Truth-telling doesn't always work

Chris Hedges tells the truth: The Truth Alone Will Not Set You Free!

The modern world, as Kafka predicted, has become a world where the irrational has become rational, where lies become true. And facts alone will be powerless to thwart the mendacity spun out through billions of dollars in corporate advertising, lobbying and control of traditional sources of information. We will have to descend into the world of the forgotten, to write, photograph, paint, sing, act, blog, video and film with anger and honesty that have been blunted by the parameters of traditional journalism. The lines between artists, social activists and journalists have to be erased. These lines diminish the power of reform, justice and an understanding of the truth. And it is for this purpose that these lines are there.

"As a writer part of what you are aiming for is to present things in ways that will resonate with people, which will give voice to feelings and concerns, feelings that may not be fully verbalized," Ewen said. "You can't do that simply by providing them with data. One of the major problems of the present is that those structures designed to promote a progressive agenda are antediluvian."

Corporate ideology, embodied in neoconservatism, has seeped into the attitudes of most self-described liberals. It champions unfettered capitalism and globalization as eternal. This is the classic tactic that power elites use to maintain themselves. The loss of historical memory, which "balanced and objective" journalism promotes, has only contributed to this fantasy. But the fantasy, despite the desperate raiding of taxpayer funds to keep the corporate system alive, is now coming undone. The lie is being exposed. And the corporate state is running scared.

Harold Jaffe speaks

Harold Jaffe just gave an interview to Every Writer's Resource:

EWR: It seems that you are using your writing, your art, as a tool, not just to probe into individual human condition but into the 'collective' human condition. Some artists would argue that the internal world of humans is our true condition and others might argue that it is our interaction, and our relationships that give us better insight into who we are. Do you feel that it is the internal human nature that defines us or the interaction and conflict?

Jaffe: I've phrased it (borrowing form the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor) as the distinction between art-making that endorses a liberation of nature as opposed to a liberation from nature.

I believe in the former. That is, like Gramsci ('pessimist of the intellect, but optimist of the will'), I've willed myself to believe that the human condition (not excluding animals, plants and the planet overall) is capable of being modified and democratized and that art can play a role in that effort.

Stories - 140 characters at a time

Can you distill a story to the size of a phone? That's the idea behind cellphone novels:

The cellphone grows more wondrous and indispensable to us every day. Talking is the least of it. We text and Tweet our heads off, send photos, watch TV shows, play video games. But in Japan, imperium of the future where all the above is old hat, the keitai (cellphone) has further spawned a wildly successful, populist fiction genre. Keitai shosetsu, the so-called cellphone novel, has been touted (in the pages of the New Yorker, among other places) and reviled (by Japanese literati) as the first narrative mode of the txt msg age -- the herald of a written-word future bent by wireless telecom's powers.

Dying for art's sake

Richard North Patterson, prolific writer of thrillers, has written a novel based on the wrongful conviction and execution of Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Mr. Saro-Wiwa, a popular author who helped create a peaceful mass movement on behalf of the Ogoni people, was executed in November 1995 along with eight other environmental and human rights activists on what many contended were trumped-up murder charges. His body was burned with acid and thrown in an unmarked grave.

. . .

Fourteen years have passed. General Abacha has died, and Mr. Saro-Wiwa has had a proper burial, but the circumstances surrounding the nine executions, along with related incidents of brutal attacks and torture, are getting another hearing. This month the Wiwa family’s lawsuit against Royal Dutch Shell over its role in those events goes to trial in federal court in Manhattan.

Fiction International's recent theme, The Artist in Wartime, asked artists to write about war and other opressive acts of tyrants. Mr. Saro-Wiwa died because his writings provoked the ultimate in corporate/polifical tyranny. Can you, as an artist, be as brave?

Watch an interview of Richard North Patterson as he describes how he chose Mr. Saro-Wiwa as a subject for Eclipse. Oh, and enjoy the Chevron commercial that begins the Patterson interview.

Fact or fiction?

Writing in The Independent, Tom Sutcliffe asks the question: Did you love the whaling bits in Moby Dick or find them a tedious ordeal?

I found them an ordeal, actually, and tend to skip what Sutcliffe calls the facts in fiction. The reason? Cynicism. I don't read fiction to read a recitation of facts. Details about how to kill a whale don't need to be factual -- plus it might encourage someone to do it, or think it's an activity that's worthwhile to do. Such "factualism" in fiction encourages behavior which ought to be discouraged -- like enlisting in the military so you can accurately describe what it feels like to kill another person.

Coincidentally, I also tend to skip the fiction in the (supposedly) factual or, as it is known, "New Journalism," which proved to be so successful that some journalists began writing the fictional elements of a story then looked for facts to fit the story -- and we were fed stories about crack babies and a fake addiction.

Don't get me wrong: I love both fiction and nonfiction writing. I just prefer them "separated," like the food on a child's plate. Otherwise the facts stall the narrative thrust and "journalists" lets words sell lies.

J. G. Ballard, R.I.P.

J. G. Ballard, author of Crash, High Rise, and The Atrocity Exhibition, among other works, died from prostrate cancer. His works were originally categorized "sci-fi" during the era of New Wave Science Fiction, but when Star Wars killed off the New Wave, his works were adopted by Universities - as were other New Wave writers like James Tiptree Jr., Samuel Delaney, and Harlan Ellison. It's a shame that he (and the other writers) are remembered only within literature departments, because they were - and are - visionaries.

In the most honorable tradition of writing, he found a seam, planted a mine, and slipped away.

It's easy, from the perspective of the present, to minimize just how revolutionary all this was - we now live, after all, in Ballard's world. Ballard, though, produced work that not only challenged his audiences but also actively provoked them, in some cases literally moving people to vandalism, as when he staged a 1970 exhibition of crashed cars at a London art gallery. This show, intended to illustrate the fetishization of machinery and violence, was a seminal moment for Ballard: It led to the publication of "Crash" in 1973.

"The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century," the author wrote in a 1974 introduction to the French edition of the novel, "has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century - sex and paranoia."

Elizabeth Gilbert and the creative process

I've never read Elizabeth Gilbert, but I came across her speech about the creative process and wanted to pass it along. Other writers might find her words helpful - even inspiring.

She gave this speech at a TED Talk. TED stands for Technology, Education, and Design, and a TED Talk is a conference where the world's geniuses and innovators speak to a select group of techies. There are many more lectures on the website; I invite you to sample them since, as artists, this is the closest we will likely get inside a TED Talk.

Reactions To Gaza

The following is one of several insightful responses to the invasion of Gaza by Israel recently published by the London Review of Books here

Yonatan Mendel

It’s very frustrating to see Israeli society recruited so calmly and easily to war. Hardly anyone has dared to mention the connection between the decision to go to war and the fact that we are only a few weeks away from an election. Kadima (Tzipi Livni’s party) and Labour (Ehud Barak’s) were doing very badly in the polls. Now that they have killed more than 1000 Palestinians (250 on the first day – the highest number in 41 years of occupation) they are both doing very well. Barak was expected to win eight seats in the Knesset; now it is around 15. Netanyahu is the one sweating.

