Category: [Videos]

Disability Pride Month

It’s been Disability Pride Month all month, and I’ve said nothing about it cos, frankly, I don’t know what to say about it. But I think this video nails at least some of my issues about it (you should also watch it because Jo uses a microphone attached to her prosthetic foot in this video which I think is fucking MARVELLOUS), particularly the use of the word “pride” in a context like this. Cos I know it’s not about literal pride in being disabled as such, it’s like not being ashamed of being disabled. I’ve just always found the use of the word “pride” in this sort of way to be… I don’t know what, exactly, but off-putting. It’s using a word to indicate you are not the opposite of that word rather than that you are that word, they’re not the same thing. “I’m not this thing!” That’s nice, good for me… what am I supposed to be in a positive way, then?

Anyway, Jo also brings up the idea of being “differently abled” and yeah, FUCK THAT TO HELL. I am able to feel pain (physical and mental) I might not otherwise experience if I weren’t disabled, that’s as far as THAT goes. I am able to stumble in a way that I couldn’t before. I am able to only walk rather than run as well. Bah. This is why I’ve always been enamoured of the cripple punk movement since I first discovered it (yes, something good and useful did come from Tumblr! Unimaginable), there’s none of that bullshit and it’s actively opposed to that “inspiration” Jo also talks about, i.e. the pressure she feels as someone who’s a public figure in the disabled community to put a brave face on things all the time. And I’m not a public figure of any sort, but even I feel that sometimes. I kind of like having cripple punk there as a corrective to that. More useful for me than disability pride.

RIP Mother Bernadette Mary

Ah Sinead, you complicated woman. I can’t honestly say I was ever a fan as such, and, frankly, I’ve probably been as judgy towards her over the years as anyone. I like to think I’ve become a bit more understanding as I’ve got older, and I think as she got older we all realised Sinead’s complications weren’t entirely under control or her fault. She was a difficult woman in a time when that was even harder to get away with than it is now, and she kept going through all the bullshit that came her way.

And we should’ve known right from the start that she would be difficult. I watched the video for “Troy” after I read the news this afternoon, not the first time I’ve done that but I can only remember seeing it once on TV many many years ago… what a fucking berserk choice of a song to release not only as a single at all, but the first single from your debut album. Holy shit.

I don’t think I ever heard this at the time, my own first memory of Sinead was “Mandinka” which followed this, and that seemed singular enough back in 1987. Looking at this all these years later… Christ. She was nothing if not unto herself and true to herself. And she definitely wasn’t wrong about the Catholic Church. 56 is no age to be leaving us.

Shaun vs Posie

New video from Shaun, who is one of those Youtubers who makes only a few videos a year but they tend to be really substantial when they do appear. This is a nearly two-hour extravaganza on Pissy Parker, whose recent visit to our fair shores you may recall, and which is an important part of the video… but OY it goes so much further than just mother Minshull being weirdly comfortable with Nazis agreeing with her; I actually didn’t realise just how much of a piece of shit she actually is until Shaun brought it to the surface.

Mistakes in time and space

Another WhoCulture video. Several of these are random and usually brief intrusions by crew members, but I don’t feel like I’m spoiling much by noting that #1 is the justly legendary incident with Malcolm Terris’ splitting pants in “The Horns of Nimon”…

You little ripper!

…but I’m more intrigued by an item lower on the list, that being an episode of “The Chase”…

…in which a camera can be seen for a few seconds in the background of this shot. As the narrator says, this probably wouldn’t have been noticed back in the days when the show was shot in b/w 405-line (and being viewed on much smaller screens than we have now) compared to PAL colour… but then never mentions the time the same thing did happen in colour…

…that being “Planet of the Daleks” episode five where you can indeed just about see the camera lurking, and also one of the extras playing a Spiridon, standing at the right of the shot with his fur covering hanging slack and making bugger all effort to move out of shot. A bit odd they brought one up but not the other, and I didn’t see any of the commenters bring it up either (though I did discover a new favourite error, that being a random stagehand’s hand in “Pyramids of Mars”)…

…And bass for all

This is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen: a bass tablature book for Metallica’s …And Justice for All album, a record that (in)famously has bugger all bass on it. I’ve no idea how good it is or isn’t (our host finds it kind of dubious), I just think it’s conceptually hilarious.

