#Female Convict Scorpion

[fuckyeahmeikokaji]

Meiko Kaji (梶芽衣子) in Female Convict Scorpion: Beast Stable (女囚さそり　けもの部屋), 1973, directed by Shunya Ito (伊藤俊也).

This is a cutout that I do not know the origin of.

[sklira]

Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972) Dir. Shunya Itō

[simulacrumaussois]

Female Convict Scorpion: Beast Stable (女囚さそり けもの部屋, 1973), directed by Shunya Ito (伊藤俊也)

[thethirdbear]

[dustedmagazine]

DJ Female Convict Scorpion — Paradise Re-Lost (Self-released)

The Christian poetry of John Milton and the idiosyncratic turntablism of Josh Pollock, better known as DJ Female Convict Scorpion, are not an intuitive match. That’s an important thing to note, given the deeply strange quality of Pollock’s music, in which intuition seems crucial. Some of us first encountered DJ Female Convict Scorpion releases as unlabeled CDrs circulating in the mails (especially the several volumes of Clash Ups, from Pollock’s “Anti-Social Remix” series) and were fascinated. It takes Pollock’s particular variety of intuition to suspect that isolating Jowe Head’s gonzo vocal from the Swell Maps’ “Full Moon in My Pocket” would sound both disturbing and great if you soak it in reverb and let it play; or that the interminable drum solo of Led Zep’s “Moby Dick” would become completely transfixing if you laid a scrim of tortured theremin over it. It isn’t paradise, exactly, but you don’t feel any desire to leave.

Leaving, return and loss are crucial themes in Milton’s Protestant poem in blank verse. Many children of the 1980s (hello) did the forced march through Paradise Lost (1667), the more famous part of Milton’s epic — and some of us ended up being very glad that we did. Few literary treatments of Christian myth get anywhere close to the majesty of Milton’s language, and the verse’s strange interplay of a rough-hewn austerity and a begrudging engagement with poetry’s eros ends up being particularly useful for understanding American puritanisms, old and new. You can try to keep that libidinal power repressed and submerged, but it always returns. There’s a reason why Satan is the most interesting thing in Paradise Lost.

Of course, Milton attempted to correct for that interest. Paradise Regained (1671) focuses on the story of the Christ and the establishment of the new covenant with humanity forged by his sacrifice, if you believe that sort of thing. Many of us do not. The narrative is flat, and the mythic scale that thrills in Paradise Lost is — well, lost. Pollock’s Paradise Re-Lost riffs on the dynamic of delight and its loss with a score for a ballet by Nostus Tanztheater, based in Heidelberg. N.B., dear reader, the dance company really exists, but this reviewer was able to find no evidence of the ballet, nor did Milton ever write Paradise Re-Lost, a “third part” of his Christian epic, which Pollock credits as source material. It may be that, in a Satanic gesture of his own, Pollock’s impulse to fuck around with culture has reached a new intensity of pranksome mischief.

You may hear traces of mischievous fun in some of the titles of tracks on Paradise Re-Lost: “Eden Disorder,” “Mephisto Birkenstock” and so on. But the music is mostly more serious. Massive, creepy churchbells toll, sounding as if captured on some degraded cassette tape, at the record’s outset. Soon, the inimitable Nina Simone emerges from the moody morass of a DJ Female Convict Scorpion soundscape: some tense brass, a mournfully lovely flute, more theremin — one imagines the streets of Bedlam set-dressed in late-1940s Frisco noir. And Simone is doing her thing on George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” (you can find the full, joyous and outraged performance on her record Emergency Ward, most of which was recorded at a 1971 live gig at Fort Dix, and it’s insanely good…): “I really want to see you, lord / But I’m afraid it’s too late.” Nobody could express indignant sorrow like Simone. Milton gets close.

In much of DJ Female Convict Scorpion’s music, mood is more important than thematic coherence, and the mood of Paradise Re-Lost is downcast and anxious. There are lots of horns that sound drawn from late-1960s free jazz, a lot of haunted piano, pealing chimes and taut acoustic guitar tangles. Tension builds and builds and goes nowhere. One is tempted to read that as a gesture toward critique of Christian morality, which poses the next world as the ultimate truth, as if our actions on this material plane are secondary, less real. Given just how shitty this world has become, it’s a tempting proposition to give in to. But some of us still believe (or at least want to believe) in material experience and in the value of good works in the here and now, for their own sake. Lots of luck with that.

