Charles Frith

Soup Nazis of the World - Nº1 - Iranian Ashe Reshte

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Where I live there's been a flourishing of ethnic supermarkets opening and I'm always looking for an excuse to go in and explore. I've been looking for chicken hearts at all the Western supermarkets as I adored them grilled over charcoal when I was living in Klong Toey, Bangkok but they're not stocked. I finally stumbled across them at the new Natura supermarket which stocks Turkey, Greece, Iran, Italy, Balkans, Middle East and Polish foods and a few others. They, like similar new entries have a full fish counter and butcher unlike the plastic cling film wrap of our supermarkets, but the real challenge is where do I start in order to try things out?

There's just too much choice, so I've decided to hone in and focus on one single product which is canned ethnic soups and stews. I'm also checking what's available in Western supermarkets so any exceptional products of note will be included in this series.

The first banger is this Iranian Ashe Reshte by Anjoman which is a Persian Greens, Herbs, Beans and Noodles soup. There's no point trying to describe how it tastes as my lovely Maltese Mother raised us children on ethnic foods so I'm into different tastes and people aren't the same, but you can judge by the ingredients if it's your thing too. Not every Iranian soup I've tried is to my taste, but this is lovely, complex yet subtle new entry on my shopping list and each time I stock up I notice something else I want to try which feels like a more organic way of discovering new things.

Lastly a key driver of this new Soup Nazi of the world endeavour is that Western Brands, particularly the most promoted are invariably tarnished with toxic ingredients that are carcinogenic as any fool knows we're being poisoned if you follow the mainstream lifestyle much like Western allopathic medicine is designed to kill, not heal us.

Rudyard Kipling - The Beginnings

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:58:00 +0000

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others - George Orwell, Animal Farm.

DRIP Orchid

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 06:00:00 +0000

BBC R3 - Hannah Peel - Night Tracks - 10PM

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:24:24 +0000

Holy Viennese Pastries. I've only just discovered Hannah Peel's Night Tracks on BBC Radio 3. I post a lot of new Dance Music here from religious listening to a roster of BBC R1D DJs but that's because I love dancing or rather some of the best times of my life were years on end dancing in nightclubs. However, I've been restless of late. I like to listen to BBC Radio 3 when I'm reading but by some trick of the universe, I've only just discovered Hannah's broadcast at 10pm which is often a blend of classical and electronica of which she's also an artist herself.

Radio 3 is a both a thousand years old and bang up to date. I'm going to amend my BBC Women in Electronica post right now that was triggered by Olive's - You're not alone track, which is fitting, and I now have all the archive sessions (going back to September 2019) to listen to which will probably keep me going till the end of my days catching up.

I do slag off the BBC, but that's their news division propaganda. There's absolutely world class content produced by the still venerable institution if a person is selective and it's completely free, although I'd have no issue at all bunging them a donation now and again by Paypal to keep the good ship going.

Search Night Tracks on BBC Sounds.

Gabriele D&'Annuzio - Poet oGabriele D&'Annuzio - Poet of Slaughter - Lucy Hughes-Hallet

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 06:00:00 +0000

Gabriele D&'Annuzio - Poet oGabriele D& - Lucy Hughes-Hallet

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:30:00 +0000

The Pike: Gabriele d'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War — A Book That Sticks With You

Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s The Pike was a terrific read. It really immersed me into the complexity of post-WWI peace in a way that will fuel me for many years. The book’s award-winning, cut-up non-linear style worked for the subject. It mirrors d’Annunzio’s own flamboyant, self-mythologizing autobiography and throws you into his world of contradictions without a dull linear plod. Only a minor quibble later.

Italy After Unification: Hunger for Glory

What staggered me most was the lust for conflict among Italy’s elites and officer class in the lead-up to, during and after the Great War. Italy had only recently unified into a kingdom in the 1860s–70s. The drive to restore national honour through acquisition of Italian-speaking enclaves and “lost” historic lands ran deep. Only about 8,000 out of 5.5 million mobilized soldiers actually volunteered. The rest were conscripts. Yet the upper echelons — poets, politicians, aristocrats, and ambitious officers — were often rabid for intervention on the Allied side in 1915, chasing irredentist dreams against Austria-Hungary. The ordinary soldier paid the price: roughly 650,000 Italian dead and 950,000 wounded. Those numbers hit harder after reading this.

