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August 31, 2004
go to bikesagainstbush.com/blog
josh is back and blogging over at bikesagainstbush.
Posted by yatta at 1:28 AM | TrackBack
August 30, 2004
Josh survives the Tombs, blogs his experience, works on legal defense.
Quick update of Josh's bikesagainstbush situation: He's out of jail and after a quick shower, called his family (fully supportive, by the way), and did the Hardball interview. He blogged about his jail experience on the msnbc site (make sure to check out his description of "Lil' Gitmo" the oil-slicked razor-wired holding pen the critical mass cyclists were forced to sleep in Friday night. Must find a first person account of this somewhere.) After that he dropped by the screensaversgroup RNCredux event we did at SHARE last night. He looked a little harried but alert (I guess a night in jail will do that to ya.)
The short of it is that the bike is out of commission until the hearing Friday. Although Yury has started gathering the parts needed to build a second bike, the code is still in police custody and Josh didn't have an adequate backup. (I know, i know. I'm buying him a copy of Retrospect for his birthday.)
He's definitely going to continue the project. As he reminded me last night, the goal was never about the RNC -- it's about getting Bush out of office. There are 60 more days before the election and miles of sidewalk left in New York City. :)
Problem is he has to get this declared legal first. There's still a strong possibility that he'll be facing jail time. While his lawyer originally thought that this was an open and shut case, similar casesare starting to make her think otherwise.
So going forward, here's what's going on: Josh is concentrating on putting together his legal defense. (You can make a donation to help him out at bikesagainstbush. Because some folks have been picky about this, make sure to specify whether you want your resources to go towards his legal defense or the construction of a new bike.) Someone passed along contact info for James De La Vega's lawyer that I've passed on to Josh. He appreciates that. If anyone knows of anything or anyone that could help Josh in his case, let him know. (Anyone know who defended Steve Kurtz in his case?)
What we civilians can do in the meantime is spread the word on Josh's case which will hopefully put pressure on the city to resolve this case in a swift and just manner. If you can blog about his case, thank you. If you can get coverage in traditional ink-and-electrons media, that'd help, too. Anything to help the community understand that this is the work of someone exercising his first amendment rights in a legal and respectful manner (and not the work of "a man with a convoluted spray-paint mechanism")
As far as the project is concerned, plans are being made for a second bike. I'm going to move all of the updates on Josh's situation to the bikesagainstbush blog but first I have to get some work done. I mean, it is Monday and all. :)
Posted by yatta at 1:32 PM | TrackBack
August 29, 2004
Update on the arrest of Josh Kinberg
Joshua was released at 11:00 AM Sunday morning after being charged with vandalism. His bicycle, laptop, and cell phone have all been confiscated and are being held until his court hearing. A lawyer from the National Lawyer Guild believes that the case is a clear violation of the first amendment (Houston v. Hill). In the meantime, the likelihood of his getting the bike back to use during the RNC is pretty much nil. The court date has been set for Friday, 9/3, after the RNC ends.
UPDATE 3:31PM - Josh is to appear live on NBC's Hardball tonight at 7:00PM, EST. If anyone can TiVo this I'd really appreciate it. Just a random thought: the police showed up yesterday just minutes after the MSNBC interview began. I wonder what story the producer really intended to get.
Posted by yatta at 3:18 PM | Comments (20) | TrackBack
RNC 2004 - The Struggle Against Those Who Use Bicycles To Try To Shape The World
in 2000, it was the puppets. in 2004, it seems to be the bicycles. first, after eight years of peaceful, fully cooperative protests, 250 bicyclists critical mass riders get arrested on friday. (My favorite quote: "Before, it was these peaceful environmental groups doing it, but they seem to have been taken over by this other group—Critical Mass—that’s basically trying to take over the city" Wha?) Saturday, Josh gets arrested, his bike confiscated, and this afternoon comes with word from NY1 that cyclists were arrested again during today's United for Peace march.
Perhaps this is part of the "Struggle Against Ideological Transportationalists Who Happen to Use Bicycles as a Weapon To Try To Shape The Conscience Of The Free World."
Posted by yatta at 1:56 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 28, 2004
Activist bike creator Joshua Kinberg arrested, 8/28/2004
Bikesagainstbush creator Joshua Kinberg was arrested while taping an interview with MSNBC's Ron Reagan in Manhattan Saturday afternoon.
Kinberg was stopped by police while demonstrating the bicycle for the television interview. His bicycle is a high-tech graffiti writer, using chalk to print anti-Bush political messages sent by people via the internet. Apparently there was a question of whether or not the sprayed messages were a defacement of property.
When Kinberg showed the police sergeant how the bicycle used a non-permanent spray chalk, the sergeant seemed to agree that it wasn't defacement, at which point Kinberg asked, "am I free to go?" After conferring about it, officers decided to call superiors, then came back moments later to place Kinberg under arrest and confiscate the bicycle.
Kinberg cooperated fully with the officers as he was being handcuffed, only asking, "can I ask what I'm being arrested for?" to which no one provided an answer. As of 11:00 PM, he was still in custody without being charged with anything.
Video of the incident is available as a torrent at DV Guide.
Posted by yatta at 11:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 24, 2004
Bunny of the Month.
bev tang: The Morbid Tendencies Bunny of the Month" Club.
"Something dreadful in the mail each month to brighten your life. I encourage you to have them delivered to your office.$35 is the full Bunny Club membership. You get your choice of bunnies, bears, or some of each (e.g., “I want 5 months: 3 bunnies and 2 bears”), and you can request special animals like monkeys or penguins, and I will try my best to get them for you. I do have some cats at the moment.
I do not make the same bunny for everyone each month, oh, no. I look at each person's file, and I think of all the clues I have about them: name, address, handwriting if I have a sample, email style, any hints of personality I am given. I make sure they will not get the same colour or style this month, and finally, I listen to the rabbits and make a wild guess as to which thing to send them this month
I think I just finished my holiday shopping for the year.
Posted by yatta at 9:42 PM | TrackBack
August 23, 2004
RNC-Redux.
Next week is going to be a busy week for a lot of folks in NYC -- that is if standing in extra long lines for trains at Penn Station counts as 'busy.' For me, I'll be busy working on the RNC-Redux project every night while helping document Bikes Against Bush during the day. Additionally, a bunch of the unmediated folks are working on a wifitv broadcast with Konscious TV which I'm supposed to be giving the assist on. Fun times all around.
Posted by yatta at 6:14 PM | TrackBack
frikkin duped!
Frikkin Harner! Or rather: Frikkin Peretti! A couple of months ago, Harner shows me Jane's blog, a blog for a fictional character on some Oxygen show. She even shows me a cross blog where she blogs about "Jane" and "Jane" blogs about her. "Do you think it's written by the actor?" Harner asks me rather innocently. "No, it has to be a writer," I answer, "I don't believe it."
Flash forward to today and I read a Joi Ito post where I find out that Jonah's the one responsible for Jane's Blog in the first place. I'd been duped!
Posted by yatta at 6:11 PM | TrackBack
August 20, 2004
Calendars of RNC related events
I'm compiling a short list for a screensaversgroup project we're doing. Here are the calendars:
- counterconvention
- imagine festival
- rncnotwelcome
- radical reference
Posted by yatta at 12:32 PM | TrackBack
how to make my day....
...and keep me laughing so much i can't get to sleep tonight.
Swedish graffiti artists kidnapped a fiber-glass cow from the international art exhibit CowParade, held power drills to its head and threatened to "sacrifice" it unless the sculptures were declared "non-art."if stockholm's anti-art-terror squad comes after them they should flee to brooklyn where i'll hide them in the mountainous caves and declare them martyrs.
Posted by yatta at 2:18 AM | TrackBack
August 19, 2004
why i i'm not concentrating much on issues of spectrum anymore.
howard rheingold in an interview for businessweek:
Q: Are there more such conflicts and opportunities to come?it's why lucas gonze's work on playlists and josh schacter's work on aggregating links interests me immensely. it's also why i think cable access television needs to get a new model and fast.A: Assigning frequencies to license holders...is an old-fashioned scheme...based on technologies of the 1920s. We now have technologies that make it possible to use the spectrum the way packets use the Internet. Instead of having a circuit-switched analog system in which you have to have an end-to-end connection, you just send your packets out with their addresses through this network and they find their way. It's much more efficient. It makes for millions more broadcasters in the Internet space. This is all pointing to a kind of voluntary sharing of your property.
Posted by yatta at 7:48 PM | TrackBack
an mp3 blog of open content?
i'm reblogging right now. just read adam curry's post about enclosure blogging and the need for a good source of songs with open content licensing. of course, it's probably all out there.
the question is: is anyone aggregating and filtering open mp3s yet? (and 'free' doesn't necessarily count as 'open'.)
Posted by yatta at 12:04 PM | TrackBack
T & A & Ryan Shaw.
Ryan cracks me up. A couple of days ago he found the gestalt between my date with bad television and kottke's(?) link that seven out of the current top twenty most popular photos on Yahoo! News are of female Olympian asses. (The cracking up part came with the post title - "unmediated ass." Confused the hell out of me while I was reblogging.) Ryan went on to explain how a media by the masses will still result in the same old asses:
Kenyatta believes that the democratization of media will result in better content. I myself am less optimistic. Case in point: the “Most Popular Photos” page on Yahoo! News. Yahoo! keeps records of how often its news photos are emailed to others, and collects the most popular photos of the day there. This is photojournalism as selected and edited by your peers, freed from the shackles of Big Media. And this is how they’ve chosen to cover (or uncover) the Olympic Games.Ryan, I totally agree. We aren't going to change the power law curve just because we went all civilian on their asses (word count:4).
