Archive for August, 2006

Get These Mutherfuckin’ Snakes Off My Mutherfuckin’ Blog!

Tuesday, August 15th, 2006

Snakes on a Plane (SOAP) comes out Friday (finally), which allows us to ponder the phrase of the summer one more time (you know what it is). OK, OK, so it’s an over-hyped movie by a big media company no doubt part of the problem (whatever problem it is you’re having right now). But it’s still: a) fun stuff (not up for debate); b) a watershed for bloggers and Hollywood (arguably).

As Chuck Klosterman notes in his occasionally great but too often grumpy-like-a-hipster-ArchieBunker Esquire column, “Snakes on a Plane is like the Wikipedia version of a movie.” That is, the bloggers have spoken and actually catalyzed a change in the final product (which is only final until the DVD comes out and fans start playing with that). See, the masses demanded that New Line change the title back to Snakes (the suits had planned to switch it to the safer, snoozily titled Pacific Air Flight 121). New Line not only did that, but also brought back Samuel Jackson and other cast members to shoot the additional dialogue the fan demanded (Jackson’s oft-quoted line, “I’ve had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!” was evidently not in the original version), as well as upped the violence quotient, unleashing some more snakes on the plane.

Klosterman argues that what he calls “this brand of participatory, choose-your-own-adventure filmmaking” a terrible idea because: 1) People don’t really know what they want and always want everything (thus the trouble with focus groups—a sentiment to which I heartily concur); 2) Something about SOAP being all about irony in reverse, and people liking bad movies to be cool and contributing to box office returns of lame movies (but I couldn’t follow his second point very well). Basically, Klosterman feels user-generated ideas lead to stupid ideas. Obviously, he ain’t been listening to what’s going on in the massively exciting user-generated world. It’s not all good, but it’s not all bad, and it’s not all MySpace either.

But all this pontification is standing between us and the poetry. SOAP fans launched scores of stuff online (no doubt to the delight of New Line, which promotes some of these sites on its official site). I could spent all morning on them (looks like I just did) but a few of my favorite are the Quote Tracker, the audience wiki Snake Play
and, the inevitable, awesome, old-school All Your Snakes Are Belong to Us

The filet of the Snake-y neighborhood is Snakes on a Blog which launched in January as one nut’s attempt to get invited to the Snakes premier in Hollywood, which he did (this Thursday, 8/17—have fun Brian Finkelstein), and offers a rich repository of fan links, shots of snakes in kindergarten classes, and fan poetry. And what could be better than this on a Tuesday in mid-August?

snakes on a plane, bitch
on this motherfucking plane
aint shit we can do
—by Snakes in Europe

YouTube for XBox

Monday, August 14th, 2006

Big news from Microsoft today: at the end of this month, the company will be releasing a program that allows users to create their own Xbox games. Those games will then be shareable across Microsoft’s Xbox Live internet platform. The Associated Press quotes Microsoft VP Peter Moore as saying, “It’s our first step of creating a YouTube for video games.”

YouTube for video games, eh? Let’s hope someone thinks to include the Chinese Backstreet Boys

Wiki Belief Systems at Standpedia

Monday, August 14th, 2006

I just stumbled upon and deep into Standpedia, “The Social Encyclopedia of Belief,” which, as the name implies, is an experiment in debate, wiki- style. The site allows users to make an argument (links to back up your perspective if you like) on all the burning and non-burning issues (gay marriage, war in Iraq, the origin of life, Lance Armstrong as role model, existence of UFOs, which game console will be the biggest hit). Clicking on different areas of an argument in progress allows you to track the discussion, and literally view it from a different perspective. I don’t know if Standpedia will gather enough moss to make it as a business, but it’s a terrific social experiment made possible by the technology and user-driven belief systems that can bubble up so well in the best of this Web 2.0 world.
Tip o’ the ‘pedia to Solution Watch.

Celebrities - They’re Just Like Us!

Friday, August 11th, 2006

Sure, everyone has a story to tell. Some are just better than others at telling their story. Frankly, while there’s a ton of great personal media out there, there’s a whole lot of it that’s, well, pretty bad. And not in a “so bad it’s good” way - it’s just bad.

Fortunately, the web’s newest video sensation proves that sometimes celebrities can make bad viral videos just as well as the rest of us.

Shooting Weather

Friday, August 11th, 2006

We love Lulu, the best place we know to self-publish your words and images, rolling easily from amateur to author. Reason #606 we heart the
company…

Derek Powazek—creator of JPG Magazine, founder of one of the first and best storytelling sites The Fray (now on hold as he pursues many other projects), friend of SMITH—showed up in New York City during the recent heat wave, broke out his Lomo LC-A camera, melted his way across Manhattan, and a few clicks later made a book: Apple Sweat: The 2006 Heat Wave from NYC Streets.

