techyum ::

There is a certain subset of the human race for whom viewing David Bowie’s performance in 1986′s Labyrinth was a coming-of-age experience that defined not only sensuality, but life itself. In fact, had the universe not dictated, before its inception, that fourteen billion years later there would be a David-Bowie-as-Jareth, these folks assert, there never would have been a Big Bang. In the same way Tim Curry as Frank-N-Furter inspired and inspires star-struck fandangos in the delirious faithful, The Goblin King, with his mullet and his eye makeup, is what it’s all about. And when I say what it’s all about, I mean what. It’s. ALL. About.

Weirdly, all those people seem to also love Neil Gaiman.

Well, leave it to Amanda Palmer of Boston’s Weimarpunk outfit the Dresden Dolls to ask Gaiman, who happens to be her new husband, to walk a mile in Bowie’s schlong, alongside sock puppets — in Edinburgh, no less — in this hilarious fan video/parody that damn near tops the Original Pink Five. It is featured prominently on Palmer’s YouTube channel, and was also distributed by Twitter, Twitter, Facebook, Facebook and blog post, in the kind of social-publishing “Take this! And that! And this! And some of this! And one of these!” that the pair specializes in. If you’re one of the faithful, you got it a couple of days earlier, on Palmer’s email list, which you should join if you’re into that sort of thing.

By the way, get your mind out of the gutter! A “schlong” is a mullet — that’s all! I have no idea if Bowie rents out his actual schlong, but I wouldn’t count on it. Besides, the line would be around the block.

As I was saying before I was interrupted by your filthy ruminations, Gaiman and Palmer are both known for dishing out beaucoups fan service — obsessive blogging and Tweeting, free songs, free stories, videos, personal messages and interactions, and frequent responses to fan questions — even, painstakingly, the rude ones. The two of them are poster children for social networking and new media as iconoclastic art forms, not to mention an ongoing Blitz of fan-appreciation.

This particular bit of iconoclasm is presented by Palmer, Gaiman, and the rest of the video’s crew with a hearty “A Very Bowie Xmas Gift… Love, AFP, Mr. Neil Gaiman, and Team Chaos Merry Xmas and Kwanzaa to all!!!” — perhaps in lieu of a wedding reception where they could invite all their fans. As I mentioned, the G-man is Palmer’s new husband. The pair announced their engagement back in January, 2010 in a co-Tweeting, multi-blogging jitterbug orgy. According to Offbeat Bride, they tied the knot in New Orleans last month for Gaiman’s birthday, with Gaiman in top hat and Palmer in statue-drag, as revealed in this video shot by Cat Mihos:

…but then, as it turns out from Gaiman’s blog post on the wedding, the whole thing was a surprise to him. He writes:

Next time we get married, I’ll marry the lady, not the statue, and there will be invited people and not a flash mob, and I’ll know it’s happening in advance, and there will be a paper and it will be legally recognised, but I cannot imagine it will be any more joyous than this was.

Surprise wedding, eh? Well, when you’re marrying the MC from Cabaret, such things tend to happen; Palmer recently completed a two-month run in that role at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge. Having not seen it, I can only offer unsupported speculation, but that’s my specialty; Bigfoot (who attended the premier) just texted me that Palmer was born to play that role as surely as Bowie was born to play The Goblin King.

Offbeat Bride directs me to Palmer’s blog post on the wedding, which is absolutely uproarious (as is much of Palmer’s blogging), as well as Kyle Cassidy’s wedding album.

A Techyum congratulations to the lot of ‘em!

Every once in a while I run across a book that makes me think, “This world. It’s a big one. And there are some really unusual people in it.”

I know!!! “Define unusual!!!” I had the very same thought.

I have no idea what’s in Mind-Controlled Sex Slaves of the CIA, other than — presumably — that it involves mind-controlled sex slaves and the CIA. A responsible journalist (say, Hunter S. Thompson in one of his braver moods) would probably buy it for his Kindle, read it and hand the pieces of his detonated brain over to you, the Techyum reader, maybe with a hand-scrawled Post-It note saying: “Ow. Do not read. –HST.”

But Thompson was defining an era with his bold new vision of gonzo journalism. At Techyum, we’re pretty  much just treading water until the dead start to rise and we finally get to whack monsters with very large handguns and not feel all that bad about it.

