Day of the Panther, 1987

As Australian Kung Fu movies go, Day of the Panther is… the one I’ve seen.

It’s bland. Not atrociously bad. Not especially good. Just sits there. Clichés, tropes, a few marginally decent fights, nothing else.

Begins with a voiceover from William Anderson (John Stanton) telling us about how he was the first Westerner ever to be inducted into the “ancient and secret order of Panthers”, a Chinese kung fu cult, and how his daughter Linda and JASON BLADE! (coughcoughcough) became only the second Westerners ever to etc., etc.

So the Panthers, seemingly centered in Hong Kong, studiously ignored westerners for over a hundred years. Curious, as HK was a creation of the British Empire, and so much of its success was dependent on both western trade and western culture. The Triad gangs got started partly because groups of Eurasian men felt that they could not be accepted in either culture (this is gross oversimplification, before somebody complains). Yes, Chinese culture was (and continues to be, in some ways) highly xenophobic and resistant to any outside influence. (This is why China does not practice capitalism, but capitalism “with Chinese characteristics” — because to just take it as is would be to admit that Chinese culture is not superior to everything else, everywhere, in every way; but add “Chinese characteristics”, and you’ve instantly made it better, and Chinese.) Still, kung fu was no secret, and even “secret societies” took in a few westerners (of the right sort, of course) long before the 1960s. So what were the Panthers doing all that time? I think I have now given this more thought than the writers did.

The induction ceremony is a hoot. The actor playing Anderson clearly speaks his Chinese phonetically, and whoever coached him didn’t get across the idea of tones very clearly. Or at all. (I couldn’t even tell if he was supposed to be speaking Cantonese or Mandarin. That’s sort of like not being able to tell if he was trying to speak French or Italian.) The actress playing his daughter has, alas, the sort of face that just doesn’t look intelligent; she spends the ceremony looking befuddled. JASON BLADE! (Edward John Stazak, whose only IMDb credits are this movie and its sequel), in comparison, is reasonably credible here. The amount of smoke arising from his forearm as he brands himself(!), though, is not.

Turns out JASON BLADE! and Linda are also special agents for Her Majesty in some form; apparently police, though it’s not especially clear (the most precise naming we get is “Hong Kong’s Special Branch”; Special Branch of what is never explained). They’re partners, and work undercover together, and Dad’s voiceover ends with saying “Then came the night that would ultimately change all our lives,” and you just know that Linda’s going to achieve “hungry ghost” status before the second act begins.

I mean, she’s the daughter, the partner, a girl, she doesn’t get the backward-looking voiceover, and her name’s not JASON BLADE!. Why they didn’t name her Dead Meat and have done with it, I don’t know.

Granted, the movie doesn’t kack her immediately, and in fact gives her a lengthy action scene in which she defends herself ably — I had been fully expecting that, despite her Panther training, she was going to fold, as girls in western kung fu movies frequently do. But no, she fights off three or four assailants in an extended sequence, killing at least two of them, and only dies when caught off guard by another man, who knifes her while she’s in a defenseless position.

On the other hand, she does die because she didn’t do what JASON BLADE! told her to do, which was to sit tight and wait for him. No, she had to go out on her own, “investigating”, and because she didn’t follow the dictates of the masculine (but babyfaced) hero, she pays the price of all expendable characters.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. In “Hong Kong” (adequately impersonated by a few sets in Perth, Australia, and some stock establishing shots in the beginning — although the stock shots don’t really scream “HONG KONG!”, they could be HK from unusual angles, or they could be Perth), Linda and JASON BLADE! sneak into a Chinese restaurant (of course!) and take pictures of a drug deal going down between an irritating, doughy-faced Aussie and a couple of old Chinese men. They’re discovered, pursued, and lose the camera (into a pot of noodles; one wonders if Jackie Chan saw this movie at some point before making Crime Story, though probably not, and he did a lot more with the gag than anyone on this movie even thought about), and while all the bodyguards are pursuing them, the doughy-faced Aussie, whom we’ll come to know as Baxter (“Baxter”? The best name they could come up with for the head henchman was Baxter!?), blows away the two older Chinese men, taking both the money and the drugs and hightailing it to the airport.

If you hadn’t already worked out that this movie is shallow, this sequence does the math for you. First, the dialog amongst the criminals while Linda and JASON BLADE! are taking pictures is banal and repetitive in the extreme. Most of it was clearly looped in later, and there is little purpose to it, other than to establish (five or six times) that Baxter wants to pay only five hundred thousand dollars. He does finally get bargained up to six hundred and they hit an agreement. The agreement is for an ongoing deal. The Chinese Triads (not so named, but one presumes) will supply Baxter and his organization with drugs every two months for six hundred thousand.

(Side note: Was HK really a central distribution point for drug running? I mean, okay, maybe for getting drugs into the mainland, but to Australia? Wouldn’t it be more practical to deal directly with drug producers in Thailand, and elsewhere? Again, I’m thinking about this more than the writers ever did.)

