PeaceLove's Musings

Steve Aoki & Datsik at the Bill Graham Auditorium

2012-01-23T21:27:00.000-08:00

I accompanied my 16 year old son and his friends to the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium Saturday night to see Rockstar Energy Drink Presents Dim Mak's Deadmeat Tour featuring the young dubstep hotshot Datsik and superstar producer/DJ Steve Aoki. Crowd: 7000.

Okay, first of all I was one of the oldest people in the place. The kids all had a great time. Average age of the crowd: 17. Average girl's shorts length: micro-mini (not that I noticed). For boys in the target demographic, there's a lot to recommend about this concert.

I'm a big electronica fan, so I'm comfortable with the genre. Datsik had a strong set and tore up the joint. He was the reason my kids wanted to come; they didn't really know much about Aoki before tonight. I suspect a lot of the boys in the audience were brought in by Dasik, who plays a pretty industrial brand of dubstep.

The girls were there for Aoki and they went wild. For my money, his set was somewhat generic. I'm not into corporate-sponsored music, with tour sponsor Rockstar being a particular target of wrath, both for their connection to gaybasher/hatemonger Michael Savage and for just basically peddling addictive, caffeinated shit to young people. Largely absent was the spirituality and tribalism of a genuine rave. Aoki mainly set a tune spinning then got up and pranced around the stage like a rock star.

Aoki's schtick is spraying champagne and cake, which seemed kind of pointless to me. Is he trying to establish his punk bona fides? I guess I like my art to have a point. Color me picky. Years ago, raves eschewed cult-of-personality deification; they were all about the music and the tribal gathering. Raves were anti-establishment gatherings, often held in secret. How far we've come! (Fallen?)

I read somewhere that Aoki started out politically active. While at UC Santa Barbara he majored in women's studies and immersed himself in the punk scene. Somewhere along the way, he decided to let that go. Why? Perhaps that's a natural progression; Aoki is a 1%er from a world of 1%ers. His dad Rocky Aoki founded Benihana restaurants, his half sister is the supermodel Devon Aoki.

This concert felt like a well-oiled corporate machine. I was a bit put off that Aoki had a merch signing at 9, right in the middle of Dasik's set. The timing seemed pretty disrespectful toward his fellow artist.

During the show, I and all 3 kids with me got separately approached and asked if we knew where to find "pills" (ecstasy). Although I'd prefer my son and his friends avoid such substances, I also want them to be safe. I warned my kids they should assume anyone asking like that is an undercover cop. Our toxic drug war and criminal justice system is far more dangerous to kids than any drugs.

Worst moment: After the show, we fought our way up to the front to quickly buy a couple of shirts then get in line to have them signed by Aoki (another signing). A particularly thuggish security goon named Rick (he tried to intimidate me when I asked his name) was yelling out, "IF YOU'RE GOING TO BUY SOMETHING, BUY IT! IF NOT, MOVE ON!" Then Rick yelled out, "HE WILL ONLY SIGN THINGS YOU BUY RIGHT NOW!" I explained that we were holding shirts we had just bought 30 seconds ago before we got in the signing line. Rick yelled again, "HE'S NOT SIGNING IT. HE'S ONLY SIGNING THINGS YOU BUY RIGHT NOW!"

So my son had to leave with his brand-new Aoki shirt unsigned. This abusive guard was yelling at all the kids ten feet away from Aoki and he never said a thing about it. Not a pleasant way to leave the show.

But all the beautiful kids had a good time, so I can't really complain too much. The high percentage of girls in attendance seemed to helped ensure all the boys pretty much behaved themselves. I never saw any unruly behavior or ill-treatment.

Kudos to the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium for having water fountains on both sides of the hall. I assume they're required by law to have them (no doubt they eat into those $3/bottle water sales) but they make for a much safer and more pleasant concert experience for all the pacifier-sucking #MollyPills kids.

I dig Aoki's energy, and he seems like a genuinely nice guy. But I wish he held on to a bit of his early activism. He seems to have made peace with the establishment -- hell, he seems to BE the establishment -- and for an artist that's never a good thing.

The Weeknd

2011-10-12T22:51:00.000-07:00

The Weeknd is a red-hot band right now, both because their music is fantastic & dark and for the mystery behind the story of how they got hot.

They put their music online, got rave reviews on Pitchfork (the most trusted independent music review website), upped their price to $25,000 a show and snagged $1 million in bookings. Not bad for a mysterious band that gave away their music for free.

Thanks to the great Bob Lefsetz for hipping me to the Weeknd story. As Lefsetz (and others) says, if you're amazing you can give away your music and fans will find a way to pay you. The Weeknd are pretty stunning. That first Pitchfork reviewer praised the dark narratives laid over "incredibly lush, downcast music."

Download both their albums for free: The Weeknd A third album is apparently on the way soon.

Joel E. Siegel's 1982 Blade Runner review

2010-08-10T01:51:00.000-07:00

Bill Blackwell's my new hero. He dug up the legendary 1982 Blade Runner review by Joel E. Siegel of Washington's City Paper.

Well, legendary in my own mind, at least. Joel E. Siegel, a jazz critic and teacher at Georgetown, was also the amazing film critic for the Washington City Paper. He was perhaps the first critic I ever really trusted; so often he pointed me to films that were great, or steered me clear of the phony and dishonest. Most importantly, he was the critic who "got" Blade Runner even as so many other critics I read didn't.

If I remember correctly, the general impression of Blade Runner among the mainstream critics was that it was a basically unsuccessful attempt to meld science fiction with the hard-boiled detective genre. Siegel, on the other hand, knew it was something special. He didn't know what, exactly. But he knew underneath the occasionally-ridiculous surface was something entirely new, something rare and shudderingly beautiful.

I read that review as a high school senior and I knew at once I had to see the film. So I watched Blade Runner. What Siegel saw was obvious to me, too.

I actually spoke to Siegel many years later, after Blade Runner had become an acknowledged classic with its influence seen everywhere. We first commiserated about the fact that he shared his name with the mustachioed douchebag film critic from Good Morning America, and he told me stories about his former colleague John Powers (another hero critic of mine, who I had read back when he wrote for the LA Weekly). Then we spoke about his Blade Runner review. Siegel said he had recently reread the review and he remembered the trouble he felt putting his feelings into words. He and I both agreed it remained perhaps the best cyberpunk film ever made.

Flash forward to 2007 and my post on Hidden Gems, in which I mentioned the Siegel review. In an aside, I lamented that the review wasn't available online. I must have communicated in that aside that I would really love to read the review again.

And there, for three years, the story rests...until today, when one Bill Blackwell sends me the following email totally out of the blue, no introduction, just this, along with -- MIRACLES! -- the original Joel E. Siegel review:

Like you back in 2007, I went in search of Joel E. Siegel's City Paper review of Blade Runner on the Net. Everything may be here somewhere, but not Joel's review. The City Paper's search system was no no help. I called the paper. I had to explain to two people there that they once had writing for them THE film critic of DC. No luck. The last option was to descend into my basement and look through my files. The review was there, but it was missing the date of publication, though it has to be from a July, 1982 issue. I hope you still have an interest.

(Oh I do, I do! Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr. Blackwell!)

Sharp Blade: Ridley Scott’s Visual Banquet

By Joel E. Siegel
Washington City Paper

In 16 years of movie reviewing, I've never had as much trouble writing a column as this one. I've seen Blade Runner twice and have tried for three weeks to come to terms with it, but I still feel tongue-tied trying to deal with the critical problems it poses. It's easy enough to pinpoint the film's flaws, particularly its poorly written and developed screenplay and Harrison Ford's unambitious, crushingly dull performance. Yet I don't think I've ever been as spellbound at the movies as I was during both viewings of Blade Runner. In terms of design, special effects, and cinematography, it surpasses anything the screen has shown us so far. Each sequence, each shot, is brilliantly alive to the possibilities of what film can do.

Blade Runner deserves special membership in that fraternity of crazy, doomed films whose visionary achievements redeem cheesy ideas and slapdash narratives (D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance is probably the godfather of this group, which also includes Michael Powell's Stairway To Heaven, John Schlesinger's Far From the Madding Crowd, John Boorman's feverish duo Zardozand Exorcist 2 and, recently, Michael Wadleigh's Wolfen. It is perhaps no coincidence that most of the abovementioned filmmakers, like Blade Runner's Ridley Scott, are Englishmen, products of the culture that gave us visionaries like Milton and Blake.) What these films have in common, apart from critical and box-office failure, is the creation of worlds so obsessive, so vividly imagined and compulsively detailed that open-eyed viewers can't possibly dismiss them, no matter how strongly good sense says we should.

Blade Runner, set in Los Angeles in 2019, is a knockout from its very first shot—a long-held cityscape dominated by vast pyramidal structures and punctuated by buzzing aircraft and smokestacks belching flame. Early on, we learn that the city, like the film itself, is built on oppositions. Mammoth glass and steel highrises dominate the skyline; beneath them, in a gaseous half-light, sprawls a neon underworld, a mixture of Times Square and Hong Kong, where the darker and, the film suggests, least quenchable aspects of human nature hover in the shadowy, rain-swept streets.

This underworld is familiar to us. It's the tenderloin of a dozen world capitals, only dingier, more decadent, rotting in the future's noxious atmosphere. But the upper world, with its inlaid, highly textured, rectilinear motifs decorating both internal and external walls, is new to the eye. It looks like a universe designed by Louise Nevelson—elegant, tactile, chilly.

Scott and his talented crew of technicians have populated their world with wonders. Huge floating video cubes drift through the streets hawking candies and soft drinks. There's a cold storage Eye World where men in heated suits fabricate eyeballs for advanced robots. There's a television set capable of scanning, enlarging, and reproducing the most minute photographic details. (A complex photo-scanning sequence extends the visual and aural explorations of Blow Up and Blow Out. There's a lavish mansion in the sky filled with echoes of Citizen Kane's Xanadu, including a perched mechanical bird and an expansive, columned study. Scott mixes future with present, fantasy with reality. Long sequences in the film are set in the Bradbury Building, downtown L.A.'s most notable architectural landmark. But we see the Bradbury not in its restored spendor but in a state of ruin, with rain and debris staining its grilled walkways. The terrible and wonderful things about Blade Runner's view of the city of the future is how logically it extends trends evident in our present urban centers. The Oliver T. Carr malls and condos that nestle alongside slum apartment houses and strip joints are the roots of Scott's bi-level metropolis.

The narrative and dramatic elements of Blade Runner are not worthy of the film's visionary style. The Hampton Francher-Davis Peoples screenplay, adapted from Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? attempts to transport a Raymond Chandler-like protagonist into the world of the future. In theory, the mixture of genres could work. After all, hardboiled detective fiction and sci-fi usually deal with the same question: how can one retain human values in an increasingly indifferent, mechanistic universe? But, as attempted in Blade Runner, the marriage of genres barely extends beyond self-congratulation over the originality of the conceit. The writers seem to feel that the very idea of placing a tough-guy hero in the midst of a futuristic city is so clever that no further development is required. As a result, the script is often foolishly coy; our intelligence is insulted while our eyes are being dazzled. Francher and Peoples aren't much better at exposition. Chunks of >action and motivation are missing, signs perhaps that the film was extensively cut before release.

It's more than a bit sentimental to believe that a Chandleresque character could survive the social and moral mutations that precede Blade Runner's society. (Even today, 37 years before the film takes place, one would have better luck enlisting the services of a private eye in the architectural anomie of Rosslyn or Crystal City than in the sleaziness of 14th Street. Today's tough guys have lost their affinity for the gutter.) According to rumors, the film's producers lost faith in the script's mating of tough guy and sci-fi during the final editing stages. Director Scott was reportedly taken off the picture, a voice-over narration was added to clarify the action, and a cop-out happy ending was patched on to lighten the film's deeply pessimistic view of the future.

The plot is a reworking of Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville. (Both films are set in futures where people live in servile, robotlike existences, and Godard's picture even has a private eye protagonist.) Replicants, sophisticated robots designed for slave labor, have been created for use in colonizing remote "Off World" settlements. These replicants look exactly like human beings, and are as smart and far stronger than the people who created them. Six replicants, aware that their four-year termination dates are up, illegally return to earth and infiltrate Los Angeles. Former enforcer Deckard (Harrison Ford) is brought out of retirement to "retire" them. As in both versions of the classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the only thing that separates replicants from humans is emotion; they have no real feelings or memories.

Deckard, a withdrawn man, is virtually a replicant himself, such a cold fish that he's known to his ex-wife as "sushi." Disciplined and repressed into mechanical numbness, he is awakened to feeling when he meets Rachel, an advanced experimental replicant who has been implanted with feelings and memories. The cool killer is surprised by a longing for tenderness and decency. The dialogue and screenplay indicate that Deckard is a man quietly at war with his vestigial conscience, a zombie with an appendix soul. Unfortunately, Harrison Ford's performance as Deckard is the ultimate expression of Hollywood he-man emptiness. In the great tradition of macho stiffs like Gregory Peck, Glenn Ford, and Dana Andrews, Ford numbly flexes his way through the film, never once suggesting any kind of internal conflict. It's a replicant performance, without a flicker of feeling or individuality illuminating the solemn male impersonation.

Deckard's climactic decision to run away with Rachel should yield a harrowing irony—the repudiation of a world of human beings grown so soulless that happiness and tenderness are only possible with a robot. But Ford plays his scenes so mechanically that these ironies are never awakened. When one recalls how much complexity and wit Humphrey Bogart and even Dick Powell brought to their interpretations of Philip Marlowe, it's evident how great a liability Ford's bloodless performance really is.

Too bad, because the rest of the cast is marvelous. Blond, muscular Rutger Hauer is visually and dramatically perfect as Roy Batty, the brightest and strongest of the rebel replicants. Hauer, who has the kind of looks and physique that Hitler must have dreamed about, offers a Miltonic version of the replicant-slave—the unjustly cast-out angel who hungers for revenge. Batty's Satanic, larger-than-life emotions contrast sharply with the fumblings of the burnt-out Deckard; his death scene in the rain, complete with released white dove, is tinged with a dizzily poetic comic book grandeur.

Darryl Hannah is affecting as Batty's cohort Pris, a Blondie punk clone with dark spray-painted eyes and greenish makeup who dies a spectacular twitching death. Joanna Cassidy is beautiful and arresting in her brief turn as Zhora, a replicant tart whose expiration through walls of neon-tinted glass quotes from the shoot-out finale of The Lady From Shanghai. William Sanderson is touching and funny as Sebastian, the genetic designer-misfit who lives in a decaying toy-filled apartment in the Bradbury Building. His performance is a witty evocation of all those doomed little fall guys played in 40s films noir by Elisha Cook Jr. Sean Young is a very beautiful Rachel and fully deserves her long, adoring close-ups. But her elaborate 40s hair-do, scarlet lips, padded shoulders, and painted nails are handicaps, old movie allusions that imprison her until she, literally, is allowed to let down her hair.

Blade Runner's strengths and weaknesses are, I think, direct expressions of its director's gifts and liabilities. Ridley Scott was a painter and worked as a set designer and TV commercial director before coming to feature films. His pictures to date, The Duellists and Alien, have been strong on design and visual texture, weak on narrative continuity and characterization. This time out, Scott's preoccupation with visual imagery dominates every other element of the film. Each shot is so finely detailed that a dozen viewings would be necessary for the eye to take in the film's full visual richness.

Even while my mind was rejecting Blade Runner, my eyes were popping at the film's splendors, and so I want to recommend it, very strongly. And not as dumb fun, either, the sort of pinhead claims Pauline Kael makes when she's shilling for junk like Flash Gordon or Star Trek. The eye has its own intelligence; we don't leave our minds at home when we visit a museum or art gallery. I've never seen an exhibition of paintings as exciting or original as the images contained in Blade Runner and so I'm recommending it for intelligent people to see and enjoy. One wishes the rest of the film lived up to the grandeur of its surface, but Scott and his crew have given us a visual banquet, something to be grateful for. •

----------------------------------------------------

I think later versions of Blade Runner showed that the film's narrative was deeper than Siegel gives it credit for. But he essentially nailed how profoundly the visual design of the film created a wholly new cinematic experience. Sadly, Joel E. Siegel died in 2004 at the relatively young age of 63. Happily, his visionary take on Blade Runner is finally available online.

On Allen Ginsberg & Collateral Murder

2010-07-03T21:44:00.000-07:00

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix...

I have been surprised over the last week or so that so many of my friends have no idea who Allen Ginsberg is, or the significance of his Beat poem Howl, which I used as the backing drone for Bushmaster Crazyhorse Howl. My film professor at Foothill told us he used to keep a copy of Howl in his back pocket; many young people did, back in the day. Howl, with its cry to explode the stifling wasteland of mid-1950s conformity, its call for mental and sexual liberation is, along with Jack Kerouac's On the Road and William Burroughs Naked Lunch, a key document in the founding of the Sixties counter-culture revolution.

Furthermore, Howl has particular resonance for people in the San Francisco Bay Area. The release of Howl is inextricably linked to the great City Lights bookstore in North Beach, perhaps the most famous independent bookstore in the country and still owned and operated by the 91-year-old Beat poet and artist Lawrence Ferlinghetti. When Ferlinghetti published Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems in 1956, he was arrested on obscenity charges -- a landmark free speech case he later won, and one about to be memorialized in an upcoming film called Howl that is due out in September. (I'm sure Ginsberg, an outspoken homosexual at a time when being Out was rare, would be amused to see himself portrayed by the handsome actor James Franco.)

