Five Before Chaos

My apologies to those of you who check in here often regarding the light posting lately. Had a bunch of out-of-town company last week, spent this week catching up on firewood and chipping that I should have done during those two rainy weeks.

Leaving for Washington State on Thursday. I’m going to try my best to have a few things posted for you all, and will do my best to check in out there when I can. Gonna try to have another film review up soon, and will hopefully do some photoblogging when possible. Rest assured, when I get back, it will be business as usual here, so be sure to check in from time to time. I just hit 1,400 wisitors recently…thanks for stopping by.

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Ok, just wanted to let any of you in the northeastern U.S. know about the upcoming 4th Annual Northeast Kingdom Music Festival, not sponsored by Pepsi or affiliated with Ticketmaster or Clear Channel or any of those other corporations that have killed live music. It’s a homespun good ol’ fashined music festival in the middle of VT’s beautiful Northeast Kingdom. My band played the very first one four years ago, withs some noteworthy acts such as The Headhunters and Soulive. Once again there’s a diverse lineup. The headliners this year are the Afro-funk NYC band Antibalas and the gypsy-punk Gogol Bordello.
Lots of other genres, too - folk, bluegrass, hip hop, etc, as well as some good Vermont consciousness and Bread and Puppet.

You can get tickets by going to www.nekmf.com, and the festivities are happening August 4th and 5th. It keeps getting bigger every year, so why not help that continue? A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

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http://www.samharris.org

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Getting outraged by the news is a normal occurrence around here… Last night, I had a killer headache and went downstairs to read the paper. This article in the Times Argus got my blood boiling, called ‘Air Quality Reached Unhealthy Levels’. Apparently that nasty muggy day we had on Sunday was a bit nastier than I realized.

“Vermont is experiencing its highest levels of highly polluted air in nearly five years… The episode of polluted air was due to a high pressure system that brought in air originally from the Midwest where it was exposed to sulfur dioxide from burning coal. The stagnant hot air allowed possibly dangerous particles to slowly build up over a couple days in all of Vermont and upstate New York. These particles, referred to as pm 2.5 (particles less than 2.5 microns in size) tend to build up under hot conditions.”

Vermont is, undoubtedly, one of the cleanest states in the country, due to our low population, quantity of trees, and lack of major polluting industries. That’s why this burns my britches even more. We’re doing things right here and have to breathe the shitty air brought on from coal-fired plants in the Midwest. And it’s only going to get worse. As global warming increases, scientists from Harvard believe that it will exacerbate pollution in our area, due to the lack of cooling winds that come down from Canada and blow the nasty stuff away.

“Mickley and colleagues found that the frequency of cold fronts bringing cool, clear air out of Canada during summer months declined about 20 percent. These cold fronts, Mickley said, are responsible for breaking up hot, stagnant air that builds up regularly in summer, generating high levels of ground-level ozone pollution…If this model is correct, global warming would cause an increase in difficult days for those affected by ozone pollution, such as people suffering with respiratory illnesses like asthma and those doing physical labor or exercising outdoors,” Mickley says.”

And Vermont’s hilly topography easily creates little pockets of stale air. I don’t know why I’m worried, I’m sure the Bush administration is working on the problem with it’s ‘Clear Skies Initiative’ that it touted a few years back. Oh, wait… this is Bushworld here, so expect the opposite of whatever is said. A quick look at it from the Sierra Club shows that, among other things, by the 15th year of the plan, we’ll have 450,000 more tons of nitrogen oxide, 1 million more tons of sulfur dioxide, and 9.5 more tons of mercury allowed than under the enforcement of the existing Clean Air Act programs. It gets better: it delays the enforcement of soot and smog standards until 2015, creates loopholes for existing power plants, and most importantly, restricts the power of states to call for an end to pollution from upwind sources from other states. SO, if we can put up with this nasty air for about 10 more years, everything should be just fine.

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I’ve been having a bit of an email dialogue with one of my friends out in Oakland. We played together in several bands over the years, were in an affinity group a few years ago, and got arrested at the WTO minesterial in Montreal a few years ago (yee ha, we sure threw a cog in the wheel of the New World Order on that one!). He’s a great, funny guy, and we’ve been talking about the goings on in South America, of which he seems to be very hopeful for, although he is aware of the romanticism of it all. He’s travelled quite a bit there recently. He doesn’t think anything will get better in the world until capitalism is brought down, with all of the misery and such that it brings.

