport in July 2013.
If you have an interest in the intersection between para-culture and the world of hip-hop, then there's an article that you need to read top to bottom, right now. It's this VICE story detailing exactly how MTV-crowned "Hottest Rapper in the Game" Rick Ross - real name William Roberts - stole his identity whole cloth from a real-life crime figure who helped the CIA flood America's West Coast inner cities with crack cocaine back in the 1980's to incalculable effect. Far from being a crime boss before making it big in the rap game, Roberts was, of all things... a corrections officer. The above photo broke the story wide open and forced an eventual confession from the rotund pretender.
But hold up. Can it really be that the most sinister aspect of this rapper's background is the fact that he doesn't have a sinister background?! I mean, it's not as though most people take all these hip-hop beefs seriously... do they? I've always assumed it was more like, say... professional wrestling for black folk. And on those occasions when the shit does get real - as it also tends to do in the wrestling game, an industry with a mortality rate that rivals hip-hop's - it's usually because the play-acting gets out of hand and boils over into a temporary spasm of narcotic-fueled violence.
Boyz will be boyz, in other words.
But what if there's more to it than that? In fact, what if there's more to Roberts/Ross's correctional industry background than first meets the eye? What if way back in 1991, there was a secret meeting that changed rap music and destroyed a generation?!You can read the full text of an anonymous email that rap journalists and bloggers received in 2012 here.
In fact, I kind of have to insist you go read it. Go ahead, I'll still be waiting here when you're done.
Finished? Okay, let's proceed.
So... what does the real "Freeway" Rick Ross think about all this? He definitely believes something unsaid is at work...
...something far more grave and conspiratorial than taking a name and a rep. “The police union gets a lot of laws passed in this country so they can build up the union. It's a strength in numbers gang. The more people that commit crime, the more police officers they get to hire and the bigger the union gets.[Roberts] would be the first one that you start to look at because he was part of the union. This goes to the heights of the music industry.” It's impossible to validate an entirely anonymous tip-off such as this, just as it's impossible to disprove it. Still, people have been joining the dots and tracing cross-shareholdings ever since. Some have noted that BlackRock owns stakes in both Vivendi (the parent of Universal Music Group) and Corrections Corporation of America. That may be true but the $4trillion asset management giant also holds interests in Wal-Mart, Chevron and owns 5% of nearly half of all companies traded on America's various stock exchanges. “I look at what makes sense,” says Freeway. “If something doesn't make sense to me then I question what’s really going on. When you look at the justice system here in America, is it working? We got 2.2 million people in prison. After you think about it you see that it's absolutely working the way the people who put it in place wanted it to work. They wanted to lock people up. They don't want it where people are not going to jail because then they make less money.” Prison is big business in the US. America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with roughly one in every 107 adults imprisoned. The nation accounts for 5% of the world’s population, and yet 25% of its prisoners.
And maybe that should be our biggest take-away from this story after all... the fact that we're living in a vast gulag system, and most of us hardly ever notice.
Respected psychopharacologist David Nutt wants to use cutting edge science to create safe, non-addictive, synthetic alcohol that gets you just as sauced as the real thing and comes with its very own sober-up pill.
He said: “I think this would be a serious revolution in health... just like the e-cigarette is going to revolutionise the smoking of tobacco. “I find it weird that we haven't been speaking about this before, as it's such a target for health improvement.” The scientist said 10 per cent of drinkers become addicted, and that addicts account for most of the one and a half million people killed by alcohol every year. The Professor said that the drug would be taken in the form of a range of cocktails, and added: “I’ve done the prototype experiments myself many years ago, where I’ve been inebriated and then it’s been reversed by the antagonist. That’s what really gave us the idea. There’s no question that you can produce a whole range of effects like alcohol by manipulating the brain.”
So... a product with all the anxiolytic and euphoria-inducing qualities of alcohol that doesn't wreck your liver, rot your brain, and cause you to plow your SUV into a bridge abutment on the way home... sounds like a no-brainer, doesn't it? Who on Earth could possibly object to such a thing?
