KENNETH CAPPELLO
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Michael Jackson
from the New Yorker
by Kelefa Sanneh July 6, 2009
Michael Jackson
The news of Michael Jackson’s death arrived late on Thursday afternoon, and the great outpouring of celebrity eulogies began immediately. Steven Spielberg: “His talent, his wonderment, and his mystery make him legend.” Beyoncé: “He was magic.” John Mayer: “I truly hope he is memorialized as the ’83 moonwalking, MTV-owning, mesmerizing, unstoppable, invincible Michael Jackson.” And, from France, a gracious statement came from Manu Dibango, the seventy-five-year-old African pop pioneer. He mourned the loss of “un artiste exceptionnel, le plus talentueux et ingénieux” (no translation necessary).
Dibango was one of countless people whose lives were changed by Jackson’s music, although in Dibango’s .......read more
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Monday, June 22, 2009
Iran Election Crisis: 10 Incredible YouTube Videos
1. Saturday, June 13th
This was one of the first Iran election protests videos to be spread around the web. Translate, the video’s title is “Saturday 23 June.” In actuality, this video was taken on Saturday, June 13th in what we believe to be Tehran.
2. June 13th: Riot in tehran streets after election day
This now well-known video has over 400,000 views. You can see the green masks of the Mousavi movement onn clear display.
3. June 13th: BBC – Protest against Iran election results
The BBC was on top of the Iran crisis. This popular video is an incredible on-the-ground report.
4. June 14th: Iranians protest against election results, police intervene
This is one of the first videos that shows the police getting involved in breaking up the crowds that formed not long after the elections. There are cries, screaming, running, burning wreckage, and many angry citizens.
5. June 14th: Iran Election Protest in Paris
The protests have not just been inside of Iran. There have been demonstrations in cities across the world in support of Mousavi’s Green Movement. This well-produced video comes out of Paris.
6. June 17: Protesting in Silence – Tehran
Silence.
7. June 19th: Poem for the Rooftops of Iran
From the video’s description: “A woman speaking about the state of her country while filming the rooftop shouting of “Allah-o Akbar” in Iran on Friday June 19th”
The poem and the background noise make this video evoke emotions that are unlike most of the other videos coming out of Iran.
8. June 20th: Basij Milita have opened fire into crowds
This unedited video from the BBC is a display of how the violence has escalated in all of Iran.
9. June 20: Wounded Girl Dying [GRAPHIC CONTENT]
WARNING: The following video is very graphic, disturbing, and involves the death of an Iranian woman.
DO NOT WATCH unless you feel capable AND are old enough.
Nevermind the crisis in Iran – this is one of the most brutal videos I have ever seen in my life. That is why I have provided multiple warnings about this one, but I feel that it is important to include it for several reasons:
- Social media is raw, and that YouTube allows you to get the uncensored version of things. We cannot be blind to that fact.
- This is, in my mind, the most incredible of all the videos coming out of Iran.
- Sometimes, you have to see everything to really understand what’s going on. Things are very, very bad in Iran, period.
With all of that said, this video is just gut-wrenching.
10. June 20th: Tehran Tazahorat
You can’t help but be amazed by the sheer number of people in the streets. THis video has been passed around a lot recently in social circles, and for good reason. It’s incredible, just like all of the videos here.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Enter the Real-time Genie
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Iranian youth make their case for freedom and democracy to a worldwide audience and they find more than a sympathetic ear-they find a global avalanche of support- being a despot will never be easy again-Viva the courageous youth of Iran-Viva peace & freedom-Viva the new global opinion and consciousness-Viva the Real-time web.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
The Green Brief - By NiteOwl
I'm Josh Shahryar AKA NiteOwl and I've been immersed in tweets from Iran for the past several hours. I have tried to be extremely careful in choosing my tweet sources and have tried maximally to avoid listening to media banter. What I have compiled below is what I can confirm through my tweets to have happened in the past day and in the past week in Iran. Remember, this is all from tweets. There is NOTHING included here that is not from a reliable tweet. No news media outlets have been used in the compilation of this short brief as I would like to call it.
