You know there's something wrong in the world

When an appeal for humanity is labeled political by the BBC (emphasis mine):

London - Britain's public service broadcaster, the BBC, is facing unprecedented criticism for refusing to broadcast an emergency fundraising appeal for people living in the Gaza Strip.

Long used to winning plaudits for the quality of its journalism, staff at the 97-year-old institution have become accustomed to allegations of left- or right-wing bias.

However, even many BBC journalists are furious at a decision by senior management not to air the appeal this week by an umbrella grouping of 13 charity organizations including the British Red Cross and Save the Children.

The appeal to help Palestinians facing homelessness and hunger following the Israeli onslaught in the Gaza Strip was broadcast Monday night by three rival broadcasters – Channel 4, ITV, and Five – although not by Sky News, which is owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

Mark Thompson, BBC's director general, said he could not permit the BBC to endanger its impartiality by appearing to endorse an appeal for the victims on one side of a complicated conflict.

"For us to broadcast such a thing would in my view be out of keeping with our strict duty to be impartial," he told one of the BBC's radio channels.

The two-minute appeal, which went out on Monday night, began with images of child victims from Gaza.

A narrator said: "The children of Gaza are suffering. Many are struggling to survive, homeless, and in need of food and water. ... Today, this is not about the rights and wrongs of the conflict. These people simply need your help."

Latest Palestinian death toll: around 1,400. Israeli death toll: 13.

The State of my heart

Tomorrow I'm going to see a live reunion tribute show to The State, a sketch comedy program that had quite an impact on my teenage drama nerd days of the mid-90s, and I'm incredibly excited.

I would describe the show as a hybrid of Monty Python and Kids in the Hall--but it was so very original, so brilliant in essence. We used to reenact key sketches and impersonate the characters all the time in my high school drama class. (To this day I get one of those "I'm not so sure I trust or could ever really like you on a personal level" kind of feelings about people whenever they badmouth the show, or the best comedy movie in the world, Wet Hot American Summer).

It was the tail end of the "grunge era," and MTV was still relevant. Liquid Television and all things "indie" were embraced without seeming exploitative. It was fertile soil for an absurd, experimental sketch comedy show like The State to come around. It would never be given a chance in today's jaded, reality-television obsessed youth market, but I do find comfort in the fact that cast members have cropped up in some of the best, most original tv and movie projects available over the past decade: Wet Hot American Summer, Stella, Reno 911, The Ten, et al--all of these were written, directed and/or starring members of The State.

And although, in my own little teenage world, the show went leaps and bounds beyond all predictable, mainstream shows like SNL, the humor never seemed to break into the mainstream. After two years, The State went off the air. I just assumed the humor didn't resonate with the humorless masses and it was canceled. But apparently, as I later discovered, they actually sold out to CBS, where they created a Halloween special featuring Sonic Youth, but then weren't opted for further episodes.



While it's upsetting that the original 11 cast members couldn't keep on performing as a unit, the ways in which they manage to crop up in various projects is always a surprise and pure joy for me. And as a testament to their timeless originality and cult appeal, they are working on a State movie for Comedy Central. There is also a DVD of all the of the episodes that may be released one day, however, MTV shelved it for unknown reasons and won't release it--yet.

Here's one of my favorite sketches, one that me and some friends recreated in drama class (ah the good old days, when everyone thought they were going to grow up to be a movie star):

Michael Ian Black and Thomas Lennon performing "Monkey Torture"

Rolling Stone recently interviewed a few of the cast members about their upcoming reunion in my fair city:

What does the Great Recession of '09 mean to comedy and the State?

Black: It's good for comedy. I mean, people are miserable, they want to laugh.

Lennon: We actually have a really wonderful sketch in the SF show called "The Great Depression" and it's really sort of a charming, Hallmark Hall of Fame scene about a family that's trying to decide whether or not they should eat their baby.

Advertisement

Nine members of the cast did a dress rehearsal of this new show in March 2008. How has time affected your writing and delivery?

Marino: I'm happy to say that our material has not matured at all. It's the same stupid fun stuff I hope.

Black: It really comes down to "are we making each other laugh?" and if we are doing that, then it goes on the show. To me it's just a really personal voice, in the way that retarded monkeys are personal.

Well, retarded monkeys are hilarious.

Black: I agree. I've made my career on that very premise.

I just thought of a good snap

I have decided to add a new section to this blog, one that I shall entitle "I just thought of a good snap." As in, a really good comeback to some issue or person that really chaps my hide. Today, on the 36th anniversary of the Roe v Wade decision, I would like to address the anti-women's rights/anti-civil liberties/anti-reproductive freedom demonstrators that are flooding D.C.:

Hey idiots, count your blessings that the media for some strange reason chooses to give you the microphone and positions you at the top of the news priority list for the entire day even though your crazed evangelistic, backwards folkloric ways only represent a minority of the many belief systems practiced in this country. Your opinions, however impassioned and however entitled you are to them under this great nation, are also things you should count your blessings for--these basic human rights of expression. Because if it were up to you and your oppressively barbaric ways, you would strip very similar human rights from women who are not anti-life, but rather, are placed in very dire situations that involve their bodies and hearts and minds completely. And you want hand over the very basic right to be in control of one's body to the government? Because you have a definition of what it is to be human? Well I've got my own definition of what it means to be human: respecting the rights of people to control their own bodies. Here, I've got another: respecting the idea that every person that is born into this world should be given the opportunity to an equal shot at a basic quality of life. That every person born should not be birthed from a woman who was raped, a woman who was molested or a victim of incest, a woman in a third world country that cannot provide for a child and will end up dying or enduring the pain of watching a child starve because they cannot provide for them, a woman with a severe mental or physical condition that is not capable of raising a child, a young and/or underage woman who's chance at going to college or providing for herself will be shot to hell...YOU anti-choice bible thumpers demean and cheapen human life. YOU ARE NOT PRO-LIFE.
P.S.: if men could get pregnant, abortion would be legal. AND YOU KNOW IT!

