Never heard of this guy before, but apparently his monstrous bodily waste hangs out with famous people. (Yes, the hideous grammar of that headline really was the thing that grabbed me about this ludicrous story.) It’s a crappy way to become notable—apparently this guy has spent a long time just rocking up to industry events where no one knows who he is but they just accept him as this sort of constant background presence—and I fear his famous friends will now dump him. Still, that’s what you get for taking a drug diabetics actually need more than you; karma will sometimes feed you that sort of shit sandwich…
Observe also Count Binface and the ventriloquist’s dummy.
To be honest, I’m struggling to get too excited by the UK election results, which were broadly as expected, i.e. Labour romped home while the Tories were routed. The latter, however, still have about 120 seats, and Reform got four [correction: it actually wound up being five] including one for Nigel Farage. That’s four five more than should’ve been acceptable to anyone, but the UK never was immune to fascism, crypto- or otherwise, was it… of course, some wits have said that Farage winning his seat was actually the worst thing for him cos now he’ll have to actually do something to keep his constituency happy rather than just lurk in the background… but I fear he’ll be fine with that; he’s finally got an actual place in government, however small, which I don’t think he’ll give up easily, and he’ll be perfectly happy to do things as long as he can make things worse for the people he hates.
And frankly Labour under Keir Starmer inspires me about as much the Democrats under Biden and the ALP under Albo. As I saw someone say on Mastodon, the Conservatives may have lost but the conservatives won:
A song that, alas, will almost certainly never not be relevant. On the plus side, though, most of the worst examples of the Tories lost their seats, so we can bid not especially fond farewells to Liz Truss (who blamed the party’s loss on having to obey laws that stopped them from booting out them damned furriners; I expect to see her in Farage’s gang sooner rather than later), Michael Fabricant’s lunatic hair and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s general 19th century undertaker’s demeanour… and speaking of whom:
Much like the giant fellow in the top picture, it feels like Baked Bean Man here entered the electoral race purely to force Mogg to appear in a photo like this with him. It would, frankly, be worth having to stand right next to the cunt like that.
Meanwhile, my favourite non-winner of the day:
Well done, that bin. And let’s not forget:
Less than 200 votes for Pissy Parker! That was worth the effort, wasn’t it, K-J Kunt? Slightly bothersome that she got even that many people on her side who couldn’t see through her, but at least several thousand more people did. All told, not entirely satisfying but at least it’s also not exactly the far right surge we saw in France recently… not yet, anyway.
I frankly never had any interest in watching Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever, though I also had no real idea as to what it was about or anything like that… just that it acquired an almost immediate reputation as one of the worst films ever made. But I watched this the other day, this is a video which looks at just how and why it acquired that reputation… and I must say the backstory of how Ballistic was made and unmade by the studio to blame for it is compelling, almost certainly better than the film itself. Maybe not quite the catastrophe of the second Highlander film, but even considering everything that went wrong there, I don’t think the producers of that were actively scamming investors out of tens of millions of dollars like Franchise Pictures were doing…
I don’t think I’d ever heard of Franchise before, but it does turn out I’ve seen quite a few movies produced by them and at least heard of a few others; apparently studio head Elie Samaha’s modus operandi was picking up scripts that the major studios were dilatory about, that he then made cheaper than the majors because he refused to pay the people involved what they were normally worth (often on the grounds that, like John Travolta with Battlefield Earth, they were so desperate to just get their passion project made they’d do it for less than their usual fees, if not nothing at all), and which then got released to cinemas and generally bombed cos they were kind of shit. I still don’t have much desire to see Ballistic, but the story of what was happening behind the scenes is kind of amazing; the fact that Elie Samaha still has a job in an industry from which he should’ve been banned for life years ago is kind of appalling.
Someone posted on Bluesky tonight about Robert Mitchum’s brief but baffling career in calypso music, and that put me in mind of someone else whose own career as a calypso singer back in the 50s looks equally baffling now, Louis Farrakhan… or “The Charmer” as he was known before that encounter with Elijah Muhammad in 1955…
Of course, the subject matter— i.e. Christine Jorgensen and her famous sex change—is almost as perplexing as the idea that LOUIS FUCKING FARRAKHAN of all people would be singing about it (I don’t think he’s a big fan of our trans cousins these days). In NINETEEN FIFTY-FUCKING-FOUR to boot. A CALYPSO song on top of that. This was a hell of a thing to be singing about in popular music of the 1950s…
And the B-side is, frankly, almost as perplexing, being a song about zombies, which is another subject you didn’t hear much of in mid-century popular music. Am unaware of Louis’ current opinion of zombies, but I don’t suppose he’s much of a fan of them now either. Even conceding that Farrakhan’s career as a singer only really looks weird in hindsight, these really are peculiar songs…
I think it’s fair to describe this as one of Aamon’s weirdest yet. I don’t think he quite makes Hasan Piker as terrifying as he did Sam Seder, but he more than makes up with what he does to Tate.