Well, how about the rather deep-pocketed and morally ambiguous alcohol industry, for starters?
Keep your eyes on this story, folks. If Nutt ever gets any serious backing for his endeavor - and a recent appearance on Dragon's Den suggests that he's looking - the corporate shenanigans it will invariably lead to will involve some serious popcorn-bait.
The ever-creepy Lady Gaga struck a decidedly otherworldly pose during a UK show last October. More photos and details about the performance (at a venue suggestively called G-A-Y) at the link.
I was in hospital with a serious infection for a couple of weeks, but I'm back now and should be back on track by this evening, so January 28th and beyond WILL be up and ready to read for y'all! In the meantime, I guess I'm going to let this gap stand, and rectify it next year!
The 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK has resulted in a lot of published words, very few of them worth your time. If you should choose to read only one article from the torrent that is still washing over the info-sphere, I believe you should make it this one. Written by Robert Kennedy Jr., this article stands as a clear-headed and definitive knock-out blow to all the shoddy historical revisionism being peddled in the mainstream press, where we've seen doctrinaire conservatives try everything from belittling the man's legacy and achievements to trying to claim him as one of their own. The article also serves as a big, angry FUCK YOU middle finger right in the face to the sanctimonious, holier-than-thou likes of Noam Chomsky, who attack JFK from the left, claiming there couldn't be a "conspiracy" behind his murder because there was no significant difference between him and Richard Fucking Nixon. Chomsky and his ilk often come across as even more bitter, dismissive and inexplicably hostile than the bloviating jerkwads of the Right... not an easy thing to do! Anyway, read this article and make sure the people in your life who should be reading it are sent a copy of the link, as well. This needs to be read by one and all.
He's got Satan on speed-dial, apparently. A few too many Lovecraft references here for anyone out there to take this too seriously. Still, kind of fun.
The fun starts ten minutes and 35 seconds deep into the morbidly-obese, crack-smoking, pig-eyed mayor of Toronto's "impromptu" interview with Toronto talk radio fixture John "Johnny" Oakley.
Montreal-based, Ontario-born documentarian Peter Wintonick passed away today at the age of 60. He had recently been diagnosed with liver cancer. Join me in celebrating this great man's life and work by watching his most well known and important film, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media.
One of the most respected, senior and widely published professors of psychology, Daryl Bem of Cornell, has just published an article that suggests that people — ordinary people — can be altered by experiences they haven't had yet. Time, he suggests, is leaking. The Future has slipped, unannounced, into the Present. And he thinks he can prove it.
Sadly, the link from the above-quoted article leads to an online dead end. If I find Dr. Bem's study published elsewhere, I will check it out and post my thoughts in this space.
My good friend Albert V - of the Future Seeing Visions blog - has just turned me on to the works of Judee Sill, "the shockingly talented occult folk singer that time forgot." Click the link to find out more about her strange, short life, and check out this choice cut, titled Jesus Was a Cross Maker.
By now, you've all probably heard about the controversy surrounding Miley Cyrus' performance of her already controversial single, "We Can't Stop", at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards. Also controversial was the video for the single, which was expertly dissected by CollegeHumor.com in their excellent music-free version. So I suppose Sunday's VMA performance means that Cyrus has scored a controversy hat-trick, triple play or trifecta, depending on your choice of sports analogies.
For all of you not living in the USA, which means you're currently unable to access the performance due to MTV.com's anal-retentive region blocking policies, here is a Youtube version that at least lets you see what all the fuss is about. I don't know how long it will be up, though, as others have been removed already tonight:
For those of you whose delicate constitutions prevent you from watching an ostensible human being completely and utterly debase herself in a doomed attempt to acquire whatever wispy shreds of "street cred" she can dig her manicured little claws into, Buzzfeed provides a countdown of what they consider to be the "weirdest and craziest moments" from the performance. I think they make some great observations, but they missed a few.
