Haven’t heard a California beach party bonfire singalong this ramshacklin’ good since Little Wings drifted out… On second thought: this song is plenty sturdy, isn’t it? From an album full of Velvets-on-the-beach singalongs called Tomorrow Is Alright, released late last year by San Francisco-based Sonny & the Sunsets. A run of 500 on vinyl is gone already but CDs are available for pre-order now from the good folks at Soft Abuse.
Arthur Radio Voyage No. 4: SOUNDSCAPES. Ivy Meadows and Gustav Ernst meditate in the zen-like interior of the new Newtown Radio studio. Hairy Painter joins telepathically whilst building a float in New Orleans. We invite you to climb aboard the sonic airship…
Pete Toms is back with PAWS, another comic that blurs the line between fiction and reality.
The comic is essentially a horror comic about a guy that only experiences the outside world through television trying to sell an autobiographical screenplay. It has all the same themes as my other comics, how people choose identity roles, the media’s effect on memory, how we mythologize our personalities, but this one has a lot more dogs and possibly werewolves, and jokes about how creepy sitcom laugh-tracks are.
I’m doing the same stuff as always, drawing at night, using my natural jazz dancing ability to put my kids through college during the day.
As we’ve been saying, as others have been saying (see: Glenn Branca in NYTimes blog last November, ) — here’s the latest perceptive person — Douglas Coupland — to just go ahead and say it: culture is almost over. From today’s NYTimes Sunday Mag:
Q: How would you define the current cultural moment?
Douglas Coupland: I’m starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the words they want to read and the music they listen to. You don’t have the broader trends like you used to.
Q: Sure you do. What about Harry Potter and Taylor Swift and “Avatar,” to name a few random phenomena?
Coupland: They’re not great cultural megatrends like disco, which involved absolutely everyone in the culture. Now, everyone basically is their own microculture, their own nanoculture, their own generation.
Floating World Comics is proud to offer original artwork by Al Columbia. Every month or so we plan on making a new piece available for sale. This original painting from 2003 features Pim and Francie at the Salmon Falls Sweet Shoppe. Click on the image below to see all the beautiful details – check out the books on the comic rack!
We’re down to the last ten copies of the limited edition ‘TOYLAND’ giclee print. There’s still time to get one before they’re gone. Artwork is shipped priority mail or fedex for international orders.
PIM & FRANCIE – SALMON FALLS SWEET SHOPPE
Size: 14″ x 12″ – mixed media – 2003
SOLD
To purchase please email: jason (at) floatingworldcomics (dot) com
C & D Two confirmed schmucks grapple with the big issues—and an unexpected female visitor.
PICK A WINNER dvd (Load) C: You’re not going to believe this. D: Try me. C: [delicately loading DVD] Like an hour’s worth of charmingly bonkers/whimsical low-tech animation to go with homemade psych-crunge by the usual Fort Thunder-plus suspects… [Reading the sleeve text] “Dual formatted, double dipped and extra-whipped. Technicolor-laced acid flakes are on the table. Dig in! 18 trips of sound & sights are poured into K-Holes of dubious dimension from tonz of Load bands and video tribes with this new DVD/CD powered pellet.” Amen to all of that. D: [looking at screen] Whoa. C: Lightning Bolt, Black Elf Speaks, Wolf Eyes, Neon Hunk, Pink & Brown… D: [eyes pinwheeling] I don’t believe it. I mean, I do believe it. I am believing it very hard. C: Party video of the year. People are gonna be getting mandala’d all winter long to this thing, man. Plus there’s a CD in here too. D: Do you have any mushrooms? C: No. D: I’ll take a spray paint can and a plastic bag at this point…
This just in from occasional Arthur contributor Dave Tompkins:
I’ll be doing a talk for my Vocoder book How To Wreck A Nice Beach at the Goethe Institute as part of the Unsound Festival. Goethe is located at 5 E. 3rd at Broadway in the Wyoming Building. It takes place at 5pm, this Saturday, February 6, (also known, in the blizzard immediate, as tomorrow). It’s free.
I will be showing images from the book and playing vocoder audio clips from the 1930s and The Future, including the years for which we were more or less present.
“Something To That Effect” will include an ad for Silly Willy Toothpaste, “Barnacle Bill,” German soccer chants rendered from stadium noise, the last house on Mars going bananas, Cold War drones, seashells powered by unvoiced hiss energy, a song called “You’re A Peachtree Freak On Peachtree Street,” my Verizon bill, talking castle winds, talking this, talking that, Phil Collins, and, if time allows, a guy with strep throat singing “Candy Girl.” Whatever it takes. Bring a snowman, win the Super Bowl.
