Saturday 12 May 2018
but our princess is in another castle
Friday 11 May 2018
zersetzung
Our faithful chronicler, Doctor Caligari’s Cabinet, informs that among many other momentous occasions, on this day in 1944, director George Cukor debuted what would be the second cinematic adaptation based of playwright Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 psychological thriller, Gaslight (previously, when the term obtained its clinical sense). Featuring the acting talents of Joseph Cotton, Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer and Angela Lansbury, the main theme of the film centres on a husband (Boyer) who tries to unmoor his wife’s (Bergman) sense of reality in order to distract her from his criminal enterprise.
intern’yet or press “like” to help jesus win
Earlier this week, Democratic party members of the US House of Representatives obtained and released a cache of some thirty four hundred targeted advertisements produced and distributed by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency via social media giant Facebook and Instagram. While I will admit that none of us (not just the American voters) are immune to the architecture of choice and propaganda and that ignorance and churlishness leveraged are force-multipliers, it is a sobering reminder how pathetic the counter-messaging was and how vulnerable we’ve allowed our democratic institutions to become and how through our neglect, we risk to lose them forever. Elections and inaction has consequences, and I suppose now the question is not who was to blame (everyone is) but whether we who were careless are yet redeemable and whether we might one day be able to restore civil society and get back our on-line privileges. Though we don’t always recognise it, we’ve been on restriction for quite some time.
catagories: ๐ท๐บ, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐ง , networking and blogging
geocentric or keeping up appearances
Via Open Culture and through the medium of rather beautiful star charts that rallied against the Copernican revolution that unseated the Earth as the centre of the Cosmos, we met the adherents of Muggletonianism.
The namesake of Lodowicke Muggleton, championed by his cousin John Reeve—tailors both—the sect started in 1651 London (Muggleton was styled as the last prophet as foretold in the Bible) as a refutation of scientific method, philosophical discourse and conversely did not believe in sermonising (a self-described, most disorganised religion) or that there was any sort of divine intervention until God choose to destroy the world, though infamously, they practised public praise and denunciation, believing that they could reduce one’s social standing with a curse. Their maps (there is a more extension gallery plus links to other resources to be found at the source up above) and cosmological hierarchy may have influenced the style of William Blake.
Thursday 10 May 2018
no filter
My Modern Met has a nice appreciation of the effortlessly whimsical portfolio of New York-based photographer Rodney Lewis Smith (1946* - 2016 †), who insisted on remaining on remaining true to the art and discipline, setting up his subjects with only natural light and relying on his trusted Leica 35 mm camera and his refined vision to tease order out of chaos. With a career spanning over four decades, Smith has influenced many portrait and fashion photographers that followed as well as leaving a vast archive of sentimental and surreal snapshots that represent a cross-section of moments—especially punctuated by the artist’s own sense of spontaneity that complements his talent for composition.
catagories: ๐ท
expurgation
The US Federal Communications Commission released thirteen pages of public complaints on comedian Michelle Wolfe’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner performance.
Ironically, the majority of the objections focus on obscenities and profanities that the dotard Trump himself forced uncomfortably into the public sphere and lowered standards all around by his own words and actions. Furthermore, it looks like those getting grumbly couldn’t be bothered to switch stations—thirteen pages seeming rather measly compared to the furore ignited on social media.
lawful evil, neutral evil, chaotic evil
We’ve seen quite enough of this narcissistic jerk and given him enough free airtime to last several lifetimes, but it was nonetheless interesting to learn about the portrait painter Ralph Wolfe Cowan, who found his niche in as a vanity artist of the 1980s, specialising in pandering to the egos of the likes of the reality show star aspiring to dictatorship pictured, actual dictators and their trophy wives, several musicians, sultans, popes and royals. It’s strange to ponder Cowan’s various subjects sitting for him and to consider how they’re connected—ever so tenuously by this cult of personality that individually they’d probably would not want to share in and could not stand the each other’s company since the would all magnify the worst within them.
thank you for visiting arkham sanitarium
Via The Art of Darkness, we were delighted to discover a growing, carefully curated catalogue of charms and talisman that will be no match Cthulhu (previously) and the other dread elder gods return. Alas, not even this jean bag chair, despite being Shub-Niggurath-like in appearance, can save you from the horror to come.
catagories: ๐, myth and monsters