Month: April 2024

Wait until he hears about the Sabine women

Someone shared this on Bluesky:

Apparently this is what I miss out on by not following Oolong on Twatter, i.e. this sort of first-class mind speculating on history as if he were the first person to ever have this idea and THE FUCKING ROMANS THEMSELVES hadn’t thought of it MILLENNIA ago. Like… the Aeneid exists. It has done since before the putative birth of Christ. The Trojans are there in the extant parts of Dionysius and Livy, which are of the same period.

And the Romans got Aeneas from the Greeks, much like they got almost everything else. I don’t know exactly when the story of him founding the Trojan colony in Italy first originated, but we do find this in the Iliad at one point (Emily Wilson translation):

Aeneas has been fated to survive,
so that the family of Dardanus,
whom Zeus, the son of Cronus, loved the most
of all the sons he had by mortal women,
will not die out, forgotten, with no seed.
But Zeus has come to hate the line of Priam.
Therefore Aeneas and his children’s children
who will be born in future generations
will rule the Trojans.

That’s Poseidon speaking in book 20. Aeneas isn’t a big character in the Iliad, but the idea that he was being spared by the gods for something big was present in this text, whose precise date and origin are still quibbled over (and have been for millennia as well) but it’s generally considered that it was committed to writing some time in the eighth century BC. So the idea that Aeneas was fated to survive the war and flourish as the Trojan ruler (and it doesn’t say he would necessarily rule Troy as such, just the Trojans) goes back a very long way.

And here’s this stupid cunt going on like he’s the first person in history to ever think this. As if he’s ever given the Romans any thought in the first place. Next thing he’ll be noticing that English contains a lot of words from other languages…

“Pandemonium” was right

The Pandemonium Rocks festival has been in and out of the news for a few months now, and it’s been kind of amazing to watch. I think I first heard about it when there was harrumphing about the Sydney date being held at The Domain on Anzac Day:

A music festival planned for Sydney’s CBD will be moved to Western Sydney after the RSL deemed the event “inappropriate”.
NSW Premier Chris Minns defended his decision to relocate the Pandemonium event from the Domain in the CBD to Sydney Olympic Park.
The rock music festival, which features acts like Alice Cooper, Blondie and Deep Purple, was initially booked for 11:30am in the CBD, a venue managed by the Botanic Gardens of Sydney.
The annual Anzac Day commemoration service will take place in front of the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park at 12:30pm, in earshot of the music festival.

And to be sure it probably wasn’t the best idea to do this, but I was more intrigued by the lineup. Alice Cooper, Blondie and Deep Purple? And then there were more: Placebo? Wolfmother? Psychedelic Furs? Palaye Royale? Cosmic Psychos? Gyroscope? WHEATUS? GANG OF FOUR? DEAD KENNEDYS? What, and indeed, the FUCK. This would not be the last time the words “what the fuck” would be uttered in response to Pandemonium, especially when news came through that it had been cancelled.

This turned out to not actually be the case, but I don’t think anyone would’ve been too surprised if it had been (quite apart from the way music festivals are going tits up left right and centre around Australia right now). Unfortunately, the show was going on… but reduced from two stages to one and accordingly losing Placebo, Deep Purple, DKs, Go4 and Gyroscope. (Palaye Royale just dropped out too, but that was a family emergency rather than incompetence.) People were pissed, not without reason, and it didn’t help that Apex Entertainment weren’t exactly forthcoming with offers to refund people; currently they’re refusing to offer more than $70 cos that’s how much they’ve reduced ticket prices by.

The most interesting detail in this was that Blondie and Alice Cooper offered this joint statement:

So, am I reading that correctly if I think they’re saying the bands have actually been doing some of the organisational work for this festival…?

Frankly, though, they should be offering people refunds for adding Warwick Capper to the bill… that was JUST what was needed. That brothel he bought last year must not be paying the bills for him. Anyway, just as the people still looking forward to the event were getting ready for the tour to start tomorrow, THIS happened:

Pandemonium Rocks has inadvertently leaked the bank account details, phone numbers, names, and email addresses of hundreds of ticket holders. This breach occurred late this evening through a form that was distributed to festival attendees seeking refunds.
The data exposure includes sensitive financial information such as BSB and account numbers. These details belonged to attendees who submitted their personal information to claim a partial refund after the festival lineup dramatically changed last minute, leading to the cancellation of performances by 7 out of the 13 scheduled bands.

Fuck. Me. Dead. Someone was asking Joel King, the author of this piece, on Facebook (where I first read it) if he thought Apex’s Andrew McManus had actually done this deliberately to discourage people who hadn’t yet applied for their refund, because this is the 21st century and this is the Internet and people make that sort of assumption because it’s de rigueur, and King said probably not but to be honest I think I actually wouldn’t be surprised to find that he had… and in any case there’s a bunch of people on brother King’s FB who are now very wary of taking McManus’ offer. Oy. I just hope against hope that the shows still go OK, cos I can imagine this festival fucking up even further, though I’m afraid to ask how in case McManus tells me. In any case, I think the real headline show will eventually be in court somehow…

In fact it’s a gas

House conservatives have a special group dedicated to preserving their power. Of course, it’s called the FART team.

No, really, that’s what it’s called. The Floor Action Response Team. FART.

Mind you, this isn’t the first time they’ve had trouble naming things according to Wiki:

The caucus originated during the mid–January 2015 Republican congressional retreat in Hershey, Pennsylvania. According to founding member Mick Mulvaney, “that was the first time we got together and decided we were a group, and not just a bunch of pissed-off guys”. Nine conservative Republican members of the House began planning a new congressional caucus separate from the Republican Study Committee and apart from the House Republican Conference. The founding members who constituted the first board of directors for the new caucus were Republican representatives Scott Garrett of New Jersey, Jim Jordan of Ohio, John Fleming of Louisiana, Matt Salmon of Arizona, Justin Amash of Michigan, Raúl Labrador of Idaho, Mulvaney of South Carolina, Ron DeSantis of Florida and Mark Meadows of North Carolina.
At the retreat in Pennsylvania, the group settled on the name Freedom Caucus. Mick Mulvaney told Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, “We had twenty names, and all of them were terrible. None of us liked the Freedom Caucus, either, but it was so generic and so universally awful that we had no reason to be against it.” According to Lizza, “one of the working titles for the group was the Reasonable Nutjob Caucus.”

As far as bunches of fucking deadshits go, this clown car certainly is one. The fundamental unseriousness of these people is stunning.

Those teeth are a bit loud too

Found this via one of those Tumblr archives I’ve got downloaded. I’ve seen a lot of complaints in recent years about the loudness of TV ads compared to the shows, but clearly this is not a new phenomenon… took a bit of effort to track down exactly when this issue came out, but I now find the year was 1959. So the “loud” commercial thing has been an issue since then at least (I wonder what the “facts” were; the US has laws against ad volume exceeding program volume but that’s only been since 2012) and it’s not even remotely a new thing, which is interesting. Well, to ME at any rate…

RIP IP

This was rather sad news. I am, in general, not especially interested in food, I have a very limited palate and to be honest I often feel like if I didn’t have to eat I probably wouldn’t. There’s a deep-rooted psychological issue in there, I’m sure, maybe an autism thing but that’s not the point. The point is that Ian Parmenter (who I was thinking about just the other day, maybe I shouldn’t do that) has left us, and I actually watched and enjoyed his cooking show, which I didn’t do with many other TV chefs. I kind of like that it was an off-screen passion for him at first, too; he was trained as a journalist and he produced TV news in the late 80s, but then he managed to parlay this off-screen interest into 450 episodes of Consuming Passions… I recall it being like a bumper segment before the ABC news, something like that; I don’t know that I would’ve eaten most of the things he made, but he was fun to watch while he was doing these things, I remember him having fairly animated facial hair, and I am rather sad to know he’s gone.

