WEIRDLAND: Queen of the Magazines, A Clockwork Orange

Sunday, March 22, 2020

Queen of the Magazines, A Clockwork Orange

"Snow nestled in Spring. When Sun makes wine & blood dance dangerous in the veins or vine. To have just been born for beauty & see sadness. What is this frail sickness?" - Jim Morrison, Untitled poem


Thom Yorke (Radiohead)Anyone Can Play Guitar is like a chant almost. The second verse is ‘I wanna be Jim Morrison’ and I’ve got this pathological disrespect for Jim Morrison and the whole myth that surrounds Jim Morrison, simply because it has affected the people in bands and in the rock business, in that they think they have to act like rock stars in order to live up to the legend.”

Louder Sound: “The mysticism that’s grown up around Morrison since his death is similar to that which guitarists seek to perpetuate around their instrument. That there is something more metaphysical to it than just a bit of practice: that it’s a gift that’s bestowed rather than a craft that anyone can accomplish with a bit of application.”

Thom Yorke: “Yeah, it’s really hard! And the better you are at the guitar the worse songs you write. I hope that maybe one day that song will appear on MTV in between a couple of rock tracks and you’ll get all these guys going widdly-widdly and then we come on going ‘Anyone can play the fucking guitar, it doesn’t mean anything!’ Jim Morrison’s a fat, talentless bastard and he’s dead. And none of that means anything. It’s more important just to have your own voice within the business than to live up to this thing that you’re supposed to live up to. There’s this brilliant thing Lester Bangs said about how on the one hand rock’n’roll should be taken very seriously, while on the other hand it should be completely taking the piss out of itself.”


Mass Writer (Steve Hoffman Forum Resident): I hear a lot of people questioning Jim Morrison's talent. You gotta realize that, besides being a great lyricist and poet (which alone takes philosophical intelligence), this guy basically heard all the music in his head and had to describe it to the band. That's like some Mozart level. He was naturally musical, he just got almost no training and did not know how to express it correctly. Queen of the Magazines is a song contained within Rock Is Dead which has a bridge that sounds pre-arranged, like the band had rehearsed it before. But has anyone ever noticed that Radiohead’s hit Creep (1992) bears some sonic similarities, to Queen of the Magazines? Creep makes you wonder if Morrison-hating Yorke had a copy of the Rock Is Dead bootleg. The chord progression is not exactly the same and the arpeggiated sequence could be dismissed as coincidental, but it makes you wonder... Thom Yorke is blasting trained guitarists in this same exact interview, saying that "the better a guitarist you are, the worse songs you write." Sounds to me like he was just trying to be shocking and bratty. Thom Yorke sounds like a victim of the media infused Jimbo projections, and like most Morrison haters, these people are ignorance-born lackeys due to a bad Oliver Stone film.


RidderontheStorm1969: Don't let this obviously miserable little bastard get under your skin or question yourself as a Doors fan. I'm glad Thom's Yorke's life has worked out better than Jim Morrison's but that is all the more reason for "Thom" to keep his toxic mouth shut and be a little kinder. Art is subjective, Jim Morrison was a very talented artist and Thom Yorke can go intercourse his little self (it might put him in a better mood). How he says ''AND HE'S DEAD'' as if that's supposed to be some sort of sick burn? Well, Thom Yorke is a nasty, miserable creep AND HE'S UGLY! May he get trapped in an elevator with David Crosby for days and days. Thom Yorke made it known that he suffered from depression. What exactly did he think Jim Morrison suffered from? Being too high on life? What a classy and compassionate person Thom Yorke is. If anyone would like to point out to Yorke that image he hates so much was created by Jim Morrison's "friend and admirer" Danny Sugerman. Among the many good aspects of Jim Morrison conveniently suppressed was Morrison's tendency to give people the "don't do drugs" lecture. Pamela Des Barres noted this in her memoir "I'm With The Band". Yorke can take his complaints to Sugerman, Hopkins, Manzarek, Densmore and others who helped create the "Morrison mystique". Jim Morrison had no control over how people would exploit his image after he died.

A Clockwork Orange (1971): As is the norm for Kubrick movies, the critics did not seem entirely comfortable with this avant garde movie. They claimed that it was just a crude and very dangerous display of sado-masochism dressed up as high art. The primary messages of this film were directed to his fellow Jewish tribesmen and would be largely invisible to the outer parties. We infer from Kubrick's earlier masterpiece, 2001 Space Odyssey, that Kubrick is an evolutionist and Darwinist, and we know that being a Darwinist is a sin among his Jewish kinsmen. The very aversion therapy that the inner party psychiatrist was administering to Alex late in the movie to curb his criminality, Kubrick was administering to his fellow tribesmen right from the opening scene, to curb their liberal universalist illusions. The setting is in a future time in which the people speak a language which is a mixture of English and Russian. The protagonist, Alex, is a high school dropout born and raised in a public housing project. 

Alex is what you would call a tabula rasa -a blank slate- from a cultural standpoint. Alex's parents are exactly what the inner party wishes us all to become. The talented and intelligent Alex transforms his acts of theft, rape and torture into artistic performances. High art and violence become intertwined and reinforce each other - doubtless a profoundly disturbing and disorienting revelation to the inner party and their liberal hangers on. Thus, Kubrick's message that high art is a differentiating mechanism - fraught with potential for conflict and competition - is broadly consistent with Professor Geoffrey Miller's thesis in The Mating Mind, that our brains evolved primarily as ornaments of fitness in the highly competitive sexual selection process. 

And finally, we get the conspicuous IP psychiatrist Brodsky, who has developed a new aversion therapy. He is going to remake Alex by showing him movies - which, of course, is exactly what the IP has been doing to all of us for the past 70 years. Only Brodsky has an advantage - a serum that allows him to get the job done in 2 weeks. Alex screams for Brodsky to stop the movie, pleading the gross unfairness of making him dislike Beethoven as, in Alex's words "all Beethoven ever did was write music!" Thus the scene is Kubrick's wicked stab at his fellow tribsmen - forcing them to see and hear the clear and dramatic answer to the question why a nation that had produced Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms could have produced the Third Reich, as they are forced to recoil in horror at the juxtaposition of Beethoven with the Nuremberg rally - a juxtaposition which Alex vehemently protests for different reasons. The evolutionist in Kubrick surfaces, as the newly pacified and denatured Alex is incapable of defending himself. The "true Christian" of Brodsky's creation cannot survive. And ironically, that is exactly the state that the IP has left us in after 70 years of effort invested addicting us to passive entertainment and then desensitizing us to vice, crudeness and ugliness while attacking Christian mores. In the final scene Kubrick informs his audience that the conditioning can be reversed in an instant, as soon as it is in the Interior Minister's political interest to reverse it. And, of course, the Interior Minister has Brodsky (and his ilk, by implication) to blame for all of the conditioning's ill effects. The implied message directed at the inner party is that any ambitious interior minister who so wishes could reverse the real world cultural conditioning (degradation) of the past 70 years very quickly as well, whenever the hold on power demands it. 

This movie appeared in 1971, and shortly thereafter, the 200 or so people in Hollywood who Ben Stein informs us decide what we are to see every night suddenly decided that - "popular culture was formed in the black community." Public school field trips to the symphony, so popular in the 1950s and 1960's ended for most school districts. The dumbing down of education and culture began in earnest. The coincident 180 degree turn was dramatic. The problem is that Hollywood feels compelled to sell us ugliness and vulgarity. Indeed their own group psychology prevents them from doing otherwise, for to produce and sell to us our own vision of beauty would only reinforce the one remaining boundary that separates our culture from the mud of oblivion. To sell us our own vision of beauty would only strengthen us and reinforce that one remaining isolating mechanism that keeps us what we are, and the IP cannot bring itself to do such a thing. Truth be told, they never will. Source: www.euvolution.com

COVID-19, while not as lethal as media coverage would suggest, is a reminder of our mortality and human fragility and will necessarily have a jarring effect on a Western liberalism that has become increasingly distant from the confrontation with death. Just as one has to confront death in order to truly live (or to become “authentic” in Heidegger’s philosophy), our society is in constant flight from death and thus inevitably collapses into decay. We do not “live towards” Death, with a sense of purpose and a feeling that we are part of a much grander civilizational trajectory. We do not understand that Death has shaped our historical path, and that it hangs over us in ways that should direct our actions in the present. The Age of Fantasy is confronted with the ultimate reality.  I also see the cracks already forming in the Western conceit. This society that is against “hate” and prides itself on “coming together” is already struggling to stop people rioting over toilet paper and bottled water. Source: www.theoccidentalobserver.net

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