Update re: Joker Folie A Deux. (Why I think people didn´t like it; and how current Hollywood directors are behind the curve.)
And indeed, although the Guardian reviewer Peter Bradshaw https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/sep/04/joker-folie-a-deux-review-joaquin-phoenix-and-lady-gaga-musical-spirals-out-of-tune
actually liked it better than did Maher of the Times, the Guardian and other publications are now publishing a slew of articles, as to how this movie is losing money hand over fist ($200k at the box office), and their only hope is to recoup it on streaming!
Folie à Deux is heading for an early debut on streaming platforms as its dismal run at the box office continues
Well: I suppose that's really ALL that counts, in Hollywood! 😏
As one or two have commented, I really don't see how they can have spent so much on a movie, without action scenes or special effects.
But the Guardian Hollywood writer seems to think it bombed, largely because it rubbed comic book fans, "an important sector of the market", "up the wrong way"..
And this Guardian writer Andrew Pulver reckons it "scolds the audience". Though I don't see how. With a musical? 🙄 With a musical, you can only ANNOY the audience, by making it flat and unentertaining. (If however you make it entertaining, you get the audience on your side. 🙂) And this is obviously no Little Shop Of Horrors…
Well.. You see, I believe the FIRST Phillips movie did rub fans of the characters up the wrong way too, to an extent! 😏 Not everybody liked it. If you look back in time to various contemporary YouTube parodies of movie 1, you can see that a lot of them parody the Phoenix Joker as weak! One I saw even had him falling from top to bottom of those concrete steps! (Though of course he didn't, in the movie!)
Well - again, this Lokean believes this negative box-office result vindicates her theories! And proves that I have the answer! 🙂
People don't WANT an incompetent, clumsy, sad-sack antihero. They want an old-time "rags to riches" story! I BELIEVE! (Even if it has certain ironic touches.)
I also think that a story told by a bourgeois director in which he is basically saying that a working-class rebel of whichever stamp, needs must fail, is ALSO not these days going to be popular. 😏
Yes. Pulver commented: "The core audience [which is WHO, one wonders, according to Pulver? JUST the comic book fans? But for a Hollywood movie to succeed, it has to appeal to more than just fans of the novel or comic book!] received the message that not only is the film very different from the first film, but also that people liked the first Joker for the wrong reasons."
And COULD a LOT of them have liked it, not for conventional superhero movie fan reasons (after all, that was precisely what Joker wasn't) but because they saw the first film as a rare example of "the underdog getting some of his own back", genre? 😄😄
Michael Moore had his finger on the pulse of why the first movie succeeded. (Michael Moore usually does! 🙂)
"Except in this story a discomfiting question is posed: What if one day the dispossessed decide to fight back?"
"Joker": Michael Moore writes tribute to Todd Phillips' "cinematic masterpiece."
But Loki and His Own, we'd like to take that a little further, you see! Oh yes! 😄
The public - comics fans included, I do believe - would have far preferred a story in which Arthur Fleck the "Joker", however mentally disturbed he is or isn't, developed into a HERO! In which he grew into a much stronger character. Aided and drawn onwards and upwards, one would think, by his love for the character Harley Quinn. And hers for him. Pity, then, that in this, she is a duplicitous COW, who goes by the dull soubriquet "Lee", not "Harley". 😏
One supposes though that SOME diehard comic bookers would want Phoenix's Joker to develop either into the evil genocidal villain he is in some of the modern comics 🤮, or into the even more recognisable Gotham-destroying terrorist of Nolan's The Dark Knight 🙄.
This just proves, however, that such people are stupid! 😄 And I know that no Neopagan would go in for such obvious Christian right-wing ideological fantasies, which we see right through!
We have something better! (And something we might even be able to sell to the male incel comic bookers, because it is FAR from wimpy! And it offers the underdog a bit of HOPE.)
I DO believe, that a writer such as myself, could and would manage to sell to the public who are tired of wimpy Jokers, and "failure stories", and all such dull negativity, a fantasy that I have already outlined in my previous essay above, and that is far more folksy, and far more Pagan both. ☺️
That would be the rags-to-riches tale of a Trickster Hero! 👍
THAT the public would now buy and lap up, I'll stake my best idol of Loki on it! 🙂😄👍
P.S. Very recent events - much more recent than my writing any of these reviews/musings - have I think proved, that vast numbers of the US public are perfectly prepared to support rebels against the status quo - in real life! Even if in real life, ¨the system¨ turns those rebels into martyrs. What is important to the public, is that they achieve something, however symbolic. Violently symbolic. A bit of ¨own-backery¨, as one might say! 😏
I´m not sure that that was precisely what I was talking about in my essays - but I think we can all see, the way that the public mood is going, and that ¨conventional¨ ideas on the part of directors - like wasn´t Phillips trying to quote some Scorsesean/Roman Catholic bit of ¨moralism¨, at the end of Folie A Deux, according to what I read on Wikipedia - just don´t cut the mustard any more.
People want ¨the terrorist" to win. As long as he is the right kind of terrorist! 😏
As for Tricksters - well - this Lokean will let you all into something! 😄😄😄 The great thing about them, is that they tend to get away with it! 😄 In the long run, they do! (Yeah: so Christians said Loki didn´t. But Christians lie: and they have the wrong cosmological outlook anyway!)
P.P.S. Those interested in Trickster Heroes will also need to read my forthcoming reviews/essays/musings on the sorely much-unadapted (as yet) science fiction writer Julian May, her Saga of the Exiles, and her fabulous Trickster, Aiken Drum! ☺️
Joker: Folie a Deux, Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, movie plots, different ideas, trickster heroes
Review (But not mine! Though I have largely made my mind up) of the latest Joker movie: Folie A Deux
I decided to read a couple of recent Joker II reviews, and to copy out a leading one for the purposes of this article. (I did this just before the movie came out in UK cinemas.)
That would be the one in the Sunday Times by Kevin Maher, which I managed to access through bypassing the paywall through archive.org. Fiddly, but worth it!
Joker: Folie à Deux review – a messy, lifeless sequel with Lady Gaga
(That's from the 25th of September I think.)
It's not very long, so here we go:
The director Todd Phillips said there would be no follow-up to the original, but he changed his mind and the result is a derivative musical
(you can input the above at archive.org, and then go clicking on a particular snapshot as to date and time)
In September 2019, at a press conference in Los Angeles, the director Todd Phillips decided to set the record straight. His forthcoming movie, Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix, would not be getting a sequel. It was designed as a self-contained one-film experience that referenced Martin Scorsese's The King Of Comedy and other 70s New York classics."The movie's not set up to have a sequel," he said of a film that ends with exquisite finality after Phoenix's deranged loner has ultimately become a criminal demigod. The last shot features Joker, in Arkham state hospital, sauntering down an empty corridor, ecstatic and triumphant while Frank Sinatra's That's Life blares on the soundtrack. A title cards reads: "The End." Philips, at the LA press conference, added, just to be clear, "we made this movie, I pitched it to Warner Brothers as one movie. It exists in its own world. That's it."
So what happened? Joker, to everyone's surprise, made more than one billion dollars at the box office, with an Oscar for Phoenix and the composer Hildur Gudnadottir. The emergency axe thus came out, and despite everything, Phillips and Co smashed back into the self-contained world, shook all the contents out onto the carpet and, against their own advice, had another go. The result? Messy, lifeless, derivative and exactly what you'd expect from a film that simply doesn't want, or need, to exist.
This time it's a musical. That's the hook. And it's set almost entirely, apart from some courtroom sequences, in Arkham Asylum. Musical is putting it kindly: the songs are a random, uninspired grab bag including For Once In My Life (made famous by Stevie Wonder), If My Friends Could See Me Now, Bewitched (Bothered and Bewildered) and I've Got the World on a String. They are "sung" with croaking atonal defiance by Phoenix and his co-star Lady Gaga. She's Harleen Quinzel, a fellow patient at Arkham who, adopting the Phoenix performance style, mostly murders her tunes, especially an ear-scraping version of That's Entertainment, delivered outside the courthouse where Joker's fate is being decided.
Yep, that's the plot. He's in the asylum because he's maaad (laughs manically a lot). He goes to court to decide whether or not he's really maaad. And (no spoilers) then he's back in the asylum. And there's bad singing. And everyone in court discusses at length the events from the first Joker, which is a terrible idea because it reminds you of a much better film and of how the mighty have fallen.
Two stars, in cinemas from October 4th.
I don't really know whether I will bother going to see it in the cinema!
(In the end, I didn´t.)
...
Right. So they've made at least one further major departure from the entire Batman ethos, really, which is to have Harley Quinn, Harleen Quinzel, a patient at the Asylum instead of a doctor. Although I don't know whether they've made her a doctor who fell into madness, or something, before she met the Joker! Or if they're somehow going to blame her madness on the Joker. Or whatever. 😏🙄
It all does seem a bit stupid, really. Well – this idea that none of the Batman characters really have, as it were, the superpowers that they genuinely do have, in the comics. And these are not always, in the case of all characters, supernatural superpowers: they're not in the case of the Batman himself.
