A few years ago I read 'Strange Angel', George Pendle's very readable biography of Jack Parsons, the (in)famous rocket pioneer and occultist. Parsons led a strange double life of rocket science and Crowleyan magician. For Parsons, the old Hermetic maxim 'As Above, So Below' was taken very seriously.

During the 1990s I lived in Pasadena, not realising that Parsons' old OTO lodge would have been a short walk from my house - so the constant references to 'Orange Grove' as haven of Crowleyan magic were fun, as today it's a very vanilla middle class street.

An awful lot of virulent rubbish has been written about Parsons - it's common to see the usual reactionary tosh about him and Crowley being 'Satanists' (AM radio level analysis). You'll also hear him described as though he was some sort of blue-blood 33 degree baby-eating Illuminati insider. He's often incorrectly credited as a founder of Caltech (now that would be magic, as Caltech was founded 19 years before he was born); He did found JPL, but he was one member of a team of about half a dozen). Pendle's book gives a very different depiction from the usual inflated portrayals - but no less interesting because of it.

The occult blogs Daily Grail and Secret Sun take on the show.

Viewers expecting a giant owl from Bohemian Grove to devour babies in Canaanite rituals whilst being cheered by GOP Chamber of Commerce members are advised to prepare for bitter disappointment.

I'm really looking forward to seeing L. Ron Hubbard show up at some point - his interactions with Parsons will be, eh, most entertaining! Conjuring elementals with whom Parsons would try to conceive a Moonchild!

Hopefully the scene with the first ever use of SRBs on a prop plane will be worthy of the description in the book - it should be a 'Right Stuff' moment.

The book is a fun read, and feels like a TV show in waiting, so it's no surprise that it's finally going into production. Hopefully the show will do the subject justice. I wonder how Parsons would have turned out had he not died in a chemical explosion in 1952 (aged only 37). I imagine as the fifties and sixties rolled on, he'd have been caught up in all sorts of counter-cultural mischief.

Parson's poem 'I height Don Quixote':

I height Don Quixote, I live on Peyote,
    marihuana, morphine and cocaine.
I never knew sadness but only a madness
    that burns at the heart and the brain,
I see each charwoman ecstatic, inhuman,
    angelic, demonic, divine,
Each wagon a dragon, each beer mug a flagon
    that brims with ambrosial wine.
I went to the city and found it a pity
    the devil was playing at hell,
And ten million mortals had entered hell's portals
    and thought they were all doing well.
I said: "See, dear people, on every church steeple
    an imp of the devil at play,
See ghouls cut their capers in daily newspapers
    and fiends in police courts hold sway;
The mountains are palaces, women are chalices
    meant to be supped and not sold,
The desert a banquet hall set for a festival,
    ripe for the free and the bold;
The wind and the sky are ours, heaven and all its stars,
    waken, and do what you will;
Break with this demon spawn'd hel-inspired nightmare
    bond - Magick lies over the hill."

* * *

They said I was crazy, ambiguous, lazy,
    disgusting, fantastic, obscene;
So I hied for my sagebrush and cactus and corn mush,
    To see if the air was still clean.
Oh, I height Don Quixote, I live on peyote,
    marihuana, morphine and cocaine,
And may I be twice damned for a bank-clerk or store hand
    if I visit the city again.

A wonderful animation from NASA Goddard showing the phenomenon of 'lunar libration':

The animation archived on this page shows the geocentric phase, libration, position angle of the axis, and apparent diameter of the Moon throughout the year 2011, at hourly intervals. The Current Moon image is the frame from this animation for the current hour.

This marks the first time that accurate shadows at this level of detail are possible in such a computer simulation. The shadows are based on the global elevation map being developed from measurements by the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). LOLA has already taken more than 10 times as many elevation measurements as all previous missions combined.

