The Dead Weather’s latest single, “Blue Blood Blues”, will have a limited edition component in the form of an all new Triple Decker Record. Designed by Jack White and assembled by United Record Pressing, the Triple Decker contains a 7” record embedded inside a 12” record. The Triple Decker is limited to 300 copies and are available at Third Man Records in Nashville on Friday Sept. 17, and at finer brick and mortar independent record stores worldwide. 50 copies will also be inserted in random mail order for Blue Blood Blues.
A new website called Price of Weed.com asks the question: What is Marijuana really worth?
From their mission statement:
We want to crowdsource the street value of marijuana from the most accurate source possible: you, the consumer. Help by annonymously submitting data on the latest transaction you’ve made.
It’s simple: you, the public, go on the site, select the area you live in and report the amount you paid for your herb and rate its quality.
The site says that it costs roughly $420 an ounce for top shelf herb in Los Angeles. I think that seems about right, although it reports the same for New York City where truly high quality cannabis—the kind more common than not on the west coast I might add—costs closer to $600 an ounce. Our friends in the Pacific Northwest get the best deals. In Portland and Seattle, high quality pot sells for just $250 an ounce.
It may be rainy up there, but at least you can be unemployed and still afford good weed. That’s important these days.
Ginsberg’s ride on that wave has perhaps ebbed and flowed since his death 13 years ago, but it is cresting once more, with the recent publication of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters (Viking) and The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation (Free Press), by Ginsberg’s archivist and biographer, Bill Morgan; an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, “Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg” (with an accompanying catalog, published by Prestel); and the movie Howl, starring indie heartthrob James Franco, about Ginsberg’s most famous poem and the 1957 obscenity trial challenging its publication in the United States. That trial, along with the simultaneous publication of Kerouac’s On the Road, catapulted the Beats into literary and cultural history.
The intense, candid letters that Ginsberg and Kerouac wrote to each other capture the emergence of that literary and cultural moment when America, and American literature, would change irrevocably. The letters are often elated with aspiration, extravagant—even hyperbolic—with language sometimes soaring for its own sake; at other times, they plunge into despair: “God knows what oblivion we’ll wind up in like unpopular Melvilles,” Ginsberg ponders.
The correspondence begins in 1944, when the two young men met in New York City, where Ginsberg was an undergraduate at Columbia University and Kerouac a dropout living nearby, and continues until 1963, six years before Kerouac’s death, in 1969. Although they were greeted by American media as barbarous buffoons at the cultural gates—“I go rewrite Whitman for the entire universe,” Ginsberg boasted—the letters demonstrate a committed literary perspective. Allusions to Melville, Balzac, and Dostoevsky, Pound and Eliot, Joyce and Henry Miller establish the tradition they were committed to continue.
Some of the letters describe the daring literary ambitions they had for their friends, especially Ginsberg’s for William S. Burroughs, whom he regarded as a genius. Others, written from Mexico in the early 1950s, reveal how their views were deepened by living in a country “beyond Darwin’s chain,” as Kerouac put it. Fortified with tequila and peyote, Kerouac praised pastoral Mexico, and both men saw it as a foil to an American obsession with acquisition and consumption. Occasionally the letters crawl with dense Buddhist philosophy; inevitably they race again with reports of the latest recklessness of friends like Neal Cassady and Gregory Corso. Later letters, more ominously, are full of the hysteria that overwhelmed Kerouac after the notoriety of On the Road. As he reported to Ginsberg, with some of the cascading presumption that galvanized his prose—repeating what he had announced in a television interview—“I am waiting for God to show his face.”
Fascinating stuff from New York-based filmmaker, Kirby Ferguson:
Remixing is a folk art but the techniques involved — collecting material, combining it, transforming it — are the same ones used at any level of creation. You could even say that everything is a remix.
Did Johnny Carson know what he was getting into when his producers asked Jim Henson to perform without Muppets on his show in February 1974?
By the time of the clip below, Henson and his Muppets Inc. crew were five years into what was becoming a hugely successful partnership with the Children’s Television Workshop on the show that would raise Generation X, Sesame Street.
What better time to do something like, say, adapt electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott’s highly trippy piece, “The Organized Mind” as a short live multimedia stage performance? (By the way, the film playing in the background is apparently Henson’s film adaptation of the same piece of music.)
A Russian communist organization urged on Tuesday the arrest of British singer Sting over his “public promotion of drugs.”
Sting, 58, played St. Petersburg on September 13 and is due to perform in Moscow on Wednesday.
“In April 2010, Mister Sting publically called for “the worldwide legalization of marijuana,” the Communists of Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, a separate organization from the much larger Communist Party, said in a statement.
“Not only communists, but everyone in favor of a healthy way of life, the strengthening of our nation’s culture and tradition must understand that such a figure , however talented screaming teens may consider him, can not appear on stage in the Russian Federation,” the group said.
It also claimed the failure of the police to detain Sting as a “leading” proponent of drug use in St. Petersburg was an example of “double standards, negligence and rotten liberalism.”
The statement went on to call for the dismissal of St. Petersburg’s cultural authorities, and accused them of “pushing our children toward the hell of degeneration,” by allowing Sting to perform.
Sting has yet to comment.
