Free Preview: A Night in the Zone by Jonathan Shaw

Check out Jonathan Shaw's excellent story from OBSOLETE! #2 at his kick-ass blog, SCABVENDOR.

DISOBEY

In the era of Total Information Awareness, representative democracy as we practice it in the U.S. is looking more and more quaint and out-dated. The Obama administration continues the Bush post-911 paranoia with increased surveillance of “we the people”. While the government's ability to collect data on it's people (more than 99.9999% of whom have done absolutely nothing wrong) increases so does the paranoia, creating a feedback loop of diminishing civil rights.

As rights-infringing technology has advanced exponentially, the technology of democracy has not. Our leaders make decisions very much in the same manner that they have for the last two centuries. They travel to a central location and meet in committees. They pound the needs and desires of their campaign contributors into a slurry of semantic abstractions. They ad heaping spoonfuls of pork-fat earmarks, appropriations and amendments, obfuscate the intent with archaic legalese, then force-feed the resulting pablum to the public while claiming victory for their party. With any luck, these franken-laws, stitched together from the putrid flesh of dead ideas, rise to zombie-life in the course of several months- but more likely several years.

OBMag #2 preview: Review of "Borderland"

Borderland:

Seven Lives. Seven Stories.

As Told by Victims of Human Trafficking.

by Dan Archer and Olga Trusova

published by Archcomix

www.borderland comix.com

    In what artist Dan Archer describes as a "comics journalism project", he collaborates with Fulbright Fellow Olga Trusova to tell the stories of seven of the 12.3 million adults and children forced into bonded labor and prostitution around the world.

    Trusova traveled to the Ukraine in 2009 to study human trafficking and returned with stories of the desperate and risky lives of people in a country ravaged by economic collapse. Archer transforms these stories into stark, monochromatic graphics, highlighted in sepia to convey the gray, eastern European atmosphere. At times the drawings almost feel like Soviet Era agit-prop, yet the heroic workers have become grimly ill-defined and the crimson backgrounds has faded to the color of clay, as the hammer and sickle has disappeared from view. The workers paradise has become the workers purgatory.

    The introductions to each of the seven stories convey the hard facts and statistics about the situation in the Ukraine. For instance, over 14% of the victims of trafficking have university level degrees. One story tells of an educated, middle aged woman who, desperate for money, took a construction job in Russia and ended up chained in a shed, forced to milk cows until she was too weak to work.  Luckily, she escaped, and through the kindness of strangers, made it back home.

    Comics have a long tradition as a serious story-telling and news medium in other parts of the world, and Borderland is a fine example of how a serious subject can be addressed in an engaging and graphic format for an English-reading audience.  The stories are tightly packed, with interludes with statistics, references, and links to the websites of NGOs working to stop the abuse.

    Borderlands is a cautionary tale for those of us in countries with our own "dirty little secrets" and stories of worker exploitation. It's an eye-opening read.

Video: Abandoned Six Flags New Orleans Tour

A beautiful and haunting video tour of the abandoned New Orleans Six Flags amusement park by videographer Teddy Smith. The park will be demolished and sold for scrap in January, 2011.

Why I blame Rush (the Band, not Limbaugh) for the Tea Party.

By Rich Dana

I read an article this summer that the Canadian rock band Rush was filing a lawsuit against Kentucky senatorial candidate and Tea Party love-child Rand Paul. The power trio's lawyers alleged that the Paul campaign's use of their song "Spirit of the Radio" constituted copyright infringement.

"Oh, the irony," I thought. The band, who have openly promoted libertarian philosophy through their music, credited Rand Paul's namesake- polemical sci-fi writer Ayn Rand - for the inspiration of several of their records.....

EDITORS NOTE:
The remainder of this article has been removed temporarily, as Little Village Magazine has chosen to publish it.  Check it out exclusively in the December issue of Little Village....  Thanks Everybody!

Issue #2- Intro

Here is another preview of ObMag #2 - this is the introduction to the "What I did on my summer vacation" issue.  I thought it might be a good read for those of you with post-election blues....

What I did on my Summer Vacation

    As I write this introduction, it is fall, 2010. Summer is over. I sit alone in the house of a dead woman, looking out the door toward the Puget Sound. The sun is bright above the thick quilt of fog. I’m waiting for the movers, who missed the ferry.
    Barbara was a journalist, an artist and interior designer; she transformed things and places. Now, her meticulously arranged home is being disassembled- the last pieces carefully packed for their trip to a Seattle auction house.
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    It’s fall and school is back in session. If you had to stand at the blackboard on the first day of school, what would you tell the class? What did you do on your summer vacation? Did you have a great adventure? Did you max out your credit card for a few days of blissful escape?  Or did you stay at home and pray the AC kept working and that you might soon find work? Did you fall in love... or did you sit on the couch and watch 24-hour cable news coverage as the US of A declined into a made-for-TV remake of the Weimar Republic?  In the current state of the Union, the idea of a “summer vacation” is disappearing over the societal horizon faster than my Dad’s Country Squire station wagon crossing the Badlands. But we still have “The Holidays” to look forward to, right?
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    Barbara understood how things worked. She carefully restored Victorian furniture that she found at Goodwill. She practiced Ikebana, the art of floral arrangement, which she first studied in Tokyo as a G.I. Bride during the Korean War. She understood time.
    She survived a decades-long fight with disease through faith, not in God but in herself. Faith... and just the right amount of denial. She didn’t sweat the small stuff, but she was obsessed with
detail.  I wish I could talk to her. I talk to her.

 

Table of Contents:

 

Coming Soon: OBSOLETE! Magazine #2- due out Nov. 1