Monday, September 26, 2011

Film Review! Faces of Death 2

The review of Inseminoid and Humanoids from the Deep is still the entry on here that gets the most hits, partially due to the presence of a reference to the existence of tentacle hentai, the Japanese pornography of girls being raped by monsters with tentacles. I am eager for the opportunity to review Human Centipede 2, but that won’t be possible until Oct. 7th. Despite the hype surrounding that film, I doubt my review would even get the same amount of attention as a review of Inseminoid or Humanoids from the Deep that mentions animated tentacle rape porn. I’ve been looking for variations on the general subject of extreme horror that would match or surpass the Inseminoid/Humanoids from the Deep review, but there is something charmed about that review. For whatever reasons, people are constantly doing searches on-line on phrases like “monster rape”, “creature rape”, “rape and impregnated by monster”, and “anime woman raped by tentacle monsters”. I’ve tried other perversions, I really have. I just reviewed a documentary on snuff films to see if I could people looking for violent pornography or death films. There doesn’t appear to be the same fascination. I’m going to try once again though with one of the Faces of Death films.
The Faces of Death movies, I recall them well from my childhood during the 80’s. The first Faces of Death was banned in a number of countries, just as Human Centipede 2 has been banned in the U.K. today. I watched the first one in maybe 2009 or 2010. I’m not going to review it, because I’m not going to sit through that thing twice. What the Faces of Death films are essentially is mock “documentaries” about death (both among humans and animals) that are largely fraudulent, i.e., fake. Faces of Death 2 is even faker then the first one, which at least had real stock footage from the holocaust. There’s stock footage of whaling in Faces of Death 2. There’s a bunch of fake crime scene footage, fake avalanche footage, etc. I don’t really understand why these films were banned, being, so very clearly, largely fake. There’s no real character or plotline, it’s episodic fake sequences of deaths with a narrator talking over the film. That’s all it is.
These films were very popular in the 80’s. I’m not sure why. Faces of Death 2 is an old enough film that it still has background music that could almost be called disco. There’s a boxing match in there…it…it’s awful.
This is a truly awful film. I’m surprised that the Faces of Death series doesn’t make it onto “worst movies ever” lists more frequently. Faces of Death is some serious crap. It’s not that I’m offended by it. It’s that a child could figure out this footage is mostly fake. The only context in which this film could work might be a social event where everyone laughs at the movie. This is real bad movie night type stuff.

Here’s some good explication of the Faces of Death films-

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Tentacle Hentai

I know from my computer screen which blog posts are doing well and which are doing nothing at all. The answers are not ones that I like. By far the two blogs that get the most hits are blogs I wrote almost as a joke referencing the fact that theme of women being raped and impregnated by monsters was one that was used a number of times in horror films during the 80’s. The second of those blogs, which gets twice the number of hits of any other blog I have written is distinct in that it also mentions the fact that an entire genre of Japanese videos exist called tentacle hentai, which very specifically revolves around animated depictions of women and girls being raped by monsters with tentacles. I came across an inexpensive DVD of Japanese Tentacle Hentai material, and reviewed it. That review is quickly climbing the charts of what I blog on that does well. You want to see these images? Here you go:

It’s almost strange calling it pornography in so far as it involves animation and not even human flesh on camera.
I’ve never discussed this publically before, but I was involved with a woman whose fiancĂ©e had been imprisoned for molesting her daughter who was about 12-13-years-old. When the woman I was with for a while cleaned out his belongings, she found his collection of- you guessed it - tentacle hentai. I don’t buy into the notion that feminists or elements within the Christian right have expressed over the years that this man committed his crime because of exposure to tentacle hentai. Rather, I feel he was drawn to tentacle hentai because he had perverted fantasies about young girls.
I want make money off my writing one of these days, so I’ll exploit whatever angle like that I can, mathematically based on hits. Excuse my foul language, but money is a real bitch. Everyone wants to take some, and people won’t part with it easily. Will I exploit the perverted sex fantasies of others to advance myself, to get my name out there? Of course I will. Of all the topics that have come up as tangents, this is the one that gets the most public interest? That is very, very unfortunate. The 80’s horror film side of it I can see a little more so, tentacle hentai is a sick joke. I think it’s sort of a sad sick joke as well. I am imagining very lonely men becoming drawn to this material.
The free market principals have spoken. Here you go, tentacle hentai:



For the record, this is not subject matter I care very deeply about.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Human Centipede 2 Poster Released!


Yes folks, it’s here-the poster for Human Centipede 2. It’s a dozy, and for a film made illegal in the U.K., as I have written about at length on here and elsewhere. I’m not sure if this verifies or not that the “human centipede” depicted in the film has a different shape or not, so I won’t comment on that, not having seen the film which is being shown publicly for the first time at a film festival tonight.
I will say that while much was made of the first film of the connection it had to human experimentation in Nazi Germany because the mad scientist was German, the whole thing also made me think of the Abu Gharib prison photographs from Iraq a few years back. With the naked bodies with the hands tied behind the back, it makes me think even more of Abu Gharib. It evokes total debasement and degradation of the human form.
I must stress that this image is not work safe. And Lucy Jones at The Telegraph thought Lou Reed and Metallica's poster was offensive!

Raped and Impregnated by a Monster Back in the 80’s, Part 4:Jumping the Shark with Alien Seed

One unfortunate result of the success of the blog series I’ve done entitled Raped and Impregnated by a Monster Back in the 80’s is that this success has lead me to the film Alien Seed. I’m not going to pretend that Breeders, Xtro, Inseminoid and Xtro are the best films I’ve ever seen, but they are all better then Alien Seed. This whole subgenre of flicks involving women being impregnated by aliens jumps the shark related to it’s own terribleness with 1989’s Alien Seed. The only actor in it you have any chance of having heard of is Erik Estrada from CHIPS. If you looking to satisfy some sort of sick sexual fetish you have for human alien hybrid procreation, this is not the film you are looking for. The aliens are not shown in it much, and when they are, well, you could probably find better alien masks at a Halloween store. There’s a scene in a shooting range where details of a shooting range are incorrect.
The plot of the movie is…I don’t feel like writing a plot synopsis for this film. The only thing I can say in favor of this film is that there are a few brief scenes in a topless bar.
The baby in the end looks human. I know that’s a spoiler, but there is no way to possibly spoil this film.
This is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen.

