On the upcoming 30th anniversary of the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan...

I think this was a terrible and heinous act on the part of Hinckley...for missing the heart, lungs, and other vital organs that would have done the job properly. I also want to excoriate the idiot for doing it for all the wrong reasons--to impress Jody Foster, a lesbian. In addition to that, it gave Reagan a second term since Americans are sentimental assholes who cry at a John Williams string-swell on command like Pavolv's fucking dogs.

In addition to that addition of their house of cards, that of the myth-makers, I want to say that we need to face that fact that President Reagan--the construct--was so fucking dumb he couldn't even be assassinated correctly or impressively like President Kennedy, McKinley, or Lincoln, and had no idea he'd been shot for several minutes since he was barely sentient, like the people that voted for him. Hey, at least Booth had some kind of ideology and some reasons that made more sense, Lincoln really did act like a dictator during the American Civil War.

And McKinley? He was in the pocket of the Trusts and the Monopolies, people like Rockefeller and Carnegie. Kennedy? We don't even know why he was fucking whacked. It's a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, rolled into some club papers, and smoked by some fucking hippies somewhere...

"We won the Cold War," but didn't want it to end: reflections on the Thatcher-Gorbachev revelations

WWW--We did? Who won it? It wasn't the average person. Considering the recent revelations about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ("Iron Maggie," a beloved to neocons along with the Maoist veneration of Ronald Reagan) and her discussions with the final Soviet President Mikael Gorbachev--that Thatcher and the rest of the West including America--didn't want reunification of Germany under any circumstances, you'd think it would be everywhere in our media.

Fine, it came out on September 11th, our new sacred national day, but this is earth-shattering news, it downs many myths about the Cold War, including the legacy of President Ronald Reagan. The contention of "we won the Cold War" just doesn't float anymore, they wanted to keep it going, and it served many purposes for the power structures on both sides, and Thatcher's comments underscore what many have suspected all along: the Cold War was a lie, a big lie. I could have told you that, but now we have solid-proof.

As usual, the official line and rhetoric are just window dressing, a lie, cover. The Western powers wanted the Soviet Union to stay-in-place for the foreseeable future during Peristroika (the thaw of authoritarianism in the Warsaw Pact nations) and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. This exchange comes less than three months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it is extraordinary.

From the Times:

September 23 1989 : transcript

Thatcher: I wanted to raise some questions regarding the situation in the countries of Eastern Europe. I was deeply impressed by the courage of General Jaruzelski in Poland and by his patriotism. Of course, the future of Poland and its alliance with you are very important. I noticed that you reacted calmly to the results of the Polish elections and generally to processes taking part in this and other Eastern European countries. My understanding of your position is following: you welcome each country developing in its own way on the condition that Warsaw Pact stays. I understand this position perfectly.

Now I would like to say something in complete confidence and would ask you not to record this part of our conversation.

Gorbachev: I agree to your request.

(The following part of the conversation is reproduced from memory)

Thatcher: We are very concerned about the processes taking place in Eastern Germany. Some big changes could happen there, forced partly by the state of the society and partly by the illness of Erich Honecker. One example of this is the flight of thousands of people from the GDR to the FRG. All of this is on the surface, it is very important but even more important is something else.

The reunification of Germany is not in the interests of Britain and Western Europe. It might look different from public pronouncements, in official communiqué at Nato meetings, but it is not worth paying ones attention to it. We do not want a united Germany. This would have led to a change to post-war borders and we can not allow that because such development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.

In the same way, a destabilisation of Eastern Europe and breakdown of the Warsaw Pact are also not in our interests. Of course, internal changes are happening in all Eastern European countries, somewhere they are deeper than in others. However, we would prefer if those processes were entirely internal, we would not interfere in them or push the de-communisation of Eastern Europe. I can say that the President of the United States is of the same position. He sent me a telegram to Tokyo in which he asked me directly to tell you that the United States would not do anything that might put at risk the security of the Soviet Union or perceived by the Soviet society as danger. I am fulfilling his request.

