Recomended Movie: Compañeros (original release title: Vamos a matar, compañeros)

Lovers of Spaghetti Westerns Rejoice! If you have not seen Companeros recently, or not at all, check out this film. Franco Nero and Tomas Milian play off each other perfectly and who can resist a one armed Jack Palance. One armed because his companion hawk freed him from crucifixion, by eating his arm off. Jack Palance is a totally whacked oil company enforcer. Who uses every evil torture, including a big fat starving rat in a basket. This movie has scenes that will blow your mind and make your jaw drop.

Spaghetti Westerns, Godzilla, and Kung Fu movies were the only reason I knew there we're any foreign films when I was growing up in a world film with 3 and a ½ TV Stations: The networks and PBS on the UHF if you got the foil wrapped, just right, on that thick wire loop screwed in to the back of the TV, just below the rabbit ears brown flat wire.

So in Junior high school, when my father was transferred to Sasebo, Japan, a whole world of cinema opened up to me.  Without American TV to fill my life, I spent most of my time just wandering around Sasebo. Sometimes with some Temp friends, (When you moved as much as we did, you understand after 2 years you're never going to see the people you're hanging out with again). Other times I'd wander alone because I liked to study things and that just made me even weirder to the other military brats, so I spent a good deal of time by myself.

The crime rate was basically nonexistent, so even though I was only 12, I had free rein in the town. I took cabs, rode my bike all around town, or walked for miles exploring the city. I spent a lot of afternoons in Japanese Movie Houses. Instead of multiple screens, these theaters played different movies in a single large theater. It was possible to go into the theater at 10 o'clock in the morning and not get out until 7 or 8 at night, without seeing the same movie twice. When Enter the Dragon, with Bruce Lee, came out it was only a double feature and I sat and watched it 3 times. I can't even remember what the other movie was, even though I watched it twice, But, Enter the Dragon, I still check out that movie every year, or so. We returned to the States in the summer of 74 and it wasn't until I got old enough to drive and find an art-house theater that I was able to see foreign films with any frequency again and when VHS came down the pipe I really started exploring the world through film.

I especially like to watch good lower budget foreign films that are shot on location. The backgrounds are real and there's a lot of gabbing a handy person who actually does, whatever it is you want to get on the screen, from bull fighting, to cooking in an authentic way, or just sitting on a bench feeding pigeons. If the film is historical you get to see history from their perspective. So you get to see some reality of the country that the film came from. How they see the past. A good example of this is Marketa Lazarov̀a a 1969 Czech master piece about a feud between two rival medieval clans. It is a gritty, believable, look at medieval life in somewhere other than Britain, France, or Venice. I'll be recommending that film next.

"Companeros" poster by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Companeros.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Companeros.jpg

011115 – Political Rant - Turning the USA into North Korea

People like the Koch Brothers look at North Korea and they see what they would like to do with this country. Got too many poor people, let them starve a million at a time, serving as slave laborers, until enough drop dead that the scraps from the tables of those who think of themselves as gods, can keep the peasants alive. Got too many people that need medical care. Let them die alone in their beds, or state run nursing homes rather than waste expensive capitalist medicine on them. 

The Darkness I see in the eyes, of the cartoonishly evil presence of Dick Chaney, sends shafts of ice through my heart that chill with me with fear of the insanity and power this man can wield. You know he would not so much as blink at killing you, if you were even slightly in his way, and not just because he never ever blinks. 

  

The leering smile of the Koch Brothers, who eyes laugh at the pain and suffering of others, makes me wonder if there's any hope, because the Beast certainly has the reins of absolute power. You can sense their total lack of compassion, or moral compass. They would squash you like a bug, just to see what sort of pattern you'd make on the cement. They don't care if ten thousand people die, or live horribly with disease, and millions of acres and gallons of water are ruined forever, as long as they can squeeze out one more shiny gold coin to add to their stack, so they can feel, one troy ounce more superior to you, than they already do. And they'll never stop, because no amount of wealth can fill the black hole where their souls should reside. When I see their lecherous faces and cold eyes, and hear their hyper capitalist rhetoric, I have not trouble believing that pure evil exists.

Those who support the agendas of these types are at best unwitting accomplices, to the destruction of this planet and of turning life into hell on earth. Or worse, supporting them, knowing the consequences, but caring only for personal gain that comes with it. Hell already exists in many places and on every habitable continent. These power mad vampires want to enslave humanity completely and cut off any upward mobility in life and if possible drink every drop of life the world has to give.

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

Charles Baudelaire

012315 History Snip-it - King Abdulaziz, the First King of Saudi Arabia

KingAbdulaziz 1st King of Saudi Arabia

With the recent death of King Abdullah, of Saudi Arabia, I did something a lot of people do and clicked his article in Wikipieda. I started following the predecessor links back until I got to the first king of Saudi Arabia. It was King Abdulaziz who Reigned as King of Saudi Arabia, from 14 August 1932 to 9 November 1953. Of all the kings that have reined since, he looks the most like an Arab King. You can see the history of the Arab people in his eyes. It was a little amazing to have a line of royalty be so short, most of the time titles like these lines go back centuries. So before 1932, it was still Arabia, wild and free, Unmolested by modern life. I don't have any illusions that it was an perfect life. A brutal and harsh life to be sure, but also one with a purity that is so absent from our world now. Certainly the role of a woman at that time, was nothing to cheer about, but that's still true in modern Saudi Arabi and I wonder if in the desert things we're actually better for women than in modern cities, where they have to deal with the clash of culture.

Some thing I found interesting about King Abulaziz, was that his predecessor was himself as King of Nejd and Hejaz who reined as Himself from 8 January 1926 to 23 September 1932. Which would mean, if these dates are correct that from 14 August 1932 to the 23^rd of September 1932, he was two people. Was he putting off dropping the former title, lamenting, “I'm going to miss being King of Nejd and Hejaz.” Heavy sigh. “Now I'm going to be King of Saudi Arabia, it's going to be nothing but work, work, work, talk, talk, talk. No more riding horses across the desert, sleeping under the perfect sky with every star so close their whispers brush you with their breath at while you're sleeping, taking your dreams to the farthest reaches of the heavens. I guess anyone would have had a hard time giving up that lifestyle.

I have a real back log of blog entries, because it's a new frontier to me. I can't get the formatting the way I want and as I said in my original description, my posts are going to be about many a splendid thing and I'm having trouble figuring out where to start. To end further delays I'm posting the last one I wrote. Hopefully I'll figure out the formatting as I go along. I have a real interest in history, so you will occasionally see a history snip-it like this one. 

Source Wikipedia KingAbdulaziz 1st King of Saudi Arabia