Tuesday, May 31, 2011

The Futurity of the Status of my Writing or Something Along Those Lines


It is hard to say what will happen with my writing these days. I am in general sort of despondent about it, as I am with many other things. This blog I have plans to continue with. My fiction remains in an uncertain place. This blog is hooked up to Adsense, so I may eventually make a buck off of it, which is more then I can say about a lot of projects that surface out of micro-presses. A fair few people have been reading it. The interview I did with Danny Jock on YouTube went over also relatively well so I adopted the straight ahead, anecdotal, tone of the YoutUbe interview and expanded it. In that interview I talk about how my grandfather developed the M14 assault rifle and being an NRA certified firearms instructor and a member of the Libertarian Part. I talk about living in Las Vegas. There’s the story about my knowing about fraud at American Apparel before it hit the news through Daniel Nicherie’s Xanax dealer in Vegas, some reflections on doing security work for William Powell at the Sci-Fi center in Las Vegas, and then at the end I mention black metal, a few horror films I like, and Derek Raymond. That is about the expectation of what this blog will have material about. However, I can see from the stats on here what is grabbing a lot of hits from the internet. That does shape what content will make it on here, for example if I can see that Derek Raymond is not getting hits on here, but reviewing Joseph Wambaugh does get hits, then I’ll do Wambaugh over Derek Raymond. The answer is sort of disappointing but I’m going to go with it. What I’m learning from the statistics is that reviews of mid-popularity bands are doing well, specifically my review of Celtic Frost Into the Pandemonium and the album Third: Sister Lovers by Big Star. What those two things really have in common is that they are mid-sized bands, they have a following but are not so huge that the blog would be lost in a web-search. That’s unfortunate, because I don’t really like many bands and don’t want to be too much of a rock critic type. There is a kind of juggling of sincerity and pleasing and finding an audience, but that’s how it goes.
My fiction is in a much more ambiguous state. Certain things about my life, that story about getting information about Dov Chareny through Daniel Nicherie’s Xanax dealer, that’s right out of The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo. However, I have no publisher right now and to switch over to doing crime fiction which is sort of my intent with my fiction, I have to learn how to write backwards, in so far as an event has happened in a murder mystery, and the details must be reconstructed. That may take a while. Again, there is a juggling of sincerity and finding an audience. So be it. I don’t know where that is all going to sit.

Monday, May 9, 2011

Peter Joseph-The Zeitgeist Movie- WRETCHED!



The Zeitgeist Movie

Review

This film was made a few years ago and the guy who made it, Peter Joseph has gone on to make three more films. I met Peter Joseph’s ex-girlfriend recently. The Zeitgeist Movement?  Those are these people that want to save the environment by putting end to money or something to that effect. This is an extremely dull and laborious film to review.  I find the Zeitgeist movie itself boring and difficult to sit through.  The first part of the film claims that Jesus never existed and was kind of an astrological metaphor representing the sun.  Here is a link to an excellent and sort of funny rebuttal of the claims of part 1.

http://www.publicchristianity.com/Videos/zeitgeist.html

If I’ve got my own facts straight, a Christian webpage contacted Australian scholar of ancient history Chris Forbes about the film.  Chris Forbes rips Peter Joseph a new asshole on factual inaccuracies presented in the film.  It gets pretty brutal.  Even with an undergrad degree in the related field of literature it looked off to me. Chris Forbes goes through all of the films factual errors (Dionysus was not born of a virgin, all of that) and points out that you really shouldn’t believe everything that you see on YouTube.  The film mentions Gnostic Christianity.  A professor of mine in college warned me that Gnostic Christianity attracts “mad people and frauds”.  No joke!  You can slap Peter Joseph on the list!
            Part 2 is even worse.  Have you ever seen Loose Change or other 911 truther material on-line?  If you did, don’t bother watching this film.  It is very much the same kind of material.  Part 3 apparently deals with the Federal Reserve, but I’d be more inclined to take a look at a less discredited source on things, Congressman Ron Paul writes extensively the subject of the Federal Reserve, for example.
            Peter Joseph has developed a cottage industry out of marketing conspiracy theory materials like this, that much appears true.  There are plenty of crackpots and frauds floating around on-line.  Who can possibly sit through an entire documentary when you know the documentarian is largely discredited?  There’s no way I can sit through this thing in its entirety, let alone the three sequels.    

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Terrible Music! Kangroo by Big Star covered by This Mortal Coil!



