bellwether

Ten years ago today, world stock exchanges underwent their sharpest decline in modern history—causing some ten percent of global wealth to sublimate in a single day’s worth of trading, despite emergency measures. “Bloody Friday,” which precipitated a period characterised as the Great Recession, occurred on the same day of the month as “Black Tuesday” of 1929, bringing down Wall Street following the crash in London markets in September and set off the Great Depression that affected all Western industrial economies.

the funk of forty-thousand years

I can’t exactly pin-point the appeal of this vintage audio grimoire—released by Capitol Records in 1969 as a double eight-track tape—except to say that people respond to stories and can’t exactly vouch for the accuracy of the history and witch culture presented, but this recording from Vincent Price, “Witchcraft-Magic: An Adventure in Demonology” is incredibly soothing and somehow enchanting.  With interstitials by the witches’ chorus from Hamlet, Price masterfully delivers anecdotes and instructional lessons of how to summon the unseen, as well as the antithetical, graphic explanation for witch-hunts over the fragility of the male ego and challenging the hierarchy.

persons of exceptional prominence

The US National Archives in St Louis, Missouri, an independent agency of the government charged with curating the country’s historical records and transmitting the votes of the Electoral College to Congress, has a special collection of official military personnel files of war heroes, politicians and celebrities available for public inspection. There one can see the service records of notable people like Bea Arthur, Desi Arnaz, Joey Bishop, Frank Capra, Humphrey Bogart, Lucius Clay, Allen Funt, Theodore Geisel, Frank Herbert, Grace Hopper, the Kennedys, the Roosevelts and many others.

a slap in the face of public taste

Though the pronouncement from the Russian Minister of Culture that the first rapper was Soviet poet, graphic designer, playwright and actor Vladimir Mayakovsky (*1893 - †1930) struck me at first a little bit like Chancellor Gorkon saying “You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon,” but just as I was pleased to see the ministry warming to the music genre as a legitimate art form, I appreciated the introduction to Mayakovsky’s works and could see the assertion as an arguably valid one.
Authoring pieces with titles like the eponymous, Backbone Flute, A Cloud in Trousers (excerpt below), So this is How I Turned into a Dog and A Flying Proletarian, one of the original framers signatories to the Furturist Manifesto and accomplished propagandist (though his relation with the state was never fully reconciled or rehabilitated after censorship), Mayakovsky was at the very least what could be characterised as an early influencer, cultivating a brand for himself and one could easily adapt his verse to a beat.

Of grandfatherly gentleness I am devoid,
There’s not a single grey hair in my soul!
Thundering the world with the might of my voice,
By I go—handsome,
Twenty-two-year-old.

carry on chili peppers

dark they were and golden-eyed

Our faithful antiquarian, JF Ptak’s Science Books, finds some lush, poetic language in the debate that spanned from the time when astronomer Percival Lowell’s assistant Carl O Lampland described the exacting photographs taken of the surface of Mars by Eugene Michel Antoniadi.

Lampland came by this poetic license by way of an Italian false-friend (falso amico) but the mistranslation sparked a vigorous back and forth about Martians and design that lasted from 1886 to 1909, when the photographer accounts for the optical illusions in the channels that captivated the public and attempts to finally dispel the persistent illusion. There’s an excerpt below in translation but be sure to visit the source up top for more verses and more finds from old books and journals.

Our observations lead us to divide the channels into several categories, namely: In diffuse shadows, more or less irregular, some of which appear double in a fleeting way; In gnarled blobs; In gray masses, shapeless and disjointed; In irregular, thin blurring, in the construction of a hedge of Martian seas, and widen into a vast and confused shadow further on, like new with their tributaries, seen at a great distance.