Oh snap.

Words and action

Obama signing off on orders to close all secret prisons and detention camps, and to close Guantanamo within the year. (NYT)

This image made me teary-eyed. President Obama's speech the other day did not, however. Words can be beautiful things, but words put to action are something magical.

JFK's Speechwriter on Obama today

Ted Sorensen, of "Ask not what your country can do for you" fame, gives his interpretation of today's inauguration and speech to the Guardian:

My experience is that great speeches are frequently in the eye of the beholder: Obama is so respected, even beloved, around the world that I think the speech will be hailed.

I have been speaking for two years of the parallels between Obama and Kennedy: two young senators, Kennedy even younger than Obama, two men committed to peace. Two men with progressive domestic policies and a multilateral foreign policy. Two men who reached out to young people and brought them into the campaign, and now, in Obama's case, bringing them into government.

President Kennedy, I am sure, would be beside himself with joy at today's events, having turned our country around in its attitudes towards our black citizens, with his speech to the nation, and then his legislation to Congress in June 1963.

The very idea of a black man being elected president, when in those days blacks could not be elected to almost any office, including the House of Representatives; he would think it was a wonderful day for America

Happy MLKJr Day of Service Inauguration Eve!

So I decided to do some gardening at the Island of Alcatraz for this fine volunteer day (i.e. national "Day of Service"). That is, since my employers are not racists and understand the importance of taking an entire day off in reverence of the great King. Anyways. Working through the Golden Gate Parks service, I joined about 60 volunteers in vegetation management duties. After four groups were sent to various spots (I would later kick myself for failing to join the Agave Trail group, who got to work on one of the most recently renovated areas to the south, facing the city) I was assigned to weeding ye 'ole rose garden on the shady east side of the compound. Shady as in there was a lack of sun, not as in, there were rastafarians trying to sell us ecstacy. While the flower bed I worked on did not contain roses, there were a few areas with rose bushes where, for seasonal reasons, the flowers had yet to bloom. My team leader said that no one has seen the roses bloom since the Penitentiary closed in '63. The island, or "Rock," became a park in 1972, yet no one has seen the roses bloom since there hadn't been enough money to revitalize the gardens until more recently. By the summer, park service men and women will finally see them bloom--which, according to my team leader, is going to be a real treat since they will probably be of some outdated 50s variety that you just don't see nowadays.

I leaned over the bed, reflective in my silence for a while as I ripped clovers and dandelion leaves from rich dark soil. I later began picking my team leader's brain. I found out that she lived in London around the same time as me, working at Kew Gardens. I also found out that she has found molded spoons in other gardens on Alcatraz, and that a maintenance man found a shiv in a drain pipe once. A few minutes later, someone found a rusty old oyster fork buried in the dirt. I frantically began ripping the little green buddies harder and digging deeper. I really wanted to find a shiv. 'By god if only I could find a shiv' I thought. It's probably best that I didn't find one, because I would probably keep it for myself and forget about it and find it hidden under a pile of post-it notes and collages and half-finished greetings cards in a desk drawer a few years later, forget what it was, and toss it out. I am like the anti-Indiana Jones. "This doesn't belong in a musem! It belongs with me!"

After about three hours of gardening, it was time to call it quits and we were all satisfied, having weeded and ripped it up so nicely that a massive flower bed looked barren and brown, dirt brown. It looked really ugly, but somehow made us all feel real good.

Unbeknownst to me and my fellow volunteers, we would soon be greeted by a park ranger that wanted to take us all on a special guided tour. He took us into the Pen, where we were able to walk near the cell blocks on the second floor, in caged corridors and to the prison's mini-chapel, guard's recreation room, and later up to the rooftop. It was a great tour, filled with anecdotes about the Indian occupation from '69-'71. I took a picture of some graffiti in the chapel and asked what it was; he told me it was probably from the wild parties that were held during the occupation. The IWW, the Hells' Angels, Jane Fonda--it could have been anybody. It was in blood red and I spotted a soviet symbol and a swastika. Jane Fonda probably did it.

Towards the end of our tour, our friendly park ranger guide said it was his great pleasure to give us this tour, and that he was very excited today. And the way he said it was so funny--he used almost the same exact words that our volunteer organizer from the beginning of the morning had used: "I'm not getting political...but...this is an exciting time for us. This is and exciting time for America."

Bush: a "good person"

According to a Fox News poll:

A 72 percent majority of Americans believe Bush is a good person, including an overwhelming majority of Republicans (93 percent) as well as majorities of Democrats (56 percent) and independents (74 percent).

--and by "a good person" the pollsters must mean "will smile and pat you on the back (massage your neck if a female European leader) and offer you a beer while he strips away your civil liberties, deregulates markets until--in the blink of an eye--you have lost your job and are homeless, keeps your son/daughter/husband/wife/mother or father of your child/neighbor/friend in the desert until they come back (if they do not die) with PTSD or missing limbs and no programs to support their recovery, rapes and pillages the environment to pad the pockets of said buddies yet again, denies the validity of modern science, common sense and just plain rational thought.