      
         Yeah, here you go.  This Mortal Coil, eighties gothic kind of band, though somehow their music is more evocative of the 90’s somehow, perhaps because their version of Tim Buckley’s Song of the Siren was used in the Lynch film Lost Highway- although it did not appear on the soundtrack album with Rammstein and Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails and the rest. I’m sick to death of hearing about David Lynch and have been for years but that’s actually a good soundtrack album.  This Mortal Coil did not have a stable line up I think it was just the producer Ivo and he would rotate members. Kim Deal from Pixies for example or the woman from Dead Can Dance. About half of their songs are covers or so.  For music of that kind I would say your best bet is Joy Division’s Closer album.  I actually find the development of extreme metal in about the same years far more stimulating.  Early Celtic Frost, early Voivod, that’s good stuff.  I don’t know about This Mortal Coil though. 
         The original of Kangroo is by Big Star.  I would describe Big Star as being a band that did much the sound that indie rock has tried to duplicate but they were doing what they did in the early 70’s. The most notable quote from Big Star leader Alex Chilton I can recall is “there are people who think Big Star made some of the best rock and roll albums of all time. And I think they’re wrong.”  I owned that Big Star album that is on Third: Sister Lover. Probably it is not a bad record but I see where the late Alex Chilton was coming from with his self-deprecating assertion.  Big Star are easily described as ahead of their time, but that’s because the douche bag hipsters on Bedford Ave with the bar band you don’t care about had yet to exist. 
            Circa 2002-2003 I still had hopes of creating bands, while working as a foot messenger in Manhattan. My mother had passed way in June of 2002, so my problems with depression. I listened very closely to This Mortal Coil looking for ideas.  I wanted to female singers in the band working in harmony.  The fantasy was, of course, that the two girls in the band would both be my girlfriends. It didn’t happen.  There’s a very good chance that it would have been an unbearable band if it had.  Even This Mortal Coil is sort of unbearable.  Very art students of 20 years ago or more.  Nothing better to do then to rehash all that.  Throw in My Bloody Valentine Isn’t Anything with that.
            

Friday, May 6, 2011

Film Review! Watchers (1988) Nearly Unwatchable!


Film Review: Watchers 1988

            I recall the Dean R. Koontz book being different in that the main characters where grown-ups and the movie version they made the protagonists are teenagers so they could cast the late Corey Haim in the film.  I’ll have to re-read the Koontz book, which I have not read in years but recall as being highly entertaining.  In the original the main character is not a teenager but an ex- Delta force member, having more of a survivalist kind of a vibe.
            The general premise involves two experiments that have escaped from a fire at a government biological warfare laboratory. One of them is a dog of human intelligence, the other is a Bigfoot- early man like creature with claws that has a kind of telepathic link to the dog.  The bigfoot creature hates the dog. Corey Haim’s girlfriends dad gets killed by the bigfoot type creature.  The government is evil in it, the nab Corey Haim’s girlfriend. 
            There are some serious mullet haircuts in this one. They do a lot of very cheesy super smart dog scenes in it.  In that sense it is a very calculated commercial film, although I do not recall the film being a huge success. The Koontz novel actually was.   Be forewarned on the film- there is an 80’s cheese factor to the film version not to be believed. The odd family-teen film elements in the film are not at all present in the original Koontz novel.  I have no idea why they did that with the movie script, perhaps they though that the intelligent dog lent itself towards a kind of boy-and-his-dog kind of film.  They made three sequels to this piece of shit film in the 90’s.  I think they might have been straight-to-video though.
            Do not get me wrong.  I am not discouraging you from watching terrible horror films especially if they are cheesed out and from the 80’s.  Rather, I heartily encourage you to delight in the unstoppably absurd 80’s cheesiness. 
            There is one scene in the film were the eyeball is popped out of the female cop’s skull.  I’m turning this piece of crap off.   I’m not sure I will turn it back on at any time.  

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Sean Hannity has a Boner Because Osama is Dead and an Identity Crisis Because Obama Killed Him

Sean Hannity Has a Boner Because Obama is Dead and an Identity Crisis Because Obama Killed Him       

Listening to Sean Hannity on Osama bin Laden, talking to former Mayor Giuliani and others about the death of Osama bin Laden.  Man this Sean Hannity real seems to have a hard-on for the corpse of Bin Laden.  He keeps saying over to see the photos of the corpse.  It is a kind of quandary because part of the format of the show is that he has to rant against Barack Obama.  He’s paralyzed because his greatest wet dream, which is Navy Seals blowing Osama away have come true, but it has come true under the watch of Obama, which defies the principles of format the radio show is based on.  It is as though a law of physics has been broken.  Hannity seems to want time alone with the glossy eight by tens of the death photos.  The details are way to exciting for Sean to keep in his pants, but he is in the uncomfortable role of his outstated mission to make Obama a one-term presidency.  It’s quite a conflict of interest Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh have on this one, a possibility they must have completely overlooked.  Oh, I’ve been involved with the NRA and the Libertarian Party of Nevada, I would not describe myself as a screaming liberal, but it would be hard to ignore the irony of Sean Hannity’s apparent woody for the corpse of Osama bin Laden, care of the Commander-in-Chief himself.  It’s a doozy. 
There are a number of strategies they kind of employ, one of them being to discuss the way the “liberals” have supposedly underscored of the role the George W. Bush administration set for the execution of Osama in Laden.  The other obsession that keeps reoccurring is that Gitmo worked, i.e., that the intelligence techniques used by the Bush administration, specifically waterboarding.  He kind of seems to have a hard on for that, too.  He’ll try and swing that one into a criticism of Obama and the left even though, well, Obama actually did use waterboarding techniques.
It may take a while to sort out this psychological internal conflict, in which the libidinal need for the photos of the carcass. Hannity more so but a lot more then the big man Rush in charge, but they both really sound like their blowing a load of the details of this crap, but they can’t abandon their most basic prime directive of hating Obama.  They sound like their brains are going to explode.  You can almost hear Hannity drooling on air, but he’s got to fit the format.  They have to be losing sleep over this quandary, they need to discuss this with a professional.