I wonder how the Dr. Pepper Facebook page would have responded?

(via reddit)

 
While the mainstream media has turned its back on Occupy Wall Street and its associated Occupations across the world, one reporter, Fox UK’s Don Ronson has kept his job and boldly gone out on to the streets to make things up. Without Don and Fox UK’s coverage this whole OWS thing would probably have blown over weeks ago. But thankfully, Don has been committed to getting his side of the story out, and even offered to pay protesters fifty quid to hit a policeman.

Recently Don went down to the front-line of the Occupy London Stock Exchange, where he came face-to-face with the grim reality of peaceful protesters, who hate money and want to “put it in a room and spank it on the botty.”
 

 
Via Bt3a
 

 
This warms the cockles of my Trotskyite heart: Wednesday night in New York City, schools Chancellor Dennis Wallcott and the members of the Panel for Education Policy (or PEP,  the body which enacts policy for the New York City DOE), got more than they bargained for when annoyed parents took a page from Occupy Wall Street and commandeered the meeting with the “people’s mic.” Unsurprisingly, rather than attempt to engage the parents and find out what they wanted, the panel just fucked off.

Nice work, folks, keep the pressure on these clowns.

There is a revolution going on that will touch every aspect of American life. Anyone who think this genie is going back in the bottle is dreaming.
 

 
Thank you Glenn E. Friedman of New York City!

 
ABKCO Films presents legendary director Alejandro Jodorowsky in a rare New York appearance with a Halloween screening of The Holy Mountain at MoMA:

Jodorowsky will introduce his visionary 1973 cult film The Holy Mountain, which famously played for sixteen straight months at New York’s Waverly Theater, at “An Evening with Alejandro Jodorowsky” on Monday, October 31, at 7 PM. The program serves as a coda to the exhibition of Jodorowsky’s work that was organized at MoMA PS1 earlier this year by Klaus Biesenbach.

Jodorowsky will take part in an onstage conversation with Klaus Biesenbach and Joshua Siegel.

The Holy Mountain is a surreal and picaresque satire depicting the journey of a Christ-like figure, the Thief, to a symbolic mountain that is said to unite Heaven and Earth. Playing the character of the Alchemist both on and off screen, Jodorowsky immersed his actors in months of preparatory spiritual and occult exercises, and was also responsible for the costume, set designs and for co-writing the musical score.

Tickets are $12 adults; $10 seniors, $8 full–time students. Admission is free for Museum members. Tickets and info. The Holy Mountain is out on Blu-ray DVD.
 

 

 
The second of this week’s seasonal mixtape treats, and this one is quite a departure from yesterday’s Disco Argento mix. Ave Satanas is (as the name would suggest) a compilation of Satanic rock from the late Sixties and early Seventies, that could be considered the roots of what we now know as black metal, though at the time it would have been classed as psychedelic. It was compiled by one DJ Goatface Killer, better known as Russell Elder from Glasgow’s Mono music emporium.

There are culty groups aplenty on Ave Statanas, like Germany’s Lucifer’s Friend, Chicago’s Coven (pictured above), Leicester’s Black Widow and the original Iron Maiden (not to be confused with Bruce Dickinson’s lot). The music represents a time when rock was getting heavier, drugs were getting harder and post-hippy culture was getting darker, hence the inclusion of extracts from both Anton LaVey’s “The Satanic Mass” and Bpbby Beausoleil’s score for Lucifer Rising. It’s also unlikely that you’ll hear the word “Satan” uttered so much in the course of around 80 minutes - below is the tracklist featuring the year and country of origin of each track:

01. ANTON SZANDOR LAVEY (USA) / THE SATANIC MASS (EDIT) (1968)
02. ANTONIUS REX (ITALY) / NON FIAT VOLUNTAS TUA (1974)
03. BLACK WIDOW (UK) / IN ANCIENT DAYS (1969)
04. COVEN (USA) / BLACK SABBATH (1969)
05. BULBOUS CREATION (UK) / SATAN (1969)
06. THE RATTLES (GERMANY) / THE WITCH (1968)
07. THE GHOST (UK) / NOW YOU’RE DEAD (1970)
08. THE GUN (UK) / RACE WITH THE DEVIL (1968)
09. THE CRAZY WORLD OF ARTHUR BROWN (UK) / FIRE (1968)
10. ROKY ERICKSON & THE ALIENS (USA) / WHITE FACES (1977)
11. LOLLIPOP SHOPPE (USA) / YOU MUST BE A WITCH (1967)
12. DUFFY (UK) / JUDGEMENT DAY (1971)
13. BEDEMON (USA) / CHILD OF DARKNESS (1973)
14. LUCIFER’S FRIEND (UK / GERMANY) / LUCIFER’S FRIEND (1970)
15. IRON MAIDEN (UK) / GOD OF DARKNESS (1969)
16. AFFINITY (UK) / THREE SISTERS (1970)
17. SAM GOPAL (UK) / THE DARK LORD (1969)
18. BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL (USA) / LUCIFER RISING PART II (1972)
 

 
Download DJ Goatface Killah pres Ave Satanas here.

