Slave Revolt Radio: Black August Fred Hampton Jr. on Aaron Patterson
Fred Hampton Jr. on Aaron Patterson mp3
08-19-05 As Black August continues with another "Roar of the Black Cat" segment, Tracey James takes us through what Fred Hampton Jr. had to say about wrongly accused death row inmate Aaron Patterson. Patterson is another victim of torturer Jon Burge.
More on Burge.
08-19-05 As Black August continues with another "Roar of the Black Cat" segment, Tracey James takes us through what Fred Hampton Jr. had to say about wrongly accused death row inmate Aaron Patterson. Patterson is another victim of torturer Jon Burge.
More on Burge.
posted by Rohan at 9:32 AM
Filmmakers like Jarmusch have an extremely limited sense of what goes on in the US. They inhabit small, incestuous, quasi-artistic circles, imagining themselves to be the most advanced of men and women. In fact, they settle for vague and pale images, an America that exists largely in their heads. They always miss the important thing, the social mainspring of American life. In Broken Flowers, frankly, the images of the New York and New Jersey towns and suburbs through which Don drives suggest in and of themselves a complexity that the film’s narrative does not. One wants to see more. At present filmmakers lag far, far behind.
How to treat contemporary American life in an artistic and truthful fashion? This remains a major stumbling block even for the sincere and the semi-sincere. Elements in Hustle & Flow are lifelike and convincing; other, more important ones, are not. Unhappily, the rest of Hustle & Flow does not, for the most part, live up to the promise of its opening sequence. The spontaneity, the elementary and understandable human confusion, even the reflectiveness largely evaporate as the film settles too often and all too easily for the cliché of the American success story, clumsily glossing over its own contradictions in the process.
Compared to Hustle & Flow, this is a more honest portrait of capitalism, the music industry, and the myth of the American dream. Few cult films have enjoyed the continued impact of Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come. Since it's release in 1973, it's gained an underground following that is nothing less than legendary.
The call for Chavez’s assassination is a serious threat coming from a leading Republican and close ally of the Bush administration. It is in line with the previous attempts of the Bush administrations to destabilize and unseat the Venezuelan government. As is evident in Robertson’s comments, the main issue for the US ruling elite is not tyranny or terrorism, but Venezuela’s oil and the preservation by any and all means of the US sphere of influence in Latin America.
