Month: March 2023

The Special Editions will be with you. Always.

What the fuck is Jon Favreau talking about?

The Mandalorian creator and longtime Star Wars fan Jon Favreau believes that fans of the iconic space opera franchise would likely not be interested in a re-release of the original film trilogy’s theatrical cut.
When asked in a Moovy TV interview about the potential for the first three Star Wars movies to have their original theatrical cuts released in the present day, Favreau expressed doubt that there would be enough demand. “Do you think anybody but us, like, the people who grew up with it … would care? Because … what I figured out [is] that the younger people have a whole different perception of what Star Wars is.”

Oh FUCK the “younger people”. It’s the old farts like me for whom Star Wars is the original trilogy in its original form who want this. We absolutely WOULD care BECAUSE we fucking grew up with it. We want the films as we knew them first time round, not as George Lucas tooled about with them in the 90s. Fuck, I’m not even really a Star Wars fan any more, I grew up on that original trilogy but by the time it kicked off again in the 90s I’d mostly lost interest (and the prequel trilogy hardly re-inspired me when I did see it); all I’ve otherwise seen of new Star Wars is bits of The Clone Wars, and that was only because it happened to be on TV while I was in hospital in 2009 for you-know-what, I didn’t go out of my way to watch it or anything. Anyway, you can fuck off with that nonsense, “longtime Star Wars fan”; get the original theatrical cuts of the original trilogy onto high-definition discs and watch them fly off the shelves, even into my hands, even into the hands of “the younger people”…

Panic in the schools of Colorado

We’ve been in the “last moments” for nearly 2000 years now, I’m not sure how much difference this’ll make. After School Satan Club is a project by The Satanic Temple, who I’m not a big fan of though I do enjoy certain of their stunts including this, which people like whoever wrote the above are freaking out about for some reason. Personally I can’t help but feel that if God can be defeated by the handful of edgy schoolkids that are likely to take advantage of this thing, he probably deserves to be…

And I still find it so hard

“Blue Monday” by New Order turned 40 the other day, and I am just old enough to remember it being new, and if there’s anything I really need it’s something to make me feel old… Anyway, the Graun has a piece by Alexis Petridis looking at some of the tunes that inspired it and that it in turn inspired, and I was intrigued by a reference to something called Gerry and the Holograms, which I dimly recalled having heard of somewhere but I couldn’t place where; I now gather it is widely considered by those who’ve heard it to have been a primary source for “Blue Monday”. Anyway, I duly went in search of them and found this:

Now, Bernard Sumner has denied having heard this and claimed “Mighty Real” by Sylvester was actually what New Order really ripped off, but GODDAMN. If Sumner’s telling the truth, then we have a truly odd case of parallelism at work here… I know there’s not exactly an infinite number of ways in which you can combine notes so you’re perfectly likely to innocently come up with a note sequence someone else has already come up with, but even so. But Petridis reckons the band have been otherwise honest about where they nicked bits of “Blue Monday” from, and Sumner said he would’ve admitted it if he had borrowed from “Gerry”. So.

Anyway, Gerry and the Holograms were a duo of fellow Mancs who had variously played with the Albertos and John Cooper Clarke and released two singles in 1979, one of which was designed to be unplayable cos the record was sealed inside the sleeve with glue, rendering it impossible to play the disc even if you could get it out of the sleeve. Much more of an absurdist art project than a band (their label was in fact called Absurd Records), hilariously the “music” on the unplayable record was actually two minutes of silence. Frank Zappa was a fan. Found their complete works on Bandcamp, too.

