This Christmas card is part of a promotional campaign to get people to donate a percentage of their income to a Polish animal shelter.
The target audience for this ad are actually clubbers. It’s a postcard inserted in envelope with flyers promoting cultural and nightlife events, distributed in party venues and also posters placed in such venues. Christmas and first months of New Year (when you can donate 1% of your income tax to the chosen NGO) is kind of eruption period for charity campaigns. It was the intent of this piece to be different than all the rest of such campaigns and to draw attention of people who sort of became habituated seeing tear-jerking charity ads.
The student riot is a great British tradition. From Oxford’s St Scholastica Day, on February 10 1355, when a couple of undergraduates complained about the quality of beer served in their local hostelry, leading to an all out battle that left sixty-three students and thirty locals dead. Through to 1968, when plucky youngsters attacked the American Embassy over the Vietnam War, with eighty-six people injured and over two-hundred arrested. To the Poll Tax Riots with its famous Battle of Trafalgar in 1990, which left 113 injured, and 339 arrested.
Today in London, Britain’s great students have been protesting against the triple hike in tuition fees, leading to running battles with the police, vandalism of property and an attack on a car containing HRH Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall, as the Daily Telegraph reports:
Demonstrators kicked the Rolls-Royce as it travelled to the Royal Variety Performance in central London. White paint and bottles were thrown over the car and a window shattered.
The Prince and Duchess were “unharmed” and continued with their engagement at the London Palladium, a Clarence House spokesman said.
The attack occurred on Regent Street at the end of a day of protest that turned into a riot and left 10 police officers injured, six of them seriously.
Matthew Maclachlan, who witnessed the attack on the Prince’s car, said: “The police cars at the front of the convoy drove straight into crowds at the top of Regent Street. They got trapped in that mob and it meant that Charles and Camilla were on their own further down the road except for a Jaguar travelling behind them.
“Charles and Camilla’s car ran into such a concentration of people that it had to stop. It was stationary for a lot of the time, then would squeeze forward an inch. They had just one bodyguard in the car with them and a chauffeur.
“We couldn’t believe it. The car had really big windows so Charles was very much on display. People were trying to talk to him about tuition fees at first but when more people realised what was happening, the crowds swelled and people were throwing glass bottles and picking up litter bins and throwing them at the car. You could hear all this smashing.
“There was one protection officer in the Jaguar behind, dressed in a tuxedo, and he was opening the car doors and using them to bash people away. His car took a real pummelling.”
No, not quite anarchy in the UK, but good to see students carrying on a great tradition, which gives me an excuse to blast this olde favorite.
The hardest working rocker in show business, the godfather of punk and heavy metal, wizened philosopher, shameless hedonist and virtually indestructible, presenting Lemmy Kilmister.
Lemmy talks about how the new, twentieth Motorhead album is shaped by the current political climate, and his his anger at the BP oil spill. “You can love the individual, but you can’t love the race… we’re arrogant bastards. We’re like a dose of crabs”, and adds that human cooperation could learn from our smaller fellows on this spinning planet: “talk to the ants, they’ve got communism working.”
The new Motorhead video ‘Get Back In Line’ and Lemmy’s thoughts on John Lennon after the jump….
Striking a blow straight to the heart of celebrity vanity, the newest edition of the Popbitch newsletter contained the following item:
Neatly proving just how ineffective social media actually is, 18 celebrities (and Jay Sean) sacrificed their “digital lives” for charity last week, vowing to stop updating their Twitter and Facebook feeds. Social network silence from Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys, Justin Timberlake and others until their fans donated a million dollars to [Keys’] Keep A Child Alive campaign to help fight AIDS.
With six days gone, donations were still under $300k. The celebs got restive - Usher just plain gave up and started tweeting - so a billionaire patsy, and longtime AIDS funder Stewart Bahr, was drafted in to pay it off.
It would have cost the celebs’ 35 million combined followers less than 3 cents each to buy back their lives and get them tweeting again, so it appears their fans are staunchly pro-AIDS, or no-one really cared very much about what they had to say in the first place.
Laying down that kind of bread, couldn’t Bahr have pushed his weight around even a little bit and negotiated a way to still keep Kim Kardashian off Twitter?
Seeing as how we’re all echoing each other’s classic rock memes here on the DM lately, here’s yet another Zep song that at least I had been previously ignorant of. This is evidently dating from the 1978 rehearsals for their final album, the deeply uneven In Through the Out Door and maybe called Fire. Like a few of the others posted by Richard, this is a rough rehearsal tape but I found it exhilarating to listen to. After a minute or so of random noodling you are suddenly a fly on the wall in a room with the mighty Led Zeppelin as they tease you with a song which while having many of their trademark idiosyncratic elements, is utterly new to you. Like a dream, really. Did that actually just happen?
Little Keegan Roberts is my new favorite shining star. I have no idea what was going on in his mind when this interview was being taped, but methinks it was, “Get down and dance your ass off.”
Hey, what’s a little bait and switch during a presidential election, huh?
I have never voted for a Republican in my entire life, but it sure feels like I have with Obama… The tax cut deal for millionaires and billionaires is a moral outrage and it’s going to be wrapped around his neck come next year when the GOP refuse to raise the debt ceiling.
Follow this link to donate a couple of bucks to ActBlue. For every $3000 they raise, they can show this ad one time on local TV stations in the Washington DC metro area. Obama’s base can only erode so much until it’s gone for good…
World Of Wonder’s Stephen Saban sums it up quite nicely:
Don’t ask questions, just watch. It’s a most extraordinary mix of people engaged, surprisingly, in can’t-look-away dancing that appears to have been auditioned, styled, and choreographed because in all our born years we’ve never seen anything quite like it happen by accident. And we’ve been to da club a few times.”
A intimate solo performance by Neil Young filmed during his ‘Journey Through The Past’ tour. It was broadcast on BBC television in February of 1971.
For some odd reason (of which I’m not aware), this is not available on video or DVD.
Set list:
1. Out On The Weekend
2. Old Man
3. Journey Through The Past
4. Heart Of Gold
5. Don’t Let It Bring You Down
6. A Man Needs A Maid
7. Love In Mind
8. Dance, Dance, Dance
The fact that Jamaicans are posting up hilarious little tributes to kung fu film online should come as no surprise. As in most countries, Jamaica always had its share of young men enthralled by martial arts cinema, which crested in terms of both prolificacy and popularity during the mid-’60s, soon after the rugged island nation became independent. Reggae producers like Lee Perry, Keith Hudson, Augustus Pablo, and Prince Jammy folded martial arts influence into their music, sometimes in the lyrics, and in other instances by simply titling their dubs “Exit The Dragon” or “Shaolin Temple.”
The global digi-video age now opens up possibilities for Jamaica to explode the kung-fu spoof genre. Below you’ll find the possible first bamboo shoots, starting with Prezzi909’s footage from November of some brilliantly awkward kung-fu kombat street theatre, replete with the sound of cackling and screaming onlookers. But wait til a pro gets a hold of the concept…
After the jump: watch the kung-fu kraze refined with actual scripting and wicked effects!