In fact, with Joker and with Harley I think that their real superpower, that of both of them, lies in their ability to bend reality through absurdity. That's a trickster superpower. That's my analysis! Has been for a long time. 🙂
Of course, in the comics, and in the Suicide Squad movies, they don't just "imagine" it, they do it! 🙂
But if you're just gonna say that Harley is just another dumb powerless mad person... well, then that shortchanges both the character and the viewer.
They've even had the neck to remove, the director has, a superpower that Lady Gaga has in real life, which is the power of being a decent singer! For it says here that she "croaks" through the numbers instead of singing them! What a swizz!
And there aren't even any original numbers, just songs recycled from other places in popular culture. As far as I can see, they haven't bothered to compose one original song for the movie. This just shows you that it's all totally derivative, and that Disney could do better than that, because they always compose songs for their movies, don't they? For the Pirates of the Caribbean, and everything.
Anyway. A musical is supposed to have original material in it, just like the movie musical Little Shop of Horrors did! After all, if they've been marketing it with the musical shtick as the hook as it were.
But never mind my preemptive criticism of the actual movie. I'd just like to finish with a bit of musing on the subject of whether the first movie, Joker by Todd Phillips, actually demanded or indeed implied a sequel, or sequels. I quite agree that his original intention was that it should not get one: however as an experienced Hollywood director, he should always bear in mind the possibility that a sequel will be demanded! 😄
But I'm saying that if either Todd Phillips or Kevin Maher are saying that a sequel to the movie Joker was never implied or was impossible – going by the text of the movie – then I would like to say that they are both very wrong. And that they do not understand storytelling techniques such as foreshadowing.
(Again, the Pirates Of The Caribbean writers would have known better! 😄)
Ok, why? One simple reason would be that the Batman, Bruce Wayne, was in the first Joker movie, albeit as a child. (But then, he's also a child in the Gotham TV series by Fox.)
Well: just by having the young Bruce Wayne in the first movie, that by itself is an implication that he will grow up to be the Batman, and fight villains such as the Joker. No? It does I think to anybody and everybody including those who are not big comic book fans.
That's a kind of foreshadowing. As is the fact that the young Bruce Wayne and Arthur Fleck who is to call himself the Joker, do actually meet in the movie: albeit in a very brief manner. Arthur Fleck, in his clown costume as I recall, or something looking clownish, anyway, somewhat heartstring-pullingly attempts to entertain the child Bruce Wayne through the gates of Wayne Manor. He appears to be having at least a little success! However, this is soon brought to a halt by the intervention of the butler, Alfred, just as we know him from the comics and other adaptations, but perhaps presented a little less amiably, and more socially realistically here, for as a faithful servant of the ruling class he shares their disdain towards someone who is obviously a kind of a hobo character: and if not a hobo, then one at least of the poor underclass who is not to be allowed to hang around anywhere near the rich, because he might try to steal from them or do them harm. 😏
(Although Pennyworth does not know Fleck from Adam at the time. But he is just making the usual privileged social judgement..)
Arthur Fleck / the Joker as Other, then.
Arthur Fleck pretty much in the role of The Little Tramp. Definitely some pathos in that scene! 🙂
But anyway, you see: if you show a character as a child, who everybody knows because of all the surrounding mythos, and yeah sure all the different versions of the character and the concept of Batman: but who everybody knows does grow up to be Batman the crime fighter vigilante who fights mad villains! (After all, he has no reason not to in this version of the story, because his father is still killed – I'm not sure about his mother - by a low life named Joe Chill!)
And then you show him, albeit as a child, juxtaposed with someone who in the main mythos you know becomes one of his arch enemies, one of the arch villains, then that is just implying that Wayne will grow up and will go on to fight the Joker later on! Which means a sequel right there! So how any of these Hollywood idiots or reviewers can say that it doesn't, I don't know! They're certainly not writers, I can tell you. 😏 They know nothing about foreshadowings or the implications contained in works of fiction. Particularly not ones that already have an established mythos, as I've said.
But it would be the same if you were writing about something else very well known like Charles Dickens characters, or the gods of various well-known mythologies, etc etc etc. 😏
Ok, final suggestion. If Todd Phillips wanted to copy other movies, from other eras of Hollywood, (or "reference" them, as is the posh Hollywood term for it) then why doesn't he simply go back a bit further than the Hollywood of the 1970s? To an era when it really was the silver screen, the Hollywood of dreams, the fairy tale Hollywood? 🙂
Because I for one think, and this has been echoed by many another critic over the years, that the reason Hollywood was invented, was basically to tell modern fairy tales. The "rags to riches" and other wish-fulfilment types of story.
Nothing wrong with that - if people don't have dreams, they won't get anywhere! 🙂
The "Accidental hero" is another theme, both of movies and literature, that I like to return to.
And of course, the protagonists of such movies don't all have to be innocents, like in Mr Smith Goes To Washington or Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.
Quite a few Hollywood movies of the 30s and 40s featured gangsters, some of them fairly sympathetic, like the characters generally played by Edward G Robinson.
Am I saying that Arthur Fleck should be the hero of this movie? Basically, yes. He is the main protagonist of this movie "series": and "hero" and "antihero" are seen as pretty much the same these days, no? 😏 😄 Well why not lean into that? (Oh, and have a real plot?)
Yes. Well, anyway: Arthur Fleck, the guy who is to eventually call himself Joker in the first movie, experiences various twists of fate in that movie, some of them extremely misfortunate, and some of them, like being rescued and acclaimed by Joe Chill and the clown protestors towards the end of the movie being fortunate. For him.
But I think, that for the protagonist of a movie like that, he can't solely rely on luck – at least a character like the Joker is, or what I think he should be, can't – it's how he uses and manipulates that luck! It's a case of if he manages to use it to leverage himself into a better situation.
Now that, of course, is a fairy tale theme, well-known in old stories! In fact, I would further classify such a theme as a trickster fairy tale! Which is of course what the Joker should be! 🙂 (Certainly in a story that portrays him as the main protagonist.)
Well-known traditional examples would be (to choose but a couple) Jack and the Beanstalk, and the German story of The Brave Little Tailor, who manages to use sheer luck and a couple of handy misunderstandings to impress the king to gain honors and goods for himself!
Now, Joaquin Phoenix's Joker could do something like that, if his writers and the director would only allow him to! But I very much doubt that they have allowed him to do anything like that in Joker: Folie A Deux: whatever the assistance (or lack of it) he receives from Harley Quinn! (I suspect that all they've allowed him to do is to get really excited to have a girlfriend at last! 😏🙄)
Although what I've said they should do, is I believe what would be the most logical development of the story. (Certainly to a Lokean such as myself. ☺️)
How would he do that? Well, again to a Lokean, it's obvious! Look at movie one: he practically stirs up a revolution! So, instead of trying to prove he either is or isn't mad, he should lean on that support he originally got from the clown protestors, to get him out of the asylum, one way or another. Yes indeed: that notion would express shades of Trumpian demagoguery, as well as shades of genuine revolution. 😏
(Really Phoenix's character is in need of an EGO the size of Trump's! Because if he had it, he could do what I said he could do! 😏... That's USUALLY not a problem for those of my archetype, I can hear my Patron, Loki, slyly commenting in the background! 😄)
That's all you need: ego plus smarts. (I would argue that Arthur has already got the smarts: the problem is, that Todd Phillips doesn't allow him to use them properly! He didn't in the first movie either: otherwise a certain teenage gang would have had an unpleasant surprise... 😈
Phillips does not allow his Joker the capacity, the competency, to be able to astonish, and to pull the odd rabbit out of the hat.
Whereas in TRUE folklore, that's practically all Tricksters do! By Loki, it is! 😄❤️)
But according to the reviewer, all they do in Folie à Deux is warble a bunch of pointless random song numbers, and go over most of the first movie, which is just boring!
The plot is therefore pointless, tedious, stagnant... you name it! Everything modern movie writers should be notorious for, which is that many of them CAN'T WRITE.
(Pro tip: DON'T GET THE DIRECTOR TO WRITE MOST OF THE SCRIPT! 😏)
(And this lot have zero knowledge of the techniques and elements and themes both of movies and of older forms of storytelling, such as foreshadowing, traditional themes, archetypes.. again, you name it. 😏)
Hmm. This very morning, I saw a guy much younger than myself on YouTube, basically saying that modern movies either sucked, or were remakes, or both!