The most emotive actor ever

The breadth and depth of feeling is almost too much to handle

Many years ago I remember seeing a similar meme to this starring Mischa Barton, using the same photo of her looking blank in various emotional situations, but that was done with clear ill-will to paint her as a limited performer. Buster Keaton, of course, was a man of stone and not wood, “the great Stone Face”, but this meme really is more of a tribute to him. The really funny thing, with hindsight, about his very early stuff with Roscoe Arbuckle is that he actually does emote in them, sometimes even broadly:

Continue reading “The most emotive actor ever”

Words have consequences

One of the funniest stories I’ve seen lately is this one:

“Jesus” here is apparently claiming he’s done no such thing, and I get the impression that the whole “crucifixion” thing was actually meant as a joke, and no one really seems to be taking him seriously, treating him as lunatic or liar rather than Lord. Still, it must be said, if you’re going to go around telling people you’re Jesus, getting crucified and coming back from the dead would certainly be the best way of proving it. Much more so than the miracle of turning water into tea, which is something that technically even I can do on a daily basis…

Isn’t there another word for that?

Found on Tumblr. I know that in the very early days of TV in the UK, some programming (news reports and the like) apparently were actually broadcast as sound only, but the rest of the shows had, you know, actual vision. I can’t imagine why you’d want a sound-only TV receiver. That’s just a radio, isn’t it? I don’t get it. The past was a different country indeed…

Not quite 5000

John Coulthart recently marked the occasion of the 5000th post over on his blog, which is not at all bad for 17 years of effort on his part. I am obviously nowhere near that post count (not even quite up to 100 yet) and it may take me as long to get there depending on things like, you know, continuing enthusiasm, keeping up a good posting rate, not dying before I make it to that point, etc… but he offered this consideration that resonated with me:

Post no. 4000 (January 8, 2016) arrived almost a year after I’d stopped writing every day, and had consequently seen visits decline as a result. (You can’t really talk about “readership” here when most visits will be from people looking for pictures of some sort.) The WordPress stats show that visitor numbers had been falling even before I stopped the daily posting routine, no doubt as a result of the uptake in social media. What’s interesting about the present moment is that the visitor numbers have been rising again at a time when disenchantment with social media is growing. I don’t think these two things are connected—I’m bound to see more visitors if I’m writing more often, as I have been since mid-2020—but it’s a curious thing sticking with an endeavour like this while vast internet edifices rise and fall around you. Since stepping away from social media myself I value the autonomy of this place all the more.

Yes. I haven’t really stepped away from social media as such, I’m still on it each day, but my posting to do it has become noticeably limited in recent times. Ironically, perhaps, it was actually someone on Mastodon who kind of inspired this thing here, cos on Mastodon you get a lot of talk about decentralisation (I know I talk about “Mastodon” like it’s a monolith but it is really a mass of individual communities on who the hell knows how many different servers) in opposition to the massive concentration of everyone on the Internet where venturing beyond the walls of Facebook or Twitter is scary. As I remember someone saying, Facebook is the Internet for a lot of people, a truly terrifying thought.

I no longer remember who said it nor exactly what they said, but it was something about how decentralisation Mastodon-style might bring about the revival of old-style blogging, and I just thought… hmm, maybe I should try that again. Back to 2002 when I first tried my hand at that, perhaps… so here we are now. (Parenthetically, I also found this post by Jeet Heer also pondering the revival of blogging on platforms like Substack, which Coulthart also mentions in his post. Although Heer has since been hired by The Nation and ended his own Substack thing…)

What Coulthart says about the “autonomy” of his blog is what struck me the most, cos that’s what I’m finding about mine too… thus far I haven’t exactly promoted it so I have no idea if anyone other than me is reading, but that’s fine. I suppose I can write longer form stuff there (I don’t know if they have a maximum word count or what it is if they do), but I feel like I’d need to explain myself there in a way I don’t have to here (“why is JG crapping on about 3D films like this? Richard who?”). And archiving on FB is shit; if I wanted to find something I wrote just a month ago it’d take me ages to find it again. This is a lot more convenient way of doing things. So I think I’m pretty happy myself with where I’m at; at least I hope I am given how much money I’m putting into the plan I’m on…

38. 38. There were 38. (And then a bit more)

Post title borrowed from the Revolting Cocks, with apologies

OOF. I use the airport reading as my local one cos that’s the one nearest me, so yeah, 38 degrees… this is why you can’t assume that just because it’s no longer December January or February it’s also no longer summer. Weather no longer cares about such niceties as human timekeeping. And remember those cunts who were complaining that we missed out on a “real” summer cos we went nearly a full 365 days without the temperature breaking thirty? Hope you pig fiddlers are fucking satisfied now… (EDIT: it actually made it to 40.6 later in the afternoon at the airport, slightly hotter than it was even at Penrith. Quelle jour.)