In spite of loss, some things seem to endure. Pollock reaches deep into our collective cultural imaginary at the close of Paradise Re-Lost, situating the vocal of Anne Briggs’ version of the sea shanty “Lowlands Away” in a glistening, slick mid-1970s soft-rock arrangement. It’s hard to tell what the gesture signifies. The shanty is lovely but sad to its core. The musical accompaniment feels like a warm bath, which sweetens the sadness rather than negating it. In our current period of interregnum, awaiting fascism and its savaging of the bare vestiges of the liberal administrative state, there is a fragile sense of sweetness to this time: holidays and their invocations of relative constants. But atop the treacly surfaces, we know that these bright, clear autumnal skies, with their gem-hard blue, will soon fill with something different. The strains of “Hail to the Chief,” the smell of smoke and something worse than Satan.

Jonathan Shaw

[sorryfortheyouth]

Meiko Kaji (梶芽衣子) shooting a press photo for Female Convict Scorpion

https://www.instagram.com/sorry.for.the.youth/

https://www.instagram.com/____isle____/

[strathshepard]

Meiko Kaji (梶芽衣子) in an ad for Female Convict Scorpion: Beast Stable (女囚さそり けもの部屋), 1973, directed by Shunya Ito (伊藤 俊也)

via fuckyeahmeikokaji.tumblr.com

[danielpico]

Female Convict Scorpion: Beast Stable (女囚さそり　けもの部屋, Joshū Sasori - Kemono Beya)

[riddickkkk]

Fans of Vin Diesel’s best-loved character Riddick have been waiting nine years for the promised sequel to 2004’s Chronicles of Riddick and its predecessor Pitch Black (to say nothing of the top-notch video game installments). We’ve perked up at any offhand mention of a new movie in interviews and taken heart in teasing messages posted by Diesel himself on his personal fanpage. Now, at last, Riddick is back in a new adventure that is more of a series reboot than a proper continuation of the intergalactic convict’s story.

Stripped down literally and figuratively, Vin Diesel and director David Twohy deliver one of the stranger examinations of machismo dressed in sci-fi trappings in recent memory. After waiting so long, so patiently, I had a lot of feelings watching Riddick. There’s some good, some disappointing, and some frankly really, really disturbing.

Spoilers after the cut.

“Don’t know how many times I’ve been crossed off the list and left for dead,” Riddick intones in the movie’s opening. This has been happening to him since his birth, when he was abandoned in a trashcan on his homeworld Furya. After unwittingly backing into the throne as Lord Marshal of the creepy supernatural army of Necromongers, the lone wolf found he didn’t like wearing a crown. Still searching for Furya, Riddick was duped into being dropped off on a new barren planet filled with hostile beasts with only his cunning to help him survive.

A brief flashback—with bonus R-rated naked babes—to Riddick’s crushing melancholy is all we get of his recent past. Riddick is, after all, a rebirth of the franchise. It’s not meant to move Riddick’s journey forward in much of a meaningful way and on that note, Riddick delivers on its promises. This is a self-contained side story.

On first watching, I thought the beginning half of Riddick was really oddly paced. Even a bit slow. It’s Jeremiah Riddick, as, totally alone and broken, Riddick dedicates himself to getting back to his primal roots among the ravenous space-hyenas and mud-dwelling space-scorpions. He fashions crude weapons, hardens himself against venom, and even briefly goes naked. He makes friends with nature, in the form of an adorable hyena pup that he raises and trains to be his sole ally.

But there can’t be a birth without blood and when desperation forces him to activate a beacon as a lure for bounty hunters and their much-needed spaceships, there’s blood and action aplenty. Riddick is the man that can kill you with a tea cup, after all.

Yet, I think I enjoyed solo Riddick more than Riddick playing another game of cat-and-mouse against two really ugly groups of mercenaries. One group is lead by creepy pervert Santana. The only standout among his crew is a pretty charismatic Dave Bautista. I’m told wrestlers are good with charisma. See: Duane “The Rock” Johnson. The other group is more organized and led by Boss Johns (screenwriter and author Matt Nable). If that surname rings a bell to a longtime Riddick fan, well, it’s no surprise there. His second-in-command is beloved badass female actress Katee Sackoff.

