Monday, 23 January 2012
Unfugnbelievable!!!
Group participation: what's wrong with this picture?
I ordered some video-editing software from Hitfilm in the UK which also comes with some instructional videos. So a few days later I get a call from FedEx saying that the DVDs were being held at U.S. Customs until I filled out a Video Declaration Form, which she said was now standard practice. Now, I'd never heard of this before, so I called back to ensure that this was indeed FedEx and not someone phishing for information. Had them email me the form.
This is what the form said: "I/we declare the the films/videos contain no obscene or immoral matter, nor any matter advocating or urging treason or insurrection against the United States, nor any threat to take the life of or inflict bodily harm upon any person in the United States."
Now, the first clause I can kinda see, though "immoral" is weird and there's no standard definition of obscenity in the US, but let that go...what made my eyebrows go up my forehead and down the other side was clause two. So I called back the nice lady at FedEx -- who was only following instructions given to her by Customs -- and asked what this was all about.
Apparently -- and this is only her understanding of the situation -- this is a new thing being done by Customs and Homeland Security with FedEx, UPS, and other carriers to make sure that films and videos with ideas or stories that were at odds with the United States Government didn't get into the country, as it was a form of terrorism (as further elaborated upon in the third and final clause.) She added that some DVDs showing Occupy events in London and elsewhere had gotten bounced because of the concern that these were being used to coordinate activities here (as if with the internet people actually need physical DVDs for that sort of thing but that's neither here nor there).
Under this new stipulation, if V for Vendetta had, for instance, been produced in the UK (instead of just filmed there), importing it into the US would be considered subject matter "advocating or urging treason or insurrection." And if you lied about it on the form, you could be held liable for this.
So there are now very literally guardians at the gate ensuring that the wrong sorts of ideas, movies or DVDs are not allowed into the country without investigation and/or prosecution. And most pernicious of all, they don't actually define what they mean by advocating treason or insurrection, any more than they define what "immoral" means, it's whatever they decide it means, so you could be breaking the law without knowing you're doing it, until they decide you're doing it.
Thoughts?
Via
(Thanx Sander!)
I ordered some video-editing software from Hitfilm in the UK which also comes with some instructional videos. So a few days later I get a call from FedEx saying that the DVDs were being held at U.S. Customs until I filled out a Video Declaration Form, which she said was now standard practice. Now, I'd never heard of this before, so I called back to ensure that this was indeed FedEx and not someone phishing for information. Had them email me the form.
This is what the form said: "I/we declare the the films/videos contain no obscene or immoral matter, nor any matter advocating or urging treason or insurrection against the United States, nor any threat to take the life of or inflict bodily harm upon any person in the United States."
Now, the first clause I can kinda see, though "immoral" is weird and there's no standard definition of obscenity in the US, but let that go...what made my eyebrows go up my forehead and down the other side was clause two. So I called back the nice lady at FedEx -- who was only following instructions given to her by Customs -- and asked what this was all about.
Apparently -- and this is only her understanding of the situation -- this is a new thing being done by Customs and Homeland Security with FedEx, UPS, and other carriers to make sure that films and videos with ideas or stories that were at odds with the United States Government didn't get into the country, as it was a form of terrorism (as further elaborated upon in the third and final clause.) She added that some DVDs showing Occupy events in London and elsewhere had gotten bounced because of the concern that these were being used to coordinate activities here (as if with the internet people actually need physical DVDs for that sort of thing but that's neither here nor there).
Under this new stipulation, if V for Vendetta had, for instance, been produced in the UK (instead of just filmed there), importing it into the US would be considered subject matter "advocating or urging treason or insurrection." And if you lied about it on the form, you could be held liable for this.
So there are now very literally guardians at the gate ensuring that the wrong sorts of ideas, movies or DVDs are not allowed into the country without investigation and/or prosecution. And most pernicious of all, they don't actually define what they mean by advocating treason or insurrection, any more than they define what "immoral" means, it's whatever they decide it means, so you could be breaking the law without knowing you're doing it, until they decide you're doing it.
Thoughts?
Via
(Thanx Sander!)
R.I.P. FileSonic & Uploaded.to
Wow. Do you think anyone else will fold in light of the ongoing witch hunt? And could a major player like Mediafire go under?
