June is nearly over, and July starts tomorrow. I’ll be hitting the road for a week in Indianapolis to visit my older brother, which means I’ll probably get another poorly-selling travel book out of the deal—maybe something like Midwestern Musings, Washingtonian Woes. Of course, I need to finish my series on the wild, stressful trip to Washington, D.C., from this March. For whatever reason, I just haven’t had it in me to continue writing that saga, even though the best (and, at the time they occurred, the worst) parts are yet to come.
But I digress. In the spirit of shameless self-promotion, here’s another edition if YouTube Roundup, in which I showcase some of my recent YouTube uploads. Feel free to follow my YouTube page. Watch a video, like it, leave a comment—whatever you’d like. I upload approximately once a week, sometimes more.
Apologies for the delay, folks; I had this post scheduled for PM instead of AM. Oops! —TPP
For all the insufferableness of “Pride” and its gyrating acolytes, America’s original pagan deity was, and will always be, race. There will come a time—and it’s already manifesting—when Americans will turn on LGBTQIA2+etc. movements with a vengeance. At a certain point, there’s only so much pederasty a people can take.
But race is a far more intractable problem. It is the dark (no pun intended) elder god come back to wreak havoc on Americans. In exchange for cheap cotton and cloth in the 1800s, we now pay a thousand invisible taxes in tribute to appease this insatiable monster.
Gavin McInnes argues that we’re living in a “black theocracy,” at least in a cultural sense. The gatekeepers of popular culture can’t seem to resist recasting traditionally European characters—like Anne Boleyn!—as ebony goddesses who somehow held twenty-first-century sensibilities in Tudor England. We’ve all seen the endless television commercials that seem suspiciously absent of anyone with a drop of European ancestry.
Contrast that with Night of the Living Dead (1968). The main character in that film, Ben, is played by Duane Jones, a black actor and university professor. George Romero cast Jones for the part not because he was trying to “make history” (although in 1968 it actually was rare and controversial to cast a black man as the lead in a film), but because Jones was simply the best man for the job. Jones himself backs up this assertion—it was never about race; he’s just a great actor.
I remember seeing Night of the Living Dead sometime in high school. It was one of the most powerful films I’d seen up to that point in my life—terrifying, yes, but also dramatic, with such a disastrous (in a good way) ending. I was on the edge of my seat. Not once did I think, “oh, man, they cast a black dude for diversity points.” I’m sure I recognized that Jones was black, but it did nothing to enhance or detract from the story—he simply was; in this case, he was Ben He was perfect for that role.
Interesting and original black characters are great. Black Panther(2018) was way overrated, but it wasn’t terrible; the late Chadwick Boseman was impressive in the title role. Miles Morales in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse (2018) was a clever way to introduce an “ethnic” variant on Spider-Man that didn’t simply steal an existing intellectual property. Who else but Sidney Poitier could pull off Mark Thackeray in To Sir, with Love (1967)?
No, dear reader, this post isn’t another screed against ghoulish sexual perverts, despite what the title might suggest. It’s a fun installment of Myersvision, the intermittent series of whimsical posts from our senior correspondent, Audre Myers.
I reached out to some of my regular contributors to see if anyone had anything for me, and Audre whipped up this short, charming piece about alleged goblins and faeries—well, pixies—roaming the English countryside. She notes that one YouTuber has around 400,000 subscribers, and asks, “So who’s crazy?”
Well, my money is still on the people that think CGI pixies are real, and the only Goblin I believe in is the Italian synth rock band.
At least, for now. I’ll never forget learning about the Scottish researcher in the nineteenth century who went looking for faeries, because if he could prove faeries and other supernatural or folkloric creatures were real, he could prove God’s Existence. After all, if God Exists, there is surely a rich world of supernatural entities—angels and demons (of which I am thoroughly convinced are real), but also all manner of other creatures. The Bible speaks of giants and Behemoth. Who’s to say dragons (clearly dinosaurs) weren’t swooping around causing trouble? The Bible speaks of dragons, too.
All things to consider for another day. For now, here’s Audre, taking us on a tour of the mystical English countryside:
It’s been refreshing to get back out to open mic nights and to do some live performances again. In the spirit of getting back out and playing again, I’m digging deep into my back catalog and playing some really obscure originals.
My mind is also percolating for the first time in years with ideas for new songs. Here’s hoping I have some time to sit down at the keyboard and do some actual writing and composing. Sure, I’ve been composing a great deal of instrumental music lately, mostly for the piano, but I haven’t written a proper song since about 2019.
That said, at last week’s open mic I decided to pull out a really old piece, one I wrote way back in 2010, called “Quasi-Date.”
I’m not typically one for “trigger warnings,” but this week’s film is hard to watch. I’ve seen some pretty foul stuff in all the crappy B-grade horror flicks I consume, and I have, perhaps sadly, become immune to most shocking material. Just writing that sentence made me feel convicted… dang.
But my crushing Pentecostal guilt can wait until after this film review. This flick, the 2021 French black comedy Bloody Oranges (or Oranges sanguines in French) possesses some truly difficult scenes to endure. I found myself watching through my fingers at a couple of points in the film.
