The media constantly prove themselves such suckers for the combination of death, Hollywood, and the 20th century. This week MSNBC felt the need to drag out poor, 72 year-old Charlie Manson as the personification of psychedelic evil in a show luridly titled The Mind Of Manson. They didn’t even bother to wait until some kind of anniversary or parole hearing. In the interview segment, Charlie made the point that he was the squares’ scapegoat for all the stuff they hated and feared about the 1960s. And, to a degree, I have to sympathize with the guy. Beside Pol Pot, Charlie was a rank amateur. Click for some of Charlie’s recent rantings that MSNBC didn’t get. (By the way, Charlie will be next considered for parole in 2012. One more factor for a year already gathering unhealthy significance.)
Meanwhile, in this week’s LA CityBeat, my media column is all about the mass attempts to subvert Wikipedia and names the guilty.
The secret words plainly have to be Helter and Skelter
SURPRISE! This has to the Web Toy of the Week! (Thanks some girl)
Mind deadened to a dull ach by the same layer of motionless heat, power blackouts, dull dissatisfaction, and, other scenarios shopping themselves in Hollywood as prequels to the apocalypse or beasts caged in the heart of the city (they should be so lucky) I offer nothing except a clip from Doug the Bass demonstrating just how barking crazy Ted Nugget really is and how he should be put out of his misery with one of his own guns.
The secret word is Craving
The translation is “Anarchist books are arms against fascism” (Thank you Valerie.) Which I allow to reassure me that I am not a fraud, because all I do is write or rant about the fight for what I fondly define as liberty. And also, with its Spanish Civil war !No pasaran! romance, the poster totally shames me into renewing my belief that the struggle will continue – must continue – no matter how distracted or diluted it may have become, because, very simply, this planet could be a fucking paradise if we would simply stop abusing and exploiting it and each other.
The secret words are If Only
And here’s the Clash doing “Spanish Bombs” – trite perhaps, but at least Joe always meant it.
Here’s another Julian Beever (the English artist famous for his chalk art on the pavements of England, France, Germany, USA, Australia and Belgium – see last Wednesday.) A crowd gathers around the archeological illusion. (From HCB)
Doug the Bass sends over this was an 'off the cuff' response by Brother Noam Chomsky, during a public talk, to an audience interruption asking "...what are you talking about? Fascism? Anarchy? Define your terms."
"Fascism is a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership togetherwith a belligerent nationalism."
"Anarchism is not just a romantic fable but the hard-headed realization, based on 5000 years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners. It is founded on the observation that since few people are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to ruleothers."
The secret word is Hope
(And, of yeah, Andy and I had a pretty satisfying show last night – mainly thanks to Francine.)
I don’t know if it’s an omen, good or bad or what, but Ronald Reagan keeps popping up all over. Here he is with James Dean on the cover of the new Radiators From Space CD. It was sent over by Miss Templeton who explains its provenance. (But beware. There’s more Reagan to come.)
"It's from a 1952 TV playhouse thing in which Dean is rather good as a drunken beatnik and Reagan is, well, Reagan as a Doctor who has been held hostage by Dean until he can fix up his friend who is badly wounded - they can't go to a hospital because the wounds occurred in the course of a robbery or whatever. It's called "The Dark Dark Hours" and is mostly rubbish, Dean's fascinating hep-talking beatnik excepted. Classic network cheese. A black/white simplistic moral situation, decent society vs degenerate 'other' and then everyone's perennial favorite: guns. It wouldn't be more than a footnote in either actor's history, except that one of them became the President of the United States at the time when the national Chevrolet was taking a hard turn to the right. And the other become the international icon of that streak of raw American rebellion that's always there and ready and doesn't even need to wait for a cause."
