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Posted By Bob Asman

These images are Noir.  They are common images in common places.  They are accessible in almost any small town in America. 

These are real photographs on silver film and silver prints done expressively; in anger, because a bunch of kleptomaniacs on Wall Street have so much power. 

I hope the photographs convey a sense of surrealism and foreboding because as an historian of the day-type-artist, that’s what it feels like today. 

These photographs are the Noir debris of our times.

Posted By Ed Simmons

Pride. Swallow It

That’s what its there for. I spent the morning, and some of my afternoon, standing in the welfare line. Thank you Senators, for your job well done! A lot of men like me, standing in those lines are not broken men, just angry men. I heard a lot of rude statements about illegal immigrants. Our Government got a lot of people scared of the Sewer Gators, I know illegal immigration is not our problem, we are a Nation of immigrants. What we need, what we want right now, is work! Its important to say, the people working in this welfare office, are wonderful people, they get it. They know the people they’re seeing these days, are only the effect, the cause, a dysfunctional Congress! It takes more than talk, to make something happen. Where have all those shovel ready jobs gone anyhow, its ugly out on the streets out here in LA. Not much going on, nothing much will get going on, until the banksters cut loose with some cash. Why in the hell would they, they make so much more money moving it around markets, they’re still playing both sides of the fence, for them. This is a thing of beauty, the perfect storm!

40% of this Country’s GNP is all about nothing, they aren’t producing product, they just continue the poor business practices that got us into this mess in the first place. WE THE PEOPLE, bailed them out once, don’t be fooled, all this crap is still going on! We need to clean house in this Country, I’m not talking about the immigrants. Who I’m speaking of, are the bastards, and the bastardetts, wasting space in the Congressional Hallways of Washington. I remember hearing more than once, first we’ll kill all the lawyers, we desperately need a cross section of the fabric of America, occupying the seats of Congress, people in touch with the Citizens they represent, the Common People of America, taxi cab drivers, carpenters, janitors, and cooks, our labor force and librarians, our fishermen and our farmers, people not beholden to the corporate scum! In their quest for unbridled profits, these corporations have sabotaged our once Great Nation, just think about this situation for a minute, tent cities, sprouting up, all across our Country.

I’m sure Congress would truly feel shame, if only they cleaned their Capitol Office windows. You know, this assumption I make, hinges on believing they have a conscience, with all we’ve witnessed through these troubled times, we all know they don’t! Christ, all I hear from them, is more tax cuts for the rich, I’m not the sharpest tack in the pack but I know, with the tax base eroded as it is today, any solution other than an increase in tax, is insane.

If I could just get a job, I would be more than happy paying double the tax, I know, I’d be bitching and moaning, in lock step with everyone else. However, as a result of these misdirected polices, firemen, police men, and our teachers in our communities now are loosing their jobs! These are the jobs that grow our society, the professionals that keep our communities safe! So I am going to reread the Secret again this weekend. I’m wearing out the pages in this book. I’m just a little worried the pages may turn to dust before this awful economy turns around! Here is the hope I can believe in, the November Elections are coming and all these clowns in Congress who’s seats are up for election will leave!

……….I just got back from Silicon Gallery to see the prints that are going to be hanging at PENN starting on Thursday, February 18, 2010, opening reception from 4 to 7. Charles Hall put one hell of show together. I recommend that everyone should stop by the opening if your in town. Various associates of the Studio will be there……

……….The first time Summer visited the Studio was for a meeting, assisted by a female off duty officer of the Phiadelphia Police department. She was looking to have some new pictures taken. The national spot light was still shinning brightly upon her, a result of the death of one of her customer’s wives while she was working as a stripper at Delilah’s Den in Philadelphia. Craig Rabinowitz was a regular at the club, and apparently had a fondness for Summer which led to a deadly obsession. He routinely would spend a couple of thousand dollars a week for lap dances at the club where the sultry dancer worked, racking up enormous debts that he no longer could afford to pay. Rather than break the habit of his weekly trips to the club, he decided instead to take out a two million dollar life insurance policy on his unexpecting wife, and conveniently executed her by drugging and drowning her while at home taking a bath.