Funny how the mouthpiece of the administration has become just as lame as the lame duck itself.

I live in California. Hallelujah.

CNN(yesterday):

In Minneapolis, Minnesota, it felt like 40 below because of the wind chill, CNN meteorologist Rob Marciano said. It was 48 below in Fargo, North Dakota, where unprotected fingers could suffer frostbite in 60 seconds.

This morning, my mom checks in from northern Indiana, takes a picture of her street sign:



Isn't it ironic, donchaknow?

Part three of a youtube series on Minnesota weather hell:

An idea to save our economy

Using the new Los Angeles model of prosecuting gang members--which involves confiscating the assets of gangs and investing that money back into the community--I think the new administration should prosecute all the private military corporations like Halliburton, Bechtel, Blackwater, DynCorp et al on war crimes, bankrupt the hell out of them, and give all our local municipalities community economic packages from the billion dollar settlements. It's our taxes being wasted on this Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction scam, and I think we have every right to reclaim them.

From the CSM:

Los Angeles - The gang capital of the world is taking a new tack against them: cash damages.

The city of Los Angeles, plagued by 23,000 violent gang crimes since 2004, including 784 murders and 12,000 felony assaults, announced Tuesday that it had won its first civil judgment, for $5 million, against a criminal gang that had dominated the heroin trade downtown for decades.

The verdict could bode well for another first-of-its-kind lawsuit the city filed last month that goes after all assets of gang leaders, not just those associated with their criminal activity. Both suits seek to plow the money back into improving the neighborhoods affected by the gangs through a fund.

"By giving prosecutors more tools to fight gang activity at the local level, we are protecting our communities at the same time [that] we're able to strengthen our statewide anti-gang efforts," said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in a statement released with the announcement of the $5 million verdict against the 5th and Hill gang in L.A.

From CNN:

Five former Blackwater Worldwide security guards pleaded not guilty Tuesday to voluntary manslaughter charges and other crimes stemming from a shooting incident in Baghdad that left 17 Iraqis dead.

Each of the former guards has been charged with 14 counts of manslaughter, 20 counts of attempted manslaughter and one count of using a firearm in the commission of a violent crime.

...The Baghdad incident, which occurred September 16, 2007, exacerbated the feelings of many Iraqis that private American security contractors have operated since 2003 with little regard for Iraqi law or life. It also created an extremely delicate political situation for the Bush administration and the Iraqi government.

...The company of Blackwater Worldwide does not face any charges.

Exercise:

1. Read the article about the LA model and then read about Blackwater. Notice the similarities in gang members and military corporations--they're both thugs, terrorizing, killing, and injuring innocent bystanders. Replace all phrases such as "criminal gang" "gang leaders" "gang members" etc with "private contractors" "military corporations" "war profiteers" etc etc.

2. Read this Amnesty International report.

3. Get real mad.

For those about to rock, I salute you

From CSM:

(JAPAN)The latest sensation on the baseball diamond here is a five-foot-tall, 114-pound, dimpled high school girl who throws a nasty knuckle ball.

Eri Yoshida, who left a line of male batters hitless in tryouts in November, recently signed on to become the first woman to play in professional baseball in Japan. Her drafting into pro ball has catapulted her from little-known high school jock to media darling, with camera crews following her daily rounds from calligraphy class to the dugout. Clips of her quirky side-armed pitch seem to be stock footage on nightly sports and news programs.

Yoshida’s spot on the bench of the new team, the Kobe 9 Cruise in the Kansai Independent League, which launches its inaugural season in April, has many women here hoping that she is more pioneer than token.

“She is a symbol of the changing status of women in Japan,” says Machiko Osawa, an economist at Japan Women’s University and an expert on women in the workplace. “She’s been accepted in sports, a very conservative world.”

Indeed, the United Nations’ Development Fund consistently ranks Japan as the most unequal of the world’s richest countries when it comes to gender equality. Women are not only barred from participating in Japan’s national sport, sumo wrestling, they can’t even step foot into the sumo ring, which is considered sacred and, therefore, off limits. Japan’s other national pastime, Kabuki theater, also remains an exclusively male domain.

Barack in the day



From Time photos, "Obama: The College Years"

Greetings from the O.C., China

45 min outside of Beijing, right next to Vancouver Forest

...when I ask a resident, Tong Xiaobo, about the appeal of the development, he explains that the American lifestyle represents health and freedom. What about it, exactly, is healthy, I ask. In America, after all, we associate suburban sprawl with the sedentary lifestyle that has led to our national obesity epidemic. The healthy aspect of the design that stood out, Tong explains, was having a bathroom next to the bedroom. Traditional Chinese homes have only one bathroom, shared by all the residents. Orange County’s homes boast lavish bathrooms adjoining the master bedroom complete with his-and-hers sinks and a Jacuzzi. Tong extolled the additional bathroom as “an innovation in construction and design [that] represents modern health.” He then lit up a cigarette. Having explained what he meant by “health,” I pressed him to explain what he meant by “freedom.” He simply ignored the question.

--from "Welcome to the O.C." (Good magazine)

Frank Rich's Bush Farewell

Rich is a poetical columnist/propaganda fighter unleashing hyperlinks that burst like cannons through the hot air of the cyber ether. I took the time to reconnect all of the links to the right places at the last sentence of this excerpt. This week's column is a real gem; worth reading the whole thing to see the meticulous placement of links in the piece's entirety.

