I'm being stalked by the Grim Reaper

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I'm Leaving Dublin for a few days, more death parties.

It's getting beyond a joke, I wanted cinematic dead bodies, not real ones.

The table of Ancestors will be crowded this Halloween, but everyone's cups will be full, and laughter will ring through the hall.

If anyone actually gets to see the Horrorthon don't forget to let me know how crap it was, and tell me that I missed nothing.

Still, the trip out West, and quite possibly the Island may well be just what I need. Some time in a place where everyone in common parlance speaks a language that I do not, in a place which has little in the way of modern metropolitan "convieniences".

Many good books have been written in isolation I am told.

Judging from the context of the visit, anything I write will be ghostly visions of Pirate ships, dancing funeral robed skeletons and the voices of the dead being swept in on the crest of an Atlantic gale.

The laptop gets to come so does a book, and i'm going to see whether I can purloin enough tea to last me the whole experience. I intend to attempt to start, what I hope will be a habit of writing at least a thousand words a day, whether or not they are in any way good.

The Island, considering my outsider status, may well be the place to start that. Though I fear that in the beginning there may well be little of use I can cull from my inital attempts.

There is of course the chance that I will not get to the Island, and will spend most of the weekend drunk in a Western pub. In which case, it is unlikely that I will get the thousand words a day written, and if by some miracle I do, they will all be very badly spelt.

Will more than likely be back Monday when normal incredulous observations will be resumed.

Everyone have a good weekend.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Slouching, croaking and bleating toward the IFI

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This weekend, for those who are in Dublin, is the annual Horrorthon, a four day shotgun blast to the rotten underbelly of the collective unconsciousness, many interesting things will be popping up, or rather sliding out of the closet and gradually slithering their way downstairs like wounded blamanges.

For those who are interested, this demonstration of all things corrupt and nightmarish will be revealed to the waking world in the IFI (Eustace Street, Temple Bar) from the 22nd to the 25th of October, oddly enough, the weekend before Halloween - not Halloween itself.

This year, the Horrorthon brings us at least two premiers. The first of which is the Irish Zombie movie (Joy!!!) "Dead Meat" which apparently takes a quasi - humorous view of the undead in that the origins of the Living Dead are actually rooted in the recent spate of mad cow disease. The fact that a hurley stick is used to decapitate one of the fiends has been talked about to a great extent in the Irish Press as proof of our National contribution to the genre, something I am reserving judgment on. Now I have not seen this movie, nor the short that preceded it, but I get shivers of joy knowing that there is at least a small possibility of large scale zombie GAA teams, Massgoers, Schoolchildren and Farmers. I feel a tingle where I really shouldn't when I think of the "Oirish Undead" being shot at, hacked to pieces, decapitated, set on fire, and diced, in fact dispatched in any way that does not involve an EU grant. Sounds like the cinematic equivalent of a daytrip to Dundalk.

The second premiere being a "secret film" the name of which will not be known until you actually pay the ticket and take your seat, which is scheduled for, I think, sometime Saturday.

Other showings in the festival that I personally am looking forward to are:

The Grudge (directed by Sam Raimi of Evil Dead fame, an American remake of the Japanese hit Ju-On) with the usual more spooky than gory approach of the recent hits like the Ring, and the Eye (the Eye 2 is also being shown this Horrorthon). The Grudge centers on a house with some really bad vibes in its past, enough to create some more in the present.

The Grudge 2: this is by all accounts a superior Japanese sequel to the original Japanese movie, more than likely involving more unfortunate visitors to the house to be rent of all their Karma in the most disturbing way possible.

Tobe Hooper (of "the Texas Chainsaw massacre" fame) has an alleged return to form with "the ToolBox Murders" a supposed supernatural slasher flick, with little or no humor, so don't go confusing it with Dead and Breakfast. Mr. Hooper don't play no games.

The Classics also seem to be well represented being dragged beaten and bloody from the vaults are: John Badham’s 1979 Dracula (celebrating its 25th birthday), Jess Franco’s sleazy shocker Bloody Moon (1981) and Umberto Lenzi’s cannibal movie Eaten Alive (1980) (Eaten Alive is a good example of the 70's and 80's euro-exploitation flix though whether it could be considered classic by anyone who is not already a fan of this genre is debatable).