I am terribly sad about all this, and frustrated. On the first day of the operation I wrote an article for the Walla News website and within four hours I had received 1600 comments, most calling for my deportation (at best) or immediate execution (at worst). It showed me again how sensitive Israeli society is to any opposition to war. It is shocking how easily this society unites behind yet another military solution, after it has failed so many times. Hizbullah was created in response to Israel’s occupation of Lebanon in 1982. Hamas was created in 1987 in response to two decades of military occupation. What do we think we’ll achieve this time?

The state called up more than 10,000 reservists, and even people who had not been called also travelled to military bases and asked to be sent to Gaza. This shows once again how efficient the Israeli propaganda and justification machine is, and how naturally people here believe in myths that have been disproved again and again. If people were saying, ‘We killed 1000 people, but the army is not perfect, and this is war,’ I would say it was a stupid statement. But Israelis are saying: ‘We killed 1000 people, and our army is the most moral army in the world.’ This says a lot about the psychology of the conflict: people are not being told what to think or say; they reach these insights ‘naturally’.

Since I was a soldier myself ten years ago, I worry I might be called up as a reservist. If I were to refuse now, when Israel is at war, I would be sent to prison. But still, I tell myself, that would be so much easier than being part of what my country is doing. Apparently, every single Jewish member of the Knesset, except one from the Jewish-Arab list, believes that killing more Palestinians, keeping the Gazan population under siege, destroying their police stations, ministerial offices and headquarters will weaken Hamas, strengthen Israel, demonstrate to the Palestinians that next time they should vote for Fatah, and bring stability to the region. I have no words. Only one Jewish member of the Knesset, out of 107, went to the demonstration that followed the deliberate bombing by the Israelis of an UNRWA school being used to house refugees, resulting in the deaths of 45 civilians. Once again, the Israeli slogan is ‘Let the IDF win’ and once again everybody agrees. People have short memories. By 2008, two years after the Second Lebanon War ended, Hizbullah had more soldiers than before, three times more weapons, and had dramatically improved its political position. It now even has a right of veto in parliament. The same could happen to Hamas, but once again military magic enchants Israeli society.

I have a friend whose brother is a pilot in the IDF. I asked to speak to him. I told him what I thought about Israel’s behaviour and he seemed to agree with my general conclusions. He said, however, that a soldier should not ask himself such questions, which should be kept to the political sphere. I can’t agree. But the second thing he told me was more important. He told me that for pilots, a day like the first day of the war, when so many attacks are being made simultaneously, is a day full of excitement, a day you look forward to. If you take these words into account, and bear in mind that in Israel every man is a soldier, either in uniform or in reserve, there is no avoiding the conclusion that there are great pressures for it to act as a military society. Not acting is damaging to the IDF’s status, budget, masculinity, power and happiness, and not only to the IDF’s. This could explain why in Israel the military option is almost never considered second best. It is always the first choice.

Ha’aretz too is a source of unhappiness for me, since in wartime the paper is part of this militaristic discourse, shares its values and lack of vision. Ha’aretz did not criticise Israel when its troops deployed to Lebanon in 2006. Nor did it have anything to say when the same soldiers bombed Gaza’s police, schools and people. Even when there was a demonstration against the war, with more than 10,000 people taking part, both Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel, the Ha’aretz website chose to publish a picture of a counter-demonstration, in which a few hundred participated, waving Israeli flags and shouting: ‘Let the IDF win.’

I have problems speaking to my closest friends and family these days, because I can no longer bear to hear the security establishment’s propaganda coming from their mouths. I cannot bear to hear people justifying the deaths of more than 200 children killed by Israeli soldiers. There is no justification for that, and it’s wrong to try to find one. Usually I feel part of society in Israel. I feel that I am on one side of the political map and other people are on the opposite side. But over the last few days, I feel that I am not part of this society any more. I do not call friends who support the war, and they do not call me. The same with my family. It is a hard thing for me to write, but this is how it is.

Yonatan Mendel was a correspondent for the Israeli news agency Walla. He is currently at Queens’ College, Cambridge working on a PhD that studies the connection between the Arabic language and security in Israel.

Warr Games

A Docufiction by Harold Jaffe.

Night after night throughout the wrecked city contingents of US troops in cartoon video uniforms hunt for hidden roadside bombs.
        On a recent night, a unit from Company B of the Fifth Engineering Battalion, out of Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., met in a darkened tent to prep for their road-clearing mission in a 27-foot armored vehicle called Cowpoke.
        At the end of their meeting, Staff Sgt. Jessie McGah, 31, of Greenville Arkansas, led his team in prayer.

Out on what passes for a road, crawling along at five miles per hour, the unit peer through blast-resistant glass windows, using giant floodlights and a remotely operated steel arm to help detect any telltale disturbance in the pavement or median that would reveal a buried bomb.
        To accomplish their mission, the engineers, or sappers, try to get into the enemy’s mind.
        "When we're out," Sgt McGah said, "we're thinkin’ like how the bad guys think, even like how we'd blow ourselfs up to keal Americans.”

Wolfing trash food, the bright American male 17-year-old sits cross-legged on the floor, pavement, tarmac, astroturf playing warr games.
        Video velocity, hand-eye coordination, game-theory-fantasy-slaughtering- cartoon-state-of-the-art weaponry.
        Speed speed.
        In warr games the fierce-eyed baddies wear long beards and turbans.
        Make agitated gestures and scream Jihad! Jihad! when they’re not sticking their collective butts in the air praying to Allah.

Meanwhile the bright 17-year-old’s older brother, dad and uncle are murdering the fierce-eyed baddies in their long beards and turbans.
        In what used to be called “real time.”
        Murdering the long beards’ wives and children.
        Infinite children, since the phrase “birth control” has never been translated into Arabic.
        There is no corresponding phrase in Farsi.
        In Urdu.
        No corresponding phrase in the million and one regional dialects of tribal Africa.

Hyper-brained 17-year-olds play warr games in their techno-caves
while their older brothers, sisters, National Guard dads, uncles are killed and maimed by roadside bombs.
        Poisoned by xenophobia.
        Sickened unto death by depleted uranium.
        Zombied home with PTSD.
        Resume a life of legislated dysfunction with sharply reduced benefits.
        Migrating patriotism.

40 years ago, before Starbucks, the internet, and boutiqued angst, 20-something males refused to kill while contesting the real-time war, and (no matter what the Discovery Channel tells us now) raised consciousness, as the phrase went, helped end the holocaust.
        End the war that in hindsight nobody wanted, not even one of its chief architects, Defense Secretary McNamara, previously a car salesman, president of Ford Motor Company, who long after the war received a seven-figure advance for dictating his old man’s recantation to a ghost writer.
        In Retrospect, 1995, Random House.
        Then gave contradictory lectures based on the book he didn’t actually write for big $$ where he bristled when the audience interrogated him.

“Mr. Secretary, you say you objected early in the campaign to the bombing, napalming, wanton murder of innocents, carpet bombing of neighboring Cambodia which was not even a player in the war.
        “Mr. Sec, if you had these objections early on, like you say, why didn’t you make a case for stopping the war to the president, to the congress, to the American people?”

Mac’s peeved response: “I was a member of the team.
        “I was not in position to instruct my President.”
        From the audience: “What about after you left Defense and headed the World Bank? It was ‘68; the war was still raging.”
        Mac’s response: “As president of the World Bank I had pressing responsibilities, no time for distractions.”
        “Mr. Sec, are you calling the genocidal Vietnam War a distraction?”

