Video

ooVoo.com is a multi-person chat service that has turned the personal and often 1-to-1 idea of video IMing into a social networking event. Anyone with a computer, broadband connection and a web camera, can use ooVoo for real-time video calls with up to six people simultaneously.

So, to kick-off August as the beginning of the end of the US Presidential season (the Democratic Party's convention is at the end of the month, followed by the GOP's convention on the first week of September) ooVoo has convened a convention of their own, My ooVoo Day Political.

I blogged about Matt first at The Awearness Blog after I first saw the video via Metafilter. Metafilter is a snarkful community of wen connoisseurs who have a witty remark or twenty at the ready. So it was with shock that I saw comment after comment of Mefites saying that this video brough a tear to their eye.

I've watched this video at least 50 times --my kids have been playing it all day today. It's not the music or the somg that brings a tear to my eye. I can be in a different room, like I am right now, and listen to the music and have no reaction.

No.

It's watching the pure joy, the pure radiance, the pure light beaming from all those dancing, happy faces that makes me cry.

I cry because it is so uncommon to see such selfless joy these days. Matt has a quality not of "whatever" but of real in the moment joy.

You can find them at http://youtube.com/user/blogdiva

They're not the bestest quality but you can get a good sense of the excellent presentations by the likes of Van Jones, Mark Pesce (who I've already written about), Brian Behlendorf, Craig Newmark and others.

In the immortal words of Team America, fuck yeah! This has got to be one of the best "get out the vote" initiatives I've seen in a long time.

Via Digg and Twitter and cross-posted at Booman Tribune.

I want to thank your momma,
for making you a cutie
and giving you that bootie.

LOL!

White boy lust. I love it!

I posted this awesome video when we were in the old server at the evil web hosting company that failed us miserably for the past 6 months. Yet in the move, we lost the last two entries to the site.

So let me repost this video. It's just too good.

H/T, once again, to Elephant Journal.

In the immortal words of Team America, Fuck yeah!

I have spent the last 72 hours scouring videos online, looking for citizen journalism from Iraq. I've found scores of video blogs and bits by US soldiers. I cannot find any videos created by Iraqis from inside Iraq. It may be because, I do not speak Arabic. Yet I doubt that's the case --there are quite a number of propaganda videos from the different insurgencies fighting in Iraq.

What I speak of is of videos coming from Iraqi cellular phones or digital cameras. I speak of videos where Iraqis may have filmed their surroundings, their day to day and put out on the web for any and all to witness and never forget.

Iraq by Iraqis in Iraq are nowhere to be found.

The measure of a brutal imperialistic force is in it's effective silencing of the people they've set out to conquer, submit, silence and colonize.

We The People Of The United States have been complicit in the silencing of Iraqis, in the wiping away of their culture and history, in the destruction of their freedom of speech and freedom to be by destroying their homes, destroying their country's infrastructure, destroying their economy.

Oh yes bitches, I am Pwning my own blog --it's the only thing to do after two weeks of flu hell and another week of battling the writing pixies.

So here you have yourselves the meme of the day, courtesy of the Muppets.

Oh hell yeah baby, oh hellz yeahs.

OMG, Guille, that beard makes you look HAWT!

In other news, Mark Penn says the endorsement is insignificant. Unbelievable.

The FUN SONG, but of course!

Best part ever? The Spartans jumping in the background. It's a great little shout out to "This Spartan Life".

We need something nice and smooth here. It's been kind of a drag of a week, and it's just Wednesday! Who better to groove to than Marvin Gaye.

"What's Going" is one of the most perfect "artivist" protest songs ever created. And it is a work of art, so much so, that the Gaye's record label rejected it as being uncommercial.

I love the song because the lyrics and music are almost trance like, turning subverting the radical antiwar message of the song. It's almost subliminal the way the grooves hook you while the words slip into the unconscious.

It's as if Gaye becomes with this song an R&B shaman.

Oliver Willis is mad as hell will make a video about it. Here's "She Voted For The Damn War, proof positive the woman was eager to bomb Bhagdad.

This video may not be safe for work (NSFW) or for life (NSFL!)

How could the genius of a man who's taking a shower while crying about how he was betrayed by a ghetto boy he befriended? How could I not know about the genius of Reh Dogg's shower rap?

