We cinephiles very often preach, with tear-stained sincerity, about how more rare films need to be seen by the public, to raise awareness of film history and film culture. You know the drill.

But how threatened would we feel if this actually happened; if the circle-jerk exclusivity that defines our boutique preoccupation were sundered by the attainment of that goal? There is a security in wanton cultism; a warm, baptismal Members Only thrill in being part of something, anything, from which the greater public is excluded in spirit if not exactly in word. We can agree on that much, yes? Then can we not also confess to that strange urge, every bit as addicting, perhaps more so, to reprimand that same public for not being as film-literate as we; for not making the needless effort to penetrate the cult. Can we not admit our self-satisfied pity toward those who neither know nor care about the difference between Satyajit Ray and Nicholas Ray?

For these impulses are but two sides of a larger, single-celled impulse; an organismal sickness which has resided in the body cinephilic for more than half a century now. Think about it. We love our exclusivity, but hate being marginal. WE want THEM to want the Nothing that is ours. Cinephiles have been unconscionably comfortable with the Us & Them arrangement set forth by our forbears, such as they were, for more than a half-century now. We’ve created this Eden for ourselves, but They, the ordinary moviegoers, still won’t recognize the scale of that achievement. They won’t congregate on the lawn outside Our clubhouse, they won’t beg to be admitted; if only so that We could feel even more secure in our smug arcadia; that magical place where the measure of one’s merit lies not in virtue or intelligence or success, but in crossing every last Allan Dwan picture off the checklist we use for a soul.

In a neo-feudal economy, the best you can do is keep your head oh-so-slightly above water and hope you don’t live long enough to find yourself eating cat food in a park with all the other feral pensioners. On the downside, you could end up working for an organization that hired you because you could pull off a pretty good impersonation of a white, terminally upbeat, sociopathic drone, participate in “team building” workshops that combine “Lord of the Flies” with Deepak Chopra quotes and take antidepressants until the day some HR goon informs you that prison labor in Bangladesh made a winning bid on your job. But at least this way, you can “leverage your project management skills” with balled up newspaper and a can opener.

by Jennifer Matsui

I love the city. I moved to the suburbs and I call them a borough. I vacation in cities. I like the concrete. It feels clean. It feels like home. It annoys me when people put down the city as too dirty or too crowded or too crime-ridden, rude and loud.  It pains me to hear the denigration of urban living and metropolitan values, especially when it comes from people whose contact with the city is limited to what they see on TV, read on the internet or hear from a pulpit or a pundit. People who are sheltered from the world we inhabit (as if we lived in a habitrail or an ant farm). People who are sheltered from people who are different from themselves. People who are sheltered from ideas that are different from theirs. People who need people. I like living around people. All kinds of people, in all kinds of clothes. I’m accustomed to variety. Racial variety. Religious variety. Political variety. Altvariety. It flavors my world. It expands my world view. It keeps the conversations lively.

There is a very strong anti-urban leaning in national politics. Politicians chase after rural dwelling voters because they appear to live in somewhat secluded areas and are categorized as clinging to more traditional values because their isolation shields them from evolving issues that city dwellers face daily. The middle states shape the political landscape because they control the Electoral College by virtue of land mass rather than population. To court provincial voting blocs, conservative politicians demonize urban voters. They say we’re out of touch with their reality because we live in money-squandering, pill-popping, fame-worshipping, hedonistic, orgiastic sin cities, where anything goes and hell be damned. A) That’s not particularly true.  And two: what’s wrong with that and where did you say these orgies are? Rural residents who know only what they are told about urban living should be shown cosmopolitan reality before they make up their minds to condemn us.  They would see that we’re not that different.

The sense of community in urban areas is not that different than in less populated areas, but politicians treat rural dwellers as if they have more to offer in terms of communities, as if their sense of community is somehow more relevant and fundamental than the fellowships formed in cities. People in rural areas interact with less people on a daily basis. This isn’t a cheap shot at the loneliness of cornfed, intermarried hillbilly obstructionists, it is basic mathematics. They may know their neighbors very well, but they have fewer of them, and those few offer little diversity of opinion because they share a common background that has been honed by generations of homogenous conformity. Ideas become sedentary when there’s nothing to mix it up. Still waters run deep. Traditionalists fear change and resent those who would bring it on.  As an urbanite, I believe people in the middle states would have more of a sense of community if they were just a little more crowded. They would embrace change as progress instead of social deterioration and debate issues from different angles if there were more people around. Let’s bring it to them. Let them meet the people who scare them. They shouldn’t be shy. New Yorkers aren’t known to be shy. We might not be in the fucking mood, but we’re not shy. We’ve grown accustomed to each other. On the subway, we don’t look twice at pink hair, fangs, turbans, hoodies, or full-on drag. These are our neighbors, the people we steal cable from. Conservatives who live in the city see the same sights. They don’t become unhinged. They are familiar and no longer see the threat they saw when they first encountered the brightly colored masses. These are the people they may see on the trading floor, editing the company newsletter, fixing a sink or delivering their 420 at lunch.

