Alain Delon died the other day, and that made me realise that I knew practically nothing about him other than his having been an actor. Obviously I’d seen some of his films, but didn’t really know much otherwise. So I thought I’d look him up on Wiki, and, well, YIKES. Man was a piece of work. And of shit. Those pretty-boy looks got him places but they hid something fantastically unpleasant too… anyway, this story came out today:
The late French actor Alain Delon’s wish that his pet dog be put down and buried with him has been rejected by his children after an outcry from animal rights campaigners.
The actor, who died aged 88 on Sunday, had said he wished the animal, a 10-year-old Belgian malinois called Loubo, to be “put to sleep” and laid in his grave in the cemetery of his home in the village of Douchy in the Loiret.
On Tuesday, after activists expressed dismay at the prospect of a healthy animal being put down and offered to find the dog a new home, it was announced Loubo would live.
The Brigitte Bardot Foundation said Delon’s daughter Anouchka had confirmed the family would keep the dog.
“I’ve just had Anouchka Delon on the phone and she has told me that Loubo is part of the family and will be kept. The dog will not be put down,” a foundation spokesperson said. […]
“He’s my end of life dog … I love him like a child,” Delon told Paris Match in 2018. “I’ve had 50 dogs in my life, but I have a special relationship with this one. He misses me when I’m not there.”
He added: “If I die before him, I’ll ask the vet to take us away together. He’ll put him to sleep in my arms. I’d rather do that than know that he’ll let himself die on my grave with so much suffering.”
After that interview, the animal association 30 Million Friends condemned what it called the “convenience” euthanasia of a perfectly healthy dog, saying it hoped Loubo would be adopted.
I’m genuinely flabbergasted by this. Some fucking animal lover, eh? At that age, I’m guessing Loubo doesn’t have a lot of time left to him anyway (Malinois apparently live 10-14 years), but unless he was as terribly unwell as Delon was, I don’t see any need to accelerate his ending like that just to satifsy his owner’s ego. So yeah, fuck Alain Delon. Like I said, I didn’t know much about him before he died, and I think I was better off…
…but hot DAMN that title fills me with absolute joy. There’s a lot of books etc out there with parodic pun titles, but I think this might be the best I’ve ever seen. I was in stitches when I laid eyes on it.
Well, here’s a bit of TV history for you, being the earliest complete surviving BBC drama… I once observed on my old film blog that if any BBC production made before they finally ended their policy of wiping their master tapes in 1978 still exists, it probably does so by accident more than design. This is particularly true of their 1950s shows, when pretty much everything was live and rarely telerecorded in the first place; I suspect it was a somewhat random decision to so record Rudolph Cartier’s February 1953 version of It is Midnight, Dr. Schweitzer, and it probably survives just as randomly. (US networks were already somewhat better than the BBC at this sort of thing.)
I’ll be honest upfront and acknowledge that I don’t fully know how to appraise this, cos I suspect the original telerecording was kind of mediocre at best (cf. the two extant Quatermass episodes from a few months later, which are pretty ho-hum) and the copy of it I scored off Youtube many years ago (which is evidently no longer available there and I can’t find it anywhere else) is a shit copy of that. So visually it’s awfully hard to judge… but then again this almost works just as a radio play, and with a few adjustments it could probably have been turned into one.
Plotwise, Albert Schweitzer is working his hospital in Lambaréné in French Equatorial Africa (as Gabon was at the time), but it’s August 1914, and, well, you know what else was kicking off that month… and that makes the good doctor’s position in a French colony as someone who was technically German (Schweitzer having been born in Alsace, which Germany had owned since the Franco-Prussian war) kind of difficult. This is kind of the action of the play, such as it is. It’s perfectly well-acted, I suppose, and it is… well, very much acted. The one review of it on IMDB calls it “a worthy play about worthy people”, and that seems accurate; it’s a play that seems kind of impressed by its own subject matter, and it felt like it was relying on the fact that it’s about Albert Schweitzer to maintain interest more than anything else.
And it feels very much like a stage play too… apparently it did use pre-filmed sequences to a more advanced degree than was usual, but it still doesn’t open up the thing that much, with only five credited cast and some minimal sets and a bunch of sound effects by which the natives are mostly represented apart from a couple of scenes (cos obviously the natives were hardly people as such, were they; even Schweitzer loses his shit at them at one point). Hence why I said it could almost have been a radio play, cos it relies so much on off-screen noises anyway.
It’s quite long and dry, and what we have is actually the shorter version of the production; I gather standard BBC practice then was to broadcast a play first on Sunday night, and then restage it the following Thursday, which was the one to be recorded if they could be bothered doing so. In this case, the first version apparently ran 20 minutes over time and so Cartier cut a bunch for the second showing, which is what we have now… and oy but I can’t imagine this having been even longer, this is stodgy enough as it is.
