“The way they portray bands in movies, a nine year old wouldn’t buy…”
– Courtney Taylor-Taylor
Courtney Taylor-Taylor is best known as the lead singer and guitarist of the band The Dandy Warhols. The band is favorite of many of here at SG and the favor is returned by many in the band. Taylor-Taylor is responsible for writing some of the group’s best known songs including “We Used To Be Friends” and “Bohemian Like You.” The band is still going strong and last year announced that a new album The Machine will be released in 2012.
Taylor-Taylor’s new project is something completely different however. One Model Nation is a graphic novel and an album coming out on January 31. Taylor-Taylor described the project as “We invented a German art noise band that disappeared in 1978 and then I wrote a book about the last three months of their career.”
We reached him at his home in Oregon and it’s clear from our conversation that the project is a very personal one, driven by Taylor-Taylor’s personal history and his thoughts on the world as much as it a look at late seventies Germany and events that are almost too strange to be true.
INTO: Philosophizing, inquiring, speculating, and dreaming.
NOT INTO: D-r-a-m-a. Save it for your mama.
MAKES ME HAPPY: Gnomes, robots, my puppy, new tattoos, new friends, being in bed when its super cold and my bed is super warm, sunny rainy days, handmade gifts, road trips, Tootsie pops.
INTO: Plenty of things. More than likely if it exists, I’ve taken an interest in it at some point. My biggest interests are art, books, videogames and food/drink. I like history, and I certainly love a good conspiracy theory. I love dominance and go all gooey-eyed when I see a pretty lady. Oh, I also love useless knowledge. Feel free to send me random factoids.
NOT INTO: Greasy foods, bad music and pretentious assholes.
MAKES ME HAPPY: Creepy Asian horror movies, loud, shitty music, and a good cup of tea.
MAKES ME SAD: Animal abuse, homophobia, and people with low self confidence.
HOBBIES: Drawing/painting, playing games, and being awesome.
5 THINGS I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT: PS3, hair dye, my Nook, tea, endless supply of fresh fruit.
I SPEND MOST OF MY FREE TIME: Working, playing videogames, reading or drawing.
SG political contributor David Seaman discusses the ongoing media bias against presidential candidate Ron Paul, and (possibly) preferential media coverage given to presumed frontrunner Mitt Romney. David also explores the possibility that the corporate media is engaged in topic censorship in a style similar to that seen with state-run Chinese media; Protest coverage (on all sides of the political spectrum), for example, has been woefully absent from mainstream news outlets over the past several months.
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David Seaman is an independent journalist. He has been a lively guest on CNN Headline News, FOX News, ABC News Digital, among others, and on his humble YouTube channel, DavidSeamanOnline. Some say he was recently censored by a certain large media corporation for posting a little too much truth… For more, find him on G+ and Twitter.
INTO: Art, fashion, food, snowboarding, traveling, meeting new people, lightning, paradoxes, nonsense, sci-fi movies, well done tattoos, laughing at life’s oddities, the Cincinnati Bengals, San Jose Sharks, Oakland A’s, and the Bay Area.
NOT INTO: Picky eaters, bad tattoos, grass, not experiencing new things, close mindedness, the Steelers.
MAKES ME HAPPY: My two cats MaryJane and Spiderman, my white bunny YoJimbo Ninja, adoption of children or animals, going to a new place, eating bomb ass food, wearing a pair of beautiful sky high platform shoes with a sick outfit, spontaneous days.
MAKES ME SAD: Roadkill, deforestation, oil spills.
HOBBIES: Snowboarding, rock climbing, Bikram yoga, running, swimming, eating, sleeping.
5 THINGS I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT: Love, laughter, good food, good company, and good style.
This past week would have been pure lulz online, had the denizens of the web not been fighting over something so humorless. But then there’s nothing funny about spying on your citizens, denying them free speech, and criminalizing vast swathes of them for good measure, but that’s what our government, and the corporations that are under the impression that they control it, are trying to do.
