Carlin on America

“We were founded on a very basic double standard. This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free. Am I right? A group of slave owners who wanted to be free, so they killed a lot of white English people in order to continue owning their black African people, so they could wipe out the rest of the red Indian people and move west and steal the rest of the land from the brown Mexican people, giving them a place to take off and drop their nuclear weapons on the yellow Japanese people. You know what the motto of this country ought to be? You give us a color, we’ll wipe it out.”

“The real owners are the big, wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you! They own everything! They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long-since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They’ve got you by the balls! They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying – lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else!
.
“But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard thirty fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers – people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork – but dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money! They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends
on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it! They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the Big Club.”

Check out the trailers: Midnight Meat Train Trailers

Reposted from;
http://www.clivebarker.info/newssavemmt.html

…It has become apparent that the theatrical distribution of The Midnight Meat Train has been curtailed, with reports that the movie may be seen on only 100 screens. Word has come to us that the substantial excitement surrounding the movie has now developed into an active campaign by movie-lovers for its full theatrical release.

Clive is throwing his support behind the growing movement. He is asking all who would like to see the movie get the wide distribution that many people believe it deserves to add their voice.

Reposted from;
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0805570/board/thread/109019389

There is growing internal pressure within the company for a wider release of this film and PUBLIC FAN PRESSURE may help to push this decision over the edge.

If you wish to see MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN in all its big screen glory at a THEATER near you, please do the following:

Cut and paste the message at the bottom of this post and e-mail it to:

1) investor relations at Lionsgate: keasterling@lionsgate.com

2) Lionsgate: general-inquiries@lionsgate.com

3) call the main office at (310) 449-9200 and express your desire to see MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN get the release it deserves.

BE POLITE AND PROFESSIONAL! We don’t want to piss them off, just want them to know how many fans out there would like to shell out their hard earned cash to see the most groundbreaking horror film of the past ten years in a real movie theater!

My intention for this section is not to pull at our heartstrings about the unfairness of war and the collateral damage of slaughtered innocent children during war. More my intention is to use the art of film, the language of visual communication to convey ideas, emotions and stories of how war affects the lives of children, and how through the arrogance and the hubris of adulthood we impose horrors beyond most of our imaginations on children across the globe. This is not a “blame America” section of guilt, every government is capable of atrocities, this is more of a condemnation of failed systems run by ruling classes with collective amnesia, the amnesia of forgotten childhood. Often times especially during a political season “innocent children” are brought up to manipulate us emotionally to support some political position or another, abortion, health care, education are common examples. But in the case of disease, famine and especially war it can be easy to loose site of what is truly at stake. Quite simply put, the future. Not the incredibly trite Michael Jackson pop song “Children are the future”, or the crass use of kids by political pundits trying to score talking head spin points. I mean really the future, the generation we as responsible adults are teaching by example, whether we notice that the kids are paying attention to us or not. Aside from a culture that glorifies violence (and shuns sensuality and love) with Hollywood garbage, reality TV cruelty and video game carnage, all at our kids fingertips, we live and perpetuate a culture of WAR. One may argue that war has been with (in)humanity since the beginning of civilization, but one may also see when the blinders are truly pulled from our fogged over eyes that this culture has perfected war (the perfection of endless conflict), war consciousness, war propaganda, war economy and war entertainment to be consumed day in and day out. Whether we like it or not our culture teaches conflict resolution through violence. We are all affected (unless one buys the product of patriotic church sanctioned nationalistic violence) and our hearts are heavy. This culture has an infection like a cancer that is slowly eating away at our soul; we are conditioned to live in a state of fear of the “other”. This disease is much bigger than a presidential election for yet another Republicrat or even the seemingly endless eternal war on terrorism. It won’t be solved over night by going to a voting booth in November; it will take confronting the war in ourselves. Stepping out of the norm of assimilated conformist culture and questioning who we are. It takes involvement in our communities, with our friends, our families and especially with ALL the children in our lives.

