Jello Biafra is angry. Not exactly news, I realize, but at least there's a new occasion for his anger– the April 8 "Fab Mab Reunion" concert at the Fillmore in San Francisco, which is being promoted as a revival of the great days of punk rock in SF, featuring the Dead Kennedys. Only it's not exactly the Dead Kennedys, it's the Jello-free zombie version of the original band that broke up in 1986. And Jello himself isn't shy about sharing his opinion about what this means:

Enough people are confused [that] we need to set the record straight. No, it is not a Dead Kennedys reunion. Yes, I am boycotting the whole scam. These are the same greed-mongers who ran to corporate lawyers and sued me for over six years in a dispute sparked by my not wanting 'Holiday in Cambodia' sold into a Levi's commercial. They now pimp Dead Kennedys in the same spirit as Mike Love suing Brian Wilson over and over again, then turning around and playing shows as the Beach Boys. They despise everything our band ever stood for.

I understand the anger about and the profit-making potential of zombie bands-- hell, The Glenn Miller Orchestra is still touring, despite the fact that Glenn Chattanooga Choo Choo'ed into the great beyond in 1944-- but the Holiday in Cambodia/Levi's thing has always puzzled me. Not about why Jello refused (against sweatshop labor) or why the other Kennedys wanted to sell the song (against being poor). What I've never understood is why Levi's wanted it. Exactly what part of the song was Levi's going to use?

You're a star-belly sneech
You suck like a leach
You want everyone to act like you
Kiss ass while you bitch
So you can get rich
But your boss gets richer off you

Or maybe?

It's time to taste what you most fear
Right Guard will not help you here
Brace yourself, my dear…
Brace yourself, my dear…

Or perhaps the catchy...

Pol Pot, Pol Pot, Pol Pot, Pol Pot,
Pol Pot, Pol Pot, Pol Pot, Pol Pot...

... because nothing says Buy These Jeans like reminding people about genocide.
Of course, maybe Levi's really wanted to use the song as a motivational tool in it's third world factories...

Well you'll work harder
With a GUN in your back
For a bowl of rice a day
Slave for soldiers
Till you starve
Then your head is skewered on a stake

That would get the sewing machines humming. And that makes sense, at least a lot more sense than trying to use Holiday in Cambodia to sell jeans. It certainly make a lot more sense than paying $25 to see a Jello-less Dead Kennedys.

We're about as open borders as you can get, but even we rolled our eyes when a group of students announced a press conference outside SanTana's Valley High School this afternoon at 3:30 to talk about the walk outs of the last week. Done via blast e-mail, the press release is titled "SANTA ANA STUDNETS SPEAK-OUT REGARDING WALKOUTS- (3-30-06)." In-state tuition to the first illegal immigrant who posts which word is misspelled!

Looking for something new to do in Vegas? Something that involves breathing in massive amounts of particulate matter blown in from the desert? Something that involves watching yet another bit of idiotic Bush administration defense planning go up in smoke (literally)? Something a little mushroom cloudy? Well, you're in luck.

Agence France-Presse reports that during the first week of June your tax dollars will be hard at work setting off a 700 ton explosion at the Nuclear Test Site just north of Las Vegas. It was from the Nuclear Test Site that radioactive clouds were sent wafting over Vegas (and eventually Southern California) throughout the '50's and early 60's. And it seems the prospect of a massive non-nuclear explosion there has some folks feel nostalgic.

"I don't want to sound glib here but it is the first time in Nevada that you'll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons," said James Tegnelia, head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

So, aside from bringing back the good ol' days of mushroom clouds over Vegas,

why we are blowing stuff up?

Tegnelia said the test was part of a U.S. effort to develop weapons capable of destroying deeply-buried bunkers housing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons...

"We have several very large penetrators we're developing," he told defense reporters.

"We also have — are you ready for this — a 700-ton explosively formed charge that we're going to be putting in a tunnel in Nevada," he said.

"And that represents to U.S. the largest single explosive that we could imagine doing conventionally to solve that problem," he said.

The aim is to measure the effect of the blast on hard granite structures, he said.

