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WTF Animated Gifs
12.04.2009
04:20 am
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Curious animated gifs titled “Boys” by Elizabeth Heppenstall.
 
(via everlasting blort)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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12.04.2009
04:20 am
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Wall Installations Made From Thousands of Buttons
12.04.2009
03:11 am
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Artist Ran Hwang creates these giant wall installations by using a gazillion buttons and hammering pins. Ran Hwang says:

My immense wall installations are extremely time consuming and repetitive manual work. This is a form of meditative practice that helps me to find inner peace. Typical materials related to the fashion industry are used to create conceptual icons such as Buddha or traditional vase. Works are divided into two groups.

For the first type of work, pins are used to hold the buttons onto the surface to form silhouetted image, or to disintegrate such image. No adhesive is used so that buttons are free to stay and move, which implies the genetic human tendency tobe irresolute. I use buttons, because they are common and ordinary, like the existence of human beings. The second group of work consists of connecting a massive number of pins with yards of thread to occupy a negative space of the presented image. Here, threads serve as metaphor for connection and communication between unlinked human relations. Fulfilled negative space and absence of the image formed by positive space suggests deeper understanding of the image. I believe mortal essence in the heart of self recognition.

(via Dude Craft)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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12.04.2009
03:11 am
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David Rees: 10 jokes about Joe Lieberman
12.04.2009
01:14 am
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David Rees is a master of hilarious comedy and startling polemic. I rank him up there with Tom Tomorrow, Aaron McGruder, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. His Get Your War On cartoon series is one of the iconic things history will recall the Bush administration by (and this is a wonderful, wonderful thing).

Aside from cartooning, Rees is a wonderful essayist and public speaker. Here’s a recent column of his from True/Slantt, which should have really appeared in The New Yorker if they had any balls:

Joe Lieberman walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder. The bartender turns to him and says, ?

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.04.2009
01:14 am
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Obama’s economics team has got to go!
12.04.2009
12:17 am
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I’m someone who, like many of you, I am sure, had high hopes for the Obama presidency. After two terms of Bush, it really felt like the country was turning the page. Inauguration Day felt like a wonderful exhalation of 8 years of just… pollution. I thought Obama would be the second coming of FDR, I really did, but almost a year later, has anything truly changed? Has anything gotten better for the common man? We all know that the Wall Street oligarchs are sitting prettier than ever, what about the rest of us?

Today’s Huffington Post had a nice bit of reporting from Ryan Grim about Ben Bernanke’s remarks to the Senate Banking Comittee today and as I read it, I was absolutely enraged. This asshole has got to go. If Obama is getting his advice from guys like Ben Bernanke (and Geithner and Rubin) we are fucking doomed!

Let this sink in:

Ben Bernanke has overseen the greatest expansion of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet in its history, pouring trillions of dollars into Wall Street firms at roughly zero interest rates.

His generosity, however, has a limit.

In testimony before the Senate Banking Committee today, where he’s seeking re-appointment as the Fed’s chairman, Bernanke called for cutbacks in Medicare and Social Security even as unemployment rises and the middle class is endangered.

Citing legendary bank robber Willie Sutton, Bernanke said of the retirement and health care funds that are the legacy of the New Deal: “That’s where the money is.”

Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah) sympathized with Bernanke, saying that, because of entitlement spending, “you’re going to be looking at a situation where the Congress will be unable to provide any kind of fiscal discipline because of the mandatory spending. That puts an enormous burden on your plate.”

“Well, Senator, I was about to address entitlements,” Bernanke replied. “I think you can’t tackle the problem in the medium term without doing something about getting entitlements under control and reducing the costs, particularly of health care.”

Bernanke reminded Congress that it has the power to repeal Social Security and Medicare.

“It’s only mandatory until Congress says it’s not mandatory. And we have no option but to address those costs at some point or else we will have an unsustainable situation,” said Bernanke.

But here are several other obvious options that could make the situation sustainable—including a transaction tax on Wall Street speculation or a slight tax hike on the wealthiest Americans.

Bernanke talks as if increasing taxes on the wealthy simply isn’t an option.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) followed Bennett and pointed out that “there’s only really two ways you can deflect this deficit, and that’s either by cutting expenditures or raising income taxes or other forms of taxes.”

Reed asked him if he could think of other ways, but Bernanke returned to entitlement money as the way to balance the budget.

“Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money is, as he put it,” Bernanke said. “The money in this case is in entitlements.”

When I read this I wanted to throw up. Apparently Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the last honest men in government felt the same:

Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who has placed a hold on Bernanke’s nomination, was apoplectic when HuffPost told him Bernanke was pushing for cuts in entitlement spending. “Bernanke wants to cut entitlement spending? Well, that confirms everything I’m saying,” Sanders fumed.

“The CEOs and top people on Wall Street make huge bonuses, and what? We’re going to cut back on Social Security and Medicare? That’s what we’re going to do?”

I think Sen. Sanders has the right idea, don’t you? Here’s what Progressive change said of Sanders (I wholeheartedly agree!)

Now, Bernie Sanders has taken the brave step of putting a “hold” on renominating Bush’s choice for another 4-year term at the helm of our economy.This is huge. Wall Street will not be happy, and they’ll go after Sanders with everything they’ve got. Most senators wouldn’t even consider going up against them like this. That’s why Bernie Sanders is a real progressive hero.

If you want to donate money to Bernie Sanders, click here.

And finally, here’s an information rich clip of Rolling Stone’s ace political editor Matt Taibbi’s take on Obama’s economic team. It’s a preview of Taibbi’s upcoming expose for the magazine titled “Obama’s Big Sellout”:

“[Bob] Rubin probably more than any other person was responsible for the financial crisis by deregulating the economy [while] in the White House. And he had a major role in helping destroy one of the world’s biggest company in Citigroup. He has one of the worst tack records you can find, but he was basically the guy who was the architect of the entire Obama policy. Obama put him in charge of everything. “

These guys are idiots. Hell, they’re practically traitorous! They’re traitorous idiots. They should be fired with extreme prejudice. And then tar and feathered.