There is very little of either originality or skill going on! Certainly not when it comes to movie plots. 👎
(Oh yes! 🙂 P.S. for the general reader, or indeed movie-lover, especially if you have a bit of a social conscience. 🙂 Do have a look at <a href="https://youtu.be/1b8lJOhB-xc?si=Zs2huqyAmRBYxORX">this YouTube video</a> by a lady called AngieSpeaks: she has some very interesting takes on the first Phillips Joker movie. She has a good costume, too! 😄
Joker: Folie a Deux, Todd Phillips, Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Hollywood, sequels, deficient modern movies
Well: I can see I haven´t posted here for a while... Though I haven´t abandoned this blog yet! 🙂
Yes: I made a couple of posts here last year, 2023, didn´t I? One on the interminably boring celebrity sex scandals in the UK, and one on the much more savoury topic of a fish curry, recipe given in a book by Greg Palast! Which I still very much recommend.. 🙂
Yeah. The trouble with blogging for me, is that for the past decade or so, my access to the internet (including local 4G mobile services, which I was for quite a while reliant on) was decidedly patchy. 😏
I wanted to do a lot more blogging during the pandemic years, when I would definitely have had the time: only found out that the mobile internet service deteriorated even more during that time! 🙄
I only got a home broadband service, really by the start of last year. But by then I had got out of the blogging habit... I even got out of the Twitter habit, once my mobile failed, just before last Xmas, and I couldn´t get another one until past New Year.
And I am afraid that the political situation this year in the UK certainly did not encourage me to start on Twitter or ¨X" again. I make a few occasional posts or likes there. Even though my negect probably lost me a few online relationships. For what they´re worth. 😏 The only thing I´ve really been keeping up with for the whole year has been Youtube.
I may join Bluesky in the New Year of 2025, now that Elon has gone off the deep end, and a couple of his competing sites have ¨blown up¨. We´ll see.
But I´ve realised that I´ve built up a whole selection of ¨web essays" and other thoughts, really since Covid started in 2020. They´re all on my Keep notes, and haven´t found a home yet! So I think I will find them one on here...
Plus I´ve been catching up on things I hadn´t had a chance to watch before, on streaming services. For instance, I have very recently been watching the 2023 superhero satire, The Boys, on Amazon Prime. (I must say, it´s a lot better than Alan Moore´s Watchmen!) I should like to write a public review of it, once I reach the end of the seasons.
And I´ve also written a couple of, more musings than reviews, on the latest Joker movie, Folie à Deux. I didn´t go to see that at the cinema, as I didn´t think it was worth it. But I definitely kept up with all the reviews of it, particularly those in the UK broadsheet newspapers...
When I have seen it, I will finally write a review specifically of the movie. But before then, I will put up my musings thereon, which I think are rather more interesting, certainly to me (And other Neopagans like me, I hope): because not only do they cover the reasons I think that the latest Todd Phillips offering was a flop; they cover much deeper themes that I find far more compelling: such as those of archetypes, of myths and of fairytales. And of Tricksters.. 🙂
Schofield? Schmofield. 😏 (& the same to everyone obsessed by his sex life. 😏)
Yes. well, as I've said on quite a number of occasions to various people, all this celebrity stuff, in particular, is for the birds. I know I've said "for the birds" quite a few times recently, I think. But pretty much all celebrity stuff, is for me now, in particular celebrity sex scandals, or pseudo scandals, whether homosexual or heterosexual, whether they would involve Philip Schofield, or I don't know Prince Harry and Meghan Markle! Are a complete waste of time as news, particularly from the viewpoint, of any sincere and informed socialist. Well ... I know that quite a few people use or tend to use celebrity issues, as a way of relating themselves to more general issues: or even simply so that they have something to talk about, and everybody else will know what it is they're talking about.
But: this is simply a very shallow way to relate to the world. And you do have to remember, that the more time people spend on line or anywhere else, talking about celebrities, and gossiping about them, the less time they and the actual media will have to concentrate on ordinary people and talk about them and about issues that matter.
So it's a question of where the focus should be! 🙂
And don't give me that stuff all about how immoral Phillip Schofield or someone like him is. He actually fits into an a number of very normal in inverted commas cliches: that of the boss who has an affair with his secretary, which this is the equivalent of; then there's the established gay trope of the much older and more experienced man with a lot younger man, and so on and so forth. To suggest that this is anything extraordinary or criminal is simply naive. It's both naive and hypocritical: which unfortunately both are very prevalent features of contemporary British society. 😏
As I told to that Wolf person or whatever his name was on a fairly recent Twitter thread, I know exactly why - the web of reasons why - this Phillip Schofield thing is being made the most tremendous fuss of on social media right now. As I told him, it is partially mass hysteria which is fueled by the mainstream media; Britain goes through a paedophile panic every so often, which was once very neatly satirised by the satirical program Brass Eye! 🙂
And secondly, to go along with the mass hysteria, we also have a sort of mass collective guilt, which was really sparked off by, and has been hanging around for years, due to the failure by the police, the media and I suppose ultimately the public, to catch and expose Jimmy Savile as the kind of predator he was. As I also said on Twitter, worrying about Savile really is shutting the stable door after the horse has indeed bolted. 😏
But the comparisons being made, particularly on YouTube right now, between Schofield and Savile, are quite simply ridiculous and obviously completely unwarranted. Often they are done by insinuation: like with the juxtaposition of a picture of one with a picture of the other, both Photoshopped so as to look extremely unpleasant, particularly on the thumbnail where everyone can see it. This is both clickbait and libel of the worst variety and it should not be allowed by YouTube, and it should be removed. But we all know they're much more interested in censoring political channels.
Yes. This smearing by
association: that is something the modern mainstream media are well known to do. **Usually when they are producing some type of propaganda or another.** Mr Corbyn got plenty of that: but that's another matter.
And we also notice - at least I do - that most of the fuss about Schofield, at least that which has revealed itself in my YouTube feed, and nearly all the smears about Schofield, are produced by right wing sites, the likes of GB News, and further right. The kind of poisonous sneery tone, of a lot of these obviously non-socialist sites towards Schofield; denote to me two things. And often I think it's a mixture of the two! Namely, a kind of poisonous - when is it never poisonous - schadenfreude brought on by jealousy of a very successful career (some of these tubers are obviously people on the peripheries of showbiz). Second would be the still commonly felt among right wingers hostility towards homosexuals. Which they are cunningly attempting to disguise as something completely else: but I believe I can read the real emotional and ideological message particularly behind some of the more sneery type of channels. If you didn't hate gays, and you weren't jealous pricks, you wouldn't be sneering! is my conclusion. 🤷♀️
I don't really care whether a person is "moral", by the way. But I do care about fairness. The current treatment of Schofield, and the juxtaposition with Savile, is most certainly unfair. 😏
Anyway: the modern left, well most of it, doesn't appear to care about fairness: and once again quite stupidly they appear to have fallen for another scam. Or a mass hysteria; or a witch hunt; whatever one wants to call it. Similar to with the #itwasascam antisemitism thing really. 😏 Well at least, I can see them cheering it along on Twitter. I don't know if any left YouTuber has made any pieces positive or negative about Schofield: I haven't seen any of the ones I follow cover it, I haven't really looked. 🤷♀️
And similar of course to #metoo; which died a death really, with the flop of Amber Heard. And a bloody good thing it did!
What I'm saying - the conclusion I have come to - is the all these kind of celebrity things, when even not total smears, are a complete waste of time: and should not be touched with a barge pole by the left.
In fact, I would ban all this type of idea of social justice! That they think is social justice anyway; when really it's based on media bullying and Twitter dog piling; and doesn't achieve anything anyway. Much like that other pompous person on a Twitter thread I was on a couple of days ago was saying something like I was stopping successors of Savile from being hunted down! 😄 Like a) Schofield was anything at all like Savile; and like b) this fellow or a bunch of his fellow nerds on Twitter were going to do anything of the sort! Rotfl. 🤣 More people with a stupid keyboard warrior superhero complex! 😏👎
Kerala Meen Kootaan (Fish Curry) (Credit to: Greg Palast and friends!!)
[A lovely and not-at-all-out-of-place recipe in the book on geopolitics by Greg Palast, Armed Madhouse! 🙂🙂 ]
You won't find this on the menu at The Palm or The Four Seasons or other feedlots for rulers of the New World Order.
Chances are, you've never heard of Kerala [I have! 🙂 LK], and the economic carnivores want to keep it that way. While the free-market Mousketeers peddle the blood-soaked fake "miracle" of Chile as their model, Kerala has thrived, notes Nobelist Amartya Sen, on the economic cooperative model, with expansive social services and universal education.
This tiny state on the Arabian Sea has a population more literate than any American state's---its main export is PhD's for energy and computer industries. In 1995, I visited a fisherman's cooperative.
This is what they fed me:
KERALA MEEN KOOTAAN CURRY
Ingredients
1 1/2 lb. firm white fish (cod, halibut, sword) or tuna cut into 1-inch cubes
1 medium onion, chopped
1-inch cube ginger, shredded
7 cloves garlic, chopped
2 tsp. mild Kashmiri Red Chili Powder (or 1/2 tsp. hot red chilli powder plus 1 tsp. paprika)
1 1/2 tsp. coriander powder
1 pinch turmeric powder
4 pinches fenugreek powder
2 tbsp. canola oil or other light-flavored oil
1/2 tsp. mustard seeds
10-12 curry leaves (Note: Curry leaf is NOT the whole form of that English mixture called "curry powder".)
