Caligula re-re-redux

Just what the world needed, another re-edit of Caligula…

As quixotic quests go, it’s a doozy: take 96 hours of raw footage filmed during one of the craziest and most tumultuous shoots in movie history and attempt to create a new version of the film described by Variety on release in 1979 as “a moral Holocaust”.
Step forward Thomas Negovan: the man who rescued Caligula. “There were definitely a lot of points in the last three years where I thought I was crazy,” he says. “I thought: ‘Is anyone going to care about this?’” But, in fact one of the most important entities in the industry, the Cannes film festival, cared very much, booking the new-and-possibly-improved version a premiere in its prestigious Cannes Classics strand, a section of the festival generally dedicated to celebrating the art of cinema at its finest.
“And so all of a sudden, I thought: ‘OK, all the therapy bills are worth it,’” says Negovan.
Screened for the first time on Wednesday, the 2023 version is billed as Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, and Negovan is keen to point out that, “The thing that’s bizarrely unique about it is it’s almost like the version that was released in 1979 is the deviant version. Ours is closer to what was originally intended. Even the word restoration … I don’t know what word works, but it isn’t a restoration. I don’t know what to call it.”

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Hand-staple-forehead time!

Tomorrow is World Goth Day, and for its 13th anniversary I decided to do my first mix in quite a long time. Accordingly, I present you with some of my own favourite tracks in the goth/darkwave/whatever vein from the last 13 years (Cult Strange have the newest song on here, having only come out less than three months ago). 20 tracks and 75 minutes.

    1. Sounds Like Winter, The Life of the Just
    2. The Damned, Spirit Evocation
    3. Soviet X-Ray Record Club, Good Things
    4. Cult Strange, Slave to the Algorithm
    5. Gemini, Down Ballarat
    6. Elysian, Twist of the Knife
    7. Play Alone, Black Glass
    8. Masses, Blind
    9. Alaric, Alone
    10. Traitrs, Gallows Hill
    11. Secret Shame, Chaining Eris
    12. Black Angel, Walk Away
    13. Poison Culture, Nihilistic Tendencies
    14. Spectres, Longinas
    15. Occults, Sex After Death
    16. Puritans, Sacred Cow
    17. Den, Deep Cell
    18. Lock Howl, Graveless
    19. Death Church, Choking Nation
    20. Killing Joke, Into the Unknown

Enjoy. I insist.

Something for everyone

I am afraid to ask who the dress up costumes, etc, are meant for

The things you find on the Internet. I’d never heard of this place before (it’s in the NSW town of Young), although it apparently has some international renown cos Bill Bryson mentioned it in one of his books… I’m just bowled over that this place exists. Pet stuff and porn all in one place? It’s an interesting business model…

You go, geeks!

Remember Gamergate? That fucking nonsense about “ethics in game journalism” and all that which prefigured the rise of the alt-right? And how it began because gamers couldn’t cope with the gaming industry having people who weren’t straight white cis men in it, and as a result it became a major right-wing culture war® flashpoint that spilled over into the broader sf/fantasy community that can’t cope with innovations like women, gays, black people, TEH TRANZEZ etc, in media like Doctor Who or the Disney-era Star Wars films and shows? Well, you’ll be interested to learn that said community has clearly taken a long hard look at itself since then, saw what they did and how what they did made them look like a bunch of hateful regressive cunts that no one with any common decency would want to be connected with, and lessons have been learned as a result. Just… not good ones:

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RIP Andy Rourke

News is coming through of the passing of Andy Rourke, bassist for The Smiths, aged 59 from pancreatic cancer. Poor bastard, screwed over by Morrissey & Marr and then screwed over by what I presume was a combination of bad legal advice and his smack habit needing urgent fulfilment, settling for less than a hundred grand while Mike Joyce ended up with a million pounds because he insisted on fighting on. Marr at least posted a nice farewell message to him; I haven’t seen anything similar yet from Stephen Patrick but I can’t imagine it being terribly kind somehow if/when he does acknowledge it… (EDIT: happy to have been proven wrong about this.)

Do these people really not get it?

