Category: [Videos]

How about that eclipse, then

Alas, the end times appear to have been a bit of a disappointment again, with no reports that I can see of people rising into the sky en masse or that mass human sacrifice someone was predicting, or the serial earthquakes the northeast US was supposed to get according to some others… I suppose we’ve still got a few days before the red heifer thing works out. Needless to say, though, the idiots have still been out in force online; on Youtube they’ve mostly manifested as astrologers, who I’m sure are harmless, but there was a ton of religious cranks (Muslim ones, not just Christians) who I’m a lot less sure of. And then there was this guy:

No reason not to use a common astronomical event to whip up a bit of Islamophobia, eh? Always the way with these far-right American pastors…

…Oh, he’s Australian? Fuck. Well, be honest, you would’ve expected him to be American too with the amount of bullshit his channel has about American politics. Though by that logic, you’d probably think I was American too or something… Anyway, Steve was born into “a family of Buddhists, Catholics, Methodists, and Muslims” and came away from it with the worst aspects of all of them, by the look of it. I’m sure him and Danny Nalliah would be great mates.

Still, this struck me as egregious even by comparison:

Um… no? I watched a bit of the video itself which is a lot more vague about things than this thumbnail for it might indicate, but I’m fairly sure that the fact that Crowley claimed to have started channelling Liber AL on April 8th 1904 and the fact that there was a solar eclipse on the same date 120 years years are entirely unrelated. I mean, Crowley himself attached so little importance to the book that he actually lost the manuscript for a few years, so I don’t think he would’ve attached any importance to the date coincidence either…

Anyway, the eclipse happened and people were excited, weather seems to have been good for most places, and I’ve seen a bunch of great photos of it online:

Ganked from the Graun, that was the view from Toronto. The Sun itself put on a good show before the Moon moved on; someone in the Puzzle in a Thunderstorm FB group posted this photo they got:

…And then noted that the solar prominence you can see at the bottom is the size of the Earth.

FUCK.

See, I find that sufficiently head-spinning without having to a bunch of religious bullshit about the end of the world and all that. (And what about the other countries that got to see the eclipse? Does God have a separate judgement for Mexico and Canada? What about all the other countries on Earth that saw nothing, are we off the hook?) The spectacle was more than enough, especially for some of the people I saw on YT having a moment together in news videos of it getting darker and darker. Celestial mechanics can be damned pretty to look at. And however cheesy it may be, I think the message of this song is basically correct and I fucking love it:

Now I think about it, though, I can imagine some dickhead might look at that and think “Apoptygma Berzerk… wait, Apop sounds like Apep, and APEP is the name of that rocket thing NASA was doing during the eclipse, and don’t they have an album called Rocket Science too? Apop… Apep… Stephan Groth is the Antichrist?!” If people can believe some of the shit I’ve seen lately, someone can believe that, I’m sure…

Anyway, so much for the apocalypse, I suppose. We’re due to get a total solar eclipse in 2028 that’ll actually be visible here in Sydney, so I suppose that’ll be something to get excited about, cos according to Wiki the last one we got here was in 1857 and the next one won’t be visible until 2858. Somehow I don’t think I’ll be around for that. Somehow I also suspect the weather on that day in 2028 will also be shit and no one will see anything…

In which Ritchie Blackmore gives no fucks

I’m going through some old recordings of Rage to pick out music videos for the video collection, and the one I’m editing just now featured this here TV performance of “Fireball” by Deep Purple. Or should I say “performance”, cos whatever show this was done for clearly adhered to the common practice of bands miming (I think Gillan’s voice is the only actual live element). And there’s always been a sort of kayfabe thing about this, the audience knows what they’re listening to is playback but we never talk about that fact, but there have been some notable instances of miming musicians making it obvious…

…but I was particularly struck by this Deep Purple TV clip, cos near the end the camera captures R. Blackmore “playing” the back of his guitar. As being blatant about miming goes, this is kind of magnificent in its contempt. Paice doesn’t look like he’s putting in much effort on the drums either, but to be honest I can’t tell for sure and I may well be wrong; he’s certainly not as obvious as Blackmore if he is pretending…

My turquoise waistcoat is quite out of sight

For some reason “Vegetable Man” seems to have been my song of the night. So here we go, with the (rather belatedly) officially released version:

Alternately, a somewhat different mix from what I presume is an older bootleg source:

And the Jesus & Mary Chain cover:

Parenthetically, it was on account of this song that I spent the most money I ever paid for a seven-inch single… cos this was the B-side of J&MC’s first single “Upside Down” and they persistently refused to give it a CD release for years (not even on Barbed Wire Kisses), so when I found the single at Red Eye some time in the late 90s I bought it for this. Fifty dollars for a seven-incher. I think it finally came out on CD about ten years later.

And finally, a mightily brave young man:

How the hell did it get here so soon

Only just discovered this video exists (thank you, Youtube’s “new to you” tab, you delivered me both this and the new Aamon video tonight). I remember the first time I heard Bone Machine, it got to this song and I thought “oh how interesting, Tom Waits covered the Ramones”… and then for some reason I found myself looking at the credits in the CD booklet and discovered I’d got it completely the wrong way round. And yet I think I can be excused? After all, it is such a Ramones song that I still can’t fully believe they didn’t write it…

Somerton AGAIN?!

I thought James Somerton’s arse had been so comprehensively handed to him after that Hbomberguy video last year that he would never have the temerity to show his face in public again (which, admittedly, he did briefly with that apology video he made, but he withdrew it so quickly it barely counts). However, it seems no one told Somerton that… cos he’s back with another apology and explanation video, full of excuses that I don’t think anyone is buying (though I am a little surprised that no one seems to be cracking jokes about who he plagiarised this from; maybe we got that out of our systems with the first apology). I offer here Mack Attack’s response to him, which is pointed and brutal and so it damn well should be; this dickhead is either delusional or else hoping the rest of us are…

Shook it like a midnight rambler

For some reason I was reminded of this today. I hadn’t seen it in years, probably not since it came out; I remember seeing it on Rage at the time and thinking about how strange it was… not that Tom Jones should be singing about Elvis (I now discover it’s actually a cover of a song by Gillian Welch), but the particular form that song took, in which the backing is basically a thick electronic bass pulse pitched low enough that the note changes are quite hard to discern, it just seemed awfully odd for Tom Jones to go down that road so late in the game. And on relistening it still does, but I kind of love it, the combination of the minimalism of the backing and Jones being Jones makes for a fascinating result. If you’re going to do a cover that wants to be faithful yet different and distinctive, this is certainly one way to do it, I suppose.

For comparison, the Gillian Welch original (I was going to post the actual music video but the second verse got cut from it):