Post Halloween Pre Halloween Stress

Greetings, friends,
I am pleased to report that as of this morning, the "Old Glory" oak in Pico Canyon (the one that John Quigley sat in for 2 1/2 months) was not burned, although most of the rest of the oak forest west of Newhall was...a fireman said "a miracle" although I often insert the word "irony" whenever I see "miracle" and it usually works.

And now, Public Enemy's "Son of a Bush" (thanks, Adam)(warning, this site will play music, loudly):
http://www.peace-not-war.org/Music/PublicEnemy/

While I'm semi-trapped in my apartment this Halloween, due to semi-operative automobile, I'll send you some pictures of what most of us are missing in Paris (thanks again, Adam) or up yonder (thanks, Andrea). I've also enclosed a picture of our Leaders which lends itself to some risque comments, but just puzzles me.

And if that wasn't enough, yet more proof that this country is sick (thanks, Ellen):
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3146042998

I have only a few choice political SCREEDBITS (patent pending) this week. First of all, I have proof that Bill Clinton is not a complete asshole, and indeed, that he's still working, and better, than the dope we've got in charge now:
Clinton Announces Plan to Cut Cost of AIDS Drugs
By Lawrence K. Altman
New York Times
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/102503F.shtml

The Germans apparently knuckled slightly in saying that the EU should establish a separate, unified military force, but I think this is a dirty trick. Only an idiot like our leader would fall for this:
News analysis: German says EU planning unit should be attached to NATO
By John Vinocur/IHT
http://www.iht.com./articles/114789.htm

Did I say "idiot"?
The $87 Billion Money Pit
By Rod Nordland and Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
It's the boldest reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan. And we cannot afford to fail. But where are the billions really going?
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/102803E.shtml

Not as dumb as you think:
A Brief History of Computerized Election Fraud in America
By Victoria Collier
t r u t h o u t Perspective
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/102503C.shtml

Okay, against my better judgment, I've included this rather silly bit of chaff (thanks, Aunt Nona & Dana). I'm expecting (i.e. counting on) some rather icy replies from my more strident female friends:
NEW MEDS FOR WOMEN
D A M N I T O L
Take 2 and the rest of the world can go to hell for up to 8 full hours.
ST. M O M M A'S W O R T
Plant extract that treats mom's depression by rendering preschoolers unconscious for up to two days.
E M P T Y N E S T R O G E N
Suppository that eliminates melancholy and loneliness by reminding you of how
awful they were as teenagers and how you couldn't wait till they moved out.
P E P T O B I M B O
Liquid silicone drink for single women. Two full cups swallowed before an
evening out increases breast size, decreases intelligence, and prevents conception.
D U M B E R O L
When taken with Peptobimbo, can cause dangerously low IQ, resulting in
enjoyment of country music and pickup trucks.
F L I P I T O R
Increases life expectancy of commuters by controlling road rage and the urge
to flip off other drivers.
M E N I C I L L I N
Potent anti-boy-otic for older women. Increases resistance to such lethal
lines as, "You make me want to be a better person ... Can we get naked now?.."
B U Y A G R A
Injectable stimulant taken prior to shopping. Increases potency, duration,
and credit limit of spending spree.
J A C K A S S P I R I N
Relieves headache caused by a man who can't remember your birthday,
anniversary or phone number.
A N T I-T A L K S I D E N T
A spray carried in a purse or wallet to be used on anyone too eager to share
their life stories with total strangers in elevators.
N A G A M E N T
When administered to a husband, provides the same irritation level as
nagging him all weekend, saving the wife the time and trouble of doing it herself

If the bus strike continues much longer, I will be in serious need of some "Flipitor".

Okay, next a calendar for a new local bookshop that specializes in "art" (in the broadest sense of the term) books. Local may want to enjoy what is a badly-needed bit of cultural insanity (since we lost Amok Books) but just reading this calendar will be fun even if you are not near LA (which is, as you've heard, a pretty hot town, yuk yuk.)(thanks, Laura):
Art Haus BooksArt Haus Books November Calendar

Art Haus Books
5828 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles CA 90036
323.936.7244
arthaus@ispwest.com

Welcome to our new digs, 5828 Wilshire Blvd. across from LACMA, the La Brea Tar Pits and adjacent to the Folk and Craft Museum. Open 5 days a week, Tuesday-Saturday 12-6, later on event nights. Street and lot parking (at night) is available on Stanley. Ciao Alison Pinsler, Eric Chavkin

Meet me at the Art Haus.
Art Haus is the place where authors and publishers can showcase the newest pop-culture books. We have three stories of presentation space two galleries and we are building a space for video projection.
Art Haus Books is our bookstore component of Art Haus with a growing collection of hard-to-find academic books on architecture and design, architectural photography and graphics
Our plan is have as many pop-culture book selling events that will, in theory, subsidize a niche inventory of hard-core academic architecture books. The existing passive model of a bookstore filled to the rafters with old but wonderful books waiting to be found is just nostalgia in this age of Amazon online.
We have a different plan and approach to bookselling. We sell books by having events. So here goes our experiment. This should be fun.