He writes, “My camera found New York in a rare moment. A city of incredible diversity, united in sweat. From Chinatown to the Village to Coney Island, New Yorkers were out in the world, doing their jobs, making the best of it. By the time the rain started to fall and the heat began to fade, we felt a new bond with the people who call NYC home.”

These photos are scorching! Get a taste of his book on his Flickr stream here.
NYC_heat_Derek.jpg

Korey Rowe - The Loose Cannon of 9/11

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

Back Home from Iraq with Army grunt-turned-film producer Korey Rowe
By Michael Slenske

Michael Slenske writes SMITH’s Back Home From Iraq column.

“I see myself as a person who’s a buffer between conspiracy theorist and military informant, so I thought my help on Loose Change would make it a better quality piece, something more mainstream people, who aren’t dove into conspiracies, could really watch and take in.”

It took two governors, four Congressmen, three former White House officials, and two special counsels two years to compile. They reviewed over two and half million pages of classified and de-classified documents, consulted 1200 sources in 10 countries, and spent over $15 million of the taxpayers’ money in the process. And on July 22, 2004, the 9/11 Commission issued their final report about the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Is it possible that two twentysomethings from “a small hippie town that time forgot” could undermine that entire effort with $8,000 and a laptop?

Korey RoweYes, if you ask ex-Army specialist Korey Rowe. The 23-year old from Oneonta, New York returned home from two tours—one to Afghanistan; the other to Iraq—to help his best friends, Dylan Avery (director) and Jason Bermas (researcher), produce the sensational 80-minute, Web-based documentary Loose Change, which seeks to establish the government’s complicity in the terror attacks by addressing some very tough questions: Why wasn’t Ground Zero treated like a crime scene? How did both towers “freefall” to the ground “in 9.2 seconds” in just under two hours? And where are the black boxes from American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175?

Korey Rowe in IraqWhile the film is admittedly flawed and draws on some dubious new media sources, including Wikipedia, it’s inarguably sparked a new interest in the “9/11 Truth” movement. Since its April 2005 debut online, Loose Change (the first and second edition) has received over 10 million viewings, it was just featured in the August issue of Vanity Fair, and the final cut of the film is expected to debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January. “I’ve got four movie studios [including Paramount and Miramax] beating down my door to make the final cut,” says Rowe, who’s now got offices from California to London to handle his growing company. Last week SMITH caught up with Rowe—who’s been labeled everything from a traitor to a CIA operative in the past year—to see how he went from protecting the Iraq-Syrian border against Muslim insurgents to a self-described “conspiracy theorist” poised to take Hollywood (and the country) by storm.

Do you work for the CIA?
No, I do not work for the CIA.

Just wanted to get that out of the way. What made you want to join the military?
The fact that I was doing nothing. I was 18; I wasn’t ready to go to college yet. I knew that if I went to college I wouldn’t have spent too much time in class, I would have spent my time partying. I wouldn’t have gotten done what I needed to do. It would have been a waste of my parents’ money. So I decided it would probably be best if I joined the military—this was pre-September 11—Bush was in office, there wasn’t a whole lot going on, I didn’t foresee a war happening, I just thought it would be a good way to get out of town, man-up a little, and then move on with the rest of my life. Before I knew it, I just joined.

Did you want to go to war?
At first I did. I wanted to retaliate for September 11. The government told me it was Osama bin Laden, the government told me he was hiding in caves in Afghanistan, they told me he had killed a bunch of innocent Americans, so at first I wanted to go over there and defend just like everyone else. It was the hooah thing to do at the time.

What were you doing in Afghanistan?
My primary MOS [military occupational specialty] was 11 Bravo, which is infantry, frontline infantry. I was carrying a gun, humping a lot of weight on my back. That was what I did in Afghanistan full time. I was at the Kandahar airfield, Bagram, and Khost. But in Afghanistan I really didn’t do much. I was there for six months, pulled a lot of guard; I went on, I think, three missions. Never got any enemy contact, never got fired on, I watched it on my perimeter, a couple hundred meters out while someone else was getting shot at, but I never really got any action.

And in Iraq?
In Iraq I went from the southern tip all the way into Baghdad. I road in the back of a truck from the southern tip, through the desert into Al-Hillah, took the battle of Al-Hillah, which was pretty crazy; it looked like a Vietnam movie. Then we moved further north into Baghdad, where we were in Medical City. I was stationed in an emergency room door for about a month and a half just watching these bodies of children and their families come in. Then I moved north into Mosul, swung west into Sinjar, on the Syrian-Turkey border where we had to watch for insurgents coming across the border.

