‘Feline Philosophy,’ out November 24 in US and Canada
 
“Epidemiology and microbiology are better guides to our future than any of our hopes or plans,” the philosopher John Gray wrote nearly 20 years ago in Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. Anyone who entered 2020 with hopes and plans has seen these words vividly illustrated.

Gray’s work makes a strong case that our species is incorrigibly irrational, and it raises questions about humanist beliefs that should be particularly important for those of us on the political left to consider. Among his books are False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, and Seven Types of Atheism.

In his latest, Feline Philosophy, Gray pursues the deep interest in the nonhuman world that makes his critique of humanism so sharp in fang and claw. Through his reading of Montaigne, Pascal, the Stoics and Epicureans, and Spinoza, as well as literary writers from Dr. Johnson to Mary Gaitskill, Gray considers what cats have to teach us about philosophy and the good life. As I write this, the hardcover edition of the book is #15 on Amazon’s “New Releases in Philosophy” list and #1 in “New Releases in Cat Care.”

John Gray answered a few of my questions about cats by email in October.
 

John Gray (photo by Justine Stoddart)
 
While Feline Philosophy returns to questions that will be familiar to readers of your work, it seems different in some ways from anything else you have published. How did you come to write this book?

I’ve been thinking of writing a book on cats for many years. I’ve always wondered what philosophy would be like if it wasn’t so human-centred. Among all the animals that have cohabited with humans cats resemble us least, so it seemed natural to ask what a feline philosophy would be like. My book is an attempt at answering this question, and tries to imagine how a feline creature equipped with powers of abstraction would think about death, ethics, the nature of love and the meaning of life.

The book is also an ode to cats, expressing my admiration for their life-affirming capacity for happiness and their courage in living their lives without distractions or consolations.

Do you live with cats? Have you always? Can you tell us about a particular cat you have known?

My wife and I lived with four cats over the past thirty years, two Burmese sisters and two Birman brothers. For some years they all lived contentedly together, until mortality began to take its toll on them. The last of them, Julian, died on Xmas Eve 2019 in his 23rd year. He was perhaps the most tranquil of all four, and even when old and a little frail seemed to enjoy every hour of his life.

The most companionable was Sophie, who passed away at the age of 13 around seventeen years ago. She was extraordinarily intelligent and extremely subtle in her insight into the human mind, and very loving.

Why don’t cats share humans’ concern with making the world a better place?

Because they are happy. Wanting to improve the world is a displacement of the impulse to improve yourself. But cats are not inwardly divided as humans tend to be, and don’t want to be anything other than what they already are, so the idea of improving the world doesn’t occur to them. If it did, I suspect they would dismiss it as an uninteresting fantasy.

Your writing often deals with distressing truths about human beings, such as their capacity for cruelty and self-delusion. It can be upsetting. But I read Feline Philosophy with a feeling of serenity, which I attribute to cats’ total incapacity for cruelty or self-delusion. Does contemplating cats provide you relief from thinking about human affairs?

Cats are a window looking out of the human world, so I suppose that’s one reason I love being with them. I think they also help me look at the human world as if from their eyes, with tranquil detachment and a certain incredulity.

Do you know of any works of art that plausibly represent the mental experience of cats, or any other nonhuman animals?

I don’t know of any art works that capture the mental experience of cats. Whether literary or visual, they would be very difficult to produce. There are some books that try to enter into the inner world of dogs, the best of which seems to me to be Sirius (1944) by the British science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon. Perhaps the most brilliant book I know that tries to enter into a nonhuman mind is the Polish writer Andrzej Zaniewski’s Rat (1994).

You suggest that cats’ independence arouses envy and hatred in the people who torture them. Is this a culturally specific diagnosis, or do you think all cat torturers share these motives?

By no means all unhappy people hate and envy cats, but I think pretty well all of those who do are unhappy. That seems to be a universal truth.

I was surprised to learn recently that one of my closest friends, who is a committed vegan and supporter of animal rights, is a cat-hater. When I asked him why, he talked about his love of birds. Can there be meaningful ethical standards for nonhuman animals’ behavior?

I can’t speculate as to why your friend feels as he does, but it may be the innocence with which cats kill and devour other living things that offends him. Perhaps he’d like the natural world to conform to human values, which for me would be a kind of Hell.

I’m not persuaded that it is the well-being of birds that he cares about. Birds are also innocent killers, after all. The British writer J.A. Baker, who in his shamanistic masterpiece The Peregrine (1967), described ten years of his life attempting to inhabit the life of a falcon, loved the bird partly because it lived according to its nature as a predator.

