The United Kingdom wakes up half naked covered in blood decides never to take George Bush drinking again

Apparently a governments ability to undermine the personal liberties is sort of like herpes in that if George rides you long and hard your sure to catch it. The UK is now under fire by for its draconian behavior after Tony Blair and George W. Bush Jagermeistered there way into the Iraq war. It turns out that while was draft the patriot at and declaring mission accomplished on health care, financial regulation, and the the war with Iran that's lets face it is gonna happen. Blair and the UK's Republican opposite number were leading the people of the Queens country into a similar hell-scape in which we all some day fight to death for rags gasoline and mating right for mohawked lady boys.

P.E.T.A and Lydia Guevara.: Keeping Crazy Alive, Women Naked and Fox News in buisness

PETA is the place whee logic goes to die. Any organization that equates slavery with the beef industry is eight lines of Bolivian marching powder into the party before anyones even started on there beers. After criticizing the President Barrack Obama for the merciless execution of a fly PETA has enlisted the help of Lydia Guevara, Che Guevara's granddaughter in order to promote its agenda bestial-fascism. Yeah she's hot in and you want to nibble on that carrot bandoleer until you see the face god in her sharp cheeks and weird green eyes god I want some carrots.

Blood the Last Vampire: What 's Japanese, Chinese, French, American and Red all over?

Everyone will remember the Blood the Last Vampire anime as a a gritty tease with an anticlimactic ending but Chris Nohan, French Director of the Jet Li film Kiss of the Dragon has managed to breathe some new life int to the underground anime icon. The movie is composed of two parts feminine bad ass and eight parts kung fu gang slaughter. Gianna Jun plays the damaged half-ling Saya who butchers her way through Tokyo, while Allison Miller admirably portrays the out of place character of Allison; the American army brat who was neither a part of the anime series cast of characters Blood the Last Vampire: Blood+ or the original short and is likely a way for the Nohan and the producers to make an English film based on a Japanese movie. Still the movie is entertaining enough to keep your interest until the end credits mostly because of the director's ability to create narrative out of a brawl.

Tehran is burning and the death of Neda: The Iranian Protest

I just found out that this woman's name was Neda. the first thing that caught me off guard was the fact that she wasn't wearing a hajib. Then there was the look in her eye the disappointed and reproachful as if she was sickened by the person holding the camera or whoever shot her or me for watching her die. Thanks to the crackdown on the media in Iran I'm just as clueless as the people a the 24 hour news stations when it comes to finding out how real this video is. If this woman really died, if the video was even shot in Iran these are the questions I can never hope to answer on my own. The mainstream media has become so reliant on the personal media that they might as well start writing checks to Google Twitter and Facebook. Its industry suicide because the safe little visual fictions of countries like Iran, countries with a contrary political and social set of anxieties as wasted third world shotting ranges where all the kids are wearing battered flip-flops with Mr. T and Thundercat t-shirts. In these videos Tehran looks like any European city on hot day like Los Angeles during the summer, and the people in the streets don't look like the desperate antisemitic hardliners we want to ignore. As presumptive president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the supreme Iranian leader the Ayatollah fade from the public eye and into the televised characters to the western world the Democratic Left and the Republican Right have some manipulated the violence on the street into their own conflict. The dead number somewhere around 160 and the media for its part have reduced the bloodshed to its most pity denominator Republicans circle jerking themselves into a self-righteous lather complaining that Obama hasn't been as obnoxious and belligerent enough to protect American interest while the Democratic party avoids them and tries to remind them in the most passive aggressive liberal way that "hey don't we have sit to do here after your guy fist fucked the economy and the health care system into a smoldering heap?" Can Western and particularly American intervention actually help the people on the streets of Tehran? Former president Rafsanjani's daughter Faezeh Hashemi was a vocal opponent of the election result has been arrested as well as several other politically prominent Iranians. Some Iranians think American involvement undermines the platform Mir-Hossein Mousavi ran as well as the validity of the protest against the results of the election. Allowing that then how are these youtube post for?

