We can no longer hide from who we are. Not anymore. Not when things like this happen. I see something historic in this, don’t you?

We live in a cruel, cruel society. A land where the game is rigged for straight up misery for the common man and the winners have been taking all that they can get away with for decades. I was deflated when I read about this story. I just wanted to put my head down on my desk and cry.

From ABC News:

A 59-year-old man has been jailed in Gastonia, N.C., on charges of larceny after allegedly robbing an RBC Bank for $1 so he could get health care in prison. Richard James Verone handed a female teller a note demanding the money and claiming that he had a gun, according to the police report.

He then sat down and waited for police to arrive. “… I say, ‘I’ll be sitting right over here, on the chair, waiting for the police,’” Verone told reporters, recalling the June 9 robbery in an interview from Gaston County Jail.

And wait for the police, he did.

“He’s sitting on the sofa as you walk in the front door,” the bank teller said in a 911 call.

Police arrested Verone where he sat. He was unarmed.

Verone said he asked for $1 to show that his motives were medical, not monetary, according to news reports. With a growth in his chest, two ruptured disks and no job, Verone hoped a three-year stint in prison would afford him the health care he needed.

“I’m sort of a logical person and that was my logic, what I came up with,” Verone told reporters. “If it is called manipulation, then out of necessity because I need medical care, then I guess I am manipulating the courts to get medical care.”

But the charge of larceny, not armed robbery, is unlikely to keep Verone behind bars for more than 12 months. He is being held in Gaston County Jail on a $2,000 bond, according to a spokesman for the jail, and is scheduled to appear in court June 28.

Read a more detailed story of what led an American citizen to chose prison over his “freedom” at the Gaston Gazette. It’s enough to make you want to puke.

What he did took guts. I see this as a principled stand. I sincerely hope this gentleman gets the medical treatment he needs and that one day statues are erected of him across this land…

And now, if you really want to weep yourself senseless, watch this clip of FDR discussing a Second Bill of Rights in 1944. This footage, long thought lost, was found by Michael Moore’s researchers and used so brilliantly in Capitalism: A Love Story (a film I urge you all to see if you haven’t. On Netflix VOD). Imagine if the country had realized these goals 70 years ago?
 

 
The the former Kinks frontman and one of our greatest living pop songwriters and observers of working-class life, Ray Davies, turns 67 today!

Although stories have long been told about what a prick Davies is supposed to be in real life (especially those tales told by his estranged younger brother Dave Davies) I got a chance to meet him in the late 80s and he was super cool. He had to change a shot on the master of a music video he’d directed (I can’t recall for what, but it took place on a rooftop) and I was given the job at a video post house where I was working at the time. He was cheerful and friendly.

I was looking for just the right video—my first choice would have been a live “Shangri-La” or “This is Where I Belong” from the sixties or early seventies, but neither can be found on YouTube—and came across a clip I had not seen before of The Kinks performing on the Once More With Felix program hosted by American folk singer Julie Felix, in 1969.

Below, watch a terrific performance of “Picture Book,”  from their classic album, The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. This is one of those things that would have been lost to time—and the idiotic BBC policy of wiping their video masters to re-use the tapes!—had not a former BBC video engineer named Bob Pratt defied BBC policy and made his own copies of significant programs and event coverage.
 

 
Birthday bonus, a great “Days” from Pop Go The Sixties:
 

 
Truly one of the dumbest products I’ve ever seen. Apparently with this, uh… versatile mustache disguise kit you can pretend you’re in Star Wars, endorse Colt 45 malt liquor or be a mac daddy ladies’ man. It’s entirely up to you!  The mustache is $7.99 at the Star Wars Shop.

(via Gorilla Mask)

 
I’ve not seen this one before.

The Stones interviewed at the Sea Way Motel in Montréal for Canadian teen music show Like Young. April 22, 1965.

Jim McKenna (Montreal’s Dick Clark) is doing the interview. I love it when he asks Charlie whether he planned to go back into fashion design once his music career was over.

Anyone who thinks punk rock started with The Ramones or The Sex Pistols should take a look at this video. Watts and Wyman can barely conceal their disdain for the whole pop star thing. Keith is totally elsewhere, Jagger seems slightly bemused but mostly restless while Brian manages some bad boy charm as he actually takes the time to answer the questions.
 

 
Caption THIS…

My entry is:

“What Would Jethro Do?”

Via Christian Nightmares

“There is a heartlessness for people who take everything for themselves and turn their backs on the rest of the American people.”

Heroic Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, known to many of us for her role in Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story and for speaking her mind to evil Republicans, gave this great speech on the House floor last week and told it like it T. I. is about the poor in America and cruel GOP policies.

“They hurt the Republic. They hurt our country. And they have not been held accountable…

... I don’t have enough power to hold them accountable, but I hope God does. Because what they’ve done is unforgivable. Their rugged individualism is unpatriotic, it’s un-Christian and it hurts this country.”

The whole speech is good, but she get really cooking just before the five minute mark:
 

 
Julien Temple directed Mantrap, an under-rated and often considered “lost” featurette starring 1980’s New Romantic group ABC. Like a lot of Temple’s work it’s full of quirky originality and style, which compensates for the lack of script. Mantrap can be best summed-up by its Wikipedia entry:

Martin Fry is asked to join [a] band as they embark on tour heading east through Europe. But at the height of their popularity the band tries to secretly replace Fry with a Russian spy in order to sneak him back behind the iron curtain. It is then up to Martin to battle his doppelganger and make the world safe for New Romantic Synth Pop.

