The series of viral kung-fu shorts we’ve been working on is almost done. Each film depicts a struggle between two characters facing a pirate’s dilemma and fighting over the best way to use a piece of information. Taking inspiration from Streetfighter 2, anime films, Wu Tang videos, J-horror flicks and drug commercials, the films tell stories about copyright, piracy, net neutrality and the potential of 3-D printing.
I’m really excited about these films and what other people will be able to get out of them. As well as making all the films available under a Creative Commons sharealike license, we’ll be uploading twenty clips from each short, plus all the audio as parts, so other people can use them to make new versions, or use them to make entirely different films. The first one should be up in a week or two, then we’ll be releasing one a week after that up until the book is launched.
I did a postcard for The Observer Music Monthly on how music scenes have changed in New York, which came out at the weekend – which you can read below:
New York is a transient place by nature and has always refused to be defined by any one style, musical or otherwise. The fact that no single sound has ever been able truly to own the city might be why so many of them leave it.
Hip hop was born here in the mid-Seventies, but seems to emigrate to a new American city with each passing month (it is currently living in Chicago) and shows little interest in returning home. Hip hop shared New York with punk, which kicked up a storm here first in 1975, until the Sex Pistols stole Richard Hell’s thunder and made the sound synonymous with the UK. Disco sprang from the city around the same time, before it violently bit the dust. House and garage were established on dancefloors here in the late Seventies before becoming multinationals in the Eighties.
Today, a long and tangled tail of musical styles stretches over the bridges into the outer boroughs. A trendy bar serves up tech-house, while a nearby barbers plays the new mixtape by Cam’ron, and a passing cab bumps reggaeton.
The Strokes were the last rock band truly to own New York. The Mercury Lounge, from where they emerged, is still churning out new indie bands, just as the Canal Room in SoHo and Southpaw in Brooklyn still play host to the latest crop of MCs, but getting noticed is tougher than it used to be. The Lower East Side has ramshackle venues such as Rothko and the Knitting Factory catering to fans of house music’s quirkier offspring such as ghetto-tech and dubstep, while the cluster of clubs on Chelsea’s West 27th St pump out commercial sounds for the weekend crowd from New Jersey.
The Meatpacking district sums up the current state of NYC’s nightlife best – flyers rarely even mention what music is being played, just how much it costs to reserve a table, and whether a bottle of Grey Goose is $200 or $300. Every night of the week there is great music to be found in all five boroughs; the only thing you won’t find is cohesion.
I was lucky enough to speak at the Business of Software conference in San Jose last month, it was a really interesting day. The speech is now up on Google video, I’m kind of far away from the camera but it’s really me, I swear.
One hundred and eleven shirtless men descended on Abercrombie & Fitch’s 5th Avenue store in NYC yesterday. The flashmob was put together by the group Improv Everywhere.
According to their website: “Agent Nguyen came up with the idea for this mission when he noticed the 5th Avenue Abercrombie and Fitch store had a shirtless male model greeting all customers as they enter. Upon further examination, we discovered the model is only one aspect of the store’s celebration of the shirtless male. There are photographs all over the store of bare-chested men, both on the wall and on the products themselves.
“Agent CScott was the first to take his shirt off. He thought the go-time was 4:30 and accidentally pulled the trigger 7 minutes early.
“He slowly realized he was the only one and that he must have gotten the time wrong, but decided just to roll with it. Employees didn’t seem to care. In fact, one went and checked on a size for him without even commenting on his bare chest.
“At 4:37 the other 110 joined in on the fun. Within seconds everywhere you looked there were shirtless men.
“I instructed everyone to simply mill about the store and shop. I told them that if anyone asked questions, to just claim that you’re shopping for a shirt.”
If you live in NYC and want to be part of Imrpov Everywhere’s next flashmob, sign up here.
Something strange is happening to retail spaces in America. In increasing numbers, shopping malls are dying. The big boxes that were once a staple of consumer culture are terminally ill, and if nothing is done about it, they could soon become extinct.
Once a proud creature, the mall was king of the suburban jungle. The shopping mall has long served as a symbol of crass consumer culture – a privatized, sanitized public space where the only form of human interaction is shopping. They typified the 1980s, making regular appearances in cult movies of the decade like Fast Times at Ridgemont High for example, or as the backdrop for the legendary car-chase sequence in The Blues Brothers. But something has changed.