Neda: You tube authenticity WATCH THIS BEFORE THEY TAKE IT OFF LINE

I just found out that this woman's name was Neda. the first thing that caught me off guard was the fact that she wasn't wearing a hajib. Then there was the look in her eye the disappointed and reproachful as if she was sickened by the person holding the camera or whoever shot her or me for watching her die. Thanks to the crackdown on the media in Iran I'm just as clueless as the people a the 24 hour news stations when it comes to finding out how real this video is. If this woman really died, if the video was even shot in Iran these are the questions I can never hope to answer on my own. The mainstream media has become so reliant on the personal media that they might as well start right checks to Google Twitter and Facebook. Its industry suicide because the safe little visual fictions of countries like Iran, countries with a contrary political and social set of anxieties as wasted third world shotting ranges where all the kids are wearing battered flip-flops with Mr. T and Thundercat t-shirts. In these videos Tehran looks like any European city on hot day like Los Angeles during the summer, and the people in the streets don't look like the desperate antisemitic hardliners we want to ignore. As presumptive president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the supreme Iranian leader the Ayatollah fade from the public eye and into the televised identities

Notes from Oaktown III: Da Kids

My first day training with ARC, I felt like an atheist walking into a church for the first time. I didn't really know what to expect. I was in an anonymous building in downtown Oakland, the whole floor was vacant, the whole place smelled like freon. I was early so I waited for everyone to show up. the first to walk in was this old woman pulling a wire frame carry along behind filled with news paper clipping and books with frayed pages, walking with a limp. She had those long willowy jowls that make rowdy kids walk in the street when they see them dangling from an elderly chin of someone walking down the sidewalk. She told me that this was her ninth tutoring job, then she told me a story about a old black matriarch from Memphis who helped save black people from themselves by teaching them how to knit.

A few minutes later people started flooding in, all twenty minutes late and smiling and I felt a little jealous even after hearing that special little story. A guy came in carrying a fixie on his shoulder like a soldier carrying a riffle, behind him were three people: a girl and two guys, one thin and two heavy set (feel free to divide these attributes as you see fit on your own) all speaking Spanglish at a rate so fast that my socalian ear had no chance of catching up with them. A girl who smelled of wheat germ, sat down next me because, I was happy when she sat down, even though I hate the mealy weird taste, I like the smell of wheat germ. Another guy with a star wars Rebel tattoo sat down next to me and we began to chat.

Then the indoctrination started.


I. Breaking down

You want to destroy the candidates illusions of purpose and individuality One sentence I remember is "your not here to save these kids." and I kept thinking from what from who there parents? There teachers? Each other? I asked and got no answer the speaker went on

II."The teachers will not like you"

and I started to wonder why? Where just extra help right? Trying to assist these people and these kids to do there best. She went on.

III. Don't have any illusions

of course the illusions started flooding in right after she said that.I saw me, Me reaching a kid who needed help talking to a parent about why there weren't great report cards coming home, learning all the kids names really impossible stuff . Then I started having allusions why did she have to mention that twice why weren't any educational professional involved in this besides the ones pushing paper on the floor above us

IV. I don't really like No child Left behind either but.....

I had no idea we were even part NCLB until she said that. It wasn't in the advertisement on craigslist.com where, I guessed, most of the candidates in the room were drawn from.


On My first day as a tutor I was there before my sight coordinator. I was angry until I met with the coordinator. She had just come from another teaching job. She looked tired but pleasant so I helped her carry her work books into the school. I replacing a girl who had to leave after a familial tragedy. To the teacher's we are scabs. I can understand. What ever learning inconsistencies the testers at ARC finds reflects negatively on their whole, under funded, overpopulated classes. Their unions can do little to help. And there I am, the I am "tutor", the spy. The system sets us at odds.

These are my kids: D is a brilliant boy who knows it. He is rambunctious and distracting, mostly to me. English, is his second language but he handles it well enough to keep me entertained. He read my tattoo phonetically and the thing is in Latin. Then there is O and B, or Ohmidah and Berumazadahn, I like saying there names but I don't think they like hearing come out of my mouth. They're sisters and O has been helping B pretend to speaking English probably the whole time they've been in school; It's really very clever: O understands things quicker, but she's younger and teachers always expect her to try to get the answer from her older sister B, B is older and she actually has a tougher time learning English because of this fact. So really while O is "asking"B for the answers, B is actually getting the answers from O, leaving T(eachers) convinced that B grasps everything she's supposed to have learned. Then there's Rio who reminds me of myself. He was kicked out of the program because Rio can't read and has disciplinary issues.