Temple is a true maverick, who has more than a touch of genius about him. His films always deliver great visual imagination as disguise for a weak script (Absolute Beginners), but when Temple has a good script, like Frank Cottrell Boyce’s Pandaemonium, or is working with straight non-fiction narrative Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, the superb documentary on Dr Feelfgood, Oil City Confidential, or The Filth and the Fury, his talents soar.

Though slight, Mantrap is well worth watching for 101 reasons, from its classic soundtrack by ABC, its style, its visuals, its concert footage, Martin Fry’s good looks, its silliness, its joie de vivre….etc.

Seminal New Romantics ABC and punk filmmaker Julien Temple pay homage to 50s espionage flicks in this hour long folly from 1983. Martin Fry has the look of a Hitchcock protagonist, but by his own admission, his acting was a little “mahogany”. Temple captures the isolation and paranoia of the former Communist Bloc, but forgets to tell a story in the process.

Nonetheless, this curiosity from the naive dawn of pop-video has enough to keep fans and casual viewers entertained. The 6th form script about some Cold War double dealing will occasionally make you wince, but is padded out with some wonderful footage of ABC’s (sadly never repeated) World Tour.

B-Movie regulars and wannabes try their best amidst the ensuing nonsense - but it’s pretty much in vain, so don’t expect John le Carré! But do delight in a soundtrack taken from arguably the greatest debut album of all time - “The Lexicon of Love”.

 
See the rest of ‘Mantrap’, after the jump…
 

 
In the past weeks, my lovely wife Tara and I have watched every single episode (89 total over six series) of The Larry Sanders Show. What a masterpiece of comedy. It’s awe-inspiring, a tremendous artistic triumph. One that was sustained at a very, very high level for many years. The final two years were the best of all. It truly went out on a high when it left the air in 1998

The Larry Sanders Show features one of the greatest ensemble casts in the history of television comedy: Garry Shandling in the title role, Rip Torn as Artie the show’s producer, Jeffrey Tambor as “Hey now!” Hank Kingsley, Janeane Garofalo and Penny Johnson, understated but so brilliant as Larry’s personal assistant, Beverly. Scott Thompson was also fantastic in later seasons as Hank’s assistant, Brian.

The celebrity cameos the show was so famous for came from the likes of a then up-and-coming Jon Stewart, Carol Burnett, Sharon Stone, Mimi Rogers, Billy Crystal, Alec Baldwin, Elvis Costello, Ryan O’Neal… real celebrities playing often awful fictionalized versions of themselves (a neat trope Ricky Gervais, a huge fan of Sanders, availed himself of for Extras). I thought Ellen DeGeneres, Lori Loughlin and especially David Duchovny were standouts guests. Even The Butthole Surfers (who actually sang about Garry Shandling in one of their songs) were musical guests on the series (Larry acts like he wants to hang out with them, in a really insincere way and they sneer at him).

The Larry Sanders Show is simply one of the best things I’ve ever seen and it has aged like a fine, fine wine. I got the same kind of high watching Sanders as I get from listening to great classical music. Every element of the show is orchestrated perfectly. It’s a marvel to behold.

When the show actually aired, I didn’t have cable, and so I was never really exposed to more than an episode or two. Viewing all 89 episodes compressed into a matter of a few weeks like this (we’d watch 4 or 5 of them a night) was an especially good way to appreciate the perfection that each and every episode represents. There really is no end to the superlatives I could heap onto onto the production. It’s comedy cut like a multifaceted diamond. There’s not a single bad episode in the bunch and even the “worst” one would still be a 9/10.

Garry Shandling is a comedy god to me. He’s in the pantheon of the greatest greats in my book. There’s no wonder that he’s kept a relatively low profile in the years after Larry Sanders: How the hell do you top something this great? Why squander that kind of cultural capital? Writer/producer Judd Apatow went on to his own numerous successes, of course.

In any case, The Larry Sanders Show, wow. I may be a little late to the party on this—13 years, in fact—but chances are that some of you reading this, some of you like me, who spent the 90s doing anything but watching TV, might have missed it, too. Fear not, for you can watch the entire series on Netflix and I noticed that the 17 DVD set of the entire series of The Larry Sanders Show is on sale at Amazon.
 

 
Jeffrey Tambor is a genius:
 

 
(image via Publique)

 
Van Jones, the former White House green jobs adviser and activist, is the lefty Boogeyman that Glenn Beck returns to again and again and again. To hear Beck tell it, Van Jones is some Darth Vader-type evil overlord behind the dark forces of Liberalism, right up there with George Soros hisself. Jones gave a fantastic speech at the Netroots Nation convention last week, where he first called Beck out:

I issue a personal challenge to my beloved brother Glenn Beck. I will debate you anytime, anywhere, at any point. I’ll give you an hour, you give me five minutes. And I will stand up for our values. But you would have to stop talking about us and start talking to us.

You got one week left before your show goes off. My phone is ringing. Call me! Call me, Glenn Beck! And let’s have this fight. Let’s have this discussion. Let’s have this argument. Let’s have this battle of ideas. Battle of ideas. And let’s fight for liberty and justice for all.

It was Beck more than any other conservative mouthpiece who hounded Jones into resigning from his White House post, but now Jones is challenging Beck to a debate. MoveOn is trying to raise money to air this 30 second spot during the final days of Beck’s Fox News program.

Fantastic, this is a debate I’d LOVE to see. If you’d like to see this, too, you can donate to MoveOn here.

A debate of IDEAS? I wonder if Beck will accept the challenge?
 

 
Take a look at Jones’ inspirational Netroots Nation speech and see if he lives up to Beck’s characterization of him as an evil Commie or not.