Eyebrows were raised, even among the Frozdicks, when Imelda married Univac.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
TALK YOUR WAY OUT OF THIS ONE
Our pal Wendy sent over the following story with the comment “try claiming this on insurance.”
“If you've ever driven between Cincinnati and Dayton, Ohio, on I-75 then you probably saw the six-story King of Kings statue featuring Jesus coming out of a lake with hands raised in front of the Solid Rock Church in Monroe, Ohio. Monday night the statue was destroyed by fire after being struck by lightning. Monroe fire chief Mark Neu told the CNN Belief Blog he's never seen anything like the fire in his 32 years as chief. He said the 62-foot statue had a steel frame and was wrapped in Styrofoam and covered with a fiberglass coating to protect it. At 11:16 last night, the fire department got the call the statue had been hit by lighting and was on fire. "It spread from the statue to the amphitheater," he said. "There was heavy damage to the amphitheater where the stature backed up to. It was a fast-moving fire. We’re looking at $700,000 worth of damage." (Click here for more and a video)
Click here for Blind Willie Johnson
Click here for Nick Cave
The secret word is Odin
GIVE THE DOLPHIN AN iPAD
Our friend Aeswiren sent over this story of the dolphin with a computer. Damn. Maybe they’ll take over. They couldn’t make more of a mess than humanity has.
“The fact that there is a dolphin using an iPad is perhaps less amazing than the surprise that Apple’s marketing department had nothing to do with it. Yes, Merlin the dolphin has an iPad, and he and his trainer are using it to better understand each other’s communication patterns. If successful, the Apple gadget may help break the dolphin-human language barrier. Ever since the debut of the iPad, there have a plethora of cats, dogs, birds and mice playing with the Apple gadget. Though some, like the amazing cat Iggy, seem to demonstrate a level of self-awareness about the iPad, Merlin is the first mammal to use it as a learning tool. The innovative program was the brainchild of dolphin researcher Jack Kassewitz of Speak Dolphin, an organization dedicated to unlocking the secrets of cetacean communication. Kassewitz explains: The use of the iPad is part of our continuing search to find a suitable touchscreen technology which the dolphins can activate with the tip of their rostrums or beaks … We think that once the dolphins get the hang of the touchscreen, we can let them choose from a wide assortment of symbols to represent objects, actions and even emotions. The researchers have found a way to waterproof the iPad and are now using it to help Merlin — an animal that lives in Puerto Aventuras, Mexico — to make associations between physical objects and digital representations of those objects. The next step will be to layer in verbs and prepositions, making the dream of interactive communication with the brainiest animals on the planet a true possibility.”
Click here for Humpbacked Whales
Monday, June 14, 2010
I’LL BE ON TV…
…but only in the UK
The show is called Rude Britannia and it starts up tonight on BBC Four. I didn’t receive the heads-up in time to warn you about the first episode that aired tonight at 9pm on BBC Four. The second is tomorrow (Tuesday 15th June) at the same time. Episode 3 (which is the one I’m – talking about the comic book Nasty Tales and the 1971 obscenity prosecution against it) will go out on Wednesday 16th June at 9pm. (Click here for a preview.)
THE BODY OF BIERCE
Our pals at LOWFI have just posted a lengthy discourse by Brad Steiger on the legendary Ambrose Bierce…
“In the San Francisco of 1876, Ambrose Bierce reigned as unchallenged literary king, the best known writer west of the Rockies. Some of the contemporaries who nourished their lights in Bierce’s shadow are much better known today. Bret Harte, Jack London, and Joaquin Miller not only rate larger space in the textbooks, but their works remain easily available. Of Bierce’s voluminous writings, only a collection of short stories, In the Midst of Life, and fragments of The Devil’s Dictionary are easily obtainable. But if Bierce’s literary endeavors have not stood the test of time as well as those of certain of his contemporaries, he still enjoys a last laugh, because the mystery of his strange disappearance is better known than the entire life histories of Harte, London, and Miller.” (Click here for the whole thing)
And to give the story more heft, it comes hot on the heels of how…
“A construction worker in Chihuahua, Mexico unearthed what appear to be the remains of writer Ambrose Bierce from the basement of an old bordello demolished to make way for condominiums. Bierce scholars are excited about the unexpected discovery, considering that nearly a century of speculation as to what happened to the writer may finally be brought to an end. Rumored to have mysteriously disappeared in 1913 while investigating the Mexican revolution in his later years, 'Bitter Bierce' was well known in America for his disenchantment with politics, war, capitalism and his most favored target of all, human nature.”
