Released by Real Gone Music in special "hellfire" vinyl, the 877th Soundtrack of the
Week is Alden Shuman's music for The Devil in Miss Jones.
Pianist Frank Owens starts with a lovely solo piece in 3/4 called "In the Beginning". It's only 43 seconds long
but very sweet and pretty with a tinge of melancholy. Then organ, vibes, horns and piano create a lush, mysterious, swaying and also pretty atmosphere
for "Hellcat". "I'm Comin' Home (Theme from
'The Devil in Miss Jones')", builds on what the first two cues established but adds
strings and, eventually, singer Linda November to handle lyics, of which several are
"I'm comin' home", sometimes leaving out "home". Since this is actually a porn movie, there should be some kind of slinky electro-grooves.
In "The Teacher" we finally get some wah-wah guitar and electric bass guitar playing with
some gently groovy rhythms but it's still very sweet and serious and melodic. This is not
a trash soundtrack and presumably it's not a trash movie. The A side climaxes with "Ladies in Love", which is a romantic
piece for strings and piano, as well as what sounds like French horn,
low key melodrama, easy to imagine
paired with bright, colorful images. The B side starts with piano again, this time accompanied by strings
and bells, playing the theme again but this time as "Love Lesson".
Some kind of horn joins the bells on the melody and then we settle into
the waltz groove and it's really nice. Another 3/4 tune follows but "Beauty and the Beast" has a more shadowy, omnious feel to it.
Reed instruments take the melody this time. More plaintive solo piano brings us "Walk with the Devil", sounding a bit like if
Liberace played the theme from The Conversation. It's beautiful, though,
and not overdone. Next the secondary 3/4 theme gets a bucolic and pleasant arrangement for "Trio in the Round"
with strings being the main voice and there's an especially nice violin solo at the end. Then "Miss Jones Comes Home" and we have some suspenseful long tones for strings and
organ before the piano comes in with a slow and deliberate reiteration of the main theme. And then we're "At the End", a 46-second reprise of the main theme.
2025 October 03 • Friday
A different take on UAP encounters can be found in Whitley Strieber's
Communion: A True Story.
Strieber was already an established novelist with two books, The Hunger and Wolfen,
adapted into well-known movies. Communion is his autobiographical account of alien encounters and abductions,
involving himself as well as his family and friends—sometimes just as witnesses, sometimes
more directly involved. It's an interesting and compelling account although, as seems always to be the case, there
isn't anything verifiable or documented to help the unbiased reader decide what to make of
his story. Mental illness and substance abuse don't seem to be relevant here. Strieber himself is
admirably open-minded about his experiences, willing to consider that everything
could be happening inside his head. Since what he experienced is so vivid and has at least some elements observable to others,
he makes the excellent point that even if all of it is inisde his head, it should
be a very important area of study. When he starts to hypothesize about what the creatures he encountered might be,
things start to fall apart a bit. Since there isn't any concrete evidence or information
at all, they might be anything. He makes an argument, for example,
for creatures who share a hive mind. Sure, that seems possible. As does literally everything else. Nothing in particular
points to a hive-mind intelligence. It's a well-written and affecting book, though, and worth reading. It was made into a movie starring
Christopher Walken and Lindsay Crouse, which is also worth a look,
even though Strieber himself was disappointed by it. The first line is "This is one man's attempt to deal with a shattering assault
from the unknown".
2025 October 01 • Wednesday
Happy anniversary, darling! The May 2, 2025, Times Literary Supplement has a long review of two books, Rod Dreher's
Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age and Abi Millar's
The Spirituality Gap: Searching for Meaning in a Secular Age.
Is it really a secular age? I would find that to be a relief,
if true. Maybe it depends on how you define "secular" and other
such words that tend to pop up around it. And both of these books seem to me to be starting with a false or at least wholly unsubstantiated premise
and then galloping off in several wrong directions with it. But of
course that's
normal. The Dreher book, however, appears to have some especially abnormal things going on in it. I never heard of Dreher before, partly because these days information tends to come
to us already pre-sorted to comfort the recipient and confirm our
biases, so we'll be inclined to keep consuming more of it. One of the reasons the TLS is compelling and perhaps even essential is
that it is admirably wide-ranging and apparently hopes to appeal to those who are
just generally curious. Dreher is an influential conservative and Orthodox Christian and friend of J. D. Vance,
all things that make it extremely unlikely that he would ever be friends with me. His book appears to have the usual moaning about not enough people being
Christian or those who are not being Christian enough and so on. The interesting part of the review is this: The anecdotal story of possession will most likely confirm the appropriate biases.
Last year Tucker Carlson claimed to have been attacked in bed at night by a demon who left visible
claw marks. Also in bed with him at the time were four (4) dogs but that's
just a coincidence. More interesting is the reports of the silliness going on in Silicon Valley. I had no idea
the tech bros were so goofy. AI as Ouija board is a persuasive analogy, though. I've been
referring to Google as The Oracle for years. And then there are the UFOs. I've been interested in this subject for a little while
and while Dreher's take doesn't, on the basis of this review, have much of anything going for it,
it does tie in to something Luis Elizondo, who worked in the Department of Defense
and was officially involved with US UFO (or UAP) programs, says in his book Imminent: Inside the
Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs.
