What Year is This? It’s SecretSun16

Hints that ‘Planet Nine’ may exist on edge of our solar system 

Two astronomers say they have found evidence that a planet around 10 times the mass of Earth is lurking in the outer reaches of the solar system, on an orbit that comes no closer than 200 times the distance between the sun and Earth. Dubbed Planet Nine, it hasn’t been seen directly. Instead, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena have inferred its existence from the strange orbits of other, smaller bodies. 

Brown and others have continued to explore the Kuiper belt and have discovered many small bodies. One called 2012 VP113, which was discovered in 2014, raised the possibility of a large, distant planet, after astronomers realised its orbit was strangely aligned with a group of other objects.  

The art world has traditionally looked down on commercial artists and illustrators. The case of Kirby was especially problematic because he worked in a genre most critics consider juvenile, and worked at it with a deeply unfashionable lack of pretention. Sure, his work sells for tens of thousands of dollars per page, but mostly to fans, not serious people. 

Nevertheless, Kirby’s stock has been rising in academia as scholars recognize the contributions he has made to popular culture, and he has been the subject of several serious aesthetic critiques, group shows and retrospective exhibits. 

Last fall, Charles Hatfield, a Kirby scholar and professor at California State University Northridge, mounted a gallery show called The Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic Work of Jack Kirby, that made a strong claim for his groundbreaking aesthetics in the context of 20th century American Art. The show was thoughtfully reviewed in the current issue of Art in America. 

There is also a Kirby Museum project mounted by curators including Rand Hoppe, Tom Kraft and Mike Cecchini, which is seeking a physical home on New York’s Lower East Side (Kirby’s birthplace) for its collection of hundreds of Kirby original works.

Fox’s X-Files revival has controversial new theories 

Now we don’t want to reveal too much about the episode, or how the conspiracy relates to the show’s existing labyrinthine mythology. What we will report – and stop reading if you don’t want to know anything about the first hour – is that O’Malley eventually sways Mulder and Scully to adopt a new conspiracy that lays a framework for the six-episode revival. 

The theory involves global warming, war in the Middle East, NSA spying, chem-trails (here called “aerial contaminants”), police militarization, supposed FEMA prison camps, and the eventual military “takeover of America” by a UN-like group of “multinational elites.” The conspiracy theory plays a bit like Oliver Stone during his JFK fever pitch — only if his source material was Infowars instead of UFO lore.

The fact that many of the reviews make disparaging reviews about tinfoil hats and the rest of it (did any of these idiots ever watch the original series?) is surely coincidental.

UPDATE: In case the was any doubt was what is really going with the bad reviews, The New York Times puts it all to rest. Note they cite one of the lamest, most forgotten standalones as the show “at its best.” This is exactly what I was concerned about in March.

The show was at its best when its heroes investigated something very creepy — a ship on the Norwegian Sea whose crew mysteriously ages, for instance — and came up with more questions than answers. The real pleasure of “The X-Files” wasn’t having your worst fears about the government confirmed; it was realizing that our world might still contain phenomena that are unexplained, and perhaps unexplainable. 

We get flashes of this old spirit in the second and third episodes of the reboot. I hope the rest of the six-episode series continues in this vein, because watching TV heroes embrace conspiracy theories isn’t much fun when presidential candidates foster gun-confiscation paranoia and a 9/11 truther is campaigning for Donald Trump in Iowa.

Just to round out the buffet, we now find that Elizabeth Fraser, the Siren herself, is returning after 20 years of almost complete silence with a highly significant project– semiotically-speaking, that is.

Since disbanding her influential dream pop band, Cocteau Twins, Elizabeth Fraser has remained fairly quiet in the music world. Though she’s worked with artists including Massive Attack and released a pair of singles, her last full-length statement remains Cocteau Twins’ 1996 final album Milk and Kisses. Now Fraser has teamed with her husband Damon Reece for her most extensive project since then, as Loaded reports. 

The pair have composed an operatic score for the upcoming series Nightmare Worlds of H.G. Wells — a four-part mini-series set to debut on Sky Arts January 28. The consists of four adaptations of stories by H.G. Wells and includes performances by Michael Gambon, Ray Winstone and Rupert Graves. Watch the trailer below to hear some of Fraser and Reece’s score.