Vice’s Brayden Olson went to the Westminster Dog Show at Madison Square Garden and dropped acid for the first time. Here’s a record of what happened.
Video after the jump…
The war against advertising has recently taken an interesting turn, with 26 artists from 8 countries, traveling across the UK for 5 days, subverting billboard advertising.
Called Brandalism, or “Taking the piss with a point”, it is a clever mix of vandalism, graffiti and art, and is a direct attack on the corporate branding which has become such a blight on our landscape.
‘Following on from the guerilla art traditions of the 20th Century and taking inspiration from the Dadaists, Situationists and Street Art movements, the Brandalism project will see the largest reclamation of outdoor advertising space in UK history as artists challenge the authority and legitimacy of the advertising industry. We are tired of being shouted at by adverts on every street corner so we decided to get together with some friends from around the world and start to take them back, one billboard at a time…....’
Brandalist work includes a reworked Manchester United soccer player, Wayne Rooney lifting the rewards of looting; health warnings placed on car adverts; knife crime underlining trainer wars; campaigns against the London Olympics reclamation of land. These are powerful and thought-provoking works that engage directly with their audience, which seek “to confront the ad industry and take back our visual landscapes.” Below is a selection of some of the artists’ work taken from the Brandalism site. I say, more power to them.
Find out more about Brandalism and the artists here.
More works of Brandalism, after the jump…
With thanks to Scheme Comix
Like so…
The nice girl and her Schlep Labs posse have done it again for America…
After the jump: remembering The Great Schlep…
“If you’re rich and powerful, you can never have enough…”
The Guardian’s Gary Younge talks to Noam Chomsky about why the Occupy movement is so important, where it goes from here, and how it will affect the election. You can watch a longer version of this interview, here.
I read a comment this morning suggesting prank phone calls to conservative radio talk shows. The commenter had heard one such call where the caller just started laughing hysterically once they put him on the air.
Childish? Sure.
Fun? You betcha!
So in an effort to encourage this form of merriment, we’re going to hold a contest for the next 48 hours to see who can make the best, funniest, or even just the most childish prank phone calls to reichwing radio shows. All you have to do is record your prank phone call, post it to YouTube, link from the comments on this post and then DM’s readers will select the winner.
It’s that simple. We don’t know what the prize will be yet, but we’ll try to make it a good one. I don’t think the prize is actually the lure here, but we’ill update the post once we figure it out.
(If you can get on Rush, Glenn Beck, Dr Laura Schlessinger or on Michael Savage’s show, you’ll get extra points!)
PLEASE SPREAD FAR AND WIDE VIA SOCIAL MEDIA!
Today marked the launch of the Robin Hood Tax movement in America. Their plan, strongly supported by the UK’s Occupiers calls for financial transactions tax to generate revenue to invest in jobs, health care, housing and education. Activists have successfully put the concept on the table in Great Britain and elsewhere, now the’re aiming to do the same in the USA. Via Mother Jones:
According to a press release from the campaign, a 50-cent tax on every $100 of stock trades could generate hundreds of billions of dollars annually. (The rate could be even lower on other financial transactions.) Over 1,000 leading economists have endorsed the idea of a financial transactions tax, including Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs and Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute.
The notion of a tax on stock trades and other financial transactions is not new—in the United States, the federal government taxed every sale or transfer of stock between 1914 and 1966. But in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the idea has gained new support—especially overseas. German chancellor Angela Merkel recently said a financial transactions tax would be “the right signal to show that we have understood that financial markets have to contribute their share to the recovery of economies.”
Ya think, Chancellor?
As one of the commentors on Mother Jones quipped:
“A half of a percent? Shoot, why should food be taxed more than betting on it?”
