Category: Reviews

Reviews of books, movies, tv shows and other items

The Portly Politico’s Review of Rainbow’s Down to Earth

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The good folks at Orion’s Cold Fire have generously allowed me the opportunity to contribute to the site.  I write primarily about politics, economics, and history at https://theportlypolitico.wordpress.com, but as a “semi-pro” musician (and a full-time music teacher), I enjoy occasionally critiquing music.  The purpose of this feature is to review classic 70s and 80s-era hard rock and heavy metal albums.  Why such a specific genre and time period?  Essentially, I believe this genre represents the pinnacle of rock music.  With its confluence of blues, acid rock, country-western, and all the other distinct musical “flavors” of the mid-twentieth century, rock and roll reached its greatest artistic and technical summits during the “classic rock” era.  I’ll write further about that contentious claim at a later date; but now, let’s boogie!

When considering an album to review, I more or less use this criteria:  does it sound like hard rock/heavy metal?  Have I listened to it enough to comment upon it?  And does it rock?  That’s not the best criteria, as it predisposes me to writing glowing reviews of every album, but there you have it—the highly unscientific approach I take to writing about music I generally love.

All that aside, my first album review for Orion’s Cold Fire was a no-brainer:  1979’s Down to Earth by Rainbow.  This album perfectly encapsulates the direction of rock music at that crucial turning point between punk and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal.

Down to Earth was the first and only Rainbow album to feature Graham Bonnet on lead vocals, who replaced legendary metal vocalist Ronnie James Dio.  Rainbow’s guitarist and mastermind, Ritchie Blackmore, was notorious for sacking musicians on a whim, so most of the album’s personnel was wildly different than even the previous Rainbow release.

Regardless, this album rocks.  While he’s no Dio, the songs on Down to Earth are uniquely suited for Bonnet’s vocals—probably because he wrote the melodies after the band had already recorded all of the tracks.

The album’s big hit—and Rainbow’s first hit single—is “Since You Been Gone,” a Russ Ballard-penned tune that strikes the right balance between rock and pop.  The chorus is catchy as the flu, but like any good hard rock song, the pre-chorus build really sets up the triumphant release of the chorus beautifully.  Listen to the bass and guitar after the line “Your poison letter, your telegram” and you’ll see what I mean.

That said, my favorite tracks are the opening and closing numbers, “All Night Long” and “Lost in Hollywood,” respectively.  Musically, they rock, and “Lost in Hollywood” passes what I call the “drive test”—I drive much faster when listening to it.  It also features some of Rainbow’s signature neoclassical embellishments, pointing to the rise of neoclassical metal.

Lyrically, they’re fairly depressing commentaries of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, not to mention the Sexual Revolution.  “All Night Long” is sung from the point of view of a jaded, lonely rocker, searching the crowd for a babe to spend the night with him (the most poignant line, from the third verse: “I know I can’t stand another night on my own”).  “Lost in Hollywood” describes a man so dedicated to rock, he’s lost the woman who makes it all worthwhile.

There are some less memorable tracks—the neoclassically-inflected “Eyes of the World” is a commentary on humanity’s rapacious capacity for violence and waste, but is a bit ponderous; “Makin’ Love” has its moments, but is forgettable—but, from start to finish, Down to Earth is as good an introduction to classic hard rock as I can conceive.  Crank it up!

Finally Fox News Grows a Pair

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Fox News has finally decided not to reflexively fold as soon as the Left bullies some advertisers into dropping a conservative opinion show.  Tucker Carlson has of late been outspoken on immigration and other right-wing priorities and consequently has been the focus of all the usual suspects (Moveon.org, Media Matters, Sleeping Giants, etc.)  hounding weak-kneed corporations to drop Right-Wing broadcasters.

