Kathie Free, a retired Milwaukee public school social worker told Huffington Post:
“He owes it to us. Obama was not put into office just by the big money. He was put into office by millions of poor and middle-class people who walk the neighborhoods, talking to neighbors, getting the votes, and that’s how Obama got in, and he has to start remember how he got in. He’d better start working for the middle class and poor people.”
As I wind up my two weeks on Dangerous Minds, my last two posts consist of my favorite observations by others, offered during his presidency:
“Ronald Reagan is merely an anthology of the worst of American popular culture, edited for television.”
—Media critic Mark Crispin Miller
“God, he’s a bore. And a bad actor. Besides, he has a low order of intelligence. With a certain cunning. And not animal cunning. Human cunning. Animal cunning is too fine an expression for him. He’s inflated, he’s egotistical. He’s one of those people who thinks he’s right. And he’s not right. He’s not right about anything.”
—Director John Huston
“I would never refuse an assignment unless it completely repelled me. ... A national magazine asked me to go to Santa Barbara to photograph the President at his ranch. Well, I hate Santa Barbara and, far worse, I hate Reagan. I can’t ignore my feelings and just make a pretty picture.”
—Photographer/environmentalist Ansel Adams
“It takes deep bravery to be fearless about one’s own hypocrisy. Politicians of average duplicity cower at being found out. Not Reagan.”
—Columnist Colman McCarthy
“Look at the Reagan of the 1930s: a no-talent jerk with looks, charm, and a line of blarney who talks himself into one cushy job after another ... Then come the 1950s. In return for his manful anti-communistical efforts in the screen actors’ union, the pimps, procurers, and purveyors of popular culture who own stage, screen and radio arrange for him to be paid off with a job selling General Electric toasters on TV and smarmy right-wing politics on the chicken-croquette circuit. How humiliating to think of this unlettered, self-assured bumpkin being our president.”
—Journalist Nicholas von Hoffman
“If we told Reagan to walk outside, turn around three times, pick up an acorn, and throw it out to the crowd, we’d be lucky to get a question from him asking, ‘Why?’”
—Unnamed White House aide
“He’s melting. No one’s noticed yet, but he is melting. We’re talking about a semi-solid mass with dark hair. If the Democrats had come out and just said, ‘He’s melting,’ I think they would have done much better.”
—Actress/writer Carrie Fisher
Excerpted from the “Reagan Centennial Edition” of my 1989 book The Clothes Have No Emperor, available here as an enhanced eBook.
Here’s an excellent performance-documentary of The Kinks in concert at the Rainbow Theater in London, 1972. It was shot around the time of their classic album Muswell Hillbillies, and the performance footage was originally shown as part of the BBC’s In Concert series.
What makes this program especially wonderful is the way highlights form the concert have been inter-cut with documentary footage with interviews from the band, vox pops, celebrity fan / film and TV producer, the late Ned Sherrin, together with clips from The Virgin Soldiers, and Ray Davies wandering around the disappearing London haunts of his childhood. Tracks include:
“Till the End of the Day”
“Waterloo Sunset”
“Top of the Pops”
“The Money-go-Round”
“Sunny Afternoon”
“She’s Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina”
“Alcohol”
“Acute Schizophrenia Paranoid Blues”
“You Really Got Me”
Here’s a fascinating (and a little gruesome) look at what happens when a giant beast dies in wild… the circle of life. From Channel 4’s The Elephant: Life after Death.
He was the bad boy artist whose life inspired film-makers and writers to cast him as a sexual revolutionary or a proto-anarchist of the Renaissance, but the release of his police files suggest the genius painter Caravaggio was more of a gang member with a list of petty crimes and one murder to his name.
An exhibition of documents, at Rome’s State Archives, details Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s numerous run-ins with the police, all of which are described in “handwritten police logs, legal and court parchments,” the BBC reports:
The picture the documents paint is that of an irascible man who went about town carrying personal weapons - a sword and dagger, and even a pistol - without a written permit, boasting that he enjoyed the protection of the ecclesiastical authorities who commissioned some of his most famous works.
He had frequent brushes with the police, got into trouble for throwing a plate of cooked artichokes in the face of a waiter in a tavern, and made a hole in the ceiling of his rented studio, so that his huge paintings would fit inside. His landlady sued, so he and a friend pelted her window with stones.
All these events are documented with eyewitness accounts in this collection of yellowing parchments - difficult to decipher for the non-specialist, but rich in contemporary detail for a skilled archivist.
The documents provide a completely new account of his most serious brawl in May 1606 in which he killed a certain Ranuccio Tommassoni. This brawl - just like a modern-day clash between warring gangs - was arranged in advance by eight participants who have all now been named.
