can someone get me this for xmas????

im drooling right now; this looks so awesome

look, i know ive been bitching about posting and certain people (me) have been pissed about it but whatever...i dont have time to write now, so all youre getting is the old cut and paste. its still a post so im doing better than the rest of you guys this month

me two - you zero

Films by Jove in association with SoyuzmultFilm Studios presents
ANIMATED SOVIET PROPAGANDA
FROM THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION To PERESTROIKA

A landmark four disc Box Set

Unearthed from Moscow's legendary Soyuzmultfilm Studios (est. 1935), the 41 films in ANIMATED SOVIET PROPAGANDA span sixty years of Soviet history (1924 - 1984), and have never been available before in the U.S.

The set is divided thematically into four discs, all dealing with different subjects of the Soviet propaganda machine.

AMERICAN IMPERIALISTS (disc 1) contains seven films, almost all of which are drawn from the Cold War era. The recurring image is of the money hungry industrialist self-destructing because of his greed.

FASCIST BARBARIANS (disc 2) is a 17 film reaction to the Nazi invasion of 1941. While Americans were mocked relentlessly, at least they remained human. After breaking the non-aggression pact and declaring war, the Nazis became animals in the propaganda films, turning into snarling warthogs and depraved vultures.

CAPITALIST SHARKS (disc 3) contains six films that take on the bourgeoisie the world over - and sometimes beyond. In INTERPLANTERY REVOLUTION (1924), capitalists escaping to Mars discover the revolution has spread throughout the galaxy.

ONWARD TO THE SHINING FUTURE: COMMUNISM (disc 4) contains 11 works, most of which mythologize the state and envision the inevitable utopias of the future. Dziga Vertov's SOVIET TOYS (1924), however, offers criticism of the state. Generally agreed to be the first Russian animated film, it satirizes the communist members who cashed in on Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP), which introduced a limited form of capitalist enterprise.

hello?

i dont want to play mommy...but what gives? it's nearly christmas, and in three months of this blog, weve only got maybe a dozen posts. im not going to single out anybody because we ALL have slacked on this, but i rushed out a review and a 'mission statement' when we started, and then

...

nothing.

we had all this STATEMENT OF PURPOSE stuff at the beginning...we defined the mission...then we didnt do anything about the mission. ive seen this too many times not to notice the symptoms. it happens all the time wiht programmers...you shoot the shit and complain about how Software X doesnt do Thing Y, and so you brainstorm Software Z...then you and whoever you were talking to write up a big roadmap, maybe budget it, divvy up assignments, nail down each feature you want and then...poof.

the only work you wind up doing is planning the work you were going to do but never get around to. id hate to see that happen here, because i like talking to you guys, and not talking is getting on my nerves. dont get me wrong, though. I AM JUST AS MUCH TO BLAME. i noticed the problem and havent gotten off my ass to do anything about it either.

but i realize there might be other problems i havent noticed. so let me throw this out there:

what gives?

Found a super8 film with a miniature steam train...

remember back here i was bitching about bargain hunting with the gf?? anyway, i finally go around to uploading this film junk i got at a garage sale



pretty basic stuff like i usually find...family picnics, etc...but this one has the granfather (i guess) giving everyone rides on a miniature steam engine...there was a photo of the train in a box of photos i got with the films too... 3 bucks, not bad.



sorry for spacing on this one so long guys...you know how it goes, life and work get in the way...two tears in the bucket, motherfuckit

i got older family in the area though. around the holidays it sort of sucks...maybe you want to stay in with the gf on thanksgiving and have turkey sandwiches and just make love three or four times and watch football and get fucked up...but instead youve got to drive out to uncle andys place and deal with rugrats and stuffing and toasts and drama. and FUCK...you cant drink a bunch of wine and go out behind the shed and maybe do a little petting out there, because those rugrats will FIND you

me and the gf actually DID try that one REALLY boring birthday get together out there. we were groping around behind the shed a bit one time and heard someone chunk-chunk-chunking out on the gravel and managed to straighten ourselves out at the last second, and good thing because it was my little cousin who's maybe five. we had to bluff what we were doing, so the gf started dropping gardening science...we wound up showing him how to care for rosebushes and identify weeds and teaching him how to garden, and showing him the irrigation system andy put in. it actually worked out and was a lot of fun...we felt proud to be the cool relatives who give it to the kid straight, saying "this is a chore a lot of the time, but plants are cool, and i bet your dad will like it if you help him out sometime," but obviously on the other hand i wouldve been just as happy if the gf and i had just been making out the whole time

i dont dislike my family at all, and thank fuck the gf thinks theyre pretty cool, but going there can suck because of family drama and because you cant really unwind...someone will always blow up about something or needle someone else and make you grind some fucking teeth because you have to be more mature than they are and just not make a scene. going there for one night of your weekend can be pretty draining and unfun...sort of like your gf waking you up early on saturday to to hunt bargains...unsexy

not that that has anything to do with anything right now

i swung by andys place this weekend because i know he has a good video camera (and i dont) and also because hes sort of OCD and has all the old family film projector stuff going on. if youve got an old reel of your cousin naked in a playing pool and eating grass and want to embarrass her in front of her fiancee, andys usually got something to play it on

i raided his upstairs closet and got out the projector and this weird collapsable podium or whatever, and he let me use a super8 to film what we projected. good times. as OCD as he is, hes always been cool with me...i think he knows that i might be sloppy about me but will never be sloppy about someone else's stuff...especially not with a favor. i keep a favor, i pay it back

like i said, i promised this...here it is a little late...but its cute and sort of nice to watch. i made the effort so DIG IT

Why 'Kremlinology'?

i realized i meant to get this post out before i started reviewing things and making comments, but i guess i got distracted by "Soft Rains" and just started in without thinking. GFK originally asked me to write something explaining the blog name, since i picked it, and i said i'd follow through...soooo...why the name?

kremlinology is a really cool term invented during the cold war to describe anyone who specialized in analyzing the soviet union. you think you know photoshop on the internet? shit, you dont even know who invented it. the soviets were so obsessed with wiping out party members whod said the wrong thing that theyd photoshop them out of thousands of official pictures...all before photoshop even existed. the thing was, with a country that never told the truth about ANYTHING, getting a hold of doctored photos was sometimes the only way americans and other NATO countries could ever figure out what was going on

"oh, this guy disappeared from photos...which one was he?"

"he was the guy who talked peace and openness"

"i guess the peace party isnt coming to the negotiating table anymore."

the thing is, i didnt pick the name because of that. it just came to me because we all like cool soviet propaganda stuff. we dont like it because we love communism: honestly it just looks cool as shit most of the time. we were all in a chat at the time though, and after i typed the name out, i thought, "damn, that makes so much sense"

like GFK said in his earlier post, we got booted from another board for being "problem kids" or whatever, but i think a better word for it is "doubters." i dont like the term "skeptics" because that makes us sound eggheaded when we arent...im not like "hmmm...does the data correlate???" i think its a gut feel, like something is wrong here. like "i cant even be sure about this data in the first place."

maybe that comes from digging old soviet posters and writing and movies. you look at them, and theyre really beautiful and sometimes just really well made, and you appreciate them for that...but you also laugh at how many lies are in there. then...in that laughter somewhere...you remember, someone believed this with his heart. someone died believing this. someone cried to his kids telling them about this because he believed it so much...and it just breaks your heart

because then you think about your dads or uncles or friends of the family who died on the other side for the same bullshit. "russian communists have an interest in vietnam." fuck no they didnt. nobody gave a fuck about vietnam except the vietnamese who just wanted their own fucking country and everyone else to fuck off. my mom still gets tears in her eyes talking about kennedy sometimes, and he lied about a missile gap...there wasnt one! we had so many more fucking nukes than the russians it was SICK. my older brother gets more misty-eyed about fucking REAGAN than our own grandpa, and he lied too. contras, iran, russia, fucking pick one

thats where the name started to sink in with me. because look at the last five years. WMDs that never existed. yellowcake uranium that might as well of been fucking angelfood cake. Osama and Saddam are buddies...oops! they never talked at all. iraq did 9/11 --- ha! we send people out to die based on info, and the more i think about it, the more i wouldnt even go to the corner store based on it

so i immed everybody, "why not kremlinology?" and it turned out someone already had that blog. but LS said "new kremlinology isnt taken," and i said "take it." because honestly that makes even more sense. 60 years ago, all anyone knew was that the soviet union was our enemy. we had to read into it and figure it out and try to guess what to do next...because everything that came out of it was lies and misinformation.

now, 60 years later, we learned that we produced the same thing...as many lies as they sent to us, WE sent to US. we got a double dose of lies, and it turned out the one place we were looking for truth was double-dealing us too. now we have more than one enemy...there are enemies all over the globe...even maybe here...and they could be anyone or believe in anything. and how much can you trust what we hear about them? we used to have one enemy and got fed a batch of lies about it. how many more do we get from multiple enemies? multiply the doubt by hundreds, thousands...i dont know. i want to be like that poor russian guy who cried to his kids telling them a lie he believed so hard, instead of sitting here wanting to cry because i cant believe anything

we picked the blog as a place to shoot the shit and figure out life and have fun like anyone else. with a little help from your friends and with a little help from effort. it seems like it takes a lot more effort these days, or maybe a lot more friends to divide up the reading just to figure shit out. i didnt want this to be depressing. the name might be right, and its right to doubt, and maybe we find something true along the way. i just hope its fun.

Why here?

Those friends of ours who (we hope) will stop by might wonder, "Why here? Why blogger?" Other people probably just wonder, "Who are you dudes?" My response would be, "Who are you and why would you even care? We're all idiots."

The story is a pretty simple one. We're all guys who met in our 20s a couple years ago on a message board and discovered we shared a lot of interests. Sports, politics, history, activism, collecting. We eventually got banned for "causing trouble," which is shorthand for "being irritating to mods who didn't have a reasonable explanation for banning us."

The shorthand version for why we were irritating was "our politics."

The better explanation is: we don't fall easily into groups of liberal or conservative, anarchist or socialist. We distrust, but we're not paranoids (except for maybe one of us *wink*), and we love our country, but we're not patriots. At least not in the "owning a lot of guns kind of way." (Except for one of us. Don't kill me please, EC) For most people, this living outside labels is really really annoying. They don't want to listen to what you have to say: they want to listen until they find something juicy enough to sink teeth into and disagree with.

So when you act like you don't trust your government but also think socialism's not a bad idea, people don't know whether to write you off as a Milita Man Gun Nut or a social revolutionary. They just know they want to write you off. That creates a lot of flame wars and a lot of enemies. People like being able to dismiss you because it makes it easier to reinforce what they think of themselves if they can make you their yin while jerking their own yang.

Eventually, the mods at the board got rid of us. Banning a couple hundred other people who weren't adult enough to have a conversation without freaking out would have been a lot harder than banning the few of us, who were grown up enough to walk away.

Maybe you think that people like us would go apeshit about FREE SPEECH and be outraged at being banned, but those are the breaks. Websites are private things. People pay to put them up and run them; they don't have to pay attention to you. If I ran those websites, I might have banned us too, just because I already have enough headaches.

We thought about starting our own board, but that would have been gay. It's only a few of us, so we could just talk on IM or myspace blogs. That's what we did for a while, but then weird members of the old board tracked down our myspaces and were generally being assholes playing "internet sleuth." It got so we couldn't post a new blog for our friends and comment back and forth on it without seeing a mirror of it appear on the old site, with people tweaking the language and rewriting things to win a flame war we didn't care about anymore.

Because of this, we wanted to talk openly to our friends and allow strangers to read what we had to say (but it's any guess why they'd want to), but we also didn't want to do it with our own names attached anymore. Some people online are malicious, and we all started to worry about maybe losing a job opportunity down the road because somewhere someone was spamming a website with copy-and-paste jobs of our myspace discussions, tweaking the language, making up other stuff and attaching our names to it to make us sound like kooks.

Hence the blogspot. Here we can be anonymous to strangers but also show our friends whatever weird thing is on our minds. Here we can get our ideas out without the burdens of real names and worrying about any consequences. Here we can have fun. We don't expect anyone else to really care about this junk, but if you've stumbled across it, we hope you have fun too.

Thanks!