Propaganda I Love

Propaganda I Love:
After dinner with the former Iraqi minister, she gave me a wonderful video on Kurdistan entitled "The Other Iraq, Share the Dream." I haven't watched it yet but i say it's wonderful because the cover has a little girl in the middle of a mountain valley holding some sort of luminous orb. Here's the corresponding website:

The Other Iraq

Another propaganda site that I'm really digging these days is the response to Hubert Sauper's horrific (but also wonderful) documentary Darwin's Nightmare:

darwinsnightmare.net

It's a thinly veiled creation of the Tanzanian tourism ministry (or whatever) and aside from the hilarious attack on Sauper which completely misses the point it's a well designed site with links to fishing industry sites. The best part is the attempt at user generated content where you can post photos, ideally of Tanzania's natural wonders but also anything that might slander Sauper. Some savvy researcher has managed to find photo evidence of Sauper's links to both Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.



Here's the real site:
darwinsnightmare.com

ps HAPPY BIRTHDAY ELISA!

SANTORUM!

Rap Music

In The Conciousness Industry Hans Magnus Enzensberger writes:

"Too often the champions of inwardness and sensibility are reactionaries. They consider politics a special subject best left to professionals, and wish to detach it completely from all other human activity. They advise poetry to stick to such models as they have devised for it, in other words, to high aspirations and eternal values. The promised reward for this continence is timeless validity. Behind these high sounding proclamations lurks a contempt for poetry no less profound than that of vulgar Marxism. For a political quarantine placed on poetry in the name of eternal values itself serves political ends."

There's a movement within Rap that seeks to judge contemporary black music according to a set of aesthetic and thematic values known as "keeping it real." In the world of these Hip-Hop Heads (as they refer to themselves) everything is judged by how closely it can approximate the so called "Golden Age" of rap, roughly the decade spanning the mid eighties and early nineties that saw what was essentially an African-American folk style from New Yorks' outer burroughs become the dominant pop-music style in North America. It eclipsed Country as the highest selling genre, I think, in 1998.

Within this "Backpacker/Hip-Hop/Neo-Soul/Purist" culture there is very little room for experimentation

As many of my friends know, I sometimes listen to Rap Music. I can't stand anything, however, that attempts to be cerebral or concious or anything less. Have you ever wondered what people listen to in Baltimore ?
Government Names
Vancouver