BONUS! The original video for “The Witch” by The Rattles:
 

 
Yes, there is one rogue track from 1977 on the mix, care of Roky Erickson and The Aliens, but I’m sure we can all let that oversight slide. After the jump, audio clips of some of the tracks featured on Ave Satanas…

 
This is a pretty incredible bit of “you were there” style video. The camera was quite near the epicenter of what was happening at Occupy Oakland on Tuesday.

You can see Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen just moments before, and after, he was felled by a projectile.

Video by Raleigh Latham.

Via Business Insider

 
One Hundred & Forty Characters is a project by the brilliantly talented and award-winning photographer Chris Floyd, in which he takes pictures of people he follows on Twitter, including comedy genius Graham Linehan, the ever wonderful Miranda Sawyer, Caitlin Moran and Peter Serafinowicz:

In July 2010 I decided to begin photographing people that I follow on Twitter.  The idea for this came at a moment when I realised I had not seen or spoken to any of my best half a dozen real and actual friends for over a month. Some of those people on Twitter I communicate with several times a week, in bursts of 140 characters or less, and yet I had never met any of them. As we are now well and truly living in a digital age I am aware that this state of being is only going to deepen and the traditional forms of friendship, although they will not go away anytime soon, are going to have to make more room for the new way of doing things.  Where Facebook might be considered as the place in which you tell lies to all the people you went to school with, I had begun to think of Twitter as the place where you tell the truth to all those that you wish you’d gone to school with.  The project rolled on indefinitely for almost a year but when, one day, I counted up the number of subjects to date and came to a number in the mid one hundred and thirties, I immediately knew where this had to end.  So here they are.  My new friends.  140 characters.  No more and no less.

One Hundred & Forty Characters will be on show at the Host Gallery, 1 Honduras Street, London EC1Y 0TH between the 3rd & 17th November 2011.

Check here for details and to see more of Chris Floyd’s brilliant work check here.
 

@msmirandasawyer

“I like this picture because it represents my whole family. Although there’s only me and my son in it, he’s wearing a T-shirt that says Smiley on it, which is my husband’s name; and I’m five months pregnant with our daughter. So there’s four people in there, not just two.

“I look quite mad in it, which I like too. That crazy, rictus grin: I was hot, and fat, and tired and my son was playing up. The only solution was to turn him upside down and make him laugh. I notice that in another one of the 140 Characters pictures, another small boy is being held in the same way. It’s a default solution for boys, it makes them normal again, like rebooting a computer, or reprogramming Buzz Lightyear to his factory settings.”

 

@glinner

“The beauty of Twitter is that it is only as useful as the person who is using it wants it to be. It is such a simple and flexible service that everyone who uses it does so in a different way. Not only that, but it’s a meritocracy. Not only that, but Karma seems to have something to do with it. If you use it for good, you will be rewarded, if you use it for evil, you will be blocked. As a result, it’s leading to some remarkably civil conversations between ideological enemies. If the inventors of Twitter never win a Nobel Prize, they wuz robbed. Because as far as I’m concerned, they have enabled us all to take a major evolutionary step at a crucial moment. At a time when the human race faces not one but several extinction threats, we suddenly get the ability to talk to one another.”

 
4 more from ‘One Hundred & Forty Characters’, after the jump…
 
With thanks to Trevor Ward
 

 
Seven-year-old Nana Kyei aka “Mr. Rhythm Machine” is probably going to need a full set dentures by the time he’s twelve if he keeps this up. He certainly demonstrates some wicked talent, though!
 

 
(via The Daily What)

 
Look familiar? After the horrifying events Tuesday night at Occupy Oakland that saw Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen, 24, severely injured in a clash with police, this short documentary clip about 1932’s fabled “March of the Bonus Army” seems like particularly timely viewing.
 

 
This amazing photo was taken at an Elizabeth Warren volunteer meeting last night in Framingham, Mass. and posted by Daily Kos reader ndrwmls10.

