funny and interesting (sort of) tv talk show segment about Twitter, and then Rex, one of the 'experts' on the show, blogs about it, and there's some interesting comments too. social networking fads, trends, next big things....

wtfait, meanwhile people are still starving to death in bolivia and haiti and hell, new orleans for that matter, and polar bears are drowning and and and...

Former speaker of the House of Represetatives Newt Gingrich (what is he now, just a racist hatemonger on the lecture circuit?) gave a speech decrying bilingual education and calling Spanish "the language of living in a ghetto". He received cheers from the crowd of members of the National Federation of Republican Women.
(via Mun2 Daily Dos)

I'm the featured interviewee this week on the blog of Some Assembly Required, a radio show in Minneapolis about sample-based music, sound collage, etc. I think this interview happened via email at least 6 months ago if not more. But anyway, it's interesting to read because it talks about the personal experience of the host of the show, Jon, meeting me online about 10 years ago.

In other news, I had just about the worst headache i've ever experienced today, to where I was basically incapacitated most of the afternoon. It was so horrible. I'm still feeling crappy but the pain has ebbed. I don't know what's going on. Maybe a combination of not treating my back right, flirting with caffeine, dehydration, and allergies.

Latest addition on Phonophilia.com: a recording of a speech and performance I gave in Brussels in May 2000. This was the first time I'd been invited outside of my local geographical area to present my work as an artist and as "evangelist" of "cultural recycling" - and as founder of Detritus.net. It also happened to be the first time I travelled abroad, other than brief trips into Canada. And it was the beginning of my continuing project to make field recordings in odd or interesting places.

The presentation I made is still pretty interesting, content-wise, though my speaking style leaves a bit to be desired - but I will provide as an excuse the fact of jet lag and that it was about 10 pm and I'd arrived in Brussels at about 6am that morning on my flight from San Francisco. And I was nervous as hell to be one of only 2 north americans there.

More about this trip (photos, email bulletins, etc) is at http://www.detritus.net/steev/europe2000/

I'm psyched that the 2nd season of Young American Bodies has begun. In fact, it's up to the third episode already. It continues to be extremely interesting and fresh and real, I think.

Hmm, I could have sworn I blogged about YAB before, but now I can't find it. maybe i just delicioused it? Anyway, briefly, it's a really smart, modern, intelligent and realistic web-based tv show about several 20-somethings in Chicago and their love/sex lives. It's featured content on nerve.com, but there's also a myspace page for it and its own web site: http://youngamericanbodies.com (new episodes appear on the nerve site first)

However there's 2 things I don't like about it: I'm disappointed that there's an ad one has to watch before each episode now, and I'm disappointed there's no RSS feed for the series. I can't be bothered to rememeber to look at episodic web content unless I can subscribe to it in my feed reader! wwaaaaaah.

Great April Fool's joke from Google. Even more beguiling that they left it up today - well, at least for a little while... the link from their front page is now gone.

Another somewhat funny internet-based fool's joke was an announcement that 4 teachers from the spanish school i went to in Guatemala went on a surprise vacation to New York City. Complete with clever photoshopped snapshots.

Yesterday I posted a new item to the Phonophilia podcast. It was recorded February 19 of this year in Nogales, Mexico, at the migrant aid tent that was set up with the help of No More Deaths in collaboration with the local office of a Mexican agency called Commission for the Aid of Migrants. The aid station is there to help the hundreds of migrants who get shoved back across the border at the Mariposa port of entry by the U.S. Border Patrol, often in horrible medical condition. La Migra rounds them up in the desert and usually doesn't give them enough water, food, or medical help. Some of these people turn right around and try crossing again, and in their already compromised condition are a lot more likely to die out in the desert. Others have a serious situation that causes death on the Mexican side. Some are separated from their children.

The thing about this clip is while it conveys all of this information it also is a form of audio art. I montaged different snippets of the original recording into a simple sound collage, and i want it to be able to be listened to in that way, in addition to the journalistic purpose. I didn't worry about making it some NPR-style perfectly coherent and traditional radio report. The snippets aren't even in chronological order. It's a hybrid. It's another experiment in trying to find some middle ground between art and documentary. Enjoy and Learn.

I've had it, I just unsubbed from their newsletter because of this. so dumb.

Men may be from Mars and women from Venus but who wants to vacation on either planet? According to Kayak travel data, women are from the beach and men are from the golf course, which can put a crook into planning the family getaway. Who says the sexes always have to agree? Sometimes you just gotta grab a few girls and go.

WTF??!!??

Reminds me of an interesting and sort of disturbing article I just read in Bust magazine about female sex tourism that seemed to be saying it was okay when the male variety is not. It made me realize again how far Bust and "post-feminism" have come. I remember when Bust was a pretty radical little Riotgrrlish zine, the first issue about 20 pages xeroxed and stapled in one corner and mailed to me for review in my little zine, Synergy, about 14 years ago. Now it's just more lifestyle porn.

sigh.

Well shoot, March is National Novel Editing Month but it has slipped past my awareness, and besides I've been too busy, and now the month is almost over. Actually, for the last couple months or so I've been unclear whether I even WANT to keep working on the book I finished at the end of November's National Novel Writing Month. It's called "Palimpsest" (or, an alternate title I thought of: "Things Could Have Been The Same"), and it's based on some pretty dark times I went through last year and some pretty damaged people I know. Well, really, it's about a lot of things, but certain major characters and minor events are based on real people and events from my life. I haven't been sure it's healthy to revisit those dark times and screwed-up people, and yet the book is clearly a creative achievement that I'm still proud of, something I would like to develop, add to, and release to the world. So it's sort of dilemma.

There're a lot of other projects that are vying for my time and creative energy lately too. I really have been wanting to get back into music-making again, even performing live, and doing more artistic stuff with video again, and I'd like to write a screenplay one of these days soon too... who knows... sometimes I feel this ecstatic landscape of possibilities stretched out before me, and other times I just feel overwhelmed with "stuff to do". Suspira. Vamos a ver....

WTF?