You see Rio was never really taught to read but he has learned to use the same trick as O and B by himself.


Rio sees a new word.


Rio does not remember his old words and the sounds they make.


Rio gets frustrated and throws a fit, or leaves the room.


The first time I decided not to follow the ARC program, implemented based on the no child left behind protocol and requirements, I had Rio read to me while the other kids did their own reading and memorization work, Rio read perfectly spoke well and got most my questions about what she had just read correct. The next week I came to tutor he was gone.

Notes from Oaktown II

Did you know that Batman has detailed plans to kill every member of the Justice League?


Up the street from my house there's as truck parked near place named Hippie-crack park. A few days ago I saw a man with a heavy duty hikers back-pack carrying his daughter into the park and for a second fear scratched at the top of my head and I wondered about what the little girl would find behind a bench or under the perpetual piles of autumn leaves, those leaves that seem to find their way into my house, into the liquor store three house down from me, leaves the liquor store clerk's brother is constantly sweeping out onto the sidewalk while he yells at his older sibling in Farsi, leaves that I 'd seen everyday since I had moved to Oakland; perpetual autumn leaves. But when I saw the little girl walking toward the pile of moldering vegetation, in my mind I just saw her little hands gripping busted glass bulbs with speed residue settle at the bottom of them, of crack pipes with teeth jammed in them, discarded condoms, and copies of US Weekly and People; all I could think of was this little girl getting her little hands on theses, destructive, mind numbing things. I turned off my headphones and started to let the father know that his daughter was probably walking into her first case of herpes when I heard someone say, "What you worrying about dere young man?" Even though I had pretty much trained myself to tune out people on MLK I turned around to see who was talking to me.



Did you know Superman started out as a bald villain?

When I looked to the voice I saw skinny, short man with burnt brown skin and ashy white buds of dry skin for elbows. He was wearing boxy strange looking sun glasses, leaning out of his plain white utility truck with a cigarette dangling from his lip, flaking a perpetual stream of ash onto his wife beater. I tensed up when I realized I knew his face. I said "excuse me?" then he said
"I see you looking over at the park. If you had something stashed over there.. well if it's what I think it was I dumped in a garbage can and I ain't telling you where it is.
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"Your shit boy... the crack." He said.
I explained to him that I was trying to keep the little girl from catching flesh rot from all the crap that the crack-heads left in the park.
Really it wasn't much of a park; just a full asphalt basketball court, benches, and a sign that read MARCUS GARVEY PARK. Then he said.

"Let her daddy worry over her... I cleaned that place out yesterday anyway."
I asked him if he'd found anything interesting. People in my neighborhood, crack-heads homeless folks, broke hipsters, anarchist and hippie drifters are a part of Oakland's ecology. When someone moves or loses their place, any or all of these people swoop into to the place and assist in the decay of the former lodgers presence. Their stuff shows up in the park a lot of times. The man with the truck, whose name was "Freak Frank", who I had seen parked all over my adopted neighborhood, invited me to look inside his truck

Did you know that Batman was an alcoholic?

Now by then I had seen Freak Frank around the neighborhood like fifty time, yelling at crack-heads, being hassled by cops, or maybe leaning out of his window smoking a cigarette, surveying the sidewalk from his trucks window. He lived in the truck. On top of the truck was an igloo dog house and behind that solar panels but the truck was all a sort of grubby looking matte white. When he opened the back of the truck I finally caught a look at what was inside. The walls were covered in crap, brick-a-brack, and miscellanea; broken Power Rangers, tattered a Cal Berkeley T-shirts, a certificate for completion of an electricians program, burnt novels, weird looking things in jars, broken cellphones, shattered VCR's and VHS tapes; nothing I wanted, but what I noticed was that there was not sign of drug paraphernalia; not a pipe or screen or a roach. Frank was stone sober as far as I could tell.
"You cleaned this all out of the park?"
"Boy there ain't just one park out here. Besides I can't stay around one place. Gotta keep moving, they won't let a man stay still."
The name on the certificate was Franks and I'm pretty sure he wasn't a forger so I was guessing that the California seal wasn't fake.