Oh and one last shot, not included in the Horrorthon, but with current cinema release

.....OldBoy - the winner of the Cannes film festival this year....don't miss at any costs, its the most kenetic, disturbing, and engaging revenge fantasy filmed. In fact it seems to be a direct challenge to the Japanese by the Koreans for the "most fucked in the head nation" award. This cannot be avoided by anyone who actually wants to see how cinema is growing....

And that my friends is all the plugging/reviews you get as the organizers of the Horrorthon threatened to disembowel me and wrap the remains round a tree if I was to let the festival go unmentioned.

After all that plugging I feel guilty enough to actually write some original horror fiction this week. So stay tuned.

Advance booking is open for Horrorthon at the IFI Cinemas, Temple Bar, Dublin 2,
Tel:+353 1 679 3477 (special weekend packages available).

Torment and Despair

FatherCrow

Bush denies "Official start of Crusades"

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Taken from NewsEire:

WASHINGTON (NewsEire): President George Bush on Friday denied reinforcing beleaguered US troops in Iraq with a battalion code named "Knights of the Twenty-Four Thrones" recruited from various extreme Christian factions of Protestant and Catholic extraction.

President Bush stated "It is careless and frankly untrue to say, that in order to avoid implementing what would be an unpopular draft, this administration is recruiting entire religious orders into the US Army. I also refute the unproven reports that in return for their service, we have agreed to implement a modern Inquisition. Nothing could be further from the truth."

However, some Democrats have cast doubt on the veracity of this statement when it was revealed that in several states across America, many Church Services had been canceled, and religious properties sold to real estate developers. Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, the highest-ranking Roman Catholic prelate in Colorado said that this was as a result of "fewer laymen and women devoting themselves to a vocation within the Church."

© NewsEire 2004. All Rights Reserved.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

High Tech, Low Enjoyment

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The population of Cairo (pictured above in WWII with a meuzzin strutting his stuff) seems to be up in arms this week because of plans to connect all their mosques with wi-fi. This will be done in order that there is only one single call to prayer for the faithful, rather than a multitude of different ones.

Concurrently the Islamic Zealot fun police in Saudi Arabia are planning to compel muezzins to sing in boring monotones, rather than anything too tonal or musical. Allah knows why! It's Probably another monotheist theory of the more fun you have on earth, the less in the afterlife.

It is generally acknowledged that the first muezzin was a black man, an ex-slave named Bilal. A section of music scholars theorise that the call to prayer is actually the geographic origin of what then evolved into the blues, due to the huge forced migration of African muslims to the southern states of America as a result of slavery.

Stranger things have happened at sea, so they tell me.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

The Blackspot Sneaker

The Blackspot Sneaker is an alternative to the commercial, pseudo 'culture' of the mega corporations. Nike has always been the champion of logo culture, its swoosh an icon of global cool. Despite this, Phil Knight flies the flag of a fading empire. His swoosh has been hurt by years of "brand damage" as activists fought against his mindfuck marketing and dirty sweatshop labor.

The Blackspot sneaker is made out of organic hemp, and "vegeteraian leather", and when you purchase one you are operating under "grassroots capitalism" you buy a pair and you get one share in the Blackspot Anticorporation.

Your feedback and input will determine the direction of this ongoing experiment in Anarchistic capitalism. Collectively Blackspot shareholders will decide the style of future blackspot sneaker designs, what materials to use, where to make them, how to market them and how the profits will be used.

Brought to you by those anti-advertising rascals at "AdBusters"

Order your pair now at:

https://secure.adbusters.org/orders/sneaker/

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Fast Fiction - Several Sins

They came in the night, hulking from their boats and carts, all heavy boots and bestial screams.

We fled to the woods, took refuge there, enfolded in the grey arms of the undergrowth, and watched whilst they lit torches, whooped, hollared, and cut by the knives of rain, took the flame to our homes.

All our struggle died then.

They danced as demons would, around the villages flaming bones, the burning scratched up the sky. They danced an inhuman convulsive dance, all flails and copulatory jerks.

Vomit, whisky and tobacco, the flash of gold teeth, fucking and violence, until exhausted they, pulled down by their devil's revilry, fell in the mud unconscious, unmoving and pissed on by rain.

The wind carried the scent of burnt wood to our nostrils.

All but one of us were shackled by terror.

J, his eyes emptied and turned cold . He stripped himself naked, and smearing himself with mud he moved forward, dragging his thin wiry body invisibly through the mire, silent in the roar of the rain.

One of the raiders, when he was claimed by the whisky, had let his switchblade fall by his side. To J, it must have seemed like a lighthouse as he slithered towards it, a slow moving, undulating wave of mud.

The first one's cries we didn't even hear. We just heard the suction of his body bucking in the mud like a slaughtered bull, as J's hand pressed down upon his mouth and nose. But we saw that savage glint all right.

Some of us turned away.

J didn't, he just moved on to the next, and the next, and the next.
Nineteen in all.

The last one woke, and rose, a huge hairless brute. All crazy eyes, and distended belly. He glanced around at the corpses of his kin, a wounded beasts roar loosed from the depths of his being, an animal waving a gun around.

J lay under him, his body sheathed in mud, eyes closed, ears doing his seeing.

The rain still hammered down. The endless automatic weapon fire of nature. Mud, darkness and God's gunfire, not enough to drown the monsters scream as the knife entered his perinium.

J, Rage, blood and mud on his distorted visage, bellowed like all the Judges who ever went to Hell, repeating "THIS IS NOT YOUR HOMELAND", again and again, until finally his voice cracked and broke. He fell to his knees, spent, eyes unblinking and jaw slack.

The darkness and rain betrayed the trees, they bent and swayed in agreement with him.

We Picked our way through the smoking debris and corpses like the living dead, and wondered when they would bring their Freedom to us again.

© Fathercrow 2004

Peace and Hope

Fathercrow

Spider's Guide to Voting

As you all know I'm an Anarchist, and I rarely post anything up on this blog that is not by me.

However it is time for the inevitiable exception to that rule.

With the American Election coming up, its time to clarify exactly what voting in a democratic society controlled by corporations that are legally acknowledged as people, and people that should be legally acknowledged as empathically dead bio-machines actually MEANS.

Let me introduce to you Spider Jerusalem who should be able to clear up one or two of the mysteries of life for you, that of voting and why I'm not one of the self congratulatory hordes that loves patting themselves on the back, and saying how fucking NEAT democracy is.

Click on the link.

http://edge.cow-dog.net/archives/2004/10/12/on-voting-and-elections-in-general/trackback/

Peace and Hope towards an Anarchist dawn.

Fathercrow

Farewells and Transformations.

On Friday we placed the ashes of my Uncle Ian Morrison in their final resting place.

My family grave.

The grave lies somewhere in the center of a sprawling necropolis in the center of Dublin.

We walked for several minutes in that sharp October sunlight to reach it, over tarmac and narrow concrete walkways, cracked with age, by cenotaphs and sepulchres towering in their forlorn glory.

The closer we came to the grave, the more our conversation waned. The rain had spent itself earlier in the day, and was replaced with a cold wind and gathering bruised clouds. Skeleton leaves chased each other in minute twisters over the cold slabs of stone.

When we got there the grave was open, a dark maw ready to welcome my Uncle back to the fold.

There is something unnameable about the sadness that rose in me when I first came to the stained marble stone that rose above the open grave. It was a grave with my name at the head, a grave that had not been open for a half a century or more. I was unprepared for the rush of raw emotion, and thanked the Gods that I still wore my sunglasses.

My Grandfather who died when my father was eleven and my Uncle who died in his tenth year of boyhood, seemed to have been waiting in a pregnant silence for half a century to welcome another one of their own back to the damp earth.

I stood still save for the movement of my breathing. The words of the Preacher were swallowed by the silence of my head and the roar of my heart. I could feel the love and loss of my father through the touch of my hand on his shoulder and that of my cousins, my Uncles son and daughter who remained in silence nearby.

The laws of physics state that energy, of which we are made, can neither be created nor destroyed, it merely changes form.

The dead remain with us, and as their existence changes, not ends, so too does our relationship with them.

My Uncle has not left his children, nor those he loved. He has merely changed form, as have our lives to accomodate the lack of his physical presence. This I hope will provide some small solace in the days to come.

In all death there is a renewal of life, and my Uncle's departing gift, for me, I think, was the birth of a lasting friendship.

So for my Uncle, what is there left to say about him? I leave you all with these words.

"What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty. In form, in moving, how express and admirable. In action how like an angel. in apprehension how like a god."
William Shakespear - Hamlet.

Grief and pain, trasformed to Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

For my cousins W&W my Father and my aunts.

September 11th was caused by Dogs

Sayed Qutb The founder of the Islamist movement was an Egyptian.