Step forward the extraordinary character who embodied and amplified that elite fever: Gabriele d’Annunzio.

The Making of Il Vate

Born in 1863 to a fairly affluent but money-losing family on the Adriatic coast, d’Annunzio was a precocious child. Pampered yet driven, he devoured everything from the Classics to Nietzsche. He wrote poetry young, showed a knack for self-promotion that bordered on genius, and possessed a voice that must have been hypnotic in person. Physically, he was a diminutive figure who lost his hair early and was not conventionally handsome. None of that slowed him down.

He became probably the biggest shagger of upper-class (and often masculine-looking) women to street prostitutes, that I’ve ever come across in biography. The combination of high art, fastidious clothing sense, smooth words, and relentless approaches did the work. There are darker episodes too, including the rape of a peasant girl. His overriding quest was for historic glory fuelled by art, with complete disregard for money. Guys like this are usually venal and superficial. D’Annunzio wasn’t — or at least not only that.

He showed inarguable qualities: real courage in the early adoption of air battle flying and brutal Alpine ground conflict. He was extraordinarily hard-working. And he was a fabulous “noticer” of everything. Hughes-Hallett captures his eye for detail beautifully — three types of grey (pigeon, sky, and sea), the religious cross-like shadow that early biplanes cast on the ground. These observations are staccato across his writing, words and life.

Lifestyle, Creativity, and Debt

Money was only a means to an end. He was always in debt yet purchased exotic things wildly and spent what he had on absurd luxuries, like up to three or four shirt changes in a day, repeated many times over. A super creative guy — from “sub aqua glass organ” lines to the memorable pet names he gave those who stayed in favour throughout his life. He made notes of everything and anything. That archival instinct must have helped Hughes-Hallett enormously, though it also contributes to the book’s density.

The Book’s Style and a Small Niggle

This is where my only quibble comes in. The book is excellently researched and was uniformly praised for its cut-up non-linear style, probably inspired by Gabriele’s own autobiography. But there was just too much information in places. Tiny repetitions creep in. We’re told d’Annunzio was teetotal, then in one scene he’s drunk on champagne, and later reminded he was abstemious except for champagne (and cocaine, laudanum, etc.). Which is it? The same with the line about one lover, Marchesa Luisa Casati, being “the only woman who could astonish me.” Or the bloated bellies and hooves in the air of dead horses on the battlefield. Or that due to his baldness he no longer needed a brush. Or that his final home, the Vittoriale, was purchased by the state during his life, relieving him of the bills. Or the propaganda leaflets dropped with tiny sandbags from planes. These recursive echoes feel like the author occasionally forgot what she had written earlier. It’s a tiny niggle in an otherwise outstanding work.

Finest Hour: The Fiume Adventure

D’Annunzio’s finest hour — or at least the most theatrical — came after the war. He took over the enclave of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia) against the Italian government’s wishes. He hypnotized the half-Italian population into demanding violent autonomy. He pledged never to leave, never to give up, and never to yield. For over a year he delivered speeches, staged rituals, and lived the dream of poetic politics. Then the first Italian Navy missile hit his property, and he was out of there. Gone never to return.

The Bullshitter and the Cost

In the end, d’Annunzio was a bullshitter for me. A spectacularly, gifted, courageous one, but still. His brand of aestheticized militarism and irredentist glory came at the expense of those 650,000 killed and 950,000 wounded. The ordinary stories are the ones I feel for much more, even if they are less interesting to write about than the extraordinary. Gabriele d’Annunzio is very much that — larger than life, contradictory, impossible to look away from.

The Pike does justice to the complexity. It doesn’t flatten him into hero or villain. It shows the man who preached war, noticed the shadows of biplanes like crosses, burned through firewood like a Zulu in the Arctic circle, and helped shape the volatile atmosphere from which fascism would later draw aesthetic fuel. If you have any interest in WWI’s aftermath, Italian history, or the strange intersection of art and politics, this one is worth your time. It’s the kind of book that stays with you.

One of his lines is my new motto - No day of drudgery was ever as fertile for me as a week of laziness.

