michaelmaurer.net

Singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie's new year's resolutions for 1943. "Play and sing good, dance better, help win war - beat fascism". Not much has changed.

Whew, another year gone by. So much stuff has happened. So much! Like, crazy.

Ok, seriously, I've finished writing a play two months back, and am now looking for a way to bring it to the stage. It's called "The Rat king", and it's about a group of temp workers who have to fight a monster in the Vienna sewers. It's supposed to be funny AND political. At least I hope it is. I'm currently working on a sequel, but it's entirely possible it'll turn out to be something completely different. If you're curious about the play, drop me a line at ratking@michaelmaurer.net. I'm looking to translate it as soon as possible.

In the meantime, have a very 80's christmas with BeTaMaXMaS - a giant sampler consisting of Drakkar Noir commercials, fast food ads, Mask episodes and other goodies from a decade of shame/greed/revolution.

Thomas Hoepker: On that day five years ago, sheer horror came to New York, bright and colorful like a Hitchcock movie. And the only cloud in that blue sky was the sinister first smoke signal of a new era.

See The meaning of 9/11's most controversial photo @ Guardian.co.uk, as well as Frank Rich Is Wrong About That 9/11 Photograph @ Slate.com. Every time I look at it, I can't help but think of Le déjeuner sur l'herbe.

Jonathan Jones: Stendhal similarly captures the dissonance of history in his novel The Charterhouse of Parma. A young man volunteers to fight for Napoleon at Waterloo, but instead of a defining moment of courage all he experiences are random, marginal, meaningless accidents on the edges of the great day.

Nice quote I picked up while leafing through Suppressed Transmission 2:

Thus the truest account of reading Shakespeare would be not to write a book with beginning, middle, and end; but to collect notes, without trying to make them consistent.

- Virginia Woolf

Dark Girls, a documentary to be released Fall/Winter 2011, takes a a look at the challenges faced by dark skinned black women in the USA today. A short preview has been posted on Vimeo, featuring interviews and a particularly saddening school test, where a small girl is asked about skin tone and intelligence.

The film is being directed by Bill Duke, the 80s action star of box office hits like Predator and Commando. Apparently he's quite the humanist, doing stuff for the inner city youth and the United Nations. (via Gawker, Black Snob)

If you're tired of the "they're all criminals, lock them away" rhetoric, check out this interview by benuk1234. I don't know who he is, but he managed to find an articulate voice amidst the fires and the looting. Nice piece of citizen journalism right there.

August 6 and 9 marked the 66th anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Democracy Now! takes a look at the censored footage by Pulitzer Prize winner George Weller, as well as the government-approved reporting by embedded journalists.

I'll be writing up a summary of articles I've been reading later this week, until then check out this op-ed by the Guardian on the psychology behind the UK riots.

FTA:
Hiller takes up this idea: "Consumer society relies on your ability to participate in it. So what we recognise as a consumer now was born out of shorter hours, higher wages and the availability of credit. If you're dealing with a lot of people who don't have the last two, that contract doesn't work. They seem to be targeting the stores selling goods they would normally consume. So perhaps they're rebelling against the system that denies its bounty to them because they can't afford it."

HDstarcraft features commentary on popular Starcraft-2-matches, most of them between professional level players. E-sports have been around for a while now, but I'm still baffled every time I listen to HD talk about them like it's a traditional game of soccer.

Anyways, he's currently hosting a World tournament, and the second round is about to begin. If you've never experienced the frenzy and excitement of a match between Protoss and Zerg, now's your chance.

tspigot.net is the latest addition to my list of streaming radio stations. Like Ghetto FM and GBS FM, DJs Gilmore and Spunky serve up an eclectic mix of pop, rock, and whatever they are currently listening to.

Having DJs makes it somewhat more predictable than "crowd-sourced" GBS FM and its user-generated playlist. Not that it's bad, but listening to R'n'B followed by black metal followed by Zappa, requires a certain... mood. Or patience? Whatever, it's still interesting.

Ghetto and GBS FM are both connected to the Something Awful forums, and have their respective threads. Sign up, if you want to help with radio-making.