Portland’s AU may look the part (They resemble the cast of “The Life Aquatic”), but their gorgeous music transcends any easily pegged and unfunnily satired stereotype. I’m hearing shades of Magma and Henry Cow in this powerfully rocking art music. How nice it is to say that and mean it !  Check out the fiery momentum of the beautifully captured live performance below. Certainly went well beyond my (already high) expectations. An LP is due in April on the always sterling Hometapes.
 

Feels Like Home Ep 44 - AU “Solid Gold” from Into The Woods on Vimeo.

 
In a Mother Jones piece that is starting to gain traction across the liberal blogsphere today, Josh Harkinson writes about the Occupy the SEC group that includes “financial insiders with the education and regulatory vocabulary to challenge high-powered lobbyists at their own game.”

Yesterday, a group affiliated with Occupy Wall Street submitted an astounding comment letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Point by point, it methodically challenges the arguments of finance industry lobbyists who want to water down last year’s historic Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms. The lobbyists have been using the law’s official public comment period to try to kneecap the reforms, and given how arcane financial regulation can be, they might get away with it. But Occupy the SEC is fighting fire with fire, and in so doing, defying stereotypes of the Occupy movement.

The financial industry is trying desperately to wriggle out of the controls that Dodd-Frank imposed on them. Occupy the SEC, a very, very smart bunch of current and former financial industry executives weigh in with critiques and suggestions concerning the government’s implementation of the “Volcker Rule” that limits the kind of derivative packaging that caused the financial meltdown. Since the meltdown, Goldman Sachs has been trying to get their little grubby hands back on the money faucet.  They’re spending Romney-type money on lobbyists, including hiring Barney Frank’s former staffer that got the reforms passed to help overturn those very reforms!

The most common complaint about the Occupy movement is that it does not present a clear and coherent position.

This 324-page letter blows that contention sky-high.

“Occupy the SEC is a group of concerned citizens, activists, and financial professionals with decades of collective experience working at many of the largest financial firms in the industry. Together, we make up a vast array of specialists, including traders, quantitative analysts, compliance officers, and technology and risk analysts. Like much of the 99%, we have bank deposits and retirement accounts that are in need of protection through vigorous enforcement of the Volcker Rule. Our experiences working inside the financial industry have informed our answers to the questions proposed, making us well-suited to understand and anticipate how the proposed implementation, should it stand, will affect us and the rest of the general public.

The United States aspires to democracy, but no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power…”

That last sentence should be the first line of the Declaration of Independence 2.0

Here’s the best mainstream overview, from TIME. If you read between the lines—and the wipe off its condescension—the truth appears… which is that the fuckers at Goldman Sachs and the champagne drinking overlords on Wall Street are being countered by experienced folks who know the financial industry grimoire inside and out.

Meet the Financial Wizards Working With Occupy Wall Street (Mother Jones)

 
Meet the Dynasphere or “Jumbo”, as it was also known, a “one wheel, 4-seater” devised by a Dr. J. A. Purves in 1932. The Dynasphere had a 2.5 horsepower and could reach speeds of up to 25 miles per hour, it was “an invention of spherical motion” intended to one day revolutionize transportation. For some reason it never caught on, though Mr. Garrison tried something similar with his “gyroscope-powered monowheel” in the cartoon series South Park.

View photos of Dynasphere testing on Weston beach here.
 

 
Via British Pathe
 

 
The Jackson 5 team-up with One Day at a Time’s MacKenzie Phillips for a horrific version of “Junk Food Junkie,” a 1976 novelty song by Larry Groce.

To even attempt a snarky comment here would be pointless, indeed!
 

 
Thank you to America’s #1 funnyman, Neil Hamburger, for this gem/turd

Nature or Nurture (detail)
 

Nature or Nurture
 
Much like artists’ renditions of Bigfoot sightings, apparently there are gimps hiding in the forests too and San Francisco-based artist Chris Elzinga wants to tell you all about it through “Gimpressionism.” Yes, you heard me correctly…“Gimpressionism. “

Paintings are available for purchase here.
 

Birch, Please (detail)
 

Birch, Please
 
More Gimpressionism after the jump…

 
Tofugu posted these curious images from an Edo period (1603 to 1868) Japanese scroll depicting what is called he-gassen or “farting competition.” The images show people happily expelling their gasses at cats, horses and even at each other. Apparently no one is safe from he-gassen.

According to the website Naruhodo, “similar drawings were used to ridicule westerners towards the end of the Edo period, with images depicting the westerners blown away by Japanese farts.”

For whatever reason, Tofugu chose to post censored images (black boxes over the naughty bits) on their site. I went ahead and captured a few choice pics from the scroll (naughty bits included) from the Japanese and Chinese classics at Waseda University Library which you can view there in its entirety.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Taking a page from Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? which re-dubbed humorous dialogue over a Japanese spy movie to make the plot about a recipe for a egg salad, René Viénet’s 1973 film Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (“La Dialectique Peut-Elle Casser Des Briques?”) did the same sort of thing, but here the cinematic Situationist provocateur is less out for laughs (although there are plenty of them) and more about the political subversion.

The raw material for Viénet’s détournement is a 1972 Hong Kong kung fu flick titled The Crush (唐手跆拳道) directed by Tu Guangqi. In Viénet’s hands, the movie was turned into a critique of class conflicts, bureaucratic socialism, the failures of the French Communist Party, Maoism, cultural hegemony, sexual equality and the way movies prop up Capitalist ideology, all in a manner that would turn such a product against itself, using Situationist aphorisms, arguments and in-jokes.
 

 
Below, an excerpt from Can Dialectics Break Bricks?. If this looks like your cup of espresso, you can download the entire film at Ubu Web.
 

 
Malcolm X was assassinated 47 years ago today.

In this two hour compilation of speeches, the brilliance of Malcolm reaches through time and space to touch us and remind us of the harsh truth that almost a half century after the man was killed America is still struggling with most of the same problems we were struggling with back then. Technology, drugs and the silhouettes of cars may have changed, but the reptilian brain still keeps us anchored in the murk of class war, racism and injustice.
 

 
End Of The Century is one of the finest rock documentaries ever made, doing justice to one of rock and roll’s great bands. Directors Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia wring a tremendous amount of emotion in telling the story of a band that was as exhilaratingly wonderful as they were dysfunctional. With the help of Danny Fields, Joe Strummer, Legs McNeil, Arturo Vega, Rob Zombie and a shitload of friends, critics and admirers, this flick will remind you of why you fell in love with this band in the first place. Sometimes the simplest and purest of concepts reach epic dimensions.
 

 
She is just not gonna fuckin’ quit is she?

Sarah Palin’s nuclear-powered hubris is beginning to border on surrealism if she really thinks she’s ever going to become the President. (Not that I’m hoping that she doesn’t get the GOP nomination in a dead-locked convention this summer, because I most certainly do!)