COUNTER-CURRENTS: “[Robert E. Lee]’s bronze head was ripped from his body, his face was peeled from his head in the form of a death mask, and then it was super-heated to the point where it glowed…” HOW TO MAKE ART in NORTH KOREA: “[Laibach] are very, very unashamedly flirting with totalitarian aesthetics and the philosopher…
Tag: strange
weekend links: the bone orchard, war as divination, punishing wickedness
Don’t Waste a Good Crisis: “If you want to know what might come next, read the memoir of ‘White’ Russian general Pyotr Wrangel, Always with Honor, about the Russian Civil War. I’m not joking.” Godzilla: “A highlight of Heisei period Godzilla movies is Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah. It’s mostly a highlight for being completely bonkers Japanese nationalism. The…
Terra Damnata
What follows is a list of stray words and quotes that I highlighted for my own reasons while reading Blood Meridian a couple years ago. I’m sharing them because their aesthetic value is inherently high but also because, in aggregate their strangeness and desolate aesthetics are enhanced. They also act like luminol on my brain…
weekend links
Are You Ready for the Great Reset? “The world’s nations are drowning in debt and economies and private enterprise is crumbling under COVID-19 as populations scramble toward left and right populism in attempted response. Those who hold institutional and economic power from Big Tech to Big Business and Big Politics are increasingly calling for what will…
WEEKEND LINKS
A GUIDE to IANNIS XENAKIS’S MUSIC: “When you hear Xenakis’s music – any piece of what we recognise as his mature work, starting with 1954’s Metastasis, onwards – you’re confronted with an aesthetic that seems unprecedented according to any of the frames of reference that musical works usually relate to. You won’t hear vestiges of things…
Pandemic Inventory
Seems like a lot of people are taking inventory of their pandemic experiences, so I will too. (As someone on Twitter recently joked, citing Garrison Keillor: Nothing happened to me, and now I’m going to tell you about it.) Like millions of others, I spend a lot of time alone these days. Don’t my lonely…
Xenochrony
“In the 1970s, Frank Zappa developed a procedure for creating a specific kind of phonography. By altering the speed of previously recorded material and overdubbing unrelated tracks, Zappa was able to synthesize ensemble performances from scrap material… “He referred to the technique as xenochrony…Zappa translates the term as ‘strange synchronizations,’ referring to the incidental—and aesthetically…
“…lost objects are found…if we hypothesize dimensions hidden from ordinary experience…”
“…reality is not only stranger than we suppose, it may be stranger than we can suppose…”
Sacred Power Centers, Wisconsin Version
Thread. AMERICAN GODS gets this detail right: south-central Wisconsin has some seriously weird sacred power juju pic.twitter.com/SpdjjPfVLF — T U N D R A N A U T (@tundranaut) March 11, 2019 pic.twitter.com/7IZq6O20er — T U N D R A N A U T (@tundranaut) March 11, 2019
INTERVIEW: Daniel Kalder (Anti-Tourism)
ANTI-TOURISM Q: Which foreign land that you’ve visited so far was the most impenetrable in your travels — the one that had the most barriers to entry e.g. physical distance, bureaucracy, cost, etc. ? A: Turkmenistan. I visited during the imperial-hallucinatory phase of the Turkmenbashi dictatorship. It took me over a year to get in,…