techyum ::

Public domain Dept. of Health and Human Services photo.

…commenters on the story turn out to be (wait for it!)…douchebags.

If, like me, you’re still anxiously glued to the news about Egypt, perhaps a little diversion into weird news will allay your anxieties. Or will it?

Bergen County, New Jersey, has run out of money to salt the roads during this exceptionally severe winter. Their solution? Using pickle juice, which runs about $16 a ton, cheaper than the $63 a ton of road salt costs them.

For those of you living in warm climes who have never heard that satisfying crunch beneath your tires, salt helps melt snow because salt water freezes at a lower temperature than fresh water. The science of it is pretty interesting if you’re a complete dw33b, like say yours truly. Calcium chloride is preferred to sodium chloride (table salt, or pickle juice) because calcium chloride releases heat when it combines with water — voila! It melts more snow. Calcium chloride also does less environmental damage. But sodium chloride was used for years, and will do in a pinch — even if it’s in pickle juice.

Sounds simple, right? Great idea, right? Something we can all agree on, right? Wrong. Read more…

Egyptian anti-government protesters throw Molotov cocktails

While Egypt explodes in virtual isolation after being cut off from the rest of the world, we watch the shocking violence online. Which impresses upon me more than ever that internet and communications access is more of a human right – a necessary thing – that must now be upheld as an inalienable right. Horror, terror, and human rights abuses happen in a vacuum. If we did not have access, this is what would be happening. Or if we could only rely on US cable “news” outlets, who are exposing themselves during this crisis as utterly unfit, foolish and incompetent failures.

The most astonishing photos I’ve seen so far are on TotallyCoolPix, who have gotten them from Reuters and affixed their own watermark to them – legal or not, you must see these images. You will not see this, or anything like it on any corporate US media outlet. American cable news’ utter fallacies are being exposed during this event in a way that is nearly as shocking as the images themselves. (And warning: they are graphic.)

See also: Foreign Policy’s Day of Rage gallery.

American coverage is pathetic, and far substandard to world class reporting. Fucking shameful: read Al Jazeera’s Egypt coverage embarrasses U.S. cable news channels. While Al Jazeera is not as unbiased as BBC, they are live and unflinching, and not as lost and confused as Fox, CNN, and MSNBC – we would be utterly ignorant and clueless here in the US if we relied on these outlets. It is an essential lesson. Domestic news outlets are as useless as they have been for the past 20 years, and they have not adapted to the times.

“If you’re watching Al Jazeera, you’re seeing uninterrupted live video of the demonstrations, along with reporting from people actually on the scene, and not “analysis” from people in a studio. The cops were threatening to knock down the door of one of its reporters minutes ago. Fox has moved on to anchor babies. CNN reports that the ruling party building is on fire, but Al Jazeera is showing the fire live.” [Link.]

There’s a lovely tribute to the late Warhol superstar and sometime Velvet Underground collaborator Nico over at novelist Dennis Cooper’s Blog.

The author, David Ehrenstein, presents it for “Nico Day” — did you even know it was Nico Day last weekend? I didn’t — and I bet Hallmark doesn’t, either. Anyway, the tribute features a great array of images and links to YouTube footage, much of it random-feeling — like the bits and pieces of Nico’s career.

The text is mostly factual and short on commentary until the very end, when there’s a bunch of truly bizarre text at the end that makes me think Ehrenstein mighta cut and pasted this from his Facebook page. It’s interesting on a whole ‘nother level.

The weirdness of the text at the end made me pontificate on the kind of crap I would have gone through in 1987 to find video footage of Nico, or anyone connected with the Velvet Underground, really.

Nico in "La Dolce Vita."

I would have driven to San Francisco and scoured the town’s second-hand record stores finally found a bootleg version of some Italian documentary on Nico on Beta at a vinyl joint in the Haight and then run out of gas on the way back and spent the night sleeping in the back seat of a ’76 Dodge parked in a cornfield, cradling the tape and crooning, “She’s a femme fatale…”

Then, said bootleg footage obtained, I would have hung out with some really creepy weirdo I met through my job at the grease factory who was the only person I knew who had a Beta machine and liked the Velvet Underground, with both of us staring at the screen and asking, “You’re sure you don’t know anyone who speaks Italian?”

