podopolog

< 2.10.10 > EFF’s 20th Birthday with Adam Savage and Friends at DNA Lounge

Join the celebration of EFF’s 20th year defending your digital rights! Our birthday fundraiser on February 10th will be hosted by beloved TV geek Adam Savage at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco, where he will celebrate EFF’s two decades as only he can, with the help of many EFF legends and luminaries!

DJs Adrian & the Mysterious D, the duo that founded the seminal, globe-trotting mashup party “Bootie,” will get people moving with their genre-mashing blend of tracks, with guest DJs dropping sets throughout the evening. And just added: Vj/Dj Podinski from the XLterrestrials.

Doors open at 8 p.m. We’ll be asking for a $30 donation at the door to fund our work defending your digital freedom ( Suggested? usually they ‘ve had a no one turned away policy.)

Also a V.i.P. ( special donor) party here.

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< 2. 2-7. 2010 > Transmediale v.10 begins… in Berlin

< 2.6.2010 > Atemporality – A Cultural Speed Control? at House of World Cultures
Keynote: Bruce Sterling (us) – Atemporality. Participants: Alexander Rose (uk), Siegfried Zielinski (de), Mike Sandbothe (de)
Moderator: Jose Luis de Vicente (es)

Henry DeTamble has a genetic disorder known as “chrono-impairment” that causes him to time travel unpredictably. The different dimensions of past, present and future flow into each other, creating a state of atemporality.

The speed of our society is constantly increasing in terms of processes, logistics and media, causing the present to “shrink”. We are experiencing the dissolution of meaningful frameworks in a similar way as Henry DeTamble: in politics, the intervals of planning and acting are reduced to the duration of a legislative period and in post-industrial economics volatile unpredictability has come to replace regular traits of growth and stability. Progress as the paradigm of modernity has been replaced by the continuous modulation of events. If progress is to go beyond the banal indulgences that give rise to a never-ending array of car shell designs then we need to analyse our present time with regard to its aesthetics and its media. The structure of the future has changed, and with it our sense of time. Are we running out of a future as a resource for growth, progress and stability? Has our cultural cruise control become defective?

tbc…

{ life on the Res… }

< 1.30 > The Residents at The Henry Fonda Theater, LA – check the full Talking LIght tour schedule here which includes Euro dates starting in April.

According to the Cryptic Corporation: Spawned in Shrevesport, La. in 1969, which means The Residents have been slipping the LSD (lickety split dementia?) into your pop culture for 41 &^%$! years !

Ohhhh, Man, nobody puts yur brain on backwards like the Res, check these:

One Minute Movies ( ), The Gingerbread Man ( ), Man’s World (2008? video), Hello Skinny ( ),  Cry For The Fire ( live ? w/ Snakefinger )

tbc…

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{ el Nino is back, rainy LA, the concrete byways and the looming “Tyrell” corporations }

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{ Blackfire, Diné/Navajo punk served fresh, “did u think we’d just go away?” }

< Feb/Mar > Blackfire, celebrating 20 years, indigenous resistors from Black Mesa, AZ will be on tour in Germany, France, Suisse, Norway… possible XLt collaborations in Berlin, stay tune. Check the full schedule here on their site, and plug into the rising tide ! ( Listen ).

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{ Having just arrived from Arizona on the tail of last week’s 10,000+ MARCH AGAINST JOE ARPAIO IN PHOENIX – read more at Indymedia Arizona- Klee from Blackfire speaks at the 2nd annual LA Anarchist Bookfair at Barnsdall Art Park. }

Speaking of Life on the Res… We are Not all Occupied Equally…

The Xlterrestrials are working on a review + perspective on the bookfair and the LA activist arena in general… Meanwhile, the LA Times has a pretty funny view Here.

Tbc…

< 1.24 > the 2nd annual LA Anarchist Bookfair at Barnsdall Art Park, Hollywood

Publishers, Booksellers, Publication+Nonprofits attending include:

Semiotext(e), Earth First Journal, Taala Hooghan: Infoshop & Youth Media Arts Center, South Central Farmers, Skylight Books, Institute for Anarchist Studies, Critical Resistance, PM press, AK press, Journal of aesthetics and protest, Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Los Angeles Independent Media Center, KPFK 90.7 Pacifica, The Icarus Project and many many more.

For a nearly complete list see The LA Anarchist Bookfair site

…

And XLterrestrials will present “Don’t Feed The Monsters!” :

Analysis + deconstruction of our current hostile media landscapes
featuring XLt guerrilla cinema  (a short films selection + excerpts from the
Berlin archives) with interactive experiments and open debate.

Is life in the net the new precarity ? Telepresence and disembodied
information in a society which is in a state of perpetual
colonization, full of predatory mutants and consumer viruses, are
highly problematic ventures for constructing any systems of autonomy,
liberation, and empowered community. The digital domain with its
avatar trajectory may become the new disenfranchisement, and the new
unsavory download. We look at ideas and methods for extracting
ourselves from the “Military Entertainment Complex” and getting back
on the ground in terms of the challenges that are facing us in our
daily and, undeniably, very physical lives. “System Change” was the slogan/directive
at the recent Copenhagen Climate Summit, and perhaps the first step is to
reboot the clearly failing “Operating Systems” being downloaded via the
corporate culture pipeline.

XLterrestrials are a collective team of “psychomedia analysts” and
arts+praxis researchers from Berlin, San Francisco and other possible
worlds. “Kill Your Avatars” and “Don’t Feed The Monsters” are 2
touring programs on tour in 2010.

{ XLt-FB-1}

The XLterrestrials are busy going through the Flora Bora archives, FB, being the secret 2nd floor laboratory in the vibrant Mission District of San Francisco. We begin w/ things we had posted on the walls to fuel the day …

Item-1: Imagine, a people/ a culture used to mummify their sacred cats, while today’s “civilization” frequently puts living animals through the various product+consumption grinders… makes ya wonder what the values of life were in other times.

{ Xlt-FB-2 }

Item 2: “Marcos Marches North” by Fernando Marti, from an exhibition in 2005.

{ XLt-FB-3 }

Item 3: Nina Hagen “off-duty” in the Mission, possibly around the time of her collaborations with Alphabet Soup for an Anita Berber tribute, which included compositions from Dee Dee Ramone, Mark Growden, 2 pre-Xlterrestrials performers, and more… opening in the foyer.

{ XLt – FB- 4 }

Item 4: From about 2001? for an event at one of the now defunct (gentrifying) locations on Mission St. Elysium, great place to play and listen to djs, but not so wonderous management.

“Dr. Oral B-Movie says it will leave a film like no other brainwash you’ve ever tried!”

Item 5: XLt at Eschschloraque, Berlin 1999

tbc…

+

+

{ Museum für Kommunikation Berlin }

These texts are extremely inadequate, but allude to a telekomm red pill, stay tune for a little plunge into the theme, if there’s time.

“Media are not pseudopods for extending the human body. They follow the logic of escalation that leaves us and written history behind it.” (Kittler in Geschichte der Kommunikationsmedien.

{ for education + psychomedia analysis purposes only ; ) make yur own McDivision propaganda avatars, like a native Navi Leni ‘Refill’ Riefenstahl. See below. }

{ the unredeemable Leni | foto by Andreas H. Bitesnich }

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Total Techno Pocahantas Marine Porn

“The contradictions of the Hollywood Blockbuster are not proprietary to Cameron.  They are the contradictions of capital-intensive history itself.  With few exceptions here and there, audiences have not failed to purchase their Avatar tickets in advance.” Greg Moses at Counterpunch

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{ Not a culture jam, an embedded advertisment ’story’ at Entertainment Weekly }