The story of how and why the bass vanished from the album varies a bit, but Steve Thompson, one of the engineers, describes it as beginning with Lars Ulrich bringing in his preferred EQ settings for his drums. These were duly applied and Thompson thought they sounded like shit, so he remixed everything to what he thought they should sound like, Lars objected to the results and told him to turn the bass down until it was hard to hear. Then turn it down even further. Thompson thought everything sounded like shit now, but did as he was instructed. As he says, they were the artists, not him, even if they didn’t know what.

James Hetfield has also said the way his guitar was recorded (i.e. with no mid-range) meant Jason Newsted’s bass playing clashed with his sound cos he was largely doubling Hetfield’s guitar and the two instruments were hard to distinguish. Hetfield’s also more recently said that what really happened was, they didn’t turn Newsted down so much as they turned everything else up. Whatever it was, I don’t believe them when they say they weren’t just being cunts to the then-new band member, who I don’t think anyone could’ve blamed if he’d quit as soon as he heard the final mix.

But there’s one odd thing about this video, i.e. when it mentions isolated bass tracks being available in the Guitar Hero game. Cos I’ve seen another video with Steve Thompson where he says the AJFA multi-tracks are so riddled with edits and splices (which I always thought was generally considered a no-no with multi-track tapes) that they’re probably unplayable now. Someone else says in the comments there’s no fewer than five AJFA songs available in game format… so if the tapes are unusable, where are the isolated bass tracks coming from?

What is Malsh Walsh, for that matter?

New Aamon Animations video is up, and it is legitimately one of the most unsettling things I’ve ever seen. I mean, even for Aamon this is fucked up (though let’s face it: Malsh and Dennis Prager give him such material to work with). I don’t know how much further he’s going to have to go over the top to out-eldritch this thing.

A hand-me-down dress from who knows where

Found this via Twitter. Someone’s taken the various attempts at “All Tomorrow’s Parties” from the 1965 Velvet Underground home demo and synced them up. Kind of like how, when the band recorded “What Goes On” for the third record, they used all of Lou Reed’s different guitar solos together, but also… not. The remarkable thing is that the different takes actually come together more than they don’t (third verse is a little wobbly where they haven’t quite decided on the lyrics), they’re actually remarkably consistent, and brought together in stereo like this they sound pretty big. And John Cale probably benefits even more than Lou does; the mix kind of embiggens them both in a really nice way.

Doctor Worst

I’m not a big fan of WhatCulture’s videos, and I’m generally iffy about most Doctor Who discourse on YT, but I was struck by this one when it was recommended. For what they may be worth, I’ll give my own thoughts on the selections…

10. “Arc of Infinity” (1983) — not that bad, though not as good as the novelisation which I read long before seeing the serial, and as such I didn’t have the, er, benefit of the visuals.

9. “The Underwater Menace” (1967) — yeah, crap, but blighted mainly by the series’ continual week-in week-out production method of that period. This came immediately after “The Highlanders”, which introduced the immortal Jamie McCrimmon, who only became a companion once production was more or less done, meaning the next two serials (this and “The Moonbase”) had to be re-jigged to accommodate his unexpected presence. I don’t think much would’ve saved this story anyway, but that certainly didn’t help.

8. “Warriors of the Deep” (1984) — look, the Myrka is crap but I don’t think the story’s terrible. Could’ve been better, but not terrible.

7. “The Dominators” (1968) — again, cursed by the 60s production schedule as much as anything. But it kind of is the embodiment of the six-parter that should only have been a four-parter in the first place.

6. “Time and the Rani” (1987) — very bad, but knowing now what the behind the scenes situation was like on the program, I’m inclined to be gentler with it than I once was.