2 tsp. tamarind paste
1 cup water
salt
2tsp. coconut oil (optional, for garnishing)
Method
Cut and clean the fish.
In a blender or small food processor, make a paste of the following ingredients with a little water: onion, ginger, garlic, chili powder, coriander powder, turmeric, and fenugreek powder
Heat oil in a frying pan and fry mustard seed and curry leaf.
Add the paste and fry all this well (until the oil separates).
Now add the softened tamarind, and pour in the rest of the water.
Then add salt. After it boils, add the fish.
Let it simmer until the gravy thickens and the fish is tender.
Lastly, sprinkle the coconut oil, and leave it on the heat for a minute.
Serve it with white basmati rice or with boiled tapioca.
Thanks to Santosh Shyamsundar in Kochin, Kerala, for recovering the recipe. Linda Levy in New York for converting it to the Western kitchen and Oliver Shykles of Brighton, UK, for testing it.
All that to be found on pps. 164-5 of Armed Madhouse, by Greg Palast! Which is mostly a book about politics and economics!!
(Other authors in the same field, like Michael Moore, John Pilger, should try this idea of including a local healthy recipe in their books! As well as making the curry... 🙂)
VOTING TORY MAKES YOUR HEAD DROP OFF - Advertising ideas for the Labour Left... 🙂😄
Another thing to think of - you see, I took a few (small) business courses, when the Tory government was giving them away free in the 1990s, to massage the unemployment figures! :)
Well we did a couple of little modules on advertising... One of the most amusing things I was taught, that stuck in my mind, was that companies *couldn't* be prosecuted under the Trades Descriptions Act, for making claims in their advertising, that were *obviously* not literally true!! 🙂 *That's* why it's quite good for companies, to use bizarre images and humorous slogans in their advertising... Examples we were given, were the ever-popular one for Heineken beer "Heineken reaches the parts other beers don't reach"... WOW that one used to be a puzzler for me - when I was a 6-year-old! 😄
And "Chewier than a multi-storey block of flats!" (With regard to a Godzilla-like creature chomping up, respectively, some Chewits and a high-rise.... 😏)
😄😄😄😄😄😄
**Ye gods!! Couldn't we in Labour have, respectively - in order to return and "reward" the "compliment" of the massive slanders our party has been subjected to - something like, "Voting Tory makes your head drop off"????? Complete with amusing animation??**
🤣🤣
Well - people will know it doesn't LITERALLY - hence our immunity under advertising legislation! So we could get away with whatever ridiculous "smears" we wanted along those sort of lines! (Making such ridiculous claims would *also* be a way of mocking the other side's negative claims!)
But METAPHORICALLY, you see. That's the thing!! 😉
Of COURSE putting your X inside the box for the Tory tree, torch or whatever inconsistent symbol they happen to be using next, will MAKE YOU, the voter, STUPID!! Isn't it obvious?? What do the posh writers call it - ah - "axiomatic"??
😏😏😁🌹
"Voting Tory makes your head drop off - I saw it happen! 😱"
🤣
(Of course, as a Lokean psychologist, my dears, *I know that messages work on many levels*, not just on the rational level - and I am also aware of the Freudian implication of the above statement! 😁)
Another, extremely brilliant, public information film (for the safety information of kids) that haunted the minds of many people who were of junior school age in the 1970s, was the one that went "I am the spirit of dark and lonely water"....
Another ad, sinister rather than funny, just like that one, could be used to put people off the Tories, again... 😏
"I am the spirit of dark and lonely capitalism...."
(Actually what I think Labour, or a Left group like Momentum, should have, is the equivalent to its own "BBC3" channel - the Left needs its own "entertainment-mixed-with-politics" outlet; its own Spitting Image; edgy stuff like that, not piles of bland Blair(l)ite stodge); full of such bizarre cartoons, as I have suggested: with anti-elite and anti-Tory messages (there should be a regular skit called BoJo the Clown!); which the youth of a household could subscribe to, you see - for a very modest price - how about something like the Disney Channel's £5.99 a month?? Or £2.99 a month, or something?? That would both earn some revenue - and if it were available on TV, not just internet, via the usual wires, then other members of the household would also be influenced by it!!
Don't get me started, on subliminal advertising! 😏)
antisemitism, UK Labour, slander, smear campaign, smears disproven, brand, defending your brand, advertising ideas, voting Tory makes your head drop off
Another thing I'd like to say about "anti-semitism", whether in the Labour Party or in art, maybe on a wall somewhere....
Is that: IF it doesn't even approach the kind of abuse that is similar to a bad case of school bullying (and I know all about bullies; as I was bullied quite badly in secondary school...)
Then in that case my professional recommendation (as a member of various minorities myself) is that it should be IGNORED. After all, that's what we were told at school. ("And then they'll go away, dear!" 🙄 Well, they didn't *always* - but that is another matter!)
What I am saying IS: pretty much on the level of, if a race or an ethnicity or other group feels "bothered" (let alone horrified) about a mural that depicts (allegedly) some of them as greedy and rich and manipulative - well, if that cuts you to your soul to be thus described, you are a snowflakey, softy little minority, aren't you: and you wouldn't survive long at any average comprehensive school! 😏
Even if the painting were (allegedly) of you yourself (as are most political cartoons, of some named, known individual) well - wouldn't it be overreacting to accuse its author of terrible prejudice, for something uncomplimentary??
Politicians have to grow thick skins; I don't see why minorities shouldn't have to. (In fact, in the old days, we all did - and wasn't that somehow BETTER?! Didn't it make us less whiney, more valiant?)
I mean - from my point of view (as an occultist and a Neo-Pagan) - supposing someone were to produce a Halloween mural of witches, as evil old hags.... Or maybe another kids' TV series with an ugly green-faced wicked witch like Grotbags in it... 😄 Plenty of stereotyping there!
Do you expect me to have an "eppy", all over it??? Or just to find it funny, which I would?
In fact - I don't think I could think of *any* Wiccan or Neo-Pagan, who was *that* prickly and over-sensitive, to be all het up - or even annoyed or worried - over a children's TV programme, a movie or something, a piece of art: which presented a negative view of a witch or witches! (Though I have for a long time contemplated writing a critical *article* on the subject of such portrayals, for something like EMPIRE movie magazine! 🙂)
Maybe it's just because we're a fairly easy-going minority, who don't take ourselves too seriously... And aren't, in any number, at the top of any kind of political or financial trees. 😏
(With regard to anti-semitism as a prejudice: as to what *genuine* antisemitism is - many of the articles in this free online book make it very clear! 😏 https://www.versobooks.com/books/3215-anti-semitism-and-the-labour-party)
(Oh yes: and *with regard to the oft-made point about anti-semitism*: "but stereotypes and accusations like that whipped up enough hatred against Jews that in several periods, eg that of the Russian Pogroms, and even more that of the Nazi period, it sent millions of Jews to their deaths"...
*Well* - prejudices about mysterious, knowing, magical or hag-like old women (in particular - though younger women and men too were also from time to time accused as witches) and the "evil" things we supposedly did - *sent hundreds of thousands of witches and pagans to our deaths, too*: in the late medieval and Early Modern periods. *Might* not have been millions - but then the population of Europe and the New World (once the latter was populated by whites) was not nearly as great, at the time!
**People died in both the referred-to cases, of different minorities, you see! LOTS of them did...** Albeit at different stages of history - though pogroms against Jews were also as I know, prevalent in the Middle Ages.
And, as Colin Wilson rather appositely says, in his overview The Occult
The witch craze was so horrible and so widespread that the human imagination cannot encompass it. We find it hard enough to envisage Hitler’s murder of six million Jews over less than ten years, so it is quite impossible to imagine a campaign of torture and murder lasting for four centuries. It is true that witchcraft executions were on a smaller scale than the Nazi atrocities; *but it must also be remembered that each witch was tortured individually.* Rossell Hope Robbins seethes with moral indignation: ‘The record of witchcraft [ie, the witch trials] is horrible and brutal; degradation stifled decency, the filthiest passions masqueraded under the cover of religion, and man’s intellect was subverted to condone bestialities that even Swift’s Yahoos would blush to commit. Never were so many so wrong, so long.' But after reading a dozen or so pages of his Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, the student feels that these words err on the side of mildness.
So, all you out there: do you expect ME (or any other Pagan) to take offence at a Halloween picture, or a movie, or a kids' TV series, or maybe even a kids' mural at a school, depicting the witches in Macbeth or something, that makes an unfairly caricaturising portrayal of witches?? And do you think I will hate and denounce it, or just find it funny?! 😏
(Probably: unless it spread deliberate lies, such as "witches eat babies". Mind you, so do the messages of many fairy tales: and I never felt unable to enjoy Hansel and Gretel - as I grew older and more Jungian I just interpreted the witch therein as a negative female archetype... or, according to the theories of Bruno Bettelheim, a negative version of our mothers. The version who devours rather than nurtures.)