Many malls that were once vibrant are gone. Their windows have been boarded up, their colorful exteriors are fading and their cheesy 80s neon signs have been reduced to shards of glass, scattering their weed-covered parking lots. The Galleria Mall in Sherman Oaks, California for example, where Fast Times at Ridgemont High was filmed, closed in 1999. The Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, Illinois, the set for The Blues Brothers, was dead before the film crew arrived – It closed in 1979, its rotting carcass resuscitated especially for the movie. Approximately 4,000 others sit empty across the country as desolate, melancholy memorials to a previous age of mass consumption.
The blame has been placed at the feet of large anchor stores like Target and Sears that used to be the lifeblood of such places, which are increasingly opting to go it alone in their own designated spaces. Without these big brand anchors sustaining a steady flow of foot traffic, smaller stores struggle to survive. The emergence of online shopping has also delivered a fatal blow to the mall’s delicate ecosystem. But the posthumous mall hides a more valuable insight into consumer culture. Hidden in their afterlife is an omen for capitalism’s more transient future.
When a mall dies, its shell becomes something else. Dead malls serve as the ultimate blank canvas for graffiti artists. Many live on as undead skate parks, their deserted urban landscapes are the perfect place to hone kickflips and railslides without the risk of crashing into a soccer mom or security guard, and they also make ideal spots for free running. A new trend known as ‘urbex’, (short for urban exploration) has blossomed from our fascination with decaying urban spaces, as postmodern adventurers infiltrate dead buildings, swapping stories, videos and photos of their expeditions online (there are some, such as deadmalls.com, exclusively dedicated to exploring old shopping centers). These living-dead malls are teeming with afterlife, illustrating what really drives us when we’re left to our own devices – what we are really trying to get from a trip to the mall. It’s not so much products themselves we crave, but authentic experiences.
Updated
Some great feedback on Reddit about this post – The Galleria Mall in Sherman Oaks, California that I mentioned, where Fast Times at Ridgemont High was filmed, closed in 1999 but also came back to life in 2002 as a new upscale shopping center (thanks to IvyMike for pointing that out). These new type of “malls with no roof” are taking the place of many deadmalls, maybe because they can offer something the malls of the 1980s could not.
Old malls couldn’t engender a genuine feeling of community (not that I’m arguing a mall really is a “genuine” community – try organizing a protest at a privately owned mall…) for many people, and that was the experience we were really going to the mall for. You can buy the same type of goods as you could at a mall in the 1980s, but the experience you consume at a “mall with no roof” is different.
Jammie Thomas, the lady slapped with a $220,000 fine for sharing 24 songs online this week, has taken her case from the courts to the intertubes. Alongside this Youtube video, she has a blog on MySpace, and a site called Free Jammie has been set up, where you can donate money to help keep Jammie free.
Seven years ago parody newspaper The Onion ran a piece on an ad man getting in touch with his inner child to work out how to sell things. 2007 was the year The Onion’s spoof article came true. I talk a lot in the book about how marketing is causing generation gaps to disappear. Marketers are going after your inner child with products that make us feel young again. One of my favorite new inner child trends: adult baby clothes.
LRG Skeleton Hoody
Last Halloween LRG came out with the “dead serious†hoodie, a creepy little number that zipped all the way up over the head, turning the occupant into a skeleton (with glow in the dark bones no less). When Kanye West wore it at a Stella McCartney fashion show that October, it became the most hyped hoodie in history, and a trend was born.
A Bathing Ape x DC Comics Super Hero Hoodies
Japan’s A Bathing Ape street fashion brand took the concept and ran with it, teaming up with DC Comics to release a range of clothes for fully-grown toddlers featuring everyone’s favorite comic-book heroes. As well as the Batman version pictured, Superman, Flash and Wonderwoman all got a shout out, and each hoodie is complemented by a matching sneaker packed as an action figure. The best thing since your mom got you Spiderman slippers when you were four.
Marc Ecko x Lucasfilm Boba Fett Hoody
If your inner child prefers super-villains, this could be for you. Graffiti-inspired fashion entrepreneur Marc Ecko is the youngest member of the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s board of directors, which clearly means he’s still very much in touch with his inner child, which explains how he came up with this man-sized children’s party costume designed to keep your inner twelve-year-old bounty hunter toasty all winter. Part of a limited-edition collection of Star Wars-inspired clothing this fall, under license from Lucasfilm, to celebrate 30 years of all things Star Wars. No word on prices, but start saving your pocket money.
