Lockhart's Top LaFonds Volume 52

Good afternoon, here are your weekend links!

I think White Indians is my favorite non-fiction book in progress.

Banjo will use only as much force as is absolutely necessary, but he will want to talk it out.

Anarcho-tyrrany uses the tools at hand.

James assesses a very interesting site, as they try to thread the needle between their slave owning and slave laboring ancestors.

A quick boxing update, Adonis Stevenson.

Go shopping with the Ghetto Grocer.  This was one of the first things I thought about doing with James, taking him along to all the ethnic groceries around here and getting some video.  Maybe someday!

Do you find yourself yearning for Ragnarok?

James has discovered memes, and directs you to the Taboo You Facebook page to see some that were developed by a LaFondian friend.

I have never seen this movie, but if you are a fan of Milius' Conan, you need to read James' take.  (James - I noticed that you did not use your normally wide array of euphemisms in this article.)

If only we all had James' serenity when contemplating YouTube academics.

Baltimore area readers should certainly not take advantage of the City's munificence here.

A fun news round-up with Jeremy Bentham. 

Commoditization and consolidation of markets are the economic principles requiring slavery, ironically, Helper's arguments are materialistic in themselves.

Please, James, won't you stop predicting the future?

A review of Sicario (beware spoilers).

You can see James' books in the BOOKSTORE, but they are rapidly falling to the censor's hammer.  Now some -banking- troubles have held up his royalty payments.  

Many fine titles are available as pdf books through his main website.

Support James in his Plantation America work by becoming a Patron, or donate straight to the man through Paypal, because you love James and his work.

(c) 2018 Lynn Lockhart

Casting Kull and Conan

What Actor Would You Cast to Play the Iconic Barbarian Usurpers?

Two Conans have already been cast in film as well as at least one TV casting, which I have not viewed. This is a hard part to cast as actors tend to be smaller than non-actors, especially smaller than athletes and all of Howard’s characters were athletes. Kull is certainly the Conan prototype and was cast in a TV movie, which was very bad and starred a TV Hercules.

Many artists in comic and on book cover art, have done Conan and one him well. The two most prominent efforts were by Boris Valejo, who employed bodybuilders as models and whose art had much of the pose about it, and Frank Frazetta, who seemed to have painted form his mind’s eye, presenting a darker, wilder more menacing Conan, best exemplified by his painting Rogues in the House..

The two movie actors cast as Conan were Arnold Swarzenegger, who was very much in the buff, mechanical posing mode of Vallejo, and Jason Momoa, a half-Polynesian man who looks much more the part of the black-haired prehistoric Gael of Howard’s imagination than the Austrian Arnold. He also possesses better acting range. All three movies were travesties in terms of their writing and reflect almost nothing of Howard’s vision or setting.

Now, If I were going to write a Conan movie script who would I suggest be cast as the lead?

This is a difficult casting job, so I will approach it chronologically.

In Howard’s time the movie should have certainly starred Johnny Weissmuller, the best of the a Tarzan actors, a real champion athlete with very limited acting range but a suitably barbaric accent.

In the 1950s and 60s, long after the death of Howard and his pulp medium, when the Conan character was enjoying revival, the best pick would have been Clint Walker, who more closely represented the physique and face and hair color described by Howard than any other actor on this list.

In the 1970s and 80s Arnold was the best man available for the job, despite being too short, brown-haired and mechanical.

In the 1990s and 2000s the best actor available would have been Adrian Paul, the man who played Duncan McLeod on the Highlander TV series.

In the current age I really like Jason Momoa, possible as the best Conan of all.

That said, the movie with room to be made, that could be based directly on the plot of a single Howard work, would be one about an older king Conan, either combining The Phoenix on the Sword with The Scarlet Citadel or using The Hour of the Dragon. An alternative script could be made of Beyond the Black River, The Black Stranger or The People of the Black Circle, which would involve and older Conan. For this part I would suggest Ray Stevenson, who played Titus Pullo in HBO’s Rome, Frank Castle in Punisher: War Zone and Irish mobster Danny Greene in Kill the Irishman.

(c) 2018 James LaFond

Lockhart's Top LaFonds Volume 51

Hey everyone, here are your weekend links!

A movie review showing that the Poz has always been with us.

Coaching notes on Tyson Fury.

Advice on self defense, Shades and Blades.

Here's some of that old Harm City flavor.

If you believe that laws against animal cruelty are just another form of white supremacy, you've come to the right place!