For his own part, Allen Ginsberg became a major figure in the counterculture throughout the Sixties and beyond, right up to his death from cancer in 1997. He led the chanting at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in 1967 and pursued a singular path as a free-speech and human rights activist. Later in his life he taught literature at Brooklyn College where my uncle, as Chairman of the English Department, was ostensibly Ginsberg's boss. My uncle was somewhat awed by his colleague: "He's so famous. He'll fly off to have dinner with the Rolling Stones in Paris, or Havel in Prague, then come back and teach his class."

My original conceit with Bushmaster Crazyhorse Howl was to intercut clips from the Wikileaks Collateral Murder video with superficial Hollywood depictions of the world, including the world of warfare and violence. The Collateral Murder video is the leaked video of an American Apache helicopter in Iraq gunning down about a dozen mostly unarmed Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists. The Army later lied and claimed U.S. soldiers were engaged in a firefight when the killings occurred but the video is clear and unambiguous on that point. The Iraqis are merely walking along the road when the Apache crew receives authorization to kill them all.

The dispassionate voices of the Apache crew and their HQ commanders contrast with the horror of the damage they inflict--not only on the original group of Iraqis but also on some brave men who drive up in a van to rescue the wounded, plus two young children in the van who are also badly hurt. The closing line I use, "Well, it's their fault for bringing their children to a war" sums up the heartless depersonalization of war, and an astonishing lack of compassion on the part of the speaker. All of Bagdhad is a war zone; the Americans made that way.

Hollywood, of course, loves to play war, especially when they get to condemn it as something bad while still masturbating in its visual and visceral glory. I purposefully picked clips of violence and warfare that were outside the standard Hollywood formula. Tropic Thunder, You Don't Mess with the Zohan and Hot Fuzz are all broad comedies, while The Watchmen is a very deep, dark satire. Alan Moore's original graphic novel of The Watchmen is one of the strongest examinations of American hegemony, and Zach Snyder's improbably great film adaptation captures the fascist underpinnings of superherodom in general, and American superherodom in particular, with dazzling panache. In the book and the film, the reluctant blue giant Dr. Manhattan proves such an effective weapon in the American arsenal that the Vietcong insist on surrendering to him personally.

By coincidence I had the audio of Ginsberg reading Howl; somewhere along the way I realized it would make a keen backdrop to the casual brutality of the Collateral Murder video. If nothing else, Howl is a call to end top-down command structures and allow the full flowerings of creativity and freedom to bloom. The poem still packs a wallop over 50 years after it came out because its vision, hellish and beautiful, feels extremely contemporary. In some ways, the Collateral Murder video seems to point to the poem's relevance.

The addition of the Stockhausen quote was a happy flash of inspiration for me. Stockhausen's point, which is undeniably true, is that the 9/11 terrorists managed to make a stronger statement and jolt the world's citizens out of their consensual trances more powerfully than all the artists in the world ever could. He was obviously not saying he approved of the attacks, or that it was acceptable to make "art" that killed thousands. But he nevertheless got figuratively crucified for saying what he said. The first casualty of war, even before truth, is nuance.

Best of all, opening with the Stockhausen quote gave me a chance to use a couple of the composer's dischordant compositions as the background chaos unfolds. Stockhausen is one of the most influential avant-garde composers of the 20th century, counting among his influences such artists as Phillip Glass (who makes an appearance on the final music swell, care of The Watchmen), David Byrne and seminal industrial electronic artists like Kraftwork. Few people listen to Stockhausen's stuff these days because most of it, like the pieces I used, is pretty unwelcome listening. It's perfect for Bushmaster Crazyhorse Howl, though; in this context it actually seems to make perfect sense.

Bushmaster Crazyhorse Howl

2010-06-24T14:27:00.000-07:00

Bushmaster Crazyhorse Howl: In which Allen Ginsberg meets Collateral Murder...and Karlheinz Stockhausen is redeemed. I'm very pleased with how this one turned out. Does it work for you?

Gerry Hiken: Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man

2010-06-21T15:24:00.000-07:00

I've been remiss about updating this blog, partly since blogging is sooo 2005. I'm much more active on Twitter now (@magicpeacelove); that 140 character limit is very alluring, since it forces me to distill my thoughts into discrete, crisp bits without overwriting.

At any rate, I suppose I should post that I've reentered the filmmaking game, at least to the extent that I have made a couple of shorts I'm quite happy with. The first is an 11-minute documentary about my pal Gerry Hiken, an American treasure who has been a professional actor for 60 years (that's Gerry on the right, in a recent production of the play Twentieth Century). In the film, Gerry muses on the artist's life, how to be a great actor, and what it means to approach death.

I had many technical nightmares trying to get this made. Final Cut Pro refused to install on my Snow Leopard-running iMac and I ended up having to push iMovie well beyond what it's made for to get this where I wanted it. The newest version of iMovie is made for home movie assemblage, and a lot of basic editing tools somehow got left off.

I'll discuss my second short, Bushmaster Crazyhorse Howl, in an upcoming post. For that one I actually wiped my hard drive, installed the old version of Leopard, and managed to get Final Cut Pro installed as well. Beautiful program; I learned it over the weekend and pulled an all-nighter to cut the film.

Anyway, without further ado I present to you: Gerry Hiken: Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man.

iPad Pros & Cons

2010-04-04T13:13:00.001-07:00

UPDATE: Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain has an excellent summary of the dangers of Apple's closed system here.

Like many, I am bemused by the Yin/Yang posts on BoingBoing from Xeni (Apple's iPad is a touch of genius) and Cory (Why I won't be buying an iPad, and think you shouldn't, either). I'm pretty firmly in the Cory camp on this one, but I think we do ourselves no favors when we understate the upside to the iPad.

Pro: The iPad is a revolutionary device. This seemed obvious to me the moment I saw Jobs demo it. The iPad is the first really useable, beautiful tablet and it will change the way we interact with information and technology--just the way the iPhone did. As Xeni points out, we have no idea all the transformations the iPad will wreak (here's one take), but it's definitely going to be a bumpy, exciting ride.

The iPad, frankly, is a sweet, sweet ride. Apple will sell a bazillion of these honeys. They have opened up the market for the unlocked tablets to follow.

Con: By being a locked, proprietary walled garden, the iPad contributes mightily to an anti-competitive ecosystem in which certain types of innovation--those that threaten the existing order--are stifled. It doesn't matter if a majority of its users aren't makers and hackers. Indeed, I'm sure the typical iPad customer doesn't want or need to root his or her device. But the fact that you can't has major repercussions. Makers and hackers innovate on behalf of the entire society, whether you know it or not. The iPad deliberately impedes this innovation, even as it facilitates other types of creativity.

The fundamental premise that every app anyone might want to make for the iPad has to pass through the narrow gatekeeper walls of Cupertino is creepy and ought to at least give anyone pause. The fact that you can "jailbreak" the device (what a telling term!) is actually a compelling argument not to buy it in the first place. If you need to jailbreak a device you own to do what you want with it (a move Apple claims is illegal, by the way), then it truly is Defective by Design.

I love my iMac but I would never buy an iPhone or an iPad. This is more than a personal choice; saying no to locked, proprietary technology is a political act on behalf of the society around me. I have an Android phone and am waiting excitedly for the emergence of Android or other unlocked tablets. Until then, I'll remain (sadly) un-tabletted.

(Photo credit: http://www.wired.com)

BBC Special on ESP feat. Richard Wiseman and...

2010-03-22T14:10:00.000-07:00

I just YouTubed a fun BBC report on ESP and psi research from sometime around 1994. It features the now-famous psychologist and magician Richard Wiseman (still with hair) and other researchers.

The guy Wiseman tests for Macro PK looks oddly familiar...

On Magic and Technology: The Elephant in the Room

2010-03-21T02:28:00.000-07:00

Technology giveth, and technology taketh away.
-Cory Doctorow, author and digital rights activist

Question: Your friend and fellow magician offers you a hard drive containing digital versions of virtually every major magic book, magazine and video produced over the last century. Do you accept it?

1. No thanks. Those are all copyrighted works and taking them would be tantamount to theft on a large scale, which could destroy the magic world and all its creators.
2. Hmmm…Those are all copyrighted works but I probably won’t ever buy most of them anyway, and it sure would be nice to be able to peruse this giant library.
3. Hell to the yeah! Information wants to be free, intellectual “property” is not property, sharing is not a crime, and making this available to every magician who wants it will have a revolutionary impact on the art.

-------------------

This post is long overdue. I have worked on this essay in one form or another for several years (one day, I'll bust out the Keynote version), but I have never been entirely comfortable with the way I managed to express my central point. So I’ll just come out and say it: The issue of digital file-sharing is a growing elephant in the room for the magic community and it’s about to become a huge, huge deal.

My previous post outlined my magical biography in depth for one very important reason-- to illuminate just how thoroughly my personal story is inseparable from that of the various communities in which I have pursued my art. Art and culture progress through the sharing of ideas and the creative building on what came previously. Magic in particular, as an occult (hidden) art, has always depended on the oral traditions, on the passing on of information through one-on-one exchanges. With the advent of technology, the sharing of magical information is taking an exponential leap forward.

Until about a decade ago, if you invented a new trick or move you could put it in print in a book or magazine, or you could just show it to your friends. If it spread more broadly, you might get credit for it and a bit of cachet at your local magic club. Only recently, with the democratization of technology, has the average magician gotten the wherewithal to actually produce and distribute his or her own ebooks and videos. The last decade has seen a concurrent explosion in new material, released through this relatively new distribution channel. Everyone can now try to monetize his or her creative output. Technology giveth.

But the very explosion in technology that facilitated this extraordinary new distribution paradigm also contains the seeds of its demise. The field of magic is about to be transformed by the same forces that transformed the music industry. These forces emerge from the explosive growth of peer to peer (P2P) and other file sharing technologies, which allow anyone to share any digital file with anyone else, anywhere in the world. Because of these technologies, and the fact that people by the hundreds of millions have adopted them, many culture watchers have seen the writing on the wall and declared the (historically brief) era in which music was bought and sold as a commodity to be effectively over. Something similar is about to happen to the world of magic books and videos. Technology taketh away.

Contrary to the blatant lies spouted by the recording industry, this state of affairs has largely benefited musicians. Most musicians never made much money on CD sales in any case (which partly explains why no artists have ever benefited from the recording industry's lawsuits against file sharers). Musicians have traditionally made most of their money from touring and merchandise. For the majority of bands, file-sharing has been a gift that extends their reach and fan base. If there’s one thing worse than having fans who don’t pay for your music, it’s having no one listen to your music in the first place. And, of course, the same digital progress that begat file sharing also yielded the social networking sites like MySpace, which have empowered musicians to control their own destinies beyond all previous imagining.

What has demolished the industry has helped its artists.

Technology giveth right back.

The End of Scarcity

Like music before the late 1990s, magic has always been a relatively scarce resource. If you are a beginner, your options for learning magic have historically been pretty limited. You can visit one of the few remaining brick and mortar magic shops or you can join one of the local magic clubs in your area. With the rise of the Internet, you can also buy magic online. If you don’t want to have to buy everything, you can peruse YouTube and try to extract meaningful magic lessons from the unorganized clips of varying quality others have posted.

To really gain deep knowledge of the art, however, you need access to a good magic library. Traditionally, such access only comes with a whole lot of cash, a job in a magic shop, or a visit to one of the few private magic libraries--the Magic Castle Library in Hollywood, for instance. If you don’t happen to be wealthy, live near a good magic library, or work at one of the handful of magic shops still in business, you have traditionally been pretty much out of luck. The unfortunate result of this sad state of affairs is that the art of magic has mostly been practiced by artists who—through no fault of their own—are not well read in the art.

That’s about to change. The magic world doesn’t know it yet, but it is on the verge of the most cataclysmic transformation since the rise of the Internet itself. The scarce resource of magic books and videos is about to become about as scarce as digital music files on a college campus, which is to say not scarce at all. The days in which young magicians had to painstakingly consider every book and video purchase are over. Welcome to the Universal Library, magic style.

The Universal Library, a decentralized digital library containing all the music, books, movies and other products of human creation is being created even as we speak, and the magic world is not immune from this game-changing revolution. A worldwide army of anonymous volunteers is discreetly digitizing magic books and videos and putting them up on the web. Vast swaths of the great works in the history of magic – books, magazines, videos – are already available on file-sharing networks, and this trend towards broad general availability will only increase in the coming years. The new democratization of magic information is an unprecedented boon to all the world’s magicians; imagine having your own 24/7 access to the greatest magical library ever created! But it also brings tremendous challenges as old business models cease to be valid in the new, networked world. Technology giveth and technology taketh away.

The End of Copyright?

The old paradigm for monetizing creative works involves putting them into a tangible form, such as a book, CD or DVD, and selling them. The digital revolution fundamentally subverts this model. Copies are freely made and easily distributed worldwide, so any business plan that depends on selling copies of information that exists digitally is in deep trouble.

The rise of the digital magic library brings with it a whole host of challenges, mostly centered around issues of copyright and ownership. To many people, including many content producers and owners, a world of free and unlimited copies of books, videos, and music boils down to one word: theft. Virtually all the files on the file-sharing sites are copyrighted, and many of them are currently in print.

The recording industry tried valiantly—some would say stupidly—to hold on to their dying paradigm, suing music fans for downloading music, and suing file-sharing sites like Napster for facilitating such activity. These lawsuits, while yielding the occasional Pyrrhic victory, did little to quell the explosion in file sharing. Music sharers simply moved to other sites using new, more protected technology and sharing has continued to grow exponentially. As an added insult, a generation of young music fans learned to loathe the music industry and its heavy-handed tactics.

The magic world is not an exact parallel to the music world, of course. The music industry was plagued by a predatory, top down hierarchy that exploited artists for years, and few people outside of EMI, Columbia, and RCA are lamenting its demise. Magic, on the other hand, is a largely decentralized, artist-centered industry. Individual magicians can and do put out their own books and videos, selling them from their personal websites to a small base of fans. Contrary to the music industry powerhouses, the recent growth of large magic industry players like Penguin, Ellusionist and Theory 11 has, by most accounts, been quite profitable for those creators lucky and talented enough to put out hit material.

What will happen when a critical mass of young magicians begins acquiring most of their magic for free through file-sharing sites? No one knows, of course, although early signs suggest we are about to find out. One result is that the next generation of magicians will likely be the most magically literate generation in history, with full access to a vast magical library. Another result is that certain creators, those who depend for their livelihood on selling magic books and videos, will have to adapt to this new reality and find a new business model. In an era in which digital copies are cheap and plentiful, a successful business model will be the one that finds other avenues to monetize.

More than one person has suggested to me that if everything is instantly available online for free, creators will simply stop releasing new material. If this were true, the music industry would have come to a stop over the last ten years. Yet musicians existed before there was a recording industry, and they will continue to exist after the recording industry in its present form has vanished.

In the case of magic, I feel confident that creators will continue to create, and they and their fans will find new ways to reward them for their creativity. This does not mean that every work that would have existed under the old model will necessarily also exist under the new one. Every business model has its pros and cons, and every creator must struggle to get paid under whatever model exists at the time. The restaurants in Hollywood are filled with actors who can’t get paid to act, the gas stations are packed with screenwriters who can’t get their movies made, schools are full of painters, law firms packed with musicians and novelists who gave up their dreams in order to pay the bills. Technology has opened up vast new opportunities, and closed a few, too.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Think back to the question that opened this essay. Which answer would you give to a friend who offered you that hypothetical vast digital library? I’m going to go out on a limb and say the younger you are, the higher the number you probably chose as an answer. In other words, if you are old enough to remember a time before there was an Internet, you are more likely to perceive of any unauthorized exchange of copyrighted material as theft. If you are in your thirties, you probably straddle both worlds, and if you are in your twenties or younger, you likely grew up downloading music, movies and TV shows and take it as a given that digital information flows freely on the Internet.

“When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”
-Gordy Thompson, New York Times (as quoted by Clay Shirkey)

I love the above quote because it so neatly encapsulates the dramatic divide between those who chose answer number 1 and those who chose number 3. A 2007 New York Times Magazine profile of Columbia Records head honcho Rick Rubin is instructive. The article cites an internal focus group conducted with a group of their college-aged summer interns. Among the findings: “[young people] mostly steal music, but they don’t consider it stealing.” In other words, young people are either morally bankrupt (the traditional industry view) or they have emerged within a fundamentally new paradigm with totally different rules. Copyright laws, which were originally intended to protect creators, are now widely seen as an onerous tool for a small cadre of large content owners to protect their business interests. Such laws may well be obsolete, replaced with the most democratic system of information exchange in history.

The reason this matters was recently elucidated by the great copyright lawyer Lawrence Lessig in a speech to the Italian parliament. Lessig points out that our cultural and legal battles are more and more turning out to be battles against young people. Besides being ill-advised on moral and spiritual grounds, a battle against the next generation is an obvious strategic blunder; young people have the insurmountable advantage of time on their side. They are going to emerge victorious.

Technology giveth. The Internet has facilitated an extraordinary explosion in creative talent over the last decade. Young sensations like the Buck Twins, Daniel Garcia, and Ponta the Smith are undoubtedly much more widely known than they could ever have been a decade ago, with huge fan bases spawned by the Internet’s global reach. How will their fans support them in the future?

The magic world needs to start thinking about such questions now. Radiohead’s famous “tip jar” model, in which their fans decided how much if anything to pay for their album In Rainbows, is one possible model. Along with the “pay what you like” download, Radiohead also offered an $80 collector’s package containing a CD, a vinyl disc, and other selected merchandise. Early reports estimate the average price paid for the download was $6, with many fans opting for the collector’s package as well. With 1.2 million downloads, Radiohead earned somewhere in the vicinity of $7 million on their new CD in its first week of release. Such a number is extraordinary for any artist, and all the more so because every penny of it was given voluntarily by their most passionate fans, who could have downloaded the music for free directly from Radiohead’s website.

