Pretty Sad
About a week ago, I visited the subject of the Bush attack ad, “Kerry’s Coalition of the Wild-eyed” (see: Jackie Would NEVER Have Let Jack Put Hitler in an Attack Ad!). If you had a chance to view the original Bush ad, you might be interested in this remix...
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May Day! May Day!
While I’m on the subject of collected images, there is a wonderful photo gallery of May Day 2004 protests at the Design Action Collective website. Located in Oakland, California, Design Action provides graphic design services to many grassroots and activist groups including Greenpeace, Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids and...
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Israeli Soldiers: There’s Shooting and There’s Shooting
One of the themes I’ve been tracking for the past few months is the “unofficial” circulation of wartime images. Although there have been many unofficial photos and video journals posted by and from soldiers over the past couple years, Abu Ghraib has brought the practice into sharper focus. The...
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Bush’s Monica Moment
Yes, it has been a year since memoryhole posted video documentation of how Bush reacted (or failed to react) to the news of the 9/11 attacks. In what is often referred to as the “first pass of history,” however, the country is only now beginning to fit the facts...
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Baghdad Freestyle
Michael Tucker, who had two stays in Iraq and was embedded during the second trip, is making a film about the war. His site, Gunnerpalace.com, is part journal, part overview of the project. What’s particularly nice are two video clips he shot. One involves a soldier playing a Hendrix-style...
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Hapi To Have That Over With
Either Team Schwarzenegger is extremely good at managing the p.r., the press is not interested in getting after Arnold right now, or it’s some combination of both. Maybe someone can help me, but try as I might, I could not find one movie still of Arnold in the role...
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The Last Great Republican War
Another offering in this season’s steady stream of political documentaries is The Hunting Of The President. According to the website: “Harry Thomason and Nickolas Perry’s incendiary documentary, based on the best-selling book by Gene Lyons and Joe Conason, offers a glimpse at the genesis of … partisan vendettas and...
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Under “Tasteless” In Websters
I know as well as anyone that humorists deserve the widest latitude. However, Dennis Miller sunk pretty low with this riff on the Abu Ghraib photos. Maybe he was going for the idea that people quickly become desensitized to these kinds of images. On the other hand, maybe he...
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Bowling For Michael Moore
This was posted today at Alternative Press Review (The “What Really Happened” site is a little idiosyncratic, but the story seems to check out.): “So desperate are Bush Republicans to kill Michael Moore’s latest film, Fahrenheit 9/11, they have hired a public relations firm to set up a web...
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Uplink Of An Eye
Yesterday, I mentioned two highly regarded political films aiming for a general audience. I forgot to mention one other. “Control Room,” is a documentary by Jehane Noujaim which premiered at the Sundance Festival in January. (Joujaim was the director of “Startup.com” about the decline and fall of an internet...
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Starring Big Brother
The challenge of a political film aimed at a broader audience is to be hard hitting without compromising dramatic or entertainment value. The Corporation, favorable reviewed in the the New York Observer, chronicles the most dominant institution in modern culture. According to it’s website, the film “is a critical...
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Beyond The Barb Wire
As the fallout from Abu Ghraib continues to reverberate, one way media and government seems to be responding is by taking a fresh look at the condition of people who are incarcerated or living under adverse political circumstances. Recently, I came across interactive pieces that reflect each condition. An...
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Memorial Car
Because it’s Memorial Day (and, perhaps, because the Administration has tried intensely for weeks to suppress attention to American losses) there couldn’t be a higher awareness today about the human cost of war. What brought some of the reality to me was a photo piece in yesterday’s NYT Week...
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And Porcupines Shall Overrun Her Houses
This photo, shot in 1956, is of the ruins of Babylon. It’s from a series of vintage photographs of Iraq from the University of California Riverside’s Museum of Photography. Looking at the ruins of mighty Babylon, I found myself ruminating on the nature of empire. They rise, they fall,...
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Bush, The “War” On Terror, And The Black Panthers: It Aint Just Black And White
In the bubble of the White House, Bush and Co. seem convinced they can aggressively and unilaterally pursue war in Iraq one day, then suddenly back-off and “finesse” the whole thing with a “Mission Accomplished” gesture the next. If it had been six months ago, the spin probably would...
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Glowing Parody
As far as low denominator, anti-nuke, flash animation goes, “Lil Suzy And Atomic Energy” (at virgilcrow.com) delivers the goods. I especially like the narrator. Click HERE to view.
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Free Speech
When Smoking Gun released this “home movie” clip of President Bush at a wedding party in 1992, the story line had to do with alcohol. Of course, the fact that Bush teases his friends for not drinking, and looks like he’s having a beer, is noteworthy because of the...
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One Man’s Idea Of A Good Time
So Limbaugh thinks the torture of Iraqi prisoners was just a few people “having a good time?” Here is the Media Matters tv spot calling the so-called commentator on the carpet. It’s clean and to the point. Windows media format MPEG-4 (higher quality) (This image is the work of...
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