Rabinowitz tried to make the claim that his wife’s death was accidental but good police work and forensic evidence soon revealed it was a brutal and calculated murder.
Craig Rabinowitz was charged with his wife’s death, and is rightfully serving a life sentence in a Pennsylvania prison.

To see the entire sitting of Summer and more Erotica from the Tony Ward archives, log on to tonyward.com

Posted by John Grant

I was just reading an 1898 essay by Leo Tolstoy on the Spanish American War in which he satirizes the United States for defeating the “decrepit and doting old man”  that was the Spanish Empire and, as “a young man in full possession of his strengths,” taking over Spain’s imperial role in Cuba and, especially, in the Philippines. The US beats this “decrepit old man” (known for his cruelty) and “knocks out his teeth, breaks his ribs, and then ecstatically tells his exploits to a vast public of just such young men as he is, and this public rejoices and praises the hero who has maimed an old man.” This from a writer who saw real bloody combat in several places and wrote War And Peace. This is late Tolstoy, when, in the eyes of many, he had gone off the deep end to preach Christian pacifism. War to him at this stage is organized “murder.” He is disgusted with governments who tell their citizens their wars are undertaken to protect them. “What you (governments) say of the threatening danger and of your concern about protecting us against it is a deception.” Sounds familiar, given the past nine years, when our leaders launched two major wars, one of which we are escalating in spite of opposing popular opinion — a war our military commanders have begun assuring the occupied Afghans is about “protecting the Afghan people.”

Now we must absorb the idea of assassination orders for US citizens. Our leaders now openly declare the right to murder American citizens deemed “enemy combatants” — or some such label worked out by PR-savvy lawyers aware of the post-9/11 fear and the lynch mob state of mind in parts of America. First we were worried about warrant-less wiretapping of citizens. Then, it was the three-year “slow torture” of a US citizen in a brig in South Carolina. Now we have graduated to warrant-less assassinations. The President says it’s OK, so sit back on the couch and watch the rest of Hitman4. And the current Supreme Court is probably fine with assassination hits of anybody as long as they are in the pursuit of American Power & Wealth. 

The target dejure is the US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemini Muslim cleric who had conversations with both the Fort Hood shooter and the underpants bomber. US intelligence has him pegged as Satan’s child, but, let’s be honest, US intelligence is not the most reliable arbiter of truth and they have been good at providing popular fodder for demonization campaigns. Al-Awlaki has told reliable Arab journalists he did not encourage either of the above to commit the acts they did, though, after the fact, he said what they did was honorable. Al-Awlaki is currently in hiding for his life, but he seems to argue he was a sympathetic ear to these disturbed men, not their instigator. Like the many people involved in some fashion with the loosely confederated global insurgency we are currently engaged with, al-Awlaki is clearly angry at our invasions and on-going occupations of Muslim lands, our support of Israel for its occupation of Palestine and a perceived general war against Islam. The argument for assassinating people like al-Awlaki is the exact same reasoning used in the Phoenix Program to assassinate nationalist Vietnamese leaders opposed to the US occupation of Viet Nam. The difference is the current war is being played out in a globalized context and our assassinations are done by the CIA or by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the hunter-killer teams commanded so well by General Stanley McChrystal and now operating in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. They currently favor the use of drones directed by some operator in Arizona with a Diet Pepsi on the console next to him to assassinate people by taking out entire buildings. Of course, no one gets a trial; guilt is established in secret by … well, no one is sure. 

It’s becoming easier to understand why Tolstoy ended up where he did relinquishing literary and commercial success to take on the war powers of his day. Think back to the 1980s and the outrage in the nation over “war off the books” by Oliver North and his patriotic warriors during the Reagan years. One’s head spins at the moral distance we have traveled since those innocent days. Thanks to rapid technological advances and stagnant human morality, the notion of war off the books is now beyond steroids as a metaphor and approaching some kind of secret robot dystopia in which the soma of the age is a popular culture where The Killer reigns supreme as an iconic figure of comedy and romance.