Via
Filesonic Kills File-Sharing Service After MegaUpload Arrests
Luc Sante: The Mother Courage of Rock
Patti Smith holding the photographer Judy Linn’s Super 8 Bolex camera at Linn’s apartment in Brooklyn, early 1970s; from Linn’s recent book of photographs, Patti Smith 1969–1976
I first heard of Patti Smith in 1971, when I was seventeen. The occasion was an unsigned half-column item in the New York Flyer, a short-lived local supplement to Rolling Stone, marking the single performance of Cowboy Mouth, a play she cowrote and costarred in with Sam Shepard, and it was possibly her first appearance in the press. What caught my eye and made me save the clipping—besides the accompanying photo of her in a striped jersey, looking vulnerable—was her boast, “I’m one of the best poets in rock and roll.” At the time, I didn’t just think I was the best poet in rock and roll; I thought I was the only one, for all that my practice consisted solely of playing “Sister Ray” by the Velvet Underground very loud on the stereo and filling notebook pages with drivel that naturally fell into the song’s meter. (I later discovered that I was just one of hundreds, maybe thousands, of teenagers around the world doing essentially the same thing.)Very soon I began seeing her byline in the rock papers, the major intellectual conduits of youth at that time. Her contributions were not ordinary. She reviewed a Lotte Lenya anthology for Rolling Stone (“[She] lays the queen’s cards on the table and plays them with kisses and spit and a ribbon round her throat”). She wrote a half-page letter to the editors of Crawdaddy contrasting that magazine’s praise for assorted mediocrities with the true neglected stars out in the world:
Best of everything there wasCreem devoted four pages to a portfolio of her poems (“Christ died for somebodies sins/but not mine/melting in a pot of thieves/wild card up the sleeve/thick heart of stone/my sins my own…”—if this sounds familiar, you expect the next line to be “they belong to me,” but it’s not there yet).
and everything there is to come
is often undocumented.
Lost in the cosmos of time.
On the subway I saw the most beautiful girl.
In an unknown pool hall I saw the greatest shot in history.
A nameless blonde boy in a mohair sweater.
A drawing in a Paris alleyway. Second only to Dubuffet.
Then in November 1973, a small ad in The Village Voice announced that she would be performing at Le Jardin, a gay disco in the roof garden of the Hotel Diplomat on West 43rd Street, in honor of “the first true poet and seer,” Arthur Rimbaud. Accompanied on guitar by Lenny Kaye, a rock critic familiar from his job behind the cash register at Village Oldies on Bleecker Street, she read and talk-sang: Kurt Weill’s “Speak Low,” Hank Ballard’s “Annie Had a Baby,” a version of Édith Piaf’s “Mon vieux Lucien,” and twenty-two more poems, four of them about Rimbaud. She was skinny, quick-witted, disarmingly unprofessional, alternating between stand-up patter, bardic intonations, and the hypnotic emotional sway of a chanteuse, and she was sexy in an androgynous way I hadn’t encountered before. The elements cohered convincingly; she seemed both entirely new and somehow long-anticipated. For me at nineteen, the show was an epiphany...
MORE
ioerror Jacob Appelbaum
The number of people in Australia with iPhone battery problems only after being physically near me is absolutely stunning.
Hmmm...
rupertmurdoch Rupert Murdoch
Copyright piracy. Everyone now agrees is stealing and wrong. So why all the hysteria? Why not discuss and settle on cure?
龍年
May all you and your family have good health 身體健康, good wealth 財源廣進, and all your wishes come true 心想事成 for coming New Year!
Sunday, 22 January 2012
♪♫ Viva Vox Choir - The Prodigy Mix (a cappella)
The Prodigy Mix (Out of Space, No Good, Smack My Bitch Up, Omen, Breathe, Firestarter originally performed by The Prodigy), performed by Viva Vox choir from Serbia, Belgrade, Zemun.
Live a cappella performance at Sava Centar, December 2011.
arr. Boris Balunović
conductor: Jasmina Lorin
via
The Story of Rough Trade (BBC Documentary)
The Rough Trade story begins more than thirty years ago on 20th February 1976. Britain was in the grip of an IRA bombing campaign; a future prime minister was beginning to make her mark on a middle England in which punk was yet to run amok; and a young Cambridge graduate called Geoff Travis opened a new shop at 202 Kensington Park Road, just off Ladbroke Grove in west London. The Rough Trade shop sold obscure and challenging records by bands like American art-rockers Pere Ubu, offering an alternative to the middle-of-the-road rock music that dominated the music business.
In January 1977, when a record by Manchester punk band Buzzcocks appeared in the shop, Rough Trade found itself in the right place at the right time to make an impact far beyond that of a neighbourhood music store. When Spiral Scratch was released in 1977, the idea of putting out a single without the support of an established record company was incredible. But Rough Trade was to become the headquarters of a revolt against this corporate monopoly – it was stocking records by bands inspired by the idea that they could do it themselves.
But selling a few independent records over the counter was not going to change the world. Early independent labels had to hand over their distribution to the likes of EMI or CBS. But one man at Rough Trade challenged that monopoly. Richard Scott joined Rough Trade in 1977 and became the architect of a grand scheme that was nothing short of revolutionary: independent nationwide distribution.
The shop could now offer experimental musicians the chance to sell records nationwide and so it was inevitable that Rough Trade became a record label in its own right. In 1978 the Rough Trade label was born and by the end of the year it had released a dozen singles by an eclectic mix of post-punk artists and become not just an alternative ideological force, but genuine competitors in the commercial music world.
via
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