1971: Osama bin Laden (second from right) on a visit to Falun, Sweden. That year 23 members of the wealthy Bin Laden family visited Falun while one of the elder brothers conducted business with Volvo. Osama is remembered from the occasion as a quiet and reserved boy who at 16 didn’t really stand out from the crowd…
Although it’s bounced around the blogosphere for a while, this picture’s still something to behold. Shot four years after the death of construction magnate/patriarch Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden’s accidental death by plane crash, the photo highlights the bright and brilliant fashion sense of a typical rich and cosmopolitan Saudi family on tour in early ‘70s Europe. Osama—the 17th of Mohammed’s 54 kids from 22 wives—peers out in seemingly pure velour and a comparatively subdued yellow-green and Carolina blue combo.
Of course, perhaps the most laden irony on a trip surrounding business with Volvo is the nearly obscured presence of what seems to be a sick pink Caddy.
Thanks to timmmiii… ...and also to metasonix, who spotted what I thought might have been a Caddy as actually a ‘67 Chrysler Imperial…
This Saturday night in London town, it’s Saturday Night Fulchfest!
Featuring that zany, madcap American in London himself, funny man Rich Fulcher, best known for his multiple roles in The Mighty Boosh and his own nasty piece of work, cult creation Snuff Box (with Matt Berry).
Appearing with Rich will be the very talented Alice Lowe, Pat Cahill, Brett Domino and the marvelous Simon Munnery (AKA “‘The League Against Tedium” from Attention Scum!). He’s also promising a very special exciting GUEST STAR.
Black Hollywood: Blaxploitation and Advancing an Independent Black Cinema is an inexplicably obscure documentary that deserves a wide audience. Directed by Howard Johnson (Deep Roots) in 1984, the film offers an in-depth perspective on race and racism in America’s dream factory: Hollywood.
This 1984 documentary traces the history of black filmmakers, actors, and audiences in America. From Oscar Micheaux to Eddie Murphy, Black Hollywood amasses interviews and clips to explore the role of black entertainers and entrepreneurs. Although progress has been undeniable, the exposure ushered in by blaxploitation movies did little to advance a black cinema independent from Hollywood. After all, the majority of blaxploitation films were financed by white producers who reaped great rewards. Featuring Diahnne Abbot, Rosalind Cash, Alfre Woodard, Jim Brown, Vonetta McGee, D’Urville Martin, Lorenzo Tucker, Joel Fluellen, Vincent Tubbs, and Sidney Poitier.
Enjoy Black Hollywood: Blaxploitation and Advancing an Independent Black Cinema courtesy of our friends at See Of Sound.
Karl Marx, the 19th century social philosopher and historian who is regarded as one of the most influential intellectual figures in human history—Marx was voted the “thinker of the millennium” by people from around the world in a 1999 BBC poll—was born on this day in 1818.
Below, Marx for Beginners (look for a cameo from R. Crumb’s “Mr. Natural”):
Monty Python’s classic “Communist Quiz” sketch from Live from the Hollywood Bowl featuring Marx, Lenin, Che, and Mao.
Live recordings of Can tend to be iffy things. Throughout their existence they steadfastly refused to do anything but entirely improvise each set including wildly divergent takes on pieces from the L.P.s. They tended to be far less disciplined live than their very tightly edited and economic recordings as well and could end up sounding like a trainwreck quite frequently. Not so on this recording, though. They are dazzlingly on point here and traveling stealthily throughout the Kosmos with minimalist drum wizard Jaki Liebezeit at the helm. The spontaneous radical changes in tempo and willingness to luxuriously zero in on the subtlest regions and repetitions reveal a five-man collective organism at its peak powers. Stream the whole thing right here:
Bonus clip: From another 1973 show in Paris two months earlier:
Andrew Curtis shot this time lapse video at a Cinco de Mayo celebration at Waterfront Park in Portland, Oregon. I know Portland is a long haul from Mexico but the good energy in this video transcend borders.
Jaw-dropping portraits of Kurt Vonnegut and Twiggy made entirely from junk mail by artist Sandhi Schimmel Gold. The Kurt Vonnegut piece is still available for $800.00. From the artist:
My work reflects our society’s obsession with beauty through advertising - and the endless images that bombard us daily. It is a purposeful intermix of images derived from advertising and thousands of incongruent pieces - images and text - from advertising that arrives through my mailbox. Assembled like a mosaic; the paper tiles create an entirely new image - an eclectic and tactile portrait reworked in my imagination, utilizing materials that would otherwise go to waste.
Check out more of Sandhi Schimmel Gold’s mosaic portraits over at her website.
War School is a simple and effective short film written and directed by Ben Newman, in which a military training camp is transposed into a British classroom. The film brings home the brutal reality that affects 300,000 children in over 30 countries worldwide.
Psychoville, the brilliant BBC2 comedy series from The League of Gentlemen’s Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith is returning tonight to television sets in the UK and, no doubt, to many bit torrent savvy homes across the world like mine…
I am an absolute League of Gentlemen fanatic (as anyone who knows me can tell you) and Psychoville’s initial seven episode run in 2009 had me in TV heaven. The Halloween special was amazing. I’m really, really looking forward to more Psychoville. (So smart of them to end with a cliffhanger. That’s how to get a second series commissioned!).
Complex and multi-layered as 24 or Lost—and with distinctly Hitchcockian elements in abundance—Pemberton and Shearsmith’s series ties together several disparate characters: Maureen and David Sowerbutts, a mother-son serial killer duo; Mr. Jelly, a bitter one-armed alcoholic party clown for hire; Oscar Lomax, a blind millionaire who collects Beanie Babies; Joy Aston (played by Dawn French), a nurse who believe a doll is her real son and a dwarf actor with telekinesis trying to hide his “midget porn” past.
All six are connected by a mysterious letter they all receive that simply reads: “I know what you did.”
Web gallery Venicepix features hundreds of photographs from the 1970s-80s of surf and skate kids hanging out on LA.‘s Venice Beach. Richly evocative of an era when punk was breaking and the hippie dippy sixties were starting to fray at the edges, these photos have a “Lord Of The Flies” vibe suffused with the scent of cannabis and peroxide.
This ain’t Beach Blanket Bingo. These kids have seen the future and it sucks. A heavy melancholy weighs on some of these faces. Surf, sand and concrete seem like an afterthought.
Like probably many of you reading this, I absolutely loathe Andrew Breitbart. Seeing him on TV turns my stomach sour the same way seeing Pamela Geller or that Koran-burning idiot with the Yosemite Sam mustache being given airtime does. Foul, hateful people. WHY do the major news outlets (non-Fox News, I mean) offer these distasteful, tacky creeps a platform to spout the lousy nonsense they KNOW IN ADVANCE they’re going to come on to these programs and puke at their viewers?
Breitbart is a KNOWN fabulist. A KNOWN practitioner of “creative editing” and outright DECEPTION. What is a guy like him doing on any supposed news channel? He’s not a serious person who has opinions worthy of respect, so why pretend that he is? He’s just a punk, like his dweeby, pimple-faced side-kick James O’Keefe.
Another person who causes me to wince when I accidentally see him on TV is anti-gay rights activist Tony Perkins, he of the respectable sounding hate group, Family Research Council. Giving an asshat like Perkins a national stage is like providing the same service for one of the most rabid witch burners in Salem, Massachusetts if there were cable news channels back in 1692. This is how history will remember a man like Perkins—if history marks him at all, which is doubtful—as an ignorant, hateful, intolerant religious extremist.
So why allow a malignant goofball like Tony Perkins the airtime and the credibility it confers upon him?
Was Noam Chomsky already booked???
CNN seems to me to be the most pathetic of all the cable newsers—grasping at straws as their ratings slide. Watching CNN recently, it would seem that a misguided management decision was made to do like a “reverse Fox News” using a lot of the same guests. Does the upper management at CNN really think that their audience (or potential audience members) want to see the same exact idiots they see on Fox News, albeit in an environment less welcoming than the joint owned by Rupert Murdoch?
Poaching some guest bookers from Fox News was hardly the innovation CNN needed to reinvent itself. Why not just have some random haters from the Free Republic boards on with Wolf Blitzer if that’s the sort of “sizzle” they seek…
And again, I ask CNN’s upper management, is the reason we don’t see America’s greatest living intellectual on your channel—but we do see an un-credentialed, perhaps deranged, rightwing racist gasbag like Pamela Geller—because Noam Chomsky is not taking your phone calls???
