Fred Kiesche 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇲🇽 🇩🇰

I feel like this photo of masked, armed men pepper spraying a pastor protecting his community is going to be a defining picture of this moment in America for a long, long time.

Richard S Shaver sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/shaver... was born on this day (7th), so here's some of the interior magazine art for his 1948/1949 stories (Artist: Malcolm Smith, Robert Gibson Jones, J Allen St John and Malcolm Smith). 4th for "The Fall of Lemuria". 'Irwin' a pseudonym:

Edgar Allan Poe sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/poe_ed... died on this day, so here are some of Carlo Farneti's illustrations to the 1927/1928 editions of his 'Histoires Extraordinaires' and 'Nouvelles Histoires Extraordinaires'.

Artist Howard V Chaykin sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/chayki... and authors Steven Erikson sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/erikso... and Michel Parry sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/parry_... were born on this day: some related artwork (Howard V Chaykin, [couldn't identify], [couldn't identify] and Bob Haberfield):

4-panel comic. (1) [person in front of window, shaped like a trapezoid with a curved top] This weekend, I had to make an oversized screen for a porch window. (2) [person sitting with hands on head surrounded by images of assorted equations and measurements] It involved countless tiny problems, each somehow way harder than it should be. Oblique angles. Curved edges. Noncoplanarity. (3) [person in front of window with screen on it, with building detritus strewn on the ground] ...I solved them all. I measured precisely. I did trigonometry. I made custom parts. And it fit *perfectly.* No gaps, no ripples. (4) [person typing at computer] I know that your foundation normally limits its purview to physics, medicine, peace, chemistry, and literature. However, if you review the attached photos showing how well the screen fits into the...

Window Screen

xkcd.com/3151/

A threa for you, @darkerhue.bsky.social

The Evolution of Music: 40,000 Years of Music History Covered in 8 Minutes We shouldn't take music, or running water, for granted, and the comparison should give us pause: do we need music –- for example, nearly any recording of any Beethoven symphony we can think of -– to f...

The Evolution of Music: 40,000 Years of Music History Covered in 8 Minutes

Do not be surprised when alt-Bowie’s LACRIM/OS/A makes an appearance in some novel or short fiction of mine in the near future

Way too good (and detailed) a concept to leave solely to the dreamspace

Brains are fucking wild places. So much going on you can just barely catch out of the corner of your mind’s eye.

This dream consolidates: listening to OUTSIDE, a proposed Rapture, the bloviating orange shit gibbon, hostile corporate takeovers, AI/corps eating books, people, & art to “ascend”

As a sidenote, it’s common for me to experience often multilingual puns in my dreams

But I’m particularly impressed by the mashup of Heavenly Host (a host who serves as gatekeeper to take reservations to an exclusive place)

And Heavenly Host - as in an army, a military force - the Biblical meaning

(there is a typo by omission that I just caught and you’ve probably corrected reflexively in reading, but I will point out:

“The Being, completely accustomed to violence,”

Should read “completely UNaccustomed to violence”)

We are talking about appearances & façades & big flashy symbols used as collective shorthand for meaning which an audience only superficially understands & how these can distract & reshape perception - dangerously

It is upon these reflections that I wake up

And that was my dream of LACRIM/OS/A

He points out little details in the suit he has the singer wearing

Intentional scuffing at the lapels. A grease stain here, subtle. A frayed seam.

“She’s perfect for this because at first you’re overwhelmed by her voice, her presence, but the closer you look, you see how tawdry it all is.”

In the interview, dream-Bowie diverts into a heartfelt rant about the living human man this character represents

He has that measured but fervent tone when he is passionately striving to convey something he understands so profoundly words are not sufficient - only symbol, spectacle, music

In the interview, as we watch these clips, dream-Bowie gushes about the singer’s talent. Not only her voice, which is impressive as promised, but her stage presence. The way she fully embodies the character.