Why do all alien impregnation films from the 80’s have four notes on an early synth for a soundtrack? It’s like a rule or something.

Snuff Film! Real Murder Caught on Film for Your Enjoyment!

Film Review: Snuff (A Documentary About Killing on Camera).

This is actually just a film review. It’s of a commercially distributed mainstream film. The film is a documentary that addresses the question as to whether snuff films exist. The answer that is provided is “probably” but it stops short of proving such films exist.
I’ll tell you exactly why I am writing this review. I’ve tried to write about a number of different kinds of subject matter here, and the one blog entry that has gotten the most hits is the one entitled Raped and Impregnated by a Monster Back in the 80’s part 2, in which I review the films Inseminoid and Humanoids from the Deep. This review also referenced the existence of the Japanese “Tentacle Hentai” which are all those weird Japanese porn videos of women being raped by creatures with tentacles. Most of the hits on that blog entry are from people that appear to be looking for images of rape and impregnation by aliens and monsters. I didn’t create such images- I referenced that this was a popular theme in 80’s horror film and mentioned the existence of the Japanese animated pornography about it. I made fun of the subject. I mocked the film Inseminoid. But it got hits, and it got my name out there in a big way. That’s only one little niche market of sexual perversity though. It gets hits and hits that means publicity, and the hits keep coming. However, since that audience is limited, I’m going to try and come up with something else that will get lots of hits. I think people looking for snuff flicks might work.
Snuff: A Documentary About Killing on Camera is a documentary film that deals with the subject. Snuff films are films of murders made for enjoyment, in particular sexual enjoyment, for commercial consumption. The existence of snuff flicks is debated since there has never been a snuff film by strict definition publically made available or publically recorded. M15 caught the Russian mobster Dimtri Kuznetsov on wiretap discussing the sale of child pornography of boys being killed. That case is discussed in the documentary by a guy from the adult film industry named Mark L. Rosen. There are also videos of murders done by serial killers like Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, such as the M Lady tapes, some footage of which is included in this documentary. However, those do not constitute a snuff film, because the M Lady Tapes and videos like them were most likely not made for commercial purposes but rather simply as keep sakes by the killers.
They have various people talk about related subjects to the issue of snuff films. The film Cannibal Holocaust, the Guinea Pig videos, and other films thought to contain real snuff footage are discussed in the film. They have people discussing the Faces of Death films with some clips of those. There’s some Abu Gharib footage in the documentary. All of that is actually tangential to the topic.
Any snuff films that might exist would be by their inherent nature black market items. Law enforcement and forensic information about snuff videos could also be classified or gaged. The information given in the documentary suggests that such films are likely to exist. There just isn’t public evidence of such a film existing. Mark L. Rosen also tells a story at the end of the film about being shown a snuff film from the Philippines. It doesn’t look like he’s lying.
That’s about as much information as your going to publically get on the topic by anyone. Someone who knows any more then that is likely to keep that information close to their chest.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

MORE FUN WITH LOU REED AND METALLICA!




“The poster – which had apparently already appeared in one or two places – depicts a dismembered, cut and bruised female mannequin. The word LULU, the name of the album, is scrawled across her in coagulated blood by the perpetrator’s finger, we presume. Perhaps from cutting up her legs. I’ve only just stopped feeling sick an hour after seeing it. The artist has made the face as human as possible; this is no lifeless plastic model”.
So blogs Lucy Jones columnist for the British newspaper the Telegraph about the poster for the Lou Reed and Metallica album. She’s writing about how British transportation officials have banned the poster from British subways.
They actually didn’t do it for the reasons she is happy they took it down for: they took down the posters down supposedly because they looked too much like graffiti. I don’t quite follow the real reason why the British transportation officials did what they did. It doesn’t look like graffiti to me.
I think that’s great though, that this Lucy Jones woman is offended. Lou Reed and Metallica get much respect from me for getting censored in Britain, just as Tom Six with his Human Centipede 2 has. That must say a lot about me I was quite excited about both of those before Human Centipede 2 got banned in Britain and before they took the posters for the Lou Reed and Metallica down. Michael Savage, he’s been banned from even entering the U.K., I read his work and listen to his radio show sometimes. Savage. I would say that Michael Savage has anger management issues when the topics of homosexuality or Islam come up, and I would not consider him a top tier intellectual heavy weight of the political right the way someone like Ron Paul is. He has this amazing ability to provoke arguments, and in so doing he clearly hits on very sensitive and thus very core political issues. It’s almost as though that’s the mark of cultural relevance: you get banned in Britain.
Incidentally, Lucy Jones does not have an incorrect analysis of the Lou Reed and Metallica cover. The music on the Lou Reed and Metallica album was written for a German play about a whore the gets killed by Jack the Ripper. If you read her blog though she was one of these people who maintain the asinine notion that works of art inspire acts of violence. If someone is moved to violence by the Lulu cover, then they are already insane; to paraphrase something the New York Times about making Human Centipede 2 quotes Tom Six. If the Loutallica poster disturbs Lucy Jones then she is weak.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Give Devon White Your Money!



I went to the same college (Bard) as this sideshow freak. He’s involved with N.L.P and the whole “Life Coach” thing. It’s so funny, that book by David Mamet I reviewed on here, The Secret Knowledge, in which he explains why he’s switched over the years from the political left to the political right. I’ve written about this elsewhere, but Mamet essentially argues that the liberal arts school does not make productive citizens but rather erodes productivity and discipline in it’s students, producing citizens who have no true marketable skills (after all, a gender studies student is taught how to be offended by misogyny and homophobia, but that is not a marketable skill), a deep resentment for the capitalist system of reward for work, and an incredible arrogance. Mamet more or less says outright that gender studies, theory, and deconstruction have no real intellectual merit. He also writes about New Age being symptomatic of this same problem and specifically rights about the problem that liberal arts colleges produce “life coaches”!
Bahaha, that’s hilarious! Theory people might be able to come up with some kind of counter argument, but to counter the part of Mamet’s argument about new age, you’d have to intellectually defend the legitimacy of Devon White. And if you do that, people will think you’re a cult member that belongs in a psyche ward!


He’s got all the answers and he’s going to tell you all about it! He’s going to tell you all about the warrior path! Just give him all you money!