Katee Sackoff Riddick Dahl

It’s Sackoff’s character Dahl (pronounced like “Doll”) that really made me super uncomfortable. Women are barely featured in Riddick, unlike the decent assortment of females present in Pitch Black, who were tough and subversive and flawed. And Riddick treated them with the exact same amount of respect he gives any human. Which, granted, isn’t much at times, but still. It counts. And I’ve already addressed my issues with women in Necromonger society, but Dahl kind of made me wish for Dame Vaako’s return. It was that bad.

You see, Dahl says she “doesn’t fuck guys.” We don’t know if it’s a lie to keep scummy Santana from creeping on her, but let’s take it at face value. This is all we know about Dahl’s personal life beyond her sniping skills. So later on when Riddick is doing his trademark “This is how I will kill you” threats, he also mentions that afterwards, he’s going to go “balls deep” in Dahl. It was really fucking disgusting and not the Riddick I enjoyed previously. It immediately threw me out of the movie.

The only other times women were seen were, as stated earlier, writhing naked in Riddick’s Necromonger bedchambers and one escaped prisoner (presumably a rape victim) that Santana murdered for pretty much no reason in front of Riddick. Yeah, classic fridging.

But it gets worse for Sackoff, who deserves a million times better for her nuanced portrayal of Colonial frack-up Kara Thrace on Battlestar Galactica. She has a really gratuitous topless scene where Riddick spies on her. And he then tries to rattle her about it later in the crudest way possible: “Your nails are pink. Like your nipples.” WAT.

Finally, when all of the mostly interchangeable redshirt mercs are dead (and you pretty much know immediately who’s going to make it the moment they are introduced) we’re left with the implication that Dahl, who had no other conversations with Riddick beyond trying to kill him and who is gay, fucks Riddick. You know, because Riddick is so manly he can “cure” a lesbian.

It’s a big chunk of ugliness in what is otherwise a perfectly serviceable sci-fi thriller. The action scenes have a lot of style, the violence is really over-the-top as you’d expect from the franchise and there are some funny one-liners. I was disappointed Riddick’s flashbacks with Karl Urban (sans mullet! Nooooooooo!) were so brief, but I get it. This movie was funded on a much smaller scale than Chronicles. The FX that are here are solid and the planet has a lot of dark, creepy atmosphere, but it’s definitely not as baroque and beautiful as Chronicles. Matt Nable intrigues and I hope to see him in more roles soon. He imbued Boss Johns with a lot of world-weariness and heart.

But a good script is a lot harder than good CGI, apparently. Even though words cost a hell of a lot less to create. At least in theory. There’s no excuse for some of the terrible dialogue in here. Not even funny-bad, just plain bad-bad. Again, lots of that is centered around Katee Sackoff’s character, but not always. Riddick was never a poet, educated as he was in the penal system, but fans have come to expect a certain level of cleverness from him that just isn’t really to be found here.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Riddick the character should’ve stayed buried in development hell because there were glimmers of goodness and, if the movie does well enough, a continuation of Riddick’s story proper—i.e., a visit to Furya and the Underverse—seems likely. And I’d still want it.

But this Riddick made me think more of Pet Semetary than Pitch Black: “Sometimes dead is better.” Riddick came back wrong. As a huge Riddick and Vin Diesel fan who is also female, I’m incredibly disappointed that the movie I waited so long to see was so incredibly, blatantly, alienating. Riddick isn’t some meta-commentary on male superego. It’s not that smart. And it didn’t need to be super smart to be enjoyable. But if science fiction says more about the present state of a society than the future, what does that say about representations of women in genre? If Starbuck could be so humiliated, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Riddick is in theaters now

[outfitposts]

[sklira]

Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (1972) Dir. Shunya Itō

[movieposters1]

[fitsofgloom]

Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion

[psyonite21]

Execution Division🗡

[neosumiosarchive]

[danielpico]

Female Convict Scorpion: Beast Stable (女囚さそり　けもの部屋, Joshū Sasori - Kemono Beya)