#strange behaviour (1981)

[haveyouseenthishorrormovie]

SUMMARY: A scientist is experimenting with teenagers and turning them into murderers.

[saintsenara]

Idk, Remus was this kid who knew nothing but prejudice and isolation before Hogwarts, my lukewarm take is not that he was in with the prank nor that Sirius broke his heart and trust forever for revealing his secret.

I think young and dumb teenage Remus, riding the high of his young and dumb friends already overlooking the gravity of his condition by hanging out with him as animals, was dumbfounded by the fact that someone thought little of his condition to think the whole thing would be a funny prank. Maybe, in a backwards way to process the whole thing, he also chose to believe it was just that.

Deep down I’d guess the self-hatred only grew, and the same way Snape was scared of him, he was scared of Snape - in SWM, he’s not just ignoring James and Sirius tormenting Snape, he’s paralysed). SWM has got to be after the prank, since he was still talking to Lily when it happened.

I think adult Remus sees things differently, the thing about the prank discourse is there is no resolution. Would Remus ever have apologised sincerely, for dismissing Snape’s pain to defend his friends? Would Snape ever have accepted his apology? Can we admit that, tho Snape was undeniably a victim, he also fostered an unfair bias towards werewolves that can also justify Remus’s bitterness (a bitterness that he’ll forever try to hide).

Idk, just rambling. I’ll be a minority here, defending Lupin, but could be worse, I could be defending Sirius.

i'm not sure i back this - although you and i are certainly aligned on not thinking that the prank ruins lupin's relationship with sirius.

[and also in thinking that his incredibly strange upbringing needs to be taken into account when dealing with his various... idiosyncrasies.]

i just think that the idea that he was afraid of snape - even if only as a teenager - doesn't really stand up. my reading - not only of snape's worst memory but of lupin's assessment of his youth in prisoner of azkaban - is that his self-loathing is connected to two divergent things: the first, that he likes james and sirius' cruelty, recklessness, and danger - and the fact that they go out of their way [literally becoming animagi!] in order to allow him to participate in this - and is ashamed of himself as an adult [after 1981, when james' recklessness gets him killed] for this; the second, that he dislikes james and sirius' cruelty, recklessness, and danger, but is ashamed of himself for never confronting them over their excesses [worried as he is - i think there's a strong case to be made from canon - that james, the man he thinks of as his best friend in the whole world, would side with sirius against him].

he behaves the way he does in snape's worst memory because his friends are - as harry puts it - humiliating someone in the middle of a crowd of onlookers for absolutely no reason. the decent thing to do in such a situation is to try and stop them - but that requires a willingness to risk the ire of one's friends which someone with lupin's life experience [the isolation of his youth making him desperate to cling to any friendship he's offered, no matter how unsuitable - which is very like snape...] doesn't have.

i don't think - to be clear - that lupin's actions are unforgivable. indeed, i think far more of us would behave like him in an equivalent situation than we'd like to admit, and that's something always worth being aware of. but i think that the other side of that coin is that it's fine to state frankly that he acts like a coward when it comes to snape's worst memory. there doesn't need to be a deeper interpretation of his behaviour which makes him appear more sympathetic - he's frozen because unfreezing would mean having to involve himself against james and sirius. and that's something he simply doesn't want to do.

i'm also unconvinced that snape's attitude towards werewolves is unfair. it's striking in prisoner of azkaban that - while snape is terrified of lupin due to his lycanthropy - his primary concern is that lupin is aiding and abetting sirius [who he believes is the death eater who sent voldemort to kill lily - there is no suggestion whatsoever that he knew wormtail was the real traitor] while in human form. he leverages social prejudice in order to bring about lupin's dismissal from his job - since dumbledore doesn't take his concerns about human!lupin seriously - sure... but one of the circles the canon text's worldbuilding never fully squares is that this social prejudice is... completely legit.

lupin is the series' one "good werewolf" - who embraces the "civilising" influence of the wizarding world's social conventions, and is the only werewolf in the series harry, from whose perspective the narrative is written, likes - and so the prejudice he experiences is something the text views as cruel. the prejudice experienced by werewolves like fenrir greyback, on the other hand, is something the text sets up as entirely justifiable. after all, werewolves are dangerous and the mechanisms which exist to reduce that danger are relatively new [lupin says in prisoner of azkaban that the wolfsbane potion is a "very recent discovery"] - being afraid of them is an entirely sensible position, even if one has never almost eaten you.

[which is why jkr's lycanthropy-as-aids metaphor is complete and utter bullshit - and is one of the long list of things she ought to have shut her mouth about.]

[dr-abigail-richelieu]

Vampires were an extinct human subspecies, discovered and then de-extinct through morally questionable genetic engineering research in the year 1981 by The Genomic Innovation Institute (or G.I.I) in an attempt at finding cures for some neurological disorders through gene therapy and tweaked retroviruses. Thanks to these… Morally questionable experiments, It was discovered that some specific dormant genes were extremely widely spread throughout the population and that these genes could be reactivated in some individuals. In certain cases some of these genes express spontaneously. This gave rise to the theory that some neurological disorders could at least partly arise from the expression of these genes albeit in a very “broken” and rudimentary form. Essentially the treatments to cure certain types of neurological disorders turned out to activate some of these dormant genes, essentially turning the test subjects into what we now call a Vampire. The Genomic Innovation Institute decided to pursue research on this subspecies, hoping to turn a profit. Thanks to them, we now have a complex understanding of Vampires…

They were humanity's natural predator, emerging between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago, around the same time as Homo sapiens, or at least shortly after. They hunted our ancestors with brutal efficiency, to the point that even though we eventually forgot about them (before bringing them back from extinction), they remained engraved in our cultural memory. For lack of better words, they were the things we feared were in the dark.

It's difficult to identify ancient vampire remains, as their identifying traits are primarily neurological and soft tissue-related. However, their skeletal structure does have some minor differences, which allow for identification now that we know what to look for. It seems that vampires began going extinct around 2000 BCE, with their population drastically reducing as civilization emerged. Their extinction was due to more than one factor. 

-Vampires were extremely antisocial, which makes sense for a predatory species whose prey resembled it that much. This however did complicate mating between vampires because vampires didn't just tend to ignore each other but would see other vampires as threats and would often attempt to dispatch each other upon contact. Since sexual dimorphism is quite lacking in Vampires, which not only resulted in both of the sexes looking very androgynous, it also meant that both Male and Female had essentially the same musculature and strength and general ferocity, sexual coercion would have most likely resulted in one or both of the party's demise or heavy maiming, rendering it extremely inefficient. Plus, vampires seemed to generally be very uninterested in copulation, though it did happen from time to time. Strangely enough all of this seemed to have made the idea of mating with humans more appealing for some Vampires which is why like with Homo Neanderthal, Vampiric DNA can be found in modern day humans. (The mating behaviours of Vampires will be discussed more thoroughly in another chapter)

-The Emergency of euclidean architecture seemed to have greatly affected vampires. We discovered that in their eyes, the receptor cells that respond to horizontal lines are cross wired with those that respond to vertical ones. When both are fired simultaneously in a specific way it'll result in quite a violent seizure. We call the effect “The Crucifix Glitch”. While the glitch will only trigger when intersecting right angles occupy more than 30° of visual arc, we discovered, thanks to our currents subjects, that the simple suggestion of the Crucifix Glitch being triggered is enough in 75% of cases to completely dissuade an attack, if they had been exposed to it previously (depending on the vampire's current emotional state). These seizure are quite violent, reminiscent of Tonic-Clonic seizures, but because of the vampire's particular muscular structure and their higher distribution of fast twitch muscle fibers, these seizures tend to result in dislocated limbs much more often than regular seizure. Plus, with the Vampire's unique neurochemistry, we suspect that the seizures are much more distressing for them. In conclusion, the seizures caused by the Crucifix Glitch are extremely traumatizing and painful for vampires to the point that any right angles, even if not in a context that could induce the glitch, will usually make a vampire extremely uncomfortable and anxious (work best if they've been exposed to the glitch at some point in their life). Because of this a lot of the vampires did not even dare to approach human settlements with euclidean architecture, which greatly complicated things for the overall survival of the species.

-Vampires make for terrible parents. Given their natural antisocial behaviour, it’s unsurprising that they aren’t the best caregivers. Despite their longer lifespans, one might expect them to invest more time and effort in their offspring, but this is not the case. In fact, it’s quite the opposite; their longer lifespans and fertility lead them to essentially not value their offspring, as they can always have another later on in life. The father is most likely going to be completely absent, as he typically feels no compulsion to ensure the survival of his offspring. The mother, on the other hand, while interested in her child's survival, is not as invested as one might expect from a primate species. She won't hesitate to abandon her offspring if she considers it a liability. She'll usually take care of it up until it's pre teenage years where she'll abandon it. However, some exceptions to this were found, as we've recently found proof of a Vampire Pack, more on this in a later entry.

-Mating with humans: As previously mentioned, vampires tend to be awful parents, to the extent that some began mating with humans. Why? Because it was easier. Human mating rituals were simple for vampires to emulate, and once mating was complete, the male vampire could leave, confident that its offspring would be cared for. Meanwhile, the female vampire could stay with the human and be looked after during her pregnancy, a wolf in sheep's clothing, she could discreetly sustain her need for blood by feeding on humans in the tribe or even her mate. Once she gave birth, she could either leave or continue caring for her children with a continuous blood supply. Another tactic vampire would use to get out of raising their young is “Brood Parasitism”. They would kidnap human children and replace them with their own. We believe that this is what gave birth to the legends of “Changelings”.

Overall the extinction of Vampires wasn't due to one reason but a combination of many things. A reminder of how evolution might screw you over. You may have been a perfectly adapted predator but something seemingly insignificant can truly come back to bite you.

Speaking of biting, the infamous bite of Vampires while not exactly as described in myths, is nothing to joke about...

This is from a setting of mine, where alot of cryptids, myths, etc are real or were directly influence by real events/creatures all explainable by science, kinda like the amazing YouTube Channel ThoughPotato This entry focuses on Vampires which biology and history is inspired and influenced by the Amazing Peter Watts and his just as amazing books Blindsight and Echopraxia (in fact this setting started out as a AU of his awesome universe)

[sollody]

Stranger Things 4 - Songs We Need!

SELF CONTROL - Laura Branigan (1984)

"...I, I live among the creatures of the night. I haven't got the will to try and fight..."

HIGHWAY TO HELL - AC/DC (1979)

"...Hey, Satan! payin my dues. [...] Hey Momma! Look at me!..."

SOMEBODY TO LOVE

- Jefferson Airplane (1967)

"...Tears are running, they're all running down your breast. And your friends, baby. They treat you like a guest..."

- Queen (1976)

"...I just gotta get out of that prison cell. Someday I'm gonna be free."

BAD MOON RISING - CCR (1969)

"...I know the end is coming soon. [...] I hear the voice of rage and ruin."

I WANT TO KNOW WHAT LOVE IS- Foreigner (1984)

"... I'm gonna take a little time. A little time to look around me. I've got nowhere else to hide. It looks like love has finally found me..."

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN' - The Mamas And The Papas (1965)

"...you know the preacher likes the cold, he knows I'm gonna stay..."

PEOPLE ARE STRANGE - The Doors (1967)

"People are strange when you're a stranger. Faces look ugly when you're alone."

EVERYBODY WANTS TO RULE THE WORLD - Tears For Fears (1985)

"...acting on your best behaviour. Turn your back on mother nature..."

YOU CAN'T HURRY LOVE - The Supremes (1966)

"...how long must I wait? How much more can I take?..."

SMALLTOWN BOY - Bronski Beat (1984)

"...But the answers you seek will never be found at home. The love that you need will never be found at home..."

HOTEL CALIFORNIA - Eagles (1976)

"...we are programmed to receive. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave..."

KIDS IN AMERICA - Kim Wilde (1981)

"...Much later, baby, you'll be saying never mind. You know life is cruel, life is never kind..."

THE PASSENGER - Iggy Pop (1977)

"...And everything was made for you and me. All of it was made for you and me..."

RUSSIANS - Sting (1985)

"...There is no monopoly of common sense on either side of the political fence..."

DON'T STOP ME NOW - Queen (1978)

"...I am a satellite. I'm out of control..."

BOYS DON'T CRY - The Cure (1980)

"...I tried to laugh about it. Cover it all up with lies. I tried to laugh about it.Hiding the tears in my eyes..."

GHOST TOWN - The Specials (1981)

"...Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town?..."

MIDNIGHT BLUE - E.L.O. (1979)

"...and what you're searchin' for can never be the same, but what's the difference 'cause they say what's in a name?..."

SOS - ABBA (1975)

"...I tried to reach for you, but you have closed your mind..."

BREAK ON THROUGH (TO THE OTHER SIDE) - The Doors (1967)

"...Made the scene, week to week, day to day, hour to hour. Gate is straight, deep and wide..."

HURT SO BAD - Little Anthony And The Imperials (1964)

"...I know you don't know what I'm goin' through. Standing here looking at you. Well, let me tell you that it hurts so bad..."

LIVIN' THING - E.L.O. (1976)

"...Making believe this is what you conceived from your worst day. Oh, moving in line then you look back in time to the first day..."

PAINT IT BLACK - The Rolling Stones (1966)

"...Maybe then I’ll fade away and not have to face the facts..."

I WANT TO BREAK FREE - Queen (1984)

"...It's strange but it's true, yeah: I can't get over the way you love me like you do, but I have to be sure when I walk out that door: Oh, how I want to be free..."

BREAKFAST IN AMERICA - Supertramp (1979)

"...Take a look at my girlfriend. She's the only one I got. Not much of a girlfriend, I never seem to get a lot..."

OWNER OF A LONELY HEART - Yes (1983)

"...Say , you don't want to chance it. You've been hurt so before..."

PSYCHO KILLER- Talking Heads (1977)

"...Don't touch me, I'm a real live wire.."

EVER FALLEN IN LOVE - Buzzcocks (1978)

"...You spurn my natural emotions. You make me feel I'm dirt, and I'm hurt and if I start a commotion I run the risk of losing you, and that's worse..."

PICTURE BOOK - The Kinks (1968)

"...Picture book, of people with each other to prove they love each other..."

MY FAIRY KING - Queen (1973)

"...Then came man to savage in the night. To run like thieves and to kill like knives. To take away the power from the magic hand. To o bring about the ruin to the promised land..."

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST

Blue -> personal favourites

[conradscrime]

June & Jennifer Gibbons: The Silent Twins

October 28, 2021

June and Jennifer Gibbons were born on April 11, 1963 to Caribbean immigrants Gloria and Aubrey Gibbons. The girls were born identical twins, and most twins have what we know as twin telepathy, having a deep in tune bond and connection that most siblings do not share. The girls were not the only siblings in their family, having an older sister, Greta, born in 1957, and am older brother, David, born in 1959 and a younger sister named Rose. 

In 1974, the family moved to Haverfordwest, Wales. June and Jennifer often only spoke to each other, keeping to only themselves and others found it hard to understand what they were talking about. 

The Gibbons siblings were also the only black children living in their community, which made them stand out and they were often bullied at school. The twins were bullied quite badly, to the point that they would get permission to leave the school early each day to avoid the other kids who would bully them. It was around this point that the language the girls only spoke to each other that many others couldn’t understand, became their primary way of communicating and they would only talk to each other and their sister Rose. 

The girls would often mirror each others movements and could not be physically apart. They eventually stopped speaking to anyone except each other. June and Jennifer would continue attending school though they would never read or write. 

In 1974, medics came to give the kids vaccinations and one of the medics noticed June and Jennifer’s odd behaviour and how they only spoke to each other in their own kind of language. Being concerned, the medic contacted a child psychologist which the girls began going to multiple therapists who would try to encourage them talking to other people. 

The twins eventually were separated, each getting sent to a different boarding school in an attempt to create some separation and have them engage with other children, however this backfired with the girls becoming more reserved and they completely were withdrawn and possibly even distraught without each other. 

When June and Jennifer were reunited after boarding school they spend many years staying in their bedroom, being isolated from life. The twins were both creative, and would pass the time by creating plays and stories and sometimes would record themselves aloud on tape for their sister Rose. Both girls found a passion for writing, despite refusing to at school and both wanted to begin a writing career. 

Each girl kept a diary and wrote many poems, stories and novels often stories relating to crimes or individuals who have strange behaviour and engage in criminal activities. June wrote a novel titled “Pepsi-Cola Addict” that was about a teacher seducing a high school hero and who then goes to a reformatory where a homosexual guard makes a play for him. 

The twins put together their unemployment benefits to try to get their novel published by a vanity press, after having many unsuccessful attempts at getting published. One of Jennifer’s novels was called “The Pugilist” where a physician wants to save his child’s life so bad that he kills their dog to get it’s heart for the transplant. The dog’s spirit still lives and the child eventually seeks revenge on the father. 

When the girls were in their late teens they began to drink alcohol and take drugs, and eventually turned into criminals themselves. In 1981, June and Jennifer would be involved in vandalism, petty theft and arson where they were soon admitted to Broadmoor Hospital, a mental health hospital. The girls stayed at Broadmoor for 11 years and June blamed their long sentence here on their selective muteness later on, saying that most kids who commit crimes would only get a 2 year sentence, but that they got more because they wouldn’t speak.

The girls were made to take high doses of antipsychotic medications which left them unable to concentrate. Jennifer apparently began suffering from tardive dyskinesia which left her making involuntary repetitive movements. These medications apparently were adjusted so that the twins could still write in their diaries however they pretty much lost interest in creative writing during their time in the hospital. 

A journalist named Majorie Wallace discovered the twins’ story and thought they were really interesting. She covered a story on them in the newspaper which gained a lot of attention, and even wrote a book on them called “The Silent Twins” which was published in 1986 and why the girls are often referred to this name by many. 