Then, halfway through, when the guy’s girlfriend stumbled home from her job at the strip joint out on I-5 and proceeded to shoot up heroin in front of me and then vomit on my copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas while the eighteen minutes of Nico interview footage on the $50 Beta tape lapsed into an old half-demagnetized version of “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly,” I would have thought:

“This is it, man. I’m living the Bohemian dream.”

Those were the days, bubba. It’s a hell of a lot easier now; I just sit here drinking coffee and waiting for the Google Alerts to roll in.

Anyway, the piece came to me through a blog called Grounds for Appeal, which promises “Criminal Defense and Rock & Roll.” I’m not sure whether that’s cooler or less cool than “Comedy Traffic School” or tour guides who sing, so I’ll just leave it be.

It should not really surprise me, but apparently there is a Guinness world record for speed-texting. It just got pwned at the LG Mobile World Cup in New York. This is according to Recombu.com and CNet Asia. Says CNet:

It’s one thing to type really fast on your cell phone, but beating the world’s best texters is a different ball game altogether. That’s exactly what Christina Sales Ancines, 20, and Jennifer Sales Ancines, 15, have done at the second annual LG Mobile Worldcup where the Panama duo beat 30 other contestants from around the world to walk away with US$100,000 and ultimate street cred.

Korea was placed second and Brazil third in the finals which were held at Gotham Hall in New York City January 26. Contestants had to punch in phrases that appeared on nearby LG plasma displays without making any mistakes or using abbreviations on the Chocolate BL20 and Town GT350 handsets.

At the competition, Cheong Kit Au from Australia also broke the Guinness World Record by typing out a 264-character text in 1 minute 17 seconds on a QWERTY device–a whopping 43 seconds faster than previous record holder Pedro Matias.

[Link.]

To clarify: the sisters from Panama won the competition, but did not pwn the Guinness record, which is administered by Guinness, not LG. The money was LG’s. But even the Guinness record may be in dispute. Switched.com rightly points out the dicey nature of the claim:

Cheong Kit Au, from Australia, mashed out a 264-character text in one minute and 17 seconds, crushing the previous record by 43 seconds. Then again, Melissa Thompson supposedly broke the record in August by Swyping out a 160-character message in just over 25 seconds. If you were to double that measure, you get 320 characters in well under a minute, significantly faster than Au’s typing.

[Link.]

Of course…Melissa’s record was set on a Samsung. It all seems like a corporate scandal in the making. Possibly even a corporate war, with Blackwater-style mercenaries in body armor facing off in the Thunderdome, texting each other furiously: boom! lol! : -) — bang! rofl ;-D — pow! lmfao!!!

But that’s not the only earth-shattering Guinness World Record news this week. Important records have also been decided.

Because in case you were wondering, the record for Pakistani schoolgirls in a Smart Car is 19. Actually, that’s the record for schoolgirls in a Smart Car overall, nationality notwithstanding. It used to be 18, and the schoolgirls used to be Australian. Now it’s 19, and they’re Pakistani. The Karachi team just dusted that record, according to All Pakistan News, which informs me:

Team captain Aymen Yousuf said she and her team members are extremely glad on thier success, adding she will try breaking some more records as well.

[Link.]

But what can possibly top the feat of cramming 19 Pakistani schoolgirls into a Smart Car?

I’ve got some bad news for you, Aymen. The rest of life will be downhill from here. Sorry.

Screencap of "The 19XX" entry page.

The 19XX is a dieselpunk webcomic that updates with two pages every other Wednesday. It relates the adventures of a secret group commissioned by the League of Nations after the Great War to scour the globe to find magic artifacts, undiscovered superweapons, and dangerous magic spells before the next war. Drawn by a web designer named, as far as I can tell, “Kopetkai,” it’s just plain oodles of fun.

You can start at the beginning with the evocatively beautiful entry page (and be sure to turn your speaker on or put your headphones in). You can also “like” the comic on Facebook.

