connecting*the*dots

Yesterday, Andy, Jonathan and I attended the film’s world premeire at the Tribeca Film Festival as a guest of Director, Deborah Scranton. The air of the theatre was chock-full of tangible anticipation, as the audience verbally spatted with itself before, during and after the screening. What else would you expect? We’re waist deep in a war that has spiraled out of (non)control into random acts of sectarian violence, kidnappings and assassinations.

But no matter your position on the war in Iraq, The War Tapes is a must see. It isn’t propaganda for empire building and it isn’t anti-war material. The film is 90-minutes of brilliantly edited (from 1200+ hours of raw footage), first person perspective of three National Guard soldiers who agreed to film their year-long tour of Iraq. The narrative twists and turns through adrenaline rushes, moments of self-reflection and gut-wrenching honest discourse.

It’s nothing but real, human storytelling of real, human beings.

The Q&A session following the film was interesting, both from the filmmaker and audience perspective. While we were being told about the thousands of hours of footage and IM conversations behind the making of the film, a few guys in the front of the audience began shouting randomly at the audience, defending the complexity of the war to a group of people who might have had a particular political perspective, but were incredibly apropos with their attention and questions directed squarely at the film itself.

Deborah and crew gracefully handled the protests and gave their mic’s to the soldiers (Stephen Pink, Mike Moriarty and Zack Bazzi), who casually stepped into the spotlight and delivered their $.02 on the whole experience. I guess a film premeire isn’t too much pressure after spending 365 days watching each other’s backs on the other side of the planet.

Following the Q&A, we stopped by the after party at The Bubble Lounge. While packed with friends, family and industry types, we eventually bumped into Deborah and her son (what’s up, Benjamin!?).

During our conversation, Deborah told me that due to the success of this project, a handful of soldiers have since contacted her, looking to become armed with the latest weapon of warfare: a video camera.

Citizen media has a new brother in arms, and soldier media has a five star director.

Chickenhawk bitch

Peter Beinart
‘NY Times’ Sunday Preview:
Democrats Need a Shot of ‘Cold War Liberalism’

NEW YORK Democrats may feel they are riding high, heading into the midterm elections with President Bush’s approval rating at an all-time low, but Peter Beinart offers a warning, and a new direction, for the party in a feature piece upcoming this Sunday in The New York Times Magazine. It’s titled provocatively, “The Rehabilitation of the Cold-War Liberal.�

The article is adapted from his forthcoming book, “The Good Fight.� Beinart is currently editor-at-large for The New Republic.

Beinart warns that it is not enough for the Democrats to simply run on “competence� this year, rather than telling Americans “what their vision is.� For better or worse, the Republicans have such a vision, which voters understand: “America represents good in an epic struggle against evil.�

Democrats have some good foreign-policy minds and even some worthy foreign-policy proposals but no “coherent story about the post-9/11 world….Before Democrats can conquer their ideological weakness, they must first conquer their ideological amnesia,â€? he declares.

The problem is, “Liberals don’t have a script because they don’t have a Reagan.� Their most recent presidents: Jimmy Çarter, considered a “failure� in the international field, and Bill Clinton, who allegedly didn’t have to do much because foreign policy was “peripheral� when he was in charge. (Beinart does not mention that Clinton at least ignored pleas to invade and occupy Iraq.)

While conservatives have “at least told a coherent political story, with deep historical roots, about what keeps America safe and what makes it great,” liberals “have offered adjectives drawn from focus groups and policy proposals linked by no larger theme.”

So what are the Dems to do? According to Beinart, they should look back to the late 1940s and 1950s and embrace the cold war liberalism of the time, best represented by Reinhold Niebuhr and George F. Kennan.

Besides being tough and anti-isolationist, this is defined by “a struggle not merely for democracy but for economic opportunity as well, in the belief that the former required the latter to survived.â€? It also requires admitting that even in fighting evil America must admit that we are not “inherently good.” He also calls for “generosity at homeâ€? as well as “generosity abroad.â€?

But how all this differs from current Democratic philosophy is hard to discern.

