STAR WARS gif – Episode IV told using an animated gif.

Rading the 20th Century MP3 – a mashup by DJ Food

THIS ONE IS HOT!
A podcast RSS feed of MP3s bookmarked on del.icio.us. What a great way to find new audio! Just copy that link into your podcast download app (iTunes, Juicer aka ipodder, etc.) and get what ever the group mind that is del.icio.us selects.

Ruby tips me to a set of stencils on Flickr that appear to be taken by a US solider deployed in Taji, Iraq. Ya’ll should check out the Iraq or Soldier tag on flickr…lots of AMAZING pictures. Thanks for sharing with us Luodanli, come back safe!

Somewhat related links to the photo… DIY kids I love ya!

Stencil How-To and Community
Stenciling Tutorials


Stencil X Core – a stencil community on livejournal

another excuse to post a BANSKY stencil photo…

In my exploration of stencil art in DIY books at the Internationalist bookstore and on the photo website Flickr I’ve discovered BANSKY. He’s this amazing street artist from Bristol, UK. Art historians might call him a public artist. I see him as a Robin Hood Artist, stealing from the rich property owners and giving to the people beauty. Please check out his website and the amazing collection of photos of his work on Flicr. Tag: Bansky

One of my favorite RSS feeds is from the Stencil photo pool on flickr. http://www.flickr.com/groups/wwwflickrcomgroupsstencil/pool/feed/?format=rss_200

Some of the top tags for this pool are: stencil, streetart, graffiti, art, urban. All of this art is the digital art gallery I dreamed of in the 80’s. Even better it changes often like a new show has been hung in a gallery. Very influencial work for me. I need to get to work on a design for our wedding invites.

So this morning I saw this sign. It is a xeroxed peice of paper COVERING a permanent women’s bathroom sign in a university building. It reads; “UNISEX” “It Does not matter if you have a vagina, penis, or other, ALL bathrooms should be accessible to ALL people.”, and “Should be Accessible to Differently-Abled People”

Interesting awareness campaign. I’d call this protest art. (Sidenote: I took these pics with my Treo 650 camera, then uploaded them to Flickr. Capturing stuff like this is what makes a mobile camera with a network connection awesome!)

2046 is a beautiful film noir like movie with LOTS of close-ups that was shot in color and set in the 1960’s and the year 2046. Serenity is a funny Blade Runner like Sci-Fi movie with just enough cowboy genre characteristics to be fun and not annoying. Mirror Mask is the most surreal film I’ve ever seen and gives The Brother’s Quay a SERIOUS run for their money. Go see them all. (I highly recommend the Firefly DVD box set. Serenity the movie is based on the TV show Firefly. Same characters – same fun.)

To the point of the complexity of video production Rabbel on his AnarcoGeek blog said this:

Since the dawn of podcasting people have been looking beyond audio to video. I’ve mostly dismissed this as dreaming, and then pointed out the exceedingly high production costs to video. I’ve worked on producing videos and it’s a lot of work to get something which looks at all good. For that matter audio is a lot harder to produce than text. We are all trained in school how to write, and a little how to talk, but fewer people learn how to act. Creating quality productions is hard.

Please go read the rest of Rabble’s post. He really is a smart man.

Now I can totally relate to these concerns and have had similar experiences but… when I see Chuck Olsen’s Minnesota Stories videos I BELIVE lots of good vlogging we all want to watch will happen. It’s all a matter of changing production techniques to match a new medium and a new aesthetic quality. We all just need to find oursleves a new voice.

For starters the round yellow title credit was a beautiful throw back to 1970’s independent film. The words were superimposed on a moving shot of our main characters cruising in there ride. I knew right away what genre we were in for. This movie about a pimp and his hoes was more than a imitation of Dolemite and Shaft. As the character Shug sings, “It’s hard out there for a pimp. When ya trying to get money for the rent.”

This movie is a drama. It was shot and directed to achieve reality. This movie is violent, sexist, full of drug abuse, gun violence, child abuse, etc., etc. But like a lot of good art it’s mirrors real life. Unfortunately our world is so much more violent than this movie many times over.

There are a few happy times but mostly it’s one super sad scene after the other. The oppression just oozes off the screen. If it makes all us privileged white people uncomfortable… it should. This is what has become of the violent racist country our founding fathers created. But with their heads held high people overcome.

The characters in this movie live in Memphis, Tennessee. Upon buying tickets I exclaimed. “This must be the summer of movie segregation”. With the Dukes of Hazzard and Hustle and Flow at the same movie theater at the same time. It always amazes me how art imitates life.

I’ve heard tell of quite a bit of controversy in the African American community over the fact that a white man made this movie. The director Craig Brewer has delivered a serious labor of love about some people in a town he obviously loves. This isn’t just a blaxploitation style picture of stereotypes. We have middle class blacks, impoverished blacks, and poor whites working together to make beautiful art and rise up to make a dream come true. This situation is as much about class as it’s about race.

All in all we were moved. It’s amazing how big the solid gold carrot is hanging in front of the mule. It drives those with out to grab by any means necessary the cash to live the great American lie. What a drama.

Sounds like an interesting plan to me. Very like something the Yes Men might do. It brings awareness to Googles new mega-corp status. Will Google abuse their power? Shall we play along and believe all that we have read on the web? Or shall we act in our own lives and look for more evidence of positive change down the street? I love the grey areas that art creates. We must question everything or serve like slaves. Guess I just served these very creative artists by passing along their meme. By linking to them we raise their Google ranking. Thus their ads should be worth more. Cha Ching!

The bottom line is no corporation as powerful as Google can be completely trusted as the arbiter of so much information. Doesn’t their fiscal power finally demonstrate the power of the info economy we live in? This darling of the Internet may one day eat us all. I mean how long will they continue to link to sites that question them or work actively to destroy them? For now Google shows that the search phrase “Google will eat itself” is linking 828 pages.

We need a open source community search engine!