Do 17-year-old males playing video warr games in their techno-caves constitute a distraction?
        Are “real time” wars a distraction from accountable reality?
        What counts more than Reality (TV) in your palm in a strip mall in anywhere, America?
        More than the NFL, America’s game, with a GDP higher than Sub-Saharan Africa?
        More than XXXtreme Games?
        With God, family, hedge funds, and Xtreme patriotism, McNamara, an advocate of game theory and the technological “revolution,” has never (he says proudly) found time for play.

**

        Intelligence officers of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) have been studying postmodern theory.

        You’re lying.

        They recognize that the principles of waging warr must change in the new millennium.
        For Israel to contain its enemies on every side without taking big losses, the intelligence officers have studied Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Althusser, Deleuze, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Bourdieu . . .

        Whole lot of Frogs.
        The French and Israelis don’t even like each other.

        They’ve read PoMo architects and scrutinized their erections.

        Okay.

        Origins are out.
        Except for the origin of the disputed territories, which belong to the Jews, indisputably.
        Perpendicular is out, swarm is in.
        If insurgent street fighters have mined an alleyway and are wedged into sniper positions in the buildings lining the alley on either side, the Israelis don’t enter the alley from the front and proceed forward.
        Instead, small contingents of Israeli commandos break through the walls of apartments in the buildings lining the alley.

        What do they do with the families living in those apartments?

        Lock them in a room, bolt the door.
        The commandos unwall the walls, collapse the space, swarm into the alley from either side.
        In medias res.
        Like ants, like killer bees.
        They blast the insurgents.
        Or they disrupt them, startle them out of their holes.

        I didn’t think freedom fighters startle that easy.

        Not easy.
        Reading postmodern culture theory isn’t easy.
        Applying postmodern culture theory to warr ain’t easy.

        What happens if the freedom fighters are not in the alleys?

        Then Israeli intelligence hacks into their technology.
        PoMo warr is fundamentally a discourse between enemies.

        They discourse in different languages.

        Incidental.
        If the enemy’s lines of discourse are impeded they can’t communicate.
        An isolated, incommunicable enemy cannot warr effectively.

        You’re saying that the IDF, with their ruthless reputation world-wide, wage warr on their computers?

        PoMo battle-space is various.
        Situational.
        A network of interfacing but also unlooped spaces, offline and on.
        Battle-space is inseparable from living space.
        The souks, sewers, streets, mosques, kasbahs are where the enemy live, shit, pray, terrorize.

        How does the IDF distinguish combatants from innocents?

        Vermin is vermin.
        Nobody is innocent.

        Nobody on the insurgents’ side.

        It’s all in the mind.
        Which is the technology.
        Space is relational, subject to interpretation.
        So is innocence.
        We have the technology.

        True.

        The principle is if you can’t kill or brutalize the enemy, impede him.
        While the enemy moves haltingly, the IDF glides effortlessly.
        Online, off.
        Smooth, liquid, permeable movement vs striated, opaque, impeded movement is how the texts put it.

        The PoMo culture theory texts?

        Previously, the IDF, like other well-equipped, rigidly organized armies, warred strictly off-line via a traditional, Euclidian -- so to speak -- perspective.
        Now that centralized perspective has been put under erasure.
        Torqued, ruptured, shattered.

        If the freedom fighters are not murdered they will regroup.
        Resume fighting.

        Less effectively.
        Confidence shattered.
        An enemy does not have to be annihilated to lose a battle.
        Lose the warr.
        When the battle resumes the IDF “reads” and analyzes the dynamic; it kills with hardware, disorganizes with stratagems, reorganizes with software.
        One can win a post-millennial battle purely by reorganization.

        Were -- are -- any of those postmodern theorists soldiers, fighters?

        Postmodern theorists are pussies.
        Especially if they’re French.
        They’ll murder their wives.
        Or themselves.
        They do what they do.
        So long as they leave their texts behind.

        What happens to the unwalled walls?
        The inhabitants bolted into their rooms?
        What happens to the buildings the IDF breaks through in order to swarm like killer bees, reorganize space?

        The buildings remain unwalled.
        The inhabitants are not a factor.
        It could be they don’t even notice the unwalled walls.
        That is one of the advantages of warring with an impoverished enemy.

        You talk of the new post-millennial battle plan.
        Startle, swarm, disrupt, rupture.
        Battling situationally, with knowledge gained by studying the postmodern culture theorists?
        But isn’t this the way the most impoverished guerrillas on every bedeviled continent have been warring all along?
        Without having to read those French pussy theorists?

        Maybe.
        But without our technology.


[Part 2 is drawn from Eyal Weizman, “Walking through Walls,” Radical Philosophy #136, March/April 2006.]

When war wages on...

Below is a clip of a news story about the lasting effects of the U.S.'s use of agent orange during the Vietnam war. Three decades after blanketing parts of Vietnam with chemicals, many people are still suffering from its effects. Note the response of the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam.

RIOT GOING ON

(Thanx to G. Lain for the Basement 5 tip-off)

In 1970's England a weird hybrid of punk rock and dub reggae started playing in the underground. The two genres have alot in common: heavy bass, stacatto guitars, fast beats, and players who indentifiy as marginalized political malcontents. What is called "Post-Punk" these days often owes more to dub reggae than punk rock.

Below is Basement 5 's "Riot" played over footage of "The Battle of Grosvenor Square", an anti-Vietnam War demonstration that turned violent in 1968 London.

I like that the guitar mimics a police siren and that the "My Sharona Bassline" is put to better use.

Structural Adjustment

Zeitgeist: Addendum (Zeitgeist II) - Part V
by ZeitgeistAddendum

The second Zeitgeist film, Addendum, was released last month. A portion of the film is above. Turns out war, in the conventional sense, isn't always a necessity for continuing colonialism...

Drive In Saturday, 10/25/08

Rico/Man From Wareika

One of my favorites; good fidelity too.

Jesus Coyote gets reviewed

Harold Jaffe's newest docufiction novel, Jesus Coyote, was reviewed in Mad Hatter's Review. Read it. Buy it.

War is Over

The Doors/Unknown Soldier

After Tomorrow

Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Richard D Wolff, with an anti-capitalist analysis of the current market crises, via Lenin's Tomb

Under the Big Black Sun

Pauper's Cemetary, NOLA. Photo by Bryce Lankard

5 Pieces of Advice for the New Paupers
By John Dolan, AlterNet
Posted on October 15, 2008, Printed on October 15, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/102992/

Little did I know that when I lost everything last year, I was doing research. At the time I thought it was just stupidity or bad luck or both. But now that the economy's crashing, it turns out I've been out there gathering valuable tips for millions of new paupers. And let me clarify, I'm talking real poverty. My wife and I fell through many layers of poverty in a few months. First we revisited the genteel poverty known to grad students, the sort of poverty where you have scary dreams about the rent and eat a simple, wholesome diet toward the end of the month. But we fell right through that into the sort of Dickensian privation that spoiled first-worlders like me never expected to experience. That's the kind of poverty a lot of people are going to be experiencing soon -- and I'm here to tell you, it can happen here and it can happen to you. And it's remarkably unpleasant. You may be saying "Duh!" here, but you're probably not imagining the proper sort of unpleasantness. So I'll try to lay out what to watch for, how to hunker down when it's not just a matter of cutting back or selling your second car but having no car at all, having no money for heat or food.

All the things we learned are going to seem pretty obvious, but remember that it's very hard to think clearly when your life has collapsed. These are what they call the old verities, the truths of life before the middle class was (briefly) in session:

Warmth

Above all, you need to have a dry, warm place to sleep. We had only an unheated boat, and that was not enough. We woke up to the thump of sea ice banging against the hull and realized that the old world was still very much in session. When we finally fled to stay with family, we stayed in our blankets up against their gas fireplace for weeks. You won't even want food much after a while. You'll want heat itself, not the chemical middleman. You are going to realize that cold is the most frightening thing in the world. In older English dialects, "to starve" meant "to freeze." You will see why.

Car

Got one? Maybe you should sell it. Cars drain the last dollars out of you. And there's something worse: Cops can smell desperation, and they hate the poor. I didn't hate cops as much before, except drug cops, but God, I hate them now. The real purpose of cops is to keep poor people off the roads. That's their only real goal. On my way to an interview for a job that could have gotten us out of the gutter, a cop stopped me because my insurance was two weeks overdue -- for the simple reason that we didn't have money to pay it. She gave me a $600 ticket for that, plus $120 for not having an updated address on my driver's license. Then she called for a tow truck and told me, "So, a lesson learned here today!" as I watched my car get towed away and trudged off with our terrified dog down a typical Western suburban road: four lanes of fast traffic with no sidewalks. Are you poor? The cops are your enemy now. Accept it. The car is how they'll try to get you. Sell it if you can -- which is to say, if there's any decent public transportation -- hah! -- where you live.

Shame

As in, forget about it. Shame is an affectation. I don't even need to say this, really. Once you've experienced actual cold and hunger, your good old Olduvai Gorge mammal body and brain will take over, and believe me, shame won't be a problem.

You'll also find that most of the social stuff is easier than you'd expect. These people are in show biz in a way; they have to be, just to survive. It makes them lively. And though I suppose it all depends on where you are when you lose out, in my experience they're not especially violent. They talk about it a lot, but so do all the white jocks I ever met, and in neither case does anything actually happen. They're flinchy people, mainly, who spend a lot of time waiting for things. When you're waiting, you get very frustrated but you don't want to shake things up. So they're tense, bitter, sociable, gossipy and treacherous -- a fine cross-section of the population. After waiting around with them in line at the local food bank, sharing "how I ended up here" stories and hanging out with them around a propane heater trying to stay warm, I relaxed a lot. They're not going to mug you. They are going to try to get any cash you have, and God did they get a huge chunk of our last resources, but it was friendly, schmooze-based extortion, just like in the middle-class world. All that was missing was the deodorant.

Food Banks

These places, usually in the basement of a church (because churches are the only public institutions in the new suburbs of western North America) hand out baskets of groceries every week or, more often, every two weeks. You have to wait a long time, so learn your refugee skills. Come early, get a number first, and be nice but pushy. It's a delicate operation, being nice but pushy, but you'll learn it. The "nice" part is because you need to ask people for help and advice; you're not rich enough to be solitary anymore. The pushy part is simple: It's to prevent you from being ignored. So always talk to people, but never show money or mention it, if you have any.

Antidepressants

Get on them right away, if you're not already. If you are, up your dose. Because it's going to hurt. It doesn't matter how much Marxist theory you've absorbed; it doesn't matter that you can put your fall into global context; it's happening to you now, and it's going to hurt like you wouldn't believe. You're an American, and you share that culture's values whether you like it or not. So you define yourself by your job, car and house. When they go, you're going to hate yourself. Don't even bother arguing about it. It's going to happen. Just take the damn Prozac. Would you refuse a coat in Siberia? Refusing Prozac after falling into poverty makes about as much sense. Tom Cruise can go fuck himself. Prozac saved our lives. I won't go into the sordid details, but really, I don't think we'd be here now if Saint Prozac hadn't extended a sacred hand to us.

So the second you slip beneath genteel poverty toward the street, find the nearest free clinic, and don't be deterred by the smell of the crowd in the waiting room. Smell is going to be a problem for you at first, but after a few weeks you won't mind, because you smell too, and so does everyone around you. If you want a break from the relentless olfactory fact of being around unwashed large mammals, sidle up to somebody who smokes. That's the one good thing about cigarettes, and it may be why losers all smoke. Don't smoke just for that, though. Cigarettes are insanely expensive and turn lots of poor people into cringing beggars.

How do you tell your story? That's going to matter, because you'll be brooding about what went wrong 24/7, whether you want to or not. And you'll find that explaining one's great fall is a vital skill among the fallen, as well as a deeply satisfying pastime. This raises the issue of denial, a vital and deeply misunderstood mechanism. Denial, like Kurtz said about Terror, is your friend or an enemy to be feared. You need some denial to keep your ego from being crushed completely. Your ego is going to get very sick, now that you're nobody. It's easy to be polite and self-deprecating when you're winning. I used to be like that. You can't afford that when you're being crushed. You have to demand respect if you expect to get it. The alternative is to dwindle away and disappear. Those antidepressants will help you deny the facts, but don't be shy about doing ego-exercises, boasting practice, to reawaken that playground ego that so many of us polite middle-class types allowed to atrophy. You're going to need it.

On a practical level, the question is what to jettison -- and I'm not just talking about things. If you have kids well, God help you; I can't give advice here, because luckily we didn't. But we did, unfortunately, have a dog, a big clumsy puppy we got just before everything fell apart. We probably should have given her up. Growing up in an atmosphere of terror and cold and self-hatred, she turned out to be a very weird, unhappy dog. I've had lots of dogs before this, back when I was comfy, and they were all nice suburban dogs, Frisbee-catching pals. This one's a feral freak. Now that we have a warm place to live, it's almost fun watching her reactions, the way she flinches and sniffs at every noise, smell or flash of color, but I know she would have been happier getting adopted by some family that complains about what a pain it is having just four bedrooms.

Besides, if you have a dog, you're cutting down on your chances of getting a job. This one howls when she's left alone, another legacy of her traumatic puppyhood, so one of us had to stay with her most of the time. It was like being handcuffed to the wretched unheated ex-fishing boat we were living on.

The boat was another contributor to our debacle; it was something else we should have sold off right away, even at a 90 percent loss. The idea behind that damn boat was that instead of paying the insanely high West Coast rents, we'd live on the boat for free. This is a very bad idea. Any idea you have of retreating to some simple, free habitation should be regarded with deep doubt. The thing is, you can't get back to the comfortable, heated world from a place like that boat. No Internet. You need the 'net if you're ever going to claw your way back. You need a working shower, which that boat lacked. Otherwise you develop that look, that smell you first encountered in the free clinic waiting room. It's not a good look, jobwise. Maybe if we'd gotten rid of the dog I'd have had a chance.

But you lose more than that. You change completely, more than you realize, to the point that even if you get a break you can't grab it. After months of applying for teaching jobs without even getting answers, the perfect job opened up for me at a local college. It was half creative writing, half teaching literature and composition -- all my specialties. But when the interview started I realized I was no longer someone who could talk the quiet, polite, oblique version of self-promotion demanded by academic hiring committees. I was too deeply, permanently spooked by our condition. I was just plain wrong, unhireably wrong in every way. No hot water on the boat, and I needed to shave the graying wisps of hair on my big bald head, so I'd shaved in the McDonald's men's room on the way to the interview, with a cheap Bic shaver. You can guess the results: I looked like a bobcat had tried to roost on my scalp and been evicted after a violent struggle. The used sport coat we'd spent our last $20 of Visa credit on at Value Village didn't seem to fit nearly so well once I was inside that humming, immaculate classroom where the interview was held. And I had become a louder, more desperate, excessive person. When I tried to sound positive, it came out furious. When they asked me, as I'd known they would, why someone who'd taught at bigger universities wanted to come to this small rural campus, I said truthfully, "I'd rather teach here in the forest than at Stanford." It didn't come out enthusiastic; it came out strident. After months of being a bum, I was the wrong volume, the wrong temperature. I could feel the job slipping away, and in fact they hired a local guy who was friends with the director, even though my resume kicked his resume's ass.

You'll find that if you want to get back into that quiet, odor-free, polite world, you're going to have to decompress for a few months. What happened to us is that we fled, found a basement apartment on borrowed money, and stayed there, keeping the heat on high for months. Then we were ready to try again for a job.

It took that long to calm down, quiet down, lose a little of the bitterness. Yes, you're going to be very bitter. You can't hate yourself all the time; you have to switch off now and then and blame somebody else. In fact, somebody else may damn well be to blame. Just make sure the bitterness doesn't keep you awake. To enable yourself to sleep, take long walks. Shout curses at the world if you need to; just keep walking. And no matter what, don't sell your sleeping bag. I had a North Face down bag, and I learned to love it way, way more than I loved myself.

Sleep is an antidepressant almost as good as Prozac. And it's free. The time to worry is when you wake up after a couple of hours screaming. That happened to me after five months, and that's when I broke down and asked my brother for a loan. That's where this story diverges from a real street story: I had an out. And believe me, I took it. I should have taken it sooner, in fact.

If you have an out -- a relative or friend who can lend you money to find a place to live -- take it now. And as soon as you get an offer -- some old friend has a ski cabin nobody's using, or a small unit behind their house -- take it, as long as it's heated.

The old world is very much alive, and has it in for you. Do anything to keep it from killing you. The only reason I haven't endorsed crime here is that from what I saw, paupers are not in a good position to try it. Like so much else, crime is for the big people.

John Dolan is a contributor to eXiledonline.com. He is the author of, most recently, Pleasant Hell (Capricorn, 2005).

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/102992/

Writers Living in Economic War Zones

Harold Bloom just published an article about how the lessons learned from an economic meltdown informed his writing. The writer? Ralph Waldo Emerson.

While Emerson is a great source for "self-reliance" and "transcendence" in a country gone mad from greed and power, other writers -- like Walt Whitman (who can teach us about transcending war) and Henry David Thoreau (who can teach us about transcending both greed and war) are Emerson's equals -- not his pupils, as Bloom suggests. (Bloom does love a hierarchy!)

               

Hope

Image by Shepard Fairey.

Here is a link (posted without comment) to a Wired feature on street artist Shepard Fairey, who has been hired by the Obama campaign to create images for their theme "hope."

The Return of History

Commentary by Richard Estes on the recent, unsanctioned market interventions by the US govt:

the global neoliberal era that commenced in the late 1970s, implemented by figures like Reagan, Thatcher, Pinochet and Deng Xiaoping, among others, is now officially over

in the short term, investors and the financial sector will be winners, having pocketed outsized returns, bonuses and transactions fees, with a government backstop, but, in the mid to long term, they will be losers, as the consequences of their actions are visited upon us

it might be called, "The Return of History", in juxtaposition to Fukuyama's famous declaration, "The End of History", in the early 1990s

class conflict is going to return with a vengence, when people realize that they are being brutally subjected to the discipline of a market administered by politicians and corporations that not only exempt themselves from it, but require everyone else to pay for their mistakes

You can read more of Estes' commentary at his blog American Leftist.

Looking for a New York Reading!

One of Harold Jaffe's scheduled readings in NY, at the Brooklyn Public Library, had to cancel because of withdrawal of city funds!

He will be in NY between Oct 8-13, reading at the KGB Bar on October 10, but he's looking for another reading venue to replace the cancelled Brooklyn Library reading. Can any NY fans help?

SARTRE ON LIVING IN NAZI OCCUPIED FRANCE

WE HAVE NEVER BEEN SO FREE AS UNDER GERMAN OCCUPATION.  We had lost every right, and above all the right of speech:  we were insulted every day and we had to remain silent;  we were deported as laborers, as jews, as political prisoners;  everywhere, on the walls, in the newspapers, and on the screen, we saw the foul and listless face which our oppressors wanted to give us.  Because of all of this we were free.  Since the Nazi venom penetrated our very thoughts, every true thought was a victory.  Since an all powerful police tried to force us to be silent, each word became as precious as a declaration of principle.  Since we were hounded, every one of our movements had the importance of commitment.  The often atrocious circumstances of our struggle had at last put us in a position to live our life without pretences--to live in this torn, unbearable condition which we call the human condition.  Exile, captivity, and above all death, which is ably disguised in periods of happiness, became the perpetual object of our concern; we discovered that they were not inevitable accidents or even constant but external threats:  they had become our lot, our destiny, the source of our reality as men.  Each second we fully realized the meaning of that trite little phrase "All men are mortal."

--Jean Paul-Sartre.  From his essay, "The Republic of Silence."

Harold Jaffe San Diego U-T interview

Hal's interview (published Sunday, 9/7/08) can be found online here:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20080907/news_1a07view.html

Always war

As a preliminary contribution:

"There is a War" by Leonard Cohen

There is a war between the rich and poor,
a war between the man and the woman.
There is a war between the ones who say there is a war
and the ones who say there isn't.

Why don't you come on back to the war, that's right, get in it,
why don't you come on back to the war, it's just beginning.

Well I live here with a woman and a child,
the situation makes me kind of nervous.
Yes, I rise up from her arms, she says "I guess you call this love";
I call it service.

Why don't you come on back to the war, don't be a tourist,
why don't you come on back to the war, before it hurts us,
why don't you come on back to the war, let's all get nervous.

You cannot stand what I've become,
you much prefer the gentleman I was before.
I was so easy to defeat, I was so easy to control,
I didn't even know there was a war.

Why don't you come on back to the war, don't be embarrassed,
why don't you come on back to the war, you can still get married.

There is a war between the rich and poor,
a war between the man and the woman.
There is a war between the left and right,
a war between the black and white,
a war between the odd and the even.

Why don't you come on back to the war, pick up your tiny burden,
why don't you come on back to the war, let's all get even,
why don't you come on back to the war, can't you hear me speaking?

What type of "Artist in Wartime" are you?

Traditional Battlefield-Style Warfare?


War Re-enactment?


War metaphors?


Cold War?


Guerilla War?


War of Words?

War of Wills?


War as "hot, man-on-man action"?


Submissions are now being accepted for Fiction International's "The Artist in Wartime" issue.

Guernica

What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who, if he is a painter, has only eyes, if he's a musician has only ears, if he's a poet has a lyre in each chamber of his heart, or even if he's a boxer, just muscles? On the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly alert to the heart-rending stirring or unpleasant events of the world, taking his own complexion from them. How would it be possible to dissociate yourself from other men; by virtue of what ivory nonchalance should you distance yourself from the life which they so abundantly bring before you? No, painting is not made to decorate apartments. It is an instrument for offensive and defensive war against the enemy.

