Singaporean Weasels Rap

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksw2UqTyhhc

Bang! The post-literate future in all its glory.

Senior management at Singapore's Media Development Authority have produced something no parody could approximate.

Tokyooykot

A sublime portrait of Tokyo. Gorgeous detail, nuance, music... far deeper, lighter and habenero than a simple collage of high and low Japanese weirdness, this is gorgeous...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVIpmEcLcoE

Sublime Soviet Bus Stops

And much, much more... these make my thick so(u)led very rooted feet itchy to move...

http://www.herwigphoto.com/index2.html

Some of the doomed culture jamming fun posted as my "audition" as one of the finalists in a viral marketing contest (see "Confessions" just below my fave entry)

The Last Post (With Apologies to Julie Andrews)

Confessions from the Creative Class

Yes sir yes ma'am, I have the official seal of approval from no lesser authority than Nissan: I am in the creative class, having tried a wee bit of doomed culture jamming as a finalist in their viral marketing contest. Here is most of my blurb from Cubeless.ca (a site run by Sunny Crittenden, a garrulous bipolar texthibitionist ex-cam-whore who was going to cure her agoraphobia by winning the car... she is all that and very much more, a force of cyber-mediated nature and someone who writes the world by the short and curliesm to say nothing of the Jager shots from lexibadger's navel, whatever that might mean).

The Germans, bless their precision and creativity, have a great term for a song that burrows into your head.

An Ear Worm.

Lodged in your skull. Can't get it out.

After months of ostensible and impossible (but fun) culture jamming with this contest, spending hours a day checking things out and trying to riff a different kind of attention to viral marketing by writing stuff like this on my canvas:

I feel

a) empowered
b) used
c) hungry

Well.... the joke is, yet again, on me.

Like Pavlov's dog and that damn bell, I'm still digitally salivating and can't get enough of this.

If I disappear, I will have had the strength to pull the plug on this all. The good folk I have befriended can find me on e-mail... and great bad and indifferent folk can do the same...

I'm not quite sure why I feel compelled to share my perspective here... that damn neuroplasticity thing where my brain is all a-jitter about this for months so I can't quite stop... maybe... but it is also out of respect for Sunny and her project. My thoughts do not parallel all of hers... how could they? She is (you are.. hello!) so exhaustive... so much! And in this so much, this poetic and detailed and sometimes painful and sometimes funny and always honest much, Sunny somehow blossoms incredible energy, community and creativity.

Gosh. Doesn't that sound familiar?

I'm still trying to work out how much digital community dovetails into flesh world community... or if it even needs to... but I love the irony and, somehow, the justice and beauty of how the central pillars of the contest, community and creativity, now spiral out of here... more than ever, for it is a very narrow kind of creativity to stick a cardboard car around your ass or spam "vote me! vote me!" across the electric divide...


Sidebar: I loved passive's canvas out of Halifax that was a simple chart about our stats...


My story... for this record [Cubeles.ca] of stories:

I do not feel icky, bitter or let down. Insulted, yes, but more on that in a moment.

My auditions speak for themselves. Always already and at all times, I went against the grain and took the piss out of viral marketing.

For example, the last canvas. Hum this to the tune of "My Favourite Things"

The colonization of social connection
Is something that branding does with great affection
Subversion subverted resistance is useless
Shopping’s triumphant consumer choice juices
the dopamine uptake of synaptic sluices
you buy shiny jakes they end up as deuces
the moment you get home and unwrap the strings
they are no longer your favourite things

[and a few spaces below, this:] except the Cube it transcends satisfaction decay


My project was and remains to make people think about marketing, consumption... all that jazz.

But did I get caught up in the drama? Oh yes. Still am.

I also have immense respect for some of the constants who worked hard even within the very paradigm I was trying to mess with... we are all complicit in this system we live in and there is no innocent space, so creative class or not, we live in an age where we can both mock and enjoy what tickles the cultural horizon... kind of a strange moebius strip of complicity in a world where everything can be sold and used to sell...

We are always already fungible...

So kudos to photojunkie and a big shout out to Jade... and the incredible and real community of Francophones I had the honour to be tangential to in LinkedIn...

Skid marks to the people who simply branded themselves down the Cube highway... now that the genre of "Vote for me to be Prom Queen / King" is closed, I wonder how they will blog for Nissan... and what Nissan, in its Tony proclaimed role of Ed Sullivan (!) will be able to nurture out of some of these people...

A lump of coal to those who stooped to a shallow but thrilling Benetton exotification of the Majority World... INDIA a winner gushed, with sharp voyeuristic gaze that captures and thrills with decontextualized images onto which we can pour our postmodern malaise (Gosh, they are poor but happy... mighty colourful... spiritual folk, kind of fascinating and of course reflecting on how absolutely hep I am for blessing them with my First World gaze, their pictures by association conferring onto me and now an automobile some kind of patina of Global Cool, all difference, context and signification flattened into the empty titillation of advertising, the White Man's Burden, the power to pick and choose at a global buffet of wind chimes, Tibetan prayer flags and Balinese trinkets, the Inca Chinka of our empty urban[e] dreams).

And a final, final bug-eyed raspberry to the very blonde somewhat charming but trying too hard privileged guy who tried to win a car buy saying "Watch a white guy speak Chinese!" as if this were a talking parakeet or tap-dancing penis.

Holy shit, grasshopper! Glad you are cool enough to have penetrated that inscrutable tongue and gone out of your way to rupture Orientalist tropes of no ticky no laundry. No Cube-y too, gweilo.

And, uber-slickster Tony Chapman and his careful scruf and iconoclastic message... first, you're no Richard Branson or Richard Rorty. You're shtick *is* good, but in the end, your glamour industry is all about selling baubles.

Our tallest buildings are fuelled by the pursuit of shit, yet more get more bet more ever more piles of shit. And note, closet Freudians-- the anal stage and all that-- our first possession was shit in a diaper.

Why do we call money "filthy lucre" ?

Why do we call stuff "shit" ?

Because... it's shit.

It's a car. A cola. A sneaker.

Behind it and dripping from it, the labour of a different creative class, the people who sweat and bleed in toil, without autonomy, without Twitter, without the hope in hell of getting that trinket.

But they think their kids might.

So more shit is made.

More shit is bought.

And guess what, fellow copraphagiacs? There ain't enough shit to build all that shit out of. We can't sustain this.

And there is no special glory in fuelling this orgy of consumption.

Especially when a parent buying groceries is something to be mocked... food! Community! The heart(h), sustenance of body, soul and community mocked, occluded by the new Cube hero, somebody with dreads (culturally appropriating from Jamaica now, not India or China, in order to soothe over our anomie and alienation on shit mountain here) ready to sell their image...

All image. All the time.

And does writing something like this do ANYTHING to change any of this?

It won't make those tall buildings smaller, but, hell, call my Sisyphus. I try. And by doing so, also step sideways into some strange kind of rejoicing and connecting, shouting out props to the cool folk who lost and won, the netizens who orbit Sunny and orbit the people in their orbit's orbit...

I dunno', eh?

Get Sunny a reality TV show.

Get her a car.

All publicity, Tony, is good publicity. Calling you a douchbag, while dissing lovely gendered nether regions that somehow need cleansing while other nether regions do not, still draws attention to you, and by extension the product.

Jack Smegma, I think, would be a more gender neutral and appropriate diss for your faux scruff self...

But that too sells cars.

All of this shit here draws attention to the Product (perhaps those press releases I wrote where I refused to mention Nissan or the Cube by name... that's why they were ignored? Ha ha ha [demonic cackle here]).

So, Tony equivalent weasels of the world, here is an idea.

Get Sunny on TV.

She is personable. Feisty. An ex sort of sex worker. Ooooh!

Her honest blogging about bipolar disorder and agoraphobia demystify mental illness. It's brave.

It's fascinating.

And, car giants, in a universe of fetishized commodities and their wake of advertising that fills every niche of this universe... here is one left for you.

Car given to retired cam whore to cure her of agoraphobia.

Take it and run.

But most of all, good peeps, remember the punk ethos.

DIY.

Make more stuff. Buy less shit.

And remember the truly dangerous and not surprisingly silent R of the three R's.

