MAJOR OSMOSIS

7.28.2011

R.I.P. AMY WINEHOUSE: Queen of Trasher Culture

News that Amy Winehouse likely died from the toxic shock caused by quitting alcohol cold turkey is tragically ironic. Amy had the courage to kiss the trasher lifestyle goodbye on her own terms - not by going to rehab. Had she been in a rehab facility, she could have detoxed gradually under medical supervision and survived.

It breaks my heart to know that the woman of my generation who brought back the soul to our era's plasticky, auto-tuned pop singing, not only died too young and with too few recordings; but so too, that revelations about the cause of her death - which should be a cautionary tale to aficionados of trasher culture everywhere - may scare off other addicts from taking similarly bold leaps of faith to bring their own drug and alcohol vices under control.

If you ain't ready to kick the bucket yet, it would be a damn shame to see ya go... don't be ashamed to ask the folks who love you for help, kids!

R.I.P. Amy Winehouse. Thanks for the good times. You were the greatest soul singer of the millennial generation - and Our Queen of Trasher Culture.

10.30.2010

Being Independent is Confusing

Unless you live and die for fashion, you should never aspire to be called “Coco.” That’s just one syllable away from Coco-NUT. (Conan O’Brien and Charlie Crist - I’m talking to you.) Coco Chanel, R.I.P.

7.26.2010

How to Access Blocked Web Content

Lifehacker.com recently posted a very useful guide to circumventing pesky restrictions imposed by Big Brother on the Internet. Check it out: http://lifehacker.com/5516305/top-10-ways-to-access-blocked-stuff-on-the-web

ADBUSTERS" TACTICAL BRIEFING #1

Are you familiar with AdBusters magazine?

To me, the Adbusters Foundation is what would happen if Andy Warhol and Saul Alinsky gave birth to a revolutionary love-child. Here's a transcript of the most recent screed I received from AdBusters.org via email:

Between November 22-28 the whole world will light up with seven days of Carnivalesque Rebellion!

Think of it as an adventure, as therapy, as Buy Nothing Day times a hundred … think of it as the World Cup of global activism – a week of postering and pranks, of talking back at your profs and speaking truth to power. Some of us will poster our schools and neighborhoods and just break our daily routines for a week. Others will chant, cut up their credit cards in big box stores and and pull off theatrical stunts that provoke mass cognitive dissonance. Others still will drop stink bombs in strategic locations and engage in the most visceral kind of civil disobedience.

In all, millions of people around the world will walk out of their schools, offices and factories for a week and live!

To pull this off, we need to learn from the failures of the recent G8/G20 protests. A few sensational and spectacular acts of violence (police cars on fire, window smashing) will not provoke the kind of global mindshift that our world so desperately needs. And neither will sitting at home yelling at our screens. If our Seven Days of Carnivalesque Rebellion are to succeed we'll need a plethora of actions that cannot be dismissed as petty acts of vandalism, that genuinely challenge the power of megacorporations, that make people think about the climate tipping points now descending upon us and that highlight the perversity of a system that has brought us to the zero point of systemic collapse.

What would you do if you could mobilize thousands of connected protesters in cities all over the world? Send your best ideas for coordinated acts of civil disobedience to memewarriors@adbusters.org and we'll share the most compelling ones in subsequent briefs.

To get the ball rolling here's a personal plunge you may want to take right away: Vow never to walk into a Starbucks ever again. Instead, search out the most interesting indie coffee shop around where you live and work … get to know the people who own and run the place and get your friends and co-workers to join you there. Individually this may feel like a drop in the bucket, but if all the 86,000 of us in this network do it collectively, then we can begin to shift power from megacorporations to our friends and neighbors.

This little shift in our lives is a good way to get in the mood … and during the week of rebellion in November, these indie coffeehouses will become our meeting places and bases.