Did you know that Ant-man nearly beat his wife to death?

"Why?" I asked
"Why what boy?" I was really getting tired of this boy shit but I pressed
"Why do you chase of the druggies? Pick up their crap and dump it all?"
"Cause all those motherfuckas want is to use stuff up and mess things up. And white folks already think that's all we do."
He had a point. I kind of understood what he was saying. I mean I scare people without even trying and sometimes it gets on my nerves.
White-guilt+Black rage=Black fear, Fear of Blacks.
But Oakland isn't Gotham or Metropolis or Bludhaven heroes get killed here. Of course Frank was crazy. After I had taken a look at all things I didn't want in the back of his truck, he handed me a pamphlet on solar energy, even though I told him I lived in an apartment. He said it didn't matter and that he would set it up. I told him that was O.K. when I realized there were solar panels of the roof of his truck but no wires or grounders or generators just a lot of shit found in parks and vacant houses around Oakland.

Notes from Oaktown I

I live on Martin Luther King in Oakland California and I am an negroid. I don't use this term around the people in my neighborhood because I do enjoy walking home without getting my face stomped in by the boys at Your Muslim Bakery the occasional Black Israelite and your random and insane 5 percenter (they are so crazed that I had to ad the word into my open office spell check memory... they've made up a word and now my work has to suffer for it...bastards.) but I will bust it out when I'm talking to the occasional guilty white intellectual near and around Berkeley and San Francisco, but it is nice to be in a place where there is even an illusory line to keep my racial social experimentation in check .

But somewhere around the edges things are slipping. Now I will say that I have no problem with people being peaceable, as long as it doesn't fuck up my ability to mock other people; the other day I watched as two families; a mother and her two large sons and three bigger daughters on one side of the street and on the other side three big guys and a very loud woman they called "gran ma ma", they were all fresh from the church three blocks down the street, some of the boys were still wearing their pleated slacks and the girls were busy taking down their hair extensions.

As I walked by them on my way to work I saw one of the women drop and flash her ass obviously trying to draw the debate to a close with the heavy gelatinous rebuttal.

Someone once told me that the average dog is only about three free meal away from becoming a wolf and the average cat one meal from becoming a bitchy lynx. So how far away is your doctor from using sharpened stone to lance your boils? From pissing on the wall of his hospital to establish his mating rights to all the females in the candy striper pool?

Religion, Hood-wealth, respect, and drugs are pumped in to the streets of Oakland and a hundred other of her twisted sister cities. They ruin on tragedy and justified pity. People (and you know who you are) need something to pity and some people need to fall.

Or at least that's what I tell myself
Some times when I pass a shack and ramble church I think of Jim Jones and when I see the crack-heads smiling on the porch and hear the people
People are primal because we are the ones who came up with the word its the shadow we run from.

Cats don't worry about going feral

They just go feral and some even enjoy the ride

Robo Dough: The Work of Eric Joyner

We want Robots. To clean for us, to cook for us. To keep us company. To remind us of who we are. And according to Eric Joyner 's new book Robots and Donuts we need them to halt the unholy onslaught of donuts from space.

Eric Joyner has complied nearly twenty years of paintings depicting battery powered, mechanized raiders and roughnecks and doughy fat saturated death rings. Mr Joyner's work show robots as icons of modern culture that have insinuated themselves into the most integral parts of our cultural consciousness. Recalling the genesis of his obsession with automatons Eric Joyner explains, “Back when I was in art school I used to go to these fair grounds about once or twice a year, and they’d have theses toy shows, that’s when I found all these tin toys…. I thought the people who would buy theses toys would buy my prints I really never expected it to be a big deal.” People did buy his prints, but they also bought into Joyner's preoccupation with tin toys. The toy robots at the fair ground were those mass manufactured in Japan following the countries reconstruction after WWII.
They are heavy pieces, of which Eric has hundreds and each model has its own personality. The robots in the world of Eric Joyner mimic us, becoming our illegitimate subconscious offspring. One of Mr. Joyner’s more arresting paintings depicts the conclusion of the famous fight between Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali, with Ali and Liston are replaced by those paragons of conflict the Rockem’ Sockem’ Robots. There is a diptych which depicts Eric’s star-bot Sparky hung by the neck from a rope tied to the roof of a cathedral. Some the images are fantastic, some are haunting , all are honest.

Joyner embraces the humanity of his automatons, the part of them that makes for good Issac Asimov stories and bad Will Smith movies. Sometimes they are contemplative sitting under willow trees or terrified by a cosmic incursion of marauding donuts “First I thought, 'Where would these robots be?' so I put them in space, so then I thought 'Where wouldn’t they be?' so I put them in bars, then I thought they needed a nemesis: donuts!" Eric’s logic has a seamless way about it, a mechanized rationale that revolves around these tin toys.
Sparky stands out from the dozens of tin faces, “I think [Sparky’s] Original name was Hiru. He has a lot of emotion, you know with those bulging eyes. He’s perfect for running away from donuts.” Sparky is attention addict to whom Eric rewards with a lot of canvass time. The paintings with Sparky are full of sexually aroused robots and machines that build other machines. A lot of questions are raised by Eric’s choice of subject and evocative imagery, questions concerning how we see ourselves in the design of things we build to help up us, to defend us from ourselves and to remind us of how to be people. Eric’s recent popularity in the film industry and in themed gallery circulation is due to his ability to articulate humanity though his paintings. Written and directed by Greg Grunberg Group Sex, a film about sexual addiction and advertising, will feature a cameo by Eric Joyner and his paintings. In San Jose his work is on display as part of ‘Robots: Evolution of an Icon’ at the San Jose museum of the arts. People are reacting to the humanity of Eric’s figures, Eric responds to the world that manufactures his subjects “I’ve been to the big comic conventions,” he said “you're always sitting at the you booth and your so excited to see someone…anyone.” Eric likes to have his work showcased to see how people react to humanity depicted in an automatic form. Some people look and can’t help themselves from smiling, others just let their eyes walk through the a world of painted man made of gears, pistons, and shafts and tin, driving suped up model T’s through Italian Villas and Tuscan roads drifting into something like nostalgia.
“I used to like Rockwell’s work. I admit it. I never really thought about it. I don’t think I paint like him”, Eric says commenting on how Americana has influenced his work. Like Rockwell, Joyner imagines a certain America but he takes that image into the stratosphere, the universes, and the boxing Ring. “I try to make a lot less sense than [Rockwell],” Joyner asserts and it is a goal worth having. The world of tin toys in bar fights, worker-bots addicted to the sweet sugary goodness of fried bread, a place where the sinister congealing saucers taunt and terrify tin toys.

Willingham's Mysteries

Willingham gives everyone who thought Jack was a a jerk and the wolf was a bad ass a chance to to severely warp there children...awesome.

It's been a long time Rami...Come get some.

Sam Rami takes a break form Toby McGuire and spandex to give the poor, dead, down trodden, and horrifically demonic a crack at some old fashion biblical revenge. (Sorry Fan Boys no Bruce Campbell cameo).

Sam Rami drags Alison Lohman to Hell!! YAY

Drag Me to Hell is a movie that comes to the public and gives them what they want to see when they need it, even if they don't know. Citizen Cane let America simultaneously envy and pity a rich tycoon during the end of the great depression and and the beginning of WWII, Rocky 4 made gave us a Microcosm of the cold war just as silly and costly as the real thing, and Soul Plane prepared black America for the depression, disgust, and devastation that would come with Hurricane Katrina. This film is all about finance in terms of both story and in terms of production. It was written well before Rami made his three spider man films which the untainted mainstream film fans will think of when the here his name. Rami wanted to make the film earlier but couldn't afford the director he wanted and ended up having to wait to see the film completed. The film gets pretty physical with bodies flung across the ceiling and possessed zombie puppets.