Wallace spent a lot of time with June and Jennifer and began to know them quite well. Wallace said the twins had made an agreement that if one of them died, the other one would go on to live a normal life and begin to speak. While they were at the hospital they began to believe that one of them would have to die so that the other could live a normal life, and that Jennifer apparently agreed to make the sacrifice. 

On March 9, 1993, the twins were transferred from Broadmoor to the Caswell Clinic and on the way Jennifer collapsed and could not be woken. She died at the hospital from acute myocarditis, which is a sudden inflammation of the heart. Her death truly remains a mystery as she was only 29 years old at the time, just one month shy of her 30th birthday. There was never any drugs or poison found in her system, it was as if she had just died from natural causes. 

June admitted that Jennifer had been acting strange the day before and that her speech became slurred and she had told her sister she was dying. When they were on their way to Caswell she had been sleeping in June’s lap with her eyes open. Wallace went to see June a few days after Jennifer’s death and June claimed she was free and that Jennifer gave up her life so she could have this freedom. 

After Jennifer died, June was able to live a normal life, speaking and even giving interviews for Harper’s Bazaar and The Guardian. In 2008, she was living a quiet life near her parents in West Wales. She is now accepted by her community and no longer needs mental health services or psychiatrists keeping an eye on her. In 2016, the twins’ older sister, Greta, did an interview and claimed it was Broadmoor’s fault that Jennifer’s health had been failing and that she wanted to file a lawsuit against them, though Gloria and Aubrey refused. 

To this day no one knows what caused the twins to become silent, and only communicate with each other, becoming isolated and anti-social from the world. It is a mystery how they figured out that one of them would have to die so the other could live a normal life, and Jennifer’s death in general is a mystery. Many believe that if Jennifer was still alive the twins would still be silent.

[criminol]

Dennis Nilsen

Dennis Nilsen was a Scottish serial killer and necrophile who is known to have murdered at least 12 young men and boys between 1978 and 1983 in London, UK.

Born in Aberdeenshire, Scotland to parents in an unhappy marriage, Nilsen was a quiet child. He described his most vivid childhood memory as seeing is grandfather’s body in a coffin. Nilsen had always adored his grandfather and began to withdraw after his death, showing resentment towards his family. During puberty Nilsen discovered he was gay, which confused and shamed him, he kept his sexuality hidden but his older brother teased him for being gay and a ‘girl.’ 

On 30th December 1978, Nilsen killed his first victim, he invited over and drank alcohol with a teenager before they both fell asleep. The following morning when Nilsen woke up he was afraid to wake the boy in case he left, Nilsen decided the boy was the ‘stay with me over the New Year whether he wanted to to not.’ He strangled him and then drowned him in a bucket, carefully washing the body, putting it on his bed and masturbating over it before storing it under his floorboards for 8 months. He then burnt the body in a bonfire in his garden. In October 1979, Nilsen attempted another murder but his victim fled and after contacting the police did not press charges. 2 months later he killed again, strangling his young victim with his own headphones, the next day he bought a Polaroid camera and photographed the body in suggestive positions before storing the body under the floorboards. On several occasions Nilsen took the body out and sat it next to him when he watched television. Nilsen killed again in May 1980, again keeping the corpse. By the end of 1980 he had killed another 5 victims.

The bodies under his floorboards soon attracted insects and had a strong odour, maggots began to infest. Nilsen attempted to kill the insects and eliminate the smell but could not, he eventually removed and dissected the bodies before burning them disguising the smell by also burning a tyre. He checked for recognisable debris in the ashes and smashed an intact skull with his rake.

Nilsen killed 5 more victims, often taking time off work to be alone with the bodies- dates which were later matched to disappearances. In mid-1981 Nilsen’s landlord decided to renovate the property and Nilsen was asked to vacate, he dissected those bodies before burning the corpses.

After moving Nilsen had no garden or floorboards to store bodies under, he attempted murder multiple times, including one victim who he resuscitated and after Nilsen’s dog licked the victim’s face, allowed to leave even driving him to the train station.

Nilsen killed twice more, as with all previous victims, undertaking strange behaviour with the corpses, flushing the organs of his final victim down his toilet.

The flushed organs were found and a murder investigation was opened, when officers entered Nilsen’s flat they immediately smelt rotting flesh, Nilsen calmly told the officers the rest of the body was in his wardrobe. Nilsen stated “ I'll tell you everything. I want to get it off my chest. Not here—at the police station." When asked whether the remains in his flat belonged to one person or two he replied fifteen or sixteen, since 1978.

Nilsen was sentenced to life imprisonment on 4th November 1983 with a recommended minimum of 25 years, this was later changed to a whole life tariff. He died in prison on 12th May 2018, aged 72.

[thisbluespirit]

James Maxwell TV/Film List

More of a guide than a recs list, because old tv/film depends so much on availability.  It’s also hard as there’s nothing surviving that’s really like SotT for him (his voice is always slightly different, too & rarely the grand one from SotT) - I found it hard to find where to start back in the day, so I hope this makes it easier.  However, I have starred my favourites (rated for JM content only). 

I’ve divided things into categories and @jurijurijurious​ (or anyone) can make up their own mind as to what to go for.  (Also @jurijurijurious I have NO idea what old telly you’ve already seen, so forgive me if I’m telling you things you already know.)

Where to find it:  Luckily in the UK, it’s not too bad!�� Network Distributing are the DVD supplier to keep an eye on (they do great online sales), you can find secondhand things cheap on Amazon Marketplace & eBay, and several Freeview channels show old TV & film, especially Talking Pictures.  I’ll note if things are on YT or Daily Motion, but they come and go all the time, so it’s always worth searching.

***

Film serials (ITC mainly)

British TV made on film in the US mode with transatlantic cash, so generally pretty light,  episodic (continuity is almost unheard of) etc.  Some turn up on ITV3 & 4 on a regular basis (colour eps). 

*** Dangerman “A Date With Doris” (ITC 1964)  James Maxwell is a British spy friend of Drake’s (Patrick MacGoohan) called Peter who gets framed for murder.  Drake goes to Fake Cuba to rescue him by which time JM is dying from an infected wound and faints off every available surface, including the roof.  It’s great.  On YT.  (The boxset is v pricey if you just want 2 eps.)

“Fair Exchange” (ITC 1964) JM is a German spy friend of Drake’s called Pieter who helps him out on a case.  Not as gloriously hurt/comfort-y as the other, but it does have some excellent undercover dusting. (Why  Patrick MacGoohan has JM clones all called variations on Peter dotted around the globeis a mystery.)  On YT.

The Saint “The Inescapable Word” (ITC 1965) This is pretty terrible, but  entertaining and James Maxwell plays the world’s most hopeless former-cop-turned-security guard. With bonus collapsing.  On YT.

“The Art Collectors” (1967).  JM is the villain of the week.  It does include a v funny bit, though, where the Saint (Roger Moore) goes for JM’s fake hair (and who can blame him?  How often I have felt the same!)  This one’s in colour so should pop up on ITV3 or 4. 

The Champions “The Silent Enemy” (ITC 1968).  Surprisingly good JM content as the villain of the week who drugs sailors and steals their clothes before realising that maybe he should have worked out if he could operate a sub before he stole it.

The Protectors “The Bridge” (ITC 1974, 30 mins.)  Not worth seeking out on its own, but ITV4 seems fond of it and James Maxwell gets to do some angsting and wears purple, so it’s worth snagging if you can, but too slight otherwise.

*** Thriller “Good Salary, Prospects, Free Coffin” (ITC 1975; 1hr 10mins, I think).  James Maxwell moves in with Julian Glover and runs an overcomplicated murdery spy ring where they bicker a lot in between killing girls by advertisement and burying them in the back garden.  What could possibly go wrong??  Anyway, it’s solid gold cheese, has bonus Julian Glover and a lot of natty knitwear.  What more does an old telly fan want?  (tw: Keith Barron being inexplicably the very meanest Thriller boyfriend.)  On YT but tends to get taken down fast.

***

Films

Design for Loving (1962; comedy).  Can be rented from the BFI online for £3.50.  Isn’t that great or that bad (or that funny either), but does have JM as a dim layabout beatnik, which is atypical.

***The Traitors (1962).  This is a low-key little 1hr long spy B-movie, but it’s also thoughtful and ambiguous with a nice 60s soundtrack and location work (it’s a bit New Wave-ish) and the central duo of JM and Patrick Allen are sweet and it all winds up with James Maxwell going in the swimming pool. One of the things where JM is actually American. (Talking Pictures show this occasionally & it is out on DVD as an extra on The Wind of Change.)  The quality of the surviving film is not great, though.

***Girl on Approval (1962).  A Rachel Roberts kitchen sink drama about a couple fostering a difficult teenager.  It’s dated, but it’s also really interesting for a 1950s/60s slice of life (and very female-centric) & probably the only time on this list JM played an ordinary person.

***Otley (1969).  Comedy that’s generally dated surprisingly well & is good fun, starring Tom Courtenay +cameos from what seems like the whole of British TV.  JM is an incompetent red herring & there are more cardies and glasses as well as a random barometer. 

Old Vic/Royal Exchange group productions

(Surviving works made by the group that JM was involved in from drama school to his death, made by Michael Elliott or Casper Wrede.  I like them a lot mostly, but they are all slow and weird and earnest & not everybody’s cup of tea.)

Brand (BBC 1959).  The BBC recording of the 59 Company’s (the name they were then using) landmark production, starring Patrick MacGoohan.  This was a big deal in British theatre & launched the careers of everybody involved.  It’s very relentless and weird but interesting & I’m glad they decided it was important enough to save.  First fake beard alert of this post.  It won’t be the last.  On YT & there is a DVD, which is sometimes affordable and sometimes £500, depending on the time of day.

***Private Potter (1962).  The original TV play is lost and this film has an extraneous storyline, but otherwise has most of the TV cast & gives a pretty good idea of why as a claustrophobic talky TV piece it made such an impact.  Tom Courtenay is Private Potter, a soldier who claims to have had a vision of God during a mission & James Maxwell his CO who needs to decide what to do about this strange excuse for disobeying orders.  Tw: fake eyebrows (!) and moustaches.  Only available on YT.

[???]One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1970).  Again, no DVD release (no idea why), but it is on YT.  I haven’t seen this yet, but it’s another Casper Wrede effort starring Tom Courtenay and apparently JM is especially good in it.  (I’m just not good at watching long things on YT and keep hoping for a DVD or TV showing.)

Ransom (1974).  A more commercial effort starring Sean Connery & Ian McShane; it gets slated as not being a good action movie, but is clearly meant to be more thinky and political with the edge of a thriller. JM’s part isn’t large but Casper Wrede shoots his friend beautifully, & it’s a pretty decent film with nice cinematography, shot in Norway, as was One Day.  I liked it.

[I think this post might be the longest in the world, whoops.  Sorry!]

Cardboard TV (the best bit, obv)

One-off plays etc./mini-series

Out of the Unknown “The Dead Planet” Adaptation of an Asimov short story; this is very good for JM, but hard to get hold of unless you want the boxset.  I think someone has some of the eps on Daily Motion.  (His other OotU ep is sadly burninated.)

The Portrait of a Lady (BBC 1968).  Adaptation of the novel; JM is Gilbert Osmond, so it is great for JM in quantity and his performance, but depends how you feel about him being skeevy in truly appalling facial hair.  Do the bow ties and hand-holding make up for it?  but he’s in 5 whole episodes, and Suzanne Neve, faced with Richard Chamberlain, Edward Fox, and Ed Bishop as suitors, chooses instead to marry the worst possible James Maxwell.  Relatable. XD

***Dracula (ITV 1968, part of Mystery & Imagination).  JM is Dr Seward, fainty snowflake of vampire hunters, who falls over, sobs and can’t cope for most of the 1 hr 20 mins.  More facial hair, but not as offensive as last time.  Suzanne Neve is back again, although now JM is nice, she’s married Corin Redgrave, who’s more into Denholm Elliott. Anyway, I love this so much because it turned out that I love Dracula as well as shaky old TV with people I like in getting to fight vampires and all be shippy.  Good news - TP keep showing M&I, the DVD is out, and there are two versions of it up on YT.

The Prison (Armchair Cinema 1974).  This is the one with Lincoln in it, but it’s not that great & JM isn’t in it that much, so depends how curious you are for the modern AU!  (But my Euston films allergy is worse than my ITC allergy, and I watched this when very unwell, so I may have been unfair.)

Crown Court “Fitton vs. Pusey” (1973) - part of the Crown Court series, set in a town full of clones who all keep returning to court.  JM is on trial for his behaviour in (the Korean war?  I forget?) although he ought to be on trial for his terrible moustache.  It’s not that great, but it is nice JM content.  He probably did it, but for reasons, and he wibbles & panics whenever his wife leaves the courtroom.  Also on YT.

*** Raffles “The Amateur Cracksman” (ITV 1975) - He is Inspector Mckenzie in the Raffles pilot & is a lot of fun.  At one point when there was a Raffles fandom someone in it claimed he was too gay for Raffles, which I’m still laughing about, because Raffles.  Anyway, watch out if you try to get the DVD because it is NOT included in S1, whatever lies Amazon tells. It is up somewhere online, though, I think.

Bognor “Unbecoming Habits” (1981).  Some down marks for possibly the worst 80s theme & incidiental music ever, but fun & has been shown on Talking Pictures lately.  JM is an Abbot running a honey-making friary that is actually a hotbed of spies, murder, gay sex and squash playing.  This is the point at which he chooses to strip off on screen for the first time, because strong squash-playing abbots do that kind of thing apparently.

Guest of the week in ongoing series/serials

Since even series with a lot of continuity tended to write episodes as self-contained plays (like SotT), these are usually accessible on their own.

Manhunt “Death Wish” (1970).  This is one of the most serialised shows here, but this episode is still fairly contained.  WWII drama about three Resistance agents on the run across France.  JM is... a Nazi agent & former academic trying to break an old friend (one of the series’ three leads, Peter Barkworth) with kindness, possibly??  (Manhunt is very angry and psychological & dark and obv. comes with major WWII warnings (& more if you want to try the whole thing), but it’s also v good.)  Up on YT, I think.

Doomwatch “The Iron Doctor” (BBC S2 1971).  “Doomwatch” is the nickname of a gov’t dept led by Dr Spencer Quist that investigates new scientific projects for abuse/corruption/things that might cause fish to make men infertile etc. etc.  JM is a surgeon who comes to their attention because he’s a bit too in love with his computer for the comfort of one of his more junior colleagues.  (I think it’s perfectly comprehensible & a nice guest turn, but it is hard to get hold of outside of the series DVD.  Which, being a cult TV person, I loved a lot anyway, but YMMV!)

***Hadleigh “The Caper” (S3 1973).  Hadleigh is a very middle of the road show, but watchable enough (lead is Gerald Harper, who’s always entertaining) and this is pretty self-contained as it centres around an old con-man friend (JM) of Hadleigh’s manservant causing trouble by pretending to be Gerald Harper, for reasons.  JM seems to be having a ball.

Justice 2 episodes, S3 1974.  He guests twice as an opposing barrister & gets to be part of some nice showdown court scenes.  Again, a middle of the road drama, but stars Margaret Lockwood, who was still just as awesome in the 1970s as she was in the 1930s & 40s.  On YT.

Father Brown “The Curse of the Golden Cross” (1974).  JM is an American archaeologist getting death threats; stars Kenneth More as Father Brown.  Just a note, though, that 1970s TV adaptations tended to be really really faithful and this is one of the stories where Chesterton comes out with an anti-semitic moment...  (JM was unconscious for that bit and, frankly, I envied him.)  But otherwise lots of angsting in yet another fake moustache about someone trying to kill him.

The Hanged Man “The Bridge Maker” (1975).  Confession time, I have v little idea what this one was about apart from Ray Smith being an unlikely Eastern European dictator, as this whole series went over my head and was not really my thing.  (Ask @mariocki they’re cleverer than me and liked it & can probably explain the plot!)  I don’t know if it’s available anywhere off the DVD but on a JM scale it was v good/different as he was a coldly villainous head of security & it wouldn’t be too bad to watch alone, but there was an overarching plot going on somewhere.

Doctor Who “Underworld” (1978).  This is famously one of the worst serials in the whole of classic Who, but largely because of behind-the-scenes circumstances, not the guest cast.  There is some nice stuff, though, esp in Ep1 (JM is a near-immortal alien who’d like to lay down and die but still the Quest is the Quest as they say... a lot) & it’s bound to pop up on YT or Daily Motion.  The DVD has extras that include v v brief bits of JM speaking in his actual real accent (which he otherwise does in NONE of these) & making jokes in character.  Honestly, though, this is the only DW where the behind-the-scenes doc is genuinely the most exciting bit as they desperately invented whole new technologies & methods of working to bring us this serial, and then everybody wished they hadn’t.

*** Enemy at the Door “Treason” (LWT 1978).  This is a weird episode but I love it lots - from a (v v good) series about the occupation of the Channel Islands.  (So obv warnings for WWII & Nazis.)  JM is a visiting German Generalmajor, but he’s come for a very unusual reason - to ask for help from his brother-in-law, a blackballed British army officer (Joss Ackland).  It’s all weird and low key and JM is doomed and nevertheless probably my favourite thing of his that isn’t SotT.

* The Racing Game 2 eps (1979).  Adaptation of Dick Francis’s first Sid Halley novel Odds Against (ep1) + 5 original stories for the series.  This is an interesting one - JM plays Sid’s father-in-law & they have a lovely relationship that’s central to the book BUT Dick Francis loved this adaptation and Mike Gwilym who played Sid and was inspired to write a sequel Whip Hand, which he tied in with TV canon - and adopted at least three of the cast, including JM.  Which means that all the Sid & Charles fanfic is also JM fic by default and it’s quite impressive. (There’s not much but it’s GOOD.)  On YT.

Bergerac “Treasure Hunt” (1981).  Not a major role, but pretty nice & it’s one a Christmas ep of the detective show (also set on the Channel Islands) that involved Liza Goddard’s cat burglar, which was always the best bit of Bergerac.

His guest spots in Rumpole of the Bailey (1991) “Rumpole a la Carte” and Dr Finlay (1994) are both really just cameos, but both series come round on Freeview; the Rumpole one is funny and the Dr Finlay one his last screen appearance before his death the following year.

Not worth getting just for JM: Subway in the Sky; Bill Brand and Oppenheimer.

These films only have cameos but some quite fun ones and they come around on terrestrial TV: The Damned (1962), The Evil of Frankenstein (1964) & (more briefly) Far From the Madding Crowd (1967).  (I think his cameo in Connecting Doors must be at least recognisable as someone spotted him in it just based off my gifs, but it’s not come my way yet.)  I’ve never been able to get hold of any of his radio performances, not even the 1990s one.

ETA: I forgot The Power Game! This is the one surviving series where he occurs as a semi-regular (at least until halfway through S1 when he went off to the BBC to be in the now-burninated Hunchback of Notre Dame).  This isn’t standalone, but it’s a good series and it is on YT.  See how you go with crackly old TV before you brave it but it’s the snarkiest thing ever made about people making concrete and stabbing each other in the back.  JM is a civil servant who tries to run the National Export Board and is plagued by Patrick Wymark and Clifford Evans as warring businessmen.

***

[... Well, now I just feel scary.  0_o  In my defence, I have been stuck home bored & ill for years, and often unable to watch modern TV while trying to cheer myself up with James Maxwell, so I didn’t watch all of this at once.  It just... happened eventually after SotT. /waves hand 

But if anyone feels the need to unfriend my quietly at this point, I understand. /o\]

[truecrimesposts]

The Milwaukee Cannibal

Timeline of events

1960′s

May 21, 1960: Jeffery Lionel Dahmer was born in Milwaukee’s Evangelical Deaconess Hospital to his parents Lionel and Joyce after a very difficult pregnancy. According to Lionel, Joyce experienced random bouts of paralysis during the pregnancy, and doctors were unable to find any reason for this. To try and treat this and mostly to calm her during, she was given “injections of barbiturates and morphine, which would finally relax her.” She would apparently also be given phenobarbital. 

We know now that the “Use of barbiturates during pregnancy has been associated with a higher incidence of fetal abnormalities. Neonatal barbiturate withdrawal symptoms have been reported in infants whose mothers took barbiturates during pregnancy,” but we don't know for sure if this applied to Jeffrey.

1962: The family made the decision to move to Ames, Iowa in 1962 so that Lionel could work on his Chemistry Ph.D.

1964: After their young son complained of extreme pain, Lionel and Joyce took Jeffrey to the hospital, were he was diagnosed with a brutal double hernia in his scrotum. Even after the surgery corrected the issue, Lionel would claim that this experience was what initially triggered the change in Jeffrey’s personality, apparently making him become much more shy and withdrawn. Psychologists believe that there is a possibility that this could actually have influenced his feelings of sexual inadequacy and insecurity in later life.

November 1966: When Joyce fell pregnant with her second child David, the family decided to move home in an attempt to find the perfect spot to raise their two children. This led to several moved throughout Ohio during the following year. This was not an easy time for the family, Joyce was struggling with another very difficult pregnancy, and young Jeffrey, who was now in the 1st grade, was starting to feel neglected, especially after David was born on December 18th.

Of course feeling neglected when a new baby comes along is a fairly common thing, but unlike most children, Jeffrey would not get over this feeling, instead it would get worse. Lionel describes his son at this time as extremely shy and withdrawn, even going as far as t say that he was terrified of new people and situations.

1968: After the family moved to Bath Ohio, Jeffrey experienced a new and particularly heinous kind of trauma. According to Lionel, Jeffrey was molested by a boy in the neighbourhood, however Jeffrey never once admitted to even remembering this.

It seems likely that Jeffrey repressed this memory, especially since his personality ticks pretty much every box when it comes to the traits that come with childhood memory repression:

Strong reactions to certain places people and situations.

Difficulty controlling emotions.

Difficulty keeping a job.

Struggling with a sense of abandonment.

Immaturity.

Tendency to self sabotage.

Impulsive.

Emotionally exhausted.

Anxiety.

Trouble with anger management.

1970′s

Late 1970: Over the last few years, Joyce had, according to Lionel, been taking drugs in order to try and deal with the extreme anxiety that she was facing on a near daily basis, but they didn't really work, and in the late 1970′s she was actually institutionalised twice for ‘psychiatric problems’. Since the family were so busy trying to take care of Joyce and raise their very young son, Jeffrey reportedly did not have a stabilising influence, or much emotional support.

This combined with the fact that he had grown tired of not fitting in led Jeffrey to build himself a reputation as somewhat of a clown, and a misfit. His behaviour at that time is very similar to that of fellow serial killer and cannibal Arthur Shawcross, he would drink heavily at just 10 years old and was always pulling ‘pranks’. Jeffreys pranks including randomly shouting, bleating like a sheep, and most memorably, faking epileptic fits.

June 4, 1978: By the time that Jeffrey had graduated from high school, his parents were going through a very difficult divorce and due to the fact that he was now legally an adult, he was actually living by himself in the home while his parents and brother lived elsewhere. Jeffrey had less emotional support than ever before and all the freedom in the world.

June 18, 1978: 19 year old Steven Mark Hicks was hitchhiking when Jeffrey drove by him and stopped, suggesting that he come back to his home for a few beers. Hicks agreed and the two went back to the house and began to drink, everything was going fine, until Hicks tried to leave. It is believed that Jeffreys crippling fears of abandonment kicked in and he flipped. He grabbed a barbell and began to club and then strangle Hicks with the weapon. According to Dahmer, over the next few weeks (!) Jeffrey stripped the flesh from the bones using acid (like he apparently had to a whole host of animals previously) smashed the bones and disposed of the remains in his back yard.

Dahmer would later claim that he had killed Hicks because he didn't wat him to leave. This reasoning would later be corroborated by at least one survivor of Jeffreys attack, claiming that Jeffreys entire personality changed when he mentioned wanting to leave. This reasoning isn't difficult to believe when you consider the lack of parental support, tendency to move, and I believe most noticeably his memory repression

After his high school graduation Dahmer enrolled in Ohio State University but he stayed only one term before dropping out.

December 24, 1978: Lionel remarried.

December 29, 1978: Jeffrey was trained as an army medic and shipped of to Baumholder Germany. This happened not long after the Vietnam war, and morale and discipline was at an all time low within the armed forces at the time, and drug and alcohol abuse amongst the soldiers was rife.

Dahmer’s reputation changed once he joined the army, he was no longer known as a clown an a prankster, but as an aggressive drunk. 

(Interesting side note, after his arrest police actually looked into murders in the area were he was stationed to see if he was active while he was there, and there did appear to be a serial killer in Baumholder at the time, but it is not believed to be Jeffrey since it was young women being killed, and as far as is known, Jeffrey only killed men.)

1980′s

March 26, 1981: When Jeffreys drinking reached the level were he was no longer able to do his job, he was discharged from the army and sent back to the US. When he got back, he slept on the beach in Florida for a few months before returning to Ohio.

October 7, 1981: Dahmer was arrested for a drunk and disorderly and resisting arrest and paid a small fine. 

August 7, 1982: Dahmer was arrested again for another drunk and disorderly. He dropped his pants in public. By this point in his life Jeffrey had moved in with his grandma, who was apparently the only person in his family who actually showed Jeffrey any affection.

September 8, 1986: By this time, Jeffrey had gone off the rails, and was getting himself into trouble pretty often. He was arrested once again for exposing himself to a group of children in Milwaukee. There are two different accounts of what happened at that time, (he was either urinating or masturbating).

Dahmer was also now frequenting gay bars and bath houses often, and actually got himself banned from one bath house, for drugging at least 4 men. No official charges were filed against him, but one of his victims was hospitalised for about a week.

September 15, 1987: According to Jeffrey, he woke up in a hotel room to find the dead body of 24 year old Steven W. Tuomi. He transported the corpse to his grandmothers home in a large suitcase, disposing of the body pretty much as he had Steven Hicks.

Nine years passed between the murders of Hicks and Tuomi, which is pretty unusual for a serial killer to do. He spent years before this second murder working his way up to it, learning how to pick up men, how to drug them, and how much. We still don't know for sure whether or not Jeffrey actually remembers the murder or not. It is possible that he was just too drunk to remember, or that, like he had for earlier trauma, he repressed the memory. I personally find it like likely that the latter is true to be honest, as it seems strange to me that he would admit to all his other crimes and not this one. Also, Jeffrey would later say that he didn't actually enjoy the killings, and that there were a necessary evil in order for him to get the bodies.

January 1988: Jeffrey offered 14 year old James Doxtator some money if he agreed to pose nude for some photos. After James agreed Jeffrey took the teenager back to his grandmothers house. After raping James (Dahmer described it as sex but James was still a child so it was actually rape) Dahmer drugged and then strangled the boy. By now his method of disposal, acid and crushing bones was well practiced.

March 24, 1988: 25 year old Richard Guerrero also came back to Jeffreys grandmothers house, once again for nude photos, and once again after sex, he drugged and strangled the young man.

September 25, 1988: Jeffrey finally moved into his own place, which is where the pace of his crimes really picked up, since he no longer felt he needed to be careful, he once again had all the freedom that he wanted.

Once he moved in, he met a 13 year old boy, who was once again offered money to pose nude for him. Jeffrey drugged the boy sing coffee and fondled him, but luckily the young boy escaped.

January 1989: Jeffrey was arrested and this time charged with 2nd degree sexual assault and enticing a child for immoral purposes.

March 25: Dahmer met Anthony Sears, 24, at a club, and like he had previously he drugged and murdered him after sex. After Dahmers arrest, Sear’s skull was recovered from Dahmer’s apartment. He had painted the skull.

May 23rd: Jeffrey was sentenced to 5 years and three years, for his attack on that 13 year old boy, but he only served 10 months before he was out on a probationary period of 5 years.

1990

May 29: Dahmer met 33 year old Ricky Beeks at a club, and used his usual MO of bribing, drugging and strangling. However this time Jeffrey had sex after he was dead, instead of before. Once again, Jeffrey had painted the mans skull, which was recovered after his arrest.

June 1990: 28 year old Edward W Smith was killed in the same way as Dahmer's previous victims, but this time Dahmer did one thing different. Jeffrey took photos of the dismemberment process.

September 2: Something changed before the murder of 24 year old Ernest Miller, causing Jeffrey to be even more gruesome than he had been previously. Instead of drugging and strangling Ernest like he had his previous victims, he drugged him and cut his throat. Once again taking pictures of the body, Jeffrey dismembered the body, putting the biceps in the freezer, and once again painting his skull.

September 24: David C Thomas was the first time that Jeffrey killed somebody without sex being involved.  It is believed that David wanted to leave before having sex with Dahmer, since Dahmer was known to kill his victims in order to make sure that they couldn't leave.

1991

March 7: Curtis Straughter was 18 years old when he was murdered, with Jeffrey this time using a different sequence of events. Previously he had had sex with his victims then drugged and killed them, and at least once he had drugged and killed them and then had sex, but this time he drugged Curtis before raping and murdering him. It is likely that this change was due to the fact that Jeffreys last victim had wanted to leave prior to sex.

April 7: Errol Lindsey, 19, last seen alive. Dahmer met him on the street and offered him money to come home with him. He drugged Lindsey, strangled him and had sex with the body. The unpainted skull was recovered from Dahmer's apartment.          

May 17: 14 year old Konerak Sinthasomphone was pickes up by Dahmer outside of the mall, he went with Jeffrey under the promise of money for nude pictures. After drugging the boy Jeffrey apparently felt pretty comfortable, ince he left the home to go out for a beer. The boy managed to escape, naked, and the neighbours called the police. Somehow however Jeffrey managed to convince the police that responded that he and the teenager were simply lovers who had had a fight (I don't know how they could be so stupid, this is a drugged child and a 30 year old with a pretty lengthy criminal record, including the sexual assault of a minor?! Like how do you just let that be?!) and the police actually RETURNED the poor boy to the sick serial killer. Dahmer strangled the 14 year old as soon as the police were gone, had sex with the body and then took pictures like he had previously. Konerak’s skull was also recovered from the apartment. 

Once people actually discovered what had happened the officers involved received mild disciplinary action (which is nowhere near enough) and the department was sued.

May 24: Deaf and mute 31 year old Tony Hughes had reportedly known Dahmer for about 2 years when Dahmer, by writing on paper, offered the man $50 to come and pose nude for him. Hughes was drugged and murdered without sex. Once again Hughes skull was found in Jeffreys apartment.

June 30: Matt turner was killed by Jeffrey after a gay pride parade. After cutting the body up the head was put in the freezer and the rest was put into a barrel of acid.

July 6: 23 year old Jeremiah Weinberger travelled with Dahmer from Chicago to Milwaukee where he then stayed overnight. Like the previous cases, everything was fine until Jeremiah decided that he wanted to leave, at which point Dahmer drugged, killed and disposed of the young mans body. 

July 15: Jeffrey was fired from the Ambrosia Chocolate Co. for bad attendance. 

On this same day Oliver Lacy, 23, was killed by Dahmer. Jeffrey had sex with the body before dismembering it, at which point he put his head In the fridge and heart in the freezer “to eat later”.

July 16: Joseph Bradehoft, 25, met Jeffrey at a bus stop, where Dahmer offered him money to pose for nude pictures. After sex, Dahmer drugged him and strangled him with a strap. He dismembered the body and, as before, put the head in the freezer and the body in the acid barrel.

July 22, 1991: Shortly after midnight, Tracy Edwards, 32, escaped from Dahmer with one hand in a handcuff and flagged down a police car. He lead the cops back to Dahmer's apartment. They found photos of dismembered victims and body parts in the refrigerator and freezer. Shortly, the sight of crews in biohazard protection suits taking evidence out of Dahmer's apartment was televised all over the world. The suits were necessary because of the smell of decay in the apartment and because of the acid in the          barrel.

Caught red-handed, with overwhelming physical evidence against him, it's not surprising that Jeffrey confessed. His dry, unemotional descriptions of murdering a dozen and a half young men belied the reality of brutality and sadism that was revealed in Tracy Edwards' testimony.

It's possible that the sameness of the descriptions (Offers of money to pose, drugs to knock them out) was not entirely accurate. Tracy Edwards claimed he was not offered money, that he only went to Dahmer's apartment for some beers before going out again. He may have been covering up his own indiscretion, or Dahmer may have lied about the ways he lured people back to his         apartment in order to make them seem less like innocent victims.          

Edwards was drugged, but did not lose consciousness. This raises the possibility that the sedatives Dahmer gave victims were intended only to weaken them, while leaving them aware of what was being done to them. Dahmer had certainly had enough practice by then to have a good idea what dose was needed to knock a man out. Dahmer may have enjoyed taunting the victims about their fate and killing them, slowly, much more than he let on later.          

Dahmer also claimed that he needed to drink heavily in order to be able to face killing people, but we know that he was a hard-core alcoholic for much of his life. For him, making excuses for drinking was normal and can not be regarded as      likely to be honest.

1992

January 14: Dahmer entered a plea of guilty but insane in 15 of the 17 murders he claimed to have committed.

February 15: By 10-2 majority vote, a jury found Dahmer to be sane in each murder. Testimony from defense and prosecution experts took weeks and was extremely gruesome. One expert testified that Dahmer periodically removed body parts of his victims from the freezer and ate them. Another testified that this was a lie Dahmer told to make himself seem insane. The jury deliberated slightly more than ten hours.

February 17: Dahmer was sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms. At the sentencing, Dahmer read a prepared statement in which he expressed sorrow for the pain he had caused.

"I knew I was sick or evil or both. Now I believe I was sick. The doctors have told me about my sickness and now I have some peace. I know now how much harm I have caused. I tried to do the best I could after the arrest to make amends."

"I now know I will be in prison the rest of my life. I know that I will have to turn to God to help me get through each day. I should have stayed with God. I tried and failed and created a holocaust. Thank God there will be no more harm that I can do. I believe that only the Lord Jesus Christ can save me from my sins."

He later pled guilty to aggravated murder in Ohio, in the death of his first victim, Steven Hicks. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

November 28, 1994: Dahmer murdered in prison. Dahmer and two other inmates were assigned to clean the staff bathroom of the Columbia Correctional Institute gymnasium in Portage, Wisconsin. Guards left them alone to do their work for about twenty minutes, starting at around 7:50 a.m. When Dahmer was discovered, he was unconscious and his head and face were bloody. He died on the way to the hospital from multiple skull fractures and brain trauma.                  

A bloody broom handle was found near Dahmer, but a broom is probably not sturdy enough to inflict the damage that killed him. Reports in December indicated that he was struck with a steel bar stolen from the prison weight room.  

One of the other two inmates in the area with Dahmer was also attacked. Jesse Anderson, 37, was pronounced dead in the hospital at 10:04 a.m. on November 30. Anderson was convicted of stabbing and beating his wife to death in 1992. He was serving a life term.                        

The third inmate in the work party is twenty-five-year-old Christopher Scarver, a convicted murderer reportedly taking anti-psychotic medication. Scarver murdered a coworker when he was angry at his boss. The boss got away. Scarver claimed his boss was a racist and there has been speculation that Scarver, who is black, wanted revenge for the wrongs Dahmer and Anderson (both white) had done to black people. The majority of Dahmer's victims were black. Anderson tried to blame two fictitious black men for murdering his wife during a mugging. It's been pointed out that a desire for publicity or status may have also been a motive.                        

Dahmer was attacked the previous July, also. A convicted drug dealer tried to cut his throat with a razor blade attached to a toothbrush handle, making a crude straight razor, but the weapon fell apart. Dahmer, received minimal injuries.         

Scarver is said to have delusions that he is Christ. He has been in psychiatrict observation and treatment several times, with diagnoses of bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia. He was found guilty of the murder, though, and sent to prison. A jury apparently did not believe he was insane.

[fel-i-fod]

Welsh, Scottish, and Irish Writers

This isn’t a definitive list by the way, so please add names if you think I missed someone important (which I probably have).

WELSH WRITERS

Dannie Abse: poet, playwright and physician. A Doctor’s Register; Ghosts; Funland; Song For Pythagoras.

Gillian Clarke: poet, playwright and lecturer.  A Difficult Birth; The Sundial; Catrin.

Roald Dahl: author. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 1964; The Twits, 1980; Fantastic Mr Fox, 1970; Danny, Champion of the World, 1975; The Witches, 1983. (I’m not going to list every book he’s ever written so these are just my childhood favourites.)

Ken Follett: author - thriller and historical fiction. The Century Trilogy, 2010-14; Kingsbridge Series, 1989-2020.

George Herbert: poet and priest. The Altar; Easter Wings.

Cynan Jones: author. The Dig, 2014.

Diana Wynne Jones: Welsh-English author. Howl’s Moving Castle, 1986-2008; Dalemark, 1979-93; Chrestomanci novels and short stories, 1977-2006; Derkholm, 1998-2000.

Philip Pullman: Welsh-English author. His Dark Materials, 1995-2000; The Book of Dust, 2017-; Sally Lockhart, 1985-94.

Kate Roberts: author. Traed mewn Cyffion (Feet in Chains/Feet in Stocks), 1936; Te yn y Grug (Tea in the Heather), 1959.

Bernice Rubens: author. The Elected Member, 1969; Madame Sousatzka, 1962; A Solitary Grief, 1991.

Owen Sheers: poet, author, playwright and presenter. Farther; Y Gaer/The Hill Fort; The Dust Diaries, 2004; Resistance, 2007; The Green Hollow (”film-poem”), 2016.

Dylan Thomas: poet, author and scriptwriter. Do not go gentle into that good night; And death shall have no dominion; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, 1940; A Child’s Christmas In Wales, 1955; Under Milk Wood, 1954.

Gwyn Thomas: author, playwright, columnist, and broadcaster. All Things Betray Thee, 1949.

Sarah Waters: Welsh-English author. Tipping the Velvet, 1998. Fingersmith, 2002.

Hedd Wyn: poet. Yr Arwr; Rhyfel; Plant Trawsfynydd.

SCOTTISH WRITERS

Iain Banks (sometimes Iain M. Banks): author - mainstream and sci-fi. The Wasp Factory, 1984; Walking On Glass, 1985; Culture novels, 1985-2012 (can be read as standalones - I recommend Excession).

Robert Burns: poet. Auld Land Syne; To a Mouse; Scots Wha Hae; Tom o’ Shanter; O, Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast.

Arthur Conan Doyle: author, poet, playwright and physician. Sherlock Holmes stories.

Jenni Fagan: author and poet. The Panopticon, 2012; The Sunlight Pilgrims, 2016.

Janice Galloway: author and poet. The Trick is to Keep Breathing, 1989.

Alasdair Gray: author, artist, poet and playwright. Lanark, 1981; Poor Things, 1992.

James Kelman: author and playwright. How Late It Was, How Late, 1994; Greyhound For Breakfast, 1987.

Val McDermid: author - crime and thriller. Tony Hill and Carol Jordan, 1995-2019; A Place of Execution, 1999.

Denise Mina: crime and comic author and playwright. Conviction, 2019; Garnethill, 1998-2001; Paddy Meehan, 2005-07; John Constantine, Hellblazer, #216-228

Maggie O’Farrell: Irish-Scottish author. The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, 2007; After You’d Gone, 2000; I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death, 2017.

James Robertson: author and poet. The Testament of Gideon Mack, 2006; And the Land Lay Still, 2010.

Walter Scott: author, poet and playwright. The Lady of the Lake, 1810; Ivanhoe, 1820; The Bride of Lammermoor, 1819.

Ali Smith: author. How to Be Both, 2014; Seasonal 2017-20; There but for the, 2011.

Muriel Spark: author, poet and essayist. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1961; The Ballad of Peckham Rye, 1960; A Far Cry from Kensington, 1988.

Robert Louis Stevenson: author. Treasure Island, 1883; Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1886; Kidnapped, 1886.

Alan Warner: author. Morvern Callar, 1995.

Irvine Welsh: author and screenwriter. Trainspotting, 1993; Skagboys, 2012.

Louise Welsh: author - psychological thriller. The Cutting Room, 2002.

IRISH WRITERS

John Banville: author, critic and scriptwriter. The Sea, 2005; The Frames Trilogy, 1989-95.

Samuel Beckett: author, director, playwright, poet and translator. Waiting For Godot, 1954; Molloy, 1951; Malone Meurt, 1951;  L’innommable, 1953.

Maeve Binchy: author, playwright and columnist. Tara Road, 1998; Circle of Friends, 1990; A Week in Winter, 2012.

Elizabeth Bowen: author. The Last September, 1929; Eva Trout, 1968; The Death of the Heart, 1938.

John Boyne: author. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, 2006; The Heart’s Invisible Furies, 2017.

Emma Donoghue: Irish-Canadian author, playwright, screenwriter and literary historian. Room, 2010; Slammerkin, 2000.

Anne Enright: author. The Gathering, 2007; The Green Road, 2015.

Josephine Hart: author, producer and presenter. Damage, 1991.

Seamus Heaney: poet, playwright and translator. Digging; Strange Fruit; In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge; Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, 1999.

James Joyce: author, critic, poet and teacher. Ulysses, 1922; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916.

Molly Keane: author and playwright. Good Behaviour, 1981; Devoted Ladies, 1934; Time After Time, 1983.

C. S. Lewis: author. The Chronicles of Narnia, 1950-56.

Iris Murdoch: author and philosopher. Under the Net, 1954; The Sea, the Sea, 1978.

Edna O’Brien: author, poet and playwright. The Country Girls Trilogy, 1960-64; August is a Wicked Month, 1965; A Pagan Place, 1970.

Frank O’Connor: author. Guests of the Nation, 1931; My Oedipus Complex, 1952; The Majesty of Law, 1936.

Nuala O’Faolain: author, journalist, producer, critic and teacher. Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman, 2003; Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman, 1996.

Bram Stoker: author. Dracula, 1897.

Jonathan Swift: author, satirist, essayist, poet and cleric. Gulliver’s Travels, 1726; A Modest Proposal, 1729.

Oscar Wilde: author, poet and playwright. The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890; The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895.

W. B. Yeats: poet and playwright. The Lake Isle of Innisfree, 1890; Adam’s Curse, 1903; Easter 1916, 1916; The Second Coming, 1920; Cathleen Ní Houlihan, 1902.

[blues-sevenfold]

World Building: Body Swap Universe

This is another universe which is largely like ours. The point-of-divergence is late 1981 - in which the birth and survival of Zachary Baker (Zacky Vengeance from Avenged Sevenfold) splits this universe off from James Baker Dead Universe, James Baker Alive Universe, and Avenging Gaia Universe (the three universes to form the three key sliders groups).

This is the one universe in which The Rev from Avenged Sevenfold does pass away in late 2009, Brooks Wackerman joins the band in 2016, and Donald Trump is elected POTUS later that year.

A major event occurs on January 20th of 2017. About an hour before Donald Trump is to be sworn in as POTUS, he switches bodies with Jimmy Reed! This means Jimmy Reed now has to fumble his way through a major federal office that he never considered running for.

Shortly before the inauguration, Jimmy-as-Donald tries to call Rose Reed (who is both his mother and his daughter) to explain what happened.

Jimmy-as-Donald: Listen, honey, this may seem strange - but...

Rose Reed: *demands* Who is this?

Jimmy-as-Donald: I’m Jimmy Reed. I...

Rose Reed: *checking caller ID* I dunno what kind of sick joke you think you're playing, Donald Trump! I don't vote Republican, and I sure the hell didn't vote for *you*! Good bye! *hangs up*

While Jimmy-as-Donald is understanding of Rose’s reaction, he can’t help but feel lost and lonely. He decides to check his Twitter account, and sees that he has a lot of messages from fans hoping that he gets better soon. This prompts Jimmy to Google his own name, which alerts him to a news article detailing how Jimmy Reed is in a coma after being severely injured in a car crash. While this initially horrifies Jimmy, he comes to realize that... if he himself is in Donald Trump’s body... than Donald Trump must be in *his* body! Jimmy then sees the silver lining, as he realizes that Donald Trump can’t make trouble for him while he’s in a coma.

Barron, Tiffany, and even Melania come to like the new “Donald Trump” - while Donald Jr, Eric, and Ivanka not so much. Just a few days after his inauguration, “Donald Trump” gives a huge apology on national TV for “his” prior behaviour (from before the body swap). This is a turn-off to Trump’s main base (who liked Trump for his ruthlessness) - while those to his left, understandably, regard his apology with skepticism. Rose Rose is *especially* skeptical, considering that strange phone call that she got from “Donald Trump”.

Barron Trump definitely comes to appreciate this new affectionate and attentive version of his father:

Barron Trump: You used to spank me a lot, when I was younger.

"Donald Trump": *hugging Barron* Well, pumpkin, Daddy is very sorry about that. I dunno what I was thinking. I promise to be more loving to you, from now on.

In the months to come, “Donald Trump” manages to successfully get several decidedly progressive bills passed.

“Oh, great! We ended up as a RINO as POTUS!” is the common reaction from Trump’s former base.

~~~~~

Meanwhile, the body that Jimmy Reed has left behind is comatose for several weeks. Even Marlene and Malinda (Jimmy Reed’s aunts/daughters) come to visit him in the hospital. They get this nagging intuition that something is off, yet they can’t quite pinpoint it. Both have psionic abilities, although neither of them have psychokinesis (which doesn’t even exist in this universe).

After coming to, “Jimmy Reed” is amnesiac for the next few weeks. Much to the chagrin of his family and friends, “Jimmy Reed” has started acting outrageously rude and demanding - complete with using of foul language, which Jimmy Reed has never been too keen on.

“I understand that he has amnesia - but amnesia doesn’t usually result in a complete change of personality, does it?”

At one point, as “Jimmy Reed” and Rose are eating out, they catch “Donald Trump” on TV. When “Jimmy Reed” refers to “Donald Trump” as a “pansy” and a “wuss”, Rose is quite taken aback. While Rose is no fan of “Donald Trump”, those aren’t exactly the words she'd use to describe him - nor does she even see them as being major character flaws. And neither did Jimmy Reed himself!

Rose soon calls up Marlene and Malinda, hoping that they could pinpoint the cause of “Jimmy Reed’s” strange new behaviour. Both of them come over, and they can instinctively detect that it is *not* Jimmy Reed in that body! Rose then recalls that strange phone call from “Donald Trump”, followed soon by “Donald Trump’s” apology and sudden change of behaviour. The trio of women come to realize what happened. “Jimmy Reed” is Donald Trump, while “Donald Trump” is Jimmy Reed!

~~~~~

Rose is then quick to send Jimmy Reed an email message explaining that she, with the help of Marlene and Malinda, figured out what happened - hoping that Jimmy still checks for email messages.

Jimmy-as-Donald checks his email inbox, and he finds the message from Rose. He is relieved to find out the he is no longer alone, and that he now has three family members that know what happened.

However, there are a still issues of concern: Donald-as-Jimmy is still amnesiac, they have no idea how the switch occurred... and, even if they could figure out how to switch Jimmy Reed and Donald Trump back, they have the welfare of an entire country... and even the world... to consider!

It’s clear that Jimmy-as-Donald has made a lot of positive changes in national and international politics, since taking over. Sure, this might result in Donald Trump taking all the credit - once he is returned to his own body. However, it’s more important to consider the global effects of this event.

~~~~~

Eventually, “Jimmy Reed’s” amnesia goes away - in he does, in fact, remember being Donald Trump! He is horrified to realize that he is in the wrong body, and that he’s been out of commission for the past few month. As he reads up on what Jimmy-as-Donald has done during the past few month, he is torn between disgust and jealousy. He never cared about appeasing the “loony left”, which Jimmy-as-Donald has been quite successful in courting. Meanwhile, his former sycophants have turned their backs on them, not liking this new “beta cuck” version of “Donald Trump”.

Donald-as-Jimmy tried to call The White House, and is rejected by them. He then tries to call Donald Trump Jr, who laughs him off as a “nutcase that ought to be in the loony bin”. He deliberates over calling Melania Trump - but, after seeing public photos of Melania being happy with Jimmy-as-Donald, he decides against it.

Donald-as-Jimmy considers logging into his Twitter account - but he cannot, for the life on him, recall his password. Then he realizes that he might be able to log into Jimmy Reed’s online accounts - only to realize to Rose Reed managed to remove all his personal details from both his laptop and his mobile phone.

~~~~~

As the year 2017 comes to a close, Jimmy-as-Donald has a heated argument with Mike Pence... at the precise moment as Donald-as-Jimmy has a heated argument with Zacky Vengeance. Both arguments escalate to Mike and Zacky both shouting, “I don’t like the new you!” This results in Mike Pence and Zacky Vengeance switching places. It really doesn’t take Zacky-as-Mike long at all to figure out the sudden change of personality in both “Jimmy Reed” and “Donald Trump”. Zacky is happy to finally be reunited with his friend, even if it happens to be in a different body.

Likewise, it doesn’t take long at all for the other Avenged Sevenfold members to notice “Zacky Vengeance” acting very strangely. Even M Shadows, who was vocally a Republican about a decade ago, is dismayed with the sudden change of personality in the rhythm guitarist. Thankfully, the band has just released The Stage - but it seems that the subsequent tour might need to be called off.

Soon afterward... Rose, Marlene, and Malinda decide to explain to the other members of Avenged Sevenfold and the other members of The Jimmy Reed Band what happened - which comes as a relief to all of them.

The Jimmy Reed Band includes Brad Logan on bass and Russ Miller on drums, same as in Vampire Universe. Brad is the resident Democrat, while Russ is the resident Republican that never supported Donald Trump. In the place of Danny Taylor, Taylor Jackson is the rhythm guitarist. Taylor is half-black and half-white, and is the grandson of Eddie Taylor’s maternal cousin. Taylor has an identical twin brother named Edward (Eddie), who is a bit more interested in sports than in music... blues or otherwise.

~~~~~

During the years of 2018 and 2019, Jimmy-as-Donald and Zacky-as-Mike work as a team to continue to make improvements in the country... and the country’s relations with the rest of the world.

Come 2020, Jimmy-as-Donald opts not to run for re-election - as that might be disastrous if everyone switches back before the next term. Besides, many of what remains of the Republican Party aren’t exactly in line to support “Donald Trump” for another term - feeling betrayed by him.

Shortly after Super Tuesday, Jimmy-as-Donald makes some friends at the local hospital - who may even provide a key to switching everyone back. Two nine-year-old girls, Emily and Haven, are best friends. Emily is dying of cancer, and Haven can’t bear the thought of losing her. While Haven is perfectly healthy, it’s her mother that’s dying of cancer. Haven’s mother just cannot bear the idea of leaving behind her children to languish in foster care.

Emily’s mother is perfectly healthy, but is a couple months pregnant. Haven has two younger sisters, aged seven and five. Emily has one younger sister, aged six - and another sister on the way. The mothers arrange for Haven’s mother to enter the body of Emily’s mother, while Emily would enter the body of Haven. Both mothers are single, and Emily’s mother (with Haven’s mother inside her) plans to adopt Haven and her sisters. However, they are concerned about if it can be easily done. Jimmy-as-Donald promises to due his best to help.

Eventually, Haven’s mother enters the body of Emily’s mother - while Emily enters the body of Haven. And then Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Jimmy Reed, and Zacky Vengeance all get switched back. Also, the soul of Gena Paulhus is transferred to the body of Meaghan Doe - while a mutual friend (who was sick her whole life and is on the brink of death) of Gena and Meaghan enters the body that Gena Paulhus left behind. As the weeks go by, Gena/Meaghan help the mutual friend (Hannah) adjust to her new body and her new life.

The newly combined family comes to live with Jimmy Reed in Huntington Beach, California. The year ends with Jimmy Reed marrying the mother of Emily/Haven, with the girls all adopted a month later. Bernie Sanders is elected president. In early 2021, Jimmy Reed and Emily/Haven’s mother have another child. It takes a few weeks for the personalities of Emily/Haven and their mothers to combine. Upon adoption, Emily/Haven becomes Haven Emily Reed.

~~~~~

As for Donald-as-Jimmy and Mike-as-Zacky, they spent the past few years as reclusives - having no other real friends but each other. After realizing how lonely they felt, and they were unable to get away with the same behaviour as “Jimmy Reed” and “Zacky Vengeance” - both were forced to some major self-reflection, and realized that just maybe they should change their ways.

