James R.

Cumberland blue

Nice to be able to report that Cumberland City Council undid a bit of stupidity it enacted last week:

A controversial ban on same-sex parenting books at libraries in part of western Sydney has been overturned at a marathon late-night meeting after large crowds of protesters clashed outside the council chambers.
Cumberland city councillors voted 13-2 in front of a crowded public gallery on Wednesday night to revoke the ban, two weeks after it was introduced.
The council’s u-turn followed a widespread backlash and a warning from the NSW government that Cumberland risked losing its library funding.
Councillors narrowly voted on 1 May to “take immediate action to rid same-sex parents books/materials in council’s library service”. During the meeting, the councillor who put forward the motion, former mayor Steve Christou, brandished a book he alleged had received “really disturbing” constituent complaints, saying parents were “distraught” to see the book, A Focus On: Same-Sex Parents by Holly Duhig, displayed on a shelf in the children’s section of the library.
At a fiery meeting on Wednesday, Christou attempted to have same-sex parenting books restricted to the adults’ section of the library.
When that failed, his Our Local Community party colleague Paul Garrard tried to have the same restriction placed just on Duhig’s book.
Ultimately, all but two councillors supported a motion put forward by Labor’s Kun Huang to reverse the ban and ensure all books were catalogued according to national library guidelines, including having Duhig’s book in the junior non-fiction section.
Eddy Sarkis was the only councillor who supported Christou.
Labor councillor Mohamad Hussein, who had voted for the ban originally, changed his vote at the last minute. Hussein declined to comment when asked by journalists why he had changed his mind.

Notably, the 15 council members who voted tonight were more numerous than those who voted for the ban, cos there were only 11 councillors there that time. Almost like Christou, a far-right shit of several years’ standing, was exploiting the other four’s absence to make it easier to push his ban through or something. Anyway, the grand plan came undone and a bit of sense prevailed for once; Christou succeeded in getting drag queen story time events banned at Cumberland libraries despite the fact that none were planned and none had indeed ever happened in the first place, so I quite like seeing him be told to go fuck himself in this fashion.

Shannon Molloy at News, on the other hand, had an interesting take on the affair; after describing a couple of books full of horrors, he makes this “shocking” revelation:

I’m talking about the Bible and the Quran, of course.
If we’re applying Cumberland City councillor Steve Christou’s same logic about what’s appropriate in a library, then surely those holy books have to go too.
Mr Christou’s opposition to a book about kids with two mums or two dads was to prevent the “sexualisation” of children.
The book in question isn’t remotely sexual. It’s about families.
If Mr Christou is really, truly concerned about the welfare of children and saving them from content that’s inappropriate, he mustn’t waste any time.
He should immediately call a vote of the council and push for the removal of the Bible and Quran from Cumberland’s libraries.
To not do so would expose shocking double standards, which I’m sure he doesn’t hold.
Of course, I’m being facetious.
I’m gay, but I’m also a Christian with a deep fondness for the teachings of Christ. I’m in favour of the freedom of religious practice, no matter the brand of one’s faith.
But the metaphor I’ve used here shows how absurd and hypocritical Mr Christou and the council’s book ban is.
It also demonstrates that censorship – which flies in the face of an open and free society and the democratic values we hold dear – is a very slippery slope.

I don’t know why, but I feel like brother Shannon wouldn’t actually be that bothered if the Qur’an did get pulled from libraries…

Anyway, according to Leo Puglisi on Twitter (yes, I KNOW what I said in the last post; I saw this bit earlier before it went to shit), the book in question has apparently been borrowed ONCE in the five or so years that it’s been in the Cumberland library system. It’s so dangerous that hardly anyone’s read it… and, funnily enough, Steve Christou himself had to admit to being among its millions of non-readers. Because OBVIOUSLY. The only thing I worry about in all this is that the silly cunt might look at all this bullshit and decide he needs to up his homophobia game. Or maybe he’ll just go back to racism. I don’t want to say anything more in case I give him ideas.

Worth a thousand words?

Gina Rinehart demands National Gallery of Australia remove her portrait

The mining billionaire Gina Rinehart has demanded the National Gallery of Australia remove her portrait from an exhibition by the award-winning artist Vincent Namatjira.
The image, arguably an unflattering picture of Australia’s richest woman, is one of many portraits unveiled at the Canberra gallery as part of the Archibald prize-winning artist’s first major survey exhibition.
The National Gallery has rebuffed efforts to have the picture taken down and said in a statement that it welcomed public dialogue on its collection and displays.

