The Distant Ago in Color

When Academia and Esoterica Attack

Dramaturgical Experiences with Hair:

On Thursday March 29th between 12:30 and 2:00pmthe Sociology program will have a guest speaker - Dr. Meghan Probstfield from Indian River State College - to present his work in progress titled “Dramaturgical Experiences with Hair: The Experiential Story of the Longhaired, Mullet, Conventional, Mohawk Wearing, Burrhead."

It all just sounds so inspiring, I must say, and it might even explain this: Man in mullet wig robs Melbourne bank

Workers in a busy Melbourne shopping hub joked that a strange man in a mullet wig and sunglasses looked like he was about to rob a bank.

Minutes later, he did.

The man entered the NAB’s Burke Road branch in Camberwell about 10.45am today, armed with a double-barrelled, sawn-off shotgun and demanded $20 and $50 notes from the teller, police said.

Number Station Remix

The vibe is the essense of "joyously grim".

Pretentious Crap, circa 1988

"Halb-Stadt" (Berlin West)

Where exactly DOES Art-Haus rubbish go when it dies?

Red October / Красный Октябрь

Sell everything. Sell the kids to science.

Europe's fate hinges on the willingness of the German population and it's government to pony up the dough. The next election, which could just as well go the way of the DDR-inspired "Die Linke" party of the Entitlement Libertarian "Piraten" are sure to dunk any participation in any affair that includes the word "austerity" or "Eurobond".

Basically the Piraten are as pure an expression of the politics of nanny state comfort as there could ever be. Their entire platform, guanrunteed income for all slackers, "free U-bahn for all", and "steal this book, I've sure he'll keep writing for free", are entirely bound up in an overaged adolescent's notion of amusement. The rest of it is just the usual perfunctory crap about human rights, as if they'll ever make a stand on the state of affairs in Bolivia or Equatorial Guinea.

As for "Die Linke", they are equally self-absorbed with the notion of selling themselves to society's couch-bound and unskilled by promising to appropriating stuff from their neighbors for them.

Buy canned goods and shotgun shells, because if you think the lot in charge now don't get it, get ready to greet the bunch that feel more comfortable with a paper bag over their heads.

Creepy Echos of Shortwave Past

You Know them by their Blank Stare

Berlin's eternally dyspeptic "Wutbürgers." Their intellectual heft makes one nearly want to evacuate in situ.

Just the Facts, Ma'am...

What would we do without mullet spotters?

With her flaming red do, this court reporter has managed to combine her news-hounding skills with her love of mullet-spotting. Hailing from hair-raising (and hair style-challenged) Ipswich

Amelia Bentley, court reporter, taking it all so seriously.

Speak! Speak to your People, Oh Mighty Mullet!

The Hair Is Shorter, but the Career Goes On and On. [God help us.]

Bon Jovi, 49, went on to make an important distinction: "[My hair] was very famous, but you know what? Bono had a mullet. I never had a mullet. Mel Gibson had a mullet. … I was Cousin It. I just had a big ball of hair. … Fortunately I still have it."

New York Stories

The city of lost souls has a million tales to tell...

A man with fine, thin hair trying to affect a rock 'n' roll look was dubbed a "coconut wearing a toupée." A red-eyed pothead who forgot to shampoo became a "vulture with a mullet." I came for the haircut. I stayed for the weird Q-tip imagery.

Mullet's, Now to be Made Dull by Academia

It's the hairstyle that time forgot

Just long enough to get sidetracked:

It's the mullet of the moment. Yes we're talking about the male ponytail. If you want to look like a crim, a weasel or most probably both, grow your thinning hair long and scrape it back. Into a girl's hairband.

Counter-Counter-Counter Something or Other... Still With me?

Veeeeery Interestink!:

DFS 904 was a propaganda station from east germany in the cold war. These messages, sent during night, were absolutely nonsense and were intended to pretend it was an underground station operated by banned communists in western germany. On a website I found *exactly* this messages as an example mp3.

Code Pink Lod Haw Haw

Vengeance is a Dish Best Served with Creepiness

Unintelligible Number Station banter: I say it's art.

The Near Distant Ago Becomes Even More Distant

Slab Magazine, a journal of Architectural fixations sums it up best in review of new work and urbanism is what used to be the death strip between the two Berlins:

Floating Further out into the Cultural Vacuum

Everything looked clean and new and in a certain sense no less reflective than the polished glass of the new building’s curtain walls. In a world of Photoshop effects, smoothing filters, color balancing and corrected saturation, it seems there’s an irresistable drive to create a world in the image of the image.

Which in reflection, seems as unreal as the DDR's Potemkin villages, or West Berlin's Architectural social experiments.