The Moon always keeps the same face to us, but not exactly the same face. Because of the tilt and shape of its orbit, we see the Moon from slightly different angles over the course of a month. When a month is compressed into 12 seconds, as it is in this animation, our changing view of the Moon makes it look like it's wobbling. This wobble is called libration.

The word comes from the Latin for "balance scale" (as does the name of the zodiac constellation Libra) and refers to the way such a scale tips up and down on alternating sides. The sub-Earth point gives the amount of libration in longitude and latitude. The sub-Earth point is also the apparent center of the Moon's disk and the location on the Moon where the Earth is directly overhead.

Sometime in the late 80s or early 90s, the BBC ran a documentary by David Hockney in which he analysed a famous Chinese scroll with the catchy title 'The Kangxi Emperor's Southern Inspection Tour (1691-1698), scroll seven', about 72 feet long.

'David Hockney looked at this Chinese canvas, and you're not going to believe what he saw'. Much better title.

I saw it when it aired and was very impressed. Hockney's fascination with perspective would return years later with the Hockney-Falco Thesis.

The lack of Renaissance perspective was shown to be not a 'lack' as a westerner might assume. The absense of depth allows a god's-eye view of the scene, and Hockney spends a great amount of time navigating over the scroll, showing the possibilities of the different visual scheme.

Milestone films has released a re-mastered DVD of the documentary, in 1080p!

You can see a short clip below, to get the gist:

I shall dwell for a moment on this term - 'understanding'. For I must not smuggle in unnoticed this apparently harmless, but in fact sharply controversial word. A powerful movement of critical thought has been at work to eliminate any quest for an understanding that carries with it the metaphysical implications of a groping for reality behind a screen of appearances. Natural science has been taught to regard itself as a mere description of experience: a description which can be said to explain the facts of nature only so far as it represents individual events as instances of general features. And since such representation of the facts is supposed to be guided merely by an urge to simplify our account of them, rival explanations are professed to be merely competing descriptions between which we choose the most convenient. Modern science disclaims any intention of understanding the hidden nature of things; its philosophy condemns any such endeavour as vague, misleading and altogether unscientific.

But I refuse to heed this warning. I agree that the process of understanding leads beyond - indeed far beyond - what a strict empiricism regards as the domain of legitimate knowledge; but I reject such an empiricism. If consistently applied, it would discredit any knowledge whatever and it can be upheld only by allowing it to remain inconsistent. It is permitted this inconsistency because its ruthless mutilation of human experience lends it such a high reputation for scientific severity, that its prestige overrides the defectiveness of its own foundations. Our acknowledgment of understanding as a valid form of knowing will go along way towards liberating our minds from this violent and inefficient despotism.

...I have moved deliberately from facts to values and from science to the arts, in order to surprise you with the result; namely, that our powers of understanding control equally both these domains. This continuity was actually foreshadowed from the moment that I acknowledged intellectual passion as a proper motive of comprehension. The moment the ideal of detached knowledge was abandoned, it was inevitable that the ideal of dispassionateness should eventually follow, and that with it the supposed cleavage between dispassionate knowledge of fact and impassioned valuation of beauty should vanish.

A continuous transition from observation to valuation can actually be carried out within science itself, and indeed within the exact sciences, simply by moving from physics to applied mathematics and then further to pure mathematics. Even physics, though based on observation, relies heavily on a sense of intellectual beauty. No one who is unresponsive to such beauty can hope to make an important discovery in mathematical physics, or even to gain a proper understanding of its existing theories. In applied mathematics - for example in aerodynamics - observation is much attenuated and the mathematical interest often predominates; and when we arrive at pure mathematics, for example, number theory, observation is effaced altogether and experience is alluded to only quite dimly in the conception of integers. Pure mathematics presents us with a vast intellectual structure, built up altogether for the sake of enjoying it as a dwelling place of our understanding. It has no other purpose; whoever does not love and admire mathematics for its own internal splendours, knows nothing whatever about it.

