Badtraum2020

In The Wire, the great crime saga from fifteen years ago, one of the characters D'Angeĺo Barksdale starts teaching the meaning of chess pieces on the board to a young crack dealer in the projects of Baltimore. The Castle that's a mans stash, touch that and feel his wrath. The Bishop that's a mans Ideology, it might slip and slide but it has to remain the same. The Knight is a mans capacity for violence, to defend friends and family. The King speaks for itself, as the most important piece on the board. But The Queen? If you.take a mans Queen! You destroy a mans ego. You reduce his world to rubble. Leaving him to limp on. Hiding behind pawns. The little guys who might help you out of a crisis. But probably wont. The world has been on lockdown for over a year now. And where are the piles of bodies in the third world to justify this universal bang up? They are nowhere to be found. Herd immunity is now the result of months of uncertainty. Lies and obfuscation. Old pe...

They are at war, but with whom? The popular view seems to be that Islam is to blame for the worlds ills however if your faith and way of life had been systematically demonized for twenty years maybe you too would feel like demographically replacing the infidels in the form of an invasion. Enslaving their women and children. Charging them a fiver for a donnor kebab. Whilst dominating the skyline of UK cities with minarets. Never mind the deep fried street pigeon passing itself off as chicken; food for drunken bums and slobs. No respect. Post 9/11 Muslims have been shown no mercy in the Jewish/American/Anglo sphere. Most narratives and plots in films and TV series have been anti Islam, even films that aren't American Sniper show Muslims in a bad light. Hurt Locker for example directed by Kathryn Bigelow shows scenes of evil perpetrated by local insurgents portrayed as insanely callous monsters like when they turn a sympathetic child character into a bomb, Bigelow of Zero ...

I found his wife hard to take. She was a people pleasing do gooder with a flimsy humanist/feminist philosophy. Most philosophies have some kind of sacred text at their core. Hers seemed to have the guardian newspaper wrapped around the anti male sentiments of a feminist fish supper. Soon the appeal of what lay within the paper wouldnt interest dogs nevermind men. Maybe that was the whole point.  It would just be refreshing occasionally to meet a feminist who went for the throat. Rather than the telephone. To report to Daddy that you were being mean to her.  I got a call one day from my friend. This was rare. He hardly ever asked me for anything. Turns out his wife had taken the kids to her mother's. It sounded like he was sat at home drinking a bottle of whiskey. Crying. Looking at old photographs of happier times. I agreed to go round that afternoon to visit him. It sounded like every cliche in the book was crashing down around his ears. He had lost his job. He ha...

The soundtrack to Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising was first conceived in Tracy Prison also known as Deuel Vocational Institution in California. The birthplace of La eMe or The Mexican Mafia. The album is the brainchild of Bobby Beausoleil who was committed to prison for life for the murder of Gary Hinman. After Charles Manson hacked off Hinmans ear with a samurai sword. Bobby stabbed him through the heart with a knife. Beausoleil was a successful musician at the time and his band The Orkustra later to be renamed, The Freedom Orchestra, in jail, did concerts around San Francisco.  He managed to recruit Clem Grogan into the band on a guitar he made him in the woodwork shop.  The music is a blood soaked portal opening up onto California of the late sixties. This is the era when new religions were being born. When L Ron Hubbard ran off with Jack Parsons wife. Later he founded the Church Of Scientology from his books on the pseudo science of Dianetics. Parsons was workin...

I'm going to review The Joker after never having seen the film. I dreamt it one night. Got up early and wrote this. It's as simple as that. I obviously know what the film is about as I dont live in a cave without the internet. The film made me see it although I never had a burning desire to do so. Through advertising billboards it stalked me. With reviews on podcasts I was blanket bombed. The colours. The fashions. That little dance on the steps. The film was invading my mind. The night before I dreamt it,  I listened to my favourite film podcast. The two hosts hated the film and ripped it to shreds. Anyway back to the dream. I was in Grand Central Station late at night. Nobody was about. Well that never happens. There were just a few bodies. Pushing brooms. Looking in litter bins. I found an unnamed office. Its door was ajar. Inside Steve Buscemi was watching video tapes of old films. He offered to sell me some acid. As he was rooting around in his bag,...

Society was starting to decay around me. It had no doubt started years before but it was only now starting to affect me. I had lost my job 6 months ago, before my wife took my kids to live with her black, transgender  yoga teacher. When I told her that money didn't matter and that we would be better off long term, she laughed. It turns out her lover Helios X5 is a multi millionaire. He invested heavily in city properties burnt out in the race wars of 2025. Each tower block. And there were five in all. Had been transformed into living pods for the Hong Kong Chinese who arrived in the UK in large numbers back in 23. So now my wife had taken my kids to live with this slum lord. She told me that she would be given a family pod like the other hundred men and women in Helios X5s harem. Visiting rights were denied me. I was banned. Facial recognition software would Xray any disguise. My only hope would be to broker a peace deal but I was just a loser to Helios X5. A joke. My h...

We lived together in North Berwick and it was good for a while. I'd do the washing up and from the kitchen window see the sun glinting off the fibreglass whale jawbone on top of The Law. There had been a whale jawbone up on the hill since 1709. Sailors used to navigate with the help of fires lit on top of The Law. It would serve them as a makeshift lighthouse. After the relationship ended I found myself on the streets of Edinburgh in the middle of a harsh winter. It wasn't so bad. I checked into the night mission with a hundred others. We would be given a hot meal cooked by the staff. Then it was time for bed. We'd grab a foam yoga mat and each go to our regular spots. Often it would be snowing outside so people behaved well. Not wanting to take their chances outside. In sleeping bags on cardboard. One night after dinner I got talking to one of the volunteers there. Mike. He told me that he was a Christian and worked for BAE systems. I was intrigued. I had once ...

In Thirst, an Australian film from 1979, a relative of The Countess Elizabeth Bathory is found living in Australia. Bathory one of the most prolific mass murderers in recorded history lived in the 16th century as a Hungarian Noblewoman. Her victims tended to be from the lower social orders like servants and prostitutes. Bathory would have sex with them, murder them, and then drink their blood. Her death toll was estimated to be in the hundreds at the time of her arrest. She was spared the death penalty and walled up alive in her castle at Csejte. She died at 54. In the film we see Kate adopted by a cult called The Brotherhood. They claim to have 70,000 members worldwide although it is soon made.clear that the mostly youngish members dressed in white are just blood cows to be milked of their red juice. This operation happens in the sterile environment of what is called the dairy. Incisions are made and two tubes are then attached and we see the life giving fluid trace crimso...

Books like Libra published in 1988 in the genre of historical fiction, are problematic. The book is a classic about the Occult history of the JFK conspiracy. Oswald is brought to life sympathetically as a deranged loner serving in the US military, who is a communist and wants to defect to the USSR. He does this. Leaving the Marines with an honourable discharge despite many transgressions whilst serving. He then moves to Europe and arrives in Moscow on October 16th 1959. He is then relocated to Minsk where he gets employed as a lathe operator in an electronics factory. He starts a relationship with a local woman. Ella German. He is maladjusted and unhappy and returns back to the USA. He is accompanied by Marina and also with their first child June. They set up home together in Dallas. It is 1962. He orders a gun from the mail and looks around for someone to shoot. The inner monologue in Oswalds head vibrates like a jar of wasps. The pressure of history powers his fists into ...