Is there a magician with the status of Radiohead willing to take the plunge? Imagine if Paul Harris decided to release his True Astonishment videos in low-resolution digital format online using the tip jar model—pay what you like, or nothing at all—alongside an optional full resolution version for a nominal charge, the beautiful boxed version with props for the usual fee, and even a “limited collector’s edition,” perhaps with a different box, or a signed limited edition of the Art of Astonishment books to accompany the videos. Such a move would instantly jump-start the new magic economy, re-establish Harris as the most forward-thinking magician of his era (yet again!), and leapfrog over the impending showdown between the “magic establishment” and the new generation of magic fans, for whom freely exchanged digital media is a fact of life.

Perhaps most importantly of all, it would ensure that the information in the videos, one of the most extraordinary collections of magical thinking to come out in the last ten years, would be more widely seen. Assuming Paul Harris and co-conspirator Bro Gilbert really intended for these videos to have a transformative effect on the magic world (as they stated they did), wouldn’t making the material available through the broadest range of options be the most efficacious strategy?

It will be up to the next generation to figure out the business model of the future. The universal magic library is coming, and no amount of railing against the new generation of magic file sharers will change the fundamental essence of the new media paradigm. The magic world must not demonize people who build digital libraries of “pirated” works, but must instead embrace the democratization of technology and make a concerted effort to find a way forward.

Technology giveth and technology taketh away. The time to start thinking about these issues is now.

My magic biography, and why it matters

2010-03-20T18:30:00.000-07:00

As a magician, I have been extremely lucky throughout my life. I first got into magic while living overseas, when my dad bought me a magic set as a gift. Shortly thereafter, on a return visit to the U.S. he stopped into Tannen's and picked up a bunch of starter tricks on their recommendation, tricks which just happened to include two very good effects (Hot Rod & Svengali Deck) and one flat-out masterpiece (Invisible Deck). More trips back to the U.S., and more visits to Tannen's and some other magic shops, stocked my drawers with enough material that I was able to start doing kid shows at the ripe old age of 10 or so. The following year, I met Doug Henning backstage at The Magic Show and got a mention in the New York Times.

When I moved back to the Washington DC area in 1977, I was delighted to find a magical co-conspirator named Greg living right down the street from me. We began hanging around Al’s Magic Shop, which (lucky me!) turned out to be one of the greatest magic shops in the nation. We made ourselves enough of a pest that Al soon hired us as weekend demonstrators; throughout my junior high and high school years I attended the parallel school of Al’s Magic, where my teachers included not only Al and the other talented folks who worked there but also people like Tim Conover, Harvey Rosenthal, Larry Davidson, Jack Birnman, Scotty York, Bob Kohler, and David Williamson. In our spare time, Greg and I worked at Dream Wizards, a legendary D&D supply place (never my thing) with a separate magic section, right when they were releasing the brilliant John Kennedy’s first great effects – Floating Bill (which kick-started the IT craze), Impossible Matrix and his Card Stab routine. I still remember having throwing card battles in the parking lot with a 14-year-old Alain Nu.

My affiliation with Al's was fortuitous for another reason as well; my downtime was inevitably spent perusing the ample “library” Al called his stock, and working on new material with my colleagues and magical friends who stopped by the shop. I bought plenty of books in those days, too; my personal library contains some of the classic books of the day (Lorayne, Ammar, and a lot of Kaufman titles). But my great blessing was in the unusual combination of access to material, access to great minds and a place to hone my craft day in and day out.

In my high school years, Bob Sheets and Steve Spill opened up the Brook Farm Inn of Magic in my neighborhood, so naturally I used to hang out there and watch lots of great magic. Not only did I see their excellent regular dinner show on several occasions, I also caught Ricky Jay’s one-man show there long before Jay became a darling of the David Mamet/NY theater/film intelligentsia crowd. In short, the Washington, DC area was a mecca for great magicians in the late 70s and early 80s, and I was lucky enough to become plugged into the zeitgeist and to mine a particularly rich vein of talent.

These same years, my family would vacation in Sarasota, Florida where, (synchronicity, anyone?) there happened to be an excellent magic-themed restaurant called The Magic Moment (sadly, it closed in 1991). I showed up one day, auditioned for owner Chris Moore, and wound up with a regular Christmas season gig table-hopping alongside some excellent pros, including the very gentlemanly Paul Cummins.

By the time I graduated college and moved to L.A., I had put in my 10,000 hours. I promptly became a regular at the Magic Castle, performing in the close-up room at least once a year. I hung out there 2 or 3 times a week for 6 years, doing a ton of magic around the Castle for delighted overflow crowds, and also became a regular denizen of the extensive Castle library. During this time, the list of colleagues and mentors I hung out with is almost embarrassingly extravagant: Dai Vernon, Charlie Miller, Bruce Cervon, Larry Jennings, Billy McComb, Bob Jardine, Bill Goodwyn, Ray Cosby, Alfonso, T.A. Waters, Franz Harary, John Carney, Kevin James, Nicholas Knight, Tony Clark, Christopher Hart, Mickey O'Connor, Dan Sylvester, Joe Monte, Paul Harris, Jerry Andrus…

I left LA to wander Europe and ended up spending two and a half years in Prague, that most magical of cities. In that time, I became a mini-celebrity in the Praha magic scene, one of the only really top notch close-up performers in the area (another being my good friend Petr Kasnar). I hung out with the magic club (which consisted of a lot of drinking, except I don't drink), lectured at their conventions, and just generally enjoyed my status as the King of the Lilliputians.

Back in the U.S., I spent a couple years in the DC area largely out of magic (what with a wife and a new baby). I still checked in with Al's now and then, and I may have even filled in behind the counters once or twice. A move to Chicago put me in touch with a whole new group centered around the regular Saturday gathering at another legendary shop, Magic Inc., where the great Jay Marshall held forth in all his bawdy glory. I was never able to hang out there as often as I would have liked but I did nevertheless make one more talented magical friend and, all too briefly, another great friend, the husband and co-conspirator of a delightful puppeteer (R.I.P. Lon).

A move to Silicon Valley put me in touch with my latest, perhaps greatest magical community, one blessed with a disproportionate number of extremely talented young magicians (a post-David Blaine generation, you might say). I am honored to consider myself something of a mentor to one or two of them, and just as thrilled to consider every one of them my teachers as well. Examples of these rising young talents are Chris "Orbit" Brown, about whom I wrote this;, a hyper-talented contact juggler named Chris Bruner, who also happens to be one of the most naturally gifted close-up artists I've seen in a long time; Michael Feldman, who's now a semi-regular performer at Jamy Ian Swiss' Monday Night Magic; Theron Schaub; Josh Logan; the becoming-legendary Ricky Smith; Brian Hart; and my good friend John Bodine, whose reputation is beginning to precede him. This is also the community that, slightly before I got there, birthed the extraordinary Buck Twins.

Within this same amazing community, I have a bunch of magical friends roughly my own age and generation, including people like Kim Silverman, another magician of fast-growing reputation who I'm pretty certain does the best versions of Ninja Rings and Ring on Cord done by anyone, anywhere; Kent Gunn, who has done some truly pioneering work on the Cups and Balls; Scott Emo of Sacred fame; and Will Chandler, proprietor of our own Magic Castle North, The Magic Garage.

The point of this brief biography is that I have been extremely lucky to find myself immersed in such a diverse series of magical communities and have always been honored to be both the giver and receiver of magical wisdom. I have been the recipient and beneficiary of an extraordinary amount of generosity and knowledge, freely given by mentors and peers. Magic, like most arts, grows through this free exchange. The art of magic has evolved enormously in the past dozen or so years for reasons I will go into in my next post, but the upshot is that all the power in the art, all the potential and wonder, springs from the open sharing that governs this and any other art. Magic grows when creative people give freely of their time and energy.

Next: Why it matters, or The Elephant in the Room

Buck Twins meet Die Antwoord ("100% South African Culture" mix)

2010-02-08T02:39:00.000-08:00

I was inspired by my (completely accidental) purchase of an English Laundry shirt on deep discount, a rare deck of Aristocrat 327 playing cards, and the double-edged brilliance of this week's mind-boggling Die Antwoord/Leon Botha conjunction. The Universe provides...

Buck Twins meet Die Antwoord ("100% South African Culture" mix)

All White Basketball League - Unseen Footage!

2010-02-05T00:15:00.000-08:00

The Whites Only Basketball League, as discussed a few weeks back on BoingBoing, Rachel Maddow and elsewhere, seemed like a dumb, racist idea. Now we see in this never before seen footage that those white players are amazing!

Thoughts on Cardini

2010-02-04T23:04:00.001-08:00

UPDATE 4/09/2010: Sadly, the Miracle Factory has asked me to take down the video under threat of legal action. Magicians and others will now once again have to either watch the degraded version of the act or buy the entire Festival of Magic DVD to get the golden 9 minutes. This is a poignant demonstration of how copyright laws have nothing to do with protecting artists (Cardini died in 1973) and everything to do with controlling the free flow of information in order to prop up a dying business model. I do not intend the above as a personal attack on The Miracle Factory, an excellent company that puts out many wonderful magic videos, but rather a critique of the entire U.S. copyright system. I will be posting more on this subject shortly.

Cardini (nee Richard Valentine Pitchford) is an absolutely legendary figure in magic. He is widely reputed to have been one of the greatest magicians who ever lived, but magicians who saw him live (he died in 1973) are a diminishing lot. The only footage of his complete act, an appearance on a 1957 TV magic show called Festival of Magic, has been closely guarded among a small group of magicians. Incomplete, low quality versions have been up on YouTube for a while, but they look like copies of copies of copies and are quite tough to evaluate properly.

Kudos to The Miracle Factory for releasing the complete Festival of Magic on DVD in a beautifully remastered version. Finally, the rest of us can have the chance to check out Cardini's act and see what all the fuss is about. The whole DVD is worth watching; Robert Harbin, for instance, does the first and only convincing chair suspension I've ever seen.

So, does Cardini live up to his reputation? I have posted the Cardini segment up on YouTube so that all magicians can finally see it and learn from it. You really haven't seen it until you've seen this remastered version.

Cardini of England (NOTE: Dead link. Try this low quality version instead.)

Here's my take: It's stunning. This is one of the most elegant, funny and magical acts I've ever seen. Cardini doesn't just produce cards and cigarettes because he can. Everything happens for a reason, sometimes because he's drunk and can't control himself.

I would argue that Cardini's act barely deserves the label of "manipulation" act. Cardini uses classic manipulation technique to create magic, not to show off. He's not strutting his stuff, for the most part. He's just out there having fun, and his technique happens to be superb.

He also uses direction and misdirection in a very sophisticated, masterful way. He never does a move when you're watching; he creates "on" beats and "off" beats and uses them to cover his work. Best of all, he is such a charming personality that you don't really care one way or the other. Cardini is simply a joy to watch when he's on the stage.

Cardini's act has its roots in vaudeville and silent film comedy. I'm a big Charlie Chaplin fan, and his influence on Cardini is quite striking. In one of his early shorts, The Cure," Chaplin plays a wealthy drunk at a fancy rehab resort. The main room could be a double for Cardini's set. For all I know, Cardini may have also been influenced by an even earlier French film comedian, Max Linder, who also frequently played wealthy drunks.

And I love the sleeping guy in the background! How many modern magicians would set such a complete stage for their acts?

Really a treat. It's great that magicians can finally see this amazing act, and learn from one of the great masters of our art.

OCD Comes Alive

2009-10-25T20:34:00.000-07:00

Balls is a highly addictive (for me, at least) little flash app whose sole purpose is to grab you and hold you and force you to keep reducing the balls until the 4 big balls you start with become 4 to the 7th balls, or 65,536 balls.

It’s a wonderful lesson in the power of, well, powers. After many hours (many hours), I have completed this task. The image below of the completed board might help save you from the same obsession.

H/T to BoingBoingfor pointing to this one a while back.

Book Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

2009-10-10T17:52:00.000-07:00

Phenomenal. Junot Diaz is an amazing writer.

I picked this up on a whim at the library after seeing it in the zeitgeist for the last year or so. It's a dazzling, crackling book, the story of a fat Dominican sci-fi geek in Brooklyn, of his older, hottie sister, and of their mother and her horrifying backstory in the Dominican Republic (the DR), which was ruled from 1930-1961 by a psychopathic tyrant, a totalitarian Sauron (Diaz's term) so brutal he made Saddam Hussein seem like a lightweight.

Diaz's cast of characters includes many real-life international playboy evildoers dropped into footnotes like devils from some parallel Gatsby, and he mixes hyper-nerd pop culture and Spanglish with authority and a supremely deft touch. For such a pain-filled book, Diaz never loses sight of either the humanity of his protagonists or the absurdly black humor of their world. Best of all, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a ripping yarn from beginning to end.

Ormond McGill on Hypnotizing Difficult Subjects

2009-08-18T19:32:00.001-07:00

Longtime readers may recall my obit for the great Ormond McGill, Dean of American Hypnotists and father of modern stage hypnotism. Ormond was a lovely and gentle man but you might not believe it from this handy bit of advice from his seminal 1947 Encyclopedia of Stage Hypnotism:

Challenge Hypnotism

Occasionally, although very rarely, you may run up against a person who is refractory about entering into the situation with you and following your instructions. Dr. Q [McGill's stage name] would always get around such difficulty by the following secret method of putting the subject to sleep against his will. This is the famous "Bulldog Method" which has long been one of the most cherished secrets of stage Hypnotists.

Standing directly in front of the subject, push his head well back, with your left hand on the front of his forehead. Then place the thumb and first finger of your right hand directly on his exposed throat, just above the Adam's apple. You can quickly find the exact spot by the feel of the blood pounding through the veins in his throat beneath your fingers. Push firmly in upon these veins, at the same time requesting the man to breathe deeply. (Even if he doesn't wish to comply, he'll be largely compelled to do so in order to get air in such a position.) Maintain this pressure upon the veins in his throat for a moment, and at the same time push his head farther backward...and carefully watch your subject.

You will find that he will suddenly go limp. Catch this moment and shout loudly, "Sleep," and let him drop to the floor in a heap.

Step aside to give the audience a chance to see the "hypnotized" man on the floor. Then quickly bend over the subject and hit him gently on the back of the neck while saying in a loud voice, "All right now, wake up now...wide awake!"

After that demonstration you will find that the subject will be most docile and willing to follow whatever whispered instructions you care to give. It also serves to impress the other subjects on the stage to the end that they'd better co-operate along with you--or else.

(Emphasis in original)

I've decided to put together a stage hypnotism act. Anyone want to come over to my place so I can practice the "Bulldog Method"?

Modern Times

2009-08-13T12:42:00.000-07:00

That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of "bread and circuses" can compensate for the damage done--these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence--because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.
--E.F. Shumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973)

An Open Letter to Joan Walsh about that O'Reilly appearance - UPDATED

2009-06-13T23:57:00.000-07:00

Salon Editor Joan Walsh was just on The O'Reilly Factor and you can see the results here. I posted the letter below to the comments section of her recent Salon post about the interview.

You were angry throughout the interview, Joan. Big mistake. What would Jesus do? What would Mohammed do? What would the Buddha do?

Unconditional love, that's what. Compassion and constant forgiveness. That's what the Left stands for. Nonviolence, and unconditional love and compassion. All the important Left political positions stem from that essential foundation.

All the letter writers who told you you're a fool for going on the show are wrong. Let the Left media be your guide. Look at Colbert, who regularly has quite Right Wing people (including Papa Bill) on his show and treats them with respect and love and dignity -- even as he very bluntly satirizes them in that deliciously calibrated way. Or Rachel Maddow, who has "my fake uncle Pat Buchanan" on and seems to feel a real affection for him, as repugnant as some of his views may be.

You can be the Left guest who shows the right that someone on the Left can be loving and gentle and actually say some things that make sense. But you have to take control. Don't ever argue with him; that's his territory and he's a master of forcing you into an argument in which he has already defined the terms to his own advantage.

Bill O'Reilly's a fake and a fraud, no doubt about that. But maybe on the abortion issue he has a point. When he asked you if you thought late term fetuses should have any rights, why couldn't you just say, "I believe a woman's right to control her body should trump any rights we may or may not extend to unborn fetuses." Let him have his belief that abortion is some level of violence, if not murder. Lots of very civilized people have that fundamental belief, including a lot who think a woman should have the legal right to make that choice.

But his rhetoric of hatred should be met with a rhetoric of love. Meet every ugly statement of his with a very calm, positive declarative statement of how he could become a better man, a better American, and a better leader for his legion of followers. "I understand where you're coming from but I think it would be more democratic, and American, to work to change the law rather than calling someone a 'baby killer' and all but advocating vigilantism against him." Smile sweetly.

Never give him back anger. Never never. O'Reilly feeds on anger, it makes him stronger. He feeds on anger like a mosquito feeds on blood. Give him only love and forgiveness. Help set him straight.

UPDATE

Joan Walsh responded:

With all due respect peacelove, I so totally agree with you, I do believe the answer is love and compassion, and I do my best to show it.

And yet I think your letter is condescending bullshit. And I bet Rachel would agree with me re: Uncle Pat, because I have dealt with more of his hard-core racist bullshit than she has. Your letter makes me wonder how you model love and compassion to people as shriveled as O'Reilly - but I love you for it.

To which, I responded back:

So sorry, Joan. I didn't mean to be condescending but I can certainly see how my letter can be read as such. My bad.

