A “national call to creative resistance.” Join the effort to end fascism. Register your events on October 2nd, 3rd, & 4th.
RIP Screaming Mad George 1956-2026
A heartfelt farewell to Screaming Mad George (a.k.a. Joji Tani), who left us on February 10, 2026. He was my student at SVA in 1977. I was teaching media communications, and to involve the students in the art of creating a spectacle, we took to the streets. The idea was to use a diversionary tactic to grab public attention.
The students staged a fake demonstration about a real issue in front of the New York governor’s office — the environmental impact of the supersonic Concorde jet. In the midst of the demonstration, the protesters were attacked by New York’s legendary Sewer Monster, created by Screaming Mad George.
This was early in his extraordinally creative career designing visual effects for bizarre, macabre, and gruesomely realistic effects. Read the full story here.
Read his obituary here: “The Man Behind The PS1’s Oddest Game, Has Passed Away”,
Attempting to Humor the Humorless
There’s a long history of clowning for social justice. We need more of it. Thank you Felipe.
Send in the clowns: the new guard of activists combating the right, by Morgan Jerkins, The Guardian, September 16, 2026.
A growing cohort of performers ‘clown’ as a means to innovate traditional protest and create social change
On a humid morning on 15 July, Tillie the Clown, a Brooklyn-based drag performer whose real name is Taylor Horne, was waiting to be let inside a New York City council meeting. Horne had started getting into character at 5am, for a makeup and clown-costuming process that would take two hours. It would be another 10 hours before Horne was allowed to address the city council about the passing of Romanch’s Law, which would phase out and ultimately ban New York’s horse carriage industry.
The Joke’s on Who?
When will “cancel culture” evolve and stop trying to canceling speech that’s clearly and obviously protected by the 1st Amendment?
The price of campus humorlessness, by Washington Post, September 8, 2026.
The University of Washington pays $600,000 to a professor it investigated for poking fun at a land acknowledgment.
One way to identify ideologues is that they won’t tolerate ribbing. After the University of Washington recommended that computer science professors include in their course materials an acknowledgment of “the Coast Salish peoples of this land,” one instructor responded with a parody statement on his syllabus.
That angered the university administration, which launched an investigation. But now the professor has prevailed in court, winning $600,000 in damages and legal fees, as well as securing a vow by the university to allow his parody statement. Read whole article here.
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