Gorbachev: Thank you for this message. In broad terms, you have outlined our position correctly. We believe that socialist countries should solve their internal problems themselves, chose themselves the course and speed on the way of implementation of their socialist choice. We do not want and will not interfere but will, of course help our allies as we have always done.

As for the state of health of Erich Honecker, he is planning to take part in all events commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the GDR. I can tell you that I am planning to arrive to the GDR on 6-7th October to celebrate this anniversary.

In other words, Reagan was in total agreement with Thatcher and considering American might, could be presumed to have been pulling some of the strings here. And there is more, much more to establish the veracity and legitimacy of these documents. Where was it in the American press? The virtual "page eight," if it was there at all.

This is a stunning rebuttal to the mythology surrounding the Cold War, former Prime Minister Thatcher, and the late President Ronald Reagan. Former President Gorbachev comes off looking very good, even better than before. Western leaders of the time look like the lying, scrambling, unimaginative clowns that they were and are. "Conventional wisdom" is often misinformed, now we know. The real history tends to be unwritten for generations. We lucked-out on this one. What a "Man in the High Castle" moment.

"Thatcher Told Gorbachev Britain Did Not Want German Reunification," The Times online, 09.11.2009: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6829735.ece

Excerpts from the Thatcher-Gorbachev talks and related excerpts:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6829416.ece

Patrick Swayze (1952-2009)

WWW--I will always remember the Patrick Swayze of Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders, Donnie Darko, To Wong Fu, and yes, even Red Dawn (but only in a "camp" sense). He was a great dancer and actor. Today, Patrick Swayze died of pancreatic cancer, and my heart goes out to his family, I know where they're at right now.

I'll never forget the first time watching The Outsiders and loving his big brother character because he was just so good, so real. When I went and saw Red Dawn he was just as great, not that it's a great movie, but we all have bills to pay, and so did he. The next time you watch Red Dawn, play songs from the Violent Femmes' first album every time a character dies, I swear to God it fits, it works. I nearly got into a fistfight seeing that one at the theater because I couldn't stop laughing since the scenario in it could never have happened logistically, it's literally a campy science fiction movie by the very closeted John Milius, a guy who likes to play with army toys in his advanced age. He should run for office.

But besides his role in The Outsiders, I have to say that the pinnacle of Swayze's acting career was as a motivational speaker/evangelist/closeted pedophile in 2001's Donnie Darko, a classic that I believe paints a fairly accurate portrayal in many parts of how unpleasant the 1980s really were. Yet, he was one of the good parts, and I'll remember him always for it. There will never be another actor quite like him. There are watersheds in everyone's life, and this is one of them. You made a very drab life and world a little more interesting, sleep well. What a cool dude he was.

For the love of God, please bury Michael Jackson and place several concrete slabs above the sarcophagous.

Los Angeles, Cali-forn-ia--As the world rapidly and dramatically moves towards a wide conflagration, ecological catastrophe, and as the global economy starts really looking like a village (and none of this in the same order), we get wall-to-wall coverage of everything "Jacko."

Considering all of the aforementioned, it's not hard to understand why the coverage is everywhere, ubiquitous, and of course, pathetic.

Jacko, Jacko, Jacko, and more Jacko, 24/7 Jacko, until it feels like the 1980s all over again when the first three listens of Thriller were great until that 339th one came along. But fortunately for the young, nobody has to listen to the radio or watch television if they don't want to, the "captive audience" syndrome being a dead letter. There must be a God, after all.

There's a smell in the air, and it's the smell of dumb-laced fear with a twist of formaldehyde-impregnated clothing from China that we're told is "safe for humans," and a dash of dying free market extremism.

That's great, I hope that doesn't work out for you...

It goes without saying, so why not say it again since it's not sinking-in: yes, he was the "king of pop," and yes, he made a lot of moronic and corrupt assholes richer, just as Ronald Reagan did back in the "glory years" of the 1980s. Yet, the 1980s weren't that great, the economy was in the shitter just 26 years ago according to solid economic statistics, the time of "Thriller" when America was in-the-process of sticking its collective head in the sand just as we're attempting to do now.

