Friday, May 24, 2013

Zombie Pigs

Dave Zirin buries the 3 in this instant classic of sports journalism.

As a long-time resident of Illinois, I can confirm that Chicago leads the world when it comes to the sheer brazenness of its elite looting. Most famously, Chicago sold off its parking meters to banksters for a song, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars being transferred from city services to the pockets of the 0.1% (read Hal Dardicks' excellent and devastating expose of the scam). Now Mayor Rahm has decided to shut down more than fifty elementary schools as part of the plutocrat's open war on public education - schools that just happen to be 90% located in African American communities. Sheerest accident, that. While the schools are being destroyed, His Greediness the Pharoah Rahm-ses I is shoveling $100 million of public funds into a shady sports arena.

Billions for despicably evil, stupid plutocrats and their Roman circuses, all at the expense of our children.

But enough carping. The time has come for action. It's time to topple the neoliberal Pharoahs, from Cairo to Chicago. The forces of resistance are on the march, and unlike past rebellions, this time we, the 7 billion working people of planet Earth, have powerful digital tools at our disposal. It's the 7 billion against the 700 billionaires, and I know which side I'm on. Do you?

Monday, May 20, 2013

To The Fans

Are you tired of crappy, overpriced corporate media?

Have you had it with the nauseating lies of the plutocrats?
 Do you regularly have to resist the urge to throw your cable TV box out the window?

Friends, you are not alone. The time has come for change. Not the fake kind brought to you by corporate executives, their NGO quislings, or their stooge politicians.

No, the real kind of change begins at home. You -- and me -- must do this together.

Instead of paying evil, ruthless corporations for access to media monopolized and censored in advance by evil, ruthless corporations interested only in becoming more evil and ruthless -- it's time for us to to fight back, by supporting our favorite digital artists.

Buy only from producers who respect your hard work and labor, we fans, players, consumers and audience-members.

It's easier than you think.

The hip hop artists of the middle-income nations pioneered the art of building digital audience networks to support digital artists (e.g. Gazgolder).

Ross Scott's "Freeman's Mind" series has been delivering comedy platinum since 2007. Visit Scott's site, hit the tip jar, buy a T-shirt.

Meanwhile, in friendly neighborhood BRIC country Russia, Roman Samtsov, Andrei Mankiewicz and a group of volunteers are creating a live-action fan series called "Freeman's Days", based on the Half Life 2 universe. The first episode is out, and it's astoundingly good. You can contribute to the team via their Boomstarter site.

It's time to learn from Kratos: fight the Hades of Media Plutocracy with its own hell-forged weapons!

Sunday, May 12, 2013

To the Artists

You have one mission, and one mission alone.

To create.



If you put your heart and soul into your art, if you put everything you have into your art - not everything the market tells you will sell, not everything the academics tell you is tasteful, not everything your social milieu tells you is acceptable, but everything you have been and are on the way to being, everything that speaks truth, everything which honors the least of us and does justice to all of us... That. Is. Enough.

Because it can seem that noone appreciates or understands what you are saying. That no work of art can survive the blast-zone of reification, ranging from the sniping of insider clubs who reject anything they cannot monopolize for themselves, all the way to the saturation bombing of neoliberal media corporations who want to turn the planet into a copyright jail. 

Don't listen to their lies. This is what is true:
 Someone you don't know will run across your work of art.

Someone you don't know will hear it.

Someone you don't know will see it.

Someone you don't know will play it.
 Someone you don't know will read it.

And somehow, somewhere, at the deepest core of the smallest of all things, you will make the impossible... possible.

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Resistance

...sometimes comes down to a single word.

This word, and no other.

This word, not the words which cite other words.

This word, not the sentences which cite paragraphs, the essays which cite volumes.

This word.

There is no other.

Friday, May 3, 2013

Shadowland

Daily life in dying empires is like one long survival-horror videogame. Only there's no save button.

If you survive -- and survival is now a lottery, determined more by sheer luck and preexisting familial-cultural capital than by education or talent -- you become a pack rat.

You can buy nothing. So you collect every random artifact you come across. Might be useful, later.

You have no power. So you dodge the terrifying monsters of the total system. They hunt us ceaselessly.

Everything once comforting and familiar becomes strange and distorted.

Your taste in music, literature and aesthetics narrows to what will replenish your energy-pack.

Baroque ornamentation gives way to annealed silicon, symphonies give way to hip hop, films give way to pixels.

No respite. No sanctuary. Just survivorhood.

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

May Day

May Day, festival of the 7 billion.

Though I'm not feeling festive these days.

In fact I feel pretty atrocious. Depressed on account of the depression.

Who has better teeth / blood or the stone.

Bits of myself are disappearing. Raw, down to pulp. Nothing takes its place.

Nothing.