Ten years ago today was the first morning of the Iraq War, after the "shock and awe" kickoff the night before with bombs and cruise missiles raining down on Baghdad.  Remember that? On this special occasion it's appropriate for me to look back on what that time meant for me (It's kind of astounding how little attention this anniversary has received, both in the media and amongst friends' social media posts. I may be just too busy this week to look hard enough, or maybe there's a lot of collective amnesia).

The importance of that time as a turning point in my life really can't be overstated - and I don't mean this simply as a sort of standard, progressive narrative, in an anti-war activist hand-wringing way, lamenting the many ways in which the Iraq War and the Bush Administration were a terrible move for the worse for the U.S. and for the world (of which I agree there are many of those ways).  What I have in mind is more personal:  simply put, the leadup to the war in early 2003 was a profoundly radicalizing experience for me, which led me for the first time to really get involved with Indymedia, and also led to me starting to see myself, and act as, a citizen journalist, and perhaps most important Read more>>>

I'm a little late to the game on this little online kerfuffle, but it's still worth me weighing in.  A week ago, Nate Thayer, a freelance journalist/writer with a long and distinguished career on his vita, posted to his blog complaining about being asked to do some work for free by The Atlantic.  They wanted him to re-write and summarize a piece that he had done previously for another site, and then they wanted to put it on the Atlantic's website. He declined, and then publicised the incident.

A couple days later Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor of The Atlantic, responded on his blog to Thayer. They both have some good points, but they're both also guilty of representing their end of the debate with their own particular slants (of course). 

I think the original reporter, Nate Thayer, is speaking in his original post and other comments he had made, from a place of pain and hardship. He clearly is having a hard time making ends meet, and his frustration Read more>>>

author: Christopher Mark O'Brien

name: Steev

average rating: 3.55

book published: 2006

rating: 4

read at: 2013/03/10

date added: 2013/03/10

shelves: fun, own-it, food

review:
This book gets a 5-stars for effort, but a 3 stars for execution, so that averages out to 4. I sympathize with all the ideas and issues that this book is about, but the author is just not a very good or exciting writer. The book reads kind of like a long marketing pamphlet or non-profit charity ask letter. That's a real slow slog when you're talking 275 pages of it.

That said, there's some interesting historical and scientific facts and figures in here, here and there but in between those there's also a lot of painfully plodding pleading and cajoling.

I think reading and books has been just about my longest-running vice. I've been into reading every since I actually learned how as a child.  It's one of my few weaknesses as a consumer, although I have learned to resist a little better the impulse to keep buying books.  

I definitely need to spend more time reading the ones I have already bought.
A while back I got into this site Goodreads, and if you've been reading my blog for the last couple years you've seen my reviews there get auto-posted here. I'm trying to decide if I should add this goodreads recent updates widget to the sidebar of my blog. That way people can see not only the occasional book that I finish reading, but also the endless flood of books I desire. I probably add one to my "to-read shelf" once a day or so.

Read more>>>

In this modern age of economic tightness and shifting paradigms of distribution and funding, cultural workers of all kinds have been somewhat adrift for awhile now. At this point in history and in my career, monetization and promotion is still an ongoing challenge.  Crowdsourcing such as Kickstarter seems promising. Grants are out there but have always been hit-or-miss, especially in the U.S. amidst its current anti-art climate. Today I want to just take a moment to tip my hat to one general model, and one specific instance of it: the small independent "record label" has been an important type of patron for musical and other artists for years. (The quotes are because both words are somewhat anachronistic, aren't they?) These little companies have been changing the landscape for decades in a variety of ways, and even as the "diy" way of doing things continues to grow in viability, there's still recently been, and will continue to be, an important role and need for the small, focused, dedicated outlets that nurture and curate the creations that are too under-the-radar or off-the-map for mass corporate attention.

In 1997 I found out about a new label starting up that seemed to be perfectly matched to my interests as a sample-based composer. It was called Illegal Art. At that first moment I actually suspected their initial call for submissions to be spam, or a prank, but they went on to be very important and a huge boon to me over the next decade and a half.  Now they're going on indefinite hiatus. 

IA specialized in music (or "audio art") made from found sonic materials. The first thing they put out was a compilation called Deconstructing Beck, which had a track of mine on it and which almost got us all sued by Beck's label, Geffen. (a few days ago was the 15th Anniversary of that disc's release.)  A couple of years later they released a CD of my work, Original, the first disc by a single artist that they ever put out.  I'd been ready to self-distribute, burning CD-Rs myself and stuffing them in envelopes, but they saved me from this and got my work into stores as far away as the Tower Records in Tokyo. Because of this first solo CD, and the closeness in aesthetic focus between Illegal Art and my website, Detritus, for some time I would hear the rumor that myself and Philo T.Farnsworth, the label's head, were the same person.  This amused both of us and we didn't spend a whole lot of energy trying to prove it was false.  Soon the label went on to publish a long list of other, amazing releases by artists far more accomplished and skilled than I, including Girl Talk, Steinski, Wobbly, and People Like Us.

Seven years ago, after a gradual turn from experimental music to socially-conscious filmmaking, I was just finishing up my first full-length documentary, On The Edge: The Femicide in Ciudad Juarez.  Philo was impressed enough with it that he decided to take a significant step outside of Illegal Art's usual wheelhouse, and offered to release the film on DVD. Once again, for something that I was going to just go small-scale and DIY on, suddenly Philo gave me the rare and pleasureable experience of seeing something I made show up in stores and on Amazon and get reviewed in magazines, without that being because of my own legwork - something I, like many artists, am pretty bad at and have trouble getting motivated to do. 

Illegal Art never had a lot of cash, and though they secured pretty good distribution deals, being an artist on their roster was not a huge financial windfall or star-making machine (Girl Talk is the exception, one HUGE star to come out of their stable.  However, a few months after my DVD came out, I was still getting mucho disrespect from festivals and other institutions, including one conference in Juarez itself that cared so little about my film that I had to put up my own hand-written posters at the last minute to advertise a screening there - see the above photo).

But there was a certain cachet to the label, and I was proud to be a part of it.  They never went on to put out any more DVDs, and I think mine was not a financial success, although they did do two pressings of the disc.  But the film is still available from their website, along with most of the rest of their catalog (and they're working on providing the older releases), on a pay-what-you-wish (even zero!) basis. I can't really begin to put into eloquent words how important it is, what a rare treat it is, as a creative person, to have someone else, someone that's not only an individual but a business, put trust and interest and work and money into something in a way that not only shows their approval, but that assists in getting that something further along and out into the world (and in a way that clearly is not exploitation, as so many other record labels or film distributors are gulity of).  

So: thank you, Philo. Thank you, Illegal Art. You've done well. Read more>>>