Culture, Art & Film

"I agree that Bush should be kicked out of the White House ... but I don't believe that will be meaningful unless there emerges in the United States a significant anti-empire movement. ... This doesn't mean voters can't judge one particular empire-building politician more dangerous than another. It doesn't mean we shouldn't sometimes make strategic choices to vote for one over the other. It simply means we should make such choices with eyes open and no illusions." [more]

"Michael Moore's documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11," will open in about 1,000 U.S. theaters June 25, and a trailer promoting the expedited release could hit the Internet by the end of this week." [more]

Part of the problem, a British officer said, is that Americans tend to see the Iraqis as “untermenschen,” the term for “sub-humans.” [more]

"In the video, Abd al-Rahim sings against a backdrop of animated cartoons portraying Sharon as a bully whose acts backfire on him./ In one scene, he tries to bomb the world but the bomb explodes prematurely and tears his clothes off. Bush appears chopping up a cake and distributing the pieces among people, with a map of the Middle East in the background." [more]

"Palestinian President Yasir Arafat watched a preview of the film at his West Bank headquarters earlier this month. Aides said he found the film 'moving.'" [more]

"The theology of the powers was in the spotlight today with the claim that "Spiritual forces” may have caused a projector to break down during one of the free screenings of The Passion Of The Christ laid on by a group of churches." [more]

Activist and singer/songwriter Evan Greer explains how public spaces are being coopted for private interests and calls for a re-claimation of public space and social interactions. [more]

"Along with the shaving ban, the mayor has proclaimed all men and women must dress in Western or historic clothing on Fridays beginning in May." [more]

"It all started when EMI began shouting the odds about DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, a mix compiled from Jay-Z's Black Album and The Beatles' White Album and which started showing up all over the Net, as well as offline." [more]

"The situation today is starting to improve. There are now eight cinemas operating in Kabul, mostly showing Indian films. Afghan Film is slowly being re-equipped and some private companies are emerging from the dust of older firms such as Ariana Film and Kabul Film. New initiatives include a production company set up by Bollywood actor Hashmat Rahmini (known to audiences as Hashmat Khan), himself an Afghan." [more]

"Starship Troopers (1997) is the last film with which he felt he could be oppositional. 'While I was working on it at Sony the regimes kept changing and ultimately no one looked at it. Someone said to me, "I think these flags look like Nazi flags", and I said, "Well, they're not. The Nazis didn't have green-and-white flags." But of course they are Nazi flags and the costumes were based on Nazi uniforms. It's about Earth, but Earth is the United States, clearly. We were showing a fascist utopia where the citizens were like the citizens of the US last year, believing in it, and not seeing the evils. A lot of the newscast inserts are based on Texas. It's all Mr George Bush - how many people get executed, gun laws, soldiers giving out bullets." [more]

"Taken together Virilio's grey ecology and 'hyper-vigilance regarding immediate perception' constitute a bold reaffirmation not only the life of the planet, but our own lives, our memories, the anima of our souls; everything that distinguishes us from mere automata." [more]

"Computers with desktop publishing software offer many advantages to the modern billboard liberator. Fonts and colors can be matched precisely, professional-looking graphical elements can be added to your text message, and scale and spacing become much easier to calculate. There are many software packages suitable for producing overlays, including PageMaker, Quark Xpress, Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, and various CAD programs. Adobe Photoshop gives you the additional flexibility of being able to preview your hit - just scan in a photograph of the original board and apply your modification over it as an independent layer." [more]

"Thus, although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object." [more]