These are some of the happenings that I can positively confirm:
1. During the last protest in Tehran, several policemen have been spotted by protesters who were wearing green bands which is the color of the revolution. The policemen have told them candidly that they support them.
2. During the protests, on several occasions, Baseejis who have attacked peaceful protesters have been arrested on the spot by the police. This seems to have occured in several spots, yet it hasn't been a crackdown of sorts. A few cases only!
3. Several Baseeji militiamen have been spotted laying down their arms and going home after being asked to interfere with the protesters.
4. By far the biggest threat people are facing right now are plainclothesmen. They seem to be everywhere and are targetting people who are not in groups. These men have been mostly linked with Ansar e Hezbollah. They are responsible for beating people up, arresting people, threatening protesters, arresting reformists from their homes and such.
5. So far, it has been confirmed that 15 people in Tehran and 32 people around the country have been killed. Hundreds more have been injured and in excess of 800 people have been detained. Among these there are dozens of reformists. Most of these arrests have been made by the notorious plainclothesmen mentioned above.
6. During yesterday's protests, mullahs have been spotted joining rallies within Tehran and in several other cities. No one could confirm what the status of these Mullahs was or is within the clerical society, but their numbers have been very visible this time.
7. Protests have occured not just in Tehran yesterday, but in Ahvaz, Mashhad, Kermanshah, Qazvin, Shiraz, Tabriz and EVER Qom.
8. Pro-Ahmadinejad protesters' numbers have been greatly exaggerated by the state media in comparison to Mousavi's supporters' numbers. In reality, Pro-Ahmadinejad protesters were only a pocket full of people. Most of these people have been identified by other protesters as either people who work at government offices or people who were brought from the countryside.
9. After downplaying the protests for days, the state-run media has finally started to announce news of the events a little more accurately.
10. Text Messaging is still down in Iran and internet is extremely slow. People are unable to get sattelite channels on their televisions. At the same time, police and plainclothesmen are going door to door and taking away people's sattelite dish antenas.
11. Mohsen Rezayee, one of the candidates, is going to declare his support for a reelection tomorrow. The fourth candidate, Mahdi Karoubi openly joined yesterday's rally.
12. A group of prominent officials within the Ministry of Interior have written a letter to the Guardian Council declaring that they have witnessed widespread irregularities within the voting and counting processes during the election. They have asked this matter to be investigated fully.
13. As of today, not a single report of the military's intervention into the peaceful protests has been established. Not a single one.
14. Khatami and Mousavi have both asked the Ministry of Justice to investigate the involvement of the plainclothesmen in the violence that has been sparked during the protests.
15. Several eye-witnesses have seen non-Iranian Arabs waving Hamas/Hezbollah flags around the protests. These reports have been fully confirmed and are NOT a rumor spread by Israel.
16. Finally, the big news. It seems that the Green Revolution has garnered the support of Hashemi Rafsanjani, Nateq Noori, Tabatabayee and other prominent clerics and politicians. The Rohaniyone Mubarez organization that which has in its ranks pretty much most of the clerics except for the ones in power and includes Mr. Rafsanjani and Mr. Noori has declared their support for the annullment of the election and holding of new elections. Ayatollah Montazeri has yet to declare clear support.
Finally a few words to those who are reading this:
People Outside Iran: This is as clear and concise as I can be. I have not included ANYTHING that I have sensed to be remotely fishy, but human error will always manifests itself in even the most flawless of non-mathematical things. However, this includes nothing from the Western media, including the BBC which I have been generously using to inform people and I laud them for their courageous journalism.
People Inside Iran: Don't believe a WORD of what I am telling you. Do what you think is best, keeping everything in mind. I know LITTLE of what you know so make your decisions based on your OWN judgment.
People Who Want to Send Me Tweet Links: You don't need to find me, I will find you. Don't hassle yourself. Your voice will be heard through millions of others like me.
People Who Want to Hunt Me Down: I'm an Afghan. If you ever tried to attack me, you'll see my back only after your back has met the ground.
