Thursday, June 24, 2010

Artisanal Document Destruction

In order to keep nosy paparazzi and garbage-trawlers away from my financial details, I purchased a decent shredder. It makes fine short strips and would possibly thwart even the reassembly skills of Iranian Revolutionaries.

But my shredder is mechanized and mindless and has no soul. No élan vital. So I've decided to rend my papers by hand, with the help of the 5-bladed shredding hand scissors available at the retailer MicroCenter.Soon, shredding will once again be an act of personal expression and fulfillment.

[I may be prepared to provide this service for a fee for the discerning and profligate who appreciate sustainable craftsmanship.]

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Shoe-bury-ness? Really?

With a punishing austerity budget due to descend upon Britain (my thoughts are with you), it's time for lefty troubadour Billy Bragg to speak up for the ragged masses.

Let's get enthused about road maintenance with his stirring song A13 Trunk Road to the Sea, which is basically (Get Your Kicks on) Route 66. Kind of.



Lyrics [with notes] from Braggtopia
:

A13 TRUNK ROAD TO THE SEA

If you ever have to go to Shoeburyness
Take the A road, the OK road that's the best
Go motorin' on the A13

If you're looking for a thrill that's new
Take in Fords [The Ford factory in Dagenham], Dartford Tunnel [Road tunnel under the River Thames to the east of London] and the river [The River Thames] too
Go motorin' on the A13

It starts down in Wapping
There ain't no stopping
By-pass Barking [Billy Bragg's birthplace] and straight through Dagenham
Down to Grays Thurrock
And rather near Basildon
Pitsea, Thundersley, Hadleigh, Leigh-On-Sea,
Chalkwell, Prittlewell
Southend's the end

If you ever have to go to Shoeburyness
Take the A road, the OK road that's the best
Go motorin' on the A13

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Goat Confiscation in Virginia


Bedford authorities find goat in trunk at DUI checkpoint

"She told deputies she is from the United Kingdom and transporting goats in this manner is acceptable there."

According to Ms.
Enderdy--who said she had kindly obtained the animal as a pet for her four Kenyan passengers--the standards of caprine conveyance in the UK are lamentable. Please, Britishers, leave your livestock handling practices behind when you come to the USA.

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Life By the Throat-- With Dijeridoo

Wilhelm Reich was a castoff of early psychoanalysis who believed that the energy of life, including that from orgasms, was a distinguishable and collectible force called "orgone energy." An orgone accumulator could be built (and he built them-- in part for which he was imprisoned in the USA and his books were burned) which would enable those positioned in the small cabinet to be revitalized by the forces of life and of ecstasy

Yes indeed, that's a schematic outline of part of the most prurient of Reich's ideas.

The Serbian filmmaker Dusan Makavejev used those Reichian themes and more to shape a "70's ludicrous," * tedious and hilarious movie called WR: Mysteries of the Organism in 1971.

Makavejev subsequently made a well received "serious" movie called Montenegro in 1981 dealing with political themes from his native Yugoslavia and beyond.

Four years later, for some reason we can only celebrate, an international consortium paid for Makevejev to create a sublime concoction of politics, commerce, surreal humor, cultural imperialism and romantic comedy called The Coca-Cola Kid. Eric Roberts plays a good-ole southern boy sent to the Australian outback to capture for American business the drinking habits of one of the few places in the world that had not yet succumbed to Coke.

It's a universal movie; it resonates more over the decades. It features a luminous Greta Scacchi. It has fewer Australians than expected in lead roles. And yet, as a character in the following clip jests, it's "As Australian as a barbed wire canoe. It's as Australian as a shit sandwich."

This movie will repay your attention but it's not what you expect.

Behold Neil Finn of Crowded House toying with the American corporatist for all he's worth and then performing the best Coca-Cola jingle that the corporation would never allow to represent it.



Lyrics:

Don't want to go
Where there's no Coca-Cola

You've got

Life by the throat
When you're drinking Coke

Choke back the tears
When there's no Coca-Cola

You've got

Life by the throat
When you're drinking Coke

Under the hot sun
When the day is done
And you're dying of thirst
There's only one drink
It's universal

Don't want to go
Where there's no Coca-Cola

You've got

Life by the throat
When you're drinking Coke
Choke back the tears
When there's no Coca-Cola

You've got

Life by the throat
When you're drinking Coke
Life by the throat
When you're drinking Coke

Life by the throat
When you're drinking Coke
Keeps you up 'cause
there's nothing like Coke


* Footnote: "70's ludicrous" is a category of films from the late sixties through the seventies that are bold, experimental, "counter-cultural," sometimes tedious and often outrageous. It's my own designation. I know it when I see it.
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