The secret words are Republicans Caught In The Men’s Room
(AND DON’T FORGET I’LL BE PLAYING LIVE TOMORROW. SEE MONDAY’S POST FOR DETAILS)
Can’t write anything profound, insightful or even just plain silly today since I am contending with the deadline from Black Lagoon. I can, however, offer you a free download (if you can follow the directions, which I’m not sure I can) of Gringo Madness by Tijuana Bible. Tijuana Bible consisted of Henry Beck, John Collins and me, and was a minimalist, highly poetic, Manhattan anti-folk, unplugged kinda endeavor that played live in the saloons of the Lower East Side in the late 1980s and reconvened on a snowy weekend on 9th Avenue to cut this epic around the time Bill Clinton was getting elected president.
Hurricane Dean (for James Dean, Dean Stockwell, Dean Moriarty?*)didn’t hit any major population centers or wreck a city, and blew out leaving comparatively few deaths and less than total devastation. It was, though, at one point in its evolution, a monster Category Five, more powerful that Katrina, and also a week earlier in the season. For facts and figures check Chris Mooney in yesterday’s HuffPo, who makes the case that Dean may not be a symptom of a disintegrating global weather system, but it sure as hell could be.
*Original joke from HCB.
The secret word is Rising
PLUS
In this week’s edition of LA CityBeat, I make a stunningly plausible case for how another fourteen some months of this no-limit, no-quarter, no-prisoners presidential electioneering may reduce us all to drooling mental cases
I fear even we at Doc 40 suffer from the same deplorable short attention span as our brethren in TV and print. One day a story is red hot, but the next it is lining the proverbial canary cage, as was pointed out on the credits of Lou Grant. (Who among you remember Lou Grant?) A few months ago we were beside ourselves about the bees, citing Einstein, expecting Gotterdammerung, pretty much every panic response short of quoting Latin. Now all is silence. The bee story is on hiatus. But has anyone any new information, observation or rumor? If so, let’s hear it.
The secret word is Buzz
In the meantime, here is some Latin, call it a CRYPTIQUE SPECIAL…
Dies irae, dies illa solvet saeclum in favilla (The day of wrath, that day which will reduce the world to ashes.)
(Pic and motivation from Valerie)
Artist Till Novak constructed this produce masterpiece, the Alien made entirely out of vegetables as his tribute to H. R. Giger and Giuseppe Arcimboldo. (lifted from boing boing)
For a while, our Dutch pals the Buggers seemed to be laying low, but then, back at the end of July the came through with new position, and now, suddenly, here’s another one about money and banking.
BUGGER POSITION #18
Normally speaking we would not give a rat's arse about the current bank crisis. Let banks sort out their own mess. We don't care for their dog-eat-dog world. But there are a couple of aspects of the current bank crisis which make it even more unsavoury than usual. In the first place, of course, the fact that the crisis has its origin in rip-offs of people whohave next to nothing. The subprime mortgages given out by American banks, which lie at the root of the crisis, cheat people without means out of what income and possessions they have. First the banks take their money through high interest rates and then, when the money has gone, they take possession of their homes. As long as the prices of houses are on the rise, there is no risk involved for the mortgager: the lender ends up with the borrower's money and house, which by then is worth more than the value it has beenmortgaged for. That is why subprime mortgages have always been lucrative deals for lenders. And that is how unscrupulous businessmen like Roland Arnall have made a fortune. A fortune that enabled him to buy himself the position of US ambassador of The Netherlands on the one hand and to buy off criminal prosecution on the other. A rat like that ought to have a price put on his head, or arse, if you think that part of the body will make a better investment.
