Michele Bachmann’s delusional McCarthyite “Islamunists in the State Dept.” conspiracy theories are all fun and games until someone starts getting death threats…

Via The New York Post:

Police and federal officials have placed security around ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, after a New Jersey man threatened her, law-enforcement sources said.

An individual, described as a Muslim man, made the unspecified threat after Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) last week claimed Abedin’s family had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and asked for a probe to see if she is helping the Islamist organization.
The man was questioned by the NYPD and the State Department and has not been charged, sources said.

The GOP really needs to do something about this reckless, irresponsible train-wreck. To say nothing of the voters in her district!

If you’d like to donate some money to the Democratic challenger running against Michele Bachmann, MN hotel owner Jim Graves, you can do so here.

Image by Skywalker11

I grew up in West Virginia. Practically from the day I was born, I was exposed to the idea of what a strip mine is. When I saw The Lorax on TV for the first time, I would have been about six, and I can recall drawing an immediate connection to the barren wasteland hell-pit down the hill from my parents’ house as I watched. My childrhood was spent in an area where the “Truffula trees” were hard, black and underground, but the point Dr. Seuss wanted kids to instinctually grok, I can assure you, was not lost on me.

Large coal companies have been coming in and raping the land without opposition for decades. That is the way things are in West Virginia. Without opposition? Who am I kidding, they roll out the red carpet for the pleasure, because residents of the state are so desperate for the work. When your family is hungry, it’s all about the here and now. The coal companies write the laws in WV. This is how they’re able to saw the tops off of once pristine mountains and hills, fuck up the drinking water and destroy the soil, generally leaving the place looking like a lunar landscape in their wake.

When the coal is gone, West Virginia is going to be a big hole in the middle of the country. That’s all that’s going to be left of it. The people who live there who would like to stop it, can’t stop anything and most people outside of the state are either totally unaware of what’s going on there or they simply don’t care.

Very few images of the so-called “sacrifice zones” left behind by rapacious late-stage Capitalism make it to the mainstream media. Once in a while, maybe, but what goes on in the hills of Appalachia isn’t really the stuff of The New York Times, CNN or even MSNBC. The state is too far removed from the media centers and corridors of power, so the mountain tops keep getting removed and now the guy living in the mobile home down the road has sold the fracking rights to his five acres. Who gives a shit about your drinking water?

The answer, quite frankly, doesn’t seem to be anyone. This is just the way it goes…

After the jump, watch Bill Moyers and Chris Hedges discuss Capitalism’s ‘sacrifice zones’...
 

 
This is raw video of an interview from the early ‘90s with Devo co-founder Jerry Casale that was intended to be used in a documentary on the band that was, as far as I know, never completed. But the footage as it is still serves as a wonderful history of Devo and an entry into the brilliant mind of Casale.

The fact that you can’t hear the questions being asked of Casale doesn’t diminish the interview in the least. It’s full of fascinating insights and anecdotes detailing the genesis, rise and continued success of one of rock ‘n’ roll’s truly visionary bands. Casale delivers all of this with wit and sharply observed truths about the art and business of pop music.

Spud-boy Casale is one very intelligent potato and this video should be mandatory viewing in high school art classes (if they still exist).

Unfortunately, there’s about six minutes missing from the interview that contains some musical content that was disallowed by Youtube for licensing reasons. If that situation changes, I will update this article.
 

 
Gerard Courant’s Cinematon is a 175 hour long film comprised of 2,627 portraits (cinematons), each made from exactly one reel of three minute and 25 second 8mm silent film. They were shot between 1978 and 2012. Courant’s subjects vary from his close personal friends to artists in various fields, including actors, painters, film makers, as well as public figures known and not-so well-known.

Among the many directors that Courant has filmed are Samuel Fuller, Terry Gilliam, Jean-Luc Godard and Wim Wenders, to name just a few.

I’ve chosen a handful of my favorites to share with you. They can seen after the jump. Approximately 900 cinematons can be viewed here.

The entire collection of cinematons has been screened only twice and as a whole is the longest film ever made. I love many of these little vignettes because they’re so naked and at times you do feel as if you’re peering into the soul of the people on film. The natural lighting and silence contributes to their purity.

Of the cinematons I’ve seen, #264 is among the ones that delighted me the most, for obvious reasons. The subject is Galaxie Barbouth, the daughter of French actor Joel Barbouth, and she’s absoulutely wonderful. I believe this is Courant’s favorite.
 

 
Samuel Fuller, Sandrine Bonnaire, Derek Jarman, Terry Gilliam and Julie Delpy after the jump…

 
Money can’t buy you friends, but it can buy you new (nonexistent) Twitter followers. Just ask Thurston Howell III Mitt Romney!

Yep, it would appear that Mitt Romney’s startlingly inept presidential campaign is at it again. Today’s mishap? Buying up fake Twitter followers to give the appearance that Romney’s lackluster social media fortunes (at least in comparison to Obama’s over 17 million followers) might be turning around… but not just a few, a few football stadiums’ worth!

The Romney camp must be kinda new at this stuff. How else to explain how Romney saw his Twitter followers spike with over 100,000 new followers added within 24 hours (and not the 1000 to 5000 new followers Romney’s account normally gets)? His best day EVER was gaining about 9000 new followers in April. Peek You analyzed the Twitter accounts of the Republican presidential contenders in 2011, and found that only 26% of Mitt Romney’s followers were actual human beings! (Amusingly, 92% of Newt Gingrich’s followers were fake accounts.)

This is what you might call a statistical anomaly.

There are other ways to describe it, too, of course…

Via Little Green Footballs:

Check the number of followers, then watch as it increases by a hundred or so every time you reload the page. If you look at all these followers, they seem to have major trouble with spelling simple English words, have names that sometimes seem to be random assortments of syllables, and have no (or very few) followers themselves.

At the current rate, he’s adding about 10,000 followers every hour.

Strangely, a great many of Mitt Romney’s new followers, for some reason, have tweeted this gibberish:

“Lmao lucky there was no time left on the clock lol home boy dead hit dat half court shot”

Search for that word salad on Twitter and look who comes up. Some of these “people” haven’t tweeted even once since last year and yet TODAY they all just up and decided to fire up their moribund Twitter account, follow Thurston Mitt and then tweet inane shit like that?

Kids these days, right? Wasting their time on that Twitter, posting nonsense like “Lmao lucky there was no time left on the clock lol home boy dead hit dat half court shot” when they could be watching Internet porn or playing video games. I mean, what gives?

How ridiculously low-brow and stupid Romney’s Twitter followers seem to be would be alarming IF THESE PEOPLE REALLY EXISTED IN THE FIRST PLACE.

If you can’t even manage a fuckin’ Twitter account, or delegate better than THIS, how you gonna run a country, Thurston Mitt?

Meanwhile, against all evidence to the contrary (see chart below) the Romney campaign is denying that it purchased any Twitter followers!!!
 

 

 
Clearly a labor of love by a fan who adores Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Greek director Nicholas Triandafyllidis’ I Put A Spell On Me manages to transcend the sort of cinematic mash note that directors who are too in awe of their subject tend to create. This documentary is the kind of testament Hawkins deserves - a solid and well-rounded film that features insightful interviews and great live performance footage. It’s unbelievable that no one thought of telling Hawkin’s tale before 1999, the year Triandafyllidis began filming his movie.

Documenting Hawkins’ tour of Greece, Triandafyllidis manages to capture Hawkins in full force and it’s hard to fathom that only four months after this concert footage was shot Hawkins would die of a heart attack in Paris at the age of 70.

