Wholphin

MOE’S BOOKSTORE Presents WHOLPHIN DVD
Wednesday, January 31, 7:30pm
2476 Telegraph Ave. Berkeley, CA
Click here for a map

We will be screening a selection of films from the past three issues of Wholphin, as well as something new from the upcoming #4.

Starts at 7:30pm. Free, plus pizza for the taking.

At long last, Brian Fischer of Cal Academy reveals the methods of eating an ant. Click for the film:

Edited by Kendra Coleman.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

I never owned a Che T-shirt, but in college I had a tee that proclaimed: “It’s Not A Revolution If You Can’t Dance To It.” I rarely wore it because it was a little blousy, but when I did, it was better than a Che for impressing flowering-feminists that I was a conscientious boy-radical worth getting drunk with and ranting all night to about the sorry state of the proletariat.

I looked it up, and when the great radical-granny-fem-anarchist, Emma Goldman, supposedly uttered her most-quotable line she was not, in fact, promoting my life of frat-tastic free-for-alls. She was instead responding to an impudent proto-punk who had taken her aside at a party to chastise her for dancing at Anarchist functions. Emma was always getting down at parties, with or without music. In between leading the fight for female contraception, co-founding the anarchist movement, and being arrested and jailed for high treason, she shook it. The boy tried to convince her that her incessant dancing was disrespectful and dangerous to the group. He was afraid that if people saw one of the new party’s leaders showing such silly displays of emotion they would never take the movement seriously. The kid had a point. As liberals repeatedly prove by, say, disowning Howard Dean for getting excited at a rally or nitpicking Obama’s every move or attacking Hillary’s singing, the left loves to devour its own. But Emma thought it was crucial to keep a sense of playfulness in one’s political activism. Nervous Nelly’s be-damned. So she told the little prick, “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.” Oh well. She didn’t stop dancing, and capital A “Anarchy” today is a couple of pony-tailed guys calling Cheney a fascist on Berkeley late-night public access television.

The point is Emma would love how The Daily Show’s Scott Jacobson* and Josh Glasser have taken the piss out of all of us faux-revolutionaries in their new short film, “Wearing Che.” Ernesto Che Guevarra on the other hand would have had them both executed by a Bolivian firing squad. Touché T-Che. Viva la Circle Pee!

PLAY WEARING CHE

*Scott co-re-scripted The Japanese Bewitched on issue #2.

The Howard Dean Screaming Action Figure:
This audio-equipped collectable goes for $29.95 a pop.

I have a screen saver pulled from a pharmaceutical company’s 2006 conference DVD. All these beautifully animated, abstract, microscopic images float across the screen only to be labeled, “Pancreatic cancer cells,� “Trastuzumab, leaking out of a tumor,� and things like that. My friend Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary, “My Kid Could Paint That,� is like that screen saver.

The film is about Marla Olmstead, a four-year-old girl who is plucked from childhood and catapulted to fame in the art world. Marla’s paintings are cool and her family, happy. And then the labels start popping up. Fraud. Puppet. Con artist. Part Tom Wolfe’s “The Painted Word,â€? part Bravo’s “Showbiz Moms & Dads,â€? Amir floats a seemingly ideal family across the screen only to see them infected by the tumor of celebrity. It’s a great story and a huge hit at Sundance. I know this because everyone I meet tells me about the $2 million dollar deal they just signed with Sony (speaking of diseases).

Click the thumbnails for larger versions: