This 37k/sec WindowsMedia video stream was shot in 1998 by M. Baranova as part of an effort to test the acceptability of "video impressionism" as a potential populist medium–easy and inexpensive to produce and to distribute. Image "crispness" is deliberately sacrificed in favor of a "smooth" frame rate (5 fps for 56K modem reception). And image quality is further compromised for the "reality effect" of stereo sound.
My reluctance arises from having to confront directly not only the symbols but the reality of my life and imperial citizenship at the center of a global power structure. At the Mexican Consulate, the Nicaraguan got a one-month visa, the Russian got a three-month visa, and the American without even a passport got a six-month visa. And then there are the mirror "Check Point Charlies": one sixty miles north of the border past Oceanside, surrounded by a massive US military base, tanks and helicopters always raising dust to the right and left; and the other sixty or so miles south, right past Ensenada. The scenery is beautiful, but it can’t sufficiently hide naked geopolitical realities.
The most recent attempts to measure the Web’s dimensions (May 2000) have produced not so much interesting results as a new wave of metaphors to “naturalize” the predictable effects of mass media advertising, specifically the last two seasons of site-pumping TV ad campaigns.
Whether or to what extent "The Jerry Springer Show" is in tune with America or America is being tuned by "The Jerry Springer Show," I’ll leave for you to consider as I present this little, "real-life" carnival mirror from one of America’s most telling of places, the California freeway.
I have noticed that the building at Fort Mason where I take my improv workshop classes is also home to the Waldorf High School. This campus on National Park land incorporates big, empty, white-wall rooms with cheap-ass posters of vacation spots and one room with a pink sheet on the door that says “Detention” and a list of the usual crimes that land a kid in detention.
The issue is NOT piracy. Pirated digital and audio CDs, and endless knockoffs of every other kind of brand-name consumer good have been black-marketed in America and elsewhere for decades.
The current uproar is fundamentally not about this kind of piracy, because what now threatens Hollywood profits also and equally threatens the large-scale, established pirate businesses throughout the world: the prospect of a global grassroots network of theft and distribution, with no centers of production or points of sale to target.
I had a hard time sleeping tonight, and I woke up, read a bit from a book titled "The Victorian Internet" about the history of the telegraph, let my mind wander, and felt compelled to rise up from my bed and check the financials on Yahoo!
We are now living through one of those interesting, though hardly unique or remarkable periods in the history of human delusion when fundamental alterations in existing social, cultural, political and economic arrangements have become as unthinkable as they are inevitable
I have yet to understand how anyone can interpret American Beauty as a movie about dysfunctional families, suburbia and “life’s changes.” This is the essence of why American Beauty to me is a very bad movie.
The problem with the slogan, the problem with the notion that "democracy means everybody taking care of themselves," is obvious, though hardly ever stated publicly, even by Democrats. Disempowering Big Government accomplishes little more than clearing the field for Big Business. The notion that democracy means everybody, from poverty-level single working mothers to a Bill Gates or a Donald Trump or, more powerful still, an AT&T or a Disney, each separately talking care of themselves as best they can without regard for each other, is patently absurd. Yet it’s the standard stuff of our corporate media-orchestrated political discourse.