Month: March 2021

12MAR2021 – Quote of the Day

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I have explored the seas of the Old World and the New, and trodden the soil of the four quarters of the Earth. Having camped in the cabins of Iroquois, and beneath the tents of Arabs, in the wigwams of Hurons, in the remains of Athens, Jerusalem, Memphis, Carthage, Granada, among Greeks, Turks and Moors, among forests and ruins; after wearing the bearskin cloak of the savage, and the silk caftan of the Mameluke, after suffering poverty, hunger, thirst, and exile, I have sat, a minister and ambassador, covered with gold lace, gaudy with ribbons and decorations, at the table of kings, the feasts of princes and princesses, only to fall once more into indigence and know imprisonment.

I have borne the musket of a soldier, the traveller’s cane, and the pilgrim’s staff: as a sailor my fate has been as inconstant as the wind: a kingfisher, I have made my nest among the waves.

I have been party to peace and war: I have signed treaties, protocols, and along the way published numerous works. I have been made privy to party secrets, of court and state: I have viewed closely the rarest disasters, the greatest good fortune, the highest reputations. I have been present at sieges, congresses, conclaves, at the restoration and demolition of thrones. I have made history, and been able to write it.

François-René de Chateaubriand

 

The Dunwich Horror (1970) – A Science Fiction and Fantasy Movie Review

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(War Pig loves really bad sf&f movies.  This one’s for you War Pig.)

This movie is so monumentally bad that I feel compelled to dissect its awfulness so that we can learn something from it.  First of all, look at the date.  1970 is something of a low water mark in American cinema.  Now granted this was produced by American International Pictures and they only ever made really cheap and schlocky movies.  But that sets the stage for how this movie became what it was.  Next, the story is an old H.P. Lovecraft story so the cost of buying the movie rights must have been pretty close to zero.

Next take a look at the actors.  Sam Jaffe and Ed Begley were actual actors at one time but their careers were coming to an end and they probably really needed the money.  Dean Stockwell was a young guy whose career had begun as a child actor in the big studio system but with that system now a thing of the past he would earn his daily bread working in schlock and it suited him.  Sandra Dee was a product of the post war teen movies of the late fifties and early sixties.  She had played all the Gidget and Tammy parts and was now too old to be the girl next door.  This was what was next on her ride to oblivion.  It’s also funny to see that before she got some big screen parts in movies like the Godfather and Rocky, Talia Shire had a small role in this stinker.  So, there are some actual actors in this movie.  But what can they do with this thing?

And finally, what is the plot?  Well, in the original Lovecraft story Wilbur Whateley, played by Dean Stockwell, and his monstrous twin are the product of some kind of bizarre ritualistic impregnation of their mother by one of the Great Old Ones, Yog-Sothoth.  The book chronicles the attempt by Wilbur to use the Necronomicon to allow Yog-Sothoth to break through from his own dimension and conquer Earth and eat all the humans for lunch.

But the geniuses at American International Pictures decided that what Wilbur wanted was to go for another generation of Yog-Sothoth baby making and Sandra Dee would be the baby mama.  The monster brother is still in the plot but it seems like a sort of dangling appendage that nobody knows what to do with.

Ed Begley is Dr. Henry Armitage, a university professor who has a copy of the Necronomicon and is Sandra Dee’s boss.  He will try to save her life and foil Whateley’s diabolical plan.  And to round out the cast Sam Jaffe is “Old Whateley,” Wilbur’s grandfather who seems to have inexplicably changed his mind about being an evil servant of the Great Old Ones and now just runs around warning everyone about how dangerous everything is.  Comically they’ve painted thick black eyebrows on his face.  He sort of looks like Groucho Marx in that sense.

