Today John Edwards endorsed Senator Obama for President. They look good together. Is this the beginning of a populist-progressive one-two?

Here’s the endorsement in Grand Rapids, Michigan:

I can’t strongly enough recommend the “best of the left” podcast, from whom I take the above image. The music is fantastic, the radio clips great, and the mixing of music and dry congressional testimony regularly rousing. Give them your love, your clips, or at least an ear.

“My Wall Street Journal” is here.

Hey, they’re in it for the culture. Who doesn’t want to escape the tedium of selling your labor to fight and band with relatively safe, similarly alienated people. I’ve not yet seen Monster Camp, and it might be too much to call it a priority, exactly, but one wonders…

My live action experience is limited to one Vampire session on the creative arts floor of my undergrad institution. I had smoke blown in my face by a zealous toreador who really had it in for tremere. If not thoroughly non-plussed, I was at least less than impressed. But I get the urge, and approve of counter public spheres as always in some way containing a utopian impulse. There’s plenty of regressive feudal wish fulfilment present, alas, too. As Dani Filth puts it, “I still played vampire aristocrat.”

My filmclub partner is hosting a production design blog-a-thon! He writes:

production design blog-a-thon: call for participation

At this stage in the development of the discipline, I think we’re all prepared to recognize the benefits that auteur theory has bestowed upon film studies. However, critics of auteur theory are quick to point out that any theory that champions the director as “author” also has the unfortunate tendency of eclipsing the deeply collaborative nature of film production, and will inevitably underplay the contributions of other people such as the screenwriter, the editor, and the cinematographer.

Perhaps even more maligned in this hierarchy is the production designer: the individual responsible for the overall “look” of the film, coordinating set designers, property masters, and costume designers to create an overall visual “feel.” With a little effort, it isn’t difficult to think of films where we have been delighted by the product of production designers’ labor and aesthetic, but they have nevertheless received a saddening lack of sustained appreciation, even from the most attentive of critics.

Film bloggers may not be able to change this state of affairs permanently, but I’d like to call for us to take just one week to focus our collective attention on the role of these under-recognized creators. So for the week of May 19-25, I am inviting your participation in the Production Design Blog-A-Thon. During this week, I will use the Film Club blog to collate posts in which you write on any aspect of production design or art direction. Use this week to celebrate your favorite production designer (or lambast one you can’t stand). Inspect your DVD collection for the most striking costumes and sets. Look for recurring interests in a production designer’s overall body of work. Have fun with it.

If you’re thinking about participating, send me an e-mail at projects [at] imaginaryyear.com so I know to check your blog during the week; if you could also ping me once you’ve got something up that would be helpful.

I hope you’ll consider participating!! I’m going to post on Bo Welch of Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and Batman Returns, fame.

I’ll be running my first 5k bright and early. Today A, J, and I ran to Ping Tom park (pictured above) in the rain. Good times!

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I just quickly want to mention that M83’s new album Saturdays = Youth is really great. Sweet-sad synth textures to the tune of lost youth in progress. If LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver is about waking up in your 30s, Saturdays is about the dream just prior.

It’s the kind of album that helps you to feel happily pained to still be alive. Affect of The Verve’s bittersweet symphony, but more experimental. Midnight Souls Still Remain, for example, manages to compellingly alternate between two tones for 11 minutes. And yet a pop sensibility animates the album as a whole. Witness Graveyard Girl, the first single:

Info at youtube:

Thomas Friedman, the author and NY Times columnist, was invited to Brown University to give a keynote speech on Earth Day, before a packed auditorium. His talk, titled “Green is the new Red White and Blue” was about how corporate environmentalism (based on putting a price on the atmosphere, and investing in biofuels and techno-fixes) can restore America to its “natural place in the global order.” Luckily, this outrageous neoliberal capitalist propaganda was interrupted with a suprise visit from the Greenwash Guerrillas. Leaflets were thrown to the crowd, stating:

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Thomas Friedman deserves a pie in the face…

* because of his sickeningly cheery applaud for free market capitalism’s conquest of the planet

* for telling the world that the free market and techno fixes can save us from climate change. From carbon trading to biofuels, these distractions are dangerous in and of themselves, while encouraging inaction with respect to the true problems at hand.

* for helping turn environmentalism into a fake plastic consumer product for the privileged

* For his long-standing support for the US Occupation of Iraq and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Such committed support to the US War Machine and its proxy states overseas cannot be masked behind any twisted mask of “green” - the US Military is the largest single emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.

* for his pure arrogance.
On behalf of the earth and all true environmentalists — we, the Greenwash Guerrillas, declare Thomas Friedman’s “Green” as fake and toxic to human and planetary health as the cool-whip covering his face.