I can’t say that I don’t entirely see Gina’s point, cos it’s really not flattering to her… but by the same token she’s also one of the worst people in Australia, so we may ask if she deserved a flattering portrait in the first place.

Talking of portraits…

…Chuckles has unveiled his, and… it’s… red?

Jonathon Yeo was chosen to do the portrait – he’s done paintings of lots of other famous figures, including Sir David Attenborough and Malala Yousafzai.
The artist said he wanted to make a break with the past. This means he wanted to paint something slightly different to other, more traditional paintings of monarchs.
This is why he used a bright red colour throughout the painting.

The portrait seems to have drawn mixed reviews (though his kingship seems satisfied with it). I… kind of like it? I suspect my mum would’ve hated it, but I do think it’s interesting at least. However, Nigel Farage says he likes it too, so I don’t know how to feel about that…

I saw the shite

By way of contrast with that Wipers album, I also listened to this last night:

I’ve left the album art at full size cos I do think it is pretty cool, and is much the best thing about the record. Todd Rundgren’s Initiation from 1975, infamous at the time for being one of the longest single LPs ever, running some 68 minutes in total; the record was so delicate as a result that the album actually came with the advice to, more or less immediately, change your turntable needle and record the thing onto tape and listen to it that way rather than risk damaging the record.

I’d read about this album many years ago, noting the extreme length and how the whole of side two was occupied by one 35-minute instrumental track. And I’d read about Rundgren in various books, and he always seemed like the sort of person whose work I should find interesting… but I never actually knowingly heard anything by him apart from “Can We Still Be Friends” until I listened to Something/Anything a few years ago. I… kind of hated it. I can’t remember if I even played the whole thing before quitting it.

I definitely didn’t finish Initiation, finally having had more than enough about six minutes into the instrumental side. FUCK this record. I REALLY hate this. Generally overplayed and overdone, and there’s an accent Rundgren sings in for some parts of the song “Eastern Intrigue” that, frankly, came over as kind of racist. It may be one of those records that needs multiple listens to properly absorb, but I rather doubt I’d actually gain anything from doing that. Like I said, I always felt like Rundgren sounded like someone I should be interested in… but I think this might be the last time I try anything by him.

Important images 49

Nudity? Well, we’ve kind of got shirtless Sylvester Stallone in his X-rated film, and the Pioneer plaque… also a couple of shirtless Stooges, though at least Scott keeps his jacket on and you can barely see him anyway…

Continue reading “Important images 49”

It is time we rectify this now

Kind of rediscovered Wipers’ Youth of America recently after I found this video of them performing the title track live in 1983:

And so that brought me back to the album, which is great:

Released in 1981 at the peak of the early hardcore scene, when hardcore was positing itself as the “real” thing reacting against “normal” punk and new wave, Youth of America was a further reaction against that: six songs in 30 minutes rather than 30 songs in six minutes, and the title track clocks in over 10 minutes. It’s borderline prog by comparison with, say, Minor Threat or early Husker Du (whose Land Speed Record was even shorter but had 17 songs). Great stuff. I’ve seen Greg Sage characterised as a sort of punk Hendrix, which he demurs in interviews but I don’t think it’s entirely wrong.

The thing that puzzles me, though, is that when Sage reissued it in the Wipers box set, he switched the sides round. I don’t know why, and obviously it was his prerogative to do that, “When It’s Over” still makes a good album closer… it’s just that the title track makes a better one. It’s the sort of epic guitar burnout that feels like a natural final track for an album or a live set closer.

New Who, then…

Fuck the haters, I LIKED “Space Babies” (though I will concede it’s probably the worst episode title since “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship”). The consensus on Bluesky appears to boil down to “Ncuti & Mille great, otherwise WTF” (I don’t know what the consensus on Twitter is, but I presume it’s something like “ugh, darky poofter”), so I was more curious than usual to see it… and I kind of agree with some who said it was an odd choice of story to kick off the new series, but fuck it, I had a ton of fun with it. Babies running a space station is quite an idea, and people seem to be going on about it as if the show’s never done this sort of conceptual weirdness ever before… cos the fucking Land of Fiction back in 1968 was the very apex of hard SF, wasn’t it?Whatever, I enjoyed the thing.

