closertodanger-fartherfromharm:
Daughter of Amenophis IV or Akhenaten (1351-1334), Egyptian, limestone/ red paint.
This female head has an elongated skull, and is probably a child of Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten (1351-1334 BCE). The eye is hollow for inlaying. The piece is broken across the neck, and is a forgery executed in the 18th Dynasty, Amarna Period style.
Courtesy & currently located at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, USA.
hey JRM
(via neurological-safari)
The Strange Lovecraftian Statuary of Puerto Vallarta
(pinched by me from http://www.wired.com/table_of_malcontents/2007/02/the_strange_lov/)
Reader Preston sent us a wonderful email about the strange Lovecraftian statuary overlooking R’lyeh by the sea of Puerto Vallarta.
His email is so enthusiastic it would be a shame to do anything except turn this post entirely over to his delectable ravings…
Preston writes…
“Two Christmases ago (2005), my family and I travelled to PuertoVallarta, Mexico to exchange the gray, wet misery of a PacificNorthwest winter for a polluted, humid and stinky (though warm) twoweeks amongst the foolish and idle rich.
PV is actually very nice, by and large, though for whatever reason itdid not agree with my constitution. One day I strolled the lengthybeach-front boardwalk (the “Malecón”) in an effort to adjust and takein local color. I was pleased with the non-touristy things, mostlydisgusted with the tourist-targeted nonsense, and greatly impressedand surprised with the copious amounts of statuary dotted along itslength.
And then I reached a particular installation, and was simplyflabbergasted…
Known as “La Rotunda del Mar” (“The Circle of the Sea” in my poor,
poor Spanish), this installation by artist Alejandro Colunga featurescreatures/beings straight out of Innsmouth and Lovecraft’simaginings. Fabulous!Sunset at Rotunda of the Sea [Photo Gallery]
A quote describing it from somewhere:
The whimsical sea inspiredhigh back chairs are the work of Guadalajara native AlejandroColunga. This installation made its debut on the Malecón in 1997. Onechair is crowned by an octopus and another by what may be a seahorse.
One of the original chairs surrendered to the forces of HurricaneKenna and was replaced with a stunning replacement that appropriatelypays homage to the strength of the sea. Colungna studied varioussubjects in the university, but he is a self-taught artist. Stop andhave a seat on one of the whimsical chairs inspired by the sea. Youwill often see performance artists in the area and the publicenjoying the mystical seating created by “La Rotunda del Mar.”
Besides the Malecón you can find Colunga’s work throughout Mexico,
the US, Europe and South America.These chair/statues are *brilliant*, and despite their (for me)
creepy (might I even say…eldritch?) presence, incredibly popular.
It was very difficult to take any photos of the statues withoutpeople (natives and tourists both) swarming all over them. Here’s adecent one of my favorite:
Look at the feet! The robe, with the “hands” folded in a religious-
like pose over the chest. A detail of the head/face:
Here’s someone’s (not mine) Flickr with a couple of photos. And here’s some other crummy images that I took…”
I think we all know where the first official meeting of ToM’s Order of the Tentacle must be held… on the tropical shores of Puerto Vallarta. We will drink margaritas and chant prayers to the Elder Ones until a mist settles on the sea and the clammy fishmen drag themselves from below and carry us down to our slumbering god.
Needless to say, Renaldo, this is incredible. Thanks so much for sending this in!
Aren’t these just fabulous? Also, eldritch, blasphemous and cyclopean. IA!!
(via winneganfake)
CIA’s cipher code book in XIII: The Series, episode The Irish Version.
The ancestral Cora religion has three principal divinities. The supreme god is the sun god, Tayau, “our father”. He travels across the sky during the day, sitting down in his golden throne at noon. Clouds are believed to be smoke from his pipe. In earlier times the priests of Tayau, the tonatí, were the highest authority of the Cora communities. His wife is Tetewan, the underworld goddess associated with the moon, rain, and the west. Her alternate names are Hurima and Nasisa. Their son, Sautari, “the flower picker”, is associated with maize and the afternoon. Other names for him are Hatsikan, “big brother”, Tahás, and Ora. He is also associated with Jesus Christ.
Some Cora myths clearly have Mesoamerican origins; for example, the myth of the creation of the fifth sun. Others are shared with the geographically and linguistically adjacent Huichol; for example, the myth of the human race being the offspring of a man and a dog-woman who were the only survivors of a mythical cataclysmic deluge. Quetzalcoatl is still worshipped by the Cora.
