Inside Penguin’s Publishing Offices

by Cimaxion

Guy Kawasaki over at Holy Kaw! posts about the various team members and office spaces at his publisher, Portfolio, which is an imprint of Penguin.  He’s put up a bunch of photos he took inside the Manhattan office building where all the book work goes on.

It’s all more or less just fine… until we get to the photo of the art department (although I don’t trust smiling publishers).  The poor art people are given those brutally unprivate low-walled cubicles to work in.  All management teams use the exact same excuses for these open work areas:  fosters team spirit, allows easy direct communication over cubicle walls, lets the window light spread throughout the work area.

The real reason management installs low-rise cubicles is for observation and control.  It puts all employees, even the most dedicated and creative ones, in the position of monitoring each others’ work habits and arrival/departure times.  Low-rise cubicles are an insult to employees and do not foster team attitudes.  Professionals build teams by sharing their skills, not by watching each other.

Here’s Kawasaki’s book at Amazon.  And the cover really just truly sucks.  It’s about how to convince people to do the things you would like for them to do in business.  It probably helped convince the art designers to work in this cubicle hell.  His next book should be about how to smash furniture.

Mystery Video From Neill Blomkamp

by Cimaxion

Wired Magazine for the iPad included this mysterious little film that is apparently some sort of teaser by Neill Blomkamp, the director of District 9. It shows the discovery of a dead alien or unknown life form by two guys driving down a dirt road. Creepy. But why would anyone touch a dead alien?  The creature is stamped as if part of some project at a lab.  Maybe it’s about growing new life forms to feed the planet and then some of them escape.  Or some company has captured and bred aliens for food production!

Here’s a Slashfilm article that suspects it’s a teaser for an online narrative about a company doing genetic engineering.

Wednesday Is The Day To Make Hell For The TSA At U.S. Airports

by Cimaxion | 1 Comment

I can’t believe that I’m posting a video interview with Ron Paul about the ongoing horror show coming out of the TSA and the Obama administration. But the simple fact of the matter is that it really doesn’t matter who is attacking the President and the TSA for blatantly unconstitutional molestation and physical abuse of air passengers across the United States. It doesn’t matter if it’s Republicans or Tea Party dopes. The only thing that matters is that a free people with some hope of maintaining a democracy MUST stop a government that thinks it can go inside peoples’ clothes and touch their bodies in the name of very questionable security.

The Obama administration’s TSA must be stopped no matter what. It is an absolute imperative that they not be allowed to molest men, women or children who are simply exercising their right to travel freely. So I find myself fully in the camp of a political party that I normally want nothing to do with. When it comes to stopping the TSA and protecting the civil rights of people in this country it makes no difference who is leading the fight. It think this cause does in fact join Republicans with liberals. It’s one of the few things we can agree on.

The TSA has expressed concern about verbal and physical abuse being directed at its employees. They hope that passengers can understand the difference between the TSA employees and the officials making the policies. Except that the person you have to defend yourself from is the one standing in front of you trying to put his or her hand into your pants. You must defend yourself against that person. The policymakers will get the message and act eventually. But in the airport you must defend yourself against the person actually committing the assault.

Continue reading …

Wednesday, November 24, 2010 is National Opt Out of TSA Abuse Day

by Cimaxion

Mature Content

One would of course want to do more than just ‘opt out’ if a child were treated this way by the frighteningly imbecilic TSA. You know, the regular airport police really don’t much like the TSA people very much and are probably just itching for a good reason to arrest one or two.

I thought of a possible alternative to the TSA’s threat to arrest or financially penalize people who try to opt out of the full body nude scanners and the groin touching pat down. One could simply opt out of the scanner and then state that although not refusing the pat down a request for local or airport police observation of the pat down procedure is insisted upon because one has a real fear of imminent sexual assault. That would seem to me to put the TSA officers at a serious disadvantage legally and force local police to come to the scene. Just a few episodes like this will really jam up airport gates all across the country and then the hand-job President might get the message that we’re all just fine without hands in our pants.

At the very least, passengers all across the country should be filming with their cell phones just like the guy in the video above.

