Organ Harvester Pleads Mercy
Master ghoul in body parts scam wants plea deal
Sunday, April 6th 2008, 4:00 AM
A former oral surgeon who admitted trafficking stolen body parts in New York is now trying to cut a deal in Philadelphia to avoid serving more time for a similar body-snatching charge.
Michael Mastromarino wants his latest sentence to run concurrently with the 18- to 54-year sentence he is already serving – meaning he would not spend one extra day in jail. But prosecutors are balking at the two-for-one proposal and want the so-called master ghoul to serve an additional 20 to 40 years in the slammer.
Mastromarino, 44, was the boss of a multimillion-dollar body-snatching ring that plundered at least 44 corpses, according to Philadelphia prosecutors. He has already pleaded guilty to carving up hundreds of corpses at area funeral homes in New York and illegally selling body parts. He was sentenced in that case last year.
Mastromarino did not appear at a pretrial hearing in Philadelphia on Friday but defense lawyer Charles Peruto Jr. vowed to push for concurrent sentences.
With News Wire Services
Posted Because Naomi Watts Is Hots
Funny Games
(Cert 18)
Peter Bradshaw The Guardian
Double take … Naomi Watts and Michael Pitt in Funny Games, the 2008 version
Michael Haneke’s new movie is an Americanised replica-remake of his 1997 cult shocker Funny Games: just as before, it’s an icy ordeal of sadism, a macabre vivisectional experiment in pure cruelty, practised upon a bland upper-middle-class family – two parents, tousle-haired kid, adorable dog – which thinks itself safe in its prosperous cocoon. And just as before, it caused my stomach muscles gradually to contract to about a sixth of their original volume. Repeat performance this may be, but its brilliance and technique and ingenuity are still in a different league from anything else around. It is horrifying, genuinely horrifying, in a way that regular horror films never are, and somehow never expected to be.
PJ O’Rourke once wrote that there are two kinds of dangerous: fun-dangerous, like speedboats and race-cars, and not-fun-dangerous, like open-heart surgery or the South Bronx. Haneke is a great believer in making us experience the second kind of dangerous. What his target American audience will make of this is anyone’s guess: maybe the National Rifle Association will use it as a recruitment video. Or maybe it will be the surprise smash of 2008 and Haneke can franchise it out to every foreign-language territory in the world.
It is famously not explicit in the usual sense: you don’t see the actual gory impacts. But it is explicit in a far more horrible way, making us live through the anticipatory fear, and giving us a closeup view of the victims’ horror and despair. The critical convention with violent movies is to compare them to Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and there is an obvious similarity here: after a while, you will feel, like Malcolm McDowell’s punished delinquent, that you are watching with your eyelids clipped open.
Free Bullets With Every Purchase!
Warning: That rifle may be loaded
Sunday, April 6th 2008, 4:00 AM
A Brooklyn rifle manufacturer has asked arms dealers nationwide to make extra safety inspections after discovering it accidentally shipped four guns loaded with live ammunition.
Henry Repeating Arms, a maker of lever-action rifles like ones used in the 1860s and 1870s, said inventory checks revealed no other loaded weapons.
“We would never want anybody to get hurt,” Anthony Imperato, the Park Slope company’s president, said.
As a rule, firearms are distributed unloaded to prevent potentially deadly accidents.
Every gun made by Henry Arms is test-fired before it is sold, a common practice in the industry. The rifles are then supposed to be checked to make sure no rounds remain, but Imperato said an error allowed a few guns to be distributed still loaded for the test-firing procedure.
Lily Allen Saves Literature
Lily Allen drops out as Orange prize judge
Sean Michaels
Monday April 7, 2008
guardian.co.uk
Lily Allen was never the most obvious pick to judge a major literary prize. She’s famous not for her views on novels but for a song about London that doesn’t even spell out the city’s whole name.
That didn’t stop the organisers of the Orange Broadband prize (awarded for the best novel in English by a woman). In December, they added Allen’s name to a judging panel alongside broadcaster Kirsty Lang, journalist Bel Mooney, novelist Philippa Gregory and the Guardian’s Lisa Allardice.
Many lit snobs squawked, wondering what a 22-year-old pop singer would bring to the table – other than chewing gum and photographers’ flash-bulbs. And now, well, they can stop squawking. Because Lily Allen’s out.
“It is with deep regret that Lily Allen has withdrawn from the judging panel,” Allen’s manager told the Daily Mail this weekend. “Lily had read extensively for the first stage of the judging process and was looking forward to the shortlist meeting but recently found that she was unable to commit 100% to the role due to ill-health.”
Allen did not attend a judges’ meeting last month to discuss the 20-book longlist, according to the Daily Mail. Instead she participated by telephone. Allen also missed a debate last week to decide the shortlist.
“Lily hopes that her withdrawal will not detract from the huge importance of the Orange prize and sends her sincere apologies to her fellow judges and to the individual authors,” her manager added.
Porn No Longer Banned At Crucifixion
Rethink over Christ ‘porn’ film ban
An arthouse movie refused a licence 20 years ago could be released after repeal of blasphemy law
Jamie Doward, home affairs editor
Sunday April 6, 2008
The Observer
A landmark decision to ban a film showing Christ being caressed on the cross on the grounds that it was blasphemous could be reversed after almost 20 years.
The 1989 ruling by the British Board of Film Classification to refuse a release licence for Visions of Ecstasy, a low- budget film depicting the 16th-century Spanish mystic St Teresa of Avila caressing the body of Jesus on the cross provoked a national furore.While the film’s director, Nigel Wingrove, believed he was making art, the board, under its heavily censorious director James Ferman, took a different view and said its mix of pornography and religion risked upsetting the Anglican Church. Now, however, in a sign that Britain’s social mores have moved on, Craig Lapper, of the board’s examining body, has invited Wingrove to resubmit the film for classification.
