Hippies,beatniks, go go dancers and acidheads let it all hang out in a psychedelic group grope set to the now sounds of the new generation. Mature audiences only.

“What Goes On” (live) - The Velvet Underground
“Cellophane Woman” - Sopwith Camel
“Help You Ann’ - The Lyres
“Time Machine” - Satori
“Roller Girl” - Anna Karina
“She Has Funny Cars” - The Jefferson Airplane
“I Haven’t Got The Nerve” - The Left Banke
“Sally I Do” - Abdullah’s Regime
“Hold Me Now” - The Rumors
“Mona” - The Pleasures

Break out the Kama Sutra oil, the Nepalese Temple Balls and the Nag Champa incense and get ready to freak out!
 

 
With The Beatles and Apple Corporation’s seal of approval, Commes des Garcons in tandem with French company Spring Court are selling tennis shoes emblazoned with The Beatles and Apple logos.

While this appears to be just another tacky attempt at sucking more money from the Beatles’ legacy, there is some historical context for this particular bit of marketing. John Lennon wears Spring Court sneakers on the cover of Abbey Road.

If you’ve got a spare $295.00 lying around and dubious taste in footwear, you can buy the sneakers here.
 
Via Highsnobiety

Shiulie Ghosh and Sami Zeidan present the first program on Al-Jazeera English, which premiered in November 2006
 

The Arab revolts of the past couple of months have of course been incubating for many years and crystallizing for many recent months. It’s become a media meme that they’ve resulted from social networks like Twitter and Facebook. But these have been more organizing tools than anything else.

We still don’t know the depth of the role played by 15-year-old Qatr-based Arabic TV news network Al-Jazeera as the region’s only non-state-controlled media platform. It’s definitely turned out to be the most reliable on-the-ground reporting platform during the revolts. With rising American cable customer demand for the network’s English-language channel emboldening the company to make its case to Comcast and our Secretary of State praising it as “real news,” it seems that AJ’s time has truly come.

Last week, journalist and author Robert Wright invited British-Egyptian Mideast media scholar Adel Iskandar onto his highly recommended Bloggingheads.tv vlog platform to talk about where Al-Jazeera’s been, what its significance is, and where it seems to be going.

Extremely informative.
 

 
The ratings for Glenn Beck’s nightly Fox News conspiracy theory rants are still taking a Nielsen nosedive. I’m not going to go out on a limb again and say Beck’s “over” because he rallied the very next day after I did it the last time and I just had to take it all back. So I’ll simply point out what James Downie wrote in The New Republic:

Beck, says [biographer Alexander] Zaitchik, was caught “in a vicious circle”: To keep viewers coming back, he had to keep creating new, more intricate theories. Last November, in a two-part special that indirectly invoked anti-Semitism, he accused liberal Jewish financier George Soros of orchestrating the fall of foreign governments for financial gain. During the Egyptian Revolution, Beck sided with Hosni Mubarak, alleging that his fall was “controlled by the socialist communists and the Muslim Brotherhood.” Beck is now warning viewers not to use Google, accusing the search-engine giant of “being deep in bed with the government.” In recent months, it seems, Beck’s theories became so outlandish that even conservatives—both viewers and media personalities—were having a hard time stomaching them. Now, each new idea appears to be costing Beck both eyeballs and credibility. “At some point,” says Boehlert, “it doesn’t add up any more.”

Yep, at this point even the very dumbest people watching Beck’s show have probably realized that Van Jones and obscure magazine articles written in 1965 don’t have shit to do with anything.

“It’s hard to gain a million viewers,” says Eric Boehlert, of Media Matters, in the article, “but it’s really hard to lose a million viewers.”

Worse still, for Beck’s, uh, fortunes, as Adam Weinsten points out on the Mother Jones blog today (quoting “The Wrap” an entertainment trade blog):

In January, [Beck’s] FNC show averaged 1.76 million total viewers during the 5 p.m. hour, according to Nielsen estimates—down 39 percent compared to January 2010.

And he scored just 397,000 viewers in the coveted 25-to-54-year-old demographic, a 48 percent slide.

February did not show much improvement. Through Feb. 27 his Fox show is down 26 percent in total viewers for the year (2.06 million compared to 2.89 million last year) and off 30 percent in the demo, averaging 501,000 25-to-54-year-olds vs. 760,000 last year.

But dig what this implies about the, er, vintage of his viewers:

Here’s the salient fact: Less than one-quarter of Beck’s viewers are ages 25 to 54. Assuming the number of youngs who watch him is negligible—a pretty safe assumption, I think—that means that dang near to 80 percent of his viewership is in or around senior-citizen territory. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the olds like Beck. But it gets me wondering: Who exactly makes up that 25 to 54 demographic?

“Asexual trolls who still live with their mothers” would be my first guess. Hey, there are a lot of ‘em, we just never see them, except for when they’re commenting on blogs.

 
Whereas I myself tend to think of Aldous Huxley in more psychedelic terms (I read The Doors of Perception when I was like 14 and immediately ran right out and found some blotter acid), most Americans probably remember him more for his dystopian novel Brave New World. As Pamela Paul points out at The New York Times, the next generation might come to think of him as the author of a children’s book:

But what many teenagers — and their parents and younger siblings — don’t know is that Huxley was also the author of a rather charming children’s book, his only foray into the genre. “The Crows of Pearblossom,” which was reissued on Monday by Abrams Books for Young Readers, tells the story of Mr. and Mrs. Crow and the nefarious snake who lives downstairs and steals their eggs.

The book has been out of print for years, but not for good reason. The story is clever, wittily told and bristles with spiky humor — and it could quite possibly become a new favorite among schoolchildren. In the reissued edition, Brooklyn-based illustrator Sophie Blackwell transforms the chapter book into a picture book for kids 4 to 8, with detailed, full-color images. According to the book jacket, her father once entered a party as Huxley was leaving. (It does not detail what took place at said soiree.)

Huxley wrote the book for his niece Olivia in 1944, and gave it to her as a Christmas present. The original manuscript was then lost in a fire. Happily, Huxley’s neighbors, the Yosts, kept a copy, which they passed along to Olivia after her uncle’s death in 1963. Four years later, Random House published it as a small format early chapter book, with illustrations by Barbara Cooney (of “Miss Rumphius” fame).

Vis Steve Silberman’s Twitter feed

 
On August 28 1963, the same day Martin Luther King delivered his landmark “I have a dream” speech, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, writer James Baldwin, director Joseph Mankiewicz, and actors Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, and Sidney Poitier, sat down in a CBS studio to discuss Civil Rights in America. It was an historic moment, one that would be difficult to imagine happening today, amongst Hollywood’s glitterai - especially when Mankiewicz let’s the cat out of the bag:

“Freedom, true freedom is not given by governments; it is taken by the people.”

 
Via Open Culture
 

 
Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich’s latest book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future can, more or less, be summed up in a single sentence: Until we deal with the preposterous wealth disparity in this country, America’s fucked and it’s going to stay that way. (I couldn’t agree more, btw and loved the book). The following excerpt from his February 17th blog post, “The Republican Strategy,” lays the issue pretty nakedly on the table, I think you’ll agree:

Republicans would rather go after teachers and other public employees than have us look at the pay of Wall Street traders, private-equity managers, and heads of hedge funds – many of whom wouldn’t have their jobs today were it not for the giant taxpayer-supported bailout, and most of whose lending and investing practices were the proximate cause of the Great Depression to begin with.

Last year, America’s top thirteen hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion each. One of them took home $5 billion. Much of their income is taxed as capital gains – at 15 percent – due to a tax loophole that Republican members of Congress have steadfastly guarded.

If the earnings of those thirteen hedge-fund managers were taxed as ordinary income, the revenues generated would pay the salaries and benefits of 300,000 teachers. Who is more valuable to our society – thirteen hedge-fund managers or 300,000 teachers? Let’s make the question even simpler. Who is more valuable: One hedge fund manager or one teacher?

Suck on that logic, Teabaggers and rightwing dickheads… take a good long toke!
 

 
I was happy to see that the following guest column by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka that appears in today’s Wall Street Journal (of all places!) had been liberated elsewhere so no one had to pay Rupert Murdoch to read it… Love this, Trumka says some important things here. If the state workers in Wisconsin—teachers, for god’s sake—were not to blame for the economic debacle, then why should they be expected to fix it?

Please forward this, FB share it and Twitter it. This needs to get out from behind the WSJ’s pay-wall:

Close to 200,000 working Wisconsinites have been given the following option by Gov. Scott Walker: If you want to keep your job, give up your rights. If you want to keep your rights, you’re going to be laid off.

This is downright un-American. The governor’s choice is a false one, manufactured for political reasons.

The real question, the one at the heart of our economic debate, is this: Do we continue down a path that delivers virtually all income growth to the richest 1% of Americans, or do we commit to rebuilding a thriving middle class?

We believe to address this question, it’s crucial that we sit down at the table together and find a way to grow without taking more away from the middle class.

The business climate couldn’t be stronger. Corporate profits reached an annualized level of $1.7 trillion in the third quarter of 2010, the highest figure since the government began keeping statistics 60 years ago.

But, as we’ve seen, high corporate profits aren’t enough to drive robust and equitable economic growth. Three years after the onset of this epic recession, unemployment is still near double digits, millions of Americans are facing home foreclosure, and wages have been stagnant. In our consumer-driven economy, that pulls down businesses as well as tax revenues. Our entire economy is weaker when we have the kind of income inequality that we have today.

The freedom of workers to come together to bargain for decent living standards, safe workplaces, and dignity on the job has been a cornerstone of building our middle class. It’s also recognized in Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This right ensures that there is sufficient spending power to drive the consumer demand, which makes up two-thirds of our GDP. And it benefits all Americans—not just those who are in unions.

It’s no secret that boosting corporate profits no longer translates into shared prosperity. Many private-sector companies have gone to extraordinary lengths in recent years to effectively eliminate the freedom of workers to come together to bargain to lift living standards. That’s one reason middle-class wages have stagnated since the 1970s, and why the U.S. is at risk of becoming an hourglass economy—one with all the income at the top and people at the bottom.

Sadly, a group of radical Republican governors is working overtime to export the most short-sighted private-sector labor practices into the public sector. Not only are they demanding steep cuts in wages and pensions for public workers, they also want to take away workplace rights, so that workers can no longer bargain for better compensation and benefits.

Their claim is that public workers have become parasites, busting state budgets with bloated wages and benefits at a terrible cost to taxpayers.

But average citizens have little interest in taking away workers’ rights. According to a CBS/New York Times survey, Americans support bargaining rights for public workers by a nearly two-to-one margin. Despite their best efforts, governors like Scott Walker haven’t convinced Americans that public workers are at fault for state budget woes.

Nor does economic research support their arguments. When adjusted for education, experience and training, the data show that public-sector workers are paid less than their private-sector counterparts. Right now, state and municipal budgets are in trouble primarily because of high unemployment, falling incomes, and losses in the stock market. Together, these lead to lower tax revenues and depleted pension funds.

It wasn’t teachers or firefighters or nurses who crashed the stock market and caused the recession that led to millions of layoffs and foreclosures. It was the so-called engine of our economy—Wall Street—which has suffered no consequence after nearly destroying the global financial system in 2008. Wall Street bonuses averaged over $128,000 per person in 2010, more than six times the average pension for a retired public-service worker in Wisconsin.

So here’s working America’s message to governors like Scott Walker and New Jersey’s Chris Christie: We believe in shared sacrifice. But we don’t believe in your version of shared sacrifice, where the wealthy and Wall Street reap all the benefits of economic growth, and working people do all the sacrificing.

We need to improve the climate for America’s middle class. We need tough rules to protect the health of workers and consumers, fair taxes on the super-rich to support decent public services, fair trade policies, and a 21st century approach to workplace rights, which recognizes that high-performance enterprises depend on making employees a part of the team.

That’s a recipe that can repair not only our budgets, but also our body politic.

AMEN TO THAT.

But I do have just one question for the esteemed Mr.Trumka: “Where’s your buddy Obama?”
 

 

 
By now, we’ve all probably seen the video of the anti-Muslim hate rally in Orange County, CA. These REPUBLICAN idiots should be ashamed of themselves, but chances are of course, that they feel completely self-satisfied about their actions. Why allow them this pleasure?

Each of these REPUBLICAN politicians who spoke at the anti-Muslim hate rally should resign, effective immediately, so as not to bring any more shame on the great state of California. Why not exercise YOUR right of free speech and let these folks know exactly how you feel about their disgusting behavior? Last time I checked, this was still America and these folks DESERVE SOME FREE SPEECH, don’t ya think?
 

 
You can reach REPUBLICAN Congressman Ed Royce here (I just called both offices, it was fun!)

1110 E. Chapman Ave, Suite 207
Orange, CA 92866
T (714) 744-4130 F (714) 744-4056

2185 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
T (202) 225-4111 F (202) 226-03
 

 
Villa Park Councilwoman Deborah Pauly, also a REPUBLICAN, said this at the hate rally: “I know quite a few marines who would be happy to help these terrorists to an early meeting in paradise.” Was she implying that our marines should be put in service of killing the people who were attending the charity event???

Vile Teabagger Deborah Pauly can be reached here:

Here is her Twitter account:
@YnotDebPauly

Email address:
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Facebook profile:
www.facebook.com/deborah.pauly

How I wish I had a phone number for her, but so far, no luck… Deborah Pauly is also the first pol in the OC to call for CA following Arizona’s plans for illegal immigrants!

You can contact her fellow members of the Villa Park city council here. Why not cc them on anything you send? Can’t hurt!
 

 
Ethically-challenged wingnut asshat REPUBLICAN Representative Gary Miller has three offices, two in CA and one in Washington, DC.

Send your love to Rep. Miller at one (or all three) of the following addresses:

2349 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

Phone: 202-225-3201
Fax: 202-226-6962

1800 E. Lambert Road
Suite 150
Brea, CA 92821

Phone: 714-257-1142
Fax: 714-257-9242

200 Civic Center
Mission Viejo, CA 92691

Phone: 949-470-8484

Go get ‘em. They NEED to hear from you!
 

 
Also among the non-elected protesters were Rabbi Dov Fischer of Young Israel of Orange County, Irvine Jewish activist Dee Sterling and Chapman University adjunct professor of law Karen Lugo. It was Karen Lugo (a pal of Michele Bachmann) who said “This is not about hate [...] We are not hatemongers. The word ‘Islamophobia’ is an effort to chill us. The Constitution was never meant to allow a tyranny of a minority.”

She’s a freakin’ LAW PROFESSOR and she makes a statement like that in this context! Lugo must have a severe irony deficiency, eh? (Or else she’s just a flaming idiot). Best of all? Lugo is a member on the California Advisory Committee to the US Civil Rights Commission!!!

Unfortunately, here’s that vile video again if you want to psych yourself up for the task:
 

 
Few artists personify the spirit of demoralized post-‘60s Europe like Blixa Bargeld, the frontman for legendary German post-industrial music outfit Einstürzende Neubauten. Born in Berlin two years before the Wall went up, Bargeld leveraged his destroyed looks and singular voice—which Nick Cave likened to the sound of strangled cats or dying children—to make Neubauten the key progenitors of Western machine-age art.

As brought to our attention by TwentyFourBit‘s esteemed Peter Henry Reed (and fortunately for us English-speaking-only dopes), YouTuber Nevaree has seen fit to add English subtitles to Birgit Herdlitschke’s fascinating 2008 Blixa doc, Mein Leben. It traces Bargeld’s journey from young, torn-up Berlin musician to cosmopolitan middle-aged avant-garde artiste, actor, and gourmet, and features both answers to the heroin question and a visit with his charming mutti.
 

 
Mein Leben part 2 | Mein Leben part 3 | Mein Leben part 4
 
After the jump: Blixa grimaces at Neubauten live mistakes…