The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism

Book #9 for 2024. John Coulthart’s been revisiting surrealism somewhat on his blog in recent weeks, which has in turn kind of led me to investigate it a bit further myself, which I’ve never really done much before. This may or may not have been a good book with which to start building on my existing knowledge. I’ll quote the “about the author” page first:

Patrick Lepetit has written several books in French on esoteric traditions and surrealism. He is a member of the Grand Orient de France and of the Mélusine Network of scholars interested in surrealism. He lives in Mons en Baroeul, France.

I must say the book does give me the impression that Lepetit has spent years immersed in his subject and that it’s a real labout of love from someone who Knows His Stuff (capitals used advisedly). Being French, Lepetit obviously has access to vast numbers of French-language resources of which probably hardly any (apart from a couple of bigger titles like Seligmann’s Mirror of Magic or Mabille’s Mirror of the Marvellous, both of which I’ve got and should finally get around to reading now) has ever been available in English, which does make it a useful resource for the non-Francophone.

And therein, somewhat, lies the problem with the book. Lepetit just throws so fucking much information at you, with quotes from the surrealists themselves (particularly Andre Breton, obviously), fellow travellers like the Grand Jeu mob, critics and commentators and whoever else he can cite. The book opens by observing the surrealists’ fairly unbridled loathing for conventional religion, then spends most of the rest of the book going into their fascination with decidedly non-conventional stuff before ending by asking just how seriously they actually took this sort of thing. I’m not sure how well he answers that question really, but it is intriguing to see just how deep the hole goes. (I for one had no idea Arthuriana was something the surrealists were into. H.P. Lovecraft puts in an appearance, too, cos the surrealists had a long-standing fondness for him. I don’t think he reciprocated it, though. And even Colin Wilson gets a look in, and I think he would’ve been even less sympathetic…)

So there’s a lot of information in this book… and, as I say, that’s part of its problem, there’s just so much of it and Lepetit also seems to assume a lot of prior knowledge on the reader’s part. Like I said, he has access to a lot of material by people who are for the most part probably best known outside of France by specialists, insofar as they’re known at all, and one of the things Lepetit seems to assume is that you do in fact know who they are. I don’t blame him for this; he’s clearly writing for a French readership that presumably knows these people a lot better, and I don’t suppose he was expecting the book to go any further than that.

It’s just some of the other stuff he assumes you already know, particularly the visual art he describes; the book has some illustrations but nowhere near as much as it needs (I would particularly have liked some pictures of Victor Brauner’s work, which Lepetit writes about at some length). And there’s smaller things like glancing allusions to Breton’s “Great Transparents” that Lepetit never elucidates, and which would’ve baffled me had John Coulthart, again, not posted about them a few months ago. Lepetit’s presentation of all this business is, of course, the other part of the book’s problem; he has a rather thick writing style, full of subordinate clauses and other things that make his text a lot more convoluted than it needed to be. I don’t know if that’s an issue with Lepetit or his translator, but it’s an issue in any case, and the longer I persisted with the book the more of an issue it became.

So, awfully interesting subject matter kind of hindered by how it’s actually transmitted, which is a bit of a shame, though if you’re interested in the subject it’s still worth reading. Just not as a beginner’s book or anything like that. It’s got me interested in reading more on the subject, anyway.

Bondi

Well, YESTERDAY was a fucking day, wasn’t it? I felt too nauseous at the whole thing to write about it yesterday, today I’m just angry. Because so many people just had to do this sort of thing:

This was just one clump of responses I found trailing one post on Twatter, and there would be worse, because OBVIOUSLY this was a Muslim man who specifically targeted Westfields at Bondi cos Bondi is the Jewish capital of city, apparently, and Westfields is Jewish-owned, apparently, so OBVIOUSLY this was some sort of revenge against Israel for the Gaza bullshit because obviously everyone at Bondi Westfield was Jewish…? And if they weren’t all Jewish, he could magically pick out all the ones that were…?

