culture: February 2007 Archives

No, not really. That would be news, though...

(Technorati tags: Anna Nicole Smith)

Why not? Hey, you may be the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby -- how do you know you’re not? If Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband could be the baby’s father, so could you.

In other news, the mainstream media continues to fail to understand the revolting-peasants importance of bloggers. I don’t mean that categorization to be derogatory -- I mean it to indicate a role as revolutionaries bringing down the hegmony of the corporate media.

Get this: Reuters today had the gall to call the bloggish outrage over the nonstop cable-news coverage of the death of a Playboy bunny as “pseudonymous savagery [that] passes for informed commentary on the Web,” while stating that this “cruelty contrasted with the tone of respectful shock used in blanket coverage of her death on cable television.”

Speaking of the complete irrelevance of the mainstream media to anything that matters...

NBC is still trying to woo us bloggers. Today they’re asking us to join a service called BlogBurst, which takes our full-content RSS feeds and turns around and sells them to corporate outfits.

No kidding. Cuz the cubicle-surfers haven’t got an inkling of a clue on how to harness full-content RSS feeds themselves. Honestly.

How does BlogBurst work? It’s brilliant in its evil:

Are they kidding? Seriously. Are. They. Fucking. Kidding? Top story of the night:

The New York Post picks up on the debacle of the NYC blogger summit I attended last week:

Jeff Zucker, who's set to take over as CEO of NBC Universal to tackle the challenges the Internet poses to TV land, might want to dole out some advice to his underlings at WNBC-TV.

The local New York TV station hosted more than 130 bloggers at an evening event last week at NBC headquarters and ended up alienating most of them by begging them to e-mail in scoops.

Tee-hee. They really were begging. It was fairly pathetic.

(Technorati tags: blogger summit)

So I was at this “blogger summit” hosted by WNBC (the local NBC affiliate) here in NYC on Wednesday night. I figured it’d be a chance for a free drink and some free food and networking with other members of the rising hegemony of alternative noncorporate media types. It was only once I actually arrived at NBC Studios at 30 Rockefeller Center -- aka GE’s evil urban lair -- and met up with some blogging friends and we all started wondering just why the hell NBC had called us all together that I started to get a hinky feeling.

Also: it turned out there was no booze. That’s never a good sign.

My buddy Gabriel Shanks of Modern Fabulosity has the lowdown -- honestly, he says absolutely everything I wanted to say about this ridiculous shindig, so there’s no need to repeat it: just go read his reaction to the event. Then come back here.

I just bought this T-shirt from Raplica.com:

(It says "ATHF is the bomb.")

Though there's also this one, too, from CottonFactory.com:

(Technorati tags: Aqua Teen Hunger Force)

And now we have the criminalization of geekiness. Two artists in Boston have been arrested -- arrested -- because their guerilla marketing scheme for a cartoon for adults was misinterpreted by some idiot -- by multiple corporate idiots -- as attempted terrorism.

What we have here is a failure to communicate. No, worse: we have a fundamental disconnect between disparate realms of the culture. Look, I’ve never even seen Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and still I would have recognized that the little electronic Lite-Brite thingie that panicked someone into calling the police, and panicked the police into locking down the city in order to detonate these things, was clearly just an alt-culture touchstone, or someone having a goof.

Is it me? Maybe not: the judge in the arraignment of Peter Berdovsky, 27, and Sean Stevens, 28 (note: they’re Xers), reduced their bail from $100,000 to $2,500, so perhaps already it is being recognized that this is a case of overexaggerated response on the part of the municipal authorities in Boston, not a matter of willful, concerted intent to do malice on the part of the artists.

The Washington Post is eternally clueless, though:

The light boxes portrayed "mooninites," essentially juvenile delinquents from another galaxy making an obscene gesture.

Because, you know, our moon is in “another galaxy.” Am I wrong? Does a quick Google not reveal that this character is supposed to be from our moon?

Holy shit! CNN is pixelating the image of the Lite Brite thingie that terrified the city of Boston, lest ATHF get any more free publicity out of this. Or else CNN is afraid that people will be offended to see a Lite Brite cartoon immigrant from the moon flipping the bird.

Check out AlterNet: it has video of the press conference Berdovsky and Stevens gave this afternoon, in which they accorded this issue precisely the kind of seriousness it deserves.

Oh, and P.S.: Advertising can certainly be evil, but still...

(Technorati tags: Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Boston terrorism scare)