ROCK THE BENTO

ITEM [via Pink Tentacle]: Food hackers at Obacchi Jacket Lunch Box cut and arrange ordinary bento lunch box ingredients to recreate famous album covers.

Here’s my personal favorite:



Also available: Rage Against The Machine, King Crimson, Weezer, Jimi Hendrix, Public Enemy, The Velvet Underground & Nico, and Aphex Twin.

I need lunch,

This is dF

HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC, PART 18,458

UPDATE: Remember that documentary from Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), the anti-piracy wing of the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA), showing Australian music artists saying, “Please don’t steal our music, we need the money”?

Turns out one of them now claims he was quoted out of context and misled on how the interview footage would be used.

Frenzal Rhomb guitarist Lindsay McDougall says he was told the 10-minute film, which is being distributed for free to all high schools in Australia, was about trying to survive as an Australian musician and no one mentioned the video would be used as part of an anti-piracy campaign.

"I would never be part of this big record industry funded campaign to crush illegal downloads,” he says. “I'm not like Lars Ulrich. I think it's bullshit, I think it's record companies crying poor and I don't agree with it."

A spokesperson for MIPI replies she has no idea what Mr McDougall is talking about, and wonders if he’s actually watched the video, which only actually mentions downloading for a minute or so.

Yeah, well, I have watched it (it’s available here), and while many of the artists don’t specifically mention downloads and talk more about what a struggle it is to make a living in the business (which is probably more true if yr on Fat Wreck Chords like Frenzal Rhomb than if yr on a major label like The Veronicas, but whatever), it’s fairly obvious that the message of the video is: “It’s hard enough for artists to make money – if you download stuff for free or burn CDs for yr friends, yr part of the problem”.

Also, MIPI is pushing for the doc to be included in school units related to copyright and file sharing. So clearly they have an agenda with this video.

I’d say McDougall is right to be outraged. I’ll be interested to see if any of the other artists (who couldn’t be reached for comment) come back with similar stories.

Out of context,

This is dF

EDITED TO ADD [a few hours later]: One thing I forgot to mention – if you go to the site where the official video is hosted and read the list of artists thanked for their input, you'll notice Lindsay Strutt McDougall and Frenzal Rhomb are no longer mentioned.

EDITED TO ADD [May 3]: Lindsay Strutt isn't mentioned, of course, because she's a Page 3 model, not the guitarist for Frenzel Rhomb. God knows where that typo came from. Cheers to drhoz fo the correction.

I AM BRIMMING WITH COGNITIVE SURPLUS

[At least some of you have probably already seen this, but it’s somewhat relevant to the recent Australian music industry propaganda wars I’ve been posting.]

ITEM [via Warren Ellis]: Clay Shirky recently delivered a brilliant speech about “cognitive surplus” that resulted from post-WW2 society suddenly having more leisure time than it knew what to do with, and dealing with it by watching sitcoms. Now we have Web 2.0, which lets people channel that cognitive surplus into Wikipedia, World Of Warcraft, YouTubes, LOLcats or blogs like this one.

Read it here. Or watch it now.

If you don’t have time (because Desperate Housewives is coming on in a few minutes or something), here’s the important takeaways:

Media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share ... And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer...

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

This is what the RIAA, the MPAA and the TV industry are afraid of, basically. They like it when we consume their content. They don’t like us making our own to compete with them, and they don’t like us sharing what content of theirs we do consume. But instead of giving customers what they want, they tried to make them like what they were being given. And it’s not working like it used to.

This, incidentally, makes me what’s going to happen with books – where will they fit in the cognitive surplus? After all, if yr reading a book, yr technically sitting around being unproductive – though maybe you can argue reading is a more cognitive activity than watching BSG.

And how about the interactive element? If you don’t count those silly D&D “choose yr own ending” books, the experience of reading a book is still an analog, self-contained, top-down experience – at least in print. Maybe e-books will change that, too. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read something in a book and wished I had a way to copy and paste that passage to share with the rest of you.

But then that’s what Google Books is for – and the book industry freaked out over that, too.

My brain hurts,

This is dF

MOB TEST

Just testing the LifeBlog app on my phone. If it works, what yr seeing is the far side of Disco Bay that will NOT be our new view in two weeks, on acct of we cannot fit 3 pax into 620 sq ft. And don't think we haven't tried.

Thu 01.05.2008 15.18 010520081461