Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Revisiting Candle Cove

Does anyone remember this kid’s show? It was called Candle Cove and I must have been 6 or 7.

Read that example of discussion board forum as storytelling.  Be sure to read through mike_painter65's final post.

Done?  It's a Gothic short-short story, fearsome media with hints of Thomas Ligotti.

There's a comic strip riff, too.

Social media storytelling: apparently the Candle Cove idea spread around the social Web.  The author reflects on it hitting 4chan:

Candle Cove has entered a subset of the public subconsciousness, much in the way the characters were trying to figure out if it was real within the story. It’s almost as if Candle Cove is becoming real.

there's now a user-generated video sample, which is unsettling.

A rather bizarre episode of Candle Cove, a children's show which aired on a small uhf television station in Ashland, KY about 71 or 72. I contacted the old owners of the station and they loaned me the tape and asked me to digitize the episodes for them and said I could do whatever I wanted with them. This is the last episode and is very strange.

Sleep well.

(via MetaFilter)

Halloween musics

What music should you play this season?  Now that we've covered reading and watching, it's only fitting Infocult points to listening.

Artist Jon Coulthart offers a nice set of acoustic pleasures.  He starts with Rachmaninov and Bartók, then moves on to Xenakis, Ligeti, and Crumb.  I'm listening to Zorn's Necronomicon now.

(thanks to Tim Pendry via Facebook)

Oregon Equus

Today's real-life Gothic comes from rural Oregon, where a couple decided to get very close to a horse.  No, not zoophilically, but in a combination of necrophilia and animal fetishism with new media.

It's like something from Georges Bataille:

The 21-year-old woman told Washington County Sheriff’s Office detectives she wanted to “feel one” with a horse, according to a WCSO incident report.   
After the horse had been put down and gutted, the woman undressed and crawled inside the carcass of the dead horse and took pictures to prove it. 

Or perhaps 19th-century French horror:

In addition to the picture of the naked woman inside the horse, there are other photos, including one of the woman and her boyfriend holding what appears to be the horses’ heart. Another shot shows them holding a piece of the horse in front of their mouth – posing as they’re about to take a bite out of it...

The report veers towards decadence at one point:

Arguably the most artistic photo of the group is a picture of the naked 21-year-old, blood-soaked from head to toe, standing over the horse’s body she had just been inside.

To cleanse your palate, here's the classic dogs in elk story.

Infocult Halloween: Poe/Walken

Happy Halloween morning! You may start with Christopher Walken and Poe:

Open Culture also has another fine Poe item.

(thanks to Scott Hamlin via Twitter)