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A paragraph on Page 3 of a NY Times online story, concerning the impracticality of the WTC memorial designs, has this exact juxtaposition of text and image (may require refresh because they shuffle the ads):
The Suspending Memory design has a bridge connecting the two memorial islands that is so narrow as currently conceived that it might become overcrowded, said Paul Buckhurst, who teaches at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University...
Update on the New Jersey Wasteland Tour. (Take the tour--
DJ Set List, 2000. Back when I was DJing regularly, I had the idea of integrating some mixes I'd been taping off the radio (from '93 - '99) into my own live "deep tech house" set (yes, the term sounds pretentious, but it's accepted jargon and I've collected tons of it so cut me some slack here). Kind of curating the curators, or padding my mix with those of my betters, if you want to be cruel. So I hauled my cassette player into the restaurant where I was playing and plugged it into the mixing board. In order to make it work, I felt I needed some kind of road map. This piece of doodled-on, taped-together, water-stained legal paper--which had to be read with a flashlight--is it. Yes, I rocked the house, i.e., people were moving as they ate. (Alert readers will note the presence of DHS' immortal "House of God" in the list.)
A bunch of new movie preReviews are up; allow me to shamelessly self-plug and steer you towards my entries on Man on Fire, Peter Pan, and The Day After Tomorrow. The Peter Pan post is so topical I'm going to put up an excerpt here.
Remember the front page "asteroid hitting earth" stories that happened a few months before Deep Impact and Armageddon came out? Or the giant shark hooked off Montauk Point the summer Jaws 2 was released? (OK, the latter did happen, or they said it happened, but no reason you should know or remember it.) Call me a cynic, but I find it very strange that the media is gearing up for a Michael Jackson arrest frenzy just as Peter Pan is hitting theaters.The theory is, the film studio gives the DA a wad of cash to prosecute the suit, which will be very costly for the state, in exchange for wide dissemination of the lost boys/Never-Neverland meme at a time when a film about same, which doesn't look very good, is coming out. Sales of Jackson product will also increase. Lots of bucks at stake here. But of course Hollywood (filmmaking, law enforcement) could never be that corrupt. Or could it?
Also, while Sally McKay's preReview of Bridge on the River Kwai is well written and funny, the film must be defended as a kind of classic '60s antihero story. It's much more nuanced than you would think. True, there's a commando raid to blow up the bridge but for most of the movie's length Alec Guinness is keeping his fellow POWs sane by building the bridge. He wins a moral victory over the Japanese by showcasing British engineering skills and "stiff upper lip" resolve under demoralizing circumstances. (The film's ethnic politics still aren't very enlightened.) The problem is, he has so much pride in his work he nearly foils the commandos' mission. The latter must kill one of their own to make up for his pigheaded folly. Guinness' penetrating look when he's searching for evidence of sabotage and his mask of pain when he realizes what an idiot he's been are just unforgettable. The bridge, which would have been a real asset to the Southeast Asian locale after the war, is of course blown up, and when the POWs' physician surveys the ruined structure and all the bodies of principal characters lying around his only words are "Madness. Madness." (The last line of the film.) A more detailed synopsis is here.
Thanks to Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes for mentioning this page as an example of online art-writing. I've been enjoying his, too. In another recent post he mentions his dislike of John Currin and mocks the inevitable hagiographic Kimmelman review in the Times. Kimmelman invokes Paul Cadmus and I think that's exactly right: both artists are acerbically witty, with old master polish, but "minor" or "genre" figures. The difference is Currin's canvases are sold as the current high-priced ($400,000) "cutting edge": that's disturbing because it shows how retrograde the collector sensibility has become. Currin's work is mildly transgressive, eminently collectible, and assures the continuity of a certain line of American painting in museum collections: Sargent, Hopper, Cadmus, Tooker, Larry Rivers, Alex Katz, John Currin. Avant gardes come and go, modernist and postmodernist trends seem faddish, but the Painterly Tradition is preserved. John C, I hope you're very proud.
Dallas, 1982 (They Live), scan of a black and white photo. I stood at one end of a University Park strip center and took a roll of pictures with a telephoto lens. One thing that strikes me about this image now is how huge the cars are. Also, remember antennas? Geez. I thought they were streaks on the scan at first. This looks like a documentary photo from the '60s to me. Very strange time warp.
My Dream (I promise this won't be a habit.)