While the film’s director, Nigel Wingrove, believed he was making art, the board, under its heavily censorious director James Ferman, took a different view and said its mix of pornography and religion risked upsetting the Anglican Church. Now, however, in a sign that Britain’s social mores have moved on, Craig Lapper, of the board’s examining body, has invited Wingrove to resubmit the film for classification.
The invitation comes ahead of the repeal in June of the blasphemy law, which has long been a source of anger for those working in the creative industries who complain it is an archaic piece of legislation that stifles art.
A decision to allow the film’s release would bring to an end one of the most controversial chapters in British cinematic history. Coming amid the arguments surrounding Salman Rushdie’s provocative novel The Satanic Verses, the board’s decision was seen as an attack on freedom of speech by organised religion. The debate raged all the way up to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which upheld the decision to ban the love scene, thereby killing the film’s release.
[ click to read rest of article at Guardian UK ]
Picasso Is Dead
Picasso is Dead in France at 91
Special to The New York Times
Mougins, France, April 8 — Pablo Picasso, the titan of 20th- century art, died this morning at his hilltop villa of Notre Dame de Vie here. He was 91 years old.
The death of the Spanish-born artist was attributed to pulmonary edema, fluid in the lungs, by Dr. Jean-Claude Rance, a local physician who was summoned to the 35-room mansion by the family. Dr. Rance said that Picasso had been ill for several weeks.
With him when he dies was his second wife, the 47-year-old Jacqueline Roque, whom he married in 1961. In the last few years, Picasso rarely left his 17-acre estate, which was surrounded by barbed wire. He had been in exile from his native land since 1939, when Generalissimo Francisco Franco defeated the Republican Government of Spain in the three-year Civil War.
About 10 days ago, Picasso was helping to assemble 201 of his paintings for exhibition at the Avignon Arts Festival, which will open in that city May 23 at the Palais des Papes. According to Paul Puaux, the festival director who had visited the artist at his home on the Riviera above Cannes, these canvases covered the artist’s output from October, 1970 to the close of 1972.
“There was something completely different, something less tortured in certain paintings,” Mr. Puaux said today in Paris. He added:
“You feel there is a change, a new period. There is much less eroticism and much more softness. His wife told me that he was working much more slowly, more deliberately now, searching and dogging into each canvas.”
The main subject of the 201 works, Mr. Puaux said, “is man, as always – children, a number of mothers with child- but also musical instruments, trumpets and flutes, birds and one very, very beautiful landscape, which is rather unusual for Picasso.”
The dominant color of the canvases is bistre, a warm, brownish black, Mr. Puaux said.
Major Show in 1970
Three years ago, in 1970, 165 of Picasso’s paintings and 45 drawings were shown in the Palais des Papes. They constituted Picasso’s production from January, 1969, through January 1970. The pictures were mostly of vibrant men and women, often in close embrace. There were also dozens of goateed, lusty figures, which the artist’s friends called “the musketeers.”
In 1971, on the occasion of Picasso’s 90th birthday, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which has the world’s largest public collection of his works, put on a special exhibition. At the same time, the French Government displayed some Picassos in the grand gallery of the Louvre, the first time the museum had ever exhibited the work by a living artist.
As for Picasso, he ignored his birthday, shutting himself up in his villa, even refusing to receive a delegation from the French Communist party, of which he was a member. The group included his old friend, Louis Aragon, the poet.
Why He Was a Communist
The artist had a succinct reply to those who asked him why he was a Communist. “When I was a boy in Spain, I was very poor and very aware of how poor people had to live,” he told a journalist in 1947, adding:
“I learned that the Communists were for the poor people. That was enough to know. So I became for the Communists.”
Sometimes, however, Picasso was an embarrassment to his party. A portrait he did of Stalin on the Soviet leader’s death in 1953 caused a furor in the party leadership. Earlier, the Soviet Government had locked its collection of Picasso’s early works in the basement of Leningrad’s Hermitage Museum.
Publicly, Picasso displayed amusement at the Soviet Union’s banishment of his paintings. Everybody had a right to react to his work as it affected them, he said.
Although the artist passionately detested Franco, he admired his fellow countrymen. One expression of his feelings came in the spring of 1970, when he decided to give 800 to 900 of his early works to Barcelona. These were said to be the best of his output up to 1917.
Earlier, in 1963, Picasso’s close friend, the late Jaime Sabartes, had donated his Picasso collection of some 400 works to the city of Barcelona, and the Palacio Aguilar was then renamed the Picasso Museum. However, the Franco regime covertly opposed the museum, and the artist’s name, was not on the door.
A Paris friend credited Picasso’s gift to Barcelona to his sense of irony. “He liked putting an important Picasso collection right in the middle of Barcelona when there was unrest in Spain and Franco was on his way out,” the friend explained.
Picasso’s works fetched enormous prices at auction, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. By sales through his dealers, the artist himself became wealthy, although the precise size of his state was not known.
In addition to his wife, Picasso leaves four children, a son, Paulo, born to his late first wife, the dancer Olga Khoklova; a daughter, Mrs. Pierre Widmaier, born to his mistress Marie-Therese Walter, and a son, Claude, and daughter, Paloma, both the children of Francoise Gilot, another mistress, now the wife of the biologist Dr. Jonas Salk.
Funeral plans were incomplete last night.
College Scholarships Offered to Budding Suburban Pimps
Weather
Photo from ‘Adventures in Tornado Alley: The Storm Chasers,’ (Thames & Hudson, $29.95) by Mike Hollingshead and Eric Nguyen.
St. Paul Poetry Slam
Putting poetry in motion
Article Last Updated: 04/06/2008 11:12:43 PM CDT
April is National Poetry Month, so it’s a particularly good time for local bards to polish their works in a competitive performance venue. Poets from Minnesota and Wisconsin have been strutting their stuff the first Monday of most months in St. Paul at the Artists’ Quarter, where tonight is the final night of the regular season.
