This year’s slate of Super Bowl ads indicate two trends: 1) a continued lack of imagination among the highest paid “creatives” in the world, and 2) a backlash against environmental activism. These Super Bowl ads were decidedly conservative by recycling standard demographic tropes to shore up the shrinking ego of the persecuted male species. This has been the long-standing approach of torch-bearer Bud Light, which perfected the art of celebrating the isolated, addicted male in defiance of the over-bearing power of women and community. What is new this year is transmuting this “abusive authority” into the guise of ecological consciousness.
Case study number one is the “Green Police” ads by Audio, which couches its anti-PC message in ironic humor, thereby softening the seriousness of its subtext. It confirms the fears that environmental regulation will result in a police state, and turns anyone who cares about the environment into a potential fascist. While we may laugh at such cartoony fears (it’s only a joke, right?), the Rush Limbaugh crowd takes them very seriously.
(It’s not an illegitimate protest. From an eco-justice point of view, the threat of global regulations forced upon local populations is real, but in the latter case the concern is that corporate interests will hijack environmental rhetoric in the service of obliterating local autonomy in the same way that trade liberalization promoted by the WTO has done.)
Here Audi defends the rich white male’s perceived loss of autonomy and his right to be a jerk. My particular peeve against Audi is based on personal experience in Europe where Audi drivers across the board are the most arrogant and dangerous exemplars of the tragedy of commons (for example, watch this ad). On highways one must be in constant alert of Audis rushing at jet fighter speed, lest your leisurely Sunday afternoon drive through the Tuscan countryside ends in a pile of crushed steel, bones and shattered glass.
The paranoia exhibited by Audi plays into the general meme that government regulation of corporate abuses will translate into socialist totalitarianism. Say “Green Police” ten times fast and you may end up with “Greenpeace.”
Call this a backlash shot across the bough of environmental activism. Green consciousness becomes the work of thought police.
Case study number two comes from Bud Lite, which (yawn) sticks to its failsafe storyline. In it Bud Lite’s primary target audience (those possessed by an inner 13-year-old “mook“) must retreat to their boys-only (stripper exception clause allowed) playhouse to take cover from moralistic authorities (women) who condemn their innocent behavior. But now the right to secrecy, addiction and misogyny is threatened by ecological activism. In this ad, rather than a house being built of recycled beer cans (which excites a young female foil), its owners have constructed a living refrigerator, without realizing, however, that symbolically it’s also a morgue.
Case Study number three is the Budweiser bridge. The only thing surprising about this ad is how it blatantly demeans humans as mere slaves to their corporate overlord. In this case, people are willing to let the truck (a symbolic container of the Budweiser corporate brand) drive over their backs. So while the previous ads play into people’s fears of losing individual freedom to ethical constraints, here people voluntarily become the servomechanism of corporate power and control. How’s that for ironic Super Bowl humor!
* Pithing is when you stick a needle in the brain of a live frog. The goal is to scramble its brain in order to immobilize it for dissection while it is still alive. When applied to advertising a paradox or insult is used like a needle to confuse and conquer unwilling media gawkers into immobile rage. In protest I won’t post a link.
How’s this for media ecology: Ecosia is a green search engine that restores rain forests. Watch the above video to see how. According to them, if 1% of Internet users search on Ecosia, an area of rainforest the size of Switzerland will be saved every year. On the surface this seems like a preposterous solution (that is, pretend that something more drastic is not necessary). Yet, why not? I’ll give it a try.
TM: What would a person want to know or learn or do to begin to participate in this spontaneous evolution?
BL: We have to start recognizing that our belief systems are controlled by our mind, and that most of our mind is not under our control. We have a conscious mind, the creative mind, home to our wishes and desires, and we have a subconscious mind, a habit mind with programs downloaded. We generally believe that we’re running our lives with our creative minds. A lot of people say, “We’re facing a crisis, let’s create answers and solutions.” But 95 percent of our life comes from the habit mind, programmed primarily by other people and our culture.
TM: So even with the best of intentions, we miss 95 percent of where the action is.
BL: Absolutely. That’s why we struggle so hard to get to where we want to go. We’re operating from invisible beliefs about how life works that were programmed into us before we were six.
In the first six years of your life, you see the stresses and struggles your parents go through, and that becomes a behavioral program in your subconscious mind. Then when you’re older, you say, “Let’s have a life that’s wonderful and joyous and happy.” But 95 percent of your life is coming from behaviors downloaded from your parents.