Scott Brown is so fucked. I’m sure he must know it. Although Brown is my #1 favorite Republican—not that this is saying very much, of course, because I hate all Republicans—I won’t be sorry to see him go…

If you are interested in Elizabeth Warren’s 2012 Senate campaign, you can find more information here: Elizabeth Warren for Massachusetts

 
I’m at loss for words here. You just need to watch the video. And you’ve been warned… very NSFW.

The video was shot in Los Angeles and directed by Keith Schofield. The tune “Big Bad Wolf” brought to you by Duck Sauce.
 

Slavoj Žižek at Cooper Union in NYC, 2009

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek poses some interesting questions in a new essay titled “The Violent Silence of a New Beginning,” which was prepared from the remarks he made at Occupy Wall Street on October 10th (video of that below).

This except from the full essay, which you can read at In These Times, discusses answering conservative’s hollow critiques of the OWS movement:

The direct conservative attacks are easy to answer.

Are the protests un-American? When conservative fundamentalists claim that America is a Christian nation, one should remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. It is the protesters who are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street pagans worship false idols.

Are the protesters violent? True, their very language may appear violent (occupation, and so on), but they are violent in the sense in which Mahatma Gandhi was violent. They are violent because they want to put a stop to the way things are done — –but what is this violence compared to the violence needed to sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?

The protesters are called “losers” — but the true losers are on Wall Street, bailed out by hundreds of billions of our money.

They are called socialists. But in the United States, there already is socialism for the rich.

They are accused of not respecting private property — but the Wall Street speculations that led to the crash of 2008 erased more hard-earned private property than if the protesters were to be destroying it night and day. Think of the tens of thousands of homes foreclosed.

They are not communists, if communism means the system that deservedly collapsed in 1990. The communists who are still in power run the world’s most ruthless capitalist system (China). The success of Chinese Communist-run capitalism is a sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce.

The only sense in which the protesters are communists is that they care for the commons—the commons of nature, of knowledge—that are threatened by the system.

The protesters are dismissed as dreamers, but the true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinitely the way they are, just with some cosmetic changes.

The protesters are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare. They are not destroying anything. They are reacting to a system that is gradually destroying itself.

We all know the classic scene from cartoons: The cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. What the protesters are doing is reminding those in power to look down.

Read more of “The Violent Silence of a New Beginning” by Slavoj Žižek at In These Times
 

 
Part 2 after the jump…

“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.”—Abraham Lincoln

At this point, it’s probably too early to report this without recomemmnding the rhetorical “grain of salt,” but according to several tweets from Mother Jones, Occupy Oakland and elsewhere, last night at Occupy Oakland, the General Assembly passed a resolution calling for a nationwide general strike on November 2nd, with 1184 votes of approval. I can’t wait to hear what happens in NYC this evening and if Occupy Wall Street will also vote to approve a General Strike in their assembly. Via Washington’s Blog:

Mother Jones tweets:
 

 
JackalAnon tweets:
 

 
There are also rumors of a global general strike planned for next year. Why plan for just one?

I say bring it the fuck on! It’s about TIME for a general strike in this country!

We’ll be watching this space closely, hoping this isn’t another “Radiohead rumor.” Stay tuned…

A history of the 1946 General Strike in Oakland

 
The Berioska Dance Company of Russia gets in an ultra-mod frame of mind in this video from 1969.

With great national pride our young and fashionably hip comrades dance a folkloric boogaloo while off in the distance Moscow’s Ostankino TV Tower (the fourth largest in the world) looms like a giant hypodermic needle.
 

 
Fantastic. I still haven’t seen her name posted anywhere, but I salute her efforts to educate these clowns. Bravo!

Via Huffington Post:

A protester brought the message of Occupy Wall Street to the deficit-slashing super committee on Wednesday, even as Democrats on the committee sounded like they want to ring up even bigger cuts than required by law.

With Democrats and Republicans sparring over the underlying issue of whether the committee should hike taxes, and whether various parts of the nation’s spending are out of whack compared to historic trends, a woman dressed in black interrupted to try to make it simple.

“The American people want to tax the rich and end the wars,” said a woman who stepped forward as committee member Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) wound down. “That’s how we fix the deficit. And all this obfuscation with percentages of GDP, this is just trying to confuse the issue.”

“We would have enough money for housing and health care and everything that we want if we stopped spending our money [on the] military machine,” she added before Capitol police escorted her away. “It’s very obvious. I speak for the 99 percent: End the wars and tax the rich.”