FACT: The people of Chicago cannot have a rally on the Federal Plaza unless they take out a million dollar liability policy... (that's just one way to make it hard for the people to show their voice). This would shock our founding fathers.

Photographer Robert Frank

Photo above by SANDRO Our Father went to Bolivian Altiplano for a solar eclipse in 1966. He bought this poncho I am wearing in this photo back for our mother. After our mom passed this was entrusted to me. I was talking to my brother the other night about Che Guevara, and how he was killed in the Bolivian Altiplano. My brother told me that while our father was there in the Bolivian Altiplano he was at a dinner hosted by the local Bolivian officials. At this dinner there was a man who pulled out his gun and said this was the gun that was going to kill Che Guevara. He was waving the gun around with so much bravado that it made our father nervous. Because our father is dead now, we cannot ask him who this man was, but Che was executed in Bolivia in 68. We don't know who this official was. Che was not actually killed by an official, (he was executed by an infantryman) so this was not the man, but we wonder how close this official was to the action. They were in the Altiplano, and Che was killed there, so it is riveting for us to speculate. All this is just an interesting side story given my fascination with Che at the moment. But, the real story is that I love this Poncho because our father bought it for our mother in the Bolivian Altiplano. Our father traveled to exotic places for his work as an astronomer, and he always brought back the deep gifts; Not the trinkets. But, the soulful gifts that you never let go your whole life. The ones with power. This poncho has always held magic for me, but now with this back story, it holds something more. The Visionary Photographer SANDRO took this photo of me before I knew anything about all this. He asked me to wear the poncho, I had not planned to. I am thankful he did. He saw the mana (power) it held. (The 1920's accordion "Bandoneon" in this photo, I bought while in Agrentina with Captain Manion) f.q.o. 2009  _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________  Must see film: "CHE" 1 & 2 (watch them in order one after the other) Hearkening a new type of film making:     I'm going to review the 2 films as a whole because I feel that is how it should be considered, and watched. When I talk about 'the film' I am talking about parts 1 & 2 together when watched one after the other, as they should be.     Thank you Jon Anderson, Steven Soderbergh & Benicio Del Toro.     This film is a refreshing, bold, gritty and true film. And, it hearkens a new style of film making. No Faux drama. No Swelling sound track. Not Faux Documentary style. Just clean shots and an attempt to stick to the facts. I have been reading Jon Anderson's "Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life" and recently finished Fidel's Auto biography, and this had helped my ability to soak this film in properly. But I have to say that it is Jon Anderson's painstakingly researched, detailed and wonderful biography that has given this film the proper historical back bone. Anderson was consultant on this film (or these 2 films). What makes this film a true thing is that it is clean. No swelling music or slow-motion photography to heighten drama, and no fake documentary shaky camera. Just square shots and straight forward shooting style. The type of camera used makes you feel right there in the jungle. Benicio Del Toro should be given full honors for this, I never doubted him as Che throughout the film... not once. He did a wonderful job and I will respect him for ever for this. Some people complain that the film only deals with 2 slices of his life and not the whole. But I think this is one of the true beautiful aspects of this film: it doesn't try to be everything. It doesn't try to 'tell the story'. A person's life is too multifaceted to try and tell in 2, 4, 8, 16 or 32 hours. This is one of the subtle beauties of this film, it resists that temptation, and stays focused on the intent of letting us GET A FEEL FOR CHE, HIS DEVELOPING MILITARISTIC MIND AND THE FORCES AROUND HIM. It focuses on 3 slices of time: The Battle to over throw Batista, Che's U.N. speech and the guerrilla preparations in Bolivia. "Motorcycle Diaries" already told his young man side, and I applaud S. Soderbergh for focusing on other aspects instead. I keep referring to Jon Anderson's book and the film stays true. The only weak link for me are the casting (not the performance) of Matt Damon. In a film so loaded with true to life performances, an American, (Matt Damon) playing a Bolivian is a clunky stretch - he does well, but after so much care in the casting, this was an oversight. Small and completely forgiven. The reality that the rest of the casting gives you, and most notably Benicio Del Toro's amazing job, put's this film at the top of my list.     The fact that this film went almost straight to video say's something about how the cold war ethics that would never allow the 'revolutionized Cuba' to become what it might have, are still at work keeping it's story quiet. If not out of clandestine muffling, then out of the effects of properly done propaganda that has prejudiced this topic.     This is a must see film, and Jon Anderson's "Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life" is a must read if you want to start to get a grasp of the early effects on the global mind set regarding the expansion of international / political financial chess moves of the 40's, 50's & 60's that placed unfair pressure on our South American neighbors, and the effects it fostered.     F.Q.O. 2009

YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS DOCUMENTARY NOW... IT''S STUNNING: "The Future of Food"   I love people, I love life, I love nature... to the fullest.   I will not let these companies like MONSANTO have their way. I will not let them try to control food. I believe in free individual farmers. Please Watch this, and prepare to have your mind blown.  Rumsfeld and other top politicians are in bed with these muther fuckers.  This is DIRTY! (Be brave.. watch it - it's free, but you have to sit through a few commercials) The gloves are off;  these bastards are fair game, and PDP has them in our sights. I don't get mad often, but this one gets my goat.

 

  

The fall of Mom and Pop stores and rise of corporate America

This image of our flag is very potent to me Anyone who has taken a long drive across America has seen the aggressive corporate obliteration of small business. In it's wake every town now looks the same, every main street is lined with the same chain stores. Target, Wal-Mart, Chevron, Starbucks, Shell, McDonalds, Ramada Inn, Applebees, Boarders, Blockbuster video etc., Our mom and pop community owned stores are disappearing fast. We ignored them out of business. They were our neighbors and we traded them for overseas labor and some new world plantation style corporate head out of an office somewhere. All this is not "Just the way it is"; - it is > seriously self defeating. It is "Laze Faire", caught in a trap, gnawing on it's own foot.

________________________________________________________________   Topic .. 30 : "National responsibility": I am not a nationalist. The mere fact that I was born here in the U.S. does not make me feel any sense of unilateral support for any of my government's actions. I feel I am a citizen of the world. I would not go to war for this (or any country) unless I believed in the particular virtue of the situation at hand. That is not un-patriotic, that is watchful. I have a basic distrust of government in general - ours especially. We have left the tribal order of "Knowledgeable Elders" - for an new order of politicians as "business smart people who know how to fiscally run a country". And Business and Ethics are not good bed fellows ...period. A country should not be run like a business - it should be run like a community of people who put people in positions of power to look after the WHOLE of the people and the LAND. My point here is that when I was a kid the "Buy American" slogans seemed stupid - short sighted - even "nationalist" ... in the worst sense. Now I feel differently. I am disturbed at the lack of responsibility our corporations feel towards their workers. They feel they have to pay their workers too much here, or that they have to pay for their workers benefits - so they move production to other country's. In Mexico there are towns right over the border where American companies have relocated their plants to take advantage of a struggling economy's cheaper labor - forsaking our own country's (now struggling) work force. Now these same corporations feel that, even this foreign labor is too expensive so they move to India and China. Here's the awful equation: Worker gets paid a fair wage to make something. The corporation wants to make more for it's self and it's shareholders, so it finds a cheaper work force in another country, then passes on a small portion of the saving on to the consumer - the consumer is happy, and buys the cheaper product. Then the consumer (WHO IS MOST LIKELY THE WORKER) is laid off. = The real gainer here is the CORPORATION HEADS and the STOCK HOLDERS, who did LITTLE (if any) of the work. The real LOSER is the worker / consumer who plays ball with this mentality, There is a whole "work force" that just TRADES on the stocks of companies - asking them to show dividends on the bottom line of company's earnings, re-gaurdless of Ethical business decisions. We need to shop with consciousness. Buy from companies who treat their workers fairly. Don't buy the cheapest thing - buy the "right thing". In France the waiters are older - it's their life (i.e. - being a waiter) - here... it's some young kid, who fell for the job - on their way to some thing else. Do you know that waiters do not get minimum wage? They get less than half, because they get tips. Tips have become a way of companies not having to pay the "right price" for services. Our tips have become part of their pay - we are now paying what companies should be paying their own workers. I'm a good tipper. I could not stop tipping because it would hurt the under paid worker, but this needs to be addressed. Tip jars at a starbucks for a $3.50 latte is an insult straight from the head office. Corporations are now the new government. We still have national borders - but trade agreements and economics redefine a new world order only seen by those who move large amounts of money and power. Those who have the most to gain - have the most to lose. The larger conglomerations are allowed by governments to grow - the more lobbying power they hold over governments. Do not be fooled: corporations lead government by the nose. Financial power is Political power. Our leaders work for us, we do not work for them. They need to be Ethical in a non religious sense because we are varied in faith - and they need to respond to the WHOLE community and to the THE LAND (i.e. the environment) - not just the financially powerful. The financially powerful are only strong because of the sweat the workers have shed for them. White collar America is now VERY UN-PATRIOTIC. I love to buy products from other countrys... but - "their" products. I just want American companies to make American products here. I want us to respect and support our workers. F.Q.O. _____________________________Topic ..29: "Amtrak" We cannot lose the train system here in America - it cost too much blood, sweat and lives to build. It could never be re-built. If we dismantile it; lose the tracks, the land rights, and the public conciousness of it's steadfast existance.... it will all be over. Gone. Never to be again. All because people need the convenience of a car all the time and for everything(!?!?!). Take a train. Experience it. Whenever I do - I relax. I don't feel I need to talk on the phone.... I just want to read, to look out the window and think, or take a nap. There is nothing like it... I feel like I am in a part of history, rolling across the country - along lands Woody Guthrie might have crossed. It took so much momentum and blood to build - if we dismantile it... It will never exist again - period. F.Q.O.

