IN LA TODAY, SOMEONE ELSE DIED

While the media in what the TV news like to call “the Southland” spends 100% of its time today waxing implausibly maudlin over the Michael Jackson memorial circus in downtown LA, the following email arrived from the Cinefamily organization who do a damned good job running the Silent Movie Theatre here in Hollywood. I didn’t know Bob Mitchell either, but, in this guy’s lifetime, we have gone from light-through-celluloid silent film with a human pianist, to digital downloads and now approach computer-generated total entertainment. This must serves – if nothing else – to confirm what Marshall McLuhan told us. The Speed-Up is now.

“I have sad news. Our organist, Bob Mitchell, has passed on at the age of 96. Mr. Mitchell, who started playing at the Pasadena Playhouse at the age of only 12 years old, had actually played for silent films in the '20s. It was a pleasure and a privilege to witness someone who wasn't just a master at his craft, but was a human portal to another time. There will be wonderful silent musicians continuing the tradition of live, improvised accompaniment, but there was a certain unforgettable authenticity that comes from not simply recreating another time, but being of it. Bob's entire musical background and earliest memories lent a texture to his performance that was quite unique; his musical quotations, his sense of humor, his reference points were all of the era. He knew and remembered the songs and themes that were contemporaneous with the films he accompanied, and would weave them into the scores at natural points. If you were watching William Hart's silent western Tumbleweeds -- sure enough, he would play the hit song "Tumbleweeds" as the credits rolled. It is short notice, but tomorrow, before our screening of Greta Garbo's Love, we will have a short memorial for Bob.”

THIS IS A WATCHBIRD

And one symptom of the Speed-Up is way in which all things become possible on the web. Just yesterday, I remarked how, “when I was a kid I used to see a comic strip – I’m damned if I can remember the title – that featured something called a Watchbird that came with the highly forbidding slogan ‘This is a Watchbird watching you!’” In less than twelve hours our pal William Kretschmer directs me to Munro Leaf's Watchbird cartoons. And here is one. Just like it was in the depth of the 20th century. Does anyone wonder that we who grew up with this kind of weird-ass moralizing accepted paranoia and conspiracy agendas as viable options?

The secret word is Mindfuck

ANOTHER BILLBOARD ON THE LOST HIGHWAY

IS IT A BIRD? IS IT A PLANE?

No. It’s a surveillance device.

When I was a kid I used to see a comic strip – I’m damned if I can remember the title – that featured something called a Watchbird that came with the highly forbidding slogan “This is a Watchbird watching you!” Now it seems we have the real thing. We may not be able to care for our sick, educate our children, or find jobs for the workforce, but there’s always a couple of million for a new spy toy. The story comes from our pal Faux Smoke.

“AeroVironment is designing and building a prototype flapping-wing unmanned aircraft under the second phase of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Nano Air Vehicle (NAV) program. The $2.1 million Phase 2 contract was awarded after the company accomplished controlled hovering flight of an air vehicle using a pair of flapping wings for both propulsion and control. The milestone was achieved in December 2008 with the 20-second flight of the Mercury interim test vehicle, says the company. Under remote control, the battery-powered vehicle climbed and descended, flew sideways, and forward and backward.” (Click here for more and a video.)

The secret word is Tweet

THE MONKEY WILL HAVE WHAT YOU’RE HAVING

Last week wallabies were breaking into opium fields, getting high, and then staggering around to make crop circles. (See June 26th) Now Noudela draws our attention to how, in the Caribbean, vervet monkeys have developed a taste for alcohol and can regularly be spotted stealing cocktails from humans on the beach. Could it be that monkeys and marsupials have a better grasp on reality than we do? Click here for the video.

SPACE OPERA

WHEN SUPERMAN FAILS (And negativity don't pull you through)

Charles Krauthammer is a right wing, neocon, blowhard who fancies himself as an intellectual, and to prove he’s a cut above Rush, he has a column in The Washington Post, maybe by some concept which gives equal space to the slavering lackeys of arcane corporations. (He’s also an unlovely motherfucker so we don’t need a picture.) What follows is Krauthammer’s vision of the “real” agenda of the Obama administration. And as I read it, I can only hug myself and sway, laughing with something near to hysteria. Oh if such was only true. If it was only true. If only the right could be close to right.

“Obama has far different ambitions. His goal is to rewrite the American social compact, to recast the relationship between government and citizen. He wants government to narrow the nation's income and anxiety gaps. Soak the rich for reasons of revenue and justice. Nationalize health care and federalize education to grant all citizens of all classes the freedom from anxiety about health care and college that the rich enjoy. And fund this vast new social safety net through the cash cow of a disguised carbon tax. Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission…The reordering of the American system will come not from these temporary interventions, into which Obama has reluctantly waded. It will come from Obama's real agenda: his holy trinity of health care, education and energy. Out of these will come a radical extension of the welfare state; social and economic leveling in the name of fairness; and a massive increase in the size, scope and reach of government. If Obama has his way, the change that is coming is a new America: "fair," leveled and social democratic.”