The plot revolves around a desperate bank employ trying to make her bones on a Gypsy at a time when the world hates bankers much more than Gypsies. An this film is a s messy as we would hope any thing from Rami could be. If you ever seen Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2, or Army of Darkness then you've been suffer for the last 17 years for fly witches spew slime and and guts from every orifice like decapitated sprinklers and cryptic and eerily accurate references to gypsy folklore that made the Roma scary even to the Nazi's thought they had to go. Alison Lohman is believe as the amiable but self centered loan officer. She gives you someone to route for while Rami pummels with glass blizzards and rancid old lady sputum. Lohman's torture is tinged with Schadenfreude as the world spins out of control due to the economic hell-storm caused by bankers like her character so seeing one thrown through a window or hunted by hell beast is more than cathartic. The effects were adequate but I expected more from the man who created the invisible hollowing forest demon from saga. But then can any thing really hope to stand up to a beast so horrifying that it permanently chiseled an WTF look on Bruce Campbell's face? There are three lessons you can take away from Drag Me To Hell; one: in movies gypsies are hot when they're young and beat when they're old, two: old people are not to be trusted, and three: bankers can sometimes get what they deserve if you know magic. Learn magic!

Best Line of the movie: "Did it get in my mouth?"

Children

The Murmur of the Innocents 8 2009
183 cm x 295 cm

Gottfried Helnwein in San Francisco you should there too.

Bitter Blood Spells Fun

Park Ki Woong, scared virgins and why your friends are try to kill you.

Helnwein's Innocence

Gottfried Helnwein is one of the most accomplished realist of the day and it is a blessing that he's found his way to San Francisco. From May 7th to June 29th 2009 the San Francisco Modernism Gallery will be exhibiting the Helnwein one man show “The Murmur of Innocence" in honor of Francisco de Goya.



The theme of the exhibition, the suffering of children in war time, will be familiar to fan's of Helnwein's work and this exhibition will likely be an articulation of the machines of war, with a raw Nordic sensibility that draws the witnesses of his work to reach back into themselves and delve into whatever tenuous memories of world conflict and violence haunt them. His work acknowledges the universal heritage of globalized conflicts shared by every person on every continent.

Blood At Last

If your looking to wash the crotchy taste Dragon Ball The Movie out of your mouth and and impress the friends you lost when they caught you walking out of Fast and Furious the live action version of Blood The Last Vampire is going to be released in Japan on May 29 2009, meaning you movie pirates can get it around May 20 2009. Wouldn't it be great if this one was like 20 minutes long like the animated one?

Former Secretary of State belives George W. Bush can alter reality with his thoughts ... and crap ice cream.

After the Obama administration waffled on whether officials who ordered the water boarding of prisoners who may have known about possible terrorist threats Condoleezza Rice was caught off guard at Stanford University marking what will the last time that "f@#k you next question" could be used as a rhetorical technique by former remembers of George W. Bush's administration. (It should be noted that this technique was never used on the true patriots like Shepard Smith and further noted that is not technique doesn't mean you're a mean douche if Dick Cheney says you can say it.)

8 Movies to Die: Vocies (Someone behind you) : Crazy Korean Style

Someone Behind You mixes paranoia and the supernatural into a collection murderous instances from stabbings to homicidal arson. Poor Ka-in can't even make it through the an afternoon without a classmate clubbing each other to death over a boyfriend or a cousin bouncing off the pavement from two stories above he head. Someone Behind You mixes paranoia and the supernatural into a collection murderous instances that blaze from stabbings to homicidal arson. Poor Ga-in can't even make it through the afternoon without a classmate clubbing each other to death over a boyfriend or a cousin bouncing off the pavement from two stories above he head. Park Ki Woong is the source of all the mayhem, he's the little voices that says “You know your brother really likes your car...you should hit him with it.” as a creepy strange presence that undulates through out scenes in the movie like jaws with an awesome hair cut.

ShIt loRd qUesT: An Oakland Pilgrimage After Casy & Brian

The first time I saw the Religious Girls was on Halloween in Oakland and I wasn't drunk enough to have done anything I would regret. I was standing outside with an acquaintance working out how we would be heading back to San Francisco. “Fuck no, not yet...” my friend replied, and then “they haven't played yet.”

