#Anglo Amalgamated

[chernobog13]

When you ate a bunch of those brownies the hippie chick at work brought in and now you're paranoid AF.

[screamscenepodcast]

Completing Anglo-Amalgamated Production's "Sadian trilogy," it's CIRCUS OF HORRORS (1960) from director Sidney Hayers! Starring Anton Diffring, Jane Hylton, Kenneth Griffith and Erika Remberg, this film makes your hosts wonder... what's up with circuses?

Context setting 00:00; Synopsis 13:42; Discussion 24:01; Ranking 39:42

[aturinfortheworse]

I read a fair number of recipes on the ten thousand interchangeable recipe blogs that exist, and often they say something like "This recipe is a family favourite!" or "This a crowd-pleaser" etc. and I roll my eyes a little bit every time because of course they are, it goes without saying! People like food! Nearly any special-occasion home-cooked meal is going to be popular.

But there is one recipe, one cake, that has recontextualised all those comments for me and now actually I think those bloggers might be wrong about what a family favourite is. It sure as hell isn't Interchangeable Chocolate Cake No. 7.

I'm telling you this because I need you to know the seriousness of the power I am going to bestow on you. And hey, maybe your friends and family have different preferences than mine do. Maybe you need to find another recipe to fill this role. But you must know that there's a recipe out there, and not even a particularly alluring one or a particularly difficult one, which people will bring up in unrelated conversations to you four years later.

If I so much as say the word cake, my family all turn to face me like a pack of hungry wolves. Even the ones that don't like food!! Health nuts and people who simply don't enjoy eating and people with no appetite and people I have no goddamn memory of ever having cooked for, all of them come up and say to me "Hey remember that cake-" I asked my brother and his girlfriend what foods they're looking forward to, when they return home after three years in Japan, and they say "You know that cake?"

It doesn't sound particularly appetizing. I only made it the first time because it was gluten free and I had a bunch of lemons. Please don't let the name inform your opinion here. This is a fairly fast and simple cake that requires no special equipment and people will literally never stop asking you for it.

It's not even my favourite cake! I'd rather have basque burnt cheesecake, which is harder and more expensive to make and consists almost entirely of fat and sugar but still manages to be a little savoury... But people want the weird corn one.

To be fair, this is the only cake that'll make me dip my fingers into boiling sugar without regret.

[imkeepinit]

Movie poster by an unknown artist for the American release of the 1959 Anglo-Amalgamated film Horrors of the Black Museum. The American release featured “HypnoVista,” a thirteen minute prologue with a hypnotist.

[360degreesasthecrowflies]

I’m afraid I’ve come more and more around to the opinion that Rowling is the kind of author who simply doesn’t think. So to look for an analytical interpretation of anything in the series is probably an exercise in frustration. She paints what is intended as impressive word pictures — essentially vignettes — mainly on the basis of how they are supposed to push your buttons and make you feel, without ever considering how they are supposed to fit together. This sometimes produces a considerable emotional impact, if you are at all sensitive to that kind of jerking around, but it doesn’t necessarily make sense. And sometimes they just plain backfire. Quite a few of these issues are still slowly coming into focus. And one of the sharpest is the awareness that the world Rowling assembled is simply a lot bigger than the narrow-focused, smug, anglo-centric view of it she gave us. Because when you come right down to it, it becomes clear that she never really intended to build a solid secondary world to put her story in. She simply didn’t do the groundwork. Instead, she has ended up with this weird amalgamation that she threw together — which is highly detailed in some areas, and only vaguely sketched in elsewhere with several great gaping holes where you least expect them, to fall right out of the story through. But, back when she first assembled this pretend world, she used the best possible materials available. She mined folklore, and classic (written) tales that have been pretty fully absorbed by the culture, as well as ancient myth, and symbolism that has been around for centuries, she mimicked the authentically traditional “tropes” of how stories are put together and how they work, and she did it with a free hand. But I’m no longer convinced that she did it all consciously. I think she slung a lot of them together because they just “felt” right together. Sure, sometimes she tweaked them before she deployed them, or renamed them, or trivialized the hell out of them, but she hardly ever invented anything new. Most of her elements already existed. The only thing in the Potterverse that is really original are some of her combinations. And, of course, the Dementors. Consequently, as I say, she ended up with something that is a lot bigger than she is. And which upon first encounter comes across as a lot more erudite than she probably really is too, because all of the elements she used to build it came already equipped with their own baggage, and a whole pre-existing collection of associations which all originally led someplace. And most of them are so widely known and/or so universal that even with a 2nd or 3rd-rate education, you are able to recognize them, and are at least somewhat aware of what those particular elements usually mean. And the components are all thoroughly documented, so you can readily find out what the original source meant if you are at all curious. But that doesn’t mean that she ever intended to use any of that material. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is certainly bigger than the shallow, petty, and mean-spirited viewpoint that she keeps pushing into the foreground and expecting us to use as a lens.

