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misscrawfords · 5 years ago

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The Rise of Skywalker: Part One

I have lots of thoughts and feelings about TROS. Most of them negative. For three days I’ve been alternating between raging and crying. Finally, I’ve felt able to start writing.

This is a negative review. If you loved the film then this might not be the post for you. I am very sensitive to what happened after TLJ. And I want to reassure anyone reading that I would never turn criticism for a film (which is absolutely a valid response to seeing something that you disliked and are trying to understand) into personal attacks against the actors or creators involved or, worse still, fans who liked it. If you liked TROS, can’t bear to hear any criticism of it, and still choose to read my posts about it, then that is on you. (I really shouldn’t have to say this but this is a hellsite.)

This post contains spoilers for TROS... and Jumanji 2. Go figure.

Things I liked:

· C-3PO and everything he did. This droid is the character I identify with most in the entire SW series (which probably says some uncomfortable things about me but this is not the time!) and he had such a big and important role and his quips were genuinely great and funny and I loved everything he did. Apart from – but more on that later.

· Ben Solo. Uh, other people have talked about his little shrug and his “ow” and his smile – oh god, his smile. Ben Solo is amazing. It’s a shame that – but more on that later.

· I didn’t hate Rey Palpatine. I mean, I literally wrote this story when I was 13 when I made Hermione Voldemort’s daughter as a way of explaining her inner darkness and had her team up with Harry (with whom she had a telepathic bond) to destroy him. (You can read the story here if you really want to.) So it would be pretty hypocritical of me to hate this plotline. I enjoyed seeing angry, feral Rey on screen, I enjoyed seeing a female hero confronting her capacity for destruction and darkness. I was okay with the idea of a final face-off between a Palpatine and a Skywalker and how this is a way of bringing final balance to the Force. This was pretty interesting and I’d be up for this. I much prefer Rey Nobody but as a concept I’m not actually against it. Unfortunately the execution – but more on that later.

· I really enjoyed more of Finn and Poe. I love both of them as characters. I mean I can’t think of a single bit of dialogue that was meaningful between them or what they accomplished in particular for they had some fun moments.

· Finn and Jannah’s conversation about being ex-stormtroopers was a lovely scene, a moment of much-needed quiet and reflection and bonding in a film that was far too hectic and crowded. Shame it went nowhere.

· Reylo kiss? I mean, that was cool.

· Unironically, I loved Hux. He was snarky and his revelation of being the spy because he just hated Kylo that much got the biggest reaction in the cinema of the entire showing. Admittedly it was derisive laughter as we all realised what a clusterfuck of bad writing this film was, but still. It crossed over into so-bad-it’s-good territory. Hux gave me considerable pleasure in a film that otherwise made me very angry.

· My favourite scene in the film was when Rey and Kylo fought on Pasaana over the transport ship with Chewie (apparently) on and Rey blows it up. The cinematography was amazing, it was a visual representation of both balance and building on the lightsaber breaking scene in TLJ while upping the stakes considerably and Rey’s reaction of visceral horror when she realised what she had done was truly shocking and unexpected. To have Chewie killed off so suddenly like this for no reason except that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and the stakes are high and this is a desperate war with casualties – genius. A perfect way to make Rey and Ben even more similar – both having killed father figures – and have Rey confront her dark side as she wrestles with what she has done and the consequences of having a non-unified relationship with Ben while also being in a position to truly empathise with him – this was exactly the content I had signed up for. But it was the moment that it was revealed that Chewie was still alive that I realised what I’d only suspected before then: that this film was terrible and I would not be able to trust any emotion it was inviting me to feel.

Fundamentally, I think that this film is incredibly poorly written and emotionally dishonest. It is telling that I saw Jumanji 2 earlier in the day and out of the two films, the only point at which I cried was when Milo decided to stay in Jumanji as a horse. Why did I cry? Because Milo and Grandpa’s relationship had been gradually built up over the course of a film that was not afraid of quiet moments and building a narrative of a relationship that revealed what it needed over the course of several meaningful scenes. It allowed Milo’s decision to stay to be both a tragic loss but also a happy ending for him. Truly bittersweet and in a way that everyone can relate to. The loss of a dear friend to illness is a horrible but human thing to contemplate. To be able to set this friend free through a metaphor of a beautiful death and afterlife is genuinely moving and hopeful. Unfortunately TROS did not manage to give me any such emotions or elicit a single tear.

At least not till afterwards. I’ve subsequently cried a lot, some of it over the tragedy of Ben and Rey in a film that promised hope, but mainly for myself and the other (mainly) young female fans who have poured all their knowledge and intelligence into analysis of TFA and TLJ and who seemed to understand the story that was being told and who had been promised more of this story in the interviews and trailers released prior to this film – and who are now feeling like absolute garbage as this film throws out its own mythology for an incoherent, self-serving mess that in many ways defies analysis. The only thing I feel really capable of analysing is how much it doesn’t work, as opposed to what the film is trying to do. Where is the symbolism? Where is the metaphor? Where is the hero’s journey? Where is the heroine’s journey? Where is nuance? Where is everything that was set up in both TFA and TLJ? IDK, I can’t see it. It’s a kick in the teeth.