Besides, the blurb and cover themselves provide as much newsworthiness as a Republican Congressman copping a squirt in a rest stop in rural Idaho…wearing his wife’s prom dress. Read more…

The New York Times has a great article today on the Subway Art History project by a collective called Slavery that recreates some of NYC’s classic graffiti with a modern twist — like “Joan of Arc” image here, a recreation of a famous subway painting, “Hand of Doom,” that you can see in the accompanying Times photo gallery.

[They are] the works of a newly formed collective of (mostly) former graffiti writers in their 20s and 30s, who have embarked on an unusual citywide campaign to summon 50 or more of the most famous pieces of old-school graffiti out of the history books and back onto the streets. The project, called “Subway Art History,” is unusual not only because the artists are making the pieces with the permission of businesses, schools and other perhaps nostalgic owners of blank vertical space, but also because of the nature of the pieces themselves. They are expressions of homage in a subculture that has almost always been defined by fierce competition, intense striving for originality and a kill-the-elders attitude toward the past.

…In New York the idea is to use the pieces to try to teach a two-part history lesson. The first is about the glories (as the collective sees it) of the early days of graffiti and the invention of a vernacular art form that has swept the world. The second lesson is about world history itself, in neighborhoods where education remains low on the list of priorities for many struggling teenagers.

[Link to NYT Article]

[Link to NYT Photo Gallery]

[via Streetsy]

In much the same way that I am just now getting really into Lady Gaga, I’m sometimes a little behind the curve in my role as a “culture blogger.” That’s why I’m just now laughing sick over this magnificent Cold War instructional film, What to Do in a Zombie Attack.

It seems so campy now, but back when it was made, Zombism was a real threat. Remember those days? It was 2007; Eisenhower was president and wore a smart hat. Kids nationwide were doing The Twist. Elvis was on Ed Sullivan; Lucille Ball was dating Frank Sinatra. The Red Menace had infected Europe, and here on the home front, beatniks were everywhere. For a time, it looked like our American way of life might be threatened by both world Bolshevism AND things that wanted to eat our brains.

But we prevailed. Across our nation the rallying cry went out: “Better Dead than…um…”

Anyway, it makes for laugh-a-minute viewing, even if it is kinda, y’know, SO last year.

There are about eleventeen versions on YouTube; this appears to be the high-production value version. If you’d like it on DVD, with zombie-riffic out-takes and bloopers, not to mention a special “colorized” version, you can get it here. The filmmaker’s website has great stills and a link to his classes in flash basics and animation.

Felton, California, is about fifteen minutes north of my old alma mater, UC Santa Cruz. It’s home to the Bigfoot Discovery Museum, which since 2006 has co-hosted the annual Bigfoot Discovery Day with the Alliance of Independent Bigfoot Researchers. This year’s event was on Saturday, and about 50 people attended, according to the Santa Cruz Sentinel. A barbecue lunch in Felton at the Museum was followed by evening presentations at the Louden Nelson Community Center in Santa Cruz.

According to the Sentinel, the event mostly consisted of experiencers relating their stories about Bigfoot; these included Museum founder and curator Michael Rigg, who told his story of encountering Bigfoot as a toddler in 1950.

The encounter, of an encounter with a large, hairy hominid near the Eel River in Humboldt County (about 8 hours to the north of Felton) was related in an earlier Sentinel article. Sez the Sentinel:

Michael Rugg says he was just a toddler when he wandered off alone on a trail while his parents cooked breakfast at their campsite on the river that early summer morning in 1950.

He passed through some brush and emerged onto a sandbar — and that’s when he encountered a bigfoot.

“I looked up into the gaze of a very large man completely covered in bushy dark hair, with nothing on but a rather poorly fitting, torn shirt,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I looked at the hairy man, and he looked at me, then my parents started screaming for me, ‘Mikey, Mikey, where are you?’”

When he returned to the campsite and told them about the encounter, they reassured him that what he’d seen was likely a homeless man.

Er…um, yeah, that’s what I woulda told him, too. But never mind that. The event included “a presentation of evidence — including sound recordings, a large, unidentified tooth and a video clip of an unidentified, bipedal figure — that has been accumulated over the years in communities including Felton, Zayante, Ben Lomond and near the Forest at Nisene Marks in Aptos.”

The Sentinel reported that Placerville resident Colette Alexander “said she saw a bigfoot near the Pocono trail head about a mile from downtown Santa Cruz along the San Lorenzo River in June 1999….She later studied primates at Cabrillo College, but when she tried to tell her professors about it, ‘I got shut down pretty hard. They don’t condone that kind of stuff.’” Alexander’s whole story can be read here.