The books that are on my night stand at the moment   I'm not a communist by any stretch of the imagination, but I definitely have a true Democratic view of our country. A view that understands that we are a collective nation, responsible to each-other, and therefore having social responsibilities to our fellow country man. I also feel it is now time to question everything we've been told to believe. Politics have become a 'performance'.
	Fidel Castro: My Life: A Spoken Autobiography Fidel has been in power for longer than I have been alive. And all I've ever known of him was our propaganda against him. I'd like to take some time to understand him. The U.S. has had 10 presidents since Fidel Castro became Cuba's prime minister in 1959. From Eisenhower, who refused to meet with him, to Kennedy, whose CIA wanted to kill him, to Clinton, who tried to ignore him, Castro outlasted them all.
	Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life This is an incredible book. A must read. People like to call Che a murderer, but in-fact he was a military man, and he did kill people in war, but so did President Truman, Nixon, both Bush's - and every military leader since time began. War is war. Ideology is ideology. And it is important to understand the times and circumstance before you judge anyone. "Even to those without Marxist sympathies, Che Guevara (1928-67) was a dashing, charismatic figure: the asthmatic son of an aristocratic Argentine family whose sympathy for the world's oppressed turned him into a socialist revolutionary, the valued comrade-in-arms of Cuba's Fidel Castro and a leader of guerilla warfare in Latin America and Africa."
And because I want to learn more about our Mexican neighbors to the south...
	(Pancho) Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution
	The Labyrinth of Solitude: The Other Mexico, Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude, Mexico and the United States, the Philanthropic Ogre By the Poet Octavio Paz "Nine beautifully written, deeply felt essays . . . whose concern is the Mexican's solitariness and quest for identity"

Let us not forget:   This was the cover of the Economist magazine following the breaking story of government sanctioned abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Images of the interrogation techniques were leaked, and it did take a while - but Rumsfeld did eventually resign, but he held on long enough to try and make it look like it was for other reasons.
Shockingly, some dumb parent thought it was funny to dress their kid up like this and take a picture of it ->>>   That's the kind of Dumb shit we just lived through!