Until we become aware of these invisible programs that undermine us, we look like we’re victims to the world. If we want peace and love, harmony and health, and we don’t get it, we may conclude that the universe is against us. But from the perspective of the new biology, we undermine ourselves with the acquired beliefs of our culture. We have to rewrite those beliefs to re-empower ourselves.
Like most things new, it took a month for Avatar to screen in Italy. I avoided reading any posts or articles about the film until I first had a chance to view it myself. Since seeing it here in Rome, I’ve been crafting my response. I haven’t posted because I keep thinking of things to add, but I decided to just stop and let the following speak for itself. I’m sure I’ll add more later as the film continues to resonate.
Media critic WJT Mitchell asks the question, What do pictures want? Whenever staring into the eyes of media, I often wonder who or what beckons me. From the initial to closing shots of Avatar, we are invited to connect to a world through the gaze of a floating screen. In the former case eyes open to a world turned upside down, but one yet to be born. In the latter, through another set of eyes we see ourselves transmuted as a cyborg animal in a world right side up, returned to order. In other words, we voyage though Campbell's Hero's Journey to a T– one of Hollywood's most tried and true narrative arks. But what if Avatar's archetypal roots reach deeper to its Hindu namesake, calling forth the larger comsic question: is the dreamer being dreamed? Maybe the picture (as isn the film) wants to know the answer.
Before moving on, I'll start by acknowledging the easy criticisms of the film, which are also echoed across the blogosphere. Indeed it's a cowboy and Indians weekend matinee movie. James Cameron plugged and played a number of tropes, the most obvious coming from Last of the Mohicans, Pocahontas and Dances With Wolves. In the end we have an updated version of the White Messiah violently intervening to resolve a conflict between pastoral natives and a colonial war machine. Which begs the question, Do we really need another crusade to solve a problem of consciousness? One lesson is that we should avoid the right-wing Christian view that takes "spiritual warfare" literally. Certainly the film's decisive battle scene would mesh with Derrick Jensen's call to bring the fight to Empire. On the other hand, has there ever been a major film in which the protagonist does not prove himself a "man" without an act of violence?
Going back to the film's homage to matinee adventures, I could go on with the genre mash-ups (as many bloggers humorously did), but the film's conventions ultimately serve as an easily digestible morality play that are context for the special effects and larger issues of global significance. That the film has pretensions of planetary appeal is indicated by its Up With People/ world pop/ ready-made-for-New-Age-bookstores soundtrack.
Nonetheless, as an ecologically themed movie one has to wonder (tongue jammed into cheek) if the disposable 3-D glasses are made of biodegradable plastic (they are imprinted with recycling code "7"–which I think means a highly toxic amalgam that shouldn't be recycled, buried or incinerated). Also there is the fact that Mattel will make Avatar action figures made of who-knows-what toxic polymers under who-knows-what labor conditions under who-knows-what kind of authoritarian rule while shipped across the planet producing who-knows-how much C02 in transit. Not surprisingly, McDonald's will have Avatar themed Happy Meals with who-know-what "meat" product. Surely we couldn't expect the the culture industry's machinery to shut itself down in the wake of the world's greatest blockbuster. No, not when there's consumer markets to be mined. It may be too much to ask for more purity from Hollywood, but at least we (the audience) can make the cultural intervention by supplying a deeper systems analysis when one is absent. We can thank the film for creating the space to make such a discussion more relevant.
Surprisingly, Avatar makes me optimistic, despite its double binds. The quandary is that in order for the film to connect viewers to nature spirits it must use the technology of the system that it critiques. After all, like the film, Pandora's alien miners deploy 3-D imaging which enables them to map and exploit the world. But ecology to us modern folks is contradictory in the same way: we call for a return to nature, yet depend on science to map the risk of global peril in order to combat it. For instance, the iconic photo of Earth in space could not have been made possible without NASA's help, who deploy a highly extractive and environmentally destructive form of "high" technology (US rocket fuel, for example, is very destructive to the ozone and its toxic compounds are found in baby formula). At our current stage of globalization, arguments for restoring the biosphere, mitigation and remediation, whether we like it or not, require science and technology, and even the Internet, a primary byproduct of military research. The rub is that technology, according to Jacques Ellul, is first a product of "technique," a way of thinking and categorizing the world that is materially manifested in technology. The bind is that we are now called upon to turn technique upon itself in order to tunnel back to "nature," something that is itself now just a construct.