via Red Hen's restrospective review of Deathly Hallows, 2008

[gurumog]

Carry on Cleo (1964) Anglo-Amalgamated Dir. Gerald Thomas

Sid James as Mark Anthony David Davenport as Bilius

[brokehorrorfan]

Circus of Horrors will be released on 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray on October 29 via Kino Lorber. The 1960 British horror film features reversible artwork.

Sidney Hayers (Burn Witch Burn) directs from a script by George Baxt (The City of the Dead). Anton Diffring, Erika Remberg, Yvonne Monlaur, Donald Pleasence, Jane Hylton, and Jack Gwillim star. Anglo-Amalgamated (Peeping Tom) produces.

The film is presented in 4K (SDR) from a 2018 scan of the 35mm original camera negative. Special features are listed below.

Special features:

Audio Commentary by Film Historian David Del Valle

Theatrical Trailer

TV Spots

A deranged plastic surgeon (Anton Diffring) takes over a traveling circus, then transforms horribly disfigured young women into ravishing beauties and coerces them to perform in his three-ring extravaganza. But when the re-sculpted lovelies try to escape the clutches of the obsessed doctor, they begin to meet with sudden and horrific “accidents.” Now the trapeze is swinging, the knives are flying, the wild animals are loose – and “The Grisliest Show on Earth” is about to begin.

Pre-order Circus of the Dead.

[barkingbonzo]

Julie Christie in Darling directed by John Schlesinger, 1965

Darling is a 1965 British romantic drama film directed by John Schlesinger from a screenplay written by Frederic Raphael. It stars Julie Christie as Diana Scott, a young successful model and actress in Swinging London, toying with the affections of two older men, played by Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey. The film was shot on location in London, Paris and Rome and at Shepperton Studios by cinematographer Kenneth Higgins, with a musical score composed by Sir John Dankworth.

The film premiered at the 4th Moscow International Film Festival on July 16, 1965, and was released in cinemas in the United Kingdom on September 16 by Anglo-Amalgamated. It became a critical and commercial success, grossing $4.5 million, and received five nominations at the 38th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won in three categories: Best Actress (for Christie), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Costume Design. It also won four BAFTA Awards: Best British Actor (Bogarde), Best British Actress (Christie), Best British Screenplay and Best Art Direction (Black-and-White)

[abtrusion]

Book review -- Monstrous Intimacies

There are a great many ways to know chattel slavery. The worst cast slavery in terms of violations against humans' rights while simultaneously positioning it as opaque and unthinkable, a doubled label that renders Black trauma and survival raw material for mobilizations against 'wage slavery,' 'white slavery,' and other issues considered pressing to the white population. Alternatively, scholars like Charles Mills and Alexander Ghedi Weheliye have analyzed chattel slavery and the mid-Atlantic slave trade as institutions of utter dehumanization. Chattel slavery is a social death, a cutting of people from society via the 'largest forced transfer of people in the history of the world,' an institution built around moving enslaved people so far from home that they had nowhere to run. Chattel slavery created race as we know it, and it made 'human' as we know it through an Enlightenment humanism that prefigured Black people as categorically inhuman. This makes framing slavery as the violation of a human's rights seem inadequate, because despite modern attempts at inclusion, 'human' was something that was never intended to include enslaved people.

But while there's something clear to the way that blackness is foundationally positioned as against the category of human, it's not sufficient to describe the social dynamics of slavery and its aftermath. As Hartman notes in Scenes of Subjection, there are "qualities of affect distinctive to the economy of slavery," patterns of empathy and ambivalent joy which intensify subjection. We return from utter abjection to a horribly ambivalent state, and the question now becomes: how do we consider affect without implicitly positioning it as a reprieve from, or existing outside, the violence and subjection of slavery? The public/private // male/female dyad of Anglo-American gender renders emotion, intimacy, and desire as categorically outside power relations, and even efforts to break this distinction and 'make the personal political' often frame power (typically only patriarchal power) as a sort of infection into the pure world of feeling. In Monstrous Intimacies, Sharpe makes a significantly stronger effort to this end, considering the 'double status' of subjectification, the ways that enslaved people were both humanized and dehumanized, often in contradictory ways, leading to certain conditions of 'relative freedom within unfreedom.' Her eponymous monstrous intimacies mark the ways that "slavery and the Middle Passage were ruptures with and a suspension of the known world that initiated enormous and ongoing psychic, temporal, and bodily breaches," which, combined with the white domestic domination of enslaved people, yielded intimate brutalities which continue to structure post-slavery life.

Sharpe starts with amalgamation, incest, and the ways the two were rendered as one under various legal codes. She argues that this collapse was "one nodal point around which subjectivity in the New World was reorganized and around which it cohered;" that is, interracial relationships were considered along the same lines as incestuous ones due to the subjectification of enslaved people. There's one clear material reason for this: because of the systemic rape of enslaved women by white enslavers, and because of the intergenerational nature of chattel slavery, the two taboos became one. Sharpe lays out these monstrous intimacies through a review of the letters of James Henry Hammond and a close reading of Corregidora, a novel which follows Ursa Corregidora and her family's history with, and efforts to reckon with, their monstrous intimacies with Corregidora during and after slavery. In both cases, Sharpe looks at Black subjectivity not in spite of, but in part through the horrific emotion and empathy of white slaveowners, and the ambivalent effort to survive through it and build something after the end of slavery.

This first chapter establishes the frame of monstrous intimacies through perhaps its most vivid example, showing, through Corregidora, the strange ambivalence that squats inside these horrific acts of subjectification. Now that this monstrosity is established, she's free to move to yet more ambivalent acts of emotion. The second chapter explores the intimacies of Black liminality, the ways that blackness has been utilized in the US and Europe to define the 'edge' of human and object through the rhetorical use of people like Saartje Baartman. Sharpe argues that "In much (white) South African writing the Bushman (KhoiSan), the mulatto, and the so-called coloured in apartheid’s racial nomenclature were each, individually and at times interchangeably, figures of monstrosity" -- that is, different ethnic groups in South Africa were often differently instrumentalized as boundary objects in a similar manner to Baartman. Sharpe takes Maru as the object of study in the latter part of the chapter, and she discusses the ways that its protagonist stands as a sort of living impossibility.

The third chapter's excellent. This is the clearest analysis of S/M and slavery that I've ever seen, and Sharpe works very clearly between different critics without falling into the disavow etc. trap -- not that describing rightness is /bad/, but Sharpe uses the ambivalence she's built over the first two chapters excellently to talk about something she could probably never navigate readers through if this chapter had been at the start of the book. This feels like a climax (ha), and it manages to do it without spectacularizing or isolating S/M -- in fact, the interweaving of S/M and the monstrous intimacies of slavery serves to despectacularize S/M itself -- the current is pushing in the other direction! This is what's so fascinating about reading Sharpe. She's clearly in Hartman's tradition, and has gotten incredibly good at pushing on different forms of spectacularization and narrativization in ways that make them paradoxically cancel out -- or maybe the tools she's developed to despectacularize Black subjectivity just apply really well to sexual spectacle? Either way, this is the best analysis I've seen of S/M in general, and I don't think that's a coincidence.

The last chapter's alright. I am not an art person, but it really felt like Sharpe was trying to draw water from a stone. The section seemed as much about the reactions to the art, and about trying to rescue the artist as anything else -- which I am all for, but I'm also not inseparably invested in what Sharpe's saying here. I think the best comparison is to chapter 3 -- Sharpe seems to be using these tools to tackle more and more spectacular portrayals, but at this point it feels like the spectacle is devouring everything else. Unlike chapter 3, there's not a ton of analysis of the media itself. I think this is maybe overshooting the performativity/materiality balance here?

