Abel Raises Cain Before Bruno

still from Abel Raises Cain ©Jenny Abel & Jeff Hockett

With all the brew ha over Bruno, I got to thinking about the mockumentary and remembered seeing Abel Raises Cain at the Camden International Film Festival in 2005. One of my favorites was Abel Raises Cain about Alan Abel. It's a documentary made by his daughter Jenny Abel with Jeff Hockett. Alan was the prankster behind SINA (Society for Indecency to Naked Animals) as well as the 2000 campaign to ban all breastfeeding. One of my favorites was the hoax that purported the nutritiousness of human hair on a New York tv talk show (to which Jenny Abel, as a child, accompanied her father on tv but refused to eat her hair sandwich.)

Alan Abel was way ahead of Ali G and, in fact, made a couple of mock documentaries himself. I'm trying to get a copy of his 1971 Is There Sex After Death? for the upcoming 2009 Decatur Film Festival.

He's still the only person for whom the New York Times ever had to retract an obituary.

Is Anyone Listening?

Labrador, 1998 ©ArtCamp LLC, Russell Kaye & Sandra-Lee Phipps, Photographers

From last weeks New Yorker. A profile of James Hansen by Elizabeth Kolbert. He's the go-to scientist that created one of the first models to study climate change. For thirty years he's studied our climate. For thirty years his models have been very accurate. For thirty years no one has really heard his message. Below is a excerpt with a letter he wrote to Mr and Mrs Obama in Dec '08.

©Elizabeth Kolbert & The New Yorker

Today's New York Times

and slideshow here