Then a naked man came running out of the apartment where the show was meant to happen.He was one of the keyboardist in the Religious Girls. I asked him about it later and he said it was the drunkest he'd ever been while playing. I hadn't seen very many naked people in Oakland that week, weather and all, so I was surprised when three more guys ran out behind him with their knobs out for an autumn evening. When I finally went inside the apartments where the bands were playing; converted stockyard storage structures passing as cheap studios, the stage was in the kitchen, a drum-set pressed up against a wall next to the fridge, the kitchen floor was a stringy mess of wires and chords and there were keyboards mounted on racks near the dining room, where people were looking for places to stand.
Their rhythms were like war drums from space and there was day-glo orange bright green war paint everywhere, by the end of the set folks in the pit bounced like walking super balls speckled like cosmic Easter eggs, grinning like a unicorn had licked their faces, bobbing up and down with their mouths open, in what used be called awe before the words mind and fucked were united in one grand descriptive verb. The show was all over too soon. I wandered out into the parking lot and found them packing a van. I started helping them pack up and leave, trying to hide my band crush. Someone said they were going to be playing in Temescal; the hipster district in the middle of Oakland where the CCA art studenst paid too for decrepit Victorians and had fuck rad parties. The second time the Religious Girls played they had mutated the living room into a fully wired stage; dozens of peddles, gaggles mics and suddenly Nick Cowman,Dylan Reznick, Guy Culver, and Chris Danko were up again sending primal vocalizations through their amps the drums, sounding like something between the Battles and Amon Tobin, sending paint through the air. On April 17 I saw them play again after getting an invite from Guy Culver I saw them play in their garage at DeepSpace, the bands home and current venue. They played after Casy & Brian who killed so hard there were kids hanging form the rafters. After they played sat around afire and tried to roast hot dogs.

James / Cordas/ Long / Over/ Due: Do Over

James likes to reinvent his previous work. There were experiments in medium, and content. Alterations on older pieces on exhibition that night. Clipping, snipping, and painting over them so nothing is wasted but everything is in a constant state of self-perpetuating innovation of his work. 

Tits performed a rushed set like grenade going off in a cathedral. Maj, James, and Nick's atmospheric cacophonies and flitting vocals emanated from behind glass masks. Sounds circling a crowd of people thirty deep while James murdered his drums as Marguerite soldered her voice to Nick's keyboard melodies.
After knowing James Cordas for two years; waking up on his floor after nights of composition and decomposition, chatting back and forth about modernist reality, beer, and seeing sound, and experimental drummers, I've learned that he's worth following around.

Horrorfest III: The Broken: Long Cracked and Bloody

Has anyone told you they've seen someone who looked like you walking down the street, or that you look like the parking attendant or someone famous? Well congratulations you're fucking doomed! The Doppelganger concept is nothing new. Two weeks before he was shot Abraham Lincoln was rumored to have seen his own shifty shadow riding a horse past his home. It was reported that John Donne saw his wife double in Paris on the night of his daughter's stillbirth. Then there was the creepy, but under appreciated Keifer Sutherland film Mirrors. The Broken tries to explain the idea of a ominous double without explain anything at all. This Stephen Ellis film is as sneaky as the innocuous back rub which morphs into accidental groping then into a full blown tongue knotting, that mutates into the awkward buddy hump; this movie has its hand down your pants before you realize that you've had too much to drink. Only problem is it's just too long. The climax, while explosive and messy, just doesn't measure up. If you want blood look to the rest of the the movies in the Horrorfest III collection. The movie is a tease at first, with heavy shadowed black and blues for ominous hallway scenes and black and burnished brown-reds to highlight the feeling of home and hearth during the pivotal birthday scene; a scene filled with the kind of chit chat that leaves you hoping the pay off will be immediate and gruesome. There are tons of moments like this but the ambiguity works...sort of. The inclusion of The Broken in Horrorfest is like hiring Uma Thurman to work at a meat packing plant: she comes in with really good intentions but eventually she'll just look like a model covered in entrails. The plot revolves around the events that occur after a car crash where the main character finds herself unable to remember the specifics but recalls seeing herself walking down the street when the crash occurs. What follows is a good story that's convoluted but and murky. The murk helps the suspense for a while but then it just gets on your nerves. The car crash is shown about three times i n s l o w m o t i o n. There are a lot of moments of dead space and "Why the fucks" but there is a really well developed story that could work well if the idea premise was handle a little better.