The Sexy Chicken Manifesto

Here is a prime time version of the legendary Sexy Chicken Manifesto.
You can view it in full screen by hunting and pecking that arrow icon on the lower right corner of the screen.




The subsequent versions of this will probably appear on current tv, a web site devoted to frivolous videos. It's a minor miracle that the footage I captured on St. Patrick's Day was enough to edit anything coherent. In fact, this video is the only coherent thing produced by that day. Everything else is a dizzy blur. The lame thing about this is the resolution is bad. There's nothing I can do about that.
Fortunately, Ken's and my instincts were enough to get by and a few hours slicing off my camera goofs and bloopers (there might be a blooper reel if I'm motivated) was enough to mine the two hours worth of footage for 9 minutes of meaningful discourse on chickens.
If it weren't for the cool-headed chicken farmer and his audible and enunciated narrative this would not have worked. My own natural voice is incoherent except when I perform little skits. It took a lot of tiny slicing on the audio to remove most traces of my voice.
Experience is the best way to get experience. You can't talk about making movies or dream about it. You have to find a way to make it. I felt this project had value, that the resulting video would be "Great" but when I was filming it I had serious doubts deadened by vodka and orange juice. Not only would the video not be great it wouldn't even get finished. Then the tape sat in the camera for two weeks because I had no way to put it on my computer. When I finally got the right firewire card my computer was too slow to edit the footage. But persistence paid off.
I remember seeing pictures of Ken's chickens last year and thinking I'd like to make some kind of visual tribute to those chickens. Partly to give myself a goal and partly because I think the chicken holds the key to reconnecting with our natural habitat. Give me Toyota's marketing budget and I would put a chicken coop in every backyard.
here's the video again from the blogger upload. there's no full screen option so I've demoted it down here.




Now for the daily rant:

Morals don't shift but cultural bullies are running an aggressive smear campaign against sustainable living. Reliance on technology is not imperative, unless your wealth is tied to a majority share of Microsoft stock. If it is then you must convince consumers of their relative worthlessness when lacking the latest tech product. If you don't succeed in translating luxuries into necessities then your wealth will wither. Advertising can be recognized by infants as soon as they can focus and become the #1 stimuli in a human's life right down to the logo on the blood thinner you're taking in your death bed. That's no accident. The smartest, most driven people in the world understand that in order for wealth to be controlled people's images of themselves must be controlled and what you see on television is an attack on self determination. Now that tech products have actually become necessities the leash is getting shorter. If you are like me then you are surrounded by copper wires that snake through your life in black and white tangled nests. Who invited them here?
It's not the government's job to censor the tsunami of information. The Puritans had a new continent to escape to. We don't have that luxury so our defenses will have to be within our own minds.
I believe individual people are intuitively smart and economical. But cultures can easily run amok like ours has done. The only way to turn it around is to think for yourself. Long live the chicken!

Sexy Chicken Manifesto

I've attempted this before, a manifesto to organize my theory on human interaction. I have several manifestos in journals that should be sealed until I die. But my latest video project I've considered calling "Chickens are Sexy" has me seeing things more clearly, my role as a counterculture revolutionary. You can either go along or you can resist. But if you resist with a half-baked idea of what you are doing then you might as well get a job a Starbucks. But since survival is so difficult no one has a clear idea of what it means to seriously revolt against board room manufactured culture. There is no time to break it all down. But I took the time and I think I'm ready to publish my manifesto on this topic.

It came to me as I told Claire for the third time that "Chickens are not the subject of my documentary. They are the stars. The topic is Native Culture Sublimation."
I kept trying to explain myself because every time I mentioned it I sounded, as Claire said, "Insane."
Am I insane? I don't think so. But my sexy chicken documentary is central to my goal and I decided that I need a manual to follow. But there is no manual so I will need to write a manual: The Sexy Chicken Manifesto/Manual. It's a mouthful, I know.

