rrrojer.net

Driving Driving Driving

“Ballad of the Black Gold”
video by Sam Ellison (Ashley/Amber‘s cinematographer!)
song by Reflection Eternal (Talib Kweli & DJ Hi-Tek)

The only income left for most of those who create is earned through self-promotion, but as Lanier points out this turns culture into nothing but advertising. It fosters a social ethic in which the capacity for crowd manipulation is more highly valued than truth, beauty or thought.

While the severing of intellectual property rights from their creators, whether journalists, photographers or musicians, means that those who create lose the capacity to make a living from their work, aggregators such as Google make money by collecting and distributing this work to lure advertisers. Original work on the Internet, as Lanier points out, is “copied, mashed up, anonymized, analyzed, and turned into bricks in someone else’s fortress to support an advertising scheme.” Lanier warns that if this trend is not halted it will create a “formula that leaves no way for our nation to earn a living in the long term.”

“Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth,” Lanier says.

Chris Hedges: The Information Super-Sewer – Chris Hedges’ Columns – Truthdig

As a founding (now lapsed) member of Harvard Free Culture and a former employee of Creative Commons, these are some pretty hard truths, thoughts I’ve been harboring for over 3 years now but reluctant to state publicly. But perhaps as a result of working on my thesis film— by far my most substantial endeavor to date— combined with getting ready to graduate— meaning next year not only will I no longer have institutional/financial support for making art, but I will have to actually earn a living— that I feel like it’s time to come out about my growing ambivalence towards “free culture.”

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He faulted the new video not for its failed attempt at Sontagian camp but for portraying the university as a kind of summer camp for élites. “It’s a variation on Marie Antoinette in the garden of Versailles,” he said. “I’m surprised they didn’t dress the girls as shepherdesses. In the ancien régime, this is the kind of thing that would have prompted the French Revolution. Are we supposed to send this to struggling youths in Asia and Africa?”

The New Yorker

(For those of you fortunate enough to have missed it, he’s speaking about these 17 minutes of institutionally-sanctioned musical theater hell.)

Prefuse 73: The Forest of Oversensitivity EP

Prefuse 73: Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian

Portofino video by blackmoth

Hoop Dreams video by Sam Gurry

happy travels!

Cameron‘s band The Franks has a new video out and it looks great, sounds great. Very impressive and lots of fun. They sure are stylish over there … something about watching The Doom Generation* this weekend and then seeing this video, combined with all the snow outside, is giving me some LA envy like I haven’t felt since I first read Weetzie Bat.

The Franks: Neon Politik from The Franks.

* I think Ché put it best – “The Repoman of the 90s” … definitely nsfw.

This student piece has everything I love in cartoons and folk songs. It’s adorable and grotesque, in the tradition of both Betty Boop and Ren & Stimpy. Moral but not preachy, it makes me really happy.

Story from North America by Kirsten Lepore and Garrett Davis.

[via Paul]

I’m a little late in the game posting about this one but I’m really digging muxtape. I’ve never been able to get into sites like last.fm because they seemed so impersonal, and kinda creepy… a robot spying on your itunes and then comparing you to this huge database and telling you whats compatible with your personal record. Muxtape is old school curatorial, your friends putting together the exact songs stuck in their head at the moment, and in an order that makes sense to them. Plus I like the post-web2.0 design that seems to be all the rage today – simple, clean lines, big text, and no goddamn rounded corners. Click once to play a song, once more for it to stop.

Of course, for all you readers out there philosophically opposed to listening to music through your browser, and who can’t be bothered to hack it out (thnx jono!), I’ll try to keep an mp3 archive of each playlist I upload on this site, and calling it fair use. Here’s my first mix, a collection of tracks that have been stuck in my head (for better or for worse) during the past month:

springtime fuck yea!

01 – Stro – clothing song
02 – The Breeders – Walk It Off
03 – Bondage Fairies – He-man
04 – Teengirl Fantasy – Portofino
05 – Battle of Mice – Sleep and Dream
06 – RjD2 – Ghostwriter
07 – Blind Melon – No Rain
08 – Rihanna – Umbrella (VNDLSM remix)
09 – Mistah F.A.B – Hula Hoop
10 – The Killers – Smile Like You Mean It (Fischerspooner Remix)
11 – M.I.A. – Paper Planes
12 – Lali Puna – Micronomic (boom bip remix (compilation edit))

It’s not a trip back home without a visit to Maxwell’s. Tonight I took my sister to her first rock show (and my first in some time– its been far too long since I’ve seen “live” music that consisted of more than a dude in front of a laptop or a coop jam session). It did not disappoint. I first discovered Los Campesinos! because of their animated music videos, but it turns out that they are one attractive band (their other videos attest to this). So I got to introduce lil’ sis to my favorite Maxwell’s ritual: its cozy enough that even if the music is lame, you can always content yourself ogling the cute boys and girls with guitars. Luckily in this case, the performance was fantastic, and the crowd great. I love shows in Jersey cuz people aren’t afraid to be enthusiastic. There was much dancing and cheering, and in a unsuccessful but valiant effort for an encore, even something of a sing-along.

I’m seriously all crushed out. Campesinos! are adorable; they sound like what when I was 15 I had hoped college would feel like. Sort of obnoxiously indie but so sweet that you have to smile. Anyway, tonight was the beginning of Campesinos! US tour. They’ve got shows in most of the cities that I have friends in, so if you dig indie-pop (think Apples in Stereo), definitely check em out.

Los Campesinos! – The International Tweexcore Underground

Also, the opening band, The Orion Experience, was lots of fun.

The Orion Experience – Blood & Money

The Orion Experience – The Cult of Dionysus

The Orion Experience – Obsessed With You

Los Campesinos! – My Year in Lists