Art of the Living Dead

Image © Fathercrow2005

A very small version of an A1 size charcoal drawing I recently completed, an attempt to draw the zombie obsession out of my head.

Now it's in yours.

Click to enlarge.

Enjoy

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Comments Temporarily Reactivated

I have reactivated the comments section temporarily.

The decision was made when I found an option in bloggers function tabs that allows people to comment only if they type an assigned selection of letters that initally appear in jpeg form. This procedure is intended to prevent automatic bots from posting ads.

To anyone who is thinking of manually posting ads, DON'T, this is an ad free blog, and will remain so.

If any ads are posted I will disable comments again, as I will never allow this blog to degrade to the point of hawking products, this blog is written from passion and not for money. I think I made this clear with the earlier announcement that the comments were disabled.

Nor will I, before anyone asks, include product placement in any of the posts. So if any advertising agency employee is considering asking, again, don't waste your time. The only response you will get will be an abusive email that mocks your profession.

The reactivation is a pilot. I encourage discussion and dissent, if the comments section is reduced to advertising or abuse, it will not remain.

Lets see how this goes shall we?

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

SCUM

Bessonov Nicolay. Girl in a prison. Water-colour. 1987.

Some States in the U.S. are now billing inmates for their stay in jail.

So how do you like the possibility of being billed past your ability to pay? If you cant find a way to pay the debt for staying in jail (and have no-one who is willing to pay for you) you go back to jail where the debt gets larger and the cycle never ends.

And it can all happen for the sin of a joint.

You can now be, as a friend says:

"(possibly falsely) accused by a flawed system, imprisoned, buggered, beaten, quite possible strung out AND have to pay for the privilege. Then when you get out you can't vote or get a job."

Your relatives can also be punished for your sins as well, because if an inmate cannot afford to pay for his stay the burden of payment falls to his or her loved ones (if he or she has any). If the persons relatives cannot afford to pay it will, inevitably, result in them being in debt up to their necks.

These people are not being rehabilitated, they are now chattel to be exploited.

Even the innocent, who are imprisoned awaiting trial are billed ( a "booking fee"), so both the guilty and the innocent are exploited.

Now include the fact that the State can, for drug offenses, freeze and then drain your bank account, reposess and sell your car and your house (under the pretence that ALL of your earthly belongings are the result of drug trafficing). So now that your money's been taken by the state, how can you afford to pay the prison "company"? You better hope you have a well off family, or else some of them may be joining you for failing to pay your debt.

Then as a direct result of the privatisation of prisons in the states, the prison "companies" need to make a profit from your incarceration. These companies will not only bill you for your stay, but many force the inmates to participate in work programs where the company "rents" the inmates to other organisations to provide services. I would imagine that if things continue they way they are, several prisons will bill the prisoners AND in isolation from their prison "debt" force them to participate in work programs, .

To add injury to injury if you happen to get busted in Kansas the drug offense can also be tax evasion. "Tax evasion?" you ask, "how so?", well in Kansas the state is now taxing drugs with stamps (to be purchases anon, though how this works I am not sure), if you dont have your stamps you have to pay an additional charge. How likely do you think drug dealers are to expose themselves to the law by paying an "illegal drug stamp tax".

Its not about justice anymore, it's about profit.

Talk about things going to fuck.

Who wants to go on vacation to the states now?

Read about the SCUM.....

(It has been a while since this article was posted by the times, and you may now have to pay a fee to view the whole article. When, I ask myself, is the NYT going to adopt a sensible policy for access to their archives? As it is a site for profit, perhaps the NYT might consider introducing a system like Salons' "watch an add and get free access for a day" should be adopted.)

A variation of this piece was sent out on FatherCrow's now mostly defunct mailing list on 13th of August 2004, but due to its nature I thought it bears repeating on the blog.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

U.S. illegally Napalms Civilians in Fallujah

Photo: Nick Ut's photograph of Kim Phuk age 9 running to escape death in 1972 after being struck with napalm. An image that may have changed the course of the Vietnam War.


