Curated chaos - vol.4 🛸🌍🌐🧠👁️

Transmissions from the global brain

Hello again, weird friends.

I hope you’re savouring this annual moment of liminality - the Merryneum, if you will.

I’m writing this email from a tiny village on the southern coast of Pembrokeshire, Wales, where my partner and I are dogsitting a 12-year-old Cocker Spaniel called Ellie. It’s our first experience with Trusted Housesitters, and we’re loving it. Here’s Ellie relaxing after a gale-force frolic on the beach.

Today, I’m giving you a festive-sized portion of interesting internet finds. If I were you, I’d just pick one or two links that catch your eye, or graze your way gradually through the list over the next week or so.

In 2024, there will be plenty more curated chaos. I’ll keep writing longer essays too. And, I hope, I’ll keep hearing from readers and connecting with the brilliant people whose ideas I riff on.

Oh, and I’ll also be telling you much more about this.

Weirdness Wins will be staying 100% free for the foreseeable future, but if you want to support my writing, you can always buy me a beer or share the newsletter with someone you think will dig it.

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Here be links 👇

Let’s get creative

This collection of free online creativity tools includes a browser-based modular synthesiser, a meditative sand art maker, and lots more. A lovely bit of curation by Bryan Braun.

The figurative-to-abstract art pipeline

Étienne Fortier-Dubois explores how pioneers of abstract art all began painting more conventional, representational pictures. If you’ve ever thought “my kid could have painted that” or been unsure how to respond to someone else making an observation to that effect, this post is a must-read. It’s fascinating to see the visual progression of works by artists like Kandinsky and Rothko laid out like this.

So you want to be a sorcerer in the age of mythic powers?

The Emerald is fast becoming one of my favourite podcasts - the ideas always take me somewhere new, and the audio production is absolutely on point. In this episode, Joshua Michael Schrei reflects on the implications of generative AI through a mythic lens. Here’s a taster from the episode description:

“Buried deep in this urge to tinker with animacy and sentience are core mythic drives — the longing for mystery, the want to live again in a world of great powers beyond our control, the longing for death, and ultimately, the unconscious longing for guidance and initiation.”

How Smack My Bitch Up was made

Old but amazing, this video - posted by Jim Pavloff back in 2009, shows you how The Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up was made, sample by sample. Take 10 minutes to sit back and appreciate the genius of producer Liam Howlett.

The truth is always made of details

In this article, David Cain implores us to more time appreciating the infinitely intricate details of the things and phenomena around us. It certainly gave me pause for thought, having recently concluded myself that, if anything, humans are too habituated to zooming in. But this is less about zooming in/out, and more about the fidelity of what we see. Cain argues the Information Age is “pushing us towards low-res conclusions on questions that warrant deep, long, high-res consideration.” He points to our “poor hominid brains” and the challenges they face:

“Trying to form a coherent worldview out of monetized feeds made of low-resolution takes on the most complex topics imaginable — economic systems, climate, disease, race, sex and gender.” Unsurprisingly, amidst the incredible volume of information coming at us, there’s been a surge in low-res, ideologically-driven views: the world is like this, those people are like that, X is good, Y is bad, A causes B. Not complicated, bro.”

The bridge back to magic

Tom Morgan wonders what comes next after our “post-Enlightenment descent into a disenchanted world”, exploring the threads connecting myth, psychology, neurology, Taoism, complexity theory and quantum physics. Is it time for all of us to recalibrate what counts as ‘woo’?

Bobby Fingers makes a Jeff Bezos rowboat

This was my first encounter with Bobby Fingers, and my immediate thought was “this guy is giving me strong Blindboy vibes”. You know Blindboy, right? If not, you’re in for a treat. Anyway, turns out Bobby Fingers was Blindboy’s sidekick in the hip hop comedy duo The Rubberbandits. This video is a delightfully detailed look at the process of making a hyper-realistic model of Jeff Bezos’ head to use as a rowboat, obviously. The narration is a work of art in itself, and the whole thing climaxes with a sea shanty. Class.

Tilda Swinton’s guide to life

Jenny Theolin shared Swinton’s brilliant list of directives for living, including gems like “make friends with chaos”, “be wary of the doubtless”, and “follow the wind”.

Creatures that don’t conform

In the woods near her home, Lucy Jones falls in love with slime moulds. Click for the biology lesson, stay for the prose - here’s a taste:

“Iridescent rainbow orbs bursting into tangerine spun sugar. Pearly spheres of goo. Sorbet corn dogs leaning into one another with matching bouffants. Bright yellow blackberries. A bunch of Mr. Blobby’s babies. Golden goblets overflowing with effervescent honeycomb. Opalescent spherules in crinkled sweet wrappers. Amaretti flecked with flakes of soap.”

Yum.

The real magic of rituals

Anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas explores how rituals help us impose order on the chaos of everyday life, and why they’re valuable in life’s high-stakes situations, even if the control they offer is illusory.

The weird, secretive world of crisp flavours

Amelia Tait takes a deep dive into the world of “seasoning houses” and “flavour chemists”, exploring how new crisp flavours are born. Perhaps most interesting is what crisps reveal about the “culinary worldview” of different countries.

The story of Juan Pablo Echeverri

The Colombian artist Juan Pablo Echeverri posed for a passport photo everyday for 22 years. He died last year, aged just 43, and posthumous exhibitions in New York and Berlin followed. This article explores the “genius behind his jest”.

Ewww, I love it. When did illustration get so gross?

Allyssia Alleyne speaks to a bunch of illustrators and artists making fantastically weird and grotesque work - a movement that can be read as a rejection of the “suffocating norms of our visual culture” according to Beth Frey, one of the artists featured.

The snake cult of consciousness

Maybe you’ve come across Terrence McKenna’s stoned ape theory before? Maybe you’ve heard about the Dead Sea Scrolls scholar who thought Jesus was a mushroom? Well, this piece from Andrew Cutler might just blow your mind. What if the snake in the garden of Eden, the snakes in cave art, the snakes protruding from the head of Aztec creator god Quetzalcoatl, and all the other snakes in myths and temples across the world share a common symbolic root? Could they be clues to the psychedelic origins of human consciousness? We’ll never know, of course, but Cutler has assembled a tantalising case here, which tickled my synapses just right over a cup of tea this morning.

Pair his article with this video of stand-up comedian Paul Smith recounting his first DMT experience, where he met the “cosmic serpent” (thanks to my good friend Chris for pointing me to that!).

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OK, that’s it for now.

I’ll be back with a juicy essay on the creative renaissance soon.

Until then, keep it weird x