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Tag: history

17aug24

Published August 17, 2024 by Warren Ellis

The first groundfallen fruit from the cape gooseberry I raised from seed. It was small, but herself and I shared it, and it was sharp but delicious. Good start to the day.

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On the latter, my money says the stone is from Orkney, which was the cultural center of the British Isles at the time, and it was brought down in a years-long ritual procession. With what we now believe we know, look at the structure of Stonehenge:

England, Wales and Scotland: and, if the altar stone is from Orkney, then the central piece represents not just Scotland but Orkney itself, the heart of religiocultural activity in the region at that time. I find that wonderful.

OPERATIONS: I’m behind on probably half a dozen things, but right now I am taking great joy in writing and rewriting a project that was delayed a few years ago, and in a few days will take great joy in wiping it off my board.

Kraftwerk’s legendary Kling Klang studio was famous for containing many weird and wonderful electronic instruments, but one of the strangest was also one of the most mundane: the telephone. In order to avoid any irritating disturbances when the band were at work, it didn’t have a ringer. Occasionally, the story goes, a journalist with the rare opportunity of interviewing the band over the phone would be given a precise time to call, and at that moment one of the band, usually co-founder Ralf HĂŒtter, would pick up the receiver. If there was no one there, he put it down again. That was it.


STATUS: Inbox 88. I’m across email, but it’s in triage mode. Apricots and pears for breakfast, and I’ve cracked the code on making very good lactose-free ice cream. The lime sorbet needed more agave syrup. Tomorrow I get her to test the rhubarb gin infused I canned on the 4th. If I get time tomorrow I’ll try making a rhubarb compote, but right now the focus is on getting pages done and then making good drinks.
READING:  I’M TRAVELLING ALONE , Samuel Bjork
LISTENING: LATE JUNCTION
LAST WATCHED: DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE: exactly what you think it is. Matthew Macfadyen appears to be having tremendous fun. TWISTERS: That was a cleverly crafted script. It’s a flyover country USA film, there are some musical tricks in the middle that make it feel like an old-style big-country movie, the last act slightly upends expectations while staying inside character traits, the romantic subplot rolls pleasantly low in the mix. It’s what I think of as a Sunday afternoon film. One hopes this is the last film where “Glen Powell’s resting smug face conceals a heart of tarnished gold” and he gets to do something else going forward.


THINKING ABOUT:

…the central tenet of his theorem – is the proposal and demonstration of a cinematically inspired method of fabricating history based on the principle of the montage of disparate phenomena in poetic imagery. “Bring together things that have as yet never been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so,” he suggests simply, citing Robert Bresson.

Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian, Michael Witt

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter. Forthcoming 2024: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, FELL: FERAL CITY new printing. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM.

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Threeness

Published July 20, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Threeness

‘In the Mabinogion, for example, a collection of prose stories compiled in Middle Welsh in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, we encounter the “otherworld”, a place variously depicted as either paradisiacal or menacing. The otherworld is the source of fantastical narrative: within its shifting borders are found tales of vanishing babies; of superhuman kings so large, they can use their bodies to form bridges; of magical golden bowls and star-crossed lovers.

Some of the human cast members in Welsh myth resemble Marvel superheroes. But there are also tales of fantastic creatures, including magical ravens that croak prophetically about future events and are said to have shapeshifting abilities. There are interesting correlations between myths across different traditions, links forged between Wales and Ireland in particular, but also persistent tropes shared by numerous cultures, including “tripleism”, which plays a key role not only in Welsh myth, but also in Macbeth’s trio of witches and old nursery rhymes. Threeness is “an endemic part of British and European Iron Age and Roman provincial symbolism”.’

July 20, 2024 at 07:48PM

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morning computer, 8jul24

Published July 8, 2024 by Warren Ellis

🌐 TODAY IS 8jul24

📡 RITUALS, FIRES, CAVES

Berta Fischer.

The miniature fireplaces are the remarkably preserved remains of two ritual events dating back 500 generations.