A consequence of the subprime mortgages is that people are either forced to sell their homes at relatively low prices or that banks take possession of them and auction them. This rising amount of relatively cheap houses unsettled the already inflated housing market in the USA. When a couple of years ago the US housing market collapsed and the value of houses dropped, a crisis began to take shape. Subprime mortgages no longer guaranteed profit for the mortgagers, debts turned bad. Big banks and wholesale lenders had bought the debts from mortgagers when they were still considered profitable, repackaged them and sold them to Wall Street firms. These Wall Street banks and investment companies had further repackaged these debts and sold them to pension funds, hedge funds and institutions all over the world. So, once the debts of people with low incomes in the US had turned bad, the system was infected on a global scale. Some banks and funds suddenly faced huge financial losses, others became distrustful of making investments or granting loans to fellow-banks and funds. What is called a "credit crunch" is actually a flare of paranoia all around the dog-eat-dog world. Paranoia is inherent to this world. But it is ironical that failed rip-offs of the poor should kindle it. There is a sense of justice in this backfire. It is a cliché but in this case an appropriate one: "Dog" spelled backwards reads "God". The past few weeks central banks all around the world have injected huge sums of money into the financial world to ease the paranoia. With private banks distrustful of one another and unwilling to make investments or give out loans - except against high interest rates - the financial crisis was beginning to spread to other areas of the economy: the shares of companies that do business with borrowed money dropped in value and stock marketsaround the world plunged. Today the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the USA, announced that it has lowered its interest rate with 0,5 percent. No doubt, other central banks will soon follow. Now when central banks start to intervene, the public should be wary. Central banks, the monetary institutes of our governments, can only produce money and grant loans at low interest rates at the cost of inflation. Thus, the trick by which the financial losses of mortgage banks and investors are being compensated by their big brothers, the central banks, is called INFLATION: they simply decrease thevalue of our money. In the end the bugger in the street will pay the bill. Fuck a duck! There is no god after all. There are only dogs and rats.
The secret word is Loot (as in the profit of theft)
When Munz sent over this piece from The Guardian in London, I kinda groaned. Another fucking dissection of 1967? But this one seems to be fairly balanced, and attempts to place the counter-culture in a much broader social context. And the writer quotes me, so it can’t all be bad. For those unfamiliar with the history, Tom McGrath was the first editor of the UK underground paper IT. After IT’s first obscenity bust, Tom took it on the lam, and the paper was taken over by an ad hoc collective of which I was the most vocal and loaded. (I’m posting the story in full because the link has run out.)
SUMMER OF LOVE: The hippies were the most extreme example of a much broader movement transforming Britain into a relatively permissive society.
by Marcus Collins August 9, 2007
In March 1967 Tom McGrath, the editor of the leading countercultural newspaper, IT, sought to describe "the revolution [that] has taken place within the minds of the young" on the eve of the Summer of Love.
He identified its core as permissiveness: the notion that "the individual should be free from hindrances by external law or internal guilt in his pursuit of pleasure so long as he does not impinge on others". He was right, for "doing your own thing" became an articleof faith among his fellow hippies in the 1960s and beyond. Yet, for all their attempts to distance themselves from "squares" and The System, hippies were simply the most extreme example of a much broader movement transforming Britain into a relatively permissive society.
The legal restraints to which McGrath referred had been undergoing wholesale reform during the previous decade, transforming the relationship between state, society and individual. Print censorship was relaxed in 1959 and that of drama in 1968. Citizens won the right to take their own lives in 1961 and murderers got to keep theirs after 1965. Off-course betting became legal in 1960, as did abortion and male homosexuality in limited fashion in 1967. The National Health Service (Family Planning) Act of the same year extended access to contraception regardless of marital status, while the Divorce Reform Act passed two years later dissolved marriages that had undergone "irretrievable breakdown" after two years in consensual cases and five years in contested ones.
The liberalisation of the law was only one facet of permissiveness in 1960s Britain. McGrath's disavowal of "internal guilt" shows how those affected by legal change were no passive recipients of civil liberties. The radical theologian, Douglas Rhymes, duly urged his readers in 1964 to overcome both their guilt and any deference to "priest, Church, politician or parent" when making moral choices. Advocates of permissiveness equated individualism with iconoclasm, described by McGrath as a rejection of leaders and by George Melly (who died last month) as a "cool refusal to pay homage to traditiona bogeymen and shibboleths". Disdain for convention sat uneasily with the pluralistic dimensions of permissiveness. McGrath commended the "international, inter-racial, equisexual" dimensions of the "alternative society", while the anarchist hippie Mick Farren stated that "each and every individual has unique needs and desires that areentirely his own".Permissiveness encouraged people to express and satisfy these desires. McGrath urged everyone to follow their "inner voice in the most honest way possible", gays "came out" and the future politician and perjurer Jonathan Aitken incongruously applauded his generation's "remarkable frankness" in 1967. Self-expression often took creative forms such as the "wild new clothes" and "strange new music sounds" that caught McGrath's attention. The past decade or so had witnessed a cultural efflorescence that rid Britain of its frumpy image. A country producing the Beatles and the Stones, Mary Quant and VidalSassoon, Biba and Habitat soon lost its inferiority complex. Equally significant was the manner in which British culture challenged existing aesthetic standards. It was no longer self-evident that high culture was superior to popular culture or, indeed, how each termshould be defined. British icons likewise redefined female beauty (Twiggy), male beauty (Mick Jagger), artistry (Lennon and McCartney) and heroism (James Bond). Tom McGrath's championing of "the individual's right to pleasure (orgasm)" points to the bond between permissiveness and the sexual revolution. Britain overcame its reputation for prudery by conducting a carnivalesque breaking of taboos in the 1960s. The first C-word in a paperback (1960), the first F-word on air (1965), the first drug reference in a Beatles song (1965) and the first full-frontal centrefold in a soft-core magazine (1971) could be taken to signify liberation or merely titillation, but either way they indicated a weakening of controls. While this process was furthered by the relaxation of censorship, contrary attempts to restore public decency often achieved the same effect. The prosecution of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 made it a bestseller; Christine Keeler's nude bodybecame the defining image of the Profumo Affair of 1963 and Marianne Faithfull served the same role in the 1967 Redlands drugs trial.
The primacy given to freedom, pleasure and sexuality necessitated a rethink of morality and religion, leading McGrath to write of a "new spiritual movement". Some defined the "New Morality" in terms of the abolition of prohibitions; others toyed with moral relativism. The famously liberal Bishop of Woolwich preferred to restructure Christianity around a situational ethics in which "nothing can of itself always be labelled as 'wrong'." But for humanists, permissiveness was inseparable from a process of secularisation thattook off in the 1960s and continues to this day.
McGrath's utopianism became painfully unfashionable once the 1960s gave way to the 1970s and the Summer of Love to the Winter of Discontent. But 40 years later, his vision of a Britain embracing freedom, individualism, iconoclasm, pluralism, openness, pleasure, creativity and a post-Christian morality seems almost prophetic. Britain is now a more permissive society than it has ever been, and hippies deserve their due for assisting in its creation.
The secret words are Oh Wow
Which is actually a lame excuse for being, with LA in the nineties, too burned to even think let alone come up with a witty, thought provoking, revolutionary blog entry.
The secret word is Fried
Max Roach -- RIP
Elvis with Little Junior Parker and Bobby Bland
Elvis Presley died thirty years ago today. I think we can all accept by now that he’s not hiding out in Hawaii under the name John Burroughs. I have written so much about Elvis down the years I have little left to say. Why don’t we just let the performances be the tribute? Here are three tunes from three essential peaks in the man’s career – “Heartbreak Hotel”, “Jailhouse Rock”, and “In The Ghetto.”
We can, however, mark the occasion by laying to rest an unpleasant rumor that been circulating for a half century that claims Elvis once remarked “The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes.” The evidence seems to have finally been amassed that this was an early piece of anti-Presley, anti-rock disinformation.
The secret word is Left
It’s hot here at the night computer, and the wee hours could grow depressing, so why not a picture of Liz when she was hot and not in the least depressing? (Also I think the time is right.)
This is another theft from Tom Sutpen. I just can’t help myself.
Meanwhile Sky passes along this frightening report that, if this is some asshole’s computer simulation, it is managed worse than the real world.
"The oxygen-poor "dead zone" off the Louisiana and Texas coasts isn't quite as big as predicted this year, but it is still the third-largest ever mapped, a scientist said Saturday. Crabs, eels and other creatures usually found on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico are swimming in crowds on the surface because there is too little oxygen in their usual habitat, said Nancy Rabalais, chief scientist for northern Gulf hypoxia studies. "We very often see swarms of crabs, mostly blue crabs and their close relatives, swimming at the surface when the oxygen is low," she wrote in an e-mail from a research ship as it returned to Cocodrie from its annual measurement trip. Eels, which live in sediments 60 to 70 feet below the water surface, are an even less common sight, she said. The 7,900-square-mile area with almost no oxygen, a condition called hypoxia, is about the size of Connecticut and Delaware together. The Louisiana-Texas dead zone is the world's second-largest hypoxic area, she said." (For more)
"It was a dirty job, but Rove liked to do it."
When I read news (oh boy) I flatly didn’t believe it. “Karl Rove, President Bush's close friend and chief political strategist, announced Monday he will leave the White House at the end of August. On board with Bush since the beginning of his political career in Texas, Rove was nicknamed "the architect" and "boy genius" by the president for designing the strategy that twice won him the White House. Critics call Rove "Bush's brain." Yeah right, that sonofabitch, known to his boss as Turd Blossom, is about as likely to ride quietly off into the sunset as Sauron would be to trade the Dark Tower for a Florida timeshare. So what’s the deal here? Is he bailing ahead of subpoenas and even indictments? R. J. Eskow in HuffPo today seemed to be of that opinion…
“Rove is facing a Congressional subpoena. And let's not forget his role in the Libby scandal. In what was probably a public threat/negotiating ploy, Libby's lawyers threatened to submit evidence that Scooter's actions were part of a broader criminal plot to protect Rove. It apparently worked, since they suddenly reversed themselves and offered only a token defense. Then, in what was an extraordinary exception even for cases of Presidential pardons, Scooter never served even a single day in jail. Funny, that. So Rove is either leaving now because a) he wants to write that book, b) he wants to spend more time with his family, c) he thinks this will lower the pressure to have him testify before Congress, d) somebody said "we'll fix it with Scooter but when the heat dies down you have to leave town," e) all of the above, or f) there's something else going on we may never know.”
But then again I wonder. I could easily see him trolling the slime trails of the Republican primaries whoring out as a kingmaker-for-hire figuring which wannabe might have a prayer in this shambles of America that Rove helped create. This evil motherfucker is about the most wholly amoral political manipulator since Joseph Goebbels. This is the bastard who ran the Bush 2004 election on insinuation and homophobia, and I’m telling you, citizens, we do not, for a moment, want to turn our collective back on this very dangerous, slithering scumsucker.
The secret word is Wormtongue
(But check this video clip Noudela just sent in which Rove jokes about being president.)
The article was about a proposed new skyscraper in San Francisco, taller than the Trans America Pyramid, but the illustration jumped out at me so hard I had to steal and post it. A symbolic landscape I know from my nightmares, and, for all of my days, have been doing my damnedest to fight. And yet it still encroaches, like the bumper sticker “Frodo Failed – Dick Cheney Got The Ring”. But my sword is still dully gleams, my staff is not broken although I may lean a little more heavily upon it, and sometimes in the night, I long for the Grey Havens, and some rest and respite, and yet we have to go on. No choice in the matter.
The secret word is Nazgûl
But, neighbor , what better antidote, short of pharmaceuticals, for this pre-dawn desperation than Buddy Holly!
This story headed “Eight-million-year-old bug is alive and growing” culled by HCB from the New Scientist strikes me as a really bad idea. So bad in fact, that the H. P. Lovecraft, Yog-Sothoth crowd are waiting for something really nasty to happen should it happen to get loose.
An 8-million-year-old bacterium that was extracted from the oldest known ice on Earth is now growing in a laboratory, claim researchers. If confirmed, this means ancient bacteria and viruses will come back to life as ice melts due to global warming. This is nothing to worry about, say experts, because the process has been going on for billions of years and the bugs are unlikely to cause human disease. Kay Bidle of Rutgers University in New Jersey, US, and his colleagues extracted DNA and bacteria from ice found between 3 and 5 metres beneath the surface of a glacier in the Beacon and Mullins valleys of Antarctica. The ice gets older as it flows down the valleys and the researchers took five samples that were between 100,000 and 8 million years old. (For more…)
The secret word is Telluric
But after all this grim shit, here are a whole bunch of optical illusions to mess with when stoned.
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