Here’s the viral video made by Richard Curtis and Bill Nighy about the Robin Hood Tax. It’s pretty effective at getting its point across—give it 3 minutes, you won’t regret it:
Dazed Digital has an interesting back and forth between Atari Teenage Riot’s Alec Empire and “AnonyOps” from online hacktivist group Anonymous:
Alec Empire: What do you think about all these new laws that are being put in place around the globe right now? Sopa (the US Stop Online Piracy Act), Acta (the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) and all the variations of them in various countries? I was shocked that almost everyone I spoke to in the independent music industry welcomes those laws.
AnonyOps: The companies pushing for laws like Sopa and Acta are trying to protect their profits, but these laws aren’t really about protecting intellectual property. They’re about making sweeping laws that give governments broad powers to take down anyone’s website and/or business.
New communications technologies have always been a threat to people and institutions in power; they have responded with repression and restriction. It took 100 years for kings to clamp down on the printing press, and 30 years from the invention of radio to the creation of the Federal Communications Commission at the behest of the US Navy and commercial broadcasters. We forget how young the internet is – most of us have only had access for 15 years. We believe that because it’s always been open, it always will be.
We’re losing our ability to communicate, and all the while governments are attempting policy laundering. They recycle the same tired, unpopular bills and this happens because corporations are only too happy to fill the pockets of politicians. Acta, for example, has been characterised by an astounding lack of transparency, negotiated in secret while excluding civil society and non-government organisations. For many years, we only knew what was in the Acta text because of WikiLeaks.
In short, this shit is bad news. We need a new paradigm in politics. One where we demand transparency, and when we find that backroom deals are done, we kick them out on their asses. We need public will in our favour for this to happen.
Alec Empire: I thought of pirate radio in the UK in the early 90s. I had my first record deal back then and we recorded in London. At night we would listen to pirate radio – yes, that was before it was easy to stream music via the Internet. Huge raves were happening in the country at the time and because the major record labels weren’t a part of that the official radio stations weren’t, even though so many kids were listening to this music. Most of the records DJs played were distributed on white labels, and there was a lot of ‘copyright violation’ because sampling technology offered so many news ways to manipulate sounds, beats, voices, basically everything. Another reason why most radio stations could or wouldn’t play it. Most producers of those records stayed in fact anonymous.
Two decades later, nobody can deny that those times were key to what followed. Pop music wouldn’t be where it is today without that huge influence of early rave and electronic music. So the enemy of the major record labels back then became their life saviour. Because the majors had to adapt. What I am trying to get at here is that isn’t it true that when the time has come for an idea that will bring change, nobody can stop that? Not even a country’s army?
Read the rest at Dazed Digital.
Alec Empire and AnonyOps are having a more public discussion over Twitter today. Follow @An0n_DAZED_atrD to join the conversation.
Stand-up comedian, social satirist and political activist Lee Camp—the “Che Guevara of comedy” as Paul Provenza calls him—is best known for his popular “Moment of Clarity” web series and Camp has performed live for protesters at various Occupy sites around the country.
Now he’s an author, with a new collection of his work in print form, Moment Of Clarity: The Ravings of a Stark Raving Sane Man
Lee, so it’s been a week… have you had a moment of clarity yet about what happened in Wisconsin?
Lee Camp: I’ll be writing that one tomorrow. It might just be a string of profanities. Wisconsin is just the first explosion in the corporate-backed Citizens-United-fueled demolition of our democracy. If I can get over my moment of dispair-ity, then I’ll work on the Moment of Clarity. [See below!]
Do the WI election results auger as poorly for the future of labor and the Democrats as it seems? I was shocked at the delusion I saw on MSNBC on election night. It was ridiculous, I thought, especially what Lawrence O’Donnell said about Obama being the “biggest winner.” Absurd.
Lee Camp: Yes, they are a horrible sign for the left, for labor, and for this country. I think that as this shit-storm continues people will have no choice but to wake up. At least, that’s my hope. And yeah, you see a lot of delusion from the talking heads because they know that if they’re too depressing, we’ll jump off a bridge. And if we jump off a bridge, they lose viewers. MSNBC is fighting for ratings, so they don’t want anybody dropping their “Lawrence O’Donnell” flag and stuffing handfuls of pills in their mouths.