Nowhere else on Earth have archaeological expressions of a very specific cultural practice known from ethnography, yet traceable so far back, previously been found.

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GunaiKurnai ancestors had transmitted on Country a very detailed, very particular cultural knowledge and practice for some 500 generations.

Jun Oson.

It may not look like much—just a flaking image of three people around a big red pig.

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But the humble cave painting discovered in Indonesia is the oldest known narrative artwork ever made by human hands, dating back more than 51,000 years, new research said on Wednesday.

“This is the oldest evidence of storytelling,” Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Australia’s Griffith University, told AFP.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

It’s time to move on, toward whatever happens next.

CAIRN, Kathleen Jamie

morning computer, zibaldone first thing in my day

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here and there, 29jun24

Published June 29, 2024 by Warren Ellis

🌐 TODAY IS 29jun24

📡 HERE AND THERE

Timur Si-Qin.

Iwagumi is a Japanese term that refers to the methodical arrangement of rocks in aquascaping. Usually taking on the form of bold, weighty stones resting among each other in opposition to open, airy surroundings, the distinctive art form appreciates and showcases the humble beauty of rocks. For the tenth edition of the i Light Singapore art festival in Marina Bay, art and technology studio ENESS pays homage to the creative tradition with a major installation titled Iwagumi Air Space.

Kate Carr’s new album is a ‘sonic transect’ across London. She slices the city from her Loughborough Junction home out west to Staines and east to Slade Green, travelling on public transport and recording as she goes. Her work is based around field recordings, which morph into electronic tracks, distortion emerging across the stereo spectrum from bus and train noise, and blending back into the sounds of the places she visits.

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Voices, Lightning

Published June 24, 2024 by Warren Ellis

🌐 TODAY IS 24jun24

📡 VOICES, LIGHTNING

Some 1,000 years ago, a small band of Polynesians sailed thousands of miles across the Pacific to settle one of the world’s most isolated places—a small, previously uninhabited island they named Rapa Nui. There, they erected hundreds of “moai,” or gigantic stone statues that now famously stand as emblems of a vanished civilization.

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Eventually, their numbers ballooned to unsustainable levels; they chopped down all the trees, killed off the seabirds, exhausted the soils and in the end, ruined their environment.

Their population and civilization collapsed, with just a few thousand people remaining when Europeans found the island in 1722 and called it Easter Island. At least that is the longtime story, told in academic studies and popular books like Jared Diamond’s 2005 “Collapse.”

A new study challenges this narrative of ecocide, saying that Rapa Nui’s population never spiraled to unsustainable levels. Instead, the settlers found ways to cope with the island’s severe limits, and maintained a small, stable population for centuries.

Very unusually among the virtuoso composer-pianists of the 19th century, Charles-Valentin Alkan spent much of his life as an apparent recluse.

He shunned the concert platform in favour of keeping his own company, reading, studying and creating some of the most spectacularly demanding piano music ever written.

Choosing a life like this meant that rumours flourished about him during his lifetime, as they have ever since. For instance, the story that he died when reaching for a volume at the top of one of his bookshelves, which then toppled forwards and crushed him, is now known to be a fabrication.

To see the quick corruption of the revolutionary minds and the ease with which the general population accepted conformism as the way to go through the life, it was an interesting experience which shaped my feelings about reality, when I’m thinking about history, and the sociological and psychological mechanisms of people and societies.

“One of them was called Cone of Variable Volume. It was very simple, just an exploratory film in which I tested the idea of a circle that would change its volume, by expansion and contraction. It was at four different speeds, from frenetic to so slow you could barely see it moving. To my surprise, I realised that it was doing something I had never noticed before. It was quite obviously breathing.”

