Angelina Jolie

Please do not lose any weight. Not one ounce. Not one milligram. You look perfect just the way you are right now.

Seriously, you make ME want to lose 40 pounds, cover myself in leather and tattoos and totally go butch for a night of good lesbo love for you.

Did I say I am a het?

Yet gurl, you got it going on after those twins. It's why I can't believe the rumors that you've been falling on your anorectic tendencies because you feel fat and ugly.

You know I don't have to tell you EVERY SINGLE WOMAN goes through that after giving birth. Don't knock yourself down woman. You look perfect. Eat more a couple of hamburgers a week and splurge on that pizzas you like.

'Cause, child, you make a het woman want to go totally bi for you. Am thinking if I want to hit that with you ten thousand ways to Monday, I'd have to find it in my heart to entertain Brad. Anyhow, you look lovely and perfect and healthy.

So girl, stay just the way you are.

Love,
liza

Black Angelina

This ad for A Mighty Heart has been cycling through our site and just have to comment on it.

I sincerely still do not what to make of Angelina Jolie playing a black (albeit light-skinned) woman.

Yeah, sure, Marianne Pearl is her BFF but still, the former struggling actress in me just goes, Damn!

I can't help but see this as yet another example of how, not just latina neither just black, but black latina actresses are rendered invisible by the Hollywood crowd.

Let's just say that I should have gone to see Dream Girls instead. This three hour-long attempt to give a historical account of the birth of the CIA made my butt fall asleep in the theatre at best. The plot is disjointed, and Angelina is utterly unconvincing as a disheartened uppercrust housewife of the 50s. Matt Damon's stoic performance confirms that he should just stick to the screenwriting and leave the acting to Leonardo. This boy seriously lacks versatility. Better wait for this one to come out on DVD.

Hello visitors from The Showbuzz and CBSNews. Thanks for stopping by.

To enlarge click here.

A day or two ago I published information given to me by anonymous tipsters about a duo who may have been involved in the stealing of a digital camera memory stick with 450 private photographs from the Jolie-Pitt family's time in Namibia.

Well, there have been rumors of some arrests as reported by both The Daily News' Rush & Molloy and TMZ.com. I have yet to confirm any arrest(s), but it seems like the information we provided on our site led to one of the suspects.

Here's the story so far: The camera which held the memory stick is owned by Angelina Jolie's brother, James Haven. A series of unfortunate events happened to Haven and the camera : The camera broke, he sent it for repairs to the store where he bought it but ... oooooops! Haven forgot to take the memory stick out of the camera. The camera got sent from Malibu to a repair center in Connecticut. That's were the illustrious practitioner of extreme vanning, a Mr. Bill Keyes, pops into our story.

I have been on the net for ages now, going as far as 1992-1993 when I got my first email account. And I think I was in the first wave of web surfers to get an actual site back in 1994 (eventhough I didn't really get a domain name until 2000). And yet ... and yet.

I still get shocked at how fast things move on the internet. Which is why I always wonder about how much did the Bush Administration really wanted to catch Osama Bin Laden. Had they googled him after September 11, they would have caught him by the 13th. Just saying.

An anonynmous tipster sent me this yesterday :

I'm not sure how reliable this is, or if it's even the same person but the email address from that guy belongs to this website and myspace. He's some dude from Massachusetts who lives in CT as a computer programmer. Bastid!

http://lowrdr27.home.comcast.net/
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendi...

And people wonder why I love the net.

Lowrdr27 seems to be the pseudonym for two guys :

Tim Barnes

and

Bill Keyes

Let's just say that after reading Foxes in the Henhouse : How the Republicans Stole the South and the Heartland and What the Democrats Must Do to Run 'em Out, I can tell you this is the kind of down home country guy Mark Warner wants to spends his afternoons courting for presidential votes and inviting over the next four years to the White House. Yeehaw!

I just got today an email from a Yael E. Holtkamp working for a Lavely & Singer, Professional Corporation. Interesting that nowhere in the email does it say this person is an attorney or that she is working on behalf of attorneys.

The email seems to be a hodge podege of human unreadable legalese with a custom paragraph relating to the photos tacked on at the beginning:

Dear Sir/Madam:

Recently, a digital memory card containing a number of personal copyright protected photographs of our clients was stolen. The police are currently investigating this matter. The photos depict, among other things, private moments and images of our clients and/or their minor children, taken in Namibia, including images from a private baby shower (the “Stolen Photos”). It is obvious to anyone viewing the Stolen Photos that they were taken in private, on private property and that they could only have been taken by our clients and/or a family member, who own all right title and interest thereto.

We understand that the person who stole the Stolen Photos, or an accomplice, has been offering them for sale to the various media outlets and celebrity content websites, and may have offered the Stolen Photos to you.

I hate it when lawyers try to put words in my mouth.

Honestly, it was not obvious to me that the photos were taken in the privacy of their Namibian home. On the contrary, both on the post related to this incident, not only did I think I was a hoax, but I watermarked the image with a plea, asking people for information on where I had seen that photo before.

By the way, the original photo was scrubbed from the server and now substituted with the sign we have above this post.

This is an instance when I really had to contend hard with the "should I or shouldn't I". I felt that if it was a hoax, then I would have loved to punk the seller. But if the photos were indeed stolen, then I honestly wanted whomever was behind this to be taken to task.