And from here there is but a short step to the abstract arts to music. Music is a complex pattern of sounds constructed for the joy of understanding it. Music, like mathematics, dimly echoes past experience, but has no definite bearing on experience. It develops the joy of its understanding into an extensive gamut of feelings, known only to those specially gifted and educated to understand its structure intimately. Mathematics is conceptual music - music is sensuous mathematics.

And so we could go on extending our perspective, until it took in the entire range of human thought. For the whole universe of human sensibility - of our intellectual, moral, artistic, religious ideas - is evoked, in the way illustrated for music and mathematics, by dwelling within the framework of our cultural heritage. Thus our acknowledgment of understanding as a valid form of knowledge foreshadows the promised transition from the study of nature to a confrontation with man acting responsibly, under an over-arching firmament of universal ideas.

I was recently pushed to write a letter of complaint - this time, to the editors of RTE, the national broadcaster of Ireland. When one listens to radio, it is to hear the guests speak, not expectorate. Given that this organisation is tax-payer funded, I find the lack of a reply to be wanting in the extreme.

More smart-arsery here.

Arnold Toynbee, from 'Civilisation on Trial' (1947)

THE PRESENT POINT IN HISTORY The writer’s mind runs back fifty years, to an afternoon in London in the year 1897. He is sitting with his father at a window in Fleet Street and watching a procession of Canadian and Australian mounted troops who have come to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. He can still remember his excitement at the unfamiliar, picturesque uniforms of these magnificent ‘colonial’ troops, as they were still called in England then: slouch hats instead of brass helmets, grey tunics instead of red. To an English child, this sight gave a sense of new life astir in the world; a philosopher, perhaps, might have reflected that, where there is growth, there is likely also to be decay ... They saw their sun standing at its zenith and assumed that it was there to stay— without their even needing to give it the magically compelling word of command which Joshua had uttered on a famous occasion.

The author of the tenth chapter of the Book of Joshua was at any rate aware that a stand-still of Time was something unusual. ‘There was no day like that before it or after it, that the Lord hearkened unto the voice of a man.’ Yet the middle-class English in 1897, who thought of themselves as Wellsian rationalists living in a scientific age, took their imaginary miracle for granted. As they saw it, history, for them, was over. It had come to an end in foreign affairs in 1815, with the Battle of Waterloo; in home affairs in 1832, with the Great Reform Bill; and in imperial affairs in 1859, with the suppression of the Indian Mutiny. And they had every reason to congratulate themselves on the permanent state of felicity which this ending of history had conferred on them. ‘The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.’

Viewed from the historical vantage point of a.d. 1947, this fin de siecle middle-class English hallucination seems sheer lunacy, yet it was shared by contemporary Western middle-class people of other nationalities. In the United States, for instance, in the North, history, for the middle class, had come to an end with the winning of the West and the Federal victory in the Civil War; and in Germany, or at any rate in Prussia, for the same class, the same permanent consummation had been reached with the overthrow of France and foundation of the Second Reich in 1871. For these three batches of Western middle-class people fifty years ago, God’s work of creation was completed, ‘and behold it was very good.’ Yet, though in 1897 the English, American, and German middle class, between them, were the political and economic masters of the world, they did not amount, in numbers, to more than a very small fraction of the living generation of mankind, and there Were other people abroad who saw things differently— even though they might be impotent and inarticulate.

...All over the world, in fact, though at that time still under the surface, there were peoples and classes who were just as discontented as the French or the Southerners were with the latest deal of history’s cards, but who were quite unwilling to agree that the game was over. There were all the subject peoples and all the depressed classes, and what millions they amounted to!...