Up to 10 poets present original works, with each scored by judges picked from the audience. The eight-month season culminates with a Grand Slam in May. The top four finishers form the Soap Boxing Slam team, which will compete in the Poetry Slam Nationals in Madison, Wis., in August.
Frosty’s Gone
from the AP
Breakdance Pioneer Dies in NYC
NEW YORK (AP) — Wayne “Frosty Freeze” Frost, a hip-hop pioneer whose acrobatic performance with the legendary Rock Steady Crew in the 1983 movie “Flashdance” helped set off a worldwide breakdancing craze, has died. He was 44.
Frost died Thursday at Mount Sinai Medical Center after a long illness, said Jorge “Fabel” Pabon, a senior vice president of the crew where Frost and other so-called b-boys (for beat or break boys) made their name performing complicated and daring dance routines.
“He was one of most charismatic b-boys that ever lived,” said Benson Lee, director of the new documentary film “Planet B-Boy.”
Breakdancing emerged from the Bronx and Harlem in the early 1970s, part of the hip-hop culture that also included graffiti, MCing or rapping, and disc jockeys scratching and mixing vinyl records on turntables.
During extended pauses, or breaks, in the music, b-boys would mimic James Brown’s showmanship and footwork and Bruce Lee’s martial arts, adding their own signature moves.
Frost was known for his energetic style, intricate choreography and fearless moves including back flips and head spins. One was even dubbed the “Suicide.”
Frost got his start in 1978 with the Bronx-based Rock City Crew. In 1981, he became part of the Rock Steady Crew, joining such acclaimed breakdancers as Ken Swift and Lil Crazy Legs.
Frost toured the world with the Rock Steady Crew and other hip-hop artists, including Fab 5 Freddy, Futura 2000 and Kool Lady Blue.
Frost’s appearance with Rock Steady Crew in “Flashdance” spread the breakdance phenomenon globally, said Joseph Schloss, a visiting scholar in the music department at New York University. “He was one of the first B-boys that most people ever saw,” Schloss said.
Graffiti artist and close friend Zulu King Slone, who knew Frost for 15 years, said he was “like a walking hip-hop culture encyclopedia.”
As a member of the Rock Steady Crew, Frost also appeared in several movies on hip-hop culture, including “Wild Style,” “Beat Street” and “Style Wars.” He also appeared on the cover of the Village Voice in 1981.
Funeral arrangements were incomplete.
Associated Press writer Tania Fuentez contributed to this report.
On the Net:
Triumph of the Atomized Uprising
from the LA Times
Chicano art, beyond rebellion
© Jason Villegas, LACMA
OFF THE WALL: Artist Jason Villegas’ “Celestial Situations,” a video projection with wall drawing, is part of the new LACMA exhibit titled “Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement.”
‘Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement’ provides a rare showcase at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
VISITORS to the sprawling Chicano art show opening today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art are greeted by a display of photos depicting a group of daring guerrilla street artists known as ASCO, Spanish for “nausea.” The photographs are from the early 1970s — which seems to defy the show’s title, “Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement.”
In one famous photo from 1972, in the midst of the movement, the museum itself was the target of these Dadaesque subversives protesting the exclusion of Chicano art from its galleries. In “Spray Paint LACMA,” ASCO member Patssi Valdez is seen posing outside the museum’s walls, which had been tagged overnight by her rebellious cohorts, Gronk, Willie Herron III and Harry Gamboa Jr. This act of creative defiance — turning the building into a Chicano canvas — is now enshrined in the very place that sparked the protest by treating Chicanos as the phantoms of the art world. So does this mean that Chicano artists have finally found the acceptance they sought? That they can now put down their spray cans and pursue careers as equals in a harmonious “post-ethnic” art world?
“I have a feeling if I was a young person today, I don’t think I would spray paint the museum,” Gamboa, 56, an author and college lecturer, answers slyly. “Because now, [tagging] has been felonized, and to put three signatures on a county building might result in three strikes. Who knows if we would all wind up in prison for life and never have the chance to pursue careers as artists?”
Variety, not ethnicity, is the show’s hallmark. Artist Ken Gonzales-Day deals with the lynching of Mexican Americans in California by digitally erasing the victims from historic photos. Sandra de la Loza, meanwhile, fills in the gaps that history erased by placing plaques (that are quickly removed) in places such as the whitewashed Siqueiros mural at Olvera Street. And Julio Cesar Morales reveals the resourcefulness of immigrants trying to cross the border illegally by exposing them in their hiding places, such as the little girl inside a piñata, through transparent water-color illustrations based on real cases.
“What about the budonkadonk butt?”
The Show That Spawned A 15-Episode Generation of Environmental Warriors
This was one of the coolest (and warmest) series on Saturday Morning TV – when there was Saturday Morning TV. You can see today still the actual Ark vehicle in which the young eco-saviors scavenge the planet parked at a prop car place on the south/west side of the 101 in Cahuenga Pass in Hollywood
Review of ‘Animal’s People’ by Indra Sinha
from Shelf Awareness
Book Review: Animal’s People
Animal’s People by Indra Sinha (S&S, $25, March 2008)
Animal’s People should have won the Booker Prize.
It towers over the other shortlisted novels, entertainment on a grand scale, hugely ambitious, brilliantly written in slang-laced language that’s a pleasure to savor aloud, and teeming with unforgettable characters. (Can you remember even one character from The Gathering?) There’s Animal himself, a 19-year-old with a spinal deformity who runs on all fours and is narrating the story into a tape recorder; Elli, the bold, no-nonsense American doctor who has come to open her own free health clinic; Zafar, the beloved leader of the poor who would starve for his cause of justice; Ma Franci, the crazy French nun awaiting the Apocalypse; and Somraj, internationally famous Hindu singer with a damaged throat who now hears music in all the sounds around him. And that’s just a few of them.
