out of step

Trump, Hillary, Bernie... Yes, goddammit, it's another election year. And it's a good time to beef yourself up with some of the great political films of the past. Last night, I revisited one of my favorite, little-seen, 1980s movie classics -- the late Robert Altman’s Secret Honor. I saw the original stage production starring Philip Baker Hall (remember him as Seinfeld’s library cop?) in 1984 at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theater, a teeny 35-seat auditorium tucked away on a side street off Hollywood Boulevard. Hall’s one-man show was loud, profane, savage, and amazingly sympathetic. And I’ve always felt grateful that...

By Wally Conger Vote4 1

This slim book compiles three Murray Rothbard articles: “Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy,” first published in the August 1984 issue of World Market Perspective, and “The Treaty That Wall Street Wrote” and an accompanying sidebar called “Who’s Who for the Canal Treaty,” which were both published some three decades ago in the long-defunct Inquiry magazine. This book is a terrific tool for the historical arsenals of those who would fight the world money/power elites. Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy is a great example of Rothbard’s trenchant and brilliant historical analysis. He saw American history as the...

By Wally Conger Vote3 0

[Cross-posted at WallyConger.com] Shit, you can make money doing almost anything! And by shit," I mean that literally. A Facebooker has alerted me that a non-profit company called OpenBiome is paying for stool samples! The samples are needed to create fecal transplant treatments for people infected with Clostridium difficile, a bacteria that causes about 14,000 deaths a year and is highly resistant to antibiotics. The treatment requires the collection and screening of stool samples, which may be turned into ready-to-administer frozen fecal capsules for hospitals. OpenBiome will pay up to $13,000 annually for your commitment to provide five stool samples...

By Wally Conger Vote2 1

I quit watching “The Walking Dead” a season or so back, but I couldn’t avoid the news yesterday. It was all over freakin’ social media and the “world wide web.” Wails of anguish. Gnashing of teeth. Cries for revenge. You see, last Sunday night, the folks over at “The Walking Dead” killed off a beloved character. And not just ANY “beloved character.” This fella’d been with the series for the long haul. Since pretty much the beginning. Viewers invested a lotta time and, yes, even love into this character. Now that character is gone. Forever. Of course, diehard fans of...

By Wally Conger Vote8 10

Marketing wunderkind Ben Settle once shared a piece of philosophy with me that’s so brilliant in both its depth and simplicity that I've lived by it ever since. Ready? “I’d rather have four quarters than a hundred pennies.” OK, we’re not talking pocket change here. (Although you’ve gotta admit carrying just four coins is better than lugging 100 of ’em. And it’s sure easier to count out four quarters than it is a crapload of pennies.) Ben was talking about customers. His point was he’d rather have four high-ticket, top-dog clients who take him seriously than a hundred “bottom-feeders” (as...

By Wally Conger Vote13 2

Here’s one of my favorite bits from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (a movie stuffed with favorite bits, by the way)... It happens at a cocktail party. The place is filled with so-called Beautiful People. The camera pans around the room and you overhear one guy say, “Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept ... and later turn it into an idea.” The scene brings a couple of thoughts to mind. First, most of us spend more time dicking around with ideas than we do acting on them. As...

By Wally Conger Vote15 3

Deb saw it first, presented as a meme on Facebook… “Not my circus, not my monkeys.” She shared it with me, then we kinda made it our mantra. “Not my circus, not my monkeys. Not my circus, not my monkeys. Not my circus, not my monkeys.” It’s actually a Polish saying, and it’s good to remember when the world seems to demand that you get involved in each and every one of its dramas. Two co-workers are battling over who used the last ream of copy paper in the cabinet, and each is bugging you with their side of the...

By Wally Conger Vote7 0

Sunday was an unusual day for July here on California's central coast. It rained, sometimes in torrents, with lots of lightning and thunder. And the electricity in our neighborhood was kaput for most of the day. So we got out of the house to see the new movie Mr. Holmes, starring Ian McKellen as Sherlock Holmes. McKellen plays a 93-year-old Holmes, long retired to a small farm on the Sussex Downs to keep bees, just as Arthur Conan Doyle reported in the original stories. As a diehard Sherlockian, I loved the movie and recommend it without hesitation. Sir Ian has...

