Quite an enjoyable action film, with Chris Hemsworth giving a performance a grade or two higher than required. It has the following virtues: it’s relatively short by modern film standards; the pace chugs nicely along; the violence is good; the Hemsworth is Hemsworth.
It could have been a very good film, with a little script tweaking – Hemsworth’s character just needed a bit of deepening and then it would have been something more, potentially much more.
A kind of spin-off novelisation of the 80s HTV show Robin of Sherwood, written by Richard Carpenter, Robin May, and Anthony Horowitz. The book is okay, evidently hastily-written with minimal characterisation or attention to the usual narrative niceties, but has many enjoyable moments. I wouldn’t advise anyone to read it if they haven’t seen the HTV show, indeed it doesn’t add much to the original series save for some occasional well-written passages. Here’s a trailer for the TV show:
It’s one of these 70s/80s TV gems, low budget but astonishingly good, with a psychotic Will Scarlett played by of course Ray Winstone, and an excellent Sheriff of Nottingham. The death of the first and best Robin is well-described in the novelisation:
The men-at-arms were murderously close now, just a few yards short of the first boulders as Robin set his last arrow on the string. The Sheriff was nowhere to be seen – hiding behind his men while they brought down the outlaw. The great bow bent and sprang, sending the arrow flying high over the forest in a salute to all that had been. In the last moments that were left to him, Robin unstrung his bow and broke it on his knee. Then the soldiers charged forward and he was lost from sight as swords flashed down, glinting in the sun.
I awoke to this video today, in which a high school principal has been fired/displaced for disagreeing with rioting and race-grievance. The culprit, Tiffany Riley, is no doubt a Leftie like most teachers, yet had the audacity to state:
“I firmly believe that Black Lives Matter, but I DO NOT agree with the coercive measures taken to get to this point across; some of which are falsified in an attempt to prove a point. While I want to get behind BLM, I do not think people should be made to feel they have to choose black race over human race. While I understand the urgency to feel compelled to advocate for black lives, what about our fellow law enforcement? What about all others who advocate for and demand equity for all? Just because I don’t walk around with a BLM sign should not mean I am a racist [sic]”
She looks like a typically clueless normie who thinks we can all be friends, and she was no doubt a bit taken aback to be fired.
Since the boundaries of acceptable discourse have been rapidly shrinking, and people now say Friends of all things is racist, we are experiencing extreme outrage inflation. The Left know that no one in the public eye would dare say the kinds of things everyone admitted in the 80s or 90s; even sentiments that were common sense in 2012 are now increasingly forbidden. Thus, since the Left is in part animated by the desire to extirpate heresy, and is unable to believe in the innocence of whites, they necessarily zoom in on the tiniest behaviour or utterance of Whitey. For the progressive, to say “you probably shouldn’t burn your own neighbourhoods down” is on a par with flashing a Nazi Party badge while donning a white hood and hefting the noose, because they truly believe that every White Devil is a racist fascist sexist homophobe Nazi etc. etc. – and in the absence of actual proof, of e.g. openly racist and murderous statements, Prog is forced to amplify the smallest of infractions into evidence of that which they inwardly know to be the case.
For Prog, the total sum of racism can not decrease; so as the expression of racism decreases, the significance of each utterance must increase. For Prog, the White Devil is every bit as racist as in the early 19th Century, it’s just he/she has learnt to hide it – to speak in code.
This will continue. As normies shrink from even daring to criticise mass violence & looting, Prog will have to look closer yet; to establish guilt, it will soon be enough to have not praised the beatings and arson; and then, when normie learns to begin each day with a hymn of praise for anti-white murder and destruction, Prog will frown – Prog will look closer yet; then, it will be necessary for the White Devil to join in the rioting, to attack other White Devils; and in time, only suicide will suffice – anything short will be taken as evidence of hate, of being a closet Nazi, a White Supremacist, that most ghastly of things, a living white person.
Peter Hitchens having none of it.
Perhaps, in time, a statue of Hitchens in just this pose will be erected, on just this spot.
Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.
Die Welt ist die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen, nicht der Dinge.
Die Welt ist durch die Tatsachen bestimmt und dadurch, dass es alle Tatsachen sind.
–
The world is everything that is the case.
The world is the totality of facts, not things.
The world is determined by the facts; and by these being all the facts.
—
Wittgenstein, Tractatus
Watching older music videos, I was struck by how many were pseudo-live, lip-synch versions where the band pose on a stage pretending to play their instruments & sing as their song is played from a record. For example, Oasis “performed” ‘Roll With It’ on Top of the Pops, but the Gallagher brothers swapped roles, the guitarist Noel pretending to sing Liam’s vocals and the singer Liam pretending to play guitar.
or Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel:
Live versions are never as perfect, but can have an unsettling energy, e.g. Arcade Fire’s ‘Rebellion’ live in 2006:
or the Beastie Boys’ ‘Sabotage’:
An amusing comment I found to one of their other live ‘Sabotage’ videos:
There is something unnerving about a good live version of a song you only know from the studio. I wondered how someone who grew up watching lip-synch videos would feel, watching something like this:
Much of our post-WW2 world is a man-made and managed “matrix” of advertising and political propaganda. Read the average contemporary writer, then go back and read some work on e.g. beekeeping or a history of church bells by some obscure clergyman or schoolmaster, and one is struck not merely by the far greater erudition and lexical/grammatical range of the latter – there is a sense of earthy grit & grain to the minor schoolmaster, in contrast to our contemporary propagandists.