Then JASON BLADE! and Dead Meat Linda are discovered, and Baxter whips out a silenced pistol, shooting his suppliers: one in the forehead, the other in the neck.

So, okay, there was a security breach, but come on! The breach was exposed by the Triads. Is it really a good idea to whack your suppliers? I can’t imagine other suppliers are going to line up to deal with you after that. “Yeah, Mr. Baxter, we know you blew away your last business partners, but it was understandable — after all, they very helpfully exposed a couple of police who were spying on the deal, and you were mad, and people do things when caught off guard that, under calmer light, they wouldn’t; we’re sure you’ve learned an Important Lesson here, and have no worries about any such incident ever happening again.” Further, it is clear that the Australian operation needs steady supply, not a one-off deal. (The movie, on the other hand, only needs the one-off, so this action makes sense in terms of the plot, in a meta sort of way.)

There are no consequences to the killing off of these two old, apparently powerful triads. Once dead, they and their organization never affect the story again. (OK, there is one piece of throw-away dialog telling us that the killings started a Triad war in Hong Kong, but this makes little sense other than as a way of excusing the total lack of consequence within the story.)

So, yes, not the deepest, most thought-out movie of all time.

Linda pursues Baxter to Perth, while JASON BLADE! remains in Hong Kong, so that Linda can be killed off cleanly. No, really, there’s no actual reason given for him to stay behind, it’s only so that his partner can go off alone, die stupidly, and give him motivation for the rest of the movie. She calls him (on his 1987 car phone!) (which actually just looks like they put a store-bought regular corded phone into the car, and tried to shoot it so that it looked like it was part of the not-luxurious car’s standard equipment) to tell him that she’s followed the target, but not sure where the consignment of drugs is, and that the local cops are apparently clueless (oh, if she had only lived long enough to find out!). JASON BLADE! tells her to lay low, he’ll fly into Perth tomorrow and join her, but she doesn’t want to lose track of the bad guys, doesn’t promise much, and hangs up.

The sequence where Linda meets her demise is actually kind of impressive. Somebody gave a damn about this movie, and it shows here, if nowhere else. The (rather extended) pursuit through, over, and around a warehouse by three menacing hulks in animal masks (the first one we meet is a very hairy gent in a pig mask, and we even get a couple of POV shots from inside the mask, complete with echo-y breathing foley) is intercut with JASON BLADE! arriving in Perth. And while the sequence is longish, it doesn’t flag. The fighting isn’t hugely impressive, but neither is it embarrassing. They milk the abandoned warehouse location for LOTS of action gags. Nothing huge or spectacular, but it never gets too repetitive. JASON BLADE!’s arrival is spliced in at just the right moments, counterpoints the action going on elsewhere, and establishes a few things.

First, he’s being watched. By two Aussie cops. Who are our film’s Odious Comic Relief, with supersized emphasis on the “odious”. One of them is like Ned Beatty from Superman: The Movie, only without one ounce of Beatty’s talent, comic timing, or the John Williams-scored humorous tubas in the background. The other one I have no convenient analogy for, he’s such a boring stock straightman. Flinders is a by-the-book idiot who thinks that wearing a fedora in 1987 qualifies as “plain clothes” and will help him blend in and not be noticed. He gets flustered and angry at his partner’s incompetence, while he’s not noticeably better himself. And again, no talent or knack for timing are apparent in his performance.

The only saving grace with regard to these two twits is that the director, editor, and producers did not fall in love with their komedik stylings. They are a part of the movie, and never just vanish, more’s the pity, but there are no extraneous scenes of them doing their schtick that serve no other purpose. What is in the film is there because removing it would harm the logic of the story (such as it is).

Second, from the OCR’s dialog, we gather that JASON BLADE! is a well-known Triad assassin.

Er, what?

It’s a necessary piece of business, but it’s handled so badly that they might as well not have done it.

The local drug lord, it comes to pass, has lots of police and judges in his pocket (though we never see any of these, we’re only told about them). So JASON BLADE!’s status as a top member of Special Branch is known only to one member of the Aussie police (as we’ll find out later), and his cover story is that he’s a Triad assassin, because the Kowloon Triads owed him a favor(!!!).

At no point does any of this make one damn bit of sense. JASON BLADE! always goes under his own name. (Because, you know, his name is JASON BLADE!, which is just too frakking cool not to use, right? Right?) Yet (almost) nobody knows who he really is. Dead Meat Linda was under an assumed name, so that the local cops wouldn’t know she was Anderson’s daughter right away. (Did I neglect to mention this? After Anderson left HK Special Branch, he retired to Perth and now owns a fitness center. Also a very Chinese-style home that is more like a mansion, or at least a compound, than a house. Retiring from Special Branch nets you a good bit more than a gold watch, I guess.) Everybody seems to know about the “secret” order of the Panthers, and to know that JASON BLADE! is one of them, and also that Anderson is one (it doesn’t seem clear if anyone figured out that Linda was, or not; at first, it goes unmentioned, but later in the movie, the cops do seem to know, yet nobody ever really cares), and don’t put it together that they’re pals and working together. It only works if you don’t think about it at all, and accept that this sort of thing just happens in these sorts of movies. JASON BLADE! is who he is, everybody knows who he is, but nobody knows what he is, except when they do, until it becomes necessary for him to be “revealed”.