Fox put out a statement saying they won’t cave.  Sounds good.  Let’s see if they stay the course or beg for mercy.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/fox-news-defends-tucker-carlson-we-will-not-be-censored-by-intimidation-efforts

 

Who Can Replace a Man? – by Brian W. Aldiss – An OCF Science Fiction Book Review

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Aldiss was a British science fiction author and “Who Can Replace A Man” is the name of a short story collection published in 1965.  From my exposure to the English films and theater from that time period they seemed like a thoroughly unhappy bunch.  A lot of that shows up in Aldiss’s stories.  There’s a dreariness and an almost claustrophobic atmosphere to some of his work which I can’t enjoy.  But mixed in with these will be a gem.  Out of the fourteen stories in this collection two of them are excellent and highly recommended.

“Old Hundredth” is the story of a megatherium (giant sloth) riding on a baluchitherium (sort of like a prehistoric giant rhinoceros) in search of transubstantiation into a musicolumn.  This piece of insane storytelling is remarkably enjoyable and feels like some kind of impressionistic water color of a beautiful landscape rather than a science fiction story.  I’ve always greatly enjoyed rereading it.

The story “Who Can Replace a Man?” is more prosaic and recognizably science fiction in its content but it provides a self-consistent and believable vision of what a world of robots would be like after humans disappear.  It’s fun even when it’s bleak.

After these two stories recommendations become qualified.

“Poor Little Warrior!” is the story of a time travelling brontosaurus big game hunt.  It follows in the footsteps of Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” but outdoes it in grimness.  It has that British mid-century dreariness but has some cheerful horror at the end.  To each his own on this one.

“The Impossible Star” is equally grim but does include and interesting imagining of how proximity to a black hole might affect the human animal.  I’ll give it a passing grade.

Finally, “The New Father Christmas” is dreary enough but so odd that it gets points for holding my interest.  I’ll give it a D+.

The rest of the stories, although they have interesting facets are just too downbeat for me to enjoy or recommend.  If you do decide to read the New Father Christmas and enjoy it then maybe you can find value in the rest of the collection.  Once again, to each his own.

18DEC2018 – American Greatness Post of the Day – Death of the Weekly Standard Signals Rebirth of the Right

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https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/17/death-of-the-weekly-standard-signals-rebirth-of-the-right/

Chris Buskirk runs the American Greatness website.  Chris is a civic nationalist who believes in restoring the American project.  But in his post, he sounds a lot like the folks in the dissident right:

“But the Bushes killed the Reagan legacy and rather than capitalizing on his victories abroad to achieve his goals at home, they instead embraced the social democratic impulse that replaces core human institutions like the family and the church with the government. This was the point at which institutional conservatism lost its way and slowly became a shadow of the progressive Left—following always just a few paces behind wherever it led.”

That line about “following always just a few paces behind wherever it led,” could have been in a post by Vox Day or the Z-Man.  To my mind, the information that has been percolating around the dissident right has finally become completely mainstreamed.  That is very good news.  I tell some of my friends who get discouraged that knowing the truth about the Fake Right is more important news than anything else.  The sucker punches we took from the Fake Right did more damage than the direct attacks from the Left.  Uniting the people on the right will make us much stronger whereas having false friends among the rich and powerful is an enormous negative.

Onward and upward.

 

Miller’s Crossing – A Movie Review

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The Coen Brothers make a lot of interesting movies.  Some I like more than others.  Miller’s Crossing is one of my favorites.  It’s a gangster story in an unidentified southern city during the 1930s.  Albert Finney is Leo O’Bannon, an Irish gangster who runs the city.  Gabriel Byrne is Tom Reagan, Leo’s right-hand man and best friend.  Verna is Leo’s girl.  But she’s also sleeping with Tom.  Verna’s brother, Bernie (played by John Turturro) and  Mink Larouie (played by Steve Buscemi) are small-time bookies who have crossed another gangster, Johnny Caspar.  Caspar wants Bernie dead and Leo won’t let it happen because of Verna.  Tom knows that Bernie and Verna spell disaster for Leo and advises him to give up Bernie.  So, this is the complicated basis of the story.