Last night I dreamed I was a Japanese salaryman, living by myself in a large two story house, and all the light bulbs kept failing. As soon as I screwed one in it would short out, and I was starting to get scared. I went upstairs to see if I could find some part of the house with light, and found a duplicate of myself lying face down on some nail-studded boards, awkwardly trying to wield a hammer. I've never dreamed of myself as Japanese before; the vibe here was distinctly Tetsuo the Iron Man meets Waiting for Godot. Weird. After I woke up, I got online and ordered a VHS copy of Tetsuo, but mostly because I want to own Greg Nickson's incomparable "Drum Struck" video, which is on the Fox/Lorber tape (the dream reminded me I've been meaning to do this).
I have been thinking a lot about going to Japan, though. One thing I want to do is visit the west coast (Akita or Yamagata) so I can eat hatahata. I found out about this from an episode of Patlabor: Mobile Police, where Captain Gotoh dispatches Izumi and Shinohara to Sakata (in Yamagata) for a mission and asks them to bring back a package of these fish as a souvenir, or "miyage." (see Anime Companion Supplement). "Where's my hatahata?" becomes a running joke in the show. At the end the crew has boiled his hatahata in a soup-pot and appears to be eating without him. I do not get the ending of that episode.
Update, 2013: Drumstruck is on Greg Nickson's vimeo.
Oswald Rising, 1988, oil on canvas, 66" X 47". When I lived in Dallas, "the city that killed Kennedy" AKA "the city of hate," I participated in a university gallery show coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the assassination. I made this painting for the show, whoops, sorry, to express my deep feelings about an event that changed America. It was reproduced in the Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Star Telegram and Art Papers. On the 40th anniversary I find it amazing that webloggers like Steve Gilliard still buy the "lone nut" theory (scroll down to "Conspiracy Theories" on 11/21/03). Even if you don't believe all the evidence pointing towards a second shooter on the Grassy Knoll, the idea that a sleazy mob wannabe like Jack Ruby would suddenly get an attack of morality and kill Oswald out of "revenge" just stretches credulity. I'm with Gore Vidal that the shooting of the President with his wife in the car, in full view of everyone, was "classic Palermo style"--that is, a mob hit. Help from crazy anti-Castro Cubans and rogue CIA agents shouldn't be ruled out either. Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK is valuable not for its theory--that the military industrial complex whacked Kennedy because he was going to end the Vietnam War--but rather for its careful laying out of the many reasons the lone gunman hypothesis makes no sense.
Update to my previous post on the "A.B.C." video night at Deitch: It seemed strangely contradictory that Carly Ptak contributed the evening's most holistic performance (as a camcorder pans across images of the Great Outdoors, her voice hypnotically intones such Baba Ram Dassian commands as "look at the water, it's flowing neither forward nor backward, be a leaf in the water, just be here...") while at the same time, as a Duchampian found video finder, she offered the most out-of-synch-with-nature entry in the video program: a tape called Memorial Day 2000, which originally turned up in a West Michigan yard sale. The latter piece, shot by an anonymous camera holder, records a weekend of drinking, dancing, barbecuing, and bonfire-burning at a campground near the Michigan sandhills, attended solely by 20 and 30-something Midwesterners (no kids or anyone over 40) with the world's largest collection of RVs, ATVs, dirt bikes, and beer bongs. Kind of like an outdoor rave without a DJ, the event features vehicles chewing up the countryside, men wrestling in mud, a guy vomiting, and at the climax, a couch hurled onto the bonfire. To sensitive East Coast intellectual types, many of whom fled this kind of milieu, I'm guessing, the tape was a glimpse into the 9th circle of hell.
But maybe Ptak's two contributions aren't so far apart, on second thought. The TM piece isn't "nature" but electronically mediated nature, somewhat reminiscent of a soothing self help tape you could order online to get your fried head together. The electronic drones underlying the words were vaguely sinister and hardly "natural," in the sense of wind and babbling brooks (Ptak is one-half of the demonic noise act Nautical Almanac, after all). And as barbaric and eco-unfriendly as the Memorial Day revellers were, "at least they weren't at home clicking through the channels all weekend," as Ptak pointed out to me later. Their activities were a frenetic but ultimately non-violent coming together in search of...some kind of meaning? An attempt to reclaim lost communal rituals? And who's really in a position to judge them? When all was said and done, both performances reduced nature, or "natural experience," to phosphor dots on a screen, watched passively by a room full of people in their own search for collective meaning/entertainment/enlightenment.