MUBI Presents Free Online Screening of Revolución

by Cimaxion

Tomorrow, Saturday November 20 through Sunday November 21, MUBI.com presents a free screening of Revolución.  Ten directors contributed films to the project which looks back at the violent upheaval of the Mexican Revolution and compares conditions then to the situation today in Mexico.

The MUBI screening event has a Facebook page with more information.

Go here to attend the MUBI screening of Revolución.

Obama Orders Touching of Genitals Nationwide

by Cimaxion

Mature Content – Language

When was it you realized that Americans had unwittingly elected a horrible president?  Was it when he decided to cover up photographic evidence of systematic atrocities by U.S. troops?  Was it when he took tax money to buy General Motors?  Was it when he decided to continue an illegal war of aggression against Iraq?  Was it when he decided to continue a Vietnam-like quagmire in Afghanistan?  Was it when he decided that he would let British Petroleum defecate into his mouth?  Was it when he began to falsify scientific research data about the water in the Gulf?  Was it when he decided that he could constitutionally force every American citizen to purchase health insurance from brutally self-interested corporations?  Was it when he decided to use the power of his office to forcefully defend the military’s anti-gay bigotry and discrimination?

Or was it when he ordered his Homeland Security employees to stick their fingers into your genitals if you decide not to allow the government to blast you with x-rays in a ‘full body scan?’

President Barack Obama has finally positioned himself, uniquely among modern presidents I think, so that actual physical resistance to a presidential order is not only logical but morally imperative.

The Transportation Security Administration is installing full body scan machines that use x-rays in airports across the nation.  If you refuse to be photographed naked and dosed with x-rays that many scientists are very worried about, the TSA will force you to accept a physical ‘pat down’ that involves the probing and touching of your penis, vagina, breasts, and buttocks.  In one airport, a woman’s blouse was removed in full public view to expose her bare breasts.  Nearby agents then taunted and mocked her for several minutes as she tried to regain her composure and escape the area.  This is a full-blown sexual assault that warrants a full physical response in self-defense, followed by prosecution of the TSA agents involved.

Why not just go through the full body scan machine?  Because it photographs you naked.  The TSA and the manufacturers have continually asserted that the machines cannot store images.  But they have been proven repeatedly to be lying about this and thousands of the nude photos have been stored by the machines.  Think about it.  Would you build a scanning machine that could not save the photograph showing a bomb strapped to someone’s butt?  Don’t you think you might need that photo in a courtroom trial at some point?  Of course the machines store images.  Only an idiot would think otherwise.  They also shoot radiation all over your body.  The pilots’ union is very nervous about this and wants pilots exempted from the machines.  Scientists are weighing in to say that the radiation can have long-term effects on the human body.  This is scary enough.  But stop to think about how these machines will sit in airports and be tended to by dimwits earning minimum wage.  Are we to expect these crotch-grabbing imbeciles to keep sophisticated x-ray machines in proper adjustment?  Will it take a baby getting barbecued in one of these things to wake people up?

Yet, the TSA asserts that it has the right to pursue incredible monetary damages against you if you refuse the full body scan and the genital touching procedure.  They can come after you even after they make you miss your flight and leave the airport.  Shocking.  The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals actually upheld this civil penalty right.

We are far down the rabbit hole when a person, who doesn’t want to risk his or her health to x-ray radiation managed by low-level government employees, cannot reasonably refuse having their genitals and breasts touched without being turned into a criminal and put at risk of at least a ten thousand dollar penalty.

These TSA people can feel the genitals of children also.  There’s no protection.  You think this is pretty bad?  Well it gets worse.  They can also go inside your pants.  If the agent decides that your clothing is a little too loose, they can go inside to feel your private parts.  They can do it to children.

If some dude in an airport touches my special Christmas package, I’m going to put his head on the floor.  I think anyone else should do just the same.

Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security, insists that the new procedures are necessary to thwart terrorist threats.  Bullshit.  These x-ray machines that they are trying to zap us with come from a company that employs the former Secretary of Homeland Security.  Sound odd?

