Increasingly, creative types are harnessing what I’ve begun to call “the T-shirt economy”—paying for bits by selling atoms. Charging for content online is hard, often impossible. Even 10 cents for a download of something like Red vs. Blue might drive away the fans. So instead of fighting this dynamic, today’s smart artists are simply adapting to it.

Their algorithm is simple: First, don’t limit your audience by insisting they pay to see your work. Instead, let your content roam freely online, so it generates as large an audience as possible. Then cash in on your fans’ desire to sport merchandise that declares their allegiance to you.

We’re talking about a surprisingly big market. According to Impressions, a clothing industry trade publication, Americans spend around $40 billion a year on decorated apparel. At CafePress, a Web site that lets anyone customize and sell merchandise, users sold more than $100 million in goods in 2007—pocketing $20 million in profits—and overall sales are growing an average of 60 percent a year.

As you might expect, the T-shirt economy is a long tail phenomenon, with comparatively few people making a full-time living while millions earn only a few hundred or thousand bucks a year. On the high revenue end, you’ve got companies like BustedTees—an offshoot of the funny-video portal CollegeHumor—which, with a staff of eight, expects to clear a 20 percent profit on sales of 350,000-plus shirts for 2008. In the middle are outfits like RightWingStuff, which hawks T-shirts mocking the left. And on the far end of the tail are people like David Friedman, a New York photographer who cooks up three or four witty ideas a year—like his series of T-shirts adorned with fictional corporate logos that are blurrily “pixelated,” as if on reality TV—and makes just enough money to cover his hosting fees, plus a bit of pocket change.

Full Story: Wired

Someone at Daily Kos takes a look at media coverage of the church shooting and digs up some interesting details about the Christian group that Murray was most involved with, Youth with a Mission:

The Cult Awareness Network national office in Chicago had several letters on file concerning YWAM. One such letter by Nancy Brown dated March of 1984 from Itheca, New York stated “that Ywam has many elements of a destructive cult”. A major issue cited was “the authoritarian control by the elders”. Allegedly YWAM depicted the “world” as “Satanic”. Members were told that “Satan comes into an idle mind” and were advised “Whenever you have a spare moment memorize. Elders gave out cards with Bible verses to carry and use”.

And:

Denver station KMGH reports that many people at the Colorado Springs church have similar connections: “There is a Youth With A Mission office on the New Life Church campus, and many members of New Life have completed the YWAM’s school and discipleship programs. They have also worked together in local evangelical outreach programs.”

So here’s what seems to have happened: a particularly loony Christian group filled a mentally ill kid’s head with terrifying non-sense and he ended up killing some people, and now the conservative media want blame secularism for it. Well, it makes as much sense as Christianity does in the first place, I suppose.

Full Story: Daily Kos.

“After years of reading puff pieces about the coming of the “Hypersonic Soundbeam,” a device designed to send targeted blasts of sound waves that can be heard only be selected recipients in an audio environment, it has apparently made its debut in the public sphere, right here in New York. As part of a billboard marketing campaign for a television show. A&E has placed a billboard (on Prince St. between Mulberry and Mott) that shoots sound waves designed to resonate against your head, giving the passerby a distinct feeling that the advertisement is arising from within their skull. The television show is is about ghosts, so that means this is a witty kind of progressive marketing stunt and not just totally fucking creepy, right?IRI Technologies, one of the many companies vending this device to the industry, highlights the invention’s utility like so: “The Hypersonic Sound Waves travel silently through space, up to 300 feet away, then convert into an instant sound source whatever surface [including your skull! -ed.] they impact. Amazingly, if you aim this magical device at a person, their head will become a speaker, and they will hear your message “inside” their head.”

The patent owner of this little baby is an American Solo Maverick Inventor in the old model – he cooked this idea up and built a prototype without the help of a corporate research team. Woody Norris is, as an interview posted to his website will have you know, “no techno nerd.” And he’s humble about the source of his inspirations, observing that, “I didn’t invent that [medical sonar imaging device]. It happens and I observed it. And so I claimed it. You know what inventing is — I heard this from somebody else — ‘It’s an accident observed.”

(via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog)

(WSJ Article on Woody Norris via Woody Norris’ blog)

A documentary about Brother Theodore is in production, directed by Jeff Sumerel. According to the official web site: “over 15 hours of interviews have been shot, with additional interviews scheduled in New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin. A brief sample of interviews has been compiled and will be presented to potential executive producers.”

View trailer here.

See also:

Clips of Brother Theodore on YouTube.

Torrent collection of Brother Theodore material.

Brother Theodore is Dead by Nick Mamatus.

Norman Podhoretz believes that America needs to go to war soon with Iran. As far as he knows, Rudy Giuliani thinks the same thing.

