Watch this incredibly smart short film, called "Food Fight". It is the history of modern warfare from WWII to the present as re-enacted by food (Japanese are sushi, Americans are hamburgers, etc.). The director, Stefan Nadelman, describes it as a "smorgasbord of aggression" and you'll see why. (The end is particularly effective.) You might have to watch it more than once to successfully identify all the battles, but it's worth the effort.
A video mashup compares Hillary Clinton to cinematic go-getter Tracy Flick.
Semiotic democracy is a process by which ordinary citizens redefine culture by remixing and repurposing cultural elements and then disseminating them to a mass audience. The internet has been hugely helpful to this effort. While people have always been able to reinternpret cultural, they have never before had the ability to broadcast these reinterpretations to a mass audience. This final step is key, because it is only through mass redistribution that a reinterpretation of culture can become a generally-accepted norm. The internet, through personal web sites, blogs, and video
Here are a couple of videos a friend sent me, made by Amnesty International. The first is my favorite. It is about how important a petition signature is, that signatures save lives. It's pure poetry. And even though it looks like it will be violent, it isn't, which is the whole of Amnesty International, after all.
The second has the same theme but doesn't have the narrative clarity of the first. Nevertheless, the last few seconds are really beautiful, so you can fast forward to the 0:41 minute mark if you're impatient.
No, this isn't a joke. Since last summer I've been submitting commentary to a program on Aljazeera English called The Listening Post. I knew that my comments were being broadcast but I had never seen the program until today when one of the show's producers very nicely sent me a link. The show is about the Iraqi government stopping its reporting of civilian casualties. My comment is at the end, around the 3:10 minute mark.
