It’s the day after Worldcon, and I’m more than a little toasty, so expect slow blogging while I get up to speed.
So here’s a long interview with Gene Wilder about his career, working with Richard Pryor, Mel Brooks, Gilda Radner, etc. Wilder has reached the stage in his life where he speaks slowly and carefully, but always cognizantly, and it’s an interesting interview. I suspect that if it were not the day after Worldcon, I’d find it a little slow, but right now slow is just fine.
The Great Wilderness is an all-girl post-punk band from Costa Rica, and “Dark House” has a nice gaze sound to the guitars.
Here’s UK nugaze band 93MillionMilesFromTheSun (yes, they jam the letters all up together like that; probably works well for Twitter) with “Waiting There.”
Looks like I’ve been falling down on my Giant Spider reporting duties. A retro black-and-white giant spider film has been released called, oddly enough, The Giant Spider.
There’s an IMDB listing for it as well.
Via Gardner Dozois’ Facebook comes news that it’s International Clown Week. I don’t suffer from Clownophobia, but I’ve known people who do.
So let’s take this moment to remember Bart Simpson’s awesome bed:
Alice Cooper even did a song:
And speaking of bed:
Maybe International Clown Week exists to remind us it’s just three months until Halloween…
“The players here are using devices called Matryomins. They’re single-oscillator theremins that happen to be contained inside a matryoshka doll.”
167 of them.
Here’s another “Is it Shoegaze or not” entry, with Belle and Sebastian’s “Sleep Around the Clock,” which is more bouncy retro low-fi pop, but there’s enough of a shoegaze tinge to it (a little like Black Tambourine) that I’m throwing it in here.
Plus I like the sciency theme of the video. So there.
You’ve probably heard of Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple and the fringe SF book The Temple of My Familiar.
What you may not have heard is that she’s a fan of David icke, he of the shape-shifting lizard people.
And Ms. Walker is evidently a believer:
Earlier I wrote that David Icke reminded me of Malcolm X. I was thinking especially of Malcolm’s fearlessness. A fearlessness that made him seem cold, actually, though we know he wasn’t really. All that love of us that kept driving him to improve our lot; often into quite the wrong direction, but I need not go into that. What I was remembering was how he called our oppressors “blue eyed devils.” Now who could that have been? Well, we see them here in David Icke’s book as the descendants of the reptilian race that landed on our sweet planet the moment they could get a glimpse of it through the mist that used to cover it (before there was a moon). No kidding. Deep breath! Yes, before there was a moon! (Oh, I love the moon; can I keep it? Please?). Anyway, there they came, these space beings (we’re space beings too, of course, not to forget that). But they looked…. different than us. And they were.
They wanted gold and they wanted slaves to mine it for them. Now gosh, who does this remind us of? I only am asking. You do the work. Apparently their own planet needed this metal to continue its, apparently, long life. Credo Mutwa, Zulu shaman – and I am on my knees here in gratitude that he held on long enough to tell us about this – calls them the Chitauri, which has become my favorite word of all time (well, of this time that I’m learning all this): my partner and I go around saying Oh, Chitauri, whenever we get a glimpse of one or two of the Chitauri offspring, aka Illuminati bloodline families and their puppets, on the telly. It’s quite the stress reliever, just knowing what we’re looking at. And I like saying “telly” too, because it sounds so English and David Icke-esque.
It’s an amazing book, HUMAN RACE GET OFF YOUR KNEES, and reading it was the ultimate reading adventure. I felt it was the first time I was able to observe, and mostly imagine and comprehend, the root of the incredible evil that has engulfed our planet. A lot of it is how shall we say: shocking, beyond belief (but not really, if you don’t get too scared), stunning, profound. The deconstruction of language is breathtaking, the interrogation of symbols startling. Magical, in a way. I kept going: Oh, so that’s why…. You will too.
The Reptilian space beings whose hybrid (part human, part reptile) descendants make our lives hell in Paradise were blue eyed devils to Malcolm X, the devil himself to my Christian parents, who never talked about eye color, which I think was not only prudent but wise, although they seemed clear enough about his sex, and as demons in many other religions, including the non-religion, Buddhism, where the advice is often to invite them in until they go away. But maybe these were other kinds of demons. Not the ones controlling not just you, but everything.
Sorry, I’m still in the “beyond belief” camp.
In a more recent post, Walker expresses enthusiasm for Icke’s new 24-hour international news network.
(In the video Icke says he’s crowdsourcing his new network, called The People’s Voice, and, in fact, he’s raised over £300,000.)
Well, we all have our flaws. I enjoy truly crappy Sci-Fi original movies like Sharknado. Alice Walker believes in shape-shifting lizard people who rule the world and oppress black people.
It’s always something…
To celebrate the 4th anniversary of the moon landing, here’s footage from For All Mankind, with Brian’s Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” on the soundtrack.
I recommend both the movie and the soundtrack.
Alas, lacking cable, I won’t be able to watch it in all its glory. But I do hope the ratings top the final episode of American Idol.
Here’s a longer trailer:
It really does look like everything I long for in a movie called Sharknado.