Just look for yourself and enjoy

Oh.

My.

Blog.

This man is so full of win, I just can't stand it!

LOVE HIM!

Don't blame me, blame Steve Garfield. I reiterate what I twittered back to him, he's a sick, sick man, and I am sicker for not being able to stamp my feet and yell at him, "Shame on you!"

Granted, once I read the lyrics, I couldn't help but laugh --even though I wanted to cry at the same time.

A look at how the Democratic Party defines democracy. LOL!

OMG! This is a whole phenomenon. Via Librarian's Matter, I found more Code Monkeys. Here's my favorites :

• The Anime One
• Awesome Clockwork Orange version
• Those Asian dudes
• OMFG! A machinima version made with "The Movies Game", for a machinima show called TrashTalk ... Sweet!
• And another machinima version made with Sims2.

I have just wasted almost an hour of my life following my sons recent obsession. LOL!

This post wouldn't be complete if we didn't include the original code monkey. I give you, Steve Ballmer --Microsoft's Monkey Boy-- The Remix :

My (imaginary) boyfriend has been busy shooting movies, doing some performances and growing a beard. I hate the beard, by the way, but I love the acting.

That's not just the reason why I can't wait to see him and others in Howard Zinn's "The People Speak". The material itself is just incredibly compelling, by presenting alternative texts and voices to History, to the official story those in power want you and me to agree as being truth and reality : Democracy is in dissent, Democracy is in resistance, Democracy doesn't come from the top, it comes from the bottom.

Here's a list of the performers :

Howard Zinn
Martín Espada
Christina Kirk
Danny Glover
Darryl McDaniels (DMC)
David Strathairn
Harris Yullin
Jasmine Guy
John Legend
Josh Brolin
Kathleen Chalfant
Kerry Washington
Marisa Tomei
Michael Ealy
Michael O'Malley
Q'orianka Kilcher
Reg E. Cathey
Staceyann Chin
Viggo Mortensen

You can read more about the project at Howard Zinn's website.

You may have already heard of the awesome remix video produced by Will.I.Am, member of the Black Eyed Peas using the inspirational Barack Obama speech, Yes We Can.

Well... someone went ahead and created a video using the speeches of John McCain.

Best. Parody. Ever.

I got this via the BlackFolk LiveJournal community.

I honestly can't stop laughing. Best part? The video's title, john.he.is.

I believe the measure of a leader is in their ability to inspire their supporters creatively.

Will.I.Am said of his remix of Obama's New Hampshire speech :

"It made me reflect on the freedoms I have, going to school where I went to school, and the people that came before Obama like Martin Luther King, presidents like Abraham Lincoln that paved the way for me to be sitting here on ABCNews and making a song from Obama's speech," will.i.am said.

"The speech was inspiring about making change in America and I believe what it says and I hope everybody votes," Dylan said.

I believe the measure of a leader is in their choice to engage supporters as collaborators in the building of a social and political future. The difference between a campaign and a movement is in how people take the political moment as a call to action, regardless of whether the powers that be are there to reward them :

I actually lay awake, nights on end, disquieting over the possibility that R. Kelly may indeed be the music, film and poetry genius he wants us to believe he is.

Oh shit ... pregnant by a midget ... oh shit.

So Michael R's calls last night to ask if I am still alive. I have been incredibly busy trying to juggle 6 different projects plus the kids plus Xmas and well, he reminded me how guilty I have been feeling about not being able to blog not even part-time these days.

So this morning I was thinking, hmmmmmm, do I use "Staying Alive" or "She Works Hard" for my "I'm not dead yet" post?

I settled for Donna and not the Bee Gees, first because of Travolta and second because my present situation is very 1980's, very recession and Reaganomics with a whiff of Iran-Contra secret war. I get the embed and here's what I got :

I can't believe I had no memory whatsoever of that white woman. "She works hard (for the money)" has never been in my mind a song about "working poor" white women. And the fact that her song is being told by a black woman ... wow.

It's debatable whether Hip Hop won out and took over MTV. At the time it was a big deal to see people like Donna Summers even though she was the biggest female pop vocalist in the United States (if not the world). Prince, Michael Jackson : they were on semi-regular rotation on MTV only because they were the acceptable "poppish" negroes.

