Another Original...

No one ever went any near where Lyle Lovitt went with C&W lyrics and subject matter and he turned it into classic music! I Married Her Because She Looks Like You....

What a great song!

The Original

I consider myself pretty lucky to have seen Carl Perkins a few times at the Bottom Line in West 3rd Street in New York around 1980. He had a great band with two of his sons. He was ablaze in the late 50's and was on his way to being one of the biggest stars of the early days of Rock. He wrote the songs, he had the looks and he invented the style, but a tragic car accident in 1958 took him out of the game at the wrong moment. Even Paul McCartney paid homage with the comment, "If there had been no Carl Perkins, the would never have been The Beatles."

Next Victim?

 
"If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll even empty his pockets for you.”
LBJ

I have bee writing a lot about Detroit and trying to establish the link between what is going on there is a test drive for what is going to happen in the rest of the country, if we aren't ready to throw ourselves into the machine to destroy it! What ever you think about Lyndon Baines Johnson, this  statement sort of crystalizes what  is happening. Racism, class warfare are being used in very targeted and systematic way to inure Americans to the rape of Detroit. Because if they can get away with it here, then it will be so much easier to do it to you...This is the frontline of class warfare in America and the aggressor is the self ordained elite. They think they own you. They think minimum wage is destroying their privileged position. An educated public is a danger to them. Wake up, educate your self, become dangerous! 

Americans are born into the belief that accumulation of capital is the most important part of their economic system. In their new book, The Making of Global Capitalism, Leo Panitz and Sam Glindin show how the US government has worked to create a new world order where private capital accumulation is the dominant and controlling function of governments around the world. Part of that involves covert and not so covert attacks on foreign socialist governments. But we can see it in our cities and states.
For example, for centuries US churches and communities established hospitals organized as non-profit entities. These hospitals provided medical care to contributors and non-contributors alike. Now for-profit corporations, with treasuries fattened by the profits reaped from sick people,are buying out those entities, leaving the communities dependent on the rich people who control those corporations for their medical care. The logical outcome is spiraling hospital costs, because the only goal of a corporation is to maximize returns to shareholders at any price. Including your health.
In the same way, states and cities have turned over their prisons to private companies. Again, the goal of these corporations is to maximize profits at any price, including the health and safety of prison inmates.
In each of these situations, we as citizens bought and built things for our mutual benefit. Some rancid government types in thrall to the idea that the market should do everything decided that we shouldn’t own things as a community, and sold them to some private company. That means that instead of getting things at a reasonable price, paying for them with tax revenues and user fees, and owning important assets and services ourselves, we are getting screwed over by a bunch of rich people and their minions devoted to taking as much of our money as they can for themselves.
One big reason governments are selling public assets to the rich is to raise money to pay on government debts. Governments have debts because they borrowed from the rich instead of taxing them. That, of course, is the real scandal. But the rich want you to think it’s your fault so you should pay, or forfeit all that juicy public property.
Detroit is the poster child for the future. The rich and their minions on Wall Street are circling the city, planning to buy up the assets that belong to the community at fire sale prices. This story in the Financial Times strikes just the right note:
The state attorney-general has opined that [the Art Collection is] “held in public trust for the benefit of the city’s residents”. But some creditors and their counsel say it is ludicrous that they are recovering only a small fraction of the money they are owed while the city is sitting on such valuable items.
Among those valuable items are a wonderful collection of art works, and we know how much Wall Streeters love that art. Steve Cohen of SAC, the recently indicted hedge fund, just paid casino billionaire Stephen Wynn $155 million for Picasso’s Le Rêve, widely perceived as a poke in the eye of the wimpy SEC. There’s no telling how much the creepy Walton heirs would pay so they could move it to the bustling metropolis of Bentonville, AR for their Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
What else is there? The Financial Times points to Belle Island, a logical site for development by the rich as a playground carefully isolated from the misery of the city; the water and sewage system; 22 square miles of Detroit, mostly blighted; nine parking garages, two parking lots and a bunch of parking meters; and half of an aging cross-border tunnel to Windsor, Ontario. More generally, the private sector is looking for roads, bridges, airports, utilities and hospitals. So what could go wrong with private ownership?
Just think about giving a private company a monopoly on Detroit’s water supply. I’m just sure they won’t charge monopoly prices, enormous hook-up fees and so on. They’ll be satisfied with a pint of blood from every citizen of the city over the age of 10.

Let's Twine, Baby!