The novel takes place 19 years after a nightmarish industrial gas leak in the American factory that dominates the town. This is clearly inspired by the very real industrial disaster at Bhopal, India, on December 3, 1984, when a Union Carbide pesticide plant chemical gas leak resulted in more than 3,000 deaths, deformed births, contaminated food and polluted water.
As a stylist, author Sinha falls somewhere between Rohinton Mistry and Yann Martel, but his classic passion for social justice links him more with Victor Hugo and Emile Zola, and his host of characters verges on Dickensian in numbers, memorability and sheer delight. Sinha loves these characters passionately (Google the incredible lifesize statue by Eleanor Stride that the author commissioned of the novel’s central character, Animal) and tortures the reader with worries over their various fates, as a hunger strike in the deadly hot season and a huge protest movement by the poor veer angrily out of control and erupt into city-wide violence.
Here’s a hefty slice of the human comedy, served up with generous portions of every pleasure fiction can offer: language, character, plot, suspense, surprise and wisdom. Go ahead, start with the first sentence. “I used to be human once.”–Nick DiMartino
[ click to view original review at ShelfAwareness.com ]
[ click to purchase Animal’s People ]
Whenever Queenan Writes It Rings
from the New York Times
There Will Be a Quiz
By JOE QUEENAN
Freelance writers are always looking for ways to scare up a few extra bucks, so recently I tried my hand at writing some of those “Questions for Discussion” that appear at the back of many paperbacks. I got the idea after reading Andrei Makine’s novel “The Crime of Olga Arbyelina,” the hard-luck saga of a Russian émigré with a hemophiliac son who pops up in France after World War II, hoping to put her life back together. Rumored to be kin to the luckless royals who ran afoul of Lenin and the boys back in the old country, Olga endures a life of uninterrupted misery and heartbreak.
The novel’s story line isn’t all that hard to follow, so by the time I reached the end, I had a pretty clear idea that Olga hadn’t gotten a fair shake in life. Be that as it may, I was startled when I turned to the back of the book and encountered eight questions prepared for book clubs that might be interested in discussing the novel further. Question No. 5 ran like this: “Olga has been driven from her homeland by the Bolsheviks, raped by a soldier, abandoned by her husband, treated with indifference by her lover, drugged, sexually violated and impregnated by her son. Does the novel lay the blame for Olga’s fate on the shoulders of the men in her world? Would you?”
At first, I thought this question might be a fluke or an oversight, but then I paged through a pile of other novels containing similar supplementary materials. Now it became clear to me that seemingly off-the-wall questions were a staple of the genre, deliberately included to shake up the musty old world of literature and force readers to think “outside the box.”
I soon discovered that a number of Web sites list proposed questions for book discussion groups, and that on these sites, a kind of down-home, no-holds-barred irreverence rules. On ReadingGroupGuides.com, readers who may not initially have grasped all the nuances of “The Diary of Anne Frank” are confronted by this brain-stumper: “Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann was asked how he could explain the killing of six million Jews. He answered, ‘One hundred dead are a catastrophe, a million dead are a statistic.’ Have we become more or less tolerant of murder since he made this observation?”
Since throwing curves is second nature to me, I decided to take a crack at writing my own unorthodox book-discussion materials to see if some publishing house might purchase my wares. Here are a few examples:
The Odyssey After the fall of Troy, it takes Odysseus 10 years to return home. Since Troy was only a hop, a skip and a jump from Greece, do you think Penelope should have been more skeptical about her husband’s explanation for the long delay — a cabal of one-eyed, man-eating giants; a troupe composed entirely of homicidal, aquatic chantoozies; a sorceress who can turn sailors into pigs? Isn’t the whole thing kind of sketchy?
In describing a woman who can effortlessly turn a man into a pig, is Homer criticizing men in general? Or only sailors? Do you personally know any women like that? Are any of them named Brandi? What time does her shift end?
If it took Odysseus 10 years to make a short trip across a microscopic body of water, why does everyone in “The Odyssey” keep insisting he’s so smart?
Moby-Dick Captain Ahab’s obsession with the white whale leads to complete nautical disaster in this novel, as the vengeful protagonist finally bites off more than he can chew. Do you think Ahab should have taken a page out of “Jaws” and gotten a bigger boat?
The Red and the Black The penniless protagonist of this book has only two career choices open to him: the military or the clergy. Today, poor people have innumerable career options: personal training, consulting, cabaret. If Stendahl were writing today, what color would he use to symbolize a career as a private equity fund manager? Is teal just totally out?
Wuthering Heights Did you see the movie based on this book? Didn’t you think Laurence Olivier was too old to play the part? Boy, I did. I never thought he was all that good-looking, did you?
If Heathcliff had fallen in love with Jane Eyre or Elizabeth Bennett instead of Cathy, do you think his house would have burned down?
If Heathcliff were alive today, would he mention Cathy’s death on his Facebook page and change his relationship status to “It’s complicated”?
Remembrance of Things Past This novel is 4,000 pages long, yet nothing ever happens. Is Proust making some kind of veiled comment about French society?
Do you think this book would have been more interesting if Swann had been replaced by Thorfin Sigurdsson, the Raven-Feeder?
Frankly, I thought I was getting somewhere with my questions. Then I turned to the back pages of “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and found this:
“What do you make of Hyde’s appearance? (He is small and subtly deformed.) Do you think he should have been depicted as tall and hypermuscular, or obese and debauched, or pale and cadaverous? Why? (Or why not?) Is there a specific meaning in, or reason for, Hyde’s appearance?”
That’s when I decided to bag the whole enterprise. I was a dwarf among giants. These people were totally out of my league.
Joe Queenan writes for Barron’s, The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian.
MTV to Show More Fur
from Variety
MTV grooms ‘Fur TV’
Warp Films moves to tube with warped puppets
By DOMINIC SCHREIBER
MTV has picked up “Fur TV,” an adult comedy series about a group of foulmouthed, sex-mad puppets, made by Warp Films, the U.K. shingle behind BAFTA-winning feature “This Is England.”