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summer solstice 2024

Published June 20, 2024 by Warren Ellis

🌐 TODAY IS 20jun24

📡 ASTRAL, MASKS

Didier William.

they were in fact taken in 1924 by Minya DiĂ©z-DĂŒhrkoop, and they show the “masks” – actually intricately constructed and dazzlingly inventive full-body costumes – made and worn by German dancers Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt for their own performances in the early 1920s. T

The collection of texts that make up Nos Invisibles purport to channel, via Briatte (or indeed Charles d’Orino), the voices of HonorĂ© de Balzac, Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Alphonse de Lamartine, and other illustrious writers and thinkers from beyond the grave — the authenticity of which, readers can determine for themselves.

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Peace, Nitrate And Warp Fluid

Published June 19, 2024 by Warren Ellis

🌐 TODAY IS 19jun24

📡 PEACE, NITRATE AND WARP FLUID

Sam Friedman:

Nitrate film stopped being used in the early 1950s. What had once been the industry standard was replaced by a variety of “safety” film stocks, so named because they, unlike their predecessor, were not prone to spontaneous combustion into inextinguishable fire. A festival dedicated to the projection of nitrate film will inevitably hit a historical limit. Every year at the Nitrate Picture Show, hosted by the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, the prints get older and more brittle. At some not-too-distant point in the future, it will become impossible to run the festival at all.

I liked this bon mot from later on in the piece:

In his opening remarks, Festival Director Peter Bagrov quipped that an “esteemed colleague” likened the festival to “spoiled billionaires eating extinct animals.”

Warp drives could generate gravitational waves. This is a current area of research for me, and there’s all kinds of good stuff in the piece.

“From the perspective of simulating the warp drive dynamically, the key challenge is stability,” the authors explain. Equations show that the Alcubierre Drive can initiate a warp bubble using the Einstein Equation, but no known equations can sustain it.

“There is (to our knowledge) no known equation of state that would maintain the warp drive metric in a stable configuration over time. Therefore, while one can require that initially, the warp bubble is constant, it will quickly evolve away from that state, and, in most cases, the warp fluid and spacetime deformations will disperse or collapse into a central point.”

Though instability is a prime obstacle to warp drives, it’s also what could make them detectable.

After analyzing the remains of 64 ancient sacrificed individuals, most of whom were children, researchers have revealed new details about human sacrifice at the ancient Maya site of Chichén Itzå.

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Published in Nature, these results show that contrary to popular belief, every one of the ritually sacrificed individuals was male. Additionally, many of them were closely related, including two pairs of identical twins, evoking important themes of Mayan mythology.

These ancient genomes also show that despite European colonialism, the genetic legacy of the ancient Maya continues in today’s Indigenous people from the region.

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King Skellig Mor – 2jun24

Published June 2, 2024 by Warren Ellis

I feel like it’s okay to live in your own head, because it’s not like you didn’t pay for all the fucking furniture

TODAY:

Sam Rodriguez.

FILM:

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A Little Splash Of Colour For a Dark May Morning – 31may24

Published May 31, 2024 by Warren Ellis

I could write a long list of all the things I don’t care about any more, but I don’t care about them enough to write the list.

TODAY:

Starburst galaxy:

Erin Hanson:

Even Nature can become depraved if people relentlessly incite it to do so . . . And Nature must have had an interest, taking an unscrupulous glance at our history where it discovered the perfect setting it needed to try out some new experimental form of life.

THE TWENTY DAYS OF TURIN (UK) (US+)
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Head boy; How André Breton policed a movement for artistic freedom

Published May 12, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Head boy; How André Breton policed a movement for artistic freedom

‘Finally, at a benefit gala at the Grand Central Gallery in New York in April 1917, Arthur Cravan was set to deliver a lecture on “the Independent Artists of France and America”; having sunk too many pre-show drinks with (here they are again!) Duchamp and Picabia, he instead swore at the audience, did a striptease, waved his cock around and was promptly arrested. Cravan was a one-man awkward squad: painter, poet, provocateur, publisher, critic, hoaxer, athlete, amateur diplomat, dandy, draft dodger, merde-stirrer, tango dancer, early tattoo adopter, professional loose cannon. He advertized one performance promising that it would end with his suicide.’

May 12, 2024 at 07:37PM

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