Both Avenged Sevenfold and The Jimmy Reed Band go on reunion tours in 2021 - but not with each other, as they perform two different styles of music. Jimmy Reed is able to use Skype every night to keep in touch with his new family.

~~~~~

ETA 3/21/20: Further ideas for Body Swap Universe.

Even before the whole body swap incident ever occurred - Jimmy Reed has publicly claimed, on several occasions, to be the reincarnation of his famous grandfather... thereby making it an interesting case of "I'm My Own Grandpa".

This, thereof, has the effect of the probably of reincarnation coming to public light, even though there are still many skeptics. So, upon seeing an abrupt change of personality in Donald Trump - and, later on, Mike Pence - the same community starts to consider the probability of transmigration... which is related to reincarnation, but doesn’t necessarily result in the transference of a soul leaving a dying body to re-enter that of a newborn baby.

After being in a coma for over a month, followed by amnesia, "Jimmy Reed" will need to use a wheelchair for about two years, followed by him using a walker for awhile. As such, this prevents Donald Trump from making trouble for Jimmy Reed. Being as he's a minor blues musician, rather than a huge rock star... or a larger-than-life Hollywood movie star... it'll be quite easy enough to keep "Jimmy Reed" out of the public limelight for the next few years.

It'll be a bit harder to keep "Zacky Vengeance" out of the public limelight - but there is the rest of Avenged Sevenfold to cover for him.

[dentelle-grise]

Your Latest Trick - Chapter 26

Long after everyone has stopped talking about Loki and his misdemeanors, his failed attempt to take over Midgard and his punishment, you meet him at a party.(Loki x Reader NSFW) -

First chapter here (can be read as a oneshot) All chapters to date at AO3 (66K, NC-17)

Tagging my rebloggers, commenters and other folk who asked. Please let me know if you want in (or out) of the list: @joanbushur, @frenchfrostpudding, @lovely-geek, @wolfsmom1, @sigridlaufeyson, @lokislonelylady, @monitoroutside, @daniissuchadani, @devilbat, @deadlydreamersecrets @helenisabel, @stardustandangelsfanfiction, @ely-seum, @wendyrobson1978, @the-ships-i-ship, @shemart101, @dreamourbrainout, @sadghostomg, @lokilover2000, @blobfishington, @lynneth1968-blog, @deaddecade, @nardo94, @tom-fucking-hiddleston-1981, @ashesandfire, @imagines-of-the-fandom​, @beingrandomisfun​, @tomsragnarok, @skulliebythesea, @bubbles8231999, @jesuisunthot

Chapter 26

The silence in the great hall makes a stark contrast from the bustle and merriment outside. The room does not have the same cold as on your last visit though,  at least there’s that. You look around for the mysterious casket, but there’s no sign of it. This is a different place now, a place of day. It’s still empty though. There’s really only you and Thor. For good or for ill… You follow his red-cloaked back down the long aisle toward the throne, half expecting him to seat himself there, finally. He doesn’t. Instead, he rounds on you, examining you with a look approaching distain. This is not the Thor of old - the friend you could jest with.

If you didn’t feel so confused at events and at his behaviour, you’d wish Thor the congratulations that the whole city is preparing for him and Jane.  But here he is alone, severe and terribly imposing. A single ray of light from a still untended gash high in a wall hits his pale hair just so, making him look every inch a deity.  Surely the news about Loki would have made him happy. If he’s had the news…

He doesn’t look happy. His expression is like a thundercloud. Rumoured wedding or no, something has displeased the god of Thunder and you strongly fear that it’s you. You’d forgotten how he could be. While Loki’s presence relies on his poise, force of personality and the intense mental energy he radiates, Thor is a physical entity.  His sheer size, regal allure and ceremonial dress make him all the more impressive.  You search in vain for the young man who was part of the gang way back when, or for traces of vulnerability he showed at Loki’s death. But no. You’ve no trouble, however, seeing in him a monarch with the same fear-inspiring demeanour as his father.

“It must end between you and Odin.”

So  that’s it. Thor believes the rumours too.

If you hadn’t just had the conversation with your mother then you would have no idea what he meant.  But now… You want to scream at the sheer ridiculousness of the idea. He’s made the same mistake as you mother but added an altogether different judgement.

So you’ll have to put him right, then get the hell out of here and find Loki.

“I’m not seeing your father. It’s nothing but a vicious rumour.”  And you let out an exasperated sigh. There’s something else that riles you too though you’ve sense enough to hold it back. What business is it of Thor’s to run his father’s life?

“My father  is…not himself at present from what I have heard,” With that Thor looks at you hard a second, or like he wants to stare imposingly but then his gaze skitters off, embarrassed or incredulous. At last some humanity.  But, intended or not, his words hit like an insult - no man in his right mind would court you.

Your anger boils up again, but you maintain your countenance. And say, flatly and slowly, but still trying to sound respectful.

“The King and I are not in a relationship.”

Then you remember the flowers again and banish the image furiously.

You wish with half of your heart that Odin would appear to confirm this.  With the other half you dread him arriving and the embarrassment of explaining it in front of him.

Has Thor even asked his father himself?  Somehow you doubt it. While Thor would counter his father in affairs of state, you can’t imagine them arguing on matters of the heart. No, Thor must just have heard the rumor and coupled with the fact that his father, still finding his feet after losing Frigga, is indeed behaving strangely, decided it was true.  

“Would that you speak the truth. It would be far simpler.” Thor shakes himself and there again is a shadow of his younger self; as though the sight of you conflicts with whatever he’s going to say. It’s this glimpse you hang onto. “Though I hate to question your word, the eyes of Heimdall always see true.”

Heimdall! Whose eyes do see true.  Who would surely not report such an untruth. And you feel a pang… Heimdall who found you once as a lost and wandering child, would not betray or lie.

Unless…

Unless he was tricked.  And at that idea all the warmth that there is gets sucked out of the room.

Because trickery is Loki’s signature.

You don’t know who to be more angry with. Thor for his accusations. Heimdall who you’ve always trusted.  Or Loki for playing a trick at your expense.

“It’s not true.” is all you can say. Your word against Heimdall’s is nothing.   You don’t want to appear as angry as you feel. It would be an insult to the King that you appear in any way repelled by the idea.  As mother so clearly implied, any woman of Asgard should be honoured by Odin’s suit.

“But that it were not. But I know my father is weakened, such that someone, in the pursuit of wealth and power…”

“What?” You’re shaking your head. “Have you asked him?” you keep your voice steady though you want to spit the words at him. Thor looks somewhat abashed.

“He sleeps still.” Then, before you can point out how this undermines his claim Thor adds. “You should not be putting my father under such stress.”

You flush hot, livid at his implication and burst out in anger

“What! I’m not. How dare you.” Then, more controlled but no less vicious,  “What do you mean?” You’re seething and Thor, rightly, lowers his eyes.

“Only that he’s trying to be a young man again.” he tries to backtrack, pitifully.

“He has protected the realm and prepared us to defend if we come again under attack”.  You picture Odin holding the sword that day at the training fields…the ambitious experiments…What Thor says is not altogether untrue. Even though it’s not what he meant.

“Exactly as I thought, this is why he sought a young woman–”

“That’s not the point.” You raise your voice.

“You will swear to leave my father in peace.”

“I haven’t touched your father.” You yell in exasperation, shaking slightly. “He strives to ready us should Malekith come again.”

Even in the midst of your fury, you realise your mistake, but it’s too late. Brought on by your anger and Thor’s  bullheadedness you said just said the wrong thing.  You couldn’t have known about Malekith, not unless someone had confided in you.  Someone like Odin.

There is no way Thor will believe you now.

But he merely looks confused.

“Malekith?! But of what nonsense do you speak.”

And the his face lightens and he actually smiles. Radiantly. You don’t understand.  What is there to smile about in that? Then you see he is not looking at you but over your shoulder.

“My lady Jane’s valiant band put paid to the tyrant.” He says, as loud as though he were addressing a crowd.

You look and there she is, the tiny Midgardian, a fully formed woman barely older than a babe in arms, dressed in Asgardians finery cut to her smaller foreign frame. The dress is broad skirted with a low bodice hugging her torso. Around her shoulders she wears a white gauze stole like a cloud. Thor has clearly not seen her dressed like this before because he cannot look away from her and you suddenly might as well have evaporated.  You notice the hand of your own seamstress on the garment, but such a detail is meaningless to you in the light of the danger and of Thor’s obliviousness. If only Asgard was once more become a place of peace where you worry about how many rows of pearls would look best.

Thor doesn’t know about Malekith.  How does Thor not know of Malekith, of the danger? While you panic silently,  the couple gaze at one another and Jane slowly approaches, a wide grin on her face, holding her skirts as though unaccustomed to how they move with her steps.

“I’m sorry, my lady Jane’s valiant research group.” Thor corrects himself with a chuckle. This is clearly a private joke between them. Your thoughts are in a whirl, but you sense that in the last instants, your importance for Thor has shrunk to indifference.

You foolishly revealed something you meant to hide, only to not have it taken seriously. You want to yell it at him now, to make him see sense, but he’s already shown you how much he’d listen.

You have to get out. Find out what’s really going on.

“This is…”He goes to make an introduction, then looks at you and there’s that distaste again. If only Thor stopped to think of the you he knows. But he doesn’t stop. What is he even going to introduce you as. You don’t want to hear it.

“Your humble servant.” you say quickly and bow before both of them. “You are right that I should not have a relationship with the King.” You add in a rush “I will speak with him at the first opportunity. Consider it over.”  You salute them as you would your sovereign then make to exit as fast as you politely can, not caring that you’ve all but admitted Thor was right.  

As you straighten up you glance at Jane Foster’s face, and see her eyes flare with an indignance you could almost believe is on your behalf.

Chapter 27

[guardmmorg]

Ssl duende plugins

Ssl duende plugins install#

Ssl duende plugins drivers#

Ssl duende plugins software#

Ssl duende plugins series#

In terms of their usefulness, you can be as surgical or as gentle as you like with the EQ section – E-series for hacking into stuff, and G-series for gentle sound shaping. These are emulations of the channel designs used to mix just about every pop tune since the 4000 E-series was released in 1981.

Ssl duende plugins series#

So what will Duende do for you? How does 32 channels of SSL E or G series EQ combined with compression sound? Mighty attractive if you ask me.

Ssl duende plugins software#

According to SSL, this wrapper technology is courtesy of FXPansion’s VST > RTAS software but you’d never know it, as it’s integrated within the Duende installer. The software installs AU and VST versions of the plug-ins with ‘wrapper’ software to access the plugs as RTAS devices.

Ssl duende plugins drivers#

Currently, support extends to OSX 10.4.4, with Windows drivers expected around early October this year. It’s also recommended that, if you are running a Firewire-based audio interface, you should employ a separate Firewire bus for the Duende unit – not just another Firewire port but a completely separate bus on a third-party PCIx/e card. However, I’d be confident betting this will be possible with future software revisions. Two Firewire ports account for the only connectivity to the box, which leads me to believe you could gang these units up, but, as things stand, there’s no provision for daisy-chaining multiple Duendes. The unit will run from bus power or using the supplied wall-wart adapter.

Ssl duende plugins install#

It’s a similar affair to TC Electronic’s PowerCore and Focusrite’s Liquid Mix – you simply connect the unit via a Firewire 400 cable, install the software and go for it. There’s not a lot to say about the front panel other than it has a power switch and the words ‘Solid State Logic’ on the right-hand side. The Duende unit is a single 19-inch rackmount device that hooks into your system via Firewire. The C-series is itself modelled upon SSL’s analogue designs, specifically the E- and G-series consoles, and who better to emulate SSL circuitry than the SSL technicians themselves… And it’s this legacy that brings about the guts of Duende the same algorithms and technology that make the C-Series such a favourite of the broadcast and production industry. So what is Duende? Well, simply put, it’s a Firewire-based DSP system sporting channel strips and mix bus compression from SSL’s C-series digital consoles. Now we have Duende, which brings the SSL within hovering distance of us groundlings. But, even then, the XLogic range is still out of reach of most. In fairness, SSL has gradually been addressing the needs of those of us who are less well heeled with the release of its AWS900 console (which is nonetheless still over six figures!) and to a greater extent its outboard offerings. SSL FOR MORTALSĪn external DSP-based processor initially seems a strange move for a company that traditionally specialises in large-format consoles. Duende is the very essence of musical creativity and a darn good (or completely bizarre – Ed!) name for some SSL console-style processing that will integrate snugly with your DAW. The Spanish poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, when delivering his ‘famous’ lecture: The Theory and Function of Duende, is quoted as saying: “Thus duende is a power and not a behaviour, it is a struggle and not a concept.” You’re no doubt getting the gist by now. The Random House Dictionary translates the meaning to be a goblin, a demon and a spirit, or alternatively, the human attributes of charm and magnetism – charisma if you will. With the word’s recent migration into the English vernacular, the New Oxford English Dictionary claims duende to be a ghost or an evil spirit while equally being inspiration, magic and ‘fire’. Apparently the concept of ‘duende’ (pronounced ‘do-en-day’), owes its etymology to the Spaniards, and symbolises the human force behind creativity, most especially the musical art form. Huh? Until I’d taken delivery of SSL’s first DSP offering, I had no idea either. They’ve planted themselves fairly and squarely in the centre of the marketplace with a product that is sure to set tongues wagging.ĭuende.

[aboutanancientenquiry]

Another review of the same book of Thomas Harrison on the ancient Greek Classics as source for the Persian Empire and the “New Achaemenid historians”

“Thomas Harrison, Writing Ancient Persia

The International Journal of Asian Studies, 2012

Takuji Abe

Writing Ancient Persia .

By Thomas Harrison. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2011. Pp. 190.

ISBN 10: 071563917X; 13: 9780715639177.

Reviewed by Takuji Abe, Kyoto Prefectural University

E-mail tabe@kpu.ac.jp

doi:10.1017/S1479591412000095

“Herodotus was the authority for Persian history,” Arnaldo Momigliano retrospectively mentioned, looking back at his youth. “It was a dogma that if you wanted to study Persian history you had to know Greek.” He went on to say, “Persian history is still in the hands of Herodotus.”1

Today, however, Herodotus is no longer the authority figure he was when Momigliano delivered his lecture in 1961/62. The study of Persian history, especially its association with Greek literature, was involved in a serious dispute in the 1980s, the age of post-colonialism. The Achaemenid History Workshop, which was organized in 1981, actively questioned the validity of Greek sources for Persian studies. Its initiator, Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg, published her ideas to that effect in the early volumes of the proceedings of the workshop’s conferences. The traditional picture of Persian history was, according to Sancisi-Weerdenburg, a one-sided or “Hellenocentric” image, due to its exceeding dependency on Greek historiography; it was full of clichés such as decadence, harem-life, luxury and intrigues. She urged us to “dehellenise and decolonialise” this “Europe-centered perception,” by laundering prejudiced Greek texts.2 Is this method, which is extremely sceptical and distrustful of Greek sources, nevertheless really useful for understanding Persian history? In his book, Thomas Harrison intends to critically examine this new approach, which has come into being over the last thirty years.

This essay consists of a preface (pp. 11 – 18) and six main chapters, of which the final one is the conclusion. The first chapter, “Against the Grain” (pp. 19 – 37), discusses the view of modern historians on Greek literature, the “grain”. Historians sometimes complain about Greek writers’ transmission of distorted information pertaining to the Persian Empire, and their ignorance of what modern historians are really interested in. Yet Harrison considers these statements of criticism as unreasonable; according to him, some Greek writers must have had better knowledge of the Persian Empire than modern historians give them credit for, and we would be well served by a closer reading of their sources. In front of the “grain” in the barren field of information, not to “harvest” that which does exist would be unprofitable for the further understanding of Persian history, he contends. 

Due to the scarcity of sources left for us, modern Persian historians have to fill in gaps by their acts of imagination. This means that a number of negative judgements of the Persian Empire can be easily converted into positive ones, not necessarily by the introduction of new evidence but by the “slightestrhetorical redirection”. For instance, Xerxes’ withdrawal from Greece after the sea battle of Salamis used to be characterized as a reckless “flight” before, but nowadays, some scholars describe it as a“strategic decision” from the perspective of the Persian Empire. The second chapter, “The Persian Version” (pp. 38 – 56), points out that this shifting of scholarly viewpoints and judgements shows the new emergence of  “Iranocentrism”, which takes the place of the “Hellenocentrism” that came before it.

“Family Fortune”, the third chapter (pp. 57 – 72), is focused on the behaviours of kings and queens in Greek literature. Greek writers, like all other writers, have a strong interest in those things which seem strange and therefore curious to them. They recorded events which may at first sight appear to be cruel executions and absurd activities on the part of kings, as well as apparent political interference and intrigues orchestrated by queens at the court, with the support of eunuchs. Modern Persian historians, who are usually sceptical of these kinds of Greek accounts, try to distill and rationalize them in a Near Eastern context, or go even further by dismissing them as fiction altogether. Harrison, in contrast, reminds us that Greek writers did not invent their accounts in the absence of any foundation; we need to distance ourselves from any extreme vision, by looking at Greek sources through a “dispassionate lens”. The discussion of this chapter is based on the author’s belief in Greek writers and their superior knowledge, which is a main subject of this essay. 

Previous scholars sometimes dealt with the Persian Kings as Oriental despots, but this image has now been altered into one of a tolerant and benign ruler; Cambyses and Xerxes in particular experienced a significant change in scholarly assessment. As Harrison mentioned already in the second chapter, the image of the Persian Empire is infected and coloured by what modern scholars want it to portray. In the fourth chapter, “Live and Let Live” (pp. 73 – 90), he points to the multiple aspects of the Persian Kings –  they sometimes rule their subjects fiercely, and at other times treat them gen-erously; which aspect takes precedence is contingent on the viewpoints of modern historians.

The fifth chapter, “Terra Incognita ” (pp. 91 – 108), which stands slightly apart from the preceding chapters, explores the reports and writings of nineteenth-century British travellers and historians.The scholars of the Achaemenid History Workshops severely criticized their intellectual predecessors, and thus emphasized their originality in the field. Directly contradicting this notion, Harrison successfully found forerunners of the Achaemenid History Workshops in descriptions more than a century old. Some of the writers in this period already held views from the perspectiveof the Persian Empire and identified with them, although they could not be completely free from their British imperial context. In Harrison’s opinion, the approach of the Achaemenid History Workshops was not as novel as they claimed.

In the final chapter, “Concluding Hostilities” (pp. 109 – 27), Harrison reviews the discussion so far, and comments on the influence of Edward Said’s Orientalism  (1978) on the study of Persian history. Said attributed the first example of Orientalism to Aeschylus’ Persae, which preceded Herodotus’ Histories  by some forty years, thus showing that Greek writers were responsible for its inception. Harrison asserts that after Said, Greek sources on Persia were mechanically characterized as biased, and as a result, students of Persian history were required to avoid excavating this rich mine of information. Here, Harrison repeats the topic of his book that Greek writers understood Persia more properly than modern scholars presume, and therefore we should pursue a more detailed investigation of Greek accounts and a more sympathetic engagement with them in their original contexts.

This book can be said, in a word, to propose a “post-post-colonial” theory for the study of Persian history. This refers to how we can break away from the dominant pejorative view on Greek sources, not “from the dominant Hellenocentric view”.3 The next step to take is of course how each of us can draw a new picture of Persian history, by exploiting Greek sources in all respects as Harrison suggests.

Lastly, I would like to make a small addition by stating that, although Said’s Orientalism had a great influence on the distrust of Greek sources and restraint from using them, their limitations were already recognized before Said. For instance, Chester Starr states in his article in Iranica Antiqua, published two years before Orientalism , “In ancient history we are accustomed to look at events from thevantage point of Rome or Athens . . . Our histories are so deeply impressed by a Hellenic stamp that even careful scholars are not aware of the distortions which they introduce.”4 In her Dutch article in1979, Sancisi-Weerdenburg also questioned whether it was possible to reconstruct Persian history from Greek sources, without referring to Orientalism  (I suspect that she had not yet been introduced to it).5 The new approach to Persian history was never derived from outside the discipline, but emerged spontaneously from within. This might have been the result of the intensive investigation and exploitation of Greek sources at that moment in time, which is what Harrison suggests is something we should now continue with.

1 Arnaldo Momigliano, “Persian Historiography, Greek Historiography and Jewish Historiography,” in ArnaldoMomigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography , Sather Classical Lectures Vol. 45, pp. 5 – 28 (at5 – 6). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

2 Especially, Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg, “The Fifth Oriental Monarch and Hellenocentrism: Cyropaedia  VIIIviii and Its Influence,” in Achaemenid History  Vol. 2, pp. 117 – 31, at 131 (Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor hetNabije Oosten, 1987).

3 Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg, “Introduction,” in Achaemenid History  Vol. 1, pp. xi – xiv, at xiii (Leiden:Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1987).

4 Chester G. Starr. “Greeks and Persians in the Fourth Century B.C.: A Study in Cultural Contacts before Alexander: Part 1.” Iranica Antiqua  11 (1976), pp. 39 – 99 (at 41).

5 Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg. “Meden en Perzen: op het breukvlak tussen Archeologie en Geschiedenis.” Lampas  12 (1979), pp. 208 – 222.

Source: https://www.academia.edu/29513969/Thomas_Harrison_Writing_Ancient_Persia

Takuji Abe is Associate Professor, Department of Historical Studies, Faculty of Letters, Kyoto Prefectural University

[thehauntologicalsociety]

The body is under threat in the city—The cinema is under threat in the city—The digital city is antipathetic to both ...

1.

In early 2016 I was standing in the ballroom of the Duke of Cornwall Hotel in Plymouth (UK), chatting with a kilted Dee Heddon, co-founder with Misha Myers of The Walking Library (see Heddon & Myers 2014), and waiting for a performance of a scabrous Pearl Williams routine by Roberta Mock, author of a key account of walking arts (2009, 7-23). Conversation drifted to films and Dee wondered what kind of resource for wandering a passion for movies might offer.

It was an appropriate space for Dee’s question. The ballroom is on the ground floor of the hotel, which rises to an impressive tower topped by a single room. It was to this room that Roberta’s partner, Paul, and I had gained access on a ‘vertigo walk’ some years previously. We had walked from Paul’s childhood home town of Saltash on the other side of the Hamoaze, a stretch of the River Tamar, into Plymouth. This involved us crossing high above the river gorge on the 1961 road bridge. Although he had crossed this bridge many hundreds of times by car and bus, Paul, susceptible to vertigo like myself, had never walked it before.

Having successfully negotiated the bridge, we sought out all the highest points in the city that we could access. The manager of the Duke of Cornwall led us up winding stairs and opened the room in the tower for us. A telescope stood at a window; above the bed (and this was after 9/11) hung a framed photograph of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. I might have thought of ‘Wolfen’ (1981), or the anachronistic underwater shot of the twin towers in Tim Burton’s 2001 ‘Planet of the Apes’, or ‘Man on Wire’ (2008) even, but the opening scene of Fulci’s ‘Zombi 2’/Zombie Flesh Eaters’ (1979) was how I immediately cross-referenced through film what I was feeling on coming into the room; to be precise, the moment when the music reaches its climax not for the monster, but for the Manhattan skyline. Flying in the face of Ivan Chtcheglov’s assertion that “[W]e are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun”, in Fulci’s movie solar rays spill from behind the twin towers, just as they have from behind the zombie cadaver. The two monoliths cancel each other out and the movie almost stalls before it can begin; landscape and body equally ruinous.

2.

I want to propose that by systematically drawing on such associations – of the ambience, shape or narrative of particular places with memories of movies – the effectiveness of a certain kind of political and critical walking can be enhanced. Ironically, this walking springs from the dérive of the Lettrists/situationists who, subsequent to their exploratory walking, developed a theory of the ‘Society of the Spectacle’, a deeply negative attitude to the predominance of the visual, and produced anti-art and anti-cinema works like ‘Hurlements En Favour De Sade’  (1952) in which the screen throughout is blank, either dazzling white or dark. While what follows skirts a narrow adherence to the asceticism of later situationist theory, drawing upon the Lettrist/situationist experimentation with art processes recovered in more recent publications such as McKenzie Wark’s trilogy (2008, 2011, 2103), it also implements the orthodox situationist technique of détournement, hacking up and depredating the movies drawn upon and redeploying their images, themes and narratives in ways that are often aggressively at odds with their makers’ intentions.  

3.

The body is under threat in the city. The cinema is under threat in the city. The digital city is antipathetic to both. The cinema offers the urban walker a chance to return as an immanent and imaginative body to the city.

Stephen Barber, in considering the turbulent confluence of body, performance, film and digital screens, makes this damning assessment of the contemporary city: “[T]he city’s surface, as a scoured and excoriated environment.... precludes and voids the eruption of performance acts.... forming an exposed medium that is already maximally occupied with such visual Spectacles as digital image-screens transmitting corporate animations, along with saturated icons, insignia and hoardings.... surface has no space for the corporeal infiltration of performance, unless that performance is commissioned.... to fully serve corporate agendas” (2104, 89). Barber’s portrait of urban surface is extreme, but it explains the absurd policing of image-making and the suppression of the most innocuous of non-retail behaviours by mall security guards, the tendency, akin to conspiracy, among consumers to mistake advertising logos for ornament and the strange brutalist sculptural contraptions placed to inconvenience rough sleepers.

When the screen was digitised, the Society of the Spectacle became architectural. A new intensity to the integration of the Spectacle (Debord 1998, 8), beyond and subsuming free market and authoritarian manipulation, now commits it to an invasive, algorithmic pursuit of the preferences of the online majority. An authoritarian redesign of the city, complementing the ‘nudge units’ of its happiness industry, is under way; engineered to encourage the preferences that the Spectacle prefers. This new city space wraps free market around free interiority; then, by scandal-dramaturgy and pseudo-spirituality, it demands a confessional revealing of all things to the Spectacle’s algorithms.

Against such tides, I want to propose a means of ambulant, contemplative and corporeal resistance, drawing upon the anachronisms of the cinema screen, on an unsentimental deployment of our memories of movies, and on our walking bodies. I want to propose that we, walking artists, pedestrians, anyone who will listen, should perform our walking; as a matter not of life and death, but as part of the struggle between vivacity and morbidity; in resistance to a society that seeks to exploit not just our labour, but our entire lives. We should “perform” our walking because in this mode it is “integrally concerned with survival.... not necessarily its [performance’s] own survival as a medium.... but always of the body, and of the inhabitable spaces of corporeality in the digital world” (Barber, 2014, 211). Such talk of survival signals just how antagonist circumstances are for the immersive walker, repeatedly prodded for digital access or visual seduction. The luxury, once, of distinguishing between the heightened and super-sensitised walk of the derive or flânerie or whatever we want to call it and the humdrum everyday shopping trip or walk to the call centre has increasingly withered; the new city centre surface is an intense, demanding and closely woven battleground. Where, before, an exulting in finding the accidental poetry of damaged signs, long-abandoned esoteric communications or dust from Mars all constituted a little taking back of the surplus joy and ecstasy extracted from their production on the part of the sensitised walker, the digital city changes that relation. Now we are not only consumers, but the unpaid producers of what we pay to consume – our reflections on or images of the pleasures of our latest ‘drift’ are turned through the alchemy of social media into instantly scalable and exploitable product – and the deficit is already so wide that being able to perform a heightened journey through the city is no longer about bonus additions to the pleasures of everyday life, but about the survival of our subjectivities and of the meaningfulness of our agency.

I am not suggesting that cinema is a unique resource; nor that the films cited below could not be replaced by better ones, nor that a subjective choice of films by any walker is not more important than an argument over the objective worth of any one film over another. There may be similar resources to be found in obscure branches of religious iconography, in literature or philosophy, in gaming or in folk traditions. What makes film such a valuable resource is its availability in multiple forms, its formal self-entanglements, its susceptibility to a spectatorial-edit and the historical architecture of its projection: that large, off-white and flawed screen. Carrying a memory of that fragile means of crude reflection, mediating the plethora of images in your hoard of movie memories, constitutes a ‘screenplay’ by which to act the streets and perform your own trajectory through them; preserving by enacting your memories and subjectivity, without revealing anything to either security guard or digital algorithm; walking discreetly with morphing hallucinations, learning to look through multiple eyes and settling, eventually, on long shots and gentle pans.

To make my argument for a cine-dérive, I will reference a number of movies and a few key concepts: unitary urbanism, actuality, ‘anywhere’, doubleness, the released or floating eye, separation, landscapity, effacement and totality.                              

4.

In 2008 at the Vue in Exeter I attended a midnight showing of ‘The Mist’, directed by Frank Darabont and based upon a Stephen King story. Those of us present were considered questionable enough to be repeatedly monitored by an anxious cinema manager; standing to the side of the screen. The movie’s paranoid narrative was thus enhanced. Halfway through the screening, the imagery of the genre movie was loosened; at a moment when the screen itself suddenly re-appeared from behind the movie as a blank.  

The eponymous miasma of ‘The Mist’ makes its appearance early on in the movie and hangs around until just before the final credits. It seems to watch the movie’s characters; just as, that night, the manager was watching us. At one point the camera drifts, as if it is the viewpoint of the mist itself, across a glass storefront behind which fugitives from the mist’s deadly inhabitants are sheltering. A miasma looking through transparency! When a handful of the survivors briefly leave the store, the moment occurs: the characters (in search of medicine in a neighbouring building) disappear into the mist. For a few seconds there is only whiteness on the screen; indeed, there is nothing on the screen! The screen itself emerges from behind the colour reflections of the projection, reaching through the image directly to the cinema-goer. Of course, this effect does not occur for anyone watching a streamed or dvd version, but in the cinema, at the moment of stripping away, the film enters itself, becomes its own subject, the confined melodrama of the besieged store falls away: cars, road signs and even a freeway appear like sketched line drawings, almost not there at all. A beast of extraordinary scale appears and looms, indifferent, a mass of extraneous claws; a gigantic Spectacle just passing through.

There is something Deleuzian about this screen landscape, a kind of ‘anywhere, anytime’ where “a collection of locations and positions which coexist independently of the temporal…. moves from one part to the other, independently of the connections and orientations which the vanished characters and situations gave to them” (Deleuze, 2005: 123). This space – or rather the making of this space from representations of place (the cinema’s counter-digital alchemy) – subverts, within an un-subversive film, cinema’s privileging of “the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world” (Mulvey, 1993: 114-115), effacing what Delueze calls “landscapity”, the characterisation of the landscape as face-like, replacing it with a barely tangible, elusive, ideal and unscalable space that resists reproduction. From this negation emerges a screen that is more like a translucent membrane or a cloud of dust than a reflecting and re-presenting mirror.  

5.

Landscape is rarely filmed without the representation of human form, character or mind. This is partly a residue of the romanticist practice of ‘pathetic fallacy’ and of the correlationist tendency in phenomenology; the idea that objects have influence, not as a result of the properties inherent in them, but as a result of those imagined for them. In an ‘experimental’ film like Nina Danino’s ‘Temenos’ (1998), consisting almost exclusively of long shots of sites associated with apparitions of the Virgin Mary, or critical films like Patrick Keiller’s ‘Robinson’ trilogy (1994, 1997, 2010), of which Iain Sinclair writes “(M)ovement becomes a function of voice” (25), or a mainstream mystery-movie like M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘The Happening’ (2008) in which landscape and climate are granted autonomous agency, it is still the human discourses about these landscapes – through consecration, narration or fear – that predominate. The vibrancy of objects, as vividly expressed by neo-vitalists or Object-Oriented Ontologists, only very occasionally permeates cinema.    

A rare exception is the brief fūkeiron (landscape theory) movement in Japan. Its seminal movie, ‘AKA Serial Killer’ (Ryakushô renzoku shasatsuma, 1969), the work of a number of filmmakers including Adachi and Matsuda Masao, consists entirely of a series of fixed shots, with (mostly lateral) pans, of locations in Japanese cities: pedestrians come and go, trains arrive and leave, alleyways and jazz clubs are deserted. An intermittent voiceover describes the rationale for these shots: they follow the life trajectory of teenager Nagayama Norio who in 1968 murdered four people in a chaotic crime spree. The sequence of shots tracks Nagayama’s rootless wandering across Japan after leaving his rural home.

The movie rejects not only the sensationalism of the Japanese media coverage of Nagayama’s case, but also the ‘rapid fire’ editing and frantic scenes characteristic of contemporary militant Japanese counter-cultural documentaries. ‘AKA Serial Killer’ was filmed at a time of violent student uprisings, with which the film makers were in general sympathy, and it is against images of the violent clashes between thousands of riot police and armed and helmeted students that the film was expected to be ‘read’. By adopting a method similar to the ‘actuality’ films of the very early pre-dramatic cinema, Adachi and Matsuda seek to shift an attention already attuned to violence to find it within the repetitions, circulations and orderings of un-dramatic urban goings-on; in the “mechanisms of control and governance built into the everyday environment.... which operates through subtle, noncoercive, and economic forms of policing and managing the urban population”. What the movie shows is “[W]hat remains in place after the departure of the student protestors and riot police.... the ubiquitous presence of the state” (Furuhata, 118, 138).  

The calm, but critical viewing that ‘AKA Serial Killer’ solicits, by playing a simple, sparse and spectral documentary narrative across the relentless flows of homogenous, economic cities, encourages the viewer (and dériviste) to learn to be static in the city, to be in a state of ‘static drift’, to allow the streets to pan slowly by, to ignore the blurs of what passes close up and focus on what is ‘background’ and that is, for once, the main performer. This calm and stable viewpoint pre-empts the cool and indifferent gaze of the fixed video surveillance cameras that makes geographical and dreadful the blighted town of Santa Mira in ‘Halloween III’ (1982), and haunts the characters of Michael Haneke’s ‘Hidden’/’Caché’ (2005) with a shared memory of violence.  

Matsuda Masao remarks that when the film makers were considering Nagayama’s story “we became conscious of the landscape as the antagonistic ‘power’ itself”. Inverting Walter Benjamin’s description of an early Parisian photographer representing landscapes as if they were the deserted scenes of crimes, they “filmed crime scenes just like landscape [photographs]” (Furuhata, 135, 134); thus making viewers detectives in the city, but turning around (détourning) the usual function of a detective and redeploying their forensic skills to examining a suspect state’s undemonstrative coercion. By shifting focus from the state’s human agents (riot police, etc.) the portrayal of the state is rendered hyper-materialist; not a human ordering of neutral and inert materials but the order of certain materials imposed (or adopted) on the humans – “to grasp oil as a lube is to grasp earth as a body of different narrations being moved forward by oil” (Negarestani, 19) – by which the state becomes landscape.

By drawing on a memory of such restrained filming of ‘backgrounds’ as agents, a critical walking becomes more possible. The walker becomes the camera, not simply walking in response to the terrain, but with a particular, cinematic discipline of looking; in this case, one that detaches itself from the narrative-of-the-walk that is often generated by exploratory and hyper-sensitised walking. For radical walkers, this means that rather than seeking out spaces and relations where social violence becomes explicit, spectacular and reproductive, they can watch for the behaviours of materials that organise violence in an undemonstrative way, where relations can be disrupted or diverted by the gentler means of installation, sabotage, détournement and re-telling.        

In Nagisa Ôshima’s ‘The Man Who Left His Will On Film’ (1970), fūkeiron filmmaking is criticised by student radicals as “morally and politically bankrupt.... wast[ing] film by shooting mundane settings that could be filmed ‘anywhere, anytime’” (Furuhata, 131). It is exactly that ‘anywhere, anytime’ (Wrights & Sites, 110) that is the radical contradiction of the urban landscape portrayed in ‘AKA Serial Killer’; the violence of homogenisation and the circulation of goods creates a slipperiness and connectedness that can be turned to particularities that resist the flow of the state’s ordering and distribute different contagions, constructing situations at odds with the violence of the mundane.    