The “About the Comic” page tells it thusly:

Not long after the end of the Great War, those who were capable of hearing it, received a revelation… another Great War was coming…

…A weak League of Nations banded together to form a group. A group capable of doing what those countries could not. A group of adventurers, explorers, and scientists from every allied country to search the globe and fight a battle far from the public eye. This group is The 19XX, all the public has been told is that they are fighting for all of the good in humanity to survive the nineteen hundreds and beyond.

Their mission is to track down every powerful relic, every modern and undiscovered weapon, and every magic incantation ever uttered on the earth’s crust, because the forces of evil responsible for the next Great War would be searching for the very same thing. Nothing in the realm of the tangible or intangible is off limits when the fate of the entire world is at stake.

[Link.]

Because comics and pulp fiction were where the really wonderful adventures of the late ’20s and the ’30s were happening, to my  mind, comics are the place where this genre belongs. Like the genre overall, 19XX brings in an overall Art Deco look and gorgeous influences from places like TinTin and German Expressionism.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, “dieselpunk” is the interbellum (1920-1940) version of “steampunk.” It’s a term for modern science fiction that memorializes previous dreams of the future. Instead of spinning off from Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, dieselpunk is spun off of 1920s and 1930s adventure pulp, with science fiction and fantasy elements out of Doc Savage, The Shadow and Buck Rogers, with some Weimar-era Germanic and Hindu mysticism thrown in.

If you need an example, the first three Indiana Jones films were probably, because of the fantasy elements in each story, dieselpunk, though really only peripherally. Those aside, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was the best promoted (not to mention most ham-handed and inexpert, if you ask me) attempt yet to realize a purely dieselpunk vision on the screen. Disney’s film The Rocketeer was, to my mind, much more successful, and in fact it’s based on a comic as well. It bombed at the box office — ahead of its time?

Damn straight it’s ahead of its time — it’s all ahead of its time. It’s as ahead of its time as a Super Proton Spazzer Ray mounted on a Henderson.

"Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Earth of Filth."

It’s well known in Russia that Vladimir Lenin didn’t want a mausoleum, and that his relatives, at the time of his death, were against a ghoulish display of Communist pride, or in fact any monument whatsoever. Think Ivan cared!?!? Nyet!!! Lenin was placed in a display chamber and preserved for future generations.

At least since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the anniversary of Lenin’s death on January 21 has prompted annual debate over whether Lenin should continue to be preserved, or be placed in a grave. Before 1991, the preservation of Lenin’s body was maintained by funding from the Russian government; since then, it’s been supported by private donations.

Yahoo News now reports that an online poll resulted in 70% of Russians voting supporting the removal and burial of Lenin’s body. Which I wouldn’t take too seriously, since the vote was at goodbyelenin.ru. Kinda stacks the deck, if you know what I mean. But that reminded me about the brain fry I experience every time I realize that, 87 years after his death, Lenin’s body is preserved and you can go see it.

How does that work? Wikipedia has the answer:

The family of Lenin’s embalmers states that the corpse is real and requires daily work to moisturise the features and inject preservatives under the clothes. Lenin’s sarcophagus is kept at a temperature of 16 °C (61 °F) and kept at a humidity of 80 – 90 percent. The chemical used was referred to by the caretakers as “balsam”, which was glycerine and potassium acetate. Every eighteen months the corpse is removed and undergoes a special chemical bath. The chemicals were unknown until after the fall of the Soviet Union, kept secret by authorities. The bath consists of placing the corpse in a glass bath with potassium acetate, alcohol, glycerol, distilled water, and as a disinfectant, quinine. This was the process used for all subsequent treatments of Lenin’s body and continues to be used even now.

One of the main problems the embalmers faced was the appearance of dark spots on the skin, especially on the face and hands. They managed to solve the problem by the use of a variety of different reagents in between baths. For example, if a patch of wrinkling or discoloration occurred it was treated with an acetic acid diluted with water. Hydrogen peroxide could be used to restore the tissues’ original colouring. Damp spots were removed by means of disinfectants like quinine or phenol.

