Month: September 2025

Rock on Chicago

You may understand why I didn’t think this fucking thing could be real when I saw it posted on Bluesky, so I had a squiz at Truth Social and yeah, of COURSE this fucking thing is real, I shouldn’t have doubted. This is Mushroom Cock’s latest thing, rebranding the Department of Defence (I will not use the American spelling, fuck you) as the Department of War, amd deploying the National Guard to Washington DC in the name of “reducing crime” or something; now he’s apparently making good on his threat to do the same to Chicago and other Democrat-controlled cities…

And that’s the just-posted response from Illinois governor JB Pritzker, who’s been talking an awfully good talk against Krasnov’s behaviour until now. Just hope walking the walk isn’t beyond him now. I must say, I’ve been expecting civil war in the Unhinged States for a long time now and been surprised that it hasn’t happened. Never expected it to be declared by the president, though.

Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977)

“What is the point?” our shitty “hero” shouts at one point during a fight with his wife, a question I found myself asking throughout this film. I likely would never have watched this had it not been in the 1001 Films book—I vaguely recall reading director Jon Jost’s name somewhere but otherwise knew bugger all about his work—and would have missed nothing… I was, as you probably don’t recall, pondering a while ago the lack of “respectable” cinema on my list for the Century of Cinema project, so I decided to go for “serious and arthouse” again tonight, and strike another title of the 1001 Films watchlist while I was at it. It’s one of the harder films to obtain on the list and it was not worth the effort. Our aforementioned shitty “hero” is Tom, a truck driver who’s out of work and not trying too hard to find new work, which is pissing his wife off cos he leaves her behind for weeks at a time on his nominal trips to get a job, and the film ends with him murdering another man for his money, and I suppose we’re meant to assume this is how he’s been surviving without a job. I gather the whole thing is meant to be a critique of how capitalism ruins the lives of people like Tom, and JESUS FUCK WHO CARES, cos Tom is so unlikeable and uninteresting that I don’t give a fuck for his plight and how capitalism has driven him to to point he’s at. He is such an absolute bore that the film, telling a story (barely) about emptiness, just becomes vacuous itself. Last Chants was a famously cheap production, clocking in somewhere between two and three thousand dollars; I admire to a certain extent how Jost worked around those limitations but not the end result. I will say that Jost, who also wrote and sang the songs scattered through the film, is a reasonably good singer. Beyond that, I don’t think I have any further use for his other work; happy to leave Jost as a one-time thing.

Reborn in the USA

Thiscomes interestingly timed after that bullshit the other day where Aaron Lewis was whining about being later than everyone else to realise “Born in the USA” actually wasn’t the ra-ra anthem he thought it was… this is the so-called “Electric Nebraska” version; having done the home recordings that turned into the Nebraska album, Bruce then tried to work up full band versions of those songs but wasn’t happy with the results and scrapped them (until now, with an expanded Nebraska featuring those E Street Band recordings coming out soon). However, the sessions had produced a number of other songs that would be reworked for Born in the USA, including the title track… whether or not the 1982 version above is better as such than the 1984 one is obviously a matter of taste, though I think it might actually be. And, either way, it’s different enough in its approach that even Aaron Lewis might realise the bitterness underpinning it.

It’s been a while (since everyone else learned this)

Staind’s Aaron Lewis: Bruce Springsteen “Duped Us All with One of the Most Anti-American Songs Ever”

Staind frontman and outspoken conservative Aaron Lewis recently made an appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show, during which he was asked about his thoughts on Bruce Springsteen, whose political beliefs are in strong opposition to those of the post-grunge rocker.
Not surprisingly, Lewis proceeded to go on a tirade, accusing The Boss of being unpatriotic and fooling everyone with one of the most “anti-American songs ever.”
“I think that he is a disgusting display of not appreciating what was handed to him, in this country as being an American, the success that he has had,” Lewis told Carlson (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). “The fact that he duped us all with one of the most anti-American songs ever and called it ‘Born in the USA’ as some sort of celebration of how great it is to be born in the USA. I’m angry at myself for not seeing it for so long and actually giving him, in my mind, the credit of being a representation of blue-collar America.”
Springsteen wrote “Born in the USA” from the perspective of a Vietnam War veteran who was disillusioned with the way the country treated him upon his return home, but the song has often been misinterpreted as a patriotic anthem.

Aaron Lewis has apparently only just discovered the concept of irony. Meanwhile, I suspect most music fans who care about this sort of thing have been aware for decades that “Born in the USA” was celebrating piss all and was far more about standing up for the blue-collar Americans drafted into that shitty war who then got ignored when they returned home having lost it. I suspect, mind you, that brother Aaron should be less angry that he was too stupid to realise what a certain song was well known to actually be about and more that Springsteen looks better at 76 than he does at 53…

When the war was over

Male magazine from 1951 (via). The most notable thing about this cover, of course, the casually tossed off reference to the end of World War III. Nice of “science” to tell us it would end in 1966, but I can’t help but feel it would’ve been more helpful to tell us when it would start… I mean, for all Male‘s readers knew, it could’ve started as soon as they finished reading about the mysterious seemingly immortal chap, and then dragged on for another fifteen years…

The sex world of Skyline

Another adventure in Australian cinema exhibition(ism?), this time at the drive-in… When was this from, though? That was the fun part to work out, cos the year isn’t exactly legible in this scan… I was guessing mid-70s or so, so I did a number of IMDB searches on the titles (still not sure what some of them are, though) revealing that most of them certainly predated that period… but there was one title that could’ve been either of two films, one from the early 70s but the other from 1980, which would kind of complicate my theory… And then I looked at the picture again and realised the answer was staring me in the face all along. If I just flipped it:

…I saw a bit of the ink on the preceding page had carried over to this one, revealing the date to be April 19… 1981.

NINETEEN EIGHTY-ONE.

Hoyts were still showing this shit in their drive-ins up to NINETEEN EIGHTY-ONE.

Hoyts were still showing FUCKING LOVE CAMP 7 and FUCKING ANDY MILLIGAN MOVIES from FUCKING NINETEEN SIXTY-NINE as late as NINETEEN FUCKING EIGHTY-ONE.

I am baffled beyond belief by this. I can’t even explain why I’m so perplexed, that’s how perplexed I am. I could see this sort of thing happening in the US where the pre-VHS ozoner market was so much larger that I can imagine some films just taking years to get to some places for the first time, or the distributor trying to market it again years later with a new title (cf. this infamous little number, spent two years bombing at the box office before Jerry Gross picked it up and renamed it in 1980)… I’m just oddly blown away by the thought of Hoyts keeping these films for so long; I know that this actually was a bit of a general tendency here in the Good Old Days for films to stay in cinemas much longer, but that was usually much bigger films that did that… I just don’t know that Bloodthirsty Butchers and Torture Dungeon would’ve had that sort of drawing power by 1981. And even if some of them were only being released here for the first time in 1981 (a lot of films took a lot of years to come out here), VHS was already a thing, so who would’ve even expected more than just a video release? Look, it’s one of those things that interests only me, hence it confuses only me, I’m sure, otherwise I understand it as little as anyone else probably does…