July 4– Mao Dun
Famed radical Chinese writer, journalist, cultural critic.

JULY 4, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
*U.S.: Independence Day.
*Flag-burning day
*Hannibal, Missouri: Tom Sawyer Fence-Painting Day.

ALSO ON JULY 4 IN HISTORY…
1585 — English colonists land on Roanoke Island, New World.
1627 — Virginia Colony orders “scorched earth” policy for neighboring natives.
1776 — Liberty Bell rings, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: not all it’s cracked up to be.
1826 — New Harmony utopianists sign Declaration of Mental Independence.
1840 — “Calico Indians” rise up in 5-year-long Hudson Valley Anti-Rent Wars.
1845 — Henry David Thoreau takes up 26-month-long squat, Walden Pond, Mass.
1855 — Walt Whitman, age 36, self-publishes “Leaves of Grass.” Dismal sales.
1896 —Radical Chinese writer Mao Dun born, Tongxiang, Zhejiang, China.
1904 — Jazz great Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong born, New Orleans, Louisiana.
1905 — Radical anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus dies, Thourot, Belgium.
1928 — Black American beat poet Ted Joans born, riverboat near Cairo, Illinois.
1966 — LBJ signs U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
1980 — Anthropologist, cultural theorist Gregory Bateson dies, San Francisco.

Excerpted from The 2009 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints: Radical Heroes for the New Millennium by James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective

Now that we’re at the height of the home-grillin’ season, it’s as good a time as any to revisit this Wonder Showzen classic, wherein the kids get to visit a hot dog factory! Who wants to swim in the meat pool?

“Dreams always end before you kill the last person.”

July 3– Gil Wolman
Prominent French Lettrist and Situationist theorist.
Read A User’s Guide to Detournement by Wolman and Debord on Bureau of Public Secrets.

JULY 3, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
*Montana: Annual Sun Dance of the Assiniboine tribe.
*Festival of Wilderness

ALSO ON JULY 3 IN HISTORY…
1832 — Opium exempted from US federal tariff duty.
1883 — Modern allegorist writer Franz Kafka born, Prague, Czechoslovakia.
1917 — Petrograd uprising. Street fighting. Lenin goes into hiding.
1971 — Poet, Doors frontman Jim Morrison dies of heart attack, Paris, France.
1976 — U.S. Supreme Court reverses itself, says death penalty OK.
1982 — Black Panther and Move activist Mumia Abu-Jamal sentenced to death.
1988 — US kills 290 civilians aboard Iranian airliner without punishment.
1990 — Bulgarian Federation of Anarchist Youth protest Commie Prez Mladenov.
1995 — French Situationist theorist Gil J. Wolman dies, Paris, France.

Excerpted from The 2009 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints: Radical Heroes for the New Millennium by James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective

The above image is taken from R. Crumb’s awesome “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick” and you can get the whole shebang by clicking here.

So have you all seen the new issue of Orange Coast magazine yet? You know, “the magazine of Orange County”? Yeah, us neither. But thankfully LA Observed checked it out and hipped us to this decent article about Philip K. Dick’s final years of ducking the spotlight, having profound religious experiences and munching on Trader Joe’s grub down in the OC, basically living a life quite similar — minus the amphetamines he’d mostly left behind — to the goners of A Scanner Darkly. An excerpt:

Dick moved from Fullerton to downtown Santa Ana, where he rented a two-bedroom apartment that he later bought when the building went condo. As a bohemian hipster whose work depicted future people oppressed by life in their monstrously huge, regimented, soulless “conapt” complexes, Dick couldn’t escape the irony that he lived in a condo. In a 1980 Slash magazine interview, he denounced the condo association’s resident meetings as creepily intrusive.

In truth, Dick’s new residence was in some ways ideally suited to him. His building had an elaborate security system, which assuaged his latent paranoia. For the agoraphobic author, the apartment was within walking distance of the post office and a Trader Joe’s, where he could pick up roast beef sandwiches and frozen dinners.

Read the whole of “The Unending Tale of Philip K. Dick” at Orange Coast, or right here after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

People across the USA (and now parts of Europe) are reporting unusual sunsets, the result of Russia’s Sarychev Peak volcano, which erupted on June 12, “hurling massive plumes of sulfur dioxide and other debris into the stratosphere. The white ripples that herald these sunsets are made of volcanic aerosols–a mixture of ash and sulfur compounds. Blue light scattered by fine volcanic aerosols combines with ordinary red sunset rays to produce the telltale lavender.” More at http://www.spaceweather.com

“Under our lives our death continues like the blank tape under a recording.”

July 2 - PATRICE LAMUMBA
Martyred Congolese pioneer of African liberation.
Read Speeches and writings by Lamumba on Marxists.org

JULY 2, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
Besse-en-Chandesse, France: The Black Virgin is carried into the mountains, where she once went on her own.
Siena, Italy: Madonna di Provenzano Festival. Horse race, followed by revelry and music, in honor of armless madonna.

ALSO ON JULY 2 IN HISTORY…
1717 — First American book auction held, Boston, Massachusetts.
1776 — New Jersey, in oversight, gives right to vote to some women.
1778 — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, French philosopher and social theorist, dies.
1789 — Marquis de Sade shouts from Bastille that prisoners are being slaughtered.
1881 — U.S. President Garfield shot by overlooked politician Charles Guiteau.
1903 — U.S. leases Guantanamo military base from Cuba, “in perpetuity.”
1925 — Martyr Patrice Lumumba born, Katako Kombe, Belgian Congo.
1939 — First World Science Fiction Convention opens, New York City.
1950 — Protesting ban on Communists, NYC Teachers Union resigns from NEA.
1993 — 35 die in anti-Salman Rushdie riots, Sivas, Turkey.
1995 — Radical journalist George Seldes dies, Hartland Four Corners, Vermont.

Excerpted from The 2009 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints: Radical Heroes for the New Millennium by James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective

Dean Wareham (ex-Galaxie 500, ex-Luna, now of Dean & Britta ‘fame’) reads a letter from a concerned Luna fan onstage…

Birdhouse craftsman Fred Jakubiec made it through 25 years of jobs as a supervisor at a fast food joint, a worker at a steel mill, and a driver for FedEx before he found that he was much, much happier making birdhouses out of wood and found materials for the chickadees, cardinals and finches surrounding his Connecticut home.

Fred now builds and sells birdhouses full-time with his partner Lynn, and he cites the nature walks he takes with her in a nearby reservoir as a direct inspiration for his work. It seems that Fred has found happiness in a serene, peaceful lifestyle that all can learn from:

Everybody says, I wanna do what you’re doing when I’m your age. That’s what I wanna do — what a life, making birdhouses.

Watch more inspiriational vids from Etsy:

There’s No Place Like Here
http://www.etsy.com/storque/search/tags/theres-no-place-like-here/

Process
http://www.etsy.com/storque/search/tags/process-video/

“The great thing about being ignored is that you can speak the truth with impunity.”