A Further Reflection on Coptic Light

This blog is largely redundant of things I’ve posted elsewhere, but I’m going to put my thoughts down here and a newly organized fashion to make it a little clearer what I really mean.





This is a subject that I’ve addressed before, but this week, for some reason my writing related to the line-up of bands No Quarter records had in the mid 2000’s such as Psychic Paramount, Coptic Light, and even Electric Turn To Me have gotten more hits then they normally do. As I think I’ve stated earlier, all of those bands with the exception of Earth, I meet members of during the 2000’s, including Circle and Pharaoh Overlord who live over in Finland- I meet Jussi on line. I think that’s really why I would even bother writing about these bands at all. Circle and Earth I think are good bands. I’m more interested in listening to other things these days. I think I will give repeat what I’ve said in a different form in a few different blog entrees. Coptic Light performed at a decimal of what they could have accomplished. An experimental instrumental project with Kevin Shea on drums with two former members of hardcore bands should have been something really great. It was not. I will state this once and for all: if Jon Fine had turned his guitar amp all the way up, put his guitar to the amplifier and let the amp feedback for a half an hour, that while Kevin played drums, it would have been a better band. I am dead serious. What they did instead was relatively limp wristed.
Now I will clarify about what I am more interested in listening too. I don’t really like paying for music. I’ll tell you how to hear some music that is far superior to Coptic Light without paying a dime.

1. Last year around this time this year, an on-line metal store called Metalhit.com put out a serious of six free sampler albums based on genre- Death Metal, Thrash Metal, Folk Metal, Gothic Metal, Doom Metal, and Black Metal. I’ve written about this series on here before. On all six albums there’s one song that I dislike, the energy that these bands have and the technical skills they have for the most part blow Williamsburg hipster type bands completely out of the water.
2. 2009 the on-line radio station Soma.fm started broadcasting the station Doomed.fm, which is their gothic/industrial station. I’ve written on here about how I’ve gotten sick of goth over the years. I’ve had a change of heart because I’ve been listening to Doomed a lot, and there’s a wealth of more recent bands I wasn’t familiar with (Collapsar, Big Mouse, Sky Burial) older bands I didn’t know about (Brighter Death Now, Autumn Cathedral) and bands I knew about but hadn’t heard much (Attrition). Every once and a while I hear a band I’ve known forever like Legendary Pink Dots, Bauhaus, Black Tape for a Blue Girl, Joy Division, or Current 93. Mostly, however, it is gothic/industrial music few people have heard before, and a lot of it is quite good.
There you go. Don’t buy experimental music by some terrible band that Williamsburg hipsters are in. There’s far better music available for free.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Wretched Music! Antioch Arrow! Featuring Kevin Shea, Electric Turn to Me, and Rick Moody!

Today is a strange day in so far as blog posts I’ve done about hipster music types that normally no one bats an eye at, got hits. Those included the post about why the band called Bitch Magnet are awful, why the band Electric Turn To Me squandered their talent completely, and why Rick Moody’s attempt to make a music album. These are largely people I’ve met by the way, Rick Moody and Electric Turn To me, one member of Bitch Magnet Jon Fine. I want to point out that because these kinds of entrees don’t get many hits, I am always considering stopping from writing them.
What is important to understand is that the blogs I’ve written thus far that have gotten the most attention are ones dealing with their being a subgenre of horror films during the 80’s that involved rape and impregnation of women by aliens and other monsters In one of which I made reference to the subgenre of Japanese animation known as “tentacle hentai” involving the rape of women/girls by monsters with tentacles, in particular with the girls in school girl uniforms. There is a strong mathematical likelihood that anyone that finds this post will be looking for such 80’s films or such “tentacle hentai” and not out of any interest in the band Antioch Arrow. Puts things in an important kind of perspective.
Then something deep within forces me to continue. It comes from a very sincere place inside. I sincerely hate Bitch Magnet. I actually recall that Jon Fine didn’t care for Electric Turn To Me. Electric Turn to Me was this incredible squandering of talent, but Jon Fine deceives himself- Electric Turn To Me were a slightly better band then Bitch Magnet. Bitch Magnet and the attempt at a music career by my former writing instructor Rick Moody are connected projects, David Grubbs was in Bitch Magnet, David Grubbs played in a wretched indie rock band called Gastor Del Sol, and then Jim O’Rourke played with Rick Moody. We are talking about a lot of awful, awful music right there. It all comes back full circle to musicians in New York that would be better if they put a microphone between their thighs, defecated in their pants, and recorded it. I’ve been writing about the Lou Reed/Metallica collaboration and you have die hard Metallica fans posting comments every where about how it “sounds like shit” based on 30 seconds of music. Metallica and Lou Reed “sound like shit”? It’s a slightly odd collaboration and neither Lou Reed nor Metallica are in their prime, but those are two of the all time greats right there. If that “sounds like shit”, what is Bitch Magnet? Those are shadows of Lou Reed’s ideas, maybe.
It keeps going and going with those people, if you dig into the various projects that they’ve been involved with. Jon Fine from Bitch Magnet, if you’ve read the other blog post you already know, but he played with my band Kevin Shea in Coptic Light. The other member of Coptic Light was Jeff Winterberg from the 90’s hardcore band Antioch Arrow.



They’re also pretty terrible. They did, however, turn into a goth band after Jeff Winterberg left, which is somewhat a redemption for the rest of them. Basically even very second tier goth bands are probably much better then the music I am writing about here. However, Antioch Arrow did not feel 100% natural as a goth band, it was as if they wanted to be a goth band with only a passing sense of what a goth band was. They never gained a real goth audience that I’m aware of, and I was heavily into obscure goth bands during the 90’s.
Now this blows my mind- the problem with Jeff Winterberg-era Antioch Arrow was that it was a whole bunch of sloppy, dull hardcore music-granted though, it was noisy. Yeah, Winterberg starts Coptic Light, he has a drummer with the speed and skill of Kevin Shea, and where is the noise? It’s nowhere really. I’ve written about gothic/industrial bands and metal bands having reached a creative impasse where more recent bands sound like re-constructions of 80’s bands? That’s nothing compared to the creative impasse of Coptic Light. Kevin Shea is the most misused drummer in rock and roll history that I am aware of. Once Jeff Winterberg had a musician with the technical capacity to pull of aggressive music successfully, he had abandoned making aggressive music.
More people care about tentacle hentai anyway.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

MORE FUN MOCKING MAX MASLANSKY!!!!

