The Pit and The Pendulum

One of my favorite shock theater movies, Roger Corman's 1961 film adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Pit and The Pendulum is a classic creep fest. The film stars Vincent Price as the diabolical husband who kills his wife in a slow and agonizing death. Sorry no details, just watch the movie. The film also stars Luana Anders, who also starred in another horror classic directed by Frances Ford Copolla Dementia 13. If you are a fan of those awesome 1960's Satuday afternoon shock theater films, you're going to love The Pit and The Pendulum.

LRAD - part 2

Whoa! - it's all coming back to me now. In the late 80's I took some of my boys (12-15 yrs. old at that time) down to the old Grady Cole Center ... down by CPCC to see a band touted to be the loudest band in the world at the time (I remember Spinal Tap was on hiatus)... anyhoo ... Since I was an old acquaintance of the road manager, we went down and picked up our VIP/backstage passes and prepared ourselves to be astonished.

Now Grady Cole was built for basketball and was totally hard. I mean it was harder than hard ... harder than remembering the name of the band ... concrete slab floor, solid concrete walls, concrete balcony all the way around it kinda like the Blue Horizon in Philly if you've ever been there and of course the exposed steel trussed roof.

Great! ... listening to the loudest band in the land in this teeny little concrete and steel bunker and I mean to tell you, it was loud! They may well have approached the 150 db level. I didn't notice it at the time but no one in the band had any facial hair! Perhaps the db level did blow their whiskers off! And then. After the show was done. And it was really a great show. I wish I could remember the band's name. The drummer was un-frickin-believable.

I can remember his name. It was Dave Lombardi or Lombardo. And so after the show we're walking through where the mosh pit was, and lying on the floor among the torn tennis shoes, ripped underwear and whatnot was a ponytail, completely intact. Just as if it had been blown off by an LRAD or something worse.

So I think you may be onto something there with the whisker deal but as far as content goes ..oh!Slayer ... it was the band "Slayer". yup. You know, Slayer music would be a good candidate for using with their "death ray" machine. Kenny G., Pat Benatar and Don Henley while truly abysmal musically, in the long run, may just make everyone feel sort of gooey. You have a great weekend, too.

LRAD

For a little over $30,000 bucks, you can pick up a really decent LRAD, which is short for a Long Range Acoustic Device. The question I wonder is - could you just pick a song to play at 150 decibels and what song would it be? I mean, getting Rick Rolled as a weapon just doesn't seem to cut the mustard. But which song, when there are so many to choose from. Honestly, Kenny G could be deadly out there. A stone cold killer, the little fella. And what doing something sneaky, like Don Henley's Forgiveness, blowing out the enemy eardrums. It has a certain irony to it. Why not, hmmm, Pat Benatar's Love is a battlefield could knocks the stirrups off your saddle as well, because at 150 decibels loud, that would just about blow the whiskers off your face. Have a great weekend.

WTF

never mind

Jericho Rez

In the beginning, things were really great. All was peaceful and quiet. Slowly but surely, in our foolishness, we added new sounds to the silence. Over thousands of years, this silence grew into a maddening din. White Noise. Jericho Rez. What has happened to the days, when we were eager to listen and slow to speak? Those days seem far away, but we can begin to change - one person at time.

William Butler Yeats - The Second Coming

This poem, written in the days before WII by William Butler Yeats gave me chills when I read it for the first time 30 years ago. And today, it seems like an appropriate post for today's Jericho Rez musings. (Yes, you are correct, Easter 1916 is another Yeats masterpiece to consider).

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?