AUGUST 29 — EDWARD CARPENTER
British poet, gay liberationist, socialist.
AUGUST 29, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
Vevey, France: SWISS WINEGROWERS’ FÊTE, a revival of the Roman
Festival of Ceres, Goddess of the Earth, complete with Ceres, Pales,
Bacchus, Old Silenus, satyrs and fauns — and Swiss yodelers.
ALSO ON AUGUST 29 IN HISTORY…
1533 — Atahualpa, last Incan emperor, put to death by conquistador Pizarro.
1758 — First U.S. Indian reservation established; will serve as model for Hitler.
1809 — Breakfast autocrat Oliver Wendell Holmes born, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
1844 — British gay poet, socialist Edward Carpenter born, Brighton, England.
1877 — Mormon “propheteer” Brigham Young born.
1920 — Jazz great Charlie “Bird” Parker hatched, Kansas City, Missouri.
1970 — Huey Newton offers Black Panther troops to the North Vietnamese.
1992 — Radical analyst and schizo-theorist Félix Guattari dies, Paris, France.
A bushel of sawdust and a low-tech composting toilet used for compost collection.
Your Crap, Our Compost: Squat and the earth shall grow . By Sisi Tang In These Times
Poop.
A generally fecal-phobic society reacts to the thought with a mix of snickering interest and fearful aversion, all dispatched in a single flush. But Nance Klehm, 43-year-old urban forager and grower, transforms human excrement into nutritious soil one bucket at a time.
Klehm’s Humble Pile, a local do-it-yourself human waste composting project, introduces a backyard alternative to the machine-churning, power-draining waste-processing facilities tucked away in remote locations.
“I’m not treating it chemically. I trust microorganisms to do it for me,” Klehm says.
In early 2008, Klehm sent letters and humorous surveys to households in six Chicago neighborhoods, calling on potential participants to help “transform waste into fertility, pollution into resource, and isolation into connection.”
With no need for “Compost 101” instruction, complex machinery, electricity or water, Humble Pile asked its 22 volunteer “nutrient loopers” to opt for dry buckets with snap-on toilet seats when nature calls.
“This is an except from a track from my forthcoming Catsup Plate LP, Of Bonds in General. (The track is 15 minutes long in its full form…) It’ll be available in October/Novemberish as a vinyl LP with some complicated packaging courtesy of Mr. Rob Carmichael of Cplate/SEEN, and will come with a download card. It will also be available for download via Catsup Plate. No CD, the world doesn’t seem to need them anymore.
“This record has been in the works for a long time, the title coming from a text by Italian heretical monk/philosopher/magician Giordano Bruno on the doing and undoing of erotic bonds through magical manipulation of images. The record is the result of three years, two bad break-ups with Gemini women, a sample of 15th century Franco-Flemish composer Josquin Desprez, and massive consumption of Steve Reich, Theo Parrish and Metal Machine Music, all mixed in the Central Fire.
“I have also formed a band with poet and 50 Ft. Women member Elaine Kahn, who I accompanied last summer on the No More Bush tour. We’re called Coelom. We’re working on our first two records right now.”
• ACCIDENTAL GUNFIRE AND UNEXPECTED NUDITY: Doug Fine is a journalist who lives on a remote solar-powered ranch somewhere outside of Silver City, New Mexico. The founding of said ranch is chronicled in his sometimes corny but ultimately pretty fascinating book, Farewell, My Subaru. In the years since, Fine has remained almost entirely off-the-grid, save for the digital connectivity by which he maintains his career as a writer, as well as his blog: Dispatches from The Funky Butte Ranch. This has led him to consider how well he would do in a real grid-crash and the ensuing collapse of mainstream civilization that might soon follow in an essay called “In The Year 2049: Would I Survive A Worst-Case Scenario?” How would he mine the perimeter of his compound? Who would make his shoes? It’s especially entertaining to compare the responses of his city-dwelling pals who are all like “you’re nuts everything’s gonna be fine” and his fellow ranchers who are like “that’s a good idea about the mines.” [Dispatches from the Funky Butte Ranch]
• DO YOU EVER PLAN ON EATING OUT IN LOS ANGELES?Pulitzer-Prize winning food critic Jonathan Gold’s “99 Essential LA Restaurants” is a delightful read even if you don’t plan on dining out in Southern California anytime soon: It’s a journey from the obscure meats of Vietnamese strip mall joints to the finest haute cuisine, and as such it’s one of the best impressionistic portraits of what makes Los Angeles such a strange, delicious town. He’s known to compare tacos and noodles to different varieties of cocaine, he follows Spanish-language media in order to keep up with Mexican-American chefs and says things like this about a Korean spot out in Torrance:
We are as jingoistic about fried chicken as the next guy, and we’ve been to dives in Louisiana where the chicken was so good it made a roomful of testosterone-crazed roustabouts weep like your mother’s bridge club that time Steel Magnolias came on TV. But Korean fried chicken really is an evolutionary leap forward — steeped in a cabinet full of spices, saturated with garlic, double-fried to a shattering, thin-skinned snap dramatic enough to wake a sleeping baby in an adjoining room.
