Wunderbar! Lots more of these parodies, courtesy of Ward Sutton (writing as “Joe Smith”) at the Boston Globe.com
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
“I’d lost my heart to a long-hair named Flowers.”

For more Woodstock heartbreak visit Golden Age Comic Book Stories here
 

 

 
This short editorial was found on the Roosevelt Institute’s website and was written by Henry C.K. Liu. I’m reposting it here in toto—hopefully Henry won’t mind—because it’s a breathtakingly simple—and brilliant—way to help get the country out of this mess. Call it New Deal II, call it Socialism, call it whatever you want, this is a great idea, one worthy of a think tank bearing the Roosevelt name. At a certain point, they ARE going to have to do something like this—there are simply too many unemployed people to tell them all to go fuck themselves when their unemployment checks run out, don’t you reckon? If the Tea party types like Sharron Angle and Alaska’s Jo Miller get their way, WHAT do they expect will become of the people whose UI has ended and who face homelessness and destitution?

Obama and Congress have done plenty—too much if you ask me—to bail out big business, the banks and Wall Street. If Obama doesn’t get his thumb out of his ass and DO SOMETHING BOLD AND MEANINGFUL for the poor in this country, there are going to be riots and violence breaking out all over the place. But it doesn’t have to be that way, as this short essay points out:

The first year of the Obama presidency has been a monumental disappointment. By now, the President’s populist rhetoric of “change we can believe in” rings hollow against the hard data of the sad shape of the economy.

The critical bottleneck to recovery is the continuing loss of jobs. Conventional economic wisdom asserts that employment is the lagging indicator. Unemployment cannot be expected to fall until after the economy recovers. But in an economy that suffers from overcapacity due to low wages, as the world economy does today, economic recovery from excessive debt cannot be achieved without full employment with living wages to produce the needed rise in demand to absorb overcapacity. The government, despite its enormous power to intervene in the economy on the supply side, is stuck in a self-perpetuating vicious cycle of stagnation caused by unemployment that in turn causes stagnation.

Yet all is not lost. The President needs only to reestablish his political leadership with bold and effective action to deliver help directly to deserving workers rather than to failed undeserving financial firms that are allegedly too big to fail. One way to do this is for President Obama to use the coming State of the Union address at the beginning of the second year of his presidency to announce that he will be the first president in US history to abolish unemployment in the US economy. He will be the president who will smash the destructive myth that structural unemployment is needed to hold down inflation even in a deflationary cycle.

This is not an impossible task. The US now has 6.5 million unemployed workers, 4 million of whom joined the unemployment rank during the first year of the Obama presidency. The President can introduce a Full Employment Program starting February 1, 2010 to give a job to every American who wants one, to be funded by a Full Employment Fund constructed out off already-appropriated but yet unspent bailout and stimulus money. These jobs can be socially constructive jobs such as teachers, nurses, caretakers of children and seniors, police, artists, health workers, writers, inventors, etc., with the prime function of increasing demand in the economy.

At the rate of the 2008 national average wage of $42,000, a program to fund 6.5 million jobs will cost $2.7 trillion a year. In the past two years, the government has committed over $20 trillion in various form of bailout and stimulus packages, with very little to show for it in the form of economic recovery. The not-yet-spent portion of this $20 trillion can fund full employment for more than three years at a declining rate. As this money is injected into the economy in the form of living wages, the resultant rise in demand will increase the utilization of the capital assets to reduce overcapacity. A balance between supply and demand will be maintained by full employment to permit the economy to grow again.

The resultant growth in the economy will reduce the spending rate of the Full Employment Program way before the allotted money is depleted. With full employment, the US economy of $14 trillion GDP can grow at a 6% annual rate, producing an additional GDP of $560 billion the first year. The $2.7 trillion Full Employment Fund will be repaid in less than 4 years.

That is a change we can believe in.

Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Henry C.K. Liu is an independent commentator on culture, economics and politics.

 
Jeff Krulik, the VHS auteur responsible for one of the most legendary low-fi masterpieces of the tape trading underground of the 80s and 90s, Heavy Metal Parking Lot, has a new film out that returns to the era of his much-beloved earlier film. It could almost be considered a prequel.

Dig it! I for one, cannot wait to see Heavy Metal Picnic. This looks amazing:

Produced and presented by the team behind cult hit Heavy Metal Parking Lot (Jeff Krulik and John Heyn), Heavy Metal Picnic is a celebration of mid-80s Maryland rock and roll and heavy metal, by those who lived —and survived—it.

The film focuses on the 1985 Full Moon Jamboree, a weekend field party bacchanal that took place at “The Farm,” home to a cast of colorful characters who lived and partied alongside unamused neighbors in the McMansions of Potomac. The Full Moon Jamboree, an affair so raucous that it made the evening news, was the farm party to end all farm parties, and much of it was recorded using a home video camera and a stolen CBS News microphone swiped from the Reagan Inauguration earlier that year. Twenty-five years later, we revisit the scene and meet the people behind the party, as well as the musicians who performed there, including mid-Atlantic doom metal icons Asylum.

 
Heavy Metal Picnic (official site)

 
Brazilian singer and birthday girl Gal Costa started her career during the Costa e Silva and Médici military juntas in Brazil, and from the top there was no stopping her. Joining up with the renegade Tropicalia movement in 1968, Costa helped make history with a group of musicians led by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil.

In 1973, in an atmosphere rife with governmental repression, torture and strict press censorship, Costa unleashed the album India, which sported a Sticky Fingers-esque cover that got the album immediately banned from the shelves. Based on a themed live show and arranged and produced by Gil and recently rediscovered funk-meister Arthur Verocai, India comprised a great bunch of post-Tropicalia experimental rock tunes, a version of Tom Jobim’s bossa classic “Desafinado,” and this intense version of the Portugese folk tune “Milho Verde.” 
 

 
Bonus clip after the jump: an Afro’ed Gal tears down the house in 1968 with Veloso & Gil’s “Divinho Marvilhoso” at IV Festival de Música Popular Brasileira!
 

 
Carl Barat was Paul McCartney to Pete Doherty’s John Lennon. Their band The Libertines were the wannabe Beatles of the past decade, but an excess of drink, drugs, and, er, burglary all led to the band’s early demise. 

However, the story doesn’t stop there.
 
More on Carl Barat plus bonus clips after the jump…
 

 
Last year, American student, Amanda Knox was convicted of the murder and sexual assault of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher.  The killing took place in the apartment the two young women shared in Pergugia, Italy, in 2007. It was an event that literally divided continents - Americans tended to believe Amanda innocent; while Europeans thought her guilty.  The paparazzi dubbed the 23-year-old, “Foxy Knoxy”, while the prosecution described her as a sex-mad, drug-addled psycho, all of which detracted from the horror of the crime and complexities of the case.
 
More on the Knox media circus after the jump…
 

 
Gene Loves Jezebel was the coolest band ever to be fronted by identical twins (Michael and Jay Aston). And ‘Motion Of Love’ was one of the hookiest songs of the 80’s.

The brothers Aston look a lot like Gina Gershon and Juliette Lewis in this video. I’d consider fucking them.

 
Here’s some video I shot of Roky Erickson with Okkervil River at SXSW last March. Resurrected.

 
Via this isn’t happiness