We should urbanize America. Expand and diversify the people in the middle states.  Liberals and progressives should move inland.  Immigrants should venture past the urban sprawl of their points of entry. Inner-city families should pool their resources and find cheap land with the clean air that they’ve only seen on a farm on TV. We should develop land and housing to accommodate a growing population that can bring change to static ideas and under-developed backwoods and remote wastelands. We can make “middle-of-nowheres” into “centers-of-somewhere.” Where you see subsidized farmland, I see projects, some office buildings, a corner pharmacy, a bodega, a strip club and a commuter train or light rail. Where you see rocky terrain, I see concrete, tenements, trucking docks, delis, social clubs, a fashion district, a basketball court, a red light district and hot dog stands day and night and a kid selling dime bags.  Where you might see long stretches of abandoned cars, trucks and couches along a highway that only sees three cars a week, I see a graffiti-embellished skateboard rink, a health clinic and a factory park that becomes a tranny whore hangout after dark. There should be a seedy section in any community so people have some outlet for the desires they can’t quench when they are plowing the fields or taking care of the livestock. Same sex marriages are frowned upon but animal husbandry is encouraged. They’re out in the fields for days at a time without human contact and, hey, that sheep over there has a nice ass. Rurals might like a little kink out in the open, I’m not saying it’ll save one goat-raping but if it does, so be it.

Country naturalists say city living is unhealthy, but according to the city’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, babies born in New York City in 2009 will live more than two years longer than the national average. Evangelical purveyors of etiquette say New Yorkers are selfish, but New Yorkers top many charitable donation lists. Polite red-staters say New Yorkers are rude and insensitive. Fuck them. Bible Belt representatives are afraid that their residents may be seduced by the Sodom-and-Gomorrah-life lived by such hedonists and criminals as those found in the ultra-nice Minneapolitans and St. Paulites of the Twin Cities. They bludgeon congregations and with frightening statistics that prove that 97% of crime in the United States is committed in cities, which only have half the population of the country. Lawmakers roll out studies like one from a few years ago that found that all but three of 268 boys in the Kansas State Reform School came from cities. They say that someone is killed in New York City every thirty-six hours.  (Which reminds me, it’s my turn and I only have an hour left.)

I am afraid to live in a country where decisions are made by a rural voting bloc. They don’t represent me. They don’t even like me. I’ve seen websites where they encourage people to kill me and people like me. They put red and white targets on images of people who don’t agree with them so they can hunt them down and shoot them on the floors of congress. They equate cities with progressives and liberals, as if it were that easy, and they have no real idea what progressives and liberals want because they have no contact with them and have no interest in what they have to say. Liberals and progressives are usually well-versed in conservative thought because conservative has come to mean holding on to the past, which means we’ve already passed it. It’s already the foundation of most of what we know. We were raised in a world that had a history. A history we don’t particularly wish repeated, but that traditionalists in central states run over and over like a loop of old news footage in an abandoned movie house. We think they’re out of touch with other people and they think we’re out of touch with reality. Social progress in city areas is being hindered by the misinformed populace of the more sparsely populated areas. We would have recognized same-sex marriage, legalized medical marijuana, probably decriminalized recreational marijuana. Civil rights would have been passed much faster. Stem cell research may already be saving lives. We would be greener, less reliant on polluting energies. We wouldn’t be so quick to go to war.

Urbanize America. Build more cities. Bring industry to an outsourced nation. Unions should get behind this because, at their heart, they want to build. It creates more than jobs. Unions feed on accomplishment. It keeps them strong. Like their workers. New York City has one of the greatest labor workforces in the United States. They’ve done a great job.  The supposedly Mafia-lead construction union built Manhattan into one of the greenest places in the country.  Manhattan and other cities make the most ecological use of land mass. Apartment buildings are more efficient to heat and cool. A New Yorker’s carbon footprint is 30 percent smaller than the average American’s. The rate of car ownership is among the lowest in the country; 65 percent of the population walks, bikes, or rides mass transit, which emits less atmospheric carbon than trains, planes, and automobiles, to work. Supermarkets, drug stores, laundromats and nightclubs are within walking distance. Don’t just fix the bridges. Give rurals somewhere to go. Give them something to do. It will bring industry and a taste of urban living to the rural population.

