005: Kate Bush, socialist sci-fi, the early days of the Internet, etc.
Merry Christmas folks! I’m playing catch-up this month with a list of links instead of my usual paragraphs of fawning excitement, but I did manage to build you a playlist. I hope everyone is able to get some joy or peace. Talk to you all next year!
🎭 Experience Chapter & Verse: The Gospel of James Baldwin, a virtual exhibit and 21st century ritual tool kit for justice inspired by Baldwin’s remarkable work The Fire Next Time.
🎻 Watch the Kate Bush Christmas Special (1979), of course.
💽 Stroll down memory lane with screenshots from the 1996 instructional video Everything You Need to Know About... Introduction to the Internet.
🎄 Catch up on the history behind The War On Christmas.
🚀 Read this piece on how sci-fi shaped socialism, from William Morris to Ursula K. Le Guin and Iain M. Banks.
🛸 Pair that with the Библиотека Галактика, or Library Galaxy, an astounding collection of Bulgarian science fiction covers from 1979 on.
🐓 Peruse the full text of The Public and Private Life of Animals (1877), illustrated with wonderful anthropomorphic creatures by J.J. Grandville.
🦥 Explore the Cloud Zoo, in which short clips from the hundreds of zoo and aquarium animals being live-streamed at any given moment are collected, including a beluga at the Georgia Aquarium, a two-toed sloth at the Hattiesburg Zoo, and a Sumatran tiger at the Edinburgh Zoo.
🐳 Read or listen to a long true tale about the obsessive life and mysterious death of the fisherman who discovered the Loch Ness Monster.
🚶 I’ve been walking a lot this year, so I was delighted to learn the term pedestrienne, about women’s endurance walking in the nineteenth century.
🧠 Get the third issue of Maggot Brain if you haven’t already. I may have written the cover story on the titular album and it may be akin to a mini 33 1/3.
If you haven’t seen Weird Al’s delightful Facebook post yet, read it and weep. (Really. Some of you definitely might weep.)