The XLterrestrials were obsessed with vivisecting the “Avatar” phenomenon long before it arrived in cinemas on Dec.18th. An especially dark irony for our psychomedia analysts was that the blockbuster, and its new level viral campaign, launched worldwide on the very day we witnessed up close the collapse of the Copenhagen Climate Summit. Like a prescient market reflex, Cameron, the self-proclaimed King of the Hollywhores, must have reckoned that since the prime movers of corporate capital would be incapable of reeling in their destructive and self-consuming tentacle reach, humans might as well stick their heads deeper into the virtual abyss. In it’s 3rd week, this sci-fi epic mess has topped the US$1 billion mark at the planetary box office.

Avatar’s list of underbelly hypocrisies are LONG and growing. And as we were preparing a talk last week at a fringe event of the 26c3 – the Chaos Communications Congress -  called the Future @ C-base ( a kind of arts + technology + oddities appendage to the traditional hacker meet), we discovered this hilarious clip where the game/advertising tie-in producer – Jon Landau – says that McDonalds is a “visionary” and “quality” partner.

U know, that wonderful company which is a big player in daily deforestation ( i.e. Amazon soy farms, cattle industry, Agro giants, local merchant clearcutting, etc). Be prepared to wretch a few lunches, when you analyze it all. And tragically the majority of viewers will remain googly-eyed over 3-d dragons, the blue chick, The Tech… and maybe order another Burger w/ XL fries following the flik.

And in another dark juxtaposition to Copenhagen realities, there were discussions at the alternative Klimaforum about the UN’s 2006 study naming the meat industry as the NUMBER 1 cause of global warming. ( Hey there’s even a FBook group, u can sign in,  inform yurselves, and act as if u actually did something ; )

…

Step Right Up, James Cameron’s Got Your 3-D Brain Enema Right Here!

And it took us at least 2 weeks of deconstructing ( and a brief sampling of audience responses ) to wonder how Cameron can get away with so masterfully making a public swallow that an ex-marine turned mercenary (and anthropological spy), who essentially f*cks the indigenous elder’s daughter right before their village ( + rain forest) is blown to bits, can be so quickly and easily redeemed as a hero/lover/rebel warrior … and admired by the whole tribe no less! Wow if only Leni Riefenstahl had access to CGI, Fox Pictures, and Cameron as a scriptwriter, our world could be even dumber (and more vicious) than it is now!

…

We naturally began to get a number of defensive responses that Cameron has made a pioneering work both visually and content-wise. And we conceded there are some astounding elements ( and artistry ) that initially seem as if the film has risen to the occasion of effectively deconstructing the current cannibalistic empire in all its exploitative nature, or shall we say anti-nature. It takes on the theme of mercenary Halliburtons + Blackwater-like armies that work for corporate interests. And it dabbles in a message of connecting with spirit+nature over metal+plastic-age technologies. So now Hollywood has suddenly evolved and is now redeemed, and on our side?!

Yeah right!  The XLterrestrials consider the bizness of Hollywood, and in this case Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox, as merely playing to an obvious mainstream undercurrent of awareness, and really bares no teeth when it comes to any true plot subversiveness, and provides no methodology, no tactics, and certainly no praxis.

In the Avatar world, earth has already been laid to waste and its corporate necrophilia stretches onward,  successfully wreaking havoc + destruction + concentrated wealth, the rebels with their bows and arrows are predictably crushed, and this flimsy + untrustworthy hero will be forced to evacuate The Real for a disembodied future of a fantasy alien place – Pandora ( and his new blue mate) . One might even consider this initially sympathetic surface plot of rebellion as a Trojan Horse for pushing another new agenda into the mainstream, knowing it has lost the hearts + minds ( + the earth?) by the ol’ brute force.