Off their recent “Drop a Deuce” seven-inch single… self-styled “regressive rock” marijuaniacs Mighty High of Brooklyn reel off a primo green riffer for the masses. The centerfold for this single (see it on their site) is worth your remaining five dollars alone. Dudes play the Jan Kotik annual memorial concert this Sunday, February 7, at Union Hall…probably in the late afternoon.
Wikileaks Develops New Business Model, Goes On Strike http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8490867.stm
“WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website that allows people to publish uncensored information anonymously, has suspended operations owing to financial problems. Its running costs including staff payments are $600,000, but so far this year it has raised just $130,000. WikiLeaks has established a reputation for publishing information that traditional media cannot. The website claims to be non-profit and relies on donations. A statement on its front page says it is funded by “human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public”.
Labor Dispute http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/jan/29/wikileaks-shut-down
“Its tremendous success has meant the site has often struggled under the volume of users. It has faced down governments, investment banks and the famously litigious Church of Scientology but paying its operating costs has proved its undoing. As of today instead of reading government secrets and details of corporate malfeasance all visitors to the site will see is an appeal for cash. The site won Index on Censorship’s 2008 freedom of expression award because it’s an invaluable resource for anonymous whistleblowers and investigative journalists. But Wikileaks is not just a tool for journalists, it allows ordinary Kenyans to read a confidential report detailing the billions their former president allegedly siphoned from the country’s coffers. Its repository includes controversial military documents including the US rules of engagement in Iraq and an operating manual issued to army officers in Guantánamo Bay. It has put corporations on notice that the costs of unethical behaviour are immeasurable in PR terms because it amplifies the Streisand effect, the social media phenomenon that punishes those who use the courts to suppress or censor information, by ensuring it has a much wider reach.”
Overworked, Undervalued http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks#Notable_leaks http://wikileaks.org/
“To concentrate on raising the funds necessary to keep us alive into 2010, we have reluctantly suspended all other operations, but will be back soon. We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release. You can change that and by doing so, change the world. Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another ten thousand hands and $1000, a million.”
Support Technically
“Wikileaks is currently overloaded by readers. If you support our mission, you can help us by integrating new hardware into our project infrastructure or developing software for the project. Become patron of a WikiLeaks server or other parts of our technology, adding more pillars to the stability and balance of the WikiLeaks platform. Servers come trouble-free and legally fortified, software is uniquely challenging. If you can provide rackspace, power and an uplink, or a dedicated server or storage space, for at least 12 months, or software development work for WikiLeaks, please write to wl-supporters[at]sunshinepress[dot]org”
Support Legally
“Individuals or organizations wishing to donate lawyer time write to wl-legal[at]sunshinepress[dot]org”
Q. So, you strike?
A. Yes, it’s similar to what unions do when they go on strike. They remind people that their labour has value by withdrawing supply entirely. We give free and important information to the world every
day. But when the supply is infinite in the sense that everyone is able to download what we publish, the perceived value starts to reduce down to zero. So by withdrawing supply and making our supply to zero, people start to once again perceive the value of what we are doing.
Q. Do you urgently need money?
A. We have lots of very significant upcoming releases, significant in terms of bandwidth, but even more significant in terms of amount of labour they will require to process and in terms of legal attacks we will get. So we need to be in a stronger position before we can publish the material.
Ending in Pay Settlement: Leaked Data Back Up, For Now http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/02/wikileaks-meets-cash-goal
Wikileaks Meets Its (Minimum) Cash Goal
“The whistleblowing site Wikileaks has apparently raised the money it needs to continue operating, for the time being, according to a message the organization sent out Wednesday night on Twitter.
“Achieved min. funraising [sic] goal; we’re back fighting for another year, even if we have to eat rice to do it,” read the tweet.”
YOU Submit a document for us to publish and, inorder to maximize its impact, distribute amongst our network of investigative journalists, human rights workers, lawyers and other partners.
WE will publish and keep published the document you submitted, provided it meets the submission criteria. Your data is stored decentralized, encrypted and as a preserved historic record, accessible in full by the public. The information you submit will be cleaned by us to not be technically traceable to your PDF printing program, your word installation, scanner, printer. We also anonymize
any information on you at a very early stage of the WikiLeaks network, and our services neither know who you are nor do they keep any information about your visit. We will never cooperate with anyone trying to identify you as our source. In fact we are legally bound not to do so, and any investigation into you as our source is a crime in various countries and will be prosecuted.
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