I love this film, Down By Law, and this is one of the best Jim Jarmusch sequences ever. Tom Waits, Roberto Benigni and uhh, the guy who was in the Lounge Lizards who stole my US Army Surplus leather tank drivers gloves...I thought of this because my wife is making a new mint ice cream recipe today...I found a big patch of wild spearmint in the valley yesterday.

What we are looking at tonight...
A little barbecue, then, for dessert, the universe...

You Go, Girl!

14-year-old Canadian activist Rachel Parent debates Kevin O'Leary on the question of why genetically modified foods need to be avoided. Back in June the Canadian broadcaster called the protesters against Monsanto, "stupid". Rachel challenged him to a debate, and two months later they had one. Frankly, she does what I am not capable of doing. O'Leary is a highly paid professional spokesperson and shill for Monsanto. He uses every lame argument in the book and every guilt trip he can lay on a 14 year old kid and Rachel slaps him down each time with calm reason. I would have lost it and they probably would have had to call "SECURITY" after I used my big left foot to kick O'Leary in his GMO modified nuts. She is as we say, AFB! Absolutely Fuckin' Brilliant!
Fourteen year old Rachel Parent challenged CBC's Kevin O'Leary to a debate on GMOs. O'Leary accuses Parent of being a "shill" for environmental organizations. Watch as Parent schools O'Leary on the dangers of GMOs --and see for yourself who the corporate shill is.
Rachel's website: http://www.gmo-news.com

39 Years Ago Today!
Why isn't August 9th a National Holiday?

Apres moi, a half life of 48,000 years.....

The quote, Apres moi, la deluge, (After me, the flood) was attributed to the 18th century French king, Louis XV. To be accurate though, it was actually his mistress La Pompadour, who uttered the comment. Louis XV ruined the French economy. He engaged in a ruinous war that he lost and the effort to wage the war decimated France. Forests were cut down to build ships. Thousands of men were slaughtered in the campaigns. France lost Canada, but at Versailles, the party never stopped. This was the legacy he left his son, the fated Louis XVI, a bankrupt nation on the verge of Revolution. There

was a sense of madness infecting the ruling class of France. A desperate attempt to create a false front of serene power on all fronts. A senile nobility trying to maintain an illusion of power through the excessive fashion and cosmetics. Even old men could not be seen in public with out a properly powdered wig, a coating of white lead tinted thick pancake makeup and the liberal use of red rouge and a beauty mark. The the thick white make up sort of filled in the wrinkles, the beauty mark distracted the eye from "imperfections"...the rouged cheeks and painted on lips? Mark it up to the rigid style which made everyone look sort of the same. I suppose you could find an analogy in the esthetic of conservative American media and politicians. Freeze dried bo toxed Blond women, blow dried touped tanned men all with a secret mania for cosmetic surgery to stave off the inevitable fate of obsolescence.
I suppose I should ask here, what is the half life of a FOX News female talking head? If you're a guy, heck, you can go on until you wither up and die on screen, like Wolf Blitzer or or just plain senile and incoherent, like, uh, Rush Limbaugh or like Geraldo, because, nobody really notices anyway and senile mental incontinence seems to be a big plus in that business, it would seem.  But the rampant sexism of conservative media will not tolerate any less than plastic coated cyber blond perfection in a woman. But, back to the quote, After me, the deluge, represents an attitude which is more alive today than it was in the 18th century. It is the attitude of the financial industry, the attitude of corporations like Monsanto. The financial industry is all about their profits; protecting and enriching themselves and those blessed to be insiders and the future be damned. Corporate mentality is the same. Monsanto and the pharmaceutical industry, for example plays by their own rules when it comes to marketing and testing ideas and products. They create and control their own studies to prove to the consumers that their products are safe and the consumers must buy them or be damned. More about Monsanto, which I have been ranting about for years in another post.
I have to say first, that I am militantly opposed to Nuclear Energy...it is not the future. I won't deny the science or the possibilities, but the commercial attempts by corporate interests to sell us the concept of safe and affordable Nuclear power have failed catastrophic level in every aspect. We have had the concept of safe affordable nuclear energy force fed to us for over a half century. What could go wrong? And when something inevitably goes wrong...who knew?
The history of nuclear energy and research has been one of ever accelerating attrition for our planet. More and more parts of the planet are becoming sacrifice zones. There is an area in the Caucasus region of Russia, Kyshtym which had a storage facility accident in 1957. The entire area is still too dangerous to venture into almost 60 years later. America is still dealing with the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and the ongoing radiation problems it has been responsible for in Washington State since the end of WW2. The problems are incrementally ongoing and growing. France is just beginning to deal with it's super secret nuclear industry and the contamination it has created in the hills outside of Limoges. America and the rest of the new born nuclear nations on earth have been using the ocean as a convenient place to make nuclear waste disappear. Except it doesn't.  Here's a partial list of civilian nuclear accidents starting in the 1950's. In 1964, I was a kid on a field trip to Luna Pier, Michigan to visit the new Detroit

