Wednesday, March 27, 2019
The Plot Against the Principality of Sealand
How the world’s quirkiest micro-nation got pulled into one of history’s most epic intercontinental frauds.
Read the full article on Narratively HERE
Tuesday, March 26, 2019
Nick Cave: Stranger In a Strange Land
Nick Cave: Stranger In a Strange Land
Dutch documentary film (1987)
Monday, March 25, 2019
Sunday, March 24, 2019
Diary Of a Rich Madman: Jacques Lebaudy, Emperor Of the Sahara
Diary Of a
Rich Madman: Jacques Lebaudy, Emperor Of the Sahara
In 1903s, the French millionaire Jacques Lebaudy renamed himself
Jacques the First and declared himself Emperor Of the Sahara. At the
age of forty, he was rich, by the standards of his day, after
inheriting money from his deceased father who had made his fortune
running a sugar factory in their home country. Lebaudy was a short
man with a taste for expensive odd clothes and, some would say, an
annoyingly high-pitched voice that resonated like nails on a
chalkboard. Apparently the age of forty was the big turning point in
his life when he decided to translate what he believed to be his
destiny into reality. But was he insane?
At first, no one seemed to think so. Lebaudy, using his vast
sums of wealth, bought a yacht for himself and two others to follow,
filled with 400 men, a battery of high powered guns, and the American
Civil War hero George Edouard Gouraud who would act as his
Governor-General during the venture. The yachts landed at Les
Minquies island off the coast of Morocco. Jacques Lebaudy had his men
carry a throne to his recently built pavilion and announced his
intention to claim the Sahara as part of the Empire of Patagonia for
the French colonial government. The French crown, however, refused to
accept him as Emperor. Lebaudy, nonetheless, continued to make plans
for his conquest, no doubt believing the colonialists would soon see
the error of their ways and come around to his point of view. While
Lebaudy sat on his throne, some of the local Arab population hatched
a plan to make money off the faux-dignitary; they kidnapped several
of his men and demanded a ransom. Lebaudy refused to pay them and
tried to coax his followers to ambush the kidnappers and bring the
men back. By this time, his subjects had started to think he was a
kook; many of them abandoned the Emperor. Some returned to France and
petitioned the authorities for help. Soon a fleet of French naval
vessels showed up and began bombarding the island shores with
artillery. The Arab kidnappers got scared and released the prisoners.
Jacques Lebaudy, Jacques the First, Emperor Of the Sahara had
become an embarrassment to the French government. They went to Les
Minquies, captured him, revoked his French citizenship, and deported
him. Lebaudy soon showed up in London, using his wealth to establish
residency in the plush Savoy Hotel.
Jacques Lebaudy had quite an interesting time at the Savoy. When
entering the dining room in the purple robes of an emperor, the hired
musicians would cease whatever piece they were playing and launch
into the national anthem of the Empire Of the Sahara which he had
commissioned a local composer to write in his honor. Lebaudy always
sat at his own private table with wife and daughter, the table being
draped with a royal purple tablecloth; a crown of chrysanthemum hung
from the ceiling overhead. Word got out that an emperor had arrived
in London and a cadre of journalists, photographers, celebrities, and
other schmoozers began to hang around. Several hundred visitors
stopped by; laborers, weapons dealers, merchants, farmers and others
all sought favor from Lebaudy, hoping to land a job. Some of them
were hired and immediately put on salary. Jacques the First spoke of
elaborate plans to cover the entire Sahara desert with his newly
designed flag as soon as he conquered the vast territory spreading
across the African continent. At dusk there was to be a church
ceremony and the greatest fireworks display the world had ever seen.
January 1, 1904 was set to be the date in which the new empire was to
be officially declared. That day came and went. Nothing happened. The
emperor’s throne remained empty on the island of Les Minquies,
awaiting the return of Jacques Lebaudy.
His family felt humiliated by his delusions of grandeur. They
quietly shipped him away to America to live in a Long Island mansion
where he would pace the halls and grounds in his uniform, covered in
thick rows of medals and military insignia.