And here we suspect is the beginning of the new colonial tact: Are we being pitched the corporate avatar/game industry as the inevitable migration and way of life ??! Of technotopian progress ( in manipulated + forced hybrids ) ?!! Of the post-material + post-human colonies ??!  Does it communicate in effect that because The Real will go on getting sucked to the bone, we need not / cannot try to stop this machine ??! Because here in this technological simulation is our refuge. The new precarity or else! Feeling indoctrinated yet to the “Pandora” Inc. ?!

…

work-in-progress

…tbc

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OH hey kids you can avatar yurself ( yes “avatar” is now a verb, as in “to avatar-ize” )… And we at the XLt lab began thinking that maybe one could avatar yur Favorite Propaganda Monsters! Yep, right here:

http://blog.oddcast.com/2009/11/avatarize-yourself.html

And feel free to post the links or send us a screen shot. So far we received a few, like Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, and even David Ogilvy known as”The Father of Advertising”! We’ll have to make a full picture gallery or family album. Stay tune!

Thx to Lena Strayhorn for playing the XLt game first !!

…

And meanwhile here’s a few more illuminating reviews of Avatar the commerical, er um … we mean  the movie :

Contradictions in James Cameron’s Masterpiece “Avatar”
The Jungle of Technology By GREG MOSES

Going Native
Hollywood’s Human Terrain Avatars By DAVID PRICE

When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like “Avatar”? by ANNALEE NEWITZ

Avatar-same old story by JUST SEEDS

…

{ scooped and appropriated from a 26c3 image search, thx to whomever captured the vibe ! }

XLt presents Kill Your Avatars!

Disembodied information in utopia might provide some interesting fantasy outlets and MAYbe even some educational, evolutionary + transpersonal + psychodelic-like experiences, but given that societies are in a state of perpetual colonization, full of predatory mutants and consumer viruses, for one to enter into the avatar medium and imagine producing liberating futures is a highly problematic venture, if not delusional. And if you are aware of current individual and community obstacles to autonomy, believing that you will construct viable alternatives via the internalized machinery of the Military Entertainment Complex appears to be about as futile as trying to practice + globalize social justice in a 3-d ( strings, batons, and corporate media ) Heiligendamm puppet theater.

Is there nevertheless tactical value in multiple identities and augmented
realities? …

tbc…

< 29.12 > To be presented 2nite, as part of Classless Kulla’s (from the mighty and illuminated 26c3 bookstore ) The Future at CBase event. @ c-base – Rungestraße 20 – 10179 Berlin-Mitte. Please note, timeline is changing and currently looks something like this :

( added: Kulla’s site/schedule is now updated + ‘final’):

18:00 Open Moon

The latest on the c-base Open Moon Project.

19:30 Ein Heldenleben

Short film: Join the Illuminati – free the slaves!

20:15 Neuro evolution will go on!

classless Kulla on Timothy Leary’s model of the nervous system and its past and future development.

21:00 The Future of Sex

Rose White, Johannes Grenzfurthner and Aaron Muszalski ( ella saitta substituting ) with insights to sex, porn, and technology.

22:00 Identity Wars: the End of Human Society

plomlompom (Christian Heller) on how internet culture challenges the identity mappings that human society depends on.

23:00 XLterrestials’ (comment on plomlompom … et al ) Kill Yur Avatars!

see above.

…

And a note from DaddyChronic says: the weekly jam session and open mic, new mixing console event at c-base spacestation Berlin. so their could be live music later that night. see you there – Liebe Grüße von der Raumstation sendet DC

tbc.

< 27-30.12 > 26c3 : Chaos Communications Congress, Here Be Dragons…

Live Streams (+ archives) HeRe.

Full Schedule Here.