See, I've studied the methods of the prevailing culture. I see the brainwashing that has to start early...almost at birth. Tyson Food, Disney, Toyota...THEY CAN NOT AFFORD TO LET YOU THINK FOR YOURSELF. THEY WILL GET INTO YOUR BRAIN. They also have billions of dollars to do it. But their methods are what I've studied and it's basic propaganda, a manipulation of priorities until their priorities appear to BE YOUR ONLY CHOICE. So you choose between a Camry and a Corrolla. It's liberating! Toyota-thon (like a pledge drive for cancer research) A Hannah Montana doll has a choice of outfits. Awesome! I get to choose between fish sticks and chicken sticks? Which do I want tonight??

Really, the board room giants are children with drug habits and call girls on speed dial and acne on their ass and pit stains on their blouses. But do I need to attack them? No. That's the easy path. Their biggest fear is that someone will come along who is better at every facet of their brainwashing methods and will beat them at their own game. Hackers and open shareware software programmers do this all the time. Look up the history of Apache server. Written by guys in their spare time it blew away everything to the point it is the #1 HTTP server and the internet owes a great debt to the developers. I love the story of a Windows exec trying to figure out what his programmers were using and it all came down to,
"It's just a free server."
"But did you buy it?"
"No. You just download it."
"Who wrote it?"
"Anyone can write it or improve it. It's open source."
The guy looked around at his gigantic office of overpaid programmers and must've felt like an ant under a microscope. I think that anecdote was in a book called The Earth is Flat. Fact-checkers get to work!

Anyway, my goal with the Sexy Chicken Manifesto/Manual is to supplant dominant cultural dialogue with my own. That's the only way to stick it to The Man. You can not fight The Man, you just have to outsell The Man. Can I outsell The Man? I think so. My product is not counterculture, it is sexy chickens. Are chickens sexy? Yes. Very sexy. Will I employ sex to market chickens? Yes, I will. Not chickens having sex or people having sex with chickens but definitely sexual images, a tender breast, a long red fleshy waddle, talons clipped just so from digging for worms. And those wings~! So fucking delicious and erotic!
I mention this because what I will be asking people to do for a few days is to be filmed saying, "Chickens are Sexy." This mantra (people are so easily influenced) will become a battle cry of the next revolution. Did anyone catch that Starbucks marketing campaign where the entire world could sing All You Need Is Love? This is a very good campaign. The marketing strategists at Starbucks are earning their money.


The Manifesto/Manual may take some time to publish but the chapters I have under development are as follows:

Hannah Montana: The Whore of Disneyland
We Were All Eggs Once. (Except Steve Jobs...He Was Protoplasm)
LIVE Is EVIL Spelled Backwards
Charlie Manson Baked Good Organic Bread
Repeat After Me: Chickens Are Sexy
How To Play Harmonica

There will be a disclaimer at the start of the manual that says, "For entertainment purposes only." which is funny because if I do it right then it will slowly erode all previous definitions of acceptable culture.

Howl

That's no hoax. That's an Arctic Wolf I found at the Shubenacadie Provincial Wildlife Park (zoo). I was trying to figure out how to climb the fence to get in there when in the distance a train whistled. This caused the gray wolves in the next pen to howl The chain reaction caused the Arctic Wolf to whine a little and then howl too in response to the train. They were born and raised in captivity yet retain this elemental assembly call. Somewhere out there, they suspect, are others of their kind living different lives and their howl summed up their mournfulness. Or maybe that is me projecting my own wishes onto them.
The few visitors stopped to listen, holding their breath. The howl means something to everyone and its echo is in danger of being lost or at most it will merely answer the call of the log train rolling into Halifax.
Then a loud child came along wearing a Toy Story t-shirt and dirty baseball cap. He pointed.
"Wook at the fox, mommy! Wook at the white fox!"
"It's a wolf," I said under my breath, a tear for the future rolling down my hollow cheeks. "It's an Arctic Wolf."

