history – Jason’s Stuff

LACMA: Outliers and American Vanguard Art

Part of the exhibit. The crazy guys room (Henry Darger, Mike Mullican, and Forrest Bess). More on the exhibit here.

Recently went to this exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I found it to be incredibly inspirational. These are people who had to create, who were driven to create. Their circumstances (uneducated or rural or sometimes insane or sometimes all of the above) really didn’t allow them to think about commercial success. They were not stopped by lack of materials. They just did art. Whenever they could. On whatever material they could obtain. In whatever medium they could use. All the time.

The inspirational part is precisely that. This exhibit inspired me to create. Just fucking kick it in the head and start writing again. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in online shit, Twitter threads about how to self-promote, about how to get published, it’s so easy to forget that the point is to create. For me, the point is put the words on the page. And this exhibit reminded me of that essential fact.

Bill Traylor: Men Drinking, Boys Tormenting, Dogs Barking

Howard Finster: Vision of a Great Gulf on Planet Hell

The early internet: Ong’s Hat

If you were into science fiction or the paranormal, “you’d eventually butt up against Ong’s Hat,” said David Metcalfe, who runs social media for the University of Georgia Business School, and edits Threshold: Journal of Interdisciplinary Consciousness Studies. When he discovered Ong’s Hat as a teen in the late ‘90s, said Metcalfe, “It was popping up on chat boards and message boards, it would bleed into your life.”
Ong’s Hat: The Early Internet Conspiracy Game That Got Too Real

Oh man, no shit…

Fuck, do I remember this. Completely formative early Internet experience. There I am, working in the dot.com world, late 20s geek who’s lucked into a corner office in a skyscraper at Universal Studios working for a guy who’s convinced the South Koreans to fund an early web community site. And I’m spending the day clicking around the early web (blink tags!) using Netscape. I run across this website. And it leads me down the rabbit hole. Montauk. Hakim Bey (who I think I had already run across via various other esoteric web sites, maybe Sterling talking about TAZ). The Pine Barrens themselves.

Then, just a few years ago, I ran across this book. It brought back all the memories. That never to be recovered rush of those first discoveries when the Internet was young. I don’t think that I believed all the Ong’s Hat stuff was true, but I have to admit that I was sad after I read this book and found out it had all been a couple of guys fucking with me and everyone else.

A little bit of the magic went out of the world.

Alewives

This is for one of my best friends. An article I found on the history of alewives.

By the 1500s, the church had had it with alewives. They were usurping the structures the church had been using to strip women of their agency and autonomy for over a thousand years. Land ownership? Nah, alewives just needed a cauldron. Husbands? Nah, alewvives didn’t need any land. Alewives were perfectly capable of making money without men. They were, quite literally, destroying the patriarchy with their beer.

So go forth and destroy the patriarchy! Drown it in your beery goodness!

Also, going to toot my own horn here, but my historical spy thriller features a London alewife who knows much more than she lets on…

Despite these obstacles, some women did secure licenses, especially licenses for alehouse-keeping. … Yet the women licensed to keep alehouses in the sixteenth century and later constituted not only a small minority of licensees but also a small minority of a particular sort: they were almost invariably widows.
Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England
Judith Bennett