Themes? Stories? Vision?

I’m sorry, but I don’t want any of that politics-as-usual crap from the Democratic Party. I want agile leadership, stocked with backbone and the ability to shift on the fly.

And for this guy to wax poetic about the Republicans owning the concept, “America represents good in an epic struggle against evilâ€? shows how out of touch he is with the American voters, because ever since the Bush administration took office, even Republicans have been questioning this… narrative.

Keep on telling stories, bitches.

In the meantime, I’ll take a leader who listens to his/her constituency, will pull out a mirror and ask the tough questions of us as a republic and is willing to make sacrifices for the benefit of our already impoverished unborn grandchildren any day of the week.

I guess Lance Dutson shouldn’t have challenged the Maine Office of Tourism’s strategy to overbid for the top “Maine” queries in their search optimization campaign, even though it drove up prices for both his and other local businesses attempting to bid on similar keywords. The state’s advertising firm sued him (pdf) for his public display of discontent for how tax-payer’s money was being spent.

Oh yeah, they’re also suing because he took this (taxpayer-paid) ad off their site to make a point about the number provided (hint: call it if you’re lonely).

If the State of Maine had any clue, they’d do themselves a favor and pause to learn about the nature of the web and the power of conversations across state lines before backing an agency over one of their own residents. But then again, this is reality.

So much for Northeast intellectuals.

Back to the campaign at hand; Increasing the visibility of the Maine Office of Tourism to Maine residents must be good for the state, right? Why exclude Maine web browsers from their optimization campaign to help residents find Maine businesses first and foremost? I mean, I don’t know about you, but I’m always looking to come across tourist attractions within my own home state.

Unbelievably dumb. If this was happening in my neck of the woods, I’d be equally upset.

(via BuzzMachine)

World 2.0 seems to have raised it’s periscope within our culture almost 5 years ago, in the immediate post-9/11 world. Who would’ve thunk it possible?

Brad Neuberg on October 21, 2001:

The world seems to be hungry for an ideological alternative to capitalism. I don’t know if this is a rational or simply emotional need for something to challenge what is now the dominant ideology of the age, but I predict that as soon as a semi-credible ideological alternative to capitalism arises that it will spread like wildfire and produce another Cold War type situation. Communism used to be it, but is now defunct and dead, while fundamentalist Islam semi-fills this need in parts of the world. I’ve noticed this need to challenge capitalism while traveling; I can even see it in myself.

I’ve never met Brad — as a matter of fact, I was only introduced to his blog tonight via Messina’s post — yet I dropped a similar perspective on the state of capitalism on the other side of the planet just two weeks later in the fall of 2001.

Coincidence or…?

The collective unconscious has always been a powerful concept, but before blogging, it wasn’t a tangible construct. It took the invention of the permalink and intra-day personal publishing to even begin to generate enough trails of human expression to expose Jung’s concept of unspoken, shared realities and archetypes.

While The Cluetrain gang introduced the concept of a global conversation to netizens back in 1999, what I find so interesting about the blogosphere since that time, is that the very notion of a conversation has the potential to become explicitly amplified and extracted to become findable across new dimensions of length and density.

The web is now chock full of meshed thoughts and dreams, connected explicitly by hyperlinks, loosely by tags and conceptually by discovery. With a shift in search result interface paradigms, the possibilities for more complete, immediate research queries are endless.

Topical themes — or memes — shift intra-day and can last as conversations either as sporadic and finite bunches (Jill Carroll’s abduction and release over a three month period) or prolonged variants (George Bush’s presidency). Imagine what types of conversational connections will become possible when interfaces, such as a Technorati search result, leaves the conservative constraints of separated permalink results based on latest entries or authority, and instead focuses on the clustering of such conversations through visual metaphors across other dimensions.

And no, I’m not talking about a folder paradigm.

I’m talking about dynamic, visual representations of conversations, with the ability to shift in real-time, using attributes such as tags and language co-occurance to drive groupings within oppositional variants such as the length and density of the conversation.

