UPDATE – We’ve hit the web big, with over 411,000 views on YouTube as of  December 2011. See the video and check out all the extra features here.

The sequel to our 1992 viral video Don’t Copy That Floppy has hit the Web in a big way, causing controversy, and getting more than a few laughs at our (admittedly heavy-handed) approach. In Don’t Copy That 2, actor / rapper ME Hart reprises his role as MC Double-Def DP, a virtual spokescreature who materializes to warn us about the downside of pirating software, music, games, and other copyrighted content.

A sneak-peek trailer for the new video was shown at the SIIA (Software & Information Industry Association) COdie Awards in San Francisco; the trailer became an instant hit on YouTube, racking up over 150,000 views in just a few weeks.

Like its predecessor, the new video features dance moves and sweet rhymes from cyber-rapper DP, as well as some hot vocals by hip-hop sensation BSheba. Yes, there are Klingons whose behavior may shock you. And yes, we did get permission to use them from Paramount, and yes, the Father of the Klingon language was there to coach the actors and provide authenticity.  And a surprise sequence at the end that is sure to generate some heated discussions and bring a provocative angle to the ongoing debate about copyright, piracy, and enforcement.

You can watch Don’t Copy That 2 on YouTube and enjoy the comments wildfire, or check out SIIA’s website for the video PLUS special features, production credits, stills, lyrics, and other goodies.

Suspense builds as we prepare to release Don’t Copy That 2, the long-awaited sequel to the anti-piracy hit Don’t Copy That Floppy. People around the world (welcome, France!) have discovered our short teaser, and I’ve received a number of questions about the Klingons who appear in it.

Q: Are they real Klingons?

A: They looked real to me. During the shoot they frightened our crew by practicing battle moves with lethal bat’leths.

Q: Why Klingons?

A: Klingons have a highly developed sense of personal honor; they would find common theft, such as software or movie piracy, quite offensive. Personal honor is a concept that should come up more often as people debate the issues surrounding intellectual property.

Q: Was that really Klingon they were speaking?

A: Renowned linguist Marc Okrand, creator of the Klingon language and consultant on numerous Star Trek movies, was on the set to assure that the phrases were technically correct.

Q: Will the Klingons be in the actual music video?

A: Yes, and what they do may surprise you…

Q: When will the video be released?

A: Very soon. Keep your eye on the SIIA website and MJville for the latest information.

COMING SOON : Production Photo Gallery

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now we are working on a sequel, and it will be hot! Here’s a sneak-peak “trailer” we showed tonight at the SIIA (formerly SPA) COdie Awards banquet in San Francisco.

Friends and family of Ross McConnell will gather in Lynchburg, Virginia on Friday, 10 October to bury his earthly remains and share memories of his remarkable life. The service starts at 11 am at the Spring Hill Cemetery. Ross died near Tbilisi, Georgia in May after being struck by a minivan. Details in our previous post.

The photos I share here (click for large versions) were taken in the late 80’s when Ross and I visited his Grandmother at her home in Lynchburg. Ross and I stayed up all night exploring his late Grandfather’s library of rare books; in the photo Ross is cradling a first edition of Dickens’ David Copperfield, one of many amazing volumes we examined. Everyone who knew Ross knows how much he loved books. That evening he was animated in a way I’d never seen before. We jumped from early Shakespeare folios to a zany 18th century book on pirates, and then on to first editions of Twain, Walt Whitman, and Theodore Roosevelt.

PHOTO CC: MJ Vilardi some rights reserved

The next day, dressed in his Grandfather’s old WW II military jacket, Ross took me to a nearby farm, where he cavorted with a frisky pony.

PHOTO CC: MJ Vilardi some rights reserved

Here’s a portrait of Ross’s Grandmother, Margaret Alexander, taken during our visit.

NOTE: If you can make it to Lynchburg on 10 October, you will be richly rewarded. Many of Ross’s closest friends and family members have never met. I’m sure it would make him a bit uneasy having all of us in one place, comparing notes and trading stories. But what stories!

IF YOU CAN’T ATTEND: Please write something. I promise to read it aloud in Lynchburg, and, with your permission, share it here. Send it to: mj [at] mjville.com

And speaking of stories, check out the new “Ross History” posts at the Ross blog maintained by the mysterious Marcolis…

There is great joy in MJville tonight: Julie, one of our dearest friends from Antioch has found us. She’s at the center of the photo above, with Grace and Ross, in my tiny yard on Corcoran Street In Washington DC (mid 80’s). Right after Ross died this May I had tried for days to track Julie down, using every private eye technique and Internet trick I could think of. Then I realized how she, a woman of no small intuitive powers, would advise me to proceed: calm down, reverse the polarity and let it happen.