These films I have selected for this section is just a small example of what children can and do experience during wartime. It is a slice of cinema, an incomplete film list and I’m sure many films could be added to this section that I have missed and have yet to be exposed too (feel free to add titles to the comments below). So from the emotionally draining brutality of COME AND SEE or the Roger Waters’ cathartic rock musical PINK FLOYD, THE WALL, to recent documentary IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS, we touch on numerous visions of how war affects children from infancy to older teens. Not every film is directly involved with bombings and death, some are much more subtle. For example SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE deals with a child’s confusion with her mixing of fantasy and reality after war has altered her country or GERMANY PALE MOTHER and how a baby’s life is framed by the parent’s experience of war. In the end we see stories from abject horror to acts of compassion and survival, where a child loses their innocence and their mind or heals and moves on with their lives. Hopefully the selections in this section CHILDREN AND WAR will expose you to new art, new stories and can be a catalyst for confronting our useless culture of war.

“We write a television show. Measured against more thoughtful and
meaningful occupations, this is not the best seat from which to argue
public policy or social justice. Still, those viewers who followed The
Wire — our HBO drama that tried to portray all sides of inner-city
collapse, including the drug war, with as much detail and as little
judgment as we could muster — tell us they’ve invested in the fates of
our characters. They worry or grieve for Bubbles, Bodie or Wallace,
certain that these characters are fictional yet knowing they are
rooted in the reality of the other America, the one rarely
acknowledged by anything so overt as a TV drama.

These viewers, admittedly a small shard of the TV universe, deluge us
with one question: What can we do? If there are two Americas —
separate and unequal — and if the drug war has helped produce a
psychic chasm between them, how can well-meaning, well-intentioned
people begin to bridge those worlds?

And for five seasons, we answered lamely, offering arguments about
economic priorities or drug policy, debating theoreticals within our
tangled little drama. We were storytellers, not advocates; we ducked
the question as best we could.”

Follow the link to read the full article.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1719872,00.html

-Werner Herzog

I thought I wanted an adventure, so I decided to go to the Amazon jungle. The Amazon jungle can be a living death; humid, hot, wet, crawling with insects, animals and diseases that will kill, eat and decay you in a matter of hours, if you’re a complete idiot. Not healthy for children or most humans, especially if you are an outsider who has no idea how to survive in the jungle. It can epitomize Herzog’s man against nature complex. Nature doesn’t care for or have compassion for man’s folly; it’s simple, if you can’t survive you die, and perhaps suffer along the way. To the assimilated western conformist who lives by their conveniences, it is raw, dangerous and the heart of darkness. For me the jungle is full of immense beauty and life (it’s difficult to grasp the amazing collective cacophony of the living orchestra from the jungle unless you’ve heard it for yourself) but I can assure you no unprepared person would want to be lost in its chaos.

My first foray into the jungle was back in 2003 in Brazilian Amazon city of Manaus. I spent roughly a month in the jungle outside of Manaus, staying in a nice Posada (aka jungle lodge), with electricity and running water. It didn’t seem like roughing it or adventure at all, it felt like a bit of luxury, albeit a sweaty luxury. I did a couple short hikes into the bush and many small boat rides up and down branches of the Rio Negro. It was my first experience with the heat, humidity, torrential downpours, bugs and other exotic animals of the jungle. It was relatively easy for me, heat and bugs one can get used to. But for me the most challenging part was the psychological exploration I was battling within my own mind under the influence of a shamanic inebriant the local Indians use, called Ayahuasca. This was the other aspect of the Amazon that drew me to South America, the indigenous people’s use of visionary healing plants. I wanted an adventure, I felt a need to explore, but mine was to be an inward exploration more so than an outward one. Also I had been hired by the people putting on the Ayahuasca seminar that I was a part of to help facilitate the creative expressing of these heady experiences for the other people ingesting the brew. I was there to draw and paint and to hopefully get some visual inspiration from the jungle.