The Cynics took their name from Diogenes’ epithet, “the dog.” Why haven’t any philosophers styled themselves after cats?

That’s a very good question. I don’t know a good answer, but possibly philosophers suspect that cats don’t need them.

As a reader of your work, I am very happy to have finally gotten a list of tips for living well from you. Are there any prescriptive philosophies that have helped you conduct your own life?

No, I can’t think of any prescriptive philosophies that have influenced me. In the early Seventies I met Isaiah Berlin, and talked with him regularly until his death in 1997. His value-pluralist philosophy of competing and often incommensurable values strengthened my suspicion of any strongly prescriptive ethics. In recent years I’ve been more and more influenced by Montaigne, whose scepticism about philosophy as a guide to life appeals to me greatly.

My ten feline hints for living well are of course meant playfully, as examples of feline philosophy. But they might not do much harm if taken seriously.

Feline Philosophy, already out in the UK, will be published in the US and Canada on November 24.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
DM talks ‘Godless Mysticism’ with John Gray, the world’s Greatest Living Philosopher

 
Freddie Mercury had many loves in his life. One of his big passions was his love of cats. Mercury so loved cats he was once described as “rock’s greatest lover of cats.” According to his last partner (and the man he called his “husband”) Jim Hutton, Mercury “treated cats like his own children.”

He would constantly fuss over them, and if any of them came to any harm when Freddie was away, heaven help us. During the day the cats had the run of the house and grounds, and at night one of us would round them up and bring them inside.

When on tour, or away recording, Mercury regularly phoned home to speak to his beloved felines. During his lifetime, Mercury had ten cats starting in the seventies with Tom and Jerry (who he shared with the woman Mercury described as his “common-law wife” Mary Austin), Tiffany (a present from Austin), and then a cluster of cats (Delilah, Dorothy, Goliath, Lily, Miko, Oscar and Romeo) who he shared with Hutton at their home in Garden Lodge, Logan Mews, London. As Hutton later wrote in his memoir Mercury and Me, Mercury’s favorite feline was his calico cat named Delilah:

Of all the cats at Garden Lodge, Delilah was Freddie’s favourite and the one he’d pick up and stroke the most often. When Freddie went to bed, it was Delilah he brought with us. She’d sleep at the foot of the bed, before slipping out for a night-time prowl around Garden Lodge.

Delilah was a spoilt cat and depended on Freddie for everything, even protection from the other cats. They would gang up on her and she would run into our bedroom—it was a cat sanctuary, In many ways the cats were Freddie’s children, and we all thought of them that way. The slightest feline sneeze or twitch and he’d send them off to the vet for a check-up. And we were old-fashioned when it came to having to have sex in total privacy. Whenever Freddie and I jumped in the bedroom to make love, he would always ensure that none of the cats were watching.

Mercury dedicated his solo album Mr. Bad Guy (1985) “to my cat Jerry—also Tom, Oscar, and Tiffany, and all the cat lovers across the universe—screw everybody else!” and so loved Delilah that he wrote a song about her on Queen’s Innuendo album in 1991:

Delilah, Delilah, oh my, oh my, oh my - you’re irresistible
You make me smile when I’m just about to cry
You bring me hope, you make me laugh - and I like it
You get away with murder, so innocent
But when you throw a moody you’re all claws and you bite

Delilah once peed all over Mercury’s Chippendale suite—something that apparently happened quite often with all of the cats on other fixtures and furnishings. Not everyone in Queen was so enamored by Mercury’s song to a cat, drummer Roger Taylor claimed he “hated it.”

Before he died in 1991, Mercury told one journalist he planned to leave everything to “Mary and the cats.” And here are some of those little darlings who outlived Freddie and inherited his wealth.
 

Jerry.
 

Romeo.
 

Oscar.
 
More of Freddie’s furry feline friends, after the jump…
 

 
Kenji Yanobe is a Japanese sculptor who has isolated a fascinating niche for himself. Inspired by the Cold War nuclear nightmares of Japanese kaiju cinema, he has in the past focused on huge statues of robots wearing brightly colored hazmat suits and his work also has been known to incorporate actual geiger counters. Some have called his work “cynical,” and when the subject comes up he tends to switch the parameter to “humor.” But somehow, actual fear constitutes the core impetus of his work. Yanobe has said, “I worry about things. I’m constantly thinking about people’s happiness.”