Skein is Warp’s first move into TV. Created by filmmakers Chris Waitt and Henry Trotter, “Fur TV” centers around three puppets who share a flat in the human world and spend their time drinking, fighting and trying to chat up girls.
“I can’t imagine any other channels having the guts to commission a concept like ‘Fur TV,’ ” said Heather Jones, executive VP content and creative, at MTV Networks U.K. “It’s fresh, funny and outrageous and will make perfect late night TV.”
Set to launch on MTV One in the U.K. on a Sunday night slot on April 27, theseries started out as a short film, which won a BBC Greenlight Award for new comedy in 2003 and a Golden Rose for best pilot in 2004. It aired on BBC2 in 2004.
When Warp producer Mary Burke came across the short, she approached Waitt about making a feature-length version, but, by then, the project had already been set up at MTV.
Last year, Waitt directed his first film for Warp, the feature documentary “A Complete History of My Sexual Failures,” which recently screened at Sundance. His other credits include the Channel 4 short “The Naked Rambler.”
Based in Sheffield, in the north of England, studio’s other recent releases include thriller “Donkey Punch,” which also premiered at this year’s Sundance, and Paddy Considine’s short “Dog Altogether.”
[ click to view original article at Variety.com ]
Charlie Still Surfs
Even Charles Manson Digs Creative Commons By zab
Think nobody interesting uses Creative Commons?
CC is a special license that allows anyone to download, share and mix other people’s music as long as they give proper credit. Recently, Nine Inch Nails released their album under a Creative Commons license, and it has been a great success!
Good old Charles Manson of the Tate and LaBianca murders has done the same thing. His recent album, “One Mind” is licensed in a way that allows anyone to share it with others, remix it and use it for non-commercial uses. The exact legal details are here.
So, you can download the full album here if you like (or you can shop for more Charles Manson at the LimeWire Store
American Retro by Dave Gorman
from the Guardian UK
Audio slideshow: American retro
Frustrated with the faceless, corporate America on offer to the casual tourist, Dave Gorman decided to travel from coast to coast without giving any money to The Man. Read all about Dave’s adventure in this Saturday’s Guardian. America Unchained by Dave Gorman is published by Ebury at £11.99
Press 
below to start the slideshow.
[ click to view original article at Guardian UK ]
T.G.I.F. (with a bonus 12″ single)
Soap Drugs & Rock n’ Roll
copped from Conscious Choice
Dr. Bronner’s Magic Media Soap Opera
The counterculture’s exceptionally eccentric soap family hits the big screen
By Charles Shaw
This is the story of one Dr. Emanuel H. Bronner, chemist, master soap maker, Holocaust survivor and lead prophet for the One God of Spaceship Earth. In 1947, Bronner escaped from a mental institution and began selling soap made from his family’s 150-year-old recipe out of the back of a Los Angeles tenement hotel. Today the company, run by his grandsons, David and Mike, sells more than six million bottles of soap a year.
This tragicomic drama propels the narrative of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox (magicsoapbox.com) , a new documentary by Sara Lamm that attempts to capture the essence of this thoroughly mad (and at times, thoroughly maddening) genius who was, in the purest sense, far ahead of his time.
As Soapbox illustrates, Dr. Bronner — who passed away in March of 1997, just shy of 90 years old — was definitely out there. He saw himself as part of the long lineage of prophets that includes Jesus, Mohammed, Hillel, Moses and Buddha. Bronner believed these prophets appeared on earth regularly — every 76 years to be exact, inspired by the arrival of Haley’s Comet — to lead their people to God. He was also convinced the most recent of these prophets was Mark Spitz, the American swimmer who won seven gold medals at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Unfortunately, the course of human history is littered with the literal and symbolic corpses of prophets — real or self-imagined — who bore new truths as harbingers of a new way. And Dr. Bronner’s fate was no different than those who came before him. He was locked away, called insane, discredited and dismissed. The FBI even had him listed in their “nut file.”
However odd or unorthodox his behavior or his theories, though, Emanuel H. Bronner’s product was a hit with the west coast counterculture, who became his best customers and sustained the business for decades. Blind for the last 20 years of his life, he remained first and always a subversive, a true believer in absolute freedom who embraced the work of Thomas Paine, made friends with Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, advocated for hemp and organic farming, and was so rabidly anti-communist he put Nixon to shame. His “all-one” philosophy was a Universalist doctrine of mutual peace, respect and ecological harmony, based on the central tenet that we are all children of the same divine source.
Headlines Read: “Germ Wrongly Jailed by Soap!”
Another film — this one hitting the small screen (YouTube, to be exact) — continues the epic tale of the noble Bronner clan. The wry, upbeat and at times hilarious web short — which has received tens of thousands of downloads since it was released in early May — centers around David Bronner, grandson of Emanuel, hemp activist and current President of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, and the recent allegations by police in Newport Beach, Calif. that Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps contain traces of GHB (Gamma Hydroxy Butyrate), a notorious “date rape” drug.
Entitled Soap, Drugs & Rock and Roll the seven-minute short is an original and effective use of the media as a PR tool — with our heroes the unassuming soap makers who, in one fell swoop, cast serious doubt on the practice of field drug testing, expose the lies of commercial soap producers, advocate for organic products and educate the viewer on yet another layer of our culture’s dependency on oil.
The circumstances laying the grounds for the story have already become the stuff of legend:
On the night of April 4, Don Bolles, eccentric 51-year-old drummer for punk outfit The Germs, was driving through über-conservative Newport Beach, Calif. on his way to an AA meeting when his tricked-out van was pulled over, allegedly for a broken taillight. Bolles gave consent to search the van, and the presiding officer found a bag of legal medical marijuana sitting next to a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap. For some reason (perhaps because the bottle was clearly labeled as hemp soap) the officer decided to apply a NarcoPouch® 928 field test to the soap to assess it for drug content. The test came back positive for GHB, and Bolles was arrested and taken into custody.