Or are some minorities JUST "more equal than others", to use the Orwellian phrase? MORE entitled to whine than the rest; to "tell teacher", and get everyone into detention..
I think that it's when some powerful bunch of people swear to "hunt you down": that is when you really have to worry, as a minority.
Bit like the current situation of socialists in the Labour Party. 🙄
"If you have been called by Loki, you may find that (like Loki) you are always going to be placed in the middle of something. You may be biracial, bisexual, bipolar, intersex, transgendered, walking two spiritual paths, or even have been born with dual citizenship. On one hand, I believe that this “middle” nature has the natural tendency to make Loki’s people very open-minded and unusually good at seeing many different perspectives. However, the middle can become a very uncomfortable place to be. Like Loki, you may never have the solid home, family, or identity that so many people take for granted, and as a result you may feel as if you are constantly being torn in two. However, this may also force you to learn one of Loki’s most valuable lessons – there is really no such thing as “black” and “white”, and the world actually exists in varying shades of grey. Having Loki as my fulltrúi has also led me to another interesting conclusion. Events in your life will often mimic the myths of the god or goddess that you are devoted to (and you may remember that not all of Loki’s myths ended well). If you are truly Loki’s, you may find yourself unintentionally playing the part of the little boy who knows the emperor isn’t really wearing clothes. As in Lokasenna, you may find yourself acting as a mirror for others, or be purposefully placed where others will stumble over you, in order to change their perceptions. This can be a very dangerous position, and Loki’s people would benefit from being careful of what they say, how they say it, when they say it, and who they say it to. There are ways to speak your mind without putting your head on the chopping block, even if it requires a little more patience and understanding on your part. [BUT then again, some of us just LOVE a good row, and show-down occasionally!! 😄 It feeds the dark, or confrontational/adversarial/warlike side of our nature: which as a Lokean I can personally attest does require at least a little bit of food... And expression. 😏😉 LK.]
You may also find (in typical trickster fashion) that no matter how tricky you think you are, you always end up tricking yourself eventually. Not every aspect of belonging to Loki is fun or pleasant. If you suspect that Loki may be your fulltrúi, you might as well prepare yourself for an unfortunate wakeup call. Today, many Heathens and Pagans [this is mainly in America - LK] avidly believe that Loki is evil, is unworthy of worship, and that anyone who does worship Loki is either doing it for attention or is a fool who doesn’t know any better. Some Lokeans have received death threats or been the targets of physical violence. As I have already attempted to demonstrate, I do not believe that these assumptions about Loki are historically founded or correctly reflect who Loki is; however, some people defend their hatred of Loki just as viciously as fundamentalist Christians defend their belief in Satan. This has been the hardest part of having Loki for a fulltrúi. Every time I hear someone openly disrespecting and demonizing the god that I love above all others, it’s like a knife in my heart.
It can also be very frustrating to be automatically regarded with mistrust and suspicion by most Heathens for choosing to have anything to do with Loki. There have been many times that I wish I didn’t have to continuously reaffirm myself as a good person because of the god that I worship. Even so, I have never wished that I belonged to any other god. My love for Loki is about Loki, not other people, and I would never insult him by apologizing for our relationship or pretending that it doesn’t exist. To conclude, I would like to reiterate that being Loki’s is by no means easy, and if this is not a path that you have been called to it is not one that I would necessarily recommend. Every god and goddess has different lessons and initiations for their devotees: some are joyful, some are hard, and some are painful. But if you truly love your fulltrúi, any challenge that you face as a result of your relationship will be worth it. Any trials that I have faced due to being a Lokean are completely balanced by the happiness that Loki brings into my life, and knowing him on an intimate level has been one of my life’s greatest joys."
Playing With Fire: An Exploration of Loki Laufeyjarson (Epub), Dagulf Loptson.
Incidentally: the only other thing I can think of as an equivalent to the above "meta-controversy, based on a false narrative" (Verso book https://www.versobooks.com/books/3215-anti-semitism-and-the-labour-party) - or "chimera" as Norman Finkelstein called it -
apart from the "Barack Obama birther" annoyance I mentioned in my previous post... 🙄
Is something, which, incidentally, I know only through my neo-pagan, and comparative religion studies! (Told you it paid for me to be the religion I am! 🙂 Gives one a broad perspective)
Well: again it's something which took place in the USA. Where you will find millions of Christian fundamentalist bigots. All these people are irrational. And wild accusations are what the **irrational** tend to indulge in.
Oddly enough: a lot of the time they (the bigoted and privileged) tend to portray THEMSELVES as victims; and/or identify themselves with the victims of previous real sufferings. **This is a tendency such deluded people of privilege have**.
I have it on good authority (a much-shared article, mainly to do with Halloween propaganda/misunderstandings, by the late Neopagan writer and reliable religious authority Isaac Bonewits) that Christian Fundamentalists in the US have quite frequently identified themselves with "Holocaust victims" **(apparently no Jewish organisation attacked them for this!)** and paranoidly accused anyone they didn't like of being the "Nazis". 🙄
Oh yes: and equated any criticism of themselves: with "bashing" (which as Isaac pointed out, originally meant something much more serious) and persecution and what-have-you-all. THESE are people (lots of them white and rich) who - up until recently anyway - were actually in the religious MAJORITY in the States. 🙄
And they say that THEY are the victims of persecution! 😏
Of course, none of these people want to lose their unfair privilege and POWER, which for them is the biggest deal.
Here is a quotation of a section of the relevant article, still to be found online at:- http://www.neopagan.net/Halloween-Lies.html
“Bashers” and Bigots
People with poor self-images [a psychologist might add, "ego disturbances"!] always want to inflate the power and evilness of their real or imagined opponents. After all, if there’s a Gigantic Global Satanic Conspiracy™ to defeat the Forces of Goodness™, the people believing in it can think of themselves as “fighting on the side of the angels,” instead of as the pathetic, demon-obsessed, xenophobes that they really are. Of course, my pointing out that these folks are bigots will make them claim that I’m “Christian-bashing,” so they can retain their precious sense of victimhood. Don’t think they have one? Consider these words from Pat Robertson, then head of the theocratic Christian Coalition:
“Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history.”
Granted, this is the same jerk who agreed with Jerry Falwell’s claim that the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 were the fault of Pagans, feminists, gays, and the A.C.L.U., still his words deserve analysis.
Robertson equates the loss of American Christianity’s special political and social privileges with the Jewish Holocaust of World War II. Oddly enough, I haven’t noticed Fundamentalists being herded into concentration camps by Democrats in Congress, nor any of the media (liberal or conservative) calling for their execution, nor any gay or lesbian organizations bombing Fundamentalist churches.
Yet I have seen Fundamentalist Christians (1) trying to take over Congress through illegal and dishonest stealth campaigns, (2) spending millions to prevent accurate science, history and safe sex from being taught in public schools, (3) organizing Christian Militias to overthrow the American government through domestic terrorism, and (4) gleefully murdering people whom they thought were homosexuals or abortion doctors.
See?!?! Isaac said it all. "Precious sense of victimhood". Loonies, fundamentalists, irrationalists and histrionics. In effect. **All** the same type of people! Psychology-wise, and mental-health-wise, certainly. And just add in a large dose of self-entitlement and privilege... Said individuals obviously also to be found, not only in the midst of the religious and the culture wars, but also in the field of politics. 😏
Not a BIT like us Corbynites and us Neo-Pagans! WE'RE actually sane!! 😄
(I know that Graunistas and neo-liberals and Blairites will find this hard to believe. But I speak the truth!)
I'll tell you all why not even LOKI 🔥 HIMSELF, could pre-empt/counter/prevent that ROTTEN TRICK that the Neoliberal Elite and their press stooges played on UK Labour, with their "Anti-Semitism" hoax! 😡😡
(With reference to the Wagner Das Rheingold variant, of some of the myths... 🙂 Which the so-called "victors" at the last UK general election might well be advised to take as a *cautionary tale"... For it predicts their likely end.)
And it's the reason *I* didn't understand it; and couldn't see why people would believe it: because the accusation of Anti-Semitism, bigged up by all the conservative - yea even the "liberal" aka the Blairite press - was and is NOT LOGICAL. 😡 (Which is why my keen mind was of little use in the situation, unfortunately. I cannot argue with fools. It reminds me of arguing with some very thick bullies at school: there is literally no intelligence for eloquent words and for reason to have any purchase on!)