Now, my point of this is I hear this argument (if one could call it that) a lot from some of my more anarchist-socialist leaning buddies, and I agree with them. But here’s the kicker. I never hear a plan. Ever. It’s as if I were to ramble on about how someday we won’t have a need for religion because humanity will finally see through the fictions and stuff and realize one can reach that kind of bliss and be a good person without resorting to belief in fairy tales, but I never talk about how we’re going to get rid of such a deeply ingrained belief system. And that’s a problem I see with many on the far left. It’s like we’re at point ‘A’ in time right now, and they’re at point ‘Q’. What does point ‘B’ look like? How do we get anywhere when this belief we espouse isn’t even a blip on the radar of most of the public? And that many people like being able to spend $4000 on a television set, and even the ones living in barely-standing mobile homes still manage to find money for their 500 channels of shit every month? And the sad truth that most Americans are so insulated from the effects of their affluence that they wouldn’t give enough of a shit to change thier lifestyles even if they did? It’s really frustrating, and it really ties into the idealism that ties our hands on the left.

You’ve heard me rant about it before; we can’t seem to really get past talking about the way the world should be enough to have a plan to make it that way. And even if the stuff in Latin America is the real deal, it’s not going to work here in that form. America is a different planet. Che was a Stalinist who killed a lot of people, and that’s not a right-wing thing, it’s just history. Chavez might be alleviating poverty in Venezuela or he might just be another lightweight dictator who talks about it. Get over it.

Stop telling me how it should be. I know that already. Give me some kind of clue that you know how we’re going to get us there, because, to be quite honest, I don’t think that many of you have any more of a clue than I do. Howzabout how we’re going to survive two and a half more years of this asshole president? Do any of you know? If not, then why the hell should I listen to you about what it will be like when the walls of capitalism come crashing down? Do you have a clue as to how thick and titanium-reinforced those walls are? Are we going to even be around long enough to enjoy it?

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The leftiness south of the border could be spreading to our doorstep. There is a distinct possibility that the leftist Mexican presidential candidate Manuel Lopez Obrador is gaining in the polls. Now, this is news to me, but from a preliminary peek around, although he has put much emphasis on his campaign in ending poverty, (his slogan is “For the Good of Everyone, the Poor First”), he’s no Chavez. There’s no talk of nationalization of the natural resources, anti-American rhetoric, and the like. One premise that sounds promising, though is he has talked about renegotiating abysmal trade deals such as NAFTA and such. I’ll be following this one. Anything that has the elite class nervous can’t be all that bad.

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Time for an installment of ‘a modern white guy’s take on ’70s black cinema‘ (for my introduction to the beloved ‘blaxplotation’ genre, have a read of my review of ‘Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song’ here). Today it’s 1973’s ‘Detroit 9000‘. Now, as I do more of these film reviews, I find that the easy part seems to be the commentary about subtexts, message, moviemaking details and such, and the hard part for me is the summary. Often, I watch these late at night, and I’m not neceessarily taking notes. Here’s a quick summary from Blaxploitation.com:

$400,000 dollars in donations and jewelry is stolen by a masked gang from a fundraising dinner in honor of black congressman Aubrey Clayton. The case is given to veteran detective Danny Bassett, a complex character who has to support his mentally-ill wife. He is partnered with up-and-coming black detective Jesse Williams, a move that provokes Bassett’s resentment as he wants to take the credit for solving the case himself. Williams makes the initial investigation lead to an old acquintance, call girl Roby Harris, who provides crucial information about a homicide victim and a related operation for handling stolen goods. Roby is also in touch with pimp Ferdy, who she alerts that the police are on to him; this leads to her murder as his henchmen catch up with her. Williams arrives too late to prevent the fatal shots but Rody confesses while dying that she provided the vital information for the intial robbery after hearing about the fundraising dinner while turning a trick with Clayton. Bassett discovers that the fence for the goods is holed up in a cruise ship and substitutes himself for the gang member who was supposed to be taking the jewelry to the ship…

Ok, now with that out of the way, some background. This was one of those films that Quentin Tarantino, who has many times stated the influence of the blaxploitation genre on his own films, rereleased under his ‘Rolling Thunder Pictures’ line. He even gave it a brief cinematic release a few years ago. That would explain the high quality restoration. It is crisp and clear, and looks great.