The U.S. has since 1980 made it illegal to napalm civilians.

In Fallujah they broke that self imposed law.

Civilian victims of napalm in the hundreds died in Fallujah, even those waving white flags.

Faces melted away, clothes still intact, enabling observers to distinguish combatent individuals from non-combatent.

The following documentary can and most likely will disturb as it contains images of a very graphic nature, but deserves to be seen as the truth deserves to come out. If only to prevent any further atrocities.

You can see the documentary here

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow

Cannibal Holocaust "Interview"

Back in the nineteen-eighties, in the dark depths of the "video nasties" scare in England and Ireland, one film caused more revulsion and disgust than any other.

That film was Ruggero Deodato's "Cannibal Holocaust" (1980) one of the many Italian Exploitation Horror Films of the late seventies, early eighties.

The film is intended as a cautionary tale about the West's and Western Media's involvement with primitive societies, and society itself, creating, rather than reporting news.

The plot involves a group of young documentary film makers going down to investigate some of the last Cannibal tribes of the Amazon, they disappear and the movie begins with another expedition to find them. We follow Professor Harold Moore (Robert Kerman) down to the Amazon and watch his travels as he attempts to find the missing crew. He only finds their bones, and the film they shot. Professor Moore then returns with the footage and reviews it in preparation for its use in a documentary about the missing crew. The second half of the movie involves the reviewing of this footage and is shot as a documentary and thus Cannibal Holocaust can be viewed as a precursor to films like "The Blair Witch Project".

The movie itself involves various scenes of Rape, Torture, Mutilation and perhaps most disturbingly of all, real scenes of animal death. A monkey has it's head split in half with a machete, a tortise gutted alive with a knife, and finally a pig shot and killed to advance the plot. It is one of the hardest movies to watch that I have ever sat through, though it is not without value.

Cannibal Holocaust caused such a stir on it's realease that the Italian Government refused to believe that some of the "Native" deaths were special effects and sent a team over to the films locations to investigate that no actual murders had been commited. Of course none had.

The movie was until recently still banned in the U.K. and Ireland.

Last Saturday, presented during the I.F.I.'s (Irish Film Institute) 8th annual Horrorthon was a rare screening of "Cannibal Holocaust", even rarer was the fact that Director Ruggero Deodato was in attendance and gave a short speech about the movie before it began, and afterwards answered questions from the audience.

I asked the first of the questions and I got a longer answer than I bargained for, Ruggero Deodato gave an answer that was nearly eight minutes long, and he only had fifteen minutes speaking time.

I managed to catch a good deal of his answer on my cameraphones video, though due to the time it takes my phone to process and then save videos I lost a minute or two of his answer. However since it was such a rare opportunity to capture his comments, even incomplete (as I have checked the web for similar media and found nothing) I have uploaded them and present them here for your edification. The visuals are mostly the back of other Patrons heads, but the sound is clear enough and allows for Ruggero Deodato to make his point.

The files themselves are in 3gp format and can be played by the quicktime player and are in four parts.

The question that I asked is not included on the recordings and was as follows:

"Could you tell us a little about the thought process that went into the inclusion of the animal killings in Cannibal Holocaust? and do you think that the inclusion of the killings caused Cannibal Holocaust to become as Exploitative as the media that it was trying to comment on?"

The following is Ruggero Deodato's answer in sequence (with the exception of video 1 which is part of his initial speech prior to the screening).

This is where the files are stored.

When you get to the page, look to the right at the green icons by the files, click to download. This will bring you to a new page, where it specifies the file that you have selected to download. Scroll to the bottom of the page, where you will find another "download" button, click, and it does exactly what it says on the tin.

If you are wondering why I chose this particularly arcane way for you to access these files - 1. I could not find a "free" way of uploading files to the blog and 2. It was one of the only free services I found that allowed public downloads of personal files.

Anyways, enjoy.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow