The most appropriate Christmas song: "The Rebel Jesus
I've been touting Jackson Browne's "The Rebel Jesus" since my very first Blogmas, but thanks to the miracle of YouTube, I can now offer up the music into the collection basket as well. The version below is pure Jackson Browne, and is reasonably well illustrated (something I've been meaning to do for a year but is unlikely will ever be a priority). A better (in my view) musical version is the version with The Chieftains, which has a pro-forma video (five minutes of the album cover), but you can listen to/"watch" that one here.
Your assignment for today, class
See what you can do along these lines:
This week an arts group in Oakland, the Center for Tactical Magic, began shopdropping neatly folded stacks of homemade T-shirts into Wal-Mart and Target stores in the San Francisco Bay Area. The shirts feature radical images and slogans like one with the faces of Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian anarchist. It says, "Peace on Earth. After we overthrow capitalism." (Image here)
Too challenging? OK, maybe you can handle this one:
Moving Bibles from the religion section to the fantasy/science-fiction section.
Marxy Holiday!
At a non-religious holiday party last night, I was introduced to an absolutely brilliant piece of work (below) called "Manifestoon," which is the Communist Manifesto illustrated by cartoons. It might sound silly, which I guess it is, but it is also brilliantly done. Over and above admiring the work of the videographer, if you haven't read the Manifesto at all or in a long time, as I hadn't, what stands out as you listen to it is the remarkable prescience of its words. 157 years before Thomas Friedman (hate him as I do, but credit where credit is due) popularized the term "the world is flat," Marx and Engels were talking about precisely the same thing.
This version is in English, but if you type "Manifestoon" into the YouTube search box, you'll find it's available in numerous languages. Enjoy!
Reprinted from Left I on the News