psychedelicatessen: May 2008

The Big 4-0

On this day 1895, Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for sodomy.

On this day in 1933, Disney released the short The Three Little Pigs.

On this day in 1939, DC published the first Batman comic.

On this day in 1965, the Stones released "Satisfaction."

On this day in 1977, the Pistols released "God Save the Queen."

And on this day in 1968, on the birthday I share with Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Dashiel Hammett and Lisa "Left Eye" Lopez, I was born.

Thank You, Ted Turner

One of the guys at Swork loaned me 42nd Street Forever Vol. 2: The Deuce. I have vol. 1, and it's fun, but the second one is so much better! Most of the movies on the first one are just sleazy, gross things you'd never want to actually watch, but Vol. 2 really makes me want to track down a lot of the movies. Even Dirt, a 70's documentary about various kinds of off-road racing stuck between a bunch of drag race and car chase films, looks like it would be fun to watch. But the one that most blew me away was Sugar Hill.

This may just be the perfect movie. And look, TCM is showing it Friday night, just in time for my birthday! In fact, I'm going to watch it Memorial Day as part of a 70's triple feature. And then, on the morning of my birthday proper (Tuesday), they're showing Sam Fuller's hard boiled noir Underworld U.S.A., which I've been wanting to see for ages. Thanks for the presents, Ted!

P.S. - I finally modified the post for the "Wyatt Tape" with Bob's complete liner notes. I was wondering why he never sent them, but it turns out Yahoo! was putting them in the spam folder or something. The formatting's all fucked up, but fuck it.

Hard-Working White Americans

As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

Now, let me start by saying that I don't believe that Hillary Clinton meant what she seems to mean in the above quote. In fact, if you listen to the audio (I heard it several times over the weekend), those commas should probably be elipses. She sounds like she was trying to remember the exact phrase she was supposed to use ("hard-working white Americans"), rather than emphasizing their color or implying that only white people are hard-working, or whatever you thought the first time you read it. But this argument that she has been making as the point of no return gets further into the rear-view,* that the only votes that matter are the people who voted for her, puts her in a position where, sooner or later, she's going to phrase it just slightly wrong and end up sounding like a racist, because it's pretty close to the edge of racism to begin with.

The Republicans have played this sort of politics for decades, keeping poor whites so worried about the idea that poor blacks or poor immigrants might be getting something they don't deserve that they don't notice the rich guys walking off with all the money**. That Hillary has now joined her campaign to this kind of politics marks her forever as an unacceptable candidate.

Meanwhile, some more positives for Obama:

"Voters and legislators in the states - from California to Nevada to Maine - have decided to provide their residents suffering from chronic diseases and serious illnesses like AIDS and cancer with medical marijuana to relieve their pain and suffering," said campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt.

"Obama supports the rights of states and local governments to make this choice - though he believes medical marijuana should be subject to (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) regulation like other drugs," LaBolt said. He said the FDA should consider how marijuana is regulated under federal law, while leaving states free to chart their own course.

LaBolt also said Obama would end U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration raids on medical marijuana suppliers in states with their own laws.

If he didn't have my vote already...

*I was going to say something like "as the chances of her nominatino get slimmer," but that's bullshit. She has very clearly lost. It's just a matter of how long she's willing to stick around with no chance of winning.

**Seriously, this needs to be emphasized: "58% of the benefits of [McCain's proposed] tax cuts would go to the top 1% of Americans. Not the top ten percent, not the vaguely defined "rich", but the top 1%. That's just extraordinary."

White Cargo (1942)

This movie is wrongheaded in about a dozen different racist, sexist, colonialist ways, starting with the fact that Hedy Lamar plays a native African girl (a lusty temptress) with her whole body tinted. And the white guy who's in love with her is all excited when the missionary tells him that he parents were Arabs--she's one of us!