by Travis Mateer
How can one stop a time-traveling alchemist intent on identifying and removing the nefarious mechanism of narrative control deployed by the psychopath class to keep each of us human sparks from understanding we have a direct line to the divine?
Ha, trick question, because YOU CAN’T, although this week certainly featured enough efforts attempting just that, starting with the screw in my tire, and ending with a little altercation at Pie Hole last night with a butthurt critic of my journalism. In between those fun bookends I learned my mugshot is posted at a local non-profit AND I got a heads up that I’m being called a schizophrenic by a local police officer, which led to a quick lesson for Missoula PD on Newton’s law about actions and reactions.
Also, I managed to squeeze in an expensive trip to the ER thinking appendicitis, but was told it appeared I was doing the kidney stone dance before the tests confirmed I’ve got a stone to pass out of my pee hole. I’d prefer a dozen altercation at PIE hole if it meant having nothing come out of my PEE hole.
Did I turn my shitty week into poem songs? Of course I did, and here’s one of ’em:
In local art news, the Roxy Theater is gleefully promoting its suckling of Uncle Sam for NEA dollars. Is this the same Roxy that torpedoed my effort to show my documentary, then panhandled Missoula for a hundred grand a year later? Of course it is!
From the first link (emphasis mine):
Missoula’s own Roxy Theater on Wednesday said it will receive a welcome grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support this year’s Montana Film Festival.
The theater received one of more than 1,100 grants awarded by the NEA that totaled more than $37 million in all. This year’s funding marks the second round of funding for the 2024 cycle and the first time the Roxy has received the grant.
“We are so thrilled and grateful to receive this funding – the first NEA grant in the Roxy’s history,” said Mike Emmons, the artistic director of the Montana Film Festival. “Because the NEA has faith in our vision, we will be able to bring extraordinary films from around the world to our community.”
For a counter to this uncritical joy at getting NEA funding, here’s an article worth considering from The Hill, along with an excerpt to get those non-zombified brains a-thinkin’! (emphasis mine):
Public choice theory provides us with this simple insight: if we are going to assume people are selfish, narrowly focused on their own lives and needs, then this assumption should hold across the board. That is, it must hold even when we’re considering the NEA, its chairperson, and its council.
And herein lies the problem with ostensibly innocuous government agencies such as the NEA, with modern government’s relentless mission creep.
Government-funded art is publicly-funded art only once government is lazily conflated with the public. It is not the public (whatever indeed that may mean) that decides which art projects are to be supported with taxpayer dollars.
The taxpayers are never consulted, as they tend to favor art to which funding flows quite without compulsion — the kind of lowbrow art at which the sophisticates of the NEA council turn up their noses.
Yes, low-brow art, like hand puppets and poems with simple rhyme schemes relying heavily on visceral bodily functions!
Speaking of shit, Martin “Gomer” Kidston continues to exemplify what propaganda for the local cabal looks like by what you DO NOT SEE when you go looking for “journalism” from the Missoula Current.
What do I mean? I mean you will see NO MENTION of our County Commissioner, Josh Slotnick, and his former investment in the Corner Farm project. If you’re not averse to traipsing through shit, I challenge you to read Gomer’s “article” and find any mention of Josh and the controversy I of course covered when it happened.
Here’s the closest Marty comes to doing his alleged job as journalist (emphasis mine):
A request to apply $310,000 in funding from the Open Space Bond to preserve an 8-acre farm in the Orchard Homes neighborhood will advance to a public hearing in June, the City Council decided on Wednesday.
The Corner Farm Open Space Project sits at the corner of Tower and Third Streets and is currently owned by Neva Hassanein, who bought out the property’s other two owners last year.
Hmmm, I wonder who those “other two owners” are?
Nevermind, it’s almost the weekend, and I got pain to alchemize and mutha fukin methodology handbills to make, which will the verses of the above poem-song.
And here’s another one for this ominously cloudy Friday, but first the pitch for donations to Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF), since tires and ER visits can quickly hit over $500 dollars.
Thanks for reading!