An unusual article from the Washington Post.

An excellent tech-piece in Gawker.

Made as the radical underground began organizing into violent factions, Peter Watkins's Punishment Park is a window into late 60's extremism. Portrayed as a documentary, this fictional window into law-enforcement and justice showcases a brilliantly realized manhunt through desert terrain, with convicted extremists forced to run literally for their lives towards a 58 mile distant flag to escape sentences of up to 21 years for sedition. The deal is quite simple, make it to the flag and your sentence will be vacated. Told explicitly, with some threads well developed, others staccato (as if the crews lost their subjects), the film begins with the convicts' arrival at a makeshift court clearly outside the bounds of constitutional law, with a council of judges made up hastily from the locale status quo (California). A lone civil rights lawyer tries to add balance to the proceedings but is little more than a gnat in the face of a slowly moving elephant. It bears some resemblance to our current fears, the desert locale has an eerie nuance and the procedures seem to predict Guantanamo. Unknown actors provide pivotal performances. A cold satire of both sides. An early demonstration of hunting techniques by a policeman must be seen.

Viewed without preconception in 1995, the second incarnation of Meier's "The Shining" began at Winnie's on NYC's Avenue A and after a quick beer and a signing of a waiver (physical contact), the seven or so ticketholders boarded a bus for a surreal trip (narrated by a thrift-store cat puppet) to a then non-museum P.S. 1, where one-by-one, disorientation rising, ticketholders were led to a darkened school hallway, where we were given a very slight taste of Stockholm syndrome attitude. Screamed at, cajoled into removing our coats, we were then forced to wait on a bench while Throbbing Gristle blasted from the former school's gymnasium. Then one by one were were thrown into the gym, and told "follow the light." After sixteen years, Meier's craziness gets its revival. Should be seen. Begins at New York Arts Live and travels to an undisclosed location.

A multi-front conflict: The Cartel Wars of the Americas vs. Anonymous.

www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/anonymous-cancels-operations-against-drug-cartel-say-kidnapped-member-has-been-found/2011/11/04/gIQA11SzmM_blog.html

An Anthro-Bio-Chemist, Ott has botanically observed hundreds, perhaps thousands of plants that yield varying amounts of altered states, from a library and research lab in Mexico, recently damaged by arson. For proof of his studies, check out Pharmacotheon. He analyzes many chemical forms, shows inferior paths, and discusses policy and history. Footnotes tell the real story, and are half the size of each chapter. Continuing Gordon Wasson's unusual and maybe ground-breaking constructions of ancient ceremonies utilizing medicinal tools that altered users, Ott writes the only ethnopharmacogosy of entheogenic drugs. A chemical zoom lens into the brain. Volume 2 is delayed, but Volume 1 is a must have.

Ridley Scott's R-rated preamble to the 80's was his summer 1979 shocker Alien, a marriage of two graphic sensibilities, Ron Cobb and H.R. Giger (nod to Chris Foss). Cobb skeletized the ship the art directors took over and Giger fleshed out the skeletons of demon and benign aliens and supervised their construction. Scott married their shapes and filtered some through his and came up with the stillest of horror movies. Three cultures meet, human, derelict and alien. Imagery of contrasting visualists are conjured wholesale into sets and creatures, a feat Scott repeated with Syd Mead in Blade Runner. Into metal, and viscera, underlit, dank. And audio shapes it all. In a ship that appeared like an earthly probe into the Star Wars galaxy (same art directors), by way of a haunted planet. A product of post-Watergate Hollywood, the machine that hides their corporate-planned doom from the crew is the first character we meet as the slumbering ship awakens. Likewise both gestating alien and robot hide in plain sight. Later, when the creature manages to camouflage itself, you know Scott has been conducting us the whole way intentionally to miss this. A masterpiece of graphic oversight shaded by clipped, stern speaking. Procedures litter the technocratic dialogue. Rape/birth is scattered in elements of all violence: Kane gives birth to an uncontrollable ceaserian and even Ash turns sexually violent, using a porn magazine as a suffocating tool, duplicating the facehugger (proof he admires it: he emulates it). Now visible in a comprehensive visual history published October 2011, just google Alien Vault.

Thompson, 43, said some in the mob ran away backward so they could continue to watch the action.