Category: [Videos]

Hmmmmmmm… no

I’ve passed the point where I can even muster a basic platitude about murder being terrible. Rebecca Watson, it should be said, is correct in what she says at the end of this video: empathy really IS one of the best things about humanity. That’s exactly why mine is generally limited to those who actually deserve it, rather than, you know, THAT individual who didn’t believe it was even a thing. Fuck him. Remember I said the other day that I didn’t want him dead? I still don’t, because of how he’s being exploited in death by MAGA. Charlie himself I don’t give a fuck about. I’m done with all of these people. I’m done with this fucking world I live in. It’s like that right now.

Ghosts of 1930

THIS was a hell of a thing to see tonight, and it’s left me weirdly uncomfortable for some reason.

I gather that this was the almost entirety of the cast and crew of the production of The Man With the Flower in His Mouth, the first play shown on British television back in July 1930. Forty years later. almost everyone in that photo (including all three of the cast) was still alive and accordingly appeared on some BBC show called Review to show how it was done using the original Baird 30-line gear, a period microphone, etc.

And it just felt… strange. Not least because, obviously, the 1930 technology was so limited compared to what the BBC had by 1970 (never mind how much further it’s progressed since then); this performance certainly did give what I imagine was a pretty accurate reconstruction of how the 1930 production looked and sounded, and it’s quite fun to imagine TV as we know it blossoming from… this thing. But it was more than that somehow. There was something a bit “unco” (to use a good Scottish word Baird himself might have used) going on. Like ghosts being summoned.

I mean, even if you don’t consciously register it, there’s always ghosts being called up whenever you engage in some old media where the people involved have left this world behind, but this had some very particular ones. One of those ghosts, obviously, was that of the original production, which vanished into the ether as soon as it was finished in those days before recording. Though the actors were 40 years older by then, it was still the same actors as in the 1930 broadcast, and indeed the same crew. I suppose, too, there’s also the ghost of the long-dead production method as well, finally defeated in 1936 by Marconi’s electronic camera system.

But, like I said, there was more it than just watching an old TV show… I don’t know anything about Review; with a name like that I can’t exactly find much information. What sort of show even was it? How much of it did the BBC keep? (I mean this is the BBC we’re talking about here; as I’ve been saying for a long time, if the BBC made something before about 1978 and it still exists, it almost certainly does so by accident rather than design.) Is anyone involved with it still with us, like the original Man With the Flower team were for them? I suspect Review is as lost to history as most of the BBC’s programming from that period, and watching it tonight in 2025 on the BBC’s Youtube archive channel was kind of summoning its ghost just as the show itself was trying to summon that of the 1930 play. Ghost within a ghost?

I don’t know how to really express it, nor indeed why I’m trying to do so; yet again, I’m sure this is something that only I even notice or care about. For whatever reason, though, there was something kind of uncanny about watching this TV show that’s even further in time from us now than the TV show it was about was from them when they made it, those people who were still alive then wouldn’t be for much longer…

Reborn in the USA

Thiscomes interestingly timed after that bullshit the other day where Aaron Lewis was whining about being later than everyone else to realise “Born in the USA” actually wasn’t the ra-ra anthem he thought it was… this is the so-called “Electric Nebraska” version; having done the home recordings that turned into the Nebraska album, Bruce then tried to work up full band versions of those songs but wasn’t happy with the results and scrapped them (until now, with an expanded Nebraska featuring those E Street Band recordings coming out soon). However, the sessions had produced a number of other songs that would be reworked for Born in the USA, including the title track… whether or not the 1982 version above is better as such than the 1984 one is obviously a matter of taste, though I think it might actually be. And, either way, it’s different enough in its approach that even Aaron Lewis might realise the bitterness underpinning it.