I experienced this back when I was program director for a community radio station. Each year we'd get a flock of new djs wanting to get on the air but all they wanted to play was commercial pop songs. Fast forward five years later and I'm working programming for public access. Half of all of the new shows are about music videos and video games. But that's okay. People like what other people like. As long as we're social, that's how it's going to be.
We've already been spimed. It just isn't totally explicit yet.
When Geocities started offering free webpages, it was the Sarah Michelle Gellar webring that exploded -- not Rainbow Ruthie. Once everyone starts videoblogging from their WiMax VoIP Treo 900s, they'll still be sharing their favorite Buffy moments and dismissing their Amy Goodman ones.
None of us are going to Robin Hood the joint. But we will have an opportunity to widen the paradigm a bit. 20% of the bloggers will still command 80% of the attention, but we'll make it easier for folks on the edges to find each other and hopefully build their own little villages in the shadow of Nick Denton's castle.
Okay, on that sound bite, I'm out.
Posted by yatta at 5:33 AM | TrackBack
August 18, 2004
by the power of grayskull!!!!!!
nothing, really. i just wanted to say that.
Posted by yatta at 8:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
the credit roll for your life.
another great use for blog entries. the credit roll for you life. this particular one has to be one of the most sincerely sweetest things i've seen in a while. (like i said, i've been watching television.)
Posted by yatta at 3:06 PM | TrackBack
"saving face" in toronto film festival.
wednesday comes with the news that alice's feature, saving face will be debuting at toronto next month. yippie!
Posted by yatta at 12:34 PM | TrackBack
August 17, 2004
where's the feedback loop for sports pages?
especially during the olympics when thoughts turn to nationalism and performance enhancing scandals. i'm so glad i have a teevee again! it's been good for balancing out my overly content life.
first, i got really annoyed reading the sports pages about usa basketball's loss to puerto rico on sunday, but it wasn't because of the chicken little sky is falling pieces -- knee jerk reactions are excusable. it was because of the "who cares if we lost, it's not so bad" pieces that reeked of anxiety induced testosterone.
first there was the cnnsi guy effectively saying that the loss wasn't embarrassing b/c it wasn't like they lost to a bunch of girls. from there i went to the the foxsports column that took the pat buchanan bunker approach: who cares about anything we're not good at? He even had a couple of pot shots in there about the French. (French bashing was so pre-end to hostilities.) Of course, I'd love to post a response on the article pages, but comment forms don't seem to exist on most sports news sites. Meanwhile, I google around looking for sports blogs and find that most folks are still bbs-ing it. I wonder what's going to happen when more of them start blogging.
Posted by yatta at 4:56 PM | TrackBack
adrants.
is it me or has Steve Hall's adrants been rather randy lately? it's better than reading fleshbot.
It probably doesn't help that J.Jarvis eggs him on. ;)
Posted by yatta at 3:11 PM | TrackBack
August 13, 2004
finally, tv news for me.
reuters "raw footage." it's information without obvious inflection. no obvious narrative. no voice over. no research averse reporting. no fearmongering. interview footage without intermediary. (plus it reminds me of the stuff orlando and i shot for durban diaries.)
Posted by yatta at 3:51 PM | TrackBack
August 12, 2004
I'm proud of my gay governor!
it's stories like this that will always make me proud to say i'm from New Jersey, Bon Jovi be damned:
"At a point in every person's life, one has to look deeply into the mirror of one's soul and decide one's unique truth in the world -- not as we may want to see it or hope to see it but as it is," McGreevey told reporters at the Capitol in Trenton. "My truth is that I am a gay American."And, as usual, when I'm looking for news on NJ, I skip all the major media (just AP reposts, anyway) and go straight to the source of all things Blog-Jersey.
Posted by yatta at 5:54 PM | TrackBack
watched tv for the first time in months last night....
for about 30 minutes I cut between the constant high-pitched drone of the '2004 teen choice awards' on fox and the constant dull moan of spike tv's '50 most desirable women'. (There really was nothing else on. Really.) The whole thing reminded me why I'm working on this media alternatives stuff. By the way - the crossover between the two shows? Embarrassingly high.
Posted by yatta at 12:11 PM | TrackBack
August 9, 2004
The Struggle Against I.E.W.D.N.B.I.F.S.W.H.T.U.T.A.A.W.T.T.T.S.T.C.O.T.F.W.
"We actually misnamed the War on Terror. It ought to be the Struggle Against Ideological Extremists Who Do Not Believe in Free Societies Who Happen to Use Terror as a Weapon To Try To Shape The Conscience Of The Free World."Sigh.