Then something started to irritate the old nut. The age of
automobiles had arrived and a woman who lived nearby had taken to
cruising the roads at 15 or 20 miles per hour in her newly bough car.
The sound of the motor drove Lebaudy crazy and what could possibly
have been America’s first conflict over noise pollution resulted in
him paying his workers to put bales of hay and tree trunks across the
road to prevent any further traffic. The lady driver called the
sheriff who showed up on horseback. Then Jacques Lebaudy emerged,
himself on horseback and clad in full royal regalia, from the
surrounding forest. He claimed responsibility for the mess and the
sheriff commanded him to clear it up. Lebaudy refused and tore off
across a meadow on his horse. The sheriff summoned more police. After
seeing Lebaudy at a distance, they chased after him and a pursuit
involving pistol shots began. Jacques Lebaudy’s horse eventually
showed signs of exhaustion and fatigue then finally refused to run
any more. Lebaudy dismounted and surrendered. The police beat him up
and hauled him off to jail.
Jacques Lebaudy’s wife pleaded with the police to release him
on the ground of his eccentric and erratic behavior being symptoms of
mental illness. They agreed and took him to the nearby Knickerbocker
sanitarium. They put him in a special wing of the psychiatric ward
which was reserved for the highest political functionaries; it is
rumored that the Emperor Of the Sahara had an easy time making
friends with the King of China and the Queen of Africa.
But a good emperor can not be kept down for long. The
quick-witted Lebaudy one day pretended to be asleep; his guardians
stopped paying attention to him and he got up and jumped out the
window. He ran all the way home. Nobody pursed him and nothing else
was heard from him until one day the police were called Jacques
Lebaudy was found dead with several gunshot wounds. As the story
goes, upon his retirn hom, Lebaudy spent several weeks trying to
seduce his daughter. She continuously refused his advances until one
day he physically assaulted her and tried to rape her. His wife then
pulled out her gun and shot him dead.
So was Jacques Lebaudy, Emperor Of the Sahara insane? Probably
but then again, the French colonial era produced a lot of adventurers
who sought to conquer foreign lands, often with a head full of
bizarre fantasies about what life outside Europe was like.
Turn-of-the-century England also had its share of eccentrics and an
emperor living the Savoy Hotel probably attracted a great deal of
attention but in the end, he probably seemed like just one more weird
man in a society full of weird men. And America certainly attracted
its share of strange characters. Maybe Lebaudy was little more than a
trust-find baby who had lived a sheltered life in an aristocratic
chateau. Maybe he read too many books and never spent enough time
around other people. Maybe the other family members he knew were just
as eccentric as him. Maybe he had too much money and too little
common sense. Maybe, at the age of 40, Jacques Lebaudy started having
an unusually bizarre mid-life crisis. In any case, there were
certainly enough people who were blinded enough by his money to
overlook his oddness and believe in his grandiose fantasies. Maybe
they were the ones who were crazy.
Strauss, Erwin S. How to Start Your Own Country. Paladin
Press, 1999.
Saturday, March 23, 2019
GG Allin's Last Day: MAXIMUM ROCKNROLL — ‘YOU’RE WRONG — AN IRREGULAR COLUMN’ — MYKEL BOARD (SEPTEMBER, 1993)
GG followers pack the abandoned service station. Bobby Ebbs shows off his back to a reporter. It’s tattooed with the poster from A Clockwork Orange. A big kid, built like a football player, swigs from a Colt 45 forty-ouncer. Another kid, not older than 14, plays with his just-died green hair. Donny The Punk shows up in his sailor suit, sporting a fresh herpes sore on his upper lip. A curious college boy sits by himself among the metal art. He’s playing silent brooding intellectual. It’s a freak show: Scummy and proud.
Friday, March 22, 2019
Urban Struggle
Urban Struggle
hardcore punk documentary (1981)
featuring Black Flag, Circle Jerks & TSOL
Costa Rica Lays Out Plan to Zero Out Carbon Emissions by 2050
Time to pack my bags and move to Costa Rica. The tiny Central American country is setting an example with a plan to fully decarbonize by 2050.
