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.
Month: April 2024
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…
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…
Now he’ll never catch the real killers
OJ Simpson, the former American football star, actor and notorious suspected double murderer, has died of cancer at 76, his family said in a statement on Thursday. […]
Simpson’s death was announced on X, formerly Twitter, in a simple message from his family: “On April 10th, our father, Orenthal James Simpson, succumbed to his battle with cancer. He was surrounded by his children and grandchildren. During this time of transition, his family asks that you please respect their wishes for privacy and grace,” the statement said.
Simpson “died without penance”, attorneys for Goldman’s family said on Thursday in a brief statement.
Of course he did. Whether or not he actually did those murders (but he almost certainly did; weird how no one else has been seriously offered as an alternative, and one of the people who was suggested as the real killer allegedly said Simpson hired him to do it, so that still didn’t let me off the hook), he still wasn’t a good guy, and he proved it with that fucking If I Did It book. Evidently he was less than contrite after that time he did go to jail years later too when his guilt was rather more obvious. Prostate cancer got him in the end, and somehow I can’t even feel sorry for him on that account.
Important images 42
It’s the ultimate answer, apparently.
Nudity… one photo, but it contains multitudes, shall we say. Also some illustrated bare arse in a couple of book covers.
King of the castle
I finally got to witness King, my next door neighbours’ cat, up on my roof. I’ve heard him a number of times—he goes up there quite a lot when he’s not loitering under one of the bushes out front of the house or prowling around in the backyard—but this afternoon was the first I got to actually see him up there; he was making plaintive “get me down from here” noises, but his person from next door was unable to convince him to actually come down, and then, when he went away, King just started getting plaintive again. Joe has seen him come down by himself, so he’s able to do it when he wants… today was one of those times he evidently didn’t. But, as the bloke from next door said, he’ll get hungry at some point and work something out. I just wish King would do something useful while he’s up there like clean the gutter or something…
A blaze in the northern… suburb?
The shop once known as Helvete has burned down.
Neseblod Records – formerly the Helevete record store (the one with the “Black Metal” basement that everyone takes a picture at) – in Oslo has been severely damaged by a fire. According to Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang (VG), a fire broke out in the basement and destroyed much of its contents.
“It is unclear what has happened,” said co-owner of Neseblod Records, Grethe Neseblod to VG. “I am standing outside now and cannot enter the room, which is very smoky. Therefore, I have no idea the extent of the damage.”
Police are currently investigating the fire. Helvete – originally owned by Euronymous – was shut down in early 1993 after drawing negative attention by local police and media thanks to the activities of the Black Metal Inner Circle, and was eventually reopened as Neseblod Records. The record story is widely considered to be a black metal museum, and this fire is nothing short of tragic for the world of metal.
“Much of what we have is only on display and not for sale,” added co-owner Kenneth Neseblod to VG. “It’s a museum-like venue at the same time as a record store. We have records, cassettes and tape trading letters that were previously used to write to each other in the metal community.”
In all seriousness, this is actually quite terrible on multiple levels, particularly when you see what a mess the place is now…
…but I can’t help but appreciate the undeniably bleak irony of the situation, given that “the activities of the Black Metal Inner Circle” alluded to in the article famously included setting churches on fire.
In news that should surprise nobody
Julie Bishop – the only woman in Tony Abbott’s 2013 federal cabinet – believes that the then prime minister really wanted an all-male senior ministry and only included her because her elected position as deputy leader meant he could not avoid it.
The former foreign affairs minister remains convinced that Abbott’s preference was to have no women at all.
“I wasn’t appointed by Tony, I was there in my own right as the elected deputy leader, so they had no choice but to have me in cabinet,” Bishop says in a lengthy podcast interview with Helen McCabe, founder of professional development and advocacy organisation Future Women.
“I suspect that had I not been deputy leader, I would not have been in cabinet, so there would have been no women in the cabinet.”
So why didn’t she speak up about this state of affairs?
In the podcast, part of a series of eight with high-profile women, Bishop says she challenged his decision, not just because of “the optics” but also on behalf of “the other women who were perfectly capable of holding a cabinet position, if not more capable than many of those men chosen”. But she says she chose not to express her concern publicly out of a mix of cabinet solidarity and self-preservation.
