Soundtrack...

for the cause of future revolution:

It's Up To Me & You To Prove It

For everyone in Washington DC this Sunday, thank you.
Please remember everyone that came before Me & You:

Barbara Gittings, Washington DC, 1965.

The Ladder, 1965.

Washington DC, May 29, 1965.

Mattachine Society Protest, Washington DC, 1970.

First Pentagon Picket, Washington DC, c. 1965.

Barbara Gittings, Independence Hall, Philadelphia PA, July 4, 1966.

Independence Hall, Philadelphia PA, July 4, 1965.

Picketing Independence Hall, Philadelphia PA, c. 1965.

Barbara Gittings Picketing Independence Hall, Philadelphia PA, 1969.

Pickets from Frank Kameny's archive.

Mattachine Society Washington, Informational Flyer, c. 1965.
(please click through to read)

We've been at it for 45 years.

see also:
Equality Across America - National Equality March
Wikipedia - Mattachine Society
Mattachine Society of Washington DC Resources, especially the constitution, informational flyer, and blackmail questionaire.
Wikipedia - Barbara Gittings
The Kameny Papers: Frank Kameny's Online Archive, please look at the button collection and instructions for picketing in the memorabilia section of the site.
The Rainbow History Project - Early Protests
Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community

Flag Day

Tina Modotti, Untitled (Woman With Flag, Mexico), 1928

Lovett/Codagnone, Stripped, 2006

Robert Mapplethorpe, American Flag, 1977

Robert Frank, Parade — Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955

Bernhard Wilhelm x Francois Sagat, Spring Summer 07-08 Men, 2007

See Also:
http://www.usflag.org/

Once More, With Feeling

"...y’know, I always wanted to be the kind of person who really took chances in life. Someone who got off the main highways, and took those little back roads and byways, and experienced a kind of an America that few of us get to see... a bittersweet, nostalgic, brave America.

I wanted to walk through the Midwest early in the morning, and watch all the farmers on their way to work in the amber fields of grain in Nebraska.

To pick strawberries next to my Chicano brothers and sisters underneath the hot California sun.

To watch the morning light shining off the lady of the harbor onto all the Korean grocers as they stocked their salad bars.

These were the sounds, sights, and smells I that I wanted to incorporate into my worldview. To learn to change my own damn tires, and get dirt under my nails and jack up my car, and live life to the fullest. I never wanted to depend on Triple A.

And I don’t know if I’ve become that kind of a person… But I would like to dedicate this last song tonight to all of those that came before me and forged those emotional and aesthetic highways so effortlessly. To those that had the guts to live life right on the edge..."

From Without You I'm Nothing, Sandra Bernhard, 1990.

Sandra Bernhard returns to New York City June 10th to re-perform Without You I'm Nothing, celebrating the show's 20th anniversary at Town Hall. The 1990 film version of the performance reenacts the original off-Broadway production as it is staged in LA. In the film, Bernhard executes Without You I'm Nothing for an almost entirely African American audience, and throughout, everyone slowly leaves. No laughter is heard, and at the film's end the audience's one remaining member scrawls "Fuck Sandra Bernhard" on a tablecloth in red lipstick.

The staging of Bernhard's film skillfully and subtly underscores racial strain and anxiety in the United States. It was also released a full two years before that stress catalyzed the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Throughout the film Bernhard addresses multiple facets of the American dream and its failure. She manages to narrate and inhabit the various characters she conjures with both a compelling, empathetic sincerity and caustic wit. The performance's greatest strength is her singular ability to occupy both of these disparate polarities simultaneously. What could easily be derided as a sarcastic and brittle or "petty, bilious" critique emerges as the best film about American Life in the 1980s.

See also:
http://www.sandrabernhard.com/

Consequences of Globalization

Marie Laforet's 'Maire Douceur Marie Colere' x Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots mashup.

Dionysus Rising

Still from Black Narcissus, Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1947.

Powell & Pressburger's technicolor-induced fever dream of colonial failure, Black Narcissus, presages the British withdrawal from India by almost a year. Though the film's dramatizes the unraveling of the British Colonial Empire, it traces failure elliptically. A group of British nuns attempt to convert a palace atop a Himalayan mountain into a convent, then slowly begin to realize unremembered and repressed desires through both gardening and fashion. The Catholic Legion of Decency protested the film's American release, and forced the excision of several flashback scenes. The still above exists as a telegraphic omen from the film's meticulously choreographed final act. It always unnerves.

See also:
The Criterion Collection: Black Narcissus

Swine Flu

An appropriate [aesthetic] reaction...

... to eleven years of the Thatcher administration:

It's Grim Up North (Live), The JAMs, 1991.

It's Grim Up North, The JAMs, 1991.

Stand by the JAMs.
Turn up the strobe.
Justified and ancient.

From the single's liner notes: "Through the downpour and diesel roar, Rockman and Kingboy D can feel a regular dull thud. Whether this is the eternal echo of a Victorian steam driven revolution or the turbo kick of a distant Northern rave is irrelevant. Thus inspired, The JAMs climb into the back of their truck and work."

Following the single's release, the house of commons feared "regional imbalance" in the north of England. Labour MP Joe Ashton also proposed "It's Gruesome In The Midlands" or "There's Nowt But Folk Living In Cardboard Boxes In London" as feasible alternative to "It's Grim Up North."

See also:
http://www.klf-communications.net/
NME - 11/09/91: 'The JAMs Center of Political Interest'
Wikipedia - It's Grim Up North

The Great Unraveling

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, February 23, 2009.

We Work For You!

from Acme Novelty Library #19, Chris Ware, 2008.

Friend of Disabled Minorities...

Photo by Tannen Maury

Illinois Governor Rod R. Blagojevich.

Another Dispatch From The Trenches

Culture Wars