April 21, 2004
Wallpaper
Posted by nerdling | April 21, 2004 11:12 AM
Recently browsed by yours truly:
betterPropoganda, a new free and legal download site for fans of independent music of the rock and hip hop persuasion. The site, while similar in composition to Epitonic, focuses on newer music, as opposed to Epitonic's equally worthwhile and important focus on seminal music from the recent past. On the plus side, you can save songs that you like on betterPropoganda to a playlist for future reference. If you're like me and find yourself searching out music at work and promptly forgetting what songs you heard when you get home, that is a very nice feature.
Yet another in what appears to be a new trend, the Pitchfork spoof. RichDork, brought into being by the folks at Something Awful, asserts that "all written content was produced by eternal college students who were laughed at by English professors when we submitted rambling, vapid essays to them, which is why we now work at Border's bookstore, but one day we'll have our big break and then you'll see".
I've long suspected that Pitchfork is run by a group of bed-headed, bespectacled Dave Eggers fans with an insane prejudice for Radiohead. Apparently I'm not the only one.
Plus, lots of interesting things in the news lately:
IN P2P trading, Palisade Systems has designed a new program, Audible Magic, that purports to block the transfer of copyrighted materials on P2P networks. Endorsed by the RIAA, the filtering software is sold as part of a bundle of network-management tools and cannot be installed in the individual file trading software (such as Kazaa or Morpheus), but rather must be used on a network. Naturally, this is a major draw for colleges and universities who are being scandalized by student file sharing, as well as being hounded by the RIAA. I say it is creepy and invasive, not only because there is plenty of freely available legal copyrighted material for download, but because in addition to policing action on P2P networks, the software also searches any files transfered through email or instant messages. Three cheers for the impending police state! Hip hip hooray!
THE Governator has promised to have a 'Hydrogen Highway' up and running in California by 2010. Much, I'm sure, to your surprise and awe, I think this is an excellent notion...being put in place at a very bad time. We have already lost huge chunks of state funding for the arts and education; that money is instead being funneled into reinstating California's aerospace economy. And while hydrogen is the fuel of the future and a huge push—in the form of the $90 million it will take to create a workable network of hydrogen fueling stations, as well as all the funding for R&D on hydrogen-powered vehicles—is needed to get the ball rolling, something about this becoming a partisan issue weighted on the side of the party notorious for old (oil) money seems a little bit fishy to me, especially when the funding is coming from private sources.
IT'S just like Giuliani never left office! Veteran New York street artist James De La Vega is being charged with vandalism and facing up to a year in jail. Apparently even the enlightened minds of New Yorkers, living in the definitive urban locale, can't understand the important contribution of public art to metropolitan life.
Meanwhile Robert Johnson, the Bronx district attorney, recently told the New York Times, "We find it offensive that people come here and treat our walls as their canvas." As though there are not worse things that someone could be doing in a public space than using it to make art.
But in a country where works of art held in private collections are singled out and targeted simply because they upset the sensibilities of certain segments of the population (such as the uproar in 1999 over Chris Ofili's "The Holy Virgin Mary," part of the decidedly modern collection of eccentric collector and patron Charles Saatchi, being shown in New York), I suppose it is hardly surprising that we have only a vague idea of how to go about creating positive spaces amidst the thick of urban experience. We can barely keep a handle on preventing censorship for "real" artists being shown in museums, so why should a small group of urban (read: generally not white) kids be allowed to paint perfectly viable and non-gang-related pictures on walls in their communities?
IN political news, the New York Times ran a story yesterday about the new trend in campaigning: MRIs. Researchers at UCLA are using MRIs to study the levels and locations of brain activity triggered in partisan voters when they are shown various images, among them commercials for Bush and Kerry, as well as images from past elections. The study hopes to find out how people with strong partisan ties think about the techniques currently used to sway voters and, by proxy, how those techniques and others can be most effective.
