“Okay, so
what diid you bring the birthday girl?
Saturday, June 01, 2013
Friday, May 31, 2013
JACKBOOT STOMP
It had to happen. Hard times
create resentment and resent makes stormtroopers. From Germany to Greece the
far right is on the march with recession and austerity stirring the political
pot. Anti-immigrant feeling is running high - and such parties are scoring
electoral victories, alongside a sharp rise in racist and anti-Semitic attacks.
In Bulgaria, the far right Ataka party has gone from obscurity to almost eight
per cent of the vote and now holds the balance of power. One of the most
successful parties of its kind is in Hungary. Jobbik are anti-European,
anti-Semitic and anti-Roma, and have thrived since the financial crisis. Of
course it’s a scapegoat ploy, and a well-known capitalist smokescreen, BUT the
bodycount runs into the ten tens of millions once the ubermenschen get rolling.
But don’t
let us forget the last lines of Bertolt Brecht’s play The Resistible
Rise of Arturo Ui that are also aptly quoted at the
end of Sam Peckinpah’s Cross Of Iron…
“Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the
world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat
again.”
Click here for Gun Club
The secret
word is Bullyboy
FRED NIETZSCHE LEAPS CONCEPTS IN A SINGLE BOUND
"What
if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have
as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other ...
you have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in
brief... or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an
abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet? If
you decide for the former and desire to diminish and lower the level of human
pain, you also have to diminish and lower the level of their capacity for joy.”
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
COULD WE POST THIS ON FACE BOOK?
I have been
giving a good deal of though of late to my future use of the internet. Times a’
change, and in my own neo-retro pipe-and Jack-Daniels manner I try to keep up
with them and lend a hand when I can. Before, however, I fall to rumination, I
first owe a lot of people an apology (and not for the fishnet lady with the
rifle on Facebook that seems to have upset some folks.) For years now I never
responded to invitations to join Linked-In or similar social and contact
networks and now we have Google Plus that I have yet to understand except it
seems to want us to form circles. I don’t respond because, quite a while ago I
had made a firm decision to limit my use of the internet to Doc40, my long
running blog and my Facebook page. For a long time, they worked in tandem but
lately I’ve been finding that, on the short attention level, so much more can
be done in an instant on FB. It’s simply faster and more flexible and it’s
netted in with just about everything else and saves me hours of cutting and
pasting and converting bloody fonts and taking care of the all the little
glitches to which Blogger is heir. A part of me says fold up Doc40 and dance
solo on FB. And then I look up to the top of this blogpost. Am I going to risk
toppling the edifice by trying to post the steam punk fucking machine on
Facebook. I don’t think so. Also my FB page is full I’m limited to 5000 and
that’s seem very unfair, red rope, one-out one-in elitism. So Doc40 must stay,
but maybe with a newly evolving role. While still carrying The Frozdicks,
Marilyn, Gratuitous, the Paperback Classics, Space Opera, and The Secret Word,
we become more surreal and (in a word) deviant. Doc40 already slapped a Content
Warning on it. We’ve been branded offensive so let’s get down-home old-timey
offensive. Facebook gets the urgent links and stuff like the kettle that looks
like Hitler, and down here in the blog we get dark, degenerate, and maybe
dangerous. Deal?
Click herefor the Deviants a couple of nights ago. (My vanity thinks I look lousy.)
The secret
word is Gynandromorphophilie
Monday, May 20, 2013
ELVIS FIGHTS OFF THE ZOMBIES OF CORPORATE CAPITALISM
Well, actually
no. Not quite. Elvis is long dead and the Zombies of Corporate Capitalism have
us by the global balls. This is a reprint of one of those angry diatribes by our pal
Chris Hedges that we have made a regular feature on Doc40. Here’s an excerpt.
Do read the rest.
“Corporations write our
legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political
theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have
turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have
decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as
having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of
workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform—the primary
role of liberal, democratic institutions—we are left defenseless against
corporate power.” (Click here for the rest)
Click here
for Trouble
The secret
word is Uprising
Thursday, May 16, 2013
FAME AT LAST
Russell
Hunter (the Deviants drummer) has emailed me yesterday
“Wandering under the Westway on Sunday, we discovered this.
You are first in line on the Portobello Road Wall of Rock'n'Roll
Fame! (At least a third of the others are dead, so you're also
ahead on that score.)” Which I though was pretty fucking
cool!
The secret word is Bask
CORPORATE GLOBAL GIVES NOTHING FOR NOTHING
I had long
assumed Henry Ford started paying his workers reasonably well so they could
consume the cars they were making. (And the UAW played it’s part.) But
seemingly this was not so….
“To build cars
cheaply enough for the average person to buy, Henry Ford had to redesign the
assembly line according to the dictates of Frederick Taylor, breaking down each
task into its simplest components so that each worker was responsible for a
single task that could be repeated all day with a minimum of wasted motion and
time. This proved so dehumanizing that turnover skyrocketed to 350 percent. To
counteract this, Ford doubled his wages. This paradox of rote work and high
wages ushered in the beginnings of the great American urban middle class:
"Ford's
assembly line and his production techniques in general were exemplars of
'scientific management,' a phrase and approach made popular by Philadelphia
engineer and businessman Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor was one of the
nation's first specialists in shop-floor management, and his short book The Principles of Scientific
Management was the
best-selling business book of the first half of the twentieth century. Taylor
believed that workplaces could be made more efficient by training, inducing,
and compelling workers to labor more steadily and intensively. He conducted
time and motion studies to analyze the tasks workers were expected to perform
and then encouraged employers to reorganize the work process to minimize wasted
motion and time. He also favored piece-rate payment schemes to compel
employees, many of whom he described as 'stupid,' to work more quickly. 'Faster
work can be assured,' wrote Taylor, 'only through enforced standardization of
methods, enforced adoption of the best implements ... and enforced
cooperation.'
"Not surprisingly, most industrial workers resisted such schemes. One worker at the Ford Motor Company complained that 'when the whistle blows he starts to jerk and when the whistle blows again he stops jerking.' At Ford and elsewhere, a common response to the brutal intensification of work was absenteeism and high quit rates: in 1913, Ford's daily absentee rate was 10 percent, while annual turnover exceeded 350 percent. To reduce turnover, which was costly to the company, Ford doubled the daily wages of his most valued employees, to five dollars a day. This strategy was successful in stabilizing the labor force and reducing operating costs." Pauline Maier, Merritt Roe Smith, Alexander Keyssar, and Daniel J. Kevles – Inventing Americ (Norton)
"Not surprisingly, most industrial workers resisted such schemes. One worker at the Ford Motor Company complained that 'when the whistle blows he starts to jerk and when the whistle blows again he stops jerking.' At Ford and elsewhere, a common response to the brutal intensification of work was absenteeism and high quit rates: in 1913, Ford's daily absentee rate was 10 percent, while annual turnover exceeded 350 percent. To reduce turnover, which was costly to the company, Ford doubled the daily wages of his most valued employees, to five dollars a day. This strategy was successful in stabilizing the labor force and reducing operating costs." Pauline Maier, Merritt Roe Smith, Alexander Keyssar, and Daniel J. Kevles – Inventing Americ (Norton)
Click here for
the Captain of Industry
.jpg)
Sunday, May 12, 2013
SUNDAY BREAKFAST
Okay, so
let’s neck down two or three of these here margaritas and get going!
Click here for the Rolling Stones
The secret
word is Tequila
WE’RE FUCKED #397
We reached the 400 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 on
Thursday—a first in human history—marking "a moment of symbolic
significance on road of idiocy" Reaching this threshold level represents a
global failure to deal with runaway greenhouse gas emissions; as Al Gore wrote today, it shows "we
are reaping the consequences of our recklessness."
“George Monbiot in The Guardian slams the 400 ppm mark as
"a moment of symbolic significance on road of idiocy." The problem is
the overarching power of fossil fuel companies, he writes. The problem is
simply stated: the power of the fossil fuel companies is too great. Among those
who seek and obtain high office are people characterised by a complete absence
of empathy or scruples, who will take money or instructions from any
corporation or billionaire who offers them, and then defend those interests
against the current and future prospects of humanity.” Click here for more.
Thursday, May 09, 2013
IT’S HERE…
The affordably priced, large
format paperback, of my greatest hits is now on sale. The blurb says…
"Mick Farren has spent more
than four decades in the thick of the culture wars as a commentator, activist,
essayist, poet and performer. Being a founding figure in the 1960s underground
press, who was forced to defend his work at The Old Bailey, might well be
sufficient laurels on which to rest, but, instead, he careered on through the
London birth pangs of punk, the intoxicated madness of Lower Manhattan under
Ronald Reagan, plus earthquakes and urban insurrection in Los Angeles. Here he
shares some of his greatest stories with some of rock's most iconic people."
And, if you don’t believe the
blurb, here are some clips of me reading short snatches of the book. Sadly I
look like a bit of a chubby bastard and my vanity is not happy. It’s a bit of a
bad angle and I was also on steroids at the time for my lousy cigarette-damaged
lungs.
Click here for the video
Click here
to buy or browse.
The secret
work is Fortune
THEY DON’T CALL IT DOPE FOR NOTHING
According to St. Petersburg police, 34-year-old Jarvis
Sutton of St. Petersburg, Florida, called 911 approximately 80 times on Sunday
for some Kool-Aid, weed and burgers to be delivered to him. Sutton admitted to
making the calls. When the cops arrested him, he actually started to gnaw on
“the foam attached to the metal caging in the back of a police cruiser.”
Tuesday, May 07, 2013
A TASTE OF NUCLEAR NOSTALGIA
I don’t
know if this tale from Dangerous Minds is true but it’s a great story that I’ve
heard in one form or another since I was a pre-teen waiting for the final
warning. (And if Iran or Israel get stuck in we may be going through it all again.)
"Here’s a little quiz for you: What’s the less obvious message
this fallout shelter sign communicated to early-to-mid-60s Jazz musicians and
Beatniks? Psst, it has very little to do
with the Cold War…That’s right, to more bohemian types, these once
familiar signs were a loud and clear dog whistle that there were very likely government-issued
narcotics, free for the taking, inside that building. I come from a family that
includes professional musicians, and so I had heard of this “legend.” Is it
true?
Back in the 60s and even into the 70s, we all wondered not
if we’d die in a nuclear holocaust, but when. With both Soviet as well as
American nuclear arsenals pointed at each other, a loud sneeze by Dr Strangelove could
set everything off and then, before you know it, those of us unlucky
enough to survive would all be plunged into the middle of nuclear winter a la
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road." (Click here for the whole story.)
Click here for The Who of mass destruction
The secret word is Megaton
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
.JPG)
