Radar Waves

Great Current.tv documentary on Thai landfill "gleaners"

Friend-of-Radar Joel Gershon shot and co-produced a really incredible mini-documentary (13 minutes) called "Wasteland," about "gleaners" who mine for recyclables and other cultural detritus at the Nonthaburi Landfill in Thailand.

It's amazing to see how many recognizable brands end up there. And yet not amazing at all. The gleaner culture is also very interesting; even though it's all about eking a living from other people's garbage, there's an ethic of sharing; if you find something valuable first, no one else can redeem it. And, despite the stink, the dirt, and the disease involved in the job, they seem to have about as much job satisfaction as your average big city office proles.

Current.tv (possible presidential contender, eco-warrior, and erstwhile Internet inventor Al Gore is the chairman and founder) has an interesting model; videos uploaded to the site can be "greenlighted" ("greenlit"?) for distribution on cable by viewers. Thus far, this video has been greenlighted by everyone who's voted.

Congratulations, Joel. Keep up the good work.

Lucas sees the light(saber) -- allows Star Wars mash-ups

George Lucas, the man who screamed like a wounded wookie when the Phantom Edit first introduced JarJar-free prequelosity to millions of online nerds, has come around, kind of.

Lucasfilm, which is in the middle of a hype cycle centered around the original film's thirtieth birthday extravaganza, has announced that this time around, fans are being invited to mash-up, remix, and even eff with the official storyline and timeline, using 250 officially sanctioned video clips from all six feature-length films. They're partnering with online video editing site Eyespot.com to do it, which should provide Web 2.0 legitimacy to the plan, plus a huge boost in subscriber numbers for the video site.

Of course, Lucas isn't exactly uploading the master keys to the Death Star; for one thing, Eyespot will use some kind of pattern recognition software to censor out any user-generated clips that contain "nudity, pornography, and the like" (seems like a pretty conveniently broad stricture). Also, remixers will have zero stake in their work; Eyespot and Lucasfilm will divvy up the proceeds from streaming advertisements served to viewers. And don't even think about the possibility of either the source materials or the products being released under a Creative Commons license...

...But all in all, we like this. We are happy. We might even make an all-Jar-Jar-all-the-time edit, if it's not deemed obscene.

Hoax alert: From the annals of misunderestimation: the PC circa 2004

I love this photo of RAND corporation's mock-up (in 1954) of what a home computer might look like in 2004. As a professional prognosticator, I'm used to getting things wrong, but so far I don't think I've ever gotten anything this wrong. Kind of makes me feel better about my digital music projections circa 1999.

Thanks for the pic, Masha!

UPDATE: Speaking of getting things wrong, I've been duped! Wally Baer, former RAND guy, says:

Sorry to disappoint, aram, but the picture is an urban legend hoax that
circulates every few months or years and has nothing to do with RAND  It's
actually a montage of several images, as described at

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp

However, it's certainly apropos to your interest in remix.

Wally

Happy Wiretap Day

According to the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), today is the deadline by which network operators -- everyone who provides Internet service to businesses and consumers -- have to install "back doors" making it easier for the FBI to spy on American citizens. This is yet another nail in the coffin of American civil liberties, and a very dangerous check on free expression, not to mention the security and commercial viability of the Internet. As Wired succinctly explains:

Making surveillance easier and faster gives law enforcement agencies of all stripes more reason to eschew old-fashioned police work in favor of spying. The telephone CALEA compliance deadline was in 2002, and since then the amount of court-ordered surveillance has nearly doubled from 2,586 applications granted that year, to 4,015 orders in 2006.

Of course, we still have the right to encrypt our communications. We suggest using tools such as the TorPark browsing anonymizer (a small but effective add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser), and GnuPG, a free and easy-to-use encryption tool that works on documents, emails, IMs, or just about anything.

Aram interviews Pandora founder for Truthdig.com

This week, I interviewed Pandora founder and pianist Tim Westergren, to get his take on the recent webcasting rate hikes. The result is published in Truthdig.com, to which I recently started contributing media/tech news analysis.

Sinnreich: What do you think the impact of these new rates will be on the Internet radio industry as a whole?

Westergren: If these new rates really stick, it’ll stop. No legitimate webcaster can afford to stream. There may be a few large terrestrial stations that keep their streams going online as a loss leader, but the whole business and ecosystem around Net radio is really going to be wiped out. On the other hand, there are 70 million Americans currently listening to radio over the Internet. If you suddenly turn it off, the demand doesn’t go away. More Web radio will start sprouting up from countries where royalties aren’t strictly enforced, and people will start tuning in to them.

If you're at all concerned about the future of internet radio, I highly recommend you check out SaveNetRadio.org, which contains further information, as well as a petition.

Aram and Joanna Demers talk music sampling at the ACC

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at the Annenberg Center for Communication, based on the research I've been doing into sample-based music for my doctoral dissertation. Musicologist, musician and all-around cool human Joanna Demers (author of Steal this Music) also spoke, about the aesthetics of electronic music.

There's a WMV video of the event here, and an MP3 here. Howard Rheingold also blogged it here.

Many thanks to the Annenberg Center for giving us the opportunity to present our research, and to all the people who came to hear us.

Incidentally, Marissa and I will be presenting related research, based on our recent consumer survey about configurable cultural practices (e.g. mash-ups, remixes, machinima, etc.) at MIT5 in Cambridge later this month, and at ICA in San Francisco next month.

Vidal vs. Buckley

Last night I attended a wonderful lecture at the skirball center with gore vidal, interviewed by david ulin, editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. he was his usual brilliant, partician self and I thought in a time of outrageous reality TV squabbles and histrionic political debate that, despite the shrill cackling of pundits and politicians, never actually addresses issues, it would be fun to link to this footage of the famous gore vidal/william f buckley debate at the 1968 political conventions. vidal comes out swinging, and buckley loses his cool. enjoy.

(and just in case the sound is garbled vidal calls buckley a "pro-crypto Nazi" and Buckley responded, "Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto Nazi, or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered.")

Sexual Healing, 24 years later

Heads up: Friend-of-Radar Ben Adair interviewed Friend-of-Radar David Ritz on KPCC's Pacific Drift this weekend. David co-authored the song "Sexual Healing" with the late, great Marvin Gaye, and served as his official biographer, to boot. David's a great speaker -- he came and guest lectured for the class I teach at USC a few weeks back, and knocked 'em dead. Here's a link.

Maybe they should start thinking about a new name for their product

???

 

I was just doing a little vanity searching on Alexa, and discovered that inaccurately-named censorware purveyor SmartFilter has blocked the website for my band, Brave New Girl, on numerous occasions.

Their reason? In a word, sex.

I don't know what it was about the site that connoted sex to these neovictorian ninnies -- maybe the sweet and supple sounds of my bass playing made them feel inappropriate tinglies in their nether regions. But the pain I feel over the loss of traffic -- we would have been BIG, man -- is somewhat assuaged by the fact that we're in good company.