Here are more of Elizabeth Upton's student submissions to 10Questions.com. They are in the CUNY Language Immersion Program at LaGuardia Community College. The previous videos are here.

Maria has a simple question about Iraq:

Magdalena is worried about the internet :

Elizabeth wants to know about how they will handle violence in schools:

The 10questions.com submission period is coming to an end in 5 more days. Thanks to may computer woes, I've been remiss at following up on this fantastic opportunity to ask the hard questions to the candidates; but not any more.

I am calling on all the NYC-based sponsors of 10Questions.com to come spend Sunday afternoon with me at Rapture Cafe in the East Village. I'll be there from 3:00pm to 6:00pm downing coffees and making video clips of everybody who wants to submit a clip to 10questions.

What does that mean? If you don't have a digital camera with video capabilities, a computer with WiFi or both, just bring just yourself and the questions you would like to submit. We have the cameras, we have the computers. Rapture Cafe has the coffee, beer and WiFi.

Place : Rapture Cafe - Avenue A between 13th & 12th Streets
Time : 3pm - 6pm

So take this post to starting thinking out loud what you'd like to ask the presidential candidates.

While I was hanging out in NYU's CLACS department with economists working at the UN Cuban Mission, advisors to the Sandinists, and your run-of-the-mill academia babes and nerds, Puerto Rico was starting to see the bounty that came out of the assimilation wars of the 1980s.

As a teenager growing up in Puerto Rico during the 1980s you had to make a choice between the rockeros or cocolos.

As a rockera, I would have had to hold myself up as an English-only, gringo loving, boricua denying, wanna-be whitey. As a cocola, I would be reaffirming my negritude, paying homage to my family and my country's salsa roots and more importantly, upholding my country's cultural heritage as a Spanish-only creation.

I was one of those, just like the founders of Puya, who didn't see it as an either/or proposition.

Yet this cultural tension was very real and it happened for a very specific historical reason.

This video comes fresh from not South Central but from the hardcore hinterlands of the East Village. The 40 year-old krumper is actually a neighbor of mine. We hang out at the playground while our kids play and shoot the shit for hours talking about everything and anything.

I could not for a million years believe him when he told me he told me he was doing this series of videos where he's teaching himself how to krump. I looked at him and we had a "Wayne's World" moment filled with "ways" and "noways"

I told him I'd check it out but swamped with so much work complete forgot about it. And the, after much thinking about the current congressional session, I needed something to amuse my self with. Instead of Britney, I asked him to send me the URL.

And I saw this ...

Who knew!

It's "Hispanic Heritage Month", a 31-day long pseudocelebration which, along with Black History month, makes a mockery of anything on US soil that is not Anglophilic.

I loathe the term 'hispanic' so much that I am willing to bring to you 31 reasons why Latin American culture is not mired in 'Hispanic' colonialist nostalgia; and what better way to start that than with a little taste of Nueva Trova.

One of the most outrageous pieces of misinformation spread about Fidel Castro is that he somehow has ruled in a complete political vaccum. Americans love to infantilize anybody they deem lesser (ie: a minority) to their cause and since 1959 they've spent a remarkable amount of ink describing Cubans as a country of cowering, uneducated twits who have been easily manipulated by "The Bearded Demon".

Cuban society and culture is much more complex than that and nobody embodies this distinction so well as Silvio Rodriguez.

Silvio is considered one of the pioneers of the Movimiento de Nueva Trova, the Cuban equivalent of the Nueva Canción movement that was sweeping Latin America back in the 1970s and 80s.

So, I'm sitting here checking my email and I am reading one sent by a spokesperson for a couple of First People's tribes and all that pops into my head is "whatever happened to A Tribe Called Quest.

There's a Wikipedia page up for them. That you get their page first instead of MTV, show's how cluless they've been about capitalizing on their importance as an archive of Hip Hop history.

I guess MTV has left it up to VH1 to the heavy historical lifting.

Here's Google's compilation of their discography.

And you can find their MySpace page here.

Why can't hip hop be more like them?

Texas Chainsaw President: this is over the top. . .
Check out this link.

STOP EVERYTHING YOU'RE DOING RIGHT NOW AND WATCH THIS VIDEO CLIP.