You think I’m joking?

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.04.2009
12:17 am
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Notes From The J.G. Ballard Memorial
12.03.2009
05:50 pm
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Spotted at the Ballardian, Rick McGrath‘s great, first-person account of what went down at the recent memorial for J.G. Ballard on what would have been the “Bard of Shepperton’s?

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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12.03.2009
05:50 pm
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Edgar Allan Poe: “I’m Sorry. My Friend Got Me Drunk”
12.03.2009
05:45 pm
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Check out this original letter from Edgar Allan Poe apologizing for his drunken behavior in New York. No wonder he faked his own death… probably to escape bar tabs! Via Letters of Note:

Despite his fame, writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe struggled financially throughout his entire career, even following the publication of his much lauded poem, The Raven. He also enjoyed a drink or two, to a dangerously extent during later life. The following letter was written by Poe in July, 1842, and sent to his publishers along with an article he was desperately hoping they would buy. In the letter, Poe apologises for behaving badly when they last met in New York and blames the embarrassment on his friend William Ross Wallace, a fellow poet who supposedly let Poe drink too many juleps before the meeting.

The letter reads:

   Gentlemen,

   Enclosed I have the honor to send you an article which I should be pleased if you would accept for the ?

Posted by Jason Louv
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12.03.2009
05:45 pm
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Rendji’s 2010 Lunar Calendar
12.03.2009
05:28 pm
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Posted by Jason Louv
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12.03.2009
05:28 pm
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How to Create 1.7 Million Clean Energy Jobs
12.03.2009
05:19 pm
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Great article from Climate Progress on fixing the economy with green jobs. The score’s been clear for almost 18 months: Obama’s New Deal needs to be employing the out-of-work citizenry of the United States to develop a green infrastructure for the country. With energy independence as the goal, not only would we employ the unemployed and stimulate huge economic growth, we would also have work already provided for the vets coming back from the Middle East instead of a bottle of gin and a place in the soup line. We’d also undermine the need for future energy wars.

The challenges facing President Obama and the U.S. Congress have not gone away. Paul Krugman worries that ?

Posted by Jason Louv
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12.03.2009
05:19 pm
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Kathy Acker Interviews William S. Burroughs
12.03.2009
05:15 pm
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Great conversation between the two people who defined punk literature in the 1980s, one of them a couple decades ahead of time.

(Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker)

(Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader)

Posted by Jason Louv
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12.03.2009
05:15 pm
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The Zabriskie Point Fallout (With Mel Brooks)
12.03.2009
03:22 pm
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A few weeks back, regarding Jacques Demy’s Model Shop, I wrote about my fascination with the great European directors crossing the Atlantic to reign in and make sense of ‘60s America.  Resigning himself to merely making a film called Made In U.S.A., Jean-Luc Godard resisted the impulse.  Michelangelo Antonioni, most spectacularly with Zabriskie Point, did not.
 
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As hatched by a team of writers that included Sam Shepard, and wife of Bernardo Bertolucci, Clare Peploe, the plot of Zabriskie Point wasn’t terribly complex.  Rebel Angelenos (my favorite kind!) Daria Halprin and Mark Frechette (who go, in the film, by their real names), hook up in the desert, have sex in the sand, then separate to meet their own explosive ends.

More complex, though, was the anger and confusion the film provoked at the time.  Typically gorgeous cinematography aside, cineasts looking for a worthy philosophical successor to Blow-Up were left disappointed by Zabriskie’s relatively unnuanced take on capitalism.  Hollywood watchers were appalled that Antonioni squandered so much time and money ($7 million in 1970 dollars) on something that, despite it’s notorious “desert orgy” sequence, managed to rake in barely a million hippie-box-office dollars.

Fortunately, 5 years later, Antonioni secured cinematic redemption with The Passenger.  Daria Halprin acted in only a handful of films, but went on to become, briefly, Mrs. Dennis Hopper.  After her marriage to Hopper fizzled, Halprin developed an interest in art therapy, and now, with her mother, runs Marin County’s Tampala Institute.

The future was far less kind to Mark Frechette.  You can read the Rolling Stone article about his “sorry life and death” here, but the shorthand goes like this:

He was the apparent victim of a bizarre accident in a recreation room at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Norfolk, where Frechette had been serving a six- to 15-year sentence for his participation in a 1973 Boston bank robbery.

Frechette’s body was discovered by a fellow inmate early on the morning of September 27th pinned beneath a 150-pound set of weights, the bar resting on his throat.  An autopsy revealed he had died of asphyxiation and the official explanation is that the weights slipped from his hands while he was trying to bench press them, killing him instantly.

What the above leaves out, though, is that prior to his incarceration, Frechette was living in a commune run by American cult leader Mel Lyman.  The entirety of Frechette’s Zabriskie earnings were tithed to Lyman’s “Family,” and it’s presumed that whatever money Frechette hoped to abscond with post-robbery would have wound up there as well.

Before all this, though, back when television talk show guests could still indulge in a cigarette, Halprin and Frechette found themselves—along with Mel Brooks and Rex Reed—on The Dick Cavett Show.

As you can watch below, Cavett had yet to see Zabriskie Point—and Frechette makes him pay for it.  In defending Lyman, Frechette also goes on to argue the fine line between “commune,” and “community.”

 
Trailer for Zabriskie Point: Where A Boy And A Girl Meet And Touch And Blow Their Minds!

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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12.03.2009
03:22 pm
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