From "A President Forgotten but Not Gone":

The joke was on us. Iraq burned, New Orleans flooded, and Bush remained oblivious to each and every pratfall on his watch. Americans essentially stopped listening to him after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but he still doesn’t grasp the finality of their defection. Lately he’s promised not to steal the spotlight from Barack Obama once he’s in retirement — as if he could do so by any act short of running naked through downtown Dallas. The latest CNN poll finds that only one-third of his fellow citizens want him to play a post-presidency role in public life.

Bush is equally blind to the collapse of his propaganda machinery. Almost poignantly, he keeps trying to hawk his goods in these final days, like a salesman who hasn’t been told by the home office that his product has been discontinued. Though no one is listening, he has given more exit interviews than either Clinton or Reagan did. Along with old cronies like Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, he has also embarked on a Bush “legacy project,” as Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard described it on CNN.

To this end, Rove has repeated a stunt he first fed to the press two years ago: he is once again claiming that he and Bush have an annual book-reading contest, with Bush chalking up as many as 95 books a year, by authors as hifalutin as Camus. This hagiographic portrait of Bush the Egghead might be easier to buy were the former national security official Richard Clarke not quoted in the new Vanity Fair saying that both Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had instructed him early on to keep his memos short because the president is “not a big reader.”

Another, far more elaborate example of legacy spin can be downloaded from the White House Web site: a booklet recounting “highlights” of the administration’s “accomplishments and results.” With big type, much white space, children’s-book-like trivia boxes titled “Did You Know?” and lots of color photos of the Bushes posing with blacks and troops, its 52 pages require a reading level closer to “My Pet Goat” than “The Stranger.”

This document is the literary correlative to “Mission Accomplished.” Bush kept America safe (provided his presidency began Sept. 12, 2001). He gave America record economic growth (provided his presidency ended December 2007). He vanquished all the leading Qaeda terrorists (if you don’t count the leaders bin Laden and al-Zawahri). He gave Afghanistan a thriving “market economy” (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade) and a “democratically elected president” (presiding over one of the world’s most corrupt governments). He supported elections in Pakistan (after propping up Pervez Musharraf past the point of no return). He “led the world in providing food aid and natural disaster relief” (if you leave out Brownie and Katrina).

If this is the best case that even Bush and his handlers can make for his achievements, you wonder why they bothered. Desperate for padding, they devote four risible pages to portraying our dear leader as a zealous environmentalist.

But the brazenness of Bush’s alternative-reality history is itself revelatory. The audacity of its hype helps clear up the mystery of how someone so slight could inflict so much damage. So do his many print and television exit interviews.

The town fool sings to me.

Tropical Christmas, take two

Tomorrow I depart for Costa Rica for eight days. This will be the second tropical Christmas/hunt for dad's new retirement community I will have endured. He assures me this year won't be like last year's "journey into the heart of Dominica's darkness" (as I refer to it).

Dominica, for those not familiar, is one of the most rural of the Caribbean islands. The rain forests comprise more land mass per acre than any of the other islands, and it is the only island with a Caribe indian reservation. In my father's words, it is "not safe for whitey," i.e., there are no major hotel resorts and it is not a popular stop for cruise ships. From a distance this seemed like the idyllic retreat for him. But what we discovered, upon arrival, was a very rugged terrain and a lot of discomfort. Every beach took at least 45 minutes to hike to, and the roads were so narrow, the cliffs so very treacherous, that we constantly struggled just to get around.

After a few days, the daily dose of mortal fear was getting me down. One time, while in the car, my father remarked while speeding through a hairpin turn and nearly colliding with an oncoming van whose windows were brimming with villagers: "Wow honey, with all them hail mary's, I'd think you were turning Catholic on me!" I'll never forget how he laughed as I contemplated the cliffs and ravines to my right, whose only barrier was a bamboo fence and bright yellow caution tape.

The following is a list of random notes from our trip. The only notes I took:

- driving down Dominican roads is as thrilling as a jungle safari; instead of the threat of wild animals, you have the fear of head-on collisions and driving into ditches or off of cliffs.

- I think I heard a woman assaulted and/or killed last night. The Belgiums denied hearing anything the next morning, but I could tell they were lying.

- the buzzing and chirping of insects, the rooster calls, and the mangy dog barks drown out the human presence. But when a man yells he can be heard a mile away.

- the fan makes a galluping sound. Where is it leading me?

- passionfruit is much more passionate here.

- the villagers are like helpful zombies that don't want to eat at you, all they want to do is stare.

- i was serenaded by the "town fool" (local boozer) tonight, that is, until I backed away from the balcony and he started yelling out "bitch" to me.

- "travel" comes from the word "travail."

- the percussion of soft rain is overwhelming yet of some comfort.

- parrots show yourselves!

- I will find a good man one day.


Happy Holidays!

A Walmart shirt was taken off shelves after it was discovered to be a Nazi emblem

Further evidence that Walmart is evil and/or doesn't mind supporting neo-Nazis

Via The Guardian:

A three-year-old boy called Adolf Hitler Campbell has been refused a birthday cake with his name on it by a New Jersey supermarket.

Heath Campbell, 35, and his wife, Deborah, 25, say they are upset at the decision made by their local ShopRite not to write "Happy Birthday Adolf Hitler" across the cake, and that people needed to move forward.

Campbell said he named his son after Adolf Hitler because "no one else in the world would have that name".