I’ve been doing a wee bit of research on chaos magick and other things esoteric lately, cos for whatever reason that’s the way my useless brain seems to be turning at the moment, although when I say “research” I mostly mean these two videos:
These come from a channel called What Magic is This?, and they have a bunch of other interesting-looking stuff (I also quite liked their video on William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin).
Anyway, midnight last night rolls around after watching the second video, and there’s me doing the latest Wordle… and the word of the day is, well, “chaos”.
I’d like to apologise to anyone who hasn’t played today’s games, but tough, I’m not going to. Anyway, that was… odd, to say the least. It’s not necessarily the oddest thing like this to happen to me; I used to call these “synchroincidences” cos they struck me as falling between those two stools, in that maybe they were meaningful (which, as I’ve always understood it, is what separates synchronicity from just coincidence) or maybe they were just shit happening. Who could tell which was which? It was when they started piling up that things really got weird, but that’s another story. This story is odd enough as it is. If I were inclined to think in terms of omens, I might consider this one… albeit an omen of what exactly, I don’t know…
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.
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:
The Met Gala is a fashion event, and consequently I have next to no interest in it, because as a general rule I do not give a good goddamn about fashion so the Gala doesn’t attract me. Indeed, I don’t think I even knew anything about it before watching this video about it:
I wish JJ would come back to YT, cos her stuff was fun. Anyway, I am absolutely not a style icon by any stretch of the imagination; I am about basic black in everything—band t-shirts are about as colourful as I get and most of the ones I have are just white on black designs—and comfort above all, and if I don’t care about dressing up for myself, I generally don’t care too much about other people doing it.
Now, the Met Gala is a fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s costume department—last year it cost seventy-five thousand dollars to attend, and even that was only if Anna Wintour invited you in the first place; it’s for a good enough cause, I suppose, but for fuck’s sake—and each year there’s a theme tied in with whatever the Costume Institute is exhibiting at the time. You don’t have to dress accordingly, but it’s expected that you will. Consequently, the Met Gala strikes me primarily as a load of absurdly well-off people dressing up stupidly in public, and I don’t really care that much…
The story can be read here, and revolves around an aging aristocrat and his wife, about to be beset by raging mobs. However, Count Axel has flowers in his garden that can turn back time a certain amount when they’re plucked and thereby he holds back the advance of said mobs. But nothing lasts forever, though. It’s a neat story with a really neat idea, but I suspect Jim Ballard would have found it an incomprehensible idea for a fashion theme as I do…
…And if I didn’t understand it, I’m not sure some of the attendees really did either… I mean, the story’s not about flowers as such, is it? But that seems to have been the easiest way to live up to the “Garden of Time” theme… I don’t know, I’m just perplexed by the very idea of any Ballard story becoming the basis for something like the Met Gala (parenthetically, People Online are outraged, obviously, that the event is happening at all while Israel is wiping out Palestine, but frankly, if we stopped doing everything like this while there’s an atrocity happening somewhere on Earth we’d stop doing anything at all), though I do rather like the idea that someone who’s never heard of Ballard before might now actually read something by him (“ooh, this one’s about cars, that sounds like fun…”). Could you imagine, though, if whoever decided on the theme for this year’s ball picked another Ballard story like Crash or The Unlimited Dream Company or The Atrocity Exhibition? I think even I might watch that…
Happy 80th birthday to Tony Visconti, whose big day I choose to mark accordingly:
That’s a demix someone’s done of “Cosmic Dancer” by T. Rex, cutting it back to just guitars and strings. It’s fucking GORGEOUS. Some silly git whines in the comments about missing Bill Legend and Bolan’s vocals, but they can fuck off; I think this demonstrates brilliant just how exactly right Visconti was with those string parts. It’s an amazing piece of instrumental arrangement.
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