Pictures from "A.B.C.", a.k.a. Another Bad Creation, a group night of video and performance curated by Cory Arcangel, at Deitch Projects, NY (last night, November 19, 2003). Featuring works created and/or found by Cory and Jamie Arcangel, BEIGE, Paper Rad, Seth Price, CELLmedia, Carly Ptak, LoVid and the shinths tour.
From the press release: "Taking its title from the early 90's teen pop band produced by Michael Bivins (of Biv10 entertainment), this night explores a style of video and performance best described as 'post cable access.' [V]ideo and live performance mash together in an almost imperceptible mix of quick cuts and poorly tracked VHS footage. Think accidental high-school videos, Salvation Army found tapes, awesome karaoke, anything originally recorded on a BETA tape, broken Nintendo games, blue screen ring tone hip-hop videos, and dance videos made with tin foil and spray paint. Th[e] night explores the side of homemade single channel video which is cheap, quick, and often embarrassing. Colliding to provide us with a clear picture of the ill fated 'home video revolution,' the foundations of A.B.C. are the celebration of the camcorder, the banality of everyday life, and a complete disregard for the medium."
Top to bottom: Carly Ptak, live video/sound/performance (a kind of transcendental meditation incantation with a spooky electro-bass pulse and the artist's face superimposed over leaves, rocks, river, and sky--rather disconcerting after a night of High Irony); LoVid, live video/sound/performance (playing their new video synth--sorry I didn't get more imagery in the shot); "Shinth," DIY performance with handmade electronic instrument built by Peter B. The Shinth tour was in the basement of Deitch's Wooster Street space; the video program ran upstairs for a continuous 90 minutes of big-screen projection. The flow of recorded videos and "pay no attention to those performers behind the curtain" live video was fairly seamless: I didn't realize till afterward that the Paper Rad performance (psychedelic nonZense literally phoned in through a stuffed talking bear telephone) was done live.
A couple more pics are here (click on thumbnails for enlarged view). More on Carly Ptak here.
An earlier thread on Christopher Ashley's html drawings got sidetracked into other issues, such as browser and display technology and whether web designers are artists (I'd say they're designers, but that's not to say design can't be artistic). Ashley's abstractions are consistently inspiring and imaginative, accomplished with the most minimal and available of means. New patterns, color relationships, and strategic approaches to that Modernist mainstay, the grid, just seem to pour out of him.
A painter friend of mine was over recently and really responded to Ashley's works onscreen. We agreed they (html drawings) were the type of thing Peter Halley would be doing if his work wasn't "stuck." Halley talks a good cyber-game but he's never made the leap to actually composing with or for the computer. Usually he uses it to illustrate or document ideas in his paintings, or as digital window dressing to make his art seem more "now," while he continues producing traditionally-fabricated canvases.* His biggest problem, though, is being a prisoner of his own cells and conduits. Ashley, on the other hand, working only with the computer, shows a wide range of places the "Halley-type painting" could go: intriguing figure-ground play, simulated transparency, flirtation with applied design (logos, pictograms, game boards).
I think on some level, though, my friend still thinks of Ashley's work as reproductions of paintings, and is critiquing them imagining them "in the flesh," with smooth surfaces and crisp-but-not-brittle edges like, say, Cary Smith's. But such paintings don't exist, it's all illumination in your browser. Somehow people with an eye for traditional abstraction are going to have to subtract out that extra step they're taking of imagining the reified image and just enjoy the fleeting thing they're seeing on the screen. This is true anti-materialist practice: what conceptualism promised thirty-five years ago but never delivered, at least in a visually compelling form.
*See for example, this jacket illustration for a recent Halley book. Behind the all the naked models you can see a Halley painting fuzzed out with some kind Gaussian filter. The inside of the book features More Wacky Photoshop Fun With Halley Paintings. Oh, and I guess I should say I generally like Halley's work but find his recent forays into installation and trying to position himself as a Warholian media maven unconvincing.
The following list of online videos (with commentary) was found on Singe's Journal. Eventually I'll annotate the list, remove items, etc. Kid's Show I wrote about here, and it's great, but it's about a 23 MB file. The other ones I've seen and enjoyed were the octopus, stupid cat tricks, the exploding "firemelon", and the second stinger test, which looks digitally enhanced. (Regarding that last item, the soldiers probably aren't yucking it up so much now that those weapons are knocking our helicopters out of the sky.)
octopus.mpeg - Octopus camouflage
funnyCats.wmv - Video montage of various cats being silly.
hummer.mpg - Hummer-fired antitank missile live fire test.