How did that experience change you?
I went from being some kid who had no idea about anything in the military—I didn’t even know what the infantry was when I joined, I just told them I wanted to shoot stuff and blow stuff up—to being a communications specialist for my commander. That was really when I started to see the bigger picture—when I started working for higher commanders—seeing how things ran.

When was the first time you heard from Dylan Avery about what he was doing with Loose Change back in New York?
After I got back from Afghanistan he started to talk about the idea that 9/11 was an inside job, and started letting me know about some of the information he had come across. It was between returning from Afghanistan and redeploying for Iraq that my mind started to click on. I was like, “Wait a minute—I was in Afghanistan three months ago, and now I’m going to be in Iraq in four months, I’ve got to invade another country, where is this going?” Then—and I hate to say this—I saw Fahrenheit 911, which to me is a terrible movie. But a lot of it made sense in the pretext and military build-up to Afghanistan before we were actually attacked. When I walked out of that movie I was like, “Wow, that messed with my head.” Right before I deployed for Iraq I had the inclination that something was seriously wrong. But then it didn’t matter because at that point I had to go. My unit needed me. I was the company RTO [radio telephone operator], I was running communications. It didn’t matter what my personal beliefs were. I just had to go over and shut my mouth for another year.

So why this film?
Loose Change happened by accident. The whole thing started out as a fictional screenplay about me and Dylan and another friend of ours finding out 9/11 was an inside job. It started out as a comedic action film with us being chased by the FBI and all that. But when Dylan started researching the screenplay he found out the attacks really were an inside job, so we made it into a documentary. I see myself as a person who’s a buffer between conspiracy theorist and military informant, so I thought my help on Loose Change would make it a better quality piece, something more mainstream people who aren’t into conspiracies could really watch and take in. I call it the gateway drug because it can take someone totally green to the information—who believed Muslims carried out 9/11, that the World Trade Center was brought down because of jet fuel, and that the Pentagon was hit by a plane—you put them in front of this movie and 80 minutes later they are going to question it at least. Bottom line: they’re going to question it. It makes people think. It made me think, so I wanted to make other people think.

When you got back from Iraq did you know you wanted to go work on the film?
No, I went back to work. I was training. That’s what you do. When you’re not deployed you’re in the rear either fixing your gear or using your gear. I was stationed in Fort Campbell, Kentucky the whole four years besides the time I was overseas. When you’re back from overseas you get a month off, you clean your gear, and then go fight again.

Didn’t you ever stop and think, “Wait, Dylan is just a kid.”?
Yeah, several times. I thought, I’m in the military, I know stuff. But Dylan was way more informed than me. Like I said, I’m getting the Army Times, I’m getting the AFN, and now it’s out, it’s reported that the government spent millions of dollars spinning false articles to newspapers across the world. So who’s to say the Armed Forces Network and the Army Times aren’t chockfull of bullshit.

How prevalent is that mindset in the Army?
That they know what’s going on?

Yeah?
It’s 98 percent. It’s a fantasy world those people live in. I mean it’s really something. I call them infected. They can’t come back to civilian life. They’re like, “You can’t get out of the Army, you ain’t gonna get no job, you ain’t gonna do nothing. You gonna work at Burger King. What are you gonna do at Burger King? You still wear a uniform; you still get a hair cut at Burger King. So why don’t you just stay in the Army, join up, sign again, get $6,000.” If you don’t re-enlist they just make you sit in a chair. They made me sit in a chair for a week. Sit in that chair until you re-enlist. I just sat there. “You want me to sit in this chair,” I said, “I’ll sit in this chair for a month, because in a month I’m out of here.”

When you came back was there anything that really bothered you about the American public?
Yeah, their ability to believe the B.S. they see on TV. They’re so in tune with their television and CNN and Fox News and the New York Post. They watch the news and the news reporter, whoever it is, forms an opinion for them. Take the release of the Pentagon video. CNN had been bashing conspiracies all day because people kept writing in about conspiracy theories. They build it up for two hours, then they show the video, then Jamie McIntyre, who we actually use in our video says, “All right, there’s the plane, you can see it, there’s the vapor trail, and there’s the explosion. They only shoot in half-second frames; it’s the only shot of the Pentagon. We’ll be right back to cover more of this. This is undisputed proof that a plane hit the Pentagon.” They go to commercial, and instead of coming back and going to Flight 77, they go to American Idol. They just implant the idea, there’s Jamie McIntyre saying he sees a 757 flying into the Pentagon, and then they switch to American Idol. So then when someone says there’s no plane that hit the Pentagon someone else can say, “That’s not true, I watched CNN this afternoon. Jamie McIntyre saw the plane, he showed me.” People believe anything because it’s on CNN.

What do you think about the Popular Mechanics cover story about “Debunking 9/11 Myths”?
rowe_911.jpgThat’s a good article. It covers some good information, but it directly takes away from some of the facts. It states that NATO scrambled planes at one time that could’ve intercepted the planes, but couldn’t because they couldn’t reach them in time. That’s bullshit. That article reports they only would’ve had to have flown at 24 percent of their full-blower, and an F15 flies at 1800 mph. You’re telling me when the first plane was hi-jacked at 8:20am, until 9:45, when the plane was flown into the Pentagon, you’re telling me that not one F-15 could be scrambled and taken down one of those planes. Not to mention the [“Debunking 9/11 Myths”] piece stands on the Nova theory (the “Pancake Theory”) that one floor collapsed on another floor creating a succession of collapses where the towers fell. If that’s true, you have a 75-story office building untouched by fuel, fire, any debris whatsoever. You have a 30-story chunk above that, which is also untouched. You have the 78th to 82nd floor, which is on fire. Think about that. You have a 70-something story office building, untouched, unscathed by fuel. You’re going to tell me that the steel supposedly weakened, fell on one floor, on top of another floor, on top of another floor, for 78 floors, reaching the ground floor, and fell in 9.2 seconds. 9.2 seconds is the exact rate of freefall for a building that tall, which is 1,368 feet tall. If you take Galileo’s Law of Falling Bodies and you calculate the distance by the time it takes to fall, it’s 9.2 seconds. That means that all those floors fell without any resistance from any of those untouched floors below it. It’s completely impossible. Not only do you have to do that, you just have to watch the collapse of the towers. You can see the bombs going off. It is so obvious. It’s an umbrella theory. You blow up the top to conceal what’s going on beneath it.

The Blair Witch Project also looked real to people who were in on the documentary preceding it. It totally worked. The first time you watch it, it grabs you. But Loose Change isn’t meant to be fictional. It’s a watchable film, but what do you expect people to do with it?
What I encourage people to do is go out and research it themselves. We don’t ever come out and say that everything we say is 100 per cent. We know there are errors in the documentary, and we’ve actually left them in there so that people discredit us and do the research for themselves—the B52 [remarked to have flown into the Empire State Building], the use of Wikipedia, things like that. We left them in there so people will want to discredit us and go out and research the events yourself and come up with your own conclusions. That’s our whole goal, to make Americans think. To wake up from the 16 amps of your television to watch something and get a passion in something again. And that’s what America has always been about. From the Vietnam protests…it’s always been about a passion. And now we’re trying to build that passion in people, to wake up, to stop watching television, to stop reading the crappy newspapers, and go online and find those de-classified documents, go find the scientists that aren’t young filmmakers, but the ones after Steven E. Jones at BYU, who has steel from the World Trade Center and has conducted tests on the steel and it’s come to the point, over and over again, that what they [the 9-11 Commission] say can’t be true. That it had to be brought down by controlled demolition. Our whole goal is to wake Americans up to do something about it.

What do you say to people who’d say you’re doing this to make a dollar?
You should see my dilapidated house in upstate New York. I drive a Ford F-150 that has a tape player. We sell DVDs, we make money, but we just give the shit away because we don’t want to be war profiteers. We’re not about making money on the whole thing—we’re about getting information out. That’s why we’ve turned down seven figures, more than once, from people looking to buy our film and put it in theaters—because they don’t care about it. They only see the moneymaking aspect of it. We want to make sure it’s handled correctly. That the movie gets out 100 per cent accurate when it comes out in theaters, because it’s obviously not now, and that it’s projected in the right light so people aren’t threatened by it. If we coordinate 500 theaters across the country to start playing it, it’s going to start a wave. We’re going to have a whole weekend of events on 9/11 just to raise awareness among New Yorkers so that we can try to get an independent investigation to look back into the facts that every news agency in the world has ignored. Americans are going to be pissed.

The Most Blogged About War Ever

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

Could personal media be a casualty of war?

According to The Christian Science Monitor, Israeli and Lebanese bloggers have been building “virtual bridges” way before this current conflict erupted, yet the inevitable anger and frustration that comes with any war my be eroding those fragile ties.

“This community existed for some time before the war began. We have tons of things in common,” says Lisa Goldman, who has used her blog, ontheface.blogware.com, to publicize Israeli-Lebanese blogging since the violence broke out. “We come from two of the most liberal, educated countries in the Middle East. Many of us received a Western education. We have talked, written, and dreamed about open borders between our countries. Many of those bridges that we had started to build have been felled by the growing tensions over the war.”

