Month: June 2023

Dracula

Book #9 for 2023. So I’ve finally read Dracula (yes, I know, I’m a bad goth). I do find it a bit odd that I’ve seen a number of screen versions of the story—the Universal and Hammer series, the Coppola version, the BBC version from 1977 (I have the older Mystery & Imagination version too but haven’t watched it yet), even Jess Franco’s version, plus of course Nosferatu ’22 and ’79*—but had never actually read the book. Or, to be more precise, had never finished it.

I think I got it in the early 90s (fairly sure I still have that paperback) and for reasons I no longer remember I never actually read the whole thing through. I have memories of getting as far as the destruction of vampire Lucy but no idea why I stopped there. Was I bored? Was I finding the book simply not very good? Cos let’s face it, it’s not exactly a literary masterpiece. I suspect its status as an iconic classic of the genre is less due to its own inherent merits than it is to its various screen adaptations, particularly the 1931 version with that Lugosi fellow, which I don’t think is a particularly good film… it starts great but goes kind of rapidly downhill, in which it’s not actually unlike the book. First four chapters with Jonathan Harker in Dracula’s castle—fine. After that it’s a slog through various characters’ journals and other notes, of which they all seem to have plenty of time to write no matter how serious the situation.

Dracula is a fairly long book (just under 500 pages in the edition I read), certainly the longest I’ve read in ages, and not a lot really happens in it; the pacing is kind of ponderous (the action taking place over several months; I think the multi-narrator structure doesn’t help much), the characters are barely cardboard, the dialogue full of late Victorian melodramatics, and the count himself is, frankly, absent from most of it. He’s lurking somewhere in the background at all times, but he takes very little direct part in things. Something about it feels kind of small despite Dracula being a threat potentially to the whole world. And, frankly, the character of Renfield makes more sense in the Browning/Freund film where he replaces Jonathan Harker’s character.

It’s good, I just don’t think it’s great; I think I respect its historical importance to the genre more than anything. I wish I could find the 1901 abridgement Stoker himself made for a paperback edition which some think was an improvement. At any rate, after 30-odd years I finally finished it (longer than it took me with Ulysses), and am now in a position to also finally read the Swedish/Icelandic and Turkish knock-offs/rewrites. It would’ve been too foolish even for me to have read those before reading the original, after all…

* No, I haven’t seen the Dario Argento version except for clips. I suspect that requires a degree of masochism I rarely possess…

Murdoch changes everything

Oof. You may, however, be surprised that Lord Webber didn’t actually say that. I did a quick bit of research when I saw this posted on Facebook, cos I wanted some actual context… and the actual context was a minor part of a discussion near the end of a podcast called I Never Thought It Would Happen, fronted by Chris Difford from the band Squeeze and produced by a charity called Help Musicians (have a look at the list of guests so far) devoted to helping professional musicians. We’ll overlook the fact that ALW hardly needs any such help, he’s actually not a bad interviewee here.

But the bit about him struggling to write another musical was just a small part of the conversation near the end of a 40-odd minute chat, and it also wasn’t really related to “political correctness”, indeed I don’t think I even heard him use those words. He did piss and moan a bit about people telling him he couldn’t write certain things any more like Evita cos him and Tim Rice aren’t Argentinian, which… you know, conservative lord with a life peerage, what else would they say, but no, that’s still not really ALW’s problem… which is just that there’s a bit of a creative blockage and he hasn’t been able to find a story he wants to make a musical from. Said he could write any amount of music but doesn’t know what to write about.

This is somewhat different from “wah, PC is killing my career” and I can’t imagine why TalkTV would be spinning the conversation this way. *does quick check* Oh, that’s why. They’re Rupert Murdoch’s “news” TV station in the UK after he had to sell Sky. Looking at the list of talent I see Jeremy Kyle, Piers Morgan, a former political editor at The Scum and at least four right-wing politicians, two of them being the current leader and deputy leader of Reform UK, which was the party Nigel Farage founded after UKIP outlived its usefulness for him. Yeah, I really can’t imagine why such an evident shower of cunts might want to blow ALW’s actual words quite so far out of proportion into yet another culture war talking point…

Who’s got the Fear?

Fear Factory are active again, apparently, and by “Fear Factory” I mean Dino Cazares and three other ringers. Cos they’re not a band any more, and if any band has ever disappointed me by being, you know, kind of naked about how being in a band is as much if not more about business as it is art, it’s these pricks. (Kiss are far more obvious about it, I know, but I was never a fan so they couldn’t disappoint me in the same way.)