There's a lot of interesting stuff in this book and Elizondo is a phlegmatic, unexcitable
guide, a career soldier with no discernible traces of wackiness. He seems to hold conventional
views on just about anything and his politics appear to be centerish but right-leaning
enough to be against Edward Snowden's actions. He shares his experiences with unexplained and paranormal phenomena, not just UFOs
but also extra- or super-sensory abilities such as remote viewing—which he claims
he learned how to do and could write a whole book about it. Which I wish he would. He doesn't seem to have come to the table with any sort of bias in favor of UFOs or anything else
but to have been educated and persuaded by his own observations. As such, his should be a persuasive voice for most readers. Of course, nothing he says
is verifiable and much of it isn't even backed up by anything. When he reports seeing glowing
orbs in his own backyard, you have to wonder why nobody there grabbed a photo with their
cell phone. But Elizondo does name names when it comes to a cabal of Christians who have infiltrated
the government and its agencies and see everything through the same kind of filter
as Dreher and perhaps Carlson do. At one point Elizondo is approached by Devon Woods, "who had assumed a senior role"
at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Woods says, about UAPs/UFOs, "'you know we already know
what these things are, right?'" Elizondo isn't sure what he's talking about and is further confused when Woods continues, "'Have you
read your Bible lately, Lue? … It's demonic,' he said to me. "'There is no reason we should be
looking into this. We already know what they are and where they come from. They are deceivers.
Demons.'" This is actually the most alarming part of the book. This is a real person with a real name,
one of several such people in our own government's agencies, manipulating other people
and information behind the scenes according to religious beliefs that most people
would find to be at least unconvincing if not totally bizarre. And this part of the story, which should be verifiable as well as believable,
seems to get overlooked, despite its very real significance. The New York Times
review of Immimenet, for example, doesn't mention it. Interesting times, I guess. The first line is "In late 2008, I began a new job at the Pentagon after several tours
with other US intelligence agencies".
Technology, [Dreher] contends, is one of the main fronts in the campaign [by diabolical forces to
frustrate humans' attempts to do whatever it is Dreher's Christianity thinks we're supposed to do].
The Tower of Babel warns of the risks of using technology (in that case, the building technology of
Mesopotamia) to achieve human parity with God. The modern equivalent is Silicon Valley transhumanism –
a project that, says Dreher, sometimes appeals explicitly to gods and other higher intelligences.
A “California venture capitalist friend” told Dreher that “everyone he knows in Silicon Valley holds
regular rituals to summon ‘the aliens’ to give them technological wisdom”. Dreher quotes a Google
whistleblower, Blake Lemoine, who was fired for going public with his belief that LaMDA, Google’s
AI programme, had achieved consciousness, and who said the programme had been ritually committed
to the ancient Egyptian deity Thoth. This wasn’t a big secret, said Lemoine:
“it’s just that journalists never ask about it”. AI itself, according to Dreher, is
“a kind of high-tech Ouija board”, and we genuflect before what we have summoned.
“We laugh at the primitive Semitic tribe dancing around [the golden calf], but many
of us would have little trouble doing the equivalent around AI entities.” Whether or
not you can agree with Dreher, the equation of ultimate efficiency with ultimate moral
good (a blindly accepted axiom of technocratic postmodernity) is troubling.
Rather apologetically, he seeks to convince us that UFOs are the vehicles of resident
malign intelligences that have always shared our planet, but are becoming more
aggressive and brazen, using AI as their tool for preparing the world for a false
religion. “It’s not hard to imagine that readers who have followed me up to now will
conclude that this is where the story I tell of modern mysticism shipwrecks itself
on the shoals of crackpottery”, he concedes. “I get it. I would have thought the
same thing not long ago.” But Dreher’s conviction is unshakeable, and his treatment
of UFOs long, detailed and earnest. “[The] most intelligent and highly placed people
who investigated the [UFO] phenomenon do not believe that they are aliens from other planets”,
he writes. “Rather, most appear to think that they are discarnate higher intelligences from
other dimensions of reality.”
The devil, according to Dreher, doesn’t only infiltrate programmes, ideas and institutions.
He is personal. His friend Emma was possessed. She was possessed, he suggests, because
her dead grandfather back in Europe “had been a high-level occultist who brought a
curse onto the family”. An exorcist was called (apparently there are quite a few in
the Catholic church), but the demons made Emma fall asleep as she was saying the prayers
that would have expelled them.
Dreher went to visit Emma and her husband in their high-rise apartment on Manhattan’s
East Side. Her husband, Nathan, told Dreher that, unbeknown to Emma, he was hiding
in his pocket a relic of the True Cross. We’re not told where he got the relic, but,
says Dreher, “the demonically possessed react negatively to such things: awareness
of blessed objects hidden from view is one basic test of possession.” Dreher and Emma
were talking on the balcony. When Nathan sat down at their table, Emma’s face transformed.
“She looked at her husband and snarled, in a deep voice, ‘F—k you, bitch! Get that
thing away from me!’ Then her head dropped down.” When Emma’s head rose again, Dreher
continues, she gave him a pitiful look. “I’m sorry”, she said. “That wasn’t me.”
As Nathan walked Dreher back to his hotel, Dreher asked how the experience of
Emma’s possession had changed him. “Now when I walk down the street”, replied
Nathan, “I know that there is a spiritual battle going on all around me … It’s everywhere.”
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