…The Mausoleum is open every day from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm, except Mondays and Fridays. Visitors still wait in long lines to see Lenin’s body, for which entrance is free of charge. Visitors are required to show respect while in the tomb; photography and videotaping inside the mausoleum are forbidden, as are talking, smoking, keeping hands in pockets, or wearing hats (if male). The mausoleum is still heavily guarded, although the Changing of the Guard has been moved to the Eternal Flame by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

[Link.]

Weird.

[Yahoo link via writer Loren Rhoads.]

Image from Impact Guns.

Kel-Tec is taken fairly serious by firearms enthusiasts as a manufacturer of low-priced but functional firearms. They’re probably best known for the compact 9mm P-11, a popular off-duty choice for law enforcement officers and other concealed carry applications. Its smaller cousin the .32 caliber P-32 also gets some play for its extreme small size. Their long guns haven’t proved as popular over the years, though their new(ish) bullpup-configuration carbine the RFB looks reasonably interesting if you’re into that sort of thing.

The newest Kel-Tec offering causing a bit of a buzz seems to support my observations about a move toward the adoption of lower-caliber rounds that allow for a very high capacity magazines, as with the FN Five-seveN. It’s the forthcoming Kel-Tec PMR-30, a full-sized semi-automatic intended as a plinker or target pistol, but potentially powerful enough to serve as a grab-and-go gun in case the zombies and/or invading space aliens start flooding down your street.

It also carries up to 30 rounds in a single magazine. I’m sure that is going to make everyone real, real happy in this “charged political environment.”

The best part is that it retails for just about $300 right now — at least, if prices online are any indication of out-the-door-price  (they aren’t — at least, not in most states).

What I mean by a “grab-and-go” gun is that the PMR-30 is chambered in .22 WMR Magnum, which is a reasonably easy round to carry a whole lot of, but could potentially serve reasonably well in a pinch to hunt small game with reasonable efficiencies…even large game if you have to, and in self-defense applications.

What I’m saying is…not to put too fine a point on it, is…when you run for the hills, you can shoot squirrels with it without completely, you know, destroying them. Cook those critters up on the radiator of your 4×4, and you’ve got a tasty squirrelburger. (Hope you brought the hoagies!) You’d probably be better off shooting squirrels with a .22 Long Rifle — but hey, that’s the point. The .22 WMR round can also kill zombies, which I wouldn’t necessarily count on a .22 LR to do. At average loadings, the .22 WMR provides about twice the velocity and 2-3 times the foot-pounds of impact as a .22 LR.

“WMR” stands for “Winchester Magnum Rimfire,” and rimfire rounds tend to be lighter and less expensive, which is why the world’s most popular rimfire cartridge, the .22 Long Rifle, is the world’s most popular and typically most budget-priced round.

The .22 WMR, however, is not generally considered a competitor of the .22 LR, but of the .17 HMR (“Hornady Magnum Rimfire”) which is basically a necked-down .22 Magnum, which I’ve heard tends to be more accurate in rifles. But the PMR-30′s configuration is clearly based on the classic .22 LR pistols that are the mainstay of target shooting in the United States, like the Ruger Mark III, Smith & Wesson Model 22, and the old Colt Woodsman.

Unfortunately, the price of shootin’ is going to go up if you switch from .22 LR to .22 WMR — from about 5 to 10 cents a round (or less in bulk) for a .22 LR to something like 25 to 30 cents a round for .22 WMR (.17 HMR is roughly comparable).

And if you want a 30-round magazine to bring home your gopher dinner and keep you safe from the zombies while you’re getting it, this sounds like the pistol to go for.

A friend posted something today with the proclamation: “The end times are upon us, as evidenced by this abomination.”

He was referring to what may possibly be the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen — and believe me, I’ve seen some weird, weird things — ArKay, the alcohol-free Scotch.

Trust me, it makes as little sense to me as it does to you — possibly less. What’s next, alcohol-free Nairobi moonshine, made out of simulated nuclear waste, radiator fluid that won’t hurt you, dead rats that are really just props and ladies’ panties that have never been worn?

