Just came back from the Making Light meetup, which was fun, if totally bib or tucker free. Before that I spent the whole day on a training course, so I haven’t had any time to read the interwebs, let alone come up with something to post about. Instead, have a video of a seventies rock band now only remembered for one song, one of the countless bands that put out some records, had some limited success, then vanished, never to even make it to cult favourite. Jo Jo Gunne managed four albums before they had to quit, had only one hit, never got much of a presence on the AOR channels either, didn’t do much other bands didn’t do earlier or better, but they still had a certain charm.
The point of seventies rock like this is not that it’s original or innovative, but exactly that you get what you thought you would get.
His name is Judge Minty, not Dredd and he took the Long Walk more than thirty years ago, in prog #147. And now there’s a fan film to show what happened once Judge Minty took up retirement in the Cursed Earth, where mutants dwell. Which, no matter how it will look, can’t help but be better than what Sylvester Stallone did to Dredd back in 1995.
It’s also a good example of a) how powerful the fan fiction impulse is and b) how sophisticated it can become. It costs a lot of money/effort/expertise to make a movie and this is not a movie one can make a profit with. The Homeric impulse is universal.
Just heard S. won’t be out of hospital tomorrow, as they want to keep her a few days longer to make sure she’s allright, which is … a bit annoying … It put me in the mood for a bit of schlock metal to get rid of some of my frustration — what better than Manowar’s Battle Hymn? The video shows all past and present members of the band rehearsing for their German tour back in 2007 iirc. Naff as fuck, but I’ve always liked this song, first hearing it at the same time as I discovered David Gemmel’s equally shock fantasy novels, especially Legend and Waylander, which it fit perfectly with.
2018: updated with a different live video because some fucker had to get the original video removed from Youtube.
Good news for everybody who was hoping for a nice, easy, racist explenation for the riots in Britain, “historian” David Starkey has come to your aid. Yes, the rioters were multiracial, Black, white and Muslim, while the victims and defenders of various communities in turn were also multiracial, Black, white, Sikh, Turkish and so on and it seemed that all the simplistic ideas about how those minorities just cannot help their criminal natures were clearly wrong, but Starkey knew the truth. It was the white man that had gone Black, had abandoned its superior nature, that it had been infected by the “gangster culture”, probably through that newfangled hippity-hop music. This is not racist of course, it’s just common sense. And hence Starkey is listened to politely, not interrupted and taken seriously as a commentator even if the other guests disagree with him.
Compare and contrast the treatment of Darcus Howe, who is clearly a dangerous loony who has to be chided and can’t be trusted to be sensible. Howe needs to be handled aggressively, he’s almost a rioter himself and his waffle about root causes to explain the riots need to be attacked immediately as excuse mongering.
As with every unexpected, natural crisis when the news media are caught unawares, the raw edges of approved reality become a bit more visible. On the one hand, the manipulation of news and acceptable opinion becomes more blatant — one very obvious example being the whitewashing of the spontaneous cleanup operations in the days after the first riots, as noted and ripped apart by W. Kasper. On the other hand, even more blatant is how unacceptable opinions like Howe’s are handled, attacked, shouted down. This by and large is not a conscious process, but something journalists and the news media pick up by osmosis. It’s no surprise that it’s the BBC, supposedly independent but in practise always hypersensitive to how the political winds are blowing, that is the most hardline in this. We saw the same thing with the War on Iraq, where it was the commercial news channels that were more skeptical than the BBC, other than you’d expect at first.
Starkey might just well be trying to move the acceptable discourse to the right, to make his racist ideas respectable as Lenny argues, but the BBC is more culpable by giving him a platform and treating him with respect, making his ideas more respectable by that. Howe’s views on the other hand, the idea that some of the responsibility for the riots may just have to lie with the police for their treatment of (young) Black people in general and the murder of Mark Duggan in particular, are still beyond the pale, as shown by how he is treated. In short, the BBC is actively shifting the borders of acceptable, mainstream opinion rightwards.
Reinder Dijkhuis has for most of the year been blogging about Kate Bush covers and posting videos. Here are two he missed.
That was Pamela Stephenson from an early Not the Nine O’Clock News episode. She did a lot of these parodies and was usually brilliant at them.
And that was the real Kate Bush, in duet with Rowan Atkinson for Comic Relief.
Incidently, this year is Reinder’s twentieth anniversary of his webcomic, The Rogues of Clywd Rhan, which makes it one of the oldest existing webcomic still being published and certainly the oldest Dutch one. It was also the first, after Dr Fun, that I followed regularly.