And talking of The Washington Post, click here to read this piece of scandal sent over by Munz. Seems like the paper that brought down Nixon is now just one more whore on the beltway selling access to the power.
“Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth said today she was canceling plans for an exclusive "salon" at her home where for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record access to "those powerful few" – Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper’s own reporters and editors.”
Maybe the print media really does deserve to go broke.

And at the head of this Sunday night moan, I paraphrased Bob Dylan, (with an image from Valerie) and thus it only seems fair to post a link to a cool version of the mutilated song. Click here.

The secret words are What and If

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Aunt Gethsemane has a very understanding relationship with her personal banker.

AND THE ROCKETS’ RED GLARE/THE BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR...

Happy Fourth of July to all our American comrades as they recall their revolution. Rockets, ribs, hamburgers sizzle on an open grill night and day, while Larry the Mattress King dresses up as George Washington in his TV commercials. The Empire has staggered through another year. And now Sarah Palin wants to be president. OMG

The secret word is Independence

And, for some notes on independence, click here.

WHAT IS THE ABSURD WOMAN UP TO NOW?

My response to the news was one of profane bafflement. Palin is resigning as Governor of Alaska? Say what? If anything, it was even weirder than the announcement that she was running for VP. Does she really think that for the next three years, she can bounce around the planet – without any tangible powerbase – and wind up being elected president of what would have to be a totally insane superpower in 2012?
The timing of this move is deeply odd all on it’s own. Dropping this bizarre bomb on the Friday before a national holiday, when the majority of the media are heading for the beach, the golf course, or firing up the charcoal is strange in the extreme. MSNBC had basically shut down, a skeleton CNN was focused on Michael Jackson, and who the hell knew what was going on at Fox? The Friday bombshell is usually a political tactic that’s employed when some major, career-threatening scandal is about to break, and it’s used in the vain hope of softening the shit/fan impact before Monday comes around.
Could a Palin super-scandal be up the line? It’s infinitely possible. As Todd S. Purdum wrote in Vanity Fair – “Palin is unlike any other national figure in modern American life – neither Anna Nicole Smith nor Margaret Chase Smith but a phenomenon all her own. The clouds of tabloid conflict and controversy that swirl around her and her extended clan—the surprise pregnancies, the two-bit blood feuds, the tawdry in-laws and common-law kin caught selling drugs or poaching game—give her family a singular status in the rogues’ gallery of political relatives. By comparison, Billy Carter, Donald Nixon, and Roger Clinton seem like avatars of circumspection. Palin’s life has sometimes played out like an unholy amalgam of Desperate Housewives and Northern Exposure.”
In the meantime, the nation can only wait and barbeque while the madness of the Republican Party becomes close to hallucinatory.

(If you want to read the Vanity Fair piece, click here. For video of the bizarre Palin doubletalk, click here.)

The secret word is Curiouser

SOMETIMES THE ONLY SOLUTION IS CHEMICAL

THIS IS AL FRANKEN

This is Al Franken. I never liked Al Franken. An asshole. A tiresome wizeass blowhard. On the original SNL he was never as funny as he though he was which is why they never let him work with Belushi. And later he almost wrecked Air America by never being as smart as he thought he was – and dull to boot. I think it’s safe to say I loath Al Franken, but now he’s a fucking senator and – supposedly a liberal – and I’m expected to be pleased because he completes the magic filibuster-proof majority of sixty, and Barack will be able to push through a proper national heath service. Yeah. Right. If we live that long.

The secret word is Goodnight

Karl Malden -- RIP

SPACE OPERA

IT’S JUST A HOAX…

…BY THOSE LYIN’ SCIENTISTS

In Washington the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. It was flawed to the point of being dismissed by many environmentalists as a barely acceptable watered-down compromise that may yet be watered-down some more by the time it gets through the bought-and-paid-for Senate. At best – and like far too many Obama creations – it is a faltering and feeble step in approximately the right direction. And even that was only achieved after having to listen to all the poisonous crap of characters like Representative Paul Broun of Georgia who, to loud applause from the right, claimed that climate change is nothing but a “hoax” that is “perpetrated out of the scientific community.” This prompted Paul Krugman to respond in Monday’s New York Times…

“To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research. The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.
Thus researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Temperature increases on the scale predicted by the M.I.T. researchers and others would create huge disruptions in our lives and our economy. As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate of North Carolina today, Illinois may have the climate of East Texas, and across the country extreme, deadly heat waves — the kind that traditionally occur only once in a generation — may become annual or biannual events.
In other words, we’re facing a clear and present danger to our way of life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify failing to act?” Click here for the whole column.

Failing to act, however, seems to be the keynote of times. Times that we expected to be a frenzy of New-Deal salvation. And failing to act may well continue to be the modus operandi until those of us who still demand change make such a loud and bloody nuisance of ourselves we finally have to be acknowledged.

The secret word is Noisy

DOC’S HEALTHIER LIVING PROGRAM

“So how much cholesterol do you figure there is in rattlesnake?"

ALL OUR YESTERDAYS

Those where days, my friends. When Kellogg dusted their cereals with amphetamine and moms were happy all day and docile. Just ask Lucy Jordan.