Kinda New (Tiefschwarz Dub) Spektrum

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 06:00:00 +0000

Let Me Tell You - Vintage Culture & Greggio

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:06:00 +0000

Fantasy Ivory

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 20:22:00 +0000

The Jew of Linz - Kimberley Cornish

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:31:00 +0000

I first heard about this book in 1999 through Mark Piper who informed me that Wittgenstein went to the same school as Hitler for a period of time. Wittgenstein was always my favourite philosopher though not so much for his work but for his life which I came to learn about through the book Wittgenstein - The Duty of Genius that my drug dealer and friend of mine who studied Philosophy under Ray Monk (the author of the book) at Southampton University loaned me.

The Jew of Linz digs deep into the astonishing coincidence that Wittgenstein attended the same school as Hitler. The first question it answered for me was how could the son of one of Europe's most fabulously wealthy families attend a school of the middle-class Hitler? The answer is Ludwig's father sent him there and it's obvious to me that it was to toughen him up as he stammered and was homosexual, as were two other of his four brothers, three of whom committed suicide.

Kimberley Cornish's main assertion is that Wittgenstein and Hitler had an interaction that triggered Hitler's quote unquote antisemitism (most Palestinians are Semites, most Jews aren't) despite Hitler also having Jewish blood. Hitler made many references to this unidentified Jewish interaction throughout his life, and I think Cornish proves it. Furthermore, Cornish goes on to make an astonishingly robust claim that Wittgenstein was a Soviet spy recruiter involved with the Cambridge Five.

The book starts off great but then wanders off into a long investigation into the crossover between Hitlerian/Nazi metaphysics and Wittgenstein's Theory of Mind. This is the kind of meaningless philosophy that the controllers have misdirected great minds into and which can be most informed with the simple act of inhaling DMT and which holocaust huffers like Kimberley will never do, demonstrating they're pseudo philosophers who can't explain the dental clinics, maternity wards, theatre and orchestra groups at Auschwitz as well as ignorant of the unity consciousness experience provided by entheogens.

I'm fairly sure there's quite a bit more to the Hitler/Wittgenstein story we're unaware of, but Kimberley has made great strides into the topic. I'm reselling the book on ebay if you want it for a few pounds.

Burn Tonight Carl Cox, Alan Fitzpatrick & Alex Culross

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Sun, 31 May 2026 16:17:00 +0000

Buffidisco (Krystal Klear Remix) Storken & Farfetched

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Sat, 30 May 2026 23:52:00 +0000

Jepe - Vocoder

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Wed, 27 May 2026 20:40:00 +0000

Tell The DJ Bákayan

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Sat, 23 May 2026 03:03:00 +0000

Rock It Like Broken Hill

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Sat, 23 May 2026 00:51:00 +0000

Say What You Mean Samm

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Sat, 23 May 2026 00:24:00 +0000

VANCO - REPEAT (FEAT. DEELA)

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Mon, 18 May 2026 06:27:00 +0000

Âme - Love Is The Dance feat. RY X

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Mon, 18 May 2026 06:00:00 +0000

Praise You (Purple Disco Machine Remix) Fatboy Slim

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Sun, 17 May 2026 08:34:00 +0000

Charlie Hedges dropped this on R1 Dance earlier. It's the Purple Disco Machine remix of Fatboy Slim’s ‘Praise You’, which is a 1999 classic reborn I guess 7 or 8 years ago. Double whammy. It's a low feral fuse that whips up a storm very nicely. I’ve lived a thousand brilliant nights with music, yet this one struck the spark again. Raw, immediate, and unmistakably alive.

Wilkinson - Ultraviolet feat. Katy Alex

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Sun, 17 May 2026 03:21:00 +0000

The worldwide Freemasonic network serves at the foot of ziojudaism.

Dan is a diamond not cut in israel.

From Tha Back Jordan Brando

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Fri, 15 May 2026 04:38:00 +0000

Dance With Me Nausica

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Mon, 11 May 2026 23:07:00 +0000

Prime - Easttown - FACTORY93

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Fri, 08 May 2026 23:52:00 +0000

Steady (feat. Capo Lee) SKALAH

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Fri, 08 May 2026 20:31:00 +0000

whenyoufindout. dg., Coben & SMOORIBA

cefrith@hotmail.com (Charles Edward Frith) — Fri, 08 May 2026 19:59:00 +0000