If you’re kicking yourself for missing this year’s fandango, fret not. More love can be lavished on the Bigfoot Discovery Museum by viewing the Bigfoot Discovery Museum video podcast below:

A story on NPR about MideastTunes.com leads me to “I Shot You Babe,” credited in the above video to “Sunni & Shia” (that’s a joke, get it?)

It’s not actually by Sunni & Shia. An electroclash nightmare remix of the Sonny & Cher song mixed up with sounds of rifles cocking and firing, machine gun blasts, explosions and bombs falling, “I Shot You Babe” is really by the mysterious Mosul-based DJ Foundation, an Iraqi artist who stays anonymous due to the controversial nature of his or her work. (Esra’a al-Shafei, 24, founder of Mideast Tunes, refers to the DJ as “he” in the NPR story). There’s a great writeup of him on the Mideast Tunes site:

With just a battered laptop and a razor-sharp outlook as weapons, Foundation conjures the ultimate 21st-century nightmare party, irresistibly fusing western and Arabic pop beats, over which he goes for the cultural jugular: throwing in audio clips of war, religion, politics, pornography and consumerism, with (apparently) scant regard for whoever might be offended.

Over two single releases, equally welcomed in print and on the dance floor, he’s evaded being pinned down to any position re politics or faith, but as evidenced by comments on his MySpace, he’s already succeeded in dividing his audience, and is ready to rule.

DJ F himself is unforthcoming on the intentions behind his work. If it’s about breaking taboos or ’saying the unsayable’, he’d rather let the music speak. He just says: “it’s music and I’m making a picture of now…and when you hear my tunes you can dance or cry and laugh. I want to cause no harm. I think music is not evil. I think war is evil. I want peace for the future. I am a musician not a fighter.”

The above-mentioned MySpace Page has more of DJ Foundation’s work, and links to the “double-vinyl download” “Paradise,” which I assume is the first album referenced at the end of the MideastTunes.com bio of him.

Mosul is described as Iraq’s “second city” in cultural terms. In 2004, it was also the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the U.S. Invasion.

If you look at Adbusters’ Corporate Flag, you’ll be able to name more companies than you’d expect. That’s the effect of seeing logos in repetition, put in places you may not want — or may not even remember seeing. It’s creepy. Unlogo is a web service that aims to help undo the way you’ve been programmed to pledge allegiance to Nike by helping you remove corporate logos and signage from videos you watch.

Not that we don’t want to see who’s paying our favorite rapper’s child support these days by spotting the logos in his newest video… But much in the same way Subliminal Guy drops suggestive words under his breath into sentences during conversation to influence the listener into doing his will — mostly in hopes of getting laid, or hookers, or both — ad and marketing firms like to do the same thing with logos in videos. In the hopes that you will make sex with their client’s products, logos are scattered everywhere, unsettlingly relying on our unconscious memory to instantly recognize and associate their logo with the brand. Advertisers like it when you have no choice but to see their brands, much like that guy who flashed your mom on the bus. Some people call this “business” — while others might call it nonconsensual.

Unlogo might fall into the latter category — or they want to give viewers a choice. It’s a participatory project that uses a combination of new OpenCV and FFMPEG functionality so users can upload a video, have corporate logos scrubbed from the videos, and have the logos replaced with a solid color (or whimsically, a South Park style disembodied head of the company’s CEO). It would be extra neat if the logos could be replaced with user-generated content, such as a LOLcat, but hey — Unlogo is in the early stages. In fact, they just announced their Kickstarter page to help with funding. Looking at their long-term goals, we even might be able to LOL-ify Starbucks and Coke out of our lives, and our own videos, even if just a little bit.

This is from 2000, but oh my is it more relevant than ever.

I never, ever, ever thought I’d tell you that Courtney Love should be listened to. (Never been a fan.) If she really wrote what she said here, she did the math and calls out the RIAA and major label cartels and dot-com Mad Men VC fuckwads (oh, they’re all the same now) for strangling artists out of their rent. She spells out something that is just as relevant ten years later — especially in the new tech bubble.

Think I’ve been smoking what she’s been smoking? You tell me. You tell me if you’ve ever wanted to create, write, make something you know people want and have run up against corporate distribution mafia tactics/traditions, smelled the sweat of piracy fear from your hard work’s gatekeepers, or realized your work will never get recognition or given distribution access based on merit.

