Mohawk Girls series tells stories of once ‘voiceless’ women – Arts & Entertainment – CBC News

Posted by Harry Sifton, Sunday, May 19, 2013

Book seller Sarah McNally: Hipster writes her own business rule book – World – CBC News

Posted by Harry Sifton, Sunday, May 19, 2013

Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield Does Space Oddity on the Space Station

Posted by Mike Blaxill, Sunday, May 19, 2013

Act of Terror: arrested for filming police officers – video | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Posted by Harry Sifton, Monday, April 29, 2013

SLAVES TO THE ALGORITHM | More Intelligent Life

Posted by Harry Sifton, Thursday, April 25, 2013

Surgeon prescribes Brian Eno to patients | Music | guardian.co.uk

Posted by Harry Sifton, Friday, April 19, 2013

Gilbert King Pulitzer Groveland: Author Gilbert King wins Pulitzer Prize for book about the notorious Groveland Four case – OrlandoSentinel.com

Posted by Harry Sifton, Tuesday, April 16, 2013

BBC News – North Korea novel wins Pulitzer Prize for fiction

Posted by Harry Sifton, Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Adbusters: 1% Art

Andrea Fraser at AdB ..

recent economic research has established a direct connection between skyrocketing art prices and income inequality, showing that “a one percentage point increase in the share of total income earned by the top 0.1% triggers an increase in art prices of about 14 percent.” It is now painfully obvious that what has been extraordinarily good for the art world over the past decades has been disastrous for the rest of the world. In the United States it is difficult to imagine any arts organization or practice that can escape the economic structures and policies that have produced this inequality. The private nonprofit model–which almost all US museums as well as alternative art organizations exist within–is dependent on wealthy donors and has its origins in the same ideology that led to the current global economic crisis .. Progressive artists, critics and curators face an existential crisis: how can we continue to justify our involvement in this art economy? At minimum, if our only choice is to participate or to abandon the art field entirely, we can stop rationalizing that participation in the name of critical or political art practices or–adding insult to injury–social justice. Any claim that we represent a progressive social force while our activities are directly subsidized by, and benefit from, the engines of inequality can only contribute to the justification of that inequality

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Sunday, April 14, 2013

The Doors “Riders On the Storm” on Vimeo

Posted by Harry Sifton, Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Jim Carrey and Fox News’ War of Words Rages On (Video) – Yahoo! Movies Canada

Posted by Harry Sifton, Friday, March 29, 2013

Slate: The Boston police go undercover on the Internet to stop the city’s most dreaded scourge, DIY indie-rock shows

Luke O'Neil in Slate ..

As anyone who's watched a single crime story on TV or film knows, undercover detective work is dangerous business. There inevitably comes a moment when the crime boss gets suspicious. Scary, sure, but at least police officers have a working knowledge of the rules of the crime game. They’ve trained their whole lives to pull off this deception. Passing yourself off as a credible music scenester, on the other hand, is an order of magnitude more difficult. Never mind drug lords—no one can identify a poseur more quickly than a hipster; sniffing out fakes is essentially the entire job description. That's what Boston police are finding out as their bungling efforts to infiltrate the underground rock scene online are being exposed

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Friday, March 29, 2013

Margaret Cho: Michelle Shocked Me

Cho in Huff Post ..

Well, Michelle Shocked, I am actually totally shocked. What the hell? It's freaky to me, the whole business of going from a queer icon to someone who would actually say that God hates us. When the shock wore off, I found that people were super angry, but I just got scared. I think that as a queer person of color, I have been scared my entire life. I get over it bit by bit, enough to get by and live, but then something like this happens, and it's like getting gay bashed all over again. When people say that God hates fags, there's this idea that it's OK to kill us, that it doesn't matter if we die, because if God -- the supposedly loving force in the world, the one who is supposed to love everyone and everything, the one, the only, whatever, whenever -- hates us, then how are we to exist? But if he hates us, why did he make so many of us? When someone like Michelle Shocked, formerly a beloved, alt queer muse and maker of the '90s, decides that it is OK to hate us and lets us know that God does too, I am truly sickened, as she of all people should know what this means .. And the effect of someone saying "God hates fags" can never be underestimated either. It's a license to kill. It's a death sentence. It's not funny. It's not OK. It's not something I can let go easily, because I know what it truly means