Yanobe has been identified as a member of the “Otaku Generation,” which consists of Japanese kids who grew up in the 1970s consuming robot shows, animated TV shows and movies, and comic books. Wikipedia refers to his art as “upbeat yet nightmarish,” which is definitely a cool place to be. For eighty bucks you can buy a curious keychain of a Yanobe person wearing yellow protective gear and a Hitler mustache. There are also a bunch of books about Yanobe.

“Ship’s Cat,” the artists most recent project, recalls his earlier work but with a patina of heroism and idealism. There’s another way to describe the new statues: they depict enormous cats wearing helmets, and that is awesome.
 

Yanobe at work on one of his feline creations
 
As far as I can tell, all of them are public artworks intended to be interacted with by the public; none of them are in a museum. The first one was installed as part of the glass entryway at the We Base hostel in Hakata, which is known as Japan’s oldest port town. Two of them are at the Tsutaya Books within the Ginza Six department store, and one of them is perched atop Nihonmatsu Castle in the northern Fukushima Prefecture.

The inspiration for the works comes from the centuries-old tradition of bringing a cat as a crew member for trips on oceangoing vessels, whether for trading, exploration, or military purposes. Cats have long been regarded as useful onboard ships because of their penchant for chasing mice and rats, which not only cause damage in ropes and wires but also are dangerous disease carriers.

Over time, as in bookstores, hostels, and communes the world over, cats became an accepted and even beloved part of the experience of working on a ship. Yanobe has drawn inspiration from these noble felines, leading him to create oversized sculptures of cats wearing protective gear and helmets.

An excellent touch is that the cat’s eyes light up at night.
 
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More pics and a video after the jump…..
 

Purr Division—‘Unknown Whiskers.’
 
Cats on the covers of your favorite music—what’s not to like?

On those odd occasions when I finish reading the funnies and have nothing more practical to do, I like to ponder those big meaningful questions of life like what happens to all those sites and pages that grab their fifteen minutes and then disappear just as quickly (or are lost in the mix) as the next distraction claims its time?

Way back in 2011, musician, designer, record label CEO, and seller of vintage posters Alfra Martini seemed to be everywhere when her blog The Kitten Covers made (literally) international headlines.

Martini’s blog was a simple idea that came to her in a “fever dream.” It was also, apparently, inspired by that famous painting of dogs playing poker around a green baize table. Her idea was to recreate classic album covers with cute little furry felines. Martini’s first attempt was the cover of a David Bowie album which (understandably) impressed her boyfriend and everyone else who saw it. A meme was born, shall we say, and those first album covers were shared far and wide. Then there came the media coverage and even an interview or two.

But then what?

Martini continued making her covers with cats but all that fame and frenzy (and maybe I’m wrong here) seemed to slowly ebb away—or maybe I stopped paying attention. Which is a shame, as some of Martini’s best Kitten Covers came after the big-fifteen minute fame bubble of 2011. Maybe a lack of interest or a lack of time led Martini to stop making her kitty covers in 2016—or maybe she’s having a sabbatical away from such creative fun, I dunno. Whichever, here are some of the choice Kitten Covers you may have missed.
 

The K-52s.
 

Meowerhead—‘Ace of Spayeds.’
 

The Jesus and Meowy Chain—‘Psycho Catty.’
 

KWA—‘Straight Outta Cat Town.’
 
More cat covers, after the jump…
 

 
If you have a cat then you know you’re in thrall to that little furball pussy-paws. Your cat rules your life and only lets you live because you feed it, empty its litter tray, and sometimes you can be quite amusing like a smelly old court jester telling fart jokes. You know your place. And so does your goddam cat. So isn’t it time you just admit who’s boss in your household? Who’s the veritable Regent of all it surveys? And give your cutesy cat god the throne it deserves like maybe the one from Game of Thrones?

Made for Pets make “pet furniture” for your favorite feline (or even canine) to snuggle-up in. Among the many designs on offer is this “Iron Throne” cat bed as inspired by the hit book and TV series Game of Thrones. It’s a bit pricey at around $200 (£158.64) but if you love your cat and you know it’s really the protector of the realm, the top feline of all the Seven Kingdoms, etc. etc. etc. then you know damn fine your kitty deserves its very own Iron Throne. See details here.
 

 

 
Inspect more of your cats new bed, after the jump…
 

 
These may not be particularly original observations, but two things are true of cats—they find more of interest in our houses than we do, and they’d be happier still living in labyrinths of cat-sized Habitrail tubes. But what if there was a middle option—what if you needed a human house decked out entirely for the comfort and enjoyment of cats?

If you’re OK with living on the outskirts of Nowheresville By God Arizona, you’re covered.