It’s been 112 years since Tolstoy wrote about how the US employed a campaign of “murder” to supplant the Spanish and create its own fledgling empire out of the spoils. That empire is now in full plumage and its leaders are ordering the assassination of people around the world based on their motivational influence. That our imperial wars are the prime motivational element in these speaker’s arguments is rarely mentioned. Given the distance we have come in the past 20 years, it’s interesting to imagine where things might go in the next 20 years.

John Grant

Posted by John Grant

Those of us who participated in the September 12th march on the Army Experience Center at the Franklin Mills Mall recall the arrest of Cheryl Biren, along with six others. I remember Biren there taking photos, it turns out, for OpEdNews.Com, a news and opinion blog site. Biren was doing her job covering the event when she was arrested by Philadelphia police.
The AEC is a tax-funded, $13 million experimental store selling the US Army as a brand to kids as young as thirteen. It employs violent computer games (“war porn”) and shooting simulators with human targets to entice mall-crawling kids into joining the military — at a time the economy is staggering from a lack of jobs. The Center is controversial and raises serious questions about how we educate our youth in today’s world and how well we equip them to analyze information in a critical fashion. 

Many of us “free-lance” or “independent” or, let’s go all the way, “radical” journalists regularly encounter the kind of difficulty Biren ran into covering the AEC march, since police departments are more and more taking it upon themselves to decide who is a legitimate journalist and who isn’t. 
When cops decide who and what constitutes a real journalist they end up permitting only those working for the mainstream, corporate media, people with corporate ID cards, pre-arranged police permits, backup staff at the office, expensive equipment, van drivers and someone to get them coffee. Anyone on a tight budget and sympathetic to the ideas expressed by demonstrators at marches like the one at the AEC are seen as loose cannons and, naturally, suspect in the eyes of the police. And since no one in the mainstream, corporate media has much interest in covering such demonstrations — well, you can see the problem.

In my case, I was there and I took some photos. I, then, chose not to challenge the cops and I left as they began pushing people out the doors. My timidity, of course, is precisely what the police approach is meant to encourage. Any reporter who stayed behind to assert their first amendment right to witness and report the arrests was subject to arrest. This is what Biren did.
We see this sort of thing a lot these days; it’s a variant on the Facts On The Ground strategy. Act first — deal with the repercussions later. The police make an arrest to eliminate a journalist, no matter how illegal the action might be, then they drop the charges and employ public relations later. During the 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia, the city paid out millions in lawsuit settlements for illegal arrests. On January 13, the Philadelphia DA followed this pattern and dropped all charges against Biren – four months after her arrest and an uncertain amount of grief and legal expenses later.

The 1st Amendment outlaws “abridging” the “freedom of the press.” It does not say “freedom of the well-paid, corporate press with police permits.” When the 1st Amendment was written there were no press badges; all the bureaucratic hurdles and mazes came later. 
A.J. Leibling added this famous nugget to the mix: “If you really want freedom of the press you have to own one.” Leibling could not have foreseen the age we live in, but, now, with the advent of the internet and the capacity for virtually anyone to fashion a news blog and get out there and cover news, Leibling’s observation may be more than just a witty remark.
Maybe it’s time for those of us on the left to take a hint from James Bopp Jr., the right-wing conservative lawyer from Terre Haute, Indiana, behind the recent Supreme Court case that opened the flood gates to corporate money in campaign ads. He calculated the whole thing and designed the case to obtain the decision recently dropped on American democracy like a bomb. He is now about to launch a similar case aimed to eliminate any and all restrictions on corporate funding of political campaigns.