The problem with blogging is that, as an outsider, I have no idea who to turn to in cases like this one. Seriously, who do I call? How do I get in contact with the stars reps?

Indeed, eventhough culturekitchen may seem like an operation, it is not. We are just people with access to the technology used by the big publishing companies. Maybe it's time for these representatives to start amicably reaching to people like me, not through illegible pseudo-legal emails.

But let me take this one step further. As someone who cherishes privacy, I would never, ever publish knowingly anything on this site that would breach anybody's right to privacy; especially celebrities. I have a huge issue with the fact that many people believe that celebrities or anybody famous have relinquished their right to privacy just because they are famous.

In this day and age, when anybody can indeed have more than their 15 minutes of fame through self-published digital media (for exmaple, blogs), "paparazzi attacks" can and will be used for their chilling effect. Breaches of people's privacy will be used to silence them and neutralize the power of their dissent, creativity or uniqueness. No wonder so many people blog anonymously.

So, just so we are clear, attacks against 'fair use' by major corporations is one thing. Invasion of privacy? That's a whole other ball game and one I am not willing to play.

I guess I have arrived ... although I am sure this is a hoax.

An alleged paparazzo only identified as lowrdr27, contacted me along with other bloggers and several publishing companies, in an attempt to sell 450 pictures taken during Angelina Jolie's and Brad Pitt stay in Namibia. The email is actually a forwarded original that included the text below and 3 photos attached.

The quality of the photgraphs is relatively good although there is one, of Angelina holding Zahara, that looks just a tad too professional.

-------------- Forwarded Message: --------------
From: lowrdr27@XXXXX
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2006 22:11:25 +0000
Dear Sir or Madam,

I am contacting you because I have recently acquired some digital photos (450 pictures). On this memory stick are personal photos of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and their children. These photos are in thier home and on vacation, are good quality and are close up. These pictures have not been seen by anyone else. I am contacting you and several other Papers, magazines and websites to see what these photos may be worth. I am attaching 3 photos so you can verify the authenticity of them. You can contact me through this e-mail address:
Lowrdr27@XXXXXX

The list of people contacted includes :

eforu.com
celebritypicturesla.com
celebrity-babies.com
ew.com
howardshrine
deansplanet.com
celljournalist.com
verycool.co.uk
thebosh.com
paperunicorns
entertainment.ie
fotofama.com
celebrity8x10s.com
starmagazine.com
americanmedia
starmagazine.com
people.com

My views on fair use and the future of the internet struck a major chord at the Take Back America panel on "Blogs : The new insurgency" because I spoke about the realities of blogging politics as a business and as a form of activism and was not going to bow to the pre-packaged sound bites of "we are taking back the Democratic party" or the "we have changed politics for good" that people like Matt Stoller are so ready to spechify on these conferences.

Yes, some changes have come. If you want to count the fact that the blogs published by a Puerto Rican black feminist and their contributors are getting quoted in major media; then, yeah, it's a sign of change. But it's only the beginning.

I am not going to bullshit people about what needs to be done because I am not doing this to run for office of get a job as a political consultant for candidate X. I blog because I want to go beyond effecting politics. I want to help build a network of activists who use effectively the internet for social change. The kind of change that creatively effects the very cultural infrastructure of our democracy through heavy doses of progressive libertarian dissent.

Yeah. I do want to change the world. I'm not interested in sounding good for the next job.

I had people stopping me for questions about the issues I raised there; the most important being that in order for progressives to truly empower a blog insurgency we need to own the pipelines to the internet from IP to hosting to open source companies. That there are decades of digital insurgency before the blogs came on the scene and if we don't learn from past experiences and mistakes progressives will never be able to effectively use this very itsy bitsty bit of new media to truly Take Back America.

By the way, most of the people who came to me were women. Not only did they thank me for keeping it real; but they were impressed with the fact that I was the only who could fluently talk about the technology issues surrounding blogs. That in a panel that had two guys who called themselves the face of "net neutrality" and the "netroots".

Sigh.

I will be putting up the podcast in a minute but I wanted to update you one bit of alarming news that supports my points of contention and another one that that made my whole effing year.

First the good news.

Word has gotten to me that yours truly had the Getty Images lawyers and executives panties in a bunch. I am told by my sources that they haven't had this much fun in all the years they've been working at the company. It's seems my writing about the stupidity of exclusives had the bosses internally debating their strategy and well, getting pissed off at the fact that maybe, just maybe, I made sense.

Heh.

I know from published reports on Yahoo!News that Getty Images lawyers were adamant about muscling bloggers with the DCMA (I'm too lazy to look up the link). Here's the link :

[via Shiloh Not Ready For Close-Up, Gets It Anyway - Yahoo! News]:

As for Getty Images, which Pitt and Jolie announced earlier this week would market the photos, they claim the picture could be seen more as a teaser, enticing the celeb-savvy public into seeing the rest of the shots.

"Our legal team are looking into it and we will take it from there," spokeswoman Alison Crombie told Reuters. "But I really don't think it will devalue the pictures as everyone is dying to see the full set."

I am going to speculate that they were pushed by TimeWarnerAOL lawyers to follow in on their footsteps or else. And I am going to speculate we will be hearing more about the evil TimeWarnerAOL empire now that the debate over net neutrality vs. DMCA is getting not just heated up here but exported and imposed on other countries.

Which takes me to the bad news.