Richard Dawkins – “What if you’re wrong?” South Park-style
(video: TubeLooB at YouTube)

M’kay. By Jove, he’s right.

(tip: Atheist Media Blog)

From 50 best protest signs of 2009 (photo: anonymous)

Check out BuzzFeed’s 50 Best Protest Signs Of 2009. There’s some very funny stuff there. Trust Mike.

(tip: Zakiya Khabir)

Rachel Maddow: Why Fox News isn’t news
(video: MSNBC, The Rachel Maddow Show)

The news that Fox News isn’t actually news is hardly news if you’ve been following along. And criticizing the news media is nothing new. Some of us leftie bloggers have, for some time, been delivering the bad news that the news is, in deed, pretty farked up. Here are a handful of examples of really bad news from deep within the Tidmus Archives.

Glenn Beck back in his hippie days … not really … but you knew that
(all graphics: Mike Tidmus)

Who let this Mickey Mouse outfit have a news channel?

CNN’s abuse of split-screening was nearly as annoying as their crawling ticker

If you need me to explain this …

Bush’s final solution for his little adventure in Iraq

Bring your own shade (photo: mine)

As September blazes into San Diego, please note, AIDS Walk San Diego is slated for Sunday, 27 September. Now would be a great time to start thinking about how you’re going to pitch in and help out.

Here’s what’s coming up in sunny San Diego.

Tuesday, 1 September:

Coffee & Conversation with Nicole Torres
Join our live interview forum as we find out what makes songstress Nicole Torres tick!

Is it her Cuban heritage? Is it her passion for music? Is it her activism? Is it the poetry of her everyday life?

What: Coffee & Conversation with Cool Women
When: 7-8:30 pm
Where: The Center, 3909 Centre St, SD, (619) 692-2077
Map
Who: Host Tryce Czyczynska interviews ‘Oprah style’

Bonus: Nicole will sing for us!
Discover: www.nicoletorres.com

Free to attend, free coffee and light dessert. Come as long or as little as you can, come early for the best seats. Come to be inspired!

++++++

City Council Meeting

Councilmember Donna Frye will present AT 10:00am a Women’s Equality Day Proclamation at San Diego City Council, in the chambers. As a Feminist please join us as the city acknowledges the 89th anniversary of women winning the right to vote. Come with us to celebrate. Please wear white, if you can, as the Suffragists did and please make your self a shoulder sash or carry a sign that says: “VOTES FOR WOMEN” or something else that a suffragist from that period might say. This should be a fun event for all of us. Hope to see you there!

Wednesday, 2 September:

SAME Spaghetti Fundraiser at The Big Kitchen

Join San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality members at The Big Kitchen, eat spaghetti and support grassroots activists fighting for Marriage Equality in 2010. SAME is asking for a sliding scale of $15.00 – $100,00 pr. Person with one 50/50 raffle ticket included in the price of your meal.

For more info: www.samealliance.com or 619-234-5789

Location: The Big Kitchen
Time: 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Address: 3003 Grape Street
City: San Diego, CA

Tuesday, 8 September

San Diego Alliance for Marriage meeting

The San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality (SAME) is a grass roots, democratically-run organization committed to fighting for LGBT rights including marriage equality. SAME meetings are open to the public. For more information please visit the SAME website.

As the movement continues we encourage everyone with an idea, a hope, a voice, to join us in this struggle. in numbers there is strength, in unity there is hope, and together we WILL realize our goal: equality.

We want to invite LGBTQIQAA activists to become NEW members and NEW organizations to join us in coalition at this SAME membership meeting. Our agenda will focus on issues of the future direction in the fight for Marriage Equality, a 2010 California ballot initiative for Civil Marriage and LGBT Equal Rights. The meeting discussion will focus on SAME leadership structure and leadership structure in the 2010 Marriage Equality campaign, planning future actions, signature gathering, phonebanking and fundraisers. Also on the agenda is SAME membership dues and planning for the Spaghetti Dinner Fundraiser happening at The Big Kitchen on Wednesday, September 2nd.

Please join our membership meetings the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of the Month. SAME meetings are open to the public. For more info visit SAME online.

Time: 6:30pm – 8:30pm
Location: At a Residential Building on the SE Corner of 4th & Walnut (street parking after 6pm is FREE.) Signs at the gate will guide you to the meeting space which is UPSTAIRS on the 2nd floor. If you need directions contact Cecile: 858 335 6615.

Wednesday, 16 September:

Hillcrest Art Nite

The Hillcrest Business Association and More Super Events presents the monthly Hillcrest Art Nite. The Hillcrest Art Nite events consist of art spaces set up along the sidewalks of Hillcrest allowing event-goers to walk through a three-block portion of the community to view art, enjoy entertainment, shop and eat at some of Hillcrest’s most popular restaurants at discount prices, some of which include Baja Betty’s, Wine Steals, Bamboo Lounge, The Ruby Room and CC Lounge. Local shops also offer discounts to those coming out for the event.

