My college friend Alex Marshall surfaced this excellent montage (done apparently by a filmmaker named Azure Pepe Valencia) of Ginsberg’s classic 1956 poem to the country, the ideal, the situation. Hurrah for independence!
Media assassin Harry Allen has Twittered attention to the observations of Harlem-based Peruvian-American activist-rapper Immortal Technique upon his return from his recent visit to Haiti on the indomitable Davy D’s Hip Hop Corner.
I may not agree with all of Tech’s positions in general, but I do admire him as one of the few politically minded rappers who walks the walk. Dude built a damn orphanage in Afghanistan with no external or corporate funding, so he gets my salute.
Here are a few excerpts from his compelling Haiti look…
California gubernatorial candidate, Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, who seems intent on spending her way into the California statehouse with a whooping $125 million dollars of her own fortune is known to have hit/shoved/whatever an eBay employee who she settled with out of court for $200,000. One of her sons faced felony charges of breaking a woman’s ankle after she told him “Fuck your fraternity.” Despite eyewitnesses—and you can’t very well fake a broken ankle, either—the billionaire’s son escaped prison when the charges were mysteriously dismissed. Her other son was booted from a tony Princeton private eating club for dropping the N-word all over the place. (Even though his mommy is Princeton’s biggest living donor, son Griff Harsch wasn’t allowed to walk with his graduating class! Classic).
Is any of this surprising? Of course it’s not, but what does the temperament of her children say about Whitman’s own temperament, not to mention her parenting skills?!? How many of you reading this have ever been manhandled by your boss? How many of you reading this have ever hired a $1000 buck an hour lawyer to get your kid off the hook for a felony assault charge or said the N-word in a room full of people? A show of hands, please?
I don’t think I want the governor of my state to be a bullying billionaire who buys herself into office, with a first family including her sorry excuses for sons! Just how far did these nuts fall from the fucking tree, you know? Anybody else in the Golden State feeling me on this one?
The sole surprising thing about the stories of obnoxious entitlement swirling around the drain of Meg and her boffoonish sons, Griff and WIl Harsh, is the fact that most of the media (with the admirable exception of Gawker) is timid about taking on the issue of this woman’s offspring and what their behavior (and her own) say about Whitman’s ability to govern the Great State of California? Nothing good, if you ask me. Nothing at all!
I know, I know, the children of the rich, famous and powerful are supposed to be off limits. But Whitman’s children are ADULTS. Adults who’ve been charged with a felony, on one hand, and ostracized by a club at an Ivy League school (that his mother endows with tens of millions of dollars) for saying the N-word, on the other. Give me a fucking break.
Had the Bush twins done either of these things, I guarantee you, the gloves would have been off!
Jerry Brown for Governor!
Billionaire Bad Boys Club: Meg Whitman’s Son’s Arrest for Beating Up a Girl (Gawker)
It Gets Worse: Meg Whitman’s Sons’ Racism and Entitlement Were Stuff of Legend (Gawker)
I’m a long time fan of the work of multi-media artist Ryoji Ikeda. His work has a harsh, ascetic quality that is also rhythmically quite savvy. His source material seems to be strictly the most minute particles of ultra-magnified digital detritus which become, in his hands, something grand, even monolithic at times. Here’s a random introduction by way of some things I’ve recently found:
A short piece from the 2005 Formula DVD/Book
An excerpt from a…
Truly impressive: A fellow in the Bahamas by the name of “Emperor Duke” limbos under a stick perched just eight inches off the ground! Crazy!
I’m amazed to find this morning that one of the finest LPs ever recorded, XTC’s Skylarking has never been heard properly. Evidently during the process of re-mastering it was discovered that every version that went out to the public was out of phase ! I can tell you from personal experience that this can really take the life out of a recording. I can’t wait to hear the corrected version ! From Andy Partridge himself:
The band themselves always had a nagging doubt that the album sounded a little too thin and bass light, not like they remembered it sounding from the recording process. Well, what John has identified is that the previous vinyl and CD’s {including the flashy US Fidelity version unfortunately} have been manufactured with their sound polarity reversed. In laymans terms this mix up means that sound waves that should be pushing out from your speakers are actually pulling them back and projecting from the rear. Something as simple as a wrongly wired XLR plug in Todds studio or the Master room would have resulted in this sound mishap. Making the record sound distant and thinner. He has identified that the original tapes appear in very good condition and with this problem now rectified APE will be able to present to you shortly a splendid double deep vinyl cut of this classic XTC album as it was intended to sound, but never has done due to human error.
In the meantime, enjoy the best song The Beatles never wrote from Skylarking :
And here are the…
Short article from TIME about—get this—a violent Mexican Fundamentalist Christian methamphetamine cartel putting billions of dollars of crude crank on the American black market—about 100 tons—each year. The Obama Administration has called La Familia “a significant foreign narcotics trafficker” and Attorney General Eric Holder singled out their “depravity.”
Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s military push-back against the traffickers has had little effect. On April 24, 2010, La Familia made a bold attack on the car of Mexico’s public safety secretary, Minerva Bautista. But forget fighting the government, that’s for the little guys. The praying La Familia cartel wants to become the government by putting their own candidates into political office:
Mexico’s newest drug cartel, and certainly the most bizarre, is La Familia Michoacana, a violent but Christian fundamentalist narco-gang based in the torrid Tierra Caliente region of western Michoacan state. The group is infamous for methamphetamine smuggling, lopping off enemies’ heads and limbs, and massacring police and soldiers. (Most recently, on June 14, a band of Familia gunmen ambushed a federal police convoy in Michoacan, killing 12.) Yet La Familia’s leader, Nazario Moreno — aka El Mas Loco, or The Craziest One — has written his own bible, and his 1,500 minions hold prayer meetings before doing their grisly work.
La Familia, which has started to expand beyond Michoacan, poses more than theological problems for Mexican President Felipe Calderon. His 3½–year-long military offensive against drug traffickers, a period that has seen 23,000 gangland-style murders in Mexico, looks increasingly on the ropes. And amidst it all, investigators tell TIME, La Familia is establishing a troubling new narco-business model: It doesn’t merely buy off officials, it puts its own candidates in power. “Other cartels just pay off the political structure in order to be able to do their business,” says a Michoacan investigator, who estimates the group controls 83 of the state’s 113 municipal governments. “La Familia is making itself the political structure.”
Last fall, a DEA sting snared over 300 Familia operatives working in America. This is really fucking Sci-Fi isn’t it? Sci-Fi meets Breaking Bad, I should say…
Mexico’s Meth Warriors (TIME)
Photo essay of the Mexican drug war by Shaul Schwarz (TIME)
Fascinating photo essay seen on Time.com that shows what 12 popular alcoholic drinks look like under a microscope. How ironic that these photographs, taken at Florida State University, are so amazingly psychedelic! Above sake, below tequila.
What booze looks like under a microscope (Time)
