Drawing: Confusion

By Jack Brummet

---o0o---

The Best Thanksgiving Song Of All Time - Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant

One Thanksgiving tradition for me is listening to Alice's Restaurant.  Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.  /jack

---o0o---

A pictorial history of Presidential turkey pardons from Harry Truman through Barack Obama

By Jack Brummet, Holidays and Holy Days Editor

President Harry S. Truman seems to have been the first President to issue a pardon to a Thanksgiving turkey, in 1947.  All subsequent Presidents have carried on the tradition.

Oddly, I can't find an image of any of Jimmy Carter's pardons, only this shot:

---o0o---

The Wall of Faces

Drawings by Jack Brummet, Photography by Philip Palermo

Here are some photos, by Philip Palermo, of my office walls.  I drew the faces over the last 12 years, on surplus 2'x2' muslin cloths, stamped with Mississippi Lighthouse for the Blind (who manufactured them for hospitals).  The faces are almost all drawn with pen and ink, or Sharpies, with some random additions of colors.   Because the squares sat folded in a warehouse so many years, they are permanently creased. . .so I started drawing one face per square (and later, sometimes, six faces per square.  I've given away and sold quite a few over the years, but still have around 150+ of them, which were on my office walls until the end of this week.  I don't know what their next home will be. . .

—click the photos to enlarge—

---o0o---

Occupy No. 9 - "Unscrew the locks from the doors!"

by Jack Brummet

Thanks to Walt Whitman for the quote. See the footnote [1] (a/k/a what Ed Sanders coined a "satellite data cluster") for details on the images on the poster.

[1]  Notes on the images:  a sign on Wall St. itself; a stealth banner on Ballard's Market Street (Ballard is Jack's neighborhood in Seattle) that was removed after one day; Giotto's painting of Jesus rousting the moneychangers outside the temple; the New York Stock Exchange Building, photographer unknown; a scene from from the film "Frankenstein" (the source of the ever-popular torches and pitchforks meme...before memes had that name); an engraving of the "Storming of the Bastille"; "take out the trash is a reference to one of the best episodes of "The West Wing."

---o0o--- 

Outfoxed! #OccupyWallStreet talks to Fox News and they picked the wrong guy out of the crowd

Thanks to Ray Estrada for sharing this great clip, which we assume never saw the light of day on Fox news.

---o0o---

Saint Misbehavin' - The Wavy Gravy (a/k/a Hugh Romney) documentary

By Jack Brummet, Counterculture Editor

The trailer for this film is intriguing.  My son, Del, his cousin Melanie, and a friend, Sam, went down to Wavy's "clown camp" in Mendocino County, California, for three years running.  One year we were also down there and got to see their show, and even meet Mr. Gravy.  For all his bluster, hot air, and possibility confabulated stories, he has done a lot of good in the world, and I think that half the kids who go to Camp Winnarainbow are poor kids, on full scholarships.  Wavy Gravy is something right in the world. 

"Beginning with Woodstock ‘99, director Michelle Esrick has spent ten years documenting the life of Wavy Gravy.

 "Saint Misbehavin’ journeys from the hills of California to the Himalayan Mountains to reveal the life of this one of a kind servant to humanity. The film blends Wavy’s own words with magical stories from an extraordinary array of fellow travelers both cultural and counter-cultural, revealing the man behind the clown’s grin and the fool’s clothing.

"In Saint Misbehavin’ Wavy is revealed more than the tie-dyed entertainer and ice-cream flavor namesake that often defines him in the popular imagination. Audiences will come to know the activist, the optimist, and the healer who reaches beyond political, economic, and cultural divisions in his commitment to social change and the alleviation of human suffering.
Wavy’s life is his message, serving as deeply needed inspiration that we can change the world and have fun doing it.

"Satirist Paul Krasner describes Wavy as “The illegitimate son of Harpo Marx and Mother Theresa, conceived one starry night on a spiritual whoopie cushion,” to which Wavy has replied, “Some people tell me I’m a saint, I tell them I’m Saint Misbehavin’.”

"Featuring: Wavy Gravy, Jahanara Romney, Jordon Romney, Dr. Larry Brilliant, The Grateful Dead, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Odetta, Patch Adams, Lisa Law, Buffy Sainte Marie, Denise Kaufman, Tom Law, Steven Ben Israel, The Hog Farm, and more!"

Saint Misbehavin': The Wavy Gravy Movie - Theatrical Trailer from Ripple Effect Films

From the film:



JACKSON BROWNE
“I have known Wavy for over 20 years, but it wasn’t until last year that one of my kids went to his camp. I was really amazed at how powerful this camp was in the lives of these kids…Wavy was connecting with these kids in such a meaningful way and I really looked at him with new eyes because I am used to his joking and his philanthropy but it was brilliant, it was revolutionary stuff, it was about really turning the tides in the lives of people who will be the next to inhabit the corridors of government, and business, and become the artists and the influential people of this century…only a really serious revolutionary would have the vision and the depth and the breadth of character to actually continue to do this all these years and on into the future and so add to the description of clown and Saint….Revolutionary.”

---o0o---

Painting: Mr. Blue

By Jack Brummet

---o0o---

Buy Local/Occupy Black Friday

---o0o---

Jack In The Loo

---o0o---

The Founding Fathers Get Pepper-sprayed

A friend of ATIT—Teresa Thiessen—found this images on Google+.  It seems to have been created by misanthropologist Sean Bonner.

click to enlarge

---o0o---

Roadside Attractions No. 8 - Minnesota's Iron Man Statue



By Jack Brummet, travel editor

The Iron Man, a gigantic rendition of a nineteenth century miner standing on a sphere of rusted steel, lives in Chisholm, in the heart Minnesota's mining country.  "The Emergence of Man Through Steel"—the official title of the sculpture—was designed by the artist Jack Anderson and completed in 1987. The whole structure is 85 feet high, and is one of the five tallest statues in America. 

The brass and copper statue is a tribute to miners of the past, when mining boomed in Minnesota and King Steel ruled the roost. People claim that the giant pile of steel beneath him makes the miner appear a little small.  And, yet, the statue alone is a respectable 36 feet tall, which in itself makes it one of the tallest U.S. statues.

A plaque on Iron Man's base says the statue is "a tribute to the Mesabi, Vermilion, Cuyuna and Gogebic Ranges' men of steel, who carved out of a sylvan wilderness the iron ore that made America the industrial giant of the world. They shall live forever!"

The cross-eyed miner stares down at a McDonald's across the street

How to get there:  It's on Iron Drive in Chisholm, Minnesota, on the north side of US Highway169, just east of its intersection with Highway 73.

Read about other roadside attractions we've written on here:

The Golden Driller

The Jolly Green Giant

Christ of the Ozarks

Touchdown Jesus!

---o0o---