Caravaggio and his three companions, one a Captain in the Papal army, met their rivals at a pallacorda court in the Campo Marzio area, where the artist lived. (Pallacorda was a game played with a ball with a string attached - an early form of tennis, which some older Romans still remember seeing played in the streets of the capital in the mid-20th Century.)
Some biographers have suggested that there may have been an argument over a woman, but the text of the court report suggests the quarrel broke out over a gambling debt. Caravaggio killed Ranuccio and fled the city.
One of Caravaggio’s own supporters was seriously injured. Taken to prison, he was subsequently put on trial, and the new evidence emerges from the report of this trial.
Caravaggio himself fled south to Malta and to Sicily where he received important new art commissions. The death sentence from Pope Paul V - whose portrait he had just painted - was imposed in absentia for this offence.
About 17 o’clock [lunchtime] the accused, together with two other people, was eating in the Moor’s restaurant at La Maddalena, where I work as a waiter. I brought them eight cooked artichokes, four cooked in butter and four fried in oil. The accused asked me which were cooked in butter and which fried in oil, and I told him to smell them, which would easily enable him to tell the difference.
He got angry and without saying anything more, grabbed an earthenware dish and hit me on the cheek at the level of my moustache, injuring me slightly… and then he got up and grabbed his friend’s sword which was lying on the table, intending perhaps to strike me with it, but I got up and came here to the police station to make a formal complaint…
The documents also shed light upon Caravaggio’s death at Porto Erole, north of Rome in July 1610. He did not die alone on a beach after escaping from his creditors and the police, as some of his biographers say, but in a hospital bed.
Only 38 years old, he was on his way back to the city from the south in the belief that his powerful friends had secured a pardon for his offences.
The documents that record Caravaggio’s life in Rome are written in a mixture of Latin legal jargon and racy Italian vernacular that any modern Roman could easily understand.
They needed careful restoration, as parts of the parchment were breaking up - the acid in the ink literally devouring the pages.
Detail of case against Michelangelo De Caravaggio charged with illegal possession of a sword and a dagger.
The power of the greatest art is the power to shake us into revelation and rip us from our default mode of seeing. After an encounter with that force, we don’t look at a face, a colour, a sky, a body, in quite the same way again. We get fitted with new sight: in-sight. Visions of beauty or a rush of intense pleasure are part of that process, but so too may be shock, pain, desire, pity, even revulsion. That kind of art seems to have rewired our senses. We apprehend the world differently.
Historian Schama wrote of the great painter:
“In Caravaggio’s time it was believed that artists were given their talent by God to bring beauty to the world and to put mortal creatures in touch with their higher selves or souls. Caravaggio never did anything the way it was supposed to be done.
In this painting of the victory of virtue over evil it’s supposed to be David who is the centre of attention, but have you ever seen a less jubilant victory? On his sword is inscribed “Humilitus Occideit Superbium”, that is, humility conquers pride. This is the battle that has been fought out inside Caravaggio’s head between the two sides of the painter that are portrayed here.
For me the power of Caravaggio’s art is the power of truth, not least about ourselves. If we are ever to hope for redemption we have to begin with the recognition that in all of us the Goliath competes with the David.”
When you’re wrong, you’re wrong and it’s always best to face up to the facts and just admit it. Here goes: I was wrong, very wrong… I was OH SO WRONG about Glenn Beck in my post yesterday. I said that Beck was getting boring. Running out of steam. That his rants were getting repetitive.
In a word: HAH!
Oh, man, I really blew it, didn’t I? Turns out that there was merely a brief lull in the monkeyshines. Beck was just tuning up the orchestra before unleashing the grandest, most fucked-up (not to mention “supernatural”) conspiracy theory that he’s yet come up with in that fetid, rancid, over-heated little brain of his.
Last night’s broadcast, well, Glenn Beck made a fool of me.
Watch in disbelief as Beck uses information gleaned from a new crackpot Christian prophecy book called The Islamic Antichrist. Embraced by the batshit crazy WorldNet Daily crowd (natch), The Islamic Antichrist posits the theory that the Mahdi, the end-times Islamic redeemer/Messiah who Muslims believe will come to Earth to rid it of evildoers, the tyranny of kings and despots and, of course, the infidels, is in fact, the same fellow Christians call the Antichrist. (Their good guy = our bad guy. Makes sense so far, right? Except that the Koran says the Mahdi works WITH Jesus, keep that in mind and there is already a direct Muslim equivalent to the Antichrist known as Masih ad-Dajjal, “the deceiving Messiah,” although this character doesn’t actually appear in the Koran itself).
Within Islam, the Mahdi is often conflated or considered to be synonymous, with the 12th Imam (see Twelvers), who is prophesied to set up a worldwide Caliphate. The Islamic Antichrist, written by a guy calling himself “Joel Richardson” (apparently a pseudonym to protect him from seeing a fatwa put on his head—DO watch this video for more on this ass-clown) does appear to have some valid points (the Christian eschaton and the Islamic end-times stuff do have many parallels), but Beck being Beck, he takes what are in fact, “facts” about supernatural holy books from over a thousand years ago (interpreted by a fanatical modern day believer, of course) and then turns around and PARADES THESE “FACTS” ABOUT SUPERNATURAL PROPHECIES AS “CURRENT EVENTS ANALYSIS” ON WHAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE A “NEWS” NETWORK and not the fucking 700 Club. It would really be stretching it to call a book like The Islamic Antichrist, “non-fiction,” if you take my point, so what value would a “fact” about fiction (or a religious holy book, both are the same to me) have? It’s an empty calorie for most people. For Glenn Beck, it’s a motif whistled by his good old prophetic buddy Joel that he can turn into a conspiracy theory symphony of small-minded (albeit brilliant) religious bigotry that is positively Wagnerian—by way of Jack Van Impe—in its scope.
Fuck me… he’s good! It was a new, fresh low for Fox News, but a triumph, a tour de force, for Glenn Beck, personally.
Incorporating Biblical (and now Koranic!) “prophecy” into a wild-eyed, bughouse crazy conspiracy theory is EXACTLY the trick Beck needed to really draw the faithful back into his drama and shore up his ratings in the middle of a big dip. My hat is off to him: Glenn Beck, you are a MAESTRO of weaving together paranoia, bigotry, misrepresentation of history and wacko religious beliefs, and although the sight of you turns my stomach, I will say this: You are a genius showman. A genius. Your schtick is fucked up, corrosive to American civic life (or what’s left of it because of people like you) and I hope you’ll be raptured soon (on camera, if you can swing it). Still, as a person raised in a family of West Virginia born-agains who all vote Republican (and don’t even know why), I now have a grudging respect for your immense talents.
You’re an artist. No, an artiste! But you are no political scientist, Glenn. On that count you’re not much better than a tinfoil hat-wearing Ham radio conspiracy theorist living alone in a trailer somewhere in the Nevada desert with a cache of automatic weapons, saving his pee-pee in mason jars, but boy oh boy are you a master at coming up with plot-lines that Tim LaHaye, Hal Lindsay and Jack T. Chick would envy and turning it all into a personal fortune on prime time America tee-vee! When it comes to taking crazy, fucked-up religulous bullshit and making it sound plausible for an audience of low IQ dolts who should be asked to take a test in critical thinking skills before they vote (or are issued a driver’s license), you are DA MAN!
The thing the kept going through my mind, though, as I watched this (other than wondering what Kirk Cameron thought of it all) is that Beck really seems to be setting himself up to become the next Salman Rushdie by explicitly welding Islamaphobia with Christian Eschatology in an insecure time. Who knows, maybe that would be appealing to his pathologies and his oft-admitted martyr complex?
Japanese film and stage actor Taichi Saotome battles some fierce shadows in this incredible live performance of “Dragon and Peony.” Gee, I wish the audience was a little more excited about seeing this. What a “meh” hand clap at the end.
And so it begins… The new Radiohead album has been leaked released a day early along with a video for the song Lotus Flower. I’m no hater, I love ‘em. Let’s all watch and listen together shall we?
Depending on how much you loved or hated Richard’s post about Odd Future live on Jimmy Kimmel, oops I mean Jimmy Fallon, you might be interested to know that the debut album by Tyler The Creator (kingpin of that crew) is available as a free download from the Odd Future blog**. Released at the very tail end of 2009 (presumably to foil end of year lists) rumor has it that Bastard has had over a million downloads at this point. This doesn’t seem so far fetched. It might explain why the hype is so strong for Tyler, and how Odd Future got on Jimmy Fallon in the first place. Tyler’s new single “Yonkers” (not bad but not his best work) is also gaining a lot of hype, not least due to the video, and his follow up to Bastard is set to drop in April.
Hip-hop hasn’t been pushing sonic boundaries in the last few years, for me anyway, but it’s great to see it pushing other envelopes. The album brings to mind memories of late 90s Rawkus records, acts like Cannibal Ox and Anti-Pop Consortium/Beans and even vaguely the detuned synth-styles of the RZA, updated here for the Garageband/soft-synth age. I really like some of his music, but what I like most about Tyler is his methods of getting himself out there, creating a buzz without having to resort to the usual mainstream channels. Of course, if his music was terrible it would be different, but as it is, he might become the most high profile emerging artist yet to give away his product for free.
** Looks like the original upload has expired. You can still find Bastard for download very easily though, at links like this one. The Odd Future blog is worth having a look at, for other releases and general wackiness.