November 24, 2010 is National Opt-Out Day.  People going through security at American airports are encouraged and expected to resist the governmental assault on freedom from unreasonable search – to resist being dosed with radiation and groped in the groin.  I frankly hope that Opt-Out Day turns into a real nightmare for the TSA and for airlines.  Thousands of people refusing to be assaulted by government goons will jam up airport lobbies very quickly.  Flights will be delayed.  Passengers will be asking for refunds.  The airlines will react with anger on Capitol Hill.

Terrorists don’t have to blow up airplanes.  Why are we allowing ourselves to be victimized at airports?  Terrorists can just as easily climb onto trains or buses and blow them up.  Will the TSA start touching our penises and vaginas at train stations and bus depots?  Why wouldn’t they?

On November 24 American air travelers need to stop pretending to be mild sheep in their own airports.  Have you ever noticed how when we set foot in an airport we suddenly become Mr. and Mrs. Proper?  We behave as if we are all the most casual of normal harmless little people without the least tendency toward even the slightest outburst.  We take it up the ass because we are all told to behave in just a certain way or we’ll be arrested.  It’s a waste of energy to worry too much about terrorists.  What air travelers should be more worried about is inattentive airline mechanics down on the tarmac.  That’s where the real damage is done.  Incompetence is far more dangerous than terrorism.

Americans have punched the idiot Obama hard in the face with the recent election results.  They can do it again by punching gropers.  ‘Touch my kid’s crotch and I’ll stick my fist down your throat.’  That’s the proper response.

One suggestion I have for our smiling President is that he should offer to demonstrate the new ‘pat down’ procedure on Secretary Napolitano.  He could reach those long slender fingers of his down into her business pants, lift a roll or two of fat out of the way, and give the Secretary a good finger job for national security.  We’d all be watching.

We all have a right to travel freely in this country without being subjected to dangerous radiation or getting groped.  We have shown our crappy politicians what our anger can do in the recent mid-term elections.  On November 24 let’s show them again.

Update 11/18: New York lawmakers are introducing legislation to prohibit the TSA from using the nude full body scanners at all airports in the state, including JFK, the largest international airport in the country.

Goethe’s Derl Erlkönig: A Film by Raymond Salvatore Harmon

by Cimaxion | 1 Comment

Really frightening film adaptation of Goethe’s Der Erlkönig. Raymond Salvatore Harmon made this film that revels in the dark terror of fairy tales. It’s a densely layered film that conveys the sense of riding through the forest beautifully.  Those trees keep going by and the dolls bounce along on their horse.  Amazing! I love terrifying fairy tales!  A child, held tight in his father’s arms, senses a supernatural being of some sort approaching.  You’ve got to pay attention to this one right up to the end!

MOCA Film on Artist Alexis Smith

by Cimaxion

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles is producing a series of short films about LA artists in their studios. They sort of lean toward the cute clever artist in their oh so picturesquely messy work spaces mentality. But sometimes it’s nice to see a little mess and hear a few comments from an artist. I happen to like this one about Alexis Smith. I like her comments about not knowing where her art is going and how she keeps all this stuff around to make it with. I think what she means is that she just digs around in pile of crap and throws a whole bunch of junk together and suddenly goes ‘Oh wow! There it is!’  Of course, to do that you’ve got to have a really fine pile of junk.

The Living Dead – Adam Curtis Documentary About Cold War Mind Control

by Cimaxion

Adam Curtis makes fascinating documentary films for the British Broadcasting Corporation. This one is about the manipulation of memory, or the attempt to manipulate it, by governments during the Cold War era. It features several scientists and psychology experts who worked for either the U.S. or Soviet governments trying to figure out how to control minds.

I post the work of Curtis because his filmmaking is actually quite a lot like my own in several ways. This film bears a relationship to my latest film, Yellow Plastic Raygun, which is also about memory and how it influences the future. Curtis dwells in the domain of documentary, a form that I have serious misgivings about, while I dwell in the domain of art – or direct mind control if you will! I like Curtis’ use of corporate, military, instructional, and entertainment films as his raw visual material. He mixes it up with what is actually a rather simplistic script relating information that is not especially insightful. The film seems to suggest something more under the surface because of its imagery which often bears no relationship whatsoever to the information being related by the voice-over. This is a tricky area for documentary that brings it perilously close to the realm of art. You don’t quite know what it is that you are actually watching. I like that but I also distrust it.  But Curtis appears to me to be making a documentary about his own feelings and artistic interpretations of the factual material.  He is not trying to teach or inform at all.  He is simply trying to create an impression.  The words of the documentary could be replaced with gibberish.  In fact, it would probably be a slightly better film if they were!