O'Reilly's a tough one because he's so fundamentally dishonest. You really can't tell what he actually believes since he's perfectly willing to contradict himself if he thinks he can leverage it to his advantage.

That said, I do think there is a way to neutralize O'Reilly by simply refusing to allow his barbs to stick in their target (you). Laugh off the ridiculous ones, just like the way Obama laughed off the claims that he was a Muslim who consorted with domestic terrorists. He called them "silly" and moved on.

And, luckily, most of America did as well.

I Am a Japanese Synthesizer

2009-04-25T15:04:00.000-07:00

I was recently inspired to check the interwebs for Petr Skoumal's "I am a Japanese Synthesizer," which was a big hit when I was living in Prague back in '94. Not only is it glorious fun, but Skoumal was fifty-six at the time, a most welcome and delightful addition to all the twenty-somethings normally seen on the Czech version of MTV at the time.

I was dreaming that U.S. MTV would play this and make this guy a breakout star. Never happened, natch. The paucity of imagination on MTV by that point was complete.

BoingBoingey Goodness

2009-01-31T14:03:00.000-08:00

I was just hipped to this talented 18-year-old French Canadian singer Beatice Martin (Couer de Pirate) via the comments in a BoingBoing post (her music accompanies a lovely YouTube time lapse of an infant playing).

This led me to a few of her videos on YouTube (all in French):

Commes des enfants
Mange ta ville

Live clips

Ensemble (Featured in the above-mentioned time lapse video)
Corbeau

I really appreciate that these are all short and sweet. There's no substitute for real talent, amply on display even on these live clips.

I really dig the ink, too.

Listening to Eels right now, amazing. Also hipped from a great BoingBoing post.

As was Old Jews Telling Jokes.

The Magic Garage

2009-01-31T13:33:00.000-08:00

The Magic Garage is serious business. We are not amused.

Original

An Awesome Book

2009-01-04T15:33:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

Unleash your inner-dreamer with artist Dallas Clayton's lovely new "kids" book, An Awesome Book, a side-scrolled treat.

Top Copyright Lawyer on the Depressing State of Copyright Law

2008-08-10T15:14:00.000-07:00

William Patry is one of the country's leading intellectual property lawyers, author of a seven-volume treatise on copyright law, and now senior copyright counsel for Google. Until recently, Patry also maintained a highly-regarded personal blog about copyright. On August 1st, however, Patry announced that he was bringing his blog to an end.

Patry cites two major reasons for the move. The first is personal. Patry is concerned that many people, including some in the press, continue to cite the blog in the context of his work at Google, despite his repeated insistence that it is a personal blog in no way affiliated with Google. In addition, he's tired of dealing with the inevitable crazies who pop out of the woodwork when you maintain such a public presence.

Patry's other reason for ending the blog?

The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing.

Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.

Letter to Xeni

2008-07-04T01:43:00.000-07:00

Hi Xeni,

I'm a big fan and I've read the entire comment thread -- over 1400 comments at the time of this writing, from beginning to end. First of all, I want you to know I'm so sorry for the way this whole thing has slapped you in such a public way. Whatever your transgression -- and I'm in the camp that thinks it should have been obvious that "upublishing" a huge batch of posts without saying anything is a pretty big one -- not many BB fans in that comment thread wish you any of the pain you must be experiencing.

So keep the faith. We love you all and we love the blog. We just want to hear from BoingBoing that we can still trust you.

PeaceLove

Hitler Tamed by Prison (1924)

2008-06-23T15:23:00.000-07:00

Oh thank goodness.

Via the fantastic Pixdaus.

An Open Letter to MoveOn

2008-06-23T14:29:00.000-07:00

I have been a member of MoveOn virtually since it's inception during the Clinton impeachment debacle. Until a few days ago, I was also a passionate supporter of Senator Obama's presidential run. I have welcomed MoveOn's endorsement of this extraordinary candidate, as chosen by an overwhelming majority of MoveOn members.

Like many of Senator Obama's supporters, however, I am shocked and horrified by the Senator's decision to sign on to the unconstitutional and fascistic FISA bill. I believe that such an action betrays all Americans in a fundamental way that calls into question Senator Obama's fitness for the highest office in the land. I therefore urge MoveOn to hold an immediate vote of its members to decide whether to withdraw MoveOn's support from this candidate.

Obama Supports FISA Legislation

2008-06-21T15:01:00.000-07:00

WTF?

More on Russert, and a potential First Lady's sordid past

2008-06-21T10:58:00.001-07:00

In the comments to my previous post, Anonymous takes issue with my criticism of the recently-passed Tim Russert. Presumably, Anonymous is uncomfortable with the propriety of criticizing the dead, since he or she offers no substantive response to my main point. As a top dog in the back-patting Washington media world, Russert was a defacto enabler of the worst and most criminal Administration in recent history. This point would be hard to deny even if Anonymous wanted to try.

Linda Hirshman has a good summary of Russert's legacy up on Alternet. Here's a snippet:

The Russert Test was a disaster because it rewarded people willing to lie unabashedly on TV. They lied because they could not truthfully defend their positions. But Russert's famed "gotcha" research couldn't catch them. Much has been said this eulogizing week about Russert's hard-working ways assembling the material in advance of the show. Old metal. When someone told a new lie on Meet the Press, such as when Dick Cheney flat-out denied he had ever said that intelligence confirmed the Al Qaeda/Iraq link, Meet the Press had no procedure for producing the contrary evidence. This would hardly have been difficult, given Google, an earpiece and a producer to do instant research. As it happened, NBC had the rebuttal to Cheney's lies in its own archives, but it remained for The Daily Show to do the research.

While I'm on the subject of the media, can you imagine the media brouhaha if Michelle Obama had a history as a drug addict who stole prescription pain killers from her own non-profit, medicines intended for poor people in Third World nations ?

One of the presumptive First Ladies is a former drug addict and thief, but it's not Obama. Cindy McCain's past isn't a secret -- she has discussed it on Dateline and Good Morning America -- but I still find it odd that Michelle's fist bump can dominate a slow news cycle while Cindy gets such softball treatment. Salon wrote about the whole sordid affair back in 1999, but almost everyone seems to have forgotten about it, or decided the McCains deserve a free pass on this one. The article is well worth a read, both for what it reveals about the powerful McCain spin machine and for its tale of a lonely, depressed woman trapped in a marriage of convenience.

The media has decided that candidate's spouses are fair game; let's see if we get any balance.

Tim Russert - The Other Side

2008-06-13T18:42:00.000-07:00

The chattering class is praising Tim Russert to the stars today, after the amiable Meet the Press star collapsed and died unexpectedly. I always thought Russert seemed like a nice guy and I'm sure all the kind words are heartfelt. But I have a lot of trouble stomaching all the high praise. Russert was a $5 million a year hack, a central figure of the Beltway elite "political" press who basically shilled for his friends in high places while hiding behind his "blue-collar guy from Buffalo" persona. Serious journalism hardly ever emerged from his show.

Tim Russert: Stop the Inanity is a sharp summation of Tim Russert's unique qualities.

Glenn Greenwald, former civil rights litigator and best-selling author, holds the mainstream media to the fire on a regular basis on his Salon blog. Here are a couple of his Russert-related favorite quotes of 2007:

When I talk to senior government officials on the phone, it's my own policy -- our conversations are confidential. If I want to use anything from that conversation, then I will ask permission
--Tim Russert, under oath at the Lewis Libby trial, citing the textbook function of a government propagandist to explain his role as a "journalist."

I suggested we put the vice president on 'Meet the Press,' which was a tactic we often used. It's our best format," as it allows us to "control the message
--Cheney media aide Cathie Martin, under oath at the Libby trial, making clear how well Russert fulfills his function.

And check this video of Matt Lauer speaking with Russert about Speaker Pelosi's trip to Syria, which Greenwald calls "a two-minute tribute to the fact-free idiocy of our media stars." Notice how Russert simply accepts Lauer's right-wing frame without question.

Here's a fun Digby post from April, 2007.

BILL MOYERS: Critics point to September eight, 2002 and to your show in particular, as the classic case of how the press and the government became inseparable.

Someone in the administration plants a dramatic story in the NEW YORK TIMES And then the Vice President comes on your show and points to the NEW YORK TIMES. It's a circular, self-confirming leak.

TIM RUSSERT: I don't know how Judith Miller and Michael Gordon reported that story, who their sources were. It was a front-page story of the NEW YORK TIMES. When Secretary Rice and Vice President Cheney and others came up that Sunday morning on all the Sunday shows, they did exactly that.

What my concern was, is that there were concerns expressed by other government officials. And to this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them.

[snip]

TIM RUSSERT: I-- look, I'm a blue-collar guy from Buffalo. I know who my sources are. I work 'em very hard. It's the mid-level people that tell you the truth. Now-

BILL MOYERS: They're the ones who know the story?

TIM RUSSERT: Well, they're working on the problem. And they understand the detail much better than a lotta the so-called policy makers and-- and-- and political officials.

BILL MOYERS: But they don't get on the Sunday talk shows--

TIM RUSSERT: No.

For more Russert goodies, check out the Huffington Post's Russert Watch.

How to Reject Authority at a Border Patrol Checkpoint

2008-05-10T15:21:00.000-07:00

Here's a weirdly compelling video of a guy declining to answer a Border Patrol agent's questions at a checkpoint 50 miles north of the Mexican border. He repeatedly asks, "Am I being detained?" and "Am I free to go?" -- questions the poor agent fights like hell to avoid answering.

Comments on the site skew pretty heavily against the motorist, who people seem to think is being rude. His manner is certainly brusque, but I nevertheless find it thrilling to watch someone bravely assert their civil liberties in the face of armed authority. I can sympathize with the B.P. agent, who's just trying to do her job. Too bad that pesky Bill of Rights sometimes gets in the way.

Clay Shirkey on Cognitive Surplus

2008-04-26T13:20:00.000-07:00

Clay Shirkey is the very smart new media scholar who posited that kids growing up today immersed in ever-more advanced technology are undergoing genuine neurological changes similar to those accompanying language acquisition in small children. (Check my previous post here.) Recently, he described a social paradigm shift no less cataclysmic. In a speech given at the Web 2.0 Conference on Wednesday, Shirkey discussed the sudden democratization of the tools of cultural production, which have turned millions of formerly passive consumers into content producers. Shirkey goes on to answer the all-important follow-up question: Where do they find the time?

It turns out Americans watch 200 billion hours of television every year. Worldwide, people watch about a trillion hours per year. These are astounding numbers; by comparison, Shirkey estimates that the entire Wikipedia project worldwide represents about 100 million total hours of human thought.

If people worldwide, suddenly awash in a sea of choices, reduce their total television viewing by a mere one percent (1%), the "cognitive surplus" freed up would be equivalent to 100 Wikipedia-scale projects. Per year.*

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first.... Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

Read the whole speech here.

* Shirkey mistakenly claims 1% of a trillion would yield 10,000 Wikipedia projects but I think he's off by a factor of 100.

Wow! Tay Zondy is sharp!

2008-03-22T13:11:00.000-07:00

Tay Zondy's a strange dude. His YouTube smash hit Chocolate Rain was just voted most popular music video of 2007 despite -- or perhaps because of -- the fact he comes across as a humorless oddball with a marginal, though startlingly deep, voice. The song's catchy in that maddening commercial jingle way; once it infects you it doesn't let go easily (which may be why Chocolate Rain has inspired hundreds of parody responses, beginning with this hilarious remix).

Check out this interview with Zondy (nee Adam Nyerere Bahner), in which the 25-year-old doctoral student holds forth on selling out, Richard Wright, social justice, and media bias. He's a prickly interview subject, perhaps because he's way too smart not to sense the media narratives unfolding around him. My respect for Zondy just took a huge leap.

Tip of the old hat to Salon's Farhad Manjoo for the link.

Obama's Masterstroke

2008-03-18T22:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Obama gave what I think is the single most important political speech of my lifetime. Obama assumed he was addressing mature adults, and he wrote and delivered the speech with a bluntness and honesty I've never seen in another American presidential candidate, ever. Obama addressed the full spectrum of race and its legacy in America. He called on all Americans, including the media, to leave the past behind and embrace a new vision of a united America.

If this isn't political courage, I don't know what is.

Watch the full speech here.

Obama/Clooney 08

2008-02-22T00:18:00.000-08:00

Aha! The perfect running mate! George Clooney is already an internationally famous and beloved American. I'm sure the rest of the world is quite aware of his progressive activism on behalf of the poor and weak. He makes movies about it, for heaven's sake.

What better American Ambassador could there be, all around the world, than Vice President Clooney? An unmarried serial monogamist from Hollywood with a solid record of international political activism!

We already know they like each other!

Dibs on the TeeShirts!

And Larry Lessig for Minister of Culture! Ensuring the free flow of information to all Americans, and working to promote such values in the rest of the world as well! Maybe Hillary for Health and Human Services? Gavin Newsom to head the newly-created Department of Peace?

Hey, a guy can dream, can't he?

-----------

Hats off, by the way, to the beautiful Tootsie Farklepants for her Obama/Clooney 08 post, in which she posited an Obama/Clooney 08 ticket way back on April 27, 2006, almost two full years ago. I was unaware of any other prior use of the term until after I wrote this post, when I googled "obama/clooney" and found her.

It's possible she got the idea from TMOTTB, commenter number four on this article:

http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/
2006/04/clooney_obama_for_potus.html

Coincidentally (!), TMOTTB left the comment on the very same day, August 27, 2006...

NYC in Words

2008-02-19T13:47:00.000-08:00

Alex Gopher's short animated film The Child envisions a Manhattan constructed entirely of words. The nominal plot follows a young couple rushing to the hospital to deliver their baby. I don't know if Gopher's trying to illuminate an obscure neurological condition or simply creating a compelling textual road trip, but the result is trippy and moving.

An Idea for Hillary and Obama

2008-02-05T00:23:00.000-08:00

I think Obama will be our next President, or else our next Vice President. You heard it here first. (Unless someone else has said it before me.)

I have an idea both he and Hillary can use to generate even more momentum, more cash, all while setting a moral example for all other candidates and for the nation.

Hillary was on Letterman tonight, and they were talking about the enormous amount of money she and all her colleagues were spending on their campaigns. Letterman said, "To think some of that money could have gone to feed poor people."

There's the idea. I think both Hillary and Obama should become an example, a Christian example, if you like, by pledging to donate 10% of their total donations to help feed the poor and homeless. How much do you want to bet that their total take goes up by more than 10%? Hell, that might even inspire me to donate to one or both of them.

Maybe it should be 30%? Just how generous and giving are the American people, anyway?

Whichever candidate would have the courage to do something so obviously wonderful -- that's the one who deserves your vote.

Disaster on Lego World

2008-01-29T20:16:00.001-08:00

My son has just completed his first short film, about a UFO attack on Lego World. Contains horrible violence and bloodied, dismembered Lego dudes.

Dennis Kucinich at the Democratic Debate

2008-01-22T13:04:00.000-08:00

The warmongers at GE/NBC specifically changed their rules to exclude the anti-war Kucinich from last night's debate, after initially inviting him. Luckily, American patriot Amy Goodman of Democracy Now decided to rerun major chunks of the debate with Kucinich in studio, essentially giving him the seat at the table he was denied by the corporate controlled media. So here's the debate as it should have been:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Richard Dreyfuss@Macworld

2008-01-20T00:09:00.000-08:00

I mentioned a few days ago seeing Richard Dreyfuss, the actor from Jaws and The Goodbye Girl, hanging around at Macworld. Well, I had a Close Encounter of the Star Kind and I snapped a surreptitious pic for you, Dear Reader.

I wasn't going to add this coda but what the hell. You see, when I saw Richard Dreyfuss, all I could think of was a little anecdote in uber-producer Julia Phillips' memoir, You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. Phillips and Erica Jong* were hanging out with Dreyfuss:

“Whaddyou mean, angry fucking?” Erica says, egging him on. She and I exchange an I’ll-never-fuck-this-one look. Oh, please. Dreyfuss is a little shorter than me, and has taken to calling me “boss” as in, “Hi, boss,” then pecking me, sonlike, chastely on the cheek.

Dreyfuss pulls himself up to his full height, which is not much, and puffs out his chest. He dryhumps the air, his arms around an invisible whore, and as he screams, “I hate you I hate you I hate you…” one hand smacks his phantom lover about the head and shoulders. We crack up, but in my mind he has moved from a maybe to a never.

So that's what I thought of when I saw Richard Dreyfuss.

* So worth a click, just for the audio. At the moment, it's Jong reading her own poem Smoke on Vanessa Daou's trippy electro-jazz album Zipless: Songs From the Poems of Erica Jong.

Macworld & EFF

2008-01-16T12:42:00.000-08:00

I got to feel ridiculously hip yesterday, what with wandering Macworld and then schmoozing at EFF's 17th birthday party at the 111 Minna Gallery a few blocks down the road. The highlight of Macworld for me, besides playing with the new Macbook Air, was getting a chance to play an early version of Spore, genius Sims creator Will Wright's much delayed new wonder in which players get to create an entire universe, from single-celled organisms to highly customizable animals and creatures to galactic physics.

Check Wright's inspiring TED talk for a closer look.

In the picture, a guy is designing a creature, elongating and shaping the spine. You decide on the length, width, and placement of legs, eyes, mouth, and every other design element of the creature. Then, when he comes alive he moves according to your design and, presumably, some basic rules of anatomy and physiology. Tres cool.

Spore is the game my son and I and -- a great many other people -- have been most eagerly anticipating for several years. Wright's the kind of guy who won't release a game until it's really, truly ready, and I'm willing to believe Spore has required some seriously heavy-duty coding to bring to fruition. Previous release estimate put the date around March, but all I could get out of the EA reps was that the game would be released "sometime this year."

