Long after I’d given up hope of seeing anything even close to a principled stand by a Republican, something incredible happened. It’s amazing to me that the party responsible for my wonderment is the same attorney who represented George Bush in the Bush v. Gore election caper, former Solicitor General, Theodore Olson.

Last year, Ted Olson joined with David Boies, the opposing lawyer in Bush v. Gore, and a staunch Democrat, to bring a federal lawsuit against Perry v. Schwarzenegger challenging Proposition 8, the California constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage. This odd couple of ideologically opposed lawyers, of course prevailed in overturning Prop. 8.

This morning on Fox News Sunday, Olson appeared with Chris Wallace to discuss the recent defeat of Prop 8 in a California courtroom.  I find Chris Wallace to be the single toadiest, most craven, ass-licking employee of Fox News. That’s really saying something, I realize, but Chris Wallace is a nauseating one-man wind-up toy of Republican talking points. He’s not a journalist, he’s a weenie. He’s not a conservative, he’s a Republican and as Olson proves in the following clip, there is a very big difference between the two. Republicans used to have a credible reputation for being anti-statist and wanting to keep the government off the backs of the people and out of their lives. That was then and this is now. Now, who the fuck knows what they stand for except for the interests of the ruling class and abject stupidity? If the Republicans got smart and ran someone brilliant like Olson instead of ignoramuses like Sharron Angle and Sarah Palin, maybe they’d have a chance in general elections, but that’s not going to happen, not for a long time:

Olson: (to Wallace) Well, would you like your right to free speech? Would you like Fox’s right to free press put up to a vote and say well, if five states approved it, let’s wait till the other 45 states do? These are fundament constitutional rights. The Bill of Rights guarantees Fox News and you, Chris Wallace, the right to speak. It’s in the constitution. And the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the denial of our citizens of the equal rights to equal access to justice under the law, is a violation of our fundamental rights. Yes, it’s encouraging that many states are moving towards equality on the basis of sexual orientation, and I’m very, very pleased about that. … We can’t wait for the voters to decide that that immeasurable harm, that is unconstitutional, must be eliminated.

 
In the 1970s, it seemed as if most literate, well-informed Americans who read books could agree that Kurt Vonnegut was probably the most important American author since Mark Twain. Vonnegut, when you think about it, was really the last author who nearly everybody who read books, read. You could gauge his popularity when I was a kid by looking at all the copies of his novels on offer at garage sales. Jethro Tull, Allman Brothers and Cheech and Chong albums along with dog-eared copies of Jaws, The Godfather, The Exorcist and one, if not several, Vonnegut paperbacks were jumble sale staples of the late 1970s. Despite the fact that Kurt Vonnegut himself seems to think that writers were over the hill at the age 55, this never seemed the case to me where his writing was concerned and I was always excited to sit down with a new book from him. Watching this video I started to wonder who would replace Vonnegut as he himself took over from Mark Twain to a great extent. No one I can see on the horizon, I’m afraid.

Vonnegut is seen here giving a speech in 2002 at Albion College, where he received an honorary doctorate. The lecture’s title is How to Get Job Like Mine.
 

 
Click through to YouTube for the rest of the speech.

Bonus: Fox News did an entirely disrespectful obit of Vonnegut the day after he died. Something tells me the author would have found this screamingly funny.

Via Fishbowl LA

 
Dangerous Minds pal Paul Gallagher posted a fascinating interview with animator John Butler at his wonderful Planet Paul blog where he writes about cultural obscurities and and things that interest him:

In 2001, Channel 4 television, in the UK, broadcast a 20-part sci-fi short animation series called Workgroup Alpha.  It starred Ed Bishop and dealt with a team of inter-dimensional consultants, lost on an intergalactic space mission. Bishop, with his association as Commander Straker from Gerry Anderson’s cult TV hit UFO, was ideally cast as Aquarius, the Enterprise Class Visionary, who with his fellow travellers explored “a whole new dimension in universal solutions.”

Though there is the passing hint of Frederick Pohl’s satirical sci-fi classic The Space Merchants, which imagined a world run by ad agencies, Workgroup Alpha offered an intelligent and witty critique of the growing cultural obsession with corporate speak, focus groups, PR consultants, and all those other anemic constructs that have depersonalized our world.

The end credit to the series was attributed to the Butler Brothers, the name by which John and Paul Butler operate.  Paul is the co-producer, writer and conceptual consultant.  John is writer, designer, animator, composer, co-producer, and director.

I first heard about the Butler Brothers through friends, though it was always John Butler who attracted the most attention.  His name was mentioned with that hushed reverential tone and nodding head of respect that said we had touched on some sacred matter.  It made Butler seem almost mythical – a great creative artist who lived somewhere (no one seemed quite sure where, or if they did, didn’t say), a garret most likely, where he created, with help from his brother, these incredible digital animations, of such intelligence and imagination.

I sent Paul a quick note last week that I had enjoyed his interview and he replied:

“Butler’s latest animation, Children of the Null, was inspired by Dennis Wheatley and to an extent, more Stephen King. When I asked him about it, he said the Children of the Null was about the occult practice of finance.

“I tend to think of Finance as an occult concern, hence the masks of the Transactors. The fact that during the collapse, derivatives were described as being too complex to understand confirms this suspicion.”

Though John is an atheist - he sees capitalism as an evil.

I think he just might have something there.”
 

 
Do androids dream of eclectic sheep? – an interview with John Butler (Planet Paul)

The Butler Brothers YouTube Channel

 
Marshall McLuhan would have turned 99 years old today, and his status as the god-daddy of media studies still seems pretty rock-solid. I wasn’t previously aware of how often the Canadian theorist appeared on TV, and was especially unaware of his November 1967 duet with New York novelist Norman Mailer on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation show The Summer Way, bravely moderated by Ken Lefolii.

Recovered from recent treatment for a benign brain tumor he suffered while teaching in New York, McLuhan gamely tugs at a few of Mailer’s pretensions. Mailer is recently back from levitating the Pentagon with the Yippies, with the siege of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention in his future.

McLuhan pops off a bunch of gems, including:

The planet is no longer nature, it’s now the content of an artwork.
…
Nature has ceased to exist…it needs to be programmed.
…
The environment is not visible, it’s information—it’s electronic.
…
The present is only faced by any generation by the artist.

Communications maven Michael Hinton goes speculative on his hero’s televised meeting with the Jersey-raised boxer-novelist, but of course it’s best to just check the thing out yourself.
 

 
More after the jump…
 

 
The great inventor Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856.

A 36-second wax cylinder recording of what is thought to be Walt Whitman’s voice reading four lines from the poem “America.” [MP3]

As the sky lights up over Hometown U.S.A. tonight, let’s remember that today’s also the anniversary of two literary masterpieces of proto-freak culture. In 1855, Walt Whitman had 800 copies of his Leaves of Grass pressed by the Scottish-born Rome brothers at their Fulton St. shop in Brooklyn.

The Wikipedia oracle notes that Walt was definitely considered an original dangerous mind:

When the book was first published, Whitman was fired from his job at the Department of the Interior after Secretary of the Interior James Harlan read it and said he found it very offensive. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier was said to have thrown his 1855 edition into the fire. Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote, “It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote ‘Leaves of Grass,’ only that he did not burn it afterwards.” Critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold reviewed Leaves of Grass in the November 10, 1855, issue of The Criterion, calling it “a mass of stupid filth” and categorized its author as a filthy free lover. Griswold also suggested, in Latin, that Whitman was guilty of “that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians”, one of the earliest public accusations of Whitman’s homosexuality. Griswold’s intensely negative review almost caused the publication of the second edition to be suspended.  Whitman included the full review, including the innuendo, in a later edition of Leaves of Grass.

Seven years later to the day, math teacher Charles Dodgson and a friend took the three young daughters of Henry Liddell (the Dean of the Christ Church College where Dodgson taught math) on a short rowboat trip. Dodgson published the surrealist story he aimed at Liddell’s middle daughter Alice as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland under the name Lewis Carroll on July 4 1865.

Without forgetting Robert Cauble’s fantastic depiction of Alice’s search for Guy Debord, below are some amazing film interpretations of Alice:

 
Do you smell something burning ?
 
thx Buh Zing !

Watch this and get a lot smarter in just 11 minutes! Radical sociologist David Harvey asks: is it time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that really could be responsible, just, and humane? From a speech given at the prestigious Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). See the full speech here. The talkshow will returns in a few weeks.
 
Via the mighty Nerdcore!
 

 
Have you been keeping up with the delightful Pekar Project at the Smith website? The latest installment is my favorite, with Dangerous Minds pal Douglas Rushkoff co-starring with our hero! With terrific—kinda perfect—art by Sean Pryor.

Editor Jeff Newelt writes:

A year ago, our own cuddly curmudgeon, Harvey Pekar, joined author / media theorist Doug Rushkoff on his WFMU radio show, The Media Squat, to talk about a pet peev to both authors: the corporate takeover of society. Doug recently wrote LIFE INC: How the World Became A Corporation and How to Take It Back and Harvey legendarily bashed GE on Letterman in the ’80s, so jamming on this was a natural. To create this comic, “Pekar & Rushkoff Kibbitzin’ About How Life Got Incorporated” (part one of a four-part epic collaboration), we treated the transcript of their talk like the first track laid down for a jazz record. Harvey & Doug remixed the script and then artist Sean Pryor brought the dialogue to life. Note the masterful switch in coloring technique whenever the story shifts from the conversation itself to images of subjects being talked about. Sean first collaborated with Harvey on “Gauntet of Rock” a story for Royal Flush Magazine, and has since rocked out three Pekar Project stories, “Searchin’”, “Jungle Music,” and “Two Working Stiffs.” Sean also designed and contributed a Harvey Head to the new Pekar T-shirt.

This is fucking excellent!

Pekar & Rushkoff Kibbitzin’ How Life Got Incorporated by Harvey Pekar & Sean Pryor (Smith)

 
There may be a short film that’s quite as vivid, courageous and intense as poet Forough Farrokhzad’s Khaneh Siyah Ast (The House is Black)—her 1962 portrait of a leper colony in the northwest of her native Iran—but I can’t think of it. Farrokhzad was a Tehran-born female poet born in 1935 to a career military officer and married off to the satiric writer Parviz Shapour at age 16. Farrokhzad divorced Shapour two years later and lost custody of her one-year-old child.

As much as it surfaces the sufferings of a rejected population, the 22-minute Khaneh… (excerpted below) clearly but subtly reflects Farrokhzad’s own attitude about autocratic Iranian society’s disapproval of her as a strong woman poet. The twenty-something scribe weaves her verse in voiceover throughout the footage, and her raw editing style moves agilely between long studies and quick cuts. The film would inspire the Iranian New Wave in cinema that flourished starting in the late’60s.

Farrokhzad would eventually adopt the child of two of the patients in the colony. Unfortunately, she died in a car-crash five years after the film was released, at the age of 32.
 

 
Watch: Khaneh Siyah Ast (The House is Black) by Forough Farrokhzad. 1962, 22 minutes B&W 35mm 
 
Get: Khaneh Siyah Ast (The House Is Black) [DVD]