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Let the media whoring begin

With Webzine fast approaching, I find myself doing a bit of media and public pimping to get the word out. Last week, I pimped Webzine at Dorkbot. I’m not much into public speaking but after a couple of beers and seeing friendly faces in the audience, it went pretty smoothly. Last Thursday, I was on Chris Pirillo’s streaming radio and podcast show, reliving the past and projecting the future of Webzine. This Tuesday, I’ll be on a panel called “Vlogging, and Blogging and Podcasts, Oh My!” that’s happening from 5-8pm at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (701 Mission Street @ 3rd in SF). It’s FREE if you want to come check it out, you just have to RSVP by sending an email to news@davidperry.com. With all that behind me, I’ve still got an event to produce.

Major Ripoff

Major Ripoff

So, so lame. News from Dischord Records:

Many people have now noticed that Nike has appropriated the Minor Threat artwork and logo for a new skateboard demo / ad campaign. To set the record straight — Nike never contacted Dischord to obtain permission to use this imagery, nor was any permission granted. Simply put, Nike stole it and we’re not happy about it. We are not yet sure what options, if any, we have to stop Nike from using our images to sell their shoes, but if you would like to direct your complaints to Nike that would be a good place to start.

Come on Nike. With an army of marketing drones and a limitless advertising budget at your disposal, all you could come up with is a blatant ripoff of DC’s seminal punk rock band’s art? Ironically, this whole thing should bring more attention to how lame Nike is and hopefully educate a few people on the meaning of corporate co-optation of culture. Conact Nike or give them a call at 1-800-344-6453 and share your thoughts on the matter.

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BLF: To Serve Man

BLF: To Serve Man
Reason #74 why San Francisco rules. On the 50th anniversary of the existence of McDonald’s, the Billboard Liberation Front unwrapped a little birthday present across the street from a franchise in the Haight. A billboard graphic was revealed of a pudgy Ronald and slovenly alien created by Ron English whose work was featured in the brilliant movie Super Size Me. Soon after the unveiling of the billboard and accompanying mechanized Ronald McDonald feeding a Big Mac into a grotesque figure, a couple dozen clowns dressed as Ronald as well as a few Hamburglers showed up to pay their respects to the piece. The phrase To Serve Man comes from a disturbing Twilight Zone episode. You just don’t see this kinda shit in Tulsa, and that’s a shame cause Tulsa really needs it. Laughing Squid and SFist has a complete rundown of the craziness.

Videos contradict cops at RNC

There’s a piece in today’s NY Times [reg required] that describes how amateur video helped get a few people off who were falsely charged during the RNC protests last year. The real story is how the cops, in at least two cases, completely lied and fabricated evidence.

“We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed,” the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. “I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own.”

…

During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints.

The last bit about the officer not being present to make the arrest doesn’t surprise me. When I was arrested, I was basically assigned an officer to make my arrest. There were so many of us corralled together on the sidewalk, they just peeled us off five at a time and delivered us to the next available officer for processing. For most of us, our arresting officers could not have witnessed (and therefore truthfully testify) about anything that we may or may have not done as they weren’t even present during the alleged infractions. Yay for cheap video cameras and people who aren’t afraid to use them.

That Subliminal Kid



Blackster
Originally uploaded by ekai.

DJ Spooky is friggin’ brilliant, let it be said. He kicked off Rhythm Science, a lecture last night on art history, philosophy, hiphop and remix culture, by invoking the gift economy. He handed out free mix CDs to everyone in the audience. He then proceded to pull out a personal stash of records that are obviously the tools of his trade and shared them with everyone in the audience. Not for keeps, but show and tell like, letting everyone fondle and caress each piece of vinyl before passing it on to his and her neighbor.

And then the lecture started. Here’s some notes I picked up along the way.