“Hey William Wheaton, just to set the record straight, that website you saw identifying me as a 'street' artist is not me, but someone in Indonesia or Eastern Europe that filched my old domain after I let it expire and wrote that crap to egg me into buying it back for triple the price. Think what you will of my 'children's book illustrations', but this street art crap is not mine.”-

So wrote in the artist Max Maslansky in regards to my review. Well, you know I try to avoid making factual errors on this page. There you have it. The street art pieces and the artist statement type text accompanying them apparently were not by Max Maslansky.
1. That’s kind of a clever racket that guy in Eastern Europe or Indonesia has.
2. Something I’ve learned about the arts: NEVER contact someone who gave you a bad review. It’s a very good sign that no one cares about your work.
3. There is no way in which Max Maslansky’s art is any better then the street art he feels impelled to state is not his.
4. I am planning to phase out reviews like this review out completely. Why am I doing this? The reason is because there is very little public interest in them. I can see statistically what blog entrees people are reading and where. The number of hits the review of Max Maslansky’s work got was less then a tenth of the number of hits the review I did of the horror films Inseminoid and Humanoids from the Deep got. I encourage Max Maslanasky to sit down and watch Inseminoid. I want to make this perfectly clear. Inseminoid is not my favorite film in a lot of ways. But it beat Max Maslansky. I want that to be perfectly clear. Inseminoid gets more attention then he does. As a matter of fact the review of Inseminoid got more hits today then the Maslansky review ever got.

Lou Reed and Metallica: Lulu First Audio Clip

(Special Guest Appearance by Sebastian ex -Flux Information Sciences)




The first sound clip from the Lou Reed and Metallica album Lulu has arrived. It has been said that an opinion is like an asshole, every one has one. This is an unreal case of that however. Here though we are talking about roughly 30 seconds of sound from 90 minute long album, and people are already dismissing the album completely. The net is already engulfed with hatred for the Lou Reed and Metallica album, mostly coming from Metallica fans, many of whom have felt deeply betrayed by Metallica over the years. We are talking about 30 seconds of sound. Here’s another take if on from no less then Sebastian Brault. If you lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the late 90’s you may remember his capitalism themed noise band
Flux Information Sciences: Here’s a sound clip



And here’s fellow noise-musician Sebastian Brault take on the 30 seconds of sound to be found on the Lulu clip:
“If Lou Reed just talks it's too easy. Was hoping they'd really collaborate, but instead it seems to be superposition”
I find the one clip from the album sort of promising. I do I agree with him, if the album is only that then I will be sort of disappointed. However, I have seen photographs of Lou Reed and Metallica in which you can Lou Reed with a guitar in his hands and also seated in front of one of those electronics set-ups he’s used when he collaborates with John Zorn and his wife Laurie Anderson. So I think it’s very unlikely that the whole album will be that way.
Flux Information Sciences…funny they should come up in this context, funny they should pop on this one. I have drifted so far from that Williamsburg scene. They talk about the spirit of adventure of a very young Lou Reed going to New York in his early 20’s. For me it’s almost the inverse. The spirit of true adventure didn’t set in until I moved from New York to Las Vegas in my early 30’s. Las Vegas is anything but boring, but I guarantee you that Las Vegas has a very small “experimental” art scene, although what does exist there can sometimes trump what’s going elsewhere. For example, I don’t think this Human Centipede 2 film that was just banned in the U.K. is playing at any theaters in New York when it opens on Oct 7th, but the Sci-Fi Center in Las Vegas is doing a weekend long Human Centipede 2 festival.
I think that for Lou Reed’s New York in the 60’s was somewhat of an open book, the Velvet Underground did not have much of a following at that point.
Funny, I would have thought that Flux Information Sciences would have been about to explode in the late 90’s, or that they would have, like the Velvet Underground, been uncovered as a lost gem years later. That hasn’t happened so far, but here you do get Sebastian weighing in on the whole Lou Reed/Metallica thing.
Funny.

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Pat Robertson’s Alzheimer’s Controversy!



Just so that we have the record clear, the actual statements that Pat Robertson made are clear and free of any distortion, in particular of distortion by the far left, this is exactly and officially what Pat Robertson said regarding the ethical problem involved with being married to some one with Alzheimer’s Disease. Pat Robertson did say that you might want to consult another ethicist because it was a very difficult situation.
The question that was posed was a man whose wife has Alzheimer’s has begun seeing someone else. Pat Robertson’s reasoning is that the man must divorce the wife (in order not to be committing adultery) but that the husband is free from his vows because of the clause “till death do us part” because Alzheimer’s really is a “walking death”.
It seems like every year or every few years, maybe even on a six-month cycle there is another controversy coming out of Pat Robertson’s mouth- the United States should send an agent to shoot Chavez, Ariel Sharon’s stroke was an act of God in response to Sharon’s “dividing the land of Israel”, you name it. Many of his statements over the years have shocked even others within the Christian right.
Without commenting on the other controversies he’s been involved with over the years, because that would just be a book long document if I did that, I don’t know if I really disagree that strongly with Pat Robertson on this one. If the wife is in an advanced stage of Alzheimer’s, I’m not sure the husband seeing another woman even really qualifies as adultery. Pat Robertson did clarify that the wife needed to be put in qualified custodial care. Can it be said though that a marriage to a wife with advanced Alzheimer’s belongs within the same ethical categories? Pat clearly sees the difficulty of this situation in terms of it being a crisis and for a Christian particularly a crisis of faith. I’m actually going to side with the big Pat Robertson on this one. The husband is betraying a woman whose mind is failing and won’t be coming back? That’s pretty close to saying that a man is cheating on his dead spouse. I don’t even know if I’d be legalistic enough to call it adultery. Now that John Edwards guy who was cheating on his wife who had cancer- that is unacceptable, but I think she more or less had her mental cognizance still. This is one Pat Robertson controversy where I really don’t see where the controversy is exactly. Pat Robertson was the first to admit that this was probably over his head ethically. He didn’t even say he had a definitive answer really.
How much controversy about this one? There’s lots-of course, this is what Pat Robertson does best. Well, very clearly there is the perception that the left and moderates have that Pat Robertson is a gay hating, woman hating, far right wingnut. But the controversies surrounding Pat Robertson are often internal even within the Christian Right. Check out this evangelical blog post denouncing Pat Robertson. Strong statements against the man from his fellow Evangelicals, something to behold: http://www.russellmoore.com/2011/09/15/christ-the-church-and-pat-robertson/
A repudiation of scripture? Russell Moore calls Pat Robertson statements “Canaanite”! When you start using scripture against him like that, that’s fighting words.
Pat Robertson was certainly born with a specific gift for massive confrontations like this. It’s truly unreal. It would surprise not at all if he comes up with another one within the next six months. He’s like a walking argument.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Do the Ostrich: The Strange World of Pre-Velvet Underground Lou Reed