Well, before you know it Wilbur convinces Sandra Dee to come to his groovy farmhouse and drink some tea and after he pulls the distributor cap off her car’s motor, she has to spend the night.  She has dreams that look like they were filmed with my kid brother’s super 8 movie camera.  Semi-naked hippies who look like rejects from the Manson family hopped up on hair tonic and looking for love chase her around.  It’s quite ridiculous.  When she wakes up, she shares these dreams with Wilbur and we can see that it’s all having the hoped-for result.  She’s looking for some Yog-Sothoth action.  So, Wilbur brings her up to an oceanside cliff with an altar where she will wear some kind of poncho-like garment that allows the cameraman to show us the side of her leg and butt for what seems like hours.  And Wilbur spreads her legs apart and props the Necronomicon against her groin while he reads passages to Yog-Sothoth.

At some point Wilbur’s brother breaks out of his room and eats about five people including Talia Shire.  We never really get a good look at him.  He’s got tentacles and eyes and I don’t know what else.  He makes guttural noises and he has problems with his adenoids for sure.

Finally, Ed Begley shows up at the cliff and he and Wilbur posture and spout meaningless syllables at each other.  Begley’s babbling proves to be the stronger and Wilbur’s head bursts into flames and he jumps off the cliff.  We briefly see what might be Yog-Sothoth appear as a cartoon character suspended over Sandra Dee’s groin before he disappears.  Then Ed Begley helps her off the altar and the movie ends but as it ends, we see an image of a fetus near Sandra Dee’s belly.  Yog-Sothoth scored again!

So, there it is.  It’s embarrassing to admit I even made it to the end of this awful waste of time.  As far as I know Talia Shire is the only living victim of this terrible thing.  I imagine it still haunts her.  Maybe her rich brother Francis Ford Coppola can buy the rights to the movie and destroy every copy so their family’s shame can end.  I’ve never been a big fan of Lovecraft’s prose.  His imagination was fertile and the images he came up with were vivid.  But his prose style was lackluster.  But even he deserves better than this.  The Dunwich Horror was one of his better stories.  Maybe someday someone will do a decent job of making a movie of it.  This was not that movie.

Talking to Your Normie Friends About the Future

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Lately I’ve found that more and more people have awakened to the reality of Post America.  Well, they have and they haven’t.  They look out in horror on President Dementia Joe and his razor wire wall around DC and want to know what happened.  But when they talk about their hopes, they talk about taking back the House and the Senate during the mid-terms and the Supreme Court defending our constitutional rights in the meantime.  Yep.

My favorite is how, “If we can only find the right presidential and vice-presidential candidates in 2024, why things will straighten right out.”  One guy was explaining to me that a Nikki Haley / Tim Scott ticket was the magic bullet to Republican dominance for decades to come.

Look, I’m not trying to belittle these people.  I was one of them back in the George W Bush days.  All we had to do was get one more seat on the Supreme Court and all this lefty stuff would just go away.  Well, that’s not really how it works I found out.  George W Bush gave us John Roberts.  What we wanted and what he gave us were two very different things.  It took Barack Obama and Donald Trump for me to see what was really going on.  And don’t forget John McCain, Mitt Romney, Justice Kennedy, Little Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, JEB! Bush, John Kasich, Chris Christie, Bill Barr, Mitch McConnell, Liz Cheney, Jeff Flake and on and on and on.

So, I understand where they are coming from.  But it’s not helping anyone to humor them about this stuff.  Just tell them the truth.  Even if every RINO is expelled and we nominate every color of the rainbow coalition for Congress and the White House we aren’t going to vote our way out of this.

What will help is acknowledging that the Democrats have now stooped to massive election fraud and because of that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.  Saying that out loud is part of the solution.  And because several other elections were rigged, specifically the two in Georgia, the Democratic senate majority is also illegitimate.  Which means all the laws passed by the Senate and President are also illegitimate.  And since the Supreme Court is allowing Biden’s unconstitutional executive orders to stand, we cannot expect any relief from any of the three branches of the federal government.

And acknowledging all of this and taking it as the status quo allows someone to think about what it will take to escape the consequences of this reality.  And that is where I try to bring my normie friends.  I finish off by saying that when all is said and done, the only power centers left on our side are the red states.  If anyone is going to resist the tyrants in the federal government who are systematically removing all of our rights it will have to be the legislature and governors of the biggest red states.