‘I was asked to come in and give him a briefing on the war, World War IV,’ said Mr. Podhoretz, a founding father of neoconservatism and leading foreign policy adviser to Mr. Giuliani. ‘As far as I can tell there is very little difference in how he sees the war and how I see it.’

During a long interview this week in his bookcase-lined East 81st Street home, Mr. Podhoretz, 77, explained the very straightforward proposition he has been proposing to Mr. Giuliani from the start of the campaign: ‘The choice before us is either bomb those nuclear facilities or let them get the bomb.’

Full Story: The New York Observer.

More about Giuliani here.

More about the impending war with Iran:

The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran That the White House Doesn’t Want You to Know.

The Iran Plan.

A Kansas City, Missouri, artist well-known for his political public performances, Ford flew 24 members of his entourage to New York last weekend to participate in Maximon, a “public audience” with the aforementioned deity. Also known as Hermano San Simon, the spirit is traditionally maintained throughout the year with offerings of tobacco, liquor, music, flowers, and incense, and is said to serve as a redemptive or protective source for the prostitutes and gang members of Guatemala. (He’s also said to symbolize male sexual power-his darker aspects lead devotees to carefully guard his visage from public view for fear that his sexuality may run rampant. Um, bring it!) Participants in Friday night’s Williamsburg show-the first here after years of the celebration in KC-were instructed to bring evidence of their vices: These gifts to Maximon supposedly “guaranteed redemption for the artists and musicians of New York.” I brought vodka. Also: receipts from Anthropologie.

Full Story: Village Voice.

(via Robot Wisdom).

Wikipedia entry for Maximon.

Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, wife of Genesis P. Orridge, has passed away.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and her reactivated Psychic TV aka PTV3 are terribly sad to announce the cancellation of their November North American tour dates. This decision is entirely due to the unexpected passing of band member Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge.

Lady Jaye died suddenly on Tuesday 9th October 2007 at home in Brooklyn, New York from a previously undiagnosed heart condition which is thought to have been connected with her long-term battle with stomach cancer. Lady Jaye collapsed and died in the arms of her heartbroken “other half” Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.

Being overwhelmed by the enormity of their loss, Genesis and the other surviving band members of Psychic TV/PTV3 are not able to properly meet the demands of touring and performance. Obviously, her absence onstage , the conspicuous loss of her unique charisma, music and humour would be an unbearable emotional reality to confront night after night.

The group, who have been touring to promote their first studio album in 12 years, will announce future plans after an appropriate period of mourning.

From: Genesis P. Orridge – News.

We had a toast to her memory at PDX0 tonight. My deepest condolences to her loved ones.

I have a piece up on Alterati today about M.I.A and her new album Kala:

M.I.A’s new album Kala whips listeners through the poorest corners of the world, moving too quickly to quite distinguish between the various locales. Is this Rio or Trinidad? Calcutta or London? Wait, the Australian outback? It’s all blurred, mashed-up.

M.I.A brings us straight to the bleeding edge of modern culture. While indie rock endlessly recycles the past, M.I.A is busy remixing the future. In his essay The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City’ Rana Dasgupta wrote ‘Is it going too far to suggest that our sudden interest in books and films about the Third-World city stems from the sense that they may provide effective preparation for our future survival in London, New York or Paris? Our fast-moving media culture, groping always for any image of the ?new’ that can be used to produce more astonishment, operates in a zone slightly ahead of knowledge.’ In other words, westerners are increasingly looking to the Third-World to catch a glimpse of our own future.

Full Story: Alterati.

Found this article yesterday while reading the print edition of The New York Times Magazine (link to article). Fortunately, it’s online (for the time being), but I’ll copy n paste it in its entirety for your reading pleasure:-

By TED WIDMER
Published: July 22, 2007

None of us can control our ancestors. Like our children, they have minds of their own and invariably refuse to do our bidding. Presidential ancestors are especially unruly – they are numerous and easily discovered, and they often act in ways unbecoming to the high station of their descendants.

Take George Bush. By whom I mean George Bush (1796-1859), first cousin of the president’s great-great-great-grandfather. It would be hard to find a more unlikely forebear. G.B. No. 1 was not exactly the black sheep of the family, to use a phrase the president likes to apply to himself. In fact, he was extremely distinguished, just not in ways that you might expect. Prof. George Bush was a bona fide New York intellectual: a dabbler in esoteric religions whose opinions were described as, yes, ‘liberal’; a journalist and an academic who was deeply conversant with the traditions of the Middle East. Read the rest of this entry »

A new English-language interpretation of the Muslim Holy book the Koran challenges the use of words that feminists say have been used to justify the abuse of Islamic women.

The new version, translated by an Iranian-American, will be published in April and comes after Muslim feminists from around the world gathered in New York last November and vowed to create the first women’s council to interpret the Koran and make the religion more friendly toward women.

Full Story: Reuters.