Don’t get me wrong, Scottish Spirits Ltd. has a perfectly good business rationale for this insanity:

Scottish Spirits LTD has developed ArKay, the world’s first alcohol free whisky. ArKay is specifically targeted for Muslim consumers worldwide since it is Halal approved…ArKay non alcohol whisky tastes and looks exactly like traditional Scotch Whisky. It is suitable for drinking straight up or with soda, tea or other mixers. ArKay is the result of 10 years of research and development.

[Link.]

“Suitable for drinking straight up or with soda, tea or other mixers.” Tea!?!?!? Tea!!!???!!!!

The manufacturer can’t even call it Scotch, mind you, because distillers in Scotland control the use of that term. And they carry swords the size of helicopter blades. But they still call it “whiskey”…why? In any event, it turns out that (as far as I can tell) it’s not distilled in Scotland, although…wait a second, “distilled”??? How do you distill something that’s alcohol-free?

This thing hurts my brain.

As a science nerd, of course, I want to know what the hell this crap is made out of — other than the souls of the innocent. In that, the website is of no help:

Specifications: Made from natural identical ingredients in accordance with EEC regulations and from artificial flavors and natural malt extract in accordance with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Custom Labels: The text on the labels will be printed according to the health and import regulations of the distributor’s home country.

[Link.]

The good news is that it’s still at the distribution stage, and as far as I can tell doesn’t appear to be on the shelves anywhere. The minimum order is 1,200 cases, so if you want some of this stuff you’d better be thirsty for abomination.

Apparently having not yet secured their places in Hell, the same producer sells whisky in a can, which “will be available soon” — check it:

Scottish Spirits’ Whisky in a can is not produced in Scotland, therefore it is not Scotch Whisky , it is whisky and will be only marketted as such [sic.]

It turns out that the company is “Registered in Panama,” by which I assume they mean incorporated — though they claim to have a “distribution center” in Glasgow. Their domain is also registered in Panama.

From the J.X. Williams Archive.

Never heard of him? You’re not alone! But when I tell you that he’s the director of Nunf*cker, you will surely say “Oh! Yes!! Of course!!! I’ve been meaning to rent that!”

Now, whether underground filmmaker J.X. Williams is real or fake, I don’t know and don’t particularly give a damn, which is why I just spent a couple of hours trying to figure it out. But the fact that the hoax has now continued for several years is fascinating — as is the fact that the hoaxster(s) chose as a name for his/her/their/its fictional exploitation-filmmaker the name of a prolific collective pseudonym used to write gay smut. That’s lent credence to some hilarious claims in this Rumpus interview which pretty much spells it out if you read between the lines. So does this, which is by Lawrence himself — and it’s pretty inspired.

Back to the beginning: When, for some reason, I started getting promotional emails from “The J.X. Williams Archive” a few years back, it’s not so much that I thought I was being hoaxed as that I didn’t, for one damn instant, think I wasn’t being hoaxed. I still don’t, but I am confused as to just what the point is.

Purported to be an underground director of Mafia-financed nudie films and grindcore exploitation flicks, the guy sounds too much like what Kilgore Trout would have become, if Kurt Vonnegut had been a sex addict and hardcore alcoholic with organized crime connections and a taste for the ponies.

Is he real? Is he a hoax? Deceptology says “hoax,” of course. The New York Times is slightly less convinced, but still comes down on the side of hoax. I don’t really care. But the achievement of filmmaker Noel Lawrence is that he got IMDB to list Peep Show as a 1965 release — rather than the clip show it is.

The other cues that J.X. Williams is a hoax? None of the cat’s other movies have IMDB entries or Wikipedia pages, in this age of being able to find information about anything. There’s no  information whatsoever about them anywhere on the web except as put out by the J.X. Williams Archive and various other J.X. Williams-related sources. Williams nonetheless looks to the casual eye to possibly be (maybe) something approaching (maybe) real. And (maybe) alive. Except he’s not.

But if he was alive, or real, then it only makes sense that, just like the former-nun street hooker who sets out to avenge the mob murder of her beloved pimp, J.X. Williams would be pissed.

And he would apparently be pissed at himself, because the IMDB entry for J.X. Williams claims that Williams himself was born under the name of the director of the J.X. Williams Archive, Noel Lawrence, which is who Williams is pissed at.