6.

Landscapes in movies very different to ‘AKA Serial Killer’ achieve a similar naive ‘actuality’, a non-dramatic coolness, that makes them susceptible to, even welcoming of, their appropriation as part of a walker’s memory hoard: the deserts of Werner Herzog’s ‘Fata Morgana’ (1971), the eventless landscapes of Chantal Akerman’s ‘News From Home’ (1976), ‘the Zone’ in Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’ (1979), the fragments of a ruined English park in ‘The Pleasure Garden’ (1952), the swimming pools of the Connecticut suburban rich in ‘The Swimmer’ (1968) or the route in ‘Yellowbrickroad’ (2010): “you think that the trail will understand you, and that’s the worst part, it does”.

By assembling a memory-library of movie sequences or images, the walker can slip between different modes of looking in the same walk, spontaneously and in response to a changing terrain (triggering a different movie memory) or in a planned way that attempts to triangulate a terrain through a range of different lookings and the (potentially) different kinds of information that they detect. ‘Useful’ sequences, suitable for retaining in such a memory-library, are not necessarily restricted to serious, political or art movies. In the past I have drawn on, even at times favoured, fantasy and genre movies, enjoying how work derided as ‘hack’, ‘commercial’, ‘too violent’ or ‘artless’ sometimes peels, embroiders and embrocates the spaces I walk. The point of the memory’s leverage on the real landscape may be some visual similarity, or an association of ambiences, or even where the terrain or events in it have been shaped in response to movies.

I have often drawn on movies that divulge certain patterns at odds with their movie’s intentions, which then fold back on their image systems in accidental critiques; for example, the psychopath test in ‘The Parallax View’ (1974) which implicates both conspiracy and whistleblower, or the discovery/destruction of the underground murals in ‘Roma’ (1972) that throws in doubt the efficacy of Fellini’s luxuriating imagery. As means to the magical-in-the-ordinary, such excerpts can be reliable allies for a radical walker, standing in for utopias in the face of “our incapacity to imagine the future” (Jameson, 1984, 247). They are useful kit for filling newly found holey space; for making interventions against inbuilt systems of dismantlement.

All this could have been applied at any time since moving pictures became one of the forms of mass media; however, what I am proposing here is that, for the first time since then, the ‘grounds’ have changed, the same for psychogeographers and radical walkers as for everyone else. What is newly at stake in the digital city is our subjectivity; not in the sense of our individuality, but of our interiority out of public view. It will be harder to be playful; from now on the cine-dériviste may find her archive is bombarded with uninvited totalities along with the brief sequences she has personally snatched from the genre pool which, if she discloses them, will form the basis for the algorithms’ future bombardments.

With that proviso in mind, I turn to Joe Chappelle’s monster-horror ‘Phantoms’ (1998). In its opening sequence two sisters are negotiating space in a car-bound dialogue; by talking out one family melodrama they make room for another, metaphysical, one. The camera, also released, moves outside the car to establish the limits of a Colorado town and when it returns to the car it now looks out, lingering on the frontages of suburban houses in a pre-digital town as if they were the faces of human characters; the ghosts of the soap-opera narrative we never get to see.

Distinct from the movie male who constitutes “a figure in a landscape” (Mulvey, 1981, 210), in ‘Phantoms’ the doubleness of the central female characters is a quality both of and dividing the two women. This provokes a negation-reflection within the material of the landscape; the houses assume the iconic face in close-up, an oppressive ‘landscapity’, face-like features of the landscape that exist in a perpetual moment (mediatised, stale, self-reflecting and immaterial), less and less able to “adroitly negotiate[s] and enforce[s] its own mass within the image” (Barber, 2002, 20). This becomes more explicit, through another doubleness, in Tom Holland’s Stephen King TV movie adaptation ‘The Langoliers’ (1995), where a young girl intuits and a male ‘mystery writer’ explains their fellow characters’ predicament, awaking on an airborne plane to find that all the crew and most of the passengers have disappeared and that they are travelling in a space stuck a few moments before the present in an inert past: “what is happening to [us] is happening to no one else”. Such radical separateness is characteristic of dramatic film in general; but this is a very average movie which, by making the structural conditions of its own discourse the subject of itself, becomes collectable in parts, particularly its geography of the very recent past. This includes a deserted and echo-less airport, the untimely fading of daylight, and the wholly unpopulated world below their flight. This is a terrain that aches with loss, like the landscape of a Makoto Shinkai animation; it effaces “landscapity” and generates objects and ‘grounds’ that are blank, screen-like, collapsible and radically isolated. Despite its clumsiness, ‘The Langoliers’ makes explicit the feint of many movies: revealing that its action has been happening, in a real illusion, just a few moments back in its own past, but now, in its final reel, is returning to where it always was and will always be. It reproduces Marc Augé’s non-places – airport terminals, institutional boardrooms, airliner interiors – as spaces of political repetition, of a perpetual present and the eradication of the deep, historical past, for the reproduction of present relations; a double effacing in a “contemporary social system… (which has) begun to.... live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions’ (Jameson, 1997, 205).

‘The Langoliers’ evokes a society that has begun to cohabit with the images and representations of itself, recycling the present as a repeatable moment, already just a short while in its past, represented as soon as lived. Its tendency to auto-destruction ushers in a “sheer description” (Jameson, 1988: 95) without visage; and, for a while at least, all that remains in ‘The Langoliers’ is an airborne dérive without a destination, a plane in flight above a world without airports whose surface is being visibly eaten up by its own past.

To plunder such images and such a precarious trajectory, often from “the proliferating corporate zones of Europe’s multiplex complexes, [where] the would-be spectator finds everything except the traces of film” (Barber, 2002, 158) – from the groundless flights of fantasies and super heroes – and from tinier and tinier often handheld screens, is to sometimes float precariously in search of any central urban surface onto which to cling. However, by walking with a memory of ‘The Langoliers’, or of similar landscape-effacing movies, from ‘The Truman Show’ (1998) to ‘The Final Girls’ (2015), it becomes possible to map contradictions within the economy of the Spectacle: specifically, the small folds and hiatuses that are opened up by its relentless pursuit of our subjectivities, within which we can hide our subjective life from that pursuit. Similarly, at a bigger scale, the combination of the fragmentation and appropriation of appearance and the gentrification of Spectacle-resistant areas is now pushing psychogeographers, and all those in search of an ambient city, to the margins, in the literal sense of suburbia and the edgelands. From the inner city of ‘Lights Out For The Territory’ [1997] the trajectories shift to the outer limits of ‘London Orbital’ [2003]), or in the case of Fife Geography Collective’s superb collection of dérive accounts ‘From Hill to Sea’ (2016) the journey is even further afield. This suggests that radical walkers now require a kind of binocular vision (one familiar from these movies which reveal that theirs is a doubled world) in order to simultaneously navigate across to physical margins while seeking havens for interiority within the detail and texture of their immediate terrain.        

7.

In 1938, H. G. Wells proposed a ‘World Brain’, a library with branches in every community across the globe, stocked with a core canon of books chosen by international committees, “knitting all the intellectual workers of the world through a common interest and a common medium of expression into a more and more conscious co-operating unity” (23).  Some have claimed that this was the ‘first Internet’. However, the ‘web’ has been far more of a diversifying and fragmenting force than intended by Wells. Cinema, limited by costs, its collaborative technology, the experiential primacy of projection and a monopolised industrial structure, can still offer a ‘World Terrain’ of sorts; an accessible and exchangeable (look at the explosion of fan and lay critical writing!) canon of landscape images that is striated by exclusions, translations and the wounding centralisations of focus and rapid-fire puncta.  

The constitution of such a canon of landscapes is always far from purely aesthetic. To pluck one counter-example, arbitrarily: in 1950s England, local authorities lobbied to be placed “on a waiting list for the honour of having their buildings and monuments modelled for film destruction” in a wave of sci-fi and horror movies that re-enacted, fantastically, the precarity of the Blitz for an audience barely old enough to remember it (Conrich, 88). Nor are these landscapes in any way neutral or universal; the integrity of the body of the viewer is as much in play in them as the fabric of their fictions. These are mostly male and often violent landscapes. Innumerable movies propose ways for how the viewer/walker might take themselves apart in order to take the movies apart; from the use of double exposures in early cinema, influenced by ‘spirit photography’, through the surgery of ‘Les Yeux Sans Visage’ (1960), the eruptive and steely objectification of the ‘Tetsuo’ movies (1989, 1992, 2009) and the jouissant mutilations of ‘Hellraiser’ (1987), the bodies of those keen, or forced, to experience materiality are regularly dispersed to the landscape, their corporeal materials escaping from their container, to combine trangressively and ‘miscegenously’ with inorganic vibrancies. All these are fictions that the walker can archive and re-deploy in order that their own gaps entangle with the ‘voids’ – “empty corridors that penetrate the consolidated city, appearing with the extraneous character of a nomadic city living inside the sedentary city” (Careri, 188) – of the material landscapes.

In Higuchinsky’s ‘Uzumaki’ (2000) the nomadic eye is released; previously opened with a razor in ‘Un Chien Andalou’ (1929), with scissors in ‘Spellbound’ (1945), and dilated by hypnotism in ‘Herz Aus Glas’/’Heart of Glass’ (1976). In ‘Uzumaki’, it peers vividly through a broken windscreen, popped from its socket, until, by a sudden, stuttering, stabbing  zoom, as if the camera is exaggeratedly reaching out for information like the sensory organs in James J. Gibson’s theory of perceptual systems (1983), it dominates the screen.

Metaphorically released from its organism in this way, the eye is free to roam, moving between a satellite-seeing, where space, viewed from above, is defined by trajectories, and a zooming descent into super-detail through “layered surfaces that successively cover over one another” including an “outer wrapping (that) is none other than the human mind and its products” (Ingold, 1993: 37). The model for the dériviste’s hybridisation of these lookings (“to see the world from multiple viewpoints at any one time” [Smith, 113]) is right there in the modern movie camera’s capacities to pan and zoom – sometimes simultaneously, as famously in ‘Vertigo’ (1958) and ‘Jaws’ (1975) – and then by cranes and drones to fly out of situations or plunge down into them; so nurse Ana Clark’s accelerating trajectory through the rabid Milwaukee suburbs in Zack Snyder’s remake of ‘Dawn of the Dead’ (2004), with concentrated domestic melodramas flooding onto gardens and roadsides, is abruptly released and flung upwards on the bloom of an explosion to a malevolent bird’s eye view reminiscent of the gulls’ in ‘The Birds (1963), or of the scene in David Lynch’s ‘Inland Empire’ (2006) when the camera moves out from the socially abject and emotionally intense death of Sue Blue to reveal a sound stage and its fabricated scenery.

When ‘Uzumaki’ (like ‘The Langoliers’) introduces a force from the past – a mirror found under the water of a nearby lake – corporeal fragmentation increases, eyes swivel in their sockets, mutilations (as in ‘Dark City’ [1998]) and hairstyles become subject to the vortex of the eye; “wanting to be seen” contorts a girl gang, a father obsessively videos snails, and corpses twist like corkscrews, until finally the eye is ejected from its body, wounding the movie through its shattered screen. ‘Uzumaki’ is infused with these exploratory spirals of seeing; it constitutes a kind of ‘unitary cinema’ (counterpart to the situationists’ ‘unitary urbanism’) – subjecting each and every part (snails, washing driers, hairstyles, streets, clouds, bodies) to the sensory pattern of the whole – doing for the movies what the situationists longed to do, reparatively, for the city: overcome separation. This is the contradiction – the emergence of a stilled, synchronic pattern from a forward-lurching linearity – by which the violence of the dramatic cinema, editing bodies when not diegetically dismembering them, can be cooled, returned to the calmer ‘actuality’ of pre-dramatic cinema, restoring a slow and meandering flow to life; for example, in the painfully and beautifully extended shots of a Béla Tarr movie, or in the intense weavings of bodies and cameras in Miklos Janscó’s. First by separation, the floating free or deregulation of the senses through cinema’s technology, and then seeking to restore itself to a transformative connectivity by an anachronistic pedestrian pace and a historic cinematic reserve. The cinematic memory archive here serves as a parallel to what the radical walker seeks to achieve by placing a pedestrian and anachronistic torque upon a hyper-accelerated society, while deploying her senses, enhanced (in the sense of imitating techniques like zoom and pan) by an equally anachronistic, estranging and disruptive analogue cinema technology.    

8.

The need for radical walkers and walking artists to navigate certain contradictions in the streets – between the hyper-acceleration of information and architecture’s solid frame, between the overwhelming of the sensorium by the onrushing data of the ‘drift’ and a cool organisation of it for future use – partly explains the continuing influence of situationist theory and practice among ambulatory activists. The vitality of the dérive in experimentally and experientially joining ambience to ambience, resistant space to resistant space, is still resonant.  

Situationist critique identified separation as the means by which the Spectacle subordinates social activity to itself; “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (Debord, 1995, 12), a relationship of separation by representation and reflection. This separateness is both the ends (patriarchal, statist and bourgeois dominance over everything else) and the justification (the heroic individual male figure in the landscape) of the totality of social relations, the ruling and ruled ‘grounds’ for being/becoming. However, there is no restitution in a simple re-unification. The “unitary urbanism” counterposed by the situationists to the totalised separateness of the Spectacle is not a restoration to just any available connection of things, but an interrogation of those connections, a feint that allows separateness to be re-separated, individualised, to be further floated free, to be made an outcast from outcasts before it can return, unrecognisable and hungry to connect in novel ways. The origins of “unitary urbanism” lie in ‘hypergraphics’, a ‘Lettrist’ post-writing method for communicating in multiple vocabularies; not so much a unification as an assemblage of multiplicities, creating (as yet meaningless) gaps and voids, new levels of a-communication and materiality, unhuman and unthinkable, to which the terrain can return as an agent, and the pedestrian as a poet/sculptor/paramedic/dramaturg, collapsing functions. Just as in ‘Uzumaki’, the world of the urban locale is dismantled in order to make explicit, and relatable to, its subjection to unhuman patterns.  

The Spectacle, however, also has a similar predilection for such dismantling ‘leaps to faith’; reproducing itself as both the logic and product of its separateness, repeatedly escaping its subordination to any totality other than its own. This, though, comes at a cost, for it too is “developing for itself” (Debord, 1995: 16) and is endangered by its self-referential ends and means, always having to start from scratch and wipe the slate clean, increasingly reliant on natural disasters, wars and economic crises; and vulnerable to a future totality – democratic or fascistic or unimaginable – that can ‘get in’, after a future disaster, before it does.

9.

None of this can be successfully opposed by confronting the Spectacle with what is ‘real’ or by a simple stripping away to what is ‘true’ (something powerfully demonstrated by the Trump and Brexit campaigns in 2016); this is what John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’ (1988) shows, but does not know. The film exposes its city as a blanket illusion, revealing (through the eyes of its proletarian hero, John Nada, equipped with special sunglasses) the ‘real’ city of 1980s America, a landscape of monochrome, geometrical buildings, and homogenous main drags lined with hoardings transmitting subliminal slogans: SLEEP, CONSUME, OBEY. There is, however, a debilitating contradiction in Carpenter’s conceit. If the monochrome revelation effected by John Nada’s dark glasses is the true city (controlled by Reaganite, free-marketeer aliens), disguised electronically as what we take for real, colourful life, then why, when Nada has destroyed the masking system does the monochrome city not appear to everyone? Why, instead, are the aliens exposed in our colourful world of illusion, rather than us discovering ourselves in their real world of subjection?

‘They Live’, like other ‘trash’ 1980s movies – such as ‘CHUD’ (1984) and ‘The Stuff’ (1985) – that indicted corruption, profit and property, and celebrated acts of resistance (a kind of movie revived by the recent ‘The Purge: Anarchy’ [2014]), addresses the Spectacle as a pattern of corporate and entrepreneurial misrepresentation. It fails to grasp (it shows, but does not explain) that in the Society of the Spectacle appearances are all you get; “reality erupts with the Spectacle, and the Spectacle is real” (Debord, 1995, 14) and the promise of a truth ‘behind it all’ (the ‘grail’ of conspiracy theory) is the greatest deception, and that we, like so much else in the Spectacle, produce that deception ourselves. The crime of the Spectacle is not that it erects a screen between us and the truth, but that it distributes everything, including us, to screens.

Like much occult psychogeography and radical binary narratives of illusion/truth, the problem of ‘They Live’ is not its escapism, but its failure to take its fantasy seriously enough. For the hoard of a cine-dériviste, a totalised whimsy is of little help, but a rigorous realist fantasy (as Carpenter’s movie at first promises to be) can be; yet there are few examples. Where, we might ask, is the situationist ‘Turner Diaries’? Perhaps ‘V For Vendetta’ (2005) is the closest, generating the most popular image of contemporary resistance. But without rigour and realism in fantasy, far better, then, to chisel off something like the pre-credits sequence from ‘Predator 2’ (1990), where the camera races over tree tops, monkeys screech, setting up for a return to the jungle setting of the original ‘Predator’ (1987), only for the camera to rise up and reveal a Los Angeles skyline beyond its fringe of palm trees. Such transitions in the archive are reminders not only of just how quickly the landscape can shift, but that we are always in more than one place at any one time.

The dériviste effaces the Spectacle by reading the codes of the Spectacle and then re-encoding its surfaces with subjective codes of her own; not according to a repetition of survival behaviours or a quest for revelation, but by what she can encode, with pleasure and the coolness that ‘actuality’ brings to looking. When subjected to a separated, calmed and cooled eye, the abject canon of movies fragments, its particles serving not as keys to solving the codes in urban space, but as miasmic screens for dissolving and traducing their meanings and ‘realism’ in the letters and sounds of a new language: “external action and character interaction are suspended.... almost to zero…we peer into an opaque landscape via a slowly tracking survey without clues to help us decipher it… We share effectively in the intensive movements onscreen as we input speculative mental activity in place of dramatic action” (Powell, 2007, 138).  

