My friend and colleague Chris Tillman and her husband Joe Losurdo, working under the name Regressive Films, have collaborated on a new documentary about the history of punk rock in Chicago. Titled You Weren’t There — A History Of Chicago Punk 1977-1984, the film will have its world premiere on Saturday, November 24 at the […]

[Read more →]

Daily Kos has a review up of Naomi Klein’s new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Harper’s ran an excerpt from The Shock Doctrine in the October issue which was, as the DKos review says, riveting, and immediately put the book on my must-read list. I’m planning to pick up a copy […]

[Read more →]

I just updated the News page over at The Head of Orpheus, the Russell Hoban Web site I maintain, so I figured I might as well cross-post the info here as well (with a few slight formatting tweaks).
Autumn 2007 is shaping up to be a great season for Hoban fans, with Russ’s next novel My […]

[Read more →]

1,850 U.S. citizens were recently killed in an entirely preventable disaster.
It’s been a while since I’ve updated this record — 37 days, to be exact. On July 18 I started keeping count of the 50 U.S. citizens who die every day because they can’t afford health care, according to this statistic.
So in a little […]

[Read more →]

A few video clips from the past week: First up, here’s a scary video compiled by documentarian Robert Greenwald showing how Fox “News” is beating the drum for war with Iran … watch them repeatedly engaging in the same kind of propaganda and scaremongering they used during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in […]

[Read more →]

Bush has suddenly decided that the Iraq occupation is kinda like Vietnam after all, but of course he’s careful to draw the wrong conclusions from the comparison. The article quotes American University historian Allan Lichtman as saying that Bush’s spin on the situation “is not revisionist history. It is fantasy history.”
On a related note, […]

[Read more →]

Via Gadget Girl, let us now thrill to this 1976 appearance by Oingo Boingo on The Gong Show, from the early part of their career when they were still called The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. With bonus Bill Bixby!

 
(As the notes on the YouTube page point out, you might think that’s Danny Elfman […]

[Read more →]

Out, damned spot! Fox News caught red-handed, laundering entries on Wikipedia. Keep on scrubbing, Lady MacFox, but those stains belong to you always.

The GOP’s California strategy: winning the 2008 election by undoing California’s winner-take-all electoral system. Once the state goes piecemeal, the Repubs gain at least 20 electoral votes from safe GOP districts.
Arianna Huffington looks […]

[Read more →]

About 300 Americans have died because they couldn’t afford health care since I started this count five days ago.
About 50 more will die today.
Since this is turning into a kind of daily witness, I suppose I should document my source for the statistic this is based on.
Michael Moore says in Sicko, and he […]

[Read more →]

I saw Sicko Tuesday night, and it did not disappoint. The main impact for me is this: Watching this film makes it unavoidably clear that we as a nation have been completely duped, conned, and as the kids say, “pwned,” by those who’ve spent millions to convince us that universal healthcare is too expensive, can’t […]

[Read more →]

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Crooks and Liars has the video of Michael Moore’s appearance on Leno from earlier this week, with some great interview and a clip from the film.
Meanwhile, Daily Kos had a diary a few days ago about the more than 15,000 nurses from across the country who have mobilized […]

[Read more →]

So there’s lots of news buzz this week about how Michael Moore’s health care industry documentary Sicko has already been pirated to YouTube and other places, two weeks before the film’s original June 29 release date. And as a result the movie will be opening early, with sneak previews in 27 selected markets.
I think […]

[Read more →]

Via an email from my friend Jorjet, I see that Helvetica is celebrating its 50th birthday this year. Helvetica comes from Switzerland, which is fitting considering its essentially neutral personality.
We should all be so functional and wildly popular as Helvetica at our half-century mark. Of course, Helvetica has its detractors as well:
“When people choose Helvetica […]

[Read more →]

[Read more →]