Incidentally, the Wikipedia page, which drips with artful pomposity, is obviously written by someone in on the joke — and who’s clever enough to cite only print sources, none of which are links. The page for J.X. Williams is also tagged “Collective Pseudonyms.”

Like I care? I don’t. I just don’t have a god damned thing better to do with my time then track down mob-related J.T. DiCarlo hallucinations. With this hallucination, however, as far as I can tell, no one’s trying to get laid or even get rich. It’s all just freakin’ weirdness, which seems like it would meet with approval from the master of deception himself, Orson Welles, whose brilliant and bizarre F is for Fake is a classic example of a movie that’s not a movie about a person who’s not a person…or is he?

In the case of J.X. Williams, this weeks’ fandango stems from a screening of Williams’s films at the Slamdance Film Festival on Wednesday, curated by Noel Lawrence (who appears to be Williams). A post on therealjxwilliams.blogspot.com (sooooooooooooooooo convincing) goes like this:

For those who follow my work, you may be familiar with an unsavory “curator” by the name of Noel Lawrence. He edited a book about me in cahoots with an obscure  French rock critic and has often screened “Peep Show” and other movies at museums and cinematheques in Europe.
Until now, I have suffered this fellow. He was a pest but a persistent one so I occasionally indulged him. I gave him a few crumbs for his book and lent him some very valuable film prints from my private collection. However, Mr. Lawrence has repaid my generosity with calumny and betrayal!

Noel recently asked my permission to screen my films “at a festival in Utah” in January. Naturally, I was very excited to be a part of Robert Redford’s powwow in Park City. Strangely, Noel seemed evasive when I asked about breaking bread with the great thespian. Now I have learned that Mr. Lawrence will be showcasing my work at a doppelganger festival that bears no connection to Slundance but happens at the very same time.

Even so, I only requested that my hosts provide me with the standard perks of a visiting auteur such as a five-figure appearance fee and a limousine from the Salt Lake City airport. In fact, I even waived the usual “hookers and champagne” clause from my contract. Noel avoided my calls for some time. When my personal assistant finally reached him, he informed me that this “film festival” will not even get me a room at the Motel 6 for my stay.

Mr. Lawrence, you are a fraud and a cheat.  This offense shall not go unanswered.

Bear in mind I do not advocate a boycott of the screening. In fact, I urge your attendance as this may be your last chance to see these films. I will be confiscating my prints after the screening and locking them up in a secure location that Dick Cheney could only dream of. Instead of preventing this show, I propose to add a special bonus attraction to the festivities.  After Lawrence finishes presenting my films, I will come on stage and personally beat the shit out of this craven curator.

[Link.]

Okay, so…as pure guerrilla theater…well, that would make for pretty good guerrilla theater, I’ll admit, to have a man beat the shit out of himself onstage, a la Edward Norton in Fight Club.

Suspiciously, this post comes to my attention only through an email from Lawrence, where he says in too-polished prose that smacks of in-joke:

I assure you that this matter is just a tempest in a teapot and I am in no actual physical danger. Actually, I find the situation rather amusing.

Most importantly, the screening will happen just as planned and scheduled.

Thank you for your notes and calls of concern though. Rest assured J.X. is just blowing off some steam.

[Link.]

I get even more suspicious given the too-cute wording of the caveat at the J.X. Williams Archive (run by “Lawrence”)which provides a link to the blog:

It had come to our attention several months ago that someone identifying himself as J.X. Williams was posting messages on an Internet blog. Other writings attributed to Mr. Williams were posted on the Wikileaks website but taken down upon request of the Archive.

Upon further research, we can now affirm this blog is indeed authentic.

[Link.]

Nice. This shit is out of Sun Tsu, bubba.

Or am I just old and cranky? Could my suspicion about this enterprise stem from just an error of user-entered data in IMDB and my own bad attitude?

Right. I’ve heard that one before. I’m as smart as Fredo Corleone — can’t fool me. By the way, in “his” “post” on his “blog,” Williams cites a “book” that is in French, which I understand is a “language” spoken by “people” who “live” in some “country” supposedly called “France.” So is the linked page for the French critic who supposedly co-wrote it with “Lawrence.”