The hope is that artists and communicators can tap into the primordial call of Earth by creating stories and visualizations that move us toward a planetary vision of ecology. As Ursula K. Heise argues in her fantastic book, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, the Internet is often used in popular culture as a synecdoche for planetary connectivity. Avatar takes that one step further by showing how Pandora is itself a kind of organic Internet, its native inhabitants "jacking in" like the cyberpunk cowboys of yore. So while its true the system that produced the technology of Avatar is itself destructive, at the same time we should also acknowledge that it offers an emotional reconnection with a feeling of planetary consciousness, its 3-D heart reaching out to us over the silhouetted heads of the theater. In this sense, the film is about itself. After all, when we mindmold with Na'vi Jake Sully in the last shot, has he not become our dream? Or are we in his?
The film presents two paradigm extremes: the Mechanistic World Eaters, and the Organic World Grokkers. In-between are the bridge people, those who have a foot in both worlds, represented by Sully the wounded hero who becomes a shaman, and the chief's daughter Neytiri, who is schooled in the language of the oppressor. The love between them is one conduit to transformation; information technology and art is the other. As such, the film presents different aspects of technological prosthetics. There are the machinery versions of the Robo Cop variety, and there is the Avatar Project, which allows humans to control biologically engineered clones in order to infiltrate Pandora's natives. Finally there is the film itself which is a prosthetic of our enlarged senses. Like us, the film's avatars are digital natives, which inhabit a hybrid domain of modern network technology and the primeval matrix of interconnectivity. Despite the popular belief that we are disconnected from the natural world (reflected by the fact that we talk as if there is a dichotomy between the two), like the avatars we are biologically and imminently part of the biosphere. We are not on earth, we are in earth. And just as my mirror neurons enable me to empathize and connect with fellow humans, they also extend to other animals, plants and minerals (yes, minerals!). We are naturally interweaving with all aspects of our world, but due to our domestication (best exemplified by Avatar's comically named antagonist, Parker Selfridge), we are trained to experience nature as if it were alien. As bridgers, though, the minds that navigate the avatars are extending their awareness into a larger reality.
Still, though the technological net that encompass Pandora can model and map it in 3-D, it fails to garner empathy from the World Eaters. Only through hybridization with the Primal Matrix can it happen. This occurs through technological bonding with the world's natives, who are themselves a kind of animal hybrid (though they wouldn't see themselves that way). Indeed, humans are animals too, lest we forget. Na'vi are part cat, part humanoid, which invokes some of Donna Haraway's work about cyborgs and hybridity ("We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs"). On a biological level, if we were pressed to evaluate what is it that defines us as human, you would be shocked to learn how much of us really is water, parasites and bacteria. Moreover, our DNA contains even the most ancient strains of evolution. Indeed we are part lizard, bird, fish and algae. Where the distinction begins and ends is cultural.
In order for us to reach beyond the reality bubble of technique, we start by burrowing our way through with what we can grasp. When Sully enters the world of the Na'vi for the first time, the only way he knows how to survive in the foreign landscape is to use fire– our first technology. But it is only when the flame is extinguished that he can see the world alive with light and energy. As many bloggers have noted, such a vision is not unlike the kind you have when imbibing the "fruits of gods." If Avatar pushes the Vatican to criticizes the film's animism, then I think it's on to something.
The most useful aspect of Avatar is its ability to defamiliarize the concept of "alien." I read some reviewers refer to the indigenous inhabitants of Pandora as aliens. Wrong. As the dialog and schematic clearly shows, the humans (we don't know much about their history) are clearly the aliens, in the same sense that when the Spanish invaded the Americas, they too were aliens to the native societies.
The film's machines–as cartoony as they are–are literal world eaters, visual manifestations of the very system that exists in our planet, right now, be they rain forest consuming corporations or imperial invasions (references to mercenaries and "Shock and Awe" might confuse some of the film's fans who don't see Pandora's connection with Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan). Avatar's weakness is to not elaborate more on the RDA Corporation's home society. Like the war machine we see on the evening news, they are decontextualized from history (I imagine the sequels will flesh this out more–fingers crossed). It would be more courageous if their parent "civilization" was identified as a democracy. That could help us see more directly our own way of life as connected to the world-consuming ways of Pandora's colonizers.
If you are like me, the most powerful moment of the film comes in the last shot, when Sully's consciousness reawakens fully merged with his Na'vi prosthetic. In that moment my heart's aperture opened widely, encompassed by an enlarged sense of recognition and unity that comes from a true connection with the world. From the screen's eyes to mine, tears welled.
Cameron remarked that the Na'vi are like our higher selves. Connecting to this realm is refreshing like a purification dream. Indeed, the film's very roots are rooted in dreams, our one border region that still actively engages spirits of Earth. First, the Na'vi's physical form was inspired by a dream of Cameron's mother. Secondly, the image of blue avatars also draws upon the mythological vision of Hinduism, in which gods manifest themselves on Earth as dreamers dreaming themselves into existence. For us film can be a contact point to the liminal zones where such entities are realized by technologically aided human imagination.
Though a reviewer cynically called Avatar this season's "ink blot test," as a kind of zeitgeist film, Avatar's popularity may indeed indicate that our higher selves are calling us home. Our inner hippies are still there, feeling the groove of our filaments snaking with the global matrix, our mutated and war-damaged bodies ready to be compost for the World Tree.
In answer to my initial query– What does Avatar want?– Mitchell argues that the dominant motif of the modern era has been, "things fall apart." This can be represented by our literature's earliest version of bio-engineering: the monster Frankenstein. Such a creature doesn't dream, but is instead a nightmare. For so long his yellowed irises have stared us down in one form or another, perhaps beckoning us to re-enchant ourselves, and to rid our culture of this horrible vision of what we have become. I suspect that this is what Avatar really wants. Finally, as we stare back at the cultural dream's refashioned eyes, they invite us to download our higher selves by responding, "now things come alive!"
Looks like Environmental Defense Fund has it’s rebuttal to Annie Leonard’s Cap and Trade presentation, but cribbed the Story of Stuff’s presentation style (both aesthetically and style of address). I couldn’t find credits to see if Free Range Studios (FRS) also made the EDF video.
(Speaking of which, Jonah Sachs and Susan Finkelpearl of FRS wrote a downloadable article, From Selling Soap to Selling Sustainability: Social Marketing, in the new 2010 State of The World. There is a whole section on media. I went ahead and bought a PDF of the whole book because it looks another really good resource, but you can download some chapters for free.)
Are these videos incompatible? It appears that each follows a different paradigm of ecology, but would it be discernible to the average viewer? Maybe comparing the two could provide an interesting lesson in rhetoric.
This is an interesting ad that blurs the lines between self-reflexivity, DIY and marketing. You can click each element and it explains why it’s there. I think it works because it offers to teach something you may not know, all the while offering a way to further your curiosity. I’ve noticed that a lot new media has a very buttoned down, let’s hang out and chat kind of discourse. Does this mean we have reached the end of empire in which we are told what is good for us? Or is this just a more relaxed version?
I’m posting the three videos from her Bioneer talk. I’m still waiting on pins and needles for part 4. Hopefully you’ll go to the YouTube page and view the others, which includes talks by Michael Pollan, Naomi Klein and Annie Leonard.
I just learned the shocking news that singer Lhasa de Sela has passed away. Back in the day when I was an arts journalist I had the privilege to interview her. I was attracted to her border-transgressing music, which was kind of like a Jodorowsky film put to sound. Her earlier work was Tom Waits inflected, but later she evolved her own distinct style, all the while remaining rooted in the serpentine tradition of Mexican crooners. Like ozone after a storm, her voice seemed to emanate from the ancient earth.
Paraphrasing the Aztec poets, empires may come and go, but what remains is flower and song. Cherish this short time together, because our bonds and relationships are far more enduring than delusions of power.
Jeremy Rifkin is a monster– I don’t mean that in a bad way. He’s a monstrously prolific author and is on our side. I’ve relied on several of his books in the past, and I certainly look forward to reading his new tome, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. I’ve pasted a snip below, but do yourself a favor and read the whole article, which is a summary of the book’s thesis. It strikes me as a bit Utopian, so I’ll need to read more closely his assumptions when the book comes out. But frankly, I’m in need of some Utopian thought right now. Something about the tone and outlook of the piece feels right.
