Curated chaos - vol.5 🛸🌍🌐🧠👁️
Transmissions from the global brain
Hello again weird friends.
Before my next essay, it’s time for another linkdump — a wonder-eyed snapshot of the magnificent chaos that continues to animate the internet even as the forces of enshittification degrade the great public spaces of online life.
I hope there’s at least one or two things here that caress your curiosity…
Beer domesticated man
Did beer trigger the dawn of civilisation as we know it? Quite possibly, it turns out.
The Kekulé Problem
Staying on the dawn-of-civilisation theme, Cormac McCarthy (author of The Road and No Country For Old Men) explores the question “where did language come from?”
Merriam-Webster Time Traveller
This fun tool lets you check which words were added to the dictionary in a given year. You can check specific years from 2022 (e.g. “quiet quitting”) all the way back to 1500 (e.g. “poetic”), as well as the preceding centuries. It’s interesting looking for connections — for instance, “social media” and “FOMO” both entered the lexicon in 2004.
How different languages laugh online
A nicely-presented piece from restofworld.org looking at how laughter is expressed as text in different countries. In Italy, “volo”, meaning “I fly”, is sometimes used (as in “you made me laugh so hard I’m flying away”, which is cute).
Poems from the Song dynasty
Poet Shangyang Fang translates four poems from China’s Song dynasty era (960–1279), exploring the “primordial entwinement of the human and the living world.”
Honouring the wild proliferation of earthly perspectives
Continuing this theme of entwinement, here’s a lovely conversation between cultural ecologist David Abram and mycologist Merlin Sheldrake, where they discuss the legal and philosophical implications of acknowledging the ‘selfhood’ of the non-human world.
The Talks
Read interviews with leading creative voices in architecture, art, business, dance, fashion, film, food, literature, music, and sports — everyone from Alex Honnold to Alicia Keys. Most of the interviews include audio clips too.
Thought Maybe
This is a free library of films “to provoke, inspire and inform radical social and political change.” Topics include consumerism, protest, propaganda, and social control. You’ll find all Adam Curtis’ major films here, plus loads more gold you won’t have come across before.
Research papers used to have style. What happened?
A fascinating look at how academic writing has evolved and a convincing argument that scientists “must fight for their right to be playful, to be beautiful, to be wonderful.”
Surprises: not just the spice of life but the source of knowledge
This wonderful paper for M@n@gement (“the first open access journal in management, strategy and organisation theory”) is a nice counterpoint to the soulless sludge that so many journals publish, and its central argument is an important one for anyone that does research in any form.
The timeless moment
Jules Evans, author and director of Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, explores “how we can alter time-consciousness through drugs, sex, music and other methods.”
Surrealist artist Remedios Varo’s alchemical visions
Enjoy this short introduction to the beautifully weird and mysterious work of Spanish surrealist Remedios Varo (1908 - 1963), which aimed to stretch our perception and reveal an “intuitive, divinatory, and irrational order.” I found this one deeply relaxing:
Where does the night start?
There’s been a legal battle over the right to camp in Dartmoor recently — the last place in England where wild camping is still allowed. In this piece, Rob Sherman meditates brilliantly on the absurdity of attempts to regulate our right to sleep under the stars.
“When… does my presence on the moor stray from welcome to unacceptable? What is the precise picosecond when that welcome turns sour, when my presence transmogrifies from petted daytripper to hated camper? In which moment of the dusk do I trip into the transgression? When I shut my eyes for longer than a blink? When the last sunbeam is folded away? When I put in the first guypole? When I sit on a rock for longer than is strictly necessary to eat a sandwich? When my back, calves and the nape of my neck touch the heather all at once?”
For Jung, architecture was a tool to represent the psyche
I feel I could spend many lifetimes learning about Carl Jung and his work. This fascinating article recounts how Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious came to him in a dream where he descended through increasingly primitive floors of a house, and how the real houses he built for himself tell the story of his own psychic journey.
How far would the Earth stretch if you cut it into 1m² cubes?