And here we are, almost 1500 words into this review, and I haven’t even really gotten to the bad guy. It ain’t doughy-faced Baxter, he’s the henchman. No, the bad guy is… Richard E. Grant!

OK, it’s not Richard E. Grant, but wouldn’t you say he looks uncannily similar? An aged, eerily skeletal Richard E. Grant? I couldn’t stop thinking it anytime he was on screen. This guy is possibly the best actor in the production. He’s not good, but he gives a performance, and seems to have had fun hamming it up, while knowing when to dial back and let quietness be menacing.

The other way you know it isn’t Richard Grant is that at no point does he recite Hamlet to zoo animals in between slugs from a wine bottle. Probably just an oversight, though.

This main bad guy, whom everyone knows is the main bad guy, is named ZUKOR. Probably because "Snidely Whiplash" was already trademarked. And you want to know how truly evil he is? Not only does he run drugs, not only does he control Perth’s prostitution trade and illicit gambling rings, not only is his name ZUKOR… no, the capper is when we’re told that he even makes money from his legitimate businesses!!! Yes, it is stated in such a tone that we are meant to understand that this makes Zukor much worse than he otherwise would be.

Sigh. I only wish I were joking.

But JASON BLADE!, Real Man of Genius, has a plan.

He’s going to ask Zukor for a job.

He saunters into one of Zukor’s cover businesses, a boat dealership, and insults Zukor, Zukor’s salesmen, the business, and the hired muscle.

Then, once the hired muscle try to throw his carcass to the curb, he beats the ever-loving snot out of them.

Every single one.

(Except Baxter, who’s out “taking the Trans Am for a spin”; I cannot possibly make this excuse lamer than the movie does.)

Then he walks away, telling Zukor over his shoulder where he’s staying, and that he’d like work as a bodyguard.

Again, in this action scene, there is evidence that at least a couple of people involved in the production gave a damn. The fight scene is choreographed, and the choreography includes taking the camera and shot composition into consideration. It is, as with the earlier scene with Linda, reasonably impressive, once you account for the obvious limitations of the production. Clearly, they did not have a huge budget, an extended shooting schedule (especially as this was shot back-to-back with the sequel), or the most experienced crew ever.

I’ve left out something. See, Anderson didn’t just have a daughter, he has a niece, too. One who’s a ton cuter than his own progeny, and instantly hits it off with JASON BLADE! (but of course). There’s no actual chemistry between the two actors, and the attraction is not earned at all by the story. They meet, exchange a few words, she’s gone for a few scenes, then she all but throws herself on top of him.

But, back to where we were, more or less. JASON BLADE! is pulled into police HQ, and the big guy on precinct knows who he is, or believes him without a shred of proof, it’s not too clear which is the case. The get a little exposition out of the way, then JASON BLADE! departs, gets a call at his hotel, and is told by Zukor himself that a boat will pick him up.

This leads to more komedy.

JASON BLADE! is picked up by Baxter in an inboard pleasure craft. (To the tune of intensely uninspired synthesizer music. This sequence is the most Miami Vice part of the movie, and it’s bad.) His two tails, Beatty-clone and Flinders, decide to get a boat to follow him. They, of course, requisition a komikly tiny fishing boat with an outboard motor. And they don’t just get it and use it, no. They bumble into it, they bumble over which direction to go, they bumble starting the motor, they bumble it into going backwards, because going forwards wouldn’t be komikal, and…

Somehow, I managed not to shove razorblades into my eyeballs or do violence to my computer or the DVD. Don’t ask me how. The bits showing the bumblers are short, but intensely painful.

So JASON BLADE! gets to Zukor, who asks him if he likes the party. “Is that what this is?” he “quips”. Zukor laughs, “You’re sharp, Blade. I like your style.”

May I just point out that somebody got paid to write that. That somebody, in fact, was probably very, very proud of giving action hero JASON BLADE! the action hero name JASON BLADE!, and then doubly proud of coming up with that “clever” little exchange.

I need a drink.

(Whoever put “I like your style” in there ought to have been staked to the ground, naked, near an anthill, his face and nether regions coated with honey. Or at least had his payday reduced drastically.) (Given that no-brainer cliché line, let me assure you, the potential viewer, that at no point in this film do the villain and the hero exchange the almost-as-hoary lines “Is that a threat?” “No. It’s a promise.” That, I guess, would not be JASON BLADE!’s style.)

So Zukor gives him a task: deliver a parcel to a particular place, and pick up a briefcase in return. JASON BLADE! asks what he’ll be carrying, and Zukor proves that he doesn’t trust JASON BLADE! at all by telling him that the parcel has smack, the briefcase has five hundred grand. You get no points for guessing that both of those are lies.

