I met Tamara in New York last year and I admired her eye for details. One of her photos is hanging on my wall. She has worked with Bowie, Metallica and some other big names in the music industry. Just found her online exhibition "no adults allowed". Great stuff, young lady!

"Playgrounds at twilight: empty, lost, abandoned of their daily life force. Yet, there is the remenents, the obvious signs of use, and the ghosts of those that have been there. For all of my 'adult' life I have gone to playgrounds at night to think, reflect. Many hours have been spent on the tops of slides reflecting on the stars, swinging and working out the day’s trials and tribulations. On my relocation to New York I started to pay witness to the playgrounds in Manhattan. They are hidden in and amongst the labyrinth of cement and glass, they are in the corners of parks, they are on the edges of the island. Refuges of the childhoods for many who are growing up in the glare of this city, the playgrounds are also an obvious sign of the world we live in. Encircled in fences, gated, locked at night and with notices postedNo adults allowed unaccompanied by a child”. (Tamara Rafkin)

Portfolio at absolutearts.com TAMARIZED - Shop at cafepress.com

Tim Curry plays King Arthur in a broadway play ripping off “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”. Full story in The New Yorker

American punkband Anti-Flag started a new website called militaryfreezone.org to educate their people.

Zu faul zum protestieren? Mieten sie sich einen Demonstranten vor dem Berliner Reichstag

"I am very excited to spend time here," said Natalie Portman at the press-conference in Berlin on the 7th of March. "I have only been here for two days and have been working a lot so I haven’t had a chance too see anything substantial although I have had two very good restaurant experiences so far. Weird German food I don’t know about because I’m vegetarian, so it’s sort of limited to how weird I can get, but anything that is vegetarian I am willing to try. Otherwise I am really looking forward to checking out the city, it has such an incredible history and all the people I’ve met here have been really, really, really wonderful, so I’m looking forward to spending time here."

The Wachowski Brothers and Joel Silver, the people that brought you "The Matrix", are in town to make a film out of Alan Moore’s and David Lloyd’s comic book, V FOR VENDETTA. The director is James McTeigue and the main characters are played by Natalie Portmann and James Purefoy, who might be the new James Bond. V FOR VENDETTA is sort of based on the Guy Fawkes November 5th gunpowder plot. The nazis won the war, England has a fascist regime and the masked terrorist V is the only hero out there. It's one of the best comicbooks ever written and influenced a whole generation of writers. But why does Hollywood like the studios in Babelsberg so much? Maybe it's because of the state funding for movies they can get in Berlin-Brandenburg. "We’ve had cooperation at all levels really," said producer grant Hill. "From the first time we came here to Babelsberg we've been helped through the process. We’ve had application to and been successful with the media board [Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg], we were given a subsidy of 635,000 Euros [approximately US$840,000] and we also have an application with the federal people. We were a film that was in a sense like a lot of these films, looking for a home at one point, we had looked at other options, Babelsberg became available, and a deal was put together that worked very well for us and with the aid of all the tradespeople here it has been fantastic." So, everyone has a good time and the actors enjoy their stay in big, bad Berlin. Hollywoodstars eating pizza in Kreuzberg! "I think it’s very important to have an apartment, said James Purefoy. "You go to make a movie in a city and you’re there for a long time, don’t stay in hotel. You can stay in hotels that feel like every other hotel in the world. It is very important to stay in an apartment so that you can involve yourself with your local community there."

V FOR VENDETTA - The official site is open

... hatte ja bekanntlich die erste Homepage der Welt und man kann sie noch heute sehen! Mit WAV-Files und geheimer Osterei-Seite, ihr geilen Retrotypen!

(Gewisse Herren in jungen Jahren) Lustiger Pressespiegel zum "Reclaim the Streets"-Auftritt auf dem Balkon der Sielwall-WG anno 1998: "Die Bild muß wenigstens zerknirscht zugeben, daß das 'ne schöne Sache war"

Nagel schreibt dazu: „sonntag abend, ich sitz auf wiesmann´s bettkante, sagt der auf einmal: ach, übrigens, ich hab hier so´n video das mein bruder mal vor einem jahr (!) für euch gemacht hat. kennste noch gar nicht, oder?“... sehr geil... vorhang auf für den kleineren wiesmann und seine nebenbei-beschäftigung 'videos für muff potter machen'! (AVI mit 18.9 MB) Auch cool: Dennis hat was für ein Theaterstück komponiert und Hörproben vonne neue Pladde gibt es auch.

