In this installment: A report on the new type of futurism that’s being spearheaded by highly regarded scientists and scholars for the purpose of studying the reality and scope of existential threats to human survival. The triumph of fear as a central motivating reality in contemporary geopolitics. The global plague of feral pigs. Renowned author…
Category: Arts & Entertainment
Unnamable but Not Undrawable: The World of Lovecraftian Superheroes
A Search for the Heroic in Lovecraftian Fiction, Part Three In Part One of this series I set out to demonstrate that it’s possible to find aspects of optimism and heroism in H. P. Lovecraft’s stories. In Part Two I looked at how a number of other writers, and also filmmakers — including Robert E….
Orson Welles on Chartres Cathedral, authorship, and the purpose of human existence
And this has been standing here for centuries. The premier work of man perhaps in the whole Western world, and it’s without a signature: Chartres. A celebration to God’s glory and to the dignity of man. All that’s left, most artists seem to feel these days, is man. Naked, poor, forked radish. There aren’t any…
Steven Soderbergh on “present shock” and the state of cinema
If you’re interested in books and ideas that explore the soul of a culture and civilization that in many ways seems to be flinging itself apart at the seams — and I know this describes most Teeming Brain readers — then be advised that Douglas Rushkoff’s Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, published in March,…
Flying cars and the “world of tomorrow” that never was
You know all of those excellent articles and essays that have appeared in recent months to explore the rosy science fiction-esque visions of our real-world future that characterized American culture during most of the 20th century? (Recall that we noted one of the best of them, David Graeber’s “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate…
H. P. Lovecraft: A rabidly racist, almost fascist, deeply repressed, and perfectly lovely person
Despite a number of stylistic and grammatical/syntactical gaffes and oddities that appear in a newly published biographical sketch of dear old Howard Lovecraft at the Website Machinations into Madness — see especially the first sentence quoted below, which is both incomprehensible and strangely fascinating — the piece captures something really vital about the man, or…
Recommended Reading 39
This week: the dystopian potential of the “big data” revolution, and the need for a deliberate preservation of the sphere of the specifically human in the new reality of a true “information society.” The ubiquitous danger of untested chemicals in the products comprising most Americans’ daily lives. S. T. Joshi on H. P. Lovecraft’s enduring…
‘Sirius’: A film about the scientific reality of UFOs, ETs, and advanced energy technology
Tonight will see the official premiere in Hollywood of the new documentary film Sirius, which promises to be one of the more interesting — and perhaps more starkly significant? — UFO-related film projects to emerge since, well, ever. The film brings together the enduring “UFO disclosure” meme with the equally enduring theme of our planetary…
Jóhann Jóhannsson: “Melodia (Guidelines for a Space Propulsion Device Based on Heim’s Quantum Theory)”
“The next to last track on the album [Fordlândia] is named after an actual research paper, ‘Guidelines for a Space Propulsion Device based on Heim’s Quantum Theory’, which seriously proposes a method of faster-than-light space travel. Burkhard Heim was a German physicist who dedicated much of his life to developing a method of space travel….
Art, meaninglessness, and salvation by despair
Start the music playing and then read the excerpted texts that follow, which may or may not be connected to each other and/or the music. (The music is Jóhann Jóhannsson’s “Fordlandia,” titled after Henry Ford’s epic, disastrous, and somehow mythically tragic folly of trying to create an artificial industrial worker’s utopia in the Amazon rainforest…