A property for sale at 669 Stanford Drive (Country Road 8235) in unincorporated Concho, AZ, is convenient to expanses of hot dirt and little else. But you’re not moving here to be right in the mix, you’re here for your furbabies (and if you unironically call your pets that I’m not 100% sure we can be friends). Every room in the place is essentially Pee-wee’s Playhouse for cats. I’m powerless to further describe the 2,500 sqft of eyebleedy cat toy that is this house, I can only let the realtor’s photos do the talking.

See the effects of untreated toxoplasmosis on the human mind, after the jump…

”All that scratchin’ is making me itch!”

Anyone can become DJ nowadays. All you need is two turntables, a mixer, and a stack of club music singles (or a USB stick). Today it was announced that actor Vin Diesel was working on his career in EDM, so clearly anyone can do it. Even a puddycat.

Thanks to the internet’s love of anthropomorphic puns and a general lacking of musicianship elsewhere in the animal kingdom, now your feline friend can become the next Grandmaster Flash with this cat scratching DJ deck from the fine folks at Suck UK. Modeled after the Technics 1200, the weapon-of-choice among many vinyl DJs, the cardboard kit features a spinning, “scratchable” deck and moveable tone arm. In no time whatsoever, your kitty will be scratching, scrubbing, tearing, and scribbling like your own fuzzy lil’ DJ Jazzy Jeff.
 

 

 
The set is on sale right now for $24 on Amazon. If your cat is more of a bedroom house producer, they also carry a laptop scratch pad with a customizable desktop background.
 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Trump, Putin and Obama cat scratching posts
‘Dictator’ cat scratch posts and litter boxes
Attention Brooklyn hipsters: Isn’t it about time your toddler learned to scratch records like a pro?
DJ Jazzy Jay and Afrika Bambaataa: How to scratch

 
Kazuaki Horitomo is a gifted tattoo artist who also loves cats. A Japanese native currently making his home in California, Horitomo has chosen to make cat tattoos his specialty—not just tattoos of cats but images of cats with tattoos and also cats giving each other tattoos. They’re kind of awesome. (I suppose for the purposes of this imaginative pursuit, the inconvenient fact of a cat’s fur is a detail better left unmentioned.)

Horitomo cleverly draws on Japanese artistic traditions of the kakejiku (hanging scrolls) or ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) stretching back centuries. You can almost imagine his cats giving each other tattoos in the court of Emperor Go-Sai during the Edo period (1655–1663).

The tattooing technique Horitomo prefers is known as tebori, an ancient method of tattoo art that does not employ the needles of an electric tattoo machine, as in contemporary western practice, but rather makes use of long tapered instruments similar to a straight razor; some styles of tebori blade resemble screwdrivers. One of the cats in the images below has a tebori blade in his or her mouth.

Horitomo’s calls his creatures “monmon cats,” using the term monmon, an old Japanese slang word for tattoos. You can buy Monmon Cats, his recent book of cat tattoos, or check out his regularly updated Instagram feed (which—fair warning—also features some tattoo’d dogs). Prints are available here.
 

 

 
Much more after the jump…....

 
Edison’s early experiments in film were often pretty scandalous even by today’s standards. There was the time he recorded his favorite body-building stripper, rather gracelessly disrobing upon the trapeze, right down to her massive Victorian underwear. There was also Chinese Opium Den, from which only one frame survives, but you can guess the content. There’s even the time he filmed himself electrocuting Topsy the elephant. So you have sex, drugs and violence, all right there at the beginning of cinema.

Edison really knew what the public wanted, so obviously he made a cat video!

In 1894 Edison filmed “Boxing Cats” at his Black Maria Studio, the charming results of which you see here. Why boxing cats? The Library of Congress explains that this was a relatively popular form of live entertainment for the time:

“The performance was part of Professor Henry Welton’s ‘cat circus,’ which toured the United States both before and after appearing in Edison’s film. Performances included cats riding small bicycles and doing somersaults, with the boxing match being the highlight of the show.”

The Library of Congress’s summary of the film is just “A very interesting and amusing subject.” Can’t argue with that!
 

 
Via Public Domain Review

 
I had no idea LiarTown USA actually had products you can buy! Like these Social Justice Kittens postcards created by LiarTown USA’s Sean Tejaratchi. They come in a set of 12 and are on pre-order for $12 through the Reading Frenzy website. The postcards will be released on May 6th.

We’ve blogged about LiarTown USA before here on Dangerous Minds. If you’re not familiar with the site and Tejaratchi’s work, here’s the link.

 
via Boing Boing

 
We’ve blogged about political leaders cat scratching posts before here on DM. Awesome, yes, but the problem with them was the price! Each one was selling for £4,500.00 a pop! That’s nuts! (At least it’s not practical).