Not A Pretty Sight

After I saw this picture I broke open the "Emergency" can of beef soup. And I didn't only eat half of it like I usually do. I ate the whole can. And in an attempt to put some flank on that ham I made up some noodles and ate those too.

Cider House Rules

I was really holding out hope to complete the film reenactment trifecta of "Shawshank Redemption" "Into The Wild" and finally "Cider House Rules.




I thought it was going to happen when the guitarist from the Ceilidh told me that a farm down the road was hiring bean pickers. Yes! I would get to work with Jamaicans and learn the hard facts of life...just like Tobey Mcguire's character in Cider House Rules. What a triumph that would be.

To recap: I spent a winter in a decrepit boarding house in New England where the remains of cement workers and junkies and depressed ex-cons go to die. Oh, what fun I had feeling sorry for myself. I look back on those days with real nostalgia, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and playing penny poker of a three card variety. Getting drunk and falling up the stairs, going to the local bar and dancing with the divorced sheet metal workers and medical product assemblers. I didn't go so far as tie a rope around an exposed rafter only because there were no exposed rafters. My room looked out over the frozen river. I had become Brooks minus the long years in jail.


The lessons from that experience are still percolating in my brewery as the black goat of my demise climbs the crooked staircase to the narrow precipice of self-loathing. Raise your hand if you ever lived with a terminally diabetic balloon magician.





I escaped the Laconia boarding house and cream always rises to the top, so they say, and I found some work in the semiconductor field, which was boring as hell and taught me nothing.


As for the Into The Wild story, I have been cursed by not only a physical likeness to a Christopher McCandless (wiry, bearded, athletic) and a temperamental, reclusive, anti-social, misanthropic, resentful side that he had around some people (family) and an effervescent, spontaneous, devil-may-care, come-what-may, life is an adventure attitude around other people (indifferent strangers) BUT I also went to Fairbanks, Alaska in 1989 with the official goal to take classes at the university but really I wanted to homestead and pan gold. I failed in this goal that year because of circumstances that will be investigated upon my death, but returned in the late summer of 1992* after convincing myself (during a transcontinental bicycle trip) that I had ghosts or "demons" to vanquish by completing a pilgrimage to Fairbanks. That happened to be the same year that McCandless had decided to hitchhike to Alaska to live off the land in Denali National Park. On the trip to Fairbanks (I hitchhiked too) I was involved in adventures too numerous to name, the two major ones being (in abridged form) picked up by a drunk Innu Indian and his beaten English wife as we swerved through British Colombia to an Indian reservation where we went to a cowboy bar and subsequently insulted (or were insulted) to the point that we left, the Indian broke into a house as I drunkenly allowed him to stand on my shoulders crashing through a broken window into the kitchen to steal various effects that he said "Belonged to him" and then racing away with me driving with one eye closed and all his belongings in a trailer that bounced and clunked down the dusty Alaskan Highway into the dim light of the Northern Night. Then followed a showdown between he and I as his verbal abuse of his wife had become intolerable. He wielded a stolen double bladed axe and stared at me.




"Get in the car and drive!" he yelled.




My hands were shaking. I was torn up in ways that still cripple me today, my groin tendons were torn, my collarbones were separated, my shoulders were separated. I couldn't stand up straight. I had already paid him gas money and now I couldn't continue to drive. The stars shone their indifference as coyotes and bears wandered the thick woods and mosquitoes buzzed in the air so thick that sometimes you could only see outlines of another person. That evening I could see his hateful native eyes as perfectly as a sepia toned photograph of Geronimo. I can especially recall the grease around his mouth from the moose jerky he had been stuffing in his face for an hour.