Two days of old fashion Weimar Berlin decadence at the Art Haus
Fri Nov 7 Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler's Jewish Clairvoyant
Russ Columbo and the Crooner Mystique
Sat Nov 8 VOLUPTUOUS PANIC The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin Mel Gordon The Hot Girls of Weimar Berlin Barbara Ulrich

On Friday, November 7, 7:30 pm onward, we're going to do an evening about the forgotten but important figures featured in recently published biographies from Feral House: Russ Columbo and the Crooner Mystique and Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler1s Jewish Clairvoyant. Films from their oeuvre will be shown in an extraordinary multi-media event!

Friday Nov 7 Art Deco Era Crooner
When he died in 1934 at the age of 26, Russ Columbo was a radio and recording artist and emerging Hollywood star. A Hollywood Babylon type" accident" took his life, when a photographer friend managed to shoot him in the eye with an antique gun.
Winner of the Independent Press Book Award of 2003 for the field of Performing Arts, Joseph Lanza and Dennis Penna's Russ Columbo and the Crooner Mystique rediscovers an era when recording artists no longer shouted into horns and technology created an intimacy never before heard, and boo-boo-boo-boo crooners became the huge crushes of women in America.
The Feral House book includes never-before-seen personal effects of Columbo1s, including letters to and from Pola Negri, Carole Lombard and his other romantic Titanics. Not only was the handsome Russ Columbo Carole Lombard's "Prisoner of Love," but his hit records sold as many, if not more, than Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee. Columbo was killed just as the movie with his first starring role, "Wale Up and Dream," was released.
A Vitaphone two-reeler, That Goes Double, in which Russ Columbo plays a Dual role and sings three songs, including "Prisoner of Love," "My Love," and "You Call it Madness (But I Call it Love)" will be screened from a 16 mm print at 8 pm.
The book's co-author Dennis Penna will be there for questions and a book signing while Tiny Tim's tribute album to Columbo plays in the background.

Also Friday evening
Friday Nov 7 Jan Hanussen: Hitler1s Jewish Clairvoyant
At 9 pm, Mel Gordon, the University of California, Berkeley, professor, and Feral House and Da Capo Press author, will be presenting the "lost films" of Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler1s Jewish Clairvoyant. Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler's Jewish Clairvoyant is Gordon1s book chronicling the astonishing Hanussen1s life as a carny, Houdini-like stage performer, master hypnotist, mind reader psychic detective, filmmaker, and tabloid publisher in the Weimar Republic. Hanussen1s curious involvement with the Nazi party, including a role in the notorious Reichstag fire, eventually resulted in his murder.
Author Mel Gordon's devastating bio-history of the German-Jewish Houdini, Herschmann Chaim Steinschneider, aka Erik Jan Hanussen, explores and illuminates a fateful turning point in contemporary European history. Hanussen1s all-consuming quest to gain admission into the German universe culminates when the Nazi dictatorship emerges from the flames of the burning Reichstag, then collapses as the Holocaust claims him for one of its first victims," writes M. Michael Thaler, former President of the Holocaust Center of Northern California.
The real story of Hanussen, most recently seen as the Tim Roth character in Werner Herzog1s 2001 film, Invincible, is a far more remarkable figure than seen in Herzog1s or Istvan Szabo1s 1989 Hungarian film. Mel Gordon's biography proves it. In his appearance at Art Haus, Gordon will discuss the life of Hanussen, and reveal his lost films, which will be shown in public for the first time since 1932!
In the 1920s, Hanussen wrote, directed, and starred in his own occult-themed, feature films. Made in Vienna and Berlin, these silent melodramas achieved much renown in their time but thought to be lost or destroyed in the Nazi period. Professor Gordon has discovered two cinematic fragments from 1920 and 1932 that capture the flamboyant 'Prophet of the Third Reich.'
1) HYPNOSIS: HANUSSEN'S FIRST ADVENTURE (1920) [Fifth Act]. Similar in theme to THE CABINET OF CALIGARI and FANTOMAS, this film reflects the struggle of rationality versus mind-control. Hanussen plays a thoughtful, pipe- smoking, Sherlock-Holmeseque private detective, Gaston. His evil nemesis is a turbaned Indian fakir, who has the ability and means to hypnotize naïve Viennese girls into sexual slavery and replicate their lissome bodies with zombie-doubles. [20 minutes with original color tints]
2) HANUSSEN AT TEMPELHOF (1932). A newsreel short, this sound piece compares Hanussen's attempt to transform a goat into a human with that of British parapsychologist Harry Price. Despite the assistance of the comely and virginal Urta Bohn, Price fails to achieve the Faustian metamorphosis.
Erik, on the other hand, astonishes all with his sleight-of-hand ingenuity. [3 minutes]
Before and after the screening of these two short works, Professor Gordon will discuss Hanussen1s strange career and the reasons why his history has not seen the light of day in America since the late 1930s. Both his Hanussen book, and the Russ Columbo book, will be available for sale and signature by the authors.