So I’ve no idea how representative this is or isn’t of early BBC live drama, cos so little of it still exists (and I’ve seen almost none of what does). That said, though I can’t say I was a big admirer of this example of it, I remain impressed by the fact that it went out live for a hundred minutes with minimal pauses. I have the Criterion Collection’s Golden Age of Television DVD set, and I was always meh about the excitement expressed therein about how amazing it was when live American TV started doing 90-minute productions rather than 60-minute ones… I mean, great, but the BBC had been doing that for years and without the benefit of ad breaks. Still, you know how it is, if it didn’t happen in America, it didn’t happen anywhere…
Even the refined world of classical music isn’t above politics when it comes to Gaza, as pianist Jayson Gillham and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra have discovered:
At a previous concert at Iwaki Auditorium in Southbank on Sunday, Gillham had performed a number of songs, including the world premiere of Witness by Connor D’Netto – which the MSO said was a late addition to the program.
The five-minute piece is dedicated to the journalists of Gaza and was written for Gillham, according to D’Netto’s website. Gillham was removed from Thursday’s concert after remarks he made while introducing the piece, the MSO said at the time.
“Over the last 10 months, Israel has killed more than one hundred Palestinian journalists,” Gillham told the crowd on Sunday, according to his management.
“A number of these have been targeted assassinations of prominent journalists as they were travelling in marked press vehicles or wearing their press jackets. The killing of journalists is a war crime in international law, and it is done in an effort to prevent the documentation and broadcasting of war crimes to the world.
“In addition to the role of journalists who bear witness, the word witness in Arabic is shaheed, which also means martyr.”
MSO management then announced that Gillham had been stood down from a performance that was supposed to be happening tonight because they were shocked, shocked I tell you at him going “beyond the remit of his contract” as they put it with these words that shouldn’t really be that controversial—I mean, whatever else you make of the Gaza situation and who’s right and who’s wrong, it is transparently obvious that Israel is quite happy to target civilians and media—and that was that. The show would go on, but not with this politically minded pianist.
Having thereby earned the justifiable wrath of many commentators, the MSO have now come out and said “whoops, we fucked up” and cancelled the performance entirely because of “safety concerns” (and not a ton of people demanding refunds). Which makes everything… better somehow? I don’t know. Apparently they do want to reschedule the thing with Gillham and he’s apparently open to doing so, but still, the occasion’s going to be a bit tainted… and it’s hard to escape the feeling that this part of the statement was meant as a warning to him, however nicely put:
The MSO said it maintains that “a concert platform is not an appropriate stage for political comment”, but acknowledges “Jayson’s concerns for those in the Middle East and elsewhere”.
Well, if the MSO’s performances are going to remain apolitical from now on, I presume they’ll never be playing Beethoven’s third symphony ever again… also, for what it’s worth:
“Regardless of our differences”… apart from some, evidently.
The Liberal party’s campaign for the upcoming New South Wales local government elections is in crisis after it missed the deadline to nominate candidates for several councils.
The NSW Liberals were scrambling late on Wednesday afternoon to find out how many candidates had been affected by the administrative blunder, which meant the party would probably be missing candidates at the 14 September council elections.
The opposition leader, Mark Speakman, said submitting the nominations was a matter for the NSW Liberals secretariat and demanded the state director, Richard Shields, explain what had happened.
Speakman said he’d spoken to Shields “only very briefly” and would wait to hear his explanation before commenting on whether he should resign.
“My wish was to have Liberal-endorsed candidates in as many council elections as possible,” Speakman said.
“I think people are entitled to have the choice of voting for a Liberal candidate, if that’s what they wish to do.”
Shields is blaming “resourcing issues” within the secretariat, which, frankly, feels to me like something HE should be doing something about if he’s running the party… but whoever’s at fault, I don’t think the party has much business standing for government if this is where it’s at. If they can’t organise something this basic, should we trust them with actually important things?
Thist story about a sunken island being discovered is fascinating, but the corollary theory from the project head strikes me as… unlikely?
Researchers in Spain have uncovered lost islands that sank into the ocean millions of years ago, some of which still have their beaches intact.
“This could be the origin of the Atlantis legend,” Luis Somoza, the head of a project to study volcanic activity off the Canary Islands, told Live Science in an email.
The team found the islands on a seamount, or underwater mountain, which contains three now inactive volcanoes and is about 31 miles (50 kilometers) in diameter. Its base is about 1.4 miles (2.3 km) below the surface of the ocean.
Scientists dubbed the newfound seamount Mount Los Atlantes after Plato’s fabled civilization that the gods plunged into the ocean as a punishment for its citizens’ immorality.
