Category: [Videos]

The invisible hand gives the visible finger

I haven’t said anything about Oolong for quite a few days now, unlike the man himself who, well, said quite a lot with just a few words recently:

The funniest thing about this interview was the bit where Elon got the interviewer’s name wrong, of course, but the really important bit was where he uttered the deathless words “go fuck yourself” to those advertisers who’ve lately become sniffy about him after the Media Matters thing a few weeks ago. And then he had the nerve to post this a couple of days later:

I don’t know, are the people running those other platforms personally promoting the antisemitic shit on them like you’re doing?

The idea that if he wants advertisers on his platform maybe he should give them some sort of incentive to give him money rather than telling them to fuck off appears to have escaped him, as it appears to have done with this buffoon:

Lady Ballers looks like a horrible story unto itself, of course, but it’s not really the point here. The point is, these cunts clearly operate on the principle that they necessarily deserve advertising revenue purely by virtue of them simply being themselves? Disney should advertise on Shitter because Oolong is Oolong? No. The onus really is on him to give them a reason to. Instead he did the opposite; if there was anything he said in that debacle that he shouldn’t have said even more than “go fuck yourself”, it was “DON’T ADVERTISE”! That’s not how you do this sort of thing, you complete vacuum. It’s all about the free market for these bloody people until the free market tells them to go fuck themselves in return… and at some point I suspect he’s going to say the same thing to his investors and they’re not going to take that for an answer…

Needs more actual tubular bells

Oh this is GOOD (and rather more pleasant than my last batch of posts). If playing a church organ properly requires this much work, then I simply COULD NOT. This is a somewhat abbreviated version of Mr Oldfield’s celebrated prog masterwork, and hot damn. The coordination of hands over multiple sets of keys and feet on the pedals needed to play this just stuns me; no wonder Theo’s got an extra pair of hands standing by. Stunning stuff.

“Now and Then”, again

So the official video for “Now and Then” got released a day or so after the song was finally unveiled:

…and… fuck. The whole thing with the SAG-AFTRA strike in the US over the last few months and the union’s fear of actors being exploited by the studios using AI-generated copies of them makes a LOT of sense after seeing this. Peter Jackson made the video using archival footage of the Fabs, and it’s the way he uses some of that footage, particularly the stuff from the “Hello Goodbye” film shoot, that suddenly made me realise just why the union is wary of this shit. It’s come a long way from Laurence Olivier in Sky Captain. Still maybe some way to go, in that the 60s film footage of John and George doesn’t quite gel with the new HD video footage of Paul and Ringo, but the bit where John “conducts” the string players just leapt out and slapped me in the face somehow…

Anyway, now the song’s out there’s also a bunch of YT videos about it too, and this is my favourite now:

Amazing. The song’s actually growing on me the more I hear it, but I still feel like it’s not a “real” Beatles song somehow. It’s the sort of song that you’d put somewhere in the middle of side two of the album, if that makes sense as a description. This, on the other hand, DAMN. It’s one guy doing a cover the way the Beatles might’ve done it in their early style (with an amusing parody of John & George’s appearances in the official video), and though he doesn’t sound vocally like John as such, and “Paul” plays right-handed for some reason, he still nails the overall sound and feel of 1964-era Fabs, the vocal harmonising… it almost feels more like the Beatles than their own version does.

Gollum will survive

I’m always kind of amazed when I find something that’s been on the Internet for years and somehow no one I know has mentioned it. In that spirit, I offer you this video on Youtube since 2011 of Neil Gaiman, Adam Savage, and how the latter performed “I Will Survive” through a massive nosebleed in character as Gollum. One of the funniest things I’ve ever heard. I can’t believe it’s taken me until now to discover it.

Didn’t you watch the film?

Someone posted this screenshot on Mastodon the other day, and it kind of demands a sarcastic response like the one in the post title… however, I was sufficiently curious about the video to see exactly what the hell it was about, and lo, it’s actually really about the myth of the Titanic being “unsinkable”, and how it came to be described that way. Quite interesting stuff about how one carefully worded claim can be kind of wilfully misread. Here’s the video:

We love you?

Reading up on l’affaire Redlands last night sent me back to “We Love You”… I was always fond of Satanic Majesties (a terrific example of the flawed but fascinating classic) from when I first heard it back in 1992, and I was similarly fond of “We Love You”, the attendant single that preceded it, when I finally heard it for the first time several years after that… remember the days when it could take you years to do that sort of thing rather than a few minutes with Youtube’s help? Good times…

Anyway, I’ve always felt since then, too, that it was a far weirder and more unsettling song than I ever saw it getting credit for being. I think many at the time (including the band themselves) viewed their brief psychedelic period as a moment of identity crisis and insincere trend-chasing, and I used to see “We Love You” be dismissed as pseudo-psych fluff. I don’t think it’s actually anything of the sort; starting with the sound effects of a jail door being locked (reference to the infamous drug bust), then going into Nicky Hopkins hammering out a thoroughly ominous piano riff, the slightly recessed falsetto vocals (featuring a certain Lennon and McCartney, the former of whom would later slam the song as a knock-off of “All You Need is Love”, and with all due respect, John, it really wasn’t), then Charlie coming in on drums and Brian grinding on a Mellotron that sounds like the tapes are being chewed up inside the machine… “we love you… of course we do,” Jesus, that sounds more like a threat than anything else. All finally collapsing into an Arabesque Mellotron freakout. More sarcastic and sour than this sort of thing tended to be, and I think a lot darker and stranger than it’s given credit for being.

I give you the original promo film:

Also the official lyric video… which has subtitles that differ from the lyrics in the video, so I still don’t know exactly what’s what… it still sounds murky as shit in this stereo mix as the mono single does:

Punching Nazis properly

This would be almost tragically sad if the stupid bastard didn’t deserve what he got. Basically, this is the (barely) crypto-Nazi incel Nick Fuentes‘ fault, in that he said something on Twitter and someone else drew the French-Israeli MMA fighter Natan Levy’s attention to it, and Levy made a crack about him being built like a chopstick. Which, frankly, is an insult to chopsticks everywhere, they would find the comparison to Nick Fuentes odious, but anyway this guy called Ben jumped into the conversation by offering to fight Natan Levy. And the latter took up the offer. And, well, the fight between Natan and Ben went about as badly for the latter as you might’ve expected… and I can’t feel the least bit sorry for him somehow, he trolled his way into a situation where he was hopelessly out of his depth and thoroughly earned what he got. Personally I just hope Nick Fuentes is aware of the entire situation and boiling with rage at one of his guys being powerfully owned by a Jew…

Ron moves away

RIP Ron S Peno, the not always easily penetrable voice of Died Pretty (yeah, “Winterland”, I’m talking about you there). Alas, the cancer he was diagnosed with in 2019 seems to have not gone entirely away after all; only about six weeks ago the band had to call off an October tour cos both Ronnie and drummer Chris Welsh were both fighting cancer, and I imagine Welsh’s headspace is not great right now with this news…

One of the highlights of DP’s peak period, “Caressing Swine” from Trace, their first major label album.

Ron’s post-DP project with Kim Salmon, The Darling Downs, and “Circa 65”

Ron’s guest appearance on Black Cab’s 2009 album Call Signs.