Separating anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, New York City is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificate even if they have not had sex-change surgery.

Under the rule being considered by the city’s Board of Health, which is likely to be adopted soon, people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates by providing affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex, and asserting that their proposed change would be permanent.

Applicants would have to have changed their name and shown that they had lived in their adopted gender for at least two years, but there would be no explicit medical requirements.

continued via the New York Times

Just fyi, Canada Alberta is willing to trade Toronto for New York. In fact, we’ll give you most of Ontario in exchange…

The Phenomena Interview Padre Engo: New York’s Voodoo High Priest, Militant Messiah, Music Producer and Musician Dateline:

Ed – You have stated that you are the incarnation of a Mexican god. How did you discover this?

PE – Yes I am Quetzalcoatl in the flesh. I am the first and there will be other avatars of the Feathered Serpent to come after me.

Only a black man can hold this spiritual title. Also, being a Moor (a black Muslim) and an avatar of Quetzalcoatl is not a contradiction in terms. Most people have no idea as to who Quetzalcoatl really is. All the so-called New Age books on Quetzalcoatl fail to tell you who he really is. Quetzalcoatl was not a ‘White Man with a beard’. The Mexican Indians never believed such nonsense. This idea only exists in the letter Cortez wrote to the King of Spain. Quetzalcoatl is a West African god that was always viewed as a black man from the East. This has been proven by the Harvard Professor Leo Weiner.

Quetzalcoatl is the product of the Mandingo magicians that colonized Mexico long before the birth of Christ, and again in the 1300s. He was originally depicted by the ancient Mexican Indians as a black man with a beard wearing a white ‘Islamic’ robe. His white robe is why he is often called a ‘White God’.

Full Story: Key 23.

Reverend Magdalen is fighting to keep the New York court system from taking her children away from her because of her involvement with the Church of SubGenius. The Taphouse Cabal is doing some fundraising.

More details here.

(previously on Technoccult).

It was revealed last week that 46 Australian patients received tissue implants from Biomedical Tissue Services (BTS), a company under investigation and now shut down by the United States Food and Drug Administration for illegally obtaining body parts from cadavers (many of which were diseased) and placing them in the stream of commerce.

A tragic scandal now has repercussions beyond the New Jersey shores where BTS is located. Patients who received body parts from BTS have filed lawsuits claiming to have contracted syphilis, hepatitis and other diseases from the bones and tissues they received from pillaged cadavers. The emptied corpses were sent to funeral homes in New York to prepare for burial. Yet, Michael Mastromarino, the CEO of BTS, and his colleagues had other macabre business objectives in mind, including looting the corpses for profit.

Full Story: Online Opinion.

“This week, Rep. Felix Grucci (R-New York) introduced legislation requiring schools and libraries receiving federal funds to block access from their computers to anonymous Web browsing or e-mail services.”

Read all about it here.

Chris Arkenberg, aka LVX23, appears on this week’s R.U. Sirius Show!

Update: didn’t realize that Jason was in the interview too, by phone from New York (thanks Brenden).

MP3 on The R.U. Sirius Show.

This brings us to the most perverse suspicion of all. Perhaps the Third-World city is more than simply the source of the things that will define the future, but actually is the future of the western city. Perhaps some of those tourists who look to the Third World for an image of their own past are reflecting uneasily on how all the basic realities of the Third-World city are already becoming more pronounced in their own cities: vast gulfs between sectors of the population across which almost no sympathetic intelligence can flow, gleaming gated communities, parallel economies and legal systems, growing numbers of people who have almost no desire or ability to participate in official systems, innovations in residential housing involving corrugated iron and tarpaulin. Is it going too far to suggest that our sudden interest in books and films about the Third-World city stems from the sense that they may provide effective preparation for our future survival in London, New York or Paris?

Full Story: Rana Dasgupta.

(via Abstract Dynamics).

I hadn’t really thought of it quite like this, but yes I think some of my own interest in 3rd world megalopolisis is in gaining some insight about what the future may look like for all of us.

See also: Feral Cities, Grim Meathook Future, Biopunk: the biotechnology black market, and Adam Greenfield’s Design Engaged 2005 presentation (does anyone have better notes for this?).

Praise “Bob”, slack off, lose custody of your child. A Texas woman has lost custody of her son, not even being allowed to write to him, because she was involved in activities of the Church of the Subgenius. Although her son never attended any of the events, which involved fun, nudity, and good old-fashioned blasphemy, a New York judge, James P. Punch, allegedly a “strict catholic”, has denied custody of the child Kohl out of anger after seeing videos of the church’s devivals and X-days.

Full Story: MetaFilter .

