… in todays Guardian: the last two paragraphs of an article which describes the death of two Tunisian men who stowed away on a german cargo ship traveling from sfax in tunesia to ayr in scotland actually treat the two deceased as human beings (plus the entire article does not label them as ‘illegal immigrants’ even once):

Scott [the Conservative(!) MSP for Ayr] said: “This is tragic news, that these two men who appear to have stowed away, lost their lives in such desperate, lonely and sad circumstances. These are people who, for whatever reason, felt they had to leave northern Africa and in desperation boarded this ship. They took a huge gamble with their lives, which didn’t pay off.

“As I understand it, it is an occasional occurrence that economic migrants stow away on these boats. They leave that port to go all over Europe and indeed the world. Perhaps they were gambling on this being a shorter sea voyage than it turned out to be. Very sadly for them and their families, it has resulted in their deaths.”

Guess that is because very few of the victims of fortress europe wash up on scottish shores…

The fabulous electronic performance arts venue/center/place/non-place [it is hard to describe what this place really is] steim in amsterdam is in danger of loosing it’s funding. over the past years steim has received funding from both the dutch ministry of culture education and science and the city of amsterdam. for some reason (probably because they never go there or because their idea of culture is quite limited) the advisory bodies for both the ministry and for the city of amsterdam have decided that steim should not be supported under the upcoming (2009-2012) 4 year plans for culture (yes they do still have soviet style 4 year plans for culture here in the Netherlands).

Needless to say this would be quite a bad thing to happen. steim is one of the very few places in amsterdam that are unique and even if it caters to a ‘niche audience’, it manages to bring in a remarkably diverse set of artists from all over the world that have made it one of the best places in town to hang out and broaden your horizon. for steim the loss of structural support would probably be quite devastating and the steim crew is calling for support:

Things are not well at STEIM. We are in the danger of losing our structural funding from the government, based on a review from the advisor board which called us ‘closed and only appealing to a niche audience’. The outlook isn’t exactly bleak, but at the moment our future is unclear.

As we see you as an important friend and colleague of STEIM, we would like to ask you to help us present our case that we are connected to a diverse network of professionals and that our work has significant influence on both a Dutch and an international community.

The league of noble peers has just made available the raw footage of 19 interviews filmed for steal this film 2. the footage is not only available online but also fully text searchable based on the transcripts of the interviews:

Thanks to the magic of 0xdb and Pad.ma, plus the hard work of a number of Peers in transcribing STEAL THIS FILM II footage over the last six months, we are able to offer a full text search of the base material from which we made the film. If your search term is found, you are taken to the frame/s at which it occurs and given its immediate context. Try it out! You can also browse the whole list of clips, if you don’t know what you’re looking for in advance.

Even better, the entire material on footage.stealthisfilm.com is available in the original resolution (1080i HDV) and under a Creative Commons Attribution Share alike license. As far as i can tell, this is the first time such a comprehensive set of raw materials for a film has been made available under a open content license:

We are making this footage available in high quality format (HDV 1080i), having cleared permission from the interviewees to release it under an attribution share-alike license from Creative Commons. Practically this means that you can use this material for your own projects, including commercial work, provided you credit us and make your work available in turn under a share-alike license.

It will be interesting to see if this really works. my hunch is that there will be very few filmmakers who have use for these interviews (although most of them are quite informative if you are interested in the politics of information) and are willing or able to release films that incorporate footage from these interviews under a CC-BY-SA license themselves. Personally i would assume that it would be more useful/realistic to ask others using parts of the interviews to make available (parts of) their footage as well (instead of the finished film). This would be in line with how free software licenses operate: if you use freely licensed source code (footage) you have to make available the resulting source-code, but you can do whatever you want with the binary code (finished film).

Rright now that does not seem to be possible as it would be very hard to define which part of their footage downstream users should make available (and making all raw material available is pretty much impossible given the enormous amounts of bandwidth/discspace/work this would require). Given this the attribution share alike license does not seem that bad of a choice and of course filmmakers who, in exchange for using some of the STFII footage, do not want to make available their films under a BY-SA license can probably just pay jamie/the league of noble peers for separate permission…

Naeem posted a little gem of a text to the nettime mailing list earlier today. it describes the rising popularity of sheik-themed romance novels and begins with one of the best sentences i have read in while:

“It seems that an Arab man can now get on the cover of a romance novel in the United States almost more easily than he can get past airport security: According to the Chicago Tribune, the sales of sheik-themed romance novels have quadrupled in the years since the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Up to 20 of these novels per year, with titles like Expecting the Sheikh’s Baby, The Sheikh’s Virgin, and The Sheik and the Bride Who Said No, go through print runs of 100,000 copies or more. Typically, these stories feature a white American or British heroine who travels to a fictional Arab country (messy real-life politics aren’t welcome in the world of romance fiction), becomes involved with an Arab prince through accident and/or circumstance, and ultimately marries him. Some of these sheiks* are polished business magnates, while others hark back to the Valentino-style desert Bedouin of yore. But they all have a few things in common: All of them are rich and powerful, all of them are irresistibly sexy, and all of them are dangerous.”

Seems to be a title of a documentary film about life in Israel and gaza in production right now (no IMDB entry yet). From what i can tell it looks like an attempt to portray everyday life in both Gaza and Israel by following surfers in both territories.

