The Null Device
2005/12/5
In an attempt to generate spin for the PlayStation Portable, Sony hire graffiti/paste-up artists to put up pictures of kids playing with PSPs as if they were traditional toys. Local hipsters, irritated with the Spectacle's commodification of dissent (and/or copy-protection malware on Sony CDs), retaliate, scrawling anti-Sony slogans on them. Discussion ensues:
"Aaaaaarrrrggggghhh. I KNEW something wasn't right about the thing when I took a picture of it a couple weeks ago in san Francisco. Two kids. 6-feet tall. Right near the new freeway off-ramp. Looked way too clean to be real. Working for a branding firm. I'm adamantly opposed to this kind of infiltration by the big corporations. Equivalent in my mind with viral marketing stealth efforts to generate a buzz about a new product the unsuspecting masses by some cool, attractive shill on the company payroll."And more pictures here.
Here is a gallery of stencil art from Buenos Aires. Much of it is fairly political, and not too dissimilar in spirit to Australian stencil art.
This site has a lot of guitar tabs for songs by Australian bands; it includes a decent number of indie/garage/non-mainstream bands (including The Doug Anthony Allstars, The Paradise Motel, Underground Lovers, several generations of coolsie favourites such as Architecture In Helsinki, The Lucksmiths and The Go-Betweens, and numerous smaller bands), as well as all the mainstream chart-toppers you'd expect.
This past November, Your Humble Narrator participated in National Solo Album Month; a challenge similar to NaNoWriMo, only involving recording an album's worth of music in one month. This time around, miraculously, I managed to cross the finish line. Granted, much of the album is unpolished and, given more time, some of the tracks would have more work done on them, but that's expected for such things.
Anyway, the album is here.