Come back to the Moon

So I heard this in full for the first time today:

“Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” by Jonathan King, a song I’d heard of but never properly heard until now; it was a fairly substantial hit in its day (1965) but somehow it completely bypassed me until this afternoon. I can only assume that at least part of why that should be is down to King’s later, er, career as a convicted sex offender, you know, a bit like why you don’t hear much from Gary Glitter any more… But there is another song I have known for a lot of years that suddenly shone in a new light after hearing this one:

The Humblebums featuring Billy Connolly in 1969 (before Gerry Rafferty joined), with “Why Don’t They Come Back to Dunoon”. I actually only have this on cassette so haven’t been able to listen to it in I don’t know how many years, but “Dunoon” has always been my favourite song on it… and, listening to the King song today, I suddenly realised “Dunoon” had an earlier model. Not an exact match, but near enough…

…Indeed, had I ever done any discographical research into the Big Yin, I might actually have discovered this fact years ago, cos there it is right there on the label of the First Collection album. This is, obviously, a somewhat meaningless discovery but I’m kind of amused to have finally made it; as for which of the two I ultimately prefer, well, there’s an undeniably appealing wistful quality to the original, but, you know, the pedophile thing. So I think Billy & Tam win by default.

RIP David Stratton

What awfully sad news to wake up to today. I knew Stratton was going blind, which is an awful thing to befall someone whose chief love that they built their life on is a visual art, but this really is the last of him… I suppose at least he didn’t have to live too long without films. The Stratton family’s grocery store loss was very much cinema’s gain; he did well for a man who never finished high school.

And, for once when I’m doing one of these notices, I’ve actually got a story about Dave and how *I* once taught him something about a film…

…the film in question being Benjamin Christensen’s great barnyard oddity of a movie Häxan, a weird hybrid of horror and documentary before either of those film genres were really a thing. So, picture this: it’s 1999, and Stratton’s restarting his great cinema history course as part of the Continuing Education thing at Sydney University. I can’t resist passing this up, especially given how big I was on silent cinema at that time and that was where the course was. I sign up as a student. In the second semester, we get around to the first half of the 1920s, and for one of his 1922 choices, Stratton picks this. And people are CONFUSED.

Cos the version Stratton showed only had dialogue intertitles; all the expository titles for the opening lecture bit and elsewhere in the film were missing. By the end of the screening, I think the general mood was “WTF”, cos the absence of the expository titles rendered some parts (particularly the ending) kind of incomprehensible. I, on the other hand, was, well, not as confused as the rest of the class, cos I’d actually seen the film before this—got the old Redemption VHS from the UK when we were there in ’96—and so I knew what should’ve been there… so why wasn’t it? Well, I also knew the film had been reissued in 1968 with a narration by William S. Burroughs… was that what we were watching that night? That would explain the lack of expository stuff cos the narration would’ve replaced that… but the print didn’t have the narration. So I was still a bit confused.

Anyway, I got the Criterion DVD of Häxan a few years later and that confirmed my suspicion that it was indeed the 1968 print (which is on that disc as an extra), just that someone had stripped the narration from it for some reason (I can’t remember now if it even had a score or not). On that night, though, everyone was a bit bemused by what had just happened… and your humble scribe here uncharacteristically put himself forth to explain to everyone else “hi, I’ve actually seen this before and David’s copy was missing a whole heap of intertitles for some reason, so it actually does make sense than you’re all probably thinking it does”. And Stratton was quite taken aback by this cos, as he then said, he’d never seen any other version of the film, and had never realised there even was one. Well, he certainly knew by the end of that class. And that, children, is how I, of all people, got one up on the expert and professional. I don’t get to do this sort of thing often, so excuse me if I’m mildly self-impressed for a moment…

Another crush bites the dust?