Another mind-bending question for you, but with a much clearer answer. Watch Liv Boeree explain how your instinctive understanding of physical volumes is probably way, way off, and why that also means that peeing in pools is less of a problem than you think.
Artificial deaths
What happens to our digital presence after we die? Is the current default - that of digital immortality - healthy? Here’s a particularly haunting anecdote from Arianna Caserta’s essay:
“After an incident causing the death of a teenage boy, his mother started posting on his Facebook profile talking in first person, like it was still her son clicking the “share” button to all of the posts. The posts would say things like: “I know you miss me. But I want you to know that I’m watching over every single one of you from above” and other stuff written with the aim of easing the pain of everyone reading…”
Unspun Heroes
Unspun Heroes was started around a year ago, and reissues under-appreciated music on vinyl in limited releases of 500 pressings or less. Often, this will be the first time the music has been available on vinyl. Their latest release is an album called Chance and Time by James Varda, written and recorded as the artist knew he was approaching death from throat cancer.
Download 30GB of lost cassettes from the 80s underground
Archive.org now has an immense collection of digitised cassettes from the 1980s spanning “tape experimentation, industrial, avant-garde, indie, rock, DIY, subvertainment and auto-hypnotic materials.” If you make music or video and want some weird audio to sample, this is well worth having a dig around.
Jonathan Glazer’s rejected Cadbury Flake ad
Jonathan Glazer is the director behind Under the Skin, Sexy Beast, and this year’s The Zone of Interest. He also directed the legendary Guinness Surfer ad in 1999 — the one with the “tick followed tock followed tick followed tock followed tick…” voiceover, and Leftfield’s Phat Planet rumbling away underneath. An unmitigated masterpiece that sold an Olympic swimming pool’s worth of extra Guinness every month (and if that doesn’t sound that impressive, I’d refer you back to How far would the Earth stretch if you cut it into 1m² cubes?).
Anyway, turns out Glazer also made an ad called Temptation for Cadbury in 2010, starring Denis Lavant as the devil. It’s beyond bonkers, and, sadly in my opinion, never aired.
The insane history of Polish movie posters
Feast your eyes on this stunning collection of Polish posters for films you’ve heard of and films you haven’t. Here’s a little taste:
Solarpunk is the next big literary-design movement
Solarpunk is a genre of fiction and a broader cultural-aesthetic movement centred on envisioning a future where humans innovate and live in harmony with nature. In his newsletter, Nate Crosser laments “the false choice between working towards a more rustic society and a more technological one,” and calls on all of us to “manifest visions of abundance, balance, and peace.”
The Creative Act by Rick Rubin: A visual summary
Confession: I haven’t gotten round to reading Rick Rubin’s book yet. If you haven’t either, or you have but you fancy a refresher, you can watch the key ideas from the book being brought to life in sketch form here.
A brief history of The Great Wave off Kanagawa
The Cultural Tutor shares some high-grade threads on Twitter (I think I’ve officially given up calling it X), and this one on the creation of Hokusai’s iconic image, and traditional Japanese art more broadly, is no exception.
Dance lessons with Nietzsche
Nietzsche wrote about dance a lot. But was it purely metaphorical, or was he, despite his poor health, partial to a boogie?
The Verbasizer
This is an interactive word-juggling tool inspired a piece of software created by David Bowie, Brian Eno and Ty Roberts in the 90s. You can load in text from the latest headline news, load in Bowie lyrics, or paste in your own text across six input boxes, and then ‘Verbasize’ it into a mangled string of potentially interesting verbal juxtapositions.
Here’s a little nonsense poem I made by combining the text from this newsletter with some Bowie lyrics:
Shut then surrealist notion
Precise no default roads
Warm written rustic burning headline
Software prayers given
By major frowned explores
Some way underneath
The internet is about to get weird again
Tech entrepreneur Anil Dash welcomes the rise of “home-cooked, locally-grown, ethically-sourced, code-to-table alternatives to the factory-farmed junk food of the internet.”
I hope, in its own small way, that this newsletter can be a part of the Great Re-Weirdening.
Until next time, stay freaky.
x
