Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Amy Saunders Street theatre interview...


Amy Saunders read a book on sword swallowing, figured out how to do it and has been doing it ever since. She describes herself as a cartoon version of a drag queen and has spent her career wrestling with the whole notion of Fame and whether or not she wants it. What she does want is respect, and she certainly earned ours during this week’s interview.




Monday, January 23, 2012

Mummenschanz; Mime.

I saw Mummenschanz in Auckland sometime shortly after clown school , they were enchanting and inspirational in that they were so emotionally evocative and playful.


A collection of mime sketches performed by world-renowned troupe, Mummenschanz.





Sunday, January 22, 2012

Dub FX 13/12/2011 in Melbourne. [street theatre]

Dub FX (real name Benjamin Stanford) is a worldwide street performer and studio recording artist from St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia. After playing and singing in a band called Twitch, he set out solo when he moved to Europe. His trademark is creating rich live music using only his own performance aided by Live looping and effect pedals combined with his voice.He creates intricate hip hop, reggae and drum and bass rhythms


Thursday, January 19, 2012

Pirate Bay Press release concerning SOPA


INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012. PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear". He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent. There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them - like Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.
So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: "stole") other peoples creative works, without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they're all successful and most of the studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations - it's all based on being able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create. If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing other peoples rules.

The reason they are always complainting about "pirates" today is simple. We've done what they did. We circumvented the rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them). It's all based on the fact that we're competition. We've proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We're just better than they are.

And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech. We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.

The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe - but we've stayed out of the USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this: The word SOPA means "trash" in Swedish. The word PIPA means "a pipe" in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the rest of us obedient consumers. The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you'll learn that noone wants to be fed with trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that you will stop them, before we all drown.

SOPA can't do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we'll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really. To fix the "problem of piracy" one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they're creating "culture" but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they're fat.

In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he's complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy in the world - because he's jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you'd get a more honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.

Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can't access this information when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We're sorry for that.
THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012

Monday, January 16, 2012

Sunday, Martins life.



Kinda a day in the life gig, disjointed and pointless but, well, if not a certain charm then at least a degree of applied conceit not entirely ordinary.

Friday, January 6, 2012

I see a street show in the making

Hand balancing

Meanwhile, in New Zealand

Chicken-milk

On the milieu safari that is my life, sometimes standing on top of towering waterfalls and sometimes shivering whilst sweat covered deep in my sleeping bag in some makeshift camp, I am constantly hunting for the allusive creative shangri la. I'm lazy in some ways, entertaining rooms full of people or crowds on the street is on the cusp of psychologically unfeasible , not that I'm damaged as such, more rather I don't care enough about their approval.

Here I've discovered I can do skits digitally , this is my first. We'll see....


Chicken-milk-1
by: winsomecowboy

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Interesting 3D audio, [wear earphones]



I think this is higher quality

http://hamburglr.tumblr.com/post/8717276078/first-go-grab-some-headphones-the-best-ones

and while your earphones are on, A Virtual 3D haircut

Pokhara street festival Nepal

It's in Aug I think. I might go...

I quite like fairy tale narratives

This is the tale of a little ten year old who got on the piano and on the internet and then that small thing became a bigger thing. A much bigger thing.

I remember also Tenacious D visiting Christchurch NZ and coming across a couple of 12 year olds busking and turned them into their opening act that evening. Same narrative .  Of course Lady Gaga does it bigger.















Old school street performance fest


On New Years Eve I was wandering around and found a street festival. A man explained to me, as near as I can understand, that it was to commemorate the new pavement of the street, and also to celebrate the New Year.

There was an orchestra of 14 men, seated on the ground, playing drums, gamelans and flutes. Three females danced, one at a time. This was traditional Balinese dancing, which is derived from Hindu forms, with the fascinating body postures, hand positions, eye and head movements, and facial expressions. It was a fun, neighborhood event. Each woman danced for awhile and then went into the audience to pick a male partner to dance with, to the uproarious laughter of the crowd. One dancer picked a westerner to join her, yes, yours truly.

It appeared to be a potluck. Women kept showing up with additional plates of food which were laid out on two tables. I was invited multiple times to dig in.

Fireworks were going off all over town all night and they reached a crescendo at midnight, which I viewed from the three-story rooftop restaurant, Black Beach.

Monday, January 2, 2012

NZ music Flashback



'anything could happen and it could be right now'



These guys played earbleedingly loud live











You had to dance right next to the speakers and it got very hypnotic