Edison Enrico Fermi sodium breeder reactor power plant. We were treated to a tour and a cartoon presentation about the wonderful world of the future of cheap and safe nuclear energy. Just a few weeks later, The Enrico Fermi Reactor was stopped mere minutes before it would have created a situation that wiped out the city of Monroe, Michigan and Detroit, just 40 miles north.
The disaster was a minor design problem, which no one could have anticipated or even diagnosed until years later. The results? Thousands of gallons of highly volatile plutonium contaminated sodium in barrels too dangerous to move stored in a facility on the fragile shore of a Lake Erie swamp. Half life?

We lived through Three Mile Island and it's been a quarter century since Chernobyl. When will the land around Chernobyl be safe enough to live on again? Here's a link to a study of the biological consequences that are just beginning to be understood in the Chernoblyl disaster. 60 years into the age of Nuclear attrition and the plants we built over the decades are beginning to fall into obsolescence. Materials decay and fail. Accidents occur. Obsolete plants have to decommissioned and decontaminated. You pay for this. Here is a great breakdown of the real costs of Nuclear energy. If you do a little research, nuclear energy was never cheaper than other sources and will never be. It is a corporate money pit. A short sighted phony miracle to generate immediate profits for corporations that will be the responsibility and onus of future generations to contain and try to safely manage. We have waste untold trillions of dollars on a death wish. Think about the race and money spent to develop  nuclear energy in WW2. It was done in record time. We have been dragging our feet and fighting the corporate interests in our quest for clean affordable dafe energy. The gains are incremental, but if we had a "Manhattan Safe Energy Project" years ago, we would all be the winners. A safer planet and more manageable lives. 

In Japan, we are now dealing with the biggest ever ongoing Nuclear Attrition Disaster Zone. We all watched the video over and over again in horror as the Fukushima Daiichi Tepco reactors blew after the March 11, 2011 earthquake. Again, the best excuse the industry could muster boiled down to "Who knew?"

But the nuclear industry in Japan has been a terrible nightmare of mismanagement, organized graft and cutting corners and costs hiding behind a wall of industrial government sanctioned security. The author Alex Kerr wrote a book in 2001 called Dogs and Demons. He is an American author but has lived in Japan since childhood. He is the only western author to ever have won their highest literary award for his earlier book, the classic on Japanese culture, Lost Japan. In Dogs and Demons, Kerr documents and chronicles the history of coverups of the Japanese Nuclear Power industry. The book created such unease in Japan, that Kerr found himself, once a celebrity, shunned and really had to leave the country. His book was suppressed in Japan. But this only reiterates the power and complicity of industry in ignoring regulations and making profits at any costs. As far as they are concerned, what you know won't hurt them, and if you get hurt, it's just too damn bad and just too damn late. Now, after 2 years, the drama is just beginning. There have been two years of ongoing Cover ups about the loss of containment of the contaminated water which is now seeping into the ground water and flowing into the ocean at an incremental rate and the TEPCO officials just have no idea how to stop it.  This is the deluge and it has a half life of 48,000 years. We all owe ourselves, our planet and the future generations our whole heated, passionate desire to see the end of the death wish, dead end of the myth of safe nuclear energy. We have been lied to repeatedly and we have been denied the future that we could have had already. Here's a list of anti nuclear power groups, world wide to check out. I have been a member of Greenpeace for almost 6 years!

Welcome To My World....

Surreal post apocalypse cinema? Perhaps for you, for me it was my world for well over 25 years and this video was made after much of it was torn down. This is a drive through  Loisada...The Lower East Side of Manhattan...Alphabet City. I lived on the top floor of a building on the corner of Avenue B and East 5th Street. I couldn't imagine wanting to live anywhere else. 

MIrror, Mirror

Trying to write about American Politics....

Mirror Mirror, on the wall

Will you catch me , if I fall?

Into the ocean, Into the sea?

Will you tell me who to be?

Mirror Mirror,  just let me be

The things I'm seeing

Are killing me.....

Totally Fracked

One year ago, the residents of Bayou Corne were displaced by a sprawling, belching sinkhole. They're still waiting to move back. 

On August 3, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a statewide emergency, and local officials in Assumption ordered the mandatory evacuation of about 300 residents of more than 150 homes located about a half-mile from the sinkhole. Four months later, officials continue to tell residents that they do not know when they will be able to return home. A few have chosen to ignore the order and have stayed in their homes, but the neighborhood is now quiet and nearly vacant. Across the road from the residential community, a parking lot near a small boat launch ramp has been converted to a command post for state police and emergency responders.
"This place is no longer fit for human habitation, and will forever be," shouted one frustrated evacuee at a recent community meeting in Assumption.
The Bayou Corne sinkhole is an unprecedented environmental disaster. Geologists say they have never dealt with anything quite like it before, but the sinkhole has made few headlines beyond the local media. No news may be good news for Texas Brine, a Houston-based drilling and storage firm that for years milked an underground salt cavern on the edge of large salt formation deep below the sinkhole area. From oil and gas drilling, to making chloride and other chemicals needed for plastics and chemical processing, the salty brine produced by such wells is the lifeblood of the petrochemical industry.
Geologists and state officials now believe that Texas Brine's production cavern below Bayou Corne collapsed from the side and filled with rock, oil and gas from deposits around the salt formation. The pressure in the cavern was too great and caused a "frack out." Like Mother Nature's own version of the controversial oil and gas drilling technique known as "fracking," brine and other liquids were forced vertically out of the salt cavern, fracturing rock toward the surface and causing the ground to give way.
"In the oil field, you've heard of hydraulic fracturing; that's what they're using to develop gas and oil wells around the country ..."What is a frack-out is, is when you get the pressure too high and instead fracturing where you want, it fractures all the way to the surface," said Gary Hecox, a geologist with the Shaw Environmental Group, at a recent community meeting in Assumption Parish. Texas Brine brought in the Shaw group to help mitigate the sinkhole.

I am finally back on line! We had a hugemongous storm here on Friday night...We got off lucky, but many farmers had their crops wiped out by the hail. I had a half hour of cherry sized hail coming down here, but no real damage...I had battened down the hatches and we have some dented vegetables in the garden. I hope my friends at Vieux Chevrol are okay! I heard that a number of vine yards around Castillon and St. Emilion  got decimated, but checking the news, the Libourne area seems to have gotten off light! So we lost our power, phone and internet for almost 36 hours...enough to get me to crank up my generator to keep the freezer frozen. Then me and a friend took the generator to a few neighbors to plug in their freezers for a few hours. To make the day complete, I had to go to the funeral of an old friend in Thenon yesterday afternoon. I had to go! But today after a few false starts, the power came back on a few hours ago and now I am back on line!....btw, the color walls of the first floor of my house is somewhere between angry goldfish and eurovision contestant lips...what color is your life?

In Every Dream Home, A Heart Ache

Brian Ferry and Roxy Music's homage to the great British Pop Artist,

Richard Hamilton. The collage, In Every Dream Home A Heart Ache is one of the iconic pieces of 60's pop art. What an incredible visionary band this was, outside of time, so out side of any style that they created their own style. Hamilton was one of Ferry's teachers in college. Brian Eno was a creature from another planet who instinctively manipulated the sound of the band with primitive technology: toggle switch controlled analogue synths, synching the band through an 8 track recorder live and then hand manipulating the tape live to create effects.  The interplay of the great Venezuelan guitarist, Ray Manzanera and Eno is pretty incredible in itself. The song is a study in post modern isolationism. The vacuum of the modern world, a love dirge to an inflatable sex toy...but then again, the punch line of the song, alone, "I blew up your body, but you blew my mind" is perhaps one of the greatest moments in pop music poetry you'll ever hear....

Thank You For Volunteering, Citizen

A chillingly plausible scenario for privatizing and outsourcing surveillance. The UK already has citizen monitors watching live video from the CCTV cameras from the privacy of their own homes, ready to report any "suspicious" looking activity they think they spot.

100 Years Ago Today.....

John Sloan's great take on the show.... 

New York World Revue

The 1913 Exhibition at the New York Armory was perhaps one of the most cathartic moments in shifting  the consciousness from the academia of the past into the future. America had its first blast of cubism, expressionism and all stops beyond. The shock waves of this one exhibition are still being felt 100 years later. Here's a great link to the Smithsonian web site that gives a little insight into how profoundly this event affected the psyche of 1913 America......

The Pipe Sucker Report