(Source: ihateupeople, via sarkos)
(Source: 80s-touch, via lightamplification)
(Source: warrenellis)
The vessels, all deliberately sunk more than 3,000 years ago, are the largest group of bronze age boats ever found in the same UK site and most are startlingly well preserved. One is covered inside and out with decorative carving described by conservator Ian Panter as looking “as if they’d been playing noughts and crosses all over it”. Another has handles carved from the oak tree trunk for lifting it out of the water. One still floated after 3,000 years and one has traces of fires lit on the wide flat deck on which the catch was evidently cooked.
Several had ancient repairs, including clay patches and an extra section shaped and pinned in where a branch was cut away. They were preserved by the waterlogged silt in the bed of a long-dried-up creek, a tributary of the river Nene, which buried them deep below the ground.
…
Archaeologists are struggling to understand the significance of the find. Whatever the custom meant to the bronze age fishermen and hunters who lived in the nearby settlement, it continued for centuries. The team from the Cambridge Archaeological Unit is still waiting for the results of carbon 14 dating tests, but believes the oldest boats date from around 1,600 BC and the most recent 600 years later.
They already knew the creek had great significance – probably as a rich source of fish and eels – as in previous seasons at the Much Farm site they had found ritual deposits of metalwork, including spears.
The boats themselves may have been ritual offerings, or may have been sunk for more pragmatic reasons, to keep the timber waterlogged and prevent it from drying out and splitting when not in use – but in that case it seems strange that such precious objects were never retrieved.
Some of the boats were made from huge timbers, including one from an oak which must have had a metre-thick trunk and stood up to 20 metres tall. This would have been a rare specimen as sea levels rose and the terrain became more waterlogged, creating the Fenland landscape of marshes, creeks and islands of gravel.
“Either this was the Bermuda Triangle for bronze age boats, or there is something going on here that we don’t yet understand,” Panter said.
Kerry Murrell, the site director, said: “Some show signs of long use and repair – but others are in such good condition they look as if you could just drop the transom board back in and paddle away.”
(Source: Guardian)
Pretty much all of the book is predicated upon the assumption, which seems to be implicit in the work of most modern physicists since Einstein, that we inhabit a universe that has at least four spatial dimensions. There are the three dimensions that we are conventionally aware of, and there is the fourth dimension, which is also a spatial dimension, but we don’t perceive it as that. We perceive the distances of the fourth dimension as the passage of time. If I understand it correctly, I believe our entire continuum is at least a four-dimensional solid in which time is not passing, where every moment that ever existed or will exist is suspended, forever unchanging, from within this immense solid of space-time. And therefore the passage of time is an illusion that is only apparent to us as we move through this huge solid along what we perceive as the time axis.
If time is an illusion, then all movement and change are also illusions. So the only thing that gives us the illusion of movement and change and events and time is the fact that our consciousness is moving through this mass along the time axis. If you imagine it as a strip of celluloid, each of those individual cells is motionless. If they each represent a moment, they’re unchanging. They’re not going anywhere, but as the projector beam of our consciousness passes across them, it provides the illusion of movement, and narrative and cause and effect and circumstances.
… our view of reality, the one we conventionally take, is one among many. It’s pretty much a fact that our entire universe is a mental construct. We don’t actually deal with reality directly. We simply compose a picture of reality from what’s going on in our retinas, in the timpani of our ears, and in our nerve endings. We perceive our own perception, and that perception is to us the entirety of the universe. I believe magic is, on one level, the willful attempt to alter those perceptions. Using your metaphor of an aperture, you would be widening that window or changing the angle consciously, and seeing what new vistas it affords you.
http://www.believermag.com/issues/201306/?read=interview_moore
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“The site is currently very close to the sea,” said Harvati, lead author of the study, published in the Journal of Human Evolution. “During glacial times the sea level was lower, so there likely would have been a coastal plain exposed in front of the site. This habitat would be ideal for the kinds of animals that humans hunted.”
Fallow deer and ibex were two such animals eaten by Neanderthals and, later, modern humans. The Neanderthals seemed to have a particular fondness for tortoise meat. The shells — from shellfish too — mostly were all recycled into tools, such as implements for scraping.
Dental wear suggests that the Neanderthals enjoyed a varied diet consisting of seafood, meat and plants. Studies on Neanderthals from other locations suggest they were primarily carnivorous, but it appears they just took advantage of whatever foods were available.
http://news.discovery.com/human/evolution/neanderthal-greek-paradise-130522.htm
Above: trailer for Jodorowsky’s “acid western”, El Topo (1970).
Very soon iPhones will also be sex vibrators, they’ll be useful for masturbation. In the same way, modern artists need to be like modern objects that are polymorphous.
So is…