FF’s somewhat complicated history is summed up on Wiki, so read that. Suffice to say I was a big admirer of Demanufacture and Obsolete at the end of the 90s, and was a bit taken aback by their breakup in 2002 and the revelation that Dino Cazares was apparently a bit of a cunt. They came back as a trio without him (adding Byron Stroud on bass) and muddled on for a few more years, until apparently something like this happened:

Burton C. Bell: I don’t want to make horrible music like this any more.
Christian Olde Wolbers/Raymond Herrera: Whatever. We’ll form a new band without you.
Bell: Hey me and Dino are friends again for some reason and we’re forming a new band.
W/H: That’s nice.
Bell: And we’re making more of that horrible music I allegedly didn’t want to make.
W/H: That’s… nice.
Bell: And we’ve got Gene Hoglan!
W/H: Damn, that’s not bad at all.
Cazares: And we’re calling it Fear Factory and neither of you two cunts are invited.
W/H: Hmm. Excuse us, we have lawyers we need to speak to…

This is what B. and C. had to say to Metal Hammer at the time:

Weird how that rapport with Byron Stroud never extended to actually letting him play on any of the records the band made when he was part of it. As for Dino asking how anyone could pass up playing with Gene Hoglan, Dino did precisely that himself on their 2012 album The Industrialist, where he replaced one of metal’s most acclaimed drummers with a drum machine and apparently didn’t even tell him the band was making the album (Hoglan claimed he knew nothing about it until news of its completion came out). No wonder both of them quit the band after that…

Anyway, Wolbers’ lawyers eventually managed to throw some spanners into the works, and things got complicated with B. & C. and friends recording a new album during the legal strife, then Bell declaring the album was ready to come out and Cazares declaring there was no new album at all, then that it did exist and would be coming out in 2021, whereupon Bell decided “fuck the fucking lot of you” and quit the band, by which time he apparently hadn’t spoken to Cazares in years. Whereupon, ironically, Wolbers gave Cazares his blessing to carry on the band.

Honestly, FUCK these guys. Like I said, I liked those second and third albums quite a lot back in the day, they were a big part of me getting into more extreme metal at that time (I didn’t actually listen to a lot of the stuff then), so FF were kind of important to me. And they’ve let me down terribly as people almost ever since. I mean, I’ve heard at least some of the stuff they made after the initial 2002 breakup, indeed I quite liked some of the songs on Archetype, but I can’t get excited about them any more. They’ve been too obvious about being a business rather than a band. Which, really, is what most bands become once they pass a certain point. Most bands aren’t really bands, they don’t actually form and perform as organically and naturally as we the listener and fan might like to think. They become businesses.

But generally they don’t make that overly obvious. I suppose it’s like a sort of kayfabe, trying to act like the music outweighs other considerations like money and fame and the possibility that the band members don’t actually want to be in the same room as each other but they have to keep the money machine going… and Fear Factory have spent at least the last fifteen years shitting on that illusion and themselves in the process. I mean, I don’t need my favourite artists to all be charming and delightful sweethearts—some of them are fucking terrible people whose art I nonetheless enjoy—but FF have been too transparent over the years for me to still give a shit.

Anyway, Dino’s found a new singer, who has one of the least enviable tasks in heavy music; Burton’s voice was nothing if not a signature part of the band’s sound that won’t be replaced easily. Got a new drummer, too; the guy who replaced Gene Hoglan rather mysteriously disappeared from their latest tour due to “scheduling conflicts” and his fill-in is now the permanent drummer. Good luck to messrs Silvestro & Webber in their new roles, cos I feel like they may be lucky to hold onto them…

Mail call

Look what arrived today:

Not the most significant event to happen lately at Inanimate Towers, but I had in fact kind of given up on it happening at all… JB Hifi were doing a buy two get one free deal on DVDs/blu-rays a couple of weeks ago, so I took advantage of that, looked through all the stuff on offer, and spotted this, which is one of Amicus’ horror anthology films, going cheap. So I made that part of the order with two other full-price items, meaning this was the free one.

Only problem was, it failed to arrive with either of the other two things, both of which came separately for some reason rather than as part of the same order. A few days went by and I realised Torture Garden was not exactly en route… Also, JB Hifi emailed with a questionnaire to ask how satisfied with their service I was, so I used that to say no, I was not actually satisfied, given that the third item had not arrived and I’d come to the conclusion that, by this time, it wasn’t going to, and the only reason I wasn’t making more of a fuss about it was that it was the free item in that deal.

Sent that off, got no response which I was kind of irritated about given that I hadn’t been impressed by the service and I’d have thought they might actually want to discuss that… but, funnily enough, a couple of days later I got another email advising me that the Torture Garden blu-ray was in the mail. Coincidental timing? Or was this, in fact, their reply to me having been a bit harrumphy at them? Either way, at least the bloody thing’s here now…

Boo

Your humble scribe has just had his first haircut since 2019, and goddamn is his head cold right now (winter may not have been the best time to do it)…

…I’m actually happier with it than I look, that’s just my standard selfie bitchface. The last time I actually got it “properly” cut was actually some time in 2018 when Joe shaved it all off for me; after that, however, when it grew back it did so unevenly, coming back longer on the left side than the right. So, in 2019, April the 9th thereof according to Instagram, I got a trim to try and rectify that… which didn’t work in the long run, unfortunately, and also it took off more hair than I’d really wanted.

Continue reading “Boo”