Paul Watson’s notes, replies, likes &c.

Analogies to the Corn-mother or Barley-mother of ancient Greece have been collected in great abundance by W. Mannhardt from the folk-lore of modern Europe. The following may serve as specimens.

austin osman spare; chaos magic; art; automatic drawing; zos-kia cultus; esoterica

In the photographic series that Vera Lehndorff designed in collaboration with Holger Trülzsch, the aesthetic figure Veruschka refuses to be a projection of beauty’s ideals, yet in these portraits she retains her completely individual aura. Diffused in bolts of energy, in bizarre particle streams, and in psychedelic plays of color that reflect London of the 1960s, Veruschka transcends her body and delves into a world that translates the glamour of an icon into a sensually experiential image.

Dave Karpf is doing sterling work on what we might call the uppermost archaeological layer of paleofutures—to the extent that the various vague plans I had to write more in this direction have been shelved pretty much permanently. Leave it to the person with the headstart and the bit between their teeth, you know?

There is a striking parallel between reading WIRED during the late boom years (1998-2000) and reading tech publications during the last crypto hype cycle (2020-2022). It seems this is a pattern we are doomed to repeat, until and unless we actually learn from it.

A tradition of eeriness runs through British art of the 20th and 21st centuries. It runs, though, not as an overground river might – with a traceable and continuous surface route – but rather as groundwater runs; surging out here and there, springing up at times of heavy weather. For this eerie art has often emerged at or after times of crisis, martial or fiscal: during the economic collapses of the 1970s and 2000s, or in the years around and during the Second World War. There is no mystery to this pattern. The eerie represents a counter-narrative to the recognizable traditions of the picturesque and the pastoral in British place-art. Where the pastoral encodes order and comfort, the eerie registers dissent and unease. It is drawn to what Christopher Neve memorably called “unquiet landscapes,” and it is born of unquiet times.

Indeed, it’s striking, even to a skeptic, that every culture in human history has used rituals to shape and entrench its norms. Equally, it is clear that arguments alone are not convincing us to live within the bounds of the Earth’s resources. Few manage to make the lifestyle changes necessary to slow climate change, rein in habitat loss or minimise pollution (and we authors are not among those few). So that Sunday morning we resolved to find out whether rituals could help us to close the gap between what we actually do and what we ought to do.

Sean and Jack consider how to imagine an alternative to capitalism by exploring our relationship with the Xenomorph, the Terminator and TikTok Teens who travel to alternate realities.

Just as ecological rewilding succeeds by letting nature do what it is designed to do, could we take the same approach towards ourselves? What would happen if we were more aware of and driven by our own dynamic processes? Is this even possible in today’s world?

In this spirit, Acid Communism was meant to strengthen the political imagination. A recently published anthology of Fisher’s writings includes a draft for the introduction, which reads something like a manifesto. Fisher had taken a cue from his friend Jeremy Gilbert, a scholar who had long maintained that the sixties might serve as a blueprint for contemporary leftist revolution.

Instead they will inhabit a world progressively poorer, less stable, more violent, a world where hundreds of millions and possibly billions of people are likely to die from the effects of global heating and environmental collapse by the end of the century. They will endure fear, chaos and deprivation. Their future lives will not be better but significantly worse than their lives now. Because like Wile E. Coyote running in the air, not yet aware the ground beneath his feet is gone, we have already stepped out into the void; all that remains is the fall.

Solarpunk is sometimes claimed as a window on the future we could have if we were willing to make it happen. But as with all forms of science fiction—even, if not especially, science fiction reduced to a visual aesthetic first and foremost—it is better seen as a window on the present.

Utopias tend to magically leapfrog today’s issues without ever fully addressing, let alone rectifying, inequities of the past. What is actually missing is: How do we get there? By centering the voices of people who are at the forefront of immediate harm, and by looking at their ideas, approaches, and the future they imagine, we have a much better chance of getting it right.

Not quite weeklinks, more a 6-month backlog of links. Think I’m going to post these here for a while – at least until I get round to setting up a different personal blog.

The largest music corporations managed to support (and join) tech companies who had this idea of renting out music, calling the process streaming. They somehow convinced the masses to avoid piracy, pay the corporations a monthly fee despite NOT owning the music, and even consider this transaction a form of convenient bargain, a win/win. The frontier between marketing and gaslighting have gone wafer thin.

We have conditioned ourselves and each other to believe that artists, musicians, writers, inventors and creators must orient themselves as entrepreneurial go-getters - monetising their work into startups, small businesses or branded products. This myth of the creator-entrepreneur radically narrows down the complex motivations of human creativity and pressures creators to view financial success as the highest marker of their worth. It's economic reductionism, and it has found its way into domains of life that have traditionally been motivated by a richer array of human aspirations.

In the section devoted to activities since the 1960s Rosemont mentions a magazine, Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, which she produced with her husband, Franklin Rosemont, as part of their work with the Chicago Surrealist Group. Arsenal had more of an erratic schedule than most magazines, managing four issues that appeared in 1970, 1973, 1976 and 1989. I really didn’t expect there to be copies of such an obscure publication available anywhere but, once again, the invaluable Internet Archive has scans of the first three issues.

If living in a new weird ontology is the only way for people to keep living, what do we want to keep of ourselves? What does coexistence look like when coexistence requires deconstructing the self on a cellular level? Is it possible to consent to, and then claim agency over one’s own dissolution?

From this perspective, VanderMeer’s New Weird is to science fiction what mysticism is to theology. Like mystical texts throughout the ages, his Weird does not explain; it attempts to get at something beyond the explainable.

It’s all a bit corporate, a bit woowoo, a bit odd, but it plugs into a broader conversation about how the internet has evolved and changed, how platforms have scorched much of the landscape that was previously a bit rougher around the edges, a bit more grassroots, more personal, more creative, perhaps.