Baxter isn’t happy with this setup. This is his sort of task, and JASON BLADE! seems to be moving in on his turf. Oh, what drama! Oh, what pathos!

JASON BLADE! drives to a warehouse to make the exchange (followed by the Komikal Kops), but it’s a setup. The briefcase contains mostly cut paper, not money. So a fight ensues, of course. As the fight goes on, the Komikal Kops try to get into the warehouse, but the door is locked! So, as only happens in bad action movies with delusions of komedy, just as JASON BLADE! finishes wiping the floor with his adversaries and leaves, the Komikal Kops komandeer a forklift and krash through the warehouse wall. (They don’t know how to run the forklift, as if you didn’t already know.)

The Kops get to arrest a bunch of bruised, battered, barely-conscious thugs, and JASON BLADE! stalks back to Zukor all pissed, because he wasn’t told what the deal really was. (The Kops get the package and realize that it’s corn starch, so it was a bad deal from every direction.) Zukor laughs it off, saying it was a test, and that JASON BLADE! has now earned his trust. After all, he could have just waltzed off with the drugs and/or the money.

And even though there’s a chunk more plot to go, I am tired of recapping it. So, cut to the end, because there is something odd about the climactic fight scenes.

JASON BLADE! does not, repeat does not, square off against Zukor. The final fight is between JASON BLADE! and Baxter the head henchman. Anderson gets to chase after Zukor and hold him at gunpoint. The mentor takes on the head baddie, and the hero gets the henchman.

Man, that’s weird. And there was no especial reason for it, either, except that the actor playing Zukor would pretty clearly shatter with just a punch or two, so an actual fight wouldn’t be believable. But still, little or no confrontation, Zukor just gets handed off to the mentor character, who you would think would want revenge on the guy who actually killed his daughter, Baxter.

Nope, it was just a muddle. In any proper action movie, the protagonist is the one who resolves the conflict and deals with the root of the problem. That’s the reason he’s the protagonist — it’s his problem, he has to deal with it (or fail to do so). And the root of the problem here is definitely meant to be Zukor. So, we the audience already have a hard time identifying with JASON BLADE! because, really, there’s not much character there, and his only motivation is his partner’s death (and the actor has about two expressions, smirking and grinning). And then, at the climax, where we’re supposed to be rooting for him the most, he’s not the guy who solves the problem. He beats on the guy who actually killed his partner, sure, but henchmen can be replaced.

It’s just unsatisfying.

The end credits make a promise common to 1980s cheese-fests: “Jason Blade will return in Strike of the Panther!” Before I checked the IMDb preparing this review, I assumed this was fully in that tradition, meaning that no such movie ever got made.

(The example that leaps immediately to mind is the remarkably good The Sword and the Sorcerer, which promised at the end that its hero, Talon, would return in Tales of the Ancient Empire. That movie never got made, although Albert Pyun lensed another movie under that title this year [2009], I’m not entirely clear how direct the connection is going to be. Plus, it’s Albert Pyun, who has made precisely one good movie in his career, namely The Sword and the Sorcerer.)

But I was wrong. Strike of the Panther was, apparently, shot back to back with this feature. And given one or two of the IMDb user reviews, I’m now keen to track down a copy. This movie is comprised of banal, tired cliches pasted together with hoary genre tropes, with little or nothing to recommend it. The sequel, if the the reviews are to be trusted, is certifiably insane.

It’s actually rather interesting to look through the cast and crew list on IMDb and see who continued or went on to a productive career from here, and who didn’t.

As noted, the star, Edward John Stazak, never worked again outside of this film and its sequel. And that makes perfect sense. He can fight, but outside of the combat scenes, his expressions run the gamut from naive grin to smirk. His (highly inappropriate) aviator sunglasses show more range.

However, the villain, Zukor, has a longish list of credits.

One half of the OCR duo only did these two movies, while Hat Guy started with this movie, and launched a respectable little acting career.

The mentor character, Anderson, had a respectable career both before and after.

Anderson’s niece, Gemma, whose only asset here is that she’s moderately attractive, also went on to a respectable career, including a recurring role on Xena: Warrior Princess.

The director has done lots of work.

The actor playing Baxter has a much sparser resume, one other acting role in the 1990s, but also did stunts on a few other films.

The woman who played Linda didn’t do much acting (understandably, I’m sorry to say), but did do more stunt work, though not a large amount.

This movie came to me as part of Mill Creek Entertainment’s 50 Drive-In Movie Classic pack. The sequel, alas, is not included on the set, nor any other that I have. It’s on my list, though. Somewhere far below every Criterion Kurosawa disc, well below Sword of Doom, and a little above Showgirls.

OK, maybe a notch or two below Showgirls. But on the list, even so.

More sweetness and light from the Greatest Woman Ever

Roanne Jean Isidro Valenzuela has a hissy fit every time I expose her mendacity, her viciousness, or her deceit.

Well, here’s some more.