Time: 6:00pm – 10:00pm
Address: University Ave between 10th and Herbert
City: San Diego, CA 92103

Sunday, 20 September:

Family Matters Family BBQ

Join Family Matters from 11 am to 3 pm on Sunday, Sept. 20 at Trolley Barn Park on Adams Ave. between Park and Texas. All families are welcome! Bring your kids, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, grandkids, friends and neighbors for music, karaoke, face painting, balloon art, jumps and slides, games, prizes and lots of social time. Children under 5 are free. All others pay only $10 for lunch and beverages. Want to sponsor another family? Your $30 gift will sponsor a family of three, while $50 will sponsor a family of five. Tickets are available online. For more information, contact Jane Schmoll at (619) 692-2077, ext. 121, or families@thecentersd.org. Check out the Facebook page.

Date: Sunday, September 20, 2009
Time: 11:00am – 3:00pm
Location: Trolley Barn Park
Street: Adams Ave. between Park & Texas

Tuesday, 22 September

San Diego Alliance for Marriage meeting

The San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality (SAME) is a grass roots, democratically-run organization committed to fighting for LGBT rights including marriage equality. SAME meetings are open to the public. For more information please visit the SAME website.

As the movement continues we encourage everyone with an idea, a hope, a voice, to join us in this struggle. in numbers there is strength, in unity there is hope, and together we WILL realize our goal: equality.

We want to invite LGBTQIQAA activists to become NEW members and NEW organizations to join us in coalition at this SAME membership meeting. Our agenda will focus on issues of the future direction in the fight for Marriage Equality, a 2010 California ballot initiative for Civil Marriage and LGBT Equal Rights. The meeting discussion will focus on SAME leadership structure and leadership structure in the 2010 Marriage Equality campaign, planning future actions, signature gathering, phonebanking and fundraisers. Also on the agenda is SAME membership dues and planning for the Spaghetti Dinner Fundraiser happening at The Big Kitchen on Wednesday, September 2nd.

Please join our membership meetings the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of the Month. SAME meetings are open to the public. For more info visit SAME online.

Time: 6:30pm – 8:30pm
Location: At a Residential Building on the SE Corner of 4th & Walnut (street parking after 6pm is FREE.) Signs at the gate will guide you to the meeting space which is UPSTAIRS on the 2nd floor. If you need directions contact Cecile: 858 335 6615.

Sunday, 27 September:

AIDS Walk San Diego 2009

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cuts to California’s HIV/AIDS programs were nothing less than monstrous. Now, more than before, this is our community’s best shot at raising badly-needed funds for programs and services vital to San Diegans at risk for or living with AIDS/HIV-infection. Please, sign up and walk or run. If you can’t, dig deep and support a participant or team.

AIDS Walk San Diego is San Diego’s largest one-day HIV/AIDS fundraiser and the biggest non-governmental financial provider for HIV/AIDS in San Diego County. Dozens of agencies — serving thousands of clients — rely on funds raised at the annual AIDS Walk to help provide essential prevention and care programs to thousands of men, women and children living with HIV/AIDS.

Established as AIDS Walk San Diego in 1989, this event took place for two years prior as the Walk for Life. Through a unique funding partnership with the San Diego HIV Funding Collaborative, AIDS Walk San Diego is able to increase the impact of the dollars raised at the event. Funds from the Walk are combined with donations from other philanthropists and foundations to qualify for matching funds. Since 1989, AIDS Walk San Diego has raised more than $7.5 million. In partnership with the San Diego HIV Funding Collaborative, nearly $555,988 was distributed last year to 26 community-based HIV/AIDS service organizations in San Diego County.

Check out the AIDS Walk San Diego website or Facebook for more information.

Time: 7:00am – 10:00am (see the event schedule)
Location: Balboa Park
Map

Additions and/or corrections to calendar items are welcomed. Drop me an email or add a comment below.

Ukraine’s Got Talent – Kseniya Simonova – Sand Animation
(video: iamlikeasea at YouTube)

Gilbert and George show ‘Jack Freak’ – Culture Minute (video: The Telegraph)

From The Telegraph: “Award-winning modern artists Gilbert Prosech and George Passmore explain to Alastair Sooke why religion should be mocked and why everyone should learn to experience their inner freak.”