Tonight’s full moon is low in the sky and as rusty red as Grace’s hair, as though Mars dropped by for a visit (not impossible, ask Velikovsky). I think the power of that moon, being courted by Jupiter, gave Julie a shot of extra juice that supercharged her meditation. Julie reached out and made our very special circle complete. Tonight she wrote:

Juliana Swanson née Haynes (AKA “Julie”)

said: on July 17, 2008 at 8:20 pm

Greetings, to Ross and all who love him!

Ross†spirit came and told me he was moving on. He also sent me here today during the Grace Light Full Moon to share the juicy Ross Vibe.

Ross and I “lost touch” over the years, but I have always cherished my secret memories of our good lovin†times at Antioch and beyond. I hardly remember smelly feet because he was my heart-throb.

When we broke off our love fest, it took some powerful witchcraft to help me get over him. Well, part of me never did get over him because we are soul family.

There is no death, so party on, and let us celebrate Rossâ€s life with these wise words of Don van Vliet, one of our old favorites back in the day~

I like the way the doo dads fly
With just a kiss I blew you up into the marrow sky
Twirled n†swirled ripe like rotten gold
Cold like silver in a bed stream, trees cracked like egg creams
The swarm wet green fingery hives
I like the way the doo dad flies
Neopolitan landscape runs wet my eyes
I like the way the doo dads fly
The pink startled morning giggles just ahead behind the bush
A dark hollow echo streams
Views me from a circle formed of fiber eyes
Speak seek n†sing babble, magnify
Like wet shapeless babies
Clearly the dew drops cry
Spill n†pass from hand to hand
N†layed gently ready to explode
N†the sand combed streamed
N†the trouts blur like herdled sperm rainbows
Bubbles like glass spurs paddle ‘neath the foot bridge
Lilyâ€s pad bulb, orange spotty
Frogs lick Godâ€s lucky green tongue
Dragon flies bi-planes
The sun hung like a lone orange
N†a blue tree fell over ripe into the sea
N†swam like a giant starfish

Thank you, Ross, with all my heart here now.

It has been decades since I’ve seen or spoken with Julie, and I find I’m deeply moved, literally weeping at the orange moon with the joy of reconnecting with Grace, then Harry, then the final miracle at this sad (and for Ross perhaps quite glorious) occasion. Spirit Ross whispers sweetly in her ear that he’s catching that 777 Express to Heaven, and Julie consults an oracle (Goo-Gall) and — there’s the signpost up ahead — next stop MJville — but Ross is dead.

Thank you, Julie, for loving Ross, and loving us enough to reach out and share our joy and grief.

Julie also wrote: I know…I have a lot of feelings too and realize I need to do some inner work to reach out and heal some more about my past with Ross. I believe that is why he reached out to me…probably when he was doing the old post-mortem life review.

I do feel that he will not be reincarnating here but will be/is moving to another higher plane.

It is a miracle I was drawn to your blog, and this is a reflection of our love, which Ross is showing us is boundless. What’s a few 20 years or so between us. Thank you Ross for this miracle, and thank you MJ and Grace for making it happen, too.

UPDATE: Check out the Ross McConnell Gallery Page we just put up. It contains photos I’ve taken of Ross over the years, as well as a few of his original drawings. More added daily! And If you have any McConnell-abilia to add to the gallery, or stories you’d like to share, please send them to me at mj (at) mjville (dot) com.

When Ross asked me to teach a class with him called “Science and Imagination,” I wasn’t sure I was really qualified to teach people science, which, though it fascinates me, was never one of my best subjects. “Don’t sweat it, Little Buddy,” Ross said, “Use your imagination.”

And sure enough, that was the key to what would be a thought provoking course that challenged the old dichotomy between the Arts and Sciences. And we got about a dozen students signed up, not bad for a student-initiated course. Our curriculum and syllabus was approved by the Antioch administration and our first classes went great. We read some mind-bending science fiction, like Olaf Stapleton’s Starmaker. And a recent and controversial book by a new astronomer on the scene, a charismatic guy named Carl Sagan, who, along with a Russian colleague, had written Intelligent Life in the Universe. We took our class to the roof of the Science Building to gaze at Andromeda through the school’s huge telescope.

And, when we found out about an important convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), we took our class to San Francisco to attend. A ballsy move, since everyone (including Ross and I) were also taking a full load of classes, and Yellow Springs, Ohio is about 2000 miles from the Saint Francis Hotel on Union Square. Not all of our students got past the initial enthusiasm stage to the “shit, we’re actually doing this” stage, but in the end we had six travelers plus ourselves. One big snag: the day we were to leave in Joe’s van (classic Hippie van complete with hand-painted festoons) I had to work: I was photo editor of The Antioch Record, the weekly paper, and I couldn’t leave for another day and a half until I got my shots in.

