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February 27, 2005
Heaven & HellThe latest issue (#27) of the US based cult film zine SHOCK CINEMA has interviews with Bill Duke (Predator), Jon Finch (Polanski's MacBeth), producer Sean S. Cunningham (Friday The 13th, Last House On The Left), director Ken Russell (Altered States, The Devils) and "a visit with" Vic Diaz, a filipino actor who died in '95.
Also: The usual motherload of ultra obscure film, book and magazine reviews.
As editor Steven Puchalski puts it: "Shock Cinema covers everything a self-respecting film-junkie could possibly desire -- from Cult Movies and Arthouse Oddities, to old fashioned Drive-In Swill and Underground Obscurities."
 Films reviewed this time includes:
Victoria Principal in The Naked Ape;
Tim Kincaid's grindhouse epic Riot on 42nd St.;
Ryuichi Hiroki's Vibrator;
Charles Nizet's sleazy psycho-fest The Ravager;
the British sci-fi-paranoia faux-documentary Alternative 3;
the anti-civil rights propaganda film Anarchy U.S.A.;
Jim McBride's Hot Times;
Georgi Daneliya's absurd Russian sci-fi Kin-Dza-Dza!;
H.H. Holmes: America's First Serial Killer;
Nancy Kwan and Ross Hagen in Wonder Women;
the Chiller Theatre documentary UnConventional;
Enki Bilal's Immortal: Ad Vitam;
Telly Savalas' musical TV-special Telly... Who Loves Ya, Baby?;
Kamal Ahmed's God Has a Rap Sheet; '
Orson Welles' uncompleted The Other Side of the Wind;
Fantomas, Fantomas Strikes Back and Fantomas vs. Scotland Yard;
Umberto Lenzi's The Cynic, the Rat and the Fist;
Pig Chicken Suicide;
Paige Richards in the bio-pic Bettie Page: Dark Angel;
Frank Grow's hallucinogenic Love God;
Taikan Suga's Blister; Maskeli Seytan [The Mask Of Satan];
Klaus Kinski and Mel Ferrer in The Net;
William Shatner and Kim Darby in The People and MANY more.
Most remarkable to people living over here in Norway is the review of the newly english-subtitled "impossibly rare" dvd-r of the the Norwegian drug-scare drama Heaven and Hell ("Himmel & Helvete") from 1969, starring Lillebjørn Nilsen and Sigrid Huun. This film by Øyvind Vennerød piles on the horrors-of-drugs clichees so thick you won't believe your eyes. Available from Shocking Videos.
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February 26, 2005
The Men Who Stare at GoatsNah, we're not talking about the "romantic" hobbies in rural districts here, but parapsychological warfare at the highest level. The US government heard that the sovjets were doing research into invisibility and walking thru walls during the cold war. So they had to compete. One of the experiments was to gather a bunch of goats, then staring at them in the vain hope that they might just DIE from it. If looks could kill, huh?
 Jon Ronson, who wrote the book THEM on cults and secret societies a few years back, has now written THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS. Americans can rest in comfort that their tax dollars were well spent ...
From the description: "With first-hand access to the leading players in the story, Ronson traces the evolution of these bizarre activities over the past three decades and shows how they are alive today within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and in postwar Iraq. Why are they blasting Iraqi prisoners of war with the theme tune to Barney the Purple Dinosaur? Why have 100 debleated goats been secretly placed inside the Special Forces Command Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina? How was the U.S. military associated with the mysterious mass suicide of a strange cult from San Diego? The Men Who Stare at Goats answers these and many more questions."
18:27
February 25, 2005
Radioactive Raunch!!!Robin Bougie's consistantly ultra entertaining and great looking trash film zine CINEMA SEWER has a new issue out! No. 16 has the following:
• A massive 8 page look at the history of Post Apocalyptic movies! From "The Aftermath" to "Warriors of the Wasteland" -- it's all here in all it's post-nuke glory! And wouldja look at that on-topic cover by Danny Hellman?! BOOM!
 • Breaking news about "The Young Marrieds" a locally discovered Ed Wood movie with hardcore sex - previously thought to be lost forever!
• A dirty, dirty, dirty 2 page comic starring classic cum princess Rene Bond! Damn, my pants are getting tighter!
• A spotlight on comic artist/movie reviewer Rick Trembles, and his new animated film "Goopy Spasms"!
• Colin Upton does a comic about "Doggy Poo", and the world mourns.
• A Louise Brooks pin up by Kim Deitch!
• An insane religious anti-movie tract from 1938! Laugh at the bizarre notions of freedom from obscenity your grandparents had! This one asks for readers to ".. burn down the movie screens!"
• Sinister Sam delves into the gothic spanish chills of Amando De Ossorio's "Horror of the Zombies"
• "KitKat Experiment #17", one of the most extreme and misogynistic porn titles to come out of Germany in recent years, is put under a microscope
• John Holmes and his massive cock steam up the screen with sex superstar Seka on Nazi love island in "Prisoner of Paradise"
• Porn starring the victims of the terrorist bombings in Bali? Yep, it's the tasteless "Bali Boom Boom", and CS has got the review!
• A walk down memory lane with Ed Varulo, who details his amazing experiences seeing porn movies on New York's 42nd street in the late 70's.
• A detailed and illustrated account of Lee Frost's "Climax of Blue Power", a classic rough and nasty shit-scab of a movie, as well as his 1974 exploitation classic "PoliceWomen"!
• A Shaw Brothers martial arts DVD roundup! I'm talkin' remastered and restored '70s kung fu classics avialable on DVD for the very first time!
• A filthy comic about the Mitchell Brothers "Sodom and Gomorrah"!
• An interview with the stars of the finest cable access TV show in America: Industrial Television!
• A torrid look at Japanese Sekuban and Naked Asian nuns, with stunning art by Mike Myhre!
• George Chacon reminisces about his lusty teenage kicks at the Crestview Drive in!
• All this and mounds of other reviews, crazy readers letters, and plenty more!
Also, check out the upcoming daily comix marathon at www.livejournal.com/users/bougieman
17:35
February 02, 2005
Two new Ballard books from V. Vale's Re/SearchFrom www.eastbayexpress.com (by Anneli Rufus)
Tomorrow never knows -- or does it?: As the man credited with launching the contemporary tattoo and body-modification movements almost single-handedly, UC Berkeley grad V. Vale has been called a prophet. His 1989 book Modern Primitives (RE/Search, $19.50) inspired a generation to ink, pierce, and decoratively scar itself, not to mention branding itself with hot metal and rerouting its genitals. But the native San Franciscan writer and publisher, whose own flesh has reached middle age without a mark, is now crusading to make America venerate an even more illustrious seer. J.G. Ballard Quotes (Re/Search, $19.99) compiles thousands of tidbits from the author of Crash and Empire of the Sun, both of which were made into films.
The author of more than forty books, Ballard -- who lives in Britain and has been scarcely published Stateside -- has always predicted the future with amazing and eloquent accuracy. Forty years ago -- eons before porn Web sites and chatrooms -- he wrote: "Sex times technology equals the future." Eons ago too, he mused darkly that the future would be governed "by competing systems of psychopathology." He has called cell phones "the protective cocoon" that allows users to "discreetly theatricalize themselves." Perhaps his darkest prediction of all was: "Does the future have a future?"
In 1972, Vale discovered Ballard's book Love and Napalm: Export USA [aka The Atrocity Exhibition] in a secondhand bookshop. "It was completely prophetic. He predicted the election of Ronald Reagan 25 years before it happened." Ballard's 1973 novel Crash explores "the psychosexual implications of owning an automobile. He posited that a lot of people latently wish they would be in a car crash, because for most people today, a car crash will be the single most exciting event that they live through -- if they live through it.
"J.G. Ballard is the most relevant living philosopher. He's virtually unknown in America, yet he has psychoanalyzed the predicament of the near future, of the -- I hate to call it -- technofascistic society we're becoming." The death of Ballard's crony William Burroughs in 1997 "made me wake up and think, 'Hey, I've gotta do something about Ballard,'" says Vale, whose huge collection of rare Ballardiana assembled over three decades provided source material for this book.
And will Vale's daughter, now nine, be getting tattooed or pierced? "Not while I'm paying the rent," the trendsetter asserts.
Re/Search Publications
10:48
Ward Churchill in 9/11 media firestormThis just in from anarchist publisher AK Press out of San Francisco:
AK Press Author Under AttackAfter finding himself at the center of a media firestorm -- and receiving a barrage of death threats -- AK Press author, Ward Churchill, has stepped down from his position as Chair of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado. Not satisfied with this, Colorado Governor Bill Owens is demanding that Ward resign his position as a tenured professor as well.
The controversy is based on an essay Ward wrote soon after 9-11, which he later expanded into an AK Press book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality. Conservative protestors used the essay to force Hamilton College in New York to cancel a speaking engagement Ward had scheduled there. The mainstream media (including Bill O'Reilly and Fox News) has picked up the story, distorting and misrepresenting the facts, as usual.
AK Press wishes to voice our support for Ward in this struggle -- in terms of both his well-researched analysis of factors that contributed to the 9-11 attacks and his right to express that analysis in public without having his life and livelihood threatened.