Over the years the song “I Put A Spell On You” has sold over 18 million copies. But Hawkins never received any money for the tune because of the kind of dirty dealing that we’re all too familiar with when it came to record companies and how they treated Black artists. Arguably one of the most influential and pioneering figures in rock ‘n’ roll, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins never got his due. This documentary is a small step in the right direction in bringing attention to a legend. Too bad he wasn’t around to see it.

Jim Jarmusch, Bo Diddley and Eric Burdon add their invaluable perspective to the film.
 

 
Art: Drew Friedman

 
Probably no one has ever accused Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips of being smart, but I reckon he’s been called of lots of other things:

Talk about jumping the shark right over Occam’s Razor…

“Obama by his own admission was a very heavy marijuana user in his youth.  He has also admitted to using cocaine, though he denies using drugs such as heroin.  He also says he was a significant drinker.

Why is this important?

Because these are all symptoms of addiction.

A man named Larry Sinclair claims that in 1999 he and Barack Obama had sex and then smoked crack cocaine.  This is 1999, nine years before Obama would run for President.

Crack cocaine is very addictive.   It is very destructive.  Addiction specialist (sic) will tell you that a crack addiction is very tough to break.

Is Obama an addict?  Was he an addict in the past?

These are all legitimate questions to ask about a man who has his hands on the nuclear trigger.

Why is Obama hiding these records and why isn’t the drive by media asking these questions.  

Why aren’t Republicans demanding the answers to these questions, instead of telling Mitt Romney he needs to play into Obama’s hands by releasing more tax returns??”

Uh, well…. just hazarding a guess here, but maybe, just maybe Judson, maybe they’re a little less batshit fucking crazy than you are? Maybe you’re not buddying up to the right reichwingers? What about Louie Gohmert or Michele Bachmann? Whatsamatter THEY aren’t taking your calls anymore, Judson?

I don’t even think Fox News is willing to have poor, hapless Judson on anymore. When Fox doesn’t want your services, your salad days as a pundit are pretty much over. That’s a special cattle-brand of “DUMB SHIT” seared into your forehead! Soon Phillips will have to settle for seeing himself on Victoria Jackson’s podcast. How far the mighty have fallen, eh?

Via Joe.My.God

 
The war against advertising has recently taken an interesting turn, with 26 artists from 8 countries, traveling across the UK for 5 days, subverting billboard advertising.

Called Brandalism, or “Taking the piss with a point”, it is a clever mix of vandalism, graffiti and art, and is a direct attack on the corporate branding which has become such a blight on our landscape.

‘Following on from the guerilla art traditions of the 20th Century and taking inspiration from the Dadaists, Situationists and Street Art movements, the Brandalism project will see the largest reclamation of outdoor advertising space in UK history as artists challenge the authority and legitimacy of the advertising industry. We are tired of being shouted at by adverts on every street corner so we decided to get together with some friends from around the world and start to take them back, one billboard at a time…....’

Brandalist work includes a reworked Manchester United soccer player, Wayne Rooney lifting the rewards of looting; health warnings placed on car adverts; knife crime underlining trainer wars; campaigns against the London Olympics reclamation of land. These are powerful and thought-provoking works that engage directly with their audience, which seek “to confront the ad industry and take back our visual landscapes.” Below is a selection of some of the artists’ work taken from the Brandalism site. I say, more power to them.

Find out more about Brandalism and the artists here.
 
 

 

 
More works of Brandalism, after the jump…
 
With thanks to Scheme Comix
 

 
Ian Dury and The Blockheads with Dr. Feelgood’s Wilko Johnson play solid set at the Palace Theater in Paris, 1981.

The always sartorially and satirically sharp Dury looks like he’s channeling a combination of Bryan Ferry and Jack The Ripper in this fab bit of musical history.
 

 
Martin Cizmar, you deserved that Eagle Scout medal, too!

July 19, 2012

Martin Cizmar
 

Just mailed my Eagle Scout medal back to the BSA to protest the ban on gay scouts. Kinda sad, but important.

— Martin Cizmar (@martincizmar) July 19, 2012

 
Via Towleroad