Hey, attacking me has gotten her exposed in a way that she hates up to this point. The obvious way to make me stop is to… yes, attack me some more, and do so in low, vile, utterly dishonest and unconscionable ways.

Here are just two examples of what I have been enduring recently, comments made in my name on Flickr:

Needless to say, those comments were not made by me, nor from my account. She created an account to fraudulently use my name and image to leave such comments and defame me.

And it’s hardly the first time.

This is, in fact, the seventh account that Flickr has shut down for abuse of my name and image.

This is the image of righteousness, the apex of virtue and morality, according to Miss Valenzuela. Because she is angry, everything is permitted, nothing is forbidden, she will never back down, never apologize, never admit that she has gone too far or done anything wrong, except by way of accusing me of having done worse. I have never done such despicable things, let alone with such persistence or enmity.

I’m posting this for the benefit of anyone who ever Googles her name. She is a deeply disturbed woman, as evidenced above and in my past posts tagged with her name. She will rationalize any behavior to suit her whim, and never suffer even the slightest twinge of conscience.

Roanne Valenzuela is a racist

UPDATE 20071217: Turns out, some while ago, Miss Valenzuela posted an extended diatribe (in which she very reasonably wished death upon me, amongst other pleasantries) that included a remarkably risible claim that calling her a racist is “ridiculous”. So I’m reiterating, here at the top of the post, her own words on this subject:

Roanne: Then go ahead and publish it. I’m proud.
Roanne: I’m not sorry that I’m a racist.

Those words were written by her in an IM chat on 6 December 2008, and I have the archives to prove it. She is both proud and not sorry that she is a racist. Her words. Yet it is “ridiculous” to call her such, despite her pride in it, despite her not being sorry for it, and despite her vile attacks on a completely innocent woman, as demonstrated below.

She’s tried many, many times to get me to erase this evidence of her viciousness and bigotry. Which is why it will never disappear.

***

When things were good between my ex-fianceé, Roanne Jean Isidro Valenzuela, and myself, I made the enormous mistake of telling her about my life, trusting her to keep private things which were private, and to honor that which I valued.

One of the people from my past whom I told her about was a friend, a Chinese woman whom I have always admired, in addition to liking. She was (and is) one of the smartest people I have ever known, a good person, and just good to know.

I further made the mistake of telling her name to Roanne.

After she falsely accused me of statutory rape, and had that blow up in her face, Roanne Valenzuela did not do what any rational and sane human being would do. She did not back off and reexamine herself to determine what had driven her to make such a vile accusation. Hell, she only apologized for form’s sake, and immediately recanted her apology, saying it meant nothing, she didn’t mean it, and she only made it because she “had to”.

Instead of trying to become a better person, she simply chose a different target to attack.

She found this lady’s Chinese blog, and started leaving racist filth in the comments. She did this because I had expressed a positive opinion about this woman, and because she is a nihilist, only truly happy when causing people better than her pain.

Here are some screen shots of the garbage she spewed:

None of this had any effect on the lady in question, because she is not insecure in any way. She found it, in fact, sadly amusing.

Proving that Miss Valenzuela is not only a racist, but indeed a nihilist, she responded to this by lamenting that, since she couldn’t make her target feel bad, her verbal assaults were “for nothing” and she was a failure. Here is what she said in an IM chat on 1 November 2008 (emphases added, slight re-arrangement of lines to make clearer which lines were in answer to which):

Roanne: Was she offended at all?
Me: No.
Roanne: Huh.
Roanne: Why not?
Roanne: That’s too bad.
Me: In fact, she said that you seemed very passionate.
Roanne: About what?
Me: She said she was baffled, but not offended. She couldn’t figure why someone would bother.
Me: She didn’t say, but she said it after I told her it was you, and gave her the general idea of why.
Roanne: I’m a failure.
Me: So I guess she meant you were passionate about me.
Roanne: Man.
Roanne: Maaan.
Roanne: All that for nothing.
Me: It’s just that she’s too secure a person to have an anonymous troll affect her.
Roanne: So you’re calling me a troll now?
Roanne: And I’m what insecure?
Roanne: Huh.
Me: What you did was trolling.
Me: You have heard the term, I hope?
Me: And I did not say anything about you being secure or not.
Me: I said something about her.
Roanne: There’s no way she’s nicer than me.
Roanne: Or prettier.

Yes, she did say that there was “no way” the woman she told to hang herself in a shower and die was nicer than her.

Not content to restrict her bilious hate to one person, she also posted this as her Twitter bio:

She was so proud of this that she left it intact for more than a week.

This post has been in draft form for some time. At one point, I did tell her about it, warning that if she continued being abusive, I would post it. And she gave explicit permission to publish it. From a chat on 6 December 2008:

Roanne: Then go ahead and publish it. I’m proud.
Roanne: I’m not sorry that I’m a racist.

Yes, she’s proud of spewing vicious hate and racist filth, trying to berate a complete stranger into suicide. And she said so directly and explicitly.

