Psyched to see my cyberactive colleague Donald Melanson over there to the left... welcome to the land of fourblogs! Meanwhile, I'm off to Austin, Texas for the Fourth National Community Network Conference. We were actually supposed to move from Boulder to Austin this weekend, by screwups by Ryder Trucks delayed the move. Should've checked their Planet Feedback complaint record. But wait - I'm going with U-Haul, and theirs is worse! Dang... turns out that these rental agaencies don't do too well on Planet Feedback... they must ALL be bad! Whatever the case... yers truly may be spotty posting to the blog the next few daze... please bear with me.
posted by jon lebkowsky at 11/30/2001 08:32:26 PM
Sketches for a New Blacklist David Price, author of the forthcoming Cold War Witch Hunts: The FBI's Surveillance and Repression of Activist Anthropologists, warns that we could see a resurgence of the cold war blacklisting of academics and intellectuals with minority views as an unhappy byproduct of the War on Terrorism:
The ACTA recently produced a 38 page pamphlet that in many ways reads like a prototype of a neo-McCarthyist blacklist for our new hot war (see: http://www.goacta.org/Reports/defciv.pdf). The pamphlet, "Defending Civilization: How our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It" compiles 117 quotes from respected American academicians critical of current US policies. These quotes range from gentle questions concerning the propriety of specific actions, to radical critiques of American policies and practices, but theses quotes lead the ACTA to make the charge that "college and university faculty have been the weak link in America's response to the attack" of September 11th.
Enemy Mine... fantasizing sex with Osama. Weirdly funny piece at Nerve...
posted by jon lebkowsky at 11/25/2001 10:21:16 AM
Finally experienced Rick Linklater's film Waking Life, with Wiley Wiggins (or his interpolated rotoscope shadow) as a character in a persistent, increasingly lucid dream, or perhaps meta-dream (a dream about dreaming). He meets characters that stream philosophical dialogues about the nature of consciousness, perception, reality, life, and death, in the end reaching a... (whups, nearly popped a spoiler!) If you're interested in the animation technology behind the film, check out the article from Wired 9.02, Unreal World.
posted by jon lebkowsky at 11/25/2001 10:09:49 AM