Election time is coming round again and i've got a few things on my mind... i want a president who can speak from their heart and doesn't need a teleprompter, i want a president who doesn't have to worry about what comes out of their mouth, i want a president who's got skeletons in the closet and doesn't care if you know it, i want an ethical president... infact i want an ethically fascist president, i want someone who will ram campaign reform down the house and senate's throat, so someone without hundreds of thousands of dollars can have a chance at running, i want someone who'll implement some form of socialized medicine, so the poor can go to their own doctor with dignity instead of waiting in cook county's emergency room. i want a president who'll  give public television and public radio a shit load of money and order them to resuscitate our pop free culture. i want a president who'll pre-empt all the commercial t.v. stations for a national address - and then decide  - on the spot - "that maybe it might be a better idea" to just show  "barraca" or "wings of desire" ...... without commercial interuptions. i want a president who'll rename reagan national air port "Washington National" and who'll rename Comisky park -  "Comisky Park" ....."u.s. cellular field.......?????  ...who do they think we are? Not everything is for sale. although it sure does seem like it with all the advertising money going around, even the news has to sell advertising time! i want a president who'll make the 1/2 hour news shows give us a full half hour of news, not 10 minutes of news sandwiched inside of 10 minutes of commercials and 10 minutes of ..."coming up next" teasers to try and make you stick around through the commercials. i want a president who's seen at camp david meeting with Gore Vidal and Studs Terkel. i want a president who'll name a long dead and gone Mahatma Ghandi as secretary of defense in a beligirent, whimsical "I'm just trying to make a point" sort of way. i want a president with an art collection.

"This election has never been about me... it's   about you."  - Barack Obama              Barack with fellow Musician KIng Britt ->>>>
I live one and a half blocks from Barack Obama's home in Hyde Park. I like that fact a lot. In-fact; I really, really like him... a lot. Tonight I was riding my bicycle to the store, & my route takes me right past his house. Tonight is the night after his acceptance speech for the democratic nomination. What was really wild was that his house has always been just another house on the street, but tonight, since the DNC, there are now concrete road blocks all down his entire block and at least 8 policemen outside his home. I stopped and thanked the policemen on my way home from the store, for looking out after him. He is precious cargo for sure. Please Universe, let this man be president.    Frank Quimby Orrall jr., 2008
	<<<--- Here is Barack's DNC acceptance speech

The clip above is but a small portion of the full documentary

Toolbox Artist and documenter Brian Liu was also a driving force in this Film... Disarm              A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT LAND-MINES Filmmakers Mary Wareham and Brian Liu present a contemporary and provocative view of the forces challenging the achievement of a mine-free world. Disarm spans a dozen countries to look at how, despite a global ban, millions of antipersonnel mines continue to claim victims daily in more than 80 countries.      Defined as a conventional weapon, antipersonnel mines cause mass destruction upon civilian populations for decades after the initial conflict ends. Despite some 20,000 casualties a year, mines continue to be used and stockpiled by governments and rebel groups.      Disarm juxtaposes government and public opinion, that of diplomats, mine victims, deminers, soldiers and aid workers to explore the issues that both hinder and further the case against antipersonnel mines.      Visually stunning, Disarm features harrowing footage smuggled out of isolated nation of Burma, scenes from war-ravaged Colombia and Iraq, never-before-seen helmet camera footage shot by Afghan and Bosnian deminers, unprecedented access into warehouses stockpiling millions of Soviet-made mines, and insightful comments by outspoken Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams.      Looking beyond landmines, Disarm offers a contemporary, intelligent and critical investigation into how weapons systems, war, and the way it is waged are being redefined in the twenty-first century with devastating consequences. Awards »   Outstanding Achievement in Filmmaking (Humanitarian Vision) AWARD, Newport Beach FF

The New Yorker magazine debacle. They say it was "satire" but they did not indicate so with text on the cover cartoon, so the "casual news stand cover glancer" only sees the image of Barack and Michelle Obama as Muslim & terrorist with the American flag burning in the fire place..... it just plants a seed in the minds of those who do not dig deeper. I think it was done to create controversy and pump their magazine sales. I vow to boycott the New Yorker.