There were, of course, a handful of people who insisted with equal strength that he wasn’t Muslim, but they were outweighed by the ones insisting he must be. So Muslim, in fact, that I had someone in my Twitter replies telling me he was specifically Palestinian, not just any old Muslim. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT that suggesting, as I did on Twitter, that maybe people should wait for actual information to be released before engaging in pre-emptive racism might be considered unacceptable advice? Yeah… amazing how many people did, in fact, take offence to me saying this… Weird, though, how all the people who KNEW he was Muslim, and indeed KNEW where in the Middle East he specifically originated, refused to tell me exactly who he was when I asked them. I mean, they KNEW so much about him, you’d think they’d have known that too and would’ve been willing to share the information…

And then there was this:

Then…

Oh. Then…

OH. Slight problem with all of this, though.

It wasn’t Benjamin Cohen.

The police had already announced the attacker was thought to be 40 years old (at this point they hadn’t identified him publicly but were sure that he was someone known to them). The Benjamin Cohen in question is apparently only in his 20s. And looks nothing like the man in the CCTV footage. Why might these two Twitterers be so determined to pin the blame on a Jewish guy? Well, Syrian Girl is evidently an antisemitic conspiracy theorist peddling all manner of bullshit, with her only positive point being that her hatred of Jews necessarily encompasses that cunt Avi Yemini (who she also tweeted about saying how he looked like the guy in the video), while Cossack is slightly more complicated…

This man was allegedly 33 when this photo was taken. Usually I think I’m aging well as I approach 50 myself, but if I ever have doubts I’ll just look at this…

Semyon or Simeon Boikov is a pro-Putin disinformation spreader who’s been hiding in the Russian consulate at Woollahra for a couple of years now (that’s where he’s waving from in the above picture which I got via the SMH) for attacking an old guy at a pro-Ukrainian rally; he’s also an antivaxxer and sovereign citizen type, and if he’s not an actual Nazi he is at the very least a sympathiser who would have a vested interest in naming a JOOOOOOOOOO as the attacker in this case. (Avi Yemini and him aren’t friends either, funnily enough.)

As for why the Channel 7 news report decided to base itself around “information” from demonstrable right-wing shitheads like these two… well, I suppose we’ll have to ask Kerry Stokes one day when he’s not busy having to pick up after Bruce Lehrmann. I’ll give them some credit for deleting the news story, unlike their sources, but I don’t think that’ll save them from the defamation lawsuit Ben Cohen would surely be entitled to aim at them.

Anyway, the ACTUAL killer appears to be someone called Joel Cauchi, a guy from Queensland who was SO Islamic evidently that his first victim appears to have been a security guard from Pakistan. OH THE FUCKING IRONY. (One of his other victims was the daughter of John Singleton, who I think is a bit of a cunt—he recently came back to prominence with that incomprehensible ad “apologising” to Ben Roberts-Smith—but ye gods this is not what anyone would wish for him, surely.) This news will, I’m sure, make no difference to the cookers on Twitter, including the psychotics I’ve already seen claiming the whole thing is a false flag to bring about the NWO, and the ones saying it doesn’t matter if he wasn’t a Muslim cos it was still “Muslim-style”, to say nothing of the fucking American ammosexuals going off about how this proves we need guns (as if that wouldn’t have made the whole thing an even more wholesale massacre). Cunts, all of them.

And the champion cunt was someone on Bluesky who decided to have a go at me when I posted there something about wondering what disgusted me more, the event itself or Twatter’s reaction to it, accusing me of wanting to tone police people’s responses. As if HE weren’t trying to police my reaction to the fucking thing, I mean CLEARLY how DARE I be offended by racists exploiting an unspeakable tragedy to promote their own hideous ideology. Fuck you.

I don’t know, I’m just filled with so much loathing for so many people right now, and I think I’d better just leave off with the statement released by Cauchi’s family. I wish I had the equanimity they must have, especially to have written that last part…