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Jul 2012 12

by Alex Dueben

“Painting has the potential of expressing with a single gesture.”
– Luke Chueh

Luke Chueh studied graphic design and worked as a designer for many years, but he made his name as a painter. Chueh emerged from the Los Angeles art scene as one of the major painters of his generation and a major player in the contemporary lowbrow art movement. His use of simple characters and minimal color schemes may make what he does look easy, but his imagery and the emotions they evoke are incredibly complex. Few artists are able to make something look simple and cute at a distance, but upon closer inspection reveal itself to be a deeply disturbing scenario.

People may know him from the underground art show Cannibal Flower or Gallery 1988 where he’s been a major exhibitor. Chueh’s work has been transformed into vinyl figures and he created the album art for Fall Out Boy’s album Folie à Deux. Chueh also regularly posts his new work on his website lukechueh.com. His newest project is The Art of Luke Chueh, published by Titan Books in association with Gallery 1988. Chueh spoke with SG about his approach, the artwork he loves, and hints at a few possibilities for the future.

Read our exclusive interview with Luke Chueh on SuicideGirls.com.

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Jul 2012 12

Radeo Suicide in On Call

  • INTO: You.
  • NOT INTO: Weak hand shakes.
  • MAKES ME HAPPY: Costello my corgi, couch forts, surprises, superstitions, and fortune cookies.
  • MAKES ME SAD: When my remote control boat doesn’t work.
  • HOBBIES: Irony.
  • 5 THINGS I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT: Computer, sweet tea, ice cream, phone, and a little TLC. I’m easy to please.
  • VICES: I only listen to love songs.

Get to know Radeo better over at SuicideGirls.com!


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Jul 2012 11

by Nicole Powers

“Why are we giving any credence to anybody who says ‘I would like to reduce the number of abortions and the way that I want to do that is to remove all access to birth control.’”
– Lizz Winstead

Lizz Winstead is one of the bravest comedians around today. She talks about abortion with a rare candor, as is a staunch supporter of Planned Parenthood. Her work raising awareness and funds (over a million dollars to date!) for the organization has not surprisingly raised the ire of the religious right, but she stands firm, fighting for women’s reproductive rights at a time when in recent history they’ve never been more in peril.

In her new book, Lizz Free Or Die, she devotes a chapter to her own experience as a frightened and bewildered teenager who discovered she was pregnant, and who was even more frightened and bewildered by the reactions of the adults she trusted to give her honest advice, help, and support.

The book also features essays, which are poignant and hilarious in equal parts, on her upbringing in a conservative Catholic family, her coming of age as a stand up comedian in Minneapolis, the roots of The Daily Show which she co-created, and the rise and fall of Air America which she co-founded.

We caught up with Lizz by phone. Though the native Minnesotan currently calls New York home, she spoke to us from Texas where she’d just done one of her numerous Planned Parenthood stand up fundraising shows. This particular one raised money for a clinic that had recently lost every penny of its state funding for essential community services such as teen pregnancy testing and health care.

Read our exclusive interview with Lizz Winstead on SuicideGirls.com.

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Jul 2012 11

by Blogbot

This year for Comic Con we’re cooking up an extra-special cosplay wardrobe, with a little help from clothing manufacturer and retailer American Apparel, pop-culture designers and event planners Bubble Punch, and our fave Sunset Strip geek emporium, Meltdown Comics.

Comic chic chicks Chubby Bunny and Yume Ninja of Bubble Punch have designed three different sexy cosplay themed outfits for our ladies to wear while they man our Comic-Con booth. Each of the outfits was made using basics available at your local American Apparel store.

Above is the third in our series of three cosplay videos. This one is a tutorial showing you how to recreate the Dalek costumes our ladies will be exterminating the competition in at Comic Con. Talking of competitions, we’ll be hosting a cosplay competition at a party at 4th & B on Friday July 13th, which will feature performances by Andrew W.K., Peanut Butter Wolf, Hottub, Alexander Spit, and Franki Chan.

You can also catch our ladies in their cosplay outfits at booth #1730 of Comic Con San Diego 2012. If you’re planning on attending the convention on more than one day, be sure to come back and visit us again, since our team of sexy booth girls will be cosplaying new outfits each day!

We’ll have a veritable army of Suicide Girls on hand at the booth, which will include Venom, Severen, Seizure, Brewin, Dice, Elea, Alicee, Phecda, Sash, Zell, Chad, Ridley, Sid, Buellher, Parish, Pandie, Tita, Atlas, Kemper, LaneyChantal, Bob, Spliff, Tristyn, Ackley, Bradley, Haydin, Rambo, Callioppe, Thanatogenous, Milloux, Radeo, Dali, Lolana, Dimples, Murphie, Katherine, and Rlei. So be sure to stop by, say hi, take some pix, pick up some merch, and get your SG books and comics signed.

