The Art of the Con

The art of the con is as old as civilization, employing the skills of deception, misdirection, and the psychology of human greed and the desire to get something for nothing.

Charlatans...

Came across this video... as a boy he didn't know his father, and an army man approaches him after a war, and tells him, "I am your father."

Internet Archive & Public Domain

Ok, I'm at Archive.org and I was confused on how to find public domain material, but it's out there.

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%2Fmetadata%2Flicenseurl%3Ahttp%2Apublicdomain%2A

Type in /metadata/licenseurl:http*publicdomain* in the search box, and it will return a giant list of entries that are public domain. Then select from the drop down, the different media type you want to filter by.

Every time you hit search, it only searches by what's offered below. So if you want to open up the search, hit the back button.

Here are some interesting pieces that may be fun to pull from...

http://www.archive.org/details/alcohol_is_dynamite
http://www.archive.org/details/200
http://www.archive.org/details/answering_the_childs_why
http://www.archive.org/details/booby_traps
http://www.archive.org/details/bookkeeping_and_you
http://www.archive.org/details/brotherhood_of_man_1946
http://www.archive.org/details/buying_food
http://www.archive.org/details/crossroads_USA
http://www.archive.org/details/democracy_1945
http://www.archive.org/details/fda_quackery_psa

Quackery is good...




This is a clip from road to ruin...
http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/index.jsp?cid=209479

Murder Suicides

To continue a thread of conversation sort of started with Fritzie today... I came across an article about a man who killed his family and himself after losing his job... The scary thing, is this is happening a lot as the economy suffers. I think there's a connection in this murder/suicide trend (how awful to call it that) to the realization of a kind of 'self-con' in buying into the american dream or what have you, and the reality that the dream is built on falsities. It's really horrible, and tragic; I wonder just what their train of thought is that leads them down this road.

From the NYTimes...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/us/28family.html?hp

Man Kills His Wife and 5 Children

By REBECCA CATHCART and RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: January 27, 2009
LOS ANGELES — A man shot and killed his wife and five young children before taking his own life Tuesday, apparently out of despair after the couple lost their jobs at a hospital, the police and city officials said.

Officers responding to 911 calls placed by the man, Ervin A. Lupoe, and by a television station to which Mr. Lupoe had sent a fax around 8:30 a.m., found seven bodies in a house in Wilmington, a working-class neighborhood near the Port of Los Angeles.

A police spokesman said the bodies were identified as Mr. Lupoe; his wife, Ana; their 8-year-old daughter and two sets of twins (5-year-old girls and 2-year-old boys).

Mr. Lupoe had telephoned and sent a fax to KABC-TV that indicated “he was despondent over a job situation and he saw no reasonable way out,” said Lt. John Romero, a police spokesman.

The two-page, typewritten letter made clear he was going to kill his family and himself. The station quickly called 911 to report the letter and then posted it on the station Web site after the bodies were discovered.

The letter said Mr. Lupoe and his wife had worked as medical technicians at a Kaiser Permanente hospital in West Los Angeles, but recently lost their jobs after a dispute with an administrator.

The administrator, it said, had asked them on an unspecified day why they had come to work, and then added, “You should have blown your brains out.”

Two days after the confrontation, the letter said, the Lupoes lost their jobs and began planning their deaths and those of their children.

“Why leave the children to a stranger?” Mr. Lupoe said his wife had asked. “So, here we are,” he wrote.

Kaiser Permanente officials issued a statement confirming the couple had worked at their hospital in West Los Angeles but would not say when they had lost their jobs or provide other details. “We are deeply saddened to hear of the deaths of the Lupoe family,” the statement said.

Although the police are treating the case as a murder-suicide, Deputy Chief Kenneth Garner said the police were still sorting through a discrepancy.

Contrary to his fax and reported call to the television station, the man told a 911 operator he had arrived home and found his family dead, Deputy Chief Garner said. But investigators found a revolver next to Mr. Lupoe’s body, the only weapon in the home, he said.

The police said they found the bodies of the three daughters next to their father in a front bedroom upstairs. The boys were with their mother in a back bedroom on the same floor.

“A man who recently lost his job allowed the despair to put him over the edge,” said Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who held a news conference outside the house. “Unfortunately, this has been an all-too-common story in the last few months. But that does not and should not lead people to resort to desperate measures.”

A man killed his ex-wife, her parents and friends at a Christmas party in West Covina last month after losing his job. In October, a 45-year-old father of three shot and killed his wife and children in their Porter Ranch home after describing financial stress in a suicide note.

Mayor Villaraigosa urged Los Angeles residents experiencing financial stress to talk to friends and neighbors and seek counseling “to get back on their feet and keep their families afloat.”

Cecilia Yvar, 68, whose grandson often played with the Lupoes’ 5-year-old twins, said the family moved to the neighborhood four years ago. The Lupoes added a second story to their home last year, Ms. Yvar said, and landscaping to their backyard.

“Maybe too much money, too much stress,” she said while wiping away tears.

Ms. Yvar said the couple kept to themselves, but greeted their neighbors warmly each day. On Sunday, she said, they appeared unhappy as they walked together outside.

Yolanda and Oscar Lopez, who have lived in the area three months, said they had seen the Lupoes in the neighborhood.

“There’s so much pressure from the economy and people out of work and stuff,” Mr. Lopez, 28, said. “But adults, they know there are other options. You don’t have to do this.”

Music Ideas

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy-IkTiu-rc&feature=channel_page













A really fun beginning...

Sexual Blackmail

Picked up this book by Angus McLaren, "Sexual Blackmail, a modern history." Totally by chance, but there's some amazing stuff in here. I'm looking at blackmail as a form of 'confidence game.'

Some favorite quotes,

"It was not a crime to ask for money. Nor was it illegal to tell the truth about a person's past. But putting the two acts together as a threat constituted blackmail, a criminal offense." (side note - the play between what's illegal, and what's a crime - not always hand in hand. Hiring of judges based on ideological beliefs=illegal, but not a crime!)

"The law on blackmail is an apparent paradox. It declares that threatening to tell the truth is a crime. It raises the question of what is just: to pretend to be a moral person while leading a double life, or to gain by exposing another's guilty secrets?

"When morality was made the law's business it often became the criminal's business as well."

"The law on blackmail appeared at times to be one more defensive weapon used by the powerful to protect themselves. Blackmail accounts raised the specter of the young, the female, and the poor deviously plundering older, wealthy males... Reflecting a male perspective, these tales aimed to impress on society the necessity of respecting the power represented by age, gender, and wealth."

"Rather than silencing sexual subversives, the court accounts led to the airing of embarrassing questions: Did a man who seduced a woman "owe" her anything? Why should homosexuality be criminalized? Should women be permitted to abort?

"Society preferred to blame the eruption of blackmail on certain "dangerous" women and men rather than come to terms with the tension between the laws and the sexual practices that often provided temptation to unscrupulous individuals."

"Fear of "gold diggers in the 1930's led many American states to revoke laws - known as "heart balm statutes" - that provided compensation for the jilted."

"In the 1950's and 60's British parliamentarians claiming that the existing law encouraged the blackmailing of homosexuals, succeeded in the partial decriminalization of that sexual activity."

The gist that I'm getting is that, in the 1800's, the victorian age was in, as were the defined roles for gender and sexuality. As practice expanded beyond those boundaries, tensions rose. Making certain things illegal encouraged blackmailing. But it wasn't only that the practice was illegal, it ruined one's reputation, and character - two things that have monetary value. More later.

Company Meeting #1

Friztie came over for dinner and we caught up with life and began to discuss the Montreal Production. I threw out several options, my fairy-tale show, Murmur the dance theater chamber piece about heart and failure, and remembered this crazy idea I had for a title of a show: Sport Sex Death Porn.

When she heard that title, her ears picked up. She was immediately intrigued to where this was going. As an effort to record our ideas and inspirations, and document the evolution of a seriously made from scratch work of art, I started this blog. It will hopefully serve as a useful tool in collaboration.

Fritzie and I are on the same wavelength, she immediately thought about the clean styled look to the show, and I knew exactly what she meant. And we both knew exactly how the postcards would look. I feel bad about addressing a work of art in this way - it really runs counter to my training and tradition where you start with something precious and nurture it like a baby.

Here are the ideas we're working with now... privileged kids/adults, sex workers, drug use, games people play, the economy, a journalistic approach, real lives of people, Shakespeare. I meditated for a little bit on this and I'm enjoying the play between what we buy (into) and what we pay for (it). It would reflect the title's purpose and content rather well, and then we could explore those topics any number of ways.

That's my jumping off place for now - Fritzie and I both like the premise where 3-4 people come together to play a game that involves really hurting each other. I like the idea of someone killing another out of shame or fear (but they kill the wrong person) and then committing suicide themselves as the person they were supposed to kill looks on.

Our next task is to bring on the brightest talents at our disposal and to 'sell' them on the idea of creating a new show, designed to sell, without selling out.

I'm also curious about time/period. And video projection. And tango.