The new edition is available this week — this is gonna be the first time we pick up a hard copy of the LA Weekly since, well, Gold’s list from last year — and you can also read it online. [LA Weekly]
• ON BECOMING ONE MORE HORSE’S ASS: After 12 weird years of living in Los Angeles, California, I’m moving to Marfa, Texas early next week. Fitting that the sky above my house in Atwater Village is dominated by a massive plume of smoke rising from a forest fire in the San Gabriel Mountains; it always feels good to commence an exodus under a rain of ash. Chambo’s Internet Activity Pages shall resume upon activation of Arthur’s Marfa Station. [Bobby Bare – “One More Horse’s Ass”]
• SPEAKING OF MARFA: Yacht recorded their most recent album, See Mystery Lights, down there in West Texas. They’re giving away copies of the instrumental version over at the Free Music Archive and I am going to be playing it all weekend — along with lots and lots of Doug Sahm — while I load the moving truck. [Free Music Archive]
AUGUST 28 — E. P. THOMPSON British radical social historian and anti-war activist.
AUGUST 28, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS FESTIVAL OF NEON REVOLUTION.
ALSO ON AUGUST 28 IN HISTORY… 1749 — Writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe born, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. 1882 — Anarchist Praxedis Gilberto Guerrero born, Los Altos de Ibarra, Mexico. 1903 — Utopian nature planner F. Law Olmsted dies, Belmont, Massachusetts. 1916 — Radical American sociologist C. Wright Mills born, Waco, Texas. 1919 — Seattle mayor demands “hang or incarcerate all anarchists for life.” 1993— British Marxist historian E. P. Thompson dies, Upper Wick, Worcester.
A brief illustrated history of the U.S. presidency told by the presidents themselves in the style favored by modern social networking web sites, Forty Four Presidents imagines 220 years of presidential succession pancaked into a single moment — documented simultaneously by each commander-in-chief in status updates designed for easy consumption by their Facebook friends. Each status update is accompanied by a jaunty, high-contrast profile picture intended to reflect something of the essential personality (and hotness) of the president.
Inimitable Cartoonist and Fine Human Being Anders Nilsen has pulled together some great artwork for an even greater cause: health care reform. The participating artists are:
John Porcellino, Genevieve Elverum, Chris Ware, Ivan Brunetti, Dan Clowes, Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie), Jeffrey Brown, Paul Hornschemeier, Todd Baxter, Sonnenzimmer Print Studio, Adam Henry, Kevin Huizenga, Jay Ryan (The Bird Machine Print Studio), Lynda Barry, Lilli Carre, David Heatley, Kyle Obriot, Stephen Eichhorn, Buenaventura Press, Sammy Harkham and the organizer, Anders Nilsen.
And you can (and should) see all the artwork up for auction by searching for 46 Million on eBay.
The proceeds will go to Democracy for America Now, a national advocacy group running television ads to push the Public Option in democratic swing districts and offering support to congressional members who take a stand for the policy.
In light of recent events, this is a desperate attempt to do something rather than just sit idly by while a few giant corporations with something to lose goad a gullible few into scaring their elected representatives away from real change. We’re doing this because the richest country the planet has ever known has no excuse to not take care of its citizens. We rank 37th in the world in overall health care performance, according to the World Health Organization. Right now a million Americans declare bankruptcy every year because of lack of adequate insurance. Hundreds of billions of dollars are wasted on redundant and impenetrable insurance company bureaucracies. We spend vastly more money on health care and wind up with far worse outcomes than other comparable countries. For many of the artists involved in this auction, a real health care bill is exactly the kind of reason we voted for Obama and Congressional Democratic majorities last Fall. To sit by and do nothing while Obama’s first significant initiative twists in the wind is simply not an option.
Like millions of other working Americans, a lot of artists and freelancers in this country are denied affordable health insurance simply because they are self employed. Making access to health care dependant on a person’s employment status is arbitrary and unsustainable.
“Dr. Pek van Andel was a natural choice to investigate how somebody had attached a dried bull’s penis to the Oxford ox.”
• DID YOU KNOW THAT VIDEO IS A PR0N?: This is a scientist-made porno movie called “Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal.” It’s maker, Dr. Pek van Andel, seems to be a deeply pervy researcher who is able to conjure funding so that he can pay people to copulate in an MRI chamber. The narrator suggests that this video is of interest to “specialists,” as well as “laypersons who have an interest in reproductive anatomy” which is, y’know, pretty much everybody with a working pair of ovaries or testes, right? If you really are curious about such things — and not just for onanistic ends — then click here to read the New Scientist article with all the dirty details. And if you’re just watching because this is the sort of thing gets you wet, just wait ’til you check out the totally NSFW X-ray blowjob pics that have been in the top five posts over at Ballardian for the last year solid. HUBBA HUBBA! [New Scientist via The eXiled]
• READING RAINBOWS: When Stephen Beachy was 19, he took some acid and wandered into a “room full of cadavers.” “Whoah,” he said. Beachy colors his micro-reviews of “12 hallucinogenic novels and 8 inebriated memory pieces” with plenty more such anecdotes, guiding the lysergically-minded reader through canonical works from P.K. Dick and Burroughs, along with underexposed masterpieces; my personal favorite being Denis Johnson’s oft-maligned psychedelic California noir, Already Dead. [SFBG]
• TOO HIGH ON A MOUTAINTOP: Look, just to get this out of the way right off: The guys and gals that sit in trees with, like, a bowl of oatmeal and a hacky sack and manage to stop burly fuckers in bulldozers with giant bags full of explosives from BLOWING THE BRAINS OUT OF MOUNTAINS across Appalachia are H-E-R-O-E-S. Of all time. True heroes. Build a statue and we should all lay flowers down in front of it until the end of days. Click here to go read about all of their laudable activities in Grist.
But when they put their video up and it’s them sitting in a tree in West Virgina with hyper-earnest folk music about “grandaddy workin’ in da mountains/unlike the ‘splosion miners of 2day” it sucks all the swagger out of the thing. I understand why these fighters can’t go up there with shotguns and just cap anybody who thinks it’s a good idea to “remove” a mountain, but at least they could score it with jams that sound a little more, I dunno, aggravated. Next time let’s make one of these videos with Lightning Bolt or something like Wolves in the Throne Room’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” or maybe “Hate Crystal” if you still want to keep some of the crusty vibrations. Otherwise you’re unnecessarily wimping it up in front of the whole group. Like Jensen says, “this is war.” [Grist] • BOIL ME UP SOME BACON AND SOME BEANS: “I never knew baked beans could be such a triumph, such a prayer, such a song,” says Pioneer Woman in her introduction to this recipe for “Best Baked Beans Ever.” What is the secret of these tasty beans? “Start with eight slices of bacon …” and it just goes from there. [The Pioneer Woman via Serious Eats]
I was lucky enough to get a 14-minute test ride with this device a couple days ago, courtesy Mitch himself (and Scott Beibin), and can personally attest to its efficacy. Mitch says they should be available commercially soon, retailing for $40. Something like this is long overdue, especially given that Brion Gysin’s dream machine, which works on a similar principle, was developed decades ago. Experienced meditators and psychonauts will recognize the spaces in consciousness that your brain travels to with the aid of this device; others are in for a pleasant, overwhelming shock. It’s like a trailer for an actual psilocybin or LSD trip, or for what you may experience in deeper meditation. Wonderful, much needed—and totally subversive. Well done, Mitch!
Here’s some video with some other folks trying out the Trip Glasses..
Arthur Magazine 