I’ve been pretty preoccupied posting about music lately and I haven’t touched on anything truly diabolical or bizarre since the release of the JFK files back in November. Luckily, there seems to be no end to tales of the otherworldly and just this weekend I stumbled across a story about a woman I’d never heard of before. Her tale involves antique alien encounters, elements of the supernatural, seance trances, automatic writing, a Martian named Leopold, and a bizarre-looking written language of seemingly-cosmic origin.

Here’s a bit about Helen Smith from the Wiki…

Hélène Smith (real name Catherine-Elise Müller, December 9, 1861, Martigny – June 10, 1929, Geneva) was a famous late-19th century French medium. She was known as “the Muse of Automatic Writing” by the Surrealists, who viewed Smith as evidence of the power of the surreal, and a symbol of surrealist knowledge.[1] Late in life, Smith claimed to communicate with Martians, and to be a reincarnation of a Hindu princess and Marie Antoinette.

In 1900, Élise Müller became famous with the publication of Des Indes à la Planete Mars (“From India to the Planet Mars”) by Théodore Flournoy, Professor of Psychology at the University of Geneva. The medium and the psychologist remained very close until 1899, when “Des Indes à la planète Mars” was first published. The book documented her various series of experiences in terms of romantic cycles: the “Martian” cycle, “Ultramartian” cycle, “Hindu”, “Oriental”, and “royal” cycles.

Here’s a sample of Smith’s Martian writing…

In 1900, a certain Mrs. Jackson, a rich American spiritualist who was impressed by Müller, offered her a salary which would permit her to quit her job and dedicate herself to pursuing and documenting her experiences. Müller accepted and was able to continue with further cycles. She also began to paint her visions and particular religious images of Christ.

According to Cabinet Magazine…

Over the course of the next two decades, Smith gave fewer séances and devoted much of her time to painting. Eventually, this work too attracted significant attention, including that of André Breton and the Surrealists. At her death in 1929, nine years after Flournoy’s own passing, the Geneva Art Museum sponsored a retrospective of her work.14 In some ways, the shift away from a verbal and toward a visual medium itself constituted a new language for Smith…

Here are a few of her works…

Detail from Ultra-Martian landscape painted by Hélène Smith.

From the seven-part series “The Materialization of the Girl of Jaïrus” by Hélène Smith.

Here’s a short video from my YouTube channel with some more information about Smith. Was this remarkable woman in possession of magical powers or just gifted with a remarkable creative imagination?

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Taking a break from our spooky October posts here at the end of the month — we’ll let today’s merrymaking bring its own hard-earned scares — here’s a great little show from Canadian television that I stumbled upon the other day. Prisoners of Gravity was an interview show disguised as a pirate broadcast, covering all sorts of books, films and art through a countercultural lens to dazzling effect. The series aired 139 episodes over 5 seasons from 1989 to 1994. Here’s the word from the Wiki…

As established through a comic-strip montage opening sequence drawn by Ty Templeton, the premise held that a fan of speculative fiction becomes disturbed by news broadcasts describing the alarming state of the world and decides he must escape. He broadcasts his show each week from an orbiting space station. The show’s presentation was fully wrapped in its quirky premise, featuring on-screen graphics and background sounds to simulate a space station atmosphere, “using active, innovative cinematography to ease the visual boredom that often accompanies interviews with talking head(s).”

The week’s topic was introduced with a few opening thoughts before launching into various interview clips. In each episode, Rick would interview a number of authors and artists, along with filmmakers, animators, and the occasional futurist. Topics that were discussed ran the gamut: censorship, superheroes, humour, religion, fairy tales, Mars, cyberpunk, war, overpopulation, sex… Episodes were 30 minutes in length (having no commercial breaks on public television) and typically showcased six to fourteen interviewed creators alongside bridging commentary from Rick. Roughly six-hundred interviews were conducted and aired by the time the show’s run came to an end.

Prisoners has its own YouTube channel and this playlist is a bit chaotic so you’ll need to bounce around a bit to follow episode to episode. I’ve set the video in this post to start with the first segment of an episode that deals with racism because it dovetails so nicely with the recent news about Marvel’s upcoming Black Panther film. Here’s a bit about that from The Guardian…

The newly announced films are two-part Avengers sequel Infinity War and a Captain America movie called Civil War, alongside new film outings for Doctor Strange and – most interestingly – Black Panther.

The latter will be Marvel’s first lead black superhero, and it’s a breakthrough moment. The positioning of this ethnic minority as heroic – however tortured that heroism may likely be – is a valuable statement in this most high profile of US pop cultural products, in a year when the dominant media image of black men has been as subordinated to (often white) police.

My favorite thrill with this show comes at the beginning of every episode when it seems like a program called Second Nature goes to static and is “interrupted” by the program — so retro-meta I wanna roll around in back issues of Mondo 2000. Enjoy Prisoners of Gravity…

Stay Awake!

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This week: We’re a man down, but hunkier than ever, America goes gaga for molly, Art bell: we hardly knew thee … on satellite, Ikea CATastrophe, Mars barred, Did you father a child at a Megadeth concert?, and William Burroughs: Scientologist.

Personnel – Joe Nolan and Ken Eakins

[powerpress]

Links:

America finally notices MDMA – Link

Art Bell Cancelled – Link

IKEA let 100 cats loose in a store – Link

The Trouble with Mars (Space News) – Link

Chick gets knocked up at a Megadeth show, tries to find father on Craigslist – Link

William S. Burroughs – Scientologist! – Link – Link

Interludes:

Secret Chiefs 3, Lipps Inc

Stay Awake

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Music posts.