"They need to accept a name. A name's a name. The kid isn't going to grow up and do what [Hitler] did," he said.

Not to be defeated, the family ended up getting their cake decorated at a Walmart in Pennsylvania.

The problem is likely to be one they face again – their younger children are JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell, who is nearly two, and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell, named after the SS head Heinrich Himmler. Honszlynn turns one in April.

Also, let's not forget the suggestive children's underwear line they had to remove (thanks to Feministing) this time last year, or about the inhumane way they treated former employee Deborah Shank last March.

A Story of Hard Times

Gather 'round, chilin. With all this "recession this" and "recession that," it's fun to hear stories about what it was like to be a kid during the Great Depression, as told by papa Bukowski (from Ham on Rye):





Mrs. Fretag was our English teacher. The first day in class she asked us each our names.

"I want to get to know all of you," she said. She smiled.

"Now, each of you has a father, I'm sure. I think it would be interesting if we found out what each of your fathers does for a living.

We'll start with seat number one and we will go around the class. Now, Marie, what does your father do for a living?"

"He's a gardener."

"Ah, that's nice! Seat number two . . . Andrew, what does your father
do?"

It was terrible. All the fathers in my immediate neighborhood had lost their jobs. My father had lost his job. Gene's father sat on his front porch all day. All the fathers were without jobs except Chuck's who worked in a meat plant. He drove a red car with the meat company's name on the side.

"My father is a fireman," said seat number two.

"Ah, that's interesting," said Mrs. Fretag. "Seat number three."

"My father is a lawyer."

"Seat number four."

"My father is a . . . policeman . . ."

What was I going to say? Maybe only the fathers in my neighborhood were without jobs. I'd heard of the stock market crash. It meant something bad. Maybe the stock market had only crashed in our neighborhood.

"Seat number eighteen."

"My father is a movie actor . . ."

"Nineteen..."

"My father is a concert violinist . . ."

"Twenty . . ."

"My father works in the circus . . ."

"Twenty-one.. ."

"My father is a bus driver . . ."

"Twenty-two..."

"My father sings in the opera . . ."

"Twenty-three.. ."

Twenty-three. That was me.

"My father is a dentist," I said.

Mrs. Fretag went right on through the class until she reached number
thirty-three.

"My father doesn't have a job," said number thirty-three.

Shit, I thought, I wish I had thought of that.

Van Sant Does Burroughs: "Do Easy"

Ever since seeing Milk, I am rediscovering the brilliance of Gus Van Sant. In his new film, I definitely picked up on some echoes of My Own Private Idaho and Elephant through the intimate, experimental camera shots and scenes where the silence in a room takes on a character in and of itself.

This Van Sant short film is not only really funny, but perfectly minimal. Enjoy:

A vampire killing kit from the 1800s sold for nearly $15,000 last month

Vampires are so hot right now

Me and the gentleman friend have been obsessed with vampires lately, having watched all the episodes of HBO's "True Blood;" now going through withdraws since the first series ended. I am so into vampires right now that I even forced him to see "Twilight," a teensploitation flick starring some hot young actor from the Harry Potter series as a modern-day vampire that made all the girls in the theater yell and freak out.

Although, I'd say vampires have always been hot, what with all the vampire films produced since the beginning of the invention of the "movie." But it's interesting to see how this myth has been given the modern treatment lately. Instead of rehashing Victorian-era tales from Bram Stoker, or relying on historical fiction from Anne Rice, today we've got stories of this folkloric undead population trying to incorporate itself into a modern era where civil rights and traditional values aren't always so cut and dry.

Perhaps filmmakers and television producers are taking their cues from Bram Stoker himself. Stoker re-tooled the folklore masterfully, using it to express the sexual repression of the Victorian Era with such ferocity that the love story of Vlad and Mina still resonates with audiences. Perhaps that's why Mormon Stephanie Meyer, whose books provided the basis for "Twilight," was so effective in utilizing vampire tales--she projected the sexual frustration and oppressive abstinence practices associated with the Mormon community into the seductive stories of the undead.

Whatever it is, it's an amazing concept to take an old myth and re-appropriate it's symbology in order to expose the societal fears of the modern world. It seems obvious in the case of "True Blood" whose opening montage includes a church sign that reads "God Hates Fangs," and features characters saying such phrases as "coming out of the coffin," that vampires embody minority groups and the disenfranchised. Although very subtle, hints at what creator Alan Ball (American Beauty, "Six Feet Under") means to do with this series are incredibly refreshing and exciting to watch. Ball's fictitious, alternate world of vampires has not lost its presence on the internet, either. The blog BloodCopy is a hilarious resource of video "reportage" featuring characters from the show. Below is a "commercial" for TruBlood--the fictitious beverage of synthetic blood for vampires:



But what's brilliant about the vampire myth is that it can be interpreted as an expression of many things in our current political climate. The other day, I came across this column on the Huffington Post:

"...what is with the vampire craze right now? The vogue for them has ebbed and flowed over the last century, but at the moment the ventricles seem all the way open. A friend of mine suggested that this fad may represent our culture's unconscious efforts to depict in metaphorical terms the financial greed that has sucked blood money from the body politic--especially the subprime mortgage fiasco that started it. 'Mortgage' is derived from the Latin word for 'death,' after all."

I'd like to think the "vampire craze" is currently being utilized to expose the base bigotry and oppressive "morals" of the Religious Right. The vampire (or gay, or black, or sexually promiscuous) can be seen as a fun, campy way to address an American culture still struggling to see beyond traditional "family values" that espouse hate and bigotry.