Maybe it’s time we tip our hats to the Bopps of this culture and do some original legal thinking of our own — pull off our own “Bopp coup” in the courts — to establish that the police cannot use prejudice or whim as a basis to decide who shall report on and document their actions and who shall not. As long as a reporter is cooperative, not violent or not actively participating in whatever the cops are focusing on, it should be made clear in law that sympathy for a cause or action being covered by a reporter is not a valid reason to lump that reporter in with those being arrested. 
It’s an important Constitutional question. Can a government police force quash, silence or prevent a reporter from doing his or her job by making a phony arrest? It happens so much these days it has become part of the fabric of our times, and it contributes to the distancing of citizens more and more from the decisions and actions of their government.

As the recent corporate funding case suggests, the current Supreme Court tends to come down on the side of money and power. But the Constitution clearly does not require a reporter be equipped with money or power, or more to the point, to be connected to a corporation. Current police practice in cases like Biren’s amounts to the harassment and silencing of reporters for failing to have the proper political “juice” behind them.
If the democratic vistas of the internet we hear so much about are real, then all a reporter needs to legitimately assert 1st Amendment rights is a pen & pad, a camera and a blogsite. 
To borrow the famous film line from The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.”

Photos Copyright John Grant 

Posted by Ed Simmons

The costs of War, always exceeds whatever may be gained by way of the Spoils of War. It is pointless, unless the true motivation is to thin the herd. A lot of wealth to be made in the manufacturing of weapons. War can become an addiction. These weapons dealers step right up, just like any dealer, of any commodity steps up, when he senses a hunger for his product. The world would do much better if it were at peace, we all know the devastation that would come from a nuclear bomb, this thought is so frighting. It keeps us from thinking about the devastation brought upon the Earth by conventional weapons daily. Every bomb, every jet or helicopter that crashes, every artillery shell, leaves a scar. We know that our Earth, at this time in history, is having a little trouble keeping up and cleaning up all our messes. Wouldn’t you think, we could give her a break?

Man is the only species on the planet, that entertains itself, by destroying all that is around him. I read once, the meaning of life, was to make shade where it will benefit others. Maybe we should start making some shade. There have been a lot of wars in my lifetime. The only one we ever had a chance of winning, was the War on Poverty. We had that enemy on the run in this country, even around the world. I can remember when it changed, the idea of letting the rich get richer, that the fix would trickle down, and raise the poor out of their despair. To have meaningful agreements, first, we have to find all that is common, with blinders on. We have to navigate through all that is uncommon. It is not local or national , truly it is global. Minus a couple of nuts, I don’t think there is a man or woman on this planet who wants to see it destroyed.

Why not set a date in the future, say 10 or 20 years out, where a world treaty could be signed, declaring a moratorium on inflicting any damage to the earth. I don’t think we wait for 10 years to end the wars, its all a waste, there’s never nothing left. We could use all that money, working for solutions for a future.

I remember Kennedy putting the challenge of Space Exploration before the people. The Moon seemed, at the time, just out of reach. I know a guy that talks of his time, under a console at Johnson, with a slide rule in hand, figuring it out, as they went along. We got so much more from these efforts, than just the landing on the Moon. Our lives today, for better or worse, are what they are today, because of all this. The problems we would encounter, setting up a colony on the Moon, are all the problems we face today on this planet. The science we would gain without question would justify the costs. This science is priceless. If I were to talk about grabbing the Brass Ring, many young people wouldn’t have a clue, to what I was talking about. On the Merry Go Rounds, as I was growing up, an arm, stacked with Brass Rings would drop. As you went around, you would reach out, trying to grab the ring. You didn’t turn your rings in at the end of the ride for a prize, grabbing the ring was the prize. You didn’t keep it, you gave back.

It may sound to simple, but we as people, are at our best, grabbing for the brass ring. World war II, the War to End All War, the Moon Landing, the Special Olympics, the War on Poverty, all things I see as grabbing the brass ring. Our Planet spins, like the Merry Go Round spins, the arm is down, the rings are there. When are people going to forget about all the arcade games, the cupie dolls, whack a mole, ping pong balls in a fish bowl, and reach for the brass rings again.

