THIS IS CAMILA VALLEJO

She may be the new face of revolution.


“Not since the days of Zapatistas' Subcomandante Marcos has Latin America been so charmed by a rebel leader. This time, there is no ski mask, no pipe and no gun, just a silver nose ring. Meet Commander Camila, a student leader in Chile who has become the face of a populist uprising that some analysts are calling the Chilean winter. Her press conferences can lead to the sacking of a minister. The street marches she leads shut down sections of the Chilean capital. She has the government on the run, and now even has police protection after receiving death threats. Yet six months ago, no one had heard of Camila Vallejo, the 23-year-old spearheading an uprising that has shaken not only the presidency of the billionaire businessman Sebastián Piñera, but the entire Chilean political class. Opinion polls show that 26% of the public support Piñera and only 16% back his recently ousted Concertación coalition. Wednesday saw the start of a two-day nationwide shutdown, as transport workers and other public-sector employees joined the burgeoning student movement in protest. "There are huge levels of discontent," said Vallejo in a recent interview. "It is always the youth that make the first move … we don't have family commitments, this allows us to be freer. We took the first step, but we are no longer alone, the older generations are now joining this fight." Click here for more

Click here for Bowie

The secret word is Next

IF YOU’RE IN LONDON NEXT WEEK YOU’RE INVITED…

…to a gallery opening and live performance next Thursday September 1st at SPACE in Hackney, East London.
The event is a re-examination and maybe a celebration of the agitprop tome Watch Out Kids that Edward Barker and I put together way back in the 20th century and was a highly subjective compendium of counterculture graphics and the rogue philosophy of the psychedelic left. Since a gallery show, by definition, is primarily visual, the major tribute is really to the work of the late great Edward. But I will be showing up with master guitarist Andy Colquhoun – a once and future Deviant and Pink Fairy – plus our new friend and percussionist, Jaki Miles-Windmill, to perform poetry and other rhymed writings.
The deal is that doors open at 6.00pm; allowing us to stand around, drink 50p beer, pose and chat, observe and be observed, until sometime just after eight, when we the performers get down and perform. Finally after the show, we head into the after-party at which a good time will be had by all. All this wonder is all at…
SPACE
129 – 131 MARE STREET
LONDON E8 3RH
020 8525 4330

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Ansonia Frozdick just loved to walk the lobster.

GRATUITOUS KINSKI

THIS WAS OMAR BONGO

This was Omar Bongo. He’s dead now, but his story – a snippet of which was sent to me by our pals at Delancey Place – is a near perfect example of why Africa is a bloody mess with AIDS, AK47s, famine, cocaine and gunpowder.

"Bongo's story is a miniature tale of what happened when France formally relinquished its colonies. As countries in Africa and elsewhere gained in- dependence, the old beneficiaries of the French empire set up new ways to stay in control behind the scenes. Gabon became independent in 1960, just as it was starting to emerge as a promising new African oil frontier, and France paid it particular attention. France needed to install the right president: an authentic African leader who would be charismatic, strong, cunning, and, when it mattered, utterly pro-French. In Omar Bongo they found the perfect can- didate: He was from a tiny minority ethnic group and had no natural domestic support base, so he would have to rely on France to protect him. In 1967, aged just 32, Bongo became the world's youngest president, and for good measure France placed several hundred paratroopers in a barracks in Libreville, connected to one of his palaces by underground tunnels. This intimidating deterrent against coup plots proved so effective that by the time Bongo died in 2009, he was the world's longest-serving leader. In exchange for France's backing Bongo gave two things. First, he gave French companies almost exclusive access to his country's minerals, on highly preferential terms that were deeply unfair to the people of Gabon. The country became known as French companies' chasse gardee - their private hunting ground. But the second thing Bongo provided was more interesting. He allowed his country, through its oil industry, to become the African linchpin of the gigantic, secret Elf system - a vast web of global corruption secretly connecting the oil industries of former French African colonies with mainstream politics in metropolitan France, via Switzerland, Luxembourg, and other tax havens.”

Click here for The Cadets

The secret word is Jane

BABY NEEDS NEW SHOES

BABY NEEDS NEW SHOES WITH WHEELS

Click here for Jeff Beck & Joss Stone

AFTERMATH

Those of you who have been paying attention may have noted that Doc40 has been a little neglected over the past few days. (My Facebook wall too, for that matter.) I guess it’s the result of having entered what feels like an aftermath. The UK urban riots are seemingly over, the News Corp scandal lulls in limbo. Similar could be said of the worst excesses of US democracy, so I’ve found myself with little in the short term about which to rant. Also my private life seems to have taken a turn for the amazing, but that’s a whole other story. (As in private!) I imagine, however, this abeyance won’t last so I might as well enjoy the rest while I can.

Click here for a symphony of porn stars moaning. (We've had a content warning inflicted on us. We might as well use it.)

The secret word is Interlude

Jerry Leiber – RIP

SEISMIC FOLLIES

While once and future Californians snigger at Easterners getting all aflutter at a mere 5.9 seismic event, the US looks to the safety of its own nuke plants.

TAKOMA PARK, MD - August 23 - A 5.9 magnitude that was felt up and down the US east coast was centered in Mineral, Virginia, home to the two-reactor North Anna nuclear power plant operated by Dominion Energy. North Anna sits just 90 miles south of Washington, DC. The plant automatically shut down following a loss of offsite power, but electricity is still needed to cool the reactor core and fuel pools. "Once again, Mother Nature is warning us that nuclear power is the most brittle of electrical power systems," said Paul Gunter, director of Reactor Oversight for Beyond Nuclear. "In times of national crisis or natural disaster, nuclear power becomes more of a liability than an asset," he said. All but one of the four on-site emergency diesel generators at North Anna started up as needed for reactor cooling and safety systems. However, cooling systems for the two spent fuel pools loaded with nuclear waste do not automatically get switched over to emergency power systems. Several other reactor sites along the eastern seaboard reported “unusual events” to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission but no others were forced to shut down. “The Obama administration – which still presses for more nuclear plants – and the nuclear industry and its lapdog regulator refuse to learn the lessons of Fukushima even when they are brought right home by this powerful quake,” said Linda Gunter, International Specialist at Beyond Nuclear. “Even the Japanese prime minister has acknowledged that Japan must move forward without using nuclear energy. Here at home it seems only public outrage can move our leaders. We got lucky again, this time, but at some point that luck will run out. We should not wait to pay that price but start a nuclear phase-out today.” The earthquake risks at North Anna were known as far back as 1970, a 1975 Washington Post article reveals. Then owner, Virginia Electric and Power Company, was fined an unprecedented $60,000 for building the plant on a known fault line which consultants retained by Vepco claimed did not exist. On-going updates about the post-quake status of US nuclear plants can be found on the Beyond Nuclear website.

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Buzz Frozdick’s ostrich suit was close to perfect.

GRATUITOUS EVA GREEN

SUNDAY BREAKFAST

Today’s breakfast is being eaten in private.

Click here for Eddie Cochrane

The secret word is Secret

MARILYN SEZ...

“Private being a euphemism for what, exactly?”

ON WEEKENDS, SOME GUYS GO HUNTING

NOT SEXY BUT CRUCIAL

The conservatives of the world howl and gnash their teeth in the face of imagined debt and the IMF seek to impose punitive austerity on what had once been the workers of the developed world before capitalism descended into voodoo abstraction. All economists to whom I care to pay attention tell me that that current drastic cuts to public spending are nothing short of suicidal. In the instance it’s Robert Reich – formerly Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor (remember peace and prosperity?)

“Not only is the United States slouching toward a double dip, but so is Europe. New data out today show even Europe’s strongest core economies – Germany, France, and the Netherlands – slowing to a crawl. We’re on the cusp of a global recession. Policy makers be warned: Austerity is the wrong medicine. We all know about the weaknesses in Europe’s “periphery” – Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. But the drop in Europe’s core is dizzying. Germany grew at an annualized rate of just half a percent last quarter, down from 5.5 percent in the first quarter of the year. France didn’t grow at all. What’s going on in Europe’s core? Partly it’s a loss of confidence due to debt crises in the periphery. But that’s hardly all. Europe depends on exports – especially to Asia, India, Latin America, and the United States. But exports to China and other emerging markets have been dropping. China, worried about inflation, has pulled in the reins on its sizzling economy. Brazil has been pulling back as well. And as the United States economy sputters, exports to America have been slowing. But chalk up a big part of Europe’s slowdown to the politics and economics of austerity. Europe – including Britain – have turned John Maynard Keynes on his head. They’ve been cutting public spending just when they should be spending more to counteract slowing private spending.” (Click here for more)

Click here for Barrett Strong

The secret word is Clueless

NOT SEXY BUT DANGEROUS

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Pavia and Abigail Frozdick failed to grasp the reality of the Nazi Party.