As for “The Devil’s Chord”, consensus on Bluesky before I downloaded the episodes was “one of the best episodes ever but why couldn’t they get actual Beatles music”… quite apart from what would’ve been the ludicrous expense of such a thing, the point of the story, of course, was that there WAS no Beatles music, or any music at all in this version of 1963. Probably not even John Smith and The Common Men. The main debate about the episode seems to be was Jinkx Monsoon riotously over the top as the villain Maestro in a good way or bad way; I’m inclined to the former though it certainly is an extreme performance…

…but if you could watch “The Happiness Patrol” and accept THIS fucking thing, as we did back in 1988, well…

Anyway, as I also said, pretty much everyone seems to agree on Ncuti and Millie and so do I. Both terrific. I said of his first appearance in “The Church on Ruby Road” that he WAS the Doctor immediately, and he continues to be. No doubts about him as the Doctor whatsoever. And I like the idea that this Doctor has finally cast off the self-loathing that has kind of plagued the entire series since 2005:

RIP Roger

This one hurts. I know that, in his own way, Corman was as much of a production-line churn-’em’out factory as any of the actual Hollywood majors, and frankly the quality of the movies he oversaw was generally probably questionable at best, but so many people in the American film industry from the 60s onwards started out in the “Roger Corman Film School” that the face of Hollywood would’ve looked vastly different without him. I mean, some of those figures may have made it by themselves, but what if they didn’t? No Coppola, no Scorsese, no Jack Nicholson, no Ron Howard, no James Cameron, no Robert Towne, no James Horner… lots of Big Hollywood just never happens. So yeah, this is a sad one; Corman was just there for so long—in a bit over a week’s time it will, in fact, be 70 years since his first film (as producer), Monster From the Ocean Floor, came out—that, even though you knew he couldn’t last forever, it’s still a shock somehow. Still, no one will ever accuse him of not having lived his life to the fullest… this is Dark Corners Review’s look back at that life from about a year ago:

Jack’s off

It was news to me that Jack Dorsey was still part of Bluesky until a few days ago, cos I could’ve sworn he’d actually left it a while ago (apparently that was just him deleting his account, not leaving the company), but never mind that. He’s out for real now and not just in my fevered imagination, and here’s why, apparently:

Jack Dorsey, the cofounder of Twitter, slammed the board that oversaw the social media firm during his tenure at its helm, saying the group had “always been a problem.”
“I was extremely challenged by my board,” Dorsey said during an interview published Thursday by Mike Solana, the head of marketing for VC firm Founders Fund and editor of digital media brand Pirate Wires.
“The board has always been a problem at that company, and I was happy to see it end,” Dorsey continued. “But there was only one way for it to end, which is going private. And I think that’s the greatest act.” […]
But Dorsey said he was also unhappy with the board because of an activist investor seeking to boot him, he said.
“I didn’t want to be on a board with an activist,” he said. I didn’t want to run a company like that. It’s just a Wall Street mess. It’s not creative, it’s diminishing.”

So now that Twitter is apparently much more like Beardo thought it should be, he’s recommending people use that instead of Bluesky, cos the latter’s become too much like what Twitter actually was:

This tool was designed such that it had, you know, it was a base level protocol. It had a reference app on top. It was designed to be controlled by the people. I think the greatest idea — which we need — is an algorithm store, where you choose how you see all the conversations. But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it.
That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that’s truly decentralized. It’s another app. It’s another app that’s just kind of following in Twitter’s footsteps, but for a different part of the population.

So people being asked not to be cunts on the Internet is the real problem? Of course it is… and I’ve seen a few folks on BS frown at his choice of the words “very common crowd” to describe the people migrating there, which is indeed a somewhat odd phrase I don’t think he explained or expanded on. Were we all not elite enough for him or something?

And fair enough, maybe some people are offering uncharitable interpretations of what he meant, but maybe explain to us why he used the word “common” instead of those others…

Anyway, though he’s boosting Shitter again (it’s “freedom technology”, apparently, as long as Oolong likes you), Jack’s real interest is Nostr. You know, the social network that only crypto bros like Jack seems to be into. I mean, have you ever seen Nostr mentioned in any other context? Cos sure as shit I haven’t. Who uses it? What do people do with it? Why do you never see anyone talking about it or quoting what people have said on it? And who is the guy who invented it? We don’t seem to know anything about him other than that he’s a developer from Brazil in his early 30s who fell in love with Bitcoin after falling in love with Austrian economics. Maybe it’s just me but I’d be hesitant to give millions of dollars to someone whose identity was unverifiable. Still, libertarians gonna liberty, I suppose…