Posted By John Gialuco

Well Happy New Year everyone! Good news! On the last week of 2009 the Camden Courier Post announced that the murder rate in Camden was down 40%. This is wonderful news.

However on January 2, 2010, I received a phone call from Shorty at 5 am that someone broke into High Voltage Al’s house and tried to beat him up. Well Voltage, who is 73 years young, was forced to defend himself, in his own home, by beating up the perpetrator, who I will call Puffer, with a channel lock pliers.

Mr. John’s tip #1 for the New Year is that you don’t need to have a a gun in your house but a well prepared tool box… a 14 inch pipe wrench (preferably made of aluminum which is lighter for the ladies to swing), a 12 ounce claw hammer, a couple of long screw drivers (12 inches for children and 20 inches for adults) for those challenging dueling moments, a small first aid kit and a power stapler which should be plugged in at all times in your dining room. It’s a very accurate tool for those sprinters who are circling around the dining room table. Not to mention clipping the childrens drawings from school around the house. You might also want to get a small tape recorder or mp3 player. And just to keep the police on their toes, an oven timer so as to show the cops, if and when they arrive, that they took a little to long coming to your rescue.

To continue. So someone had called the cops and fortunately for Voltage, who carries a small tape recorder in his pocket, recorded the whole tussle so that when the cops arrived, in a timely fashion, he just played the recording to the police. The police told Voltage that he legally defended his life and home and so the cops proceeded to take the Puffer to jail, where he presently is (now 7 am or so on Saturday). Puffer will have to pay Voltage back all the monies for the damages, a broken window, door damage, lock replacement and some furnishings inside. The funny thing is that Puffer was staying there. You see Voltage doesn’t tolerate anyone using drugs in his home and when Voltage found a crack pipe in Puffer’s room he told Puffer to leave and Voltage changed the front door locks. This subsequently led to the break in and assault upon Voltage. Since I haven’t gone into Camden as of yet I will get a clearer story later on today. BTW thanks to Dizzy, who Amy and I celebrated New Years day with at a wonderful dinner in Chinatown, told me there was a money dispute between Voltage and Puffer brewing in the wind.

I have learned a lesson today and that is that we often get advanced notice of trouble in the air but we tend to dismiss it or not want to get involved, as I chose to do. But it came to me anyway. I didn’t feel it was my business to interfere and rightly or wrongly this event had its repercussions. I might have been able to mitigate Puffer’s anger beforehand, he certainly expressed his anger to me earlier last week…who knows? Puffer, despite his present situation, has shown me that he is a very good mechanic ( he always wanted to learn something he didn’t understand), he can repair almost anything and he always returned anything he borrowed from me. Puffer can be very responsible and direct. We all become very complex as we grow older, a mixed bag for sure. Whatever you take from this story be aware that most people, whatever their station in life, are willing to learn and make up for their wrong decisions. But it can be a tiresome process.

Live long and Prosper in our new year. Mr. John

…….To learn more about the chronicles of a Camden, New Jersey landlord, log on to www.camdenchronicles.com…………..

……As a follow up to our earlier feature on the illustrious success of the anti-rape campaign, “THIS IS NOT AN INVITATION TO RAPE ME”, spearheaded by Creative Director Charles Hall, we decided to publish a follow up post on the continuing global reach the advertising campaign continues to impose. Rape crisis Scotland contacted Mr. Hall, to use the campaign to bring awareness to rape conviction rates in the country, a deplorable less than 3%.

Upon arriving in Edinburgh, Charles was introduced to the METRO news headline of the day; “RAPIST OF GIRL AGED 10 FREE IN MONTHS”. This appalling court ruling served as a backdrop for the new task at hand for Charles and his creative team. He contacted regional artists Julie Cerise to contribute photographic images, and New York based graphic designer, Graham Clifford to contribute their talents for the new campaign. To learn more about Julie Cerise’s photographs, log on to www.juliecerise.carbonmade.com. To learn more about Graham Clifford’s graphic design, log on to www.grahamclifforddesign.com.