Pharaoh's Serpent

Fucking weird!
This is Mercury(II) thiocyanate, and apparently it produces deadly poisonous mercury vapors. Even cooler!

Jonsi

Belus

That's right, everyone's favorite fascist murderer/arsonist is back! Varg Vikernes has finally been released from prison and you know what that means- a new Burzum album with actual instruments on it!! And would you believe it? It's really good!

Here is a photo of our protagonist mere moments after igniting the Fantoft stave church:

Kowloon Walled City

Holy shit this was a crazy place. Kowloon Walled City! From about 1945 to 1993 this city, actually an outskirt of Hong Kong, was legally under the authority of NO ONE. Although located in China it had traded hands to the British during their imperial reign and through a long and convoluted process of creating a magistrate's fort and then simply ignoring and forgetting about it for the next hundred years- basically there ended up being a singular plot of land in Hong Kong that was monitored neither by the British nor the Chinese or...anyone... This was Kowloon Walled City. A lawless piece of land that seemed to develop almost from within itself, it's increasingly huge amount of residents building upon it's limited structure continuously until an unthinkable monolithic labyrinth was constructed. Buildings sprawled out, on top of and around all sides of other buildings. It is said that sunlight didnt reach the lower floors, but of course residents had hacked into the lighting grids. Only one man, a postal service worker, knew most of the cities hallways, corridors, twists and turns by heart. One could traverse nearly the entire city by walking up to the roof level and then descending down again into the maze. There were at least two major rat infestations. Smaller stealthier ones in the higher levels and huge sewer rats down below. But the residents educated themselves, created groups to defend themselves against crime and demolition and in classic Chinese style constantly worked their asses off to keep their whole bizarre city way of life moving ahead. And you'd better believe that in communist China many of these people were happy enough to be living in a lawless city. At it's height over 30'000 people lived in this place, one of the most densely populated habitations in human history. It remained under threat from police raids from the Hong Kong government and yet within it's walls the residents payed no taxes, the doctors worked without licenses, the cooks worked without food inspection, the drugs, crime and violence flowed in unchecked (for a time) and all was right with the world. This place was never heralded as a utopia by any means but it is one of the only examples our history has of a more or less anarchistic society. Granted, for some time it was almost completely corrupted by Triads (Chinese organized crime) And it was an obvious haven for violence, drug addiction, prostitution, etc. But in one year alone during the 70's, the Chinese government performed over 3'000 raids and stabilized the crime situation, more or less. This in turn was quite a boon to the city at large and of course raises inevitable question about what a "truly" anarchistic society could have done without some kind of authority presence, even an outside one. Needlessly to say, things like this just can't last and when the Chinese took back total control of Kowloon they predictably deemed it a nuisance and demanded it be demolished in 1987. After a lengthy and, Im certain, very unpleasant process of eviction the whole thing was finally bulldozed in 1993. Now it is a park. Yay.

Cappadocia Turkey / Derinkuyu Underground City

In the land of Turkey, in the Nevsehir Province, in the magical region known as Cappadocia, there are fairy chimneys, houses built into the sides of mountains and many entire cities underneath the ground. On the surface tourists may roam around massive geological oddities- strange conical peaks, monolithic spires, globular rock masses. Below, descending over 18 stories straight down on 11 levels and going on for miles and miles is a vast network of interconnected rooms. Derinkuyu Underground City is the largest of these that we know about so far. (Although the newest one was "discovered" only recently, in 2007) Derinkuyu was "discovered" in 1965 when a man who had simply been cleaning the wall of his basement broke through to a room that of course led to another room and still another. Even now only around 10% of its caverns are actually open to the public. Historically, these cities were the refuge and hiding place for the early Christians back when they were the victims, not the warlords. In his book The World Without Us, Alan Weisman insists that these underground cities will outlast almost all other civilized structures on the planet. However, the region is known for its earthquakes. In either case, the city of Derinkuyu was constructed with remarkable sophistication. There are huge vertical shafts cutting all the way down that function both as air supply tunnels and also for communication. Someone on the surface level can still yell down to people down in the depths. At the very bottom there is a church. There are tunnels that extend out and away from the city and actually connect it to other underground cities as far as six miles away. The whole place is said to have comfortably housed around 30'000-50'000 people. AND it had wine and a primitive micro-brewery.


Thanks

Lately Musick

Black to Comm / Alphabet 1968
The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble / Here Be Dragons
Infinite Body / Carve Out the Face of My God
Deathspell Omega / Fas - Ite, Maledicti, in Ignem
Ruth White / Flowers of Evil
Harold Budd, Simon Raymonde, Robin Guthrie & Elizabeth Fraser / The Moon & The Melodies
Dale Cooper Quartet & The Dictaphones / Parole de Navarre
Woods of Desolation / Toward the Depths

Judging Books By Their Covers

BibliOdyssey

Yeat's Magick Notebook

William Butler Yeats apparently kept a Magick notebook. In it he talks about how magick is the center point for his life's work, and hinges all of that and everything else around 3 doctrines:

1 - That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.
2 - That the borders of our memories are shifting, and that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
3 - That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.

from

The Cabinet of the Solar Plexus

A Crimson Grail

Rhys Chatham is an American composer of the avant-garde variety. Incidentally he has a lot of ties with the American punk/noise scene. He originally composed this colossal minimalist work to be performed outside by 200 guitarists. But for the recording he took it up several notches, recording inside of a cathedral with 400 fucking guitarists. Its like honey in your ears.

Back in Action

My hard drive became self-conscious and immediately TOOK ITSELF OUT OF THE GAME! So I've been neglecting this blog for a bit in the interim, waiting for repairs. But I'm back. And this is a painting by Jim Leon, whose work is surreal, sexually perverse and very symbolic. You know, the usual.