So, no matter how many individual things I was able to enjoy at the time when watching TROS, they end up being meaningless because the entire film was so bad. I can’t feel pleasure thinking about the good bits because they were mired in context (or lack of it). I can’t feel genuine sorrow about the fate of Rey and Ben because the execution of that fate was so poorly done. I don’t even mind that Ben died. It was always an option and the story of redemption followed by death is a very common story, a very Christian story. Though the death of Christ to save us from our sins, is crucially followed by resurrection. I mean, literally everyone can and does die. That doesn’t make you special. If you’re going for a Christ metaphor, you kind of need resurrection too. But I’m not sure that was exactly what they were going for with it; it was a mess and the execution made little internal consistency.

It may be that if I watched the film again, my problems would be lessened and I would see new things in them and they would make sense. I’ve read some twitter threads of people who are making connections and finding explanations on a second or third viewing. But the problem is that I shouldn’t need to see a film more than once to fundamentally understand it. I don’t mean picking up on new and interesting features and subtext which a good film, like a good book, rewards you with on multiple viewings. TLJ does that. But you should be able to follow what the ultimate meaning of a film is when you see it first.

If that is the case, then the ultimate meaning of TROS is that the good are good, the bad are bad, change is rewarded with death, a character who was once alone ends up alone again, plot coherency is sacrificed for whatever explosion or cool backwards-reference is needed at the time, death is not the end except when it is, there is no cosistency and consequently no emotional impact. And apparently it is a happy and hopeful ending? The tonal disconnect with the story being told and the way it was shot and the music being played and the clear intention of the people making the film is utterly jarring.

To famously quote Macbeth:

It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

This post is already too long so I will go into my criticisms in more detail in a further post. Stay tuned!

Read Part Two here.

#tros #tros spoilers #star wars #the rise of skywalker #anti-tros

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bubblesandgutz · 6 years ago

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Every Record I Own - Day 378: ENDON Bodies

This is a 12″ featuring remixes of the Japanese band ENDON by Justin Broadrick and Vatican Shadow. I received it from the band’s manager after Russian Circles played with ENDON in Tokyo back in 2014. The band impressed me so much that I interviewed them for Noisey. The article is reposted below:

The first time I went to Japan on tour, I was treated to a performance by an opening act consisting of two tiny Japanese girls at a small club in Shibuya. One girl played acoustic guitar and sang in a cute, sweet, elfin voice not unlike Satomi Matsuzaki from Deerhoof. The other girl was playing some sort of motion-activated sampler device. She would make karate chop movements over the small glowing piece of equipment that would trigger samples of gong hits. It was the most Japanese thing I’d ever seen. I just wished there was a hologram Anime character doing lead vocals.

I toured Japan again earlier this year and our host informed me that we would be playing with “the most extreme band in Tokyo”. More extreme than the girl duo with the gong sounds and the martial arts moves? Doubt it. But then I bore witness to ENDON. I can’t say how the band weighs up against other acts in the region—this is a culture that birthed Melt Banana and Masonna, after all—but I’d be hard pressed to envision any other Tokyoites coming close to their level of aggressive dissonance. The drummer plowed through the set with an unrelenting barrage of blast beats. On stage left, a guy was beating a black box strapped to his chest. At first I thought it was old piece of stereo equipment—an old CD player, perhaps—but on closer inspection I realized it was some homemade device with a series of springs stretched across the front. He was beating the springs the way a heavy-handed guitarist strummed guitar strings. Harsh noise thundered out of his amp. Stage right, a guitarist churned out a caustic wash of distortion that sounded Burzum’s Filosofem and the Mohinder discography getting sucked into a turbine engine. Next to him, another band member hunched over a bank of blinking lights, cranking out electronic squalls. At the front of the stage, vocalist Taichi Nagura loomed over the crowd. Built like a tank with a shaved head and a well-groomed moustache, Taichi would be perfectly cast as the intimidating bodyguard Tamaru in a movie adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84. While the band doled out their sonic punishment, Tamaru shrieked, howled, whinnied, growled, and bellowed his way through the set, occasionally chucking a beer cans at the audience along the way.

I was shell-shocked by their set. A few weeks later, I was able to get a hold of Taichi to talk about what I’d witnessed.

