A documentary about Brother Theodore is in production, directed by Jeff Sumerel. According to the official web site: “over 15 hours of interviews have been shot, with additional interviews scheduled in New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin. A brief sample of interviews has been compiled and will be presented to potential executive producers.”
View trailer here.
See also:
Clips of Brother Theodore on YouTube.
Torrent collection of Brother Theodore material.
Brother Theodore is Dead by Nick Mamatus.
Read Part 1 of The US as Police State.
In part 1, I took a very brief look at the history of the United States from 1787 to around 1980 and found a history of government repression of citizens at varying levels of government: restrictions on voting, vote fraud, and slavery. Not to mention the genocide of the Native Americans at the hands of the US military.
So now I turn my attention to Ronald Reagan and the point where the “War on Drugs” actually became a war, and not mere prohibition. The drug war is meant to stamp out the “drug problem” in America. A problem that the government helped engineer in t he first place. As detailed in Gary Webb’s series of “Dark Alliance” articles for the San Jose Mercury News, and later a book by the same name, the C.I.A, with the explicit knowledge of the Reagan administration, supported Nicaraguan contras in their sale of cocaine to drug dealers in Los Angles starting around 1981. For more information, see Webb’s 1998 article for the Orange County Weekly, The Crack-Up.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Imagine your fantasy commune, the one you’d find only in the movies, where everyone is young and beautiful; the clothes are fabulous; the leader benign; and home is a mansion in the Hollywood Hills. Chances are it probably looks a lot like the Source Family, whose 140 members “dropped out” right in the middle of Los Angeles. Led by a bearded, hunky, 6-foot-3 former war hero who called himself Father Yod and, later, YaHoWha, this vibrant group of men and women embarked on a wild social experiment, turning all their material possessions over to the group and supporting themselves serving gourmet vegetarian cuisine at their popular Sunset Strip restaurant, the Source. Living communally in a Los Feliz mansion owned by the Chandler family (former owners of this newspaper) and then in a house built by Catherine Deneuve, many of them formed polyamorous relationships; not surprisingly, the most extreme example was Father Yod, who took 14 “spiritual wives.”
Full Story: LA Times.
(via Notes From Somewhere Bizarre).
Erik Davis talks about his new book, The Visionary State (with Michael Rauner), about the psychogeography of California.
This landscape ranges from pagan forests to ascetic deserts to the shifting shores of a watery void. It includes dizzying heights and terrible lows, and great urban zones of human construction. Even in its city life, California insists that there are more ways than one, with its major urban cultures roughly divided between the San Francisco Bay Area and greater Los Angeles. Indeed, Northern and Southern California are considered by some to be so different as to effectively constitute different states. But that is a mistake. California is not two: it is bipolar.
Full Story: BLDGBLOG.
(via Abstract Dynamics).
Also, Davis’s site Techgnosis has been re-designed.
Kate Braverman, the author of Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles, interviewed on the R.U. Sirius show.
MP3 on R.U. Sirius Show.
Traffic magazine has an interview with Technoccult pal Kirsten Anderson about the “pop surrealism” movement.
Now Pop Surrealism – did I explain to you why the book is called Pop Surrealism? When I decided that I wanted to do a survey of this art genre, a big chunk of the artists didn’t want to be in a book called Lowbrow Art because they felt it was it would be misconstrued as being insulting, and that it implied a lack of sophistication or skill. . . . They thought it just sort of sounded like a downgrade term, and that it didn’t really capture the spirit of the work anymore.
So that meant that I had to come up with another title for the book, which was incredibly stressful because who am I to say what this is genre is going be called?
[...]
So I spent six months talking with everybody from Robert Williams to Billy Shire (who owns the La Luz De Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles) . . . and asked them what they thought it should be called. No one really wanted to go there. And I wrote up lists of, you know, fake movement names. Something that could encapsulate everything. And I couldn’t come up with anything. But there had been this term floating around called Pop Surrealism [and] . . . that . . . was the one term that everyone felt okay about. And I notice it’s being used pretty extensively.
Traffic Magazine.
A team at University of California, Los Angeles has found a way to communicate with bacteria through chemical signals.
Liao’s team persuaded the cells to make GFP simply as a convenient way to show that the acetate trigger was working. But in principle, they could use the acetate signal to trigger cells to do something more practical, such as making hydrogen or producing poisons to kill off diseased cells.
“You could use this approach as a Trojan horse idea to combat disease,” says Jeff Hasty, who works on gene modules at the University of California, San Diego. Modified cells of pathogenic bacteria could be introduced into a natural colony of the same cells, he says. Then, at a given chemical signal, the modified cells could be told to produce compounds that would kill off the bacteria.
Link (via Smart Mobs)
Alameda County Computer Resource Center in Oakland, Free Geek in Portland, and a group in Los Angeles are all recycling unwanted computers and components for use for global activism or for low-income individuals. Sort of like Bikes Not Bombs, only for computers. Does anyone know of anyone other organizations doing this sort of thing?
Link.
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