No reason to miss out on the anti-capitalist fun anymore if you don’t live near New York! Here’a a way to combine getting rid of junk mail with political activism, it takes just 5 minutes a day and you don’t have to leave home to do it.
It’s simple: Keep Wall Street occupied by sending all those junk mail credit card and loan offers right back to banks that sent them at their expense! Bankrupt the bankers one piece of junk mail at a time… Here are some tips:
Playing almost like a particularly claustrophobic Argento film produced by Roger Corman, but starring Hammer’s two most notable leading men, the gory low-budget—but totally wonderful—Horror Express is one of those films that we of a certain age saw repeatedly on “Chiller Theater” type TV shows in the mid to late 70s. When I was a ten-year-old kid, this film absolutely scared the shit out of me.
In Horror Express, which is almost a horror comedy, a supposed “missing link” is discovered in Siberia, but the frozen creature is merely the vessel for an extraterrestrial spirit of “pure evil” that can hop from victim to victim turning them into zombies that bleed from their eyes. It stars Christoper Lee and Peter Cushing as two competitive archaeologists. Telly Savalas has a great supporting role as a brutal Cossack officer who’s a nasty piece of work and there is even a weird Rasputin character, too. It was written by Arnaud d’Usseau and Julian Zimet, the same (one-time blacklisted) screenwriters who penned the “undead biker” classic Psychomania. It was directed by Eugenio Martín. Like many European films of the time, this Spanish production was shot without sound and the actors dubbed their voices in later so it’s got that loopy sort of feel.
The film has been in the public domain for years and crappy quasi-bootleg copies have been making the rounds for a while (I have one that has the film reels out of order). At long last, Horror Express fans are getting treated to a new deluxe 2-disc dual DVD/Blu-ray release from cult meisters extraordinare, Severin Films. The new high-definition master has been created using the original camera negative and DVD extras include a recording of an extensive 1973 interview with Peter Cushing. (Cushing’s wife died before filming on Horror Express commenced. He almost backed out of the film entirely).
It makes sense that a state as hard hit economically as Michigan has been would have clergy so supportive of the anti-capitalist protests. It’s because they know what post-capitalism looks like in Michigan! The clergy truly cater to the poor there, it’s not a joke to them. The support for Occupy Wall Street is even coming directly from the pulpit as the (appropriate) question is asked:
If Jesus were alive today, would he be at Occupy Wall Street movement?
As senior pastor of the nondenominational Fountain Street Church, [Rev. Fred] Wooden delivered a sermon this month which highlighted the similarities between the Occupy movement’s cry for economic equality and the gospel story of Jesus cleansing the temple by casting out the money changers.
But Wooden didn’t stop at words when it came to expressing solidarity with the Occupy movement. The church has allowed the Occupy Grand Rapids protesters to camp in its parking lot at night and is providing other support measures.
It appears the movement has found an ally in the faith community due to their cry for social and economic justice. On Monday, the Vatican’s call for the establishment of a “global public authority” and a “central world bank” to rule over financial institutions was seen immediately as a measure of support for Occupy Wall Street.
“The economic and financial crisis which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence,” the Vatican’s Justice and Peace document said.
—Snip—
Although some have criticized the movement’s message as muddled and diluted by fringe elements taking rhetorical refuge under the Occupy umbrella, Belief Watch columnist Lisa Miller points out that the Jesus of history would have loved them all.
Jesus gave preferential treatment to society’s outcasts, wrote Miller recently in the Washington Post. “Lepers, tax collectors, prostitutes — all would attain heaven before the ordained elites.” And, she argues, Jesus says in the Gospels that the meek will inherit the Earth.
“There would be no Wall Street if Jesus and Mohammad had their way,” said Ghazala Munir, one of the founders of the Interfaith Dialogue Association in West Michigan, during the Oct. 19 panel discussion at Fountain Street Church.
Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners and current chair of the Global Agenda Council on Faith for the World Economic Forum, recently wrote a new book called “Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street — A Moral Compass for the New Economy.”
“Don’t expect the Occupy protesters to produce a list of policy demands, Wallis said. That’s not their purpose. Rather, they are creating space for the fundamental questions about social justice that weren’t being asked before this fall.”
Wallis said Washington, D.C., is not a place where change originates, but where change arrives. If nothing else, the movement has been successful in refocusing the media and politicians on the problem of inequality, he said.
“The Bible says you see the truth of a society more clearly from the bottom and the edges than from the top.”
It’s interesting to read this brain-damaged comments thread at NewsBusters for the opposite side of this issue, including who Jesus would hate, using nukes on OWS, etc, etc.
For more of the flipside of things, rightwing radio fuckwit Michael Savage pukes up some bile on the “Would Jesus Occupy Wall Street?” question: “Jesus was not a communist, that I can tell you!” sez Savage. What kind of bitter, mean old white guys would listen to a radio show like this every day? A few minutes of Michael Savage is enough to be mildly upsetting. He’s a humorless, witless creep who makes Rush Limbaugh seem like a master showman by comparison. Enjoy!
Academic, activist, scholar and revolutionary, Angela Davis addressed the Occupy Wall Street “annex” in Washington Square Park yesterday. She asked the bone-cold crowd: “How can we be together in a unity that is complex and emancipatory?”
To the question of the language of “occupation,” Davis counseled protesters to be aware that the U.S. is behind military occupations in other countries that are brutal and oppressive, but argued it was also possible to use the word differently. “We turn occupation into something that is beautiful, that brings community together.”