Here’s more:

• The Independent: Gilbert and George: ‘Jack Freak Pictures’
• The Independent: Gilbert and George make bid for establishment status
• The Guardian: Gilbert & George, White Cube, London
• Reuters: Union Jack stars in Gilbert & George “freak” show
• National Secular Society: Gilbert and George launch new exhibition with attack on religion

Tip: The Reason Project

Imagine there’s no heaven … (graphic: via Heaving Dead Cats)

Left: Rirkrit Tiravanija, JG Reads, 2008, still from a black-and-white film in 16 mm, 10 hours 6 minutes. Right: John Giorno, LIFE IS A KILLER, 2008, pencil on paper, 6 1/2 x 6 1/2.”

This is the 500th post on the new blog. I suppose after 500 posts,
I should stop calling it “the new blog.”

Here is a collection of snippets and links about and by one of the most significant voices in queer art and culture, John Giorno. The man is a living legend and a queer treasure. Nobody tells Giorno’s tale like he does himself. I’ll step aside.

From ArtForum:

For over forty years, the poet John Giorno has explored the media through which poetry is disseminated. In 1963, Giorno was the subject of Andy Warhol’s Sleep, and recently Giorno collaborated with Rirkrit Tiravanija on the latter’s work JG Reads, 2008, which was shown at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise November 22–December 20. An exhibition of Giorno’s artwork is on view at Almine Rech gallery in Paris January 10–February 25, 2009.

[ … ]

The greatness of the poet is to get the audience to connect with a poem. As poems grow older and enter the museum of history—the Modern Museum of Poetry, or what have you—they lose it. Take Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Being a gay man reading it the year it was written, 1956, he blew me away; it was the first time anyone had said words that related to my mind. Now, at every university across the country, I hear these kids say, “John, I’m glad it did it for you, but . . . ”

If you look back over the past thousand years, there were often never more than a hundred people who heard your poem. With Baudelaire, they’d only print his poems in one hundred books, and maybe three hundred people read them, and yet he was the most famous poet in France. Our generation changed things. Years ago, a young woman came up to Patti Smith and said, “Patti, I’m a poet. What should I do?” And Patti said, “If you want to have more than twenty people in the audience, get yourself a rock band.” The young woman turned out to be Chan Marshall of Cat Power. I think that’s happened to countless people: Jim Carroll, Lou Reed, Tom Waits; it’s that Pop thing of connecting to a large audience.

From The Guardian:

My 15 minutes

Our interviews with Warhol’s friends and collaborators continue with John Giorno, 65, poet, Aids activist, friend and confidant of Warhol and subject of his film, Sleep. Interviews by Catherine Morrison

I was a kid in my early 20s, working as a stockbroker. I was living this life where I would see Andy every night, get drunk and go into work with a hangover every morning. The stock market opened at 10 and closed at three. By quarter to three I would be waiting at the door, dying to get home so I could have a nap before I met Andy. I slept all the time – when he called to ask what I was doing he would say,“Let me guess, sleeping?”

[ … ]

He didn’t really know what he was doing; it was his first movie. We made it with a 16mm Bolex in my apartment but had to reshoot it a month later. The film jumped every 20 seconds as Andy rewound it. The second shoot was more successful but he didn’t know what to do with it for almost a year.

The news that Warhol had made a movie triggered massive amounts of publicity. It was absurd – he was on the cover of Film Culture and Harper’s Bazaar before the movie was finished! In the end, 99% of the footage didn’t get used; he just looped together a few shots and it came out six hours long.

From The Leslie Lohman Gay Art Foundation:

An interview with John Giorno

By Bill DeNoyelles

Part 1: Subduing the Demons in America

John Giorno remains a fierce, independent voice in American Gay Culture. His work as a poet, performer, activist and fundraiser spans over four decades. Without any loss of his manic energy Giorno continues to champion the work of friends like Andy Warhol, William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Unrepentant and radical, he displays remarkable insight into the turmoil of the sixties, the explosive sexual jubilation of the seventies and the viral devastation of the eighties. A practicing Tibetan Buddhist in the Nyingma tradition since 1971, John Giorno is meditation in action. His AIDS Treatment Project of the 1980’s delivered hard cash to those suffering and in need–directly, without middleman or politics. If you were sick and needed the cash, he gave it to you. He continues this work today, setting up endowments for those who are seriously ill with little or no resources. Traveling worldwide Giorno continues to perform his poetry for new generations introducing works that honor gone friends while revealing outlaw history.

Part 2: Money, School and Drugs

“I’m a gay man and a poet. The big influences on me were other poets and writers. To see what William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg did with their work in the context of being gay and explicit was an eye opener. I was in the art world where Robert Raushenberg or Andy [Warhol] would never allow a gay image in their work– ever! Andy did it secretly with The Cock Book. They consciously were not gay because they didn’t want to ruin their lives. The last thing they needed was the big problem of a dick in a painting and all the sudden they get branded as a gay artist.