Now that she is fraudulently creating web accounts in my name and leaving racist trash in various places, pretending to be me, I’m making very clear that this is her kind of behavior, not mine.

So, if you are considering hiring Miss Valenzuela, especially in the United States, take into consideration that she is an unrepentant racist, a bigot, and someone who will attack innocent strangers in the most vicious ways just to vent her frustrations.

On top of that, she has demonstrated that she will erase, delete, or alter the public record (if she can) the moment her viciousness is exposed, because her greatest fear is not what she is, but simply “looking bad” to others. She will lie without compunction or shame to cover up her bad acts.

Is this really the kind of nurse you want caring for your patients?

UPDATE: Yes, I have removed links. Not, as Miss Valenzuela asserts, out of cowardice, but because I will not help her in her campaign to smear me with lies, distortions, and severely misleading out-of-context facts. She has proven, yet again, that she has no respect for the truth, and I simply removed what little sanction my links gave to her vendetta.

Furthermore, she claims that what she posted was a “defense” of herself. She made no effort to defend what she did or what she said, she merely attacked me. Argumentum ad Hominem is not a defense it is a fallacy.

Nihilism

“I hate my existence. Why should you enjoy yours? If I suffer, it’s your fault. Now it’s your turn.” That is nihilism[.]

— Edward Cline, “The Nihilism of Islamifascism: Taking it Personally”

Obama has no moral character; ergo, no honesty, no integrity, no respect for truth. He has no values to keep or preserve. He is a nihilist to the core.

— Edward Cline, “The Guns of Nihilism”

If [nihilists] can’t kill or have the lovers of life killed by some means, then they want to make their lives as painful and joyless and burdensome as possible.

— Edward Cline, “A Guns of Nihilism Postscript“

Again, for now

I’ll be posting here until I get some backside stuff worked out on my domain.

Also, while I’m still posting through Identi.ca, I now consider my Twitter feed as my front-end (in no small part because nobody can pollute it against my will, which is not true of Identi.ca at the moment). It’s in the right sidebar. But, while here on WordPress.Com, no daily digests, because they’re not automatic and I don’t want to bother to do them by hand.

Identi.ca Updates for 2009-05-15

• What Dan Brown did for the Catholic Church in Da Vinci Code, he did to physics in Angels & Demons. http://is.gd/zF16 #
• No kidding: Barack Obama, the quintessential Liberal Fascist http://is.gd/zbNX #
• Letter of Amends from a Recovering Liberal http://is.gd/yLbg #
• VDH: Cheney’s methodical defense is both logical and principled. http://is.gd/zGaW Which is why he is attacked so vehemently, of course. #
• Mark Steyn: Live Free Or Die http://is.gd/zGoK #
• Top Five Things Star Trek 2 Should Avoid. (Khan is number one.) http://is.gd/zQIp #
• Whoops, they were reverse-numbered. Number five was Khan, but he was the first one mentioned. #
• Universal healthcare to save on costs? “[G]ibberish in a prom dress,” says Megan McCardle. Gotta love her. http://is.gd/zSbA #
• George Will, “Tincture of Lawlessness” http://is.gd/zNUn Um, it’s more than a tincture, it’s more of a flood. #

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Identi.ca Updates for 2009-05-14

• Hmm, some sort of problem with my main blog… #
• Sly Stallone in his now-filming epic, The Expendables http://is.gd/zmci #
• RT @jamendo Free Music Charts and Jamendo: cast your five votes!! > http://minurl.fr/fwm in reply to jamendo #
• The masterpiece that killed George Orwell http://is.gd/ygzA #
• This is just a cool picture: Patrolling the Poppies http://is.gd/znMD #
• The United Nations’ Retreat From Science in Controlling Malaria http://is.gd/znN3 (psst: it ain’t about science, it’s about being righteous” #
• The Cold Civil War Being Fought In Medium Cool http://is.gd/znN3 #
• According to Production Weekly, Madeleine Stowe is going to start directing. Cool! http://is.gd/zol3 #
• RT @mwickens Heartened by this news about coffee: http://bit.ly/ITGPZ I should live forever. #
• “The News” vs. The News. No doubt you’ve noticed this yourself. http://www.dustbury.com/archives/8257 #
• Mammals have produced milk for 160 million years http://is.gd/zuDT #
• The Great Thomas Sowell on The Blame Game http://is.gd/zuFY #
• Ken Begg keeps ragging on the new Syfy Channel, and it’s hard to blame him. http://is.gd/zCHn #
• The most transparent administration in history! http://is.gd/zyYW #

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Identi.ca Updates for 2009-05-13

• OK, I’m never going to read the 1872 edition of Men Of Our Day, the author’s name is cool. L.P. Brockett http://is.gd/z44Z #
• Bugger! Signed up for a free telephone seminar on screenwriting, and now I’ve missed almost half of it! #
• Oh, great, one of the questions is about “socially responsible” prodcos that “don’t put profit first”. Oy. #
• Talking about options. I’ve not heard about options having a performance component. Very interesting. #

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Okay…

Something’s up with my main blog, so for the moment I’ll be posting here.

