An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for August 9, 2020

Here’s a variety of notable things I’ve recently found that you may also be interested in checking out:

• “Snapshots of Kenneth Anger. There aren’t that many photographs of Kenneth Anger smiling. They’re usually portraits of the great avant-garde filmmaker looking serious, or brooding, or, shall we say?, slightly demonic?”
• “Explore the hidden connections between art of different cultures and media.” Also: Discovering hidden connections in art with deep, interpretable visual analogies (Microsoft Research Webinar Series)
• “Cloak your photos with this AI privacy tool to fool facial recognition. Privacy tool Fawkes makes your selfies less like yourself.”
• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson—”In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.”
• “College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots. How I got co-opted into helping the rich prevail at the expense of everybody else.” Adapted from Kurt Andersen’s Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History due out in a few days.
• “For Ottessa Moshfegh, Novel Writing Is a Spiritual Experience. We talked to the writer about how she composes her books and how she gets into the minds of her characters.” Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh about, in part, her newest novel Death in Her Hands.
• “College of Liberal Arts faculty research and write on topics of racism and social justice. From the history of religion and Black culture to a modern global issue of racism, faculty examine the evolution of social justice movements.” About The Princess and the Prophet: The Secret History of Magic, Race, and Moorish Muslims in America by Jacob S. Dorman—”The Princess and the Prophet tells the story of the Black Broadway performer who, among the world of Arabian acrobats and equestrians, Muslim fakirs, and Wild West shows, discovered in Islam a greater measure of freedom and dignity, and a rebuttal to the racism and parochialism of white America. Overturning the received wisdom that the prophet was born on the East Coast, Dorman has discovered that Noble Drew Ali was born Walter Brister in Kentucky. With the help of his wife, a former lion tamer and “Hindoo” magician herself, Brister renamed himself Prophet Noble Drew Ali and founded the predecessor of the Nation of Islam, the Moorish Science Temple of America, in the 1920s.”
• First they came for Pluto … “Just Let This Lizard Be a Dinosaur.”
• The Rot at the Root: Activism and Agency in ‘Captain Planet’ and ‘FernGully’
• “How the Media Led the Great Racial Awakening. Years before Trump’s election the media dramatically increased coverage of racism and embraced new theories of racial consciousness that set the stage for the latest unrest.”
• “A nun on the radical possibilities of Christianity. A conversation about love and suffering in Christianity.”
• The evil anti-goth colours have arrived! “Chemists create the brightest-ever fluorescent materials.”
  
• As an antidote, here’s Pussy Riot’s makeup tutorial: RIOT MAKEUP TUTORIAL / 5 min makeup for a lazy person like me / Толоконникова учит ставить ТОЧКИ ХАХ—”When I first tried [this cream] I actually got scared because I put it on my face and at first it was very white but then it changed (shit) to my skin tone and I thought there are definitely some evil spirits inside it …”

• Exploding stars created the calcium in our bones and teeth, study says
• “REM sleep tunes eating behaviour. Despite our broad understanding of the different brain regions activated during rapid-eye-movement sleep, little is known about what this activity serves for. Researchers at the University of Bern and the Inselspital have now discovered that the activation of neurons in the hypothalamus during REM sleep regulates eating behaviour: suppressing this activity in mice decreases appetite.”
• Two months breaking ice (in under five minutes)
• What If We Radically Reimagined the New School Year?
• “Robert Reich: The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It (Bristol Festival of Ideas)” About The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B Reich.
• Towards a regenerative cosmology: Re-inhabitation, re-enchantment, re-indigenisation—”Innovating and designing a regenerative culture requires us to live the questions and reflect on our participatory relationship with life and nature. We need to re-examine the founding mythology (and scientific record) of our origin, the cosmological framework that defines our context and offers answers to: Where do we come from?; Who are we?; Where are we going?” And you may ask yourself, “Well… how did I get here?”
• “Celebrating the ‘Wild Ladies’ of Japanese Folklore.” About Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (Author), translated by Polly Barton, due October.
• When Writing Has No Meaning
• Oh, Christ, Not the Science Fiction Canon Again —” Some works and writers will rise, some will fall, some will be rediscovered and some will be consigned to the archives, possibly forever. No canon, just a field forever in conversation with itself, choosing its conversational partners from its past rather than having them assigned from a list.”
• “Ilze Hugo on Writing a Pandemic Novel and Seeing it Come True.” About The Down Days: A Novel by Ilze Hugo.
• Complete your pandemic aesthetic with this bookcase that converts into a coffin.
• Plague Poems – The Twentieth Week
  
• “Whoever Said Nuclear Armageddon Was Easy?” An excerpt from Bunker: Building for the End Times by Bradley Garrett.

• How to Be Sane, Spiritual, and Saintly—”No one is sane, spiritual, and saintly every minute of the day. Our daily expectations of ourselves are appropriate when they are ‘good enough’.” About Wholeness and Holiness: How to be Sane, Spiritual, and Saintly by David Richo
• The Sale of a Rare, Gold-painted Qur’an at Christie’s Raises Questions of Provenance
• Very good writing advice from New Girl‘s Nick Miller
• Shel Silverstein’s “The Tree Who Set Healthy Boundaries”.
• “Harvey Spencer Lewis, the Imperator of the Rosicrucian Order.” And “Criticisms against Harvey Spencer Lewis and the Principles of Rosicrucianism” Transcripts from the lecture series: The Real History of Secret Societies by Richard B Spence, from The Great Courses.
• “BOOKS: Strange Angel: George Pendle.” About the book Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons and the awful series Strange Angel.
  
• The Sisters of Mercy “Lucretia, My Reflection” x Taylor Swift “Look What You Made Me Do” mashup

• Prayers for an End to the Plague—”The Senate, despairing of human aid, turned the people to their prayers, bidding them go with their wives and children and supplicate heaven for a remission of their sorrows.”

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