Read this transcript of Love’s talk in Salon and in place of the word ‘musician’ insert ‘writer’ ‘author’ ‘blogger’ ‘developer’ or ‘filmmaker’ or even ‘sex worker’.

This is a cultural slap I’ve been waiting for — this is one of my favorite parts:

When you people do business with artists, you have to take a different view of things. We want to be treated with the respect that now goes to Web designers. We’re not Dockers-wearing Intel workers from Portland who know how to “manage our stress.” We don’t understand or want to understand corporate culture.

I feel this obscene gold rush greedgreedgreed vibe that bothers me a lot when I talk to dot-com people about all this. You guys can’t hustle artists that well. At least slick A&R guys know the buzzwords. Don’t try to compete with them. I just laugh at you when you do! Maybe you could a year ago when anything dot-com sounded smarter than the rest of us, but the scam has been uncovered.

The celebrity-for-sale business is about to crash, I hope, and the idea of a sucker VC gifting some company with four floors just because they can “do” “chats” with “Christina” once or twice is ridiculous. I did a chat today, twice. Big damn deal. 200 bucks for the software and some elbow grease and a good back-end coder. Wow. That’s not worth 150 million bucks.

(…) I know my place. I’m a waiter. I’m in the service industry.

I live on tips. Occasionally, I’m going to get stiffed, but that’s OK. If I work hard and I’m doing good work, I believe that the people who enjoy it are going to want to come directly to me and get my music because it sounds better, since it’s mastered and packaged by me personally. I’m providing an honest, real experience. Period.

When people buy the bootleg T-shirt in the concert parking lot and not the more expensive T-shirt inside the venue, it isn’t to save money. The T-shirt in the parking lot is cheap and badly made, but it’s easier to buy. The bootleggers have a better distribution system. There’s no waiting in line and it only takes two minutes to buy one.

I know that if I can provide my own T-shirt that I designed, that I made, and provide it as quickly or quicker than the bootleggers, people who’ve enjoyed the experience I’ve provided will be happy to shell out a little more money to cover my costs. Especially if they understand this context, and aren’t being shoveled a load of shit about “uppity” artists. (…)

* Courtney Love does the math – Courtney Love – Salon.com (This is an unedited transcript of Courtney Love’s speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference, given in New York on May 16.)

A brief post on Greenmuze.com directs me to this Banksy installation in Brighton, about 90 minutes south of London:

The piece itself is 4.28 million barrels of awesome, but but the happy kids riding it? Priceless.

Here’s a slightly better view of the thing:

The man arrested last night for scaling San Francisco’s 60(ish) story Millennium Tower — that’s the big one that screws up your view as you come in over the bridge — is 54-year-old veteran climber and cancer survivor Dan Goodwin, a Lake Tahoe resident who’s also climbed the Sears Tower in Chicago. Here’s the story in the NY Daily News, the Examiner, KGO Channel 7, and definitely don’t miss the Chron’s slideshow, linked above.

Goodwin wasn’t exactly cynical enough to be doing it to promote his self-published book, which came out at the beginning of 2010, with a foreword by Stan Lee; Goodwin said on his website he does it to promote skyscraper defense against terrorist attacks, and to inspire other cancer survivors. But let’s just say the thing’ll probably sell briskly in San Francisco.

That’s the good news. The great news? Welcome to the digital age! KGO-TV streamed live footage of Goodwin climbing. I haven’t been able to find the entire ascent, or at least the entire KGO stream, online, so if anyone finds it, please post a link in the comments.

Goodwin climbed without ropes, using suction cups to make it up the side of the 645-foot apartment building. The feat took him about three hours, from 2:30pm to 5:30pm yesterday. He put up an American flag before authorities took him into custody. The Millennium Tower is either 58 or 60 stories, depending on whom you ask.

Goodwin, also known as SpiderDan or more commonly SkyScraperMan, has climbed a lot of buildings. Here’s some TV footage of him climbing John Hancock Center in Chicago — 100 stories, 1,127 feet:

And his legendary Sears Tower ascent in 1981:

In the 1980s, Goodwin also climbed the Renaissance Tower in Dallas, Simon Bolivar Center and Parque Central Complex in Caracas, Venezuela, the North Tower of the World Trade Center, Nippon Television Tower in Tokyo, the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles and the CN Tower in Toronto. 1986 was his last major ascent.