Pablo Picasso, Les Lettres Francaises, March 1945

General, your tank is a powerful vehicle

General, your tank
is a powerful vehicle
it smashes down forests
& crushes a hundred men.
but it has one defect:
it needs a driver.

General, your bomber is powerful
it flies faster than a storm
& carries more than an elephant.
but it has one defect:
it needs a mechanic.

General, man is very useful.
He can fly & he can kill.
but he has one defect:
He can think.

Bertolt Brecht (February 10, 1898 – August 14, 1956) was a Marxist dramatist, stage director and poet.

Post via erasmuspc

I have been here

The following photographs are the work of Iranian artist Tooraj Khamenehzadeh, from his series, I have been here.

Art of the First World War

Otto Dix, Selbstbildnis als Soldat (Self-Portrait as a Soldier), 1914, ink and watercolour on paper, on both sides, 68 x 53.5 cm, Municipal Gallery, Stuttgart.

The aim of this exhibition is not to review the facts of the war, but to show how they were portrayed by artists on either side of the front line, and indicating the difficulties involved. Amongst the millions of conscripts there were painters of every nationality and every school of painting. Those who were born around the year 1880 belonged to the generation that was called up immediately on the outbreak of war. The war held no secrets for men such as these – they were the ones who did the fighting. Boccioni, Macke, Marc, La Fresnaye and Gaudier-Brzeska died during, or as a consequence of, the war. Only the citizens of neutral countries (for example the Spanish nationals Picasso and Gris) were not called up. Many enlisted out of patriotism or because they could not bear to be away from the action. Until now, with very few exceptions, artists and writers had witnessed wars without actually becoming involved. In 1914, for the first time, they all had to take part: Germans, Britons, Italians, Austro-Hungarians and Frenchmen. Léger became a stretcher-bearer, Kokoschka a cavalryman, Beckmann a medic, Derain an artilleryman, Camoin a camoufleur, Dix a machine-gunner. Many of them drew and painted what they saw and lived through. From the sketchbooks of pencil drawings done at the front to the canvases painted on returning home, theirs is an intense and accurate testimony.

And yet, many of these works have been little researched, if not altogether forgotten. Because they recalled painful memories they were not much looked at once the war was over. Even the men who painted them - with the crucial exception of Otto Dix - had grown away from their work, and made no attempt to exhibit them. For example, Beckmann and Léger were no sooner demobbed than they set to work painting very different subjects, such as contemporary life and the city. Others went even further in making a fresh start. Among those who were called up were Braque and Derain, who left Avignon station together on August 2nd 1914 to join their regiments, accompanied by Picasso. Braque took part in the fighting during that autumn and winter. He was seriously wounded on May 11th 1915, was trepanned and, after a long convalescence, returned to his workshop a year later. He left not a single drawing or canvas alluding to what he had been through and no representation of the war is present in his work. Derain was attached to an artillery unit and served in the Champagne region, at Verdun, on the Somme, and on the Chemin des Dames until 1917. He was not demobilised until after the armistice. Of this five year period there remains no trace, apart from the title of one painting, the Cabaret on the Front seen by André Breton in Derain's studio in 1921, but which disappeared and was probably destroyed. Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff and Kokoschka also refrained from painting what they had seen and experienced...

Nevertheless, new art works did appear, and in larger numbers than might be expected. They expressed violence, fear, exaltation, suffering, pity and disgust. They appealed to the persistence of the human conscience at a time when it was being enslaved and ignored by war. Some of the older ones, those most set in their old ways, tried to do this with the tools of pictorial realism handed down from the previous century. They observed biplanes, artillery guns and soldiers in close detail, and equally methodically reproduced what they saw. Illusion and illustration were their main resources. However, their themes, being all about movement, speed and the instant, were bound to suffer from being fixed as if suspended in a still picture. These works still have their documentary value however, which today is heightened by their picturesqueness from another age.

Younger painters trained during the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, attempted combinations which nowadays we find surprising, such as bright, sharp colours and macabre subjects, or cut-out shapes and white light. Whether they were painting the ruins of a bombed-out church, a mountain artillery post or two bodies lying forgotten in a trench, Vallotton in Argonne, Horovitz in the Alps and Orpen on the Somme introduced purple shadows, sinuous lines and Japanese-inspired flat tints - as if it were still possible, a quarter of a century on, faithfully to apply the lessons of Gauguin and the Nabis...

The artists belonging to the European avant-garde movements - the German Expressionists, French Cubists, Italian Futurists and British Vorticists - rejected once and for all the rules which had previously governed the painting of battle scenes. They worked to overcome the difficulties involved in devising new themes and methods suited to the monstrous new reality. Those methods were largely those of Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism and Abstract Art. In May 1915, Léger was in Argonne from where he wrote to a friend: "All the same, it is a funny kind of war (...) This war is the perfect orchestration of every means of killing, both old and new. It is intelligent to its fingertips, which actually makes it damned annoying as there are no more surprises. We are controlled on either side by very talented people. It's as linear and as arid as a geometry problem. Such a large number of shells in such a short time over such a surface area, so many men per metre and in order at the specified time, it is all triggered off mechanically. It is pure abstraction, much purer even than Cubist Painting "itself". I can't deny my allegiance to this method (...)" (6). In devastated Verdun, he discovered "completely unexpected subjects to gladden (his) Cubist soul" (7). Drawings and watercolours are the satisfactory result of these new contacts. Léger portrays dehumanised automata serving the machines that crushed them. He brings out the collapsed shapes of his ruins and the broken lines of a shot-down plane.

Dix, Nevinson, Severini, Wyndham Lewis, Nash and Grosz also came to understand that modern warfare needed to be painted in a modern way. The time for heroic realism and patriotic allegory was up. To interpret the explosions of shells, the all-powerful artillery and total war demanded transcripts and not imitations. In order to convey a feeling of its inhuman violence, rather than represent the particular details of the battle, lines had to be broken, and colours had to burst out.

From the website The Art of the First World War

Harold Jaffe, in Rain Taxi

Author Harold Jaffe just posted an interview he did with Larry Fondation for Rain Taxi, which is being published Summer 2008. In it he defines 'docufiction,' discusses his newest docufictions, and offers observations about contemporary society. An excerpt:

Official culture's facility to deceive is infinitely more advanced than in the Sixties. Successful revolutionary models are either not represented or brazenly misrepresented. And Americans are trained to rely on official representations far more than on their unmediated experiences.

Among other lies, we are told that the worldwide student revolt in '68 was a failure, that revolution as such has lost its purchase, when in truth revolution and the ethical dissent which leads to revolution are ongoing, perennial.

Pornography... and Censorship

Editor Harold Jaffe just posted a 1992 interview he did about Fiction International's Pornography & Censorship issue. The interview, conducted by Janice Wynborne of KPBS Radio, highlighted the difficulty of conducting an "adult" conversation about what consitutes pornography in our society.

The issue is still for sale - and, in fact, is now 50% off. See http://www.fictioninternational.com for more details.

