KEVIN DORIA of GROWING – Best of 2007

In no particular order:

1) Brady to Moss connection. Not since Montana to Rice has the viewing public been granted the gift of art through professional football. It’s a beautiful lesson, really. Magic of unprecedented levels can be reached when an obnoxious yuppie teams up with a misunderstood genius. Don Shula is a self-loathing fascist. The kings are dead. Long live the kings.

2) Brownsounds. A small “record label” that no one will ever know of. Small vinyl only runs of fine musical output by some of my favorite artists. If you can find the records… buy them.

3) The rise and collapse of Rudy Guiliani. Eat a dick, fuck nuts.

4) Clint Bowyer. More proof that NASCAR is in a slow descent to the darkest level of hell. What started out as what could’ve been the feel good story of the year ended like McGovern’s brutal defeat in ’72. What’s become of the finest sport ever conceived on American soil? Rich Californians and wealthy Europeans have surrounded over five generations of American moonshiners and are moving in for the kill. The South has fallen again.

5) Designer babies. Ah, the gifts of science.

Kevin Doria is a member of the band Growing, who were cover featured by writer Peter Relic and photographer Eden Batki in the still-available Arthur No. 22 (May 2006).

All Ages!
$10.00 Advance (will call)
$12.00 @ the door on Sunday night

Tickets and info at folkyeah.com

If you are one of the 120,000+ readers who enjoys Arthur for free, please consider helping someone less fortunate to have the same privilege in 2008…

PRISONERS
In lieu of a proper education system America has instituted a special school for people of color called prison. Students learn a lot in prison, but are propagandized solely by corporate media, whose rotten message grows even more virulent in the nightmare that is life inside. As a consequence, Arthur regularly receives pleas from these captives to provide them with an untainted diversion at least.

Over two million people — one out of every 142 Americans — is now in prison. Almost 500,000 Americans are in jail for drugs-only offenses, and if they try to go to a record store or coffeehouse or nightclub to pick up a copy of Arthur, they will be shot and bit by dogs. These starving minds have got to get Arthur sent to them in a warden-approved manner, which costs thirty dollars a year. With your kind donation, Arthur will be able to give a lucky prisoner and their cellblock a free one-year subscription.
Provide a beacon for a guy who got caught today.

PUBLIC LIBRARIES
America’s public libraries are criminally underfunded. You can probably guess why. When you buy a subscription to Arthur on behalf of a public library, you help to expand the public’s consciousness while also providing vital financial support to the magazine itself, enabling it to continue its mission. Not too shabby for 30 bones.

MEDICAL MARIJUANA DISPENSARIES
Because people waiting for their medicine deserve something better to read than High Times.

Mujer ángel, desierto de Sonora, México
Graciela Iturbide, 1979
Gelatin silver print

Tuesday, January 8, 2008, 7:00 p.m.
Getty Center, Harold M. Williams Auditorium
Photographer Graciela Iturbide discusses her work with Roberto Tejada, professor of visual arts at UC San Diego. This program will be conducted in Spanish with simultaneous translation into English available.

“Graciela Iturbide (born in 1942) is one of Mexico’s most accomplished and fascinating photographers. Iturbide began her career photographing everyday life in Mexico City. But, like her mentor Manuel Álvarez Bravo, she was curious about the country’s culture outside the capital. The exhibition The Goat’s Dance: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide (on view December 18, 2007–April 13, 2008 at the Getty Center) presents the stunning results of her explorations of diverse Mexican and Mexican-American groups, including indigenous communities in southern Mexico, outsider immigrant groups in East Los Angeles, and those struggling at the U.S.-Mexico border.”

Info:
http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/iturbide/events.html

Click here for “Theme Time Radio Hour” Season Two archive…

art by jaime hernandez!

“Bret Lunsford of D+ added this caption to a classic image of an one wrongly imprisoned: Stop Torture. these shirts are printed on oh so soft american apparel tees. solid black and solid white!”

Shane MacGowan of the Pogues turns 50 today. From The Guardian:

The Pogues recorded five albums together before MacGowan was sacked in 1991 because of his drinking… Over the next decade he immersed himself in a cocktail of wine, gin and tonic, long island iced tea, port and martini and put together a new band, Shane MacGowan and the Popes. He collaborated with The Jesus and Mary Chain and Nick Cave – and continued to take drugs.

His girlfriend, Victoria Mary Clarke, was once called to his house to find blood gushing from his mouth after he had tried to eat volume three of The Beach Boys’ greatest hits.

“[Shane] had become convinced that the third world war was taking place and that he, as the leader of the Irish republic, was holding a summit meeting in his kitchen between the heads of state of the world superpowers, Russia, China, America and Ireland,” she wrote in the Guardian. “In order to demonstrate the cultural inferiority of the United States, he was eating a Beach Boys album.”

“Satire and Speculation”
by Paul Krassner
December 21, 2007

A few years ago, in my last album, right after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, I talked about how furious Senators and congressmen were, looking at such photos as a prisoner forced to wear women’s panties on his head and a naked prisoner with a dog collar attached to a leash held by a woman who is pointing at the man’s penis and laughing. Why were those legislators sputtering with such rage? Because THEY have to pay EXTRA for those services.

Now, I asked Sam Leff–given his background as an anthropologist studying and writing about the hidden rituals of American sadomasochism–for his take on the CIA’s cover-up of torture videos.

“I have been watching with fascinated horror,” he said, “as America’s S/M patterns of culture have emerged into the open in the Abu Ghraib/Gitmo Bush administration. I’ve been flashing on some clear images of the fratboy reality underlying the White House torture tape controversy.

“Picture this. Bush and Karl Rove sitting around a big plasma screen (drinking beer?) and laughing their asses off watching helpless prisoners drowning under a waterboard, or naked getting cigarette burns, or maybe having analgesic balm applied to their genitals.

“Once the existence of the tapes became known, their cover story is that they were having a big discussion about whether or not to keep or destroy the torture tapes. Like that old pervert, J. Edgar Hoover, the reality is they were getting off looking at them as sadistic porn–over and over. Perhaps sharing them with the ‘frat brothers’ of their inner circle.”

Indeed, in November 2005, Garry Trudeau was queried by Editor & Publisher about his Doonesbury strip the previous Sunday which had George Bush defending the branding of Yale University fraternity initiates with a red-hot coat-hanger in 1967, and Trudeau replied that it was “Totally fact based. Bush’s comment in panel seven is a direct quote.” He was referring to the collegiate Bush saying, “Insignificant! There’s no scarring mark physically or mentally!”

Some pledges told the Yale Daily News that their branding was preceded by a physical beating. Said one: “By that time, my body was so numb [from the beatings] that the iron felt good, like a match was being held close to my body.” Bush, who was president of the fraternity, said that the resulting wound was “only a cigarette burn.” Or maybe enhanced pledging technique.

Paul Krassner is the author of One Hand Jerking: Reports From an Investigative Satirist, and publisher of the Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster, both available at paulkrassner.com