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Saturday, March 23, 2013

The novel resurgence of independent bookstores – CSMonitor.com

Posted by Harry Sifton, Monday, March 18, 2013

Adbusters: The anti-preneur manifesto

This is Danielle Leduc ..

I don’t want to be a designer, a marketer, an illustrator, a brander, a social media consultant, a multi-platform guru, an interface wizard, [] a brand, a representative, an ambassador, a bestseller or a chart-topper. I don’t want to be a human resource or part of your human capital ... I want to be a lover, a teacher, a wanderer, an assembler of words, a sculptor of immaterial, a maker of instruments, a Socratic philosopher, [] an erratic muse, [] a disrupter, a creator, an apocalyptic visionary, a master of reconfiguration

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Radical Reading: The Progressive Dr. Seuss

Peter Dreier in TruthOut ..

What few Americans know is that, despite his popular image as a kindly cartoonist for kids, Dr. Seuss was also a moralist and political progressive whose views suffuse his stories .. His most popular children's books included parables about racism, anti-Semitism, the arms race, and the environment. His books consistently reveal his sympathy with the weak and the powerless and his fury against tyrants and oppressors. Many Dr. Seuss books are about the misuse of power - by despots, kings, or other rulers, including parents who arbitrarily wield authority. His books teach children to think about how to deal with an unfair world. Rather than telling them what to do, Geisel invites his young readers to consider what they should do when faced with injustice

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Thursday, February 28, 2013

Reactions to Argo Best Picture Win

Robert Sheer in TruthDig .. "Oscar 2013: Hollywood’s CIA Celebration":

After the overthrow of the shah in 1979, I interviewed for the Los Angeles Times CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt, who led the coup against Mossadegh. For a quarter century, the United States had denied any connection with the coup, but Roosevelt, a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, was about to release a tell-all book on the subject that the CIA had approved, and he was willing to talk .. Roosevelt told me that he and Dulles kept their plan secret from Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, because they were sympathetic to Mossadegh as a genuine nationalist leader. “Acheson was absolutely fascinated by Dr. Mossadegh. He was in fact sympathetic to him,” Roosevelt said [] Instead, he waited until Allen Dulles’ brother, Foster, took over as secretary of state in the incoming Republican administration, and then Dr. Mossadegh would come to be defined by the U.S. as a potential puppet of the Soviets. In our interview, 25 years after the coup, Roosevelt was at pains to say that in retrospect, the communist label didn’t really fit. “Mossadegh was not pro-communist. ... I think that the British were very stupid in negotiations with Mossadegh. ... “I think it was possible to make an offer he would have accepted and that would have avoided this whole blowup. If they had said, ‘OK, we’ll increase the rate (paid to Iran for their oil) we’ll give you a certain percentage of the ownership,’ this would have been the smart thing for them to do.”

and here's Robert Parry in Consortium News: The Shortsighted History of ‘Argo’ ..

Despite a brief documentary-style opening referencing the 1953 coup and the dictatorial rule of the Shah of Iran until 1979, Argo quickly descended into a formulaic tale of sympathetic CIA officers trying to outwit nasty Iranian revolutionaries, complete with a totally made-up thriller escape at the end .. In that sense, Argo recalls Charlie Wilson’s War, which presented a dangerously misleading account of the Soviets’ war in Afghanistan. Though “just a movie,” Charlie Wilson’s War’s storyline has become something of a baseline for America’s understanding of the historic challenges in Afghanistan

i for one was surprised that Argo mentioned the Mossadegh coup at all - usually mainstream media, TV, movies, news etc omit that whole chapter - baby steps - mab
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Glenn Greenwald: Zero Dark Thirty, the CIA and film critics have a very bad evening

Glenzilla ..