The Living Dead – Part 1 (watch the next 5 parts after the jump)

Memory is perhaps the single most important quality of existence. We are simply memory machines walking around and recording. All of our activities point toward an ever-increasing ability to record and remember. We are building memory. The idea, pursued in the first half of this documentary, of wiping out unpleasant memories that are assumed to be destroying the health of an individual, seems to me to be misguided and foolish. I have always viewed it as the job of every human to be able to stare straight into the most horrific scene, remember it, and not allow it to take control. Very simple. You must be able to look at anything… and continue to eat your ice cream.

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A Prayer for Cool – Super 8 Biker Film by Marc Bencivenga

by Cimaxion

It’s not the bikes that I like so much. It’s the super 8! A perfect little piece of humorous filmmaking that really does somehow capture a kind of coolness and easy rebellion that I thought was long gone. There’s some absolutely gorgeous photography going on here. And who ever sees someone lighting up a cigarette with so much perfection as in this film! You just don’t see that anywhere anymore ever.

Marc Bencivenga made this and he apparently did it with a fifty-year-old super 8 camera.

R. Crumb and the Corporate Mono-Culture

by Cimaxion | 1 Comment

Cartoonist Robert Crumb gets interviewed by a Los Angeles Times writer and talks about his living in France and his hatred for the pervasive corporate mono-culture that Americans seem unaware of.  He can’t stand it and chooses to live outside of it.

Really good perspective.

In a culture where you’ve got a Supreme Court actually giving corporate entities the rights of individual human beings, you’ve got total corporate control of every single living man, woman and child.  You can see this complete robotic control on very prominent and horrific display in the current president of the United States.  He a corporate hologram who moves only when commanded to by his boardroom overseers.  The entire country is oriented around cop/lawyer shows on television which are specifically designed to make you feel close and personal with the state/corporate stooges who work for police departments and gleefully lay disadvantaged people out on their faces on subway platforms and slaughter them with bullets fired straight into their backs from six inches away.  ‘The Mentalist’ is probably the supreme example of this attempt to make the corporate/police control mechanism seem odd and quirky and just a little cutely but intelligently eccentric.  ‘Medium’ is another.  The individual with oddball abilities or perceptions is entirely consumed and controlled by the state apparatus.  All cop shows are meant to make as many viewers as possible feel completely comfortable being visited by and talking to the police.  That is the entire truth of American television.  It’s message is simply this: when we come knocking, open the door.

That is the true subtext of every single show ever produced by American broadcasting companies.

R. Crumb is totally right.

Banksy Exposed!

by Cimaxion | 2 Comments

image

Gotcha, Banksy!  I’ve been wondering about enigmatic urban street artist Banksy for some time now.  I’ve found out his secret.  Urban Outfitters.  Look at the stealth photo I snapped in a mall location.  The book raised high above all others on a pedestal… Banksy.  Apparently, he’s an Urban Outfitters fave.  Yes.  Indeed.  Uh huh.  Rebel artist.  Street prankster.  Humorist.  Urban Outfitter.  Dude, listen.  If your art is seriously dug by super-corp teenage dupe specialists like Urban Overchargers, its time to fill a vodka bottle with gasoline and fire bomb your own wall paintings.  For sure.  You know something’s off when you start reading about an artist’s ‘humor.’  Now run off to your nearest Urban Outfitters to experience the rebellious humor of legendary street artist Banksy!

The Petting Zoo by Jim Carroll

by Cimaxion

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Oh boy have I found a great book!  Poet Jim Carroll was finishing this thing up when he passed away in 2009.  I have only read 73 pages so far but I recognize this as one of the greatest novels I have ever read.  A New York painter reacts strongly to some paintings by Velazquez, stumbles into Central Park and winds up in the looney bin where he finds some time to think straight.  Simple and magnificent.  What a damn great writer!  I think this will actually be the first novel I write a review of.  Now back to reading.