The book in general is very good; seems like a natural inheritor of Hartman's work, or at least she's thinking the same interesting things, or maybe this is more widespread and I haven't read it yet. It seems like Sharpe broke further away in The Wake. Chapters 1 and 3 I like and feel like I understand; Chapter 2 has more I'm missing, I think, and I like what I have already. 4 is mediocre. The book starts very strong and keeps adding, though, and I felt like everything intro through 3 was building on itself and saying new and potent things, which is pretty uncommon for books. This is very dense, and very focused, dense not because it's saying a wide range of things, but because it really takes a few good pieces for everything they have.

[animeandcatholicism]

Radical Ideas

I always laugh when people say that someone is their "brother" or "sister" due to their ethnicity and for lack of a better term "race". It's so dumb because one, just because you share a language and a history does not make you somehow kindred and have inviolable bonds. I have more in common with people from the Midwest and the South than I do from my ancestral lands, the majority being Germany, Ireland and the British Isles in general.

The people who are of Slavic descent in These United States might share a common tongue with their distant relatives but not much else, maybe some religious and cultural practices but besides that. Even Hispanics and Latinos in the US who have family in their mother country, maybe one or two generations removed are different than how they would have been twenty, thirty years ago.

It's just weird that people become so insecure and fall into tribalism when it does not really benefit them or others to be like this. It really does not to try to be in one way in the home and one way in public, accept that you're going to both loose and gain traits from cultural exchange, it's a part of human culture that has been happening since ever. As long as humans have existed, cultural exchange and really change has existed. Trying to conserve something that simply doesn't exist or to propagate it, is extremely dumb.

For example, it's weird to have all African Americans embrace each other as one big "family" not only because they often and conveniently exclude groups like the North Africans like Egyptians and the Copts since they're "just Arabs" but, the collective history of all of these various cultures is so vast and complex that someone from Chad, another from Nigeria and finally someone from Ethiopia don't really have a baseline except, they're all from the African Continent. Their: culture, religion, languages and so much more are so distinct, that they're cousins in a general sense not siblings. Sure, geographic regions like how Europe has geographic regions (the Nords, Francs, Anglos, Slavs of all sorts) but, not this weird cope of a unified identity (I mean if the Island of England has England, Scotland, Wales and the Cornish, plus the fact that no one in England can really decide where the North starts and the South ends there's no way you have larger populations of larger land masses agreeing on a singular unified identity).

I believe this to be both a consequence of diaspora of various minorities and also a certain insecurity when attempting to affirm their own unique cultural identity. For example, I have a friend who's a Filipino and when he was living in Westminster, California (which is where a bunch of Asians of all stripes have settled initially as refugees) now have amalgamated into this weird monoidentity buuut, it's unique only to Westminster, it does not exist in the larger US or even the international community. When I lived in the Twin Cities, I worked at the postal service and again the Twin Cities are a big place for the relocation of refugees and asylum seekers. But, the Hmong stuck with the Hmong, the Ethiopians with the Ethiopians, Tibetans with Tibetans, ect. This was with the first and second generation and probably with the third generation things start to break down and they will integrate with the general population of the area, it's simple ethnographic trends. The only way you prevent this is with groups like the Amish where they simply refuse to integrate or they're just stuck in a relatively isolated area. In a rapidly connecting world people are going to adapt and you can't just set up these arbitrary barriers to make yourself feel special, then you'd be no better than those weird people wanting an ethnostate.

[mariacallous]

Nigella’s lemon polenta cake is also really good and great for those with gluten sensitivities

[screamscenepodcast]

Take a peek into the "real life" Black Museum at Scotland Yard with HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM (1959), from director Arthur Crabtree and starring Michael Gough!

Filmed in *hypnovista,* this unique British/American production showcases sadism and true crime instead of something supernatural.

Context setting 00:00; Synopsis 25:28; Discussion 39:23; Ranking 54:02

[the-occult-lounge]

•~❉᯽❉~•─ Part 2 ─•~❉᯽❉~•

⚝ All witches or magickal practitioners are wiccans.