See you in San Diego!
XOX

Images of Ackley Suicide as a Dalek by Milloux.

Related Posts:
Party At Comic Con With SuicideGirls, Spin, and iHeartComix
The SuicideGirls Guide To Prepping For ComicCon
How To Cosplay Battle Royale
How To Be A Stormtrooper
Cosplay With SuicideGirls At A Pre-Comic Con Party At Meltdown
SuicideGirls Team With Bubble Punch And Meltdown To Transform American Apparel Basics Into Sexy Cosplay Outfits For SG’s Comic-Con Crew
Dirty Laundry: Cosplay 4 Comic Con

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Jul 2012 11

by Steven Whitney

[Last week, the “Fighting Back” series began with a simple question: given their minority status for most of the last 80 years, why is the GOP not only still viable but so successful at winning elections? Over the next several weeks, we’ll examine answers in a myriad fields, some obvious and others more subtle, and then offer solutions aimed at turning the tables on the party that favors corporations and the 1% over the vast majority of Americans. The series is intended to be a discussion, not a monologue – so in the spirit of participatory democracy, feel free to share your ideas in the comments section as we move from topic to topic.]

With the death of the Lee Atwater in 1991, the GOP lost their most effective election strategist in decades – the “bad cop” who miraculously overcame a mid-summer 41% polling deficit and, many observers believe, single-handedly pushed “good cop” George H.W. Bush (President #41) into the White House via a mixture of mendacious tactics and Machiavellian strategies. Without Atwater, Bush lost badly (370-168 electoral votes) to Bill Clinton in his 1992 re-election bid – even as Republicans gained seats in the Democratically controlled House and Senate.

Spotting opportunity, Karl Rove – a crafty political “advisor” who had been biding his time, waiting in the wings for more than a decade after his involvement with the Watergate scandal – made his move. Although little known outside of Texas, he had already cultivated a nationwide network of GOP operatives and, more importantly, had long ties to the Bush family. Amping up Atwater’s dirty tricks, “take-no-prisoners,” and “divide and conquer” playbook, Rove ran the dirtiest, most negative, and most successful campaigns in anyone’s memory, electing hardline right-wingers Senator Phil Gramm, Senator John Ashcroft, Agricultural Commissioner Rick Perry, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson and, of course, Governor George W. Bush, the incurious son of the former President. (Anyone still not aware of the many sins of Karl Rove – too numerous to list in this or any other post – should read selected posts of the late Molly Ivins here and here, and/or watch the fine documentary Bush’s Brain).

During this string of unprecedented wins, Rove slowly gained invisible control of the Republican National Committee and successfully courted Fox News, Fortune 500 corporations, and individuals like the Koch brothers, bringing them into the Big Money Tent of the GOP. So when it came time for the puppet-master to run “W” for President, he had all the tools – lies, smears, dirty tricks, misdirection, and the money to implement them – and resources needed to run an Atwater Times Ten campaign, including the advocacy of James Baker (who later admitted to fixing the election), the Supreme Court, Florida Governor Jeb Bush (W’s brother) and his cohort Kathryn Harris, who carried out voter suppression while introducing the now infamous butterfly ballots to the Sunshine State. The election was literally stolen from Al Gore, marking the first time in a hundred years that a President was elected without winning the popular vote.

But it was during his years as Senior Advisor and then as Deputy Chief of Staff to President Bush (#43), that Rove actually reconfigured the GOP, transforming it from a conservative bloc that generally venerated the values that fuel democratic politics – pragmatism, bipartisanship, mutual respect, the twin arts of negotiation and compromise, and at least a semblance of civility – to a hard line, far-right party intolerant of and punitive to even the smallest form of dissent or rank breaking.

Once in the White House and in possession of real power, Rove continually mimicked and reinforced a career trajectory not dissimilar to that of Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda of Germany’s Third Reich from 1933 to 1945 and almost universally considered the “father of modern political propaganda.”

After living through World War II and witnessing first-hand the disastrous effects of Goebbels’ stunning misuse of language for political ends, George Orwell wrote the 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” in which he newly defined the agitprop of Goebbels’ Ministry: “Much political language – by means of circumlocution, euphemism and other doctorings, was designed to make lies sound truthful.”

That sentence became the basis of Newspeak – a language Orwell created to illustrate the power of words and phrases to control the thoughts and actions of the people – in his classic novel, 1984, published in 1948. And Newspeak – the seductively reassuring “branding” of party policy combined with the outrageously false and incendiary defining of any alternative views – was and is a central foundation for both Goebbels and Rove.