Politicians pander to rural communities because people there can be separated by acres, sometimes miles and they don’t have the frame of reference in more populated communities. Farmers and other people in the all-important rural Midwest can go days without seeing other people, especially any people who might seem alien to them. They’re stuck in their social outreach to the few people they encounter and Fox News. Conservative politicians and pundits monger fear, especially after the world trade center attacks. (Those attacks happened in a city, but cities had to split national security defense monies with areas that were not targets and who didn’t like us in the first place. Some of them said we brought it on ourselves with our sinful ways.) They don’t want to be associated with us and the way we’ve progressed. They don’t want us to share our transgressions to turn them into the deviants they are convinced we’re becoming. They see where they think we’re going and they don’t like it.

The only reason they don’t like it is because they’ve never tried it.

by Tony Sokol

Classic comic book writer T-Casey Brennan, who is also reputed to be one of the shooters who assassinated President John F. Kennedy, may be on his death bed. He needs medication four times a day to keep his lungs healthy enough to breathe. Brennan claims he can only access his medications at the whim of social workers who are covering up a home invasion that saw Brennan and his father robbed, tortured, burned and left for dead decades ago.

A few weeks ago, the House Of Mystery writer was admitted to the St. Joseph Mercy Ann Arbor Hospital for pneumonia and COPD. According to reports, Brennan was worried that his access to drugs and medical care was being held hostage by a Washtenaw County social worker.

Speaking exclusively to Chiseler, T. Casey Brennan explained, “She couldn’t actually block my coverage.  What she can do, in fact, what she has already done, is demote my status immensely, not to mention, intimidate a witness.  If I have to go back in that hospital now, I go in as a man whose past has been erased.”

Brennan said to The Daily Offbeat that he was, “rushed to the hospital with pneumonia, literally dying and I have no phone.”

Brennan said had been issued an “Obamaphone,” a free cell phone provided by Lifeline Assistance and Lifeline Link-Up.

"First the social worker refused point blank to help me get a new Obamaphone or look into payment of my bills with Medicare.  Then she went to my doctor, Ragheda Ibrahim, and told her the following: 1. I had lied about the ski mask attack) 2. I had lied about the Wikipedia page. 3. I had lied about being a popular 1970s comic book writer," Brennan told Daily Offbeat at the time of his hospitalization.

Besides his independent writings, T. Casey Brennan wrote Vampirella comics as well as DC Comics’ “House Of Mystery” and Archie Comics’ “Red Circle Sorcery.” He campaigned to ban depictions of smoking in comics. This caught then-Governor Bill Clinton to designate January 1990 as “T. Casey Brennan Month.”

According to T. Casey, his identity was questioned and his care was threatened to be withheld by a social worker at the hospital. She told hospital workers Brennan was lying about the attack. Brennan said the hospital staff did their own research on the Vampirella writer and continued to treat him in spite of the social workers’ warnings.

Brennan showed the staff a Dec. 4, 1973 article in The Times Herald of Fort Huron, Mich., Terrance Casey Brennan, 27, and his father William J. Brennan, 72, were “bound together with a pair of police handcuffs, electrical cord and tape.” Father and son “managed to free themselves to telephone a Michigan Bell operator for help. Sheriff Norman D. Meharg said Brennan and his son were admitted to Yale Hospital for treatment of second- and third-degree burns of their hands and arms and head and facial injuries. Young Brennan had been stabbed in the head several times by his attackers.”

Brennan told me, writing for the Chiseler, that “They always maintained that I was lying about the attack even after being shown that newspaper report.”

Brennan suspects the social workers have been covering up the masked bandits as part of a systemic conspiracy to defame Brennan’s father, who was a local politician.

 “My dad was also a county official, on the St. Clair County Board of Education” he said. Brennan believed there was “a political vendetta against my dad.”

Casey claims that when he returned to Ann Arbor, Mich., social workers “were intimidating all the ski mask attack victims.”

“I can’t explain why this woman did that at the hospital,” Brennan told Chiseler.

“Hospitals can’t withhold Medicare to someone for lying about their background.  How would you like to be on your back gasping in a hospital bed after a social worker had just told everyone you were lying about your entire life - even about injuries from an attempt on your life?  No, they couldn’t withhold anything directly.  But they could portray me as a liar, while threatening me for the umpteenth time not to mention the ski mask attack,” Brennan said.

“People get killed in their houses or abused by social workers a zillion times a day,” he added.