JavelinLiveFireVsT72.mpeg - Javelin shoulder-mounted antitank missile live fire test. (Even better!)
desertBikeCrash.avi - Awesome bike crash.1short.mpeg - "Alright, are you ready?" "Damn skippy I'm ready!" (higher-rez than the more common firemelon.mpg)
kidshow2.wmv - A "TV Funhouse"-like fake twisted kids TV show pilot. Beat kids! [23 MB]
Course de Pikes Peak (Ari Vatanen).mpeg - And finally, to wind down, "Climb Dance". Goin' up Pike's Peak in a rally car. [66 MB!]
Jonathan Yardley revisits author John D. McDonald in the Washington Post (there may be a few questionnaire questions at the Post website--just lie). McDonald's most famous book is probably The Executioners, filmed twice as Cape Fear. I would say he's a brilliant writer but not a good writer. He could produce some stinker lines, sometimes in the same paragraph with the most cutting social observations. Even some of the sentences Yardley quotes are kind of overdone (the Meyer excerpt is first rate, though). I recently reread McDonald's two science fiction novels from the 1950s, and found Wine of the Dreamers dated but Ballroom of the Skies unbeatable. A conspiracy of alien telepaths keeps Earth in a constant state of war and economic strife to produce "Earthlings," titanium-tough administrators who prevent a decadent galactic civilization from declining further. I believe it's all true and the telepaths heavily influenced the 2000 Presidential election (Bush being not the Earthling but a catalyst for war).
Here's a sample McDonald passage, from Pale Gray for Guilt, a Travis McGee book from '68. Readers are invited to put more choice quotes in the comments to this post.
It had been a fine hot lazy summer, a drifting time of good fish, old friends, new girls, of talk and laughter.Cold beer, good music and a place to go.
That's the way They do you. That's the way They set you up for it. There ought to be a warning bell on the happymeter, so every time it creeps high enough, you get that dang-dang alert. Duck, boy. That glow makes you too visible. One of Them is out there in the boonies, adjusting the windage, getting you lined up in the cross hairs of the scope. When it happens so often, wouldn't you think I'd be more ready for it?
Excellent Mike Davis piece connecting the marauding, raping protagonists of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian with the recently revealed Tiger Force atrocities no on is talking about (from the Vietnam era), and by implication, atrocities we may yet discover if the Government keeps pouring on the counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq. Good question he raises: How the fzck is Bob Kerrey still president of the New School after it came out that his unit was a bunch of throat slashers in Vietnam? That was then, this is now, right.
Kudos to the Wachowski Brothers for making the best live-action anime ever. The concluding chapter of the "Matrix" series features a Starship Troopers-quality battle sequence with men in giant Mecha battle suits blasting away at boiling chains of furious robot Squids, and the climactic duke-out between Neo and Agent Smith recalls the never-ending, crater-blasting combat of Goku and Lord Frieza in Dragonball Z. Gluing the whole thing together is a mystical or theological investigation a la Final Fantasy. It's too bad the first episode created expectations the series could never live up to, owing to the late dot com cultural context and what was at the time a cogent social critique of a fake, media created world. As recently as Bush's staged aircraft carrier landing, the Simulacrum still seemed firmly in place. However, since then, news has slipped past our own Machine filters of the hundreds of US dead and wounded in a bloody, ongoing war with the people of Iraq, making a more serious, non-ironic drama about matters worth dying for suddenly relevant. As it turns out, Zion's battle against the Empire of Machines is won or lost depending on what the Empire wants for itself--its own interior conversation. How long will it take the U.S. to realize, as did the Machine City, that its own Agent Smiths (i.e. unelected leaders), growing in power, threaten the stability of the system far more than any struggling band of separatist humans?
Sue de Beer, Making Out With Myself, 1997, color video short.