Yes, I am screaming at the top of my lungs. This piece of genius is brough to you by Latino Comedy Project and, I have to say, it is the most brilliant piece of immigration-related comedy I have seen or heard EVER!

I honestly don't know how the writers of The Daily Show manage to put out such good work day in and day out.

Hat Tip to Jeffrey Feldman.

Well, considering the grim nature of the subject matter "terrific" is kind of a relative term in this context. But as with globalvillage's other pieces that she pushes out through the YouTubes, this video photomontage is very well done and extremely effective in getting its point across. The choice of music and selection of sequential images in this one is particularly striking:

OMG. The dance off! Is it wrong I laughed so hard?

Oh my goodness. I haven't had a crush on a song like this in a while. I heard it for the first time this morning and have been playing it repeatedly on the iPod. (I bought the album--first listen says it fuckin' rocks.)

Enjoy some Friday dancing! (Or "air humping" as a friend of mine calls it)

Since we're all supposed to be cheering loudly for the newest dynastic contender to the Presidency, our very own Hillary, we might as well have fun with it. Dynasty: classic eighties television, and now, your political reality. Embrace the surreal.

It's not really a secret that the right doesn't do humor very well; but just in case you had any doubts about that, check out this episode of what purports to be Fox' answer to Jon Stewart.

Here ya go, from last Saturday's SNL:

Apropos of nothing in particular, here's the highlight of Madonna's recent concert tour, filmed in the Wembley Arena in London. Enjoy.

In honour of penguins, and because it's less than two hours until "SNL" and The Shins, and because, oh yeah, The Shins.

Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech remains one of the great monuments of our civilization. Historians consider it one of the Republic's seminal documents, along with the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address.

Unfortunately, Jefferson and Lincoln lived before the age of video. Luckily for us, King had cameras trained on him when he gave this speech; here it is, freshly youTubed in September of last year.

Daily Gotham has the full text of the speech, here.

On this day in 1973, "School House Rock" debuted. Last night, apropos of nothing, my youngest brother mentioned that he had never forgotten any of the lyrics to any of the songs. They had become embedded in his brain, always there for access.

I felt the same way when I took a test in eighth grade in which I had to write the words to the Preamble of the Constitution. I, like everyone else in the class, simply sang the song under my breath as a I wrote.

'Course, I can't find the Preamble on YouTube, but I did find "How a Bill Becomes a Law."

Funny, but nowhere in that song does it mention that the president gets to attach any of his goddamned, fucking, wrong-headed, fascist signing statements to those laws.

Just sayin'.

The most excellent thing to look forward to in January, other than that it brings us that many fewer days to have to put up with this bullshit administration, is that The Shins new cd, Wincing the Night Away will be released.

Here's the first video from the cd.

Founded in 2004, World Up! is a non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public about international cultures, and issues that affect the global community through Hip Hop and its related musics. Through its ongoing events, educational programming, and annual music festival, World Up actively promotes and fosters diversity, cross-cultural understanding and social change through Hip Hop culture.

World Up! is run by a group of volunteers who come from diverse backgrounds and cultures but share a deep love for Hip Hop and how it is used as a tool for social and political change. It has a well established network of artists, DJs, Mc's, film makers, promoters, activists around the globe.

Get Involved! Join the movement!
www.worldup.org
info@worldup.org

'Tis The Cell Block Tango, a Bob Fosse great, in honor of Donald Rumsfeld and the GOP. Enjoy.

I have not ignored all the people who have asked me to comment on the Clinton-Bloggers Harlem fiasco. I have been doing an awful lot of commenting across blogs and responding to emails. Ironically, it's been a socially intense two weeks. For those who thought a digitally lynching would make me disappear ... heh. Sorry.

There's a lot of good stuff written out there. I want to highlight Sunrunner's awesome, "Jane Hamsher: The Left's Answer to Ann Coulter?". All throughout those posts you will find really awesome comments by kid oakland, Jeffrey Feldman, Donna, not your standard poodle (oh how I love that sig!), MBW, Nannette, belledame222 and Kai. There's lots of other people and apologies if I didn't highlight everybody, but these commenters can be found all across at least 10-15 posts on the matter. Thanks all for adding to the conversation.

I do have follow-up posts. I will make good use of Monday morning traffic for them to appear on the blog. It also will give me some more time to smooth out my not-so-final comments on the matter.