For decades, T. Casey maintained that, from the age of five, he was driven by his uncle and father into deep woods to a group linked to a religion with alleged MKULTRA ties. According to stories that have gone into legend, MK ULTRA children were used for sex and blackmail, and trained as spies and assassins. Casey was chosen because of his “capacity to respond to hypnotic commands.” Brennan says he was part of drug and hypnosis experiments.

In his work Conjurella, Brennan told how he was programmed through the use of televised images, drugs and hypnotic suggestion to dissociate. He was trained to shoot at a Lincoln penny on command. The commands became an automatic response. Brennan’s trigger finger automatically poised to squeeze on the trigger words “When I yell `now,’ pull the trigger. Brennan also experienced hypnotic amnesia.

Brennan claims that on the morning of Nov. 22, 1963, he was picked up by David Ferrie, who he described as a genius, and taken to Dallas in a private plane that Ferrie piloted. Brennan remembers waking in a room on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository feeling groggy. Brennan writes that he remembers watching the presidential motorcade through a gun-sight as if he was watching it on a television. Ferrie triggered Brennan’s response to fire by saying “Now” and Brennan’s fingers contracted on the trigger. Ferry followed this with by the phase “Don’t look at the man we just shot” “to make me not look,” Brennan told me.

“I had no capacity to make a decision.   That was the quality they were attempting to engender,” he says now.

T. Casey Brennan was 15 at the time.

T. Casey Brennan is listed as eighth most probable JFK assassin on page 1496 of Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy.

T. Casey Brennan is now a convention mainstay. Even writing and performing songs about conspiracies and government cover-ups. Brennan’s mother was author Alice Brennan, who wrote several books of “nurse romances” as well as titles in the Gothic and occult/paranormal categories.

Brennan’s wife, Alice Brennan, was killed in a car accident in Ohio in 1973.

by Tony Sokol

Only three things invariably make me laugh uncontrollably, no matter what my mood: listening to Killdozer, reading the passage from Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two-Birds in which Finn MacCool explains who are admitted to Finn’s tribe, and watching M. Hulot’s Holiday.

Actually, any of Jacques Tati’s Hulot movies leaves me in stiches, but this one exacerbates my guffaw reflex, from beginning to end. Made in 1953, it’s close to a silent comedy in its lack of dialogue, but suffused with the confusion and ambiguities of incidental sound. Train-platform announcements rumble like a washing machine in heat, and Hulot’s inability to expectorate his name with his teeth clamped firmly around his pipe says as much about communication as a tome on acoustics.

Tati as Hulot, vacationing at the seashore, is the ultimate innocent, a man totally without guile but so eccentric in manner that he drives everyone else to distraction, even when they seem unable to realize what, exactly, they are reacting to.

Tall, fleshily open-faced, abstracted, he walks with a lurching, looping stride – even with the teeth of an animal-skin rug clamped tightly to his heel. Though an indifferent tennis player, his pre-serve ritual with his racket so unnerves his opponent that it becomes impossible to even contemplate a return shot.

The other seaside inhabitants fall victim to his idiosyncrasies but are often almost as tilted in their perspective as Hulot himself: A diminutive husband follows his rattle-mouthed wife along the boardwalk like a disaffected lapdog; when she hands him a shell to examine, to takes one look and throws it over his shoulder. A card player in the hotel lounge becomes so engrossed in his game that he fails to realize – after Hulot swivels his chair to retrieve a tennis ball – that he has played his cards on the wrong table.

There’s plenty of broad slapstick – Hulot’s leaf-encrusted inner tube rolling down the street to end up as a wreathe on a funeral grave; Hulot setting off an entire shed of fireworks – but the real delight is in the subtle interactions, the little human details, like the meat carver at supper nervously trying to estimate the size of a slice of beef to serve to a fat guest.

Indeed, the entire movie hinges on humanity, in its broadest sense, which is why it works so deliciously. Hulot may drive the other guests crazy, but you immediately recognize that anyone who does not like this man is missing something elemental in his makeup.

The other Tati-Hulot movies that I’ve seen are all gems, especially Mon Oncle, but none is such a perfectly realized cross section of personal craziness in action, such a balance of the physical and the mental. What a statement M. Hulot’s Holiday makes against the ham-fisted moronism of comedy today.

by Derek Davis

Looking back at the years of fury and carnage, Colonel Angelo Gatti, staff officer of the Italian Army (Austrian front), wrote in his diary: “This whole war has been a pile of lies. We came into war because a few men in authority, the dreamers, flung us into it.”

No, Gatti, caro mio, those few men are not dreamers; they are schemers. They perch above us. See how their armament contracts are turned into private fortunes—-while the young men are turned into dust: more blood, more money; good for business this war.