Which means I have to actually post, instead of relying on a plugin to simply harvest everything I post to Identi.ca/Twitter. (WordPress.Com does not allow use of plugins.)

Anyway, yes, I am aware that there are issues at my domain, and I am attending to them. Until they’re fixed, look for sporadic content here, on Identi.ca, or on Twitter (which is just a mirror of my Identi.ca, but a lot more people use it).

Identi.ca Updates for 2009-05-12

• No kidding. Perez Hilton “has done nothing to bring credibility to gay rights activism.” http://is.gd/yZEZ #
• Plugins to spruce up your WordPress based website http://is.gd/yeyF #
• Terry Teachout has both a biography (of Satchmo!) and an opera coming out this year. http://is.gd/yZH1 #
• “And on the 73rd day, I will rest.” No, Obama’s not too full of himself, is he? http://is.gd/yiZ1 #
• Blues Capitalist. http://is.gd/yZJP #
• Althouse doesn’t think the NYC overflight could possibly have been a photo op. She’s got good reason. http://is.gd/yFjA #

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Melodic musing

Lately I have been possessed of an urge to create music.

Which is nuts.

I mean, I’ve never had much of a head for music, apart from genuine appreciation. I played trumpet in band for a few years in school, and was better than I had any right to be (which is not to say that I was good). But apart from that, I don’t “see” music in my head the way that musicians apparently do, and the few times I’ve ever had a tune pop into my head that seems at all original, it has vanished within a matter of minutes.

I can’t read music for squat. Oh, sure, put some sheet music in front of me, and I can slowly plink out the notes on a piano, after much thought and strenuous deliberation. It might even sound vaguely like the melody the composer intended. But past that, I can’t read it at all.

Part of the impetus for this is a long-gestating novel I’ve been noodling with off and on for several years. As conceived, the book is experimental in form, and I’m quite unsure that it will ever be finished. The conceit is that it is a book-length set of liner notes to accompany a tribute album for a fictitious band. I know the name and tone of each of the thirteen songs on the album, and have partial lyrics for some. And I’ve wavered back and forth as to whether music should actually be created for the project. So, that’s been at the back of my mind for some time.

Then there was the recent, very ugly breakup I’ve gone through. The breakup itself hasn’t inspired much in me (other than relief), but it has made me go back and re-examine some very old business from my past. One day in February, as I was sitting at my computer working on something else, I opened up AbiWord and, without a lot of conscious thought, pounded out some very suggestive fragments of what I first thought was a poem, but then realized was better thought of as a song. A Social Distortion song, in metaphors and tone. There’s no tune yet, but it sits there, waiting for life to be breathed into it.

Another decision I made recently, also in connection with that very old business, was to write and, hopefully in the next year or so, shoot a short film. And one of the most important aspects of this is that I already have the open source soundtrack picked out and arranged. The music didn’t quite come first, but choosing and arranging it helped me get the film clear in my head. There’s no need for me to compose in this case, but for some reason it makes me want to be able to do so anyway.

Furthermore, it bothers me that I cannot talk about music in any intelligent way, and particularly jazz. As a specific example, I am absolutely unable to explain to anyone else what modal improvisation is. And if I can’t explain it, I can’t feel that I genuinely understand it, certainly not in the way that I like. (My current understanding is limited mostly to recognition — I can say “that’s (probably) modal improvisation, and that isn’t” but nothing more than that.) This lack of language when it comes to music can be embarrassing, such as when Allison Crowe’s manager left a comment the other day, and I felt like emailing to apologize for how poorly I described her work.

So the question is, what remedies am I going to apply to these underdeveloped areas of my mental life?

Well, I’ve downloaded a text on music theory to study, and am hoping that will help in my abstract understanding.

I got a cheap “learn the harmonica” set from Barnes & Noble over a year ago, and I’m starting to go through that. (It’s a nice set, incidentally, including not only a decent little harmonica and a book, but also a CD and a DVD, all purchased for something south of ten dollars.)

I also have a couple of LiveCD Linux distributions that are geared toward audio or multimedia production, dyne:bolic and Musix. Either one runs on my desktop reasonably well. I’m thinking of using them to teach myself the software, and to hear how truly awful my sense of musicality is, maybe by creating an album in a day.

I don’t have oodles of time to devote to this self-improvement, but I’m going to take a whack at it anyhow.