Hence this expanded Useless Eater Blog post, in which I will attempt to catalog every element from this performance, offering occasional attempts at analysis and interpretation... though I must confess that I mostly found it baffling.
1. First things first, Cyrus emerges from a giant, mothership-like Teddy Bear that is sporting 70's-style Battlestar Galactica "Cylon" goggles, complete with oscillating monocular eye-beam, not unlike KITT, The Hoff's ride from cheesy 80's TV favorite, Knight Rider.
2. As if emerging from a giant Teddy wasn't enough, Cyrus is also wearing a teddy... WITH THE FACE OF A TEDDY BEAR ON IT! Once again, she hits a hat-trick/triple-play/trifecta.
3. The face of the Teddy on Cyrus' flimsy teddy has its tongue sticking out, just as Cyrus does while she clumsily makes her way down the steps towards the stage.
4. For some reason, Cyrus' hair is done up to look like a couple of horns have sprouted from the top of her skull. Oh, and MTV decided to censor the word "molly" from her lyrics, as it appears to be a not so subtle reference to the rave drug MDMA.
5. At one point, Cyrus pretends to stroke her long, waving hair... despite the fact that she's sporting a Pixie cut. She almost appears to be in a hypnotic trance of some sort, like she's going through the motions of some programming that was installed in her psyche at a time when she had enough hair to pull off such a move. It's actually kind of disturbing. My Facebook friend Adam Gorightly wondered if perhaps this performance was the revelation of Hannah Montana's mind-control "alter", and called her performance "Illuminaughty!"
6. Cyrus displays an extremely odd gait as she crosses the stage, her bizarre crotch thrusts and air-humping not unlike the visual equivalent of uncomfortable fuck-grunts.
7. Throughout the performance, Cyrus is constantly “spanking” her vagina for some reason.
8. She is joined on stage by a circle of sad, dopey looking pink and white dancing Teddy Bears.
9. A handful of Black back-up dancers walk clumsily onto the stage with giant Teddy Bears of their own strapped to their backs for some reason. One of these dancers - a giant, frowning Negress who happens to have a spectacular badonk-adonk - begins throwing candies (or is it condoms?) into the audience with barely concealed contempt.
10. Oh my. Now Cyrus has begun wagging her fanny with all the passion and verve of a homeless geriatric splattering the sidewalk just steps from your favorite Chinatown restaurant with hot gutfuls of Lysol-scented vomit. I believe the kids call this abomination "twerking".
11. The "twerking" is alternated with that idiotic "invisible rainbow" move that so many musical acts seem to think is cool these days, even though I believe it originated with the Backstreet Boys.
12. Cyrus' dancing is completely off tempo. She appears to be drunk or, as previously contemplated, hypnotized.
13. What is up with the constant crotch pointing, slapping, spanking, etc, etc, etc?!
14. At one point, Cyrus appears to feign anilingus on the aforementioned candy-throwing Negress with the titanic mega-booty. More spanks and crotch-pointing ensue.
15. Yet more idiotic "twerking" and uninspired dancing.
16. Every once in a while, the Teddy Bear on Cyrus' teddy looks like the notorious Illuminati Eye. It's formed by the bear's black nose and white muzzle, with the tongue creating an eyelid effect. I know, I know...
17. At this point, Robin Thicke shows up wearing a referee costume and they perform a duet, segueing into Thicke's own summer succès de scandale, "Blurred Lines". It's at this point that Cyrus rips off her teddy, stripping down to her underwear and a giant We’re Number One.foam finger hand.
18. Godzilla save us... we are subjected to EVEN MORE "twerking".
19. Cyrus uses the giant foam finger/hand exactly the way you'd expect her to use it if you've been reading along until now.
