Gen Y Must Totally Abandon Boomer Thinking

From Douglas Haddow's latest article in Adbusters:

"Gen Y only has one choice if it wants to avoid becoming a lost generation: push the boomer way of life onto an ice floe and let it die. Rather than Bourriaud’s altermodernism, we should pursue an alter-realism: dispense with the art gallery altogether and make reality our experimentation lab.

There is a revolutionary current running through the subconscious of this generation that has yet to be realized or defined. We champion piracy, instinctively believing that information should be free and open, that intellectual property law is contra-progress and that capital is not a necessary intermediary for social organization. Postcapital collaboration is our daily bread, and we hold a distinctly global worldview, void of class, race or nation. But we grew up too comfortable, played too much Nintendo, watched too much Saved by the Bell, read too much Chuck Klosterman and not enough Frantz Fanon. We naïvely drank the consumerist-credit card Kool-Aid, and now that the Final Fantasy is upon us, we’re in danger of sliding into a delusional techno-utopianism.

This is our decisive moment. Either we wallow in debt as passive observers of history and pray that technology will eventually solve all our problems or we actively seize power and deal with the consequences. While Gen Y outnumbers the boomers, we won’t hold the balance of power for another ten years, at which point the climate may be all but lost. So democracy is not an option.

We should take our cue from the likes of the Brazilian Pixadores, a disenfranchised group of graffiti artists from the favelas of Rio who storm and vandalize art galleries and universities to proclaim their existence against the society that excludes them. But rather than storm art galleries we should pursue a policy of strife: storm and occupy whatever political and economic space we can."

Editing: The White Stripes- Hardest Button to Button

Video directed by Michel Gondry.



This music video from the middle of the White Stripes' career relies entirely on editing. There are no long shots. Each take lasts between a few frames to just less than a second. Gondry uses hundreds of very short shots to animate the band, in a sloppier, more jittery version of stop motion animation.

In the beginning of the video, the drummer Meg moves, exactly with the drumbeat, in a bizarre way. She is not walking. Instead, her entire drum set scoots through the landscape, and multiplies as she goes, leaving a trail of empty drum sets behind her. The singer, Jack, walks in what appears to be a normal fashion. In this sequence, especially when they walk down the stairs, the edits for Meg are obvious, while the edits for Jack are seamless- I am not even sure if his walking was shot in the same multiple-takes way as Meg's was.

Adorable Spider Babies Atop Their Mother

I wonder what percentage of the population would react to the baby (wolf?) spiders shown here with, "Aaw!" noises. Count me among them.