The civil unrest in Spain is taking a distinctly uncivil turn as the police get nasty before the big football match (or at least that is the excuse) and try to forcibly remove the up to 25,000 people who have camped out in Barcelona’s Plaza Catalunya. Is it just me or is it only the “business media” in America who seem to be reporting on what’s going on in Spain? As if there is no other box it can be fit into?

Nevertheless, this just in via Business Insider:

Police in Barcelona have attacked protesters that have been camped out since May 15 in the city’s Plaza Catalunya. The protesters originally were trying to apply pressure to the public to not vote in last weekend’s local Spanish elections. Those elections resulted in sharp losses for the country’s Socialist Party government.

Protesters have remained in squares across Spain since the election, demanding government reforms and renewed attention to the country’s unemployment crisis.

The forceful move against the protesters today in Barcelona was staged to clear the square out ahead of FC Barcelona’s Champions League final match against Manchester United tomorrow evening. But to many, it may just appear the beginning of a government crackdown on the country’s protesters.

Videos are now surfacing of the police assault. The video includes violence on unarmed protesters

 
If you haven’t read Tim Dickinson’s terrific article on the genius/lunacy of Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, in the new issue of Rolling Stone, it’s a must-read, tour-de-force bit-o-journalism. Dickinson manages to make sense of the entire wacko-conservative gestalt of Fox News: It’s a top down organization of far-right toadies—no liberals need bothering applying—each vying for attention, approval and career advancement—natch—from the power-mad, brilliant yet crazy-seeming paranoiac who runs that bughouse.

Here are three key “takeaway” paragraphs from the article:

Ailes begins each workday buffered by the elaborate private security detail that News Corp. pays to usher him from his $1.6 million home in New Jersey to his office in Manhattan. (His country home – in the aptly named village of Garrison – is phalanxed by empty homes that Ailes bought up to create a wider security perimeter.) Traveling with the Chairman is like a scene straight out of 24. A friend recalls hitching a ride with Ailes after a power lunch: “We come out of the building and there’s an SUV filled with big guys, who jump out of the car when they see him. A cordon is formed around us. We’re ushered into the SUV, and we drive the few blocks to Fox’s offices, where another set of guys come out of the building to receive ‘the package.’ The package is taken in, and I’m taken on to my destination.”Ailes is certain that he’s a top target of Al Qaeda terrorists. “You know, they’re coming to get me,” he tells friends. “I’m fully prepared. I’ve taken care of it.” (Ailes, who was once arrested for carrying an illegal handgun in Central Park, now carries a licensed weapon.) Inside his blast-resistant office at Fox News headquarters, Ailes keeps a monitor on his desk that allows him to view any activity outside his closed door. Once, after observing a dark-skinned man in what Ailes perceived to be Muslim garb, he put Fox News on lockdown. “What the hell!” Ailes shouted. “This guy could be bombing me!” The suspected terrorist turned out to be a janitor. “Roger tore up the whole floor,” recalls a source close to Ailes. “He has a personal paranoia about people who are Muslim – which is consistent with the ideology of his network.”

**********

Murdoch installed ailes in the corner office on Fox’s second floor at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The location made Ailes queasy: It was close to the street, and he lived in fear that gay activists would try to attack him in retaliation over his hostility to gay rights. (In 1989, Ailes had broken up a protest of a Rudy Giuliani speech by gay activists, grabbing demonstrator by the throat and shoving him out the door.) Barricading himself behind a massive mahogany desk, Ailes insisted on having “bombproof glass” installed in the windows – even going so far as to personally inspect samples of high-tech plexiglass, as though he were picking out new carpet. Looking down on the street below, he expressed his fears to Cooper, the editor he had tasked with up-armoring his office. “They’ll be down there protesting,” Ailes said. “Those gays.”

**********

Ailes knows exactly who is watching Fox News each day, and he is adept at playing to their darkest fears in the age of Obama. The network’s viewers are old, with a median age of 65: Ads cater to the immobile, the infirm and the incontinent, with appeals to join class action hip-replacement lawsuits, spots for products like Colon Flow and testimonials for the services of Liberator Medical (“Liberator gave me back the freedom I haven’t had since I started using catheters”). The audience is also almost exclusively white – only 1.38 percent of viewers are African-American. “Roger understands audiences,” says Rollins, the former Reagan consultant. “He knew how to target, which is what Fox News is all about.” The typical viewer of Hannity, to take the most stark example, is a pro-business (86 percent), Christian conservative (78 percent), Tea Party-backer (75 percent) with no college degree (66 percent), who is over age 50 (65 percent), supports the NRA (73 percent), doesn’t back gay rights (78 percent) and thinks government “does too much” (84 percent). “He’s got a niche audience and he’s programmed to it beautifully,” says a former News Corp. colleague. “He feeds them exactly what they want to hear.”

Fox News will make a lot more sense after you’ve read this article. You’ll be simultaneously impressed and sickened by the evil genius of Roger Ailes. Love ‘em or loathe him—I’m firmly in the latter category I can assure you—it cannot be denied what a media-manipulating genius he truly is.