Harold Jaffe's "Revolutionary Brain"

Here's another docufiction from Harold Jaffe's latest collection, Orfeo, called "Revolutionary Brain":


It has emerged that the brains of three leading members of the violent revolutionary group, the Red Army Faction (RAF), including its co-founder, Andreas Baader, have disappeared after being preserved for scientific research.

*

The grisly revelation comes just days after the twin daughters of Ulrike Meinhof, the other RAF founder, finally won permission to have her brain returned for burial.

*

Meinhof's brain was extracted after her alleged suicide in jail in 1976, but for years its whereabouts remained a mystery.

*

Last month it was revealed that the brain had been secretly preserved in a scientific laboratory in Frankfurt.

*

The RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, began a campaign of political killings and kidnappings of senior business leaders in the 1970s aimed at overthrowing the German state which they called "Nazi capitalism."

*

Meinhof allegedly hanged herself in her cell in Stuttgart's Stammheim Prison on May 9, 1976; her comrades Baader, Ensslin and Raspe were found dead in their cells in Stammheim Prison on "Death Night," October 18, 1977.

*

The official report states that Baader and Raspe shot themselves to death and Ensslin hanged herself.

*

The Red Army Faction cell block had been touted as the most secure prison block in the world; the press was filled with accounts of lawyers interrogated and searched for an hour or more before being admitted to visit their clients.

*

When it was announced that Baader and Raspe shot themselves with guns smuggled into their cells, it was cynically assumed that the authorities assassinated them, as well as Ensslin and very possibly Meinhof the year before.

*

Their dead bodies were promptly autopsied and their brains extracted and donated to "Science."

*

Gottschalk König, CEO of the Neurological Research Institute of Heidelberg University where initial tests were done, admitted that he could not account for the whereabouts of the brains.

*

They might have been moved to make way for other organs and finally burned, he said, but he would not rule out theft.

*

Now Ulrike Meinhof's brain has suddenly reappeared, in the possession of a medical pathologist who insisted on anonymity.

*

The anonymous pathologist said that Meinhof's brain surgery in 1962 in which a benign lesion was removed very likely contributed to her becoming one of Europe's most feared urban guerrillas.

*

Her slide into "terror" would then be explained by her brain illness.

*

Moreover, the anonymous pathologist claimed that clinical tests on Ulrike Meinhof's brain soon after her death cast doubt on her fitness to stand trial.

*

Meinhof was considered the intellectual head of the Red Army Faction, a left-wing revolutionary group that spread fear across West Germany in the 1970s and into the 1980s, after her death.

*

The anonymous pathologist confirmed that he carried out the research on Meinhof's brain over the last ten years primarily in a laboratory in Frankfurt.

*

He told a news conference on Tuesday that he gained possession of the brain in 1997 after applying for permission to examine it.

*

Previously it was held by a Stuttgart neurologist named Muehl who had conducted the autopsy after her suicide.

*

The anonymous pathologist said that although there may have been other factors, the brain surgery in 1962 could have led to behavioral changes that turned Meinhof from a talented and ambitious journalist to co-founder of the revolutionary Red Army Faction.

*

The RAF carried out a campaign of killings and bombings against leading industrial figures beginning in the 1970s.

*

Many of those figures had been influential Nazis in the Third Reich.

*

The anonymous pathologist’s involvement came to light last week, when Meinhof's twin daughters, in a law suit, insisted that her mother's brain was removed without the family's permission.

*

Meinhof's twin daughters have also filed a criminal complaint against the anonymous pathologist, accusing him of disturbing the peace of the dead.

*

They are seeking to have the brain buried with their mother's remains in Berlin.

*

But the latest revelations indicate the medical authorities also had a morbid fascination with the revolutionary killers.

*

An unauthorized plaster death mask of Andreas Baader had evidently been made by one of the anonymous pathologist's medical team who had mixed his own semen with the plaster.

*

The anonymous pathologist claims not to know who was responsible.

*

German authorities were said to be conducting DNA tests to uncover which of
the anonymous pathologist's medical team's semen was involved in Baader's death mask.

*

Andreas Baader was a telegenic Brando-type bad boy who had turned to political terrorism for the methamphetamine-like rush it gave.

*

The news of the plaster and semen death mask of Andreas Baader comes amid official concerns that a series of recent videos about the violent 1970s have portrayed the terrorist killers as pop icons.

*

Celebrations of revolutionary violence unsettle German authorities who are always on the lookout for a resurgence of Nazism.

*

Prosecutors are now examining documents from the time of Meinhof's death to establish how her brain came to be preserved for 30 years and whether any offence was committed.

