The amazing artist Laurie Lipton (left) and I (right, [photos by Ken Hollings]) were recently guests on Ken Hollings’ Hollingsville radio show on Resonance FM. On the menu were Godzilla and other famous monsters of fifties filmland, Laurie’s beautiful drawings and her suburban childhood, Mirage Men, our new drone overlords and a whole lot more, all illustrated by sublime sounds from the McCarricks.
You can now download or stream the transmission from here.
Meanwhile, we wish Ken a very speedy recovery from his eye operation.
The phrase “mind-body connection” has many connotations. For some, it’s shorthand for New Age quackery. For others, it’s a source of hope and a way to reconcile their spiritual life with modern science…
Increasingly, placebo effects are being viewed as real and tangible, if mysterious. In various surveys, 45 percent to 85 percent of American and European practitioners say they have used placebos in clinical practice, and 96 percent of academic physicians in the United States say they think placebos have therapeutic effects…
One common effect involves the assumption that a particular pill is responsible for easing pain or discomfort that is actually subsiding naturally. Another is classic Pavlovian conditioning, in which a patient is so accustomed to feeling better after a shot that it works no matter what is in it. Another is the relief a patient like Dr. Wager’s mother feels when a doctor offers a concrete solution.
THE eccentric known as The Mole Man, who spent 40 years digging a 60-foot network of tunnels beneath his £1 million Hackney house, has died without repaying the £350,000 of taxpayers’ money he owes the council for saving it from collapse. And town hall chiefs, who re-housed William Lyttle in a top-floor flat, have been landed with an even costlier repair bill after it was discovered the oddball pensioner had carried out some of his unorthodox “home improvements” there, too. The 79-year-old had knocked a huge, tunnel-shaped hole in the dividing wall of the living room and kitchen of the flat in St Lawrence Court on the De Beauvoir estate.
I used to live close to the William Lyttle’s incredible house, and would often peer over the fence onto the debris and vaulted tunnel entrances below. A psychiatrist friend of mine once examined Lyttle and declared him eccentric, but not insane. All sorts of rumours circulated about why he started digging, the most sinister, and improbable, being that he had buried his wife and children in the back yard, prompting him to dig obsessively for the rest of his days.
THE eccentric known as The Mole Man, who spent 40 years digging a 60-foot network of tunnels beneath his £1 million Hackney house, has died without repaying the £350,000 of taxpayers’ money he owes the council for saving it from collapse. And town hall chiefs, who re-housed William Lyttle in a top-floor flat,
William Lyttle
have been landed with an even costlier repair bill after it was discovered the oddball pensioner had carried out some of his unorthodox “home improvements” there, too. The 79-year-old had knocked a huge, tunnel-shaped hole in the dividing wall of the living room and kitchen of the flat in St Lawrence Court on the De Beauvoir estate.
Urthona (aka Neil Mortimer) has posted this short extract from a back projection shot by himself and the Asterism (aka yours truly) over six years on Dartmoor. The soundtrack is from a lofi improvisation that became part of our first live performance in May. We plan to record a ’studio’ version of this and to feature the full 50 minute projection as part of future performances.
You can buy the Murmurations, the first Urthona & The Asterism album, here
In Mirage Men I touch on the possibility that some early UFO encounters, particularly the case of Antonio Villas Boas, Abductee Zero, and perhaps even some of the contactees, were connected to MKULTRA and similar programmes.
Reading HP Albarelli’s A Terrible Mistake, from which this is extracted, I wonder if one day documentation to this effect might not bubble up from the depths of the intelligence archives. That said, by all accounts those involved were rigourously careful not to leave a paper trail, and almost everything that did exist was ordered destroyed by Richard Helms in the early 1970s. Until then the connection between UFOs and MKULTRA will just have to remain an intriguing possibility.
On one or two occasions, she felt that she had fallen into a “strange state, like sleepwalking while awake,” and once, while on the West Coast for work, she woke up in a hotel room “unsure of where I’d been for the last twenty-four hours.” She said, “I recalled getting unto a hotel elevator and there was a group of people already in it and someone nodded and said something and that was it. Later, I thought I remembered waking up in my room and finding someone standing there looking at me, telling me everything was just fine, not to worry about a thing…. I think it was a man who looked Asian … I don’t remember any more than that.”
On the same trip to the West Coast, Sally met a middle-aged woman in a restaurant who told her that she had had an encounter with a UFO the previous month while hiking near Sausalito. The woman remarked that, after this encounter, she had experienced strange blackouts and incidents of missing time.
‘Why does Dr. [Oliver] Sacks love cephalopods so much? They’re very smart. He says, ”Cuttlefish have enormous eyes, they are curious and, I think, even affectionate. One cannot help feeling that they have individuality and consciousness, and the basis of an inner life. Cephalopods can learn by observation, as higher mammals do. They are richly endowed with nerve cells: an octopus has 300 million or more neurons, about half in its cerebral ganglia, and the rest distributed among its tentacles. I like cephalopods because they are so removed from us and yet, in some fundamental ways, so like us. They are my favorite aliens.
…if we were in charge, June would be National Cephalopod Month…We’re not quite sure how many humans are on the planet these days, but there are even more squid. Just sayin…’
A 70-year-old radio at a Scottish heritage centre has been picking up vintage broadcasts featuring Winston Churchill and the music of Glen Miller.
The Pye valve wireless at Montrose Air Station, a heritage centre that tells the story of the men and women who served there, has no power and is not connected to any source of electricity. The vintage radio set is kept in a recreation of a 1940s room. Several people have heard Second World War era broadcasts including the big band sound of the Glenn Miller orchestra and speeches by Winston Churchill. The broadcasts come on at random and can last for up to half an hour…
Technicians who examined it removed the back, but found “nothing but cobwebs and spiders”.
Friday 11 June, 6.30pm – 8.00pm
Westminster reference library,
35 St. Martin’s Street
London WC2H 7HP
Gary discusses Aleister Crowley’s appearances in and influences upon cinema, with glimpses at rare films including Rex Ingram’s The Magician (1926, above), based on Somerset Maugham’s 1910 novel.
Entry is free but booking is recommended: Tel 020 7641 525 or email
A LOVE CRAFT: Art Inspired by Monsters, Madness and Mythos
June 11th – July 23rd, 2010
543 Union Street (at Nevins), Brooklyn, NY 11215
Gallery Hours: Thursdays and Fridays 3-6; Saturdays and Sundays 12-6
The “cosmic horror” of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, all written between 1917 and 1935, has become more popular and seemingly more contemporary with each year. OBSERVATORY and Dylan Thuras are excited to announce “A LOVE CRAFT: ” a group show of art inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, and the themes of monsters, madness and mythos. On view from June 11th through July 26th, prepare to look beyond space and time and into vistas of a new reality…
[If the player doesn't work, you can download it here]
Moving Through Old Daylight
Mark Fisher, Jim Jupp and Julian House of Ghost Box Records and Iain Sinclair in conversation at the Roundhouse, Camden, London, 5 June 2010.
Subjects under discussion included Nigel Kneale, TC Lethbridge, John Fox, BBC Radiophonic Workshop, alchemies of sound, re-imagined space, the homogenisation of culture and the impersistence of memory.