Are any of these people real? Is France real? Is this one of those situations where all your friends decide just to fuck with you they’re going to tell you, “Oh, you’ve never heard of Boner Patrol? Oh, they’re the cooooooooolest baaaaaaaaaaaand, man. You’re totally uncool for not having heard of them.”

‘Cause that’s how it feels. J.X. Williams is Boner Patrol.

But wait! Here’s supporting quotes about Williams from the “press,” courtesy of the screening’s description: Wednesday:

“A spiritual vortex of sub rosa Americana.” – Paul Cullum, The New York Times

“Underground movies cannot dig much deeper than those of J.X. Williams.” – Steve Dollar, The Wall Street Journal

“A musician friend once observed that the most intriguing artists don’t just create individual pieces; they’re iconic figures who project a philosophy or personality, a life force that becomes a conceptual umbrella covering everything they make. J.X. Williams, a cult filmmaker, conspiracy theorist, enemy of the Mafia and the FBI, and all-around outlaw visionary, is that sort of figure.” – Matt Zoller Seitz, Salon.com

…okeedokee. How can you argue with NY times articles that use Latin phrases, or guys from Salon calling someone an “outlaw visionary”? You know when Salon says (or maybe didn’t say) someone’s an outlaw visionary, it’s time to break out your ultra-trendy silkscreen rig and make some L.A. Death Trip t-shirts to wear to to the poetry slam so you can roll your eyes disgustedly and say “Oh, you’ve never heard of him?” when someone less cool than you asks what the fuck kind of asshattery that is on your t-shirt. Of course, if you made the guy up to begin with, that makes you even surer to be in on the in joke, while everyone is is not.

Anyway, here’s the short version of who the fuck this joker is supposed to be. It’s paraphrased from the Wikipedia article and a few other sources, including my own vast knowledge of who the fuck Johnny Rosselli is:

Probably best known for two of his later exploitation movies, 1975′s L.A. Death Trip and 1978′s You Axed For It!, filmmaker J.X. Williams’s past includes, according to his Wikipedia article, includes being blacklisted from his job in the Writers’ Division of RKA Studios when he refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, in the heady days of 1947.

Williams supposedly thereafter got involved with mobsters like Johnny Rosselli, the Chicago mobster who for a time ran Las Vegas for the Outfit. Rosselli put Williams “in charge of directing and distributing mob-funded nudie and pornographic films,” most of which have been lost. During this period, he is said to have claimed to continue working as a ghostwriter, writing (supposedly by his claim alone) some 72 produced films he was never credited for.

Williams started directing on the exploitation circuit in with 1965′s Peep Show, about a mob conspiracy to addict Frank Sinatra to heroin. His subsequent exploitation films included I, Jezebel (1966), E.S.P. Orgy (1967), Mondo Vietnam (1968), The Phantom of the Cinema (1969), and 1970′s The Virgin Sacrifice, said to be “a three-hour long Satanic horror epic.” Then came kaboom! (1973), L.A. Death Trip (1975), and You Axed For It! (1978). (You Axed For It! is also the title of a 1985 Mentors album.)

He also reportedly kept directing porn movies during this time, including the one a Wikipedia contributor claims is “Considered one of his best.” Yes, it’s true. You remember 1979′s tearjerker other than Kramer vs. Kramer? That’s one of his. I’m referring, of course, to Nunf*cker.

And as I was saying, if you’re at the Slamdance Festival in Park City, Utah, you can supposedly hit the presentation by J.X. Williams Archive curator Noel Lawrence. Does that lend credence to the idea that Peep Show is the only real movie on the Williams resume? Who the hell knows? Who the hell cares? Somebody does, and somebody does, but I’m no less in the dark the deeper I dig:

But the description at the Slamdance site goes a little something like this:

In this film program and live presentation, the J.X. Williams Archive opens it vault to screen a collection of rare cinematic artifacts from its holdings. Many of these fragments come from feature films that vanished decades ago. Others offer a sneak preview of works currently undergoing restoration. Alongside these rarities, we also will screen J.X. Williams’ underground classic “Peep Show” (1965).

