I am a Gamera (a satire, calculated for brevity)

I am a Gamera, my strides are always smashing Tokyo (and then someone from Central Casting just keeps rebuilding it, again and again, proving that Japanese horror films have a Keynesian basis in reality), never wondering if I left the kettle on when I left my deep sea cave. It's hard for a prehistoric creature to blend into modern life, never mind accomplishing some kind of Brechtian irony. I try to avoid crushing the slums. Top that Mr. Isherwood. You can't, because you're dead. That'll learn 'ya!

When is the GOP finally going to die, and where do we bury it?

"Climbing the eastern wall as it had come, the colossus went to and fro for many hours, no longer wreaking a hellish wrath and rancour, but searching, as people thought, for the various tombs and graves from which the hundreds of bodies that composed it had been so foully reft. From charnel to charnel, from cemetery to cemetery it went, through all the land; but there was no grave anywhere in which the dead colossus could lie down." --Clark Ashton Smith, The Colossus of Ylourgne," 1934.


Come on GOP, you know you want to take that gun and...you love that gun, oh yes you do, and you love to use it. So use it. The problem with you being gone is that then the Democrats will have a free hand to become even more corrupt than they already are, and boy are they, just like you. But they hide it better. In a short time, they would look exactly like you do, possibly worse. Granted, that's a short walk off a short pier, and God knows they want to stay in Afghanistan too and give us an Orwellian war without end, but they're a smidgen more realistic than you, GOP. Just not very much, and they like falling on their swords when it means a pro-business agenda will be secure.

And those dumbbells that come at you with assault rifles at presidential speeches--they're you're rednecks! I didn't make 'em, their stupid parents and a bad educational system did. The worst part of you--GOP--is the smell: it's there, all the signs of decay, of putrefaction, are present. You stink. Small wonder that the national elections are held in the first week of November, so close to All Saints Day, today, which is then followed by All Souls Day, for the departed. Everything about the Republican Party is death. What does the GOP have left but dead ideologies? The stiff's still walking around, going through the various stages of mourning; give it time to realize that it's dead, just let it die. Martyrs? There have been no martyrs in the Republican Party since Abraham Lincoln, so they might have to create a few, and they're willing to. What does the GOP have besides a bunch of free market extremists and racist psychopaths yelling their heads off until nobody listens?

Their disconnect from reality is both genuine and terrifying: just this week Rush Limbaugh claimed that former VP candidate Sarah Palin was somehow prepared to be president, that she's capable and educated enough in geopolitics, economics, world history, and so on, to serve adequately in the Oval Office. Never mind merit, I think she can win, so who cares? He sounds like Franz von Papen when he urged President Paul von Hindenburg "hire" Hitler and make him Chancellor (Hitler lost the election, look it up, Vonnegut was wrong), and at this point she doesn't have a chance unless the economy crashes even further without further government intervention and someone burns down the Reichstag again in a terrorist attack.

My guess is the Saudis are waiting for someone to rebuild the World Trade Center so they can blow it up again. They have a long wait. Oh yeah, and Dick Armey (unfortunate name) is William Jennings Bryan (in a sick way he really is) as William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Monkey trial, not the one that defended Eugene Debs and other unionists. We just keep coming back to the 1920s-30s! What business elites (and Libertarians) want is to drag us back into the 19th century when there was no regulation of much of anything, the good old days that never were. It's not so hard to believe when you take into account that the rich in America never accepted the New Deal.

When are we going to cope with modernity? When are we going to finally accept that we cannot go back to some arboreal Eden, that there never was a golden age, and that we're stuck with technology? There's no sticking the Djin back in its bottle once it's gotten free. History doesn't work that way; it means moving forward, and we should do so cautiously. We must change. If we go forward as we have, favoring corporations, subsidizing fossil fuels and concentrated wealth, and continue to move away from democratic traditions, all is lost. The real threat is coming from misguided Populism, as it always has, because it can be used against the rest of us. That's right, lack in others is a threat to everyone. Pointing these dummies at hot button issues and progressive targets and letting them run amok works. When people already hold irrational beliefs and attitudes, it's not such a long walk off that short pier. Now, where are we going to bury the GOP? We might want two graves for both major parties. Anyone? A shovel?

"America shoots-down a spy satellite" is a cover-story

The State Department--The mainstream media has done its best to convince us that this was Skylab 2.0, a case of space junk crashing back down into backyards everywhere. That was the misdirection, but the reality is that it was a real world test and use of the missile defense shield system, a deadly new step in the global arms race. A source who witnessed earlier tests in the South Pacific almost ten-years-ago told me at the time how wasteful and faulty the program was.

What a difference ten years makes, but do we really need this stupid thing? Does it really justify the billions that it cost to develop and make? Will the reactions of other nations make us safer, knowing that we possess the capability of a first nuclear strike with a defense shield to "protect" us from the inevitable retaliation?

Assuming that the radar installations being constructed in Poland and the Czech Republic are part of the global infrastructure of this anti-missile system, is it really wise to add to the intimidation of Russia by pushing Kosovo's (as Germany and NATO did with Croatia and Slovenia in the early-1990s--the rest is history) independence from Serbia? Ask most Russians and they'll tell you that "the Serbs are our brothers," a healthy reminder that Pan-Slavism is hardly dead.

Thanks-a-lot Werner Von Braun (and Robert Goddard). The continuing American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan also fuels Russia's justified paranoia, also including NATO's presence in those countries, and within the Balkans. How would Americans react if Chavez stationed peace keepers along the Rio Grande?

We shouldn't be surprised that Serbs are attacking the American Embassy in their Capitol considering how much the Clinton administration and the rest of NATO used them as their genocide scapegoat to bring about the fragmentation of Yugoslavia. Not everyone in Western power circles has learned the lessons of why WWI happened. Wesley Clark's comments that the rioters who attacked and set-fire to our embassy were "extremists" could be held-up against those of the Hapsburg governors a century ago. The differences and the denials of reality are striking.

Very little has changed, and the Serbs aren't ever going to stop fighting against what they see as threats to their sovereignty from outside the region. America and NATO are bent on the domination of the Balkans and the encirclement of Russia, this much is certain. This missile test is just part of the plan.

MONDO NEW YORK (1988) review

What a documentary this could have been! I first saw this in 1989 on home video, right before I was off to college. At the time, it was pretty shocking to these Midwestern eyes, but then, I was 21. There are only a few reasons to watch this at all: Karen Finley, Lydia Lunch's prologue rant, nutsoid artist Joe Coleman, Annie Sprinkle naked, some good poetry, and even some interesting looks at gay culture at that time in NYC.

However, embarrassing segments like the ones with John Sex and Phoebe Legere doing some really dumbass air guitar to a tape of her godawful 80s song called "Marilyn Monroe" sink this film. I've never been to New York City, and I don't see why I should anymore. That city is gone, and those of us who never saw the place never can now. It is gone. At least director Harvey Keith was there to document some of it, he just managed to miss most of the interesting-parts. Somehow, I think that was the fault--once again--of the money people (the Executive producers). Also embarrassing in Mondo New York are the 80s styles and fashions (the haircuts being the worst). There's no real nostalgia here, except for the New York City that is no more. There is no more cultural nexus like Greenwich Village anymore, a place where artists of all mediums can germinate naturally. It's all been cleaned-up and gentrified. Soho is the same.

A friend of mine saw Allen Ginsberg's final walk through Central Park around 1994, and he also witnessed the Village die, succumbing to gentrification. It's gone. So are the scarlet streets (where the whores were), live sex shows, and the glory that was Times Square. It's now the bureaucratic hell that Herman Melville saw it becoming back in the 1850s. The job is now done, and Big business and old money can now stew in its own self-imposed Apocalypse of meaninglessness.

No more grindhouse theaters, no more venues for independent art and music, no more revival houses, nada. Zip. Just a playground for the rich. Record stores? They're almost all gone throughout the nation. Bookstores? Who reads anymore? Some of us, but not many. If there is any nostalgia to be had, it's for a NYC that was once a free-for-all cesspool that was affordable. It was oddly refreshing in its freedom. There are certainly contemporary pockets there where scenes exist, but NYC is no longer the center of American culture, especially since Giuliani and the internet. And that's why Mondo New York isn't relevant today, and merely a so-so social document of some of the weirdness that was once allowed to flourish within the city limits of NYC. That's over.