Ross took me aside and got real serious. “MJ, you have to go. There is no way you’re not going.” He suggested I hitchhike out to California after my assignments were in. I told him he was crazy. He said if I would do it, he’d let the van go on ahead and hitch with me. I said “Now you think I’m crazy!” Ross grinned.

And three days later he and I hit the road for Cali. Later, fighting off psychopaths and near death in Arizona’s Painted Desert, I pondered the wisdom of our decision. But even later than that, safe in the loving arms of a Berkeley saucer cult (later to be known as Heaven’s Gate) we wolfed down organic rice and munge beans and smiled blissfully, knowing we had made the right choice.

PHOTO CC: MJ Vilardi some rights reserved

The first part of our journey had gone surprisingly smoothly. Hard to imagine it now, but there was a time in our nation’s history when lots of people hitchhiked around, and drivers weren’t afraid to give them rides! It wasn’t uncommon to see groups of travelers on interstate ramps holding crude handmade signs declaring their destinations. And a significant number of folks lucky enough to have cars considered it an act of good karma and solidarity to help move longhairs around the country. Nowadays we’re all terrified of Manson-like maniacs; the crazies we encountered in Arizona’s torrid Painted Desert provided a foreshadowing of the paranoia that is now the norm.

A dazed looking guy in an old red beater picked us up and immediately began pressuring us for gas money. Which was kind of against the unwritten rules of hitching etiquette. I mean, if we had the cash we’d be riding the Grey Dog, right? So we resisted, and the guy got real quiet, At the next town we hit he made a beeline for some ghetto blood bank, and turned his blood into gas. I asked him if he felt okay to drive and he said “No problemo, I did this yesterday too.” I traded worried glances with Ross. The driver had looked rather pale to begin with, and now he looked woozy. His driving got worse even as his attitude became downright testy. It was as if he wanted to pick a fight about any subject.

PHOTO CC: MJ Vilardi some rights reserved

It was a relief when he picked up another hitchhiker (photo above) but the driver gave him a hard time too, demanding gas money and making odd, insulting remarks about the cast on his arm. There was something creepy about this new passenger. The kid seemed to smolder with menace and bad intentions, and kept steering the subject to the Manson slayings and people he would like to “mess up, permanently.” The driver, whether for the sake of caution or just because he was drifting in and out of sleep, turned silent. We all listened with growing apprehension as this dude with the ragged cast got revved and started talking some very weird shit. His harangue grew bellicose and threatening, and when we pulled over for a break, Ross insisted that we let them go on, and wait for another ride. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but as we debated it the driver and his crazy new friend drove off.

“Great idea Ross,” I said, “We’re in the middle of a hellish desert with no food, no water and no cars in sight.” The main reason we had no supplies to sustain us: Ross insisted we save the money to buy books. It was a point of great contention, and I pointed out (with all the futile bitterness of someone who’s been proven right by disaster) that our dire circumstances were largely his fault. Hours passed. It got hotter. We were so thirsty I started to wonder if urine…

But as the cruel sun turned red and sank behind the mountains, a station wagon pulled over. “Where ya headed?” the guy asked. When we told him, he flashed a goofy grin, teeth going every which way. “Hell that’s where I’m going! Hop in!”

Stay tuned for Part 3: “Astronomers in Collision”

Last month my lifelong friend Ross McConnell died near Tbilisi, Georgia in a freak traffic accident. He was on his way to a Black Sea resort in Turkey, and had just stepped off the bus at a rest stop when he was struck by a speeding minivan. He died shortly thereafter, in the “reanimator room” of a nearby hospital. Ross was 55, and had been living in Tbilisi for several years. Here is a news report by Georgian State Television, with English transcript courtesy of Ross’s friend, the expatriate writer Brian Adrian, who also lives in Tbilisi.

NOTE: The remarkable life and untimely death of Ross McConnell is the topic of our first MJville podcast. If you knew Ross and would like to share your thoughts and memories, please leave a comment on this post and we’ll work out a time for a phone or Skype conversation.

I first met Ross back in the 70’s when we were both students at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. I was trying to sleep off the effects of a long night of partying, when I heard a loud noise at my dorm room door. It wasn’t knocking, not even pounding, but an insane hammering, like they were tearing down the building. I peered through the peephole and spied a big guy using a brick to nail something to my door. “What the hell-?” I yelled as I swung the door open. A preserved fox face fell to the floor. This is what the mystery man – obviously inebriated – had been trying unsuccessfully to mount. Without further comment I picked up the furry mask and held it in place, while Ross nailed it securely into the wood.

DRAWING CC: MJ Vilardi some rights reserved

I will never know how he came to acquire that fox face, or why he chose my door for it. At the time, it seemed no stranger than all the other cosmic events happening constantly at Antioch, a school that seemed, at times, to levetate. Ross and I shared a beer etc. and talked about the cosmological knowledge of ancient civilizations… Mystic Crystal Revelations late night in an undergrad dorm room… a familiar way to pass the time. Typically talks like these are fueled by beer, weed, and the sweet imagination of youth… but Ross seemed to offer the real deal: primary experience of mystical forces and divine revelations. And he knew his shit!

