Dark Side of the 8-bit Moon

Hit play and you should automatically cruise through all six parts of this 8-bit tribute to Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon.

Palin Fans Are Clueless

I'm not making this up, just going by their vague, uninformed responses to softball questions asked outside a Palin book-signing event last weekend.

Hilarious, until you realize that these people are basing their votes on hollow buzzwords, not common sense or fundamental familiarity with the issues* comprising Palin's platform. It's embarrassing that so many of them can't finish a sentence. It's even more embarrassing that America's unhealthy fascination with celebrity obscures the view of common sense (this is an issue of epidemic proportions that we can't address in just one post).

* To be perfectly fair, much of the so-called "Obama Nation" is the same way. You can tell they are second-guessing themselves now that he hasn't proven to be the messiah in the first 25% of his first term.

Source: Dangerous Minds, via BoingBoing.

Science Is Interesting

Get more Richard Dawkins here.

In B-Flat Two-Point-Oh

Check out in Bb 2.0. It's the result of a collaborative video/music (okay, multimedia) mixing project. It goes at least one step further than Kutiman's "Thru You" by putting the controls at your fingertips.

Spotted via Create Digital Music.

Untooned

Pixeloo does an awesome job of untooning animated characters. Here's his rendition of Homer Simpson, and his follow-up post on the source material used to make it. Click the image to view larger.

[via BoingBoing]

Steve Brule RULEZ

It appears that BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin is as enamoured with John C. Reilley's Steve Brule character as I am. Rather than duplicate her efforts, I'll just point you to her post. And give you a taste of the Brule clip we quote all the time around our house, above. Oh, and the sequel to it, here. Cheers, and enjoy.

UNFORTUNATE UPDATE:
Cartoon Network removed the video clips from YouTube. There are some clips online at Adult Swim's page for Tim And Eric's Awesome Show, Great Job!, but you've got to click around a while to get to anything -- and you'll be waiting for a lot of clunky pages to load. Waiting and waiting and waiting. This should be the link to video clips, but I can't tell because it's taken ten minutes to load and there's still nothing but navigation showing. So sad, Cartoon Network. Break a simple user experience and replace it with a pathetic one.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE:
Adult Swim's video page finally loaded, after seventeen painful minutes on a T3 connection. Stupendous. Here's what's worth waiting for, I guess:

Guitar (NOISE) Hero

Wandering through Wired's blogs over coffee this morning, I didn't stop on anything until I found this on The Underwire. As soon as I think of a name for the band I want to be in with Scopeboy, I'm emailing him. His Tesla-coil guitar, my chopped-up samples... it could be the kind of sweetly hellish noise that makes men weep. Wicked.

Drop Where You Shop

Saw on Consumerist today that shopdropping is experiencing a spike in popularity. Fun!

SHOPDROP: To covertly place merchandise on display in a store. A form of "culture jamming" s. reverse shoplift, droplift.

Brings to mind The Droplift Project, who've been droplifting for years. Doesn't quite top Bansky's museum-hack, but it's the same idea. The Center for Tactical Magic demonstrates a lot of the ideas I first heard articulated in Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone. Not that I've read all that, I recommend you absorb it the same way I did - listen to it*.

[* If anyone knows of an acapella version of this recording, please share. (I think the mid-90's "world/ambient" music bed might prevent some listeners from getting the most of Bey's reading, plus I'd like to mash-up some bits of it myself.)]

For those who want to skip the strategy and go straight to the rush of shopdropping, there's PeopleProducts123, an endeavor of the Anti-Advertising Agency.

How To Have A Number-One The Old-Fashioned Way

Taking time to talk pop reminded me of something I meant to post a while ago, yet I never got around to. That something is The Manual: How to Have a Number One the Easy Way. Long out-of-print and impossible to find, this book was hugely influential on my early forrays into the music industry. The K Foundation's combination of discordianism, Illuminatus references and unabashed pop sensibility stuck with me. I've followed the further exploits, musical and otherwise of Jim Cauty and Bill Drummond. I've had The Manual in my Amazon wish list for years, never to see it actually "available". I loved it when I read a friend's copy in college, and always wanted to have my own copy. Now we can all have it.

A relatively recent BoingBoing post about the KLF links to a PDF version of the manuscript. So while you miss some of the illustrations and the tactile sensation of holding this adorable little case study, full of instructions (which were guaranteed to work, BTW, if you followed them to the letter), you can still read it.

It's worth knowing that The Manual did in fact work, too. The Austrian Euro-trash band Edelweiss found #1 hit status with "Bring Me Edelweiss" - a song they claim was created by following the instructions in The Manual. And this was some time before you could use a MySpace page to collect friends or distribute a new single. Of course, with theories like The Long Tail afoot, it's probably not so much about having a number-one anymore.

Does anyone feel like telling Kanye?

In A Toy Box Far, Far Away...

Excuse my geek-out, but this looks awesome. One of my favorite Adult Swim shows, Robot Chicken, is about to release a special treatment of Star Wars on June 17. Watch the trailers and get other digital souvenirs here.

[Apologies for not embedding the trailers here; the embed codes supplied by Adult Swim don't work correctly.]

Scientific Prank Methodology

That's the term I just learned from an article in the latest issue of WIRED. The article explains how Annalee Newitz paid a service to get her incoherent, experimental blog a top rating on Digg. This, according to Newitz, was after Digg CEO Jay Adelson claimed "all the groups trying to manipulate Digg 'have failed,' and that Digg 'can tell when there are paid users.'"

It must sting to be Digg right now. But that's not the only reason I'm blogging about the article. The "cultural engineer" side of me picked up something other than the debunking of a CEO's claims.

