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Independent Music
Tim Maia, the great Brazilian soul singer, was an huge personality. Impulsive, indulgent, independent, his bio is filled with all manner of amusing insanity. As a teenager drawn to American R&B, he...
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First No-ing
“No Thanks” from Futility Closet. In June 1744, the College of William & Mary invited the Indians of the Six Nations to send 12 young men to be “properly” educated. They received this reply: We...
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Opening (The Wiccan Gates) Ceremony
What was most wonderful about Danny “Slamdog” Boyle’s artistic direction of the Olympic Opening Ceremony was that he took this unprecedented opportunity—a television audience of 1 billion, unlimited...
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Drakkar Noir [Dark Arts Now]
It is well established that the rulers of Egypt are practiced in the art of Dark Numerology. They take sinister pride in sly calendrical communications. Take, for example, the court case against the...
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My Soi Disant Life
Several years ago the anthropologist/philosopher Jonathan Lear wrote an fascinating book (excellently reviewed here by Charles Taylor) about doomspirals’ fav topic: kultural devastation. Lear explores...
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Gnome
In his review of two new Noam Chomsky books, David Hawkes discusses the “Chomsky problem”—that Chomsky’s notable work in the fields of linguistics and political commentary “appear to contradict each...
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Flora on Sand
A rose in the sand. Drawn by a pendulum during an earthquake in Olympia, Washington. Futility Closet relates the story behind this beautiful occurrence. When a magnitude 6.8 earthquake shook Olympia...
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Prints & the Computer Revolution
While we await the next credit bubble, and with it the circumstances that justify pursuit of my master’s thesis, “Metaphors of Technology in R&B”, plz allow i to share some notes for the chapter...
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Cave Art These Days
Do you remember a while back we were riffing on the dystopian fantasy world, Warhammer 40,000, which, rather than being set a paltry fifty or one-hundred years from now like timid/typical sci-fi, is...
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