Month: August 2024

I doubt that somehow

Tay Tay has been slow off the mark to say who she does endorse in this US election thing…

…but I’m fairly sure it’s not Dampnut. This is how desperate for attention the orange cunt is getting, resorting to reposting AI-generated bullshit created by other right-wing chuds like this. I feel safe in saying he also has no idea that these things are fake, too; the important thing for the clowns making them is that Senpai Noticed Them, and if he doesn’t know the images are fake that just makes it even funnier for them…

How many more minutes?

Just gave this a listen for the first time in… I don’t know, but it’s an awful lot of years. Was just browsing Youtube and, oh, look, Zep’s YT channel has their first five albums up there in full, why not give the first one another spin, been so long… It’s really not that good, is it? Never been my favourite LZ (I increasingly favour the third album), and it still isn’t… one thing I did kind of rediscover, though, is that their propensity to crap on at unnecessary length was right there at the start of their career (this, of course, was so early that they were still the New Yardbirds when they recorded the album). I mean, look at the lengths of some of those songs (and look at the dominance of slower songs on side one). “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” just about cuts the mustard, “Dazed and Confused” gets by mostly because the instrumental break is still kind of ball-tearing when it speeds up, “How Many More Times” works cos it’s kind of a multi-part jam, but good grief “You Shook Me” is fucking interminable. Obviously they were to even greater lengths in the live arena—I used to have a bootleg where the show was two and a half hours long and fully 90 minutes of that was spent on just three songs, all in a row too—but album number one was not their greatest recorded moment.

RIP… actually no, FUCK Alain Delon

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…

It is Midnight, Dr. Schweitzer (1953)

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…

A classic(al) cock-up

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.

Piss-up, brewery, etc.

NSW Liberal party campaign in crisis after deadlines missed for council election nominations

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?