Diese ziemlich geile Band hat sich leider aufgelöst, aber sie haben uns ihre Homepage hinterlassen, wo es auch MP3s zu saugen gibt. Abteilung Wir haben EA80 schon als Kinder gehört und fanden ...But Alive auch ganz gut.

Amazing film with an amazing cast, songs by David Bowie sung by various people with acoustic guitars in diferent languages, a beautiful set that looks like a stage and stop-motion candy crabs. Criterion, the "rolls royce of DVD's" has a 2-Disc edition coming up in May.

Ein schwer umkämpfter Titel, aber aktuell hält RTL2 mit "Reise nach Jerusalem" den Spitzenplatz. Leider wurde die Show mit Ollie Kahns Freundin Verena Kerth nach nur sechs Folgen eingestellt.

Berlins beste Sängerinnen (laut Stiftung Warentest!) skandalisieren den Bastard: Nora Below, Geffen_ und Spinster Sister zusammen für eine Nacht.

Diese drei Projekte verbindet, dass sie trotz oder gerade durch ihre minimale Besetzung eine explosive Show mit besessenen Performern liefern. Mit ihrer gesanglichen und stilistischen Bandbreite werden die Punkgöttinen jedem im Publikum eine süße Pein bereiten.

Nora Belows (Bpitch Control) New Wave Electro spiegelt sämtliche Spielarten elektronischer Musik. Die Songs sind tanzbar, die Vocals brachial und zusammen mit "dem Strumpfmann" präsentiert sie auch den visuellen Part ihres Gesamtkunstwerks - eine krasse und doch humorvolle Gender Performance. www.norabelow.de

Spinster Sister ist das erste und wahrscheinlich einzige Gothic Country Duo der ganzen Welt: Zwei Schwestern, eine Gitarre und zwei Stimmen die den Teufel rocken. Die finsteren mondsüchtigen Lieder, die groovigen Westernmelodien und die Glam Rock Hymnen sind optimal verpackt in eine humorvolle und dramatische Bühnenshow. www.bloodyproductions.de

Geffen -- Das Hoch drei ihres Namens steht für Volumen: Geffens PopUp ist ein Crossover von Sounds and Stilen, geprägt von verzerrten Gitarren, fetten Electro Beats und trashiger Produktion. Sie schafft es gleichzeitig zu singen und einen Apfel zu verzehren, im Spagat Britney Spears zu covern -- und das ist nur ein kleiner Teil ihres Stage Repertoirs!

After Show Party mit dem internationalen antitittentanten DJ Team!

Night of the Sirens im Bastard (Kastanienallee 7-9) , 14.04.05 um 21:00, Eintritt: 7 €

"Auf Kur5hin.org fragt jemand: What if patents applied to literature? Denn so schädigend wie für Literatur, sind Patente auch für Software.
Copyright offers authors very strong protection from plagiarism. They have no need of patents. Indeed patents would cause great harm to the vibrancy and creativity of the literary world. The same is true for software.
Im österreichischen Urheberrechtsgesetz heißt es ja auch unter § 2:
Werke der Literatur im Sinne dieses Gesetzes sind:

1. Sprachwerke aller Art einschließlich Computerprogrammen."

Gefunden im: Sukontent aus Ösireich

"Kann man in einer Fernsehserie revolutionäre Gesellschaftsmodelle und Rollenbilder verhandeln? Ein kleines grünes Männchen ohne Knochen und die Subversion zeitgenössischer populärer Stereotypen und Geschlechterklischees in der TV-Serie 'Futurama'."

Guter Artikel bei Sonja Eismanns Plastikmaedchen.net, wo es "Texte zu Feminismus und Popkultur" zu finden gibt.

"The stolen property fencing game!" Build crack houses, pay protection fees and get yourself car jacked

Kettcar auf Platz 5 in der Bundesliga, sagt der Buschfunk! Kuschelig dicht an Westernhagen und Maffay, der Herr Wiebusch! Da haben Oma Hans wieder was schön was zu meckern!

"In our ridicule of the odd mix of credulousness with wacky skepticism we should not overlook how conspiracy theorizing--which has flourished, via the Internet, into a veritable cottage industry--reveals with glittering clarity the essential structure and purpose of originary narrative. Conspiracy theories are the myths of our age, in which the random and chaotic events of life are retrospectively ordered into a story with an explanatory purpose. (...) Culturally rich narratives are strung together from assortments of details. Therefore, the artist's task is merely to provide the details; the consumers of the art object can be counted on to weave the narrative.

There are "mythopoetic potentialities lurking in contemporary celebrity worship (...) The jumble of evanescent images, publicity, rumor, anecdote, and conflicting eyewitness testimony that surrounds celebrities cries out to be arranged into a story that makes sense, a narrative."

I referred to this brilliant essay already, but I recommend it again: "What matters is the system!" - The Beatles, the "Passover Plot," and Conspiratorial Narrativity" by Matthew Schneider (Anthropoetics 8, no. 2, Winter 2003) A must! It explains a lot!

That's one great conspiracy theory you made up, Mr. Lightfoot. The horror writer does actually really look like Mark Chapman.

Before the Da Vinci Code phenomenon there was The Passover Plot (1965) by Hugh J. Schonfield. Schonfield invented the hypothesis, that a mortal Jesus had planned his ministry and crucifixion according to the Old Testament prophecies to fulfill Judaism's messianic tradition. John Lennon explained his famous 'Beatles Are Bigger Than God' sound-bite with Schonfield: 'My views on Christianity are directly influenced by this book. The premise in it is that Jesus' message had been garbled by his disciples and twisted for a variety of self-serving reasons by those who followed, to the point where it has lost validity for many in the modern age' (Boston Globe newspaper, 12 December 1980)

"Schonfield's controversial bestseller argues that the fictional premise "used. . . by George Moore in The Brook Kerith and by D.H. Lawrence in The Man who Died"--that Jesus survived the crucifixion--really happened. To the task of proving this thesis, Schonfield brought a prodigious command of scripture, new insights (largely gleaned from the recently published Dead Sea Scrolls) into the Jewish sectarianism of first-century Palestine, and forty years' experience studying and teaching (at Oxford University) early Christian history. He also brought a conspiratorial worldview that prompted him to weave from all the ancient sources available to him a story that explained on entirely rational grounds all of the events mentioned in the Gospels. The miracles and mysteries that serve to establish Christ's divinity in the church's official narrative are to Schonfield telltale signs of a plot--masterminded by Jesus himself--the purpose of which was to prove that this son of a Galilean carpenter was the Messiah whose coming had been predicted by certain Jewish sects since about a century and a half before his birth.

Steeped from his youth in the religious ferment of his day, Schonfield's Jesus gradually becomes convinced that it was incumbent upon him to manifest his Messiahship by ensuring that his demise conformed to the prophesied pattern. To this end, writes Schonfield, Jesus minutely planned and orchestrated the events of Passion Week so they would culminate in his crucifixion on Friday afternoon. For the Passover Plot, timing is everything; delaying the Messiah's predicted ordeal until just before the Sabbath, writes Schonfield, would enable Jesus to survive crucifixion by faking his death. The custom of removing the bodies of the crucified from their crosses before the Sabbath meant that Jesus' time on the cross would be minimized, allowing him to receive quickly the medical attention he would need. And by appearing to die on his own Jesus would be spared having his legs broken, the usual means by which the Romans hastened the deaths of crucifixion victims.

Every conspiracy theory needs a leap of faith; Schonfield's is the precise means he thinks Jesus used to fake his death. Jesus' words "I am thirsty," writes Schonfield, were a signal to Joseph of Arimathea, who dispatched a servant with a vinegar-soaked sponge on the end of a twig of hyssop. But, says Schonfield, there was more than just vinegar in this sponge. Had this liquid consisted of the "the normal wine vinegar diluted with water," he writes, "the effect would have been stimulating. In this case it was exactly the opposite. Jesus lapsed quickly into complete unconsciousness. His body sagged. His head lolled on his breast, and to all intents and purposes he was a dead man" (191-2). As John Lennon might have said had he witnessed the scene as Schonfield drew it, 'He's drugged!'"

Quoted from "The Beatles, the 'Passover Plot,' and Conspiratorial Narrativity" by Matthew Schneider.

The Passover Plot disinfo-mini-site

Where no tourist has gone before! Rucksacktouristen, aufgepasst, Molvania ist nur was für ganz harte Typen, die schon sämtliche Impfungen der Welt im Blut haben! Hier gefunden!

Another one of those geeky brick films, but "Batman - New Times" has the voices of Adam West (Batman), who played the one and only caped crusader in the 60s show, Mark "Skywalker Hamill (Joker), who did the clown prince of crime on the Batman Animated Series already, Dick van Dyke (Commissioner Gordon) and Courtney Thorne-Smith (Catwoman). Brickfilms.com currently hosts the "Heroes and Villains" contest for Lego filmmakers.

The map of Springfield is finally available "as a vector-based PDF file. This makes the map searchable with Adobe Acrobat and allows you to make a large print without any loss of resolution."

Cool site with tons of graphics to have a look at. A lot of nice stuff by Ken Adams

"If you think you wouldn't, you would make at ideal recruit. Those most vulnerable are the ones who think that they could never be tricked into adopting a bizarre belief. By using simple mind control techniques, cult leaders create a magnetic appeal for curious seeker. Modern cults cruise universities and personal columns for new followers and are growing rapidly." from Martin Howards "Would You Fall For A Crazy Cult?"

'Believe that there is a secret and you will feel an initiate. It doesn’t cost a thing. Create an enormous hope that can never be eradicated because there is no root. Ancestors that never were will never tell you that you betrayed them. Create a truth with fuzzy edges: when someone tries to define it, you repudiate him. Why go on writing novels? Rewrite history.' (Umberto Eco, "Foucault’s Pendulum")

It's just a fantasy-novel, but Dan Brown’s bestseller "The Da Vinci Code" made half of the world-population believe in the good old myth about the order of the Templars and the holy grail as the bloodline of Jesus Christ, who did not die on the cross as described in the bible. Even good friends of mine believe in this fairy tale. The book "Holy Blood and Holy Grail" by Henry Lincoln, Richard Leigh, and Michael Baigent came up with this idea first. A whole lot of people, including certain satanists trying to start their own order in Berlin-Charlottenburg, fall for this. Lots of them are right-wing revisionists trying to rewrite history from the very beginning. Lincoln and his friends claim that Jesus died in France and was buried in Rennes-le-Château in France. They found all these "clues" that were scattered throughout history by "initiates" of "the secret order of extraordinary gentlemen", people like Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo and Leonardo da Vinci.

Massimo Polidoro asked the right question: "Who invented such an incredible story?" He travelled to Rennes-le-Château to have a look at these "clues" himself. The story is a complete lie of course, but is has been around for a long time and Polidor finally found the guy who came up with it: Pierre Plantard.

"Plantard was an anti-Semite and the leader of a minor occult, right-wing organization known as Alpha Galates. His scheme was quite ingenious and complex. He had the parchments made by an artist friend, Philippe de Cherisey; then, he passed them on as real to Gérard de Sède, to whom he also told the invented story of Saunière’s findings.

Plantard also invented the Priory of Sion in 1956 and created fake manuscripts and documents that linked the Priory to RLC and deposited them at the National Library in Paris, where he suggested Lincoln and friends go to look for important discoveries.

But why go to all this trouble? All this and more was necessary in order to demonstrate not only that Plantard was the current Grand Master of the elusive Priory but also that he was the last descendant of the Merovingians. This meant that he was the current vessel of Christ’s holy blood and, above all, the heir to the throne of France as its legitimate king.

The scheme did not work out, however; there were no descendants after Dagobert II, and there were no living Merovingians pretenders to the throne that fell with Louis XVI. Plantard’s fake geneology quickly dissolved under close scrutiny. "

Full story: "The Secrets of Rennes-le-Château": Massimo Polidoro reports for the Skeptical Inquirer

Interesting column by Brett Stephens of The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page:

"Remember Japan Inc.? If you were a semi-sentient consumer of news in the 1980s, it was hard to avoid the impression that Japan would soon overtake the U.S. in global economic clout, if its corporations didn't just purchase the country outright. They've got Rockefeller Center! They're gobbling up Hollywood! Chalmers Johnson, Clyde Prestowitz and other soi-disant experts pronounced sagely on the invincible Japanese model of industrial organization, while the media supplied a diet of stories about how companies such as Sony or Honda remained world-beaters, year-in and year-out.

