Month: August 2023

Ron moves away

RIP Ron S Peno, the not always easily penetrable voice of Died Pretty (yeah, “Winterland”, I’m talking about you there). Alas, the cancer he was diagnosed with in 2019 seems to have not gone entirely away after all; only about six weeks ago the band had to call off an October tour cos both Ronnie and drummer Chris Welsh were both fighting cancer, and I imagine Welsh’s headspace is not great right now with this news…

One of the highlights of DP’s peak period, “Caressing Swine” from Trace, their first major label album.

Ron’s post-DP project with Kim Salmon, The Darling Downs, and “Circa 65”

Ron’s guest appearance on Black Cab’s 2009 album Call Signs.

Night of the living… who?

I love Italian movie posters from the 60s and 70s, I love the art style, but I’ve always been perplexed by the posters for a certain well-known 1968 zombie film…

I mean, look at these. Beautiful. Marvellous pieces of promotional art. A ton of gothic mood and atmosphere. Grand stuff. Also, frankly, completely unrelated to the actual film, which is, of course, Night of the Living Dead by George Romero… or should that be “George A. Kramer”? I can only assume the Italian distributor for the film just gave the artist the film title and the names of the people in the film and absolutely no visual material to work from, the end result being something that looked more suited to an earlier 60s Italo-gothic by someone like Mario Bava or Riccardo Freda, which further got the director’s name wrong and promoted Randy Burr, one of the zombie extras, to the head of the cast. Also the film is noticeably not in widescreen. Fantastic film, obviously, just… not quite the one represented by these posters, which I love, but which I also find thoroughly perplexing.

RIP Jamie Reid

One of the iconographers of punk is gone. Apparently Reid literally suffered for his art, too; one day he was out walking while wearing a t-shirt with his “God Save the Queen” design on it and he got set upon by a gang who broke his leg. I don’t suppose many people connected to the Sex Pistols came away from them without at least some damage…

What took so long?

Ian Watkins got stabbed. No, I don’t know why it took so long for something like this to happen either…

Former Lostprophets vocalist Ian Watkins was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2013 for what can only be described as the most horrific child sex offenses you can imagine. […] The Mirror is now reporting that Watkins has been beaten and stabbed in prison and is currently in life-threatening condition. According to a source from the report, “He was found by officers after being held hostage and battered on Saturday morning. He’s in a life-threatening condition and there are fears he could die. If he survives, he’ll have been very lucky.”
Watkins was taken hostage by three inmates shortly after 9am on Saturday, August 5. Watkins was stabbed and beaten, and was eventually freed by prison officers six hours after the incident.

That said, BBC reports the injuries actually weren’t life-threatening, so I have no idea what’s what. But who’s actually afraid that this cunt might die? I can’t imagine anyone outside of his immediate family who might actually be sad at the thought of him dying, and frankly even they shouldn’t. Maybe they don’t, in fact. As I said, the only surprise is that it’s taken nearly 10 years for someone to try and wipe Watkins out; he’s a fucking monstrosity surrounded by other monstrosities in that prison… personally I worry more about the guys who obviously had an opportunity somehow to end him but didn’t, I could imagine someone going after them now…

KVLT!

Klingfilm ist Krieg! I do believe I’ve just found possibly the greatest black metal band photo of all time. I gather the band are Carpathian Forest, and I have no idea what they thought they were doing with this, but it fills me with an inexpressible joy. Blood, corpsepaint, posturing with spikes and a guy who, like me, really shouldn’t go about shirtless like that. AND the Glad Wrap. Honestly, Gorgoroth think they’re something with their naked women on crucifixes, this, whatever the fuck it is, would be a far more interesting live spectacle…

Why indeed?

This was posted on Facebook:

Now, this is not an instance of Chuckles here saying something stupid and someone else reposting it with an uncharitable re-interpretation in classic Twitter fashion. This is the actual stupid thing he said in the video the tweet was reposting. I know, I watched it myself (at least from the 3m25s point highlighted in the screen grab; he says it a few seconds after that). This is not the Human Events account trying to make Kirk look stupid, that’s the organisation HE PRODUCES CONTENT FOR.

Cos, as I found after a quick search, Human Events actually dates back to 1944, when it began life as a tiny conservative news sheet, and over the decades it moved further right (by the 80s it was all for apartheid and being a bad influence on Ronald Reagan), to the point that professional liar and professional white person Jack Posobiec is now its senior editor. And Charlie Kirk is one of its featured writers on their website, which I suppose is Posobiec paying his fellow professional liar and professional white person back for Kirk hiring him for Turning Point USA.

