Tara and I watched Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story this weekend (it’s on the Netflix VOD currently) and I absolutely loved it. It’s a truly great film, one that I have no doubt will be looked at and revered by future generations trying to understand what the hell happened in our backwards era. I recommend it to everyone who reads this blog and cares about my opinion. It was absolutely spellbinding to me. I felt as if I wanted to cheer several times to see someone say these things and say them so powerfully. Capitalism: A Love Story, or a film just like it, needed to be made. but there is only one guy who could have pulled off something like this, gotten it funded, herded through the distribution system and gotten a message this radical the deep penetration in the culture that it deserves, and it’s Michael Moore.

Surprisingly, Capitalism: A Love Story is perhaps the least polemic of all of Moore’s films, even if it does, at root, articulately advocate the necessity of class warfare, at least at the ballot box.  Most of what Moore, or his protagonists, have to say in the film would be damed difficult to refute, perhaps this is why it doesn’t seem as confrontational as Moore’s films often are. You’d have to have a very closed mind to deny the reality of what you see on display here. Even Sean Hannity would have a hard time arguing with any of it (although I doubt he watched or will ever watch Moore’s film)

To say what Michael Moore says in Capitalism: A Love Story took balls and it also took amazing skill as a storyteller, underscoring his Mark Twain-like role in American society. After a mind-numbing section where the audience is introduced to the concept of the so-called “Dead Peasant” life insurance policies some major companies take out on their non-essential employees—unbeknownst to them—where they make more money if the employee dies, he cuts to an interview with Father Dick Preston, the Flint, Michigan-based priest who married Moore and his wife Kathleen Glynn (who interviewed me for a job once, she’s super cool).

He quietly asks the priest if capitalism is evil and what Jesus would think about free enterprise and his answer is devastating. This isn’t some left-wing loony he had to search out, this is the man who married him, the local priest who, like Moore, has witnessed the tragedy and destruction the loss of the auto industry in Flint, Michigan did to their hometown. Both of these men knows what greed does and how and who it harmed. People with first and last names.

And let me tell you, this priest fucking nails it. It’s a powerful, powerful cinematic moment.

Speaking as someone who took ten people on my own 24th birthday to see Roger and Me when it was in theaters—I also released This Divided State on DVD when I was at Disinformation—maybe I’m biased, but do yourself a favor and see this film. Better still, if you watch it and you like it, consider having a screening party at your house and invite 5 or 6 friends over to watch it and discuss it afterwards. It takes two hours to watch and could open the eyes of even a devout redneck Fox News watcher (well, some redneck Fox News watchers) to what’s really going on in this country. It’s not like Glenn Beck is ever going to tell them.

Below is one of the most powerful moments in a film full of them: rare footage taken right after FDR’s final State of the Union address where he lays out the concept of a Second Bill of Rights that would have guaranteed that all Americans have “a useful job, a decent home, adequate health care, and a good education.”

God bless Michael Moore. He’s a great American.
 

 
The Middle Class in America Is Radically Shrinking. Here Are the Stats to Prove it (Yahoo! Finance)

The U.S. Economy Is A Dead Horse And The American People Are Starting To Get Really Pissed Off And Frustrated (Economic Collapse)

 
Some claim the 1963 hit single Sally Go Round The Roses by The Jaynetts is the first recorded psychedelic pop tune. While this may or may not be true, it’s certainly a beautifully hypnotic, circular number with mysterious and whimsical lyrical imagery. It’s also, I’ve discovered, one of the most covered songs ever so I’ve decided to line up most of the versions I’ve found. Play ‘em one after the other or mix and match to make your own trance-inducing rose parade. Let’s begin with the original. I have no proof, but it’s claimed that the drummer on this session was Buddy Miles, later of Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies.

 
Many more roses after the jump…

 
I think that those of us who are old enough to remember hearing actual Muzak in public places were in fact hearing one of these diabolical devices: The Seeburg 1000 background music system. Essentially a stackable spindle record player that played Seeburg’s specially produced 16rpm, big hole in the middle LPs chock full of motivating background music, sure to bring out the productivity in your employees and the wallets from your customers. I was delighted to find literally hundreds of clips of these records, alas mostly being played on conventional players, on the youtubes. For the pupose of this post I’m concentrating on a few examples from Seeburg’s long running Industrial library:

Average tempo: medium fast. Predominantly instrumental,with a light seasoning of great vocals. An occasional polka or march. Emphasis on popular music. Minimum of stringed instruments. Unusually rhythmical. Over-all lively character but never a rock ‘n’ roll. Designed for Industrial plants only.

 
Much more after the jump…

 
Dutch filmmaker Jan Kounen, primarily known for his ultra-violent gangster flick Doberman and El Topo-esque western Blueberry, spent several months in the Amazon with Shipibo Shamans experimenting with Ayahuasca, a psychoactive infusion prepared from vines and plants containing DMT (Dimethyltryptamine). Ayahuasca is a holy sacrament which the indigenous people and Shamans of the Amazon have known as a powerful holistic purgative medicine capable of great healing and transformation for thousands of years.

While in the Amazon, Kounen made the documentary Other Worlds. The film depicts the Shamanic culture and their underlying belief systems which stem from their knowledge of the Invisible. According to Kounen, the objective of the documentary “is to impress upon viewers that these little-known Indians developed veritable cognitive technology through their own sciences of the spirit, thousands of years ago. To me, these men are warriors in the battle to unlock the mysteries of consciousness. Shamans consider the greatest ally and the worst enemy of every individual to be one and the same… himself or herself.” In the film, Kounen primarily shows the therapeutic power of the Shamans and their plant teachers. This power is a type of ancestral psychoanalysis or human psychotherapy backed by 4,000 years of experience and practice.

Inexplicably, Other Worlds made in 2004 has never been released in the United States. It is only available on import DVD.

In this excerpt from the film, we see night vision shots of Kounen after he has ingested Ayahuasca followed by CGI images the director created to replicate his visual experiences during his “trip.”
 

 
In another excerpt from Other Worlds, Nobel Prize winner Kari Mullis, DMT cosmonaut Rick Strassman (author of The Spirit Molecule) and artist Alex Grey

 
Word from a Fab Five Freddy tweet and a post on his own MySpace blog is that New York hip-hop futurist Rammellzee has passed away at age 50 from as-yet-unrevealed causes. (@149st features a great, fact-filled interview with the man.) Emerging as a teen graffiti artist in the mid-‘70s, bombing the A-train from its last stop in his Far Rockaway, Queens hometown, Rammell ended up like many of his talented peers—a multidisciplinary creative icon submerged in the nascent metropolitan hip-hop scene.  He first surfaced as a persona to the world in amazing fashion, dressed in trenchcoat and wielding a sawed-off shotgun as he MC’ed for the Rock Steady Crew in the Amphitheatre scene of hip-hop’s famous first film, 1982’s Wild Style.