》 This is the most in accurate thought process to ever sweep through the mundane communities. Wicca is a fairly new practice and is an amalgamation of old world magicks from many different cultures. Wicca was founded in the 1900s and became popular due to the Gardnerian Wicca sect in the 60s. Some Wiccans do not use the term witch, most witches do not use the term Wiccan. All magickal practitioners define theirself differently and the majority are reconstructionalists of cultures that are FAR older than Wicca, in fact before calling someonw a Wiccan or a Witch it is best to ask how the practitioned identifies themself within their practice.

⚝ Witches are female and Wizards and male.

》 A practitioner can be any gender or no gender. To force such a binary thought process onto magick is confining and incorrect. Anyone can practice magick no matter their pronouns. Again, ask the practitioner what they wish to be called in their line of practice. Do not push your thought process onto someone else's ideologies. Instead of you are curious, ask questions before assuming the answers.

⚝ Every practitioner follows The Wheel of the Year.

》 The Wheel of the Year is a Wiccan creation that has taken holidays from older Celtic, Nordic and Anglo-Saxon cultures to create a celebratory timeline. As previously stated not all practitioners are Wiccan and thus The Wheel of the Year is not a part of everyone's practice. You will find those who are not Wiccan may adhere to the wheel but you will also find practitioners who have created their own celebrations. The equinoxes are typically celebrated in most reconstructed cultures, however there are far more holidays within each specific culture than a wheel could ever hold.

In a community such as the Occult, it is common for those who are not members to not understand the nuances of what Occult Community Members truly believe. It is our job to correct the wrong information and to forge ahead in helping those outside our circles to understand. We should never add to the flames of judgment but provide a safe space to give knowledge correctly to those willing to listen. To learn more, visit us at The Occult Lounge Discord.

[kemetic-dreams]

HISTORICAL IGBO TIMELINES:

STONE AGE -MIDDLE AGES.

This is the period dating 1.2million years to 3000BC , the era of homo-erectus found within the areas of ugwuele uturu following the discovery of Archeolean hand axes and stone tools in caves. Clay pots dating 3000BC were recovered at Afikpo and Opi iron slags .Details of this era is buried in archeology .

EARLY HISTORY:

8th-9 th AD : Kingdom of Nri begins with Eze Nri Ìfikuánim.

1434 AD: Portuguese explorers make contact with the Igbo.

1630 AD : The Aro-Ibibio Wars start.

1690AD: The Aro Confederacy is established

1745AD : Olaudah Equiano is born in Essaka, but later kidnapped and shipped to Barbados and sold as a slave in 1765.

1797AD : Olaudah Equiano dies in England as a freed slave.

1807 AD : The Slave Trade Act 1807 is passed (on 25 March) helping in stopping the transportation of enslaved Africans, including Igbo people, to the Americas. Atlantic slave trade exports an estimated total of 1.4 million Igbo people across the Middle Passage

1830 AD : European explorers explore the course of the Lower Niger and meet the Northern Igbo.

1835 AD: Africanus Horton is born to Igbo ex-slaves in Sierra Leone

1855 AD: William Balfour Baikie a Scottish naval physician, reaches Niger Igboland.

MODERN HISTORY:

1880–1905: Southern Nigeria is conquered by the British, including Igboland.

1885–1906: Christian missionary presence in Igboland.

1891: King Ja Ja of Opobo dies in exile, but his corpse is brought back to Nigeria for burial.

1896–1906: Around 6,000 Igbo children attend mission schools.

1901–1902: The Aro Confederacy declines after the Anglo-Aro war.

1902: The Aro-Ibibio Wars end.

1906: Igboland becomes part of Southern Nigeria (the beginning of our problem)

1914: Northern Nigeria and Southern Nigeria are amalgamated to form Nigeria. (escalation of our problem)

1929: Igbo Women's War (first Nigerian feminist movement) of 1929 in Aba.

1953: November Anti Igbo riots (killing over 50 Igbos in Kano) of 1953 in Kano

1960: October 1 Nigeria gains independence from Britain; Tafawa Balewa becomes Prime Minister, and Nnamdi Azikiwe becomes President.