“They were islands in the past and they have sunk, they are still sinking, as the legend of Atlantis tells,” Somoza, a geologist with the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain (IGME-CSIC), said in a translated statement.
With all due respect to brother Luis, this sounds like some Graham Hancock bullshit to me. Let’s assume he’s right, and that Plato was indeed inspired by this thing. How would he have even KNOWN about it in the first place? We’ve only discovered it now with 21st century technology. The seamount has probably been submerged for millions of years. The article observes that the seamount might’ve been visible above water during the ice age… but that would’ve been about thousands of years before Plato’s time (to be sure, he does say that whatever happened to Atlantis did so about 9,000 years earlier), and it would’ve required there to be enough humans to have witnessed what happened and to preserve that knowledge (through oral tradition to boot, as Plato also says) for millennia until it reached Plato. I know our remote ancestors were probably a lot smarter than the likes of Hancock, Donnelly, von Daniken et al give them credit for being, but I find this concept awfully hard to accept… sorry Luis, but I’m not buying it.
Oh no, how will the Olympics ever cope if Rob Schneider’s not watching? The answer seems to be: perfectly fine, once it got past the stink of the opening ceremony, which I finally watched highlights of the other day. Let it be said immediately, it looked amazing; for the first time, the ceremony didn’t happen in the stadium but all across the city, and why not cos Paris is the perfect place to do that. (It was pissing with rain throughout, too, which for some reason I haven’t seen anyone mention. Somehow that made it even more impressive.) The athletes sailed up the Seine on boats. Looked tremendous. However, that highlights package was curiously quiet about the ceremony’s most controversial moment…
Many viewers, including Pope Francis and Ayatollah Khamanei, interpreted the scene as a parody mocking Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper (c. 1495). By extension, they claimed that the opening ceremony mocked the Last Supper, the event Christians believe instituted the Eucharist celebration – and Christianity itself. The outrage has been so intense in some quarters that the ceremony organisers have been subject to death threats.
These responses fundamentally misinterpret the scene, which was not supposed to reference the Last Supper at all. The director of the ceremony, Thomas Jolly, was principally inspired not by da Vinci’s The Last Supper, but by Le Festin Des Dieux (The Feast of God, c. 1635-1640) a painting by Jan van Bijlert.
This painting depicts the marriage of the characters from ancient Greek mythology, Thetis and Peleus, with the god Dionysus and his satyrs dancing in the foreground. This makes considerably more sense considering Le Festin is housed at the Musée Magninin in Dijon, France. The Last Supper, meanwhile, resides in Milan (quite ironically, as Milan will be the site of the 2026 Winter Olympics).
I’ll add this video from Emma Thorne, which looks at one Christian loon response that we may take as representative of the general Christian loon reaction:
While stupid people were sputtering about a bunch of drag performers destroying their faith, organisational responses varied from the kind of cringy apology from the organisers to this rather more sensible statement from the mayor of Paris:
Anne Hidalgo is not holding back.
When religious and political officials voiced outrage in response to the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony, the International Olympic Committee chose diplomacy, apologizing to anyone who may have been offended.
Hidalgo, on the other hand, said, “Fuck the reactionaries, fuck this far right, fuck all of those who would like to lock us into a war of all against all,” in an interview with Le Monde published Tuesday, using the expletive in the original English.
Yes, madame mayor was so furious at these chuds she couldn’t even curse them in French!
Anyway, people finally calmed down, and once Imane Khelif entered the picture they could finally get on with hating other, more traditional things like women, and in the meantime the closing ceremony designers kept rewriting the end show to avoid being misconstrued so no one could possibly mistake their intentions…
…which clearly didn’t quite work, though I feel like if they were really trying to do the tarot reference the “Golden Voyager” would’ve been actually upside down… But even during the Games, some people insisted on still finding occult stuff going on:
I said the other day I’d have more from Rob Anderson, and this was what I meant: Simone Biles and her charmingly self-aggrandising “G.O.A.T.” necklace. Cos let’s be honest, if anyone’s got the right to call themselves the Greatest Of All Time, she’s got as good a claim as any after her spectacular showing… but no, this stupid cunt just had to find Satan at work, however tenuously. This is the sort of thing that it’s tempting to assume they’re not actually being serious and it’s just a Poe, but then Rob also issued his proclamation about Andrew Tate a couple of days after this and I realised he meant it. I don’t know whether this or the Tate thing is more detached from reality, but either way brother Rob is not in touch with it.
