Intrepid video journo-star Esteban Caliente was seen reporting from the road blockades around Heiligendamm yesteday:

You can also download this in ogg theora format via peer-to-peer networks (yeah, I know, what a pain in the ass, but y'know, it's ideologically great, right? like using Linux and clunky open source media tools... suspira...) from v2v.cc.

Ok, I'm off now to a big speech by Vandana Shiva, a closing keynote of the Alternative G8 Summit.

I can't believe it. This is the best news I've heard in ages. More proof that Brazil is extremely cool. Hopefully other cities, worldwide, will gradually follow suit, and someday there will be no advertising, anywhere, for anything.

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.

saw an amazing film at dry river tonite. it's ecuadorian, called 'Cronicas'. it's about a tv news crew from miami covering a serial killer in ecuador, and they fuck everything up trying to get the story. it's an amazing look at journalistic ethics and integrity. and the person i want to be, professionally at least, is one of the characters. the cameraman/editor. i want to travel the world with a powerbook and a camera phoning in investigative news videos via satellite, sweating my ass off editing footage in a jungle hotel and smoking and drinking quetzalteco or chicha or pisco or cachaca or whatever the local rotgut is. and get paid for it. Of course I'd prefer to work for a show that was less cheesy than the one depicted in the film, which was called "Una Hora Con La Verdad" (One Hour With The Truth)

Interesting piece about participatory, serialized and multiple-media narratives, from the Obama campaign to Battlestar Galactica, and the opportunity through them for social good, or not... in Pitchfork of all places.

Does new media mean more to us than sharing clips of people mixing Mentos with Coca-Cola? Are we just duped rats chasing each other through ever-greater mazes? Or can we seize this chance to revitalize democracy?

(via Philoblog)

A new addition to indyblogs, Turtel, in New York, posted a great entry (a while ago, but I guess it showed up on my feedreader now because the blog was just added to indyblogs) about the frequency on TV of depictions of violent acts against women and how that serves to portray those acts as okay.

As Cialdini writes in science-speak, the problem is that

• steev's blog

Here's a test run of the Edirol R-9 from the day I got it. I was going to link to it before but something was weird with the site... anyway i just doodled around on guitar and sung a song by Cake that's been stuck in my head again a lot lately.... Sorry, indulge me.

This linkage also serves as a sneak preview of the new revamped, cms-driven version of Phonophilia, the site i set up like 6 years ago devoted to sound and field recordings.

I recorded a bunch of stuff over the last few days that i'll be posting soon. stay tuned.

Yesterday I received a present I ordered for myself on my birthday almost 2 weeks ago. It's a solid-state portable digital audio recorder, the Edirol R-09. I've been wanting something like this for a couple years now, something small i can take around and make high-quality recordings with - interviews, field recordings, music.

It's really a great device. Incredibly light, easy to use, very good sound quality, easy to get stuff off of it to the computer. I'm happy with it so far.

I say tool/toy in the title of this post because I feel a bit guilty about buying it. It wasnt cheap. But I hvaen't bought an electronic gizmo for awhile, and the deal is that I promise to myself i'm going to use it to make worthwhile stuff, media that matters, so to speak. So it will be a tool, whereas if i just used it for stupid crap or not at all, it would be a toy.

As this goes to press (heh) I have 6 photos in my Flickr photostream that I put there directly from my mobile phone. Yes, I figured out how to send a photo in an email, to Flickr, and even include tags and title and description.

This is a really cool thing to be able to do, especially for indymedia-type purposes. I wonder if any techies have made a nice fuzzy indy version of this technology. I seem to dimly remember some mention of this kind of thing, maybe at the 2004 RNC or whatever, but I'm not really aware of it as a commonly used tool. Imagine witnessing some injustice on the street and immediately being able to put a photo of it up on the web without even going home to your computer. That would rock.

I'm still reading old journals, and it continues to blow my mind. I've found the entry from the very beginning of the first Iraq War or Persian Gulf War or whatever it was called. Remember, Bush Senior gave the Iraqis a deadline of January 15, 1991, to get out of Kuwait? That night I was, in a way, doing Indymedia - I was a DJ at WCBN, the U of Michigan college station, and here's what I wrote that night:

Well, the deadline is up. I just got back from my radio show, from 11 to 2. I was on the air when the deadline went down. People were marching in the streets, and Charlie called and told me it was happening, and I announced it on the air, exhorting people to join in. Then Dave called and said the march had ended at the Art Museum, with people singing "Give Peace A Chance." I played nothing but war songs, and I got dozens of requests - one after another, people calling in, suggesting more war songs. It was incredible...

Wow. I had forgotten all about that.

Incidentally, later in the same entry I wrote, "I've got personal things I've been thinking about, too. I don't even want to write it, because it legitimizes it. Basically I have to decide if I should allow a certain emotion to enter my life again." I'm pretty sure I was referring to the very first beginnings of my feelings for the woman that I would end up being with for the next 11 years. 4 days later we were on a bus together to DC for a massive rally against that war.

Wow, reading this stuff is just so amazing. It's like travelling back in time. I'm so glad I wrote these journals and kept them safe.