Plutonic Rainbows

I’m wrapping up the year with three new reads. First is Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, originally published in 1988. In it, three editors — jaded from reviewing too many outlandish manuscripts about mystics and the occult — hear a wild conspiracy theory from a peculiar colonel and decide to create their own elaborate plot by feeding random bits of information into a powerful computer. What starts as a lighthearted prank quickly spirals out of control: people begin dying, and the trio scrambles for answers.

Next is The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, first published in 1895. It’s a collection of short stories centered on a cryptic play that supposedly drives its readers insane — a seminal work in both occult and weird fiction circles.

Lastly, there’s The Great and Secret Show, which debuted in 1989. I’m not typically a fan of Clive Barker’s novels, but on a friend’s recommendation, I’ve decided to give this one a try.

Chinese startup DeepSeek has released DeepSeek-V3. According to the benchmarks they shared, this is now the most capable open-source large language model currently available. It even achieves performance comparable to leading closed-source models even though it was trained on a budget of just $5.6 million — a fraction of what major tech companies typically spend.

• DeepSeek-V3 was trained using just 2.8 million GPU hours, costing approximately $5.6 million — significantly less than competitors.

• The model achieves performance comparable to GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 on various benchmarks, particularly excelling in mathematics and coding tasks.

• The model's efficiency comes from innovative architecture and training techniques, including a novel approach to training called auxiliary-loss-free load balancing.

I managed to catch this new movie on Boxing Day. I’ve always been a huge admirer of this story — especially Werner Herzog’s 1979 adaptation. Keeping that film as my benchmark, I was pleasantly surprised by how excellent Robert Eggers’s new version turned out to be.

Matt Zoller Seitz at Roger Ebert.

Technically and logistically, this movie is an awesome achievement. The wind, the rain, and the darkness seem to do Nosferatu’s bidding. The force of the monster’s unknowable malevolence seems to distort the movie itself, making it shudder and break down. It’s made with the most modern filmmaking technology but feels like an artifact from another century, like one of those inscribed tablets that adventurers find in a tomb and insist on translating aloud even though there’s a drawing of a terrifying demon on it.

Many predictions suggest that AGI is approaching rapidly. OpenAI has announced that its upcoming model will be the first of its kind, with a planned release scheduled for the end of January 2025.

In no order, I found something of interest in all of these.

• Seefeel - Everything Squared

• Propaganda - Propaganda

• Actress - Statik

• mark s. williamson - folklore, facts & fables 1: seabirds

• Bibio - PHANTOM BRICKWORKS II

• Sarah Davachi and Dicky Bahto - Music For A Bellowing Room

• Wewrkbund - Skalpafloi

• Milan W. - Leave Another Day

• Chris & Cosey - Elemental 7

• Elizabeth Parker - Future Perfect

• Fennesz - Mosaic

This model, which has been in preview for a few months, is now finally available to users on a Plus subscription. Additionally, there is a new $200-per-month tier that offers unlimited requests, as well as access to GPT o1 Pro.

HBO has released the first episode of a new TV series that appears to be a sumptuous and lavish production with beautiful cinematography and stunning set design. It's too early to predict its success with viewers, as television audiences can be fickle. However, HBO clearly believes in its potential, judging by the significant investment made in the production.

I just picked up The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie by Richard Dawkins. The book is filled with fascinating examples of the power of Darwinian natural selection to build exquisite perfection, paradoxically accompanied by what look like gross blunders. Along the way, Dawkins dismantles influential criticisms of the 'gene's-eye-view' of life. And, to end with a provocative sting in the tail, the author asks there is a sense in which all our 'own' genes can be seen as a gigantic colony of cooperating viruses?

This latest work is a collaborative durational work by musician Sarah Davachi and filmmaker Dicky Bahto, both based in Los Angeles. With a performance/running time of three hours, it invites the audience to shift their concentration and perception through gradual changes in sound and image. This piece was originally commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and received its premiere performance in September 2023.

You need patience and concentration for this one. Davachi splits the lengthy piece into three parts, opening with tape-dubbed string loops that she almost imperceptibly intermingles with woolly, wavering synth drones. It's music that's made for the deepest possible listening, following in the stead of work by Pauline Oliveros, or arch minimalists Éliane Radigue and Phil Niblock. And although we've not seen Bahto's accompanying film, the sound gives us at least some indication of its direction: slow, secretive and ineffably elegant. Over the course of an hour, the first part delicately progresses, absorbing different tones and textures as it grows. The solemn strings eventually disappear completely, and barely audible organ phrases appear in the far distance, suspended beneath Davachi's almost choral drones.

The second act is even more haunted, initially a soft-edged palpitation made from lower-case oscillations that twists and turns, heaving into the breathy middle section where Davachi introduces brassier, more hypnotic sounds. Warmed up by tape-y saturation, the pliant drones beat and throb with microscopic complexity, taking their time to excite quieted rhythms that only emerge after a listen or two. Eventually, the moody string loops that appeared at the beginning of the first segment seem to make a slight return, warbling into the foggy synths.

And it's these grazed, ferric murmurs that introduce us to 'Part III', in time joined by giddy resonant whirrs that almost overrun the entire spectrum. Davachi offers obscured callbacks to the rest of the piece throughout, while retaining our attention with swooning mesmeric tweaks and textures. In the central section, she almost creates an orchestral swell from her minimal electronic setup, and by its conclusion, drifts the composition towards the heavens with nebulous celestial wails.