Brian (B): I remember talking to you over dinner before seeing you play and you described ENDON as “noise metal”. That’s probably the most straightforward description of what you do. But in the States, noise metal usually refers to bands like Today Is The Day, Dazzling Killmen, or Deadguy. Those bands seem tame in comparison. For the sake of not confusing or misleading American readers, we need to come up with a different genre name for you guys. How about power-electronics-violence? Or white-noise metal?

Taichi (T): I love both of the suggestions, really appreciate it. They hit the mark. I know I should be modest, but how about “catastrophic noise metal”?

B: “Catastrophic noise metal” it is, then. So how does a catastrophic noise metal band like ENDON even start? Did you have an idea of what you wanted to sound like when you first got together?

T: Originally, we started ENDON in order to make noise music more functional on an entertainment level. In the extreme music scene in Japan, combining general rock sounds and noise has been a very popular subject for many years but it has mainly been made through collaborations between established bands and noise musicians. We were not satisfied or comfortable with it, because there were very few bands that focused on it as one unit. I think there should be more artists with these terms. Typically, these collaborations tend to add harsh noise as an addition to the higher frequencies of the guitar, like a shoegaze sound. We would like to stay away from that. We wanted to offer listeners a different style. And there is another reason we wanted to make our own sound: general noise and avant-garde styles in Japan have been too close to free-jazz or free music. We still like that stuff, but it’s gotten to be too much, too limiting in its criteria.

B: I would guess that the songwriting originates around guitar riffs, since the guitar seems to have the most concrete and recognizable structure. Am I right? Does the creative process ever start around the noise elements? Lou Reed has that famous quote about cymbals eating guitars—do you ever run into the problem of the noise eating the guitar?

T: Exactly. In most cases we wrote music with guitar riffs first just because metal and hardcore music was a major reference for most of the songs on this album. However, the guitar in “Pray For Me” was written last. For our previous EP, we did lots of jamming and improvisation over and over again to arrange and shape songs. But now we write more with the guitar first. When there is no context or specific ideas, a tiny little motif from an instrument is a great lead. With the invention of black metal, combining noise and metal is not so difficult to imagine anymore. Harsh noise and black metal have an affinity. At the same time, an affinity means a competitive frequency level, especially between guitar and noise. It is very important how we control and arrange them. That’s fun though; we never feel that the structure between guitar and noise is annoying. It is the best part of our songwriting. We usually adjust the equalization between noise and distortion, which leads to a definitive result for listeners. For example, we adjusted our amplifiers a little bit before a recent show and played our usual set. We saw a review later that said ENDON played a bunch of new songs that night.

B: I know Atsuo from Boris helped record your new album MAMA, and I could imagine there being some crossover between ENDON’s audience and Boris’s audience, just because you both have one foot in the metal world and one foot in the experimental music world. And Boris obviously has the occasional collaboration with Merzbow to add the noise element. But aside from that, ENDON and Boris are very different beasts. Do you feel like you have any musical peers in Tokyo? Do you feel a kinship with the Japanese hardcore scene?

T: Atsuo knows exactly what we would like to do, even more so than us! I am so proud of our first full-length being so well made despite our noisy and complicated style. I know we are absolutely in Atsuo’s debt. Yeah, Boris and ENDON have similar tastes in some ways, though they are the pioneers of this genre and no one can be like them. We respect them a lot. ENDON has also been very good friends with a sludge-core band called Zenocide and an industrial unit called Carre. They are the same age as us and often do collaborations together. We also have lots of friends in Tokyo’s grind and noise scenes. Personally, I don’t think ENDON belong to the hardcore music scene in Tokyo, though our favorite venue Earthdom is a mecca of the local hardcore scene. You can still see legendary Japanese hardcore bands there, bands we grew up seeing over and over again. My impression is that the cool and interesting bands at our age used to be hardcore bands that then try to do another thing. Zenocide, who I mentioned earlier, used to be crust punk guys, for example.

B: I think the hardcore vibe I was picking up on comes from the strong antagonistic vibe to your live show, as if the music and performance is meant to punish the audience. Do you feel hostility towards the crowd? Or do you ever feel like the crowd is hostile towards you?

T: No, it’s not intended to be against the audience at all, but against myself. It’s me against the world. In order to act like that, I prepare songs without words. I have no idea what makes me so irate. I see no major difference among each and every individual besides an unspecified mental condition. I try to put myself in that headspace for the purpose of the show. It is not only a punishment but also a sweet pleasure to me. When I act like a master and try to pretend to punish the audience during our show, I feel like I am released from my sin and am buried in happiness. My shows with ENDON are kind of a tragedy in that way. In fact, during the early days of ENDON, there was a lot of fighting between the audience and me…

B: A lot of singers in the world of extreme music tend to fade into the background on record because they have a limited vocal range. With ENDON, it sounds like you have 5 or 6 different singers because the timbre of your voice changes so much. It literally sounds like an entire family—father, mother, son, daughter, family dog—attacking each other. Is this a response to the monotonic quality of metal vocals? Or is it just what naturally came out of your mouth at the first practice?