Scientologists, I've got my eye on you

Last week a 48 year old Oregon man decided to seek vengeance upon the Los Angeles Church of Scientology's Celebrity Center the only way an ex-member/ninja could: charging into the building while flailing samurai swords and thus creating his own "Battlefield Earth" of sorts. The highly angered man, also wielding "violent verbage" according to investigators, was quickly shot dead on the scene by security.

I really have been struck by the lack of reports regarding the details of the events within this "center of celebrities" of sorts. I just don't know whether or not the security officers were justified in fatally shooting this man. I do understand that seeing a man handling such swords in a "samurai-type way" (the investigator's words), would be cause for great concern and thus drastic self-defense measures. However...

I'm just going to say it you guys: I suspect foul play. If it comes down to measuring the sanity and sound judgement of the Church of Scientology vs. that of the man described below, I'm siding with the ninja dude (may he RIP). And I absolutely don't see anything wrong with that.

Florence man shot in L.A. a 'crazy freak of sorts'

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

FLORENCE, Ore. (AP) — A neighbor remembers Mario Majorski, the man fatally shot Sunday in Los Angeles after wielding samurai swords at a Scientology building, as a “gentle, somewhat crazy freak of sorts.”

Nevertheless, Majorski has had a number of run-ins with Oregon law enforcement and was reportedly acting oddly just weeks before he showed up in California.

Jim Cannon, who lives in a house just across the street from Majorski’s home here, met him this spring and helped him paint his fence. Despite Majorski’s shaved head and neck tattoos, Cannon said he wasn’t “a menacing sort of guy.”

If anything, Cannon said, “I found him very comical.”

Majorski, 48, moved among rock n’ roll circles in Eugene, Cannon said.

Though a Scientology spokesman said Majorski had threatened the church in a string of incidents dating to at least 2005, Cannon said he never heard Majorski, a former member of the church, say anything critical about it.

The two men talked about Scientology, Cannon said. He got the impression that Majorski was disappointed with Scientology.

His record with Oregon police, however, describes a different man.

Majorski was released from the Lane County Jail due to overcrowding two weeks ago, the same day he was arrested by Eugene police on charges of criminal trespass and harassing a police officer at the Executive House Motel, according to The Register-Guard.

Majorski also has previously been convicted of stalking a Lane County judge, the paper reported.

In another example of his troubles with the law, Majorski was arrested in late October after threatening a man offering roadside assistance, according to Florence police.

On the morning of Oct. 26, Majorski made a call to the American Automobile Association for roadside assistance saying he had run out of gas on the road where he lived.

When the AAA driver, Doug Bushwar, arrived, he reportedly found Majorski standing next to his truck with a number of “small kids toys lined up in a row on the street” behind him.

When Bushwar walked toward the truck, Majorski yelled at him to stay where he was.

Bushwar told police that he tried to get Majorski to calm down, but when the man “grabbed a hand-held ax from his vehicle and held it in a threatening manner,” Bushwar left and called the authorities.

A police officer showed up about 25 minutes later to find Majorski walking on the road. When the officer asked him to talk with him, Majorski reportedly threatened to shoot if he came any closer.

Then, Majorski walked into his house, yelling and cursing.

After a minute, Majorski “came to a window and told me to come talk to him there” the officer reported.

Majorski then told the officer he had hostages in the house. When another officer showed up to help, Majorski threatened to shoot the officers and told them he also had explosives, according to the police report.

Majorski later came back outside “yelling and screaming for us to leave.”

The two officers moved in slowly and handcuffed him.

Police found no hostages or explosives in the house.

About a week later, police arrested Majorski again after he disrupted a Mormon Church service in Florence.

Police say Majorski entered the church on Nov. 2, “cursing and moving around a lot.”

He was asked to leave but did not, said Sarah Huff, spokeswoman with the Florence police department.

Police arrested him outside the church on charges of disorderly conduct and criminal trespass.

From TNS Manifesto

Irony and The New Sincerity

A great culture war is afoot, upon yon indecipherable horizons. Joan Didion, the NYT and others are others are declaring, as many did in the aftermath of 9/11, that irony is dead. As Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter said in 2001: "There's going to be a seismic change. I think it's the end of the age of irony."

And just today, in the NYT's "Irony Is Dead. Again. Yeah, Right.":

"A Nexis search found that the incidence of the words 'irony,' 'ironic' and 'ironically' in major American newspapers during the two-week period beginning Nov. 6 slipped 19 percent from the same period last year."

Critics point to the new-found optimism, "New Sincerity" if you will (and I will) as a side effect of all this Obama hoopla (Obopla, if you will--and again, I will).

But I really can't blame them for such a fright. This blog poster was very taken aback by the sight of 200+ hipsters in the Mission on election night, standing on cars and wearing flag paraphernalia, shouting "U-S-A!" "U-S-A!" in a completely unironic manner. Can we have a president whose mug has been sported on tote bags, t-shirts and by the graffiti artists?

Yes we can. And I do believe we must. But I think that irony is not dead. Editor of The Onion, Joe Randazzo, told the NYT:

“After eight years of the Bush administration, where irony was almost a measure of desperation — maybe now that people have seen something happen they never thought possible, their sarcasm processors have kind of gone into shock." But Randazzo also notes, "We never know what will be the next dumb thing to satirize--that's the beauty of the thing."