20. The finger, by the way, has a red tip that’s supposed to be a painted fingernail, but which looks to me more like it’s been smeared with menstrual blood... which, considering Cyrus' state of undress and how many times she slides it over and across her vagina, would not be beyond the realm of possibility.
20. Two rappers show up. I have no idea who they are, but they bring even MORE women with them. This time, however, instead of Teddy Bears, the girls are holding up cheap cardboard cut-outs of status symbols like a Rolex watch, a painting by Picaso, a yacht, a champagne bottle, etc, etc, etc.
21. The first rapper is dressed in white and black, looking kind of like an up-town Baron Samedi Dimanche, of Voodoo infamy. The other rapper is dressed in a hockey jersey with the number 777 emblazoned across his chest. That number has a great many potential interpretations, mostly dealing with perfection of some sort, which makes its inclusion here completely incomprehensible.
And then the whole thing ends rather flatly and pathetically... a study in anti-climax. The audience seems split between those who are bored out of their minds and those feeling genuine embarrassment and pity for the poor girl. Can anyone possibly hate their parents that much?
After a few viewings, some questions lingered in my mind. First of all, what was up with all the Teddy Bear imagery? I brought up the issue on Facebook and I'd like to give a shout-out to my fellow psycho-sleuth Drakonas T. who wrote: "I'll TELL you how the Teddy Bears fit into all of this..." and then posted this image:
PEDO-BEAR!!!
Of course! I could hardly believe I hadn't thought of that, myself! So thanks, Drak, for bringing up an incredibly important issue at this point, and in this context.
Because, who is Miley Cyrus, exactly, if not for Hannah Montana? And when you consider how intensely the Hannah Montana persona/brand was pushed on the "tween" demographic, on an international level and on a historically unprecedented scale, by Disney - which, just to refresh your memories, is one of the most important players in the Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Media-Entertainment Complex - it kind of makes you wonder what that courtship was really all about, does it not?
I mean, just think about all those millions of young girls who've just spent the last seven years of their lives watching Hannah Montana TV shows and films, doling out literally billions of dollars to listen to Hannah Montana CDs, clothe themselves in the Hannah Montana fashion line, scent themselves with Hannah Montana perfumes, eat Hannah Montana breakfast cereal, sing into Hannah Montana toy microphones and go trick-or-treating in their officially sanctioned Hannah Montana Halloween costumes.
What is it, exactly, that these kids are supposed to take away from Sunday night's utterly bizarre and depraved debacle?
I ask you, my fellow citizens... WHO, OH WHO WILL THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?!
The answer, of course, is the Military-Industrial-Media-Intelligence-Entertainment Complex.
If you are in a workplace that depends on the proper functioning of Xerox office equipment, then you had better read this damning report about how using the compression settings, even at the highest resolutions, can lead to the random switching around of numbers, which in turn can have potentially deadly consequences, for instance, in medicine, engineering, the pharmaceutical industry and more.
Around Christmastime 2011, noted British documentarian Adam Curtis - who has brought us such essential viewing as The Power of Nightmares, The Trap, The Century of Self and All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace - put together an elaborate post over at his BBC blog in which he examined the history of television reporting on supposedly supernatural entities and events.
Curtis explains...
Here is ... a brief history of the appearance of ghosts and poltergeists and other spirits on television. Not fictional ghosts - but real ones, or the reports of their appearances, that you find in various news and documentary programmes. But as so often when one looks at material in the archives, it turns out that it tells you less about the subjects of the programmes - the ghosts - than about the strange medium that possesses modern society - television.
As is the norm with Curtis's work, his blog post is meticulously researched, chock full of archival material, generously illustrated, endlessly fascinating and surreptitiously profound. I urge you all to read the whole thing, watch all the embedded videos, and even peruse the articles and research papers to which Curtis links throughout the piece.
Based on the 1964 cybernetics-themed sf novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye, the videos below feature both parts of the 16mm film version directed by legendary German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder for German TV, called Welt am Draht. Both parts come with English subtitles.