I said nothing but grabbed my backpack and my treasured walking stick and turned like some kind of minor character in a Sergio Leone movie and did not walk up or down the highway but walked directly into the woods. Only later did I realize I had left the last crumb of food I owned in the back seat of his rotten station wagon, a bag of chocolate chip cookies that had been given to me hundreds of kilometers earlier by a huge man riding a motorcycle who arrived as in a dream while I slept in the breakdown lane and handed me an apple, water and the cookies (which I'd saved for when I really needed them.)





I believe the very next ride I got was with a man who subsequently drove off a T intersection (as I and a British hitchhiker screamed for him to stop) into a ditch, hopelessly injuring my back and getting the truck totally stuck. The driver robbed several houses and then stole a car with the keys he'd found in a house. The British guy (a busker who played in front of liquor stores for change) went for help while I tried to wave down cars (to escape). A posse was formed, the driver was hunted down after he drove the car into a swamp and captured and locked in a bathroom. He escaped through a window and broke his ankle and was hunted down again. I fled before the law arrived.









So, when I arrived in Fairbanks in July 1992, I could not walk up a flight of stairs or tie my shoes let alone go to the wild like McCandless. I did meet a kid who had claimed to have canoed down the Yukon river killing small game (and eating his dog) and was working at a Sizzler to make money for his next adventure. Together we would sneak into the tallest office building in Fairbanks and take the elevator to the top floor and then sneak through the emergency exit to the roof where we could look south where, even though it was several hundred miles away, Mt. McKinley rose above the tundra. We both wanted to go and live off the land but, as I limped back to the rescue mission, I knew it is easier said than done. The demon's amplified laughter howled in my ears.









I found work as a retail inventory clerk around the time McCandless was starving to death.









Ever since that time the number one comment I get, no matter where in the world I am, is "Have you read that book about that guy who died in a bus in Alaska? What was his name?"



So I have had more opportunities than usual to ponder the similarities.


There is no award for reenacting parts from all these movies but there is a quiet satisfaction in delving deeper into the stories than your casual fan. For instance, I don't think anyone I've talked to about McCandless knows what his deal was. Everyone wants to have an opinion because everyone is assholes but no one has done any of the dirty research and experimentation that would crack the mystery. Missing from the movie and from the book is what was obviously a desire to "start over" to wipe the slate clean. To start from scratch. Start what from scratch, you ask. Start everything from scratch. Why would he want to start everything over from scratch? Because it is all hopelessly fucked up. That rationalization and that alone will land a college graduate in the middle of nowhere with a bag of rice, a rifle and some clothes as he purposefully covers his tracks. The new world will begin HERE and that's where he camps.

Anyway, that's the kind of analysis you have when you actually hitchhike to Alaska opposed to when you read about someone hithhiking to Alaska.

Which brings us to Cider House Rules, the last movie in the trifecta. So, what would picking apples teach me? I don't know, but I wanted to find out and the way to find out is not to watch Cider House Rules or read the book. The way to find out is to go to Nova Scotia, find a farm where Jamaican men pick beans and trim cabbage, get a job where you feed bunnies and give chickens clean shavings and give the alpaca a bit of carrot, work from sunrise to sunset with the Jamaicans, smoke their weed, listen to their jokes, offend them and apologize and embrace the farm life whether it kills you or doesn't. Then you will have your own analysis of Cider House Rules.

But thus far I have been denied. This perfect hat trick of film roles may not be my destiny to fulfill.

I would like to feed the guinea pigs and goats but they do not need me to pick beans. Furthermore, the big operations can not pay cash because they only operate through the bank and the small operations already have enough cash workers.

This farm in Nova Scotia was beautiful, fresh air, clean water, rich vegetables. There is a place that is not hopelessly fucked up and this is it. I don't have to start everything over but it does take work to find a place where Disney's poison has not penetrated and mice are vermin and ducks DON'T SMOKE CIGARS!

*My memory was off by 1 year. I bicycled and then hitchhiked to Alaska in 1993, right around the time the McCandless story was becoming known. In 1992 I was a Merchant Marine.