HOW DO YOU OUTLAW THE OUTLAW’S MASK?

THE CHELSEA TO BE REMODELED? THE WORLD MAY INDEED BE ENDING

Everything ages, everything changes, do what you think you should do, but there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden. So rage, rage against the dying of the light.

“The bohemian long-term residents of Manhattan’s Hotel Chelsea may be about to meet their match in the New York landmark’s new owners: a Moroccan-Jewish family with vast American real estate holdings and past legal difficulties. The Chetrit family, who purchased the famous property on August 1, has made clear its intention to remake the West Side building. And that is making at least some of the Chelsea’s famously bristly residents a little nervous. “I would say it’s very clear their intentions are to get tenants out, because that’s what the practical nature of business demands,” said theater producer Scott Griffin, a 20-year resident of the Chelsea. Griffin described the hotel’s atmosphere as “funereal,” since the family took control and closed the property to transient guests. “They’re being very formal and very respectful right now, as they make their changes,” he said. “But I don’t anticipate that to last. Not because they’re bad human beings, but they’ve made an investment and they need to make sure the investment realizes itself. Such cautious anticipation has not always characterized the hotel tenants’ attitude toward its owners. Following the removal of the hotel’s popular longtime manager in 2007, someone sent a fish head and a pile of excrement to one of the building’s owners. Though the manager wasn’t reinstated, his replacement was eventually chased away. The hotel — usually known as the Chelsea Hotel — holds an unparalleled place in American pop culture myth: It was the site of the sexual encounter recalled in Leonard Cohen’s song, “Chelsea Hotel No. 2,” and of the murder of Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of Sex Pistols member Sid Vicious. William Burroughs wrote “Naked Lunch” at the Chelsea, and everyone from Dee Dee Ramone to Bob Dylan spent long hours in one or another of its rooms.” (And me, many times! Click here for more)

Click here for Nico

The secret word is Desecration

FREAKS OF GRACELAND – A MEMORIAL

DON’T FORGET THE STAR FLEET PRIME DIRECTIVE

If you have inter-entity sex with The Captain, you will probably die before the end of the episode. 

GRATUITOUS BARDOT

LET US PRAY TO THE DARK GODS THAT THE MAYAN CALENDAR IS CORRECT AND THE WORLD WILL END IN DECEMBER 2012

BECAUSE IF EITHER OF THESE PSYCHOS REALLY BECAME PRESIDENT, I WOULDN’T WANT TO SURVIVE IN THIS REALITY

A DEAD MAN’S HAND?

The conclusion is hard to avoid or pretend it might be otherwise. Click here for Nick Cave.

The secret words are Hole and Card

DON’T YOU MISS THE 20TH CENTURY

Click here for the Do Long Bridge

SUNDAY BREAKFAST

The eggs are looking back at me and I’m very tempted simply to go back to bed. Maybe until September. Let’s face it, friends and neighbours, it’s been one hell of a week. The world feels as though it’s teetering on multiple brinks, and now the eggs are looking back at me. I woke up this morning seeking for respite but all I found was a TV awash in facile social commentators talking unmitigated crap about the UK riots without even the insight of my friends on Facebook. Meanwhile, back in the USA, after barely avoiding an economic apocalypse – which has not exactly gone away – the wholly insane Michele Bachmann has won the GOP Iowa Straw Poll that sets her on track for a run to the White House, and I blanch at the idea that this madwoman should control nuclear weapons. And just to cap it all, my email was hacked and everything I sent out for some 24 hours was going out under the name Clerissa Kahlil. (You figure it.) And yes, brothers and sisters, the eggs are looking back at me.

Click here for Patti singing Bob

The secret word is Contact

MARILYN SEZ...

“But you do realise, darling, if you go back to bed, it’ll all still be there when you wake up again.”

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Lilo and Niki Frozdick had excellent seats for the atomic blast.

IT’S THE REAL THING

CAMERON GRABS FOR THE BIG OFF SWITCH

For a long time I have believed that if any politician could seize the power to control, censor, or even shut down the internet, we had probably lost the ballgame. Despite the content warnings, corporate bullshit, and all the other irritants, the social networks are the people’s media. They are the only free mass communication in a world of electronic manipulation. But now Cameron has seen his chance. I’d like to say that dog won’t hunt but I just fear it just might. The UK media are whipping a lynch mob frenzy modeled on US TV in the wake of 9/11, except the enemy is the children of the underclass, not terrorists on the jihad. The War On Youth? It is all so bloody absurd I shudder and look away. Dangerous Minds tells the story…

“In response to the English Riots, British Prime Minister, David Cameron announced a series initiatives to “do whatever it takes to restore law and order and to rebuild our communities. Amongst the suggested plans (including removal of face masks) was the rather disturbing news that Cameron plans to block access to social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Blackberrys. In a speech to Parliament, Cameron said: “Mr Speaker, everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organised via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the Police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder…” Click here for more

If we lose the internet we won't be able to click here for this guy.

Or Click here for The Clash

The secret word is Dicey

THEY’LL TAKE MY MASK WHEN THEY RIP IT FROM MY COLD DEAD FACE

ME TOO

DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S # 94

Smoke it if you got it. What else after the week that was?

THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND – THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND

They sure as shit aren’t going to let me write this for The Guardian. Which is a shame because I think this might well be a valid insight. Right now I have a very bad feeling that the rioting in the UK is much more than a destructive sociological hiccup in hard times. My fear is that we are actually witnessing a whole new youth movement – just like the mods, just like the hippies, just like the punks, just like the gangstas in the hoodies, and just as inexplicable to the older generation. In political terms it is a counterculture of frighteningly perfect nihilism, ideologically pure and pristine in so far as it has severed all ties with compassion, empathy, even most minimal agenda beyond instant gratification. It has rejected the basic social compacts that make simple civilization possible. Perhaps in instinctive rejection of a corrupted social system that offers no hope, it’s a lemming lunge of the feral into a twilight world of knives, dope, and guns. You can’t fool the children of the revolution. No, no. You also can’t deter them from a violent and suicidal path. They neither have nor require an attention span and exist wholly in the moment. This new teen and preteen nihilism has embraced the logic of The Hulk – “Me want. Me take. Me smash. Last one out, torch the gaff.” Can’t argue with that, granddad, because this neo-nihilism is artfully inarticulate. A tribe of Sids Vicious without a Joe Strummer among them. This is the way they want it, and we must share the responsibility; all of us. The ones who abandoned this inconvenient, post-industrial generation to street life, video violence, and dead end TV, and we on the other side who didn’t fight hard enough to prevent it. If a solution exists at all, it will require extremely focused thought of a kind that cannot be interrupted by rhetoric, sloganeering, or cravings for popularity. Unfortunately precious few in power are capable of such thought. Maybe none. That makes matters even more problematic. (Unless the Tories use the Nixon strategy of the Attica era of the early 1970s and flood poor neighbourhoods with cheap heroin.)

Click here for Moby Grape

The secret word is Flummoxed

CUT AND RUN

PILLS (To My Head)

(By Jason Mercier)

Click here for Bo

GRATUITOUS ADOLF

NATTY DREDD

I always suspected that this society/culture/civilization would degenerate into cheap science fiction but I didn’t think it’d be Judge Dredd.

Click here for the Pink Fairies in Finland (Sent by Walcir Chalas)

NAGASAKI MON AMOUR

I’ve never been sure why the US needed to drop a second bomb on Nagasaki. To prove they could? Greg Mitchell also wonders why.

“Few journalists bother to visit Nagasaki, even though it is one of only two cities in the world to “meet the atomic bomb,” as some of the survivors of that experience, sixty-six years ago today, put it. It remains the Second City, and “Fat Man” the forgotten bomb. No one in America ever wrote a bestselling book called Nagasaki, or made a film titled Nagasaki, Mon Amour. “We are an asterisk,” Shinji Takahashi, a sociologist in Nagasaki, once told me, with a bitter smile. “The inferior A-bomb city.” Yet in many ways, Nagasaki is the modern A-bomb city, the city with perhaps the most meaning for us today. For one thing, when the plutonium bomb exploded above Nagasaki it made the uranium-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima obsolete. And then there’s this. “The rights and wrongs of Hiroshima are debatable,” Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, once observed, “but I have never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki”—which he labeled a war crime. Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who experienced the firebombing of Dresden at close hand, said much the same thing. “The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki,” he once said. “Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away yellow men, women, and children. I’m glad I’m not a scientist because I’d feel so guilty now.” (Click here for more)

Click here for Bambi v Godzilla

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Nobody told Maudie Frozdick and her atom bomb cake was maybe not the way to commemorate the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

DON'T MESS WITH THE WARRIOR PRINCESS

WHAT THE FUCK DID ANYONE EXPECT?

I feel like I’m drowning in a sea of cynicism. The dogs of brutality have been loosed and the hopelessly feral are on the rampage. Like Bob once said, “the words leave my head and they fall to the floor.” Every police cell in London is full. I’ve seen it in LA, I’ve seen it in Brixton, I’ve seen it in Detroit, I’ve suffered the clubs and smelled the teargas in the morning, and here we go again. And it’s worse here than in LA in 1992 because in LA no one lived above the shop. The nonsense pouring for my TV is the same as it ever was. “Thugs”, “criminals”, “rats”, “scum”, “mindless” “consequences”, “punishment,” “justice will be done.” COBRA? Gimme a break. As I write, a BBC reporter tells me “this is what happens when fear of the police evaporates.” Why should citizens fear the police, goddamn it? Another reporter repeats the same line. It's part of the script. The idiot mayor of London waxes bellicose for cameras how this is nothing to do with social justice. The new euphemism for escalated police violence is “robust response.” Some fools think the street mayhem is all being directed via “social networks” and this red herring this will probably trigger a clamor for clampdown on the internet. Other fools can’t wait to see the army on the streets or the use of riot control weapons previously reserved for the Irish. The mega-rich have tanked the global economy with vast pyramid scheme, and them walked away unscathed. Did anyone think there would be no repercussions when the entire burden of loss was dumped on workers and the underclass? When public sector workers stage a mass one day strike they’re ignored. Charlie Gilmore acts up and is tossed in jail. Now the dialogue is with the wholly inarticulate, with fire and broken glass. What the fuck did anyone expect? Like I said I feel like I’m drowning in a sea of cynicism.

Click here for Frank Zappa

The secret word is Betrayal

THIS IS KEITH OLBERMANN. HE IS THE LAST RATIONALLY ANGRY VOICE IN US MEDIA

Please, click here. This is rousing stuff.

OR WE COULD TAKE THE EASY WAY OUT…

GRATUITOUS EVA GREEN

MORE POPULAR THAN GOD

“Hey kids, remember peace and prosperity?”

Our pal Marjorie sent this item from The Jewish Chronicle. But will Bill remember what happened to John Lennon when was more popular than God?

“God is more popular than Barack Obama at the moment but less popular than Bill Clinton before he was reelected president in 1996. In a survey of 928 American voters by Public Policy Polling, 52 per cent of respondents said that if there was a God, they approved of his performance. In contrast, only 12 per cent had a favourable view of Rupert Murdoch. A majority of respondents said they supported the way in which God handled the creation of the universe, however only half approved of how He handled natural disasters. A third of those questioned said they were unsure of their opinion of God's treatment of animals. Gods popularity at the recent survey – only nine per cent of people said they disapproved of his performance – would probably be envied by many politicians. Approval ratings – figures used to measure the performance of public figures – have been used to rate American presidents since they were introduced by George Gallup in the 1930s. Ratings tend to fluctuate a great deal during a presidency, but President Obama's popularity is currently some six per cent lower than God. In contrast, while President Clinton only had the confidence of 37 per cent of voters when his popularity was at its lowest, in November 1996, two thirds of voters said they approved of him. Still, while God is more popular with the general population than the current occupant of the White House, a poll this week showed the president enjoyed an approval rating of 60 per cent among Jewish voters.”

Click here for the afforementioned Lennon

The secret word is Knowledge

SO NOW CIGAR JOKES ARE KOSHER?

(See comment from last Thursday)