If you just gotta have one, there’s a more affordable option: Politikats’ Trump, Putin and Obama cat scratching posts! So far they’re only prototypes and it’s on Kickstarter, but if Politikats’ make their goal, each one will retail for around $139.00. Not too bad.

My only complaint is that The Donald’s signature combover could be a bit more extreme. Also, he’s not orange enough. Or mean looking enough.

Having said that, I’d really love to see my cat tear the shit out of Donald Trump. She’d show him who was the pussy.

 
Okay folks, this post is going to be short and sweet. It ain’t about the words here, friends, it’s about THE TRIPPIEST CAT VIDEO ON THE ENTIRE INTERNET.

“That’s a rather subjective opinion,” you say? But is it really?

Nope! There is no competition. When you click play on the video below, you’ll surely be obliged to agree that it’s hands down THE TRIPPIEST CAT VIDEO ON THE ENTIRE INTERNET.

Because it just is.
 

 
For one thing, it’s probably the single highest-budgeted trippy cat video to be found on all of YouTube, at least one that wasn’t originally made as a TV commercial. Obviously shot on 35mm film, the clip is taken from the Walt Disney movie The Three Lives of Thomasina, which starred Patrick McGoohan, yes he of The Prisoner fame (and director of the rock and roll Othello movie, Catch My Soul). McGoohan plays a bitter widower, a brusque veterinarian who has lost his faith in God after his wife’s death, and been left with raising a young daughter. He does something altogether stupid, which I won’t go into here, that results in her pet cat dying and then we see this kitty’s amazing journey to a wonderful cat heaven.

 
The 1963 film was based on Paul Gallico’s novel Thomasina, the Cat Who Thought She Was God and directed by Don Chaffey, who directed the classic fantasy film Jason and the Argonauts (featuring the stop-motion animation of the great Ray Harryhausen) that same year.

Since all of the felines in this cat heaven are Siamese—sitting at the feet of Bastet, a nice detail—does this mean that Siamese cats are supposed to be like cat angels?

Who knows? Who cares? THIS IS THE TRIPPIEST CAT VIDEO ON THE ENTIRE INTERNET. Just hit play!

The VO here is in Italian, but this is the best quality clip of this on YouTube that I could find and it’s all about the visuals anyway. If you want to hear the VO in English—it’s Thomasina’s “inner voice” describing the heavenward journey “towards the light” and then getting sent back to Earth because it was only her first life (we all know how many lives cats get)—you can listen here.
 

 
H/T Ann Magnuson/Matthew Amato

 
I never saw myself writing “badass” and “cat” in the same sentence, but these are some seriously cool cat motorcycle helmets straight out of Russia. I dig the one that looks like an extra evil Cheshire Cat with that devilish grin. That helmet looks like it ain’t gonna take no shit.

The Neko helmets come in 12 different designs and are made by Russian company Nitrinos. The prices can range anywhere from $495 to $595 depending on which style you want.

I’m sure these things have been crash tested, but I wonder how the impact with the ears on the helmet affect the human skull? Is it safe? Perhaps I’m overthinking this?

 

 

 
More after the jump…
 

 
We live in an age where the majority of world knowledge is accessible via a few keystrokes. It’s truly an amazing time wherein the Internet grants us nearly limitless access to the full wisdom of recorded human history and thought.

But more often than not, we just want to look at cute animal pix.

Tumblr page Animals in Punk Vests, home to only the punkest furbabies, is our supplier today. The collected philosophies of the great thinkers of the modern world will have to wait. We have animals in punk vests.

Punx is doggies.

Punx is kitties.

And don’t overlook their friends the punk rat and the skinhead cat…
 

 

 

 
More Animals in Punk Vests after the jump…

3D printed cat panties
 
If you’ve been on the Internet at all, then you are likely aware that cats OWN IT. From clothes to memes, it’s all about, ahem, pussy.

So it should be of no particular surprise to you that just in time for the holidays, you can purchase cheeky panties with an eerily lifelike 3D image of a cat peering out from the crotch for the various crazy cat ladies in your life. A three-pack of the printed pussy panties will run you about $13 bucks and one single panty will run you anywhere from $2.99 to $5.99, depending on the vendor. Because nothing quite says “I am the queen of crazy cat ladies” like a pussy on your crotch, AMIRITE? 
 

 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The ultimate granny panties: Yep, there’s a 4 pack of ‘Golden Girls’ underwear