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Ann Magnuson’s open letter regarding her ‘Open Letter to an Open Letter’
03.17.2017
12:23 pm
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Photo by Austin Young. Styling by Squeaky Blonde. Make-up by MAC

This is a guest post from Ann Magnuson.

Initially, “Open Letter to an Open Letter” was written as a Facebook post, a goofy riff on the somewhat futile nature of ranting on the Internet. I wrote it after reading Sinead O’Connor’s “Open Letter to Miley Cyrus” where the former was chastising the latter for slutty twerking on the 2013 Grammys. I thought well, she makes some valid points but is this really helping anything? Then I thought, you know the real culprit is the Beast that feeds on all our infighting; the clickbait monster that every media site has turned into which has transformed the whole system into “a vortex that can never be filled”!

When I started recording my recent album Dream Girl I decided to include “Open Letter,” but then it didn’t really fit on the finished product so I decided to release it later as a separate track. I wanted to bring the “Open Letter” words to musical life and create an epic track that was in the spirit of “Folk Song” (initially written for one of my one-woman shows, and then ended up on the Bongwater album The Power of Pussy).

For the recording, I was partly inspired by Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” as well as by Ken Nordine and a host of other spoken word pieces from the psychedelic past. I recorded the whole thing in one take and then added embellishments later, mostly with my engineer Mark Wheaton at the Echo Park studio CATASONIC. My drummer Joe Berardi provided percussion and various sound effects and The Millionaire (Michael Cudahy) from Combustible Edison did the orchestrations and guitar work.

In the three years since the piece was written the mad chatter on the Internet has become so voluminous, so unhinged, so ugly and combative that there can be no doubt that we really are in the midst of a Civil War. And that battlefield is getting really bloody. The longer it goes on and the crazier it gets the vast void everyone is screaming into feels vaster than ever. While there are so many great things about the Internet (baby goat videos for example) it’s brought out the worst aspects of humanity. So much so that we’ve elected an Internet troll as our President!

Every time I look at the news I start singing the “Open Letter” chorus: “Seriously WTF?!” Has that become the new E Pluribus Unum? #sad

I just may have to agree with blogger Mark Manson who says, “Everything is Fucked and I’m Pretty Sure It’s the Internet’s Fault

I do think the Internet has changed our brain chemistry and not for the best. There is no denying the Internet has changed the zeitgeist. It IS the zeitgeist.

The way “Folk Song” (and a lot of the Bongwater stuff) riffed on the zeitgeist of the Reagan/Bush years, “Open Letter” riffs on today. Particularly as it relates to women - though the current madness is gender-neutral, and bi-partisan to boot!

If there is one thing that everyone can agree on it’s “SERIOUSLY WTF?!”

Love,

Ann

Hear “Open Letter to an Open Letter” after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.17.2017
12:23 pm
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Witches plan mass hexing of Donald Trump tomorrow night outside Trump Tower
02.23.2017
02:52 pm
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The so-called Wiccan “Rule of Three” (also called the “Three-fold Law” or “Law of Return”) is a moral code held by many witches. Karma is another word that (more or less) covers the same general territory. The energy that you “put out there”—whether good or ill—will return to you three times stronger. It’s not something that’s really a dogma among Pagans, but more of an admonition, or warning to neophytes, that there is a reward—or punishment—in harmony with the magic you work and the intent behind it.

Spit in the wind and it comes back to hit you in the face. What goes around, comes around. Treat others as you would like to be treated and someone is less likely to turn punching your fucking Nazi face into a popular meme.

Tomorrow night, February 24th, starting at one minute to midnight and going on for six minutes until 12:05 AM, a group of witches will perform a binding spell on Donald Trump and those who enable him outside of Trump Tower, or wherever they happen to be:

Join the largest mass binding spell in history as participants around the world, individually and in groups, focus their consciousness to prevent Donald Trump from doing harm.

 

 
An unflattering picture of the babbling orange idiot who knows the nuclear codes and a candle are all it takes to participate. The event’s Facebook page is here. If you can’t be at Trump Tower at the appointed time, face east and let ‘er rip… Some helpful instructions can be found here. Facebook event page here.

Fuck it. Sometimes you just have to exorcise the Pentagon, folks…
 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.23.2017
02:52 pm
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While we’re waiting for Moby’s evidence of Russian blackmailers, enjoy Tunnelmental’s badass remix
02.23.2017
08:52 am
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It’s not like American politics could get weirder (he wrote, praying that American politics doesn’t overhear and respond with an “Oh yeah? Hold my beer”), but that kind of baffling episode last week when noted musician Moby asserted definite insider knowledge of Russians having blackmail material on President Godfuckinghelpusall was, while far from a new and dizzying height of strangeness, certainly an amusing diversion. Here are his FB posts; I’d be loathe to accidentally misrepresent his words by paraphrasing:
 

 

 
It’s pretty hard to argue with much of that second post, and you can’t say he didn’t totally call it on Michael Flynn with a few hours to spare, though it may be a sign of encroaching Trump fatigue (if anything ever needed a long German portmanteau word, THAT’S IT) that my bigger takeaway from that was “How cool of a Dangerous Minds post would it be if Moby actually was into making balloon animals?” Moby, if that’s for real, please get in touch.

But still, this prompts, um, QUESTIONS. I don’t think it’s such a foregone conclusion that a pop musician couldn’t possibly know someone with such information and a willingness to gossip about it, but wouldn’t you think that someone possessing evidence of foreign blackmailers with a grip on the West Wing might find it more utile to share that with an investigative journalist or a prosecutor instead of, you know, MOBY?

But there’s news from the musician of a less cloak-and-dagger nature. That long-lived and celebrated unit Tunnelmental Experimental Assembly have done a new remix of Moby & The Void Pacific Choir’s “Don’t Leave Me,” that single from last fall’s These Systems are Failing with the incongruously animal-rightsy video to accompany the song’s plaintive breakup lyrics. Tunnelmental’s version is a good bit noisier and more aggressive than the already headstrong original, and the man himself seems to be pleased, telling DM “I love this Tunnelmental remix, and that I’m now in the Psychic TV, Killing Joke club of people who’ve received Tunnelmental remixes.” For Tunnelmental’s part, producer Nigel Mitchell’s comment was a good bit more verbose:

We all see things differently, so when Derek [Pippert, producer/beat doctor] and I work on a remix we use our experience as songwriters as well as our producer skills. We paint a “tunnelmental” picture from pieces of someone else’s painting, it’s like “collage” art where you get to add your own colours and shapes to form an alternative piece of art. We have the greatest respect for artists and it is an honour when they entrust us with their art. Remixing an artist like Moby’s music is a fun challenge, his work is already so good, you really have to channel that original and find an innovative way to make it your own without losing the original creative energy.

 
Listen after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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02.23.2017
08:52 am
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‘How to Steal an Election’: The dirty politics musical of 1968!
02.02.2017
09:50 am
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Like science fiction becoming reality, or worse, satire becoming reality, this 1968 off-Broadway musical—or to quote the subtitle, this “dirty politics musical”—immediately opens eyes very wide in the ironic early days of America 2017. Some things never change, they just get worse.

In a New York Times review of a revival of the play in 2000, Scarlet Cheng wrote:

In the year of Richard Nixon vs. Hubert H. Humphrey vs. George Wallace, “How to Steal an Election” offered a compact off-Broadway primer on presidential elections bought, bartered and swiped throughout American history.

Librettist William F. Brown and composer-lyricist Oscar Brand had the notion of Jazz Age prez Calvin Coolidge materializing in the present day (that is, 1968). There he meets a couple of fervent young protesters, just back from the skull-cracking Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Disillusioned, these two have no taste for the political machine. But what’s wrong with pragmatism, Coolidge wonders? What about learning to work within a corrupt system? Thus Coolidge begins his history lesson, with vignettes and songs depicting cynical power grabs of yore.

 
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The two stars were Carole Demas who was the original Sandy in Grease on Broadway, even before it was turned into the musical we know now (It was originally a much darker, dirtier production). The cast was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (don’t even get me started). She was also one of the two strange hippie hostesses of the weird early seventies TV show The Magic Garden, a program that even as a child had me running for the remote (not that we even had a remote) to avoid twee folk songs sung to flowers.

Also starring was Clifton Davis who appeared in countless films and television shows, making all the Love Boat/Vega$/Police Story rounds right up to the present. His TV biggie was co-starring on The Melba Moore-Clifton Davis Show in 1972 (or perhaps the That’s My Mama sitcom in 1974). His lifetime biggie was that he wrote the huge hit “Never Can Say Goodbye” for The Jackson 5! Now he’s a minister.

 
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Oscar Brand who passed away last year at 96 was an original folkie who, among many other things (he wrote a hit record for Doris Day, collaborated on musicals, had a TV show called Let’s Sing Out, wrote children’s records, etc.) had the longest running radio show in history.

He hosted the radio show Oscar Brand’s Folksong Festival every Saturday at 10 p.m. on WNYC-AM 820 in New York City, which ran into its 70th year. The show ran more or less continuously since its debut on December 10, 1945, making it the longest-running radio show with the same host, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. Over its run it introduced such talents to the world as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie, Arlo Guthrie, Huddie Ledbetter, Joni Mitchell, Peter, Paul & Mary, Judy Collins, the Kingston Trio, Pete Seeger and The Weavers. In order to make sure that his radio program could not be censored he refused to be paid by WNYC for the next 70 years.

 
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Brand, whose radio show was referred to as a “pipeline of communism” by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and who told stories of buying food for Leadbelly when the two traveled together in segregated areas, also participated in the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965. He said the character of Calvin Coolidge in the play was originally written by him to be Satan.

...he was Satan, who had decided that the electoral process was the most interesting thing he could join in on since he got kicked out of heaven.

 
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The producer of the play Steve Mellow had this to say:

I was the producer of this play Off Broadway in 1969. It was a labor of love. I got the idea from my uncle Jake Arvey, who was a powerful political broker in Chicago.The play took three years to get on and went thru five different authors. Oscar Brand was with me from the beginning. He has written many political campaign songs over a period of seventy years. Nixon was running for President. His campaign manager asked what we were doing on him in the play. I told him to buy a ticket.

 
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If all this sounds classic, the fate of the show is a true tale of American-style “land of the free” business Hell.

From the New York Times:

“How to Steal an Election” opened to favorable reviews and was packed nightly. After 50 performances, the show was set to move to Broadway. But there was a glitch. Turns out, says Brand, the $80,000 lined up for the move was mob money, and it would only be delivered after someone on the production helped with some securities laundering. The producer ducked out, and Brand refused to cooperate. End of deal, end of production.

And that’s no trumped up charge.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Howie Pyro
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02.02.2017
09:50 am
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Inappropriate and just plain WRONG vintage Valentine’s Day cards
02.01.2017
11:46 am
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An image paints a thousand words..or in this case just one…
 
It’s February. Time for the corporations to make some money selling Valentine’s Day cards and heart-shaped candy to lovers, couples, lonely-hearts and creeps for a made-up “holiday.”

Not that I’m cynical about these things. But to be frank, the only card I really want to see on the fourteenth of this month is your credit card so I can max it to the hilt.

Now, I know you’re gonna say Valentine’s Day is fun, Valentine’s Day is romantic, it gives lotsa lonely guys the chance to stalk women they don’t know yet. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it is all good. So if you do dig Valentine’s Day then you might appreciate these inappropriate vintage cards which look like the kind of thing nice weirdoes and freaks sent their loved ones in the past.
 
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How did this even get published?
 
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You know this guy’s a serial killer, right?
 
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Cop with a gun card—what could go wrong?
 
More heartbreaking cards, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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02.01.2017
11:46 am
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Some of the best (trust me, they are tremendous) protest signs from the Women’s March
01.23.2017
10:23 am
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One of the many signs I saw and photographed during the Seattle ‘Women’s March,’ January 21st, 2017.
 
On Saturday I spent the better part of the day walking the streets of Seattle with a few of my “delicate snowflake” friends and approximately 175,000 other like-minded women, men and children during our Women’s March. The event, which was the largest protest in the history of the city, was by far one of the most powerful and empowering things I have ever personally experienced in my life. And while it’s not an alternate fact that our work is just beginning, judging from the numbers of people who collectively participated in the massive march in Washington DC, and the local support marches around the globe, there is still room for hope.

Many of the images of the signs in this post, were taken by yours truly and by friends of mine, old and new, who I walked with in Seattle. Others were culled from the Facebook page Pantsuit Nation and I’ve done the best I can to attach locations to each photo. While I have plenty to say on the subject when it comes to why millions of people took to the streets all over the country and the world, I’d much prefer to let the images of the protest signs that marchers carried with them on Saturday do the talking. So to the new administration and our new Commander-in-Grief, get ready because you haven’t seen anything yet. Viva la VULVA!
 

Seattle Women’s March, January 21st, 2017. Photo taken by a member of my marching group.
 

Seattle. Photo by Cherrybomb.
 

A 91-year-old retired doctor protesting in Los Angeles.
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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01.23.2017
10:23 am
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Extremely ‘Childish’ Donald Trump posters
01.12.2017
03:23 pm
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GOP Info Poster

British cult artist/musician/poet/author and anti-authoritarian legend Billy Childish has just announced publication of a trio of specially commission poster prints commemorating “the occasion of Donald Trump being crassly maligned by the world’s press.”

The posters were created at the L-13 Light Industrial Workshop. Each measure 52.5 x 35 cm and are in stamped and numbered editions of 113 for £25.00 each. All posters come folded and in a deliberately distressed condition. The first orders will be dispatched on January 19th.

Mr. Childish is represented by L-13 in London, Neugerriemschneider in Berlin and Lehmann Maupin in New York.
 

Presidential Cunt Elect
 
More extremely Childish Trump posters after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.12.2017
03:23 pm
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Fire Damage: Photographer documents the devastation of Gatlinburg
12.27.2016
11:32 am
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On November 23, 2016, a series of wildfires spread through the Smoky Mountains devastating Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge in Sevier County. The fires were one of the worst natural disasters in Tennessee history—claiming fourteen lives and injuring 134.

When the blaze was first reported along the ridge of Chimney Tops mountain “no suppression activities were initiated.” On November 24, park rangers started containment procedures in a hope to stop the fire’s progression. Four days later the blaze had spread to Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge and Pittman Center, as a result of sparks and downed power lines.

The worst of the inferno—what the fire department called “the apocalypse”—destroyed the majority of wooded areas surrounding the center of Gatlinburg. In total some 1,413 properties were destroyed.

Watching the devastation on television, Nashville-based photographer Jeremy Cowart decided to do something to help the victims of the fire. Together with a volunteer crew, Cowart documented the aftermath of the Great Smoky Mountains wildfires. Using a camera attached to a drone, he photographed many of the families and individuals whose lives had been devastated by the fire as they lay on a white mattress surrounded by the remnants of their homes.

A website Voices of Gatlinburg was set up to share the stories, images and most importantly help with the needs of those worst affected.
 
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I went to work that morning, like I always do. By 9am I knew that something was wrong. I was working on Sevier County Ambulance Service. We did business as usual until later that evening. It was about 10 or 11pm that evening when I first got pulled into Gatlinburg for mutual aid with EMS response. On my way to staging I passed by my residence and it was still there. We continued to run several more calls and about 1–2am I was going to meet up with another GFD EMS unit. That’s when I passed my residence, and that’s when I saw that my house was gone.

 
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It was scary because the smoke was so bad and sirens just kept passing going both directions. We finally got to my sister’s but the sky was bright orange.

 
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More voices from the Gatlinburg fire, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.27.2016
11:32 am
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Stripping and Kissing: Ukrainian singer has a novel approach for winning Eurovision 2017 (NSFW)
12.16.2016
08:47 am
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Well, where do I begin with this little gem? Probably the history….

So, the Eurovision Song Contest that tacky annual sing-a-long started off as a way of bringing together those many battle-weary nations of Europe after the long bloody devastation of the Second World War. It was the brainchild of Marcel Bezençon—a Swiss TV exec who pinched the format from an Italian music festival where unreleased tracks vied in competition for the title of best new song. So far so good—though it behoves me to mention that Switzerland was neutral in WW2 which might explain why Eurovision is such a bland, inoffensive and unbearably condescending idea…anyhoo...

Since the Eurovision’s first appearance in May 1956—when it was called Eurovision Grand Prix—the competition has come around every year with that unenviable certainty of death, taxes and a visit to the in-laws every Christmas. Over the years there have been some fun things—ABBA, Sandie Shaw, Lulu, that heavy metal band Lordi and the first transgender winner Conchita Wurst. Then of course there has always been a lot of crap—way, way too much to mention. Still the Eurovision remains incredibly popular—some 200 million people watched the show go out live in 2015.

Winning Eurovision usually guarantees a lot of money, fame and shedload of sequins. The stakes are always high for anyone hoping to be win the privilege of officially representing their country in the competition. To find the most suitable artiste—each year, every participating country holds a national televised contest to find the person they think is going to win. As you can imagine, this brings out some of the most talented, strange and downright weird.

All of which brings me to Alex Angel who auditioned this week for the honor of representing the Ukraine in next year’s Eurovision. Most acts have a good song. Most acts can sing. But Alex doesn’t need any of that. He has a novel approach to booking his place in the final—his stripping partner Natasha Olejnik. This week Alex and Natasha tried their best to impress Ukraine’s Eurovision selection panel with their song “Running For Love.”

Let’s just say, they made an impression….
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.16.2016
08:47 am
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Women write President-elect Donald Trump’s actual quotes on their bodies (NSFW)
12.13.2016
09:18 am
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For 18-year-old photographer Aria Watson’s final project in her Introduction to Photography class at Clatsop Community College in Oregon, she chose to shoot actual quotes from President-elect Donald Trump’s mouth painted onto women’s bodies. I think the results speak for themselves. They’re even more sobering in this context.

Also, don’t say “What about Hillary or Bill Clinton quotes.” You’re deflecting if you do that. Neither one of them is about to become the most powerful man in the entire world. Donald Trump is. These are real quotes about women that came out of his mouth. Stay on topic. Thanks.

Aria Watson’s photo series is titled “#SignedByTrump.”


 

 

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Posted by Tara McGinley
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12.13.2016
09:18 am
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