P.S. Please post this around. I will be writing one brief of this kind everyday until this ends.
Link to the Night Owl
Mindblowing #IranElection Stats: 221,744 Tweets Per Hour at Peak
FROM: Mashable
The protests in Iran have only grown in size and in magnitude these last few days. Ever since the highly disputed “landslide victory” for incumbent Ahmadinejad and subsequent charges of voter fraud, Iranians have taken up their cameras, mobile phones, and computers to send Twitter updates, YouTube videos, and Flickr (
While we knew that these social tools have been instrumental to the Iranian protests (so much so that the U.S. Government asked Twitter to reschedule downtime), we had no idea about the actual number of tweets sent or YouTube videos uploaded until now. Thanks to the social media trend tracker Trendrr, we can show you the sheer scale of the #IranElection crisis discussion.
Twitter: 221,744 “Iran” Tweets in One Hour
The use of Twitter (
Use of the #IranElection hashtag is extraordinary as well.
We’re approaching one million tweets on the situation, if we haven’t passed that number already. Heck, it’s been 1% of all Twitter chatter, according to Twist. Here it is compared to iPhone chatter:
The Blogosphere: 2,250,000 Blog Posts in 24 hours
The number of blog posts discussing Iran has been on a rapid rise as well. There are now over 19,000,000 blog posts that discuss Iran in some fashion, but in the last 24 hours, 2,250,000 posts were published.
That’s nearly 12% of all blog posts related to Iran. And while news stories within Google News have risen dramatically as well, they don’t hold a candle to the social media buzz:
YouTube: 184,500 Videos on Iran, 3000 in One Day
YouTube (
Even if every video were just two minutes, that would be over 6000 minutes of video related to the Iran situation. There are days worth of video on YouTube of what’s happening on the ground.
The Buzz Only Grows
While numbers can be off, these trends clearly demonstrate that social media has been front-and-center in the Iran election protests. The Iranian government has reportedly been trying to censor some of this communication, but clearly people are finding ways around it. While we know a great deal about what’s happening in Iran, we have almost no idea how it will affect the outcome. This may be the biggest question that remains to be answered.
In the meantime though, we keep refreshing Twitter Search and watching YouTube videos to keep up-to-date. Some are even using social media to help Iranians who are demonstrating in the streets. If you want to better track what’s happening in Iran via social channels, be sure to read our article HOW TO: Track Iran Election with Twitter and Social Media.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Iranian presidential candidate Mohsen Rezai calls for peace
The former soldier and insurgent who launched two of Iran's most acclaimed news websites says he can smooth Iran's relations with the international community.
By Borzou Daragahi
June 8, 2009
Reporting from Tehran -- Like so many of his generation, Mohsen Rezai is a fighter.
Before Iran's Islamic Revolution, he was a member of an underground organization fighting against Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi's regime. Afterward, Rezai helped found and lead the Revolutionary Guard, and he was a warrior in the 1980s war against Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army.
In recent years, he launched two of Iran's most acclaimed news websites, which spoke out against the country's feuding conservative and reformist factions.
Now, he's the only conservative among three candidates running against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is seeking reelection to the presidency of the Islamic Republic. Although Rezai was long a man of war, he's convinced he is the person to calm relations between Iran and the international community.
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Monday, June 8, 2009
David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'
The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler. Happy election season.
An election-season essay
by David Mamet
March 11th, 2008 12:00 AM
John Maynard Keynes was twitted with changing his mind. He replied, "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"
My favorite example of a change of mind was Norman Mailer at The Village Voice.
Norman took on the role of drama critic, weighing in on the New York premiere of Waiting for Godot.
Twentieth century's greatest play. Without bothering to go, Mailer called it a piece of garbage.
When he did get around to seeing it, he realized his mistake. He was no longer a Voice columnist, however, so he bought a page in the paper and wrote a retraction, praising the play as the masterpiece it is.
Every playwright's dream.
