James R.

Am I the baddie?

Yeah, a “life journey” all the way to the fucking Premiership of New South Wales…

So glorious leader (NSW branch) Dominic Perrottet made a somewhat extraordinary admission:

NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet has apologised after revealing he wore a Nazi costume to his 21st birthday party.
Mr Perrottet said he was “deeply ashamed” for wearing the uniform to a fancy dress party, saying it had caused him “much anxiety” through the course of his life.
He told a press conference in Sydney that he decided to come forward after receiving a phone call from a cabinet colleague two days ago.
“When I was 21, at my 21st fancy dress party, I wore a Nazi uniform,” he said. […]
Mr Perrottet said he was “not aware” of any photo depicting him in the uniform, denying the announcement was made to pre-empt any political attacks ahead of the March election.
“I thought this was important, that this is my truth, that I should be the one to explain that to the people of our state, not someone else,” he said. […]
The premier said he was “naive” at the time of the incident and “didn’t understand the significance of that decision”.
He said the party’s theme was “uniforms”.
“It was stupid,” Mr Perrottet said.
“It was just a terrible mistake where I, at that age in my life, I just did not understand the gravity and the hurt of what that uniform means to people, not just in our state, but around the country and around the world.” […]
Mr Perrottet said he acknowledged his “mistake” the day after the party, after his parents told him it was “wrong and insensitive”.
“It’s been something that I’ve had to carry with me for my life,” he said.

Dominic has been so haunted by his “mistake” that it’s taken him 19 years to admit to it, during which time he’s had a flourishing career as a Liberal politician in which he is currently the Premier of NSW. He would’ve turned 21 in 2003, only 58 years since the end of World War 2, and somehow he came to adulthood with apparently little understanding of what happened during that war and why cosplaying one of the Bad Guys from that war might be considered… inappropriate at best.

Continue reading “Am I the baddie?”

Cold shafts of broken glass

Some years ago I read biographies of the Beatles and Pink Floyd one after the other, and having finished the latter I remember thinking “gods, Pink Floyd look like grown adults next to the Fabs”. That said, the bullshit over the liner notes to the 2018 remix of Animals that meant it took four years to finally come out demonstrated that when all’s said and done Gilmour and Waters are still pissy little children at heart. Syd would’ve been more than usually bemused had he lived that long…

Anyway, I gave said remix another listen tonight… don’t know how great the differences are beyond one or two really obvious ones, more a case of the overall sound being kind of bigger and fuller. Works fine for me either way. Like Low, which came out only a week before this, it looks like a strange album to have appeared in 1977 when punk was starting to blossom, and yet, in its way, it was also about as punk as Pink Floyd could’ve got… also the point where they really turned into the Roger Waters Band; with Gilmour only contributing to one song and Wright not writing anything, Roger was running the show. Given how miserable the ensuing tour seems to have been for all involved (with Wright threatening to quit at one point), maybe the show should’ve stopped there? But then, of course, the misery of the experience gave Roger the idea for another album…

A sad story of not much interest

I can’t bring myself to be glad as such at a person’s death, cos I normally find that to be kind of ghoulish. But there are some people who I can’t be sad about either. The world is not poorer for their having left it. And I won’t judge people who *are* glad about that person’s death. And that’s all I’ll say about that.

Don’t you wonder sometimes

After listening to the live album the other day, I had to pull this out for another listen. I really didn’t get this the first time I heard it, though now I place it as my second favourite Dave album after Ziggy; but I was in good company in not getting it at first, cos in 1977 a bunch of critics (and his own record label) didn’t get it either. I don’t entirely blame them (though Charles Shaar Murray’s description of it as “an act of purest hatred and destructiveness” was kind of ludicrous), cos I suppose it was a fairly what-the-fuck album even in 1977, especially coming after Station to Station. Side two in particular must’ve seemed just alien. Somehow the thing was still popular once RCA grudgingly released it…

Splendid production and a quite remarkable range of sounds at work, and it’s got “Sound and Vision” on it, which is only one of his best singles (the remix of the latter on the Ryko issue of the album is less so, shall we say). And that drum sound. I know Steve Lillywhite and Hugh Padgham get the credit for gated reverb, and Visconti didn’t actually do gated reverb as such on Low, but that harmoniser box he did use came up with much the same effect.

Next stop: Christian cinema?

I might normally feel sorry for Gina Carano’s new film being a spectacular box office failure, but she’s a kind of atrocious person so I can only join in the chorus of laughter.

As a result of Carano’s return film’s $804 domestic gross, the actress received backlash on social media for her theatrical performance, with one user claiming that she “didn’t bring much to the role.” The user took to Twitter and shared his review of the film and wrote, “The movie wasn’t terrible, but it was very simple, and honestly Gina Carano didn’t bring much to the role. One time watch.” Another user wrote, “Sorry sad how she pissed away such potential to make boring schlock.” Another user quipped, “Gina caranos first big release post Mando exit.” One user said, “67 People paid to see the movie.” One user shared a meme and wrote, “”Go Woke Go Broke”

Bit curious as to why this is only getting attention now, cos the film came out about six months ago. Mind you, this is the first time I’m hearing about the film having been released; maybe if they’d advertised their film a bit more than they apparently did, more people might have watched it… or maybe not.

But the thing that took me by surprise was that this thing was directed by Michael Polish, whose career I haven’t exactly followed but I recalled him having received some acclaim for Twin Falls Idaho back at the end of the 90s, and I assumed he’d kind of maintained a respectable career… though looking at his Wiki entry, I may have been wrong about that; indeed he’s already got a Christian film to his, er, credit, and thus far he seems to have avoided falling back into that particular gutter. But, by the same token, making a film for Ben Shapiro’s company doesn’t strike me as a positive career move either…

Anyway, when all else fails, as I suspect it will, Gina’s probably got a place awaiting her in the Christian film industry as well, and that’ll keep her going for a good long time. I expect her to make her first appearance on God Awful Movies within two years; indeed, given that they’ve already covered one other not particularly goddy movie distributed by Daily Wire (though they rather unfairly blame Shapiro for the content of same), I have a feeling they may even cover this one at some point…

The cassette played… Eurotones?

In the most I’ll-be-damned music news I’ve heard in some time, John Lydon has announced that Public Image Limited are competing to represent Ireland in Eurovision.

John Joseph Rotten and Eurovision are two things I don’t think I would’ve ever expected to associate with, and I don’t suppose most people would either. So maybe, by doing the last thing people would expect him to do, John boy’s doing the most punk thing he can? I don’t know. Maybe I’m just trying to rationalise something that, on the face of it, doesn’t make a lot of sense me. At any rate we are a long way from Metal Box…

Also, another thing most people probably don’t associate with PiL is the word “lovely”, and yet, that is pretty much what the new single (the one they’re attempting to get into Eurovision with) is. Apparently it’s about his wife, Nora, who is succumbing to Alzheimer’s, and, well, it is confoundingly nice. I would never have thought Lydon would write the words “you are loved” with a straight face, but there you go…

This is all last-night stuff, folks

Revisiting this one tonight in belated honour of Dave’s birthday yesterday. I suppose this is a reasonably representative performance from the Isolar II tour, with the notable exception of “Sound and Vision” making its concert debut at the very end of the tour. George Murray is a pretty solid bassist here, isn’t he? And the intro on “Station to Station” is mad, markedly longer and noisier and more extravagant than the one on Stage.

As opposed to what, fake books?

Spotted this on Mastodon this afternoon. What an odd and kind of infuriating question. What do you think I’m reading, the fucking Necronomicon?

I know electronic copies of books aren’t “real” in the physical sense but they still require a physical device to read them—Kindle, phone, computer, whatever. The issue of audiobooks is a lot more vexed, but if we leave that aside for now and limit ourselves to the words on the page, are the latter any more real in a paperback than in an .epub file? Is it more real in hardback? Is the author’s original manuscript written by their own hand more real? What if they never actually “wrote” it as such and did the whole thing on a typewriter or (perish the thought) a computer? What if the author types it all up in Word then sends it to a publisher to actually print it, is it not real or something until the latter step takes place?

I don’t know, I just find this sort of thing to be bullshit and always have done. Saw it decades ago with cinephilia (I still hate that fucking word), here’s an example from an ancient (year 2000!) edition of Senses of Cinema:

Continue reading “As opposed to what, fake books?”

RIP George Barry

Just read on Twitter that George Barry has passed. He was the director behind a singular film, in both the sense that it was the only film he made and that there’s no other film quite like it, that being the legendary Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. That link goes to my old review of it, and the film can be found on Youtube for anyone who hasn’t already had the pleasure.

Some of my best friends are Bengali

On politics, the singer denied he was far-right – a charge that arose after controversial comments on race and racism, as well as his support for now defunct far-right anti-Islam party For Britain.
“Although the left changed and deserted me many years ago, I am most certainly not far-right, and I have not ever met anyone who claims to be far-right,” he wrote.
“My politics are straightforward: I recognize realities. I am therefore sorry to report to some of you that I am absolutely not far-right.”

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jan/07/morrissey-says-miley-cyrus-exit-was-nothing-to-do-with-his-politics

Yeah, you know who else uses words like “realism” in this sense? Racists. Honestly, Steven Patrick has been dodging accusations of far-right sympathies since the 80s, you’d think he would know better by now than to think this would be enough to convince people. Especially after lending credence to the late and not especially lamented For Britain party, which even Nigel Farage, NIGEL FUCKING FARAGE, said was full of Nazis and racists…