Month: July 2024

Not so Tenacious?

One of the unexpected casualties of the Trump shooting appears to have been Tenacious D…

…and evidently all it took was one ill-judged joke made from the stage right here in Sydney the other day; Kyle Gass celebrated his birthday at the show, Jack Black asked him if he had a birthday wish, and Gass responded with “Don’t miss Trump next time”.

Which… not exactly in the best of taste, no, and as this piece of tut-tutting moralising notes, many people probably thought something of the sort after the news broke but were tactful enough not to say it in front of several hundred people (hey Karen? Seen what the Right have been saying about killing and violence in recent times? Go tell them off and then come back if you want to talk about “democratic civility”). Ralph Babet got the vapours so hard he demanded the band be deported immediately, cos apparently an American making a bad taste remark about another American while in Australia should be a crime according to him (I suppose when you’ve got such a hard-on for the far right as Deej does, insulting Trump should be an international crime).

But then Jack Black got even more vaporous, and posted to Instagram the above text, cancelling the tour and “all future creative plans”… which is not an overt admission that the band’s broken up as such but a lot of people are apparently taking it as such. And a lot of people are disappointed, particularly the people who’d bought tickets to the band’s first local tour in a decade… and quite a few people are wondering “what the fuck, Jack?”, cos for one (again, admittedly bad taste) joke to apparently end a decades-long friendship is… kind of extreme?

The idea that Black is freaking out about his movie career suddenly drying up after this is one I’ve seen a few people bring up, and… yeah, I can buy that. Gass (who, incidentally, did issue an apology that should’ve ended the affair) doesn’t seem to have an exactly mega career outside Tenacious D, where Black has, presumably, further Kung Fu Panda sequels and so forth. That’s a lot for him to potentially lose… and apparently worth more to him than decades of friendship. Why do I feel like there’s a lot more to this story than anyone’s admitting? I’m not even a fan of the band or anything, I mean, I always thought “Tribute” was terrific but it never inspired me to dig any deeper… I just find the whole thing strange.

And how is his majesty doing?

It’s been a few days now since that shooting, we should check in on the orange one…

…aaaaand he’s fine. Nothing wrong with him except morally, as ever. Good to see that coming so close to death has made him realise the preciousness of life and driven him to focus on stuff that actually matters.

And he’s got friends looking after him too:

Insofar as the mask was ever on, it’s irretrievably off now. I can’t wait to find out just what Oolong expects from Glorious Bleeder for this, though, cos I’m sure that 45 million has strings attached.

And, well, sometimes you’ve got to feel sorry for the guy:

Frankly even I can’t work out what Trump has done to deserve this. Personally I can only hope Farrago’s new constituents in Clacton don’t mind him abandoning them immediately like this, I mean, it’s only a week or so since they voted him in and he’s already shirking his responsibilities to them to go and gently cup the balls of some elderly American man who isn’t even a resident of the country, let alone the constituency. Still, they voted for him, they deserve whatever they get…

Meanwhile on RM Brown’s channel:

There’s a couple of issues about this theory that God saved Trump (apart from the fact that it presupposes God’s existence, obviously) that I find problematic:

One, if God was protecting Trump, why did he let the shooting happen at all? Why didn’t he stop the shooter from firing in the first place?
Two… frankly, someone died. And another man apparently required multiple surgeries for the injuries he sustained, plus two others were apparently hit as well. Why didn’t God protect THEM? Did he decide they could just go fuck themselves? These pricks gushing about God saving Trump aren’t making as good a case for God as they think they are…

And blood and wine were on his hands

Well, then, let’s get on with something comparatively frivolous. Stuffed to the gills with uptempo chart smashes and pop hits that’ll have you snapping your fingers, tapping your feet, singing in the shower and all that jazz, it’s nothing if not colossal and upbeat… or at least it might be if it actually were, which it isn’t. This is what it actually is instead:

    1. The Jesus & Mary Chain, Kill Surf City
    2. Slab!, Fourth Warning
    3. Age of Chance, Bible of the Beats
    4. Killing Joke, Bloodsport
    5. Yello, Crash Dance
    6. Johnson Engineering Co., Full Circle
    7. Loop, Black Sun
    8. Play Dead, In Silence
    9. Executive Slacks, In and Out
    10. Crime & The City Solution, Her Room of Lights (For Lisa)
    11. Helios Creed, Sex Voodoo Venus
    12. Virgin Prunes, Theme for Thought
    13. Material, Detached
    14. Scientists, Human Jukebox

Look Who’s back

Jodie and Mandip are returning for Big Finish! I mean, I’m sure they wouldn’t have needed as much convincing to come back to Doctor Who as Peter Capaldi evidently does, but this is still quite some news. I wonder how the pissbabies who couldn’t cope with a female Doctor on TV will now cope with one in audio form. Whatever, I just hope the get the stories and scripts right for all those people (like me) who insist Jodie was a perfectly fine Doctor who wasn’t always well served by her material… so come on, BF, please prove us right.

Sapphic

I just saw a bit of Instagram promo for a forthcoming book which described it as “a sapphic retelling of Carmilla“.

A sapphic retelling of Carmilla.

A sapphic retelling of Carmilla.

A SAPPHIC retelling of CARMILLA.

A SAPPHIC fucking retelling of THE ORIGINAL FUCKING LESBIAN VAMPIRE STORY.

Someone at some point REALLY missed the point of that story, didn’t they.

 

 

Sapphic.

The Coming of Joachim Stiller

Book #15 for 2024. This is from 1960, so obviously not part of the “My Novel Life” thing, might start that with the next book… but this is part of Valancourt’s current $2.99 deal, and that amount was too good to pass by. It kind of reminded me a bit of another Valancourt title, I Am Jonathan Scrivener, which is a great book I recommend thoroughly, although Lampo’s book does significantly different things with its titular man of mystery; in this case, our protagonist, the journalist Freek Groenevelt (yes, evidently “Freek” is a Dutch diminutive for “Frederik”, but I still kept mentally sniggering at it like the Anglophone teenager I am) first encounters Stiller when the latter writes him a letter about of his newspaper pieces. Nothing unusual about that, except the letter was apparently posted nearly forty years before said newspaper piece, and before Freek was even born. The situation is complicated when he has another encounter with Stiller in book form… except this book is about four hundred years old, not just forty. Someone appears to be playing a peculiar prank on Freek and some others… but who and why?

This is the sort of thing that could obviously be played for horror (and there is a sort of impending apocalypse undercurrent that I wish the book had done more with), except that Stiller appears to be harmless and perhaps even benevolent. I will confess to slight disappointment that the very end suggests some sort of Christ allegory all along or something, but despite that the mystery does remain compelling throughout even after Stiller finally makes his brief (and abruptly terminated) appearance; if it doesn’t have as much edge as it might, it still conjures a mood of disquiet and ominousness throughout. I liked this a lot.