If you’ve still been sleeping on checking out Radkey, I can tell you’ve been having nightmares. Stop the madness and check St Joe’s, hell, the Midwest’s hardest working young band.
Sunday, March 25, Radkey is playing with lo-fi weirdo blues band The Growlers at Riot Room. And if you don’t know the Growlers yet, well, I don’t want to sound like a snob, but what’s crawling around in your brain, man? (watch ‘Something Someone Jr.’ on repeat to repent.)
Occupy KC under smear attack, publishers call it art. Is this the 4chan-ification of insurrection? The image macros of conspiracy theorists?
from KSHB:
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Members of the Occupy Kansas City movement say they have nothing to do with racist material that is being distributed in their name.
A mailer by a group calling itself “The Occupy Kansas City Journal” is full of anti-Semitic and racist articles and cartoons.
Occupy Kansas City condemned the publication and say they don’t know who is behind it. The material is published on a website and was mailed to several Kansas City Council members.
“The Occupy Kansas City Journal” features many swastikas, epithets and provocative conspiracy-laden cartoons “anonymously” submitted to the editor, Jessica Logsdon, by what looks like the white nationalist walking dead. Political collage art hasn’t progressed with the digital age. In fact, it seems to have regressed quite a bit, not only in cut-and-paste technique but in rhetoric too.
An incredibly limited overview of the history of modern collage art as political and social critique from found objects to agitprop:
The dadaists’ nihilism failed to destroy culture when they became counter-culture aesthetes. The disassociated news clipping screen prints by Andy Warhol were stark, but grimy pop culture references worth a ton of cash. The collage fliers of DIY punk shows were too practiced to rightfully claim idgaf post-nihilism. The Dead Kennedys perfected the zine-culture of satirical and post-modern political collages striking back at 1980s social conservatism.
Culture jammers and subvertisements of the 1990s spoke truth to power in the anti-consumerism and anti-globalization movement by altering ads to show Joe Camel as Joe Chemo, or Coke as Killer. Truth in advertising. Sound collage art from Negativland and the Church of the Subgenius popped up in cassette trading circles. Popular commercial jingles were now apocalyptic hellscapes all caught on tape. TV Sheriff did the same with tv commercial collages by making KFC hypnotism or Chuck Norris workout/freakout infomercials. Beck rode the sound collage wave of radio friendly art-junk onto a soft beach of cash.
Whether this is 4Chan grossout anti-pc agitprop art similar to the collages in Dead Kennedys liner notes, or bottom-feeding legitimate neo-Nazi propaganda, it was none-the-less disseminated to the government in the name of an inclusive, horizontally-organized populist movement.
Personal vendettas, political differences and jealousy have long been a muse and not just for low-brow collage art, so the question is, who got their feelings hurt? All the collages include screencaps of individual names associated with Occupy KC, plus a notable native, comedian Dustin Kaufman, is referenced in a Jewish conspiracy comic on page one. Someone involved with Occupy KC at some point felt slighted or maybe just a tad annoyed and found themselves a confusingly muddled and tedious outlet.
Here’s a statement from Jessica Logsdon on her decision to publish in the name of Occupy KC.
Art is dead. Love live art. Bash the fash.
If opinion is null followed you, it’s because this is the originating root blog for
keepstjoeweird.com
gmdt.tumblr.com
*and coming soon*
MidwestUnrest.tumblr.com
mw-su.tumblr.com (midwest student unrest)
Season your follow according to taste
ANTONYM a pseudonymous split poetry chapbook by Everitt Fanning (NZ) and Hank Barstow (US) is now available for pre-order.
32 page full color $7.42 with Free Shipping
For a short time this was home to St Joe Free Press, a printed monthly opinion paper. Opinion is null.
Go here for VERY IMPORTANT poem directives.
or here for Psychedelic Teen Poverty
http://psychpoverty.tumblr.com
or here for arts reporting of St Joseph, MO
( in no particular order):
Top 5 bands that deliver every time:
Long awaited reunions :
Farewell shows of 2009:
Best group shows/all day festivals:
Bands to watch in 2010:
“We could go swimming any day in November,” sings the Postal Service’s Ben Gibbard and on an unseasonably warm day in mid-November this melancholy siren song about climate change couldn’t resonate much clearer. Although it is often too cold to swim in the Missouri River at any time of the year, it is never too cold for business at St. Joseph’s riverfront Recycling Center. Like the actual postal service, they work through the rain, snow, sun. (In the spring of 2010 the recycling drop off center will move to a new location on South Belt Highway near Pear Street to accommodate the zip code they claim recycles the most.) When the storage containers fill up they are sent off to a third party buyer and volunteers start loading the next container.
Aside from a couple full time employees the recycling center is mainly staffed by two types of volunteers—court ordered and free will. The recycling center is one of many options in fulfilling community service obligations. Generally issued for minor non-traffic related offenses, service at the recycling center benefits the global community as well. But from my own observations, rarely do the court-ordered volunteers continue recycling when free will kicks back into effect. Unfortunately, to make a dreaded court ordered chore out of recycling is to do a disservice to the global community. A resentful, young citizen forced to participate in recycling will just as soon continue adding to the constant trash stream than willfully try to quell it.
A November Associated Press phone poll gauging attitudes about the environment found that 60 percent of those surveyed felt either a “great deal” or “a lot” of personal responsibility to protect the environment, while 37 percent rarely, if ever, thought about the impact of their actions on the Earth’s health. While many of the respondents — a cross section of adults from across the country — said these actions would help the environment “a great deal,” or at least “a lot”. But when asked about some specific actions, the gap widened between what they believe to be important and what they, themselves, have any intention of doing.
The AP poll highlights the issue of matter over mind; the idea of conservation is appealing but the act is not. Take for example the “green” trend in pop culture.
Even Fox & Friends knows non-sensical ramblings when they hear it.
Mayor Shearin on FoxNews Thursday December 10th, trying to justify giving stimulus money to Fosters Martini Bar. Bourgeoisie stimulus is not economic recovery http://lnk.ms/3NVrS
Veteran Unemployment at 25%.
The Union Veterans Council released this number amid a growing tide of unfortunate statistics for returning war veterans, although the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the number at 11.3%. An Army study notes 1-in-8 veterans returns with PTSD, the Drug Policy Alliance sees 19% of soldiers return home to battle drug addiction, and Veteran Affairs estimates on any given night there are 131,000 homeless veterans. St Louis native Sgt. Angela Peacock suffered from all three after her stint in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. When interviewed by CNN in September she was reportedly “living in a friend’s home”. The article highlighted the growing population of homeless female veterans. On a correlating bright note, the SEIU reported that women make up 45% of union membership and this trend is also expected to rise.
Helmets to Hardhats is a national program that connects National Guard, Reserve and transitioning active-duty military members with quality career training and employment opportunities within the construction industry with administrative, engineering and management positions as well. The Helmets to Hardhats program works with the top 17 International Trade Unions and 10 Contractor Associations. The only drawback is the refusal to accept a veteran dishonorably discharged, further explanation in the guidelines is not provided with regards to homosexual discharges, drug use, desertion or conscientious objector status.
Courage to Resist.org
While there are those who would like to dismiss war resisters as “cowards,” the reality is that it takes exceptional courage to resist unjust, illegal, and/or immoral orders. For many resisters, it was their first-hand experiences as occupation troops that compelled them to take a stand. For others, “doing the right thing” and acting out of conscience began to outweigh their military training in obedience. Although the efforts of Courage to Resist are primarily focused on supporting public GI resisters, the organization also strives to provide political, emotional, and material support to all military objectors critical of our government’s current policies of empire. As a grassroots project with limited resources, Courage to Resist nevertheless has a record of successfully working with many resisters and their families in raising the needed funds for civilian legal representation as well as public education campaigns.
For help getting out of the military, or related military issues, call the new GI Rights Hotline number at 877-447-4487.
It’s free, confidential, and accurate source of info for troops, vets, recruits, and their families.
Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret.) Former State Department diplomat
“I fully support the right of US military personnel who, in acts of conscience, refuse to go to a war of aggression, a war crime.”
Garett Reppenhagen, Chairman, Iraq Veterans Against the War
“Courage to Resist [helps soldiers] resist a dishonest use of the United States military in an unlawful occupation of Iraq.”
“That’s the whole point of being the government: If you don’t like something, you simply pass a law to make it illegal.”– Sir Alistair Dormandy in the film Pirate Radio
Missouri State Highway Patrol kicked off the Click It or Ticket campaign on November 17th. The program aims to boost seat belt usage through the same negative reinforcement methods employed to train a dog: a slap on the nose with a ten dollar ticket. The program works though, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), in 2007, reported only a 1 in 1,294 chance of fatality in Missouri when using seat belts properly compared to a 1 to 32 fatality ratio without. “Seat belts save lives” is the motto, well so do heart defibrillators and insulin shots, but occasionally those too can compound the problem.
avian solidarity
