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Deep inside the mind of Andrew Breitbart
07.21.2010
08:40 pm
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Anyone who had any doubt about nasty man Andrew Breitbart’s crazypants bona-fides needs to watch the below CNN clip, wherein the strident rightwing windbag proves that he and reality are no longer on a first name basis! From Wonkette:

Yes, how do we know that is the farmer’s wife wife? Does the cow say “moo” or does it say “conspiracy”? What do the letters in the acronym EIEIO mean? The farmer says he was in the dell, but, hi-ho, the derry-o, was the farmer in the dell, or does CNN even know? We can sit here and say the farmer takes a wife, but why does the cheese stand alone, media? WHY?

Breitbart has decided to drown in liquid shit on national television and use the fact that we “can’t” really know if anything is “true” as a life raft. Does somebody with a gun mind shooting this life raft for us? It’s okay if you accidentally “miss” and hit Breitbart. Nobody will ever know if you were aiming for him, because who can say what truth is?

Passive aggressive mindrot at its finest! The thing is, Breitbart has nothing to fear: Anyone dumb enough to care what this well-fed Archie Bunker-manqué thinks was busy eating junk food and watching Fox News and will never, ever hear the truth about l’affair Sherrod, anyway! Life is a win-win situation when you’re a rightwing opinion maker!
 

 
Breitbart: Is the Farmer’s Wife Really His Wife? (Wonkette)

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.21.2010
08:40 pm
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“The whole world becomes kaleidoscopic”: Birthday Boy Marshall McLuhan Meets Norman Mailer
07.21.2010
07:00 pm
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Marshall McLuhan would have turned 99 years old today, and his status as the god-daddy of media studies still seems pretty rock-solid. I wasn’t previously aware of how often the Canadian theorist appeared on TV, and was especially unaware of his November 1967 duet with New York novelist Norman Mailer on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation show The Summer Way, bravely moderated by Ken Lefolii.

Recovered from recent treatment for a benign brain tumor he suffered while teaching in New York, McLuhan gamely tugs at a few of Mailer’s pretensions. Mailer is recently back from levitating the Pentagon with the Yippies, with the siege of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention in his future.

McLuhan pops off a bunch of gems, including:

The planet is no longer nature, it’s now the content of an artwork.

Nature has ceased to exist…it needs to be programmed.

The environment is not visible, it’s information—it’s electronic.

The present is only faced by any generation by the artist.

Communications maven Michael Hinton goes speculative on his hero’s televised meeting with the Jersey-raised boxer-novelist, but of course it’s best to just check the thing out yourself.
 

 
More after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Ron Nachmann
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07.21.2010
07:00 pm
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Kisses for Cumbio: Argentina’s strangely civilized debate on gay marriage

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For a Catholic country that’s endured more coups in the past century than a Tea Party rank-and-filer can conceive of, Argentina seems to have come into its democratic own this week as it joined the other nine nations that have legalized same-sex marriage.

Andrés Duque’s great Blabbeando blog has provided great coverage, including some enlightened sport-star involvement in the issue and the segment below featuring baby-dyke blogstar Cumbio. In a report for Buenos Aires TV magazine Vertigo, homegirl and her camera crew walk right up to participants in an anti-gay marriage demonstration and starts engaging them, taking in a bunch of the usual insulting arguments against equality. But in a startling scene that you couldn’t imagine in a similar segment here in the US, she’s actually embraced and kissed by some of the maternal types among the evangelicals who insist on the old cliché that “it’s the sin, not the sinner.” Cumbio comes out of it a little annoyed, but notes later that they “didn’t treat [her] badly.”

Kinda refreshing, eh?
 

 
Bonus clip after the jump: Federacion Argentina LGBT’s simple and powerful ad for marriage equality…
 

READ ON
Posted by Ron Nachmann
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07.18.2010
06:15 pm
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Out with the Old Spice
07.16.2010
02:39 pm
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As insane as Utah can seem to be, the Multimedia Production Unit at the Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library have come up with a pretty good spoof response to Procter & Gamble’s soon-to-be-very-tiresome Old Spice Man campaign. Ad writers will never beat out college-kid smarmy smarts.
 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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07.16.2010
02:39 pm
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Mainstream Media orientation video
07.10.2010
09:23 pm
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As someone who works in the mainstream media myself, believe me when I tell you: This is 1000% on the money. Hilarious, but all too true. No really!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.10.2010
09:23 pm
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“There’s no story to hip-hop—just culture”: R.I.P. renaissance man Rammellzee
06.30.2010
07:47 pm
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Word from a Fab Five Freddy tweet and a post on his own MySpace blog is that New York hip-hop futurist Rammellzee has passed away at age 50 from as-yet-unrevealed causes. (@149st features a great, fact-filled interview with the man.) Emerging as a teen graffiti artist in the mid-‘70s, bombing the A-train from its last stop in his Far Rockaway, Queens hometown, Rammell ended up like many of his talented peers—a multidisciplinary creative icon submerged in the nascent metropolitan hip-hop scene.  He first surfaced as a persona to the world in amazing fashion, dressed in trenchcoat and wielding a sawed-off shotgun as he MC’ed for the Rock Steady Crew in the Amphitheatre scene of hip-hop’s famous first film, 1982’s Wild Style.
 