Best of Flipside 2: Minutemen & Minor Threat
Best of Flipside 2: Minutemen & Minor Threat
live footage (1983)
Incredible Experiment Gives Infrared Vision to Mice—and Humans Could Be Next
By injecting nanoparticles into the eyes of mice, scientists gave them the ability to see near-infrared light—a wavelength not normally visible to rodents (or people). It’s an extraordinary achievement, one made even more extraordinary with the realization that a similar technique could be used in humans.
Read the full article on Gizmodo HERE
Thursday, March 21, 2019
Wednesday, March 20, 2019
No Trend - Kiss Ass to Your Peer Group
No Trend
Kiss Ass to Your Peer Group
from the lp Too Many Humans
How “Problematic” Outsider Art Avoids Scandal
Outsider art is rife with nude women, expletives and imagery that you wouldn't want to view with your parents
Tuesday, March 19, 2019
A Dead Man Was Cremated in Arizona, But Nobody Knew He Was Radioactive
In 2017, a 69-year-old man with pancreatic cancer went to hospital with abnormally low blood pressure. Sadly, he died only two days later, and his remains were cremated.
What nobody at the hospital or the crematorium knew, was that this hadn't been the man's only recent trip to hospital.
Just one day earlier, in fact, he had been injected with a radioactive compound at another hospital to treat his tumour – and when his mortal remains were incinerated, this radioactive and potentially dangerous dose of lutetium Lu 177 dotatate was still inside his body.
Navy Crossing the Line Ceremony
Navy Crossing the Line Ceremony
what sailors do when they cross the equator
Monday, March 18, 2019
Stereolab and Nurse With Wound - Simple Headphone Mind
Stereolab and Nurse With Wound
Simple Headphone Mind
The Orkustra: Notes from the Psychedelic Underground by Bobby BeauSoleil
San Francisco 1966.
SSSSSSNarrow Victorian façade houses, gaunt and quaint, squeezed together side-by-side like musty books in the library of a lunatic. The roller-coaster streets arranged with about as much apparent forethought as a casual toss in a child’s game of pixie sticks, each hilltop offering up its own unique vista, each vale a haunt of subtle intrigue. Elegant old theaters, dilapidated warehouses, eateries and clubs and coffee houses, places of commerce, places of worship, houses of the holy and the unholy, all gracefully suffering the same kind of slow decay that time and salty sea mists inflict on coastal communities. The noise, the din, an ever-present song: machines and voices, music from windows and doorways, in clubs and concert halls; wavelets lapping at the piers on a wharf, the deep bellow of distant fog horns. Twinkling spires supporting colossal bridges spanning the placid waterways, countless city lights sparkling their reflections on the bay like diamonds, like the stars of galaxies. The fairyland gardens of Golden Gate Park, a living testimonial to the vision and determination of one man, and the wisdom of city fathers who allowed him a free hand to create them out of the wasteland. Cops walking their beat on Haight Street, dressed for another era in dark blue double-breasted coats adorned with rows of shiny brass buttons. Unruly traffic on a confusing disarray of highways and byways; the buzzing hustle of an electric streetcar, the more stately bustle of a clanking trolley. And the people—young and old, rich and poor, sane and senseless, revered and misunderstood, fastidious and unwashed, drunk and sober, stoic and passionate, godless and born again—of every kind and color; a port city’s rich and pungent brew of diverse cultures.
Sunday, March 17, 2019
Stickmen with Ray Guns - Christian Rat Attack
Stickmen with Ray Guns
Christian Rat Attack
from the lp Some People Deserve to Suffer
U.K./DK
U.K./DK
documentary about punks and skinheads
directed by Christopher Collins & Ken Lawrence (1983)
featuring The Exploited, Vice Squad, The Adicts, The Damned, Blitz, Chaos UK & The Business
Michael Oliver, the Phoenix Foundation and Three Failed Attempts at Starting a New Nation
National Public Radio once called The Phoenix Foundation a shadowy
and sinister organization. It is not entirely clear if they are still
active. We do know that their founder, Michael Oliver, tried on
three separate occaisions to start his own nation based on
libertarian ideology. His methods involved stirring up troubles in
small island nations with a potential for starting violent
independence movements. Michael Oliver and the Phoenix Foundation
were, at best, on a quixotic quest without any realistic chance of
success.
The sixties were a time when national independence movements
were thriving. The post-colonial era was at its peak and anti-Soviet
rebellions were breaking out in Eastern Europe. Some of that spirit
spread to the first world and Michael Oliver, a real estate developer
who had made it big in Las Vegas, caught a bit of that wind. Oliver
was a Lithuanian immigrant, a far-right anarcho-libertarian in
ideology, an anti-communist, anti-tax activist, and advocate of
strict adherence to the gold standard. In 1971, he began pitching
dreams of a libertarian utopia where no government would interfere
with anybody and no taxes would be paid. He attracted a sleazy group
of intelligence agents, laissez faire capitalist extremists, pimps,
drug traffickers and mafiosi who poured $200.000 into his scheme to
build his island paradise in the South Pacific.
The Minerva Reefs, somewhat near Tonga, were uninhabited by
anything other than sea creatures; this was due to their location
underwater. Michael Oliver hired a team of barges to haul sand from
Australia to the reef and dump it there to make an island rising
above sea level. When the waves no longer covered the newly-made
land, Oliver and his appointed president of the Republic of Minerva,
Morris Davis, arrived with flags and freshly minted coins made of
gold on one side and silver on the other. They built one tower on the
island. The other governments of the region were suspicious, so they
held a meeting and agreed that something needed to be done. The King
of Tonga sent a small band of troops to occupy the island; they
seized Minerva’s one tower, planted the Tongan flag in the sand,
and chased Oliver and his goofy friends away. The island of Minerva
has been a part of Tonga ever since.
Never one to kknow when to quit, Oliver saw the Republic of
Minerva as a learning experience rather than a defeat. His next
venture into nation building involved ex-OSS intelligence agent
Mitchell Werbell and a large supply of military-grade weaponry to be
used for defense and armed rebellion. 1973 was the year when Great
Britain decided to set the Bahamas free and end colonial rule in that
Caribbean group of islands. The white inhabitants of Bahamian Abaco
wanted to remain a part of the U.K. since they feared being a
marginalized minority population under a government made up of
Afro-Caribbean politicians. Oliver saw his opportunity. He made
contact with the people of Abaco and offered them financial and
military aid in exchange for letting him build his libertarian
fantasy on their land. He soon brought Werbell in a helicopter with a
large collection of heavy weaponry and a newly-penned constitution
guaranteeing extremely limited government and establishing Abaco as a
tax-haven nation.
Mitchell Werbell attempted to build a militia by training the
residents of Abaco in warfare techniques. Initially, the machine guns
and hand grenades looked like fun but soon the peoples’ interest
waned. They had little interest in being a utopian country where rich
people could hide their money in banks to avoid taxation; they did
not want their island to turn into a seedy enclave of drug runners
and whorehouses. Ultimately they wanted to remain a part of the U.K.
but that dream died when the British officials flat-out told them
they were not interested in keeping Abaco as a British possession.
Oliver began to look like a meddler and a crank. The Bahamian
government easily put down the rebellion; Michael Oliver got deported
and Werbell got arrested for illegal weapons trafficking. They
sentenced him to prison in the United States.
The Phoenix Foundation officially started in 1975. The three
trustees of the group were Michael Oliver, his friend James McKeever,
and Harry Schulz, the world’s highest paid investment banker at the
time. Their aim was to turn their anarcho-capitalist, laissez faire
ideology into a tax-free banking nation ; their motivation was that
something had to be done soon since America was losing the Cold War
and the age-old right wing trope that a communist totalitarian
dictatorship would soon engulf the freest nation in the world was
imminent. Either that or society was about to collapse because the
government makes people pay taxes. After scheming in secret for five
years, the Phoenix Foundation moved its headquarters to Amsterdam to
escape the prying eyes of the IRS and other government snoops. In
1980 they put their plans into action.
