An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for November 11, 2020

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

• Polki Hidden Power, October 15–December 15, 2020, WantedDesign Online Exhibition. “Social issues, sense of humor, and observations of everyday life – meet the female talents of contemporary Polish illustration and design.” Watch—”‘POLKI Hidden Power’ is the online exhibition that aims to take a closer look at Polish women, as well as the achievements of Polish illustrations and design today. We present both the work of Polish illustrators as well as designers, particularly ceramists, that allude to the subject of womanhood in their works and the objects that embody the feminine strength in different ways. We invite you for a journey with nine Polish artists and their hidden powers.”
• “Bid to win a postcard from your favorite author!. Bidding open from November 9—December 1, 2020. This unique online auction gives literary fans from around the world the opportunity to bid on handwritten, personalized postcards from their favorite writers. Postcards will be handwritten for you or a person of your choice. A wonderful keepsake, just in time for the holidays. Author postcards make great gifts! In years past, authors have gone above and beyond when writing their postcards, including impromptu doodles, poems, and personalized stories.” “All proceeds go to The Common Foundation, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to publishing and promoting art and literature from global, diverse voices.”
• Crowdfunding: “Underpasses Are Liminal Places. A dedicated high-specification, multi-media web platform for the Underpasses Are Liminal Places project.”
• Ape Of Trismegistos: Ancient Magical Items for the Modern World by Jason Augustus Newcomb. Via email “I have been working on a practical exploration of the Greek Magical Papyri for the last few years and this etsy shop that I have just created is offering some of the things I have been working with. I hope you will check it out. There is currently a 25% off sale for everybody, but if you follow this link… Everything will actually be 30% for you because you are on my mailing list. This sale only lasts until November 15th.”
• Theosophy across Boundaries: Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on a Modern Esoteric Movement [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] edited by Hans Martin Krämer and Julian Strube—”Offers a new approach to Theosophy that takes into account its global dimensions and its interaction with highly diverse cultural contexts. Theosophy across Boundaries brings a global history approach to the study of esotericism, highlighting the important role of Theosophy in the general histories of religion, science, philosophy, art, and politics. The first half of the book consists of seven perspectives on the activities of the Theosophical Society in very different regional contexts, ranging from India, Vietnam, China, and Japan to Victorian Britain and Israel, shedding new light on the entanglement of “Western” and “Oriental” ideas around 1900. The second half explores specific cultural influences that Theosophy exerted in the spheres of literature, art, and politics, using case studies from Sri Lanka, Burma, India, Japan, Ireland, Germany, and Russia. The examples clearly show that Theosophy was part of a truly global movement, thus providing an outstanding example of the complex entanglements of the global religious history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”
• The Art of the Occult:A Visual Sourcebook for the Modern Mystic [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by S Elizabeth—”A visual feast of eclectic artwork informed and inspired by spiritual beliefs, magical techniques, mythology and otherworldly experiences.” (I was sure I’d posted this before, but I can’t find where, so here it is. Again?)
• “Changes of Mind.” About The Pattern Seekers: A New Theory of Human Invention [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Simon Baron-Cohen—”A groundbreaking argument about the link between autism and ingenuity.”
• “A Granted Prayer. An unpublished story by Edith Wharton.”
• “You Have the Prettiest Mask.” Excerpted from the novella “You Have the Prettiest Mask” by Sarah Langan, which appears in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 42 [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher].
• “When Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder Roamed the Pacific Northwest.” From The Fall of America Journals, 1965-1971 [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Allen Ginsberg, edited by Michael Schumacher—”An autobiographical journey through America in the turbulent 1960s—the essential backstory to Ginsberg’s National Book Award–winning volume of poetry”
• “The Dissident Act of Taking a Walk at Night” From The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Matthew Beaumont—”A literary history of walking From Dickens to Žižek.”
• “Loïs Mailou Jones, an Artist and Educator Who Made History.” About Designing a New Tradition: Loïs Mailou Jones and the Aesthetics of Blackness [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Rebecca VanDiver—”In Designing a New Tradition, Rebecca VanDiver presents a fresh perspective on the art and career of Loïs Mailou Jones. Considering the importance of Africa for Jones’s work and examining the broader roles played by class, gender, and politics in constructions of African American art histories as a whole, VanDiver makes a convincing case for Jones’s lasting place in American art history.”
• “A Book of Practical, Everyday Magic” About Ideas Arrangements Effects: Systems Design and Social Justice by The Design Studio for Social Intervention, foreword by Arturo Escobar—”A guide for using design principles to inform and shape radical politics.”
• “If ever there was a moment for Richard Wagner, it is 2020.” About Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Alex Ross—”Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics―an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence.”. Saint of Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica Richard Wagner.
• Want to Feel Better? Stop Reading New Books.
• The new COVID trend? Apparently, it’s buying rare books.
• Powell’s Unisex Fragrance. Limited edition, while supplies last. Notes of wood, violet, and biblichor; “Like the crimson rhododendrons in Rebecca, the heady fragrance of old paper creates an atmosphere ripe with mood and possibility. Invoking a labyrinth of books; secret libraries; ancient scrolls; and cognac swilled by philosopher-kings, Powell’s by Powell’s delivers the wearer to a place of wonder, discovery, and magic heretofore only known in literature.” “This scent contains the lives of countless heroes and heroines. Apply to the pulse points when seeking sensory succor or a brush with immortality.”
• “Mary Wollstonecraft finally honoured with statue after 200 years. ‘Mother of feminism’ commemorated by Maggi Hambling sculpture in north London.” Also “Mary Wollstonecraft statue: ‘Mother of feminism’ sculpture provokes backlash. A memorial to the ‘mother of feminism’ has provoked an online backlash before it has been unveiled.” Also “The World Got Its First Memorial to Feminist Giant Mary Wollstonecraft … and It’s a Tiny Female Nude.”
• How Does the Vatican Protect Its Digitized Collection From Hackers?
• Urgent National Security issue, wasn’t it, they said? “TikTok says the Trump administration has forgotten about trying to ban it, would like to know what’s up. The deadline to sell US assets expires this week.”
• “Second cable breaks at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo telescope.”
• “Chinese glaciers melting at ‘shocking’ pace, scientists say.”
• “Apple introduces M1 chip to power its new Arm-based Macs. A big boost over its Intel-based machines.” Counterpoint: “Apple Silicon Mac Announcement – Slow Motion Dumpster Fire”
• “‘It’s the screams of the damned!’ The eerie AI world of deepfake music. Artificial intelligence is being used to create new songs seemingly performed by Frank Sinatra and other dead stars. ‘Deepfakes’ are cute tricks – but they could change pop for ever.”
• “The Most Famous Paradox in Physics Nears Its End. In a landmark series of calculations, physicists have proved that black holes can shed information, which seems impossible by definition. The work appears to resolve a paradox that Stephen Hawking first described five decades ago.”
• “Study: Guy Fawkes bonfires aren’t a factor in ice formation in clouds. Icy clouds could provide buffer against rising CO2 levels—or amplify those effects.” If it wasn’t Anonymous, it must be the fault of Millennials, obvs.
• From 2016: Regenerative Design and a Science of Qualities—”Generally speaking, all systems with more than three interacting variables are complex dynamic systems and better described by non-linear mathematics and circular rather than linear causality.”
• Japanese town deploys ‘Monster Wolf’ robots to deter wild bears
• Thought experiment, for no particular reason. Just asking for a friend. “What Would We Experience If Earth Spontaneously Turned Into A Black Hole? Yes, we’d all die. But for 21 minutes, we’d have the ride of a lifetime.”
• “Inside the Secret Math Society Known Simply as Nicolas Bourbaki. For almost a century, the anonymous members of Nicolas Bourbaki have written books intended as pure expressions of mathematical thought.”
• The English Word That Hasn’t Changed in Sound or Meaning in 8,000 Years
• “‘Australia’s biodiversity just got a lot richer’: Two new mammals discovered”
• “Decoding Cuneiform, One of the Earliest Forms of Writing. The ancient Sumerians developed this writing system more than 5,000 years ago. Tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets still await translation.”
• “How to see the Leonid meteor shower light up November skies. Skywatchers can enjoy a celestial show that lasts all month.”—”This year, the Leonids do offer the opportunity to see around 15 meteors per hour at peak on Nov. 16 and Nov. 17, when the tiny sliver of a moon won’t produce much interference. The Leonids tend to be pretty bright with some persistent trains. ”
• Tweet thread—”At one Texas prison nearly 6% OF THE POPULATION has died of COVID-19. Not 6% of the covid patients died, but 6% of the entire prison population.” PDF: Covid and Corrections: A Profile of Covid Deaths in Custody in Texas November 2020
• Here’s some of the best online quarantine writing from the last few months.
• “How to Tell the Story of a Cult. Two docuseries about NXIVM present a question: Are the people who have escaped a controlling organization the most reliable sources on what happened to them?”