It won't work, and it didn't for the last 20+ years, but nothing exceeds like failure and Americans think that they can just change the channel and things will go away. When that fails, firearms and widescale hyperbole are necessary.

Michael Jackson's story is America's story, and it's a pathetic one because he never owned or controlled his life. Like the rest of us, others who didn't mean him well and wanted to exploit him did, and that's not the worst of it amazingly enough: there's every reason to think that he was physically, if not sexually, abused by his ostensible "father," Joe Jackson (not the British pop singer). Call it the vagaries of poverty, but there was no excuse for it.

Jackson detailed Joe's emotional abuse in a few interviews over the years, as did some of his siblings and other witnesses to their lives. Joe Jackson was hardly the first or the last person to maim Jackson's life. Racism coupled with greed destroyed the pop icon, disfiguring his face and his mind.

If Michael Jackson's life embodies anything at all, it's that the American Dream has been a lie, a nightmare, and something that we're all waking-up from after sixty years. The music and entertainment industries exploited him (and still are), pushed him, used-him-up, and threw him away, just as businesses are throwing-away millions of American workers right now in their feeble and dying game of dazzling profits at everyone else's expense.

Did they ever care about Jackson's well being beyond how much money it might generate for them? Of course not, and they still don't. And yet, nobody is likely to ever hold them accountable, which is more than a little sad...and pathetic.

Playing the Dozens: Your momma, your poppa, and your greasy-greasy grannie.

--Yo momma is so fat, when she jumped into the air she got stuck.
--Yo mama's so ugly, when she looks in the mirror, the reflection ducks.
--Yo mama's so ugly, well.. look at you!
--Yo mama's so ugly, she looks like you.
--Yo mama's so ugly, she could only be Yo mama.
--Yo mama's so ugly, they filmed "Gorillas in the Mist" in her shower.
--Yo mama's so ugly, they push her face into dough to make gorilla cookies.
--Yo mama's so stupid, she got stabbed in a shoot-out.
--Yo mama's so stank, that her shit is glad to escape.
--Yo mama smells like hot ass on a cold day. (from pimpdaddy.com)

1982: my eighth-grade year in our blunderful educational system in America. This was when there was a lot of court mandated school busing (due to Brown vs. the Board of Education, 1954), and our school was no exception. In the case of my experience, all of the rich kids from Jefferson School got bused to our crappy little Edison Elementary, away from much better teachers and resources. The reaction of many Jefferson parents--most of whom were doctors, lawyers, business owners, etc.--was incredibly vocal and racist.

When their kids came to our school, they'd boxed-up some of those resources, while shunting the rest of us away from them. This escalated when we all went to the same high school, where you basically had two separate educational-paths that kept most all of us from having a decent learning environment (while the rich kids got an excellent one). I can remember skipping-classes to go home and read something relevant, and it was common for us to be taught the same thing year-after-year! But they couldn't do it with every required class, either at the elementary level, or high school.

That was when the fun began, and we'd pillory the lone punks and the jock-stragglers. Our school had more Black and poor kids (like myself), and Edison could be seen back in the 1970s-1980s as a dumping-ground for lousy teachers, so-called administrators, and "problem students" (meaning "not white," or from poor or "broken-homes"). The best part of all this was that many Black kids got to go to the better Jefferson!

But many of us "problem children" stayed at Edison, both Black and White. The mix of White rich kids, poor White, and poor Black kids was pretty explosive, with most of the Jefferson kids constantly complaining at how they were getting shafted at our shitty school. Well yeah, welcome to our world assholes.

Every morning--it seemed--there was a major fight between Blacks and Whites when everyone was getting off of the buses, and it was repeated when they got back on at 3 PM. Almost all of the fights surrounded the waiting-time at the buses. The racial tension wasn't just palpable, there were parents coming out and yelling racial-epithets at Black students, their children doing likewise, and the Black kids sending it right back at them (and more stinging).

You had Polish-American students (an extremely racist group at this time in Michiana), Hungarian-American (a little better), Irish-American, all the WASPs, and me and my little brother (German-Czech-American). Where did we fit in? Nowhere really, but most of the Black kids knew we were getting shafted too, so we got treated better by them. To this day, I can say Black people have generally treated me and my family better than White America ever has or ever will.