But I won’t pretend that any of this is a certainty.  It will take incredible courage on the part of a red state governor to thumb his nose at the Justice Department and FBI.  I don’t put anything past those government thugs.  A man would be taking his freedom and even his life in his hands resisting that power.  I think we have only a 50/50 chance.

But I think it’s important to tell people where we stand.  It’s better to know the truth instead of always wondering why we always lose.  Because if we finally are defeated there is still the chance to leave and find a better place.  And that may come.  But to even have that chance you need to know what’s what.  And you need to know when it’s over.

So that’s “the talk” I give my normie friends.  Let me know if you have a version of this and how it differs from mine.  I’m always interested in comparing notes.

Here’s an Interview by Matt Taibbi of Martin Gurri

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Matt Taibbi is the lefty journalist who is at least honest about the crooked main stream media’s allegiance to the Deep State.  Here he interviews Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst who predicted the Brexit and Trump revolts in his 2014 book ” The Revolt of the Public.”  Gurri believes that the internet has changed the nature of the relationship between government, the media and the people.

Gurri isn’t very ideological so his take on what is going on is fairly cold blooded.  I might read his book just to see if it provides any insights that I am lacking.  But what I see is he thinks the elites still haven’t embraced tactics that will put them back in control of the situation. Good.

I won’t say highly recommended.  Just something interesting to me.

 

 

On Killing Off Fictional Family

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I’m working on a fantasy story.  And I’m at the point in the origin phase where the protagonist needs a crisis to propel him into a new and horrible life.  And I’m wavering between some deus ex machina scooping him out of his normal life or a horrible injustice killing off one or more of his family.

And the funny thing is I feel bad about killing off his kin.  I mean, they’re good people and they’ve never done anything to me and all things being equal I might need them later.  So, I’m vacillating and trying to thread the needle.  Can I just kill off his father?  But I kind of need him for later.  How about his mother?  The murder of his mother would be a great catalyst.  There’s guilt and rage and despair and hunger for revenge and all sorts of mixed emotions.  That could work well.  But it feels like a cheap trick.

I could kill off his newlywed sister.  It’s going to happen at the wedding reception anyway.  But that’s even more conflicted.  There’s the bride groom and the other sisters and then the parents won’t be distracted by one of them dying so the protagonist will be dealing with all kinds of messy emotional baggage.  Everyone will be whining for a hundred pages and I don’t need that.

I’m planning some kind of mob hit.  I’m undecided between a shotgun blast coming out of the reception or a bomb thrown through the window.  Either way it’s not ideal.  Very messy.  Definitely not the beautiful death.

So, as you can see there won’t be any easy way to write this.  All kinds of angst and messy follow-on consequences.  But let’s face it, murdered family has been a great plot device since Cain killed Abel.  I’m already trying to work my way through a father with conflicted feelings about the son whom he loves but who is responsible for the death of his wife.  That’s got all kinds of possibilities.  As I said I need the father around later and his grudging cooperation in some plot devices would add a nice amount of resistance to some scenes that would otherwise lose all tension.

So, she has to go.  But I am grateful for her part up to this point and I will give her a nice close-up scene before the finale.  She’ll get to talk to her son and they will share something personal before I finish her off.  Then she’ll upstage her oldest daughter’s wedding.  What mother could ask for more than that?

So, as you can see, for me the characters in my story take on a life of their own and I have to think carefully before I bring anyone in.  The butterfly effect is in full effect and especially when my character has a very long-life span, I have to be careful about cutting off all descendants of present characters because I might need their grandchildren or even great grandchildren at some point.

And finally, this action is meant to cut off his normal life and send him forward into a future where many of his actions are going to appear to him to be pretty evil.  To make that happen I’ll need something to disorient his moral compass.  The random brutal death of someone who symbolizes normalcy and happiness to him is just about right.  Add in a feeling that he is culpable in the death and I think I can work that into a tragic figure.  Will Shakespeare, hold my beer.