The Baltimore crime blotter is horrifying, as usual.

Baltimore public schools are exhibit A for homeschooling.  Catch the Crackpot's sidekick talking education on Myth 20!

James has had 30 books in process as long as I have been reading.  Right now he has 30 in process and about 15 awaiting editing!

In a "civilized" world, that Obama-looking dweeb would have paid for that comment with his life.

Bryce Sharper wants help shopping for books.  Please see the BOOKSTORE I set up, using 9 broad categorizations of James' work.  Find more of what you love!

James assesses BLM and the French Spring.

Don't miss this fun video of James and friends making a double-ended bag for boxing training.

You can see James' books in the BOOKSTORE, but they are rapidly falling to the censor's hammer.  Now some -banking- troubles have held up his royalty payments.  

Many fine titles are available as pdf books through his main website.

Support James in his Plantation America work by becoming a Patron, or donate straight to the man through Paypal, because you love James and his work.

(c) 2018 Lynn Lockhart

Casting Solomon Kane

What Actor Would You Cast to Play the Puritan Swordsman?

The actor must be tall, angular of features, be between 40-60 years of age and able to project a high level of menace. The most difficult aspect of casting Kane would be the need for a powerful voice, not oft used, but available.

7. Vincent Price had the physical stature and angular face to play the ghostly avenger, though his voice approach might have limited the character’s heroic appeal.

6. Christopher Walken, in his role of the Hessian in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow could have made a fine Kane.

5. James Coburn, more than any actor on the list other than Peck, would have the necessary deep, stentorian voice to do Kane in his full wrath.

4. Nick Mason suggested Mathew McConaughey as an angular-faced man with a wide acting range and I quite agree.

3. Vigo Mortensen, based on his performance in Eastern Promises, and due to his athleticism and angular features would be an excellent Kane.

2. Clint Eastwood, in High Plains Drifter, essentially did play Solomon Kane as a spectral avenger, though his voice lacks the stentorian quality.

1. Gregory Peck playing Solomon Kane would not be far from either his roles in To Kill a Mocking Bird or in Moby Dick and might be combination of the two. Peck had the perfect appearance and voice for Solomon Kane.

(c) 2018 James LaFond

See our episode of the Crackpot Podcast featuring Nick Mason, all about Solomon Kane!

‘To Ease Various Evil Men of their Lives’

James LaFond's impressions of The Blue Flame of Vengeance by Robert E. Howard

This unpublished story is barely or almost a novelette, the length at which Howard would thrive. The author obviously felt like he had developed Kane into such a powerful character in his unfinished sketches set in mainland Europe, that he completed this pirate story set in England and festooned with no supernatural elements. The story, however, did not sell, even though its core was the vengeance against evil men embodied in the saying unveiled first in the highly successful Red Shadows, “to ease various evil men of their lives.”

The stronger and deeper Howard developed Kane, the more his buying market pushed him to embed the character not only in exotic locales but in a supernatural horror matrix. The character development is had from the vantage of a hard, impetuous man of passionate type, an honorable duelist named Jack Hollinster:

“The man reminded Jack, more than anything else, of one of the great gaunt grey wolves he had seen on the Siberian steppes.”

This is a telling scene in which Howard basically takes the adventure writer Jack London, and makes him an Elizabethan duelist, a man who had traveled the world shocked by Kane’s otherworldly nature. In other stories there are intimations that Kane is himself a supernatural force, a spectral avenger such as Clint Eastwood’s character in the western horror film, High Plains Drifter.

The Blue Flame of Vengeance is the best examination of the Kane character, a tale which even begins with a quote attributed to Kane, and while it is on its face a pirate yarn, it is in fact a horror tale with Kane as the specter:

“The face was rather long, was smooth-shaven [suggesting the knights of a previous age and not the sea dogs of the age the story was set in] and of a strange pallor which together with the somewhat sunken cheeks lent an almost corpse-like appearance…”

Solomon Kane, though, was an animate ghost with eyes that “gleamed vibrant” like ‘ancient ice” invoking the Black Riders he faced in a just-abandoned draft, and the doings of Kane inflicted horrid trials on evil men and simple hard men. The sympathetic character in this story is not so much Jack, who is a bullish hothead, but the pirate captain’s first mate, Allardine, who continually urges moderation upon his two sadistic masters, who ignore him, and attempts to lead the crew from disaster in the face of the folly of those who outrank him, only to be abandoned by the men he advocated for. Allardine is the modern man who sees clearly the folly of the mechanistic class of worldly masters, of the slavishness of the common class, and dimly senses and rightfully fears the extra-human consequences of mechanistic folly represented by Kane.