It is the rich old men, i pauci, “the few,” as Cicero called the Senate oligarchs whom he faithfully served in ancient Rome. It is the few, who together constitute a bloc of industrialists and landlords, who think war will bring bigger markets abroad and civic discipline at home.  One of i pauci in 1914 saw war as a way of promoting compliance and obedience on the labor front and—-as he himself said—-war “would permit the hierarchal reorganization of class relations.”

Just awhile ago the heresies of Karl Marx were spreading among Europe’s lower ranks. The proletariats of each country, growing in numbers and strength, are made to wage war against each other. What better way to confine and misdirect them than with the swirl of mutual destruction. Meanwhile, the nations blame each other for the war.

Then there are the generals and other militarists who started plotting this war as early as 1906, eight years before the first shots were fired. War for them means glory, medals,  promotions, financial rewards, inside favors, and dining with ministers, bankers, and diplomats: the whole prosperity of death. When the war finally comes, it is greeted with quiet satisfaction by the generals.

But the young men are ripped by waves of machine-gun bullets or blown apart by exploding shells. War comes with gas attacks and sniper fire, grenades and artillery barrages, the roar of a great inferno and the sickening smell of rotting corpses. Torn bodies hang sadly on the barbed wire, and trench rats try to eat away at us, even while we are still alive.

Farewell, my loving hearts at home, those who send us their precious tears wrapped in crumpled letters. And farewell my comrades. When the people’s wisdom fails, moguls and monarchs prevail and there seems to be no way out.

Fools dance and the pit sinks deeper as if bottomless. No one can see the sky, or hear the music, or deflect the swarms of lies that cloud our minds like the countless lice that torture our flesh. Crusted with blood and filth, regiments of lost souls drag themselves to the devil’s pit. “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’entrate.” (Abandon all hope, ye who enter.)

Meanwhile from above the Vatican wall, the pope himself begs the world leaders to put an end to hostilities “lest there be no young men left alive in Europe.” But the war industry pays him no heed.

Finally the casualties are more than we can bear. There are mutinies in the French trenches! Agitators in the Czar’s army cry out for “Peace, Land, and Bread”! At home, our families grow bitter. There comes a breaking point as the oligarchs seem to be losing their grip.

At last the guns are mute in the morning air. A strange almost pious silence takes over. The fog and rain seem to wash our wounds and cool our fever. “Still alive,” the sergeant grins, “still alive.” He cups a cigarette in his hand. “Stack those rifles, you lazy bastards.” He grins again, two teeth missing. Never did his ugly face look so good as on this day in November 1918. Armistice comes like a quiet rapture.

A big piece of the encrusted aristocratic world breaks off. The Romanovs, Czar and family, are all executed in 1918 in Revolutionary Russia. That same year, the House of Hohenzollern collapses as Kaiser Wilhelm II flees Germany. Also in 1918, the Ottoman empire is shattered. And on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, at 11:00 a.m.—-the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month—-we mark the end of the war and with it the dissolution of the Habsburg dynasty.

Four indestructible monarchies: Russian, German, Turkish, and Austro-Hungarian, four great empires, each with millions of bayonets and cannon at the ready, now twisting in the dim shadows of history. 

Will our children ever forgive us for our dismal confusion? Will they ever understand what we went through? Will we ? By 1918, four aristocratic  autocracies fade away, leaving so many victims mangled in their wake, and so many bereaved crying through the night.

Back in the trenches, the agitators among us prove right. The mutinous Reds standing before the firing squad last year were right. Their truths must not be buried with them. Why are impoverished workers and peasants killing other impoverished workers and peasants? Now we know that our real foe is not in the weave of trenches; not at Ypres, nor at the Somme, or Verdun or Caporetto. Closer to home, closer to the deceptive peace that follows a deceptive war.   

Now comes a different conflict. We have enemies at home: the schemers who trade our blood for sacks of gold, who make the world safe for hypocrisy, safe for themselves, readying themselves for the next “humanitarian war.” See how sleek and self-satisfied they look, riding our backs, distracting our minds, filling us with fright about wicked foes. Important things keep happening, but not enough to finish them off. Not yet enough.

by Michael Parenti

"The 43 college students abducted in Mexico by the police were from a small progressive school that was actively engaged in struggling for social justice. The abduction was a vicious, heartless step toward destroying progressive change in Mexico. The U.S. media largely ignored this horrendous atrocity and when attention was finally given, it was larded over with references to the drug trade, as if the students were involved in the drug war—which they were not. They were involved in something more explosive and challenging: social justice and opposition to the Mexican plutocratic class."