T: To me, screaming and shouting within the limited range of extreme music sounds so boring. It’s just laborious, a kind of duty they have to fulfill. Of course, what I do is partially a response to monotonous metal vocals, but more than that I would like to keep myself happy as opposed to responding to or attacking others. In that sense, my vocals need to be done unconsciously. Most importantly, ENDON as a whole should prepare our sounds and arrangements to make our music operate unconsciously. As you’ve pointed out, I have tried to do several vocal styles, like one voice that has multiple characters. And I show a relationship among those characters in a psychoanalytical way, like family therapy role-playing. Certainly, there have been good examples of other people doing this. A few singers from great depressive black metal bands have an impressive scream that has both the characters of victim and assailant in one. Multiple characters in one voice… I wanted to move ahead in that direction.

B: Speaking of family therapy, have any of your parents ever come to see you play? And are you still welcome in their homes afterwards?

T: It’s annoying to say that my parents don’t recognize I am crazy at all even though I am doing crazy stuff in ENDON. They are baby boomers that enjoyed Western art, culture, and music during their youth, and they view themselves as the first generation that brought that Western culture over to Japan. They still try to tell me what is best when it comes to music. That is one of the major reasons why everyone in ENDON and I try to focus on musical and cultural “parricide” with songs like “Parricide Agent Service” and “Etude For Lynching By Family”.

B: So I take it that’s a “no” then.

#endon #everyrecordiown

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loadboxes950 · 3 years ago

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Texe Marrs Exposed

Texe Marrs has discovered that a number of left-wing, liberal websites are claiming the falsehood that he is a member of the Ku Klux Klan, is a white supremacist, and is an Alt-Right Identity preacher who is saying that God chose Donald Trump to punish and exterminate the Jews. Texe Marrs Exposed Sherlock Season 3 Episode 4 Encarta Kids 2009 Download Open Source Display Software Download Wallhack Cs 1.6 F1 Sony Vaio Care Windows 10 64 Bit Itunes Download File Penguin Catapult Game Minecraft Full Download Mediafire.

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Mormonism is a Judaic cult that has robbed millions of victims of their money and their souls

The founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith, was a practicing occultist as well as a serial adulterer whose own mother said often told “tall tales.” His tallest tale was that an angel named Moroni gave him golden plates and that the Father and His Son, Jesus, personally appeared to him.

Mormonism’s most famous leader was Brigham Young, a polygamist and cunning religious manipulator who secretly ordered the savage murder of dozens of innocent men, women, and children.

Now, today, the Mormon Church, which prefers to be called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, is proud to present as its candidate for the high office of President of the United States one Mittens Romney, a smiling, flip-flopping con man whose sole claim to fame is having been a sock puppet and figurehead leader of an Israeli Zionist proprietary organization known as Bain and Co.

The Chairman of the Board of Bain is Orit Gadiesh, a former Mossad agent and spy queen whose father was an Israeli army general. Bain was set up in business by elitist Masonic chieftains, the same corrupt group that hired now Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu and Romney were Boston pals and Masons chosen as young men by the Zionist elite for big things solely because of their bloodline and wealthy families.

Former Bain CEO Mitt Romney fits perfectly in the mold of satanist Mormons Joseph Smith and Brigham Young who went before him. All three are proven liars and criminals. The Mormon Church is itself built on a shaky foundation of lies, slanders, heresies, sex deviate conduct and murders. Its entire history is stained with blood and crime.

So, of course, is the history of Israel and the Jews loaded to the brim with monstrous criminality. It is not surprising, then, that the Mormon sect is, in fact, nothing more than a Judaic cult. It is, moreover, a dangerous cult that can never be washed clean of its mire and grime. Therefore, if Mitt Romney, whose own testimony is that of a dedicated and faithful priest and servant of the Mormon Church, is elected President of the United States and is duly sworn into office on January 20, 2013, that event will mark the incredible rise of an occultic antichrist religion built on a mountain of outrageous and absurd lies.

Mormonism, a pagan Judaic cult of Masonic origins, will have placed its representative in the White House in the person of President Mitt Romney. As such, he will be controller and master over much of the earth. In this high position, he will be director of the world’s greatest military force and overseer of a money printing combine, the Federal Reserve System, primed to facilitate the most massive financial crash and economic catastrophe in the annals of humanity.

I say, if a man or woman votes for Mitt Romney, why not be honest and simply write-in on the ballot the name of the one who, as Romney’s superior and Lord, will really be in charge? That would be Lucifer, also known as Satan the devil.

Under Mormon priest Romney and his vice president, the Roman Catholic Paul Ryan, America will descend into the very depths of a Leviathan Zionist hell. What’s more, we will have fallen into a serpents’ pit in which the serpents—the combined world crime factory of some 30 million Zionist Mormons and Jews—prescribe for our nation a demonic overdose of psychopathic inducing steroids.

The tragedy, of course, is that some forty million other Americans, those of the Baptist, Pentecostal, Assembly of God, and other denominations and groups who say they are “evangelicals”—erroneously believe that the Jews and Israel are “God’s Chosen People.” This in spite of the fact that Judaism and its rabbis teach that Jesus is a blasphemer and occultist burning forever in fiery excrement in hell (Talmud, Gitten 57a ) and that his mother, Mary, was a slut and a whore who bore Jesus out of wedlock, thanks to her supposed affair with a Roman Centurion.

Long-time associates Mitt Romney and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu were initiated as Masonic brothers. After college, they worked side-by-side for a Zionist firm in Boston. If Romney becomes President, together the two will immerse America into a fiery, boiling Leviathan pit.(At right) Like many other young Mormon males, Mitt Romney (left) is a draft dodger who used his stint as a young Mormon missionary to avoid serving in the Army during the Vietnam War era.

Sadly, very few evangelicals are even remotely aware of these vicious teachings by the Jews and their rabbis and so they continue to exalt the Jews as a holy and wonderful people whom God has chosen to dominate and rule the world.

Now come the Mormons. Thanks to a clever, ongoing propaganda campaign by Romney and his Salt Lake City, Utah, theocratic cronies, the evangelicals, as well as tens of millions of other deluded American citizens, have been fed the stupid and ignorant deception that Mormonism is simply another “Christian” faith and that Mormons are dedicated to their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Brigham Young was a tyrant, a con man, a polygamist, and a murderer. Today’s Mormons honor him as a saint.

Unbelievable! Folks, the Mormon Church is a Luciferian New Age Church. More, it is a Judaic cult which actually teaches in its doctrinal books and texts the notion that God the Father is an exalted man of flesh, bones and blood who came to earth and had physical sex with Mary. (According to the Mormons, there was no virgin birth.) From this sexual coupling, Jesus was born in the flesh. Mormonism says that Jesus’ brother is Lucifer (yes, Lucifer, the devil!), and that Jesus is only one of millions of gods in the universe. Does that sound like a Christian faith to you?

Brigham Young (the Utah-based university is named after this swindler) even claimed that Adam (you know, of Adam and Eve fame) is the real “God” whom we must worship. Many Mormons today hold to the view that, “Adam, not Jesus, is coming again.”

There’s more heresy too—boat loads of it. Like the Mormon teaching that Jesus did not die on the cross for our sins. Then there is the Mormon belief that Jesus had three wives he slept with while here on earth—Mary Magdalene and the two sisters of Lazarus. Jesus, the Mormons hold, has sex these days with countless other wives added to his marital collection.

Since the Mormons were founded by a Mason, Joseph Smith, naturally, the Mormon male is initiated by ceremonies originating from Masonic philosophies and using Masonic handshakes, symbols, language and signals. Mitt Romney, like all high-level Mormon priests, is required to wear his white “union” underwear with the Masonic square and compass embroidered or printed on the breast and other devilish Masonic symbols on the knees. (Ask Mitt about that at his next campaign stop).

Mormonism’s criminal founder Joseph Smith was well known as a con artist who ripped people off by claiming he could magically discover the location of gold mines and hidden treasure by using an occultic divining “peepstone.” He was arrested for this and put in jail for a short spell. Later, in jail once again, Joseph Smith was murdered by an angry lynch mob that accused the Mormon founder of stealing other mens’ land and wives. A “Jupiter” magic lucky charm was found on his possession, in his pocket. Its alleged miraculous powers obviously failed the slain “Prophet of Mormonism.”

Joseph Smith was a handsome and charismatic fellow who had a grand total of twenty-seven wives. His successor, Brigham Young, continued the practice of polygamy. After Smith’s death, Brigham Young and the “church” fled the increasingly hostile Midwest and brought thousands of Mormon faithful to the desert “oasis” of Utah. There he ruled as a tyrant and created the “Danites,” a vigilante group that tormented and murdered ex-Mormons and other designated enemies.

Mormon gunmen murdered innocents of a wagon train and seized their gold and belongings. Called the Mountain Meadows Massacre (1857), it was ordered by Mormon leader Brigham Young.

When the Mormon hierarchy heard of a wagon train passing by on its way to California, Brigham Young sent out a murderous bunch to massacre the innocent passersby. History books today refer to it as the “Mountain Meadows Massacre.” It seems that the Mormons had advance knowledge of some gold the wagon train settlers had in their possession. Old Brigham Young, like his predecessor in crime, Joseph Smith, was a scheming crook, and so he determined to seize it. The men, women, and most of the children were savagely killed. Some were scalped.

Sounds a lot like what today’s Israeli Zionists have done to the innocent Palestinians, doesn’t it?

Today, Mitt Romney believes Joseph Smith to be a true prophet of God and Brigham Young to be a saint. Thus, Romney follows in the tradition of these past Mormon devils in human clothing. “And no marvel, for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works” (II Corinthians 11:14,15).

Most Americans have been duped into believing that Mormons are a wholesome, clean-living religious group. Not so. Mormonism infects all who profess it. Would you believe me if I told you that the violent crime rate (murders, rapes, armed robberies, etc.) for Salt Lake City and most other Utah cities is among the highest in the nation? Most people have heard different, but those are the facts.

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Mormon businessmen, like their Jewish counterparts, favor each other and many do not hesitate to rip off and defraud “Gentiles.” Gentiles, that’s what the Mormons call you and me. Meanwhile, they fancy themselves to be “Israelites” of the tribes of Ephraim and Manassas. Their goal is a Zionist Kingdom on earth. Mormonism, I stress once again, is a Judaic (Jewish) cult.

Texe Marrs Exposed Concrete

Mitt Romney is personally well known as a dishonest “flip-flopper” who can’t be trusted. One day he’s pro-life and anti-gay. The next day he’s just the opposite. In my opinion that’s the mark of Jews and Mormons: doublemindedness. That’s why Masons (Freemasonry is also a Judaic cult) have, as their 33rd degree logo, the Eagle with two heads!

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In the Scriptures we are told that, “A doubleminded man is unstable in all his ways” (James 1:8). There you have it.

Jews, Masons, Mormons are all doubleminded. They pretend to be holy and pure. But just as Jesus warned, these doubleminded characters are devious, Judas-like backstabbers whose infamy will eventually come out.

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This being so, for whom, then, should we vote for the high office of President of the United States? Obama is a socialist, even a closet communist, but his evil pales in comparison to that of the duplicitous Romney. Frankly, I prefer four more years under Obama than eight years under Romney. But I do not intend to vote for either Romney or Obama. Why give either man your support and endorsement? Better to spend your time and energy equipping and preparing yourself for hard times surely to come. And pray, yes, especially pray for yourself, your loved ones, and for America. Whoever wins, Obama or Romney, we, the people, will lose.

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lodelss · 6 years ago

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2019 | 9 minutes (2,514 words)

In his satirical 1827 essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” Thomas de Quincey called himself a connoisseur of murder before ensuring us he hadn’t actually committed one himself. In her new book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, late author Michelle McNamara also reassures us that her interest is personal, not prurient (it originated with an unsolved crime in her childhood neighborhood). Most of us have excuses for our interest in true crime, as though enjoying it offered real insight into our own predilections. The quasi-religious impulse to consider this a perversion of society’s innate morality has led to a flurry of theories about the source of our fascination, with four main hypotheses recurring: true crime can be a cathartic conduit for our primal urges, a source of schadenfreude, a controlled environment to experience the thrill of fear, and way to arm us (women particularly) with the knowledge to keep ourselves safe. A psychologist, speaking to NPR in 2009, provided the perfect précis: “our fascination with crime is equaled by our fear of crime. It’s two sides of the same story.”

True crime is less embarrassing, like so many things, when it’s scrubbed clean. On my shelf, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s News of a Kidnapping and Dave Cullen’s Columbine stick out for how unobtrusive they are amidst the loudly stylized spines of Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me and Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, among others. With their unadorned print (no drips) and minimalist art (no claret), these tasteful soft covers pass for literature. They are comparable to “prestige” podcasts like Serial and S-Town and series like Making a Murderer and The Keepers, Netflix shows in which the classic hallmarks of true crime programs — overly explicit, overly emotive — are massaged into character-driven narratives for the graduate set. In the midst of this influx of classy crime content, watching throwbacks like Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly, in which survivors are tasked with reliving their abuse and tear-stained grief is the closeup du jour, starts to feel like an ignominious act.

In 2016, at the beginning of the true crime renaissance, The New Yorker asked Popular Crime author Bill James whether, regardless of the highbrow livery, it was fundamentally “distasteful” (New Yorker for “trashy”) to transform tragedy into entertainment. “Well, certainly there is something distasteful about it,” James said, but, “When there is a car wreck, we ask what happened to cause the car wreck.” That is to say: The crime itself is distasteful (or trashy), therefore it’s necessarily distasteful (or trashy) when we address it. So, either we can refuse to interrogate crime, full stop, or we can ensure that the grief we cause is for a greater good. It is a sort of trash balance — less exploitation, more justice — with only one bad ending instead of two.