< 29.12 > The Future @ c-base, parallel event organized by classless Kulla

…

< 31.12 > Journey to the End of the Year

tbc…

{ via Carl at the MS Stubnitz , now ported in CPh }

As we write this there are reports that there are about 20-30 (?) people remaining in jail and there are a few sites to keep an eye on all that… if you have any footage regarding police abuse they will need such things for putting pressure on + negotiating for their release, get in touch with ((i)) Dk:

http://indymedia.dk/
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?ref=profile&id=1568733057#/pages/FREE-CLIMATE-PRISONERS/218406068016?ref=mf
http://www.facebook.com/releaseactivists?ref=mf

Note:  We are not advocating FBook – and BEWARE the corporate data-miners – just informing the channels that came our way, there’s many other sites, but we don’t have time to list here.

Updates : 11 people were released today including 2 indymedia activists from Rostock (one of whom still faces charges). Two different reports say there are still 11 and 6 climate justice activists being held. And in the states, Democracy now reported (22.12) there are still 4 Greenpeace workers being held.

…

What follows is the wrap up from the official Bizness, we will come back over the next days and provide an XLt analysis from the OUter view. Final Bits from Tina’s Reports:
BRAVo!! + Mucho Respex!!!

Part 1 : The Final Wrap :

Dear all,
Here’s the final wrap up from Copenhagen.

Last night, the U.S along with Brazil, China, India and South Africa worked together and came up with the “Copenhagen accord.” Although the UNFCCC’s 193 countries, as UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon put it in today’s press conference, “would take note of” the Copenhagen Accord,” it’s not a legally binding agreement. It is not a protocol. In fact, it is an accord that side-stepped the UNFCCC process for working towards and agreeing upon a document.

In a backroom deal, made after the United States allegedly burst in on a meeting between Brazil, China, India and South Africa, five nations drew up an accord. In other words, the entire consensus process of the UNFCCC was put into question, to put it diplomatically, or utterly disregarded.

Frustrating is the U.S. posturing that this accord is “a deal” or “an agreement”, terminology suggesting that is something more than hot air.

The press conference President Obama held last night before hopping on to Air Force One back to the D.C. summed up well some of the spin I anticipate his administration and the U.S. media will try to put on events at Copenhagen and on the accord.

Given the side-stepping of the UNFCCC process, the barging in on negotiating countries, it is the height of arrogance, for Obama to shift the blame as he did throughout his press conference on a variety of issues but mainly seeking to shirk U.S. responsibility and to pass the buck, well, that is, the lack of buck to developing countries, esp. China and India.

Obama stated that that what was unique about Copenhagen is that  “large emerging economies have begun for the first time to open up to taking on responsibility for limiting growth of greenhouse gases.” It is, however, the United States, first, that needs to learn to open up to taking on responsibility, legally binding responsibility, that is monitorable, researchable and verifiable.
And for him to argue that “we need more work, more confidence building between emerging, the least developed countries and developed countries before another legally binding treaty can be signed,” is appalling.

Perhaps if the United States had come forward with the suggested emissions reductions of 20-30% of 1990 by 2020 and of 80% by 2050; more substantive and binding commitments on short-term and long-term aid; and with a willingness to sign on a legally binding treaty, it would have helped build this type of confidence.

How can President Obama possibly think that signing NO agreement, crashing a meeting between four heads of state, drawing up an accord with four nations, in a process parallel to the UNFCCC process, for an accord that is not legally binding, and that lacks all specifics on the three main issues – 1. emissions; 2. funding; and 3. monitoring – is a gesture that will build trust?!?!

His press conference Friday night was appalling. He argued that the U.S. “worked with many countries to establish consensus.” How is a backroom accord drawn up by five countries a sign of working with many countries to establish consensus?

He stated, too, in his press conference: “And I think it’s important to be able to stand in the shoes of all the different parties involved here. In some ways the United States was coming with a somewhat clean slate, because we had been on the sidelines in many of these negotiations over several years.”
How on earth could he deem the U.S. to have a clean slate? Shirking responsibilities and standing on the sidelines does not mean one has a clean slate! It means one has been slacking and has some catching up to do!!