Naturally, President Reagan, the GOP, and even many Democrats in Congress were opponents of both providing adequate funding for predominantly-Black schools, and mandatory busing as a cure for that lack-of-funding. We heard tales of the single-parent Black families (headed by mothers) being the cause of Black poverty, and other such ridiculous arguments. It was all just racism and racist-assumptions about Black Americans.

It was this kind of racist wrongheadedness that created the need for mandatory crosstown busing, and yet what he really wanted to give Black Americans was nothing. He just couldn't get away with it at that time. Reagan was truly a horrible human being, and he wasn't alone in his racism, it was (and is) still deeply-rooted in White mainstream thought. What was so exhilarating about all this busing though is that we got to have first-hand experience fighting those lily-white motherfuckers from Jefferson in every possible way.

There was some real unity between groups of us Black and White kids who fought these scum. The fights were verbal and physical (I'm not one to duke, so I had to use my wits). It was literally a front-line class war that had all the shades of race and class that typify the American experience. Of course, there were sell-out Blacks who were already bourgeois-types before all of this, but the worst ones were the White sell-outs who were basically working-class--the suck-ups, the sycophants, and the social-climbers. All of us Black and White kids would endlessly attack these morons and ass-lickers. The best way was by-insult: Playing the dozens (also known as cutting or snaps).

Compared to the Black kids, I wasn't shit at this, but they were ingenious in their comebacks. You couldn't top them, it was impossible. How could you? They invented the dozens, it comes from West African traditions. It's older than old. The rich kids couldn't cope with it at all, until the lure of sports hypnotized everyone, and George Lucas united a divided nation (snicker). However, the fights continued into High School anyway, and the real divisions never went away. Playing the dozens was frequently the prelude to a fight, but it was also a way to avoid all of that. As brutal and vulgar as playing the dozens is, it's more civil than kicking someone's ass.

And so, J-7 is really a part of this tradition: I'm belittling people with power because there's no choice in the matter. One of the best approaches to taking-down the abusers of power is to confront them and denigrate who and what they are, it works. There is a tradition of this in our own history, and Black Americans are a part of this, they more than compliment it.

From the Ranters' written attacks on the monarchy and the aristocracy, to the Levellers and Diggers and their communalism, from the pamphlets during the run up to the American Revolution, to the Abolitionists, the rise of the unions, to the attacks by cartoonist Thomas Nast on Boss Tweed and Tamanny Hall's corruption, reviling and mocking power works.

NEA (National Education Association) school integration timeline: http://www.nea.org/brownvboard/integrationtimeline.html

Your home for the dozens: www.pimpdaddy.com

The Ranters (brief histories): http://www.exlibris.org/nonconform/engdis/ranters.html
http://www.british-civil-wars.co.uk/glossary/ranters.htm

The Profoundly Racist Moynihan Report (1965): http://www.blackpast.org/?q=primary/moynihan-report-1965

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.

GIVE ME LIBERTY, OR GIVE ME METH (AND DEE WIMMEN)

It had to be said, and I thank 'SME' at Huffington Post for it. Gimme that old time sodomy (for others, not me), my preachers must be as queer as a three-dollar-bill. It always struck-me that Church wimmen folks were the biggest fag-hags ever. Just look at Tammy Faye Bakker.

She cries a lot, but this is an expression of compassion and empathy that is lacking in most Americans (especially young people). Who was it who cried on the PTL Club for gays afflicted with AIDS in the early 1980s? It was Tammy. Hey, it was FUN watching her pussy husband crying as he was lead away in chains by the cops, so maybe it's time for women to be priests?

At least if they touch a boy, it's not as shocking. Since women are mothers, I kinda doubt it will be as frequent. And let's get women into political office, men are generally fuckheads in politics. OK, the women who have been in there are too, but not as bad (excepting Hillary, she's awful--500,000 Iraqi-children were murdered by her husband and she did nothing). Gimme that old-time religion, yes indeed, the kind with no Churches.

Tammy:

www.tammyfaye.com