Communism In Kerala

On a recent visit to the state of Kerala in southern India I was surprised by the prominence of soviet style communist icons painted on the streets throughout the state. It turns out it was the first communist party in the world to be voted in by ballot back in 1957.

The extent to which a communist state government works within the social, religious and political framework of India appears to be very complex however, along with West Bengal and Tripura the state of Kerala seems to operate with a specific Indian version of communism that despite often looking like Cuba at times possibly has few other similarities !

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Chupacabra

Perhaps stemming from the current vampire mania the Chupacabra is a legendary creature that roams latin america feeding on the blood of lifestock, the name translates from Spanish to literally mean goat sucker. There have been 'reported' sighting also in USA and as far as Russia. While I don't for a second believe such a creature exists I do I like the concept of contemporary myths like these, this one I had only heard of recently.

The myth appears to have started in Puerto Rico in mid 90's where numerous lifestock were said to be found dead and drained of blood. The Chupacabraand is most often described as having scales or spikes on its back and hops around like a kangaroo and when alarmed gives of a sulphuric stench !

Heraldry

The elaborate art of heraldry originates from the middle ages and earlier as a form of identification in battle. Over the centuries heraldry developed from simple icons into a complex system of meanings and codes associated with the coat of arms of a family, town, or country. The blazoning as it is called has it's own specific language to describe a coat of arms such as tinctures, ordinaries, charges etc all specifying sections each with their own rules and codes.

Some detailed examples that represent a complex relationship between large regions or countries.

The House of Schwarzenberg coat of arms, located in the Czech Republic. The church called the Sedlec Ossuary was decorated with the bones of 40,000 victims of the plague and wars in the 15th century. Frantisek Rint a woodcarver and artist for the Schwarzenberg family was given the task of creating artworks out of the bones, which including not only the coat of arms but a macabre chandelier which used every bone in the human body. An odd addition to the coat of arms in the 1500's was the crow pecking the head of a Turk, to symbolize the conquest of a Turkish fortress in Hungary.

Wunderkammer

The 'cabinet of curiosities' or 'wonder room' (wunderkammer) originated in the 16th century Europe as science and exploration created a wide variety of new and exotic objects and natural history specimens. Collections would range in size from a small cabinet to vast chambers covered from floor to ceiling in exhibits. The cabinets often contained forged or unknown specimens from ships returning to Europe from distant and unexplored parts of the world, which added to their intrigue, a glimpse into the world of the unknown and exotic.

Albertus Seba a dutch zoologist and pharmacist collected and illustrated hundreds of wunderkammer specimens, Taschen has released reproductions of his life's work in the beautifully illustrated book Cabinet of Natural Curiosities. In 1716 Peter the Great purchased Seba's entire collection of specimens along with other vast collections to exhibit in the Kunstkamera in St Petersburgh, the largest wunderkammer in existence featuring over 2,000,000 exhibits. The Czar had a particular interest in deformed animals and human fetuses, and even issued a decree that all malformed and still born fetuses from all over Russia be sent to the Kunstkamera.

The Kunstamera

The 'Museum Wormianum' another vast Wunderkammer collection by Ole Worm

Pioneers of Doom - 60's-70's early metal

Music started getting a lot heavier and darker at end of the 60's, epitomised by Black Sabbath's first self titled album in 1970, with themes of sorcery and witchcraft and the use of the 'Diabolus in Musica' tri-tone riff they were arguably credited with creating the first metal album. But apart from Black Sabbath there were also a lot of other great artists from that same era of early metal

Here are a few gems...

17th Biennale of Sydney

I was fortunate enough to be in Sydney last weekend and visit the 17th Art Biennale held on Cockatoo Island in Syndey harbour.

It's definitely worth a visit, the location itself was as interesting as the art, Cockatoo Island since the 1850's was used as ship building site and eerie vast hangers, rusting cranes and abandoned industrial machinery cover every inch of the island.

One of my favourite works was by Shen Shaomin, a creepy mausoleum of beautifully crafted life like wax models of past socialist icons lying in glass tombs including Ho Chi Min, Mao and Lenin. Fidel Castro however is lying on a hospital bed as he nears his end to join the others in their death beds. It wasn't until I got close enough that I realised he was actually breathing, obviously form some cleverly installed pump device by the artist in the model. I kept waiting for Fidel to turn around and open his eyes it was so creepily realistic.



Another favourite was the series of hindu-esque gods sculptures by Rodney Glick. A mixture of macabre and humorous statues depicted contemporary people in various god like poses.



The installation by Cai guo-qiang definitely takes the epic scale award , five cars are suspended inside a sprawling hanger appearing to explode with light rods bursting out of each of them.



And for a slice of eastern european kitschy dark wierdness... is the short film 'Summer Tale' by Marcina Oliva Soto. The simple life of a group of cheery dwarves living in a forest is strangely interrupted by some odd guests (including a leopard skin clad drag queen) who appear one day from inside giant funghi that pops up in the dwarves garden one morning. The dwarf home stay begins taking a nasty turn, it reminded me of the Korean technicolour horror adaptation of Hansel and Gretel by Yim Pil-Sung.