When I look at almost any hilly rural scene, or see a cliff or gorge, I pleasurably fear that the slow, unfeasible, whirring Kenwood Chef-like dalek spaceship from ‘Daleks – Invasion Earth 2050’ (1966) will emerge, in all its kinkiness, from behind the green landscape. I grasp the fabricated nature of the English rural scene; its grasses, hedges, cattle and copses as artificial as Linoleum, the fruit of generations of genetic and environmental manipulation, England’s ‘green and pleasant land’ turned paper-thin. Even my sardonic Nan could not mediate the sheer horror of life (at least to my 11 year old self) conjured by the creak of metal and the Bernard Herrman soundtrack for a bronze mega-soldier, ‘Talos’, astride the beach in ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ (1963). It is not any fear of death I feel, on my beach, but a fear of the life in inert, inorganic and constructed things; hard and statuesque one moment, hot and streaming the next: the “anorganic metal-body trauma-howl of the earth” (Land, 498).

I am still in mental dialogue with these image-trajectories on my walks, as I find sand blowing against a thousand pink ink cartridge cases on the beach or skirt the floods encircling electricity pylons; I have not found the ends of their trails yet: “you think that the trail will understand you, and that’s the worst part, it does”.

10.

The films, above, beginning with those chosen for their exemplary qualities, are shifting more firmly towards my personal preoccupations; inevitably, but necessarily. For the hoard of sequences, camera positions and soundtracks, to have any resonance with the dérive, must spring from strong personal memories of screening and spectatorship, in tune with a key principle of mythogeography: that the walker is as much the mutable site of the walk as their route (Smith, 115).  

In brief, my personal hoard might contain some of the following:

The anachronistic ‘actuality’ of suburbia – “[T]he city’s peripheral terrains remain under the visual sway of cinema rather than that of the digital image” (Barber, 2002, 182) – crossing class divides in ‘One Hour Photo’ (2002).  

The potency of the landscape to produce a sur-reality, an over-reality, like the Kenwood Chef ufo hovering into view across the hills or the swooping and levitating shots in Gaspar Noé’s ‘Enter The Void’ (2009).

A city-totality or a transport network defined by the absence of a single person (and how that reverses the prioritisation of commodities over people): ‘Spooloos’/’The Vanishing’ (1988), ‘Ne le dis à personne’/’Tell No One’ (2006), ‘En la Cuidad de Sylvia’/‘In the City of Sylvia’ (2007).

Fabulous bodies capable of exceeding corporate agendas within a skin’s soggy container: the shadow folk in Dreyer’s ‘Vampyr’ (1932), the supine rather than upright, slithering rather than walking, beings of Żulawksi’s ‘Possession’ (1981) and Benson and Moorhead’s ‘Spring’ (2014); and bodies subjected to those corporate agendas, like the mother and daughter’s walking a hillside road and gazed upon in Cattet and Forzani’s détournement of a giallo, ‘Amer’ (2009).

Monuments and monolithic buildings, seen as if through the eyes of Larry Cohen’s ‘Q The Winged Serpent’ (1982), such as the warehouse in ‘Nosfertu’ (1922), the Seattle Space Needle in ‘The Parallax View’ (1974) or the Transamerica Pyramid in the 1978 remake of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, are monstrous and not “iconic”.

A Fortean historicist-uncanny, like that of the village in Ilya Khrzhanovskiy ‘4’ (2004), anywhere that strangeness is historic rather than supernatural.

‘Tenten’/’Adrift in Tokyo’ (2007): a healing reminder that even the permanent dérive must, and should, end sometime.  

11.

When Jean-Michel Mension called, unannounced, on Guy Debord at his room in Rue Racine he was surprised to find him “in the role of a gent in a dressing gown” (47) For Debord, and many of the other situationists, to ‘drift’ the city was a disruption of their everyday lives. For Mension, and the other youthful ‘delinquents’ in the situationists’ circle, it was simply one part of a life of rebellion: “[T]he first true dérives were in no way distinct from what we did in the ordinary way” (101). Mension’s “milieu of destruction” (Debord, 2004, 15) was idealised by Ivan Chtcheglov in the idea of permanent dérives, a subjection in the form psychological distress to what Constant built into his situationist models of a new city: permanent rush and transformation, more accelerationist than ‘unified’.

Under the conditions of the nascent digital city – even in these very earliest days of the ‘internet of things’ (which by its title alone expresses something of the Spectacle’s overwhelming ambitions, comparable to Google’s plans for immortality, to digitize matter) – a future ambulation will need to walk both sides of a binary of permanence and disruption. Disruption of the everyday, as a portal to the ambient, occulted imaginary or taking back surplus pleasure, as a means to edit and reassemble the codes of the city, will continue to serve walkers as a tactic, but not as a strategy. Fighting separation with further separations may work up to a point, but beyond that lies all kinds of New Babylons additional to those visualized by Constant, all of them fulfilling what “dérive experiences lead to proposing… the constant diminution of these border regions, up to the point of their complete suppression” (Debord, 2006, 62). Caught between Stalinism and Nazism, twentieth century critical modernism backed rapidly away from “an embrace of totality in aesthetics.... [as] it led to an embrace of totality in political communities” (Levine, 5); but we live now under different conditions, in the peculiar circumstances of a global totality rested on the anti-totality principles of neo-liberalism and prosecuted by a plethora of invasive, algorithmic ‘Skynets’. In the situation of our subjectivity in peril, jump cuts between atmospheres, ‘catapults’ and cutting a ‘V’ through the city are challenged to disrupt their own disruptions, to ‘leap’ the borders of their own separations; the epic walks, sensitized and often social, of Monique Besten, Anthony Schrag, Thomas Bram Arnold, Elspeth Owen, Esther Pilkington, Mads Floor Andersen and others seem to point to a permanent drift, and to a daily serious adventure through variegated zones of ambience as predicted by Ivan Chtcheglov (6). To that flow I am adding the suggestion of a cinematically-bathed daily practice as a provisional-totalising of ambulatory tactics on the way towards a strategy for more than surviving the apocalypse, based upon the revival of the subjective: an intense hyper-sensitization in the streets once “lived and suffered through the eye” but now for the whole body of senses.

What the static camera and gentle pans of ‘AKA Serial Killer’ and the landscape-privileged sequences from movies as different as ‘Stalker’ and ‘The Langoliers’ offers such a whole-body dériviste is an ‘actuality cinema’ default consciousness, a pre-dramatic sensitivity and a pre-romantic realism; a shift away from occult adventures and romanticism (by passing through them and beyond them) to a cooler re-exploring of landscape and a return of the primacy of terrain to psychogeography.

This bathing of the terrain with cinema images, and letting the terrain bathe back “imbu[ing] the film image with an imposed dimension.... negotiat[ing] and enforc[ing] its own mass within the image (Barber, 2002, 20), will enwrap the walker in a controlled intensity, within which they can order and direct their suffering and separated mind/body/eye: a discreet and subjective psycho-cinematography for an invasive digital city where, “alongside its powerful web of media screens, [it] is assembled from the delicate visual and emotional projections of its inhabitants” (Barber, 2002, 156).      

Phil Smith is a performance-maker, writer and ambulatory researcher, specialising in performances related to walking, site-specificity, mythogeographies and counter-tourism. A core member of site-based arts collective Wrights & Sites; and a co-author of the company’s various ‘mis-guides’. He writes and performs ‘mis-guided tours’, and creates inter-disciplinary performance. He is an Associate Professor (Reader) at the University of Plymouth.

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[spryfilm]

“The Strangers: Prey at Night ” (2018)

Thriller/Horror

Running Time: 85 minutes

Written by: Bryan Bertino and Ben Ketai

Directed by: Johannes Roberts

Featuring: Christina Hendricks, Martin Henderson, Bailee Madison and Lewis Pullman

Kinsey: “Why are you doing this?”

Dollface: “Why not?”

Ever since the original home invasion horror “The Strangers” (2008) burst into cinemas it was a completely unusual as well as original movie, scary as well as eerie as at its heart was the unknown as well as the very real feeling of isolation, two elements that the horror genre lives on from its very beginning to right now. Not only that but the movie was built around the performances of two extremely talented and well-known actors who were possibly at the top of their popularity, Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler. The trick to that movie, if it can be called that was to frame it around a couple who were possibly breaking up after a long relationship, who had just been to a friend’s wedding. So, in a natural way the tension was high from the off, then the writer/director added to the tension with the unknown people terrorizing them for the rest of the movie, for no particular reason – it was an excellent non-supernatural horror movie that has only gotten better with distance.

It’s hard to imagine why it has taken over ten years for a sequel to be produced, but here we have “The Strangers: Prey at Night” (2018) with a new cast who might not all be well known, but the leads of the movie are two well established character actors in Christina Hendricks and Martin Henderson, who play parents to a brother and sister, once again we have relationships that are in flux but for reasons that are only hinted at in the opening act of the movie. Whilst the first movie felt like a breath of fresh air, as well as timeless, this new sequel arrives in a time where horror is being looked at afresh with so many successes as well as fresh narratives that have not be seen before. Instead of having a mise en scène that seemed to be 70s based this new movie seems to be echoing the 1980s, right from the opening with Kim Wilde’s ‘Kids in America’ (1981), the use of the imagery of the band ‘The Ramones’ as well as a variety of other references, that really set this movie up as something that will be as fresh as the original. In fact the very idea of this movie taking ten years to reach the screens may have been a happy accident as it really has given some natural distance from those events all those years ago.

“The Strangers: Prey at Night ” is directed by Johannes Roberts who may be familiar as he also directed (and wrote) “The Other Side of the Door” (2016) and “47 Metres Down” (2017) two movies I would not rate as very good genre movies at all, all plot holes as well as tired tropes produced on small budgets who ideas were far better than their actual execution – I would never revisit these or recommend them as worth viewing. What is apparent is that armed with a script by Bryan Bertino and Ben Ketai, Roberts has directed a very good movie that despite many elements counting against it, is a very good horror movie that fits within the genre as well as elevating itself above what could be described as just another slasher movie, particularly in it’s narrative being based around a family in deep dysfunction.

The film opens with a “Based on True Events” message. In a secluded trailer park, the three masked killers — Dollface, Pin Up Girl, and the Man in the Mask — arrive and park their truck in front of a trailer. Dollface wakes one of the sleeping occupants by banging on the door. When the woman goes to investigate, Dollface kills her off-screen and goes to the bedroom to lie down in bed next to the woman’s sleeping husband.

Mike and Cindy, their son Luke, and their rebellious daughter, Kinsey, take a family trip to their aunt and uncle’s trailer park to spend time together before Kinsey leaves for boarding school. Cindy calls ahead and leaves a voicemail, informing Uncle Marvin that they are running late. After arriving at the grounds and collecting the keys to their trailer, they settle in and hear a knock at the door. Cindy answers the door to find Dollface – unmasked, but hiding in the shadows. She asks if Tamara is home. Cindy informs her she is at the wrong trailer, and Dollface leaves. As the family sits down to play cards and implores Kinsey to join, Kinsey storms out and Cindy sends Luke after her to try and reach out. As Kinsey and Luke wander around the trailer park, they stumble upon a trailer with the door wide open. Inside, they find their aunt and uncle brutally murdered.

As with the first movie there are many elements that are at play within “The Strangers: Prey at Night”, one of the major ones is the concept of isolation, not only of the family but the anonymous killers as well as the emotional relationships within that family group. Interestingly the physical isolation of the family is one of the elements that could save them, in that with nothing else to rely on the family will be forced to do anything to fend off the killers – so in isolating the family, the killers in one respect may have woven in their own downfall. Of course the emotional isolationism that exists within the film, that of the daughter separating herself emotionally from her brother and parents is the mirror of that physical isolation which comes into play throughout the movie, she is protecting herself from being sent away, in doing so sets up an extra level of protection from the killers, maybe even in one aspect being as cold as they are. The isolation of the killers motives to their actions is interesting as is the reason this family was ‘chosen’, which of course is random which may be the scariest of all. At least in films like “Race with the Devil” (1975) there was a tenuous reason for people to be chased by their unknown assailants, here there is none which makes it all the more frightening.

The juxtaposition that is used in the movie is interesting as well, there is the comparison of the city at the beginning of the film, which is modern, to the rural area which can be seen as backward or low on technology. This is something that is overlooked in many movies, as it is in real life. The idea of connectivity as well as connectiveness is one that is assumed to be universal but it is becoming apparent that there are the haves and have nots in regard to technology, access to internet as well as being woke as to the climate that we exist in. The killers in the movie are low-fi, able to get into places by seemingly willing it, they do not know or care about the latest thing which is apparent by their garb, all left over from the first movie. This is also a movie that is violent but is in opposition to much of the 80s pop music used within the movie, the most obvious section takes place in a pool that is already loaded with meaning, a place that is normally of joy as is the music, being played over the PA is Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ (1981), but in this case is a place that is full of violence and loss, something that should not be lost on audiences. When thinking about these aspects it must be said that this is a competently directed movie with some excellent flourishes as well as action that belies Roberts previous work, he also uses music as well as the actual locale to excellent use combiningg music, geography, action and his actors perfectly.

One of the most important aspects of the movie are the masks the killers wear which distort the wearer’s appearance, causing them to look strange and unusual. Also, these  masks do not feature moving mouths, so when the wearer speaks, the sound appears to come out of nowhere. Wearing these masks changes the wearer’s behaviour. Many people wear masks as part of becoming a character, causing the wearer to act in accordance with that character. Additionally, some people love the freedom that a mask’s anonymity provides. These killers are not only hiding behind these masks but use them to terrorise their victims in a way rarely seen in movies, they are almost like kabuki but with a very Western twist.

This is a movie that begs to be unpacked, much like its predecessor that at the time was not looked on with much critical love at all. I really liked this movie, it had some great performances, tells its story very quickly as well as maintaining its air of authenticity and creepiness. The slasher sub-genre has gone out of fashion in the past ten years, it is simply not enough for some madman to show up and start murdering teenagers, this is a movie with a story at its heart, one of family, inherent mortality and acceptance which does come at the end, with a caveat as well. If you can seek this out, but I would recommend watching the original first.

“The Strangers: Prey at Night” is out now in cinemas.

    Film review: “The Strangers: Prey at Night ” (2018) “The Strangers: Prey at Night " (2018) Thriller/Horror Running Time: 85 minutes Written by: Bryan Bertino and Ben Ketai…

[latenightcinephile]

#820: ‘Prizzi’s Honor’, dir. John Huston, 1985.

These next few films are from the part of the list where I don’t have many in-depth feelings to share. They’re films; pretty good ones. They’re about two hours long each; they have actors in them; these actors say things (usually lines of dialogue). But they’re quite vague in their merits. In the case of Prizzi’s Honor, what can be said about the film is also true of a lot of John Huston’s films from late in his career, and also true of a lot of 1980s Jack Nicholson pictures, and true of a lot of gangster comedies. Huston’s film is a good mix of all of these things, but there’s nothing particularly stellar about it.

At a Mafia wedding, hitman Charley Partanna (Nicholson) falls madly in love with a mysterious woman, Irene Walker (Kathleen Turner). Despite this, and the fact that Irene loves him back, he constantly returns to his former lover - and Don Prizzi’s granddaughter - Maerose (Anjelica Huston), whose scorn for Charley rapidly grows. She makes her feelings clear to her grandfather, who hires another killer to off Charley - and who turns out to have been Irene all along. The two lovers have to decide whether they’ll be more faithful to each other and run away with the money they’ve acquired, or continue to carry out these honour killings.

Before the reveal of the crossed killings that makes up the climax of the film, Charley has already found out that Irene is a killer. She has inserted herself into Charley’s jobs in a way that unsettles the entire Prizzi syndicate, and it’s never entirely clear whether she is playing Charley for a sucker the entire time. Irene’s character is largely built off the sexual charisma of Kathleen Turner, a cliche that developed between her role in Body Heat (1981) and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). Turner’s performance seems to hinge off the conflict between whether Irene is truly in love or merely acting like she is - a vaguely meta-theatrical conflict about the nature of acting. Where does Turner merge into Turner’s performances, where do those performances merge with the characters, and where do those characters condense into Irene Walker?

Anjelica Huston’s performance is also stunning - there is a deep complexity here that seems to have influenced her later cinema roles. The coldness and restraint that Maerose displays here is a more serious version of Morticia Addams, a more innocent version of Lilly Dillon in The Grifters. Despite being early in her career, and a film of relatively little note at the time, Huston won the Best Actress Oscar for this film - perhaps another reason why her later roles seemed to develop along this line.

Pauline Kael commented on the strange comedic tone that Prizzi’s Honor has as “like The Godfather being acted out by The Munsters.” She goes on to describe it as a story of “people who behave in ordinary ways in grotesque circumstances”. It’s not an inaccurate description, and there are definitely moments where the zaniness of the events is only grounded by the relatability of the characters’ behaviour. But this film is notable in the way it departs, at the very last moment, from the expectations of 1980s ‘romantic comedy’. Looking back to the plot description, most 1980s films would let the couple pick their mutual happiness over the demands of the Family, and everyone would learn a valuable lesson about love and identity (it’s always about love and identity). In Prizzi’s Honor, the Family wins, and the final showdown between Charley and Irene shows that there are some things that are more trustworthy than romance.

The Mafia may have sown seeds of doubt in the minds of both Charley and Irene about the other’s motivations, but the two characters amplify those doubts to the point where being a hired killer is the safer and more reliable option. This is also a testament to the way Turner and Nicholson inhabit their characters. Prizzi’s Honor doesn’t have much in the way of style or intrigue, but Huston knows how to make characters work, and he does it dazzlingly here.