But that’s not the reason to watch the movie.  It’s a comic book version of a 30s gangster movie.  A gangster can be bounced down three flights of marble stairs and walk away from it all in one piece. The cops and the city administration will switch back and forth between mob allegiances on an hour’s notice and bring to bear against their former allies all the force of military grade weaponry.

The movie has a fine soundtrack that includes popular music of the era, Irish folk music and even a little Italian opera.  My favorite scene is an attempted mob rubout at Leo’s house.  It’s a bullet riddled ballet to the accompaniment of Danny Boy.  It’s in this scene that Albert Finney proves that a Thompson machine gun will never run out of ammunition.  It’s a thing of nihilistic beauty.

Finney, Turturro and Buscemi are all extremely entertaining but Gabriel Byrne is the center of the movie.  His character Tom is a hardened bitter man who nevertheless lives by a code that requires loyalty to a friend.  In fact, his loyalty to Leo is the only admirable behavior displayed in the whole movie.  And even this is wholly doomed by their relationships with Verna.  Basically, everyone is corrupt.  The good guys are mobsters.  The bad guys are mobsters.  There’s even a scene where a little kid sees a dead mobster on the street and steals his toupee.

And because this is a Coen Brothers movie it is suffused with black humor.  Every mob rubout and brutal beating is chock full of jokes and wisecracks.  The mobsters and cops in the movie are prone to witticisms and philosophical musings that probably rarely occur in real mobsters and cops.  The best example is when Johnny Gaspar explains to Leo that Bernie’s selling of Johnny’s fixed fight information demonstrates Bernie’s lack of moral character.

Miller’s Crossing is a typical Coen Brothers movie.  All the characters are morally compromised and happy endings are extremely scarce and never unmitigated.  If you have enjoyed any of their other movies then I highly recommend Miller’s Crossing.  Otherwise, read my description and decide for yourself if this type of film is for you.

Cyrano de Bergerac – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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With enormous trepidation do I write this review.  In this year 2018, surrounded by the mores and mentality currently on display in the former realm of Christendom, how can you explain, never mind, recommend the story of Cyrano de Bergerac?  To a generation that embraces Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé and the Kardashians how do you justify Cyrano’s chaste love for Roxane.  To a world that needs safe spaces to cower in at the very hint of harsh language how do you explain two men fighting to the death with rapiers over an insult?  It’s ludicrous to even consider.  The very word honor has ceased to have an explicable meaning.

No, there is no way.  This story can only be presented to an older generation.  And even to them, watching it would be a jarring exercise in switching gears from the world of Caitlyn Jenner and Hillary Clinton to the chivalry of seventeenth century France.  So, I cannot expect any sympathy from a modern audience for such a story. Even when this movie was filmed in 1950 the plot was considered much too sentimental.  In fact, the only saving grace it had was the tour de force performance of its star Jose Ferrer.  Even critics who savaged the rest of the production including the rest of the cast, declared Ferrer’s portrayal of Cyrano as a masterpiece and his recital of Rostand’s words inspired.  And so, they were.  Ferrer’s mastery of the material only seems the more convincing compared to the journeyman competence of his fellow cast members.

For those who have read this far but do not know Rostand’s plot, Cyrano is a musketeer in the employ of the King of France in the seventeenth century.  He is also a poet and a deadly skilled swordsman.  He also possesses a very large nose about which he is devilishly sensitive.  One word or even a glance at his nose is enough to trigger a duel from which the offender will exit without his life.  And Cyrano is secretly in love with Roxane his distant cousin and one of the most beautiful women in Paris.  Because of his relationship with Roxane he is compelled by his sense of honor to help her in whatever she asks.  Unfortunately, what she asks him is to help his rival in love to succeed in his courting of Roxane.  When Cyrano meets this rival Christian, he discovers that he is unable to string romantic words together in a way that appeals to Roxane.  So, Cyrano must become Christian’s coach in writing and speaking poems of love.  And finally, when it becomes too difficult, he uses the darkness of night to impersonate Christian under Roxane’s balcony and succeeds in winning her love for Christian with Cyrano’s own passionate declaration of love.