Fortunately the Games generally went off well, and for a couple of weeks the good people of France could forget the recent electoral turmoil there from just a few weeks ago when some thought the country might not even have a government to oversee the Olympics… and the Games are now off to Los Angeles in 2028, where I presume there will still be a government then… although which government is obviously still up for grabs. But either way I’m sure someone will still complain about the opening ceremony being too “woke” somehow…
I don’t have much to say here about sports cos it’s not something that interests me that much, but it’s Olympics time so I should make some notes on that, I suppose. Been an interesting couple of weeks, haven’t actually watched much of it (though I have rather enjoyed the cycling events, and HOLY SHIT SIMONE BILES welcome back to the podium after the unfortunate Tokyo withdrawal; I think her several medals pretty comprehensively answered everyone who criticised her over that), but the discourse surrounding it has certainly been interesting, and unfortunately kind of ugly at times… and the cases of female boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting were nothing if not that, because the Right will not let women they deem insufficiently “feminine” go unharrassed.
Khelif was a target almost from the start, with a bunch of arseclowns declaring she must be trans cos she (and Lin) allegedly failed some nebulous gender test done by the International Boxing Association, even though the latter never quite explained how or why, and even though Khelif is, frankly, Algerian. Algeria is, to put it lightly, backwards on LGBTQ matters; they’re not going to send a trans athlete to the Olympics, they’re going to send them to jail at best and the morgue at worst. Now, the IBA is a Russian-owned organisation, funded by Gazprom, and the IOC suspended it from overseeing the Olympics a few years ago (which it had done for nearly 100 years in various incarnations) for, frankly, being too corrupt even for the IOC to deal with. The IBA’s real problem with Khelif, evidently, is that at last year’s world championships she beat a Russian boxer who was hitherto undefeated, whereupon the “test” was supposedly administered, Khelif was declared insufficiently “female”, and the Russian woman’s unblemished record was restored.
Khelif went on to win gold the other day, which she’s no doubt satisfied with, but we haven’t heard as much about Lin, and I’d argue that her victory is kind of sweeter:
The second of the two boxers caught up in a gender eligibility row at the Paris Olympics has won gold, 24 hours after the first. The Taiwanese fighter Lin Yu-ting secured a gold medal in convincing fashion by defeating the young Pole, Julia Szeremeta, in the final of the women’s 57kg event. Lin won every round unanimously and was never in trouble, punching the air and embracing her coach after a fight she controlled from the start.
It confirmed the overwhelming supremacy displayed by Lin, who did not drop a round across any of her four fights in Paris. The 28-year-old is a double world champion but had not previously won an Olympic medal. She was beaten in the round of 16 at Tokyo 2020 but proved unassailable here, becoming Taiwan’s second gold winner of the summer. […]
In the ring, Lin made short work of Szeremeta despite her opponent’s attempts to make full use of a springy, mobile, notoriously provocative style. Lin uses her height to sound advantage but moves lightly; she glided around the canvas, controlled the position and tempo of the fight, picked her moments to attack and was unhindered during the first two rounds.
Szeremeta, who had nothing to lose, fought back in the third and went out punching, visibly bruised and bloodied at the end. In an amicable aftermath there was no repeat of the “X” gestures that Karaman and another previous opponent, Svetlana Staneva, had made after defeats by Lin. They had been interpreted in some quarters as a reference to XX chromosomes; Szeremeta, though, took the defeat in good grace and made a heart shape towards her supporters, bowing to all sides and congratulating Lin before departing.
The runner-up was, though, questioned later about the political party she is aligned with. Szeremeta was a candidate for the extreme right party Konfederacja in elections earlier this year, unsuccessfully contesting a local election in Lublin. Konfederacja’s social media activity, largely through reposts on X, has cast doubt over Lin’s eligibility to compete and on Saturday night its feed contained a number of apparent insults towards the winner. Asked whether she would endorse these views, Szeremeta declined to offer a comment.
Though obviously both Khelif and Lin should be pleased with their work, under those circumstances, I feel like Lin should be even happier. For better or worse, however, the real loser could be the sport itself, with the IOC already saying they won’t administer it at the 2028 LA Games after this, so boxing could potentially not happen at the next Games at all. So much for Russia’s national pride, eh…
As promised last week, another batch of late 60s goodness, this time focusing on the psychedelic rock movement, featuring some of the more wilfully out-there examples of same. I’m kind of impressed that Hendrix just hid that track on a single B-side; if he’d stuck that on Axis instead of “If 6 Was 9”, I’d like that album more than I do…
The 13th Floor Elevators, Reverberation (Doubt)
The Beatles, Tomorrow Never Knows
The Bees, Voices Green and Purple
Art, Supernatural Fairy Tales
The Pretty Things, Defecting Gray
Cream, Tales of Brave Ulysses
The Electric Prunes, Long Day’s Flight
The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Stars That Play With Laughing Sam’s Dice
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