Upon hearing this, the Dr. Bronner’s company immediately paid Bolles’ bail and legal fees, and stepped up to defend their brand publicly. David Bronner appeared before California media denouncing the charges as “totally absurd,” and suggesting that Bolles was pulled over for the offense of “driving while weird.” They then ordered the same NarcoPouch® 928 test and began testing their soap products. What they found was astounding.
A frog goes into a bank…
A frog goes into a bank and approaches the teller. He can see
from her nameplate that her name is Patricia Whack.
“Miss Whack, I’d like to get a $30,000 loan to take a holiday.”
Patty looks at the frog in disbelief and asks his name. The frog
says his name is Kermit Jagger, his dad is Mick Jagger, and that it’s
okay, he knows the bank manager.
Patty explains that he will need to secure the loan with some
collateral.
The frog says, “Sure. I have this,” and produces a tiny
porcelain elephant, about an inch tall, bright pink and perfectly
formed.
Very confused, Patty explains that she’ll have to consult with
the bank manager and disappears into a back office.
She finds the manager and says, “There’s a frog called Kermit
Jagger out there who claims to know you and wants to borrow $30,000, and
he wants to use this as collateral.”
She holds up the tiny pink elephant. “I mean, what in the world
is this?”
The bank manager looks back at her and says…
“It’s a knickknack, Patty Whack. Give the frog a loan, His old
man’s a Rolling Stone.”
“Who controls your eyeballs, controls your brain”
I met this guy in a church once and then went and had a beer with him. The video is pretty cool – just turn down or skip past the predictable psychadelic top 10 sequences, altho the version of ‘Incense and Peppermints’ is a nice alternate to what you’re accustomed. – Editor
Anglo Icon Scores From The Grave Again
from the NY Daily News
‘Twist’ my arm! Dickens tome brings $229G
Thursday, April 3rd 2008, 4:00 AM
A first edition of Charles Dickens‘ “Oliver Twist” sold for a record $229,000 at Christie’s auction house in New York Wednesday.
An anonymous American collector bought the copy of the 19th century novel about a young orphan who falls in with a band of pickpockets and thieves.
First published in 1838, the copy at auction was inscribed by the author to a friend and fellow novelist, William Ainsworth.
A total of 208 lots went under the gavel, part of the William Self family collection.
The previous record for a Dickens item was held by a copy of “A Christmas Carol” that sold for $160,000 in 1996 at Sotheby’s in New York.
The Man Who Went Trying To Come
snipped from Daily Swarm excerpt of a GQ excerpt
James Brown really was a Sex Machine: “That man died trying to come”
TDS EDITORS
Sean Flynn’s lengthy James Brown profile in this month’s GQ (excerpted online here) is making headlines for its claims that the Godfather of Soul had a vasectomy in 1984 (thus throwing doubt on one of the paternity claims filed against his estate), while going a long way to explain why the late soul music legend fully intended to omit most of his blood kin from his will, and how it was almost inevitable that his extended family would battle for their share after his death.
Flynn adds plenty of dirty details about just how and why Brown managed to sire so many children in the first place:
When Mr. Brown grew up, when he was a famous performer touring the world forty, fifty weeks a year, he fucked a lot of women. That is a deliberate term, fucked, because Mr. Brown was not a man who made love or even had sex. Mr. Brown fucked. “He did not know about the soft,” a longtime friend says. A lot of times, he’d let one of his cronies deal with the preliminaries, make small talk with a girl, get her a drink, keep her company. “She ready?” he’d ask. “I ain’t got no time now. Make sure she ready.” He’d hop on, roll off. Straight missionary, straight to the point. He never saw a reason for much else. “Why’s a white man eat a woman?” he once asked a white friend. “What’s he get outta that?”
Hell, the man was in his sixties before he discovered doggy style on the Playboy Channel. He called up Roosevelt Johnson at three in the morning to tell him about it. “You sittin’ down, Mr. Johnson?” he asked, which is what he always said when he had an astonishing new fact to report. “Black man don’t know nothing. Black man don’t know a damned thing. A white man, he get up in his woman from behind.” Johnson pretended to be surprised by that. (“You had to go there with him,” he says, “because you didn’t know anything Mr. Brown didn’t know.”)
So how many women? How high can you count? Mr. Brown always kept a few girlfriends on the side, some for decades, and he always found a woman or two in whatever city he happened to be playing. “There’d be times, literally, when one would be coming in the front door while another one was going out the back,” says Buddy Dallas.
Naturally, some of them got pregnant.
In fact, even after age, diabetes, prostate cancer, and copious drug use had rendered him impotent, that didn’t stop him from digging into the dust and trying:
“Motherfucker was crazy,” says Gloria Daniel, a girlfriend he kept on the side for forty years. “It was the drugs.”
Mr. Brown smoked his drugs—PCP, until that got hard to find, then cocaine—mixed with tobacco from his Kools. “You sitting there rolling tobacco out of a cigarette—that’s a woman’s job—and you sitting there naked so he can look at you ’cause he getting ready to fuck you,” she says. “Yeah, right.” She rolls her eyes. The drugs, to say nothing of the diabetes and the prostate cancer, made him impotent. “He tried like hell, though,” she says. “He’d wear you out. That man died trying to come.”
One night in the summer of 2001, after he’d slathered her in Vaseline (“He liked you all greased up,” she says. “Like a porkchop”) and wore her out trying to come, he gave up and left the room, and Gloria dozed off. When she woke up, Mr. Brown was standing at the foot of the bed in a full-length mink coat over his bare chest, a black cowboy hat, and silk pajama pants with one leg tucked into a cowboy boot and the other hanging out. He had a shotgun over his shoulder and a white stripe of Noxzema under each eye. “I’m an Indian tonight, baby,” he announced. “C’mon, let’s let ’em have it.” Then he dumped a pickle jar of change on the floor, told her to get a machete, and went out to the garage. He took the Rolls, drove ten miles to Augusta, weaving all over the road, clipping mailboxes, smoking more dope, and screaming about being an Indian.