(Nor is "anti-semitism" based around a hot-button issue, which affects the majority of people in this country, **which was what Brexit was,** and why the latter was so dangerous. And that was of course the *main* thing that lost Labour the last election... ☹️)
But the "anti-semitism". Pfff!! 🙄 To refute all that: all you have to do is read this ebook published by Verso: which is still available as a free download... https://www.versobooks.com/books/3215-anti-semitism-and-the-labour-party
The above book, which I have recently intensively re-read, SAYS IT ALL on the subject. It's great, folks: download it - all they want in return is your email address: which they will annoyingly print on every second page of your copy, to ensure you do not upload it elsewhere: but it is worth it.
The reason, btw, as I am trying to explain, that a Lokean mind *cannot* comprehend - or possibly effectively counter-strategize against such dirt - other than to dismiss it utterly - is because, at fundament, we are *relentlessly logical*. That is how our minds work.
Unfortunately, it means we *cannot* always stand up successfully against *stupid* people, when those stupid people are in the ascendant, a bit like bullies at school... Who are always the thickies. Who always make - or believe - wild accusations!
Yes: I know that people who know a little bit about Loki, Tricksters and so on, will say that the archetype is one of "chaos", etc. Well. Actually that comes out most of all in our sense of humour. It is absurdist and surreal. 🙂 It also centres a lot around mockery and drawing down the forces of nemesis to people filled with hubris deserving of it. (To illustrate this with regard to the Eddaic Loki, you would have to look at, for example, his prank where he cuts off the hair of Thor's wife, Sif: or the barrage of witty abuse he pours all over the high gods, the Aesir, in the old poem Lokasenna.)
When it comes to *plotting*, however, Loki is finely finessing, and relentlessly logical. Rather than combing the rather obscurely-written Eddas - or reading a Marvel comic - perhaps a better way to illustrate to yourself this side of Loki very clearly would be simply to watch a video or something, with subtitles of course, of Richard Wagner's opera Das Rheingold (the Pierre Boulez production is best for my money - and it's a FINE opera! Did you know that Richard Wagner invented the "theme tune", otherwise known as the leitmotif? 🙂), where Loki goes under the more Germanic name of Loge, and where he plots and explains and persuades (his own boss, Wotan/Odin, chiefly) as finely as the finest of sophists. But nothing he says is *stupid*: or the sort of thing where any god or dwarf would stop and say: "Huh? What's THAT all about?" Or "WTF are you going on about, Loki? That's ridiculous - get off the stage!!"
(Which is basically what "mass anti-semitism in Labour" is all about!! So stupid, only newspapers could believe it! 😡
Everything Loki/Loge says, on the other hand, is clever as clever; logical as logical. (He's probably doing a bit of subtle manipulation with every sentence - but that's what Loki at his best does! 😄 You might almost call him a spin doctor...)
Oh Loki can think up all sorts of TRICKS; but none of what he says, you see, is insanely stupid.... As you can see from Das Rheingold, he's all about convincing people by means of Reason... (And a little bit of flattery, and suggestion, here and there, of course...) He's as eloquent as Alexander Hamilton. 🙂
But Loki is really the god of truth, ultimately, you see: of truth of the inconvenient sort.
Whereas what our elite - who aren't representatives of any kind of truth - this time seem to have resorted to - is not any "spin": they were obviously too desperate for that!! (At the idea of justice for Palestine; and a curb to this project of colonisation, of the Middle East, no doubt... 😏)
What they resorted to, was sheer insane FANTASY. 😵
Unfortunately, their *stupid irrationalism* seems pretty much to have worked - and caused the overall appearance of disunity in Labour, which is another thing that puts voters off. As well as any perception of hypocrisy... but THIS is only really because JOURNALISM in this country is by and large, so rotten and substandard: and so are all our major newspapers. They fall for and disseminate all sorts of RUBBISH. 😏
To see how and WHY this is so: you need to read Flat Earth News, by Nick Davies. A British journalist critical of the current state of journalism, and of all kinds of "fake news".
Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media - Ebook written by Nick Davies.
Incidentally: About the only equivalently STUPID and BIZARRE US equivalent to this pile of fake news poo 💩 - the "antisemitism" accusations re UK Labour and Jeremy Corbyn in particular: were all those "birthers" fomented by the American Right, claiming that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii, that his birth certificate was a fake and that he was not born an American! 🙄 And therefore not entitled to be President! (Which is just about the equivalent of claiming that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite, a Czech spy or any of the other garbage that was spewed about him!) The US extreme right and religious right (who love to deny truth) are certainly proficient in insane fabrication: but that was about the only thing as bad as what was stuffed down the UK Labour Party's throat!! AND, in the USA - it didn't WORK - to make Obama lose, because nobody but rabid righties believed it!! (And the left of centre press and organisations didn't promote it. Instead, all Democrats logically and vociferously opposed and argued against this "theory"! As the "rational left" SHOULD do, against everything that is STUPID! 🤤)
The racist Right in the US were obviously panicking, so as to come up with that extremely absurd, yet simultaneously trifling (bears all the hallmarks of the stupid and the trivial mind, just like fake "anti-semitism", fake "spies" and the rest of the fakes) conspiracy theory about Obama - pity they didn't somehow bring a flying saucer 🛸 into it - BUT - it didn't work for them!
Which is what surprises me: that the UK voters, and the BBC, and the Guardian, et al, would believe - and disseminate - not dissimilar disinfo here... Doesn't reflect well on us.
This all just goes to show, mind you: that the right-wing and the anti-progressives tend to suffer from a series of mental illnesses: worrying paranoias and crass fantasies of all types... Which should only make the keener-minded shake their heads... 😖
If a) Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell hadn't been so principled re the plight of the Palestinians, and kept the matter of justice for Palestine firmly on UK Labour's agenda despite all the high-level pressure to remove it, thus laying themselves open to horrific slander -
and b) The issue of Brexit had not so much obsessed the British public -
Then Corbyn's Labour would have won! Either in 2017 or 2019! 😏
As one Jewish Labour member, Roger Silverman, said on the record: "This campaign is even dirtier than the ‘Zinoviev letter’ faked by MI5 to damage Labour in the general election of 1923, or than Churchill’s lie in 1945 that if Labour won the election, it would establish a Gestapo police state. It is of course the Tory party that is riddled with racism. It was a Tory government which introduced the 1905 Aliens Act that blocked Jewish immigration from the East European pogroms, and it was a Tory MP who founded the Right Club in the 1930s to ‘expose the activities of organised Jewry’. British immigration policy throughout the Nazi period was designed to keep out at least ten times as many Jews as it allowed in."
But anyway: Re the Palestine situation leading to people in high places making up so many psychotic lies and ridiculous disinformation... As Norman Finkelstein and others have said (see above book, edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner). How people, even elite psychopaths, can be SO GREEDY, and unreasonable, as to abandon all reason and logic, is quite beyond me...
(And beyond Loki/Loge... For example, in the above opera, this "political advisor" god Loge (not at all a bad chap, by any means, in this operatic version as in many others) at one point advises that the Rheingold of the title be returned to the Rhine maidens, whose property it is at the beginning... But he is outvoted. In the end, when the treasure is recovered from Alberich, the greedy, sexually frustrated dwarf who stole it, it is paid over to two builder giants, Fasolt and Fafnir, as a fee/ransom, to suit the gods - who otherwise might have to give up a goddess! 😏 As Loki/Loge prophecies - or suggests - the two giants almost immediately thereupon turn on each other and fight each other to the death over it. Fafnir, the survivor, drags it all to a cave: where he transforms into a hideous dragon, to guard it, miserably, for the rest of his life....)
🤷♀️😝😏
THAT'S what greed does for you!! Doesn't the old opera make it obvious!!! 😏
(Actually: tempting the giants to their fate is the only way by which Loki is able to get his own back on them! And some justice for Rhine maidens! 😉)
🐉🐲🐉🐉🐲🐉
antisemitism, UK Labour, neoliberalism, Palestine, disinformation, logic and illogic, Loki, Loge, Das Rheingold, trickster thought, Lokean pov
This is basically all about what a fine wicked fellow Loki is 😄 - and all the weird and wonderful creatures He represents - and that represent Him. And his usual actions as an agent of destruction, and of change. 🙂
There is a Younger Tradition of lore in Scandinavia: in which Loki, among many other things, takes over the role of the Biblical "lord of the flies, and bringer of vermin".