Islands In the Sky - Roger Dean

I recently stumbled across a book on Roger Dean, a british artist who helped define the uniquely 70's prog/space rock aesthetic that is so synonymous with the era, not just his legendary album covers but also the classic 70's alien organic meets art nouveau titles, stage sets and even architecture.

Dean painted many of the classic album covers for bands such as Yes, Asia, Osibisa, Greenslade, Budgie and Uriah Heep and also designed and constructed a series of dramatic stage sets for Yes, including light shows of giant fibreglass alien crabs and crystals !



His often reoccuring theme of landscapes of floating islands are undoubtedly an influence in the floating mountains world featured in the film Avatar, along with the flying dragon like creatures and giant rock arches, of course receiving no acknowledgment despite much public outcry. There are rumours of Roger Dean directing his own feature called Floating Islands, and it would be great to see his imagination and aesthetic in cinema.

Water Bears / Moss Piglets

If things get pretty ugly here on earth from nuclear devastation or an asteroid impact wiping out every living thing, the chances are these little fellas will be fine. Tadigrades otherwise known as water bears or moss piglets are natures true survivors, infact they are close to indestructable.

Water bears are microscopic and can be found often living on lichen and mosses anywhere from the Himalayas, the tropics, the arctic, to deep sea trenches, but their true marvel is their near indestructability. Known as polyextremophiles they can survive temperatures of -273°C, close to absolute zero, temperatures as high as 151 °C, 1,000 times more radiation than other animals such as humans, almost a decade without water , and even the vacuum of space. In an experiment a sample of water bears were sent into space for 10 days and exposed to phenomenal levels of solar radiation and yet on return to earth many were still alive and able to reproduce.


They certainly add credit to the theory of exogenesis and panspermia, that life potentially could be spread by extreme forms of bacteria or oganisims able to survive in space living on asteroids or comets, which then eventually impact on habitable planets allowing them to start a new evolutionary tree of life suited to that environment.

There are also some types of bacteria (extremophiles) which can lay dormant for millions of years and can survive similar conditions to water bears and it's entirely possible that life, although stripped back to it's most basic form can become natures interstellar seeds, an ultimate evolutionary advantage to be able to spread a species to new planets. As we develop the technology and neccessity to begin to colonise other life friendly plants and solar systems, we may realise something like these incredible little creatures may have already bet us to it.

The Yé Yé girls

Some video clips I found of the French Yé Yé girls of the 60's.. Many of these are from scopitones, a kind of music video juke box playing 16mm films. Yé Yé was the French equivalent to American and British go-go... only way more chic !

My Yé Yé playlist

Hyrbids and humanzees

I was recently watching a documentary on evolution and in one section it mentioned our close genetic relationship (95%+ identical DNA) with chimpanzees would mean in theory a human could breed successfully with a chimp, to create what has been coined a humanzee. It is a creepy thought and ethically highly questionable but some what fascinating.

But has anyone actually tried.. well actually yes a Russian scientest in the 1920's named Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov recieved funding from the Soviet government to travel to Guinea to experiment inseminating primates with human sperm... but apparently had no success. He had previously made a name for himself by creating the worlds first Zonkey, Zebra-Donkey hybrid.

A Zonkey

However humans and chimps seemed to be proving more difficult, Ilya returned to the Soviet Union and decided to try again this time on atleast five female human volunteers (doubly creepy!), but before he was able to carry out the experiment the only viable male ape at his research center died. Ilya was soon after sent into exile to the backwaters of Khazikstan by Stalin and the humanzee experiments were never continued. So officially there has been no birth or pregnancy involving a humanzee hybrid. In the 1970's there was a suspicious looking chimp called Oliver found in the Congo which had very human like characteristics such as always walking upright (bipedular) but it was later disproven to be any type of human chimp hybrid.

The story of Oliver

It is off course ethically questionable and no doubt unsettling to us the concept of a humanzee but it hasn't stopped us interbreeding other animals such as Ilya's Zonkey. Other successful dramatic animal hybrids (check out the top 10) are Wolphins (Dolphin + Whale) , Liger's (Tiger + Lion) remember Napolean Dynamite, and Cama's (Camel + Lama). Interestingly as in a Mule (Horse + Donkey) almost all inter-species animal hybrids are born sterile, a kind of evolutionary cut off point when two species grow too far apart to create another hyrbid branch.

A Liger and Wolphin

There is the cultural movement of transhumanism which believes in supporting an enhanced evolution of humans through biotechnology or other means to improve the human condition in regards to aging, disease and general physical capacity. It unlikely humanzee's are really of any benefit to the transhuman concept and no doubt as we are seeing already some major ethical questions and boundaries are arsing through genetic engineering, humanzee's are really the least of our concern. I still wonder if in the hills of Gunea or woods of Khazikstan there might be some geriatric humanzees waiting to be discovered.

Une Semaine De Bonte - Max Ernst

I have a bit of fascination for bird people and this illustrated novel Une Semaine De Bonte (1934) by Dada artist Max Ernst contains some of my favourite examples. It is a series of collages that Ernst collected from Victorian encyclopedias, novels, and detective books, reassembled to create a dark and surreal world of dreams and erotic fantasy.

Much of the found imagery used was taken from illustrations by Grandville a century earlier who's depictions of parahuman oddities in Les Métamorphoses du jour (1828–29) was much loved by the surrealists.

There are references to Une Semaine De Bonte in George Franju's surrealist detective film Judex (1963). Thieves use bird masks to disguise their identities at a masked ball and pickpocket the unsuspecting guests during a magic show.

no connection at all, but I do love this cover of the 70's space rock classic Bandolier by Budgie...

Silver Apples

It annoys me when people talk about music and say "listen to this it was like soooo way ahead of it's time", or "when do you think this was made ?" and then you are meant to gasp that it was actually 10 years earlier than anything else that sounds like it.

However I'm going to be a complete hypocrite and say that I seriously couldn't believe this group the Silver Apples was from the late 1960's when I heard them, in fact it's hard to even think of anything to compare them to now, possibly it still doesn't exist yet .

The Silver Apples were a duo in the the New York psychedelic electronic scene (I think they were actually the only ones in the scene), with a pile of up to 9 audio oscillators and countless other custom built controls they produced some really quite fantastic tracks. They recorded three albums, Silver Apples 1968, Contact 1969 and The Garden 1970. The Garden (my personal favorite) was actually only released in 1998 after the recording was found in an attic. Apparently the cover of the Contact album with the Pan Am flight simulator on the front and the plane crash image on the back didn't go down too well and resulted in law suits and the end of the band and the record label.

Each album is full of unexpected surprises, The Garden takes the cake. There is a series of tracks called noodles, like Tabouli Noodle, Swamp Noodle or Fire Ant Noodle which seem like musical doodles, of pulsing bleeps and rhythms that build, then suddenly there's is a kind of electronic dueling banjo's sing along called John Hardy, before moving onto a very sweet poppy song about the life of an owl with hoot noises and a slightly deranged but pleasant synth melody.

I actually suspect these guys accidently slipped through a spacetime wormhole created when tinkering with one of their instruments (see below) and ended up in a highly advanced alien civilisation - dropped some acid, had a bit of a jam with the locals, then slipped back through and are waiting 400 years for everyone on earth to finally understand what they were on about, there's no other explanation.

Hothouse

I don't usually read science fiction but this book caught my eye, Hothouse by Brian Aldiss it's possibly the strangest thing I have ever read. Despite it's title and theme it's not actually related to the global warming predicament, it was written in the 1960's and is set several million years in the future as the sun is expanding into a supernova before it eventually burns out. Naturally down on earth it's very hot but the plants love it, they love it so much infact that colossal banyan trees grow to the size of continents.

Very little animal or insect life has survived and the plants have become very nasty and aggressive in their fierce competition for nutrients. Humans have survived but only just, and have evolved to be much smaller with green skin and live amongst the branches of the giant trees in a very primitive existence. But a series of events including a giant spongy spider like vegetable that can float to the moon and back and some killer seaweed, eventually lead to one of the humans ending up with a all knowing mind controlling fungus growing on his head. Eventually with the help of a creepy talking land fish they come to know their fate.

My favourite line is "After all you are the first fungus to solve the riddle of the universe" after a few chapters of this book a comment like that doesn't even seem slightly absurd.

Giant Beavers

This has to be my favourite of all the Pleistocene megafauna creatures, a gigantic beaver ! What a cool period in evolution... (well very cool infact as it was the middle of an ice age), imagine all these familiar animals of today but supersized !

Some other favourites are the giant penguin (Anthropornis nordeskjoeldi) or equally as ugly the giant sloth (Megalonyx jeffersonii). Australia had a an interesting array of megafauna too including a giant wombat like thing called a Diprotodon and a colossal kangaroo (Procoptodon) which grew to 3 metres high.

Sadly most of these amazing creatures shrunk/became extinct around 45,000 years ago due to climate change and possible human over hunting (come on... who could resist a gaint beaver steak for dinner), some lasted till more recent times–there were Woolly Mammoths still roaming Russia's Wrangel Island up until 1700 BC. 70% of the Woolly Mammoth genome has been decoded and so it might not be too long until some of these giants walk again... bring back the giant beavers I say...

Cowboy In Sweden

I really should dedicate my first post to the late Lee Hazlewood who's song 'The Night Before' inspired this blog with it's title, not becuase I usually wake up wearing stirrups, filled with remorse surrounded by empty whisky bottles on a beach in Sweden trying to remember the previous night/week...

This clip is from the Swedish TV special 'Cowboy In Sweden' which Lee made in 1970 when he moved to Stockholm. There's a lot of arty and meaningful horse riding going on in the show... and the cowboy/Sweden juxtaposition is a little odd to say the least. The album of Cowboy In Sweden is definitely one of my favorite Lee moments though, melancholy themes and even slightly haunting at times, the duet of Leather and Lace with Swedish hottie Nina Lizell rivals any Nancy and Lee ballad...

The Night Before

Welcome to the Night Before a journal of music, art, films and other things that I like...