There’s lots more at here.
snipped from Daily Swarm excerpt of a GQ excerpt
The Great Annie Leibovitz
from the New York Observer
What Makes Annie Shoot?
The great Leibovitz realized she was never a journalist but made news with magazine covers. An artist who was once fascinated with her subjects lately seems largely fascinated with herself BY CHOIRE SICHA
“I look back at it now,” Annie Leibovitz said at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1991, “I realize that one of the things I loved toward the end at Rolling Stone were the conceptual covers.” She had left for Vanity Fair in 1983, in part to follow an art director she admired. There she did little until Tina Brown arrived all bluster and balls in 1984—and then she did a lot.
Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone’s owner-operator, had become overly concerned about newsstand sales. “He wanted really clean, you know, head shots really. There was a study—they started to do studies, you know,” Ms. Leibovitz said. “And they came up with this study that the conceptual covers didn’t sell well because the person wasn’t recognizable. … For example, the Steve Martin photograph against the Franz Kline painting was the worst-selling cover that year.”
Annie Leibovitz had gotten too rock ’n’ roll forRolling Stone.
That worst-selling cover—from February 1982—is a real mess, in today’s focus-group-in-a-Chicago-mall terms. Mr. Martin, in a suit, is painted with crude black stripes, and is in mid-campy-dance-step. The black-and-white painting looms beyond him. (Inside you might have learned that he would prefer not to discuss his relationship with Bernadette Peters.)
Then there was her Matt Dillon cover late that year. Mr. Dillon, pouty and incredibly young, is in slacks and shirt and tie, twisted and reclining, one leg up, thereby showing half his ass—and with his crotch placed nearly dead center on the magazine’s cover. What definitely seems to be Mr. Dillon’s extended middle finger rests near his square hairline. It was her last Rolling Stone cover. Now that’s how you say goodbye—to your magazine, your youth, whatever.
Ms. Leibovitz was, for much of the 80’s, an unusual bridge between the fine art world and the commercial world. This meant that in her practice she gathered commerce in one hand and journalism in the other.
Then as magazines went, so went Annie Leibovitz.
Love Boat For The Agile
THE MOST FUNCTIONAL ENGLISH WORD
Well, it’s shit … that’s right, shit! Shit may just be the most functional word in the English language.
You can smoke shit, buy shit, sell shit, lose shit, find shit, forget shit, and tell others to eat shit.
Some people know their shit, while others can’t tell the difference between shit and shineola.
There are lucky shits, dumb shits, and crazy shits. There is bull shit, horse shit, and chicken shit.
You can throw shit, sling shit, catch shit, shoot the shit, or duck when the shit hits the fan.
You can give a shit or serve shit on a shingle.
You can find yourself in deep shit or be happier than a pig in shit.
Some days are colder than shit, some days are hotter than shit, and some days are just plain shitty.
Some music sounds like shit, things can look like shit, and there are times when you feel like shit.
You can have too much shit, not enough shit, the right shit, the wrong shit or a lot of weird shit.
You can carry shit, have a mountain of shit, or find yourself up shit creek without a paddle.
Sometimes everything you touch turns to shit and other times you fall in a bucket of shit and come out smelling like a rose.
When you stop to consider all the facts, it’s the basic building block of the English language.
And remember, once you know your shit, you don’t need to know anything else!!
You could pass this along, if you give a shit; or not do so if you don’t give a shit!
Well, Shit, it’s time for me to go. Just wanted you to know that I do give a shit and hope you had a nice day, without a bunch of shit. But, if you happened to catch a load of shit from some shit-head……….
Well, Shit Happens!!!
New Titles Out Next Week
from Shelf Awareness
Attainment: New Titles Appearing Next Week
Selected new titles appearing next Tuesday, April 8:
The Third Angel: A Novel by Alice Hoffman (Shaye Areheart Books, $25, 9780307393852/0307393852) follows three women facing important life choices.
Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation by Cokie Roberts(Morrow, $26.95, 9780060782344/006078234X) chronicles the women involved in the creation of the U.S.
Certain Girls: A Novelby Jennifer Weiner (Atria, $26.95, 9780743294256/0743294254) examines a mother’s struggles with her daughter and husband.
Where Are You Now?: A Novel by Mary Higgins Clark (S&S, $25.95, 9781416566380/1416566384) chronicles a woman’s investigation into a family tragedy.
Zapped by Carol Higgins Clark (Scribner, $24, 9781416562153/141656215X) follows the aftermath of a fictitious New York City blackout.
Bulls Island by Dorothea Benton Frank (Morrow, $24.95, 9780061438431/006143843X) explores a woman’s return to her home town after 20 years away.
The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow (Hyperion, $21.95, 9781401323257/1401323251) examines the story behind the famous “last lecture” given by Pausch, a professor who was terminally ill.
War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism byDouglas J. Feith (Harper, $27.95, 9780060899738/0060899735) is a memoir by the neoconservative who worked at the Department of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld.
New in paperback next week:
Loving Frank: A Novel by Nancy Horan (Ballantine, $14, 9780345495006/0345495004).
Go Green, Live Rich: 50 Simple Ways to Save the Earth and Get Rich Trying byDavid Bach and Hillary Rosner (Broadway, $14.95, 9780767929738/076792973X).
I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron (Vintage, $12.95, 9780307276827/0307276821).
White People Steal Music
from Stuff White People Like Blog
#93 Music Piracy
March 30, 2008 by clander
White people have always been renowned for having ridiculously large music collections. So when file sharing gave white people a chance to acquire all the music they ever wanted, it felt as though it was an earned right and not a privilege.