Click here for the Death Proof Coasters
Sunday, June 13, 2010
SUNDAY BREAKFAST
It has to be a while since I breakfasted on hors d’oeuvres and champagne. How long has it been? How long is the dream, girl? How far can it be extended? Too much of late has become just a matter of retreat into fantasy. But maybe that is just as well since, throwing off the warm dead sheets of illiterate self-pity, Renquist V – which is now well under way – could prove to be the hardest fantasy into which I have ever retreated. The good fight must be fought while I fluctuate at dangerous keyboard frequencies between “This is brilliant” and “Michael, you are going certifiably crazy”, but always stretching for the correct crack in the tuning-fork tonality has never been a symptom of sanity. But I don’t despair. It is early days yet. Characters old and new are loosed to scrabble randomly across the star-studded sidewalk like the windup toys of a indigent street vendor of Newtonian clockwork. Smile when you pray that, pilgrim. Only I know how clueless and simultaneously confident I am that it will all come together in the end and I won’t have to nuke the whole lot of them, because I did that on one occasion and it really pissed off many of you gentle readers. But, in the meantime, remind me to tell you about the Fermi Paradox and the Zoo Hypothesis before the ancient wistfulness silences me.
Click here for Tom Petty
Saturday, June 12, 2010
DON’T YOU MISS THE 20TH CENTURY? (Saturday Special)
"Published during the time of U.S. participation in the Korean War, Junior Books’ Atomic War! Speculated on the possibilities of World War III. Despite the series’ stated purpose to warn against the horrors of atomic warfare, it did just the opposite. In its stories, U.S. forces employing tactical and strategic nuclear weapons triumphed repeatedly over the Communists.” According to Scott Shaw at Oddball Comics: “This is one of many comics that reflected our national paranoia during the Cold War of the 1950s and early 1960s. The cover depicts the atomic destruction of Manhattan (note the crumbling Empire State and Chrysler Buildings.) Here's a quote from the issue's first story, "Sneak Attack." "Look upon the pictures of our giant cities hundred of years in the building, smashed by the atom-bomb, and say: this shall not come to pass! More than ever today, only a strong America can prevent this from becoming a reality!" (Lifted from Wikisource.org )
Tune in tomorrow for another Atomic War! cover.
Click here for Chrissie
The secret word is Fallout
DARTH VADER’S PSYCHIATRIC PROFILE
From the journal Psychiatry Research…
"He presented impulsivity and difficulty controlling his anger and alternated between idealisation and devaluation (of his Jedi mentors). Permanently afraid of losing his wife, he made frantic efforts to avoid her abandonment and went as far as betraying his former Jedi companions. He also experienced two dissociative episodes secondary to stressful events. One occurred after his mother's death, when he exterminated a whole tribe of Tuskan people, while the other one took place just after he turned to the dark side. He slaughtered all the Jedi younglings before voicing paranoid thoughts concerning his former mentor and his wife. Finally, the films depicted his quest to find himself, and his uncertainties about who he was. Turning to the dark side and changing his name could be interpreted as a sign of identity disturbance."
Click here for Eddie Izzard
Friday, June 11, 2010
THE DAY THE THOUGHT POLICE CAME TO SCHOOL
Drug Abuse Resistance Education better know as D.A.R.E.. I used to see the fucking bumper stickers everywhere, but having little or no contact with school age kids, I didn’t know just how insidious its thought police tactics really were until I lifted this story from reddit.com.
“It must have been in 1987 or so. I was in 2nd grade. the D.A.R.E. officer was paying our class an educational visit. The officer told us of all the evils of drugs, especially marijuana. Weed seemed to be the main focus of the the officer's attention. He was using an overhead projector when he showed us various types of paraphernalia. "If you see a pipe like this, or a clear baggy with this green plant in it, it's marijuana," the officer told us. "If you've seen this before, you should let me know right away so I can make sure no one gets in any trouble," we were told. Then came the next slide, a photo of a marijuana plant. The officer explained to the classroom full of seven year olds, that this was a pesky weed. In fact, usually it just grows wild, with most people never realizing that this highly illegal plant is growing on their property. He asked us if any of us recognized the plant. One boy did, Daniel. When pressed, though, Danny seemed to regret piping up. The cop told him "If you have one of these plants, I need to know so that we can get it out of there before anyone gets in trouble. If there's one in your yard, and you tell us, we'll just remove it and no one will be in any trouble, but if we find it on our own, everyone goes to jail." That's when Danny told the officer about the plants like that in his back yard. That was the last time I ever saw Daniel. A few days later I overheard my parents discussing how his parents had been arrested for growing pot. Now I am 30. I have a son about to turn 10. We have had the "D.A.R.E. talk." Basically, this is the talk explaining to him that what Daddy does at home is Daddy's business, never tell anyone. Now, usually the cops shoot for the 7-8 year old kids so they can get the info before the parents have had time to properly educate their kids about police deception. Teach your kids that the D.A.R.E. officer is not their friend, and that he will lie to you. Tell them this story, like I did. "Don't be a Daniel," I told my son.”
Click here for Uncle Bill
Click here for Uncle Frank
The secret word is Snitch
HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE A VIDEO THAT HAS BEEN RELOADED ONE THOUSAND TIMES?
“This piece explores the 'photocopy effect', where upon repeated copies the object begin to accumulate the idiosyncrasies of the medium doing the copying. Full words: I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice as well as the image of myself, and I am going to upload it to YouTube, rip it from YouTube, and upload it again and again, until the original characteristics of both my voice and my image are destroyed. What you will see and hear, then, are the artifacts inherent in the video codec of both YouTube and the mp4 format I convert it to on my computer. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a digital fact, but more as a way to eliminate all human qualities my speech and image might have.”
This is, of course, also a fairly precise analog of why we get old and die.
Click here for the Dead
Thursday, June 10, 2010
HOLD ON, I’M COMING!
Here at Doc40 we are militantly pro-science, but there are times when science really doesn’t help and causes us to sigh and demand of the vacant air, “How the fuck did they get the funding for that nonsense?” A recent example was when a journal called Archives of Sexual Behavior ran a report called “Evidence to Suggest that Copulatory Vocalizations in Women Are Not a Reflexive Consequence of Orgasm.” As you will see from the following excerpt, the combo of language and sexism manages to do the impossible and make the whole idea of orgasm grimly depressing.
“The current studies were conducted in order to investigate the phenomenon of copulatory vocalizations and their relationship to orgasm in women. Data were collected from 71 sexually active heterosexual women (M age = 21.68 years +/- .52) recruited from the local community through opportunity sampling. The studies revealed that orgasm was most frequently reported by women following self-manipulation of the clitoris, manipulation by the partner, oral sex delivered to the woman by a man, and least frequently during vaginal penetration. More detailed examination of responses during intercourse revealed that, while female orgasms were most commonly experienced during foreplay, copulatory vocalizations were reported to be made most often before and simultaneously with male ejaculation. These data together clearly demonstrate a dissociation of the timing of women experiencing orgasm and making copulatory vocalizations and indicate that there is at least an element of these responses that are under conscious control, providing women with an opportunity to manipulate male behavior to their advantage.”
I am now so fucking old that my memories of being manipulated by vocalized female orgasm are kinda hazy (and were probably hazy back then too.) Fortunately Annalee Newitz takes this dour nonsense apart. Click here.
Click here for Buddy
Click here for Frankie
The secret word is Yes!
SECOND LIVE?
Back in the 20th century I wrote a novel called The Feelies in which virtual reality was presented as a fascist-groove-trap, Darwin-eugenic thing in that those who opted for reality survived and those who immersed themselves in a virtual sensory fantasy died. (After about three months.) Thus, when folks started telling me about Second Life and suggesting I try it, my misgivings were such that I never bothered. Then, this morning, our good friend Some Girl sent me a link to a story in The LA Times about artists doing shows on Second Life, and that really perked my interest, especially the added postscript, “I have to admit, I would love to see how a Mick Farren gig would go down in cyberspace. the avatars alone would rival the Star Wars cantina, methinks.”
A few years ago Andy Colquhoun and I did a live webcast one of our dog-poet guitar and poetry shows. This involved showing up at the club called Spaceland in LA shortly after noon and performing to an empty room for a webcam that relayed our images to an event in the UK, where it was nine in the evening and the audience was waiting. Strange but interesting, and strange but interesting has always been both attractive and one of the names of the game.
Unfortunately the story in The LA Times was so badly written that it gave no real insight into what a Second Life performance might involve. Any worthwhile reporter would have participated in Second Life and described the entire experience. (Hell, I would have – gleefully.) Thus I am researching the possibilities. I figure it must be possible to something more creative than the pitiful stereotypes depicted above. I don’t know if it will come to anything, but investigation is good for the brain. You can click here for the lame story from the Times, and I’d welcome all suggestions, information, thoughts, and offers of help.
Click here for a poor dog-poet
THE FROZDICK FAMILY
Lois Frozdick didn’t know the power of kryptonite and, even after she’d brought down Superman, she didn’t care much either.
Wednesday, June 09, 2010
SMALL SOLUTIONS
The Gulf oil crisis is so doomsday vast that it can seem impossible for an individual to do anything useful, but there are ways. One is to help a single species at a time. In this case, the loggerhead turtle.
“Loggerhead sea turtles were in trouble before the Gulf oil spill disaster. The number of female loggerheads nesting on Florida beaches – one of the most important habitats for the species – has declined by 50 percent in the past decade. Scientists and government officials have sounded the alarm about what this could mean for the future of the ancient sea mariners. The National Marine Fisheries Service is now proposing to upgrade protection for loggerheads from threatened to endangered under the Endangered Species Act. These turtles need our help even more now. The world’s second-largest loggerhead nesting area is on the beaches of the southeastern United States, the vast majority of which includes Florida’s central Atlantic beaches. This area is expected to be threatened by the horrific oil slick, depending on how much of the slick gets picked up by the Loop Current -- a powerful ocean current that could bring the slick around the southern reaches of the state, through the sensitive coral reef and mangrove areas of the Everglades and the Keys, and then into the Gulf Stream and up the east coast of Florida. The spill could not have happened at a worse time: loggerheads and other sea turtles -- as well as many shorebirds -- are in the peak of their nesting seasons right now. Oil is extremely toxic to loggerheads and other species. Exposure can cause skin loss, poisoning, drowning and death… which is exactly why we need every available tool to help save the lives of individual loggerheads and save this species from extinction.” Click here to help.
Click here for The Beatles
The secret word is Lobby
STRANGE DAYGLO
These reproductions of vintage Marvel blacklight posters cost $899 each (no shit!) from a company called Penny Candy (559-226-1397), but at least we can post them on Doc40 for free.
PALIN LIES AGAIN
“With [environmentalists'] nonsensical efforts to lock up safer drilling areas, all you're doing is outsourcing energy development, which makes us more controlled by foreign countries, less safe, and less prosperous on a dirtier planet. Your hypocrisy is showing. You're not preventing environmental hazards; you're outsourcing them and making drilling more dangerous. Extreme deep water drilling is not the preferred choice to meet our country's energy needs, but your protests and lawsuits and lies about onshore and shallow water drilling have locked up safer areas. It's catching up with you. The tragic, unprecedented deep water Gulf oil spill proves it.” (Our pal Bernard sent the quote.)
Click here for The Who
Click here for BP feline disinformation
SPACE OPERA
Click here for Spike Jones. (I suspect the spacesuit is the one worn by Lou Costello in the 1953 movie Abbott & Costello Go To Mars.) Clip from our pal Munz
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
THAT WHICH RETURNS TO HAUNT YOU…
"IT'S AN almost impossible opening sentence. There can't be anyone reading this who needs to be introduced to this record. It is certainly Bob Dylan's finest hour, and there are less than a handful of other works that can seriously challenge it for the title of the greatest rock album of all time. (And it was also, of course, the first serious rock music double-album.) Shortly after the idea of this project came up, a bunch of us were sitting in the pub. All kinds of ideas were thrown about. Pieces of information were laid out on the table. Theories flowed almost as fast as the beer.
Did anyone know that the mono mix was appreciably different? Did Dylan sit up nights in the Chelsea Hotel writing the songs, or was the rumour true that he cobbled it together right there in the CBS studios in Nashville? What was the man's drug consumption at the time?
The speculation and the technical secrets only led to one single ultimate question. Where was Bob Dylan's head at when he put down these tracks? We all know now that that is the question, and we also know it just isn't going to be answered. For ten years there have been books, articles, pamphlets, mimeographed broadsheets, wall graffiti and a million conversations worrying at the question like terriers round a rat.
One of the main problems about approaching Blonde On Blonde after all this time is the temptation to take the whole thing far too reverently. It's become entwined with the experience of so many of us, all the trips, the jagged late nights, the girls, the friends, that it's almost impossible to separate the music from the decade of one's own stacked-up responses. The only profit that could possibly come from the whole exercise would be to pin down what the initial impact was. I looked up some of the contemporary reviews and comments. There was a lot of verbiage about "a contemporary poet", how Dylan "knew", how he was "telling it like it is".The one thing they said nothing about was the music.
This kind of loose talk still goes on today. (Of course, the clichés are new.) It comes trippingly from the pen. Shit, I've done it myself, more times than I care to remember. If Dylan was really "telling it like it is", we'd all know exactly what he was talking about. We wouldn't have been sifting through his symbolism, the rare interviews and even his garbage in the vain attempt to find his particular Rosebud. If we all knew, there wouldn't be any Michael Gray or A. J. Weberman, and everyone could put a precise definition on "The ladies that treat me kindly/and furnish me with tape."
So, if it's not the language that grabs you, maybe it's just the sound that gets you.
Could it be that Blonde On Blonde was one of those records like 'Heartbreak Hotel', 'Cathy's Clown' or 'Tracks Of My Tears' that bypassed the mind and got directly to the hairs on the back of your neck?
Well, Kooper's organ was oft copied, and the combination of guitars, harmonica and keyboard had a definite impact. In things like 'One Of Us Must Know' the ponderously, ascending cathedral chords do, at times, grab me by the gut in non-verbal uplift.
o, for that matter, do some deodorant commercials. If all of Dylan was in his voice and sound, we'd be treating Self Portrait with the same reverence. It ain't just the noise. There's a whole lot more to it than that. When Blonde On Blonde came, out, a lot of us had been with Dylan for some time. It wasn't anything radical and new.
We'd been sticked and carroted progressively into it. We'd followed an observant protest singer away from the externals of society and down a corridor of increasingly unresolved movie images. They had that real dreamlike quality (as opposed to Dali or Hollywood dream sequences) in which things understood gradually become confusing. The dream gave glimpses of heaven, right next door to the hints of nightmare. In a way, Blonde On Blonde was in the pits. It was the deepest shaft rock and roll had ever sunk in its journey to the centre of the psyche. Either consciously or unconsciously, Dylan performed a neat trick. He gave the illusion that through the time space of the double-album, he was finally stripping down his head, turning himself inside out so that we could actually see into the mind of this individual who had been throwing up such tantalising, familiar images.
We bought ourselves a ticket and sat down in the front row. While we watched like geeks, the whole thing was switched on us. We weren't watching Bob Dylan's interior movie. We were seeing a series of distorting mirrors. While trying to puzzle our way through the symbolism we were, in fact, being led through previously uncharted, often suppressed and frequently twisted passages of our own brains.
All Dylan gave us were some complex cat's cradles, uncompromising structural diagrams of the way relationships operate. (Although a lot of people tag Dylan as a social commentator, the great majority of his songs are about personal relationships, not those of society. This holds true for all the songs on Blonde On Blonde. They're love songs, if you like.) We took these relationship sketches and busily fitted them into our own frames of reference. I guess that was where all the trouble started. You've probably noticed how dope fiends claim he's singing about dope, homosexuals tell you they're gay love songs and women know for sure that they're all about women. I even met a paranoid once who claimed that 'Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands' contained the truth about the Kennedy assassination. Everyone fits Dylan into his own framework. Why exactly I'm not sure. Certainly the operation involves a certain amount of self-perception that wasn't quite the rage.
Maybe the response to Dylan at that time, both violent hostility and psychotic adulation, was the audience attempting to come to terms with some of the things they'd stumbled across in their own minds.
So Blonde On Blonde was a giant therapy group?
I had a feeling when this started that it might wind up far fetched. I really did try to keep it on the rails. But...
Anyhow, now I've come to this point we come to another version of the Big Question.
Was Dylan, the therapist, Machiavelli messing with our heads or just an unwilling catalyst? As I said earlier, that's the one we don't get an answer to.
Rosebud.
Blonde On Blonde is a mnemonic for Bob."
The secret word is Infinity
Click here for Bob
Click here for more Bob
Click here for even more Bob
Click here for Syd
BUT SADLY RETURNING TO THE MODERN WORLD…
Back to its doomed birds and unmitigated corporate bastardry. The fight never seems to end.
Click here for Gaga
Monday, June 07, 2010
THE OIL IS BAD ENOUGH BUT THIS IS TEN TIMES WORSE
Barack Obama has advocated three dubious energy solutions. Most recently it was off-shore oil drilling, and we’re still seeing how that one turned out. Before drilling it was clean coal and nuclear. The nuclear really jarred with me at the time, quite undoing my initial delight that we actually had a president that could pronounce the word. Obama declared the modern nuclear power plant was safe, and the old Monty Burns models were a thing of the past. Unfortunately it’s starting to emerge that nuclear power regulation is as much of a corrupt clusterfuck as oil.
“Much like Captain Renault in Casablanca, the White House is suddenly shocked, shocked to find that oil rigs can explode, destroying ecosystems and livelihoods. The Obama administration has backed away from its offshore oil expansion policy in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe as the long-term environmental and economical consequences unfold in the Gulf States. Headlines are clamoring for the criminal investigations of BP, TransOcean, Halliburton and ultimately, the federal regulator, Mineral Management Services (MMS). Rather paradoxically, President Obama is using the oil spill to call for more nuclear power. Yet, with the exception of a handful of insightful political cartoonists, the obvious parallel between the regulatory delinquency of MMS and that of its nuclear equivalent - the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) - and the potential for an equally catastrophic accident in the nuclear sector, has not been drawn. As with the MMS debacle, the NRC is gambling with inevitable disaster with the same spin of the wheel of misfortune and with potentially even higher stakes. Investigations have already revealed that MMS had become too friendly and compliant toward the industry it was supposed to regulate. This hands-off approach proved to be a formula for inevitable disaster. Similarly, the NRC consistently puts the financial motives of the nuclear industry it is supposed to regulate ahead of public safety. In instance after instance, the NRC has chosen not to enforce its own regulations even in the face of repeated reactor safety violations, risking a serious reactor accident while leaving often high-risk safety problems to linger unresolved for decades.” (Click here for the rest)
Click here for Janis
The secret word is Strontium
AND WHILE WE’RE CONTEMPLATING NUKES…
…let’s ponder a bit of dangerous science.
“This is because the uranium is not enriched. A nuclear bomb fueled by uranium releases energy through fission, the breaking apart of an atom. When a neutron hits the nucleus of a uranium atom, the atom breaks apart. The resulting pieces weigh slightly less than the original whole; that weight having been turned into huge amounts of energy. Here's the key – each split nucleus has to release at least two neutrons of its own. They hit other nuclei and start two more reactions, and those atoms release more neutrons and start more reactions. The result is either a steady hum of energy or a big boom, depending on how you work it. Let's face it. If it were that simple, nuclear bombs would have been invented long ago. If there's one thing the internet proves, it's that people will never stop looking for flashy ways to hurt themselves and others. The reason why everything, from the pyramids to the Eiffel Tower aren't reduced to little particles of dust wafting around the upper atmosphere is only very, very rare isotopes of uranium break apart easily enough and give off enough neutrons to sustain a nuclear reaction. The most common uranium isotope is uranium-238, with ninety-two protons and 146 neutrons. It doesn't sustain a reaction. Uranium-235, with 143 neutrons, is the money isotope.” (Click here for more)
Click here for the greatest Boots Randolph tenor solo of all time.
THE FROZDICK FAMILY
Ricky Frozdick became a master of disguise in the days when he was stalking Mick Jagger.
Sunday, June 06, 2010
SUNDAY BREAKFAST
Click here for Eileen Barton
The secret word is Decepticon
AVIAN GANG ACTION
(Drawing by the late and still lamented Edward Barker)
Click here for Steeleye Span
Saturday, June 05, 2010
“THOMAS KINKADE IS A DEADBEAT”
The business practices of Thomas Kinkade – the massively successful painter of Christian-kitsch cottages – are coming under serious scrutiny as one of his companies goes belly up. This comes on top of long buzzing rumors about his connections with World Vision, a supposedly evangelical aid organisation that the paranoid conspiracy community has suspected for decades of being a CIA front operation with ties to brainwashing and the 1978 Jonestown massacre.
“One of Thomas Kinkade's companies filed for bankruptcy protection Wednesday, a day after a $1-million payment was due to former gallery owners who have tried for four years to collect on a judgment they won against the self-styled "painter of light." The Chapter 11 petition was filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in San Jose in the name of the Kinkade production arm, Pacific Metro of Morgan Hill, Calif. It allows Pacific Metro to reorganize and puts an automatic stay on the collection of all judgments, including one for $3 million owed to Karen Hazlewood and Jeff Spinello. "Kinkade is a … deadbeat," said their lawyer, Norman Yatooma, who accused the artist and his Los Angeles attorney, Dana Levitt, of "breaching their agreement" to pay up. "Kinkade's word is as worthless as his artwork. His lawyer is no better." (Click here for more)
Click here for Joe Brown
The secret word is Saccharine
“BLUE LAGOON”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
.JPG)