By Wally Conger Vote7 0

[Cross-posted at wallyconger.com] I’ve just gotta share this. Three summers ago, I unloaded a raggedy-ass copy of Amazing Spider-Man #1 I’d carried around with me for some 40 years. The edges of the cover were “chipped” (as they say in the comic book collecting biz) and its colors were faded. The staples were tight but a bit rusty. The book’s inside pages were dingy and yellowed. Shit, the magazine was 50 years old and looked more haggard than I do. Anyway, I’d lost any sentimental attachment I had with that comic a long time before, wanted some cash to play...

By Wally Conger Vote26 2

When film director Jean-Pierre Melville's L’Armée des Ombres (Army of Shadows) was released initially in France in 1969, the critical response was hostile. One reason was certainly the political climate at that time. Another may have been disappointment that Melville was interrupting his run of gangster-noir masterpieces -- Le deuxième souffle (1966), Le samouraï (1967), Le cercle rouge (1970), and Un flic (1972) -- with a movie about the French Resistance. Whatever the reason, by the time Army of Shadows finally arrived in the U.S. a few years ago, it was 37 years old and the director had been dead...

By Wally Conger Vote16 1

You can find valuable, long-lost gems when you take time to page through issues of Murray Rothbard's old Libertarian Forum newsletter (1969-1984). I recently discovered an article by Jerome Tuccille (he who wrote Radical Libertarianism and It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand). It’s titled “The Psychology of Opposites” and appears in the issue dated February 1, 1970. For those of us who enjoy debating what’s Left and what’s Right, Tuccille offered some interesting thoughts. “On the rapidly changing American scene,” he wrote shortly before the U.S. broadened its Vietnam War into Cambodia and four Kent State students were killed by...

By Wally Conger Vote11 2

Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia by George Zebrowski -- This mind-boggling epic spans one hundred billion years. It’s Space Opera Plus -- a future history, a polemic, a far-reaching meditation on the ultimate survival of humankind, and a call to action. Beyond this planet, beyond Old World cultures, beyond governments, beyond authoritarian institutions, there's macrolife. Good News by Edward Abbey -- I don't care if it's Abbey's least critically acclaimed novel. I like it better than all his others, including The Monkey Wrench Gang. Part dystopian Western and part anarchist manifesto, it tackles the oldest civil war of all, the city...

By Wally Conger Vote7 1

"Endless night Long for light My head against this tomb And pushing through I'm pushing through Face-down and pushing through" -- Celldweller, "Eon," 2009 Just for grins, try this... Keep your face pointed down at your lap or feet for, oh, let's say 10 minutes. Don't tilt your head up. Keep your eyes aimed directly downward. For just 10 minutes. It'll seem like an ETERNITY! I bet you can't even make it for 10 minutes without rubbing your aching neck and screaming. Now I'm not trying to make myself sound like a goddamn hero or anything, but I had retinal...

By Wally Conger Vote4 0

I recently received this email from an online friend: "Hey, Wally, I notice in some of your photos that you smoke cigars, and you’ve even mentioned them occasionally in your posts. Question for you: how do you light a cigar properly? I usually have a hell of a time getting one lit, and when I do, it never seems to burn evenly." Yeah, lighting a cigar used to be a pain in the ass for me, too. Then, about 20 years ago, the owner of the Ceegar Gallery and Lounge in Glendale, California -- I dunno if it’s even still...

By Wally Conger Vote8 2

So I’m re-reading Jack Kerouac’s 1957 classic On the Road for, gee, the zillionth time. (“Zillion” includes all the times I’ve just opened the book randomly and read passages for inspiration. It’s one’a my bedside books.) If you don’t know the great Kerouac, WTF? He was one of the 1950s era Beats. On the Road is his American Odyssey, I guess you might call it. Kerouac wrote about freedom. Hell, Kerouac WROTE freedom. When he wrote, he got it All Out There, if you get my meaning. Today, I just wanna share with you his “Belief & Technique for Modern...

