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Unsolicited Recommendations 4

After an undeserved yet still taken break, I have got some more unsolicited recommendations for all of you good boys and girls. If Santa gave you coal, you're hereby invited to stop reading. Santa is the great moral arbiter of our time. The Greeks had Themis, the Romans had Justitia, the Egyptians had Maat and Anubis, the Hindus have Durga, and we, we have Santa.  Anyway, rambling aside, here come the recommendations.

  1. Crone- Gotta Light?

Being informed Secrets of the Moon would stop existing after Party-San, I was both saddened and somewhat unsurprised. The change from Black-Extreme Metal to Gothic Rock with some Black Metal leanings was so drastic that their 2015 and onwards crowd and their 1995 crowd were almost completely unrelated. I personally adore both sides of the equation, but I think the name represented an entity that has functionally stopped existing a couple of years ago already.

That being said, I made sure not to take my eyes off sG (Philipp Jonas) and his other band-turned-main band, Crone. Their 2022 album, eventually entitled "Gotta Light?",  would be, for better or worse, massively influential on the band's future. Oh well, good thing that it's an awesome and deeply confrontational album then.

Good thing indeed. While Crone existed since 2011 and have undoubtedly already found their footing, "Gotta Light?" is their best album so far. It might have the word light in the title, but don't let that fool you- it's more fucking depressing than getting shot on your birthday. In the rain. By Jonas Renske of Katatonia. sG's mournful, almost lost, vocals and the band's drift from cleaner guitar and piano sections to darker, more distorted pathways make this album feel like a journey. The light, for all its brightness, feels like dawn after a flood.

2. HBO's Rome

Before Game of Thrones, how could you get  that sweet "violence in movies and sex on TV" all in one place? That's right by putting a movie screen and a TV screen and doing some scandalous shit in the room. But barring that, you had one of HBO's best shows, Rome.

While I'm not disputing the quality of HBO's recent releases, I think Rome's age and relatively short run has people sleeping on it and that's a shame. A more lively and vivid depiction of the Julius- Augustus period would be hard to come by. The cast has that LOTR quality that while you probably haven't heard of them, (I sure didn't,) you cannot easily mentally dissociate them from their roles here. Ciarán Hinds, Irish actor and man I was genuinely surprised to find out isn't Alfred Molina, is still, after 15 years, the face of Julius Caeser in my mind

The dynamic of moving between the legendary figures  and the populous lets the show tell interesting stories on both the macro and the micro levels. An episode or two in, the stories of Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson) and Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) become just as interesting as the bigger historical events on display.

The only drawback is that the show was discontinued after two seasons because it was super expensive to make, but while it lasted it was glorious.

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The Apology of Caligula

Blood is blood whether it’s shameful or proud

And you best be sure it is parceled and met out

Lest I grow upset

My name is Gaius Augustus Germanicus, Caligula for short

The horned devil who steals for pleasure and murders for sport

It’s your honor to be in my behest

But you should know better

2,000 years and you haven’t learned a thing

It’s about he who dies in poverty and powerless

That poets beatify and sing

Yes I wanted power, every minute and every hour

The only meat never to sour,

But for that you would poke your finger at me?

They say I planned to make a consul of Incitatus

Believe me, I was surrounded by so many murderous bastards

I should have done so more expediently

And I, emperor

You, a mere student, laugh in giddy joy

But I had an empire of millions, all I could’ve wanted

Prey tell, who of us is the man and who’s the boy?

And you compare these paupers to me

Who fly between groups of plebeians so diligently

Not even to me but to this cartoonish effigy

My horse commended far more respect than you or your scrutiny

(An apologia or an apology

apology [Gr.,=defense], literary work that defends, justifies, or clarifies an author's ideas or point of view. Unlike the ordinary use of the word, the literary use neither implies that wrong has been done nor expresses regret)

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