-the culture of copy
-information ecology
-the source code is human expression mediated by human interpretation
-the Beats of the 50’s gave birth to the beats of the 21st century
-fuckitall.com
-discourse of the nation state
-Internet inheriting the remixing from the streets (the first network)
-the artist as font, moveable to different compositions
-Spooky is a French lit and philosophy major
-dialectics of sound
-streetlights as controls of the original network, the streets
-music is liquid architecture
-copyright as it is written and as it is lived is diverging
-electronic music is the folk music of the 21st century, everyone knows and plays each other’s music
-Birth of a Nation was the first film to play in the White House

And then there was the other reason he was here. This free lecture proceeds a $40 a head gig he’s doing this weekend at Yerba Buena in San Francisco. Spooky uses the 1915 silent KKK propaganda film The Birth of a Nation as source material for video on 3 giant screens and an accompanying composition he created. Too rich for my blood right now, but I’d love to hear report backs.

UPDATE: Some pix I took. Steve Rhodes has more.

More RNC week updates

The Washington Post has this excellent front page story about innocent people being rounded up and detained by the NYPD during the RNC. The major media pretty much ignored or downplayed the issue at the time. It’s good to see the Post doing it’s job on this one. It is interesting, but not surprising to see Bloomberg and the cops continue to whitewash the whole thing as if it never happened.

Throughout the week, police also picked up dozens of people who appeared to have nothing to do with demonstrations, the New York Civil Liberties Union said. Among those swept up by police were several newspaper reporters, two women shopping at the Gap, a feeder company executive out for dinner with a friend, and Wendy Stefanelli, a costume designer with the TV show “Sex and the City,” who was walking to get a drink with a friend.

[…]

Bloomberg has acknowledged that police may have arrested some innocent bystanders, but he suggested that it was partly their fault.

“If you go to where people are protesting and don’t want to be part of the protest, you’re always going to run the risk that maybe you’ll get tied up with it,” he said on a weekly radio show on WABC.

Yeah Mike. Maybe you should have handed out copies of your new version of the Constitution to visitors before you wiped your ass with the one that has served us so swell for over 200 years.

Democracy Now! has this story on the use of low cost decentralized messenging tools to organize quickly to breaking news and events. SMS text messaging to over 5000 people, a staffed dispatch center, and VOIP text-to-speech breaking news update phone service were all used effectively to mobilize people. The major media and even the cops themselves relied on NYC.Indymedia to find out the latest protest actions.

On Wednesday, an Indymedia journalist posted the following report: “The Entire Scooter Goon Squad is wrapped around Fifth and 48th reading INDYMEDIA from an internet phone booth. Everyone should come by and bring your video cameras.”

You’d think that with a $60 million security budget the cops would have been able to invest in a few mobile Internet devices.

RNC Arrest Story Updates

More people have published their accounts of what happened to them during RNC week. Emmanuel sums it up nicely:

I can only pray that what happened on August 31 was a mistake that will never be repeated. But I can’t say I’m optimistic – with the mayor saying the police did an “A plus” job and the mass media beginning to mock the experiences we went through. If this is indeed the beginning of a trend, then this episode will represent a big step in the decline of our freedom. These sweeps will become commonplace in the name of security. People will be held without charges for days. The suspension of rights now used on “enemy combatants” will begin to be applied in other areas, whenever national security can be even peripherally invoked. We could all wind up paying a very heavy price for our complacency. That’s why, if there’s to be any hope at all, we have to care and we have to get through to others. That’s the purpose of my telling this story and I hope it manages to open some eyes.

And that’s the purpose for my story as well. I’ve compiled and a list of links to all the stories I’m aware of. If you know of others, please let me know and I will add them to this list.

http://www.2600.com/rnc2004/
http://nyc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/121217/index.php
http://www.satanslaundromat.com/sl/archives/000386.html
http://www.latinosporlapaz.org/DocumentationofGitmoontheHudson.htm
http://www.thismodernworld.com/weblog/mtarchives/week_2004_09_05.html#001736
http://www.punksinscience.org/jeffrey/
http://nyc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/119214/index.php
http://dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/104940/index.php
http://static-ephemera.net/archives/2004_09.html#002555
http://gothamgazette.com/blogs/wordpress/index.php?author=16
http://www.eddie.com/blog/archives/000012.html

Video interview with a very articulate detainee (Quicktime):
http://www.texasmonkey.com/archive/jail.story.090104.mov