According to juxtapoz.com the film should be ready in about a year, but for now the filmakers have a daily blog covering the process of shooting in Isreael and Gaza (where they have just been arrested by hamas) with some of the best photography I have seen online in a while:

Lets hope that the film comes close to the beauty of the photos… [via nomoresleep.net]

[see previous evidence here, here and here]. Over at BLDGblog Geoff Manaugh reflects on a feature in the last edition of WIRED that praises GPS and user generated map files for allowing rich westerners to travel through remote parts of the world (Namibia in this case) without the need for local guides. In ‘the digital replacement of the natives‘ Geoff argues that this trend – should it become more widespread – will probably be devastating for local economies based on tourism:

I can’t help but wonder what this might foretell for local economies based on guided tourism around the world. For instance, a small group of American tourists comes through your village, eating PowerBars and looking at handheld GPS devices. They don’t go to any restaurants; they don’t ask any questions of anyone; perhaps they don’t even rent a hotel room. For all economic purposes, it’s as if they were never there. They were more like surreal poltergeists wearing Vasque boots, reading Jonathan Safran Foer on a Kindle. What better way to avoid meeting Namibians! Just use their electrical grid to recharge your gadgets, pay no taxes, and leave.

I’m left imagining the inverse of this situation, of course, in which a small group of Namibians shows up in London. They ask no questions, eat at no restaurants, and avoid all hotels – before going off to wander round the countryside, sleeping in tents. It would all seem rather mysterious.

‘Mysterious’ is definitely to soft of a term here: in post 9/11 reality ‘mysterious’ is synonymous with ‘suspicious’ which, (especially if you are not white and handle high tech gadgets) is very likely to result in 90 or so days of detention without charge.

So just before the meal service during yesterday’s flight to Boston i get a meal tray handed over by a flight attendant. Turns out they have me on the list for a special (vegetarian) meal. Now the strange thing is that i had not ordered such a meal (even cheked my reservation confirmation and it does say ‘no special requests‘ so Northwest’s reservation computer must have come to the conclusion that i am (still) a vegetarian all by itself. Probably based on the fact that i was a vegetarian when i flew NW for the last time (5 years or so ago). All of this would not have been all too unpleasant if Northwest would not have fucked up the definition of a strict vegetarian (VGML) meal. While the main dish had a VGML sticker on it it turned out to be pasta in three cheese sauce. Now everybody who knows me a little bit will know that this is about the worst thing i can imagine in terms of food. Just thinking about pasta in three cheese sauce makes me feel miserable.

Of course the flight attendants did not really care about the whole thing because (a) they simply refused to believe that i had not ordered a special meal (‘is that your name and your seat on that sticker, sir? – eh, yes… then it is your meal’) and (b) because they refused to acknowledge that three cheese sauce is not a a VGML dish (‘does it say VGML on that sticker? – eh, yes… – then it is a vegetarian meal’).

In the end my neighbor offered me his chicken dish (thanks!). now all i have to do is to figure out how to tell the reservation system that i am not a vegetarian anymore…

Had a bit of a bad feeling when i was reading that nat was going back to Beirut for some festival and that there would be a general strike in Beirut on the 7th of may. Turns out that my bad feelings were justified. Nat is (or at least was, the last thing i had heard from her was that the germans where bringing her to Damascus) once again stuck in cairo, and mazen is drawing again.

& for some fucked up reason these things always correspond with nice weather in Amsterdam.

So Jamie more or less forced us to watch iron man on Thursday in some nondescript multiplex cinema in Swansea, Wales. Definitely not the worst film i have ever seen but for some reason these comic book adaptions fail to really excite me (except for film versions of comic books by enki bilal that is).

Out of curiosity i also bought a DVD version of some DVD hawker in the restaurant Hai Ha (they do make really nice special roast duck in that place) on Mare street in hackney on Friday. As one could have expected it turned out to be a really bad (as in having chairs and the ceiling in the picture for three quarters of the film) chinese cam version.

Still kind of amazing that they get DVDs out into london restaurants in a bit more than 24 hours…

Turns out I am in the Netherlands for quite a while now (almost eleven years to be exact) and in that period I have managed to start something which has become a tradition of some sorts: the Anniek van Hardeveld memorial race. today is the 10th edition of this alley cat race in the memory of 19 year old messenger (of the resistance against the german occupiers) Anniek van Hardeveld, who was shot by the Germans on the last day of the occupation of Amsterdam in 1945.

I had organized the first race (as a surprise) in May 1999 after Jur had used the memorial stone for Anniek as a checkpoint in an earlier ally cat race. The race itself tends to be fairly short (the first edition had only 3 checkpoints) as it needs to start after work and be finished before 20:00h when there are two minutes of silence in commemoration of the dead all over Holland. there is one simple rule which says that the winner of the race has to organize it the next year, which has proven to be a robust enough rule to ensure that the tonight will see the 10th edition. Not sure if i expected this to go on for this long (or even expected to stay in the Netherlands for this long but i digress) although my report from the 1999 (last millennium!) race ends with by stating that:

With the silence gone we spilled some sips of beer in tribute and decided that this had to become and annual event from now on.

Update [5 May 2008]: 35 participants, perfect weather & Michael won. pictures on my flickr account. thanks to all those who came out to race or help!