Ain't the Boss just a peach?!?!! 🍑😄😄😄😄😄😄
This was all brought to the forefront of my mind by the recent global outbreak of coronavirus: and although Scandinavian or Norse tradition doesn't mention diseases and Loki (oh: except one spelling of one of his runes, "kaunaz", can mean sore or zit! 😏)
Well I thought He just might be somehow something to do with this epidemic: Especially since it ironically struck first in the UK in the North of England, where they recently voted the wrong way in my opinion: in favour of Brexit, and more importantly, for the Tories to win the general election in order to "get it done".☹️👎
Well maybe Loki's now going to do YOU, I wickedly speculated, and tweeted as much. 😏
Yes: nasty of me, I know. But I am very fed up with the current political state of affairs. And my heart has only been HARDENED over the past couple of weeks, with news stories coming out of the North such as that some people threatened a Chinese takeaway owner in Newcastle and his young school age son, for "bringing in coronavirus". OBVIOUSLY these were the exact same bigoted types who voted for Tories "against immigrants": and against the evil socialist devil Corbyn, who they doubtless feared would bring in more... 🙄
I couldn't find the link to the Newcastle story: although it was reported on Heart FM; and the takeaway owner even briefly interviewed. Well anyway, here are a couple of stories from the national press about how wonderfully some people are acting regarding the virus and its supposed links to Chinese people 🙄:
Chinese in UK report 'shocking' levels of racism after coronavirus outbreak | UK news | The Guardian
It's just that I think *human stupidity is currently so great*, that I think we need some *Darwin awards* to be carried out, before we have any more elections. Loki can here as ever be seen as an embodiment of evolution.
However, I can't claim innocence for the South-West, either: because recently I heard on Heart FM that in Exeter, I believe, some louts attacked an Asian taxi driver and asked him if he had coronavirus... 🙄🙄
Looks like I'd better stock up on echinachea and Vitamin C; in case Loki in his Aspect of Lord Of The Flies pays my area a visit... 😦 (Update: Done it days ago now!! 👍)
Loki Lord Of The Flies! 😄
As usual, I take my leads from fellow Lokean Dagulf Loptson's erudite book:-
Animals - Snake 🐍: Though there isn’t much evidence to suggest this correspondence in the Eddas, the animal which I have always most closely associated with Loki is the snake. Snakes have globally been used as symbols of power, transmutation, lightning, fire, sexuality and forbidden knowledge, all of which are intrinsic parts of Loki’s character. The snake is also a very chthonic symbol, symbolizing both the power of life (as in the kundalini) and the power of death (when it makes its home underground in the “underworld”). The shedding of its skin also grants the snake power over shape-shifting and transformation. Like Loki’s own power, snake venom can be deadly or healing, as the antidote for snake venom is derived from the venom itself. Perhaps then it is no coincidence that Loki was tortured with snake venom in the Eddas: The symbol of his own powers was turned on its head and used against him. Due to Loki’s association with snakes and the evidence suggesting he may have been revered in Denmark, I was gratified to find a passage by Ermoldus Nigellus in In Honor of Ludovick, written between 826 and 827 CE, in which he states that “The Danes were a tribe that revered a sneaky snake. This was back in the old days.”
Unlike Óðinn and Þórr, Loki doesn’t have an official symbol with which to identify his devotees. However, I have personally adopted a coiled serpent as Loki’s symbol, and it’s not unusual to find many snake symbols on my person as a result!
[NB: Apparently there's something also, a Norwegian design called the Urnes snakes, which may be symbolic of Loki. LK]
Spider🕷️: In her book Loki in Scandinavian Mythology, Ann Birgetta Rooth makes the interesting observation that Locke is a name for “spider” in southern Sweden, and from this derives a hypothesis that Loki was originally a spider trickster god just as Iktomi and Ananzi were in their respective cultures. While I wouldn’t go as far as to suggest that Loki was purely a spider god, I do believe that the spider is an appropriate animal symbol for Loki. Loki’s child Sleipnir possesses eight legs like a spider, Loki weaves together the first fishing net, and like a spider, Loki possesses the power to walk in between realities (i.e. between the sky and the earth). Loki’s power to create nets also signifies his ability to manipulate the web of wyrd (fate), and his ability to create his own net demonstrates the power he holds over his own destiny. In my own experience, Loki has often used physical spiders in order to get my attention. As I am actually terrified of spiders, this tactic works quite well.
Fly/Flea 🦗: Axel Olrik quotes a folk story from Denmark in his Loke in Younger Tradition, which recalls the close association with flies and fleas in Loki’s mythos. That same evening [Maundy Thursday] three whips had to be twisted, in order to repair the sled of Loke, who at that point would come driving with a load of fleas, and had broken the sled, as the load was very heavy. If this wasn’t performed, there would be an incredible amount of fleas the next year. 😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
[A sled-load of fleas - I can think of several good homes I'd like those to go to! 😏 Starting with no. 10 Downing Street...]
As Loki takes the form of a fly in Skáldskaparmál and a flea in Sörla þáttr, it’s evident that he came to be associated with annoying pests in the same way that he was with annoying weeds. However, Jan de Vries suggests that these folk sayings are a late development in Loki’s mythos, and he was given the role of the Christian Beelzebub as lord of the flies and bringer of vermin. 😈😄
Perhaps it is actually these creatures’ association with death and the underworld that make them appropriate symbols for Loki.
Vulture: As I have already noted in Chapter 2, Loki is known by the kenning Gammleið (“vulture’s path”) in Þórsdrápa. In the Agnicayana, the vulture was conceived of as the bird which carried fire to earth, while in countless other cultures it is a bird associated with death. If Loki is the fire of cremation and sacrifice as I have theorized, then the vulture is an extremely relevant symbol for him. Not only does the vulture remove flesh from bone as the cremation fire does (and Loki does in Gylfaginning) but like the snake, it is also a powerful transformative symbol: The vulture eats sickness and death in order to transmute it into life for itself and its family. As the Raven is undoubtedly Óðinn’s bird, I would suggest that the vulture fulfills a similar function for Loki.
Source: Playing With Fire: An Exploration of Loki Laufeyjarson (Epub), Dagulf Loptson.
Like I said, the Boss is a peach!! 🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑😄 (As Lord of the Flies he's already been round to see Nadine Dorries, for one... Can it get any better??)
But some divine entity has to do it... To be responsible for such things, I mean. Get rid of the dead wood; prepare for renewal.
If only just useless capitalist toff politicians like, say, Boris Johnson got - and succumbed to - COVID-19... But of course I know beforehand that that's very unlikely. He's not in the "risk group". (There are some diseases, though, that strangely strike fit young and middle-aged people; not the very young, nor the old. I believe I read that the 1918-19 Spanish flu virus a hundred years ago was a bit like that...)
Anyway, there's a cliché of a German saying: "Unkraut vergeht nicht": literally, "Weeds don't perish." Meaning: things that are useless tend not to die or go under... 😏
This is basically all about what a fine wicked fellow Loki is 😄 - and all the weird and wonderful creatures He represents - and that represent Him. And his usual actions as an agent of destruction, and of change. 🙂
There is a Younger Tradition of lore in Scandinavia: in which Loki, among many other things, takes over the role of the Biblical "lord of the flies, and bringer of vermin".
Ain't the Boss just a peach?!?!! 🍑😄😄😄😄😄😄
This was all brought to the forefront of my mind by the recent global outbreak of coronavirus: and although Scandinavian or Norse tradition doesn't mention diseases and Loki (oh: except one spelling of one of his runes, "kaunaz", can mean sore or zit! 😏)
Well I thought He just might be somehow something to do with this epidemic: Especially since it ironically struck first in the UK in the North of England, where they recently voted the wrong way in my opinion: in favour of Brexit, and more importantly, for the Tories to win the general election in order to "get it done".☹️👎
Well maybe Loki's now going to do YOU, I wickedly speculated, and tweeted as much. 😏
Yes: nasty of me, I know. But I am very fed up with the current political state of affairs. And my heart has only been HARDENED over the past couple of weeks, with news stories coming out of the North such as that some people threatened a Chinese takeaway owner in Newcastle and his young school age son, for "bringing in coronavirus". OBVIOUSLY these were the exact same bigoted types who voted for Tories "against immigrants": and against the evil socialist devil Corbyn, who they doubtless feared would bring in more... 🙄
I couldn't find the link to the Newcastle story: although it was reported on Heart FM; and the takeaway owner even briefly interviewed. Well anyway, here are a couple of stories from the national press about how wonderfully some people are acting regarding the virus and its supposed links to Chinese people 🙄:
Chinese in UK report 'shocking' levels of racism after coronavirus outbreak | UK news | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/feb/09/chinese-in-uk-report-shocking-levels-of-racism-after-coronavirus-outbreak
Coronavirus fears fuel racism and hostility, say British-Chinese | World news | The Guardian
It's just that I think *human stupidity is currently so great*, that I think we need some *Darwin awards* to be carried out, before we have any more elections. Loki can here as ever be seen as an embodiment of evolution.