In the 1950s, Qutb was captured and damned to prison by Nasser. He was tortured by ex-Nazi "interrogators", who the CIA had employed to help the government deal with "dissenters".

The CIA-NAZIs smeared animal fat all over his body, they then imprisoned him in a cell with dogs who had been trained to savage people.

The torture gave him a heart attack and brought Qutb to extremely radical views promoting violence as the correct method to attack infidels.

He inspired Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who was Osama Bin Laden's mentor.

For the full story check out, The Power of Nightmares,Wednesday 20th October, BBC2, 9pm, previously mentioned on this blog.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Hoist that Rag.

Well I learned the trade
From piggy knowles and
Sing sing tommy shay boys
God used me as hammer boys
To beat his weary drum today

Hoist that rag
Hoist that rag

The sun is up the world is flat
Damn good address for a rat
The smell of blood
The drone of flies
You know what to do if the baby cries

Hoist that rag
Hoist that rag

Well we stick our fingers in
The ground, heave and
Turn the world around
Smoke is blacking out the sun
At night I pray and clean my gun
The cracked bell rings as
The ghost bird sings and the gods
Go begging here
So just open fire as you hit the shore
All is fair in love and war

Hoist that rag...




Tom Waits - Real Gone Review


It's a blind white October.

Out there in the distance, stormtroppers piss in their boots to soften the leather before the march.

The Arab hides in the straw, behind the creeking barn door.

A buckshot flag snaps and flaps in the razor wind.

Somewhere in a dirty concrete basement, Waits hammers and screams, bucks and brays, barks and whispers...

The Piano is broken into firewood, It lies blackened and smoking outside in the October Frost

Kathleen looks on in approval from her rocking chair
as her husband rocks and flaps like a crazy bird...

Her son Casey whips the musicians with the cruel cables from his decks, they scream and bend to their instruments again....

The hail nail guns the rusted roof.

The New Waits Album is out.

Buy the thing and bring on that Savage rain.

Peace and Hope, Love and Thanks to Tom and his family.

FatherCrow

Short Shot From the Darkness of Brookold House

Just got web access, have not been in work this week.

They have put me on some kind of course.....

I can't get out of here until they let me.....or until the timelock on the door deactivates, whichever comes first.

Welcome to the Darkside of BIM education.

Running out of food, send help........

Once escape has been achieved, blogging will resume.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Welcome to my own personal hell.....

Dirty Bomb Disinformation

Last week the BBC showed a drama about a dirty bomb in London. The show was, in my mind, intended to keep everyone scared shitless about terrorism.

But a forthcoming documentary shows that dirty bombs are actually an impossibility. The Americans know this: the CIA tried for several years to make one, then they realised that blowing up radioactive material wouldn't hurt anyone at all.

Radioactive materials, blown up turn into dust, which disperses so incredibly quickly you would need to be exposed to it for approximatly a year before any real damage happened.

The name of this documentary is "The Power Of Nightmares", it shows how politicians are using invented stories like the dirty bomb to keep people scared, and themselves in power.

It seems to be the old story of the fascist state, that can only exist in times of perpetual war. The people need to be scared of something, and it does not really matter who they are scared of. It can be black people, arab people, people with red hair, people with freckles....it doesn't matter so long as they are smaller than you are.

The Documentary also attempts to demonstrate that the claim that Al-Qaeda is a global, hidden, terror network is also a myth.

What channel is this BBC-debunking documentary showing on?

BBC2 of course.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

a recent self portrait - fathercrow with flu "oh my lord, I am heartily sorry if I have offended thee"..........don't fuck with the god of the old testament, or use genesis as rolling papers as I have done......

Call me Lazarus....

Jesus, still breathing, albeit barely.......managed to make it into work today, more out of my tendency to be a completely crap patient than any miracle "cure".

I sit here with my feet in a bucket of hot water, towel around my head coughing and wheezing like I have some kind of lung wasting disease, spittle covered strepsils machine gunning out of my mouth and onto on my desk with every cough.

Just be glad you dont work with me.

Normal writing service will be resumed Monday morning, sorry for the gaps and the reduction of actually "interesting" written material.

Good things come to those who wait.

I gotta go now and give a good hacking cough into the buildings air conditioning system. Gotta spread the disease, not out of malice to my co-workers you understand, just to again slow down productivity.

You guys might get an image or two if you are lucky......

Peace and Hope (that this doesn't kill me in the end)

Fathercrow