Yes, I’ve done the whole theme lately of sixties and seventies rock and roll oddities( “Once You Understand” by Think, “Moulty” by The Barbarians, and “Mr. Turnkey” by Zager and Evans) and also for a long time I’ve been anticipating the release of this album with Lou Reed and Metallica. This material is sort of an oddity, although not nearly the sick joke that the other oldies oddities mentioned above are. This is Lou Reed in 1964 before the Velvet Underground recording under the name The Primitives. That and many other curiosities of pre-Velvet Underground Lou Reed have resurfaced on YouTube. He worked for a small record company called Pickwick Records as a songwriter and session guitarist.



Lou Reed made fairly atonal electric guitar music as far back as the early 60’s. Phil Spector was a very strange guy at that point, his music wasn’t that odd though. The only music that I’ve heard that is quite this ahead of this time from the era is the soundtrack that a teenage Frank Zappa did for a very hard to find film called The World’s Greatest Sinner. I actually reviewed the World’s Greatest Sinner back when I used to write for Polly Staffle back in 2010. The World’s Greatest Sinner soundtrack is truthfully similar. This is very dissonant, hard music that re-calls late 70’s and early 80’s punk and goth type bands but existed in the early 60’s. The distinctive harsh Velvet Underground guitar sound was already developed on these tracks.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Book Review: The Secret Knowledge by David Mamet

I started reading this book in preparation for another review that I considered to be a much bigger deal. David Mamet is at as director of the HBO film of the Phil Spector murder trial, and has created substantial controversy by stating in an interview by stating that he thought Phil Spector might actually be innocent. Lana Clarkson friends and family flipped out, and the controversy ensues. However, preparation for the day this HBO film comes out lead me to do a little back homework on what David Mamet is doing these days. In 2011, he put out what I would think would be an almost equally controversial book, one in which he describes why he has abandoned the political left for the political right.
It’s a decent book. It probably could have had thirty-fifty pages cu from it for sake of readability, but it’s worth a read.
One of the things this book does is target liberal arts education. He says theory, multiculturalism, and deconstruction are completely useless, and do nothing to prepare the student for useful work. As Mamet points out, there is no paying occupation in standing up and being offended by perceived racism or homophobia for example, but that is largely what the identity politics of the liberal arts school have encouraged. Mamet calls it a developmental difficulty. That’s pretty funny, I’d say he’s got a point. Even better then that he uses new age to attack the liberal arts educational institution, pointing to liberal arts students becoming “life coaches” or “spiritual advisors” is his critique. Now that’s just plain funny. I had that Whittle-Utter guy writing in because I didn’t like his films, he was a Berkley graduate. Whittle-Utter is all about life coaches and new age therapy. He complained that making the film The Fall drove him into financial ruin. Mamet was on target, that’s for sure. Whittle-Utter was a strong supporter of Hilary Clinton’s presidential run. Mamet didn’t pick up on indie rock, which I would have in a big way. Well, none among us are perfect, I find myself more and more critical of Ron Paul on foreign affairs. I.e., I like Ron Paul’s ideas for a radical dismantling of welfare systems and income tax, but I feel that the U.S. really should put a bullet in the brain of Julian Assange.
Mamet’s general premise is strong. It’s based on the notion that liberalism is a victim mentality that revolves around resentment. He does it pretty well, he goes after gender studies and feminism, he talks about how he gets asked at lectures why he hates women forty years after the review of his first play. I do have to admit this though- Anders Brevik, the shooter over in Norway? He writes for pages and pages about the influence of theory, gender studies, deconstruction-in his manifesto. I have to say, I laughed so hard at his assertions about the impact he thought such movements had on the political landscape. While I agree with David Mamet on the failings of the liberal arts education, it’s only fair if I chuckled at Brevik, I have to chuckle at David Mamet a little bit for writing almost the same thing. Obama doesn’t like being called a Marxist, the identity politics people like Judith Butler use Marx as a footnote i.e. they exist as a marginal and largely powerless minority. Mamet writes a whole chapter on bumper stickers. That’s kind of funny. Again though, doesn’t that in some sense give the fringe left too much credit?
This Spector movie for HBO should be really good. David Mamet is clearly not afraid to jump into a controversy about politics or law with a strong opinion, so I expect the HBO Spector flick to be really provocative, even if I think Spector shot that chick.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Wacky Rock and Roll Fun Fact! Mr. Turnkey!

Did you know that “Mr. Turnkey” by Zager and Evans is probably the only pop song about a rapist who nails his wrist to the prison wall?

Zager and Evans had a hug hit in 1969 with their psychedelic single “In The Year 2525”. However, that was to be their only hit. They did release this little known follow-up single “Mr. Turnkey”, whose lyrics tell the heartwarming tale of a rapist who nails his own wrist to the prison wall in penance for his crimes.
How could this song not have been a number one pop hit?

Groovy Rock N’ Roll with a Message for Today’s Young People



The single “Once You Understand” was put out in the seventies by a band called Think. That was a 70’s rock project featuring Bobby Susser who is predominantly known for children’s music. This single, which remarkably was a minor hit in the early 70’s, is a heartwarming song that deals with family conflicts between adults and children that set out to reach America in a profoundly moving way. There are little sound bites of parents arguing with teenagers and then at the end you hear a voice that is supposed to be a cop telling a father that he’d better come down to the station house, his son has died of an overdose. All with crappy seventies music and the repeated lyric “things get a little easier, once you understand”.
The whole album is available to listen to here:

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/01/365_days_18_thi.html

The rest of the album is similar material attempting to deal with and talk through teen-parent conflicts especially involving drugs. It does so in very weird ways. Ironically, the music sounds, well, very drugged out.
I don’t think either the single or the album that went with it was meant to be a joke at all.
Years before that, there was “Moulty” by the Barbarians. This was the touching story of a boy that lost his hand, but didn’t lose his hopes and dreams…

“Moulty” by the 60’s garage band The Barbarians is a similar case. The drummer for the band had a prosthetic hand, and they ended up releasing a single in which Moulty gives a motivational speech for all those teenagers to keep believing even if they might think they are “ a little bit different, or a little bit strange”.
I don’t think “Moulty” was meant to be a joke at all either. The drummer really had a prosthetic hand.

Film Review: When They Came After Ward Churchill

Reflecting on the tenth year since the 9-11 tragedy. Ward Churchill, do you remember this freak?



This guy compared victims of 9-11 to the Nazi Eichmann. He was an academic. He eventually got fired from University of Colorado. He’s also an idiot.
What he has a Marxist spin on 9-11, he saw it as a strike of oppressed people against the power structure of empire. Here are two things that leaves out:

1. Osama Bin Laden, far from a proletariat, had extreme wealth.
2. Osama Bin Laden’s struggle was to convert the world to Islam, or at least his understanding of it.
I would also like to point out that Ward Chruchill is not, as he claims, a Native American. He’s white. So when he uses his whole Native American angle as a rhetorical device, you can ignore that. He’s also an annoying, academic horses ass.
Yeah, he liked his position as a post-structural little leftist academic, but Osama bin Laden was not big on the rights of women that Western Feminists embrace at all.
Ward Chruchill’s arguments are full of such holes. I’ll tell you in very simple terms what Ward Churchill is. He’s a leftist wing nut. A free market system is not necessarily the enemy of the third world. I think it’s fairly clear that people of the 3rd world will drive taxis in the United States if given the opportunity to do so. I’d also like to point out that Ward Chruchill pointed to the economic oppression of African-Americans in the United States. I would like to point out that where we have a welfare system that does not check need that one take a drug test to get food stamps, for example, or prohibit violent felons from receiving welfare or food stamps, we have a socialist little system that subsidizes the societal problems in the African American community from obesity to virulent homophobia to gang violence on up.
By the way, this documentary is awful it didn’t at any point show what the conservative counter arguments would have been. It just lets Ward do what Ward does best, be a pompous ass and a leftist wing nut.
This is a joke. You don’t bough to the one Allah, Zarqawi would remove the head of a poor man as much as a rich man.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Film Review: 976-EVIL/976-EVIL 2






976-EVIL was a horror franchise that they only unfortunately made two of, The original 976-EVIL and the straight-to-VHS sequel 976-EVIL 2:The Astral Factor. In the late 80’s, prior to 1-900 becoming the number for pay calls, phone sex/party lines/psychics etc. used the first three digits 976. These two films took to very different feeling takes on the same general premise of a satanic 976 line that grants the user wishes, but takes demonic possession of the user. The sound of the telephone dialing or a phone ringing is the signification in these films that some thing horrific is about to take place. I think the films should really be ripe for a rival of interest as the telephonic seems to play such a critical role in today’s news stories, wiretapping playing into countless media stories such as the News of the World wiretapping scandal. These films are focused on landline phones as the cellphone was a newer phenomenon at the time.
The original 976-EVIL was actually directed by Robert Englund, best known as the actor who played Freddy Kreuger in the Nightmare on Elm St. films. The original 976-EVIL has very much the same feel as the Nightmare on Elm St. films. You have some 80’s punk rock looking teenagers as many horror films of the time had. Spike and Hoax are cousins that live next door-to-each other, Spike is older and fills the stereotypical “cool” role of the time with a motorcycle and a leather jacket, Hoax is more of a nerd with a little bit of a perverted edge to his personality. Hoax’s mother and Spike’s aunt is an extreme evangelical bible thumper patterned probably after Tammy Faye Baker. Hoax is bullied By Spike’s gambling buddies and covets Spike’s girlfriend. First Spike encounters a card with the 976-EVIL number for daily “Horrorscope”, but then it’s little Hoax that gets the card and calls the number. Hoax exacts bloody revenge on Spike’s girlfriend, the bullies, his bible thumping mother. Much like the Nightmare and Elm St films that Englund stared in, We got horrible puns and one-liners through out. That along with the use of stock 80’s character types gives the film a certain camp. However, sequences in which Hoax spies on Spike having sex with his girlfriend through a telescope lend a kind of genuine feeling perversity and pathology to the character of Hoax, and the enactment of his revenge fantasies feels very real.
Jim Wynorski, king of straight-to-video horror and soft-core films was the hand that guided the sequel, and his fetish for large busted women is featured prominently. The dean at a college is arrested for being a serial killer. However, through the 976-EVIL line he is able to send his body out of his prison cell to stalk a large busted blonde co-ed that worked in his office. Spike shows up. It has that odd bad acting that he has in all his films, the southern California setting and the fixation with using large busted actresses, in particular blondes, the Wynorski carries through all his films. 976-EVIL 2 has very much the classic early 90’s straight-to-VHs Feel of other Wynorski films such as Ghoulies 4.
Those are excellent little horror films. People never talk about those much, but those are quite entertaining.