The film stars Hari Rhodes and Alex Rocco. You’ll recognize Rocco as Moe Green, the mobster who got shot in the eye at the end of The Godfather. Now, as I get more into the genre, I seem to see two camps here. There is the over-the-top, super explotative kind of film such as Foxy Brown, replete with tons of stereotypes, T&A, violence, pimps and such, and then there’s the straight-ahead crime drama that they put the focus on black characters instead of white ones, and although racial issues are often touched upon, it is not the end-all be all focus of the film. Shaft could easily fall into this category, Shaft in Africa, probably not. And there are varying degrees between the two. Detroit 9000 leans towards the second example. Motivations of the police are always in question, and always framed in terms of race(as in all of these films). In terms of quality, this film is all over the map. Like many in this genre, it was mostly released in theaters targeting black audiences. The acting from the leads is exceptional and professional, the acting in some of the other characters is pretty bad. Lots of really fake looking blood. Not much else to say about the story, other than it was a pretty good crime drama, and the ending was good, because it left you with some questions as to the motivations of the white cop, Bassett, a guy struggling to stay an honest cop in the face of a personal crisis involving his crippled wife.

Now with me, the allure for these films is often the campy factor, as well as satisfying my obsession with time, meaning I really enjoy looking at the look of the period, and Detroit 9000 delivers on that. The gritty, shitty backdrop of early 70’s Detroit is often reminiscent of a third-world country (there is a particular chase scene that shows a lot of it in all of its abandoned ugliness). There’s the obligatory garishly dressed pimp (although none hold a candle to ‘George the Pimp’ in Coffy). The music was pretty good, alternating between typical jazz-funk of the period and some really great funk-gospel by a female band. The thing that does set this apart from some of the other in the genre is the lack of over-the-top-exploitation. Every once and a while, it stops feeling like a B-movie. It’s worth checking out. Plus, where else can you see a suit like this? -

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Quick ‘what’s dumb today’ post. Had a friend of a friend go to an interview at some vegan cookie company. Things were going well, until the person was asked what their zodiac sign was. Apparently, it wasn’t the right one because they were told they couldn’t be hired because their particular sign would ‘create conflict’ on the job. Is that all that different from “We don’t hire Jews/blacks etc?” Idiocy is not limited to Christianity, I guess. I can’t imagine wanting to work for a company that is run by people so far removed from reality.

Yep, you were right , Ed. I blogged it.

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Yep, it’ s that time again, people. So much idiocy, so little time before the Rapture, eh?

First up, it’s the ‘who would Jesus bomb?’ category, where police in Maryland have foiled a plan to bomb an abortion clinic. I don’t know about you, both nothing to me exemplifies Christian kindness more than this:

“According to an ATF affidavit, Weiler planned to bomb an abortion clinic in Greenbelt and use a .40-caliber handgun he had stolen from a friend to “shoot doctors who provided abortions.”

Apparently this jerkoff got caught when one of his homemade bombs went off in his friend’s house. Who knew God had such a sense of humor?

Next up, the single most pressing, important issue to ever face our nation, and no, I don’t mean the preservation of Hitler’s brain and the upcoming Rise of the Fourth Reich… I’m talkin’ ’bout gay marriage. As you probably know by now, the GOP spent a good portion of the week pushing their effort to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage, since apparently everything else in America is just fine. The war in Iraq is over, gas is back down to 1.10 a gallon, the earth is once agin cooling off, and I’m enjoying that new universal healthcare plan they just adopted. You know the story, they’re tanking in the polls, and it’s time to wave some bloody flesh in front of the knuckle-dragging, pea-brained GOP base. Funny thing is, it might not work this time. But at least we can all rest easy at night knowing that ‘there’s never been a homosexual relationship in the recorded history’ of Senator James Inhofe’s family. Whew, I was really worried about that one there.

Now, I must admit to having enjoyed a few ultra-super-violent video games. In fact, I still do. So what. Needless to say, I was thrilled to the gills to hear about ‘Left Behind: The Video Game’. As you probably know, the ‘Left Behind’ series is a series of books written by Tim LaHaye and some other nutjob whose name I can’t remember, where all the good Christian sheeple are whisked away in the Rapture, and the remaining ones are stuck on earth to battle it out with the antiChrist or something like that. Scary thing is, these books are ridiculously popular, as in record-breeakingly popular. You can find them at Wal-mart next to other classy literature such as the latest Dr. Phil book. Anyways the point of the game is, according to the people over at Talk to Action, is:

“Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission — both a religious mission and a military mission — to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state — especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is “to conduct physical and spiritual warfare”; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice.”

Sounds like fun to me. Sound like they really got the ‘Jesus is the Prince of Peace’ vibe down good, dontcha think? The one upside to the game is you can also come back as the anti-Christ and wreak the same terrors on the Christoidiots in the game.

And, finally, for a laugh, check out the ‘Jesus Thinks You’re a Jerk’ Photoshop contest by the funny people at Fark.

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