So how does this connect to film and Mr. Herzog? Well in the city of Manaus lies the Teatro Amazonas, an opera house built in 1896 by city leaders in hopes to make Manaus one of the great centers of civilization. My hotel room that I stayed in before going to the jungle was right next to the opera house. This opera house was featured prominently at the beginning of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, where Klaus Kinski as the title character Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (who after seeing an opera in Manaus) dreams of building his own opera house in the remote Peruvian city of Iquitos. Flash forward to 2006, I had an opportunity through friends to return to the Amazon to experience more of the hallucinogenic brew, make art, and commerce with the jungle, but this time in the city of Iquitos. I had even brought with me a Hi 8 camera to get some initial shots for a film I wanted to make. My hope was to shoot at some ruins and in the jungle, but my camera was stolen out of my luggage by the airplane baggage handlers on my initial flight to Iquitos, so much for my film idea. At this point I was aware of Herzog’s use of Iquitos in many shots in Fitzcarraldo and was interested in seeing if I could find some of these places. I didn’t really expect to recognize much realizing things had probably changed from when he filmed it back in 1982. To my surprise there is actually a restaurant on the waterfront called the Fitzcarraldo and I ended up going there a couple times for food and drinks. The restaurant is adorned with framed still photos from the film, and other odds and ends that look like may have been props used in the film. It was amusing drinking a beer out front, being harassed by homeless street kids wanting handouts and Shipibo women selling their intricate textiles. Sitting looking out at the Amazon River from a restaurant based on a Herzog movie was a strange experience, but somehow seemed fitting to the situation. At one point I took a local river taxi to a butterfly reserve. On the way there we went by one of the boats used in the film, it was just sitting in the river open to tourists, still there after all these years. Herzog’s production with the larger than life Kinski running around like a madman has left a lasting impression on this jungle city, adding to the history of the real Fitzcarald who made his own lasting impression on the region a century before.

This past June I had a chance to return to Iquitos for more jungle time at the same lodge I stayed in the year before. This lodge wasn’t nearly as fancy as the one I stayed in in Brazil. It was more archaic, half rotting into the jungle and without electricity and most of the time without running water. In fact, one of the covered structures from the year before that was used for hammocks was completely gone, consumed by the jungle. Depending on the size of the boat and which direction we were going on the river, the boat ride from Iquitos to this jungle lodge was about an hour or so ride (On a side note, half way to our destination we passed where the scene from Motorcycle Diaries was filmed when Gael García Bernal as Che Guevara volunteers at the leper colony). I had returned with the intent to drink more brew, participate in a group art exhibit and hopefully to go deeper into the jungle. As it turned out, for various reasons the extended river jungle trip I had planned on was not going to happen, so I found myself in Iquitos after my time at the lodge not knowing what I was going to do with my last week in Peru. Turns out one of the participants in the group I was with wanted to go to Machu Picchu, so we spontaneously decided to travel together. After some jockeying of plane tickets and getting to Lima we were off to Cuzco and the great Andean ruins. We took a 20 hour winding bus ride from Lima to Cuzco. After a couple nights in Cuzco we then took some more buses and a train and we finally made it to Machu Picchu. We arrived at about 6 am and spent 10 hours at the site, walking around the grounds of Machu Picchu, taking in the cloud shrouded ruins, hiking up Huayna Picchu and down the backside to the Templo de la Luna. It was on the hike up Huayna Picchu that it hit me that I was walking upon the same place that Herzog shot the opening sequence for his other South American masterpiece from 1972; Aguirre, the Wrath of God. I remember being in awe of that opening shot, with 400 Andean peasants and Aguirre winding down the step mountain trails, and here I found myself in yet another Herzog location. I hadn’t planned any of this; it just turned out that way. Maybe subconsciously I was seeking a Herzogian path; art, the jungle and the madness that I faced in my mind while drinking the “Vine of Souls”. I somewhat agree with Werner about adventure, there are no real adventures anymore. There’s too much technology available, like GPS devices and cell phones to save adventurers from their own stupidity. There will always be Darwin award nominees, but true adventure seems gone. I do think there are still two places that can be explored with integrity however, human consciousness and space.

I thought I wanted adventure and exploration, but what I realized I was looking for was what Werner calls an “ecstatic truth”. My experiences in the jungle got me a bit closer to understanding what ecstatic truth is, words can’t really do it justice, so for me I will continue with my visual art to help me convey my ecstatic truth. I think I can hear it now; the jungle symphony is calling me again. Perhaps my next trip I’ll end up amid virgin rainforest in northwest Thailand, who knows…