A former Banana Slug/student media peer of mine from Santa Cruz, Jesse Thorn, wrote a manifesto in 2006 about "The New Sincerity" movement for his radio show, "The Sound of Young America." In it, he describes the progression of the acceptance of sincerity, which is described as "being more awesome" with the lifestyle choice of "maximum fun."

However, the key caveat being that TNS is not a countermovement to irony. That is to say:

"...Think of it as irony and sincerity combined like Voltron, to form a new movement of astonishing power. Or think of it as the absence of irony and sincerity, where less is (obviously) more. If those strain the brain, just think of Evel Knievel.

Let's be frank. There's no way to appreciate Evel Knievel literally. Evel is the kind of man who defies even fiction, because the reality is too over the top. Here is a man in a red-white-and-blue leather jumpsuit, driving some kind of rocket car. A man who achieved fame and fortune jumping over things. Here is a real man who feels at home as Spidey on the cover of a comic book. Simply put, Evel Knievel boggles the mind.

But by the same token, he isn't to be taken ironically, either. The fact of the matter is that Evel is, in a word, awesome. His jumpsuit looks great. His stunts were amazing. As he once said of his own life: "I've had every airplane, every ship, every yacht, every racehorse, every diamond, and probably, with the exception of two or three, every woman I wanted in my lifetime. I've lived a better life than any king or prince or president." And as patently ridiculous as those words are, they're pretty much true."

Irony and The New Sincerity. Long live both.

A Performance

Warning: Before viewing the following footage of the inhumanly awesome Ms. Tandi Iman Dupree, bare in mind that there will be two questions that you will soon find yourself asking...yourself: what was my life like before I viewed this dance routine from the 2001 Miss Black American competition; and what was it like after.

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

I can't find much about this tranny dancer on the internets, but there does seem to be a fair amount of talk about her being deceased--I do not know how. And I do not know if she won this competition. By god I hope she won.

(Oh thank you, my god thank you John W. for introducing me to this).

O'Reilly wants to turn San Francisco into salt

Today I saw this pseudo-mentary about my beloved City By the Bay, courtesy of the Bill O'Reilly show: "O'Reilly Factor."

It made me mad you guys. My grandmother, among others, will watch this trash and think that my city is nothing but a village of homeless crackheads, Rastafarian anarchists and transvestite hookers; a melting pot of heathens. I mean, any "reporter" can go to any major city in the world and talk to people that seem like they're messed up on drugs and--through the magic of documentarian art--transform them into representatives and spokespersons from the aforementioned metropolis.

This both angered and troubled me immensely. Then I remembered how absurdly bigoted and asinine Bill O'Reilly is, and the anger seemed extremely wasteful.

(From 2005):

O'REILLY: Hey, you know, if you want to ban military recruiting, fine, but I'm not going to give you another nickel of federal money. You know, if I'm the president of the United States, I walk right into Union Square, I set up my little presidential podium, and I say, "Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds. Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead."

And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.

Yeah, can't wait for you and Dennis Miller to turn us all into salt, MORON!!!!

Monty Python's 'Dead Parrot sketch' turns 1600

From The Telegraph:

A classic scholar has proved the point, by unearthing a Greek version of the world-famous piece that is some 1,600 years old.

A comedy duo called Hierocles and Philagrius told the original version, only rather than a parrot they used a slave.

It concerns a man who complains to his friend that he was sold a slave who dies in his service.

His companion replies: "When he was with me, he never did any such thing!"

The joke was discovered in a collection of 265 jokes called Philogelos: The Laugh Addict, which dates from the fourth century AD.

Hierocles had gone to meet his maker, and Philagrius had certainly ceased to be, long before John Cleese and Michael Palin reinvented the yarn in 1969.

Their version featured Cleese as an exasperated customer trying to get his money back from Palin's stubborn pet salesman.

Cleese's character becomes increasingly frustrated as he fails to convince the shopkeeper that the 'Norwegian Blue' is dead.

The manuscripts from the Greek joke book have now been published in an online book, featuring former Bullseye presenter and comic Jim Bowen presenting them to a modern audience.

Mr Bowen said: "One or two of them are jokes I've seen in people's acts nowadays, slightly updated.

"They put in a motor car instead of a chariot - some of them are Tommy Cooper-esque."

Jokes about wives, it seems, have always been fair game.

One joke goes: "A man tells a well-known wit: 'I had your wife, without paying a penny'. The husband replies: "It's my duty as a husband to couple with such a monstrosity. What made you do it?"

The book was translated by William Berg, an American classics professor.

(Thanks Shawne F)

Canuck cowboys? Not quite, but nice try!

Amity and Bobby plan a birthday trip

(Note: My birthday is coming up in less than three months. Me and my friend Bobby discuss. )

A: I think I want to go to New Orleans, where the people will be more depressed than me. Plus, there's Mardis Gras around that time.

B: How about a train trip through Canada? We could go to the most eastern region we can afford, and then take a train trip back to Vancouver.

A: Why don't we just do that in America? There's more diversity, and cowboys! I mean, the only cities that I would want to go to are Montreal and Vancouver. I've already done Vancouver and it was boring.

B: Yeah, when I think about it, I went to a lot of Canadian cities with the airlines and I wasn't excited about any of them.

A: But you want to take a weeks-long train trip through all of them.

B: Yeah. It's just that...who does that? You can tell people you did it, and they won't know why you did it.

A: You raise a good point.

B: Put that in your hat and sit on it..

A: You want me to sit on my hat?