When (not if) you see a white male with a full iPod, ask him if all of his music is legal. If he does not immediately launch into a diatribe about his right to pirate music, you might have to nudge him a bit by saying “do you think that’s right?” The response will be immediate and uniform.
He will likely rattle off statistics about how most musicians don’t make any money from albums, it all comes from touring and merchandise. So by attending shows, he is able to support the musicians while simultaneously striking a blow against multinational corporations. He will proceed to walk you through the process of how record labels are set up to reward the corporation and fundamentally rob the artist of their rights, royalties and creativity. Prepare to hear the name Steve Albini a lot.
Advanced white people will also talk about how their constant downloading of music makes them an expert who can properly recommend bands to friends and co-workers, thus increasing revenues and exposure. So in fact, their “illegal” activities are the new lifeblood of the industry.
When they have finished talking, you must choose your next words wisely. It is considered rude to point out the simple fact that they are still getting music for free. Instead you should say: “Wow, I never thought of it like that. You know a lot about the music industry. What bands are you listening to right now? Who is good?”
This sentence serves two functions: it helps to reassure the white person that they are your local “music expert,” something they prize. Also, it lets them feel as though they have convinced you that their activities are part of a greater social cause and not simple piracy.
If you bring up this issue with white person who says “nah bro, I don’t give a shit, Dave Matthews has enough money as it is.” You are likely dealing with wrong kind of white person.
In the even more rare situation where someone says “it’s all paid for, and it’s all transferred from vinyl.” You have found an expert level white person and must treat the situation carefully.
The Decline and Fall of the Writer
from the New York Observer
Freelance Fizzle!
The Decline and Fall of the Writer BY DOREE SHAFRIR
“There’s not one path anymore,” David Hirshey, executive editor of HarperCollins and former longtime deputy editor of Esquiremagazine, said the other day. “Thirty years ago, you worked at a newspaper, you moved to a magazine, and then you wrote books or screenplays. Today you can be a blogger who writes books or you can be a stripper who wins an Academy Award for Best Screenplay.”
It all sounds so … uncomplicated, doesn’t it? Boozy lunches at Michael’s and evenings at Elaine’s, unlimited expense accounts, stories that took months to report and longer to write, maybe a ramshackle house in the Hamptons to complement the musty, book-clogged apartment on the Upper West Side. But above all, there was the sense that magazine writing was at the center of a vital intellectual universe, with New York as its capital, and vaunted writers and editors such as Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Willie Morris, Harold Hayes, Lillian Ross, Clay Felker, Norman Mailer, David Halberstam, Nora Ephron and the like as its reigning princes and princesses, with salaries and perks and moist-eyed acolytes to match. Not to mention scandals, sodden confessions and rumors that could be safely traded and tucked away among trusted friends, with no danger of being scattered like seed spores across cyberspace. Gossip was community-building, not community-busting.
What young Turk, as Esquire founding editor Arnold Gingrich called his up-and-coming editors (Mr. Hayes and Mr. Felker among them) in the late 1950s, wouldn’t want entree into this literary glam world? And until quite recently, landing an editorial assistant gig atEsquire or GQ or Elle, or the reporter-researcher job at The New Republic, or the two-year training program at Vanity Fair, or the (unpaid) internship at Harper’s, or the (nominally paid) internship at The Nation, or even, for the most well-connected and talented graduates, an assistant job at The New Yorker, was the ne plus ultra for the young, tweedy intelligentsia, those graduates of Yale and Vassar who had committed to memory the opening lines of “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”
Of course, there’s more than a little romanticization that goes into any characterization of days gone by; nonetheless, there is a discernible sense in the air that, as one young magazine editor put it, “Those kinds of jobs exist, but just not for our generation.” This editor, who is 24, continued, “It’s weird, because I feel like there are certain people I’ve met who are young and super into magazines still, which is always surprising to me, because I don’t know why anyone who wants to be involved with the media would want to turn their attention to magazines.”
THIS DIDN’T HAPPEN overnight. But it’s been especially in the past couple of years that a confluence of factors has resulted in some young people turning their backs on magazines. For one, there is the industry’s notorious (some might say sadistic) gate-keeping, which keeps out a majority of those who would deign to think of themselves as worthy of the industry’s blessing, and which also requires an aspiring magazine writer or editor to commit to working in magazines, preferably while still in college, when an internship at a blue-chip publication (nearly any magazine at Condé Nast, Time Inc., Hearst or Hachette Filipacchi, plus, depending on one’s interest, most political magazines, low-circulation-but-high-influence downtown fashion or art magazines, plus a smattering of others like New York,Spy, Harper’s, Newsweek, etc.) could potentially cement one’s place in the firmament. (It could also leave the less talented, or more charitably, less lucky writers and editors to languish. “I guess my disillusionment is partly just that it’s taken me this long,” one 37-year-old editor told The Observer.)
A generation that is starting to see barely legal bloggers become more prominent in six months than even the most talented contributing editors may not see this path as necessarily the most appealing, or expedient, one.
One 23-year-old political journalist told The Observer that the New Republic reporter-researcher job—famed for launching the careers of Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, New Yorker Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza, Atlantic editor James Bennet and author Hanna Rosin, among others—is no longer quite the coveted position it once was. “Part of the reason why the TNR internship isn’t as big as it used to be is that if you were a young sharpie on the make in 1990 or even 1995, there just weren’t that many places where you could get your start,” the political journalist said. “But the rise of the kind of whole bloggy progressive thing has, I think, really kicked off the careers of some people, or at least for smart liberal college students.”
Another related issue is influence—whether the kind of buzz generated by a magazine story is the kind that young writers still want—that is, attention from a world in which someone may get news not from CNN but from a Facebook posting about a story on CNN. Nothing seems to live for more than a day without commentary; the contemporary version of “if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound” is “if an article gets written and no one blogs it, does anyone care?”