Desedo resident polymath Paul Kamuf has managed, in the midst of our current goings-on, to complete a short starring one of his favorite beverages. Tea. Here’s hoping that the next time we mooch off of him, there will be some more great flavors in the cupboard. Until then, you can find the goodness here.

For the record, the Desedo homies have been making it happen with the crews and the lighting and the actors. We even get to use the words “in production.” We’ll have something to show for all this silence at some point, but for now trust that we miss having something to say.

Here’s a short doc piece I just did for Format magazine. What you’ll see is a brief look inside the world of the tattoo artist. Three NYC buzzers talk about process, inspiration, and adventures with the needle. We visit inside a popular Harlem parlor, The Black Ink Gallery, and an underground space in Queens.

What you won’t see is the Pit Bull Terrier owned by one of the artists who bit my leg and took away a large strip of denim. It was, probably, one of the best shots I’ve ever framed. Unfortunately, I didn’t press record in time. Here is the dog, appropriately named Perro, about a second and a half before what I affectionately refer to as the incident.

my own personal zapruder film

Yesterday the Times ran an interesting piece about French advertising, noting the cultural (if not legal) norms there prevent such things as the hard sell.

To us money implies corruption, and moreover, because we consider ourselves the inventors of freedom, never mind if that’s not true, we still consider advertising as a kind of manipulation,” Mr. Séguéla said. “This explains why television commercials started so late here — essentially because leftist opposition saw ads as corrupting the soul.”

As a result, the ads there tend to be more oblique, elliptical. All of this begs the question of whether the effectiveness of television advertising can be controlled for cultural norms. But for the aesthetes among us, the question is simple: what do they look like? Though the Times failed to link to relevant spots in a current museum exhibit there, the sleuths at the Alley Insider did. Here’s one:

Many moons ago, preparing for a year in Europe, I can remember being warned (or was it teased?) that the commercials there would be much more artistic. I was, in the next few days floored by a Levis ad that, over the years, I would remember mainly in fragments. I have attempted to describe its dreamlike qualities many times, but failed to touch in conversation what the commercial had evoked in my impressionable teen psyche. Mainly, that the coolest place to store a condom was highly concomitant with a pair of Levis (now my only brand of jeans). The commercial, I would learn years later, was directed by frenchman Michel Gondry. Allez les Bleus!

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The still above is from another Gondry-directed spot featured here.

begin recruiting skilled immigrants who are living in this country with temporary visas, offering them the chance to become United States citizens in as little as six months… Recruiters expect that the temporary immigrants will have more education, foreign language skills and professional expertise than many Americans who enlist, helping the military to fill shortages in medical care, language interpretation and field intelligence analysis.

This article makes my head spin with questions. Could have simply posted the link via my Facebook or Twitter, but want to place it within the space of Desedo and talk it out. So:

The loss of private sector jobs is a boon to the military, as more folks are now enlisting. But should that well run dry, could the US military impose a draft for such an abstract war?

Each generation of immigrants is denigrated, and then swept into the fold of ‘America’. Will this citizenship via military be adopted en masse by any particular group?

What artists are speaking with the greatest insight about everyday truth of military life? Certain sonic spaces of country and hip-hop seem to be the closest, as do documentaries like Gunnar Palace. And don’t forget the vital voice of Mommy blogs.
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…Desedo collaborator Brad just got back from filming whilst embedded in Iraq. Will soon be posting an interview with him about all this and more…

Hip-hop

Hip-hop for adults

International superstars

What we also see in these photographs is the progression both men have made as they’ve grown from being popular in hip-hop four years ago to pop icons today.

Incidentally, Webster’s lists the etymology of the word swag as potentially derived from the Norwegian svagga to sway, rock; akin to Middle Low German swacken to rock. In other words, last night’s Grammy performance was a return to form.

More reasons why the world needs more tuxedo owners and their swagger (like us).

This is one of my favorite presentations about branding within the new media landscape. Not only for the content, but for the crisp aesthetics, which look well informed by Tufte’s critique of powerpoint.

You can only copyright expressions and not ideas. Ideas are free, but the creative expression of ideas benefit the public so much that the government is willing to give a monopoly to the expression’s creator. What this means here is that the first you must do is to never say that you want to own the idea. That is untenable.

And in order for an expression to be copyrightable, it must be fixed in some tangible medium (on paper, on video, in computer code…). The medium that it needs depends upon what it is that you are trying to copyright. It is okay for a composer to write down the notes of a song, or a choreographer to write down dance steps, and then copyright that piece, but your expression may need something more than just paper fixation.

For example:

A person writing down the idea to have the interaction between the computer and the user to be graphically based with certain icons representing certain tasks, thus alleviating the need for all users to use typed commands is not copyrightable because it is an idea; but when someone writes a program that actually performs that function, then the idea has been expressed in a fixed form, with the code being the fixation. Your idea requires for the code to be written - that is a viable expression.

Now, if the technology already exists for your expression to come into fruition, you can simply compile that already fixed technology into a package and copyright the compilation. The trick is that you must actually compile it into a functioning compilation. The analogy would be if I wanted to publish a compilation of ancient Roman bed time stories, I would first have to actually gather all of the stories (I chose ancient Roman because they would all be in the public domain already) and put them in order and add whatever commentary I wanted to add before I registered my copyright. Now this copyright would only protect the unique expressions:

My added commentary (because it is truly original and fixed) and the order and arrangement of the stories (not the stories themselves).

If I wanted to compile stories that were actually still protected with valid copyrights I would have to transform them some how (like via parody) so that the transformative elements could be copyrightable and I would not have to pay the original copyright owner any royalties. (Spaceballs/Star Wars)

So with this in mind for any tech based content, one approach is to create the program with public domain software (like RedHat) that can handle everything you need, as it is difficult to prove a transformative use on someone else’s software.

Dive deeper? Here is Lawrence Lessig on Charlie Rose.