So what I originally thought was a Twitter account I hadn’t previously encoutered making fun of Chuck E. Cheese for saying something stupid, it was his employer thinking he was making a good point. And I can see the point he and they thought he was making, i.e. Trump must’ve actually been effective if the Dems are trying to stop him happening again, but… that’s not why. It’s because Trump’s presidency was a catastrophe the world hasn’t fully recovered from yet and a repeat performance would almost certainly be even worse. I mean, for all their faults, at least the Democrats still believe in democracy and letting people vote; the Republicans can no longer be trusted to do the same…

Trump’s TV comeback?

Apparently there’s moves afoot to have Dampnut’s trial televised. Which is something his own lawyer has actually argued for, interestingly enough:

Even before Trump’s third indictment dropped, his own lawyer, John Lauro, was calling for cameras in the courtroom. “I would hope that the Department of Justice would join in that effort so that we can take the curtain away and all Americans can see what’s happening,” Lauro said during an appearance on Fox News, days before the DOJ handed down federal charges in the elections case.

Now, televising trials is against US law, which says you can’t take photos in a courtroom or broadcast from one. The person who I spotted commenting about this on Mastodon today was implying that was why Lauro suggested televising the trial knowing that it couldn’t be, so that it could then be spun by the Republicans as a sham that the Democrats were trying to cover up. However, the latter have evidently decided to call that bluff, cos there are a couple of ways the law could potentially be overruled and a number of Democrat representatives are trying one, i.e. something called the Judicial Conference, to get his lordship back on TV:

Problem is, the cult won’t accept it; I foresee now that they’ll spin it all as some sort of deepfake or AI thing and they won’t believe for a second any of the evidence that the Democrats will put forth because THEY ALREADY DON’T. And if Trump loses — which is how I expect the whole thing will end — then they’re going to accept it even less…

I have kind of mixed feelings, part of which is the media overkill I’ve no doubt will result from it… there’ll already be an absurd amount of commentary on the trial anyway and there’s going to be a long time when every fucking day no one talks about anything else, but actual courtroom footage could make the whole affair truly insufferable. Cos Orange Cunt will play up to the cameras, he will make a performance out of it. It will be a put-on-a-show trial, if you’ll forgive the expression. And he’s unbearable enough as it is, how awful will he be then…

But, as someone says in the NPR article I linked above, that may actually be what the Democrats want, maybe they’re hoping Trump will make such a cunt of himself on TV that his presidential aspirations will be wiped out as a result… not 100% convinced by this cos the cultists will vote for him anyway if he’s still able to run, and if he’s not that kind of leaves… DeSantis? I don’t know if they want that or not… Otherwise, maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing? I don’t know.

RIP William Friedkin

The director of The Exorcist and many others followed me on Twitter for some reason. And, well, he’s not doing that any more… I actually got to see two of his films on the big screen, the restored Sorcerer at (I think) the Academy Twin in Paddington with the man himself in attendance, and Cruising at the Golden Age in Surry Hills, and I think it’s the latter that fascinates me the most, and I think Peter Bradshaw’s description of it in the article above sums it up well:

Elsewhere, his underworld drama Cruising from 1980, with Al Pacino as the cop going undercover to find a gay serial killer, has perhaps been derided for expressing not much more than the straight world’s fear of gay sexuality. But there are some extraordinary moments in it: such as when Pacino’s boss – played by a young Paul Sorvino, later to gain immortality in Scorsese’s GoodFellas – calmly asks him: “Have you ever had your cock sucked by a man?” and Pacino calmly says no, though without insisting he is straight. It is a brutal, rough-edged drama which scrapes tactlessly against the guardrails of what a 21st century audience would consider good taste.

Yeah. It’s a real “fuck you” of a film in many ways, not least in terms of whatever constitutes “taste” these days, and when I saw it a few years ago it was really hard to fully appraise… I actually agreed that Friedkin and co didn’t intend for it to be homophobic, but I still can’t decide if it wound up being that or not anyway, and as a non-gay man I’m not sure I’m exactly qualified to make such a judgement anyway. It’s deeply flawed and a mess, but it is so in such a fascinating way, and in many ways that’s the sort of film that intrigues me more than an uncomplicatedly well-made and unproblematic classic…