Following last week’s historic Internet Blackout Day, which saw the likes of Wikipedia, Reddit, and BoingBoing go dark, it was apparent to everyone that SOPA and PIPA needed to be put on ice – everyone that is, except the Democrats, who have been suckling at Hollywood’s teet for way to long, and appear to have got their mouths stuck there.
But with SOPA’s markup hearing and PIPA’s Senate vote both indefinitely postponed, the Feds apparently decided they didn’t need the ugly censorship sister acts to go after online targets already in their sights. It was therefore no coincidence that the day after Blackout Day, the US Department of Justice moved against file sharing site Megaupload.
Their choice of target to make an example of might have seemed strange, especially when considering that Pirate Bay is perhaps a more recognizable name to those outside of the downloading massive. However, the decision to make an exhibition of Megaupload was likely motivated by more then a little machismo (or more accurately the public loss of it) on behalf of the entertainment industry who had long been lobbying for such action, and who had been taunted, publicly humiliated, and deemed impotent by the file sharing giant. (Megaupload had posted a promotional clip on YouTube which featured numerous major label artists including P Diddy, Kanye West, and Chris Brown, and a feud involving disputed DMCA takedown missives, lawsuits, and online mudslinging had ensued.)
What was perhaps most disturbing about the US government’s action against Megaupload, was that they made the site disappear like a renditioned prisoner – without any due process. And following the arrests of the site’s founder Kim Dotcom and three other key executives in New Zealand, and two further arrests in Europe, it became very apparent that when it comes to copyright infringement the long arm of America’s law extends far beyond our nation’s borders.
Retribution, courtesy of Anonymous and #OpMegaupload, was swift, and within hours numerous websites were “tango down.” Online shop windows successfully owned included those for government agencies (justice.gov, usdoj.gov, and fbi.gov), entertainment trade/lobbying organizations (riaa.org, mpaa.org, and bmi.com), and media corporations (universalmusic.com, wmg.com, and cbs.com).
As YourAnonNews noted, the non-consensual blackout day was “the largest attack ever by Anonymous” with “5,635 people confirmed using LOIC to bring down sites!” Gawker subsequently gave some insight as to how the mass coordinated DDoS attack was achieved by way of links that launched LOICs unbeknownst to those that clicked on them – the lack of intention in theory meaning accidental DDoS’ers should have the law on their side. (In CBS’s case, a little hackery also seemed to be involved, since their site, unlike the others, at one point appeared to have been totally wiped, though we’re not sure what exactly they did to achieve this special treatment. Answers via Twitter please.)
But despite shots fired against government and corporate vessels by pro-pirate and freedom friendly ships, the battle to contain and control the web continues as other file sharing sites curtail their activities in the hopes of avoiding Megaupload’s fate. PIPA and SOPA may be dead in the water, but two even worse pieces of legislation are on the horizon.
The misleadingly named Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act would use kiddie porn as a premise to monitor EVERYONE’S online activity (and what politician can appear to be pro-pedophilia by voting against it?), while the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) contains similar Big Brother surveillance provisions and contains SOPA-like language that requires that signatory nations* monitor and censor the internet within their domain. So while we internuts may have won out against the tyranny of PIPA and SOPA, the fight to retain freedom on the world wide web has only just begun.
“They lied to Congress, they perjured themselves, they concealed the fact they had a major blowout from offshore drilling.”
– Greg Palast
In his latest book, Vultures’ Picnic, investigative reporter Greg Palast jumps ass deep into the one percent’s favorite combustible lubricant. Armed with a miniature recording device, condoms, mosquito repellant, K-Y Jelly, a 3.4-ounce flask of Felipe II, and his trademark fedora hat, Palast travels from Alaska to the Amazon, and from Louisiana to Liberia to expose the dirty business of crude oil, and those who make indecent fortunes from it.
During the course of his investigations, Palast uncovers the incestuous relationships between the petroleum corporations and the governments they control, and how human and environmental carnage, corruption, coup d’états, and cover-ups are ultimately considered a cost of doing business by these toxic bedfellows.
[Caution: You may feel violated after reading this interview — but at least you’ll know a few of the names of the motherfuckers that are screwing you.]