He sees a kindred spirit in this 22-year-old ingenue.

And now we shift sets to the interior of the stormed Sapphire Castle, refurbished as a boardroom

The Antagonist gets center stage. This is her first solo. She has a powerful alto. Smoky & brash by turns.

She deftly embodies this brute who would tear down Heaven to build a corporation in its place

The next track is an Interlude in the style of the spoken word interludes from Bowie’s album OUTSIDE

These are the dying words/thoughts of the Being/Host as he/it/they reflect on the complex strata of perception/identity/existence

Of emptiness

The emptiness of form when meaning (purpose) is lost

The Entourage overwhelm the Host as he reaches the iron gate; he tries to squeeze through a small opening only he can access

But they bodily drag him away

Naked, only his head, neck, & hands look human

Everything else is the same raw sapphire as the castle

A glimmering golem of celestial stone

The Being, completely accustomed to violence, is first stunned to inaction, then seeks to flee

The robe pulls away, first to reveal a slim black uniform, almost military in its lines, but also reminiscent of a host in a high-end restaurant

(Again, Bowie points out layers of meaning: Heavenly Host)

When Antagonist & Entourage storm the platform, the Being greets them, naïvely seeking to reason with them

Their initial goal may have been gaining access heaven, but now they attack this heavenly host, ripping, tearing his robes

He is not the god they expected. So they decide to kill God.

The Antagonist & Entourage:

They wear dark suits. They’re sleek & corporate & feral, led by the Antagonist, hungriest of them all

Bowie explains he has cast a 22-year-old woman in this role to subvert expectations for who she represents

Her hair is hacked short & dyed a very specific orange

The opening track ends with the Antagonist & Entourage reaching that matte white platform & surging toward the edifice of raw sapphire - hungry, triumphant

They are greeted by the Being, Bowie in elaborate cloud-colored robes, face painted to highlight stark jawline, cheekbones, uncanny eyes

Even in the dream, I hear the capital T in that word & the interview detours to fully explore how everything in this album is layered; meanings inside of meanings

This heaven is & isn’t Heaven, built from perceptions, real but also a façade

It’s a heaven the greedy imagine in their hunger to claim

The opening track of the album representing the act of building this tower at the cost of everything below is brassy

So many trumpets. There’s a whole orchestral element that I remark is very unlike anything Bowie’s done before.

He laughs & says he wanted to nod to the sound of the last Trump

Dream-Bowie explains how these awful people attempt to reach Heaven:

He chooses imagery reminiscent of the Tower of Babel, but it’s worse

They build the foundation from books, then bodies, art pillaged from the world & smashed into this scaffold of hubris, finally tables from board rooms

The plot of the concept album LACRIM/OS/A

Terrible people on earth who have made themselves very powerful (and who will seem quite familiar to those invested in current news) take it upon themselves to storm the gates of heaven

What they want to accomplish changes in the course of the album

Dream-Bowie casts himself as the Being beyond the gate of this cloud castle - nominally human in appearance who is a stand-in for God. Serves as a gatekeeper (he’s very firm that this is not Saint Peter - nor an angel in any traditional sense. “Think of him as - as an Archon of Concept, of Form.”)

That set is an open expanse of blue and white clouds with a platform of matte white upon which rises a spired castle of raw sapphire, roughly hewn

Light everywhere, but no fixed source

And the gate into this edifice is heavy old riveted iron, greenish-black, inspired by medieval castles

So much more to go into from this dream:

There’s a whole conversation about Bowie’s interest in Kabbalah & how that informs the worldbuilding in the album

The main action of the songs take place where the arc of our broken world intersects with Malkuth

He dresses this up as classic cloud Heaven

Tracing a finger along the slashes in the title, dream-Bowie explains, “It’s tears, you see. I chose Latin to establish a religious feel. But the OS is separated so we know it’s all artificial layers - layers of meaning. The tears are in the operating system. They are the OS. Of life, this world.”