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True crime was lurid straight out of the birth canal. Born in the mid-sixteenth century, it was the offspring of two relatively new developments: criminal justice and the printing press. Historic crime reports’ graphic nature is typically associated with a depravity believed to appeal to the unrefined, uneducated, and unmoneyed, but that was not the case with these early publications. Though they were often branded with explicit woodcuts that would have been understandable to even the illiterate, they also boasted rhyming text and only went to those who could afford them, predominantly the upper echelons. In “True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism,” published in The American Historical Review, Joy Wiltenburg writes that “emotive language, direct dialogue, building of suspense through circumstantial detail, and graphic description of bloody violence were common in the genre.”

Favored cases were in-family and usually involved multiple deaths. The focus was on the victims, while the moral of the story was that sin begat punishment. “The combination of truth with appeals to the heart underlined the religious focus of these works,” writes Wiltenburg. “Virtually all crime accounts published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries connected their stories with an edifying Christian message.” This message associated brutality with the devil and positioned public order as the path to virtue. “[Sensationalism] has had religious, political, and cultural impact,” Wilternburg sums up, “promoting the ready acceptance of punitive government actions, the advancement of religious agendas, the internalization of mainstream emotional expectations, the habit of vicarious emotional experience, and the focus on distinctive individual identity.”

With a reputation for being insensitive to and financially exploiting both criminals and their victims, true crime is often accused of sensationalism, but that term wasn’t coined until the 19th century, a time that favored rational thought over the emotive prose of journalists. “While sexual scandals and other shocking events have become staples of modern sensationalism,” writes Wiltenburg, “its chief focus has always been crime, especially the most bloody and horrifying of murders.” The 1800s also gave us our first detectives, who inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin stories and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, the latter not only centering crime fiction as a genre, but granting it a modicum of respectability. The gutter was still within spitting distance, though. Penny dreadfuls arrived — demon barber Sweeney Todd in tow — as early versions of popular culture in the form cheap mass-produced serials for young, increasingly literate working-class men, featuring salacious gore; like the true crime paperbacks of today, they supplied affordable, digestible scandal to entertain tired people with no time. The last gasp of the penny dreadful coincided with the precursor to O.J. Simpson’s so-called trial of the century: The Lizzie Borden case. The 32-year-old Massachusetts woman’s trial for the axe murder of her parents spawned a media phenomenon and firmly established the mass appeal of true crime. The next century saw the trash-fired genre shooting off in various directions, from tabloids like The National Enquirer to paperbacks like Lacey Fosburgh’s Closing Time to shows like America’s Most Wanted.

Then there was In Cold Blood.

“Until one morning in mid-November 1959, few Americans — in fact, few Kansans — had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.” Before In Cold Blood, this is not how real crime stories read. What Arthur Conan Doyle did for crime fiction, Truman Capote did for true crime. His 1965 experiment was released as a four-part serial in The New Yorker and became the reference point for every other high-brow true crime work in every other medium. “The motivating factor in my choice of material — that is, choosing to write a true account of an actual murder case — was altogether literary,” Capote told The New York Times. “It seemed to me that journalism, reportage, could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the ‘nonfiction novel,’ as I thought of it.” He believed only those with the “fictional technical equipment” — novelists, not journalists — like him could do it. The factual inaccuracies that have since emerged suggest that Capote’s belief in his own skills — he neither taped nor took notes during interviews — were as sensational as the genre he was hoping to reinvent. His book is still, however, considered the pinnacle of crime lit.

It was Capote’s book that the Times referred to when designating Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line a “nonfiction feature film,” per its distributors, in 1988. This exercise in lyrical fact was groundbreaking in its own right: an elegant piece of true crime as an advocacy tool. The subject of a false conviction, Randall Dale Adams had his case thrown out with the help of evidence Morris uncovered. It’s a straight shot from The Thin Blue Line to Serial, which blew up true crime podcasting in 2014. But while an appeal followed this program’s highly subjective long-form reexamination of Adnan Syed’s conviction for killing Baltimore teen Hae Min Lee in 1999, it was Capote — “a leap in narrative innovation on the scale of In Cold Blood” — who was once again cited, this time in The New Yorker. Serial’s executive producer has said they were trying to avoid an exploitative “Nancy Grace type of a titillating thing,” but the program was serialized with its own version of a cliffhanger each week, and provided its own hero, the avatar in our ears, reporter Sarah Koenig. Yet Koenig bristled at the suggestion by the Times’ Magazine that this was entertainment. “I don’t think that’s fair,” she said. “I’m still reporting.”

As though the two were mutually exclusive. As though true crime could only be trash if it were entertainment, and could only be entertainment if it weren’t journalism. Of course, this negates the nature of media. To entertain — to entertain a thought, for instance — is merely to take it into consideration, to allow it to hold one’s attention. Journalism is made to entertain; if it weren’t, reports would not be called “stories” and there would be no need for inverted triangles or kickers or pull quotes or anything else to catch our attention, to hold it. Because to deliver the news there has to be someone to deliver it to, and that necessitates their entertainment. Otherwise the news is nothing but fact; there is no story.