After following their heroic work for well over a decade, I finally joined the EFF at Macworld. Joining supports the leading voice for civil liberties in cyberspace and netted me a cool Hugh D'Andrade-designed tee shirt, too.

I ran into my buddy Bob around the iPod Touch display and we ended up going to dinner at Osha, a very nice Thai place right in the neighborhood. We watched a very cute redhead in a short skirt and white stockings getting a big takeout order. After dinner, we walked over to 111 Minna and discovered the cute redhead is an EFFer. I knew there was something special about her!

At the EFF party, I met Fred von Lohmann, Senior Intellectual Property Attorney, copyfight hero, and all-around nice guy. I've been a fan for years, and I complimented von Lohmann on his excellent interview in Steal This Film II, the fantastic free documentary all about the historic threat to free and open information exchange on the Internet.

I also had a nice long chat with Charles Choi, founder of Caachi.com a new indie film distribution site. With Caachi, filmmakers set their own prices for DRM-free downloads. Artists retain all rights to their work, along with 75 cents of every dollar their films take in. I wonder what percentage goes to the artists with Apple's newly-announced video download service?

In the corner, a couple of guys held court for a while with XO laptops from the One Laptop Per Child project. Impressions without actually playing with one: Very cool, stylish design, and pretty powerful for what it is. The guy doing the demo claims it's very easy to learn to use, especially for someone who has never before used anything else.

Then I met EFF's incoming webmaster Chris and his delightful girlfriend Hilary (one "l," thank you very much) and told them about the seminal role EFF has played over the last 17 years. I advised Chris to make sure the site steers everyone to the Join EFF page as clearly and conveniently as possible.

I even got to introduce Chris and Hilary to Fred von Lohmann, who wished Chris well in organizing a decade and a half's worth of documents into some coherent form!

Liveblogging from Macworld

2008-01-15T17:37:00.000-08:00

I don't have much to say at the moment. I just think it's cool to be posting from the Blogger's Lounge at MacWorld, sponsored by Office 2008. I've already bumped into a couple of friends, one of whom will accompany me to the EFF 17th birthday party later.

Saw lots of cool Mac-related stuff and got to play with the new Macbook Air. Crazy. Also saw Richard Dreyfuss hanging outside the John Lennon Bus. Pics and impressions to follow.

3 Graphic Designers + 4 Days = D-Day Invasion

2008-01-13T12:51:00.001-08:00

This astonishing clip demonstrates that the days in which you needed the GNP of a small country to make an effects-heavy blockbuster are coming to an end. The clip supports my contention from a few days ago that the balance of power has shifted quite dramatically in the film industry.

In my previous post, I mentioned that big time film and television artists will start creating their own media companies, owning every step in the production process and eliminating the parasitic middlemen called studios. Apparently, this process is already underway. Artists and writers are teaming up with geeks to create their own production partnerships, entirely independent from the studios.

The time is ripe for a bottom-up reinvention of the film and television industry. Both technology and society have evolved exponentially since the last writers' stike, way back in 1988. The current writers' strike is the biggest mistake the AMPTP has ever made, and the blowback could prove fatal.

The Daily Show is Back -- Thank God

2008-01-08T15:40:00.000-08:00

Jon Stewart went on a tear for his first show back in the midst of the Writers' Strike. Stewart, along with Stephen Colbert, is the best friend the writers could ever hope for, clarifying the issues and slicing the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) and the corporations it represents. Both Stewart and Colbert featured experts on labor and unions. If nothing else, this strike is educating Americans about the value of unions in allowing workers to stand up to large corporations to assert what are beginning to seem like fundamental rights.

Stewart: I don't believe that the AMPTP understands the struggle that it's in, and I don't think they understand the blowback that's going to happen.
Link (click on the Writers' Strike segment)

Very soon, film and television artists will simply cut free from their corporate masters and run their own shows, much the way musicians are doing right now. Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin did this in 1919 when they formed United Artists, and others have periodically tried the same tactic, often successfully. But the fundamental paradigm of big media has remained constant. Production and distribution have been so expensive that only large corporations have been able to afford them.

That era is coming to a close. Digital media democratizes every step of the process, from production to distribution. The days of scarcity, of a small number of giant corporations controlling the means of production, are over. How appalling that artists and creators largely don't own or control their own work! How'd we ever get into this situation?

The future of media is the Internet, and everyone knows it. The media giants are fighting to hold onto their digital distribution cash while simultaneously claiming they're not making any money on the Internet ($1 billion lawsuits against YouTube notwithstanding).

This strike is a big story. A very, very big story. This is the first Internet-era strike, the first time artists have been able to take their case to the public through all the new media channels, the ones not controlled by their adversaries. Hell, the Golden Globes had to be cancelled, because the producers couldn't get any actors to cross the picket lines and show up.

A line has been drawn in the sand. The AMPTP is fighting a losing battle. Watch out for the blowback.

President Bush's grandfather plotted a fascist takeover of America

2007-12-31T00:47:00.000-08:00

Here's a rather creepy BBC radio report on how a number of powerful businessmen, including Prescott Bush, plotted a fascist coup and takeover of America. Amazing, isn't it, that such a major story has remained hidden from the American people?

I wonder how far the apple falls from the tree...

---------------

The guy who blew the whistle on them in 1934, incidentally, was General Smedley Butler, the author of the famous 1935 treatise War is a Racket.

How Big is the Global One-Mind Machine?

2007-11-06T13:34:00.000-08:00

I've swooned for Wired "Senior Maverick" Kevin Kelly in the past, when he wrote his eloquent paean to the Web's first decade, We Are the Web. Kelly's latest mind-blower is Dimensions of the One Machine, which outlines the contours of our current cyberspace and posits the future rate of growth. Among the startling specs:

There are about 100 billion neurons in the human brain. Today the Machine has as 5 orders more transistors than you have neurons in your head. And the Machine, unlike your brain, is doubling in power every couple of years at the minimum.

I was recently blown away when I realized my $40 4 gigabyte thumb drive, about a third the size of a pencil, contains storage equal to 3 thousand of those old hard plastic 3 1/4" floppy discs we all used until a few years ago. You can now buy a terabyte (1000 gigabytes) hard drive for around $400. To discuss the One Machine, Kelly talks in exabytes (1 billion gigabytes) and zetabytes (1000 exabytes):

One of the problems we have discussing this Machine is that its dimensions so far exceeds the ordinary units we are accustomed to, so we don't have a way to reckon its scale. For instance, the total international bandwidth of the global machine is approximately 7 teratbytes per second. We used to talk about one Library-of Congress-worth of information (10 terabytes), but that volume seems absolutely puny now. In ten years terabytes will fit on your iPod. Keeping that metric for the moment, one Library-of Congress-worth of information is zipped around on the Machine every second. These are very deep cycles of processing. What will we use to measure traffic in another 15 years?

We could start by saying the Machine currently has 1 HB (Human Brain) equivalent . That measure might hold up for a decade or so, but after it gets to 100 HB, or 10,000 HB, it begins to feel like using inches to measure galactic space.

Shivers...

Letter to a Senator or Congressman (or Congresswoman)

2007-11-01T20:14:00.000-07:00

This is in response to an excellent email from Democrats.com, reprinted in italics at the end of this post.

Dear Senator or Congressman,

As I write this, our President is in the midst of an extraordinary power grab. He is attempting to turn America into a dictatorship, in which secret prisons and torture are accepted and commonplace, and rampant extraordinary corruption the norm. You know this and I know this--in fact, the whole world knows it.

What I don't know is why you are aiding and abetting this crime.

But I do know this. The American people are a sleeping giant and you are beginning to arouse the beast. America will not stop until the President and Vice President have been impeached and tried in an International Court for war crimes and treason. Along with the President and Vice President, the court will also focus its attention onto their willing executioners. And you, Senator or Congressman, will be called to account and will likely be charged with being an accessory to torture, treason, and other war crimes.

I believe that you contain within you more power for good than evil. But some sort of allegiance to the dark side is making you betray your country and instead support the dangerous occupants of the White House. I urge you to cast off the dark and follow the light. Protect the American people. Protect the Constitution, and protect America and everything great for which it stands.

Now is the time for you to show your strongest mettle, Senator. History will remember you for what you do from this day forward. Let there be Light.

PeaceLove

------------------

Email from Democrats.com

No Waterboarding. No Dictatorship. No Mukasey.

In an impassioned floor speech opposing the nomination of Michael Mukasey for Attorney General, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) asked: "Will we join that gloomy historical line leading from the Inquisition, through the prisons of tyrant regimes, through gulags and dark cells, and through Saddam Hussein's torture chambers? Will that be the path we choose?"

Mukasey refuses to say that waterboarding is torture because Dick Cheney won't let him - otherwise he would have to prosecute Cheney and Bush as war criminals . Mukasey also believes the President can ignore FISA and the Constitution and wiretap American citizens without a warrant, which makes the President a Dictator.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on Mukasey next Tuesday. All 9 Republicans will support him, so all 10 Democrats must oppose him. Joe Biden, Dick Durbin, Ted Kennedy, and Sheldon Whitehouse already do, but the others are undecided (Ben Cardin, Russ Feingold, Herb Kohl, and Pat Leahy) or leaning towards Mukasey (Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer).

Tell your Senators to oppose Mukasey:
http://www.democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/122

Call the undecided Senators and report their responses:
http://www.democrats.com/mukasey-judiciary-whip

Chuck Schumer is the key vote and he chairs the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee - so if you give them money call 202-224-2447 to say you will not contribute if Mukasey is confirmed.

____________________

No Wiretaps

Democrats.com has led the fight against Bush's warrantless wiretapping since it was exposed by the New York Times in December 2005. We believe it must end immediately, we believe Cheney and Bush should be impeached for it, and we believe everyone involved should be punished through prosecution and lawsuits.

Senators Jay Rockefeller and Harry Reid do not agree with us. They are working overtime on a bill to expand Bush's wiretap power and give full immunity for all past crimes. But Senator Chris Dodd is outraged and promises to filibuster the Rockefeller bill. Dodd gave a tremendous speech on Friday and spoke for all of us.

Dodd needs 40 Senators to support his filibuster, so please write your Senators:
http://www.democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/114

Apple Death Watch: Ten Years Later

2007-09-15T15:29:00.000-07:00

Fake Steve Jobs has a post up reminding everyone of the above Wired cover story from June, 1997. I remember reading it at the time with a tremendous sense of loss; although I was not the passionate Apple fan I am today, I still knew in my gut that something important would be lost if Apple went under. The "101 Ways to Save Apple" are mostly completely off-base, except for #50: Give Steve Jobs as much authority as he wants in new product development.

The last decade has been one mind-boggling breakthrough after another, thanks largely to Jobs' uncompromising vision. Of course, now there's another problem to deal with...

--------------------
TOTH to FSJ, Photo: Bernd Hammer, Lair & Garden.

UPDATED: Capitol Police Attack, Injure Anti-War Minister

2007-09-12T14:21:00.000-07:00

When anti-war Iraq veteran Reverend Lennox Yearwood, President of the Hip Hop Caucus, tried to enter the Petraeus hearings wearing an "I Love the People of Iraq" button he was refused entry. When he questioned why others behind him in line were being allowed in while he was not, police threatened to arrest him and ultimately jumped him and tore some of the ligaments in his leg.

Luckily, someone had a video camera and captured the whole incident. And now BoingBoing has posted it, too. This should be interesting to watch how the story unfolds.

UPDATE: Reverend Yearwood YouTube's his side of the story here, and addresses the ANSWER Coalition here.

Jérémie ICE

2007-08-15T13:34:00.000-07:00

I love finding any fresh approaches to YouTube-type magic This guy, Jérémie ICE has some fun stuff!
Karate Cord

Smoking D'Lite

Fun/cool backwards action

Last but not least, his Cyril parody is pretty funny.

----------------
Hat tip to my buddy Martin for the links.

Hidden Gem: Company Man

2007-08-09T12:04:00.000-07:00

I love finding maligned film gems, those pictures that open to disastrous reviews, get dumped by the studio, and slowly build their small, passionate cult following through word-of-mouth by ardent devotees. Once in a while, a single passionate critic can sway me to check something out. Blade Runner was one such film. It was pretty universally panned when it came out. But I happened to be lucky enough to read a review by the excellent Joel E. Siegel (as distinct from the Joel Siegel who reviewed films on Good Morning America) in the Washington, DC City Paper. Siegel's original 1982 review isn't online, alas, but it basically said, Ignore those other critics; this film is amazing. [UPDATE: Siegel's review is here.]

On the strength of that one review, I saw Blade Runner when it came out and was blown away. Blade Runner was lucky. It somehow survived its original dumping and is now widely considered the best cyberpunk film ever made.

Other films aren't as lucky. John Boorman's 1990 Where the Heart Is is another favorite I saw on the strenth of a single review (John Powers in the L.A. Weekly? 8/9/10 NOTE: Nope, Charles Taylor in Salon). Where the Heart Is is another one of those horribly reviewed films that turns out to be astonishing, a very beautiful farce about creation and destruction, love and magic. The only excuse I can think of for its generally terrible reviews is that it's too European for mainstream American critics--even though it takes place in New York and stars Dabney Coleman, Uma Thurman, Suzy Amis, and Joanna Cassidy.

Here's a really longshot film for you to put on your Netflix queue: Company Man. I first read about the film back in 2002 in Esquire Magazine. Film critic Tom Carson, defending a film almost universally deplored, called Company Man "the funniest cold war farce I've ever seen." Carson had been a State Department brat during the time period and he thought the film captured, in it's own wacky way, the real feel of that world.

I'm a State Department brat myself, though from a somewhat later period. Carson sounded as if he knew what he was talking about, and I loved his passion in defending the film: "About midway through, I was marveling that a movie this sharp and entertaining could have gotten such dismissive, peeved critical notices." Carson's review really sold me on the film and I've wanted to see it ever since.

Well I just caught Company Man on IFC (Independent Film Channel), and I thought it was one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. Carson wasn't kidding; I checked the external reviews off the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), and the general consensus is scathing. People hated this movie, and in some cases thought Sigourney Weaver, John Turturro, Dennis Leary, Allan Cummings, and a host of other big name actors gave career-worst performances. Virtually everyone, excepting Carson, found the whole production completely flat and cheap.

Metacritic, which assignes a meta-rating to films based on an overview of a large number of critics nationwide gave Company Man an 18. Out of 100. Next to the 18, which has a red background, is the color key: Extreme dislike or disgust. That's only two points up from Showgirls (16) and two points down from Corky Romano (20).

They're all wrong. They had no idea what they were seeing. The film's a scream.

Through the Miracle of the Internet (and it is a Miracle), I found the original review I read in a doctor's waiting room over five years ago:

In From the Cold

Company Man reminded me of Dick, another one of those films funny to those who remember thirty- to forty-year-old history with something akin to fondness. And another political farce (this one about Watergate) you may want to check out.

8/9/10 Update: Siegel's Blade Runner review, along with the story behind it is here.

Flesh

2007-08-08T14:17:00.000-07:00

French photographer, graphic artist and filmmaker Edouard Salier has created quite a splash with Flesh (2005), a ten-minute meditation on the merger of erotica and violence. Reaction on the blogosphere has been decidedly mixed. Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing recently called it "9/11-themed CGI terror-rotica," but added, "I don't know that I'm a fan of it, or not." Count me a fan. Flesh is a stunning, visionary work, even in its heavily degraded YouTube version. The Strikeback Films website has some much crisper clips; this must look amazing on the big screen.

YouTube link (NSFW, and you may need to log in and promise you're over 18 to view it.)

I sympathize with reviewers who find Flesh merely pornographic and empty, but to my eyes it's neither. Unclear it may be, but the horror and decadence on display certainly seems to express uncomfortable truths about fundamentalism, Islamofascism, and American hedgemony. I recommend the explanatory commentary on the website's About section for more details.

Just in case you were unclear about Salier's intentions, here's his earlier (2004) 4-minute short Empire. It's a decidedly more low-key work, but no less uncomfortable for it. The degraded YouTube clip is again a bit hard to read; that's military hardware moving across the screen.

The Lesson (2007)

2007-07-29T00:04:00.000-07:00

For G. My heartbreak.

Magic and Metadiscourse

2007-07-14T15:49:00.000-07:00

A ventriloquist lost his job when a local nightclub went out of business, so to make ends meet he began working as a "spirit medium." He had a talking skull on the table and people would come to him to talk to their dead relatives. The ventriloquist could secretly move the skull's mouth and make it seem as though the skull itself was talking.

One day, a very wealthy society matron came to talk to her dead husband. The woman was so impressed with the contact from beyond that she said to the "medium:"

"Young man, you have an extraordinary gift. If I pay you a thousand dollars can I come back next week to talk to my husband for a few hours?"

The ventriloquist "medium" responded, "Lady, for a thousand bucks you can even talk to him while I drink a glass of water!"

When Good Magicians Go Bad

Here are a couple of stories about two of my good friends in magic, each making a critical mistake.

1) A very talented kid I know was frying some laypeople with his rubber band magic. He did a beautiful version of Crazy Man's Handcuffs, a classic effect in which one rubber band seems to simply melt through another. My friend knows how to sell this type of thing. He brought the attention in close, created a very tight frame around the action, and slowed down the moment of the magic. When that band melted through, the spectators gasped.

Hold that moment. The effect is over but the ramifications are still building in the spectators' minds. Then...

...my friend started talking about the trick. "I usually do that as a 3-phase routine, but I've started eliminating the last part..."