Sue de Beer, whose work will be appearing in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, started her career with some fairly blunt, often violent imagery, circling around the theme of the doppelganger. (An essay I did on Heidi 2, her collaboration with Laura Parnes, fills in some background.) She is fascinated by the late-90s high-school shootings and adolescent trauma in general. Her 2-channel video installation last year at Postmasters, Hans und Grete, featured a male and female actor, each of whom played two parts: a Gothic and a "normal" teen. Highlights include a sex scene with giggle-inducing prosthetic ejaculation, the bloody dismemberment of a stuffed dog, and some seriously wack guitar playing, taking place mostly on charmingly handmade sets littered with heavy metal posters and bits of Teutonic kitsch such as plastic garden gnomes. Two stock "bored teenagers in class" scenes used sampled teacher-student dialogue taken from Nightmare on Elm Street (a discussion of Shakespeare) and Halloween (a much headier colloquy on Thomas Costain and free will with brainy Jamie Lee Curtis nailing the answers). The video shifts back and forth between good kids and bad kids, all of whom seem equally alienated, with much mawkish diary reading and eventually, gunshots.
An issue de Beer wrestles with is the impossibility of a true outsider stance, in a world where goth, punk, and goth-punk moves are heavily recycled, researched, and marketed. Like an art world version of Quentin Tarantino, who equates film and life, she makes no distinction between real teens and media teens, and the boredom we sometimes feel listening to/watching their existential dilemmas mirrors the vacuity of popular entertainment, from coming of age films to reality TV. It made little difference to me to learn that the parts of the script were taken from writings as diverse as Ulrike Meinhof's and Kip Kinkel's; it all sounded like bad TV dialogue of "disaffected youth" to me. Whether the kids shoot up a school or become CEO of Raytheon, they (we) all wade out of the same sludgepool of media cliches. The banality of the dialogue is belied, however, by de Beer's complex mise en scene mixing game imagery/sounds, cult insignia, scrambled architectural references, and pop culture bric-a-brac from both sides of the Atlantic.
De Beer's next work shows signs of brightening up: perhaps her trajectory will be the reverse of Cindy Sherman's ingenues-to-vomit trail. Below is an image from a new installation titled The Dark Hearts, "a nostalgic romp through punk coming-of-age in suburban America. Part road movie, part Mike Mills romance, the loose narrative revolves around two teenagers sneaking out of their parents' house to go prowl the neighborhood." Looking forward to seeing where they go (and she goes).
Shown here is Lord Norman Foster's original proposal for the Hearst Tower completion project (see previous post). While very much in the spirit of Belgium's Atomium museum, which resembles a giant molecule, Lord Foster's design was even more radical, taking into account environmental and social engineering concepts unknown to the earlier Modernist architects from whom he draws obvious inspiration. The left hand picture shows the building in warm weather, in the so-called "erectile" state, taking advantage of solar energy and prevailing breezes in the summer to cool the interior. In the right-hand, or "cocoon" state, shown as a greatly simplified computer model, the building reconfigures itself in the winter months, through an ingenious system of moving floors and flexible outer panels, to a squat, easier-to-heat shape. The entire building is open plan, which means Hearst employees would have a seasonal scramble to claim new work space in the reconfigured structure, thus breaking down rigid social hierarchies and territorial codes not just in two dimensions but three, possibly four.
On viewing the design, Hearst executives were not kind, offering comments ranging from "are you insane?" to "lose the Christmas ornaments." To satisfy corporate higher-ups, the overt molecular reference and shapeshifting design were removed, leaving a futuristic-looking but merely decorative shell. Despite the structure's incongruity with 75 year-old Art Deco "base" that is to support it, the watered-down project sailed easily past the Landmark Commission.
Artist Bill Schwarz refers to a certain type of architectural addition as "spaceships settled on rooftops." Above is a picture of the one that will "finish" the Hearst building at 8th Ave. and 56th Street in Manhattan. Construction was halted during the Depression (I'd previously heard it was during World War II due to steel shortages), and "resumed," with a slightly different plan, this year. I believe the original five-story deco structure is in the historic registry--it always looked oddly truncated, but if it's going to be a "base" for something, dear God, why does it have to be this? A compendium of articles here calls it a "lava lamp," but I think I prefer "geodesic sock puppet."
UPDATE: According to some of the linked articles, the "base" was built by Joseph Urban in 1928 and the structure never completed because of the onset of the Depression and the decline in William Randolph Hearst's personal fortunes. It was designated a Landmark in 1988, which means the Landmark Commission actually signed off on this turkey of a "completion" project!