There follow several obstacles, a nobleman as rival to Christian who is also his superior officer in the army and a war with Spain.  Marriage, sorrow, misunderstanding and death stand in the way of true love.  But revelation finally occurs, if too late to allow for happiness.  All of this is brocaded with a script that Ferrer delivers with wit and panache.  For a man of the late nineteenth or early to mid-twentieth century it is a treat and for those afterward a puzzle only.

Recommended only for the true sentimental idealist.

Baby It’s Cold Outside – The Outrage Police Slip on a Banana Peel

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I really can’t stay (Baby it’s cold outside)

I gotta go away (Baby it’s cold outside)

This evening has been (Been hoping that you’d dropped in)

So very nice (I’ll hold your hands they’re just like ice)

My mother will start to worry (Beautiful what’s your hurry?)

My father will be pacing the floor (Listen to the fireplace roar)

So really I’d better scurry (Beautiful please don’t hurry)

Well maybe just a half a drink more (I’ll put some records on while I pour)

…

When I heard about this tempest in a teacup the first thing I did was put the phrase “Baby It’s Cold Outside” on my Christmas Card title.  This song was written by Frank Loesser in 1944 to be sung as a duet with his wife at parties.  If the comparatively restrained adults of the greatest generation and the one before were adult enough to understand that the song implied a flirtatious game between consenting adults then you can only assume that the present-day adults must be pulling our legs when they claim outrage at this song.  These are the same people who watch jadedly as their alleged entertainers twerk their carcasses across the stage and screen.  This is a generation that will sanctify any form of abomination as their state sanctified privilege and parade it down the street frightening animals and small children in the process.  These are people who ventilate their faces with rings and metal studs and treat their epidermis as if were an urban surface in need of a good coat of grafitti.  Some of these folks are willing to castrate and mutilate themselves to satisfy a sense of ennui and we are supposed to believe that a popular Christmas song from the 1940s is too much for their delicate sensibilities.

Well I’ve got news for them.  These people don’t have mothers and fathers who worry and pace the floor.  In fact, most of their parents would probably be thrilled to death if they thought that their daughters were with a man at all and if he were a man that could be even nominally mistaken for a man from this song’s era they’d shake his hand and ask him to stick around for New Year’s Eve.  The prospect of a normal heterosexual relationship that leads to marriage and children is becoming like some kind of UFO sighting, dubious and extremely rare.

The only consolation from this whole thing is the knowledge that these people are self-selecting themselves out of the gene pool and leaving the field open for people with a little bit of normal instinct to have a family.  And for those people and especially for their parents, this song is a mild reminder that men and women have a dance that we go through to recognize each other.  It’s as common in the animal kingdom as can be.  Peacocks and roosters strut.  Fighting fish flash their colors.  Lizards find a prominent rock to sit on and puff out their throats.  The females play hard to get and the males wheedle and sometimes snort at them.  But it’s a dance that both sides recognize.  And if any of the individuals in the population don’t recognize or know how to respond to the dance then they get left out and they disappear from the gene pool.

So good luck to anyone who listens to the outrage police and forgets why we have the dance.  If you’re not on the inside then baby that’s when it really is cold outside.

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. – A Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review

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One time I mentioned on the site that I wondered what a combination of science fiction and fantasy would be like.  TomD, whose opinions on matters political, photographic and literary are always enlightening, immediately volunteered two examples, The Majipoor Cycle and the Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.  I have previously reviewed the Majipoor books.  Here I will address D.O.D.O. and just to get it out of the way the acronym stands for Department of Diachronic Operatives, a government issue time travel story.