Book Review! In My Time by Dick Cheney

You know the whole phenomenon we saw with Alvin Greene winning the South Caroline primary is not entirely unprecedented in U.S politics. In dick Cheney’s book he writes about running against a fellow by the name of Jim Rogers who’d won the Wyoming democratic primaries. He was a bartender and was rumored to have checked in the wrong box in paperwork fillings to run for state legislature.
That was a fact that I found interesting in what is largely a very dull book. It starts out with a bang, goes into a very detailed account of what actually transpired in the White House on the morning of 9-11. However, reading the book which is nearly 600 pages long is like watching hours and hours of C-SPAN. He is not a gifted political writer like Ron Paul or a hilarious provocateur like Michael Savage. He is a former statesman, a little on the pompous side. Indeed, it is not as good a book as Where’s the Birth Certificate?” or nearly as engaging a read.
Occasionally I pick up some sort of intriguing tidbits. At the time that Saddam Hussein’s forces where entering Kuwait, apparently Chaney was sent to meet with that Mubark despot they just kicked out of power in Egypt, and Saddam’s diplomat’s and he were coming literally in and out of the same door, one right after the other. You do get these occasional tidbits like that only a figure in the very top positions would know. Apparently, during the same conflict the emir of Qatar was in a limo with Chaney, turned around and asked “So, are you going to nuke Saddam?”. Pretty funny and pretty intriguing, but I’m not sure they really save this book though. I have a feeling Chaney phoned this book into ghostwriters, to be honest. It is not entirely surprising or exciting to know that Dick spent a lot of time fishing and hunting with Halliburton employees during the Clinton years. A lot of things in his book are not at all surprising if you watch the news with any regularity. Chaney actually wrote the sentence “the attacks of 9/11 had a significant impact on the nation’s economy”.
Thanks guy.
What is somewhat revealing is that Dick Cheney points the finger in the Valerie Plane thing on Rich Armitage, who was Deputy Secretary of State. Apparently, there’s a tape of Rich Armitage mentioning the whole Valerie Plane is a spook to Bob Woodward four times.
Here’s the YouTube:

Cheney goes on at length to defend Scooter, his buddy, for quite some time.
Can you imagine that all this deal was made about Valerie Plaine by the left in this country and yet there are people in the American left who view Bradley Manning as a hero?

Friday, September 9, 2011

Film Review: Lady Magdelene’s! One of the Worst Films of All Time!!!!!!





I only know about this film because a film I was in is showing directly before this film at the one art-house theater in Las Vegas. Words cannot express how bad this film is. It’s a spy movie and a failed comedy about a brothel in Las Vegas made on a micro-budget. It apparently showed at a libertarian film festival. I’m one of the few people who has actually been a member of the Libertarian Party I’ve never heard of a libertarian film festival. Also, I don’t have any sense as to what this film has that expresses a libertarian viewpoint or any other form of ideology.
They made this film nearly two hours long on top of it. The plotline has to do with this federal agent gets transferred from working against terrorism to working on a brothel that has gone into default. It ends up being that the hookers at the brothel end up trying to thwart a terrorist attack.
It’s wretched. The hookers aren’t even that cute some of them.
It keeps going and going.
The acting is so worse then the acting in porn. It was made for five bucks in Las Vegas.
I was involved with the Libertarian Party and I was in a low budget film in Vegas and I had never heard of this piece of crap.
Osama bin Laden is in it. The jokes, however, are not at all funny.
It’s one of the worst films ever.
At the end there’s a lengthy out-take type real deal. It keeps going. They sing in it a few times.
It’s awful.

On the Making of Johnny Reaper




As you can see this is a film that has me in it. The world premier of this film is at Theater7 this evening in Las Vegas. It was directed by this film student Michael Zayas. I think Zayas was only 17 or something like that when we shot the thing. He’s only doing intro to film at a local school in Vegas, community college if I’m not mistaken. Even the level of professionalism for the trailer is something else considering how young Michael Zayas is. I think it’s very difficult for independent filmmakers to even get their films on a big screen. This guy Zayas he did it in his teens with his dad on the set. Get this, the actors that made the film had to correct Michael Zayas on details about drugs because Michael Zayas had no real experience with drugs- because he is so young.
Influenced by Chad Freeman over at PollyStaffle, Zayas made the decision to cast me as a homeless person that plays a small but pivotal role in the tragedy that transpires when a young man’s first drug deal goes array. I was told to look as crazy as I could, which I think I accomplished successfully. I was allowed to improvise my lines. I have not gotten the opportunity to see the finished version of the film.
It’s a bleak little piece of cinematography. Zayas is a weird little filmmaker. It was all very much local actors from Las Vegas that made the film. There was no “budget” really to speak of.
I think it’s good. There are some very abstract and odd qualities to it. Essentially though, it has hit the head on the hammer that when you get involved with drug dealers and such you may really have no idea what you are getting into.
A homeless derelict in Vegas is likely to tell you as much with conviction, whether or not you listen.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Metalhit Free Download Series/Doomed: Music for Tortured Souls (SomaFM)

Impasse and Innovation:


This is a development on a train of thought I’ve written about elsewhere, but here I intend to specifically address the issue and fully develop the idea.
I have written elsewhere about a kind of impasse in modern music. I wrote about this in a review I was commissioned to do for the Jerry Magoo art blog of the latest single by the band Midnight and I commented something to the effect that metal and also goth or gothic/industrial music had reached a kind of impasse where the better newer or current bands actually sounded like re-creations of bands from the 80’s, in the case of Midnight they sounded like the 80’s metal band Venom. That is fairly apparent in a lot of what goes on.
Not really wanting to spend a lot of money on music, I’ve been listening to the Doomed: Music for Tortured Souls station on the Internet radio station SomaFM, which has existed for a few years. That’s the gothic/industrial station. I have to admit that I have trouble telling the difference on there between tracks by a more recent band like Collapsar and a track from an early 80’s artist like Legendary Pink Dots or Coil without looking at who’s playing and doing a web-search on that individual artist to see what the years are on them. I am a huge fan of the Metalhit Free Download Series of about a year ago, which was a release of 6 some hours of free music by underground metal bands that stretches from the 80’s to the present. Both Doomed and the Metalhit Free Download Series are full of music I was unfamiliar with, but truth to tell, it can be very difficult to tell modern bands on their from bands that started when I was a child. Occasionally on Doomed they play a track that I recognize like “Double Dare” by Bauhaus or “Last Remains” by Carcrash International, but there’s plenty of it that I have not heard, although a number of these bands are bands from the last 10 or so years that sound like college music of the 80’s. Doomed also does something which kind of annoys me which is they play sound bites from the movie Halloween over and over again. Metalhit Free Download series is much the same way with extreme metal. The bands on there are very good but more recent thrash metal, black metal, and death metal bands on their don’t sound racially unlike bands from the 80’s. In the case of the Folk Metal and Gothic Metal editions of the series bands of the last twenty years would be hard to distinguish in terms of the dates of the bands existence.
This new Lou Reed and Metallica album Lulu that’s coming out in two months, though made by older musicians, may help to point away out. By the very fact Lou Reed is on that album it must radically re-configure metal for good or ill. The information released so far about the album would imply that this is the case, because the album has ten songs on it but is nearly 90 minutes long. The gossip webpage Heckler Spray reviewed the album claiming to have an advance copy and they panned it, but I checked back on them they’ve published positive statements about The Strokes, so they clearly don’t know or understand much about music.
That brings up another very basic notion that I have written about at length, which is the extent to which the Strokes and bands of the like represent an even deeper impasse within the human psyche. If you consider the amount of energy that the hipster culture in places like Williamsburg, Brooklyn have spent on bands like the strokes taken into account considering the chord progressions that the Strokes and The White Stripes used did not differ greatly from those on early albums by the Kinks from the mid 60’s, that's dismal. It was a phenomenon that existed because American Apparel sent a paycheck to this and that publication; it’s a phenomenon that eclipsed other kinds of artistic expression in the arts oriented press for years. If you take a good long look at some of the things that indie rockers have deemed experimental, let’s say Sonic Youth for example- it remains fairly tame compared to some of the extremes you would find in a body of music like the Metalhit Free Download Series or the playlist for Doomed. That remains true even with the impasse that I’m talking about where bands on those seem to be indistinguishable from music from 20-30 years ago. The thing is that some of that material just was to abrasive to ever be absorbed into a culture for the masses. A lot of that kind of music is going to be of serious interest to, I don’t know, German art students or demographic groups like that. Doom metal has never been for the masses.
Or maybe there was just something magical about the 80’s musically. Certainly the early years of extreme metal and the emergence of gothic/industrial music have a certain kind of magic.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Book Review: Troublemaker by Christine O’Donell






Christine O’Donell is…she’s weird. If you’re not familiar with her she’s that senate candidate from Delaware that did the weird ad where she denied being a witch- meaning literally that she did not practice witchcraft. Her book is not as bad as I would have thought, but she’s a terrible face for the right.
She’ll never get over that stupid witch commercial. Her book explains at great length what actually happened there, but it doesn’t come off as any less strange after she goes through explaining it. There was something about her going on a date with a goth boy in high school which came up on a Bill Maher show years ago and re-surfaced during her 2010 campaign. Apparently, her advisors came up with it thinking it was a great idea, but in fact, it looks to have killed a campaign that was otherwise going well. It killed her.
Her new book, Troublemaker, is an autobiographical account of that same campaign written in a very inspirational speaker/self-help sort of tone. It has some political tidbits I wasn’t aware of, including the feud between O’Donell and Karl Rove, in which O’Donnell calls Karl Rove a RINO (Republican in Name Only). She calls Rove a liberal in the book. That’s great. Somebody has to bring her to a Manhattan art gallery opening or a Judith Butler lecture to say things like that. That would be amazing! They wouldn’t think she was a witch, they’d think she was Satan himself! That I would pay to see!
Christine O’Donell, that whole bit about her being a witch- that is extremely bad politics that those older statements came up and the ad responding to the old statement from the Bill Maher show were laugh out loud funny. Then by writing a book that goes into the backstory behind the TV ad at great length, she’s dug herself even further in the ditch. People don’t want their leaders to be kooks that make strange comments about witchcraft in public. They want leaders that appear stable. A little bit earlier, the New York City Councilmen Dan Halloran admitted to practicing the Neo-Norse religion of Theodism during his campaign for office. In fact, what this demonstrates I think is that if Christine O’Donell had actually practiced witchcraft and freely admitted it, she might have done just fine. Instead she just made some very odd statement about dabbling in the occult years and years ago, it resurfaced, and she made a hilariously funny video denying she was a witch. If your running for public office, if you’re someone like Sarah Palin, you’ve got to know that anything you say is going to be subject to the usages of the liberal media and by comedians, talk show hosts and the like. She faltered completely.
She’s weird. She could do very well for herself and I think has done very well for herself on the conservative speaking circuit. I think she was dead in the water for public office with the witch thing.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Book Review: Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick


When I worked as a reporter on the wiretapping trial of Anthony Pellicano in Los Angeles, there were these long dull parts of the trial that had to do with technically how the actual wiretaps where performed with the half cats and the phone boxes and such. Kevin Mitnick is so into that exact same crap that he’s gone to jail many times for screwing around with it. He didn’t make any money off it, either. It is completely inexplicable to me.
Kevin Mitnick is one of the world’s better known computer hackers, his autobiography Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker is an account of this very phenomena that still doesn’t clarify why he did what he did. The book does give a lot of insight into how he did what he did, which was as much through “social engineering”- or lying to get information out of people working at computer and phone companies, as it was through actual physical hacking. Alas, it was much like Pellicano- you had some very, very gullible people at the phone companies.
Actually, a lot of it was the exact same crap that tended to put me to sleep in Pellicano. Mitnick was into getting information out of the DMV which was a lot of what Pellicano went down for.
When he gets out of jail in the end he gets a happy ending because he makes a fortune in speaking engagements, but he could not have seen this coming and he was in prison for years.
Are phone systems that interesting to you, guy? I’m telling you man, I was nearly asleep when they did the whole bit about the phone boxes in Pellicano. My dad does consulting work for the utilities that gets into some fairly dry stuff, but he gets paid to do it. I’m a certified firearms instructor my grandfather did the M14, even the engineering in guns is more interesting.
WTF?
Don’t get it.
Fairly readable book though.

Saturday, September 3, 2011

More Wretched Music! Wilco!






This wretched band started in 1994 but was highly influential on a bunch of wretched bands at my college Bard in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Members of those bands later ended up in Company and the band the Damnwells. They were worthless, but beyond that Wilco is worthless. Wilco is best known for creating a kind of indie country rock. What a bad idea that was. It’s pretty intriguing that a bunch of hipsters own the music of blue collar rural America.
Wilco have a new album coming out. Hurray. Going to line up and buy that record since they aren't completely boring and irritating at all. If you spend time in Williamsburg, Brooklyn I’m sure some hipster will be more than happy to put it on for you while your waiting for your chai tea.
Well, 17 years of Wilco was not enough so they have a new album out. Here is the aging Wilco playing a track for you.
In a related note. I was writing about the Garbage Pail Kids Movie on here. You know how the plotline of Human Centipede 2 is that the guy finds Human Centipede 1 and becomes sexually aroused by it? I think they should apply the same premise to making a Garbage Pail Kids Movie 2….