Month: January 2025

Wendigo-a-go-go?

I know it’s still “in production” and I know that 21st century Hammer isn’t exactly 20th century Hammer, so maybe getting interested in this is a bit premature, but… Hammer doing something Lovecraft-adjacent? I mean, I’m presuming that it is, and that specifically calling it Ithaqua rather than just Wendigo means they’re taking cues from August Derleth (who created Ithaqua), even though he’s not credited in any of the material I’ve seen… Don’t know what this’ll end up being, but they’ve certainly made me curious.

So long Marianne

RIP Marianne Faithfull. Given the life she lived from the late 60s into the 80s, I wonder if she ever imagined she’d eventually live long enough to just die of old age… albeit old age with quite a lot of health complications along the way and not just from the many years of substance abuse. But certainly when she did bounce back from all that, she not only survived but evidently thrived. It was a hell of a life.

RIP Norbert

Good rest, pupper. Didn’t know exactly how old he was, but I saw him on Threads recently and was impressed to discover he was still with us, though clearly elderly (he passed just short of his 16th birthday)… alas, I also saw about him going to the vet’s with kidney problems the other day and had a feeling that his time wasn’t long (though not as short as it turned out to be). Of indeterminate if not actually confused breed, Norbert spent most of his little life as a therapy dog at a children’s hospital, making things better for a lot of people, and that’s something worth celebrating. An Exceptionally Good Boy.

Bedevil (1993)

Normally I’d try and put up a proper poster for a film review, but I couldn’t find a good quality one for Bedevil so I’m making do with this newspaper ad for its Palace Cinemas run (the Verona was a few years from opening, clearly)… also, the top quote about “TRULY MARTIAN CINEMA” from the Guardian critic is kind of noteworthy, partly because there’s a vague whiff of racism to describing this film, the first feature made by an Australian indigenous woman, as “Martian”, but also, to be honest, it kind of sums up my own reaction to it. Tracey Moffatt isn’t really a conventional filmmaker, so not surprising that Bedevil isn’t the most conventional film; I suppose it’s like an indigenous version of Kwaidan, albeit at half the length… good thing, to be honest, cos another hour and a half of this would’ve ended me. We have a folk horror-ish anthology of three ghost stories revolving around indigenous characters, though as Moffatt also noted the stories themselves aren’t “particularly white or Aboriginal” (the first ghost is actually an American GI), and while it’s obviously historically important I can’t honestly say I liked it. The kind of ratty copy I watched on YT probably didn’t help (a good print might at least make it nicer to look at), but a lot of it is down to Moffatt’s treatment of the material… it’s not as deliberately artificial and anti-naturalistic as her short Night Cries which I saw back in my UNSW days, but it’s still pretty stylised and distant in a lot of ways and I found it pretty uninviting. And frankly I kind of hated Carl Vine’s score, which felt hopelessly unsuited to the whole thing and at times more of a parody of horror film music. Kept taking me out of a film I could barely get into in the first place.

Another to detonate

Remember when I used to do these? Yeah. Just got the notion to do a new one a few days ago. Took a bit longer than usual cos instead of doing it my usual, i.e. picking a bunch of tracks I want to play and semi-randomly assembling them, I decided to be much more deliberate about it. The main problem was the end, which I had a particular song in mind for but getting the last 20 minutes or so to that point wasn’t working so I redid the entire bit (thnk it’s an improvement, fortunately). I think it works, the end result is maybe a bit chaotic… I don’t know, you decide.

Playlist:

    1. Can, Don’t Say No
    2. Peter Hammill, Nobody’s Business
    3. Lead Into Gold, Snake Oil
    4. Kraftwerk, Antenne
    5. Radiohead, I Might Be Wrong
    6. David Bowie, Blackout
    7. Yello, Basic Avenue
    8. Simon Raymonde, In My Place
    9. The Church, Mistress
    10. The Black Angels, You in Colour
    11. Tim Buckley, I Must Have Been Blind
    12. Beck, Turn Away
    13. Ulan Bator, Saint Mars
    14. Wire, Underwater Experiences
    15. Dead Kennedys, Bleed for Me
    16. Funkadelic, Super Stupid
    17. Cabaret Voltaire, Red Mask
    18. Brian Eno, Distributed Being
    19. Underground Lovers, Girl Afraid
    20. Tricky, Contradictive
    21. The Jesus & Mary Chain, Inside Me
    22. The Velvet Underground, I Heard Her Call My Name
    23. Spahn Ranch, Vortex
    24. Nine Inch Nails, Shit Mirror
    25. Black Ark Players, Jah
    26. 23 Skidoo, Coup Dub
    27. Joy Division, Twenty Four Hours
    28. The Sisters of Mercy, Nine While Nine
    29. The Damned, Therapy