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“Many of the differences between trash culture and high culture show only that storytelling adapts to changing economic, social and political conditions,” Richard Keller Simon writes in Trash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition. It’s something to consider when watching Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly. The series was produced by a network for women branded by its schlocky aesthetic and penchant for frothy romance. An exec at Lifetime has admitted it has “erred on the tabloid side” and Surviving R. Kelly, which has a number of black women recounting the decades of abuse they say the singer has inflicted on them, exhibits the familiar tropes: the inflated score, the voyeuristic set pieces, the abused women on display. In an interview with Complex earlier this month, showrunner dream hampton revealed that she received a number of notes from Lifetime and that she was pushed to find more victims. “I didn’t like the salaciousness of stacking up all of these people who survived him,” she said, “but I got the corroboration part.” The result is a series that orchestrates rescue attempts and highlights the explicitness of Kelly’s brutality, while only gesturing vaguely at the cottage industry he has fostered over the past three decades in order to victimize black women and at our collective failure to see these women as victims at all.

When I watched it, I couldn’t shake a feeling of ickiness, particularly when one of the victims was asked to describe her abuse and dissolved into tears. We didn’t need to see that scene from the pee tape so many times, we didn’t need a tour by one victim of the room where she was allegedly tortured, we didn’t need to watch as one mother reunited with her daughter. (I’m not even including the questionable stylistic choices). The whole endeavor read trashy, old-school Lifetime. “I saw someone kind of try to drag me about why isn’t this on something more premium like Netflix. But this to me is the perfect place for it,” hampton told Complex. “I know that women watch Lifetime, and that black women make up the majority of those viewers.” Reading this made me doubly uncomfortable. It suggested that to get black women’s attention you had to feed them trash. And, okay, maybe black women weren’t trying to mute R. Kelly over The Chicago Sun-Times’ original reporting, but none of us were! The world has changed since 2002, and all of us — including black women — have become more sophisticated about predation.

“The average American today has greater familiarity with the legal process, thanks in part to procedural dramas and the round-the-clock media coverage of splashy crimes that began with the O.J. Simpson trial in the 1990s,” writes Lenika Cruz in The Atlantic. “And people are more aware than ever of flaws in the criminal-justice system, including police brutality and wrongful convictions.” This means that true crime has had to hustle to keep up with its audience, reframing from the crime itself to seeking its closure. NPR noticed the new true crime formula in 2015, with programs like Serial and HBO’s The Jinx (and later Netflix’s Making a Murderer and APM’s In the Dark) concentrating on ongoing cases that could be affected by new reporting. Andrew Jarecki, director of The Jinx, called this subject matter “live ball,” and so here we are in the live-ball era of true crime in which Robert Durst literally burps up a confession on camera before he is charged with murder. “Can the genre sustain this? Can they really sustain true crime as an advocacy medium?” Michael Arntfield, founder of the Cold Case Society, asked The Pacific Standard. “The success and the legitimacy of the medium hinges on being able to stay within this framework of advocacy ahead of strictly sensationalism or profitability.”

But even advocacy has its limits. Netflix’s runaway success Making a Murder eschewed Serial-like narration and Jinx-like reenactments, but contorted almost 700 hours of footage into supporting a theory that the filmmakers had already formulated, that convicted murderer Steven Avery was innocent despite everything pointing to the contrary. Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos told the Times they secured interviews where others didn’t because of their “tempered approach.” Like those books on my shelf, this refined series passed for high culture.

The most balanced true crime isn’t actually true crime. Last year, American Public Media launched the second season of their hit podcast In the Dark, hosted by Madeleine Baran. Over 11 episodes, it examined the six trials of Curtis Flowers for the same murders. Even though the precipitating incident was the crime, the attention was on everything else; the reporting team embedded itself in Flowers’ Mississippi hometown for a year, ultimately producing not only a strong — dare I say entertaining? — sense of place, but a rigorous analysis of the systemic failures of the investigation. “For us as reporters, we’re here to look at the people in power and look at the systems in place that raise questions about whether or not the criminal justice system is fair, whether it is just using facts,” Baran told NPR. “So what that results in is not our place to say. But certainly, in this case, what we’ve shown is that the evidence against Curtis Flowers is weak. So this becomes a question now for the courts.” While other podcasts rely on their relatability, this one doesn’t have to — the story is enough. In the aftermath of Baran’s team’s exhaustive reporting, the Supreme Court has agreed to reconsider Flowers’ conviction. It is a rare case in which the balance seems to be moot. It’s all justice.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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lodelss · 6 years ago

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True Crime and the Trash Balance

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2019 | 9 minutes (2,514 words)

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Then there was In Cold Blood.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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