B: Yeah, sit on your hat and think about taking a trip through Canada.

This is what a stupid apathetic hipster looks like

Walking around Dolores Park a few hours after an anti-Prop 8 demonstration at city hall.
(Sign reads: OMG WTF SRSLY?)

"William Ayers, in the age of terrorism, will be Barack Obama's Willie Horton."
--Former counterterrorism official Larry C. Johnson, The Huffington Post, Feb. 16, 2008.













Ayers Can Speak For Himself

On Friday Bill Ayers, along with his wife and fellow Weather Underground member, Bernadine Dohrn, sat down to talk with Democracy Now! to actually explain their relations (or lack thereof) with Barack Obama, the Weather Underground, and the progressive movement in general.

Obviously, Bill Ayers did not turn out to be Obama's Willie Horton. And Karl Rove is no Lee Atwater--the puppeteer behind the Willie Horton ad believed to have cost Michael Dukakis the presidential win in '88. Further, Ayers and Dohrn are not present-day terrorists. They may have committed questionable acts that did not kill or harm anyone--performed while Barack Obama was in grade school--but to say that their current day association with Barack Obama in any way indicates that Obama is radical isn't just irrational, it's racist.

To hear Ayers and Dohrn speak today is both inspiring and enlightening. Dohrn gave critical contextual information about the political climate that her organization was responding to--namely the slaying of members of the Black Panther Party at the hands of a corrupt police force; a corrupt justice system. And Ayers is truly inspiring when speaking about his hope for the future of education and this country.

I hope Palin and all the other right-wing naysayers keep bringing Ayers up. I hope his name conjures images of a '60s radical turned progressive pioneer one day, rather than the myth that this professor, activist, and father is somehow a danger to society.

AMY GOODMAN: As we continue with our Democracy Now! exclusive, I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzalez, in this first joint interview with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn since the Obama campaign has ended. They joined us from a studio in Chicago. Bill Ayers spoke about being at Grant Park the night Barack Obama was elected president.

BILL AYERS: It was an extraordinary feeling. I’ve been in a lot of large crowds in my life, but I’ve never been in one that didn’t either have an edge of anger or a lot of drunkenness or kind of performance. This was all unity, all love. And what people were celebrating was this milestone, which was sweet and exciting and important. But they were also celebrating—there was—you could kind of cut the relief in people’s feelings with a knife. I mean, it was the sense that we were going to leave behind the era of 9/11 and the era of fear and war without end and repression and constitutional shredding and scapegoating of gay and lesbian people, on and on. And there we were, millions, in the park, representing everybody, hugging, dancing, carrying on right in the spot, forty years ago, where many of us were beaten and dragged to jail. It was an extraordinary feeling.

I don’t think at this moment we should be getting into at all the business of trying to read the mind of the President-elect and see where we, you know, might do this or that. The question is, as Bernadine is saying, how do we build the movement on the ground that demands peace, that demands justice? This is always the question. It’s happening—the question is being raised in a new context. So how do—you know, I often think, thinking historically, Lyndon Johnson wasn’t the civil rights movement, but he was an effective politician who passed civil rights legislation. FDR wasn’t a labor leader. Lincoln didn’t belong to an abolitionist party. They all responded to something going on on the ground. And in a lot of ways, we have to get beyond—progressive people have to get beyond the idea that we’re waiting for a savior. We’re not waiting for a savior. We need to transform ourselves, transform our movements, reach out to one another and build an irresistible social force for change...

...JUAN GONZALEZ: —and talk a little bit about how you evolved from the period of Weathermen. Obviously, you were fugitives for awhile, then you came above-ground and settled your problems with the law. You became a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a leader of the reform movement in education in that city. This whole issue of public education and what you see as what needs to be done in public education to revamp our public school system, and what you would hope an Obama presidency would address?

BILL AYERS: You know, I think we’ve suffered so much in the last decades, really, under the wrong way of thinking about education, education reform, foreign policy, the economy, so much of the kind of meta-narrative, or the dominant discourse, is so mistaken and so misplaced. And a lot of what I’m—what I have fought for and what I am struggling for is simply to say, let’s change the frame on education.

I can give you a couple of simple examples. When somebody says, as people said in this campaign, “We really need to get the rotten teachers out of the classroom,” I mean, immediately we all kind of nod dully. But if somebody said, instead of that frame, somebody said, “What we really need is for every child to be in a classroom with a thoughtful, well-educated, caring, intellectual, well-compensated and well-rested teacher,” we’d all nod to that, too.

So, the question is, who gets to set the agenda? To me, the agenda for education in the last couple of decades has been so wrongheaded, because it’s been based on the idea that we do our best with a lot of competition, which is very narrowly conducted and highly supervised and surveilled. That, to me, is the wrong model for democratic education. In fact, the way I think we have to ask the question is, since all of us, no matter—educational leaders, no matter where they are—the old Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, medieval Saudi Arabia—we all agree that the kids should do their homework, not do drugs, be in school, learn the subject matters.

So what makes education in a democracy distinct? And I would argue that what makes education in a democracy distinct is that we don’t educate for obedience and conformity; we educate for initiative and courage. We educate for imagination and hope and possibility. And we recognize that the full development of each person requires the full development of all people. Or another way of saying it is, the full development of all is the condition whereby we can educate each. And that shifting of the frame is so important. And frankly, I’m hopeful that in this period of rising expectations, of rethinking so much, that this is where we can go.

The second half of the interview will air tomorrow on Pacifica Radio.