[ … ]

“I thought that it was heroic to be gay in your work. I’m not worrying about losing the sale of a painting or the critics. I’m not a painter I’m a poet. So it was a heroic action, a heroic stance like going into battle not caring if you got killed because your intention was to do so. My reaction against all those artists was something that propelled me into being gay in my work.

Part 6: Dial A Poem

“What happened was that Dial-A-Poem became hugely successful. The idea of an LP was a natural progression, keeping in mind the concept of a new audience for poetry. I couldn’t get anyone to produce it. In those years the record companies were dumping money out of their offices, giving it to anybody who wanted to produce a record. Even though I was sort of famous I couldn’t convince any of them to do poetry. It was not rock n’ roll. One day I get a phone call from a guy named John Hart, who was the vice president of the Record Club of America, saying ‘We would like you to make a selection for one of our months.’ I couldn’t believe it! I had already given up on the idea. That became the first record that came out in 1972.

“The sound poems in 1965 were the first real major things I had done. It was also happening at a time when other friends of mine were musicians like Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass. People who used tapes and tape loops. They were all young and nobody was famous yet. They were part of this extended art and poetry scene. I had my eye on them since I was working with loops. I was looking at what they were doing in comparison even though it was a totally different world than mine.

Part 8: Kissing, Intimacy and Affection

“Something happened in America in the seventies that lasted until around 1980. It began to end when people began dying of AIDS which was 1981-’82, around there. There was a sexual freedom that existed among men that was truly unique. We know all the givens–The Village People, Studio 54, The Mineshaft, dissolving bad and good, dissolving all these concepts and liberating to levels that had never been achieved before.

[ ... ]

“One was incredibly depressed in the early to mid eighties because of the devastation of AIDS. In 1984 I started to deal with it by my starting The AIDS Treatment Project out of this depression. In the spring of 1980 I had met a former lover who told me his roommate died so suddenly, horribly and fast. I realized in those early years that what people with AIDS needed most was money. They were getting sick, losing their jobs and apartments. People would come home from the hospital to find their furniture out on the street. Week after week I’d hear this.

[ ... ]

“It still goes on today. It’s changed, it’s shifted into people with medical problems. Often poets, artists or people with little money or resources who are like 50 years old and suddenly have a stroke. I still work at it everyday. I get asked by somebody to help and we get a little bit of money and we give a grant. Because we’re not-for-profit we can create a fund and their friends can give money easily. We do that for anybody. It was not consciously that I did this. It came out of the despair of what was happening to mostly gay men.”

Part 1: Subduing the Demons in America
Part 2: Money, School and Drug
Part 3: Balling Buddha
Part 4: Up Against the Wall
Part 5: The Process
Part 6: Dial A Poem
Part 7: Grasping At Emptiness
Part 8: Kissing, Intimacy and Affection
Pornographic Poem/John Giorno

From Art MoCo: Welcoming the Flowers is a set of 18 screenprinted poems
by John Giorno

Spending Time With Poster Boy (Video: YouTube)

Ed Pilkington, at the Guardian, informs us that the anti-consumerist artist known as Poster Boy has been busted by the NYPD. Just last month, the Guardian did a piece on Poster Boy’s guerilla slicing-and-dicing in New York’s subway system.

Armed with only a razor and ever vigilant about his anonymity, Poster Boy cuts up sections of subway advertising posters, mashes them up and delivers whole new, frequently anti-establishment, messages. Says Poster Boy,”The idea of taking your environment into your own hands and making it what you want. As long as you’re not hurting other people, it can’t be bad.”

The NYPD disagrees. So when a flyer announced that Poster Boy would appear at an art event in SOHO, plain clothes officers showed up, arrested Henry Matyjewicz — a 27-year-old from Bushwick, and tossed the artist in a Rikers Island jail cell.

Shortly after Matyjewicz’s arrest, in a Spartacus-worthy twist, an email that claimed Poster Boy was not a single individual but rather a “movement,” was sent to the New York Times. The Times, which describes Poster Boy as “a kind of anti-consumerist Zorro with a razor blade, a sense of humor and a talent for collage,” has more at the link.

Check out Poster Boy’s handiwork at Flickr, Friends We Love, or at this Guardian Gallery.

Gotcha! (Photo: Anonymous via Elizabeth DiNovella at The Progressive)

The shocking images above make one thing amply clear: they hate us for our street names. Elizabeth DiNovella, at The Progressive, has posted evidentiary photographs of the terrists who attempted to Obamacize San Francisco’s Bush Street in the wee hours of Inauguration Day. 

The San Francisco Chronicle has an extensive gallery of the handiwork of these rascally evil-doers.