2) Another friend, a talented magician with the look, dress, and demeanor of a wizard, performed Anniversary Waltz for about 60 people. In Anniversary Waltz, a couple each select a card and sign the face. After some magical incantations, the two cards fuse together into a single, double-faced card each side of which is one of the signed, selected cards. Symbolically, the fused card represents the fusion of the two people, their link and their bond.

Picture the scene. My friend, looking like a cross between a magician and a high priest, is standing between the two spectators like a minister officiating at a wedding. He has fused the cards, and he gives it to them as a memento. Beautiful framing, magical moment.

Then he says, "You'll definitely want to hold on to that card, because when you leave here everyone in the audience will want to pounce on it and examine it from top to bottom to see that it is, indeed, a single card."

What Happened?

I've caught good magicians doing this type of thing before, but I have only recently learned the name for it: metadiscourse. In writing, metadiscourse is essentially writing about the act of writing itself. More specifically, we use metadiscourse when we refer to the act of writing whatever it is we're writing at the time. In Technical Writing, metadiscourse is generally a no no; you're not supposed to say, "This guide covers" or "Later, I will discuss..." because those are of no interest to your reader, who only cares about the information, not the form of the information or the process in which it was written.

I've struggled to define the term accurately for you and the best I can come up with is this; this whole sentence is metadiscourse. Of course, metadiscouse can be wonderful. Blogs, for instance, thrive on metadiscourse, since they are often channels for bloggers to work through their own thinking on various issues in a public way. In the future, I might have more to say about the role of metadiscourse in our modern wired society (think Twitter). But that's enough metadiscourse for now.

Magic and Metadiscourse

In the examples above, the magicians killed the moment by talking about the tricks after they happened. The young fellow took an impressive effect, a rubber band passing through another, and turned it in the eyes of the audience into a routine, a studied series of moves and sections. The wizard took a beautiful effect about a sacred union and turned it back into a puzzle. Metadiscourse doth slay the mystery.

Metadiscourse can play an important role in magic. When David Blaine talks about how Houdini inspired him, or when Criss Angel channels David Blaine to talk about how Houdini inspired him--that's metadiscourse. Much of the metadiscourse in magic can be banal, like stories about "the first trick my Grandpa showed me when I was a boy," or the perennial "I learned this trick in the Orient many years ago...." It can also be deep; Ricky Jay is a master of metadiscourse, and his entire 52 Assistants show is as much a tribute to the history and practice of card magic as it is about the magic itself.

For the most part, however, too much metadiscourse is death to magic. To create a sense of jaw-dropping astonishment, you almost by definition have to take your spectator outside the province of magical technique and history and put them in a pure, unfiltered now. David Blaine is smart enough to put all his metadiscourse, his setup, up front. You'll never see Blaine create a miracle and then talk afterward about the process. Blaine is comfortable enough with the visceral notion of wonder that he allows his spectators to remain in the state for as long as possible.

But many magicians are uncomfortable with actual wonder, and their own power to create it. So they reflexively move to kill the moment of wonder by cracking wise, or talking about the trick. Rather than allowing the spectator to simply be in the experience, they feel the need to fill the "void" with mindless chatter.

I've become very sensitive to the issue of metadiscourse, especially as it applies to magicians who appreciate and strive to create deep wonder. In the examples above, I was able to call my friends' attention to the phenomenon and point out how much stronger their material would be if they eliminated all post-effect metadiscourse. Being gentlemen of taste and discrimination, and excellent magicians both, they understood and will certainly be more conscious about not stepping on their own effects in the future.

"Technical Metadiscourse" in Magic

I've always loved the joke that opens this post, but I think it's particularly funny for magicians, for whom there's a lot of truth in the ventriloquist's retort. Magicians are often so in love with their technique they create extra proof of innocence where none is required. For instance, another very talented magician friend (I'm extremely lucky to have such an amazing community of magicians around me) sent me an email about an idea he saw posted on the Magic Cafe. The idea is a "subtlety" added to Bob Sheets' Hang 'Em High, a rope through body effect I've been doing for years.

In this new "improved" version, before you pull the rope through your body you attach a sticker with the name of your two spectators to the center of the rope. Then, when the rope passes through you the audience sees the sticker still on the rope. In other words, you have just "proved" something that didn't need proving, that the rope that passed through your body is the same rope you started with.

I've coined a term for such types of technical solutions to what are often non-existent problems: technical metadiscourse. Technical metadiscourse comes about when magicians create extra presentational points to cover what they see as a weakness or potential hole in their secret methodology. Such tools can be important in magic. Having a spectator sign a card is an example of useful, overt technical metadiscourse. The signature is openly intended to preclude an obvious method (duplicate cards) from entering the spectator's mind and ruining the effect.

On the other hand, magicians often have no feel for when such "over-proving" is necessary or even prudent. The common magical aphorism covering this situation is Don't run when you're not being chased. At one of our local magic contests, yet another talented magician won by causing a borrowed bill to vanish and reappear under impossible conditions in a selected lemon. Many of the other "magicians" were surprised the trick played so well. Someone asked one of the spectators, "Did he have you sign the bill?"

Spectator (puzzled): "The bill was inside the lemon!"

Skeptic: "But, did he tear off one corner so you could identify the bill later?"

Spectator (patiently, as to a child): "But that was my bill, and it was in the fucking lemon!"

Examine your magic for unnecessary metadiscourse, both technical and verbal. Eliminate if possible. Be fierce with yourself.

Why Magicians Use Inappropriate Metadiscourse

I have several theories about why magicians often feel the need to add metadiscourse both during and after an effect.

My first theory states that magicians often add technical metadiscourse as a way to assuage their guilt. Here's a classic example every beginner is taught to avoid, "This is an ordinary deck of cards." Saying such a thing only arouses suspicion; why wouldn't it be an ordinary deck? Even though magicians very rarely make such a silly mistake, they often create similar situations. For instance, I can't tell you how many times I've seen magicians performing coin and card effects spasmodically "proving" that their hands contain only cards. Or magicians doing the Silk from Empty Hand trick pointing their hands, fingers towards the audience, for waaay to long just to "prove" that their hands are really, really empty.

Sometimes, we just do it because we can. Even when we shouldn't.

Another pet peeve, which I see all the time during performances of Professor's Nightmare (in which three unequal lengths ropes become all the same length): "Now I have one...two...three lengths of rope, all the same length." Those familiar with Professor's Nightmare will know the count I'm referring to. Unless you're working a nursery school, you don't need to explain that three ropes are counted one...two...three. And you don't need to tell people what they can already see, that the ropes are now the same length.

I don't object to the technique, by the way, just the pointless counting. When I used to do Professor's Nightmare table-hopping, I would always do the display count as a convincer, but I would say, "Once again, here's the short rope, here's the middle-length rope, and...Oh, wait, that's the short one, this is the medium-length one...and I guess this is the long one." In other words, I use the display as a setup for a gag. The gag not only gives me a reason to do the count, it also reinforces that they are all identical in a fun way and it gives me a rhythm to move through the count and cover any dirty work I might wish to accomplish.

The whole display is technical metadiscourse, designed to point away from the method. Done right, it's very convincing; done badly, it makes you look guilty. Don't feel guilty fooling people. Your job is to create wonder, and you have the tacit permission of your audience to lie or cheat however you like (as long as no one gets hurt) to create the illusion of impossibility.

Magicians are Friendly

My other theory about why we magicians often add needless metadiscourse is that we all want to be friendly and communitarian. Fooling someone, creating deep astonishment, inevitably creates a wall between us and the audience, between us who "know" and those who have no idea what just happened. We want to soften the blow, to comfort the audience that it's all in fun, that it's all a trick, that it's all "entertainment."

So we say, "That's something new I've been practicing." Or, "That's a cool Paul Harris routine." These are metadiscourse; they mean a lot to a magicians but only serve to puncture the wonder bubble for your spectators.

Please don't make this mistake. Keep your magic occult, hidden, secret. I don't mean you should take full credit for every trick you do, but when people ask "Where did you learn all this stuff?" they don't really want to hear, "I got a book from the library, then hung out at the magic club meeting at the local church...." They don't want to hear, "Well, the original idea was in Frank Garcia's Million Dollar Card Secrets, but then Racherbaumer did some work with it...."

Here's an idea: Script your answers to common questions.
Q. "Where do you learn this stuff?"
A. "I'm part of a small group of magicians who meet and work together to bend space and time and create miracles."

That's a gag answer, in a way, but it's also relatively true without being mundane. When people ask that question, here's what they secretly hope you'll say (and mean):

"Gypsies stole me as a child and I was trained in the dark arts."
"I was kidnapped by men in black and my power grew in a secret underground laboratory in the Rocky Mountains."
"After the lightening struck my skull, I began to see and understand things others could not."

I'm not suggesting you use these lines (although feel free to, especially if they're true). I'm only saying people want mystery and romance, not prosaic explanations. When you demystify the art you're not doing anyone a favor. Not your audience or yourself.

Hans Rosling at TED

2007-07-02T18:47:00.000-07:00

The TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference is an annual invitation-only gathering of some of the most brilliant people in the world. Geniuses from one field after another get up and speak for twenty or so minutes about whatever they want, and the TED people have graciously put up many of the talks online. If you have time to kill and a mind to blow, you could do worse than to spend a few hours watching one astounding presentation after another.

I first saw Hans Rosling's 2006 talk about six months ago and it literally brought tears to my eyes. Rosling is a Swedish professor of public health on a mission to make the world's data, especially UN public health data, widely available and accessible. Here he creates highly visual animated data maps to show that the world is getting better, the gap between rich and poor is shrinking, and life expectancy is rising almost everywhere. This is a stunning, rousing talk and is apparently now considered legendary among TED aficionados. Check it out here.

Now, his 2007 follow-up talk is also online. All together now: Hans Rosling Rulez!

A New Kind of Surrealism - Updated

2007-06-07T11:09:00.000-07:00

Update: The old link died. I Googled "super cool pic" and found this new one:

This is absolutely trippy.

Hold the mouse button down and slowly move around. The old link was full-screen; this one, unfortunately, is not. But it's still rockin' cool.

Torture, Nazi Style

2007-06-02T16:26:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan, the influential blogger for The Atlantic, is also a disenchanted conservative and former editor of The New Republic. In a recent post, Sullivan compares the Nazi's interrogation methods, which were deemed war crimes punishable by death in the World Court, with the interrogation methods approved by the Bush administration.

Conclusion:

Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I'm not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture - "enhanced interrogation techniques" - is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.

Read the whole post here.

Danny Elfman and the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo

2007-05-31T16:51:00.001-07:00

I've been a big fan of Danny Elfman since the Oingo Boingo days, back when New Wave music was the hippest thing going. Hits like Little Girls, Dead Man's Party, and Stay will be instantly recognizable to anyone who watched MTV in the early days, when MTV was the most cutting edge cultural force in popular media. Only a Lad was probably Elfman's biggest hit but I couldn't find a video on YouTube.

I was as amazed as anyone when Elfman suddenly emerged with the quirky but brilliant soundtrack to Tim Burton's Pee Wee's Big Adventure. His follow-up film scores, including other Burton films like Edward Scissorhands and Batman, plus the opening song from The Simpsons have shown his range and remarkable ear for moody, kaleidoscopic tunes.

Before he became a rock star, Elfman and his brother Richard were part of the absurdist theater troupe The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, and it was in this role that they took the Gong Show by storm back in 1976. Check it out below; this is a loopy performance on one of the loopiest TV shows ever!

TOTH to BoingBoing for this one.

Ray McGovern: Cheney was behind forged Niger documents

2007-05-01T12:33:00.001-07:00

Okay, he has no evidence he's willing to share (yet), but former CIA officer Ray McGovern has been a heroic thorn in the administration's side for a while now and I hope he can back up his claims.

Jon Stewart on Bill Moyers

2007-04-29T14:49:00.000-07:00

Here's an awesome half-hour interview with American treasure Jon Stewart by American treasure Bill Moyers, presented under the terms of Fair Use, no doubt. These are two of the most truth-talking figures on television today.

Tell Us The Mission (Accomplished)

2007-04-26T10:50:00.001-07:00

Actor/poet Steve Connell slams the administration and its catastrophic war in this striking new video.

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I'm very late to the game here; this is the first time I've embedded a YouTube on my blog. The moment I posted this I got a jolt. What mind-boggling technology we've unleashed! The democratization of all media is extraordinary; in politics, this could quickly end up with our president impeached. Progressive hero Dennis Kucinich has just filed articles of impeachment against the Vice President.

Onward!

Stewart/Colbert = Yin and Yang

2007-04-22T22:08:00.000-07:00

Am I the first to notice this?
Click for larger image.

R.I.P. Dan O'Neil

2007-04-19T12:56:00.000-07:00

Among the tragedy coming out of Virgina Tech this week is the loss of 22 year old Dan O'Neil, a talented musician. His website at www.residenthippy.com contains some beautiful songs you might want to check out if you feel like taking a little trip to sadville.

Did You Know? - Another Mind-Blowing Video

2007-04-19T11:53:00.000-07:00

Did You Know? is essentially a bunch of factoids and statistics set to music. But the picture it paints of the tectonic shifts in our culture and society is pretty mind-blowing. Some of the concepts, such as the fact that the 25% of China's population with the highest IQ is more numerous than the entire population of the United States, certainly calls America's future primacy into question. Others, like the estimate that by 2023 a $1000 laptop will be more powerful than the human brain, and by 2049 more powerful than the entire human race, are so outside of any conceptual framework I can imagine that I can only drape my jaw on the ground and wonder.

The age of YouTube brings astounding visions daily. Someone else took Did You Know and made a slightly modified version with a somewhat different focus. Did You Know II concludes with a look at the massive new content creation happening among the young -- blogs, wikis, MySpace, and the like.

I recommend you check out both.

----------------------------
TOTH to John B., via Josh, via...

Amazing Animation Explains Mind-Blowing Web 2.0

2007-03-29T00:55:00.000-07:00

A favorite theme of mine is that the pace of change is accelerating quite dramatically. Even though I know this is true, I'm still blown away by how fast and how far we've come, even in the last, oh, year, year and a half. The internet is making us smarter by orders of magnitude, by exponentially extending our capabilities.

This extraordinary 4 1/2 minute film is a dense and mind-blowing journey into the heart of what's happening. It's called The Machine is Us/ing Us, and it was made by one Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. I recommend you view it more than once.

---------------------------
I first saw this when BoingBoing linked to it a while back. Just the other day my friend Greg sent it along to me again, and my second viewing impressed me even more than the first. Thanks Greg!

The version I linked above it the "Final Version." The version just before this received almost 2 million hits. I think they're almost the same; this final version is just slightly cleaned up based on some user suggestions.

Multiple Kite World Record Holder

2007-03-23T16:53:00.000-07:00

I'd not previously heard of multiple kite flying, but Ray Bethell is apparently the world champion. This video certainly is a delightful surprise.

Bethell makes the kites look like the Blue Angels. Neat-o!

---------------

Hat tip to the Grand Illusions newsletter for the link.

WARNING! Scrumptious toy alert! Don't click on their link unless you have a few extra dollars you'd like to part with.

An Open Letter to the Genii Forum - UPDATED

2007-03-22T00:44:00.000-07:00

Backstory: An extraordinarily talented young magician I know named Chris Brown has a video up on YouTube which has garnered over 2 million views, an astonishing number in the YouTube universe and a sure sign that he did something right. Needless to say, many magicians hate him.

The Genii Forum, one of the most influential online forums for magicians, has a whole long thread of pompous deconstruction (no really, don't bother) about why Chris' video is terrible and pointless and why Chris needs to consult with them so he can learn how to really do magic like a pro. Okay, it's not entirely all about that, and there are some voices from people who actually get it, but in the subtext of the thread that description pretty much sums it all up.

Anyway, as one of his many mentors (and probably his biggest fan among us), I felt the need to respond in a public way to the whole thread. If you're not into magic you may want to skip this. On the other hand, if you're interested in hearing some inside dish about the magic community, read on.

UPDATE: 3/22/07 - After you read this, you may want to check out the follow up, which I posted directly to the Genii Forum here.
UPDATE: 3/23/07 - And another one here.

UPDATE: 12/16/09 - Apparently, most of the names on the Genii Forum have been "anonymized, so my posts no longer can be identified as mine (nor can Chris' responses, except where he identifies himself). I have therefore added my follow-ups below.

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Hoo Boy, I just had to write in on this one. It's amazing to read such a typically clueless discussion as has characterized much of this thread. I'd almost wager money that most of those so upset about Chris' YouTube video aren't big fans of David Blaine either. When you don't know why the successful are successful you don't really understand your own art.

2 million hits on YouTube doesn't happen by accident, folks. It just doesn't. 2 million hits happens because you struck a chord with a lot of people by showing something, unfiltered by traditional media filters, that moves them in a deep and personal way. And they have, in turn, done your marketing for you, driven by passion -- theirs -- to share with all their friends whatever it is in your clip that moved them in some new way.

Chris' clip is more amazing than most of you know, and better magic, too. His technique is fine, and he's the most gifted natural performer I've encountered in many many moons.

He has a vision, guys. He's young and he's raw, but he has a vision, for himself and for magic. And he's got the cojones to pull it off, too.

People -- a lot of them, obviously -- saw the video and thought the magic was amazing. That's why they recommended it to their friends, and that's why he has 2 million hits. He has a lot of fans because they can feel that he's real. Not a prefabricated fake like Copperfield, but a real person who loves to make magic happen for real people.

And the humility! Chris has real humility. He's cocky as hell, but deep down he's a serious soul. Read his comments on the thread. It's all about gratitude for your opinions, about respect for his elders, about not wanting to start any fights, about his love for magic and his desire to express himself through it.