People use the metaphor of a desert to describe a place -or a state- in which you feel empty or placeless, but my childhood in New Mexico gave me a sense for the richness of life to be found there. At HPI I felt a truer form of emptiness, and now I wonder why I became so transfixed by the polished reflections of the new learning and research center. They seemed to have a cathartic effect, somehow canceling the irritation I’d felt from sustained exposure to high levels of bogusness traversing the vicissitudes of The New Death Strip . To just look away entirely, straight into the sky or towards the rail line or a group of trees outside the campus’s border, seemed like the denial

Please note that I called it TWO Berlins, as it really DID diverge culturally into two cities and two cultures.

Eye-Hand Coordination

Plantu: “I Detest You, but don’t Stop Spending your Dollars Here”

Nothing Gets those Wise Germans Worked up like a Hackneyed Old Argument

In fact the further back “the crime against humanity” is in the loon-induced mist, the better. But look at this in basic terms. 9-11 takes place. These idiots, employing the same weak logic that they always have in their overraught and fiction-laden way over the past four decades, want to blame the victims, and the majority of “wizened” folk in this “wizened” land just nod along with them.

Other than among associates of Feisal Abdul Rauf, one could well believe that 9/11 “trutherism” is largely a thing of the past. The main target of the “9/11 truth movement” was always, after all, the supposedly nefarious cabal otherwise known as the Bush administration. With the end of President Bush’s second term, the “movement” had lost its very raison d’être.

In the meanwhile, the vast majority of Americans have other fish to fry. But photographs from a rally that took place in Berlin on the anniversary of 9/11 suggest that 9/11 “trutherism” is alive and well in Germany.

These people are not allies – not of the US, nor to the humanity that they pretend to have a monopoly on the sympathy people have for them.

“Regime change” in the United States appears not to have sated the hunger for “9/11 truth” in Germany. As documented on the German Gnurpsnewoel blog, “truthers” were out in force earlier this month at the “Freedom Not Fear” demonstration that took place on Saturday, September 11, in Berlin.

They have forfeited (for the last time,) any “sure I’ll play along for history’s sake” respect that anyone could possibly have for them. Looking for a “class enemy” fit to rally the proletarian mass? Well, here they are:

The reference is to the February 1933 Reichstag fire, which was famously exploited by the Nazi regime to consolidate its power and persecute its political opponents. It has frequently been suggested that the Nazis themselves were responsible for setting the fire. The “9/11 = the Reichstag fire” equation has long been a preferred trope of Germany’s homegrown brand of “trutherism” – or what might better be called, in light of historical precedents, “9/11 revisionism.”

There is a certain irony in the fact that such 9/11 revisionism would abound at Berlin’s “Freedom Not Fear” demonstration. As German-language publicity materials make clear, the principal practical objective of the sponsoring organizations is to combat so-called data-retention laws. In March, Germany’s Constitutional Court overturned a German law implementing minimum data retention requirements laid out in a 2006 European Union directive.

So if its’ any sort of salve, the reason they persistently find new and rotating ways over the decades to hate American and the United States, is because it’s an easier, more passive-aggressive way to hate their fellow Germans.

“Freedom Not Fear,” indeed...

What is it REALLY all about anyway? The same as it always is. This year’s pretext just has to be a juicy enough lie to keep the kids marching: the idea that everyone not like them, their “class”, their “tribe”, etc., permanently has blood on their hands. And somehow, despite the regimes they love to defend, they don’t.

Without irony, the march started at what was once a divided zone, part of which was the “death strip” of a regime that never seem to understand is had the same ideology as the one most of them promote.

Starting at Potzdamer Platz, any direction you would then go in would run you into a former line in the boundary where people seeking “Freedom from Fear” were shot on sight by fellow anti-capitalists who pretended to have a monopoly on human decency – whose enemy was a faceless mythical super-beast with stars and stripes on their flag, and a flunky German federal state to do its’ bidding.

Nothing has changes. They are simply to intellectually narrow to see events as events, and not a burning bush confirming their theories and world view. They are incapable of dealing with any of the randomness and complexity of the real world.

In fact, I think that the stale repetition of the whole thing actually provides comfort, much in the way that children crave continuity.




By the way, DW-Radio last week, actually reported this event on air. However, they called it a “data privacy” rally, with the gist of the story being that “gee, people just don’t come out for these things like they used to.” The pedantic, old fashioned antikapitalismus, “Black Bloc”, anti-Polizei crap, nor were the terrorist-supporting themes mentioned. In fact the thrust of their complaint is that German ISPs log data, but somehow, by some secrete international magic, it’s all because “9-11 was an inside job”.

Demonstrators also criticized electronic cards for health insurance and the SWIFT agreement, which gives the United States access to bank transaction details in the EU to carry out counterterrorism operations.

Never mind anything else they also, in large margin, said.

Decades ago, I first saw this logic operate in exactly the same manner. It remains as vacuously and morally inverted as ever, as strange as people going on hunger strikes for the release of Baader-Meinhof gang memebers.