Russian communists call for arrest of ‘drug pusher’ Sting (RIA Novosti)
At the FreedomWorks 9/12 rally at the National Mall, conservative blowhard Andrew Breitbart asked this question of the mainstream media, “How dare you call these God-loving Americans, racists?” He accused Theresa Brewer of using Photoshop to doctor photographs to make Tea party, uh, “patriots” look like racists and homophobes.
But why bother, as you can tell from the above photograph of Mr. Breitbart, left, speaking with one of his admirers.
Nicely done whoever got that stellar snapshot!
I have never been able to get my head around Andrew Breitbart. Clearly he’s not an idiot, and yet he seems so freakishly resistant to the stark reality that he was speaking to an audience comprised entirely of idiots. How the fuck does that work???
Fascinating post from political pollster and superstar data analyst, Nate Silver on his FiveThirtyEight blog at the New York TImes yesterday about the precarious position the Tea party movement has put the Republican party in as the final primaries of the season take place today: If two surging-in-the-polls Tea party-backed candidates—Delware’s zany Christian conservative Christine O’Donnell and lawyer Ovide Lamontagnein in New Hampshire—win then the GOP’s chances of taking the Senate will fall dramatically. Why? Because they’re both going to be unelectable come November. Read Silvers’ analysis here.
Even atheists should be praying for crazy anti-masturbation spokeslady O’Donnell to take the GOP nomination today. For one, she’s a flaming nutcase, to the right of Dana Carvey’s “Church Lady” character on SNL and would no doubt provide some spectacular Sharron Angle-sized yucks along the way to the general election. And two, as Silver points out, there is almost no chance she’ll win it. To me, that adds up to a win/win situation!
This is the problem that the Republicans have going into the Fall with these Tea party-backed weirdos like Sharron Angle and Rand Paul dominating the party’s electoral line-up: During the primary election matchups with more moderate/electable GOP candidates, the vocal and highly-motivated Tea party-types have backed some seriously demented horses who will have next to no appeal to voters outside of Tea party circles or unrelated demographics. This is what the Democrats have been hoping for, obviously. an unelectable slate of Tea party-backed opponents in November. By and large, they are getting that.
So much for a resurgent GOP and so much for the influence of the Tea party. Having Sarah Palin’s endorsement during the primary season has been helpful for a few GOP candidates, but this same nod will be Kryptonite to moderate voters in the Fall. Unless voter turnout is low, and then it becomes meaningful. (Say what you will, but Sarah Palin fans are going to vote in force this year). Will the Democrats be able to bridge the apathy gap of their base? That’s going to be a very big factor also and so far, I’d have to say that it doesn’t look that way. Maybe losing in House in 2010 might be the best thing that could happen to the Democrats come 2012.
The media keeps pointing out that approximately 25% of the country sympathize with Tea party aims. So what. these folks are just the die-hards within the GOP that were there to begin with. The far more important information that never gets teased out of this equation is that 75% of the country is not in sympathy with Tea party viewpoints.
Below, then calling herself a “Christian activist,” a hapless Christine O’Donnell appears on a 1998 episode of Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect with Martin Mull, Eddie Izzard, and Jasmine Guy. What must O’Donnell made of Eddie Izzard?!?!
The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Technology built 7 of these mobile cinemas in the late 1960’s. This is the last surviving one.
It is outfitted with Epson EH-TW3500 LCD projector, Pioneer BDP-320 Blu-ray player, Onkyo TX-NR807 receiver and complete with Dolby 7:1 surround sound. It has 22 upholstered seats. The Vintage Mobile Cinema was launched in May 2010, they are based in the South West of England and are available for hire for private event.
Here’s a short film on the restoration of the last of these wonderful movie theaters in motion.
Pentagon officials are claiming that the book Operation Dark Heart written by a former intellifgence officer, contains “highly classified material”—as in names of spies—and are trying to buy up an entire print run of the book from publisher St. Martins Press. St. Martins say that the material that the Pentagon is asking them to remove is decades old and has already been revealed elsewhere.
Now speculation is picking up around the blogsphere that the military is more concerned about the way it’s being portrayed in the book and the author’s claim that evidence that could have prevented 9/11 was ignored. From the Guardian:
It’s every author’s dream – to write a book that’s so sensationally popular it’s impossible to find a copy in the shops, even as it keeps climbing up the bestseller lists.
And so it is for Anthony Shaffer, thanks to the Pentagon’s desire to buy up all 10,000 copies of the first printing of his new book, Operation Dark Heart. And then pulp them.
The US defence department is scrambling to dispose of what threatens to be a highly embarrassing expose by the former intelligence officer of secret operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and of how the US military top brass missed the opportunity to win the war against the Taliban.
The department of defence is in talks with St Martin’s Press to purchase the entire first print run on the grounds of national security.
The publisher is content to sell the books but the two sides are in a grinding dispute over what should appear in a censored version and when it should be released.
Now St Martin’s Press says it will put the partly redacted manuscript on sale next week whether or not the defence department likes it – and there doesn’t appear much the authorities can do.
Nope, nothing besides seeing to it that this book climbs rapidly up the best-seller lists…
Pentagon tries to buy entire print run of US spy expose Operation Dark Heart (Guardian)
sent me this hilarious item about Sting today:
