stAllio!'s way

so i'm starting my car at the end of the day, leaving work on my way to get comics & milk, & i catch the tail end of a bizarre story on all things considered about the revd sun myung moon being coronated as the messiah on capital hill. moon is the head of the cultlike "unification church", the very wealthy publisher of the arch-conservative washington times, a hugely influential gazillionaire (he advised reagan), & a total crackpot. as a child i'd heard rumors about the unification church; there was a house full of "moonies" at the end of our block with a big honkin' "unification church" sign out front (i think they either finally moved out or changed their signage).

but don't take my word for it: the npr story interviewed john gorenfeld, who runs a blog called where in washington dc is sun myung moon?. here's what he has to say about moon in his faq:

...I was searching for someone's name, and came across some of the most amazing documents you've ever seen, at Unification.net: Moon's sermons. Wild boasts of controlling key Congressional leaders in the Republican Party, James Bond gee-whiz stuff about taking over the world using a secret fleet of submarines, religious talk blaming the Holocaust on the Jews. I was hooked. I couldn't believe no one was writing about this, especially after I discovered that $475,000 in Abstinence-Only funds were supporting Moon's missionaries.

and that's just background. gorenfeld himself broke the moon coronation story in the gadflyer. & boy, does it make for some juicy reading. this didn't take place in the howard johnson or even the ritz carlton. it took place in a senate office building where nobody is even allowed inside with a congressional invite. the hill if you find your suspension of disbelief obliterated by the outlandishness of it all, there's video too. it might be the tiniest quicktime video ever, but if the idea of a cult-produced propaganda video featuring members of congress appeals to you, you will definitely want to check it out.

on the total opposite end of the crackpot spectrum, those who've heard my performance at experiMENTAL or a sneak preview of the new animals within animals mp3ep (due out any day now) might have heard the paranoid ramblings of albert t wilson III (i used to call him the "sunglass man" because in the video he wore his sunglasses on the top of his head). chicklet stumbled across this guy on tucson public access & taped it for me... as soon as i saw him i was in awe. this man is desperately trying to save the world by getting out his urgent message about how the vatican conspiracy and nazi jews are taking over the world, replacing people with clones, & whatnot. recently i thought to search him out online (he is so desperate to let people know about the conspiracy that i figured he must have a website) & i found him! on top of that, i found that i can watch tucson public access online. the show is called "wake up call" & by my calculations will be on in about 40 minutes, so i'm going to try to watch it... & record it (or at least the audio). what a great day for found sound: moon's culty coronation video, wake up call, & earlier tonight i downloaded (legally, thanks to the wonderful archive.org) the conet project, a 4cd set of "numbers stations" recorded off of shortwave. it's great listening, but the label actually had the audacity to sue the band wilco for sampling their recording... as though taping something off the radio gave you ownership of it. if anything, i think the obvious reaction to that should be for everyone and i mean everyone to sample the holy living fuck out of the conet project. hey, irdial already made lots of money on it even before they sued wilco for no justifiable reason, & some of these recordings are pretty cool, so i know i definitely intend to do some sampling.