Artist and writer, or writer and artist. Sometimes other things, too.
Author: Alistair
I’ve just rationalised (in most cases reducing) the prices of my books and ebooks so they’re consistent across like formats.
Some striking colour portrait photographs by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. In some ways they look like they could have been taken last week, but they were actually all made between 1907 and 1915, just before WWI and the Russian Revolution. The splendid example above is of Alim Khan (1880-1944) the Emir of Bukhara, in 1911. Bukhara was a vassal state of the Russian Empire, though the Emir had absolute authority within its borders. It was absorbed by the Soviet Union in 1920, and Alim Khan fled to Afghanistan.
There’s just something about seeing these long-dead people in colour that connects us to them, and to history in general, in way that hardly any monochrome image can achieve. To make them, Prokudin-Gorskii developed a system of exposing three glass plate negatives rapidly in succession, with a red filter, a green, and finally a blue. These three monochrome negatives could then be projected through a lantern similarly equipped…
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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden answering* some of the “unmerrrrkan, traytor!” accusations that have been flying around in the usual reckless, unsupported, contra-factual and rabble-rousing way in the US media:
“This is a predictable smear that I anticipated before going public, as the US media has a knee-jerk “RED CHINA!” reaction to anything involving HK or the PRC, and is intended to distract from the issue of US government misconduct. Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.”
What a conspiracy revelation. The US military-industrial-entertainment complex knows phoenixes are real and there’s a massive Sino-American phoenix-petting race that they don’t want the public to know about.
But seriously, if you’ve been obtaining any of your knowledge about Snowden and the US government appointing itself Big Brother from some American Ken and…
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Today, the 16th of June, is Bloomsday: the annual celebration of the life and work of James Joyce in general, and of his landmark Modernist novel Ulysses in particular. It’s a landmark in the literary sense and also in the geographical sense, a dauntingly huge and dense wodge of cellulose. If ever a book was better read weightlessly as an e-book, Ulysses is it. June 16th 1904 is the Dublin day described in hyperreal detail by the book’s protagonist Leopold Bloom, and re-enacted by Joyce fanatics every year since 1954.
The 16th of June was also significant as the date of Joyce’s first outing with the woman who would become his beloved wife, Nora Barnacle. So why don’t you celebrate Bloomsday by starting on Ulysses if you haven’t already? To be honest you might regret it and give up in frustration as many have done before, but you definitely won’t…
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More hard drive detritus! I’ve cleaned the images up a lot, because the originals look like somebody–definitely not me– just snapped the pages from some kind of text book. Nothing so methodical or high tech as a scan. As usual I don’t know where these slightly unnerving pictures came from. My highly scientific detective work (playing around with Google Translate for a while) led to the conclusion that the captions are in Slovakian. The drawing of various faceless nude people (last image on this page) has a bit of a prison camps behind the Iron Curtain vibe. Hard to tell the age of them. The somatotype thing came to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s, so presumably these illustrations are from that period or slightly later.
Also as usual, corrections or additional information are welcome.
Typ pyknický presumably means endomorphic type, i.e. prone to fatness, but I like to…
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“To be worn over head and rest on shoulders. Full size. Fine natural painted. Heads kept in stock can be shipped on short notice.”
Freemasons: plotting in secret to run the world and conceal an age-old conspiracy, or getting drunk and running around wearing a donkey head? On the evidence of this old catalogue of “Burlesque and Side Degree Specialties, Paraphernalia and Costumes” by De Moulin Bros. & Co., I’m afraid the latter scenario seems much more likely. Sorry, conspiracy fans.
OR MAYBE I’M A NWO REPTOID TOO AND I’M IN THE PAY OF THE ILLUMINATI. STAY ASLEEP.
This is more hard drive detritus. I don’t know where these images came from or why I originally stored them. I know only that they’re from late 2001 or early 2002, and they therefore predate the books or sites that came out over the past few years with nutty material from…
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Let’s reluctantly step away for a moment from the lovely gay animals of Gay Animal Fortnight, and take a look at one of the most wretchedly un-fun depictions of human beings supposedly having fun that I’ve had the misfortune to witness for quite some time. Can you make it through all seventy two seconds of this without frantically denuding your head of all sensory organs using any available implement?
This is the kitchen of the Overlook Hotel, where you’ll roll the perfect roll for ever, and ever… andever. Either that or they’re all so manic because the sushi is laced with PCP. Shortly after the scenes shown here they all shaved their own faces off with potato peelers and then rolled themselves in the perfect roll and ate each other.
These poor models are clearly at the very nadir of their careers and we should pity them for…
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What’s that? You never heard about this carnival of homosexual, bisexual and transvestite animals? (That I just made up.) So sad… some people have a sheltered upbringing. Because there are definitely gay and, yes, even intersexual or transvestite animals throughout the world and there always have been. Sorry about that, bigots and religious nuts, but to adopt a phrase already in circulation: DEAL WITH IT.
It’s documented in thousands of scientific papers, even though a shameful number of scientists themselves have not been averse to clutching their pearls and squeamishly claiming not to see what their own data unequivocally shows. In 1999 Bruce Bagemihl did the world a great service by compiling and summarising this evidence for the ubiquity of non-reproductive (hetero- and homo-) sexual practices throughout the natural world in his mammoth 750-page Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. It’s an exploration of possible evolutionary and biological…
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In 1973 archaeologists digging at Vindolanda– the former site of a Roman fort, about halfway along Hadrian’s Wall in the North of England– uncovered a store of letters and files on wooden tablets. Between about AD 85 and 122 the wall was being built to mark the farthest extent of the Roman empire. Boudicca and the Iceni had kicked off and destroyed several Roman cities only a few decades previously, and the tribal people of Britain were still far from pacified or assimilated, but Hadrian made the strategic decision to physically isolate the Picts who lived in what is now called Scotland because they were even more troublesome. Most of the tablets seem to date from roughly this frontier period. Ironically the documents may have been preserved because they were dumped out periodically with the rubbish, which led to them being buried instead of taken away or lost.
Remarkable as…
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Alistair Gentry 