This is a rare case of some justice being done. There's little question that the objections to its pro-torture depictions and CIA propaganda were what sunk the film. In explaining why its Oscar chances had all but disappeared, the Atlantic's Richard Lawson explained last month that as a result of the controversy, the film has "just become something vaguely taboo". That's a good thing, as it should be taboo

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Monday, February 25, 2013

Netflix, the New HBO

Nancy Hass in GQ..

These days, [Ted Sarandos] is the man everyone wants to take a meeting with. People love you when you're handing out the cash, and Sarandos, who looks the part [] but has one of the weirdest résumés in town (graduate of an Arizona community college, worked his way up in the DVD business from video-store clerk, landed at Netflix in 2000 to run distribution), has $6 billion to dole out over the next three years [including] $300 million for original programming .. He hopes to make at least five new shows a year. [] His dream project: a Netflix series created by Warren Beatty. "He's great in long form," Sarandos says. "His only problems have been when he's constrained." .. "The goal," he says, "is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us." His seductive pitch to today's new breed of TV auteurs: a huge audience, real money, no meddlesome executives ("I'm not going to give David Fincher notes"), no pilots (television's great sucking hole of money and hope), and a full-season commitment

Their new series "House of Cards" is amazing .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Wednesday, February 20, 2013

ENJOY

TURN UP YOUR SOUND, SIT BACK AND SEE WHAT THE MYTHFAIRE EXPERIENCE IS. WHEN SOMETHING WONDERFUL AND UNEXPECTED HAPPENS WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO SEE IS THE VERY ESSENCE OF THE ENTERTAINMENT EXPERIENCE AND WHAT IT IS ALL ABOUT. Michael Hamilton
Posted by Michael Butler, Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Oscar-Nominated Filmmaker’s New Ambitious Feature Documentary “Silenced” on Bush/Obama/DC Consensus War on Whistleblowers

c/o Kevin Gosztola @ FDL
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Monday, February 18, 2013

Kevin Gosztola: Why One Known Historian [Sean Wilentz] Is Disgusted by Oliver Stone & Peter Kuznick’s ‘Untold History’

Gosztola in FDL ..

It does not appear Wilentz finds it to be a problem that “public schools, the mainstream media and ‘those parts of America that cling to the notion of American exceptionalism,’” do not know much of the history in the book because they were not taught this history. It seems perfectly acceptable to him that Americans only be exposed to it while attending college or university and not while in other sectors of society

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Monday, February 4, 2013

Redemption: Oscar-Nominated Doc Follows the Working Poor Who Survive on Collecting Bottles and Cans

.. read transcript at Democracy Now
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Thursday, January 31, 2013

Dirty Wars, Documentary on U.S. Covert Warfare Abroad, Wins Sundance Cinematography Award

.. read transcript at Democracy Now
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Monday, January 28, 2013

Michael Moore: In Defense of Zero Dark Thirty

Moore ..

After I saw 'Zero Dark Thirty,' a friend asked me, "During the torture scenes, who did you feel empathy for the most – the American torturer or the Arab suspect?" That was easy to answer. "Oh, God, the poor guy being waterboarded. The torturer was a sadist." "Yes, that's the answer everyone gives me afterward. The movie actually makes you care for the tortured guys who may have, in fact, been part of 9/11. Like rooting for the Germans on the submarine to make it back to port in 'Das Boot,' that's the sign of some great filmmaking when the writer and director are able to get you to empathize with the person you've been told everywhere else to hate." 'Zero Dark Thirty' is a disturbing, fantastically-made movie. It will make you hate torture

anyone who's seen this wanna weigh in? not sure Joe and Jane America will take away the same things MMFlint did - i haven't seen the film and probably won't - mab .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Thursday, January 24, 2013