The day our thoughts and dreams stop getting lost in the cracks of time and authority, we’ll be one step closer to the knowledge revolution, leaving information in the dust with data. Then the decolonization of cyberspace can begin with earnest.

How rude of me… What’s up, Brad?

Naomi Schaefer Riley - WSJ Editorial Page
Ladies, You Should Know Better

Word came out this week that Darryl Littlejohn, the New York bouncer charged in the Feb. 25 rape and murder of graduate student Imette St. Guillen, has been linked by a DNA match to an October sexual assault on another woman. This latest revelation will no doubt (and rightly) lead to more angry cries about the failure of Mr. Littlejohn’s parole officer to keep track of his violent charge and about the negligence of bar owners who do not check the backgrounds of their employees. But it should also serve to remind women, yet again, that it would be a good idea to use a little more common sense.

A police investigation has confirmed that on the night of her murder, Ms. St. Guillen was last seen in a bar, alone and drinking at 3 a.m. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It does not diminish Mr. Littlejohn’s guilt or the tragedy of Ms. St. Guillen’s death to note what more than a few of us have been thinking–that a 24-year-old woman should know better. Yet there are forces in our culture (writing letters to this newspaper even now) that find this suggestion offensive.

[…]

Radical feminists used to warn that men are evil and dangerous. Andrea Dworkin made a career of it. But that message did not seem reconcilable with another core feminist notion–that women should be liberated from social constraints, especially those that require them to behave differently from men. So the first message was dropped and the second took over.

The radical-feminist message was of course wrongheaded — most men are harmless, even those who play lacrosse — but it could be useful as a worst-case scenario for young women today. There is an alternative, but to paraphrase Miss Manners: People who need to be told to use their common sense probably didn’t have much to begin with.

First of all, the Duke rape case isn’t about harmful or harmless men; it’s about a mob mentality, peer pressure and a code of silence. Period. No anti-feminism, strawman argument fits squarely into these social dynamics. What, you don’t think those dynamics could lead to the rape of, say, a mentally retarded girl?

And “behave the same as men” is the post-radical feminism, modern day feminist rallying cry? Is that what consciousness raising groups espoused?

Hey there, nice to meet you, sister. Feeling oppressed? Me too. Ok, let’s go home, drink, curse, grab our crotches, and basically, do whatever the fuck we want. Consciousness raised!

As far as I know, feminists (or any other evangalists of ‘isms’ for that matter) have yet to reduce the complexity of their message down to a singular, easily digestible elevator pitch. If they could, the “ism” wouldn’t exist as a debatable social construct. Such simplistic dialog comes from the opposition of these “isms” (whether it be capitalism, communism, socialism, etc.).

It’s completely out of line to turn this incident — or any alleged rape — into a study of the effects of feminism on the modern day woman. If we allow that line of thinking, we submit ourselves to inherently believe that women can avoid being attacked if they only dressed with multiple layers of clothing, stayed on well lit paths and wore aprons from dawn to dusk.

That’s like trying to argue that if you mind your business and remain “in line” in Iraq, you won’t get randomly assassinated.

Fucked up shit occurs in this imperfect world through the hands of fucked up individuals — sometimes affected by peer pressures, sometimes by crazed ideologies. Within this context, common sense is an incredibly loaded term, especially when spilled from the mouths of the unaffected.

UPDATE: Speaking of Schaefer Riley’s mouth, Jennifer Pozner of AlterNet places her position into a clearer perspective:

If you’re wondering who are these “more than a few of us” who’d look at a brutal assault such as the one against St. Guillen and think, “Wow, what a stupid dead girl,” it’s worth noting the company this Wall Street Journal opinion writer keeps. Her prior work on religion was financially subsidized by the John M. Olin Foundation, a right-wing foundation which — before it closed shop — placed hundreds of thousands of dollars into media programs designed to convince the public that feminists whine too much about rape, that date rape is a “myth” and that the Violence Against Women Act is unnecessary. (For example, Olin was a major funder of Christina Hoff Sommers’ error-filled screed “Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women,” a highly inaccurate, widely debunked polemic that nevertheless garnered a heap of press coverage about feminism’s supposed failures.)

Artist: Brand Nubian (ft. Common)
Song: Maybe One Day

==========

[Grand Puba]
Yeah, yeah yeah yeah
One time as we do it like this, yeah
Grand Puba, Common Sense
[Common]
Yeah, yeah, yeah
It’s all love y’all (3X) what you say?
Intro/Chorus: all, Common
[all] Maybe one day we can work it out
Strive to understand what life’s about
All it seems to be is sadness and pain
Blood like rain clogs urban drains
[Com] When we gonna realize and make the change
And take the blame, erase the shame
Cause new millenium is knockin at your door
The New World Order’s what they got in store

[Grand Puba]
Now I can’t stress this enough, life sure is rough
You gotta go through a whole lotta shit
Just for you to get a little bit
Born into existence where your existence is non-existant
but your persistance overcomes their resistance
Your daily mechanism is your defense, whether it be
past or present tense, don’t be dense
I’m droppin this with Common Sense (true indeed)
As we linger on into the darkness
Poisoned by society where high-anxiety is just one variety
Hatin each other is another, brotha
I mean I’m really true to the shit, my spit ain’t just spit
My duty is to save my people from all of this shit
And if I can get somethin for doin that then I’m gon’ get
And I won’t quit
My ways and action manifest in my way of thinkin
I just can’t stand around and do nothin
while my people sinkin
I told you that I stay true
And I gotta do, what I can do, when I can do, so

[all] Maybe one day we can work it out
Strive to understand what life’s about
All it seems to be is sadness and pain
Blood like rain clogs urban drains
[Com] When we gonna realize and make the change
And take the blame, erase the shame
Cause new millenium is knockin at your door
The New World Order’s what they got in store

[Common]
Grand Pu…I’ma do….what I gotta do….what I can do
It’s one for all like Brand Nu-bian, feedin the multitudes
Of five loads, dead men walkin with lost souls
Some say the games are strange, our ways have been tribal
Since the days of Kemet, now displayed on Bennett
Revolution’s like a pussy, I’m tryin to stay up in it
And our music is a message, though some is afraid to send it
I don’t know much about the New World Order; I know I
Got a new daughter, direction and protection I must provide for her
The moral of the story I’m building…
Like ODB say, “We for the children”
Nike make a killin off us, we kill each other, it kills me to see that
You take a life for gold, nigga did you really need that?
We try to escape the mixtapes, rims and weed sack
And to the new age, they say the women’s gonna lead that, so

[all] Maybe one day we can work it out
Strive to understand what life’s about
All it seems to be is sadness and pain
Blood like rain clogs urban drains
[Com] When we gonna realize and make the change
And take the blame, erase the shame
Cause new millenium is knockin at your door
The New World Order’s what they got in store

[Pub] Oh say it ain’t so
[Com] It ain’t so
[Pub] My peoples at a all time low
[Com] Double oh Pu’
[Pub] Nowadays we doin anything for dough
[Com] For the dough doe
[Pub] Don’t you know that knowledge is the note
[Com] What?
[Pub] Know the ledge, don’t hit the edge
The negativity pulls us down like gravity
[Com] Yup
[Pub] Devilish ways and actions poisons us like a cavity
[Com] Yessir
[Pub] As we send this one throughout our whole proximity
[all] Grand Pu’ and Common strive to come together
[Common]
In this era of prepaid calling cards
I roll with squads called the Gods
Ignorance is at large, struggles in our backyard
I slapbox with life and see we wasn’t that hard
Long as you got God, even got Gramps off lah
It’s stray lies and bullets directed, to lead the village
of lies disconnected like ghetto phones
Fuck a search through a magazine for Better Homes
It ain’t gonna happen
Til the devil’s gone with the breeze
and niggas get off they knees so…
[all] Maybe one day we can work it out
Strive to understand what life’s about
All it seems to be is sadness and pain
Blood like rain clogs urban drains
[Com] When we gonna realize and make the change
And take the blame, erase the shame
Cause new millenium is knockin at your door
The New World Order’s what they got in store