Wii Pee

This week’s sweeping generality – what is it with the Japanese and their fascination with urinating? Is this where we are going, people? Do we rely on Japan to take a great idea like the Wii and dumb it down to appeal to every fraternity house in American? How about the Wii Money Shot game?

Are the Japanese ahead of the curve or just peeing on it?

http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/superpiipii.html

The New Mix Tape

A great way to share music - http://muxtape.com/

Upload, listen, save to favorites, listen some more, then wait until Metallica's drummer Lars Ulrich wants to shut it down for copyrite infringement.

Public Print Lab

Here is a very cool project going on in Baltimore - www.publicprintlab.com

The Public Print Lab is a user-generated interactive art installation, created in collaboration with Beatbots.com's Justin Blemly. A small laser printer installed in Baltimore's Creative Alliance is connected to a public email address, allowing users to email or txt images directly to the printer. After the close of the exhibition, the collected prints will be bound into a book documenting the project.

JPG, GIF, or PNG images emailed or TXTed to print@publicprintlab.com between March 15 and April 26, 2008 will automatically print out in black and white inside the Minstallation Gallery. Digital copies of the images are instantly added to the online gallery at www.publicprintlab.com.

Radiohead Gets "It"

I got an e-mail today from RADIOHEAD asking if I wanted to remix one of their songs. I thought that was nice of them to offer. Now, I’m not a DJ by any stretch of the imagination and I wish I had the talent to mix songs but I love love love remixes. It pleases me greatly when people get the chance to reinterpret someone else’s vision/art and the original artist is open to their interpretations.

Dig this - RADIOHEAD is not only open to the “idea” of remixes but they are actually encouraging the general public to remix one of their songs. Mixers can go to iTunes and purchase the bits, or “stems”, of the song (drums, bass, vocal tracks, etc). You are then given access to remixing software” GarageBand”, if you need a remixing platform, thus allowing the mixer/DJ the opportunity to easily mix their own interpretation of the track. They are then encouraged to post that remix to the RADIOHEAD site - http://www.radioheadremix.com/ for voting - RADIOHEAD also provides a voting widget so that the DJs can upload their track to their own MySpace or FaceBook pages and generate votes from there, which , in turn, are tracked by the RADIOHEAD site. The main site then publishes the Top 10 voted songs, which is a self-governing site that allows users to “report” songs that may be offensive. There are pages and pages of remixes already, some of them good, some of them bad. But the idea is that people from all over the world are connected by just one song. What I do like about this site is that RADIOHEAD did not provide a space for comments – I imagine that they just wanted to let people’s tracks speak for themselves and they didn’t provide a forum for “hating”.

Are you following this… (he says excitingly!) a band allows access to one of their hit song’s basic tracks from a 3rd party – iTunes. They then tell you to go and remix it, oh and here is some software if you don’t have any for remixing the track. And give the song back to them if you want to, or not, it’s up to you. And OK, here is some “technology” you can use to host the song in your space and we, RADIHEAD can track the voting for YOU.

So far my favorite is from DJ HOLYFUCK, it’s a great track and I can now find more of his music at http://www.holyfuckmusic.com/. (I think he needs to work on his branding a bit – that’s a hard one for search engines). Basically, the Top 10 songs are great. Some purists may find this disturbing. ‘Who is Joe Schmoe to think he can remix a RADIOHEAD track???!” Well, I say, take a listen and you decide.