How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory: The onetime Nixon operative has created the most profitable propaganda machine in history. Inside America’s Unfair and Imbalanced Network (Rolling Stone)
 

 
I have to agree with Redditor, joelwood05: “Never understood why paper beat rock in RPS till just now.”

click here to see larger image.

(via reddit)

 
Jello Biafra’s vast knowledge of rock and roll came into play last month at this New Orleans gig where he and members of Dash Rip Rock, Supagroup, Egg Yolk Jubilee and Cowboy Mouth dusted off some classic New Orleans r&b and garage rock tunes in what looks like an absolutely smoking party. Jello’s fire and brimstone attack is perfect for these slabs of funkified soul and Crescent City blues. Dr. Jello, The Night Tripper.

Jello, you oughta do this more often. It’s good for your soul and it’s okay to take some time off from from trying to bring down empires. Sometimes the most revolutionary act is the one that feels good. Your buddy, Marc.
 
“Land Of A 1000 Dances”

 
“House Of The Rising Sun”

 
“Ya Ya”

 
A Fuck Off Bookmarklet in homage to the imprisoned artist Ai Weiwei, who is still “detained” by Chinese authorities after two months:

Hit the FUCK OFF – Bookmarklet in desired situation while you surf the web! Say it like Ai Weiwei! FUCK OFF!! Deutsche Bank, BMW and Siemens for keeping their mouths shut about Ai Weiwei’s arrest. Yes, just keep sponsoring art shows and culture in China and pretend nothing has happend …. FUCK OFF!!!

Follow the simple step-by-step instructions for your Fuck Off Bookmarklet here.
 

 

 
With thanks to Nerdcore
 

 
Zimbabwean artist, Owen Maseko is facing more than twenty years in jail for depicting the Gukurahundi massacres in which 20,000 people were killed.

In March last year, police shut down Maseko’s exhibition at the National Gallery, in Bulawayo, less than 24-hours after it opened. Called “Sibathontisele” (“Let’s Drip On Them”), an allusion to blood, and a method torture used during the Gukurahundi military offensive against Ndebele civilians in the 1980s.

The Gukurahundi is a Shona word for “the spring rains that sweep away dry season chaff”, and was President Robert Mugabe’s response to the bitter rivalry after independence in 1980 between his Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu) and Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu). Mugabe is a Shona, whereas Nkomo was from the Kalanga, a tribe associated with the Ndebele from Matabeleland, whose capital is Bulawayo. Mugabe destroyed Nkomo’s power by attacking the people of Matabeleland. When Nkomo eventually retired from politics and the two parties merged into the Zanu-Patriotic Front.

Owen Maseko’s exhibition graphically detailed the atrocities committed during the early years of Mugabe’s rule.

Maseko has been charged with “insulting the president”, which could lead to along prison sentence of up to twenty-four years.  In an interview with Bulawayo 24 News, Maseko said he is “optimistic and says his paintings have given people a voice.”

“Those atrocities, you can’t talk openly about them in Zimbabwe, so my exhibition kind of made this issue come out and people began to talk about the exhibition,” he said.

“It’s difficult in Zimbabwe to separate what is politics and what isn’t politics because maybe people see Robert Mugabe in my paintings because it is what is on their minds and their faces and it is what is giving them quite a lot of stress at the moment.”

Bulawayo National Gallery curator Vote Thebe says he displayed the exhibition hoping it would help the healing process.

“Our whole aim was to start a debate on the massacres and let the people talk about what happened,” he said.

“And then that way, once you talk about the thing, you get healed as well.

“It wasn’t a way of pointing fingers but it was a way of making sure that people are aware that such things happened.”

Mugabe admits the massacres were an act of madness, he has never acknowledged responsibility.

A campaign to Free Owen Maseko is currently on Facebook, check here for details.
 

Sean Young posted some of her personal behind-the-scenes Polaroids from the set of Blade Runner. There are a lot more of these fun pics over at Sean’s website.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Sean Young’s Super-8 film diary from David Lynch’s ‘Dune’ (1983)


 
(via Super Punch)

 
Our new partner in art crimes, Nicole Panter, was involved in the formative years of the Pee-wee Herman Show and that got me thinking about Pee-wee’s punk connections. Here’s a clip from Pee-wee’s Playhouse circa 1986 of Pee-wee pogoing with his pal Larry Fishburne (Cowboy Curtis). Music by Mark Mothersbaugh.

I know 1986 ain’t exactly the year punk broke, but, keep in mind, Paul Reubens started working on his Pee-wee character in L.A. in 1978 in the midst of a very vital punk scene and that anarchic spirit suffused his program.
 

 
“The joint I am about to roll requires a craftsman and can utilise up to twelve skins. It is called a Camberwell Carrot.”

Yoda gets Danny the drug dealer’s lines from Withnail and I.

“This will tend to make you very high.”
 

 
Via Popbitch

 
I’m kind of digging this finger soap set by Etsy seller Love Lee Soaps. They’re so realistic!

If sliced fingers aren’t your thing, Love Lee Soaps also sell a nice Hot Chicken Wing soap set. 

 
(via Nerdcore )