Piquetero TV in Argentina

by Sebastian Hacher

Mute has recently covered the appearance of street TV in Italy [unavailable, check out these instead]. Here, Sebastian Hacher reports on the emergence of a new form of self-instituted community media out of Argentina's piquetero movement

Like the advertising people we talked about, I'm concerned with

the precise manipulation of word and image to create an action,

not to go out and buy Coca-Cola, but to create an alteration in

the reader's consciousness – William Burroughs

'Mister, mister! What time will we be on TV?'

'Film his ribs, look at how skinny he is!'



The children come in from playing, covered head to bare feet in mud, dragging behind them the smallest child in a box on wheels. They get excited when the camera focuses on them in the middle of the preparations for the transmission. They probably aren't aware that the subject of their questions and pleas is not a normal television producer come to cover some crime, accident, or fire, but a piquetero. The man hanging off a post trying to mount an antenna is setting up the first ever live transmission by a mobile television channel in Florencio Valera's San Rudecindo neighbourhood.

Noam Chomsky Blog Goes On-Line

Here: ChomskyBlog

"Noam Chomsky, Superstar"

Derrick O'Keefe, Seven Oaks Magazine

The Noam Chomsky phenomenon swept Vancouver this weekend. Chomsky, the MIT linguistics professor, prolific anti-establishment writer, and perhaps the closest thing there is to a living icon of the North American Left, spoke to a crowd of close to 20,000 at the March 20 anti-war rally at Sunset Beach, and then followed it up with two sold-out talks at the Orpheum theatre. It's worth looking at the lasting and massive appeal of Chomsky, to find out what it says about the man himself and the state of movements for social change.

Here is the new website URL for American post-situationist historian, theorist and activist Ken Knabb's Bureau of Public Secrets

"The Strange Afterlife of Cornelius Castoriadis"

Scott McLemee, Chronicle of Higher Education

The story of a revered European thinker, a literary legacy, family squabbles, and Internet bootlegging

As a student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor during the early 1980s, Bill Brown began publishing Not Bored!, a photocopied journal of small circulation inspired by what Mr. Brown calls "the ultra-left milieu": revolutionary thinkers and organizations considered too extreme by orthodox Socialist and Communist parties. You can still subscribe to the hard-copy edition, but today most readers discover it through www.notbored.org. Many of them seek it out for the site's impressive archive of classic ultra-leftist texts.

Mr. Brown's Web site is prominent enough within a certain political subculture. But it is hardly the place one would expect to be the first English-language publisher of a book that would normally be issued by a major academic press. Then again, the circumstances behind The Rising Tide of Insignificancy (The Big Sleep), by Cornelius Castoriadis, are anything but normal.

hydrarchist writes:

Telestreet [Pirate television] Etera 2 in Senigallia

Etera 2 meeting, March the 25th 2004 in Sennigallia, will be the second
meeting of the Telestrade or Telestreet. A national movement of micro-tv
stations (sometimes transmitting to no more than a few blocks) scattered
across Italy. Telestreet operates between the legal and technological
cracks of the Italian mediascape. Literally squatting the shadows or blank
spots where the signals of terrestrial broadcasters cannot reach, leaving
shadows on the spectrum which the Telestreet groups occupy.

Here's a nice video from San Francisco Indymedia:

WarPigs

friend@know-our-enemy.net writes:

Anti-War on Terror Posters Available On-Line

"Here"

"Grey Tuesday" Civil Disobedience Planned February 24th Against Copyright
Cartel

DOWNHILL BATTLE (February 18, 2004) -- A coalition of websites will join
in an online protest to offer free downloads of a critically acclaimed
album that is being censored by a lawsuit threat from EMI Records. The
action is an act of civil disobedience against a copyright regime that
routinely suppresses musical innovation. The Grey Album, which remixes
Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatles' White Album, has been hailed as a
innovative hip-hop triumph, but EMI sent cease-and-desist letters to any
record store that stocked it. This Tuesday ("Grey Tuesday") the coalition
of sites will offer free downloads of the Grey Album, and turn their pages
grey, to take a stand against a copyright regime that serves neither
musicians nor the public interest.

"Copy Adorno, Go To Jail? Textz.com Doesn't Think So"

Textz.com

The Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Culture, presided by
Jan Philipp Reemtsma, has just advanced science and culture to a whole new
level: Sebastian Luetgert, the founder of textz.com, is facing a warrant of
arrest and may go to jail if he fails to pay more than 2,300 euros in damages
for the alleged copying of two essays by Theodor W. Adorno that the foundation
claims as their "intellectual property". Reemtsma was kindly asked to settle,
but refused.