He learned from the Master, folks. He's a disciple of David Blaine all the way, and David Blaine is the most important magician since Houdini. By far. David Blaine saved magic. He's the reason really cool, hip, artistic kids now are attracted to magic.

I've been in magic well over thirty years and it was never the cool, hip, artistic kids who did magic. Never. To be a magician was to automatically not be the cool, hip, artistic kid.

Now, thanks to David Blaine, we have more amazing cool, hip, artistic young magicians than ever.

The aging magical chattering class hates the Blaine style, so snootily dismissed as "Street Magic," precisely because it has the actual "street" in it, as in real people, in the real world. The idea that magic should be something that happens in their world, on their streets, in their lives, is anathema to the dysfunctional paradigm in which magic has stagnated for the last hundred years.

Like the aging rock and roll chattering class that hates and fears Hip Hop -- which similarly emerges from and expresses the feelings of the street -- magic's aging chattering class has quite convinced themselves that real magicians work gigs for money, like birthday clowns, or work live in theaters. Getting someone to pay you a lot of money to do only the magic you really, really want to do, is obviously not a path a serious artist would ever take. That's why the best and wisest actors are the ones who do commercials and amusement park shows rather than those slackers, like Robert DeNiro, who become movie stars. That's why the band that played at your wedding is obviously a more "serious" bunch of musicians than Radiohead. Or U2.

The chattering class' slide from mediocrity into irrelevance will only get worse...

And to mix your magic with Hip Hop -- quelle horreur!

Hip hop is the lingua franca of youth, my friends, and it's a language in which youth are fluent. You want to express something meaningful to kids and young adults, in a way that's hip and cool, you back it with hip hop. And Chris does just that, not because he cares about being cool, but because hip hop is his lingua franca too, it's the music that expresses how he feels, in a language he understands.

How great for all of us who love magic that the art is being saved, day by day, by the people the old guard hate and fear the most. This is absolutely the best time in a hundred years to be a great magician, a golden age. And Chris is lucky and honored to be riding in the vanguard right now.

Just be grateful for our front-row seats.

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Follow-up Comment

Thanks, everyone, for your thoughtful responses. My own post emerged from what I saw as a deeply and unfairly stacked deck on this thread. Pete Biro posted the YouTube link, whereupon a whole slew of people saw fit to insult Chris, his video, and YouTube magicians in general. Most of the attacks came from a predictable if, in my opinion, flawed paradigm which states that young magicians making cool magic videos are somehow to be hated and dismissed.

Brad said, "If they spent half as much time reading "Our Magic" as they do reading their 'Final Cut Pro' manuals, magic would be a better place."

And: "In art, a mannerist period is defined as a time frame in which the means of expression become so pervasive nothing ends up being expressed. Today's younger generation has found themselves in/created for themselves a mannerist period."

Is it possible, Brad, that something important IS being expressed but that you simply can't read the language? That paragraph makes you sound exactly like those old folks who claimed that rock and roll was useless noise ("You can't even understand the words!") and that those kids who loved it were therefore idiots. History has not been kind to that particular viewpoint -- although patronizing kids remains as popular as ever.

Asking Chris to clarify his point is like asking a painter to explain a painting, or a musician to explain a song. The expression speaks for itself, and it either works for you or it doesn't.

But don't assume there's nothing there.

Chief mouthpiece Richard Kaufman saw fit to weigh in with three -- three! -- insulting comments, including:

"What's different now is that places like YouTube provide a location where everyone can strut their underdeveloped stuff for all the world to see.

"All I can say is, YUCK."

And:

"I disagree, Tom. I would rather they NOT be performing publically [sic] for millions of people around the planet to see when they are fit only to practice in front of a mirror."

(Gee, Richard, just what in Chris' video do you think is only fit to practice in front of a mirror?)

And:

"I don't recall what Eugene wrote, but I would say that performance without an audience is called practice."

(Oh. I guess 2 million people isn't a big enough crowd to be called an "audience?")

And finally, on his 4th post, Kaufman writes:

"I should add that I have not watch [sic] the clip in question on YouTube, merely commenting on the general phenomenon."

In other words, Kaufman has just pontificated 3 times about a clip he hasn't seen. He is admitting publicly that he is prejudiced (as in, "pre-judging") against magicians on YouTube, which automatically disqualifies his opinion from serious consideration.

And he's not the only one.

David Alexander: "YouTube and its clones have given an outlet for the ignorant and self-absorbed who have no business stepping away from their mirrors. The number of viewings for some of these videos is sad news in that a great many people are being educated as to what magic is, not what it can be in the hands of a competent performer."

That's some pretty broad hating without any specifics.

Brad Henderson gives props to David Blaine, finally. But where David Blaine trumps those who have followed is in his deep, spiritual quest for meaning. Not even the merely super-talented, like Cyril and Derren Brown, can touch that. Brown, in particular, falls back on his pseudo-scientific explanations, that old "combination of magic, psychology, and intuition" bullshit so favored by mentalists these days. Don't get me wrong: I love Brown and I think he's quite brilliant, but he doesn't project a transcendent search for meaning the way Blaine does.

Magicians get so wrapped up in technique, in history and crediting issues, that they fail to see the organic way in which all arts grow and change. Chris is driven by a vision -- not yet fully formed, I don't think -- but he has a real vision in the same way Blaine does. He's a truly modern magician, with multiple streams by which his fans can respond and interact with him.

How many people on this forum have motivated their audiences to make fan art?

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Final Follow-up Comment

The magic community has shown a lot of hostility to the YouTube generation. But I'm surprised that a lot of people on this forum don't basically think Chris' video is cool, shows some pretty eye-popping (if standard, to all you pros) magic, and demonstrates nothing but respect and love for the art and craft. Same planet, different eyes, I guess.

I happen to think Chris' video presents magic in a great light -- the tricks all look great, his timing is good, and the music is modern and hip. There aren't that many magic clips I want to watch more than once but Chris did a great job with this one and it survives multiple viewings.

Of course, I'm quite partial to progressive Hip Hop, too, and the Cannibus song is very cool. Chris knows his music, and he communicates a lot by the choices he makes.

It seems as though a lot of non-magicians were impressed with the video as a demonstration of magic, too. That "Twins do magic" video linked to in an earlier post is a loving tribute by a couple of girls who were impressed by Chris' magic. You can either feel contempt for the uneducated laymen or you can ask what you can do to reach people the way Chris did.

Blaine wannabe: hogwash. Yes, Chris and many other magicians of note under 25 are the children of Blaine, no question. Chris would be the first to acknowledge this. Blaine created a whole new paradigm of magic for the 21st century: wear normal, hip clothes, take it to the streets, do it for real people with real objects in real situations...

And thank god for him, too. Blaine single-handedly stopped magic's slide into artistic irrelevance. I was getting pretty tired of magicians dressed like waiters doing tricks with gentlemen's hats and silk scarves and canes -- turn-of-the-century accouterments with little meaning to modern spectators.

I exaggerate, of course, but only slightly. How many magicians before Blaine can you think of who were as hip and contemporary as, say, The Red Hot Chili Peppers? Or Nicholas Cage? Or, for that matter, Criss Angel?

Angel wears jeans and tee shirts and performs in the streets, too, with cool music video-style editing. Is he also a Blaine wannabe? (Wait, don't answer that.)

Blaine provided a language; young magicians now use that language as a starting point for wherever their art needs to go. Chris is no more a Blaine wannabe than Channing Pollack was a Robert Houdin wannabe just because he, too, dressed in formal evening wear.

It was Houdin, in fact, who said that a magician should dress in the appropriate contemporary clothes of a gentleman. These days, gentlemen wear jeans and t-shirts far more often than tuxedos. At least the cool ones do.

Making a video after only 2 years in magic? Yup, a lot of us initially encouraged Chris to wait a while. But he's young, ambitious, and energetic and he wisely chose to ignore us older naysayers. After all, who are we to try to nip the blasting energy of youth in the bud? Chris will not be dissuaded by anyone; he has vision and drive, and I applaud him for it.

"You won't be young forever." Andy Warhol.

More power to you, young brother Chris. Take it all the way!

Vote Different: UPDATED

2007-03-19T18:32:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: March 20th. I guess I'm only slightly ahead of the mainstream. The San Francisco Chronicle today had a front page article on Vote Different. Like all great masterworks of the YouTube age, this viral attack ad really exploded fast and changed the rules virtually overnight.

Obama's people are denying any involvement (and there's no particular reason to believe otherwise), but they've got to be dancing gleeful jigs about this powerful anti-Hillary mashup of Apple's famous 1984 commercial. The original was directed by Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner), and this impressive new version surfs the iconography beautifully. Hillary makes a surprisingly convincing Big Brother, too.

I'm just saying.

This is a major new development. The political hacks have lost control of their own message. Expect to see more homebrew political ads cropping up all over between now and '08.

Brain Exercise: 50 States in 10 Minutes

2007-03-15T13:14:00.000-07:00

Ironic Sans is photographer David Friedman's entertaining blog. David (as he refers to himself) first attracted notice with his pre-pixilated clothes, hilarious tee shirts with "pre-pixilated" logos suitable for TV (no accidental advertising).

Now David has up a post about a game he likes to play with his friends, in which he tries to remember and write down the names of all 50 U.S. states in 10 minutes. One of his readers designed this terrific online version. If you have 10 minutes to spare, click on it and give it a try!

I got 38 on my first try. Is that good or lame?

Update: I got 39 on my second try. That's exhausting!

Dylan Hears a Who - UPDATED

2007-03-12T17:35:00.000-07:00

Via BoingBoing, here's a fantastically funny pseudo-mashup [No longer available here. See UPDATE below.] of "Bob Dylan" singing Dr. Seuss. The Cat in the Hat is a particular standout.

UPDATE 4/13/07: Apparently, the Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) estate has no sense of humor and Kevin Ryan, the creator of the clever Seuss/Dylan mashup, had to take it down or risk costly litigation. Salon has the full story here.

Dylan Hears a Who is still available via P2P, naturally. The Dr. Seuss people come off as the ineffectual culture bullies they are.

Copyright laws these days punish creativity. Here's a great article about copyright and intellectual property by a musician who decided to post all his music on the Web for free. He also recounts the story of his gifted 18-year-old student whose creativity was rewarded with 2 -- two! -- cease and desist letters from big corporations. Recommended.

Kids Today...

2007-03-10T12:31:00.000-08:00

New York Magazine has a fantastic article on the vast (and growing) generation gap between kids today and their parents. Pull quote featuring Clay Shirky, new media studies professor at NYU:

Shirky describes this generational shift in terms of pidgin versus Creole. “Do you know that distinction? Pidgin is what gets spoken when people patch things together from different languages, so it serves well enough to communicate. But Creole is what the children speak, the children of pidgin speakers. They impose rules and structure, which makes the Creole language completely coherent and expressive, on par with any language. What we are witnessing is the Creolization of media.”

That’s a cool metaphor, I respond. “I actually don’t think it’s a metaphor,” he says. “I think there may actually be real neurological changes involved.”

It's nice to see some generally pro-kid coverage of Internet trends, for a change.

New Hero: Craig Ferguson

2007-02-24T16:00:00.000-08:00

I'm a few days late to the game here, but I just watched Craig Ferguson's now-famous monologue in which he discusses his own alcoholism and explains why he won't make any jokes about Britney Spears (basically, it boils down to "I want to be able to sleep at night.") Ferguson, who gained fame playing Drew Carey's fatuous Scottish boss on The Drew Carey Show, devotes over twelve minutes to his moving tale of how alcohol saved his life--literally--and how he left it behind fifteen years ago.

Worth a look, if only to see genuine compassion in place of the leering, celebrity-obsessed culture that permeates so much of the mediasphere.

Denny Does the Bottles

2007-02-22T14:23:00.000-08:00

Denny Haney, owner of Denny & Lee Magic Studio, is an old acquaintance from waaaay back in the Al's Magic Shop days (I'm sure he wouldn't remember me). Denny just YouTubed a clip of himself doing the Multiplying Bottles. It's a funny five minutes.

Nice legs on the table, too!

al-Cuties

2007-02-08T11:46:00.000-08:00

al-Cuties is a sharp and funny little flash flash animation from Josh Gosfield and Alex Sherwin that spares no one. You can check it out at the al-Cuties website or, better yet, bump up the numbers at YouTube.

(Link via the always-excellent AlterNet.)

In My Language

2007-01-27T14:07:00.000-08:00

Via BoingBoing, this is a fascinating short film by an autistic woman named A.M. Baggs. In the first part, she wanders the house interacting with the objects around her; in the second, she uses a natural language translator to discuss communication, language, consciousness, and what it means to be human. An eye-opener.

The Great Chocolate Ripoff

2006-12-28T18:26:00.000-08:00

Hoo Boy! From DallasFood.org, here's an amazing expose of Noka Chocolates, a super-dooper expensive chocolate company. This gripping ten-part (!) series details how the fancy-pants company buys bulk chocolate from French chocolate-maker Bonnat, forms it into undistinguished truffles, and sells it at a markup ranging from 2500-7000%. Worst of all, they have a pattern of deliberate obfuscation on the issue of where their chocolate comes from, suggesting strongly in all their promotional materials and personal appearances that they make it themselves.

The article is currently bouncing all over the Web, including good discussions on Metafilter and BoingBoing. This is the kind of superb online investigative journalism that can kill off a slimy company in one fell swoop.

Amazing Coldplay Cover

2006-12-16T12:45:00.000-08:00

Check out 81-year-old Fred Knittle's quietly devastating live cover of Coldplay's I Will Fix You.

The clip is from a documentary about Knittle and New England's octogenarian Young at Heart Chorus that aired on the BBC. Apparently, Kittle was supposed to sing with another man named Bob Salvini -- but Salvini died of a heart attack the week earlier.

YouTube creates another phenom. Knittle must be tickled...

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Here's the original Coldplay video, by the way. It's a good song, but I think Coldplay kind of peaked with A Rush of Blood to the Head. Everything I've heard off their latest album seems a bit like Coldplay lite, including this song. I much prefer Knittle's version.

And while you're at YouTube, you definitely want to join the 6.5 million others who have watched this now-famous laughing baby.

Dice Stacking Video

2006-11-18T16:52:00.000-08:00

Here's a fun video of a guy doing some pretty cool dice stacking. Dice stacking is sort of an allied art with magic. It's really a form of juggling but since it uses dice it also allies itself with gambling and magic.

At any rate, if you've never seen this stuff, enjoy!

New Blog - Magic and Conjuring

2006-11-15T11:13:00.000-08:00

I'm not normally that excited by the magic blogosphere, but Frederick of Oz has a new blog called Magic and Conjuring that I'm pretty pumped about. His stated goal is to explore the intersection of magic, meaning and art and to take a stance "against the trivialization of magic." He's only been at it for a week and he has already name-checked John Updike, Rumi, and the McBride/Berger/Neale trio.

I've added it to my Bloglines and I look forward to seeing where he goes with this.

Alex Grey's St. Albert on Ebay

2006-11-11T16:24:00.000-08:00

Oh lordy, get your checkbooks ready! Psychedelic artist Alex Grey and the Multi-Disciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (M.A.P.S.) have teamed up to auction off the last remaining print of St. Albert and the LSD Revelation Revolution, created to honor Dr. Albert Hoffman, the father of LSD. This print is number 1 of 50 and was personally signed by Hoffman shortly after his 100th birthday celebration earlier this year in Basel, Switzerland.

Opening bid is $3000 and all proceeds will be divided evenly between a M.A.P.S.-sponsored Swiss end-of-life research study (the first legal research with LSD in 35 years) and Grey's trippy Chapel of Sacred Mirrors project.

Alex Grey is probably the most gifted visionary artist alive. My favorite painting of his is 1984's Theologue (below, click the image for a bigger, better version at Grey's Web site). I think Theologue is as good a depiction of a transcendent experience as I've ever seen anywhere. I urge you to wander Grey's site if you haven't seen his work. It's truly mind-blowing and very, very beautiful.

Thanks, Blogger!

2006-11-09T15:48:00.000-08:00

Labels at last! Labels at last! Thank God Almighty I have labels at last!

It always struck me as a tad unseemly to complain about a free service, but the lack of post labels on Blogger has been the one thing that has tempted me to move my blog elsewhere. Without labels, older posts just kind of vanish into the ether of the "Archives" at the right, and most visitors are unlikely to feel much motivation to go digging in there. So the magicians who visit this blog and find hardly any magic-related posts may be disinclined to go searching for my occasional posts on that subject.

No longer. Blogger has finally updated their service with post labels and I have wasted no time in categorizing my stuff and sticking the labels at right. For instance, I have a bunch of magic posts (forty-five, if my labeling is accurate), including six David Blaine posts. The ability to categorize and make easily searchable large amounts of data is one of the hallmarks of the modern Web and it has been a major failing of Blogger that basic tagging hasn't been available until now.

The ability to label posts is pretty fundamental to blogging, and it facilitates certain types of posting. For instance, I threatened long ago to start posting mini-reviews of all the films I see. But the lack of labeling discouraged this enterprise. Blogger didn't offer any way for me to point readers easily to a complete list of all my reviews, and I knew that once posted the reviews would quickly disappear into the ether. I actually considered starting a separate blog just for movie reviews.

All that has changed. It's a new day at PeaceLove's Musings! Stay tuned.

Balloon Art Borat

2006-11-09T12:20:00.000-08:00

Russian doctor-turned-balloon-artist Irina made this beautiful Borat in ballons. It's been bouncing all over the Web, including a prominent nod on Defamer.

The movie's extremely funny, too. Uncomfortable but funny.

