{drugs} – Page 44 – { feuilleton }

‘Hallucination’ fish netted in English Channel

‘Hallucination’ fish netted in English Channel | Mediterranean Sarpa salpa, said to cause LSD-like effects, turns up off Cornwall.

Demon rum leads to heroin

Or the temptations of Uncle Sam… An editorial cartoon from 1919 by Oliver Herford (1863–1935) showing how the nonsense argument of “X leads to Y” goes back a long way. These imps are more silly than frightening, Herford should have used this as the starting point for a comic strip: Rum Demon and the Narcotics.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Smoke
• Seamen in great distress eat one another
• Hep cats
• German opium smokers, 1900

Ropetackle Golden Ale

The last of the current round of new work updates is a beer label design for the Adur Brewery. The company specialises in bespoke brews and so commissions labels for each new ale. This one will be sold exclusively at the Ropetackle Arts Centre in Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex. If anyone sees a bottle in the wild this summer, send me a photo and I’ll post it here.

Update: Andy at Adur Brewery tells me that the beer isn’t exclusive to the Ropetackle Centre but will be sold elsewhere. Cases are already being sent out.

Austin Spare absinthe

An Austin Spare pastel (?), Astral Body and Ghost, from the collection of Cyclobe‘s Ossian Brown adorns the label of this edition of Absinthe Brevans. Would the artist approve? Do we have to ask? He spent much of his life haunting pubs and I’d be very surprised if he hadn’t tried absinthe when he was a young Decadent. Absinthe Brevans A.O. Spare is €35 from Absinthe.de.

Via Further.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists
• Absinthe girls
• Austin Spare’s Behind the Veil
• 8 out of 10 cats prefer absinthe
• Austin Osman Spare

Particle physics

It’s perhaps fitting that in the same week (almost the same day) that the Large Hadron Collider was finally switched on, Apple should release iTunes v. 8.0. The improved Visualizer for this application generates patterns not so far removed from the graphics created to explain quantum interactions or cosmic motion. (And while we’re discussing quantum events, let’s not forget this.)

I enthused last year about the Jelly setting of the Visualizer but these new graphics are a step—a quantum leap, even—beyond that, with a variety of spinning orbs and glowing lights which shoot out streams of sparks and flares of colour. Variations can be had by pressing the M key which cycles through the settings. The abstract fish and/or spermatozoa are especially impressive the way they charge around the screen while their world revolves in three dimensions. If Jelly makes you feel like you’re on drugs, watching these new effects reacting in time to some suitably contemporary music—Aerial by 2562, for instance—makes me feel for once that I’m living in the future I expected to find this side of the year 2000.

• Nature explains what the LHC has actually been built for.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Aerial by 2562
• From LSD to OSX
• iTunes 7