MSNBC is a lot better when it comes to the way they contextualize their guests, but you still have the likes of Orly Taitz appearing on the network. WHY?
Even if Chomsky is BOOKED SOLID, there are still options to Orly fucking Taitz!
But Andrew Breitbart always gets a pass on MSNBC—as does Pat Buchanan—and that always pisses me off. Just imagine how much BETTER the news would be—how much BETTER OFF AMERICA WOULD BE—if each and every time these two appeared on TV the “lower third” under their names read “Lying Fuck” or “Increasingly Senile Racist & Author.”
Some basic “truth in advertising.” Is that too much to ask of our cable news outlets? I can dream, can’t I?
Recently James Rucker, the co-founder of Color of Change waged a bit of a campaign to make sure Dylan Ratigan understood how offended he and others (raises hand) feel about seeing Andrew Brietbart on TV sans context other than his name and his URL. Not everyone knows who he is or what his greatest (s)hits as a Republican media assassin are. If they were told about just a lil’ bit of that history upfront, they’d be greatly assisted in their understanding of what they were watching and be much better equipped to properly evaluate the bullshit coming out of Brietbart’s lying pie-hole.
It’s almost like those cigarette labels with the pics of cancerous lungs. Why can’t America’s responsible journalists ALWAYS perform the same sort of service regards Mr. Brietbart and his fellow travelers?
As you may know, ColorOfChange members led the charge to ensure that Breitbart’s credibility and image weren’t sanitized by ABC News or the Huffington Post. After we saw Breitbart on Ratigan’s show, with Ratigan seemingly praising Breitbart as “smart” and a “sharp shooter who gets results,” we were deeply concerned.
When I spoke with Ratigan, he explained what he was trying to do. He quickly agreed that Breitbart was a race-baiter, dishonest, and undeserving of credibility—without question. And he frankly hadn’t thought about the legitimizing effect that having Breitbart on his show—without clearly labeling him as the race-baiter and deceiver he is—would have.
Ratigan’s core issue is exposing the corruptive nature of corporate dollars in politics (which I, and many ColorOfChange members would agree is a critical and important endeavor). Ratigan’s goal in interviewing Breitbart was to ask him why he chose targets like Sherrod or the NAACP, while Breitbart and the Tea Party activists he defends seems to agree that banks and corporations with undue influence over government are actually the ones destroying our country. It’s an important criticism of Breitbart. Ratigan’s goal was to keep the conversation there, and he believed that if he focused on Breitbart’s penchant for race-baiting and deception, it would simply trigger Breitbart, and he’d end up in the same conversation others have where Breitbart goes on a rampage and the conversation goes nowhere.
Moving forward, Ratigan said that if he deals with Breitbart at all in the future, it will be with the explicit disclaimer that Breibart is someone who deceives and race-baits. Ratigan recognizes and respects the argument that there’s a problem with giving Breitbart a mainstream platform, and he’s committed to making sure that his show is not used to lend Breitbart the appearance of legitimacy and credibility.
Breitbart, not surprisingly, is completely unapologetic. Can’t expect a racist to give up that white robe so quickly. However, I give Ratigan and his producers credit for being receptive to this at all… too often, these kinds of issues are raised by liberals and dismissed out of hand. I’d rather that MSNBC acknowledge that people like Breitbart (and network regular Pat Buchanan, come to that) really have no right to expect a national platform for their racism and hate. I doubt very much that Ratigan or the suits at MSNBC have any idea the message it sends to people of color. But I’ll take this incremental step gladly and keep pushing for more.
Nice work James Rucker and Color of Change! The repercussions of this victory are still to be felt for some time.
I could not care less about the Internet’s fascination with cutesy cakes, cupcakes and cookies. But I think I’m going to have to give in here because this Tyrannosaurus Rex cake made by Charm City Cakes blew my mind! Wow!
Jack’s Bar Mitzvah was last weekend. He wanted a big, scary, menacing T-Rex cake for his celebration. And boy did he get one. The whole team worked on this huge cake and personally I think it’s one of our best ever.
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Jack’s one lucky kid.
See more photos of the mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex cake here.