Still, in the days after the war began, bloggers on both sides of the line reported a 200% audience spike. And this amped up dialogue led many to call this “the most blogged about war ever.”

You can read more here.

User 711391

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

By now you’ve no doubt heard that AOL, hoping the data would be of help to academic researchers, recently released a vast collection of search strings entered by hundreds of thousands of users over the course of several months. The company soon made the data inaccessible again—but not before several nimble-fingererd surfers captured and republished it.

AOL issued an apology for the release, and tried to reassure its subscribers that the queries were identified only by number and not by the searchers’ real names. In other words, the company said, it wouldn’t be possible to match an actual person—perhaps even someone you know—to an apparent interest in, say, “dirty tricks for chicks,” “how to say goodbye hurtfully,” or “free angry stuff to send to an ex lover.” (Thanks to Declan McCullagh and User 2708 for those.)

But as reported yesterday in The New York Times, Thelma “4417749″ Arnold might beg to differ. Anyone who read the paper now knows that Ms. Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Georgia, is the owner of a “dog that urinates on everything.”

Not surprisingly, given the voyeuristic potential of the material and the points begging to be made about security issues, several sites—including AOLSearchLogs.com and AOL Log Search—have posted the data behind browser front ends that make it easily searchable.

Which is where the SMITH-iness of all this comes in. Look up the search trail of User 711391 on AOL Log Search, and a sadly strange, almost surreal personal narrative emerges:

“cannot sleep with snoring husband … god will fulfill your hearts desires … online friendships can be very special … people are not always how they seem over the internet … gay churches in houston tx … who is crystal bernard romantically linked with … is crystal bernard bisexual … men need encouragement … how many online romances lead to sex … how many online romances lead to sex in person … the bible says be kind to one another … i cant stand dr. phil or his wife … is george clooney gay … how can i be a good example to an unsaved friend … farting preacher … who’s the hottest porn star … devotions for women … hillary swanke nude … best nude scenes of 1999 … how to take your body measurements … jake gyllenhaal is hot … bleached pubes … oprah gained weight lately … star jones hubby is a flaming homosexual … how to make a good first impression … accepting your body … why do i weigh so much though i am in shape … the lord’s table bible study … how can i tell if spouse is spying on me while i’m online … tempted to have an affair … extra maritial affairs are not the answer … staying calm while meeting an online friend … guilt cheating spouses feel … bryce howard nude … what the bible says about worry … female pirate costumes … symptoms of bladder infection … god will show you future events … symptoms of herpes of the tongue … i don’t want my ex back … why do christian men cheat … don’t contact an ex if you want to get over them … christian men that feel guilty about cheating on their wives … if you are upset can it cause bad dreams … and after you have suffered a little while god will make you stronger than ever … kelly ripa is so annoying … how to forgive yourself … how to recover from internet affairs … denise richards is a bitch … reason for constant bad dreams … having an affair is a waste of time … how to make a man want you …”

A Series of Tubes

Wednesday, August 9th, 2006

By now, net neutrality opponent Senator Ted Stevens’ comments bizarrely describing the Internet as a series of tubes that can become clogged have attained near-infamous status in certain tech-savvy circles. (You can read Stevens’ comments, here, or watch Jon Stewart take the piss out of them, there.)

Last week, a friend made me aware of these tee shirts, hand printed by gen-u-ine West Philadelphia activists. Proceeds from sale of the shirts go to support media activism and digital divide groups in Philly, so you know it’s a good cause. Personally, I can’t get over the shirts’ genius conjunction of imagery and message; it has what the French would call a certain “I don’t know what.” Perhaps it’s the residual teenager in me, but there’s something irresistibly subversive about replying to a crusty old senator with a diagram of lady bits. Beyond, or maybe above that, I think the shirts’ creators are way smart to work the connection between feminism and a free media.

Anyway, I’ll be wearing mine to work the moment it arrives.

char-on-pink_11.jpg

Self Portrait, from Wenner’s Media Offspring

Wednesday, August 9th, 2006

Another tiny violin plays as the New York media make much of Jann Wenner’s 19-year-old son Theo’s summer internship in the Rolling Stone photo department. More interesting is what will young Wenner make of the social networking site he co-created, Self Portrait , an artier version of Facebook? Did pop fund it? Will he ante up if it gains traction? Or will Murdoch buy it for $901 million? One thing we know, it’s good, at least virtually, to be Theo: among his friends are Pete Doherty, ranked 11 in site views—10 spots lower than Theo. It’s good to be the prince.

 
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