blogdisease.com

Please note that this blog no longer lives

here. It has been transformed and transported giochi internetgiochi online poker gratispoker sexi gratistexas holdem no limitpoker tutto gratisgiochi online pokerpoker online osxpoker texana onlinepoker in tourasian poker tourtexas holdem downloadgiochare omaha pokerstrip poker game onlinepoker superstars invitational tournamentкомпютриstreep poker onlineomaha h ltexas poker on linepoker no on linesito pokeronline gamesgiochi gratuiti pokergiochi poker gratis on linegiochi seven card stud inlineabetandwin pokerstrep poker on linesoftware poker gratistavoli multigiocatori pokerpoker superstar invitational tournament,world poker tournament,poker tournamentistruzioni gioco pokerworld pokertorneo texas holdemcome giocare a pokerpoker online legalegiochi pc pokerstreap poker on linebetandwin casinoi migliori casino onlinegiochi on line roulettecasino en lineagiochi casino onlinevideo poker online gratiscasino pc,pc game casino,casino pocket pccasino bonus senza depositofree kenoall slotscasino con bonus gratiswww casino online comstrategie roulettecasino italiani con bonusdownload giochi casino to:

Mediacology.

Thanks for visiting. Please come and visit the new location.

This is what the book says: an infant needs to sleep so that she can grow new brain cells. And what about papa? Well, I’m getting by, joyfully, but with little time to focus on work, thus my long absence from the blog. The good news is that my daughter was born healthy and strong. There is no real bad news, except that my normal time management strategy has been completely destroyed.

As for life in Rome… well you probably heard the news that the air quality here, depending on your disposition, is something special. With traces of cocaine, marijuana and caffeine, makes me wonder if Darth Vader found his recent tour of the city intoxicating in more ways than one. No doubt when he left there was tear gas added to the mix. As for the Lord Emperor’s whirling death flotilla, we are more than relieved to have our quiet neighborhood back and our nights filled with the baby’s cries rather than the drone of the aerial death bubble.

Before coming back I decided that I wanted to rework the blog. For a while there were several changes I wanted to make but the time between my initial coding and the latest software versions was too long and it was too difficult to simply over right the old template. Moreover, as I have been working on my book, my ideas are getting clearer; I’ve wanted to create more of a distinct identity for the blog with a unique URL and domain. Please keep in mind that everything is a work in progress, so I’ll be making tweaks here and there, and I’m a new parent, so time is precious!

If any of you brave souls subscribed to Blogdisease, please update your readers to reflect the new name, Mediacology, and location of the updated blog, which now lives at:

http://mediacology.com

I will no longer be posting at this site (double boo-hoo), unless some of you guys out there want to take it over. I’ve always wanted to have a community blog, but it has been difficult to organize.

The main reason for the switch to Mediacology is a change in emphasis and pedagogy. Blogdisease has been increasingly a place to post about Tactical Media and art, and I no longer think that it should be separated from media education. I wanted to have a little space to cuss here, but it is too skitzo to keep up the different blogs and multiple identities. Moreover, as I have been working on my book I came to realize that what I was really probing was not just mindful engagement of media, but to advocate for a deeper kind of understanding that delves into the very operating system of our cultural consciousness.

Most media literacy that I am aware of just focuses on the analysis of media. For me that is not enough. Our technological world is running on faulty thinking that goes to the core of economics, communications, education and ecology. Therefore, what Deep Ecology is to environmentalism, Mediacology is to media literacy. It’s an effort to move from a dualistic paradigm I call GridThink, to one that is holistic, which I am calling HoloGrok. More on these terms later. I will be testing some of the ideas of my book at the new blog, and also post about interesting things that cross my browser.

And now for some other mundane things. There was a period of a few weeks with no Internet, and to be truthful, it felt great. I got a lot of writing done and a sense of anxiety that pervades a lot of my probing and searching on the Web was abated. I was a little gloomy, to be honest, when the service was turned back on, and even sadder when the TV arrived. Yet I do miss writing and connecting in the blogosphere and sharing with all of you as you have so bravely ventured into my little world. So I plan to continue posting as much as I find interesting and relevant, but not with so much urgency. I want this to be fun again. I hope it is for you too. See you at my new studio!

Deer peeps, due to the impending arrival of my baby daughter, I may be offline for a few weeks. Never fear, I shall be back!

Eco-Logical Art:

Tossed into landfills by the ton weekly, this heavy, ink impregnated material is an environmental nightmare. But ECO-LA takes the indestructible nature of the advertising vinyl and turns it into an asset. In fact the art can even hang on an exterior wall. To date his Off The Wall 1 and 2 indoor/outdoor art events have drawn hundreds of spectators and produced over $25,000 in sales of original art on recycled vinyl. OFF THE WALL 3, which will premiere on Earth Day Eve, 07 (April 21), promises to be bigger than ever because in addition to the art in and on his gallery exterior original art on 5 actual recycled billboards will be up for display around Los Angeles. At 14 by 48 feet it is estimated that over 250,000 people a day will see the free art month long drive-by “exhibit.” To put that in perspective the famed Getty Museum averages about 4000 visitors daily.

Learn what happens when you poke a stick into an ant hill.

(video by oliver stone for a MoveOn campaign)

I took these three photos on the same street within a block in Rome. I like how the poster became street art itself.

Turns out I’ve had a sex change. I answered the survey questions and it appears my personality is closest to…

Galadriel!

Which one are you?

You can take the test by clicking on the image above

This is a deadly serious rant with comical undertones. If Guy Debord were Japanese, I think he would have made this video. I don’t know how well irony works as a communication tool in Japanese culture, but I get it. Ha, ha!

There are just too many darned good visual punchiness in these four little minutes to possibly digest in a lifetime.