Obviously

Tennessee Republican proposes amendment to allow Trump to serve third term

Trump floated the prospect of running for a third term in a joke to House GOP lawmakers during a meeting in Washington before the conference had internal leadership elections.
“I suspect I won’t be running again, unless you do something,” Trump said a week after winning the 2024 presidential election, The Hill reported. “Unless you say, ‘He’s so good, we have to just figure it out.’”
Following the meeting, House Republicans told reporters that the remarks were not serious and that they laughed when they heard them.
“That was a joke. It was clearly a joke,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said at the time. “I leaned over to somebody beside me, [Arizona Rep.] Andy Biggs, and I said, that’ll be the headlines tomorrow, ‘Trump trying to thwart the Constitution,’ which — there’s nothing further from the truth.”

I said TWENTY YEARS AGO that the Republicans would try to pull this stunt for W. once he made it into his second term; I was slightly surprised that they didn’t, but then again that second term did kind of go south after Hurricane Katrina so obviously they would rather leave the Democrats to clean up their mess. I had a feeling they would eventually try it for Mushroom Cock. I was right. I just didn’t expect to be right quite so early into his next reign. Because some toady for Trump is introducing legislation to undo the 22nd amendment, which is the bit that stops presidents from running more than twice (because who wants to risk a repeat of F.D. Roosevelt? Only one of the most positively significant presidents the country ever had). Potentially term limits could cut off a good president and stop them doing further good, but, more likely than not, they should prevent Strom Thurmond happening. The article says Trump isn’t actually interested in a third term (and frankly I suspect he won’t actually last that long anyway), but frankly I don’t believe that… also, if it does happen, I hope it bites the Republicans in the arse and they end up staring down another three-term Democrat president in the future…

Sett(l)ing Sun

No  love for the royal family, even lapsed royalty, but I’m pleased to see Harry beating the Scum at last because fuck them even more:

The Duke of Sussex has settled his high court legal action at the eleventh hour against the publisher of the Sun, News Group Newspapers (NGN).
NGN offered “a full and unequivocal apology” to Prince Harry “for the phone hacking, surveillance and misuse of private information by journalists and private investigators instructed by them” at the News of the World.
It will also pay “substantial damages” as the two sides settled their legal claim, Harry’s barrister, David Sherborne, has told the high court.
On Wednesday morning, Sherborne said: “I am pleased to announce to the court that the parties have reached an agreement. As a result of the parties reaching an agreement I would ask formally that the trial is vacated.”

Slightly puzzled by this line in the apology, though:

It is also acknowledged, without any admission of illegality, that NGN’s response to the 2006 arrests and subsequent actions were regrettable.

I presume the arrests in question were those of Clive Goodman, the Scum’s royal editor, and Glen Mulcaire, the PI working with him. Both were arrested in 2006 and jailed the following year, then they both took action against the paper for unfair dismissal, which the paper settled with both. Is that what they’re calling “regrettable” here? And no “admission of illegality” despite having, you know, admitted that a couple of paragraphs earlier? I don’t know. But as long as they’re losing money from whatever they did wrong, I’m fine with it…

Take me to church?

Given the hideousness of the US right now, let me write something positive instead:

Someone posted this recently on Bluesky, noting the artist was one Samson Pollen, of whom I had otherwise never heard. Turns out he was a prolific contributor to men’s adventure magazines in decades gone by; I found a Facebook page for him, which says this comes from Stag magazine, March 1974, and it illustrated a story called “The Battling Priest Who Smashed a N.Y. Mob”. I feel the story is probably not an undying masterpiece of world literature, but I’m kind of blown away by the art.

Cos LOOK AT IT. I’ve linked the image so you can see it properly at full size. There’s… kind of a lot going on. The titular priest is wielding what looks like a screwdriver AND a hammer, and he’s attacking the gun-wielding mobster with it, while the knife-wielding mobster is distracted by cops bursting into the church being led by another priest. And look at the smaller details, too: the window art, the (presumably) Last Supper altarpiece, the pattern on the other guy’s shirt, the priest’s previously-sustained injury, the falling candelabra, the word visible on the scarf, all of it…

I daresay that Stag wasn’t the most highbrow of publications, and most magazines of the era were probably considered ultimately disposable, and things like Stag would been considered even more so than most; and I’m sure the publishers felt the same way about their own product, which they would’ve been just grinding out and moving on from it as fast as they could. I imagine Samson Pollen had minimal time to come up with a painting like this, and whatever magazines he did art for would’ve been casually tossed off and tossed away, and the art would’ve been considered as disposable as the mags it appeared in, probably. And yet he still put this sort of effort into it despite that. I kind of love it.