I spotted this online earlier today:

Of course the real question is, are there any 16 year old girls out there with low enough self-esteem that they’d even think about being in the same room as this Nazi incel, let alone actually marrying the thing? Also, really, does he think that this will do anything to convince the people who think he’s gay that he isn’t? “Ergh, you’re a FAAAAAG!” “No I’m not, I’m into underage girls!” “That’s… not actually better, man…”

Anyway, I had no idea where this interesting statement was sourced from (I didn’t recognise the design, which I now realise is what his Telegram channel looks like), so in the interests of fairness I thought I should make sure someone wasn’t putting words in his mouth… and, well, they weren’t; this is the original Telegram post (get it quick in case he has the sense to delete it), while Mediaite offers a possible explanation for why he asked the question in the first place:

“Here I am, like, hey listen, guys. You turn 21, you find yourself a 16-year-old bride, you go crazy. You go crazy: no condoms, no snips, no abortions, no pills, no none of that. That’s the most pro-sex position there is,” Fuentes said on his podcast.
“Anyway, so that’s, anyway, so that’s where I’m at with that.”
After an awkward six-second pause, Fuentes continued.
“And, uh, yeah, I gotta find, I gotta find my 16-year-old wife. Probably when I turn 30 or something. Cause here’s the thing: I don’t wanna be like, let’s say I get married to an 18-year old now. Six year age difference. When I turn 40, she’s going to be 34. Ew.
“But if I’m 30 and she’s 16 to 14 year age difference. When I’m 50 she’ll be 36. When I’m 40, she’ll be 26. And now we’re talking here, now we’re cooking with gas. Now you can see an alternative vision for how things can be. If only you knew how different things could be.”

Oy. I mean… I suppose it’s worth something that he’s open to the idea of her getting older, that he can apparently live with his jailbait lover being in her mid-thirties one day rather than replacing her every so often with a series of other 16 year olds… but still. If he’s too stupid to realise just how wrong this is, I don’t know how much of a beating you’d have to administer to him to make him realise…

How should I swear, then?

Daniel Lord was an American Jesuit whose lasting legacy was probably (at least jointly) the Production Code aka the Hays Code which (arguably) hobbled the American film industry for decades; swearing was just one of the things it prohibited (indeed, it was the very first thing outlawed in Will Hays’ original 1927 list of “Don’ts”), and evidently it vexed Lord enough that in 1943 he wrote a whole pamphlet about it. Notice that this is clearly a British edition of it, so I wonder if he had to adapt it to local tastes in profanity…

Anyway, I’m kind of amused to have found this after also recently discovering this delightful document on a related note from 1898; for all that people complain about sledging in cricket in modern times, particularly by Australian cricketers, clearly American baseball players were way ahead of them, to the point where one of the sport’s top executives wrote this letter with examples of the bad words currently in use… but what makes it hilarious is the “UNMAILABLE” notice at the end, because the thing contained enough profanity that if they’d mailed it and it had been intercepted for some reason they could’ve been up on an obscenity charge…

Now you do what God told you

I already knew that Jack Posobiec was a crypto-Nazi and professional conspiracy liar and all-round cunt, but I am late to discover that he was also in a Christian rock band in his misspent youth:

What, and I can’t stress this enough, the FUCK

Look… I know American Christian culture likes to look at whatever’s big in secular popular culture and come up with its own knock-off that’s been remodelled to make it more goddish so they can keep the kids on their team (Seth Andrews has a video on that theme here which is quite illuminating as to just how stupid but bold these people can get. I mean, TESTAMINTS for fuck’s sake), but this… this… I don’t even know what the fuck this even is. The sheer misguidedness of the very idea, and the lack of self-awareness in admitting to it and apparently not being ashamed of it… just… fucking hell. I have no idea what else to say, I just wish I’d discovered this a year ago when it was fresh…

Betelgeuse going bang?

The potential death knell for the star Betelgeuse is being sounded, with news that the big red one has somewhat abruptly gone from being the 10th brightest star in the sky to the 7th… this after mysteriously dimming a few years ago when it ejected some mass and went relatively dark for a few months. Mind you, the same author has also observed that, though Betelgeuse’s supernova ending is inevitable, it may not happen for another hundred thousand years, so let’s not get too excited.

Anyway, if it does go off soon, the real complication will be for a certain comic I grew up on back in the 80s. Cos Betelgeuse is about 640 light years from us, which means that if it popped off right now it would actually have happened in the late 14th century, and it would’ve taken 640-odd years for the light to reach us. Which means the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic could have a hard time explaining how the Mighty Tharg came to Earth from Betelgeuse in the 1970s if it had already gone nova 600 years earlier… and some of August Derleth’s Cthulhu Mythos stories could wind up looking even sillier than they naturally do, and Zaphod Beeblebrox might be stuck without a home; on which note, I found this blog post from 2009 which ends by citing an article observing that Betelgeuse was shrinking and might go nova “soon”. Fourteen years later, we’re still waiting…