A century of weird

Weird Tales #1, March 1923

Happy 100th birthday (and a bit; apparently the first issue really came out in mid-February) to Weird Tales, which is still going in some form today, quite impressive given that it looked like it might barely last one year under Edwin Baird’s editorship. No Lovecraft in this issue, of course, he wouldn’t appear in the magazine until the September issue (in the letters column) and then “Dagon” marked his fiction debut in October; indeed he apparently hadn’t even seen this first issue when various associates of his who had suggested it as a possible outlet for his work. Indeed, I was a bit surprised to discover just now Clark Ashton Smith actually appeared in WT before him (two poems, this being before Smith took up fiction)… odd, cos I dimly recall reading something in the Selected Letters where HPL credited himself with introducing Baird to Smith’s work. One of us is apparently mistaken…

I hate Florida Nazis

Isn’t it nice to see someone involved in American politics and law enforcement come out hard against Nazis?

A week after a neo-Nazi hate group circulated throughout the Daytona Beach, Florida area displaying and distributing extremist propaganda, the county’s top cop has had enough.
“These scumbags came to the wrong county… We are not going to tolerate this,” a seething Volusia Sheriff Mike Chitwood said at a press conference on Monday. “This is not about free speech. This is about violence.”
Chitwood identified the Goyim Defense League (GDL) as the organization behind the disturbing behavior, which included leaving antisemitic flyers on people’s doorsteps and hanging anti-Jewish banners from busy pedestrian bridges during Daytona 500 weekend. On Feb. 17, the GDL held a demonstration outside Chabad of South Orlando, harassing pedestrians and motorists, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The next day, members hung signs at the Daytona International Speedway with sayings such as, “Henry Ford was right about the Jews.” They later projected antisemitic slogans on the outside of the track, with one reading, “Hitler was right.” […]
Chitwood, who did not hide his rage, said a group of GDL members from various states had spent last weekend traveling up and down Daytona’s International Speedway Boulevard while thousands of fans were in town for the races, “yelling obscenities” from the back of a rented U-Haul truck. He said he didn’t “see anything where these people can say this is First Amendment [protected speech]. This is nothing but pure, pure, pure evil.” […]
Chitwood then told those gathered before him that a lot of people in the room—including himself—as well as Jews around the country, were on the GDL’s “hit list.”
Chitwood called it a “badge of honor,” daring the GDL to come and “put a bullet in the back of my head.”
“That’s my message to you: go for it,” he said. “You want to try to get into my computer and plant child porn in there with a group of people that have an IQ of 12? Go for it. I challenge you to go for it. You want to put surveillance on me 24 hours [a day]? Go for it. And the best of all: you’re going to dox me and make me unelectable? Go for it. You came to the wrong county. I stand with my Jewish friends and I’m honored to be on your hit list. It’s an honor to be sought after by a bunch of punk thugs like you.”

I know, ACAB and all that, but damn. And this Chitwood fellow is county sheriff in the thick of Trumpland, too, in Florida, the state whose governor has notably refused to condemn the support he’s received from overt Nazis on more than one occasion, indeed calling it a Democrat smear. I don’t really know anything about Chitwood apart from this story and this look at his earlier days as sheriff, but it’s nice to know someone in the force (and his fellow sheriff John Mina, who’s also busted some) gives a shit about stopping Nazis… especially since there’s probably a few in his own force.