*

After the Revolution

MLF With Bad Nosejob Gets Huge Cum Facial 3 Blow Job WMVs
Teen Slut Swallowing Globs Of Hot Nut Butter 4 Latina MPEGs
Blonde & Jap Swap Ass Cum 3 Anal And Ass MPEGs
Vintage Sex Vids & Big Hairy Bushes 3 Amateur MPEGs
Pee Lovin Chick Asks For Mo' 4 Piss WMVs
Mex Babe Spreads Pink & Gets Meatstick 3 Hardcore MPEGs
Kinky Shaved Chubber Whips Her Whip 6 Big Tits WMVs
Thick Latina Pissed Then Boned 3 Hardcore MPEGs
MILF In Pantyhose Gets Phat Ass Stuffed 4 Mature Ladies WMVs
Big Mamma Wraps Her Boobs Round A Stiffy 6 BBW WMVs
Shaven Head Babe Takes Cock for the Rock 4 Hardcore MPEGs
Cougar Stalks Son's Pal & Fucks Him With Strapon 5 MPEGs
Hardcore Electrical Lesbo Bondage 6 Bondage/BDSM WMVs
Dominatrix Drills Fem Slaves Snatch 6 Bondage/BDSM WMVs
Bound, Gagged & Helpless 6 Bondage/BDSM WMVs
2 Young Cunts A'Cookin In The Kitchen 6 Fetish/Bizarre WMVs
Texas Twins Dip Their Honeypots in a Bubble Bath 2 WMVs
Babe Tossing Her Man's Salad 3 Fetish/Bizarre MPEGs
Samantha Slurps Every Last Drop Of Goo 4 Porn Stars MPEGs
Tiny Titted Megan Takes Two Big Dicks In Pooper 3 Latina MPEGs
Bianca Pornstar BJ, Piss & Browneye 3 Porn Stars WMVs
Lesbo Amateurs Squirm In Threesome 4 Lesbian MPEGs
Fisting Hard A Shaved Wet Puss 4 Fetish/Bizarre WMVs
Slutty Granny Does Herself With Baseball Bat 4 WMVs
Twelve Dudes Jizz On Blondes Face 3 Cum Shots MPEGs
Cheating Wives Do It For $$ 4 Amateur WMVs
Monster Black Cock Gives Pearl Necklace 3 Inter-Racial MPEGs
Mature Brit Bitch Milks Black Cock 4 Inter-Racial MPEGs
Lesbo Threesome Chain Pussy Licking 4 Lesbian WMVs
College Babes Fucking Sex Machines 3 Young Ladies WMVs
Two Muscle Bears Eating Each Other's Ass 5 Gay MPEGs
Horny Tranny Pleasures Two Studs 4 Trans WMVs
Roughneck Irish Man Jacks His Cock 6 Gay MPEGs
Naive Blonde Giving Backseat Blowjob 4 Cum Shots MPEGs
Ebony Plump Rumps Getting Humped By Horsedick 8 MPEGs
Phat Slut Tugs On Cock Till She Gets Her Face Painted 3 MPEGs
Stranger Licks Granny's Snatch In Graveyard 4 Hardcore MPEGs
Phat MLF Boned Hard On Bar Stool 6 Mature Ladies MPEGs
Cutie Daphaney Gets A Long Hard Bonin 4 hardcore WMVs
Tiny Asian Girls Smoke Huge Cigars 4 Inter-Racial WMVs
Kinky Lesbo Powerplay 6 Bondage/BDSM WMVs
Uh-Oh A Dominatrix Wearing Glasses 6 Bondage/BDSM WMVs
Chick In Chains Gets Her Snatch Stretched 6 Fetish WMVs
3 Young Babes Play With Mud 4 Young Ladies MPEGs
Tranny Porks Her Eager Boyfriend 6 Trans WMVs
Brunette & Redhead Trade Anal Creampie 5 Anal And Ass MPEGs
Wifey With Huge Melons Facialized 3 Big Tits WMVs
Skinny Goth Does Gloryhole In Raunchy Loo 2 Blow Jobs WMVs
Kristina Flashing 32ddds In Convenience Store 4 Big Tits WMVs
Asian Beaver Balling Big Dick 9 Asian WMVs
Anime Hardcore Action 6 Anime MPEGs
Milf And Young Hottie Share A Big Cock 3 Hardcore MPEGs
Hot Pigtail Pisses Boyfriend 3 Hardcore MPEGs
White Boys Work Over Busty Nubian 3 Inter-Racial MPEGs
Nice Nanny Gets Rammed In The Browneye 5 Hardcore WMVs
Wrinkly Phat Granny Drilled On Barstool 3 Mature Ladies MPEGs
Mesh Covered Ebony Gangbanged By Rednecks 3 Black MPEGs
Tiny Little Ripe Rump Slathered In Cream 3 Young Ladies MPEGs
Indian Chick Gobbles Three Dudes Creamy Curry 4 Asian WMVs
Twink & Bear In Raunchy Suck N Fuck 6 Gay WMVs
Busty Pregnant Babe Gets Her Milk Pumped 4 Fetish WMVs
Sperm Spitting Bukkake Fetish Panic 4 Asian WMVs
Euro MMF Cumshot Extravaganza 3 Group WMVs
Hot Brunette Gets Nasty Rimjob 3 Anal And Ass MPEGs
Blonde Pigtail Chick Getting Monster Facial 4 Young Ladies WMVs
Mature Street Skank Plays Suck And Tell 3 Hardcore WMVs
Slave Slut Gets It In Bdsm Dungeon 6 Bondage/BDSM WMVs
Chubby Using Toes To Diddle Hard Cock To Cum 4 BBW WMVs
Asian Squatting & Peeing 4 Fetish/Bizarre WMVs
Dutch & German Milk Enemas 5 Fetish/Bizarre WMVs
Naughty Girl Spanked & Pissed 4 Bondage/BDSM WMVs
Big Breasted Jane In Titty Torments 6 Bondage/BDSM WMVs
Wrestler Gets Cameltoe Puss Licked 6 Lesbian WMVs
High School Hotshot Bones Bubble Booty Cheerleader 5 WMVs
Petite Lisa Loves Black Ghetto Cock 3 Inter-Racial WMVs
Preggo Babe Squirting Hot Milk From Nips 4 Amateur WMVs
Poon Hounds Jacking Clits And Puss Squirting 4 Lesbian MPEGs
Peeing Amateur Filmed By Voyeur Cam 4 Voyeur MPEGs
Crazy voyeur Creaming On Sleeping Girl Boobs 5 Voyeur MPEGs
Hentai Girl Getting Pussy Hammered 4 Anime MPEGs
Natasha 3 Porn Stars MPEGs
Cute Redhead Jerks Sperm From A Cock 4 Cum Shots MPEGs
Zitty Bitch Rides The Sybian 4 Amateur MPEGs
Exploited Chick Forced To Swallow Monster Dong 3 Cum Shots MPEGs
Hairy Bus Driver Gets Good Student Pussy 3 Young Ladies MPEGs
Goth Babe Gets Ass Slammed And Gaped 4 Anal And Ass MPEGs
Naughty Blonde Licks Black Guys Ass 4 Inter-Racial MPEGs
Ass Worship Facesitting 3 Fetish/Bizarre WMVs
Lady Sonia Ass-Smothering 5 Bondage/BDSM WMVs
Sweet Tiny Pornstar Monalisa Doggiestyle 4 Young Ladies MPEGs
Creamy Nurse In Homemade Hardcore 4 Amateur MPEGs
Petite Chicks Swapping Cum 4 Blow Jobs And Cum Shots MPEGs
Young Cutie Gets Double Dicked 7 Anal And Ass WMVs
Milf Double Penetrated In A Threesome 4 Mature Ladies MPEGs
Blonde Cougar In Hardcore Threesome 3 Mature Ladies MPEGs
Cumaholic Babe Doing Deepthroat 5 Fetish/Bizarre MPEGs
3 Jap Chicks Assboned & Creamed 4 Group MPEGs
Housewife Taking A Huge Schlong In Butt 6 Inter-Racial WMVs
First Gay Experience 4 Gay WMVs
Lola Sucks A Priests Holy Rod 3 Porn Stars MPEGs WMVs
Guy Eating Carrot Out Of Her Ass 4 Asian WMVs
Petite Blonde Chewing Mandingo Nuts 4 Inter-Racial MPEGs

Video Writing

Writers, take note -- here's some kick-ass art:



Watch him make his point in 2:20. Notice the quick-cuts which simulate a too-slow-internet-connection effect. Observe his hip-hop presentation -- poetic, with a beat.

Observe, too, how the 2:20 is a complete story, as it is divided into scenes by: 1) a change in camera angle; and 2) Jay Smooth's change in body angle (turning to presumably work on his computer).

All the result of good and thoughtful writing. Genius!

See more at illdoctrine.com.

Herbert Marcuse Documentary

This documentary examines the turbulent life in California of political philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), author of One-Dimensional Man, Reason and Revolution and Eros and Civilization, among other books, professor of philosophy at the University of California San Diego, and a visionary and influential force for the student movement worldwide during the Sixties and Seventies. Blending archival footage, interviews, re- created scenes and voice-over narration, the video profiles not only the life of Marcuse but also the history of student protest and social activism. The video features interviews with Marcuse's student Angela Davis, former UCSD Chancellor William McGill, colleagues Fredric Jameson and Reinhard Lettau, and rare footage of Marcuse and former California Governor Ronald Reagan. Directed by Paul Alexander Juutilainen.

Makes "Reefer Madness" Look Intelligent

Take a look at the government's latest attempt to scare children away from cannabis: http://www.abovetheinfluence.com/stoners/.

The site does convince one that marijuana decreases intelligence -- in drug haters.

Please, send every American to this site. After all, it was paid for entirely by your tax dollars. Remember that the next time you vote for someone like Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens or California Rep. Randall "Top Gun" Cunningham, who treat our government as their personal cash cow and set up fake "wars" so their friends can also enrich themelves at our expense, this is what you are getting for the money.