• “The White House Lawn Was Mysteriously Dug Up. See The Before And After Photos.” “Is he…stealing the grass on the way out?” “Four Seasons Total Landscaping.” Renovations for the White House escape tunnel, just in case?
• “The Jolt: The ‘orchestrated’ push to discredit Georgia’s election sparks more GOP infighting.”
• “Trump is attempting a coup in plain sight. How do we cover it when it’s happening here?”
• “Growing Discomfort at Law Firms Representing Trump in Election Lawsuits. Some lawyers at Jones Day and Porter Wright, which have filed suits about the 2020 vote, said they were worried about undermining the electoral system.”
• Tweet—”WHY is the @GOP accepting the results of the Senate and Congressional races. But Refuting the results of the Presidential election? Weren’t they in the same ballot? I’ll wait….”
• “10 November: Where we are: Birtherism, v2.0.”
• “A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Sociopath. America will have to contend with that fact.”—”Sadly, the voters who said in 2016 that they chose Trump because they thought he was ‘just like them’ turned out to be right. Now, by picking him again, those voters are showing that they are just like him: angry, spoiled, racially resentful, aggrieved, and willing to die rather than ever admit that they were wrong.”
• Um. “Trump administration removes senior defense officials and installs loyalists, triggering alarm at Pentagon.” Also “Trump loyalists get top Pentagon jobs after Esper firing.”
• “Civil Rights Groups, Black Voters Move to Intervene in Trump’s ‘Unprecedented, Unsupported, and Unsupportable’ Pa. Lawsuit.”
• “Trump Is Trying to Overturn the Election, but I’m Not Panicking—Yet. All the reasons I think the Trump-GOP gambit to deny Biden’s victory will not change the fact that he will become president on January 20.”—”My dude, I don’t have a plan for ‘nothing matters anymore.’ The end of democratic self-government is not a thing one has a legal plan for. That’s like asking what my plan is for closing a demonic hell mouth that opens in my backyard. Die. My plan would be to die. I’m not Keanu Reeves.”
• “Infamous ‘Hoax’ Artist Behind Trumpworld’s New Voter Fraud Claim. He tricked the Bush administration into thinking he could detect terrorist signals in al Jazeera broadcasts. Now Dennis Montgomery has a new set of believers.”
• Lawyers Cannot Locate Parents Of 666 Separated Migrant Children
• Watch the more “religious” response to the election process: “Will Donald Trump Actually Leave the White House?” Also “All The Wrong Angels.” Also “Christian Prophets Who Predicted Trump Win Still Pretty Sure They Were Right“—”Either a lying spirit has filled the mouths of numerous trusted prophetic voices in America* or Donald J. Trump really has won.” Huh. I wonder which it could possibly be.
• You may have heard about the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference debacle, where there was an adult store on one side and a crematorium on the other side of a completely, hilariously, obviously screwed up location. But, pretty profound symbolism that Sex and Death equated were the caryatid guardians on either side of Nature trying to contain the event, fwiw. Let’s just not go further down the rabbit hole and think about how these manifestations of sex, death and nature were also possibly entirely as manufactured and artificial as was the bilious spew from and at the podium. But, let me clarify: Dildo stores and crematoriums matter. Some of my best friends shop at dildo stores and eventually end up in crematoriums. Dildo stores and crematoriums on every corner! Also tweet—”For your Zoom call this week.” Also “Nestled Betwixt the Adult Bookstore and the Crematorium.” Also “The End of the Line for Trumpland Is a Poorly Rated Sex Shop in North Philly. The end is near for the president. But a round of golf (or ten), a wedding toast, and a few bizarre press conferences come first.” Also “From the Annals of Perfect Symbolism: An Architecture Critic Looks at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.” Also “VR Furries Are Now Running Around The Four Seasons Total Landscaping. The Philadelphia site of Rudy Giuliani’s speech is being put to another use.” And tweet—”Ha ha ha OMG! The grand debut of Four Seasons Total Landscaping was AMAZING! Thank you to everyone who showed up!”
• Speaking of symbolism: “Trump Plaza to Implode Just Days After Biden Inauguration, Deemed a ‘Public Safety Hazard’.”
• Watch “Cassetteboy vs Trump 2020”
• “Voting Trump Out Is Not Enough. The need in this country dwarfs the best of what Joe Biden has put on the table for changing our current condition.”
• “Trump’s Presidency May Be Over. ‘Trumpism’ Is Not. Academics are grappling with what that means — even without Trump as head of state.”
• “Why we should fear a lame-duck President Trump.”