I once won one of Mary Ann Madden's "Competitions" in New York magazine. The task was to name or create a "10" of anything, and mine was the World's Perfect Theatrical Review. It went like this: "I never understood the theater until last night. Please forgive everything I've ever written. When you read this I'll be dead." That, of course, is the only review anybody in the theater ever wants to get.
My prize, in a stunning example of irony, was a year's subscription to New York, which rag (apart from Mary Ann's "Competition") I considered an open running sore on the body of world literacy—this due to the presence in its pages of John Simon, whose stunning amalgam of superciliousness and savagery, over the years, was appreciated by that readership searching for an endorsement of proactive mediocrity.
But I digress.
I wrote a play about politics (November, Barrymore Theater, Broadway, some seats still available). And as part of the "writing process," as I believe it's called, I started thinking about politics. This comment is not actually as jejune as it might seem. Porgy and Bess is a buncha good songs but has nothing to do with race relations, which is the flag of convenience under which it sailed.
But my play, it turned out, was actually about politics, which is to say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.
The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it's at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.
Read the full post o The Voice
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Saturday, June 6, 2009
The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online
WIRED MAGAZINE: 17.06
Wikipedia, Flickr, and Twitter aren't just revolutions in online social media. They're the vanguard of a cultural movement.
Illustration: Christoph Niemann
Bill Gates once derided open source advocates with the worst epithet a capitalist can muster. These folks, he said, were a "new modern-day sort of communists," a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic incentive that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong: Open source zealots are more likely to be libertarians than commie pinkos. Yet there is some truth to his allegation. The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of socialism.
Communal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide. Wikipedia is just one remarkable example of an emerging collectivism—and not just Wikipedia but wikiness at large. Ward Cunningham, who invented the first collaborative Web page in 1994, tracks nearly 150 wiki engines today, each powering myriad sites. Wetpaint, launched just three years ago, hosts more than 1 million communal efforts. Widespread adoption of the share-friendly Creative Commons ....
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ACID DROP
Curated by Tim Barber
A Milk Gallery Project
Exhibition dates: June 2nd - 13th
450 WEST 15TH STREET
James Fuentes LLC is pleased to announce a solo presentation by ALEJANDRO CARDENAS
LISTE, The Young Art Fair Basel, Stand: 1/2/2
Burgweg 15, 4058 Basel, Switzerland
June 9 - 14, 2009
http://www.liste.ch
JAMES FUENTES LLC
35 ST. JAMES PLACE
NEW YORK, NY 10038
TEL 212.577.1201
FAX 212.577.1202
Variables
New works by Jessica Eaton
Opening Reception Friday June 12th, 7 - 11pm
June 12 - July 12
LES Gallery
1879 Powell Street
Vancouver
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Thursday, June 4, 2009
Remarks by Václav Havel and Two Members of China's Charter 08 at the Ceremony for the Homo Homini Award
By Václav Havel, Cui Weiping, Xu Youyu
This is an online-only supplement to the April 30 issue of the Review.
Opening of the One World
Human Rights Film Festival,
Prague, Czech Republic,
March 11, 2009
I offer my congratulations to the recipients of this year's Homo Homini Award and I am happy they came here from China. Allow me to make a few remarks. First, I think I will be speaking on behalf of most signatories of Charter 77 if I say that we are both pleased and honored to have inspired the Chinese Charter 08.
Secondly, I would like once more to point out our experience, one that our Chinese friends should adopt in one way or another, the experience that one may never reckon with success, one may never reckon with the situation changing tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, or in ten years. Perhaps it will not. If that is what you are reckoning with, you will not get very far.
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Wednesday, June 3, 2009
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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Data-Entry Supervisor
It's time for an ambitious new literature of the office
By Alain de Botton May 31, 2009
Without quite grasping the extent of our debt, we rely on writers to help explain the world to us. It's they who give us a feel for what it's like to fall in love, who give us words for describing the landscape around us, and who help us interpret the dynamics of our families. Such is their power that we can name whole slices of experience with adjectives built of their names. We speak of encountering, sometimes in the most unlikely settings, dynamics most succinctly described as "Proustian," "Austenesque," and "Kafkan." Writers are our map-makers.
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