Take a look at this website’s impressive collection of Soviet music and communist posters. Most of the songs, are in Russian, but the slogans on the posters have been translated to English. I love the ones with the flags on them, like these: (A) and (B). Interesting reminders of a former world order.
Becky and Sam are in Rio for the creative commons conference, iCommons. They are live-blogging it on openDemocracy. Sam wrote an interesting post on Brazilian independent music distributor, Trama, who have been doing free and cool things way before iTunes or MySpace even existed. Download some free music there. They’ve made it their business.
I won’t bore you about “net neutrality”. I’ll let Moby do it in a really bad video with good intentions. I couldn’t finish it. Lots of other videos about this circulating, thanks to a couple of “viral video” competitions. Apparently it only takes a $1000 prize to get people talking about something. Save the internet, people. The video below is better:
It amazes me that the content of this article hasn’t had any major political consequences (or even news coverage). Robert Kennedy Jr. writes in Rolling Stone a detailed account of how the 2004 election was stolen. There’s a polite question mark in the headline, but he really doesn’t seem to harbour any doubts. If even half this stuff is true, Bush would have been unseated: in Finland. In America, being a lying, cheating, theif seems to be part and parcel of politics. It’s like everyone feels safer and happier upholding the lie that everything is OK. Here, Mark Crispin Miller defends Kennedy from an attack from Salon, and comments on how Markos Moulitsas, Hillary Clinton and others have implied talking about election fraud is bad, because it will disencourage people from voting. What guts. This is exactly the weak fluff that currently passes for Democratic politics. By refusing to even touch the issue seriously, the media have also failed us.
Ay. Bush’s 19-year old nephew defends the port deal on early morning television before he signs off saying he’s going to ‘hit the bed’. He’s easy enough to make fun of, but let’s save the ire for the people who put him on TV. Know what I’m sayin?
I’ve been sick these past few days, and there is no TV in my apartment. So I am practically forced to download television off the internet (go ahead sue me: now that I am writing about it, it should count as fair use).
Everyone knows that Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City never wears the same thing twice. On HBOs website they tell you what designers make the look work, but then only sell cheap t-shirts. Two years ago, hundreds of women lined up on a street in New York to buy the real thing. Did HBO make the most out of a lucrative consumer market? NBC is working on it. If you visit the webpage for Will & Grace, you can buy Will’s designer espresso machine straight off NBCs website, or Grace’s Gucci shoes from Neiman Marcus.
OK, so it’s not quite the Truman Show, but product placement on television is becoming more and more popular with advertisers increasingly worried about people skipping commercials with Tivo-like devices. Already in 2004, the market in the US was worth $1.88 billion. Nothing is sacred. Advertisers have even openly begun courting newscasters to get paid airtime there too.
Is this really the price we have to pay to get more mindless television? The organisation Commercial Alert has fought it, the FCC has rebuffed them, and advertisers have defended it as a matter of freedom. In other words, yes.
Yesterday I saw a film at the MoMA (Tailenders) about evangelical Christian missionaries’ use of technology to spread ‘the word’. They travel to isolated villages on all continents handing out cardboard record players, cassettes and cassette players from a company, who have recorded bible stories in an astonishing 5500 languages. They call it “audio evangelism”. The film was pretty critical of the missionaries, and concluded that people were probably more attracted to the technology and the sound of their own language, than the actual content of the tapes.