UPDATE: I want to be as clear as I can about why I find this design ludicrous. I'm not opposed to "parabuildings"--Herbert Muschamp's intellectually dishonest term for add-ons usually motivated by greed or vanity, but sometimes just to pay the mortgage--nor am I some Prince Charles purist who hates Modernist-style architecture. The Hearst building is like mixing stripes and plaids though. Not only is the combination of building styles jarring and ugly, the Modernist top is a sham. The "Fuller-esque" structure serves no practical purpose, it's just modern-looking cladding over your standard post-and-lintel box.
The hiphop years: detail of F-Factor 2.
"Pixel Monster - Faier" by pixelthork at 400 X 350 pixels
Below are some Flash claymations (and one cartoon) by Prikedelik. Incredibly crude clay figures act out the artist's raging id in a perfectly ordinary apartment setting. Against background scenery consisting of books, papers, cigarette packs, and computer hardware, these lumpen, miniature superheroes dance, fight, and try their best to survive the blind forces of nature. Much of it's mindless slapstick ("cautious," "repressed," or "anal-retentive" are not words you would use to describe this work) but like the best slapstick it's funny. Turning on the speakers is recommended as the accompanying music--heavy on the electronic club anthems--is choice. Some shorts are interactive, so if you see a command like "Dance" or "Die" be sure to click it. Animations load quickly on broadband; not sure about dialup.
| Death to the Blue King! Destiny (interactive cartoon) |
Congratulations to Sue de Beer, Cory Arcangel/BEIGE, and James Siena for getting picked for the Whitney Biennial this year. Other names I appreciated seeing on the list were Erick Swenson, Yayoi Kusama, and Richard Prince, although you couldn't find a more unrelated group of artists. I had a longer post written with my thoughts on this year's lineup, but I just don't feel comfortable second-guessing the choices. Well, yes I do, to the extent I don't understand the inclusion of Robert Mangold, Paul McCarthy, Robert Longo, or Elizabeth Peyton. The institutional politics and horse-trading that go into such a high-profile project weaken it considerably, and one always wishes it would say more. Sometimes the curating's just bad: Larry Rinder might have pulled off his "high tech/primitive" duality last time if he'd picked more compelling art. Anyway, I was glad to see some people in it this year whose work I really like.
UPDATE: Someone asked to see a list of the artists; it now appears in the comments to this post.
F-Factor 2, MSPaintbrush painting, ink on paper, 55" X 50" (rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise)
(the "Xtreme detail" .gif is perversely titled "The hiphop years." If you don't see it in the larger piece, don't worry, it's very small and cut off by the top edge.)
Entertainment Industry Goober of the Month: Tom Rosenberg
One of [The Human Stain]'s producers, Tom Rosenberg, of Lakeshore Entertainment, said the trick was to translate a complex novel into film terms while deploying a cast that could draw moviegoers. Would audiences accept any white actor as an African-American? Or was a British-bred actor somehow harder to accept in the role? Mr. Rosenberg insists that in research screenings, few moviegoers questioned the casting.previous goober (actually the award isn't monthly, just when something especially dorky leaps out at me) / newer goober"When I read the book, Anthony Hopkins was who I thought of from the beginning," Mr. Rosenberg said in October. "I needed an actor who was very accomplished and who meant something in the film marketplace. I have a friend in Chicago who could be Anthony's fair-skinned cousin, whose parents were both African-American. I knew casting Anthony was grounded in reality." (via NYT)
Instead of "gook" our soldiers are using the term "hadji" to refer to an enemy combatant (sorry, liberatee) in Iraq and Afghanistan. (As in "killing some hadjis" or "mowing down some hadjis.") This article spells it "hajji" or "hodgie" and says it refers to the Arab term for "pilgrim to Mecca," but the writer is either over 60 or grew up in a country without TV because any fool knows Hadji, the Calcutta orphan with occasional mystical powers, who was Jonny Quest's sidekick. I mean, duh. The show has been in endless syndication since the '60s so it's not just a boomer thing. A semi-educated guess is the trend started in Afghanistan and spread to the Iraq theatre; maybe that's wrong, but it seems a lot more likely than appropriating "pilgrim to Mecca" as a derogatory term.
--from Bartcop. The site serves up heaps of unsubtle, sometimes verging on Hustler-style humor aimed at the pious thieves who control all three branches of government and the media. Lots of Photoshop gags, many gut-busting funny. Nazi references abound. If you are consumed with the newly identified (by conservatives), supposedly irrational trend known as "Bush hatred," this is the place for you. Laughing makes you feel better and helps release the accumulated poisons that build up watching greedy fake Christians destroy the country.