[Link.]

The page also has a helpful bio of Williams, much more concise than mine:

J. X. Williams was a legendary bottom-of-the-barrel director in the fifties and sixties, pushed even lower by his Commie leanings. In the early sixties, he fell in with the Chicago mob, helming a number of shakedown films used to extort dough from debauched politicos and celebs. After a legal settlement in 1981 with several major film studios over copyright disputes, Mr. Williams moved to Zurich, Switzerland and retired from filmmaking. He is infamous for his reclusiveness and distaste for the public eye.

[Link.]

It all sounds just a little too good, but then, many things do — and very occasionally, when the stars align just right, they turn out to be unbelievably real.

Is any of this real? Was there ever even a film called L.A. Death Trip, or has everyone from IMDB to some French people and some guy I’ve never heard plus AN ANONYMOUS BLOGSPOT BLOG conspired to mislead me as to the true nature of the underground exploitation grindcore renaissance of the 1970s?

Who knows? Who cares? Why bother?

Public domain image of Voice of America interviewing Afghan poppy farmers.

CNN has a disturbing top-of-page article and photo gallery on opium addicts in rural Afghanistan, including quotes from a carpet-weaver who feeds her four-year-old son balls of opium so she can work. According to the article, three generations of addicts have been created by lack of medical care and lack of education about how addictive opium is.

The piece starts in northern Balkh Province, in a town where the nearest detox program for addicts is four and a half hours away and has twenty beds. At the detox program, the clinic director portrays opium use as traditional and common in this part of rural Afghanistan, and addiction just as common.

I would normally take little note of this piece. Its tone of tragedy tourism is so overwrought and affected that it’s hard to sort the third-word tragedies from the Western hysteria. But this happens to come on a morning when I’ve just started reading Gretchen Peters’s 2009 book Seeds of Terror: How Heroin is Bankrolling The Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The book opens with a scene set in Helmand Province, which is the exact opposite side of Afghanistan, North-South, from Balkh Province, the area described  in the CNN article. Helmand is an area the size of West Virginia with a population of about a million. If it was a separate country, it would be the #1 opium producer in the world. The rest of Afghanistan would be a close second. The scene features American and Afghan troops destroying poppy fields to “punish” insurgents for planting an improvised explosive device in their path. After spending the whole trip gritting her teeth waiting for an ambush, Peters writes:

In the end, the only confrontation came when a skinny farmer, tears streaming down his face, emerged from his mud hut with two filthy children to hurl insults at the eradicators. “Why don’t you just shoot us now?” he shouted. “If you cut down my fields, we’ll all die anyway.”

Despite UN sources claiming that Helmand’s poppy farmers are rich, government data analyzed by non-Afghan scholars on the Afghan drug trade tell a different story. They “calculate a per capital daily income of $1, hardly reflecting Helmand as a land of plenty.” Peters quotes a farmer in the Maarja district:

“We grow poppy, but the drug smugglers take it from us…We sell it cheaply. Then they take it over the border into Pakistan.”

Given the Taliban’s record, I do find it pretty hard to believe the Helmand farmers are wealthy. The Taliban has shown a record of violently taking resources from local populations, and that same record is shown by now-related Islamic insurgent groups in places like Chechnya. I say “now-related” because the Chechen and Afghan groups were in fact NOT related at all before the US war on Afghanistan — they subscribed to different and hostile camps of Islam — but ARE allied now, or at least were as recently as 3-4 years ago when Yossef Bodansky wrote his book Chechen Jihad. I’m not an expert on the Afghan opium trade, but I’d lay odds these poppy farmers aren’t strapping on the bling.

Peters’s premise, stated clearly in the introduction, is that failure to stop the poppy trade is central in the entire region’s lack of stabilization, and that the  poppy trade hasn’t stopped because alternative economic incentives have not been offered, putting NATO at odds with the farmers’ only method of survival.

The result? Ba-da-BING! A resurgent Taliban and renewed funding to anti-Western terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. Isn’t international relations fun?

[Image: Public domain image of a Voice of America reporter interviewing Afghan poppy farmers.]