Now consider the amazing media about-face in recent weeks on Iraq. Prior to Jan. 30, dateline Baghdad was dateline Götterdämmerung. Now it's dateline Democracy. Bombs are still exploding, but we aren't reading much anymore about how we're losing hearts and minds, or how Iraq is ethnically too fractious to have a meaningful democracy. Instead, the media connect the dots between elections in Baghdad and events in Beirut, Cairo and Ramallah, and talk about 1989.

(...) The cliché is that journalism is the first draft of history. Yet a historian searching for clues about the origins of many of the great stories of recent decades--the collapse of the Soviet empire; the rise of Osama bin Laden; the declining American crime rate; the economic eclipse of Japan and Germany--would find most contemporary journalism useless. Perhaps a story here or there might, in retrospect, seem illuminating. But chances are it would have been nearly invisible at the time of publication: eight column inches, page A12.

The problem is not that journalists can't get their facts straight: They can and usually do. Nor is it that the facts are obscure: Often, the most essential facts are also the most obvious ones. The problem is that journalists have a difficult time distinguishing significant facts--facts with consequences--from insignificant ones. That, in turn, comes from not thinking very hard about just which stories are most worth telling.

(...) Look for the countervailing data. Broaden your list of sources. Beware of exoticizing your subject: If you think that Israelis and Palestinians operate from no higher motive than revenge, you're on the wrong track. Above all, never forget the obvious: that the law of supply and demand operates in Japan, too; that the Soviet Union was a state governed by fear; that Iraqis aren't rooting for their killers; that, if given the chance, people will choose to be free.

"Zwischen Hochbett und Küche, großem Arbeitszimmer und Diele tummelten sich Menschen aus schätzungsweise einem halben Dutzend Nationen: Amerikaner und Briten, Schweden, Jamaicaner und Israelis, dazwischen Deutsche aus allen Ecken der Republik. Mindestens drei verschiedene Stereo-Anlagen verbreiteten Klänge aller möglichen Schattierungen musikalischer Art."

Klaus N. Frick erzählt Geschichten Danke für den Hinweis...

Pixar can do without Disney. "FOX News reported on Disney's problems getting a Toy Story sequel produced. It sounds like no one wants to direct, write, or possibly star in Toy Story 3. Disney has the right to make sequels to all the Pixar movies it distributed, including "Toy Story," "The Incredibles," "Finding Nemo," etc. But there's a hitch — since Pixar developed all the animation materials to create the movies, it also gets to keep them.

In other words: Disney is now trying to hire another team of animators to recreate Buzz Lightyear, Woody and all the other "Toy Story" characters so that they look the same. It will have to start from scratch to reproduce Pixar's creative work. The next step, of course, is to find a writer and director for the project. With Lasseter gone, FOX reports, "Every single animator of note has turned down the director's job. They don't want to cross Pixar. They've become the only deal in town." -stolen from Luxo - The Pixar Blog

That's all Disney can come up with, sequels to movies that were originally produced by a studio that doesn't wanna work with them anymore. And then they also do "Bambi 2"! The only success Disney had in recent years was "Pirates of the Carribean". It wont take much longer and the kids wont even know who Donald Duck is. But everyone is aware of the magic that Pixar can do and the studio has become what Disney used to be for a long time. Brandchannel's fourth annual Readers' Choice Awards for brand of the year had Pixar on No. 5 after Apple, Sony, Ikea and Al Jazeera. Pixar rose up from the eighth place in 2003 and 31st in 2002."

"Those of us who like to think of ourselves on the progressive or countercultural end of the spectrum can't help but try to foment change. We want our revolution, after all, and won't be satisfied until we've won - and done so in a way that everyone notices. Catastrophe and climax are prizes for our long uphill battle. But by insisting on getting to notice change in dramatic ways, we guarantee it never truly happening. There's a disturbing fundamentalism brewing in the counterculture these days - an aching towards apocalypse as dangerous as that of our counterparts in the reddest of states, and understood just as literally. We are to await the apex of novelty, that singularity when consciousness rises from the chrysalis of matter into a new state, beyond time and maybe even energy. And, of course, only those of us with proper spiritual or psychedelic credentials will be prepared for this inevitability, and make it through the bottleneck at the end of linear history. The rest, well, they finally get their comeuppance. "

-from Douglas Rushkoffs new column in ArthurMagazine.com.

"NYPL Digital Gallery provides access to over 275,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of The New York Public Library, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more."

found at drawn.ca, " a phantastic new multi-author blog devoted to art, illustration, cartooning and drawing