Let’s be clear – I am not calling Rove a Nazi – excrementous, yes; a Nazi, no. I am merely pointing out that Rove has employed almost exactly the same tactics – updated for the electronic age and streamlined for contemporary American culture – as did Goebbels.

Curiously, there are a few personal similarities between them as well. Both men first ascended to power as acolytes in the service of, and instrumental to, their masters’ political success. Both chose to travel the lowest campaign roads imaginable and, perhaps because of that, both men were – despite their obvious intelligence, skills, and success – vehemently disliked by almost everyone with whom they came into contact. George W. Bush, the greatest beneficiary of Rove’s political acumen, even nicknamed him “turd blossom” (it is lost to history if Hitler ever called Goebbels scheisskopf).

In politics especially, every single study of voting habits shows that emotion trumps reason in almost every election. For that reason, almost all propaganda targets emotion rather than intellect. So, like Goebbels, the focus for Rove is on often imaginary or contrived wedge issues (fear, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism, and false patriotism) that negatively arouse strong and even hysterical emotions rather than on real political concerns that require positively-charged and reasoned responses.

Using emotions like fear as their cornerstones, both Goebbels and Rove created horrendously effective propaganda factories built on the dogma of Indoctrination, Intimidation and Revenge, and Distraction and Disinformation, coupled with Divide and Conquer strategies.

By institutionalizing these immoral agendas, both men created the most divisive and destructive societies in their nations’ histories – and drove a great percentage of their fellow citizens absolutely batshit crazy.

In 1945, with Soviet troops advancing on Berlin, Joseph Goebbels had the very good sense to kill himself. Since Karl Rove will probably not grace us with such a similarly joyful outcome, it’s mandatory to deconstruct his schemes so we can figure out how to successfully overcome his shameless but effective brand of politics without ourselves becoming indecent.

This, I’ll tackle in my next column, Fighting Fire With Fire.

Related Posts:
Fighting Back
The Electoral Scam
Being Fair
Occupy Reality
Giving. . . And Taking Back
A Tale Of Two Grovers
A Last Pitch For Truth
America: Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.
Gotcha!

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Jul 2012 11

by Brad Warner

Lots of people think the question “What happens after you die?” is one of the most urgent in all of philosophy. So they invent concepts like rebirth and reincarnation to try to deal with their anxiety over it. But the problem is that the question makes no sense.

The question is based on several assumptions that are not true. It’s based foremost on the idea that there is something called “me” that belongs to us as individuals and that this something is subject to birth and death. Now I could sit here at my laptop and type out a series of logical thoughts to try and lead you to the conclusion that this belief in a personal self isn’t true. But I’m not sure that would be very helpful. If you want that sort of thing there are thousands of other places to find it. Most of these explanations are produced by people who can write better than me, who have more impressive credentials than I do, and who look better in flowing ochre robes than I ever will. So I will leave the explaining to them.

What I can tell you is this. When you learn to see life as it actually is and not through ways that umpteen thousands of years of human thought has conditioned you to look at them, the idea of the existence of a personal self starts to look incredibly absurd. It takes a good deal of time and a considerable degree of effort to do this. It will not happen in a few hours or a few days or even a few years. Remember that you’re trying to cut through perhaps as much as 200,000 years of human conditioning (going by the most reliable scientific estimates of how long our species has been around). This isn’t easy to do. But it’s a lot easier than it ought to be, given how thoroughly we have been conditioned to see life in terms of a personal self.

You don’t die or get reborn because there is no you to die or get reborn in the first place.

You can see this for yourself if you are willing to put in the time and effort to do so. Notice, though, that I am forced to phrase that sentence in tens of “you.” This is how pervasive the concept of a personal self is. There is no way to make a coherent English sentence regarding this subject without having to use the idea of a personal self to put it across. Our thinking is forced by language to flow through certain channels. We are so deeply conditioned to see things in terms of self that we cannot think our way out of it.

The key is to transcend all thought. This may sound like a big deal. But it’s really not. We transcend all thought all the time. There’s an old Zen story about a guy who realizes the essential truth of the universe when he stubs his toe. When you stub your toe really hard, thought disappears completely. At the moment of toe-stubbing, there can be no thought and no personal self. Later on thought can come along and explain what happened in terms of “me” and “my toe.” But that’s just an explanation. That’s not what happened. This sort of thing goes on constantly throughout our lives.

Meditation is just the practice of sitting with what actually is until we learn how not to ignore what actually is.

***

Brad Warner is the author of Sex, Sin and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between as well as Hardcore Zen, Sit Down and Shut Up! and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff that you can click here to see. You can also buy T-shirts and hoodies based on his books, and the new CD by his band Zero Defex now!
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Jul 2012 11

Bessy Suicide in Little Break

Get to know Bessy better over at SuicideGirls.com!