The subterranean movements that could have been detected, even as far back as 1897, by a social seismologist who put his ear to the ground, go far to explain the upheavals and eruptions that have signalized the resumption of history’s Juggernaut march during the past half-century. To-day, in 1947, the Western middle class which, fifty years ago, was sitting carefree on the volcano’s crust, is suffering something like the tribulation which, a hundred to a hundred and fifty years ago, was inflicted by Juggernaut’s car on the English industrial working class. This is the situation of the middle class today not only in Germany, France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and Great Britain, but also in some degree in Switzerland and Sweden, and even in the United States and Canada. The future of the Western middle class is in question now in all Western countries; but the outcome is not simply the concern of the small fraction of mankind directly affected; for this Western middle class— this tiny minority— is the leaven that in recent times has leavened the lump and has thereby created the modern world. Could the creature survive its creator? If the Western middle class broke down, would it bring humanity’s house down with it in its fall? Whatever the answer to this fateful question may be, it is clear that what is a crisis for this key-minority is inevitably also a crisis for the rest of the world.

Continued here.

In 1913, Curtis’ unlikely financier, J.P. Morgan died suddenly. The banker’s son significantly cut sponsorship which soon forced Curtis to abandon his work. During the years he had been away, the photographer’s absence has taken on toll on his family life and several years after his funding dried up, his wife Clara filed for divorce. She was awarded his studio and the family home but Curtis made sure she wouldn’t get his work. Together with his daughter, he made copies of some of his glass plate negatives and then destroyed the originals.

But Curtis was already a ruined man. In a last-ditch attempt, he had tried to make a motion picture for Hollywood, but the film flopped, along with his $75,000 investment. The American Museum of Natural History bought the rights to the movie for $1,500. He then tried to strike a deal with the Morgan Company that saw him give up all his copyrights on the images for The North American Indian in exchange for some minimal funding to return to his field work.

But it was too late, the traditional tribal life he had visited in his earlier career had disappeared...

Today, the art of the magazine cover has been vanquished by celebrity worship and bad taste. Designers are simply fulfilling the dictates of their industry, not unlike the paint person on an auto assembly line. Innovation, creative expression, or even cleverness has been mostly abandoned. Artistic considerations are limited to how much retouching the celebrity headshot requires in Photoshop and how many headlines can be crammed in before the cover looks too "busy." The result: A world in which it's difficult to tell the difference between Playboy and Harper's Bazaar without cracking them open.

Today, you'd search in vain for a magazine that commissions covers like those. The best-designed mass circulation American magazines today - Details, GQ, Vanity Fair and, yes, Esquire - usually feature a really good photograph by a really good photographer of someone who has a new movie out, surrounded by handsome, often inventive typography. The worst magazines have a crummy picture of someone who has just been through some kind of scandal, surrounded by really awful typography ... today I also think that there is simply a general distaste for reckless visual ideas.

Why has the mainstream magazine publishing industry come to this artistic nadir? Publishers would tell you that the only way they can compete with television and the Internet is through the magic drawing-power of celebrities. When faced with a choice between an illustrated cover or Julia Roberts, consumers will pick Julia every time, they say. Publishers may be right–but why did uninspired shots of celebrities promoting their latest products become the only answer? Why did putting almost the entire contents page on the cover become required? What's worse about these simple-minded solutions is that not many designers or editors trouble themselves over the inherent esthetic failings–this is the only way they've ever known magazines to be, so how can they be any different?

Dr. Katz was a professional psychotherapist who had famous comedians and actors as patients, usually two per episode. The comedians' therapy sessions generally consisted of them doing their onstage material while Dr. Katz offered insights or simply let them rant. Meanwhile, therapy sessions featuring actors and actresses offered more interpersonal dialogue between Katz and his patient to better suit their predisposition. Dr. Katz is a very laid-back, well-intentioned man who enjoys playing the guitar and spending time at the bar with his friend Stanley and the bartender, Julie.

Interspersed with these scenes were scenes involving Dr. Katz's daily life, which included his aimless, childish 24-year-old son, Ben (Jon Benjamin), his uninterested and unhelpful secretary, Laura (Laura Silverman), and his two friends: Stanley (Will LeBow), and the barmaid, Julie, voiced by one of the show's producers, Julianne Shapiro. In later episodes, Todd (Todd Barry), the video store clerk, became a regular character.

Each show would typically begin with Dr. Katz and Ben at breakfast and initiating a plotline. These plots included events like Ben attempting to become a radio personality, believing he is in possession of ESP, or the moral conundrum he suffers after receiving a chain letter. The development of these plotlines would occur in alternation with the segments between Dr. Katz and his guests.

The show would end in a similar way each week: while Dr. Katz was in a session with a patient, music signaling the close of the show would begin to play. Katz would acknowledge it by saying, "Whoops, you know what the music means... our time is up" or some variant thereof.

On New Year's Day 1934, Fr. Conifrey led a march through Mohill, County Leitrim, in which demonstrators shouted "down with jazz" and "out with paganism" and called on the government to close the dance halls and ban all foreign dances in Ireland.

De Valera sent a representative to the rally and wrote a letter of support.

Jazz, the campaign argued, was "abominable" music that originated in central Africa and was exported to the West by "a gang of wealthy Bolshevists in the USSR to strike at church civilisation throughout the world."

Jazz was an "engine of hell" deployed to do the devil's work. The Gaelic League weighed in on the day with an attack on then-Minister of Finance Seán MacEntee, who, in allowing jazz to be broadcast on Radio Eireann, was "selling the musical soul of the nation for the dividends of sponsored jazz programmes.

This documentary looks back at that anti jazz campaign.

• BLACK HOLES: Building a black holeby Adrian Berry
• HUMAN COMBUSTION: Mysteries of the human bonfireby Bob Rickard
• UFO TECHNOLOGY: On an H-Bomb to the starsby Tony Osman
• SEA MONSTERS: Monsters of the deepby Janet & Colin Bord
• KIRLIAN PHOTOGRAPHY: Reading between the linesby Brian Snellgrove
• UFO CASEBOOK: Silently, out of the night skyby Charles Bowen

• BLACK MADONNAS: Virgins with a pagan pastby Richard Leigh & M. Baigent
• ESP: Clues from clairvoyanceby Roy Stemman
• UFO: Photo file
• UFO TECHNOLOGY: Spinning through spaceby Tony Osman
• CRYPTOZOOLOGY: Creatures from the voidby Janet & Colin Bord
• HYPNOSIS: The case for Bridey Murphyby Charles Christie-Murphy

CHAPTER CXXI

At lunch an Australian doctor implored me, for the sake of humanity, to take notice of the Turkish hospital. I ran over in my mind our three hospitals, the military, the civil, the missionary, and told him they were cared for as well as our means allowed. The Arabs could not invent drugs, nor could Chauvel give them to us. He enlarged further; describing an enormous range of filthy buildings without a single medical officer or orderly, packed with dead and dying; mainly dysentery cases, but at least some typhoid; and, it was only to be hoped, no typhus or cholera.

In his descriptions I recognized the Turkish barracks, occupied by two Australian companies of town reserve. Were there sentries at the gates? Yes, he said, that was the place, but: it was full of Turkish sick. I walked across and parleyed with the guard, who distrusted my single appearance on foot. They had orders to keep out all natives lest they massacre the patients--a misapprehension of the Arab fashion of making war. At last my English speech got me past the little lodge whose garden was filled with two hundred wretched prisoners in exhaustion and despair.

• BLACK HOLES: Doorway to Beyondby Nigel Henbest
• HUMAN COMBUSTION: A Strange Unnatural Burningby Bob Rickard
• KIRLIAN PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of the Unseenby Brian Snellgrove
• HYPNOSIS: Other Voices, Other Livesby David Christie-Murray
• UFO: The New Zealand UFO filmby Charles Bowen

from THE MACHINE STOPS
by E.M. Forster (1909)

Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere - buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.

Vashanti"s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one's own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? - say this day month.

To most of these questions she replied with irritation - a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public nurseries through press of engagements. That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one-that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it. Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music.