Kane has some great lines such as, “Are you not a stench in the nostrils of God and a black smirch on the books of men?” brilliantly juxtaposing the aspects of his dual nature.

He also claims, in a drab, corny manner at book’s end to be the avenger of the helpless, and the innocent, even of mistreated animals. In Kane, Howard tapped into the same justification for vengeance that our current media class traffics in, by casting every possible enemy of the mindless collective as child molester or a rapist.

Kane then vanished into shadow.

(c) 2018 James LaFond

‘My Sour Friend’

James LaFond's impressions of The Right Hand of Doom by Robert E. Howard

The Right Hand of Doom is not highly regarded, even by fans of Howard. However, in this reader’s opinion it is the very font of Howard’s unique ability to present the psychic aspect of sorcery after the Promethean tradition, not placing the sorcerer as the mercurial trickster but as the lit mind of one who sees clearly the unseen puppet strings of the human world and manages to tug them enough to impose his will in the face of all of Man’s mechanistic affectations to being beyond the reach of the fates, furies and saviors which negate our willful actuality.

In this case, Kane is not the worker of vengeance, but the judge of the avenging deed as a callous fop, John Redly, boasts by the tavern lights that he has betrayed “Roger Simeon, the necromancer” and Solomon Kane, self-appointed judge and executioner of men, casts a shadow of words over the scene:

“I say,” said he in a low powerful voice, “that you have this day done a damnable deed. Yon necromancer was worthy of death, belike, but he trusted you, naming you his one friend, and you betrayed him for a few filthy coins. Methinks you will meet him in Hell one day.”

In heroic fashion, loyalty is chosen over society even by the man who sees himself as the very avenging hand of God. This points to a theory which Howard holds forth in his fiction and has recently been articulated by Jason Reza Jorjani in Prometheus and Atlas, a metaphysical deduction that sees our human consciousness as a cork plugging the bottle of our subconscious, which knows that powers beyond our conscious ken impinge upon our lives and that only stepping beyond the bounds of society may one enter the realm of evil to combat it where it lives.

The revealing of Kane as a person who acts on impulse and piously refuses to reflect internally is combined with one of the most horrific scenes sketched in fiction, establishing Simeon the necromancer as the prototype of the swords and sorcery villain, the man of extra-human will.

(c) 2018 James LaFond

Lockhart's Top LaFonds Volume 50

Jameslafond.com has been down for a full day now.  I don't know anything about what has gone wrong or when it will be back.  I have some good stuff in draft here, so come back and visit!

James finds Netflix titles potentially worth watching.

Want to document urban blight?  James gives tactical defense advice and don't miss Banjo's notes on the actual photography.

A pair of movie reviews show how far the retconning has gotten in less than 100 years.

A murderbowl update, Baltimore is working on expanding territory, perhaps causing a temporary setback on the scoreboard.

The question on the origins of PTSD provides a starting point to explore the pressures on the modern warrior and the coping mechanisms available to him (or unavailable).

James' Harm City Journals are an anthropological gold mine, how else would you learn the meaning or even existence of this term?  Choose any title from the Harm City store, you can't go wrong.

Compare and contrast, Detroit vs. Baltimore.  Listen people, FBI crime statistics are all well and good, but you must understand, all violence is local.

Add to James' excellent review of this book the knowledge that over the last two generations, the population of the US has grown exclusively by immigration; that the prospect of a stable or slowly declining population is terrifying to governments and central bankers; contemplate the resources and labor wasted on housing that is essentially disposable, houses that would cook their inhabitants or freeze them within days of a loss of electricity; the intentional neglect of infrastructure of every kind, from the roads to the electrical grid; the refusal to manage the most basic renewable resources, such as forests and grasslands, in favor of banning grocery bags; the intentional and inadvertent poisoning of municipal water supplies; the permeation of plastics and medications into every fluid molecule on earth... suicidal just about sums it up.

You can see James' books in the BOOKSTORE, but they are rapidly falling to the censor's hammer.  Now some -banking- troubles have held up his royalty payments.  

Many fine titles are available as pdf books through his main website.

Support James in his Plantation America work by becoming a Patron, or donate straight to the man through Paypal, because you love James and his work.

(c) 2018 Lynn Lockhart