Below, we've provided some links to articles describing the controversy, followed by the press release Ward issued. We also recommend that you read On the Justice of Roosting Chickens yourself, rather than relying on the media's version on it. Individuals can order it here: http://www.akpress.org
The book is available to bookstores and to the trade in general from Consortium Book Sales and Distribution at: http://www.cbsd.com or 1-800-283-3572
Media Coverage:www.rockymountainnews.com
www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn
www.thedenverchannel.com
Ward Churchill's Press Release:January 31, 2005
In the last few days there has been widespread and grossly inaccurate media coverage concerning my analysis of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, coverage that has resulted in defamation of my character and threats against my life. What I actually said has been lost, indeed turned into the opposite of itself, and I hope the following facts will be reported at least to the same extent that the fabrications have been.
* The piece circulating on the internet was developed into a book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. Most of the book is a detailed chronology of U.S. military interventions since 1776 and U.S. violations of international law since World War II. My point is that we cannot allow the U.S. government, acting in our name, to engage in massive violations of international law and fundamental human rights and not expect to reap the consequences.
* I am not a "defender"of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. I have never said that people "should" engage in armed attacks on the United States, but that such attacks are a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful U.S. policy. As Martin Luther King, quoting Robert F. Kennedy, said, "Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable."
* This is not to say that I advocate violence; as a U.S. soldier in Vietnam I witnessed and participated in more violence than I ever wish to see. What I am saying is that if we want an end to violence, especially that perpetrated against civilians, we must take the responsibility for halting the slaughter perpetrated by the United States around the world. My feelings are reflected in Dr. King's April 1967 Riverside speech, where, when asked about the wave of urban rebellions in U.S. cities, he said, "I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed ... without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government."
* In 1996 Madeleine Albright, then Ambassador to the UN and soon to be U.S. Secretary of State, did not dispute that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of economic sanctions, but stated on national television that "we" had decided it was "worth the cost." I mourn the victims of the September 11 attacks, just as I mourn the deaths of those Iraqi children, the more than 3 million people killed in the war in Indochina, those who died in the U.S. invasions of Grenada, Panama and elsewhere in Central America, the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, and the indigenous peoples still subjected to genocidal policies. If we respond with callous disregard to the deaths of others, we can only expect equal callousness to American deaths.
* Finally, I have never characterized all the September 11 victims as "Nazis." What I said was that the "technocrats of empire" working in the World Trade Center were the equivalent of "little Eichmanns." Adolf Eichmann was not charged with direct killing but with ensuring the smooth running of the infrastructure that enabled the Nazi genocide. Similarly, German industrialists were legitimately targeted by the Allies.
* It is not disputed that the Pentagon was a military target, or that a CIA office was situated in the World Trade Center. Following the logic by which U.S. Defense Department spokespersons have consistently sought to justify target selection in places like Baghdad, this placement of an element of the American "command and control infrastructure" in an ostensibly civilian facility converted the Trade Center itself into a "legitimate" target. Again following U.S. military doctrine, as announced in briefing after briefing, those who did not work for the CIA but were nonetheless killed in the attack amounted to no more than "collateral damage." If the U.S. public is prepared to accept these "standards" when the are routinely applied to other people, they should be not be surprised when the same standards are applied to them.
* It should be emphasized that I applied the "little Eichmanns" characterization only to those described as "technicians." Thus, it was obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in the 9-1-1 attack. According to Pentagon logic, were simply part of the collateral damage. Ugly? Yes. Hurtful? Yes. And that's my point. It's no less ugly, painful or dehumanizing a description when applied to Iraqis, Palestinians, or anyone else. If we ourselves do not want to be treated in this fashion, we must refuse to allow others to be similarly devalued and dehumanized in our name.
* The bottom line of my argument is that the best and perhaps only way to prevent 9-1-1-style attacks on the U.S. is for American citizens to compel their government to comply with the rule of law. The lesson of Nuremberg is that this is not only our right, but our obligation. To the extent we shirk this responsibility, we, like the "Good Germans" of the 1930s and '40s, are complicit in its actions and have no legitimate basis for complaint when we suffer the consequences. This, of course, includes me, personally, as well as my family, no less than anyone else.
* These points are clearly stated and documented in my book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, which recently won Honorary Mention for the Gustavus Myer Human Rights Award. for best writing on human rights. Some people will, of course, disagree with my analysis, but it presents questions that must be addressed in academic and public debate if we are to find a real solution to the violence that pervades today's world. The gross distortions of what I actually said can only be viewed as an attempt to distract the public from the real issues at hand and to further stifle freedom of speech and academic debate in this country.
Ward Churchill, Boulder, Colorado, January 31, 2005
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