It's interesting to read about the lemming effect that ensues once a few paid ratings are imitated by other Digg users. At a time when a lot of attention is given to the alleged usefulness of user recommendations, this is a reminder that the herd instinct is still in effect online.

Since most of us don't have the time to check the reputation of every user name we encounter ourselves, my gut tells me that we should expect to very soon see a service that recommends the best recommendations. Or, at the very least, some new sort of validation layer added to the experience of Digg. Surely, the folks at Digg must be all over it by now...

Read: "I Bought Votes On Digg"

The refix is in (for now).

Refix? Yeah. Here's a fun example of a refix that follows-through on ETUC and movie remixing:

DJ Food's Raiding the 20th Century - an audio-history of the cut-up. It's a bit of a listen, but I highly recommend checking both versions - the original mix is brilliant, and the refix is true genius.

Methods of refixing in sound recording date back to Musique concrète and through early forms of sampling and dub:

Tzara, Burroughs and Gysin called it the cut-up;
Zappa called his version xenocrany;
John Oswald dubbed it Plunderphonics;
Double Dee and Steinski considered their examples "lessons";
Pop Will Eat Itself said it all in their name.

Though not the first to use it, DJ Food is onto something with the term refix. For the time being, it is a remix of the term remix - and therefore may be a better word for this discussion. Technically, I'm refixing my blog by linking to previous posts to create a richer context for this particular post and to reinforce the themes behind this entire blog.

The refix not a new tactic. It's just a new word for an old trick. We have always reappropriated cultural capital, legally or otherwise, to re-tell stories (personal experiences) within individual and institutional worldviews.

Think of all the "classic" art that is little more than a commissioned depiction of a royal family imposed on biblical or mythological scenes - notably, without the permission or consent of those who wrote the Bible. Those Bible stories are largely based on previous mythology and folklore, but "fixed" enough to support Christianity's insidious patriarchy and supplant Pagan belief systems. These refixes are traditionally maintained as classic art because they've been hanging on museum walls for centuries - but apply the same tactic to modern media and you are asking for a cease and desist order, lawsuit or worse. (That's because our permission culture is all f'd up, and our courts can't clearly define fair use.)

The refix tactic reaches into all niches of culture, not just the traditional, classic arts: ricers, bikers and gearheads refer to it as Kustom Kulture; writers know it by several names, portmanteau perhaps the most exotic of them; gamers know it in the form of cheats, mods and even machinema; programmers and hackers may consider it open source; one day soon we will refix our own genetic codes under the ideals of democratic transhumanism.

It will no doubt be outdated in a matter of months, but for now the refix is in.

What to do with Chicago's water tanks...

According to the Trib, the Chicago Architectural Club recently announced winners of a contest seeking ideas for what to do with the city's rooftop water tanks. There are some very cool ideas, my favorite is the winning idea from Rahman Polk (PDF), which uses the tanks to harness wind power and support a city-wide Wi-fi network (an idea that's got some people talking already). Let's hope the best ideas prevail.

Blue-Faced Cell-Out

CTA Tattler captures the disdain for a U.S. Cellular guerilla marketing campaign that's been annoying Chicagoans during their commutes this week. I personally encountered no less than five of these chumps while riding the Blue Line for a mere three stops the other day.

The first indication that this "stunt" was BS: there's no way any of them were getting a signal in the tunnel -- whatever conversations they were pretending to have were obviously fake. The CTA should know about this (I'd bet that U.S. Cellular didn't bother to get clearance first), so if you've encountered this shite, be sure to report it to CTA customer service.

This stunt seems to coincide with a promotion the carrier is running with WCKG radio (scroll down to "U.S. Cellular - win a free phone and service"). Go ahead and ask Pete McMurray if he's going to paint his face blue, too.

The Wall Street Journal reports that U.S. Cellular claims to be approaching teens with this "call me minutes" campaign -- so why are they irritating twenty- and thirty-somethings during the morning commute? You might also ask the conglomerate WPP Group (and subsidiary G Whiz), who (according to WSJ) helped U.S. Cellular come up with such a bad idea in the first place.

And to U.S. Cellular: if you're so keen on minding the blogosphere, be sure to check out that link to CTA Tattler. The people who blog about what you've done don't like you at all. They are talking about boycotting your services in your own home town. Joan Cusack was annoying enough; this blue-faced desperation is a total turn-off.

To Yahoo!, from the streets

Wooster Collective reports that Michael Oliver has created a cool hack combining Flickr (a Yahoo! property) and Google Maps to create a dynamic map of street art snapshots as uploaded by users. Of course, Oliver's hack isn't working right now... but there's a similar hack that does work - using geotagged Flickr images and Google Maps - here (though there isn't much that's been mapped yet).

Hey, Yahoo!, maybe it's time to get your map application in shape enough to compete with Google's? This "hack" creates a combination of tools that are not unique to street art afficionados; wait until the travel industry and its journalists pick up on this... if they haven't already.

Pimp my hybrid.

A California man spent about $3K pimping his Prius, adding extra batteries that recharge via plug in a wall outlet. Now he could get up to 250 miles per gallon of gas. It's not cost-efficient just yet, but it is an eye-opener.

West Bank Art Attack

I know, I'm late on this one... but I think it's absolutely brilliant, so better late than never:

Banksy (who normally doesn't show himself) hit Israel's barrier with Palestine. Take a look.

This is some of the most innovative and conceptually responsible "street" art to come along since "clean graffiti". For a self-described "fictional character", Banksy has been pretty busy.