Saturday Nov 8 Two books, One weekend on Weimar Berlin decadence unveiled

On Saturday, November 8, beginning at 8 pm, authors Barbara Ulrich, The Hot Girls of Weimar Berlin, and Mel Gordon Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, will conduct an evening about the sex culture of pre-Nazi Berlin. Period music, aphrodisiac concoctions, digital slide shows taking us through the multi-gendered nightclubs of decadent Berlin, delightful lectures by the mad professor Gordon (who once assembled a notorious show about sex professor Magnus Hirschfeld) and readings by documentary filmmaker/author Ulrich. Books will be signed, and an enjoyment will be had by all.

Friday Nov 14 WOMEN WHO RUN THE SHOW How a Brilliant and Creative New Generation of Women Stormed Hollywood
MOLLIE GREGORY in person to talk about Hollywood Power People
Confidence is the true, secret ingredient to surviving well." Barbara Corday, co-creator, co-writer, Cagney & Lacey, former executive VP, CBS, Chair, Motion Picture/TV Production USC.
In the 1970's you could count the number of women producers on one hand; by the late 1990's, there were hundreds. What happened and how did it happen? That's the story of Women Who Run The Show. Mollie Gregory interviewed more than 125 of these pioneers, whose stories make up a chronicle of the last three decades of the entertainment industry. Women Who Run the Show has interviews with women in every facet of the entertainment business, from features, television, production, corporate, back lot and new media, to the DGA trainee and the studio head.

Friday Nov 21 Dead End Starts Here
Me and the Dead End Kid book event with Leo Gorcey Jr.
Do you remember the Dead End kids? They were Hollywood's version of slum kids, wrong-side-of-the-track youths that were always in trouble, destined for jail or worse. Dead End meant no future, no hope. In the 30s, Leo Gorcey the actor, played 'Mugsy', as one of the Dead End Kids. Leo Gorcey Jr., has written a revealing book about his actor Dad, who became the poster child for all 'bad kids'. This Dead End Kid had fame, money, connections but alcohol was his downfall.
Today, the moniker 'dead end kid' has been replaced by the politically correct term 'at risk'. Slum kids may not have the connections Gorcey had. They see no future, only their own dead ends. But Gorcey Jr., internalizing his dad's up and down tale, says it doesn't have so. For him, there are no Dead Ends, and Gorcey Jr has started a foundation to help at risk kids.
Join us on Friday November 21 for lots of laughs, book signing, Hollywood insider stuff and some serious talk about the Bowery Boys, plus the East Side and Dead End Kids.

Coming in December
Straight Whisky A Living History of Sex, Drugs and Rock n' Roll on the Sunset Strip
"A Must read for any serious Rock n' Roll fan"- Roger McGuinn, the Byrds
The Complete Book of Oscar Fashion 75 years of Oscar Fashion
Join the book party for the west coast launch of The Complete Book of Oscar Fashion is a decade-by-decade photo history of Oscar fashions from 1929 to the present. Between the black velveteen covers lies a sumptuous photo treat of elegance and beauty. This is an Oscar history presented as photo buffet.

Finally, two articles about last weekend's march on Washington DC (after the Bush fled)(thanks again, Andrea):

WASHINGTON POST COVERAGE of OCT. 25
& other media coverage

The October 25 demonstration to End the Occupation of Iraq and Bring the Troops Home Now demonstration was broadcast live and then rebroadcast several times on C-Span, it received major coverage by CNN over an 18 hour period. It was also picked up by hundreds of local newspapers and received widespread international press attention. The Washington Post carried a photograph of the demonstration on its front page; the accompanying article is included below in its entirety.

ORGANIZERS' ESTIMATE 100,000, POLICE ESTIMATE 50,000, NEW YORK TIMES REPORT 10,000

In another shameful example of biased reporting, the New York Times report of Oct. 25 gave a lower crowd estimate than even the Washington DC police by a factor of five. For decent and objective coverage see the Washington Post article.

The October 25 demonstration had a record number of family members of soldiers, veterans and active duty soldiers; contingents from the Arab American and Muslim community; and many others. To read the A.N.S.W.E.R. report of October 25, go to
http://www.internationalanswer.org/news/update/102503report.html

** WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE **
IN D.C., A DIVERSE MIX ROUSES WAR PROTEST
By Manny Fernandez
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 26, 2003; Page A08
Tens of thousands of antiwar demonstrators marched in Washington yesterday to call for an end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, turning out in smaller numbers than for prewar protests but making plain their opposition during a noisy yet peaceful procession.
The article can be found at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17636-2003Oct25.html

Vive le screed!