Actually, I think this test might be aiming at another goal as well, one hinted at in Tegnelia's statement. "And that represents to U.S. the largest single explosive that we could imagine doing conventionally to solve the problem." Ever since it came to power, the Bush administration– particularly Donald Rumsfeld– has been imagining something rather more robust than a 700 ton conventional bomb. Rumsfeld and the president have been imagining, and been pushing for, bunker-busting nukes.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told a Senate subcommittee in April [2005] that 70 countries are pursuing "activities underground."
"We don't have a capability of dealing with that," he testified. "We can't go in and get at things in solid rock underground." Rumsfeld suggested he needs the relatively small bunker-buster to avoid using "a large, dirty nuclear weapon."
Yet at the time of his testimony, Rumsfeld probably saw a study from the National Academy of Sciences estimating that the small bunker-buster, if used in an urban area, could cause more than a million deaths.
Pursuit of the bunker-buster and Rumsfeld's testimony confirm the administration's shift away from nuclear deterrence toward possible use of nuclear weapons in war. Under Bush's doctrine of pre-emption, the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) has added missions to its war plans. STRATCOM's global strike plan foresees the use of nuclear weapons to pre-empt an imminent threat from weapons of mass destruction or to destroy an adversary's WMD stockpiles.
The Pentagon's draft "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations" describes these new missions. The draft was discovered on the Pentagon Web site in September by Hans Kristensen, now with the Federation of American Scientists. When Kristensen shared his find with the media, the draft disappeared from the Web site. But STRATCOM's war plans remain in force.

Like the rest of the Bush administration's military actions, it's extremely unlikely that nuclear bunker-busters– technically known as Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrators (RNEPs)– could ever function the way the sales brochure promises, and will instead cause horrifying "collateral damage". The Union of Concerned Scientists explained all this back in Fall 2005:

The RNEP is intended to generate a strong seismic shock wave capable of crushing hardened underground bunkers within about 1,000 feet of the explosion, but much deeper bunkers can be constructed using modern tunneling equipment. Very deep bunkers (or underground facilities spread out over a wide area) would be immune from such an attack.

Furthermore, because the RNEP would only penetrate a few meters of rock or concrete—nowhere near the hundreds of meters in depth necessary to contain the explosion—the weapon would produce tremendous nuclear fallout, potentially drifting more than 1,000 miles downwind. When Congress asked Linton Brooks, the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, to confirm earlier suggestions that the fallout would be contained, he said, "I don't believe the laws of physics will ever let that be true. . . . This is a nuclear weapon that is going to be hugely destructive."

Simulation software developed for the Pentagon shows that an RNEP dropped on Iran's Esfahan nuclear facility would cause three million radiation-related deaths within two weeks of the explosion. Another 35 million people in Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan would be exposed to increased levels of cancer-causing radiation.

In a surprising show of good sense, the Republican controlled Congress, normally such a reliable rubber stamp for Bush administration schemes, isn't willing to OK nuclear bunker-busters. So, just to keep things moving, in 2004, the Pentagon awarded a contract to Boeing to develop a conventional bunker-buster, known as a Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP). The sales brochure on the MOP promises a bomb capable of destroying "multistory buildings with hardened bunkers and tunnel facilities." But according to James Tegnelia, the aim of Divine Strake (the test's official designation. If you don't know what a "strake" is, click here. How "Divine" got in there, I'd rather not think about.), is "to measure the effect of the blast on hard granite structures". Interesting, since even the one Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator already in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the B61-11, is useless against solid rock. If one didn't trust the Bush administration, one might suspect that they were hoping for a less than stellar performance by the largest imaginable conventional bunker-buster at the same time they are loudly proclaiming that Iran's nuclear program (largely located in underground facilities) to be the greatest danger facing the country, in order to get Congress to fund their nuclear bunker-busting dreams. And if one suspected that, one might even recall what Donald Rumsfeld told Congressman David Hobson-- the conservative Ohio Republican, who has been primarily responsible for stopping the RNEP program– last April, "You may win this year, but we'll be back."