Whether in fact we will begin to empathize as a species will depend on how we use the new distributed communication medium. While distributed communications technologies-and, soon, distributed renewable energies – are connecting the human race, what is so shocking is that no one has offered much of a reason as to why we ought to be connected. We talk breathlessly about access and inclusion in a global communications network but speak little of exactly why we want to communicate with one another on such a planetary scale. What’s sorely missing is an overarching reason that billions of human beings should be increasingly connected. Toward what end? The only feeble explanations thus far offered are to share information, be entertained, advance commercial exchange and speed the globalization of the economy. All the above, while relevant, nonetheless seem insufficient to justify why nearly seven billion human beings should be connected and mutually embedded in a globalized society. The idea of even billion individual connections, absent any overall unifying purpose, seems a colossal waste of human energy. More important, making global connections without any real transcendent purpose risks a narrowing rather than an expanding of human consciousness. But what if our distributed global communication networks were put to the task of helping us re-participate in deep communion with the common biosphere that sustains all of our lives?
These days you can’t trust anything on the net, so the story of a new sex Robot that also spews 9/11 conspiracy theory sounds too much like a viral prank. So let this be my disclaimer. Meanwhile, watch the video and judge for yourself. The conspiracy sex talk comes in after the second minute. No doubt this will put a bump in my Web hits.
As for the cultural analysis, well let’s see.. porn, conspiracy, sex with robots. Pretty straight forward if you ask me.
Inspiration for the sex robot sprang from the September 11, 2001 attacks, when planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon and an empty field in Pennsylvania.
“I had a friend who passed away in 9/11,” Hines said. “I promised myself I would create a program to store his personality, and that became the foundation for Roxxxy True Companion.”
Hines sees his creation as not only a recreational innovation but as an outlet for the shy, people with sexual dysfunction, and those who want to experiment without risk.
This news clip and video of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s Ady Gil being struck by Japanese whalers will be of interest to anyone who has read Kevin Michael DeLuca’s Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism. In it he reflects on the success of Greenpeace’s anti-whaling image war in the 1970s in which the organization was able to successfully reframe Russian factory ships as agressors against powerless whales. Their guerrilla media played well in the Cold War rhetoric of the time, their images being provocative enough to transcend the dominant discourse of the evening news. DeLuca argues that through such media environmental groups have the ability to raise awareness of issues otherwise ignored by mainstream press. He wrote the book before “viral video” became a mainstream concept.
This clip, which comes from CBS News’ YoutTube channel, was also viewed on the evening news in Italy. I don’t know if it has managed any real TV coverage in the US other than the Web, but the clip is already spreading through the blogosphere.
There are two curious things about this video. First, it is from the perspective of the Japanese whaling ship, so it’s a bit odd that the video is distributed at all–considering the potential liability of the whalers. Either there’s more to the story that the Japanese intend to tell, or there was a covert videographer onboard who uploaded it via satellite. Either scenarios is intriguing.
The other strange twist is something that begs a snarky comment, but I’ll resist. The the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s other vessel that rescued the Ady Gil’s crew is called Bob Barker, the namesake, no less, of the famous game show host who paid for the boat. Goes to show that media do have a peculiar way of circulating reality.
As the joke goes, denial ain’t a river in Egypt. With the global economy and polar icecaps in meltdown, Dubai has become a World System inferno that continues to draws moths to its flame. In what could have been scripted in a JG Ballard novel, Dubai’s latest fly trap is the monstrous tower, Burj Khalifa, twice the size of the Empire State Building, which apparently defies physics: the bottom floors are ten degrees hotter than the top ones. I guess there is evidence for heaven and hell after all.
Laura Flanders has a nice polemic to welcome it into the world (see above, or click through to read the transcript below the snip):
The engineering marvel was constructed in the desert heat by low paid immigrant workers, mostly Indians and Pakistanis, paid 5-20 dollar a day. (It’s a state secret how many lost their lives in the process.) While the state-owned construction operation suppressed worker demands and banned unions from the site, it catered to consumer fantasy with equal extravagance. The tower features 144 apartments and a hotel designed by Giorgio Armani, the Italian designer. In what’s been dubbed the “super-scraper,” the super-affluent can live and vacation without leaving the brand, or the building.