Burton Sleeper Hoodie
Of all the hoodies designed for your inner child, this one from Burton is the cream of the crop. The snowboarding company went for substance rather than all-over-print style, and created a piece of clothing specially designed for catching a nap on the plane – a security blanket for travelling thirtysomethings. Featuring an inflatable neck pillow built into the hood, a second pull-down light-shield that covers your whole face, thumb holes in the sleeves and pit-zips to keep the air circulating, hidden passport, iPod and earplug pockets (complete with earplugs) this mobile sleeping bag is great for flying long haul, although the guy next to me asked if I had a neck brace on when I inflated the hood. $100 from Burton.
A good friend of mine just turned me on to Faceless, a Sc-Fi film being released this fall, made entirely using CCTV camera footage obtained through the Data Protection Act, which is similar to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
This really resonates with one of the overarching themes of The Pirate’s Dilemma – using and re-purposing information to create, but also to defend ourselves. Many people are uneasy about the Big Brother society growing up around us, but I’ve always been more excited by the potential of Little Brother. This film looks incredible, but also communicates to the audience that although we are being filmed more often than we realize, we do have some rights, and that it is possible to manipulate what happens to the footage on these these cameras all around us.
Faceless is the brainchild of London-based Manu Luksch, an Australian filmmaker who both stars and directs. By taking CCTV of herself and blocking out the faces of anyone else captured on it, she created a story set in the future, in the “faceless world” – with herself as the only woman with a face. “We’re being filmed all the time, in all sorts of situations, by CCTV cameras,” Ms Luksch told BBC World Service’s Digital Planet program.
“As a filmmaker, I was really questioning myself – where I should bring in my own camera.
“I found out that under the Data Protection Act (DPA), one has the right to retrieve data which is held upon oneself. This does not only apply to medical and financial data, but also to CCTV images.”
Forty years ago this year, in a recording studio above a liquor store in Kingston, Jamaica, a sound engineer accidentally recorded an instrumental version of a record onto an acetate disc, also known as a dubplate. A DJ named Ruddy Redwood took that disc to a soundclash that evening, and mixed the instrumental version of the record (On The Beach, by The Paragons) together with the original vocal version. That night the crowd made him play it so many times, by the time the sun came up, the record was worn out. This is how the remix was born.
Forty years later the idea behind the remix, the idea of fair use, is all pervasive. We understand it implicitly, and expect to be able to use certain things a certain way. We understand that fair use is good, helps us learn and build on what came before us. Or at least, most of us do.
Increasingly the concept of fair use is coming under fire from some big businesses. Brands are worth more than the physical items they are placed on (which is why the world’s largest sneaker manufacturers don’t own any sneaker factories), physical capital has lost weight in the information age, ideas and content are more important. As fast as new ways develop for us to share information, a noose is also tightening around it.
Last weekend the NFL broadcast this message before a football game:
This statement essentially prohibits you from talking about the game with a friend. The first rule of the NFL is you do not talk about the NFL. The second rule of the NFL is YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT THE NFL!!!
This was the same week that commercial science publishers launched a non-profit organization called Prism to take down the open access science movement. Prism makes the bizarre claim that giving people free access to publicly-funded science research is the same as “government censorshipâ€. Orwell couldn’t write this stuff. The best part of this story is that Prism were then busted by bloggers for allegedly “borrowing†the stock photos on their website from Getty Images.
If J&J win, Wal-Mart will probably soon try and copyright the smiley face, (wait, they already did)Urban Outfitters may trademark the face of Che Guevara and Reddit will sue this weird fish for looking like their alien.
The world is going mad. Fair use helps us create value and generate new ideas, locking ideas and information up behind unreasonable restrictions and artificial boundaries stifles it. It’s time to defend fair use for what it’s really worth. Luckily, the Computer & Communications Industry Association is fighting back.
“We filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission in which we asked the governments foremost enforcer of consumer rights to stop big media from making these ridiculous claims. Now, we want you to add your voice.
Their answer? Threats and exaggerations that misrepresent your rights. Your rights include the right to make Fair Use. But some of the Big Content companies don’t like the idea that the law limits their control over how you use what you’ve legally acquired. These companies know that, by law, anyone can quote, excerpt and even copy their works for things like journalism, homework and research and discussion of all sorts.
Big media companies are turning increasingly aggressive in their efforts to discourage people from doing what they have always done with the media they bought and programs they have recorded in their own homes.â€