By Wally Conger Vote6 0

A couple’a days ago, I felt trapped. It happens sometimes. I felt overwhelmed... By thoughts of an upcoming surgery that will keep me (literally) facedown for a week or so. By household projects still undone after a year or more. By an upcoming trip, squeezed into what seems an already crowded schedule. Then I went to my go-to, self-help, inspirational mentors -- James Altucher, Dan Kennedy, Ben Settle... I dipped into their books and blogs. They all helped, but it was something I found from Seth Godin that yanked me fully to my feet. Lemme quote him… "Are you certain...

By Wally Conger Vote9 8

My 11-year-old niece would say I’ve got “tude” right now. That’s what she calls a crappy attitude. And yessiree...today, this dude’s got tude. I’ll spare you the gory details, but a friend broke a promise to me. Not for the first time. For the second. And you can screw third strikes. I don’t wait around for them. So I’m a little cranky at the moment. But to burn off some of that crankiness, please allow me to vent for a minute. The fastest way to shatter my trust in you -- whether you’re family, an old friend, a business owner,...

By Wally Conger Vote9 4

Tax Day is here. To commemorate that, allow me to offer this brief piece by the late Karl Hess (1923-1994), journalist, speechwriter, editor, gun smuggler, tax resister, and anarchist. Titled "My Taxes," it first appeared in The Libertarian, soon after called The Libertarian Forum, May 1, 1969. On April 15, I sent the following letter, accompanying my filled-out 1040 Form, to the Tax Collector: The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America establishes a bill of particulars in regard to intolerable infringements, abuses, and denials of political power which belongs to the people. The Federal government of the...

By Wally Conger Vote5 3

Owning a Kindle helps a great deal now, but I still have too damn many paper-and-ink books. I long for the days when I was single and could get away with throwing bedsheets over stacks of books in my apartment, creating unique pieces of furniture. But too little space means that an occasional “weeding out” is necessary. Choices must be made. What books must I absolutely keep? Well, five immediately come to mind... Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose, by Dr. Seuss Any book by the good doctor was very big in my home when I was a kid, but this one...

By Wally Conger Vote9 8

While digging through boxes during my “book purging” this week, I found a “revised and updated” 2006 hardcover edition of Robin Ramsay’s Conspiracy Theories, first published in 2000. Of course, I couldn't resist taking a look before deciding whether to throw it in the discard pile. (This is why my efforts to “get rid of junk” are so damn overwhelming and frustrating.) Turns out the book's pretty good. I recommend Conspiracy Theories as an antidote to the “all theory, no research” conspiracy books that swamp the market. Ramsay is a Scottish author and co-founder/editor of the “conspiracy journal” Lobster, and...

By Wally Conger Vote9 1

Movie Review: SECRET HONOR (1984) Dec 10, 2015

BOOK REVIEW: Murray Rothbard’s “Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy” Nov 17, 2015

Your poop can save lives and even make you money Nov 6, 2015

Sorry, gang, but dead is dead Oct 27, 2015

Face it, most of your ideas are gonna suck Jul 30, 2015

Not my circus, not my monkeys Jul 28, 2015

A weird, rainy day with wise old Mr. Sherlock Holmes Jul 22, 2015

A guy sent me 400 bucks this week, just because Jul 18, 2015

Movie Review: ARMY OF SHADOWS Jul 12, 2015

Psychologies Left and Right Jul 7, 2015

A summer reading list for open minds Jun 24, 2015

Face-down and pushing through Jun 22, 2015

How to light a cigar Jun 21, 2015

Visionary tics shivering in the chest May 31, 2015

I’m trapped under my own shit and can’t get up! May 24, 2015

Putting the kibosh on lying asshats Apr 27, 2015

“My Taxes” by Karl Hess Apr 14, 2015

5 survivors from my latest “book purge” Mar 10, 2015

Conspiracies from Left to Right Mar 5, 2015