Update: I added the MSNBC report at the top because of its striking imagery. “Inferno” and “flame” were metaphoric devices, but upon seeing the video, they are quite literal. It’s striking imagery when compared to 9/11. It’s hard not to look at the Dubai tower’s exploding fireworks without remembering starker images of 2001. Who ever said that irony was dead after the WTC attack was clearly wrong.
For what it’s worth, as I wrote these words, it occurred to me that search engine bots would take my terms out of context. So to be clear, what ever robo-filters are slogging up blog posts about world affairs, none of these keywords are to suggest or advocate any acts of destruction against private property. I cannot help but sense the panoptic presence of internet surveillance. Privilege, it would seem, belongs to those who can “properly” or officially contextualize the symbolic order.
Ever had an idea that someone else executes better than you imagined it? Well, here is one of those situations. The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal is one of my favorite short films. For years I have photographed the ephemeral state of street art as if it were an unconscious process of spontaneous creation. This film plays with this idea and does much more with it. Please watch and enjoy!
As we watched the events unfold at Copenhagen, many of us felt powerless to infuse wisdom into the process. It seems as if the globe’s political leaders cannot transcend their own momentum, and remain stuck in a reality that defines everything in the context of numbers. One thing that Jacques Ellus points out in The Technological Society is that a consequence of the technological mindset is establishing a set of perimeters on how to think about and categorize the world, and to make taboo human scaled relationships that result from organic processes.
Consequently, this year the theme that keeps knocking me over is to scale down. In my work and professional/activist ambitions I have felt the need, like many of us, to change the world as quickly as possible. The task often feels existential and too massive to contain– our system seems like giant robots trouncing the earth and often I feel like a Lilliputan trying to pin it down.
As a colleague reminds me, complexity theory shows that all system change happens at a local level. Perhaps in our desire to see a massive global political shift many of us have disregarded another option, which is to scale down our thoughts to the local level, and to work within the means that we have available to us. For me that translates to living a certain kind of low impact lifestyle, and also re-dedicating my work in the classroom where I have a lot of one-on-one contact with the next prototype of human, our youth. And of course spending more time with my family.
My sustainability education mentor, Pramod Prajoli, has the following guidelines for moving into the next phase of transformation:
1) critique to regeneration
2) ideologies to ideas
3) discourse to design
4) global thinking to local thinking
Some ideas I have for the coming year include editing a textbook for media educators that incorporates a sustainable framework, and to develop a green curriculum that can be used as part of media literacy work.
Meanwhile, I want to rededicate myself to eating well, relaxing more, taking it a bit slower and remembering to breath. Now is not the time to panic, but to become grounded and rooted again in our life work.
I’ll close with these thoughts from Tricycle Magazine:
Caring for Each Other
The Buddha has suggested that we are without a mother and father to take care of things for us. Mother Earth, once thought to be all-forgiving and capable of absorbing any abuse we could heap upon her, is not the infinitely benevolent resource we thought she was. As we learn of our own mothers at a certain point of maturity, Mother Earth can and does get worn down by giving and forgiving in the face of our persistent demands. And our Father who is in heaven, though perhaps immensely old and lord over a host of devas (as the Buddhists view him), is nevertheless subject to the laws of karma and is not sufficiently omnipotent to make it all work out for us in the end.
If we do not care for one another, who else will care for us? Who among us has the right to say of another, “He is of no use to us?” For better or worse, whether we like it or not, we are all in this together. Learning how to care for one another is a central part of the path and of the practice.
- Andrew Olendzki, Ph.D., “Medicine for the World,” from the Summer 2008 Tricycle. Read the complete article.
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.
Bridging media literacy with ecoliteracy, this blog features various meditations and musings by Antonio Lopez, an old school dharma punk and media educator. He is the author of:
Now available, Antonio's health and media literacy CDROM curriculum for youth of color, Merchants of Culture. This valuable resource contains dozens of video and print examples of how advertisers market harmful substances such as alcohol and tobacco to various niche audiences, including Native Americans, Latinos, African Americans, Asians, GLBT and Women. This is an excellent primer for introducing the subject of cultural marketing to high school and middle school students. This is also a great product for health professionals and councilors working in the area of prevention.
ODTMaps.com Innovative Maps for Education & Presentation
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, Dubai’s latest fly trap is the monstrous tower, Burj Khalifa, twice the size of the Empire State Building, which apparently defies physics: the bottom floors are ten degrees hotter than the top ones. I guess there is evidence for heaven and hell after all.