Neal Stephenson wrote this book with Nicole Galland.  I’ve heard of Stephenson but never read him before.  I’d never heard of Galland before this book.  So, the book finally got to the top of the pile and I just finished it on Thursday past.  The first thing I can say is that this is a hybrid creation.  The outline of the story is a time-travel science fiction story of the giant government project category.  On that framework is a story that combines historical fiction, fantasy and a satiric contemporary novel about day to day life in a government bureaucracy.  The other fact about the story is that most of it is a first-person narrative by a modern female character.  And this particular character is a college teaching assistant with expertise in linguistics.  And I am intimately familiar with this subspecies.  And I’m not greatly sympathetic to its idiosyncrasies.  Also, the story takes place in Cambridge, MA.  And I am also intimately familiar with the habits and foibles of the people who live there.  And I am also not greatly sympathetic to their idiosyncrasies either.  So, this starts me out in the wrong place as a reader and reviewer.

Moving on from there, the story ingeniously constructs a scenario where the present-day American military becomes worried about losing a global arms race in magic.  Military intelligence has somehow detected anomalies in the present that lead them to believe that someone has figured out how to travel back in time.  And based on a thorough computerized analysis of historical documents, they believe the method involves witchcraft.  And since witchcraft doesn’t seem to exist anymore, they need to figure out how to revive it.  And reviving it hinges on manipulating quantum states of matter and invokes Schrodinger’s Cat who literally shows up in the story (the cat, not the Schrodinger).

From there we meet a Japanese scientist/Mayflower descendant, husband/wife team, which is a category that believe it or not, I’m also personally familiar with.  He’s a quantum physicist who has been investigating the mechanism that the story needs to restore magic and she is the descendant of a burned Salem witch.  Mix in a surviving one hundred and eighty-year-old Hungarian witch, a dashing young army lieutenant colonel, a plucky and annoying female linguist (these last two being the love interests in the story) and assorted scientists, generals, computer geeks and bureaucrats both academic and military and you have the cast that becomes project D.O.D.O.  Once they succeed, we add into the stew, witches from colonial Massachusetts, Elizabethan London, thirteenth century Constantinople and various times and places in medieval northern Europe.  And the non-witch historical characters include Byzantine emperors and empresses, Varangian guards, Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Richard Burbage and a raiding party of Vikings in a Walmart.

The text is a collection of Victorian era journal entries, Elizabethan era letters, some medieval vellum codices, U.S. military documents and a copious collection of e-mail messages from a variety of bureaucratic organizations.  The story is in several voices modern and antique but as mentioned above is primarily the journal of the young woman linguist who is the protagonist and the focal point of several of the original plot elements.

Despite my obvious lack of sympathy for the protagonist and several other of the main characters, the story works on its own terms.  The characters are self-consistent and wherever I am competent to compare them to their real-life exemplars highly accurate.  Because of the details of the time travel mechanism, the action is of necessity episodic and sometimes repetitive.  This situation is written pretty well and only results in a little slowness in the action at the beginning of the book.  Toward the end the pacing picks up quite a bit and the book ends by resolving the latest crisis but the finish requires that there will be sequels.

My opinion on the book is that if you are like me and rather dislike bureaucrats and modern women then you will have limited sympathy for the protagonist and several of the main characters.  There is a good amount of swashbuckling action by the military officer who is a main character and likable.  The story line is extremely clever as a science fiction plot.  So, I recommend it as a story with the proviso that men of my generation will be tempted occasionally to toss the book at the wall when modern New England feminist empowerment rears its ugly head.

Racism for Me But Not for Thee

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William Voegeli has an article at Claremont Review of Books titled RACISM, REVISED.

https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/racism-revised/

In it he reviews the New York Times (NYT) differeing stance on racism committed by white people and non-white people.  The case in point is their employee Sarah Jeong.  She has a Twitter history that is littered with the most egregious anti-white bias imaginable.  But the NYT waived their hands at this and said it was those evil white trolls that made her do it.  But when an equivalent bias was shown by a white person, off with his head.  Very interesting read.