1966: January 16 A coup by junior military officers takes over government and assassinated some country leaders. The Federal Military Government is formed, with General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi as the Head of State and Supreme Commander of the Federal Republic.

1966: July 29 A counter-coup by military officers of northern extraction, deposes the Federal Military Government; General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi is assassinated along with Adekunle Fajuyi, Military Governor of Western Region. General Yakubu Gowon becomes Head of State.

1967: Ethnoreligious violence between Igbo Christians, and Hausa/Fulani Muslims in Eastern and Northern Nigeria, triggers a migration of the Igbo back to the East.

1967: May 30 General Emeka Ojukwu, Military Governor of Eastern Nigeria, declares his province an independent republic called Biafra, and the Nigerian Civil War or Nigerian-Biafran War ensues.

1970: January 8 General Emeka Ojukwu flees into exile; His deputy Philip Effiong becomes acting President of Biafra.

1970: January 15 Acting President of Biafra Philip Effiong surrenders to Nigerian forces through future President of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, and Biafra is reintegrated into Nigeria.

References:

Understanding 'Things Fall Apart' by Kalu Ogbaa

Wikipedia

Image Credit: Ukpuru, Pinterest

[thepierheadjump]

Joan of Arc Couldn't Ride a Horse

My father is Catholic, my mother agnostic, and within me these two magnets war like poles casting off gravity in their urge to repel each other. As a child I became religious at my father's observance, on a whim, that because of my middle name, Joan of Arc is my patron saint. I was stunned. I came from a coastal Oregon town where we rode bikes around, chewed gum if we could get it; built forts on the beach or in the woods. Sainthood, patron saints, Catholicism, the cathedrals of France—all a new, albeit arcane magic. Tell me, as a lost and homesick 11-year old, that a radical woman on horseback is coming to lead me.

We had settled in France, and I was learning French. I knew authoritatively that she was really Jeanne d'Arc, although all I had to go on was an (ironically British) 1971 Ladybird book written by Lawrence du Garde Peach, an English actor and radio playwright who was in military intelligence during World War I. This child's book gently whitewashed the massive overlay of bubonic plague, the Hundred Years' War; virginity exams; threats of rape; the hardness of life in the 15th century.

By the time we found our way to the Rouen marketplace where she was burned I did not care if she was schizophrenic, mad, or called by God to drive the English armies out of France—I believed in her wholly, the way only a teenaged girl can believe in another teenaged girl who has been tied to a stake and burned.

Since that point my long struggle has been away from religion, letting go of the fervent superstitions of faith, to my mother's flip side, viewing religion as weak-minded, for the masses. I wanted to believe that I was smart and scientific. Then, as the slow tragedy of life drove me past that, out of a greater necessity, I began to find the similar persuasions in the way of the Tao, and in the massive, gorgeous visions of Black Elk, and in the perfunctory spiritual power of the AA 12-Steps.

Then, in a story I'm working on, one character turned to another and said: 'You know, Joan of Arc couldn't ride a horse.'

Offended, this sent me down into the research warrens, where I soon ran into the French historian Régine Pernoud and her book Jeanne d'Arc, and also five hours of the double film Jeanne La Pucelle (1994.) Pernoud cemented the deal by confessing that she had always avoided Jeanne for her mythy, overblown teenaged religious saga. However, one day she made that fatal karmic mistake of opening just the right book to just the right page, and the girl's clear treble voice rose from those documents like a mystic voice in a churchyard.

Caught up in a similar manner I found myself writing The Prisoner of the Chateau-Forte du Louvre.

The upshot of all this was that yes, of course Jehanne of Domrémy could ride a horse. Horses were such an integral part of her image that one of her chargers was put to death when she was killed. She had grown up riding her father's plough horses, and ultimately she could handle a galloping Percheron while wearing full armor, carrying a standard, and exhorting an army to follow her—to use an Anglo-French word amalgamated over La Manche—into the affray.

___________________

[gurumog]

Carry on Cleo (1964) Anglo-Amalgamated Dir. Gerald Thomas

Jon Pertwee as the Soothsayer Charles Hawtrey as Seneca Kenneth Williams as Julius Caesar Kenneth Connor as Hengist Pod