“I knew that if I went out at that point as the only woman in cabinet said, ‘This is unacceptable, it’s 2013, get your act together,’ then that would have caused a rift that would have been irreconcilable between me and the rest of the cabinet,” Bishop says.
She wishes others, including the media, had expressed more outrage at the time.
Ah. She was a fucking COWARD, that’s why. Wanted the media to be brave for her. As if they would’ve been anything of the sort, fucking Liberal shills. Of course, there’s nothing surprising about this revelation to anyone paying attention at the time; the idea of TONE ABET as Minister for Women (a position he refused to give the only woman in his cabinet)was so transparently absurd on the face of it, that the idea he would’ve preferred an all-male cabinet is “well OBVIOUSLY” stuff. And that Julie Bishop would be a coward in this situation who sacrificed other women for her own career… well, why am I not surprised by that. If there’d been no women at all in Abbott’s cabinet, how outraged would she have been then, or would she have relied on the media to do that for her too?
I can see this working just fine
The Russian republic of Chechnya has banned dance music it deems either too fast or too slow, in an attempt to quash a “polluting” western influence on the conservative majority-Muslim region.
Musa Dadayev, the culture minister, said “all musical, vocal and choreographic works should correspond to a tempo of 80-116 beats per minute” to make music “conform to the Chechen mentality and sense of rhythm”, according to the Russian news agency Tass.
“Borrowing musical culture from other peoples is inadmissible,” Dadayev said. “We must bring to the people and to the future of our children the cultural heritage of the Chechen people. This includes the entire spectrum of moral and ethical standards of life for Chechens.”
According to reports in Russian media, Dadayev set artists in the region a deadline of 1 June to rewrite any music that does not conform to the rule.
Yeah, I recall there was another country that did something like this back in the 1930s…
This is the charming poster for Hans Ziegler’s Entartete Musik exhibit in 1938, which doesn’t seem to have had a section devoted specifically to jazz but happily used it to promote the show. (Parenthetically, Igor Stravinsky was included until he complained to the Nazi government, which apparently said “whoops, sorry” and restored him to German concert halls.) The Czech writer Josef Skvorecky was a musician during WW2 and recalled this list of instructions being given by a Nazi Gauleiter during the occupation:
1. Pieces in foxtrot rhythm (so-called swing) are not to exceed 20% of the repertoires of light orchestras and dance bands;
2. In this so-called jazz type repertoire, preference is to be given to compositions in a major key and to lyrics expressing joy in life rather than Jewishly gloomy lyrics;
3. As to tempo, preference is also to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones so-called blues); however, the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated;
4. So-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10% syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races and conductive to dark instincts alien to the German people (so-called riffs);
5. Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit (so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc.) as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl (so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.);
6. Also prohibited are so-called drum breaks longer than half a bar in four-quarter beat (except in stylized military marches);
7. The double bass must be played solely with the bow in so-called jazz compositions;
8. Plucking of the strings is prohibited, since it is damaging to the instrument and detrimental to Aryan musicality; if a so-called pizzicato effect is absolutely desirable for the character of the composition, strict care must be taken lest the string be allowed to patter on the sordine, which is henceforth forbidden;
9. Musicians are likewise forbidden to make vocal improvisations (so-called scat);
10. All light orchestras and dance bands are advised to restrict the use of saxophones of all keys and to substitute for them the violin-cello, the viola or possibly a suitable folk instrument.
Apparently they were really concerned about strings not breaking. I don’t know how authentic Skvorecky’s list is or if there’s corroboration for it, but I don’t see much reason for it to have been invented as such, this is the exact sort of precision nonsense you would expect from the Nazis. And the stuff about things being alien to the German spirit, how fast music should be, what sort of rhythms you should use… there’s a resonance of all that in this Chechen thing.
I actually wondered if the story was even remotely true, cos it sounds too silly to be so, but I found it reported by the Moscow Times (an independent paper which claims to be one of Putin’s many enemies) which directed me to what appears to be the Chechen government’s website or some part thereof with a video about it, so I have to assume it is. On the plus side, maybe Chechnya will now find itself home to a new underground of kids who like their music fast…
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…
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