Reduce.

Cheers, and thanks for generously giving this text your time and attention... it ain't a Tweet I know...

Be well...stay in touch, for fun, friendship, feuding or media whoring / writing....

Nashville Lotus





Final canvas here, junior Kalle Lasns, with apologies to Julie Andrews

http://hypercube.ca/en/Canvas.aspx?id=33

8f0970-78db-4265-af4d-ffc5900249a3〈=en

Kiva (Microfinance)

This is a great article on microfinance: it's not a typical hagiography of the invisible hand...

Sawadee Krup, Loan Me $200

Eric Rumble 04 May 2009 Adbusters http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/83/microloans.html

---

Last spring I invested $200 in Kiva and discovered microlending. Lending that money to people in the developing world to further their business plans felt

like genuine, guilt-free altruism; like teaching someone to create fire instead of tossing a raft at the moat around a stranger’s unfathomable life. For the price of a dinner in the city, I could empower another human’s livelihood by helping feed his or her community’s demand for raw essential materials like animals, spices, seeds, produce, grains, clothing, sewing supplies and so on.

Facing our battered economy, microlending through Kiva (kiva.org) seems like enlightened venture capitalism. Partly because of the glaring lack offine print, but mostly because the $200 I used to start an account last year was the first meaningful investment I’ve ever been able to make. I lent $125 to a Tanzanian woman trying to expand her tailoring business by raising $1,050 for supplies and equipment. The rest went to five women from Uganda – a slice of the $1,375 they needed to start a piggery and buy inventory for a grocery, a used clothing store and a hair salon.

Like the tens of thousands of other profiles at kiva.org, these entrepreneurs’ stories were short and unvarnished, their goals modest. I searched faces from places in perpetual upheaval: Africa, South America, South Asia. I read about people struggling to control their lives by trying to resuscitate their communities: poor farmers and tradespeople; folks who could survive by mobilizing raw goods or essential services; people wanting to create healthy, affordable meals.

Later I recognized this as the brilliance of microfinance: it revalues disposable income (for those who have it) by putting a price tag on basic, necessary, attainable ideas. In Kiva’s excellent model, online lenders and fledgling entrepreneurs are allied via the nonprofit’s field partners, nearly 100 vetted microfinance institutions in 44 countries (and growing) with gaping poverty lines. Their common goal: to flush the world’s poorest pipe dreams with cold, hard cash; to catalyze credit flow for humble people who probably won’t use it to debauch their psyches; to turn dependants into providers using small fortunes.

In about three and a half years, Kiva has funded 145,000-plus impoverished entrepreneurs with more than $60 million. Lenders set a radical pace in 2008, making nearly two loans every minute.Amazingly lenders recoup their investments more than 97 percent of the time, typically within about a year. The two loans I made in early ’08 are mostly repaid, and I’ve recycled that money (plus another $50) to a group of Ugandan produce traders, a pair of Cambodian food retailers and some Pakistani and Filipino grocers.

This is where Kiva really gets interesting: less than 10 percent of lenders actually take back their money. They leave it overseas, let it change lives. You might chalk that up to microfinance’s easy, inexpensive gratification. But what’s happening here is a sea change in charity’s watermark, a reincarnation of the meaning of potential. Microfinance is becoming a beacon for people who are uncomfortable with their geographic advantage.

For example, take the logistics of turning isolated, sometimes destitute entrepreneurs’ loan requests into websites – some 500 translators and editors worldwide donate their time and skills to the effort. Kiva’s fellowship program, perhaps the best hands-on access to a microfinance education you can find, is growing, buoyed by a largely volunteer infrastructure. The San Francisco-based company’s proximity to Silicon Valley has been a perennial resource boon.

Meanwhile, the West’s suicidal economic tendencies have yanked the bulk of us from a black hole into a bloodbath. It makes me wonder: just as the Internet has usurped distribution powers from bloated entertainment labels, could microfinance avert the catastrophe of our free market banks?

The answer may come sooner than you’d think. Why? Because Kiva will soon start lending to Americans.

Eric Rumble is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters and his work has appeared in Up! magazine, Saturday Night, THIS Magazine and the National Post.