Another antiwar video. Too many to count. But I like this one. Please share with a loved (or hated) one…

Via Wooster Collective

Image from the Al-Thawra MySpace page

One of the most interesting things to happen to punk is that it has mutated from a national scene of troubled and rebellious youth to a bunch of little niches that are particular to certain communities. So it is interesting to see what is perhaps inevitable in such a climate, taqwacore: a muslim brand of hardcore punk. The movement was inspired by a work of fiction by the same name. Now it has a life of its own. Search the word taqwacore at MySpace and you will get some interesting results. The following Guardian article has coverage of the scene.

From Boston to Lahore and beyond, Islamic punk rock is spreading | Rock | Guardian Unlimited Music:

There can’t be that many female playwrights who are deaf, punk and Muslim, so Sabina England is something of a find. With a lurid Mohawk and leather jacket slathered with slogans, she looks every inch the rebel and has an attitude to match.

Sabina, who says she lives in the “shitty midwest of the United States” or the “HELL-HOLE OF BOREDOM AND YUPPIES”, is part of a subculture that, until a few years ago, existed only on paper.

The Taqwacores - a novel about a fictitious Muslim punk scene in the US - has spawned an actual movement that is being driven forward by young Muslims worldwide. Some bands - such as the Kominas - have a cult following. Others, such as Sabina, are virtually unknown. In a brief email exchange, she lays out some harsh truths.

You’re a playwright. What do you write about?

“I write plays about fucked up people in fucked up situations, because we’re all fucked up human beings that live in a fucked up society. People need to quit whining and shut up and realise that we’re all freaks, whether we admit it or not.”

Where are your ideas from?

“Being a deaf woman from an Indian Muslim family growing up in both England and the US, I’ve never felt I fit in or belonged anywhere. So I was always forced to be an outsider, and because of this, I’d just watch people and observe their actions and words. I guess a lot of my ideas come from my alienation and anger.”

Is it art, a public service announcement, or a publicity stunt? Hmmm… You be the judge.

Capla Kesting Fine Art:

“Campaign to Rescue Women of Youth” featuring “The Paris Hilton
Autopsy” offers a cadaveric nude Paris Hilton, laid out with twisted body
and opened abdominal cavity on a coroner’s table, while her cell phone
remains in her grip. The ‘unglamorous’ display which includes support
material from anti-drunk driving organizations counters “the disturbingly
glamorized trend of Hollywood’s ‘girls gone wild’,” according to gallery
director, David Kesting.

A new video from Robert Greenwald (Out Foxed, Walmart: The High Cost of Low Price, and Iraq for Sale). Check out the project’s Web site here. He’s offering a competition to change the infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner that was erected behind Bush during is USS Lincoln speech. Some examples so far:

· You love me now, right Dad?
· CRUSADE OF EVIL ACCOMPLISHED
· IRAQ IS THE NEW VIETNAM!
· MISADVENTURE ACCOMPLISHED
· Mission: Geo-Strategic World Domination
· Mission Absurd
· INSANITY ACCOMPLISHED
· FOLLY ACCOMPLISHED
· miserable failure

I used to love his rants in the New York Press before the paper was bought by a bunch of amateurs. Now that Matt Taibbi has found a home for his caustic voice in Rolling Stone, America is better for it. If there is anyone writing now that has the kind of pitch of Hunter S. Thompson’s voice, it’s Taibbi who has a knack for cussing at the right moments to express the general disgust one feels about about the political process. We need more village atheists. Thank you!
Alternet.org re-syndicates his columns. You can read them all here.

You can also read a nice interview with him at Mother Jones.

Sometimes all you need is some paint and cardboard to reach thousands.

Elton Junk

One things I miss about the good ol’ days of modernity is the massive output of manifestos that artists and activists churned out to contest the prevailing ideas of their world. With names like Futurists, Surrealists, and Bauhaus, people seemed to care a lot about having clear and strong opinions. With the advent of the postmodern world in which all values and morals are relative, it seems as if the Age of Manifestos transmuted into the 30 second sound bite and became solely the province of marketing. Not necessarily so. ChangeThis has a cool project in which people can send manifestos to their Website and readers then can vote for whether or not the manifesto gets published. The goal is to spread useful ideas. I submitted a proposal, “A Community is Not a Demographic,” with the following summary. You can vote here to encourage them to publish it.

In The Forest People Colin Turnbull recounts his experience of living among the Pygmy. He described an uncorrupted dreamworld where the number one crime against the community was hording food from the hunt. The punishment was temporary exile until the offender learned his lesson. Likewise, the memory of my high school punk years has a similar halcyon quality in which the single most significant crime against the scene was selling out. Unfortunately our culture has devolved into a marketing style. So if we are to rescue anything from punk beyond fashion, than it must be the demand for ethical behavior when marketers appropriate “indie culture.” Principles make a real community, because we acknowledge that our behaviors affect each other, just as the Pygmies identified hording as a socially destructive. We need to discard the lamest excuses of the 20th Century, “It’s only business,” and come to terms with the notion that a community is not a demographic.

Finally some cogent thought on the truth of war: it’s weird. Face it, why do we do such idiotic, insane things such as conducting modern technological warfare? I’m not trying to be flip. If aliens were to observe modern humans, they’d wonder if we were in some strange kind of rat maze experiment run by sociopath gods. Hmmm. Maybe there’s something to that…

As the Soldier Dies, So Does the Nation Come Alive:

The First World War was a horrendous, chaotic, brutal, and often surrealistically absurd war. Yet it is portrayed as a more-or-less natural or normal event, despite the suggestions in the historical accounts that something very unnatural and abnormal was occurring. Historians describe the quantity and persistence of the killing and dying, as well as the suicidal nature of the battle strategies, but rarely step back and ask: What was going on? What was all the death and maiming about?