Awesome Magic Clip - UPDATED!

2006-11-03T13:15:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: Thanks to all the commentors, especially Rick Carruth, who identified the magician as Akira Fuji, a well-known (in Japan) close-up worker. Fuji has a video out called "Coins Akira's", which was translated into English by none other than the very clever Nathan Kranzo.

Via Rick Carruth's always-valuable Magic Roadshow, here's the most entertaining six minutes of close-up magic I've seen in a while. Even though I don't know more than two words of Japanese, I can tell that this non-Cyril is a seasoned pro. Lots of strong magic, too!

BTW, someone in the YouTube comments claims his name is Akira, and someone else claims to have met him at a magic convention in Sacramento. So now you know as much as I do. Can anyone out there help identify this talented young magician?

Pollack Breaks the Record

2006-11-02T10:32:00.000-08:00

In my recent Picasso Musings post I mentioned that I'd love to have a Jackson Pollack painting in my personal collection. Coincidentally, David Geffen just sold Pollack's 1948 No. 5 to a Mexican financier named David Martinez for a record-breaking $140 million.

The picture above is how the New York Times displayed the painting, although I've never seen a huge Pollack displayed vertically, like this. I wouldn't be surprised if it's supposed to be horizontal.

UPDATE, January 25, 2007: Okay, I've had enough of seeing it vertical. I'm quite sure the painting should look like this:

Pollack is an acquired taste, but once he grabs hold of you his greatest works don't let go easily. I'm not normally envious of super-wealth, but this is one 4' x 8' painting I'd like to have on my wall.

Miscellaneous Musings

2006-10-24T14:42:00.000-07:00

1. Via Wonkette: Over half or Americans now favor impeachment for President Bush. Isn't that called a "mandate?"

2. Via CNN: SF hero Craig Newmark of Craigslist has no intention of selling the site anytime soon. This represents a nearly supernatural resistance to the lure of super-dooper weath. Think about it for a moment. Could you resist a nine (or ten) figure offer dangled in front of you?

Also in the above article is the tidbit that MySpace, which Rupert Murdoch's News Corp bought less than a year ago for $580 million, is now valued at $15 billion -- a decent ROI by most standards.

3. NORML has a just come out with an extensive review of the recent scientific literature (2000-2006) on medical marijuana . There have been over 700 articles in the first part of 2006 alone, mostly from countries other than our own. Conditions for which cannibis and cannabinoids show promise include Alzheimers, Cancer, and Hepatitis C.

No wonder the powers-that-be fight it so ferociously.

In related news, the Drug War Clock tallies over 643,000 people arrested for cannabis offenses so far this year.

And finally:

4. Seen across the street: These folks built this cool wheeled wooden ship-thingy to promote the Palo Alto premiere of 9/11 Press for Truth, a film about the struggle between grieving 9/11 families and the White House.

New Year's Eve Tickets Available Now!

2006-10-18T15:13:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty excited about my upcoming New Year's Eve show! It should be quite a blowout; get your tickets early!

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TOTH 2 C.K.

Picasso Musings

2006-10-18T12:08:00.000-07:00

Regular readers might remember my post about the Online Picasso Project, a delirous joy for fans of that seminal artist. Today comes a double shocker.

First, I'm amazed that my absolute favorite Picasso, La Reve (The Dream) (1932) is in private hands. Casino magnate Steve Wynn owns it as part of his vast collection.

I'm pretty much sold on Picasso as the most important visual artist of the first half of the twentieth century (I think a good argument could be made that Andy Warhol holds that distinction for the second half). Even before he invented Cubism and changed all the rules of visual expression, Picasso was already the supernaturally talented painter of a slew of Blue Period masterpieces like The Old Guitarist (1903) and The Tragedy (1903) (below), both painted when he was only twenty-two, as well as the amazing Rose Period paintings like The Family of Saltimbanques (1905) (also below) and many others.

At the ripe old age of twenty-six Picasso invented Cubism, a paradigm shift so tectonic that he could hardly match it again, although he continued to create brilliant work right up to his death in 1973 at the age of ninety-two.

I'm a huge Cubism nut and I think Picasso brought a more focused intensity, more genius, really, to his Cubist works than any other artist ever managed. Check out the spare monochromatic complexity of his famous 1910 portrait of the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, on the right.

But for sheer beauty -- in form, color balance, sensuality, and passion -- I'll take La Reve any day. Painted when Picasso was fifty-one, this painting of his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter is a true work of love. Marie-Thérèse never looked so beautiful; check out his other portraits from the same year if you don't believe me. The work is suffused with an intense eroticism; note the dual reading as both a front portrait and a profile view with penis -- presumably the artist's -- above her face.

La Reve is the Picasso I'd most like to have hanging on my wall at home (next to Matisse's The Dance, Jackson Pollack's Lavender Mist, and something by Jasper Johns -- as long as I'm designing my dream collection).

I was shocked to discover that La Reve is privately owned. That was the first surprise. Then I had an extra pang when I read the news today that Wynn was going to sell it (for a record $139 million) until he accidentally put his elbow through it while showing it to some celebrity friends.

Nora Ephron was there, and she blogged about it here. The New Yorker also has a nice story about the incident.

I can't imagine actually owning such a famous masterpiece in the first place. But if I did own La Reve, I certainly can't see myself ever selling it (assuming that, like Wynn, that I didn't really need an extra $139 million). Donate it to a museum, sure. But sell it to another wealthy private collector? I mean, why?

Be that as it may, I think it would definitely ruin my whole week if I accidentally punched a hole in it. Maybe Wynn needed that little lesson to remind him of why he collects great art in the first place. He and his wife have decided to repair La Reve and keep it after all.

Now isn't that a touching story?

Trippy Hubble Deep Field Video

2006-09-20T13:55:00.000-07:00

Here's a mind-blowing short film about the Hubble Deep Field image from the edge of the universe 78-odd billion light years out. The numbers are, well, astronomical.

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Link via Rick Carruth's Magic Roadshow.

We Need a "Son of Sam" Law for Wars

2006-09-05T12:02:00.000-07:00

Alternet has an excellent article tracking The Ten Most Brazen War Profiteers. This got me to thinking. Isn't it time we removed the profit motive from war?

Son of Sam laws, named after the infamous New York serial killer of the late 1970s, are designed to prevent criminals from profiting from any work of art or literature arising from their action -- and to allow the victims of their crimes to claim the profits. Son of Sam laws have run into constitutional trouble arising from their ostensible restrictions on free speech, but I see no such problem with a law prohibiting companies or individuals from profiting from war.

In fact, such a law would have the effect of preventing wars, as the military industrial complex would have a strong disincentive to ever use the product of its work. The Lockheeds and General Dynamics, the Halliburtons and Bechtels of the world would eventually have to move more thoroughly into non war-related fields. Imagine a world in which Bechtel turns down a multi-billion-dollar contract because they can't make any money on it!

A German proverb states:

A great war leaves the country with three armies - an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.

Let's help prevent the first two by eliminating the third.

Olbermann Slams Rumsfeld

2006-08-31T12:09:00.000-07:00

Keith Olbermann has his Edward R. Murrow moment!

Regular readers will remember how I rang in the new year lauding Olbermann in these pages. Well, he's at it again and he's even more gloves off -- and his target is a much bigger and more important fish. I know it's only cable but still, MSNBC is no Pacifica...

Check it out here.

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Via PopURLs.

Greatest. Movie. Pan. Ever.

2006-08-29T21:55:00.000-07:00

I haven't seen Barry Levinson's Sphere and the review to the left (click on it to read it, and boy is it worth reading) doesn't exactly make me want to. But the review sure explains a lot.

By the way, this isn't exactly worksafe. You have been warned.

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People frequently ask me where I find all this stuff. Well, below I tip one of my not-so-secret sources.

One of the most exciting developments of the last year or so is the rise of "collaborative filtering" sites that aggragate the best and most referenced URLs on the Web. This is a very Web 2.0 idea, the idea of using the collective intelligence of millions of Web users as a filter to find the best and most important sites out there at any given time. Sites like digg, del.icio.us, slashdot, and metafilter make it easy to track the global brain -- or at least keep up with whatever the digerati is reading from moment to moment.

PopURLs is a fantastic site that collects the best links from a half a dozen collaborative filters, along with the hottest videos on YouTube and iFilm and some of the most viewed new photosets on flickr.

PopURLs is always one of my first stops on the Web when I have time to kill and an appetite for the new.

Bizzaro's Promo

2006-08-26T16:36:00.000-07:00

Magician and fellow blogger Bizzaro of Why Am I Stuck In Magician's Hell? has posted his new promo online and it's a blast. I've been in magic for a very very long time and it's rare for me to see a promo that actually makes me want to see the magician.

Check it out here; the boy's got talent!

The Power of Nightmares

2006-08-16T16:37:00.000-07:00

Yikes! It's been awhile since my last post! Ah well, time flies when you're having fun. I had surgery for a hernia a couple of weeks ago, so I've been kind of preoccupied with that. My Dad came for a visit to keep me company while I recovered, so that was fun having some one-on-one time with him.

At any rate, here at last is the information on how you can see the documentary I alluded to in my last post. It's a three-hour BBC documentary by Adam Curtis called The Power of Nightmares and -- bless the 'Net again! -- it's available to watch for free right now on Google Video.

I first heard about this extraordinary series when Andrew O'Hehir of Salon gave it a glowing review, calling it the most important political documentary of this decade, and perhaps of my lifetime.

O'Hehir goes on to say:

And as for broadcast on American television, I'm told that will happen, let's see, approximately 5,000 years after pigs first begin to fly across the frozen wastelands of hell. It's probably illegal not just to watch, but also to read about or think about. You and I are both committing treason right now.

Essentially, Curtis' thesis is that the current technique of the American political system is to promulgate fear of a largely non-existent terrorist threat. The Power of Nightmares starts out in 1949 when an Egyptian named Sayyid Qutb, studying in Colorado, is horrified by the decadence he sees around him and winds up as the spiritual founder of Islamic Jihad. In parallel at the University of Chicago, professor Leo Strauss, a German Jew who had fled Hitler and settled in the U.S., is experiencing a similar reaction and founding the neo-conservative movement. Curtis' great insight is that each of these two extremists needs the other to justify their own existence.

The Power of Nightmares includes interviews with many of the key players over the last fifty years. Curtis demonstrates time and again the ways in which high-level members of the U.S. intelligence service and the White House exaggerated or simply lied outright about the capability and threat of the enemy. He accomplishes this through a darkly satiric web of stock footage from all over the place (the ridiculous state of legal clearances, as O'Hehir points out, is another reason why this might never show in the U.S.). The Power of Nightmares is a grand, sweeping effort -- a blast to watch, and if even half of Curtis' argument holds water, very very damning, too.

Part One: "Baby It's Cold Outside"

Part Two: "The Phantom Victory"

Part Three: "Shadows in the Cave"

By the way, here's the BBC's blurb on the 3-part documentary, in which they sum it up thusly:

In a new series, the Power of Nightmares explores how the idea that we are threatened by a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion.

I urge you to check out this amazing documentary before it disappears from the Web.

The Magician (1900)

2006-07-26T18:09:00.000-07:00

My old acquaintance Tom Frank, who I wrote about a while ago, has pulled up stakes in Seattle and moved back to L.A. to be with his new love and start the next chapter of his life. In the process, he has discontinued his intensly personal diary-cum-blog Coming Through the Haze and started up a new blog about his L.A. experience, Reverie.

His latest post points to The Magician, a delightful Edison company short from 1900 which contains some early special fx work. Would that we could all work such wonders live!

Thanks Tom! And good luck with your new life!

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Coming up next: The documentary that Salon's Andrew O'Hehir called "...the most important political documentary of this decade, and perhaps of my lifetime" is available to watch online!

Flatlife, plus Five More Minutes of Mitch

2006-07-19T11:33:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across this by accident (isn't that how the Net usually works?) and just had to pass it along. Flatlife is a short animated film by one Jonas Geirnaert, who was 21 when he submitted it to Cannes as a lark and was as surprised as anyone when it won best short animated film. It's a charming slice-of-life in an apartment complex, cleverly conceived and beautifully executed.

Five More Minutes of Mitch features the brillliantly trippy comic Mitch Hedberg, whose wacked-out stoner observations always overlaid an essential sweetness. Hedberg died of a drug overdose a year ago March at the age of 37, which gives this clip a sad undercurrent.

His widow, comedian Lynn Shawcrowft, has a moving personal blog here.

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Hedbergisms

I like vending machines, because snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at the store oftentimes I will drop it, so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential.

I'm gonna fix that last joke by taking out all the words and adding new ones.

I like to hold the microphone cord like this, I pinch it together, then I let it go, then you hear a whole bunch of jokes at once.

This one guy said, "Look at that girl. She's got a nice butt." I said, "Yeah, I bet she can sit down excellently!"

The Big Snit

2006-07-17T16:51:00.000-07:00

The Big Snit (1985), a wonderfully loopy short animated film by Richard Condie, is now online! I saw this when it first came out, as part of a feature-length "Animation Festival," and it was without a doubt the flagship piece of the festival. It still holds up beautifully, with its off-kilter rythms and its alternating surreal poetry and apocolyptic love story -- a gem.

The Big Snit was produced by the fantastic National Film Board of Canada, and they have put it and forty-nine other shorts online for free here. Thanks NFB! (And thanks BoingBoing for the heads up!)

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It appears my blog may now be banned in much of India. Well actually, all blogs on Blogger and Typepad and anything on Geocities -- and maybe a lot of other domains. Check BoingBoing's ongoing coverage for up-to-date reports on this heinous censorship.

The rise of national Net censorship is a growing problem; thanks to BoingBoing for publicizing this problem with their excellent coverage.

Pistachio Pudding

2006-07-11T11:51:00.000-07:00

Oh man! Here's a funny little short called Pistachio Pudding, by one "needmoreshroom s" (don't we all?). I don't know anything about this kid except that he has a great, bizarre sense of humor and he's a disciplined editor. The pacing is what sells this so well.

Once again, I love YouTube and all the technology that has enabled talented people the world over to generate this kind of content. A 24-year-old kid with a camera and a computer can get out there and have fun and make something lively, wacky, and -- most importantly -- watchable.

1979 John Lasseter Student Film

2006-06-21T15:22:00.000-07:00

YouTube does it again! Someone has posted The Lady and the Lamp, a hand-drawn animated short that John Lasseter made in 1979 while a student at CalArts. It's an impressive work, showing the strong feel for character, especially in normally inanimate objects, that marks his later work in the Toy Story movies and his current offering Cars. And it's quite funny and inventive, too -- also Lasseter hallmarks.

I first noticed Lasseter way back in 1986 (!) when I saw his now-famous Luxo Jr., which was the first really great fully digital short animation (and Pixar's first film). I had seen plenty of other computer animation prior to Luxo Jr., but nothing succeeded dramatically the way this one did. The "adult" lamp dealing with the frisky "kid" lamp was priceless; the computer pretty much got out of the way.

Lasseter received an Academy Award nomination for the film, the first CGI film to do so. How exciting to see that he was animating lamps the old fashioned way years before Luxo Jr.!

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Thanks again, BoingBoing!

Black Ops and the Iraq War

2006-06-12T00:10:00.000-07:00

Craig Unger over at Vanity Fair has written an amazing article on the successful lies and "black ops" that led to the Iraq War. The article details the labyrinthine web of connections through elements of Italy's intelligence community all the way to the White House. Sample text:

For more than two years it has been widely reported that the U.S. invaded Iraq because of intelligence failures. But in fact it is far more likely that the Iraq war started because of an extraordinary intelligence success—specifically, an astoundingly effective campaign of disinformation, or black propaganda, which led the White House, the Pentagon, Britain's M.I.6 intelligence service, and thousands of outlets in the American media to promote the falsehood that Saddam Hussein's nuclear-weapons program posed a grave risk to the United States.

The Bush administration made other false charges about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.)—that Iraq had acquired aluminum tubes suitable for centrifuges, that Saddam was in league with al-Qaeda, that he had mobile weapons labs, and so forth. But the Niger claim, unlike other allegations, can't be dismissed as an innocent error or blamed on ambiguous data. "This wasn't an accident," says Milt Bearden, a 30-year C.I.A. veteran who was a station chief in Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, and Germany, and the head of the Soviet–East European division. "This wasn't 15 monkeys in a room with typewriters."

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Link via Glenn Greenwald's excellent Unclaimed Territory blog, which pointed me to journalist David Neiwert's superb post on his Orcinus blog. Neiwert sums up the Vanity Fair article better than I do; it's a good place to start.

The Art of Science 2

2006-06-10T17:36:00.000-07:00

Faithful readers will no doubt remember Princeton's "Art of Science" contest, which I posted about back in July. Well, they're at it again; the 2nd annual Art of Science contest is over, and the winners and runner-ups are available for viewing. Easter Bonnet (pictured) is a particular standout; it's a laser etching with a speck of dust and has a diameter about half that of a human hair.

Interior Vacuum Vessel NSTX is also pretty cool, depicting a magnetic fusion device at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

And Defense to Offense is a dazzling psychedelic vision of Venezuelan butterflies.

Amazing Castle Optical Illusion

2006-06-10T14:25:00.000-07:00

Via BoingBoing (again), here's an amazingly trippy visual illusion I've never seen before. Stare at the negative image of the castle for twenty or thirty seconds then, while staring at the black dot in the middle, move the mouse over the pic. The photo appears to be in color until you move your eyes, when it becomes clear that it's actually a black and white photo.

This one feels like a magic trick; the color literally vanishes right before your eyes! But, to paraphrase Doug Henning, "it's only an illusion."