(via Post Atomic )

Pop Thought interview Morrison on the craft of writing:

I wrote The Invisibles Vol 1 issue 23 on my living room couch, hallucinating, and dying of MRSA-related septicaemia, (those cranky descriptions of demons and the crystal crown biting into Mister Six’s head and the Gnostic Christ saying ‘I am not the God of your fathers…’ were scrawled notes from the delirious no-man’s land between life and giving up) and the following issue was written from a hospital ward, waiting to hear if the near-fatal staph aureus infection I’d contracted had spread to my heart. I was there for two weeks, working as often as I could between tests and treatment, with the intention of writing myself out of trouble (as a mad sidebar, after beating off the infection with the aid of antibiotics, I became inexplicably obsessed with eating raw carrots for the remainder of my stay in hospital – only to find out last week that staph aureus – ‘golden’ staphylococcus – gets its distinctive color from carotene. I must have been so stuffed to the fucking guts with carotene-pigmented bastards when the bacteria was swarming through me that I went into withdrawal for the stuff when the bugs were finally wiped out!).

And Silver Bullet interviews him about his current and future DC projects:

I’m armpit-deep in the “52″ project which I’m plotting and writing along with Geoff Johns, Mark Waid, Greg Rucka and Keith Giffen with JG Jones on covers, I see this project as the first ‘album’ from DCs first creative ’super group’ and it’s been the most fun I’ve had in this business to date. I just got back from a series of incredible creative summits in New York and couldn’t believe the energy, imagination and refreshing lack of prima donna ego bullshit on show. “52″ is being planned meticulously and written like a TV drama. Based on the material we’ve got so far, I think this project will break new ground for mainstream comics and I can’t imagine any other company being capable of anything like it right now, so it’s going to be very unique and absorbing read, squeezing down four years of continuity into one. It’s the first real, full-length ‘graphic novel’ about superheroes and is likely to change the way we think of what can be done with them.

When I was in New York my friend Terence asked me if I liked the Magnetic Fields. He was talking about the band, but square as I am I thought he was talking about, y’know, the scientific thingies.

I guess Metachor is interested in the magnetic fields, because he’s linking to some really interesting articles. I’ve always wondered about the role of electromagnetic fields in paranormal phenomenon.

Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields

Sharks respond to magnetic lines

and most interesting, if least believable: Earth’s Magnetic Field Regions of Weakness Predict Sites of War

All via the Vortex Egg

I’m missing Burning Man this year so I can go to New York and Chicago. But I’ll be at this year’s Earth Dance in New York.

So everyone going to LVX23 and everyone else going to Burning Man: have a good time for me, and I’ll see ya’ll on the playa next year.

I’m flying to Austin for work on Wednesday July 28th and staying until August 1st. Any readers in the Austin area want to meetup?

I’m also going to be in New York and Chicago for week each sometime in the second half of September, most likely.

And speaking of meat sources:

Here’s one for the philosophers: Is New York’s water kosher? You’d imagine so, but recent tests have discovered that codepods — tiny, half-millimeter-long creatures — are surviving through the city’s filtration process. I just had a glass of water with breakfast, and for all I know I drank a couple of these things.

Are vegans debating this as well?

Link (via Abstract Dynamics)

I’m back. I’ll be posting some thoughts about Burning Man on my personal blog, as well as on Margin Walker in the near future. In the mean time, I’ll be posting some BM related links here… first off, check this:

Two full-time employees of Black Rock City LLC are helping develop regional spinoffs beyond those already growing in places like New York, Seattle, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Austin, Tex., ? and making sure they adhere to the philosophy of the original.

…

Black Rock Arts Foundation, meanwhile, has been set up to raise money and to bring radical art to communities nationwide. Organizers also just distributed what they call a ?Burning Man film festival in a box,? a do-it-yourself kit that they expect will promote avant-garde cinematography.

I think this is a great idea, as long as it is handled properly. I don’t think the Burning Man community is going to take it well, though.
Link (via Abstract Dynamics).

Here’s a piece from the Christian Science Monitor on the role of religion in the Matrix.

Mr. Frankfurter and other religious experts say “The Matrix” does not represent orthodox Christianity nearly as much as Gnostic Christianity.

Gnosticism never developed a well-defined theology, but it depicts Jesus as a hero figure who saves mankind through “gnosis,” or esoteric knowledge. In the Gnostic philosophy, the physical world is not part of God’s creation, but a manifestation of a lower god – a nightmarish reality that imprisons mankind, say religious experts. Gnostics believed they could achieve salvation, not by overcoming evil and sin with God’s grace, but by learning the “higher knowledge” about reality.

Gnostic threads are present in many religious traditions, including Sufism and Buddhism. As woven by “The Matrix,” these threads tie together current concerns with an ancient knot.

“All of this stuff has been bouncing around in the human brain for centuries. When it comes into this hip new iteration in the cyberworld, it all sounds familiar,” says Robert Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University in New York.

Link (via Purse Lips Square Jaw).