Hobson's no dove. The reason he opposed bunker-busting nukes is purely practical: he's worried "some idiot might try to use it." And the only place you're going to find a bigger concentration of idiots willing to risk it all on a bad bet than Las Vegas, is in the Bush administration.

(photo via the Las Vegas Review-Journal)

Hosting the U.S. premiere of Crash turned out to be a coup for the 2005 Newport Beach Film Festival, whose organizers noticed a marked increase in interest from Hollywood for this year's April 20-30 run. Last year, director Paul Haggis led a small Crash contingent (sadly missing promised attendee actor/producer Don Cheadle, who was stuck somewhere else) to a makeshift stage next to a free vodka line in a Fashion Island courtyard to thank everyone for coming. I know because I was the last person in that vodka line; I was so close to Haggis the back of my head must appear in the same frame as his mug in the video that was being shot that night. And two more handsome heads you'll never see!

Of course, no one—even the many of us blown away that night—knew that the film would go on to spark a national debate on racial profiling, three Academy Awards (including Best Picture) and a vehement backlash from certain movie critics that continues to this day. (For the flipside, read Ella Taylor's review that ran in the Weekly; if I had a Best Film Review of the Year vote from the Academy, I'd have voted for that—and that's saying something 'cause, as her loyal Weekly readers know, Ms. Taylor always brings it.)

Meanwhile, the Crash machine keeps chuggin': Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the Los Angeles City Council and Police Chief William Bratton are scheduled to honor Haggis, his fellow producers, their cast and crew and Lionsgate Pictures at an April 4 ceremony at City Hall, whose corridors appear in parts of the film. They'll all celebrate the DVD release of the Crash Director's Cut Edition, and Da Mayor and Council will designate it Crash/Film L.A. Day (as opposed to that ill-conceived, Sam Yorty-era Crash/Jetliner L.A. Day).

In other Crash action, down below you'll find a little tidbit relating to that movie and the debut feature by director Aric Avelino, whose American Gun is hanging in for another week at arthousy venues across the land, including the Regency Lido in his adopted hometown of Newport Beach (Avelino is originally from Brea). The first question the Weekly fired at him in a recent Q&A was this:

I hope this doesn't offend you, but as I was watching American Gun I found myself thinking of Crash. Must've been the intersecting storylines or something. Crash (the Haggis version, not the Cronenberg version) is a film I liked, but I know for every person like me there is someone with an intense hate for it (like our lead film critic, who tagged it the worst movie of the year). Frankly, I can see American Gun splitting audiences like that as well. Any thoughts?

You can read his answer and the rest of the cold-medicine induced mess here.

A couple days later, the editor who so expertly crafted that question (LOVE that guy! No, really: love him, he's sooooo lonely) read the reviews of his Village Voice Media colleagues. Michael Atkinson (whose review the Weekly picked up) wrote this:

The first entry in the Crash subgenre sweepstakes, filmmaker Aric Avelino's ambitious dependie follows the Paul Haggis award magnet's business plan pretty slavishly: Take on a contemporary social crisis (here, gun control) by way of multiple story lines, each illuminating different perspectives on the problem, and each juiced with frustration, melodrama, and mid-level-cast acting fireworks.

Atkinson's review was kinder and gentler than the one offered up the same week by LA Weekly's Scott Foundas:

. . . [T]he tag line for American Gun—One Nation Under Fire—tells you all you need to know: This is Crash with gun violence substituted for racism, although the tone of director–co-writer Aric Avelino's debut feature may be closer to one of those pious public-safety films that used to be shown to schoolchildren in order to frighten them out of potential bad behavior.

If you followed that "vehement backlash from certain movie critics" link above, you'll discover Foundas was one of those Crash-bashing crits, meaning Avelino didn't have a chance with him from the get-go. But since three different journos who had no idea what the others were writing drew the same Crash-American Gun connection, it's hard to pin it all on run-of-the-mill pack journalism.

This time.

As if anyone cares, I was about to write my own kinder, gentler American Gun review when I read the far-more-talented Atkinson's and decided dude had hit on everything I would have, only oh-so-much better. We both were definitely on the same page when it came to his writing this:

The acting is pro enough to keep your blood up . . .