 

READ ON
Posted by Ron Nachmann
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06.30.2010
07:47 pm
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Art not oil: London artists let the truth spill at the Tate
06.30.2010
01:18 am
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As you can see, London artist collective Liberate Tate were at it on Monday, letting the Tate Modern art museum know during their BP-feting summer party that taking sponsorship money from the oil giant is unacceptable. Don’t be misled by the occasional media reports of indignant Englanders bristling about the supposed anti-British nature of BP bashing. While we in the US have been driving around barely knowing what “BP” stands for, UK orgs like Art Not Oil have been working since 2004 to call attention to BP’s and Shell’s beneficent use of arts sponsorship to divert public attention away from their actual activities.

And now you can spill on the Tate yourself!
 

 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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06.30.2010
01:18 am
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G20 Toronto Riot Footage & the rise of the anti-G protest video
06.28.2010
03:31 pm
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The great Mixmaster Morris drew my attention to this bit of coverage of the G20 demonstrations in Toronto this weekend by Miguel Barbosa’s YEAH! Films Company. Clip #1 is more raw, and seems to have been converted to the more stylized clip #2. It seems like some of the most de-sensationalized, semi-balanced coverage so far, although Barbosa & co. seem rather generally disenchanted by the protestors, as shown in his posting on the YEAH! site:

If your going to attack a city, I would suggest weapons & better tactics. I knew these guys were gonna attack 10 minutes before it happened…

Anyways, they didn’t like people taking photos & video. It was kind of too late only a few minutes into the protest, the year is 2010, and everybody has some sort of camera. One protester attacked me when I yelled “Do you think this burning car is going to change the world?”

I hope you at home are sane and human enough to see what they did to this city & what they put innocent people through is completely wrong. It was embarrassing for the City of Toronto and it was embarrassing for Canadians. You all should be ashamed of yourselves. I heard you guys smashed a Tim Hortons. If that isn’t crossing the line I don’t know what is.

Barbosa points out the extreme mediation of the event—“everybody has some sort of camera.” Although it can be useful in documenting and possibly preventing police abuse—which seems to have been somewhat the case since, say, Chicago ’68—it’s hard not to detect a bit of collective narcissism as well.

Is there any doubt that the anti-globalization protest video is now its own genre?
 

 

 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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06.28.2010
03:31 pm
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The King Meets the President in Africa: Michael Jackson vs. Fela Kuti
06.25.2010
06:19 pm
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The wonderful Tracii Macgregor at Gargamel Music hepped me to this latest project put together by New York hip-hop DJ/producer/scene-vet Rich Medina. Like any device, the mash-up/remix can yield a good amount of garbage (Gaga vs. Bieber, etc.), unless the sources are well-chosen and assembled.

It hardly gets better than pop king Michael vs. Nigeria’s Afrofunk prez Fela Kuti—much has been made of how Fela and James Brown mutually influenced each other, so the R&B/Afrofunk connection is hardly a surprise. Medina’s put together 10 rounds of it for The King Meets the President in Africa, which is downloadable for free. Unfortunately, the videos below are uncredited—if Rich did these as well, I’d consider him even more of a badman talent than I already do.
 

Thriller vs. Zombie from MJ Fela on Vimeo.

 

Billie Jean is Shakara from MJ Fela on Vimeo.

 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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06.25.2010
06:19 pm
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To Chat with Charlie
06.13.2010
12:02 pm
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Although Charles Manson had been interviewed on television from prison previously, the 1981 chat he had with Tom Snyder that was aired on the Tomorrow show 29 years ago tonight was the first he did outside of his cell. On review, it’s instructive in two ways.

First, it shows that inside the clichéd image to which so many fashionably “extreme” types cling (via t-shirts and the rest) lives a rather regular guy—albeit one who inhabits an extraordinary sense of self-justification. Secondly, it demonstrates the hugely talented Snyder’s haranguing pomposity, which was also famously on display the previous year in his interview with John Lydon and Keith Levene of PiL. Geraldo Rivera would tweak that same pomposity with a bit of sleazily ingratiating buddy-buddy attitude during his 1988 go-round with the bearded enigma. For an actual listening exchange with the man, check out the Charlie Rose CBS News Nightwatch session from 1989.

 

 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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06.13.2010
12:02 pm
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