5. “Timelash” (1985) — yeah, pretty inexcusable. Not bad conceptually but the execution… yikes.

4. “The Space Pirates” (1969) — again, the show’s ad hoc production method didn’t help, really, in that they had no option but make this cos other stories had fallen through. I’ve never actually seen this in full, by which I mean I’ve watched the one surviving episode but never heard the remaining off-air audios. Never had much inclination to either. Don’t think this ever had a great reputation.

3. “Underworld” (1978) — some of the worst CSO work in the series, but I never thought this was actually bad as such (from memory it was the first of the Target novelisations I ever read; primary school library had a bunch of them). Suffered from a director who blew all his budget on the first episode, and a producer who didn’t think it might be a good idea to just cancel this one, but I have a soft spot for it. People who vote this as the worst Tom Baker serial haven’t seen “The Android Invasion”.

2. “Time-Flight” (1982) — YES. FUCK THIS. How the series went from a peak like “Earthshock” to a nadir like this baffles me. You can’t even blame it on end-of-season slump or budget issues, it’s just dogshit.

1. “The Twin Dilemma” (1984) — yeah, what I just said but worse. Again, the show went from a peak (“Caves of Androzani”) to the worst possible introduction for a new Doctor. And I think Colin Baker is unfairly maligned, the show had an interesting vision for his Doctor and he did the best he could with what he was given. But no one could’ve overcome that costume. Serves mostly to save “Timelash” from being Colin’s worst serial.

So that’s that. Interesting to not see traditional Who worsts like “The Gunfighters” or “Horns of Nimon” on this list. And for all their faults, I don’t think any of these are as terrible as “Love and Monsters” from the new series, which for me remains the single worst Doctor Who story from either old or new eras.

Heavy!

Fucking stunning. This has always been one of my Fabs favourites, and I’ve always thought Paul’s bass on this was good, lovely fills and so forth… but fucking hell, listening to the isolated bass track has given me an entirely new understanding of just how good, and now I’m hearing the full song again with a different appreciation… I think because the bass gets a little lost in the mix during THE RIFF in the last three minutes or so, it’s a bit overwhelmed by the guitars and the white noise, it’s hard to actually hear what he’s doing, so hearing Paul by himself is just… oh my. Obviously what he’s doing during THE RIFF is repetitive cos that’s the point of that section, but he finds so much room for variation in that repetition even so; and in the earlier part of the song where he’s more easily audible, you can hear how much work he’s doing to make the bassline melodic. Amazing. I think “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” is now even more of a favourite of mine…

RIP Aunty Entity

Jesus fuck. It’s been a few days for people dying, hasn’t it? Now we can add Tina Turner to the list… we actually nearly lost her in 2016 due to kidney problems when her husband donated one of his own and basically bought her seven more years on Earth. Good man, Erwin. Ike would never have done that for her. And obviously her finally breaking away from Ike in the mid-70s was the best thing she could’ve done; I actually never realised until today that he owned her name. He not only renamed young Anna Mae (or was it Martha Nell?) Bullock, he trademarked the name Tina Turner so that if she tried to leave him he could just replace her and she wouldn’t be able to work under that name again. Just like KISS copyrighting the old makeup for Ace Frehley and Peter Criss so Paul & Gene can use it on whatever ringers they get to replace those two. She made a point of demanding the name in the divorce, and won it despite Ike’s efforts.

I had no idea in the 80s, cos I was still too young, to realise just what it meant for her to become big in the 80s; I don’t know if I was even aware that she’d had a career before that, or maybe I was dimly aware that Ike had been a thing but it was only a dim awareness if that… certainly I didn’t appreciate that this was her rebounding from years of abuse and lack of solo commercial success on her own by the end of the 70s, having a mega hit of an album released by a record label that hadn’t even wanted her… and that she was in her mid-40s by the time she was doing this. She’d undeniably earned it by then. Here she is in 2009, still having it at nearly 70: