In this video Luke Rudkowski talks to Russell Brand to grasp his understanding and beliefs when it comes to government. Since Brand has made previous contradictory statements on both big and small government, we found it important to understand what he truly believes. We were able to get the first 3 questions in to Brand and the rest where from other journalists at the #nomoreausterity protest that brought out 50,000 people.
Via We Are Change
Right Where You Are Sitting Now managed to snag an interview with intense – and intensely weird – character actor/writer/artist Crispin Hellion Glover. I’ve always wanted to chat with Glover, but have never been able to make it happen. He’s a fascinating guy. Nice get, fellas.
Download the MP3 here or listen to the interview over at the site.
Crispin Glover’s cat can eat a whole watermelon.
PIC: Adult Swim/Cartoon Network/TBS (C) – fair use for purposes of story.
If you’re a fan of the Turner Broadcast System-owned Cartoon Network’s adult-oriented evening programming block ‘Adult Swim’ then you might have noticed that images associated with secret societies pop up fairly regularly in the interstitial segments between the shows and cartoons: Owls, eyes in pyramids, hands shaking in a manner strikingly similar to the Freemason’s “apprentice grip”, and much more. Having been curious about these elements for years, I reached out to the Cartoon Network publicity team, who put me in touch with Jason DeMarco, VP of on-air and creative director for Adult Swim. We discussed the strange symbols, the creative process that goes into producing the bumps, and who they enjoy working with when it comes to video, music and more.
Note: The owl costumes were created by Ash Zelly, a very talented artist. Check out Ash’s site here for more cool stuff.… Read the rest
Courtesy of the always entertaining Open Culture blog (Bookmark it for more awesomeness.) comes what’s being billed as a “lost interview” with philosopher Michel Foucault. Lost or not, we’ve got it to watch.
An introductory shot that might be an outtake from A Clockwork Orange opens this interview with Michel Foucault, “lost,” we’re told by Critical Theory, “for nearly 30 years” before it appeared on Youtube last week. In it, Foucault discusses madness and his interest in psychology and psychopathology, repeating in brief the argument he made in Madness and Civilization, his 1961 work in which—through impressive feats of archival research and leaps of the imagination—Foucault attempted, as he wrote in his preface, “to return, in history, to that zero point in the course of madness at which madness is an undifferentiated experience, a not yet divided experience of division itself.”
Well, not actually hung out with him in as much as participated in a Google Hangout to talk about his new book The Future of the Mind, but with just me and two other participants it was a fairly intimate affair. My time was limited, and in addition to my own questions I was responsible for fielding questions from audience members, so I didn’t get to everything I wanted to ask. However, I tried to do Disinfo proud: I asked about psychedelic research, Nikola Tesla (Thanks, audience member who gave me the excuse to do so!), mind uploads and some other stuff. I’m also happy to say that my fellow interviewers got to a lot of questions I wanted to ask, too.
Anyway, I thought I’d share it here. Hope you like it – or at least it gives you something to discuss or think about.
(By the way, watching this, I noticed that I was subconsciously shifting my lower jaw around a lot.… Read the rest
Pic: Cellanr (CC)
Der Spiegel interviews Tim Berners-Lee, the man widely credited as the father of the internet. Among other things, Berners-Lee is hard at work on a web version of the Magna Carta.
… Read the restSPIEGEL ONLINE: You and others are launching a global campaign to ensure the legal protection of Web users’ rights internationally. What would you include in your personal Magna Charta for the Web?
Berners-Lee: First, I would like us to have that conversation together. That is why we created webwewant.org. I want us to use this year to define the values that we as Web users are going to insist on. I would like every country to debate what that means in terms of their existing laws. In what areas must we enhance our regulations to guarantee fundamental rights on the Internet? The right to privacy must be in there, the right not to be spied on and the right not to be blocked.
PIC: Tony (CC)
In my opinion, Matt Taibbi has been one of the most compelling and informative journalists on the politics and culture beat for the better part of a decade. Taibbi sat down with The New Yorker magazine to talk about his new digital magazine, putting the personal touch in reporting and the public’s lack of confidence in mainstream media. It’s a rather short piece, but if you’re a Taibbi fan like me then you’ll probably enjoy it. Here’s a snippet.
…none of Taibbi’s anger at the “toothlessness” of the media has dissipated. “I think it’s a lost art in this country—developing that narrative voice where readers connect with you as a human being,” he says, harpooning a stray piece of scrambled egg. “They want to see how you react individually to things. And if you think something is outrageous, and you write about it in a tone without outrage, then that’s just deception, you know?”
… Read the restTaibbi says his decision to leave Rolling Stone was predicated in part on the need to make a change and “keep from falling into a pattern,” and partly by his desire to “be on Glenn’s side.” Glenn being Glenn Greenwald, who, along with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, is currently editing another First Look property, the national-security-centric The Intercept, which has been live since February.
Godfrey Reggio, director of the Qatsi Trilogy, is interviewed about his new film Visitors by Stephen Colbert:
Click through to see video. Warning: Autoplay.
Douglas Rushkoff is a well-known social critic and media theorist. While he may be best known for nonfiction works like Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now and Open Source Democracy, his bibliography is a remarkably diverse one, with entries into prose fiction and even graphic novels.
Recently publisher DC Vertigo released a collected digital omnibus of his graphic novel Testament. (Find it here.)
… Read the restFrom the imagination of best-selling author Douglas Rushkoff, one of the most iconoclastic and acclaimed minds of our era, comes a graphic novel series that exposes the “real” Bible as it was actually written, and reveals how its mythic tales are repeated today.
Grad student Jake Stern leads an underground band of renegades that uses any means necessary to combat the frightening threats to freedom that permeate the world. They employ technology, alchemy, media hacking and mysticism to fight a modern threat that has its roots in ancient stories destined to recur in the modern age.
2:30 a.m.
Four hours of trudging through circuit diagrams and forum posts that read like Chinese toaster manuals, trying desperately to figure out what “Arduino” is. I finally have a breakthrough realization: I may have reached the far end of my brain’s capacity to learn new things.
I am an idiot. What a downer.
Luckily, I find a TED Talk by Massimo Banzi, an instructor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy and co-creator of Arduino, an “open-source electronics prototyping platform,” which breaks it all down for me. Through a haze of tears, I learn how a couple of nerds have managed to turn the world of interactive technology on its head while fooling around with toys and LED displays in their bedrooms.
From what Banzi says, Arduino has slowly and quietly been taking over our technological world since 2005, when he and four friends began developing a tool that would make it easier for his students to create their own interactive electronic inventions without having to be an engineer.… Read the rest