However, I can't claim innocence for the South-West, either: because recently I heard on Heart FM that in Exeter, I believe, some louts attacked an Asian taxi driver and asked him if he had coronavirus... 🙄🙄
Looks like I'd better stock up on echinachea and Vitamin C; in case Loki in his Aspect of Lord Of The Flies pays my area a visit... 😦 (Update: Done it days ago now!! 👍)
As usual, I take my leads from fellow Lokean Dagulf Loptson's erudite book:-
Animals - Snake 🐍: Though there isn’t much evidence to suggest this correspondence in the Eddas, the animal which I have always most closely associated with Loki is the snake. Snakes have globally been used as symbols of power, transmutation, lightning, fire, sexuality and forbidden knowledge, all of which are intrinsic parts of Loki’s character. The snake is also a very chthonic symbol, symbolizing both the power of life (as in the kundalini) and the power of death (when it makes its home underground in the “underworld”). The shedding of its skin also grants the snake power over shape-shifting and transformation. Like Loki’s own power, snake venom can be deadly or healing, as the antidote for snake venom is derived from the venom itself. Perhaps then it is no coincidence that Loki was tortured with snake venom in the Eddas: The symbol of his own powers was turned on its head and used against him. Due to Loki’s association with snakes and the evidence suggesting he may have been revered in Denmark, I was gratified to find a passage by Ermoldus Nigellus in In Honor of Ludovick, written between 826 and 827 CE, in which he states that “The Danes were a tribe that revered a sneaky snake. This was back in the old days.”
Unlike Óðinn and Þórr, Loki doesn’t have an official symbol with which to identify his devotees. However, I have personally adopted a coiled serpent as Loki’s symbol, and it’s not unusual to find many snake symbols on my person as a result!
[NB: Apparently there's something also, a Norwegian design called the Urnes snakes, which may be symbolic of Loki. LK]
Spider🕷️: In her book Loki in Scandinavian Mythology, Ann Birgetta Rooth makes the interesting observation that Locke is a name for “spider” in southern Sweden, and from this derives a hypothesis that Loki was originally a spider trickster god just as Iktomi and Ananzi were in their respective cultures. While I wouldn’t go as far as to suggest that Loki was purely a spider god, I do believe that the spider is an appropriate animal symbol for Loki. Loki’s child Sleipnir possesses eight legs like a spider, Loki weaves together the first fishing net, and like a spider, Loki possesses the power to walk in between realities (i.e. between the sky and the earth). Loki’s power to create nets also signifies his ability to manipulate the web of wyrd (fate), and his ability to create his own net demonstrates the power he holds over his own destiny. In my own experience, Loki has often used physical spiders in order to get my attention. As I am actually terrified of spiders, this tactic works quite well.
Fly/Flea 🦗: Axel Olrik quotes a folk story from Denmark in his Loke in Younger Tradition, which recalls the close association with flies and fleas in Loki’s mythos. That same evening [Maundy Thursday] three whips had to be twisted, in order to repair the sled of Loke, who at that point would come driving with a load of fleas, and had broken the sled, as the load was very heavy. If this wasn’t performed, there would be an incredible amount of fleas the next year. 😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
[A sled-load of fleas - I can think of several good homes I'd like those to go to! 😏 Starting with no. 10 Downing Street...]
As Loki takes the form of a fly in Skáldskaparmál and a flea in Sörla þáttr, it’s evident that he came to be associated with annoying pests in the same way that he was with annoying weeds. However, Jan de Vries suggests that these folk sayings are a late development in Loki’s mythos, and he was given the role of the Christian Beelzebub as lord of the flies and bringer of vermin. 😈😄
Perhaps it is actually these creatures’ association with death and the underworld that make them appropriate symbols for Loki.
Vulture: As I have already noted in Chapter 2, Loki is known by the kenning Gammleið (“vulture’s path”) in Þórsdrápa. In the Agnicayana, the vulture was conceived of as the bird which carried fire to earth, while in countless other cultures it is a bird associated with death. If Loki is the fire of cremation and sacrifice as I have theorized, then the vulture is an extremely relevant symbol for him. Not only does the vulture remove flesh from bone as the cremation fire does (and Loki does in Gylfaginning) but like the snake, it is also a powerful transformative symbol: The vulture eats sickness and death in order to transmute it into life for itself and its family. As the Raven is undoubtedly Óðinn’s bird, I would suggest that the vulture fulfills a similar function for Loki.
Source: Playing With Fire: An Exploration of Loki Laufeyjarson (Epub), Dagulf Loptson.
https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=UcI5CgAAQBAJ
Like I said, the Boss is a peach!! 🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑😄 (As Lord of the Flies he's already been round to see Nadine Dorries, for one... Can it get any better??)
But some divine entity has to do it... To be responsible for such things, I mean. Get rid of the dead wood; prepare for renewal.
If only just useless capitalist toff politicians like, say, Boris Johnson got - and succumbed to - COVID-19... But of course I know beforehand that that's very unlikely. He's not in the "risk group". (There are some diseases, though, that strangely strike fit young and middle-aged people; not the very young, nor the old. I believe I read that the 1918-19 Spanish flu virus a hundred years ago was a bit like that...)
Anyway, there's a cliché of a German saying: "Unkraut vergeht nicht": literally, "Weeds don't perish." Meaning: things that are useless tend not to die or go under... 😏
These are nice paintings by Gauguin... The World Socialist Web Site are currently doing quite a good feature on him, as he is being subjected to puritan censorship at present....
My Happy Yuletide Reads (Or rather, Audiobooks!!) Fantastic Mr Fox 🦊 and Danny The Champion Of The World, by Roald Dahl
The closing weeks of any year are generally a time to be at least a little bit nostalgic. About young years and favourite children's authors, for me. 🙂 I remember first reading both the above books in the second year of junior school: which was for me at St Columb Minor Junior School, ("Blue School", nr. Newquay, in Cornwall.)
I don't remember either of the above ever being "class books" at my school: which is a pity, because both are excellent!!
They are linked in theme and tone by their life-affirming sentiments (which are reflected even in the titles: the main protagonists are described as respectively, "fantastic,", and "champion"! The plots bear this out.) Both books share a common Roald Dahl theme and message: sympathy for the underdog. And both stories are basically about poaching. 🙂 Fundamentally, Dahl's message is that it is no crime (morally speaking) to poach food when you or your family are hungry. He obviously was no Tory. 😄
The first, Fantastic Mr Fox, is a simple animal fable, pretty short and sweet, read masterfully in the audiobook by Chris O'Dowd, in a fetching Irish accent. A simply well-written, dramatic story with a good narrator always works.
It concerns the adventures of a fox with a family, as he ingeniously and expertly avoids the efforts of three local farmers, Boggis, Bunce and Bean, "all of them equally mean", to kill him and his offspring. An archetypal "trickster escapes" tale! 🙂
It's moving, too: because his wife and kids love him for it, and say that he is a "fantastic fox".
Really I find the message of such a tale to be eternally appealing, relevant, and inspiring. (Though I never did see the Hollywood animated film of it, that appeared more recently.)
Of course I encourage anyone out there to buy it and especially to play it, or read their own rendering of it from the book, to their own children. You can't go wrong with Dahl. Even though his books are often quite hard on adult villains (basically because he didn't like authority), Dahl is always sympathetic towards children (as long as they are not bullies), and towards underdogs. (Or underfoxes! 🙂)
Would that most of today's children's or YA authors stuck to such principles!
NB: In the interests of full moral disclosure, I must reveal that the major reason that the farmers Boggis, Bunce, and Bean all hate Mr Fox, is because he poaches lots of their chickens, ducks, and other stuff. 😄 (A fox 🦊 has to eat!! 🙂)
And, in the end, he even manages to swipe some of Farmer Bean's cider!! (Well, what do you expect: of a foxy Trickster like that?? 😄 But he helps some of the other underground animals too.)
Danny The Champion Of The World, also excellently narrated by Peter Serafinowicz, is conversely a tale of pure realism, observational humour and country life (the non-privileged sort) written and set in the 1970s, about Danny, a nine-year-old boy who lives, happily, alone with his widower father in a small gypsy caravan behind a filling station out in the sticks. His father is not apparently a gypsy; but a master mechanic who fixes cars, and that is how he makes his living.
This was a time (1970s) where they were still allowed to cane you on the hand at junior school; and unreasonable teachers were quite likely to do that... As Roald Dahl makes clear. 😏
The *other* favourite pastime which is a big thing in this small village is poaching from the local large estates; particularly the poaching of pheasants; which apparently a lot of the villagers got into the habit of during the Great Depression..
(Honestly: in this story it's like Cornish smugglers were in the 18th century!! "Brandy for the parson; baccy for the clerk.." Half the village is in on it, including the local doctor, and a certain policeman... 😄😄 It would make a WONDERFUL family TV miniseries; only bet the BBC wouldn't like it!! 😄)
So the theme of poaching is one that links both this book and the previous one about Mr Fox.
Danny becomes the "champion of the world"; firstly by rescuing his father from a terrible trap which has been set for him by the keepers of the local landowner, Mr Victor Hazell; and secondly by inventing a totally new method of poaching pheasants; which at first is wildly successful; but which goes on to have some hilarious consequences..
Anyway: it all ends pretty well: and the "wicked Squire", in the person of this Hazell guy, is humiliated.
Nobody gets rich; everybody gets to eat. THAT is basically the message of both Fantastic Mr Fox, and Danny The Champion Of The World; and that is why I unequivocally recommend both of these books by Roald Dahl to socialists and their children!! 🙂👍🌹