It’s an incredible movie, a movie I will heavily discourage most readers from watching. My parents, my aunts, Audre—don’t watch it. Read some reviews if your curiosity is piqued, but don’t watch it. Ponty, you could probably handle it, even though I know how much you hate the frogs.
Ah, the glorious summer. I can already feel it slipping through my Vienna sausage fingers like the grains of sand in an hour glass, or the metaphorical sandbags I’m desperately stacking up against the inexorable tide of the new school year. I love teaching, but having mornings free to write and the like is glorious.
One perk of summer is that I can actually get out to open mic nights again. I’ve missed playing live, and I want to find sustainable ways to play during the school year. It’s difficult, though: I typically don’t get in from an open mic until 10 PM. That’s doable during the summer months, but during the school year, I’m usually zonked out by 9 or 9:30 PM, not hanging out with hipsters in some coffee shop.
Regardless, here are some recent posts featuring original pieces, two of which are open mic performances:
“Open Mic Adventures XXXIII: ‘Spore Song (Mushroom Dance)’” – I’d been wanting to compose a piece named “Spore Song” after reading Stacey C. Johnson‘s post “Spore Song” at her blog Breadcrumbs. I came up with this little instrumental piece, based on a derivation of the Db major pentatonic scale. I haven’t put this on YouTube yet, as I’d like to get better performances to upload there, but these two videos should capture the essential spirit of the piece.
Even the most casual of observers will have recognized that social trust is at an all-time low. Our faith in our political institutions has long been rocky at best, but we increasingly have no faith in any of our institutions—cultural, academic, social, religious, etc. Beyond that noticeable decline in institutional trust, we’ve increasingly stopped trusting each other.
That erosion did not occur in a vacuum, nor is it surprising that as trusts in institutions—which are made up of people, after all—erodes, so does our trust in our fellow citizens. The same people debasing our institutions are the same people failing to fulfill the duties of those institutions to protect and guide us.
Sure, the conservative will say, “I don’t need some intellectual telling me how to live my life,” and that’s true. But that intellectual’s ideas and proposals are making your life much worse, whether you realize it or not. In a time of high social cohesion and trust, that boogeyman intellectual would be making decisions or proposing policies that would help or support his fellow citizens, or at least would seek to do no harm to them.
A Rasmussen poll taken in October of 2021 found that 56% of all likely voters believed that cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Another Rasmussen poll dated April of 2023 revealed that 60% of all likely voters believed that cheating affected the outcomes of many 2022 midterm elections. Unsurprisingly in a Rasmussen poll published on June 14, 2023, 54% of all likely voters believe that cheating will determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
Those are shocking numbers; that a whopping 60% of all likely voters (not just Republicans) believed that cheating affected the midterm elections is massive.
I would number myself among those 60%. But even if we’re all wrong, and the 2020 and 2022 elections were totally above board (and, come now, who can honestly say that with a straight face?), the fact that we believe rampant cheating is taking place is an indication of an extreme distrust of our political institutions.
Mason is currently undertaking an ambitious project to compose instrumental music that tells the story of the Bible, from Genesis through Revelations (or, as my friend Steve O would say, “from Genesis through Maps”). It’s an amazing concept, and he has executed it beautifully so far.
In our age of identity politics, where every individual’s personal peccadilloes are deemed a political statement and therefore there is, ironically, no division between the individual and the state, we are forced to celebrate “pride,” one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Apparently, partaking in casual buggery with one’s demiqueer otherkin is cause for public celebrations and live sex acts performed before children.
That said, all the “Pride Month” foolishness seems more toned down this year. There’s no doubt it’s still there, sashaying its glittery sinfulness through corporate America, but the rainbow is more muted. Readers have probably heard how Target shuffled its Pride displays in Southern locations away from the fronts of stores after backlash from kid’s clothing with wiener-tucking abilities. Anecdotally, while strolling through PetSmart, I saw one tiny display of “Pride” dog toys in the far back portion of the store. Modern dog owners are already kind of weirdos (gulp!) who seem like they’d be into any alternative lifestyle, so even here in the South, it seems like PetSmart could get away with more flamboyant displays. Instead, they’re sticking to what they do best—selling overpriced pet supplies.
The backlash seems to be from the increasingly overt efforts to force “Pride” onto children. When it was just adults being forced to watch two men make out on television, or vague proclamations that “love is love,” we might wince, but it was hard to get over the (disingenuous and flawed) argument that “it’s just consenting adults; we’re just raising awareness.”
Now that there’s the clear grooming of children going on—an active effort to indoctrinate and seduce children into highly inappropriate and unnatural sexual relationships with adults—people are finally waking up. The quest for homosexual “rights” was nothing but a Trojan condom horse to prey upon the vulnerable and the innocent.
Thirty years ago, it was, “we just want to come out of the shadows.”
Twenty years ago, it was, “we just want to get married, too.”
Ten years ago, it was, “we want to become another gender.”
Now it’s “we want to force your child to become a gender, then we want to have sex with it.”
The Portly Politico 