Obama also stated: “It’s not enough just for the developed countries to make changes. Those countries are going to have to make some changes, as well — not of the same pace, not in the same way, but they’re going to have to do something to assure that whatever carbon we’re taking out of the environment is not just simply dumped in by other parties.”

Apologies … but he seems to be working with the assumption that the U.S. has made changes. What carbon are “we taking out of the environment” right now? What changes has the U.S. made to reduce emissions? None. So, it really does come down to the U.S. stepping up to the plate.

The trust that needs to emerge BEFORE a treaty can be signed, could actually come into existence with such a treaty. I need you to trust me before I stop beating you is essentially what the U.S. is saying to the developing and least developed nations. Sorry for the analogy but …. Abusive behavior does not build trust.

The technological breakthroughs that Obama stressed as being able to set “the goals we are looking for” might be part of the solution but a subsidy to green technologies alone without reductions in emissions will not suffice. There is no way around it: We need to reduce emissions.

It’s pathetic for him to argue that the U.S. “goals are actually entirely comparable with Europe’s.  On the front end they appear to be less, because frankly, they’ve had a head start over the last several years in doing things like energy efficiency that we care about.”  Why, for goodness sake, does he believe Europe had a head start? What advantage did it have over the U.S.? That it heard the warning bells
and decided that action was better than inaction?

When asked, in closing, who was going to sign the agreement, since Obama was heading back to D.C. last night, he replied: “You know, it raises an interesting question, … since, as I said, it’s a not a legally binding agreement, I don’t know what the protocols are.” Obama certainly does NOT know what the protocols are, either in terms of procedure or in terms of previous COP agreements (e.g. Kyoto Protocol). But it begs the question: If one flew in to CPH for one day to sign an internationally binding agreement on climate change, wouldn’t one take a minute
to sleuth out what the protocol is? Obama does not care. It leaves much of the blame for a lack of agreement at the feet of the U.S.

But it also raises vital questions about the UNFCCC decision-making process.

As John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, put it: “It is now evident that beating global warming will require a radically different model of politics than the one on display here in Copenhagen.”

In other words, isn’t it the UNFCCC completely flawed as well?

And if the U.S. refuses to do its part to participate in multilateral agreements and to rein in climate change, and the UNFCCC process is so deeply flawed, what process will best resolve climate change, so vital to our very survival?

That is, given the complete failure of Copenhagen, how will the climate justice movement respond?

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Part 2: The Copenhagen Accord

Dear all,

Friday night, the U.S, Brazil, China, India and South Africa drew up the “Copenhagen accord.”
http://www.scribd.com/doc/24287087/The-Latest-Draft-Political-Agreement-at-Copenhagen

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Read the rest of this entry »

a

{ the 12th Hour via TckTckTck / Oxfam – London aquarium }

{ Outside the Øksnehallen, KlimaForum – the people’s venue – after Obama’s flailing speech }

Update: It’s official … the CPH summit will extend into the weekend.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon requested delegates stay for another day for more talks. See More … Xtended Day 12 report. at bottom.

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Day 12: More reports/ XLt analysis later,  but for now Tina Gerhardt – the sleepless reports warrior from the inside -  – just sent a Day 11 Remix : w/ THE LEAKS + Below That Day 12 – the wrap …

Fwd: Dear all, I was grumbling at 6:00 pm yesterday, when I sent out my previous missive, that the day’s events at the summit had been boring… no real new news had filtered out, and that I didn’t trust it, that deals had to be in the making. Where’s the leaked document? I exclaimed, then pressed send. And then I learned that there had JUST been a leaked document revealing that the cuts that were going to be proposed would lead to
a 3Celsius rise.

Here (and below) is the Guardian article that broke the news:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/17/un-leaked-report-copenhagen-3c

Here is the leaked document:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/17/copenhagen-emissions-cuts-future-temperatures

Here’s Rob’s (Eshelman / the Nation ) analysis:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/copenhagen/507098/breaking_news_from_cop15

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Read the rest of this entry »