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Wait a minute, WHAT??? Liberal Dennis Kucinich joins Fox News!
01.16.2013
06:20 pm
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This might sound like it’s one of those things to file under “When Pigs Fly” or “When Hell Freezes Over,” but believe it or not, former Congressman Dennis Kucinich will be joining Fox News and Fox Business as a paid contributor, it was announced today.

In a PR statement, the archly liberal Kucinich said:

“Through 16 years in Congress and two presidential campaigns, Fox News has always provided me with an opportunity to share my perspective with its enormous viewership. I look forward to a continuation of our relationship this time as a Fox News contributor.”

Fox News chairman Roger Ailes added:

“I’ve always been impressed with Rep. Kucinich’s fearlessness and thoughtfulness about important issues. His willingness to take a stand from his point of view makes him a valuable voice in our country’s debate.”

If you ask me, Dennis Kucinich will make an excellent contributor to Fox News. This was an unexpected, but tres savvy move on Ailes’ part. He knows Fox News is in free fall and at the very least, having a bona fide liberal like Dennis Kucinich around will elevate the conversation a bit. Have you seen Fox News lately? It’s getting pretty threadbare. I’m sure the people who work there are tired of seeing the same faces day in and day out. Will Sarah Palin or Dick Morris ever say anything meaningful? Of course they won’t and Roger Ailes must know this, too. He’s a lot of things, but dumb isn’t one of them.

Kucinich will make his Fox News debut Thursday on The O’Reilly Factor.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.16.2013
06:20 pm
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‘Shadow Play’ and ‘Happy Homes’: Powerful new work by artist Sig Waller
01.12.2013
04:10 pm
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Artist Sig Waller has been very busy with 2 excellent new projects, Shadow Play and Happy Homes, both of which will form part of a new exhibition to be held later this month.

Sig’s latest work has been inspired by a 1950s book called “Happy Homes”, which is described on its frontispiece as “an indispensable guide to housewives and home lovers everywhere.”

Sig has sabotaged the book’s illustrations creating a humorous and pointed critique of the prescribed roles for women within the home. Shadow Play presents an unsettling cartoon figure manipulating a 1950’s housewife (excitedly frothing at the mouth with toothpaste?) through a series of household chores. While Happy Homes is bleaker and more critically of the enforced relationships between women and home, where objects objects and electrical goods take on a controlling, religious, almost sexual and menacing quality, with the figures isolated in darkened voids on blood soaked floors. The images are like stills from a David Lynch movie, but far more potent and disturbing, each creating their own narrative that leaves the viewer unsettled.

Shadow Play will form part of an exhibition called Happy Homes, which will feature work by Sig Waller and Chris Shaw Hughes. Here’s the blurb:

Family life tends to be portrayed as blissful, idyllic and safe, but reality often tells a different story.

In this show, Hughes and Waller explore the dark circumference of the family circle, exposing the crumbling façade and the unseen stories behind the saccharine smiles that stare out at us from family albums or media and advertising photography. What lies beneath this apparent perfection?

‘Happy Homes’ explores these boundaries, the everyday secrets that families seek to contain and withhold. Found imagery is given new meaning, reality is warped and altered – or is it?

They say “the camera never lies”, but the power of the photographed image lies in its ability to conceal or to contain both truth and falsehood. On closer inspection, the ordinary almost always becomes extraordinary.

Happy Homes opens on January 25th-February 17th, 2013, at Krefeld, 35 Blumen eV - Blumenstrasse 35 47799 Krefeld. More details here.

Shadow Play and Happy Homes on the Sig Waller site and on Facebook and Tumblr.
 
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Previously on Dangerous Minds

Beautiful Fevered Dreams: The Art of Sig Waller


Sig Waller: ‘Our capacity for cruelty and suffering is timeless, as is our ability to look away’


 
More of Sig Waller’s ‘Happy Homes’, after the jump….
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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01.12.2013
04:10 pm
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Henry Kissinger picks his nose…
01.11.2013
11:00 am
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And then appears to eat it at a 1992 trade conference in Brazil.

These famous photos, taken by Adriana Lorete, originally appeared on the front page of Jornal do Brasil, a major Rio de Janeiro daily newspaper, on November 13, 1992.

I couldn’t choose a quote of Kissinger’s to contrast with the pics, so let’s just prattle off a few of his lovelier gems, shall we?

“Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the third world, because the US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries.”

“Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.”

“The issues are too important to be left for the voters.”

“Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power, and is often, in point of fact, useless.”

“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

Who else but Henry Kissinger could win a Nobel Peace Prize for the secret (and quite illegal) bombing of Cambodia?

And he just… won’t… die.

(Is public nose-picking some sort of Republican thing?)

Posted by Amber Frost
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01.11.2013
11:00 am
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‘Tropicália’: Terrific documentary on the Brazilian music revolution of the 1960s
01.09.2013
11:26 pm
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Marcelo Machado’s lively and informative 2012 documentary Tropicalia features rare footage of Brazilian music legends Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Os Mutantes, Gal Costa and Tom Zé as it explores a revolution animated by music and art. Mixing traditional Brazilian and African rhythms with contemporary psychedelic experimentation and the avant-garde, the 1960’s tropicália movement celebrated free expression in reaction and opposition to an atmosphere of increasing social and cultural oppression. As a military dictatorship took hold of Brazil, artists were among the front line of resistance and many were forced to leave the country or face death.

Tropicalia may not be definitive but it sure as shit is important and vital. 
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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01.09.2013
11:26 pm
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A Republican’s idea of a ‘tip’?


 
Just the tip..?

Via Early Onset of Night

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.08.2013
02:23 pm
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Rachel Maddow: Conservative movement is ‘a complete mess’


Count the clowns in this picture. Hint: They’re all wearing suits and ties.

During last night’s epic Rachel Maddow piece about the Republican party’s mind-boggling real-time implosion, she described the GOP as a dog being wagged by the tail of the conservative movement and pondered why some of the movement’s most powerful pols, like Jim Demint, are picking up their toys and leaving Congress:

“[A] huge internal fight including screaming matches in their own caucus… they’re just turning off the light and abandoning what they’re doing and nobody really knows why.”

Obama has all the leverage now. If he can’t manage to negotiate a modest tax increase for the wealthy without limiting future cost of living increases for poor and middle class Social Security recipients, he’ll have proven himself to be one of the worst—if not THE worst—presidential negotiators of all time. He’s already offered up more than he had to (WHY?) and also demonstrated that his promises made during the campaign were nothing but bullshit.

Frankly, I never thought Obama was offering lefties all that much to begin with—he just wasn’t named Mitt Romney—but these guys are pathetic, why bargain with them at all? Now’s the time to shove it up their asses, if for no other reason, just on principle.
 

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.21.2012
04:51 pm
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‘Future Now’: A brilliant portrait of novelist J. G. Ballard, from 1986
12.20.2012
06:39 pm
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Writers need stability to nurture their talent and unfetter their imagination. Too much chaos dilutes the talent and diminishes the productivity. Writers like Norman Mailer squandered too much time and effort on making his life the story - when in fact he should have been writing it. J. G. Ballard was well aware of this, and he had the quiet certainty of a 3-bed, des res, with shaded garden and off-street parking at front. Yet, Ballard’s seeming conformity to a middle class idyll appeared to astound so many critics, commentators, journalists, whatevers, who all failed to appreciate a true writer’s life is one of lonely, unrelenting sedentary toil, working at a desk 9-5, or however long - otherwise the imagination can not fly.

That’s why I have always found suburbs far more interesting places than those anonymous urban centers. Cities are about mass events - demonstrations, revolution, massacre, war, shared public experience. Suburbia is about the repressed forces of individual action. It’s where the murders are planned, the orgies enjoyed, the drugs devoured, the imagination inspired. Suburbia is where dysfunction is normalized.

And J. G. Ballard was very aware of this.

Future Now is a documentary interview with J G Ballard, made in 1986 not long after he had achieved international success with his faux-biographical novel Empire of the Sun. Opening with a brief tour of his Shepperton home, Ballard gives an excellent and incisive interview, which only reminds what we have lost.

Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara have edited together a brilliant collection of interviews and conversations with J G Ballard 1967-2008, in one volume called Extreme Metaphors, which is a must-have for anyone with an interest in Ballard.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Postcards from J. G. Ballard


 
With thanks to Richard!
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.20.2012
06:39 pm
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Tax the Rich!
12.18.2012
02:07 pm
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Someone should hack into Fox News, divert their broadcast signal and play this wonderfulness on a loop:

Things go downhill in a happy and prosperous land after the rich decide they don’t want to pay taxes anymore. They tell the people that there is no alternative, but the people aren’t so sure.

Written and directed by Fred Glass for the California Federation of Teachers, narrated by Ed Asner and animated by Mike Konopacki.

All Republicans who make less than six figures a year need to be strapped into a seat and forced to watch this pitch perfect piece Clockwork Orange-style…
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.18.2012
02:07 pm
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Meet our newest Senator: One asshole Republican steps down, another takes his place


Fuck this guy. No really, fuck this guy.

Not that anyone had any high hopes that South Carolina’s Tea party favorite, Governor Nikki Haley, would appoint anyone but a fucking buffoon to replace departing conservative dickhead Jim DeMint—who left to head the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation and make a lot more money than being a mere US Senator pays—but she really plumbed the absolute bottom of the barrel by selecting Republican Congressman Tim Scott.

In his 2010 campaign for the House, Scott described himself as a lost youth who had his life turned around when a Chick-fil-A franchise owner took him under his wing and taught him conservative principles.

Think Progress summed up Scott’s deplorably moronic record:

Floated impeaching Obama over the debt ceiling. As the debt ceiling debate raged in the summer of 2011 because of the intransigence of Tea Party freshmen like Scott, the nation inched perilously close to defaulting on its obligations. One option discussed by some officials to avoid that scenario was for the president to assert that the debt ceiling itself was an unconstitutional infringement on the 14th Amendment. However, Tim Scott tolda South Carolina Tea Party group that if Obama were to go this route, it would be an “impeachable act.”

Proposed a bill to cut off food stamps for entire families if one member went on strike. One of the most anti-union members of Congress, Scott proposed a bill two months after entering Congress in 2011 to kick families off food stamps if one adult were participating in a strike. Scott’s legislation made no exception for children or other dependents.

Wanted to spend an unlimited amount of money to display Ten Commandments outside county building. When Scott was on the Charleston County Council, one of his primary issues was displaying the Ten Commandments outside the Council building. According to the Augusta Chronicle, Scott said the display “would remind council members and speakers the moral absolutes they should follow.” When he was sued for violating the Constitution and a Circuit Judge’s orders, Scott was nonplussed: “Whatever it costs in the pursuit of this goal (of displaying the Commandments) is worth it.”

Defended fairness of giving billions in subsidies to Big Oil. Scott and his Republican allies in Congress voted repeatedly last year to protect more than $50 billion in taxpayer subsidies for Big Oil corporations. When ThinkProgress asked Scott whether it was fair to do that, especially at a time when oil companies are earning tens of billions in profit every quarter, the Tea Party freshman defended the industry: “fair is a relative word,” said Scott.

Helped slash South Carolina’s HIV/AIDS budget. As a state representative, Scott backed a proposal to cut the state’s entire HIV/AIDS budget, despite the fact that South Carolina ranks in the top-third of reported AIDS cases. The cuts were ultimately included in the state’s budget, impacting more than 2,000 HIV-positive South Carolinians who needed help paying for their medication.

Had enough?

Departing dipshit Jim DeMint is an asshole with big clown shoes to fill and it looks like Tim Scott is the asshole who’s going to fill them. DeMint is stupid, but he’s not stupid stupid, he’s stupid smart (“stupid like a fox” to coin a phrase). Scott, I fear, is just a real fuckin’ numbnuts. Exactly what the US Senate needs right about now…

That thing about cutting food stamps off for the children of striking union workers is one of the lowest of the low things I’ve ever heard of a Republican suggesting. That’ll break the unions: STARVE THEIR CHILDREN. Scott deserves spit in his face, gallons of it, not an unearned Senate appointment!

The reichwing blogosphere is already starting to bleat about South Carolina’s “first black senator” but… THIS KNOB??? Give me a fucking break…

For shame, South Carolina. If you can’t do better than Nikki Haley, Jim DeMint or a silly lightweight jackass like Tim Scott, that says truly pathetic things about your state.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.17.2012
03:59 pm
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‘Art is a means of feeling our way forwards’: Oskar Kokoschka’s letter to a prisoner of war
12.14.2012
08:46 pm
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The artist, poet and playwright, Oskar Kokoschka sent the following letter to a young German prisoner of war, in 1946. In it he advised him to be warmed by love ‘the sight of our neighbor, other people, a foreign nation, another race,’ in which the ‘embrace of love will illumine the choice, form and shape of a new order of humanity.’ Kokoschka understood the young man’s trauma, having himself served as a Dragoon in the Imperial Austrian army, during the First World War, where he slithered in trenches through ‘bottomless mud,’ until he was seriously wounded and considered too mentally unstable to fight - the twisted logic of this was not lost on Kokoschka. Later, he was the focus of hatred and bigotry, when his art was deemed ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis. It forced Kokoschka to flee Austria for Prague, before then moving to Ullapool in Scotland, where he remained for the duration of the Second World War.

In this letter, Kokoschka expounds his belief in the importance of art and the artist that could show the ‘way up from subjection of blind obedience to human freedom.’

To a German Prisoner-of-War (Fritz Shahlecker)

[London,] 4 July 1946

A close friend showed me the drawings you made in the camp in England. He told me of your prospects of soon regaining your freedom and returning home to Tübingen. Like many of your fellow-Germans, you were abused in your early youth by a criminal demagogy and thrown into a war of aggression, during which the authority of human precepts was thoroughly and totally suspended, and which appears even now to threaten the future validity of those same precepts.

As an older man, I am in a position to make comparisons which shed light on the changes that have taken place in the moral sphere. That gives me a right to offer a younger man some advice that may come in useful when you are home again. After every great disappointment - in your case, when one has been the victim of a betrayal - one’s insight is clouded, because one is always overcome by weariness at the same time. The tendency to feel sorry for oneself is only a natural consequence of that weariness. You are honest in your drawings, but it seems to me that you tend towards the idealized view which comes from being in the center of a world that one is trying to rebuild. In your drawings you are trying to give shape to a new world with artistic expressive media available to you, after the reduction of your old world to ruins. You want it to be a human world, in contrast to the physical, materialistic world where naked force ruled, and in my view that is the hopeful and promising aspect of your experiment.

But the advice I would like to give you, however great your present need and poverty may be, is this: stop surrendering to a tendency to study yourself alone and to forget that a sentimental outlook is just as sure to lead to waste and failure as the entire order that is collapsing before our eyes today. That order sprang from individual egoism, and was helped to ripen by nationalistic narrowmindedness. Humanism was believed dispensable. This materialistic attitude found its complete embodiment in Fascism. Bear in mind that your personal need and poverty, both physical and spiritual, are nevertheless infinitesimal compared to the need and poverty of the children abandoned to savagery in today’s world. If your heart turns in hope to the work of rebuilding, because you are young and want to do good, you must help to make a better world for these children. You saw for yourself that what was achieved by the sword came to nothing in the end, therefore take up your pencil in the hope of doing better. You do not succeed in expressing anything about the pain throbbing in mankind today, because you are not yet able to give shape to genuine emotions. It will be like that for as long as you idealize yourself as a man of sorrows, instead of looking for the redeemer in every innocent child. The child can truly be the redeemer, if we can genuinely believe in the possibility of a better world. Sentimentality does not help us to discover new worlds, it makes us cling to the past in fascination. The new world can only be given shape if we love our neighbor. If we are warmed by love, the sight of our neighbor, other people, a foreign nation, another race, will enable us to shape a new image of the world, in the contemplation of which the isolation of the individual and his nameless torment in a ruined world will give way to the splendor in which the embrace of love will illumine the choice, form and shape of a new order of humanity. All art, that of the great epochs as well as that of primitive cultures, that of colored races as well as our own folk art, is rooted in this soil, in which the moral man has vanquished dust, decay and force. Man overthrows the dictates of physical laws and the dominion of blind elements, and by that means fights his way up from subjection of blind obedience to human freedom.

Art is a means of feeling our way forwards in the moral sphere, and it is neither a luxury of the rich nor the rigid formalism that comes out of the theories of the academies. The modern art of the present time also tends towards arid formalism. Art is like grass sprouting from the frozen earth at the end of winter, like growing corn, and like the spiritual bread in which the human inheritance is passed on to future generations.

In hope that you will find the inner strength to practice the spiritual office of an artist in the future, I leave you with my best wishes,

Yours, Oskar Kokoschka

‘Oskar Kokoschka Letters 1905-1976’ is published by Thames and Hudson.
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.14.2012
08:46 pm
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