• Fireside Friday, October 30, 2020—”One thing that emerges quite clearly from a study of Greek and Roman antiquity is the intense fragility of self-government.That fragility is easy to miss in a modern context (to the point that it is occasionally argued that so-called ‘consolidated‘ democracies are self-sustaining) in part because the sample size is so small and recent, relatively speaking. […] The ancient sample-set is much more robust!”
• “‘Unity is great, but freedom is better‘ The way to bring America together is to fix it.”—”Perhaps the antidote to the poison of this era isn’t the active pursuit of kumbaya but good, old-fashioned progress: palpable life betterment, and repair of institutions so they can’t be hijacked again.”
• I’m reminded of the noble ideas about distributed governance Tom Coates wanted late, lamented Barbelith to model. Tweet—”PolicyKit is still under active development but you can sign up for our newsletter to get updates: https://policykit.org We’re particularly interested in communities that want to pilot this!” Github.
• “Our Love-Hate Relationship with Gimmicks. Why is the same word used to describe the harmless enchantments of literary technique and the cruel buffoonery of contemporary political and economic life?”—”The word ‘gimmick’ is believed to come from ‘gimac,’ an anagram of ‘magic.’ The word was likely first used by magicians, gamblers, and swindlers in the ninteteen-twenties to refer to the props they wielded to attract, and to misdirect, attention …”
• “Times Change. In the Trump years, the New York Times became less dispassionate and more crusading, sparking a raw debate over the paper’s future.”
• The Dire Need for a Decentralized News Media
• “Nuremberg preserves Nazi past, stone by stone.” Personally, I’m reminded of the minor point in The Architecture of Doom about how the aesthetic was designed to fall into ruins, but, for me, the most important point of that movie was the humanity of the perpetrators of inhuman horror is more frightening than if those crimes were done by inhuman monsters. Timely reminder of the past and present.
• Watch “Popes Knew Of Misconduct Allegations Against Ex-Cardinal McCarrick, Vatican Finds.” Also “Pope John Paul II Promoted Cleric After Learning About Sex Abuse Allegations. High-ranking Catholic clergy dismissed reports that former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was abusing seminarians and children, a Vatican investigation found.”
• “French priest shot on church doorstep by lover’s jealous husband.”
• “Military carrier pigeon message turns up 110 years after it was sent.”
• Watch “Kerouac’s boarding house now co-living for 19 creatives”
• ‘Lovecraft Country’: A Spell Gone Awry—”Even as it leverages African American history, sarcasm, and humor against racist bile, much of the show appears dedicated to finding a formula in which genre clichés—however racist—just have to be painted over, so as to be enjoyed without guilt. It is a tenet of the horror genre to challenge us to ponder how and why we can find enjoyment in rehearsals of abjection, cruelty, violence, and fear. But writers and filmmakers are not exempt, and Lovecraft Country has a few things to account for.”
• “Halloween isn’t about candy and costumes for modern-day pagans – witches mark Halloween with reflections on death as well as magic.”
• “Gerry Anderson puppets, collected by studio driver, go to auction.”—”A treasure trove of models and puppets from “Thunderbirds” creator Gerry Anderson’s TV shows and commercials that was salvaged and stored away for 30 years by a driver at the production studio has come to light and is set to go up for auction this month.”
• Watch this trailer for this ridiculous timey-wimey “LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special“, streaming Nov 17th on Disney+.
• Watch “Lindsey Stirling – Guardian“, a video for a track from her new album Artemis [Amazon, Spotify]
• Watch “Making Medieval Mead like a Viking”
• Watch “A Drink For Vikings?”
• Séance [Amazon, Spotify, Bandcamp] by Professor and the Madman—”When we lay our loved ones down to rest / Is it some kind of paranormal test / For all the suckers like us that got left behind? What if we could just go talk to them / Say goodbye to our family and our friends / If you want to find out then just hitch a ride.”
• From 2019, watch: “Siren Sounds Waltz by Alma Deutscher, Carnegie Hall, Dec 2019“. (As an aside, also check out Amy Denio / Billy Tipton Memorial Sax Quartet’s 1993 “Bus Horn Concerto“.)
• The Infinite Library, not a real screensaver screensaver. “Watch the books as they go by. […] If you turn on ‘Haunted Books’ there are scary sounds and the book image will be glitchy looking for random books.”
• Watch 2010’s “How To Be Alone” and 2020’s “How to Be at Home.”
• Tweet—”Your Daily Affirmation: I am braced for weather, my mind as toasty as a warm cinnamon roll, if somewhat less tasty. I will hatch and nurture sweet new ideas today. #AlsoWaffles”

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