Scott Walker, the next Nixon?
Lee Camp: Ha. Nixon would seem like a squishy lefty compared to Walker.
As a longtime observer of subcultures, one thing that is surprising to me—-and I should say upfront that I consider this a positive development—is how folks on the Left are starting to tentatively voice an opinion long heard on the Right, of favor of secession. Would it be better to agree to disagree and let Red States do whatever they want—fuck over the unions, poison their water supply with fracking, teaching “Noah’s Ark was real” nonsense in schools, outlawing abortion, curtailing LGBT rights, making church attendance mandatory, whatever—while more, how shall I put this, better-educated regions of the country split off to do what we want? “We” keep “them” from living as they wish to live and vice versa, why not give up and face the facts?
Lee Camp: Sounds kinda nice to me. The problem is that the blue states are on the two coasts. How we will stick together? Maybe a sky bridge over the country? The other problem is that even blue states will allow the corporate raping and pillaging of their land if enough money is poured into the political process. Wisconsin is not necessarily a red state, and it has a noble history of fighting for workers’ rights. However, this last election showed us that if people are handed a pile of shit and shown enough commercials saying it’s chocolate, they’ll eat it with a smile on their faces.
Do you feel that given what we’ve seen shake out in the past decade, the unbridgeable philosophical chasm that exists between Left and Right, where no compromise, no civility and really not even a productive discussion can take place anymore, just yelling on cable news shows, can ever go back into the box?
Lee Camp: Hmmm, maybe. But the truly sad thing is that in many categories the politicians on the two “sides” are not offering different paths. They seem to agree on everything Wall Street and everything military industrial complex. So I think you will see continued energy breaking out of the two part system - like we’ve seen with Occupy.
Speaking of, do you think it’s time to retire the term “Occupy” and what are your observations about how it has seemed to fizzle out in 2012? All winter long, OWS seemed dormant, I was thinking, just because of how cold it was, but it didn’t really come back all that strong this year. What caused all of that amazing energy and commitment to disperse? Or has it? Is it just gestating?
Lee Camp: I think it’s still there, and I think it will come back strong. I don’t think you’ve seen the last of it by any means. Let’s remember what we’re watching here - a handful of protesters going up against riot cops with pepper spray and batons. Is it any surprise that there are going to be lulls? I don’t think this battle is over.
Do you think Romney can beat Obama?
Lee Camp:: Sure he can. The right wing is working furiously to purge all the black and Latino people off the voting roles. If that doesn’t work, we have some of the most hackable computer voting systems this world has ever seen. I’ve seen a monkey hack the voting machines. (Not kidding. Google it.) If a monkey can hack our machines, then a robotic tool like Romney can win an election. On top of that, Romney will have a money advantage. The only way for the left to win is to vote in such great numbers that it swamps the percentage points that will be stolen.
Below, Camp’s calm, cool and collected take on the Wisconsin recall election results and Citizen’s United:
Last night on his HBO program, Real Time, Bill Maher compared OWS’s real world political gains to the Tea party’s decidedly more concrete electoral accomplishments and reveals a stark truth for the movement…
Minds have been changed, now what up, OWS?
Earlier today, in a scene straight out of Veep (which is terrifically funny television, btw), the hapless underlings of the National Republican Congressional Committee oh-so-naively invited the entire Internet to sign a petition to repeal Obamacare, which would be webcast on LiveStream as a printer printed out each “signee.” (Who would give a shit about something as bloody boring as watching a PRINTER over the Internet, anyway? Oh, right, Republicans… I get it, I get it. Sorry, it was a brainfart).
The “Watch Your Petition Print” video feed lasted just minutes before frantic GOP staffers pulled the plug on signatories like “Grumpo Prembus,” “Barnacle Jim Long Face,” “Connie Lingus” and “Turd Sniffer.”
Despite their best efforts, the trolling lives on, on a Tumblr blog called The Angry Hand.
Via Wonkette