I feel this is one of the reasons normies are so routinely affronted by Donald Trump; bizarrely – given his extensive background in reality TV – he is the political equivalent of a raw live take in a world of lip-synching fakes. He offends not by his middle-of-the-road civic nationalist opinions (“we are all American!”) but by breaking the illusion; even if he is weaving his own illusion, it is not part of the imprisoning deceit, it indeed violently jars with the narrative of the last three decades. He is his own man; like or dislike it, he’s not suborned to the manmade matrix (or should I rather say, demon-made). In a world of Top of the Pop lip-synching, Trump has the wild, controlled bluster & blister of, for example, Rod Stewart and The Faces performing ‘I’m Losing You’, with 15k likes and, at the time I viewed it, 358 dislikes:
– appended to which I found this, presumably when the 358 nay-sayers were at 297:
We are living in incompetent times. As IQ plummets, we are barely able to maintain systems created by better men. Here’s a good video showing an ex-Marine bodyguarding a news team in Seattle; he saw an Antifa goon with a stolen AR-15 and went to disarm him. Here is competence.
I’ve decided to post some of Trump’s most amusing tweets, as he comes up with some hilarious turns of phrase:
I will try to use some of this language in future, “the most vicious dogs, the most ominous weapons”.
A phenomenon I’ve only recently noticed on the Right, a kind of anti-virtue signalling where the individual (usually a commenter on blogs or Youtube videos) aggressively signals an utter lack of compassion, fairness, etc., on the grounds that such moral sentiments are Leftist tools, and that in any case for all their blather the Left don’t actually have any compassion or fairness, so why should the Right?
It’s a prevailing note struck in Vox Day’s comment section, e.g. regarding the death of George Floyd. As far as I can tell, Floyd may have tried to forge a check, the police were called, and one of them for some reason subdued him by kneeling on his neck until he died. Floyd was a huge man and looks drunk or high from the available footage, so I can understand the police using a higher degree of force, but it’s difficult to justify kneeling on an inert man’s neck for several minutes.
Now the local black communities are rioting and looting to express their displeasure; and of course because destroying & stealing stuff is fun.
The comments on Vox Day’s post are instructive. A small number say the police basically murdered Floyd and people are right to be pissed off. These commenters are then attacked by Vox Day and other regulars, accused of being race traitors, “virtue signallers”, and so on. I found it baffling and wondered if I’d missed something, since as far as I could tell the first lot were simply saying that the police shouldn’t kneel on a non-violent suspect’s neck until he dies, which seems fairly reasonable. Then I realised, Oh! They mean that because Floyd was black, no one should criticise the police. Oh.
I’m regularly accused of being a Nazi, a racist etc., but I guess I’m not racist enough for this ride.
I wasn’t disturbed so much by the racist sentiment (that only a virtue-signalling race traitor would object to police more or less randomly murdering blacks) as by the triumphal, snarling tone of the anti-virtue-signallers; it reminded me of the irritating peacockery of the Leftist virtue-signallers; both operate within a clearly-defined arena, within which they are sure their opinions will be not merely accepted but respected, and for which they will be accorded honour and acclaim. For all their venom and bravado, the anti-virtue-signallers are servile dogs snarling for their master’s approval.
As an old dog, I often think back to the formative artistic experiences of my late teens & early 20s. I have left most of them behind for one reason or another; some, like Nietzsche have receded as I only want to read him in German which means one page per 10 minutes; others, like U2, have become shameless globohomo shills, and Bono’s voice and talent have both disappeared; Tori Amos is a little special – as an impressionable 17-year-old, I found this hot redhead enticing & exciting
and she led me to read Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. I even saw a concert of hers and got the eerie impression she was repeatedly looking directly at me – though I suspect this was a mere performative trick. Little Earthquakes was (I think) the first CD I ever bought, along with Metallica’s …And Justice for All; I was mesmerised by it, by the gorgeous ‘Silent All These Years’
Lyrics like “Yes I know what you think of me, you never shut up” cut to the point with an everyday unpoetic poetry, if you like.
As I grew older, I lost interest in her new music and increasingly disliked her persona; in my 20s I had been a little bruised by narcissists, and also come to recoil from my own narcissistic tendencies, and so perceived the exhibitionism, vanity, and grandiosity in Tori Amos; not merely in her “shocking” cover art:
but in her very musical technique – too many pointless trills, to showcase her voice. Of course, every performer tends to be a narcissist but I found her blend increasingly offputting. A couple of years ago I realised I hadn’t played any of her music in a decade and so googled, and found this (quite good) song with her daughter:
It’s nothing special; just what you would expect from an expensive studio, producer, and sufficient vocal talent. I was struck, however, by the expressions on both women’s faces – a smug, knowing, “I am better than you” look which I call the Streep. It’s a look I saw on one of the narcissists I knew in my early 20s, let’s call her B, a largely talentless midwit who read a book every six months and has now become a Guardian-reading school teacher; B is now marked by a look of permanent sneering hauteur, and finger-wagging certitude:
– a look to which I respond with either the Mel or the Vince:
Recently, I’ve had some Tori Amos songs in my head; the one which returns most often is ‘Tear In Your Hand’, not one of the big hits but, more & more, my favourite.
It’s a great break-up song:
I don’t believe you’re leaving cause me and Charles Manson like the same ice cream
I think it’s that girl and I think there’re pieces of me you’ve never seen
Maybe she’s just pieces of me you’ve never seen well
All in all, my middle-aged self is glad she existed for my 17-year-old self.
Remainders 