Identi.ca Updates for 2009-05-11

• Obama and the 9/11 families http://is.gd/xJbx #
• Israel Today, the West Tomorrow. http://is.gd/xt2z #
• Sometimes I think I’m too cynical. Then I read Victor Davis Hanson, and get trumped completely. http://is.gd/xSfw #
• Startled burglar pleads for his life. http://is.gd/yFFA #
• Lessons learned http://is.gd/yFGl #
• How the Family of a Dissident Fled China http://is.gd/yFGt #
• Why does the vaccine/autism controversy live on? http://is.gd/xwLY Because it’s not about reality, it’s about feeling holier-than-thou. #
• Duckies! http://is.gd/yG0w #

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Identi.ca Updates for 2009-05-10

• The man who rescued a million Yiddish books. http://is.gd/y4z1 #
• Lies and the lying Democrats who tell them. http://is.gd/y4Am #
• “…because all of this fleeting reflected glory is as nothing to you unless you hear us say ‘You win.'” http://is.gd/y4CT #
• “…they believe that the important thing is for them to have power.” http://is.gd/y6uW Well, yes. #

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Identi.ca Updates for 2009-05-09

• Mystery solved: Basking sharks winter in Rio, which makes them smarter than me. http://is.gd/xEs1 #
• Jaguar visits island in Panama Canal. http://is.gd/xEus #
• Lying isn’t practical. http://is.gd/qj35 #
• Israel would inform US, not ask permission, before striking Iran. It’s the only sane method. http://is.gd/xKUb #
• I know this feeling. Except for the Kenny G part. http://is.gd/uetn #
• Revelations http://is.gd/xKZ1 #
• The great Thomas Sowell: “Empathy” Versus Law. http://is.gd/xKZO #
• Dafydd ab Hugh: Obamic Apology Tour Crawls to Kabul. http://is.gd/xL0Q #
• Star Trek’s warp drive may be possible. http://is.gd/xdWP #
• California threatens property rights to coerce individuals to surrender voting rights. http://is.gd/xCiJ #
• This could make an excellent movie… but never will. http://is.gd/xL5Z #
• Saving capitalism the George McGovern Way http://is.gd/xL6x #
• The President has trimmed MORE THAN HALF A PERCENT off his budget!!! http://is.gd/xL7P #
• “What a greasy, lying sack of s–t our God-Emperor is, and will remain.” http://is.gd/xL91 #
• George Will takes Obama out behind the woodshed and swats him good. http://is.gd/xtPF #
• A very pulpy title: The Squeal Widow by Anatole Feldman http://is.gd/xLbb #
• The greatest sin to the left has always been hypocrisy. You know, except for when THEY do it. http://is.gd/xLf2 #
• The left likes to say that they’re the side of science of reason. And they’ll smear anyone who disagrees. http://is.gd/xLk4 #
• Yes, Virginia, the White House lied. http://is.gd/xpvM #
• Real guys having “a guy kind of meal” don’t need TV crews covering them live. Such poseurs. http://is.gd/xz0w #
• Why are denim overall-shorts sexy? The world may never know. http://is.gd/xLAg #
• Orange attitude. http://is.gd/xLDf #
• There are some things that men should never be faced with. http://is.gd/xMuq #
• Jew hatred and other EuroLeft in-jokes http://is.gd/xCtB #
• Dismantling capitalism: bank shell games http://is.gd/xMOh #
• In occupied France http://is.gd/xtDk #
• Obama to corrupt unions: “Love you, man.” http://is.gd/xMQ7 #
• RT @mwickens mwickens”America does not need a third party; it needs a second party.” http://bit.ly/KkPz #tcot #
• RT @jamendo jamendoFirst chainstore in the US for #jamendo background music : http://www.baybread.com/ in reply to jamendo #
• RT @TheFlaCracker 17,000,000,000.00 is a HUGE number compared to 3.7T (public education works!) #tcot #gop #humor #CnMath #
• Largest trilobite yet found in Portugal http://is.gd/xNzC #
• r #
• Support Joss: Save Dollhouse. Fans get their voices heard @BuddyTV http://tinyurl.com/SaveDollhouse Please ReTweet and join the cause. #
• Another Fashion Friday for the Salsa Twins http://is.gd/xU5G #
• The buck stops, um, there. Consequences for the stupid AF1 overflight of NYC, just not for Obama. http://is.gd/xTe6 #

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A soul-rending voice

  

Allison Crowe is a Canadian singer and pianist, and if you listen to any of the songs on this album, you will quickly see that her voice and her musicality are amazing. Yes, she tends toward the very depressing, so you have to be in the right mood to listen to her, but that only means that her talent is all the more affecting.

At this point, I still haven’t listened to the lyrics closely, but that doesn’t really matter to me at the moment. There are three songs in particular that clutch at my heart — “Northern Lights”, “Little Light”, and “Disease”, which is a live performance and just stunning, a sledgehammer of emotion.

“Disease” is supposed to be some sort of social commentary, and its the song whose lyrics I’ve paid the least attention to, in part because of that. But listen to that piano. Listen to the tones of Miss Crowe’s voice. Whatever political agenda she brings to this song, she also brings ten tons of soul-ache, which makes up for whatever agenda the song might have.

Again, this is Jamendo, so the download is free. And as usual, I recommend the OGG Vorbis files over the MP3. I’ve listened to both, and the Ogg files are just a bit sharper. Miss Crowe is one of Jamendo’s biggest artists, so all her albums are well seeded in BitTorrents.