The New Hebrides were never officially a colony. The French
and British governments came to a unique agreement to jointly
administer the South Pacific island chain without actually claiming
possession of it. The colonial era was winding down and both
countries agreed to allow the New Hebrides to become an independent
nation, soon to be named Vanuatu. The transition was to be a peaceful
one and a cause for the Melanesian inhabitants to celebrate. The
biggest obstacle came from a remote island called Espiritu Santo.
Jimmy Stevens, a half-caucasian and half-Melanesian leader of a
cargo cult called Nagriamel, had campaigned in Vanuatu’s first
presidential election and lost by a landslide. Disgruntled, he
returned to Espiritu Santo and declared the island to be a separate
nation named Vemerana. The people in his cult rose up in rebellion,
armed only with fists and bows and arrows. They seized all government
property and the radio station, rioted, burned and looted buildings
and blockaded the air strip to prevent any planes from landing.
Soon after that, a boat full of Vietnamese refugees got
intercepted by the military. Upon inspection, they uncovered a large
cache of guns and radio equipment. The boat was headed for Espiritu
Santo and the ownership was registered as the Phoenix Foundation. The
Vietnamese boat-people were being brought along to bulk-up the
population of Espiritu Santo, although what they would do once they
got there has never been fully explained.
For the Phoenix Foundation, this proved to be a minor
deterrence. They flew Jimmy Stevens to the United States to petition
the United Nations for statehood recognition. He returned with boxes
of Vemerana flags, passports, and freshly minted coins. The Phoenix
Foundation clandestinely brought in a new supply of war materiel from
Fiji. Spies alerted the government in the capital of Vanuatu. The
conflict known as the Coconut War had begun. Three years after the
murder-suicides of the People’s Temple cult in Jonestown, Guyana, a
group of white men supplying natives of a remote jungle island with
rifles made the Phoenix Foundation look scary and suspicious. The
Vanuatuans asked Britain and France for help. The British thought it
was more trouble than it was worth but France still had troops in New
Caledonia. They were transported to Espiritu Santo, albeit with no
mandate to engage in any military action. When the followers of
Nagriamel saw the unwillingness of the soldiers to fight, they went
on a rampage and destroyed all the stores and buildings on the
island. In an act of desperation, Papua New Guinea sent in a band of
soldiers to quell the violence. In the end, the Papuans were welcomed
as guests and fellow Melanesians; they quickly made friends with the
Nagriamel fighters and the Coconut War ended without any combat.
Jimmy Stevens was arrested and imprisoned. During the trial, it
became obvious that the Phoenix Foundation was manipulating him and
trying to orchestrate the uprising behing the scenes. Michael Oliver
and his gang of loony libertarians were deported and permanently
banned from Vanuatu.
Despite being a successful businessman, Michael Oliver was a
three-time loser nonetheless, and the Phoenix Foundation turned out
to be nothing more than a clique of dopey rich kids who could not see
farther then they could reach. This is sad because they obviously
could not see very far. Maybe this is what millionaires do when they
have too much time on their hands, too much imagination, too little
purpose in life and only a tenuous connection to life in the real
world. Wealth does not automatically breed wisdom. A nation can not
be built with an excess of ideology and no pragmatic or practical
plan of action.
Strauss, Erwin S. How to Start Your Own Country. Paladin
Press, 1999.
Roky Erickson and the Aliens - Two Headed Dog (Red Temple Prayer)
Roky Erickson and the Aliens
Two Headed Dog (Red Temple Prayer)
from the lp The Evil One
Vanuatu: Yumi Winnem Freedom (Struggle for Freedom)
Vanuatu: Yumi Winnem Freedom (Struggle for Freedom)
documentary film by Bob Kingsbury (1980)
Saturday, March 16, 2019
Friday, March 15, 2019
Beyond the Forest: Hungarian Music in Transylvania
Beyond the Forest: Hungarian Music in Transylvania
documentary by Esther Ronay
Thursday, March 14, 2019
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