Watching this, I had to wonder: "Where's Sonic Youth? Where's the Knitting Factory scene, the Jewish jazz scene, the hip-hop, and where's Bill Laswell, John Zorn, the Swans, and the wave of postpunk artists who were doing well at that time?" Where's Keith Haring? Where's Jean Paul Basquiat?

The answer on the music-side: the morons who produced the documentary had cheese-head/coke-head Alan Douglas overseeing the music in the film. Douglas is the guy who gave Al Hendrix $30,000 for the rights to Jimi's music after 1970.

Some rumors have it that he's hopelessly-addicted to cocaine to-this-day, with one story involving a garden-hose... Also, the score is really horrible and was done by Luis Perico Ortiz and Johnny Pacheco. I think a Casio keyboard and those godawful Yamaha DX-7s (digital piano, ugh!) were used, so it sounds incredibly dated and trivializes most of what you see in the documentary. Perhaps this was "to take the edge off" for Midwestern audiences at that time, I don't know, but it's a great case of how not to score a film.

We see cock-fights, a voodoo ritual--creepin' Christ, there's a lot of dead-chickens in this one, that's for sure. We see Joey Arias do a bad impersonation of a woman singing the worst rendition of "A Hard Days Night" that you'll ever hear. We see a junkie shooting-up, possibly for real. We see a Black comedian (the late great Charlie Barnett) make racial jokes to an audience in Washington Park that wouldn't float nowadays! Ann Magnason is pretty funny with her performance art shorts. Probably the best part of this whole mess is Joe Coleman, known for his folk art/iconographic paintings of serial killers and other sundry criminals and nut-jobs. What's great is his performance-art pieces. He comes out as his persona "Professor Mombuzu," and begins a rant that makes a certain sense, and then whips-out two white-mice named "Mushmouf and Pumkin' puss."  Coleman then bites their heads off and flies into a complete rage. But he isn't done yet: once the audience are sufficiently scared and outraged, he pulls-out a fuse from his 19th century gambler's-vest and blows-himself-up! You couldn't do it today after 9/11.

Seeing shots and hearing references to the World Trade Center just makes this a really sad reminder of how things are worse than the 1980s. This is something many of us never would have imagined back then.

The 1980s sucked, and Mondo New York reminds us of this fact, but it also reminds us that things have gotten much worse since then and that a cultural American Spring is badly needed. If this was our Weimar cabaret before the fall, we really suck, folks! Trashy doesn't really do any service to most of this, and why the dopey blonde as the thread that takes us through all these locations and scenes, why the need for a narrative? If you're going to be titillating, go-for-broke. Like the 80s, it's just another half-measure, with no ejaculation at the end. The viscera needs to be serviced on occasion, and the Devil given his due.

So this is Babylon--how boring, how banal and predictable. No Nick Zedd, Bill Laswell, no hip-hop, no Nowave (NO), no Swans, no Diamanda Galas, no Marc Ribot, no Ornette Coleman, no Rockets Redglare, John Zorn, no Al Goldstein, Sonic Youth, Glenn Branca, Jim Jarmusch, no Quentin Crisp, no vice squads and police brutality, almost no street musicians, no Moondog, no real street crazies, no Allen Ginsberg, canned audio for the CBGB's footage, no reflections on the end of the nightclubbing scene after the death of Andy Warhol, the fallout of AIDS, and no Richard Kern. The hookers are on screen all-too-briefly. There's not much of the best of the 80s underground here, which was the real freak show! Where are the sex clubs? There was a subculture where people just went to these underground clubs and fucked each other, even after AIDs. Where are they? After the end of most of this, we got Michael Alig and the club kids. We know how that one ended.

Postscript, 02.09.2013: Appropriating the term "Mondo" couldn't save what is mostly a disastrous plunge into the inane of NYC in the 1980s. Eliot was right that the world ends with a whimper. Were it not for Joe Coleman and Karen Finley, none of this could rise to the level of Jacopeti and Prosperi's original Mondo documentaries, not even close, but it wasn't an entirely wasted effort. We at least get Lydia Lunch at the beginning, the Santeria, but a lot of this is simply embarrassingly stupid and unimportant. Interviewing bums around the Bowery would have been better--and where is the fucking Chelsea?! At least they documented aspects of the gay community, and in the arts. Heavy Metal magazine was doing a better job reporting on the underground there at the time, several years earlier. I could go on forever, and I wasn't even there at the time. Oh well. I blame John Waters.