It’s great to see that Berlin’s Atari Teenage Riot—electronic anarchists and creators of the “digital hardcore” sound—are back and in terrific shape. Predictably, what was first slated as a reunion for a few European shows has turned into a full-blown world tour for Alec Empire and Nic Endo, along with new Rioter CX KiDTRONiK.
Throughout the ‘90s, ATR spread sonic fire from the nexus of hard techno, thrash-punk and noise, with their members (including formers Hanin Elias and the late lamented Carl Crack) also releasing solo projects on their own Digital Hardcore Recordings label.
As shown by this stage invasion during their appearance at Zurich’s Fusion Festival from this spring, the Riot seems back on in full force.
After the jump, relive ATR’s famous 1999 anti-fascist May Day riot in Berlin, with commentary by Empire…
In case you missed it, America’s best political writer, Matt Taibbi weighed in on L’affair Breitbart on the Rolling Stone blog:
I’ve decided it isn’t even necessary to have the debate over whether or not the Tea Partiers are racists. It’s enough to point out that the Tea Party and its sympathizers contain too many people like Andrew Breitbart (the idiot blogger from the Big Government website who originally posted the Sherrod video), Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck, all of whom popped huge public woodies the moment the Sherrod video surfaced.
It’s just not necessary to say whether or not these people are racists. All that needs to be pointed out is that when they get a chance to gape at a video purporting to show a black Obama official confessing to having mistreated a white farmer (it turned out to be the opposite of that, of course), or a tape of Black Panther King Shamir talking about “killing cracker babies,” the word that best describes the emotions they display at these times is glee.
They enjoy these morbid stories about offenses to white dignity way too much. I caught Glenn Beck talking about some case involving a Black Panther who was intimidating people at a voting booth back in 2008—the guy had this pervy smile on his face that made him look exactly like one of those creepy dudes sitting hunched over at the edge of the bed playing the cuckold in cheating-wife porn videos. Over the Black Panthers! Who the hell has even seen a Black Panther since the seventies? The whole thing reminds me of that Chris Rock routine about Native Americans—“When was the last time you saw two Indians?”
I love how he ends the piece by asking “Is anyone else dreading 2012?”
I feel ya, dude. It’s going to be an all out brawl. 2012 might be the year the American republic ends up so frayed as to be ungovernable. The rightwing has backed itself so far into a corner that there is almost no way that they can still walk it back anymore. People are going to die during the next national election cycle. 2008 was merely the opening act. It’s already fucking fucked up. The rhetoric is so mean and hateful that the next step is easy to predict: Violence.
Looked at from one point of view, the whole Axis of Idiocy (Fox News, tea baggers, conservative Christians) thing we’re seeing in this country is nothing short of a mass mobilization of some of the meanest and stupidest people to publicly present themselves that I have witnessed in my entire life. Don’t get me wrong, I consider most of these sad, deluded fools to be people whose time will somewhat quickly come to an end. The Tea party is a manifestation, by and large, of cranky old white people. They’ll be dying soon enough and their grandchildren will not be replenishing their ranks. It’s just not going to work that way. the demographics all but prohibit it from happening. Still, even if, historically speaking, it’ll be temporary, what happens in the meantime is going to make for a really trying couple of decades, ‘cause there is a mean genie that’s gotten out of the bottle and he ain’t going back in anytime soon.
The Tea Party is Perverted and Irrelevant (Rolling Stone)
This is hilarious: A Republican congressional candidate and his wife are caught on videtape taking down his opponents signs, by his opponent’s son! Brilliant!
The video showing District 1 candidate Greg Brown and his wife, Jennifer, removing Doug Broxson’s campaign signs has led to a Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office investigation.
The campaign shenanigans happened Saturday night when Broxson’s son, Jason Broxson, hid an infrared video camera, often used by hunters to track game, in some bushes at state roads 87 and 89, north of Milton.
Minutes after the camera was deployed, the Browns happened by and removed [the signs]. Jason Broxson hid in some bushes and watched as the couple took the signs.
“Honestly, we just got lucky that he happened to show up right then,” said Kevin Brown, Broxson’s campaign manager. “Lord only knows the odds of that.”
Kevin Brown, who is not related to Greg Brown, said the camera was set up because Broxson was having problems with his signs being stolen and vandalized.
Tara and I watched Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story this weekend (it’s on the Netflix VOD currently) and I absolutely loved it. It’s a truly great film, one that I have no doubt will be looked at and revered by future generations trying to understand what the hell happened in our backwards era. I recommend it to everyone who reads this blog and cares about my opinion. It was absolutely spellbinding to me. I felt as if I wanted to cheer several times to see someone say these things and say them so powerfully. Capitalism: A Love Story, or a film just like it, needed to be made. but there is only one guy who could have pulled off something like this, gotten it funded, herded through the distribution system and gotten a message this radical the deep penetration in the culture that it deserves, and it’s Michael Moore.
Surprisingly, Capitalism: A Love Story is perhaps the least polemic of all of Moore’s films, even if it does, at root, articulately advocate the necessity of class warfare, at least at the ballot box. Most of what Moore, or his protagonists, have to say in the film would be damed difficult to refute, perhaps this is why it doesn’t seem as confrontational as Moore’s films often are. You’d have to have a very closed mind to deny the reality of what you see on display here. Even Sean Hannity would have a hard time arguing with any of it (although I doubt he watched or will ever watch Moore’s film)
To say what Michael Moore says in Capitalism: A Love Story took balls and it also took amazing skill as a storyteller, underscoring his Mark Twain-like role in American society. After a mind-numbing section where the audience is introduced to the concept of the so-called “Dead Peasant” life insurance policies some major companies take out on their non-essential employees—unbeknownst to them—where they make more money if the employee dies, he cuts to an interview with Father Dick Preston, the Flint, Michigan-based priest who married Moore and his wife Kathleen Glynn (who interviewed me for a job once, she’s super cool).
He quietly asks the priest if capitalism is evil and what Jesus would think about free enterprise and his answer is devastating. This isn’t some left-wing loony he had to search out, this is the man who married him, the local priest who, like Moore, has witnessed the tragedy and destruction the loss of the auto industry in Flint, Michigan did to their hometown. Both of these men knows what greed does and how and who it harmed. People with first and last names.
And let me tell you, this priest fucking nails it. It’s a powerful, powerful cinematic moment.
Speaking as someone who took ten people on my own 24th birthday to see Roger and Me when it was in theaters—I also released This Divided State on DVD when I was at Disinformation—maybe I’m biased, but do yourself a favor and see this film. Better still, if you watch it and you like it, consider having a screening party at your house and invite 5 or 6 friends over to watch it and discuss it afterwards. It takes two hours to watch and could open the eyes of even a devout redneck Fox News watcher (well, some redneck Fox News watchers) to what’s really going on in this country. It’s not like Glenn Beck is ever going to tell them.
Below is one of the most powerful moments in a film full of them: rare footage taken right after FDR’s final State of the Union address where he lays out the concept of a Second Bill of Rights that would have guaranteed that all Americans have “a useful job, a decent home, adequate health care, and a good education.”
God bless Michael Moore. He’s a great American.
The Middle Class in America Is Radically Shrinking. Here Are the Stats to Prove it (Yahoo! Finance)
The U.S. Economy Is A Dead Horse And The American People Are Starting To Get Really Pissed Off And Frustrated (Economic Collapse)
You don’t have to speak Mandarin in order to appreciate this scathingly funny Sarah Palin animation from Taiwan television.
It appears that Asians find Palin as ridiculous as most clear thinking Americans do. Scary thing is, the reality is so absurd it’s almost beyond satire. How much more of her shit is this country willing to swallow?
Anyone who had any doubt about nasty man Andrew Breitbart’s crazypants bona-fides needs to watch the below CNN clip, wherein the strident rightwing windbag proves that he and reality are no longer on a first name basis! From Wonkette:
Yes, how do we know that is the farmer’s wife wife? Does the cow say “moo” or does it say “conspiracy”? What do the letters in the acronym EIEIO mean? The farmer says he was in the dell, but, hi-ho, the derry-o, was the farmer in the dell, or does CNN even know? We can sit here and say the farmer takes a wife, but why does the cheese stand alone, media? WHY?
Breitbart has decided to drown in liquid shit on national television and use the fact that we “can’t” really know if anything is “true” as a life raft. Does somebody with a gun mind shooting this life raft for us? It’s okay if you accidentally “miss” and hit Breitbart. Nobody will ever know if you were aiming for him, because who can say what truth is?
Passive aggressive mindrot at its finest! The thing is, Breitbart has nothing to fear: Anyone dumb enough to care what this well-fed Archie Bunker-manqué thinks was busy eating junk food and watching Fox News and will never, ever hear the truth about l’affair Sherrod, anyway! Life is a win-win situation when you’re a rightwing opinion maker!
Breitbart: Is the Farmer’s Wife Really His Wife? (Wonkette)
Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams’s demotion in the amorphous movement—read the foul bit of racial satire he wrote that prompted it—has put the Tea Party’s racial issues in clear focus lately, which made me think of two hip-hop-generation responses to where racial politics stand in the country.
First: Hua Hsu wrote his piece “The End of White America?” for The Atlantic‘s January ‘08 issue, many months before the Tea Party crystallized white resentment. Launching from the refined racial paranoia in The Great Gatsby, Hsu delves into a high-level overview of whiteness and how whites are fleeing both from and into it. The core of it:
Today, the arrival of what [Pat] Buchanan derided as “Third World America” is all but inevitable. What will the new mainstream of America look like, and what ideas or values might it rally around? What will it mean to be white after “whiteness” no longer defines the mainstream? Will anyone mourn the end of white America? Will anyone try to preserve it?
Lots of food for thought, and still highly relevant. Please check it.
Second (and more rhetorically), check Pittsburgh MC Jasiri X‘s new video, based on Nashville anti-racist writer Tim Wise’s essay which asked the same trenchant question:
Andrés Duque’s great Blabbeando blog has provided great coverage, including some enlightened sport-star involvement in the issue and the segment below featuring baby-dyke blogstar Cumbio. In a report for Buenos Aires TV magazine Vertigo, homegirl and her camera crew walk right up to participants in an anti-gay marriage demonstration and starts engaging them, taking in a bunch of the usual insulting arguments against equality. But in a startling scene that you couldn’t imagine in a similar segment here in the US, she’s actually embraced and kissed by some of the maternal types among the evangelicals who insist on the old cliché that “it’s the sin, not the sinner.” Cumbio comes out of it a little annoyed, but notes later that they “didn’t treat [her] badly.”
Kinda refreshing, eh?
Bonus clip after the jump: Federacion Argentina LGBT’s simple and powerful ad for marriage equality…
After I watched this video, stunned and laughing heartily, I was considering how to best showcase it here. One thought I had was the title: “It’s only 30 seconds long, just watch it first and read this later.” which I thought was a pretty good one, but in the end, I think it’s best to use the text of DM reader Tyler who sent us this link and the following note:
I want to thank you for your article on dangerousminds the other day about the news stories covering i-dosing in Oklahoma. Unfortunately that kind of news seems to be fairly normal here in Oklahoma. So I really enjoyed reading how shocked people were in the comments. If you are interested in some additional Oklahoma scary/wacky things, consider this commercial from an Oklahoma siding and window company. I thought somebody did a (fake) voice over at first but the same video is posted on the company’s website. In the video you will see the company’s owner somehow transition from talking about their windows to how we should end this “secular socialism right now.” Thank you for your time.
No, Tyler, thank you! This could be the next in line as an Internet meme if you ask me. I’m gonna post this one and then email it to Xeni, stat!