Yeah. I’ve written about Sydney Sweeney before, the woman with The Tits That Saved The West From Wokeness Somehow, and I said then that I didn’t know much about her, so I didn’t know where she herself might stand on that issue and other matters political… well, I have more of an idea now. Mind you, even if I didn’t know much about her, I did find her awfully cute, and I could’ve added her to the list of ladies on that older post. I wish I could still find her cute in the same way, but now I don’t know if I can… Oh well, not the first time I’ve discovered someone I had a bit of a crush on might actually be shitty in some way, and it probably won’t be the last time. I just hope Emilia Clarke doesn’t come out as a Reform voter or some such, because that would be too awful to handle…

Anyway, as to that ad campaign:

The actor by then had generated considerable media coverage after the outfitter American Eagle released several videos showing her modeling the company’s denim jeans and jackets. American Eagle’s campaign generally revolves around the punny use of the phrase, “Sydney Sweeney has great genes.”
In one video, “genes” is crossed out and replaced with “jeans”. Another clip showed the blue-eyed blond suggestively looking at the camera and discussing how her body’s composition “is determined by … genes”.
“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue,” Sweeney continues in the advertisements, which include a joke about the cameraperson becoming distracted by her breasts.
Some social media users dismissed the campaign as graceless, arguing that it echoed rhetoric associated with eugenics and white supremacy at a time when the Trump administration was seeking to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives as well as aggressively pushing to detain and deport immigrants en masse.
One TikTok reaction video that received hundreds of thousands of likes accused Sweeney of ignoring the political climate of the moment, saying “it’s literally giving … Nazi propaganda”.
US conservatives have seized on the indignation over the campaign on the liberal fringes, rushing to praise Sweeney for landing a blow on “woke” advertising, invoking a term some use to besmirch DEI measures.

Now I’m not above using the word “Nazi” when I think it’s warranted, of course, but in this case… yeah, I’m not feeling it. I just don’t think it’s the white nationalist dogwhistle some people on the Left are calling it…

Mind you, that doesn’t mean some people on the Right aren’t taking it as one, even if I’m not hearing the signal… which is the point of dogwhistles after all, I know, though I suppose some people will pick up signals even if they’re not intended (cf. noted Beatles fan Charles Manson). This particular creep has a bunch of Taylor Swift AI pics with sunwheels and the like, so, you know… one of them.

I don’t know, I just find the whole thing dispiriting somehow; we perhaps should’ve known (and I’m seeing quite a few people saying they did, because OBVIOUSLY they’re all so SMART) after the “MAGA party” thing that she would be as Republican as the rest of the family evidently is, but the evident confirmation is still a letdown. I hope she has enough sense to disavow the chuds who’ve replaced the aforementioned Ms. Swift as their “Aryan” icon and that she does it in less time than Tay Tay took to make her own positions clear; like I said, I don’t entirely buy the argument that this is all some eugenics propaganda, and I rather doubt Sydney had that much creative input into the campaign… but she’s still the public face/cleavage of the thing, and some sort of clarifying statement might not go astray. In conclusion, I offer you this video I found:

Goddamn it, Chud

I’ve been rewatching some of Pat Finnerty’s stuff lately, so the YT algorithm has been suggesting more, including this one which I somehow had missed before. Not only did it introduce me to “San Quentin” (not a Johnny Cash cover, fortunately), it also introduced me to the even more egregious “Figured You Out“, which just… Christ. So yeah, I just got one but TWO new reasons to despise Nickelback. I don’t usually expect much from a Sunday night, but that’s a lot more than I usually get.

Oh, and this guy died too, brother

Yeah, Hulk Hogan shuffled off his mortal coil last night too. Funnily enough, I’m not seeing nearly as much affection on his passing as I’m still seeing for Mr Osbourne, which I suppose indicates a certain… difference between the two. Hogan was famous enough that even I kind of knew about him in the 80s, and I knew nothing about wrestling; I only started becoming even dimly aware of what it was all about once the Internet started seriously becoming a thing at the start of the oughts, but it was my housemate and bandmate Joe who taught me more about it cos he was a big wrestling nut and had actually run some shows here… so that was also how I kind of discovered just how rotten the business is, and how Mr Bollea above was one of the most rotten figures in it. Whatever else could be said against Ozzy—and let’s be honest, there is quite a lot—I don’t think he ever claimed to be something he wasn’t; conversely, Hogan’s stardom was built upon him doing just that, using the stage figure of Hulk to hide the fact that the real Terry was a bit of a shit. And, as time passed, people became increasingly aware of that as he became increasingly shitty… but what about Hulk, instead of Terry? Steve Shives, an actual lifelong wrestling fan, had some thoughts I found interesting, so I’ll let him speak:

The Comfort Zone

Michael K. Vaughan is one of my favourite Youtubers, and his latest video is a particularly interesting one; he tells about a viewer who expressed disappointment that, for a while now, the sort of books he’s been reading and reviewing on his channel isn’t as broad as it used to be, and he should read more widely and out of his comfort zone, and dared him to read something by Jane Austen (there being a Booktube reading event devoted to her in June)…

“That’s more like it, Roger!”

Now, I’m sure the horror he expresses at that idea in his video was mostly performative and for comedic value, cos he has a couple of videos on the subject of favourite books (one of which I actually rewatched the other night), and he’s upfront about his broad tastes being pretty populist, but his top 100 also encompasses classical authors like Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus (whose Histories is his top book), Arrian, Xenophon, Polybius and Livy, and “serious” authors like Dickens, Steinbeck, Walter Scott, Wilkie Collins, Hemingway, Stevenson, Charlotte Bronte, John O’Hara, Conrad, Dostoyevsky, Wilde, Dumas, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, Haggard, Wells and Hugo, and even his “genre” preferences would mostly be considered classics of their kind and even literature in general too (Asimov, Bradbury, Lovecraft, E.R. Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Chandler, Hammett, Ross MacDonald, Matheson, LeGuin, Machen, S. King, Verne, Simak, Tolkien). So his tastes are much broader than his viewer possibly thinks. But he’s also made videos about all of these in the past, so it’s probably not like he feels the need to redo them.

And the whole thing made me wonder: what if someone did that with me? I mean, if someone came across this blog and looked at the page for the films I’ve reviewed and decided the stuff I’ve reviewed on here so far (which is mostly of a horror nature) so far constituted my “comfort zone”, and then told me I needed to watch something “good” instead… well, would I respond with similar grace to Michael? Cos I suspect probably not; I would note that yeah, horror is a lot of what I’ve been watching in the last few months, but I have seen plenty of the standard classics. I’m not stupid enough to make a top ten list or anything of the sort, but if they demanded I name some non-horror titles I have considered “great” over the years, I’d include a lot of the following:

    • Citizen Kane and quite a few other Welles films
    • Singin’ in the Rain
    • The Rules of the Game
    • Sunrise
    • The Great Dictator
    • Bad Day at Black Rock
    • The Searchers
    • A Matter of Life and Death and, again, most other Archers titles from the ’40s
    • Lucifer Rising
    • 2001: A Space Odyssey
    • Duck Soup
    • Sherlock Jr.
    • A Hard Day’s Night
    • North by Northwest
    • Blazing Saddles
    • Wild Strawberries
    • Forty Guns
    • Yojimbo and, again, several other Kurosawas
    • Sansho the Bailiff
    • Tokyo Story and, again, quite a few other Ozu films
    • Fitzcarraldo and, yet again, other Herzog films
    • Battleship Potemkin
    • King Lear (1971)
    • The Cranes Are Flying, Letter Never Sent and I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov triple bill)
    • Metropolis and, once more, several other Langs
    • Heat
    • Ben Hur (1959, though the 1925 one is also good)
    • And any number of Warner Brothers cartoons, especially from the 40s and 50s (and by Bob Clampett particularly)

Alternately, I could just point them at my Letterboxd, save myself time, and tell them to choke on my general experience of “good” cinema. It’s not like I feel the need to justify myself anyway, of course, but if someone were to approach me like Mr. Vaughan’s viewer and tell me to widen my horizons, I think they’d soon live to regret doing so…