Many in the audience seemed to want advice from Davis, but she encouraged the movement to find its own answers. “We stand behind calls for…the decommodification of education, healthcare,” she said, and noted that the movement’s language carries with it the implicit promise of more work: “If we say we are the 99%, we have to commit ourselves to organizing the 99%”
Repeatedly, Davis stressed the need for inclusion, urging protesters to insist on inclusiveness, to make space for the most marginalized people in society, to hear their voices. To questions about political process, she got a laugh from the crowd when she said, “I agree with you that capitalism sucks,” but she urged the crowd not to let another Republican become president even as she said that the two-party system was broken and called for growing the movement until even conservatives wanted to join it.
“That seems to me what this movement is about: freedom and the redefinition of freedom,” Davis said. She called for support of the November 2 general strike planned in Oakland, CA.
Angela Davis interviewed in a California prison in 1970 by Barry Callahan. This is a fascinating clip.
Okay, so this incredible “standoff” between The Great Beast and the Best Movie Villain of All Time is photoshopped. It’s still an amazing image, though. Happy Halloween!
George Carlin, brilliant and prolific comedian lived and went to school on this street. He love this street and crafted many of his most famous routines around it.
We the legions of fans, admirers and fans of George Carlin believe that a street should be named in honor of the greatest comedian of all time in his hometown, the greatest comedy city of all time!
As readers of this blog know, I absolutely revere George Carlin, so I’d love to see this happen. His must-read autobiography, Last Words, tells charming tales of how the characters in his Morningside Heights neighborhood influenced his comedy. Carlin wrote in the book that for his entire career the voices he did were nearly all imitations of the vivid crowd of smartasses he ran with as a kid.
The new David Lynch album Crazy Clown Time is exactly what you would expect from America’s greatest contemporary surrealist: crazy clown shit.
Moody, sexy, spooky and hypnotic, this is perfect Halloween music. I fucking dig the way the country-noir voodoo merges with Lynch’s Transcendental Meditation mind trips, riffs on dental hygiene, melting slide-guitars, funereal drum beats and rinky-dinky new wave rhythm tracks that would sound absolutely corny without Lynch’s serial killer vocals. I’m looking for an adjective to describe this tantalizing mix of the ordinary with the mad and all I come up with is “Lynchian.”
It’s streaming right now at NPR. Turn down the lights, pour yourself a glass of wine or fire up your favorite herbal blend and let Doctor Lynch perform his psychic surgery on your frontal lobes.
Fans of Johnny Dowd should really dig the fuck out of this. I’m guessing Lynch has heard a fair share of Dowd.
Crazy Clown Town will be released in the USA on November 8.
There’s something pure and beautiful about Patrick Swayze in this 1979 Pabst commercial. He actually makes the notion of drinking shit beer seem almost spiritual.
Swayze was way ahead of the curve. Three decades after this ad was shot, Pabst became the preferred beer of hipsters everywhere.
With its Bee Gees sound-a-like jingle and Swayze in Tony Manero drag, this was clearly marketed to fans of Saturday Night Fever, the folks who preferred a mug of suds with their cocaine in a Bay Ridge disco than some Studio 54 Dom Perignon with Liza and Andy.
Swayze was cool in the same way Astaire and Gene Kelly were cool, he occupied that gravitational still point where music finds its body, flesh its orbit and center, and rhythm gives birth to grace. Any doubts about Swayze’s Zen mastery of space and time? Check out his Buddha as bouncer movie Roadhouse where he channels The Man With No Name and Sammo Hung.
If beer could make us all as effervescent as Mr. Swayze, I’d be drinking it. Unfortunately, it turns most folks into gaseous slugs.
One other thing, can you believe the quality of this 32 year old video? Where was it stored? In an air-tight vault at the North Pole? This looks as eye-searingly lysergic as Gaspar Noé‘s Enter The Void.
Before there was a Velvet Underground, there was Lewis Reed, Lewis Allen Rabinowitz (aka Lou Reed), who in 1962 recorded a couple of self-penned tracks for indie record mogul Brent Shad. “Merry Go Round” and “Your Love” were written a year before Reed’s residency as an in-house songwriter for Pickwick Records.
‘Merry Go Round’ sounds like most teen pop tunes of the era. The only thing that distinguishes it is the unmistakable voice of Lou Reed. Kinda sounds like Dion on white crosses.
Wow! Phenomenal They Live Halloween costumes by Kiersten Essenpreis. There are step-by-step photo instructions for making the masks over on Kiersten’s website. I think I may have to make one these next year—they’re just too good!
Manson (1972) is the razorblade in your Halloween candy bar. Chock full of footage of Manson and his freaky followers, this competently-made and unsettling documentary is a horror show made that much more horrifying by the fact that these folks aren’t acting, they’re real. With subject matter this dark and disturbing, the film makers didn’t have to embellish the story in order to gut punch the audience. All they had to do was point the camera in the right direction and let the film roll. Some of the interviewees have the long-distance stare of the truly mad.
Had the US government wanted to put a stake in the heart of the hippie movement, Manson’s gang of demonic flower children and the mayhem at Altamont provided the perfect opportunities to discredit an entire movement. Along with the death of Sharon Tate and Meredith Hunter, 1969 saw the death of the Aquarian Age.
The “highlights” (because he HAD TO BE HIGH) of Rick Perry’s speech Friday night in Manchester, New Hampshire. I hope to God this buffoon is the Republican nominee, don’t you?
No wonder Perry doesn’t want to participate in the GOP debates! When you come off like a bigger idiot than Michele Bachmann does, that’s really, really saying something…