Ross was tall and solidly build – not like a Venice Beach muscle boy, more like the frantic, impassioned heroes in the paintings of William Blake; naked or trailing wispy gossamer long hair and beards, these figures take mountain-high steps on tree trunk legs, and implore the moon with arms that almost reach it. But Ross’s arms were almost always filled with books: rare old tomes from the collection of his grandfather (a famous WWII general); astronomical journals, the works of Plato, even a history of Atlantis by the sleeping prophet of Virginia Beach, Edgar Cayce. Ross brought plenty of theories and challenges to get us motivated… I say “us” because almost overnight Ross had himself a following: smart kids looking for inspiration (and something more interesting than the predictable liberal art curriculum were were getting). Some of these kids had rich parents, so intoxicants were always available to keep our reality engine adequately lubricated…

Ross and I taught two classes together, and used our “instructor” status to rent films at educational rates for free showing to classes. But we’d publicize them campus-wide, and charge admission, using the money to rent better films. Extra profits funded extravagant pre-film parties with spiked punch and electric brownies … it was the 70’s, after all. Eventually we could even afford Kubrick’s 2001 – A Space Odyssey, which we showed in Main Hall with yours truly manning the giant projector. Tense moments (audience riot) when, during the crucial ape scene, the film got stuck under the hot-as-the-sun xenon bulb and some frames burned. At least one person in the crowd thought it was the end of the world, because there were screams. Ross calmly locked the projection booth door and together we figured out how to splice the film back together and get the massive Simplex projector running again.

Other films in our series included:

• Titicutt Follies
  
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
  
• Metropolis
• Dr. Strangelove
  
• The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
  
• Greaser’s Palace (hard to find now, but truly worth seeing)

And then our season finale: The Paranoia Festival. Anyone unwilling to experience true paranoia should stay away, we warned. Of course the warning just made the event irresistible, and we sold out in two days.

We started with a huge party that, in one way or another, left most of the folks in an altered state of some kind. Then the first flick: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which a small group of friends slowly realize that their town is being taken over by pod people: they’re replicates from outer space that grown in pods to look like you — when they hatch, the human goes bye-bye. “There’s yours. Do you want to watch it grow?”

The second film was a campy ’50’s Cold War terror play, Red Nightmare, in which a nice suburban man (Jack Webb) wakes up one morning to discover that his entire town — even his own wife and son! — have become communists!!! A little scarier than the first film because of the political implications.

The final film was the French documentary Night and Fog, an award-winning and horrific, unflinching look at the worst atrocities committed by the Nazi in the death camps during WWII. The mood of the audience changed immediately. There was squirming, crying, jumping up from seats … especially when, midway through the film Ross and I switched on powerful searchlights mounted on the balconies and played the beams over the crowd.

The Paranoia Festival was designed to transition the audience from laughs and entertainment, to apprehension and gnawing fear, to the awful realization that sometimes the paranoids are right. Sometimes evil forces ARE out to get you, and if you don’t run away when you have the chance, you die. It’s a harsh lesson. For some, it was too much.

We got a little flack from the administration about the way we ran the film screenings, but that was mild compared to the ass-whipping we caught for our two classes. “Irregularities” and “non-conformance to College standards” were mentioned more than once. Threats of revoked credits and even expulsion were waved around for a bit, but in the end nobody was stung too badly. Stay tuned for the story of how we hijacked an entire class and took them 2000 miles from Ohio to San Francisco in the middle of a semester. I chat with Tim Leary’s wife, crack up Carl Sagan, and kiss the hand of famed anthropologist Margaret Mead. Ross McConnell 2 — coming soon. Please check back in a day or two, or subscribe to our RSS feed so you’ll know when there’s fresh content.

Here’s a vital part of my technical setup: a small crystal skull that sits on my tube amplifier and soaks up light from the VU meter LED’s. When I talk through the old Electro Voice 668, the skull glows in rhythm with my words. My recently deceased friend Ross held and photographed the real Crystal Skull some years ago. More about that in our next podcast, Remembering Ross…

My producer, Mr. Pink, is helping me finish up the website and technical details. We will announce the topic and call windows for the premiere show in a few days.

In the meantime, if you’d like to join us, get yourself a free Skype account here. Then register with MJville using the link in the sidebar. We don’t want personal details or your full name, but we do need to know what city and time zone you’re in, and what topics you’d like to discuss.

MJville will be kind of an asynchronous radio show: each episode will be recorded as a series of Skype Conference Calls, with several of our correspondents on the line at once. As each segment is completed we’ll post it so folks who are on the list for the upcoming segments can get ready. Then we’ll post the finished show…