A Spedthrift Flaneur in the Attention Economy

delicious.com/willis.creative/blindfla links for the week ending today.

NO MADAME BUTTERFLY: Anna Nicole Smith, played by Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek, looks on in horror as J. Howard Marshall, played by Alan Oke, is seen dead on the floor in Covent Garden’s production of the opera “Anna Nicole.” [Photo by Bill Cooper/The Royal Opera/NPR] More photos

‘Anna Nicole’ Brings Sex And Drugs To The Opera : NPR 030211

Sex, drugs, plastic surgery and celebrity are the backbone of the infamous British tabloid media. But they’re probably not what you’d expect to see at the prestigious Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden. | This bastion of high culture has played host to many an operatic giant — Mozart, Monteverdi, Puccini, Joan Sutherland and Maria Callas, to name a few. | So it may have come as a shock to opera traditionalists when they heard about the latest addition: playboy model and reality TV star Anna Nicole Smith. Her turbulent life and tragic demise have been transformed into a new opera, Anna Nicole, which opened last month. | On its website, Covent Garden states that the opera is “provocative in its themes, exciting in its bravura style, and thrilling with its sheer contemporary nerve”.

Justin Bieber’s Hair Raises Funds For Charity : NPR 030311

A lock of teen heartthrob Justin Bieber’s hair sold on eBay Wednesday for more than $40,000. Bieber donated his hair to talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, who put the clippings on eBay. The proceeds will benefit the animal rescue charity The Gentle Barn. | … if you want to get a sense of the relative value of Bieber hair - $40,000 for Justin Bieber, right? Ellen DeGeneres recently sold a clipping of Elvis Presley’s hair for charity for a mere $15,000.

Life After Libya: Gadahfi Could Find Refuge Tough : NPR 030311

So far, Moammar Gadhafi has shown no sign of leaving. Instead, he’s vowed to fight - as he put it - to the last drop of Libyan blood. Still, dictators do change their minds. So we reached Scott Horton, a lawyer who’s worked with nations trying to retrieve the riches of their former leaders. He’s also written a piece for Foreign Policy magazine called “Gimme Shelter.” He says life for deposed dictators used to be a lot more pleasant than it is now.

Zimbabwe Holds Group On Treason Charges : NPR 030311

In Zimbabwe, 45 people were rounded up and charged with treason after gathering to view online news coverage of the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt. One man detained is a law professor at the University of Zimbabwe, who organized the meeting. Renee Montagne talks to Shantha Bloemen, the detained man’s wife, about the situation in Harare.

Ford Motor Co. Is Prepared For Gas Prices To Rise : NPR 030311

FORD: “Well, one of the things that’s really important is that we align customer’s pocketbook interests with society’s goals. You know, we had a funny disconnect, really, over the last, you know, X number of years as the fuel economy standards were rising, and yet the price of gasoline was cheaper than bottled water for many years. And so customers were saying, you know, give me the biggest engine you’ve got. Meanwhile, fuel economy standards were rising. So we were in this kind of odd position of having to try and force fuel economy into a marketplace that didn’t want one. | That’s one of the reasons that I, for years, advocated a gas tax, because I thought that that was a way to increase not only the price of gasoline, but also inject some certainty into the marketplace. And it never happened. I think we are now in a period of higher gasoline prices, and I think customers are going to move fuel economy to the top of their list.”

Why The Continued Economic Weakness? A Huge Chunk Is M.I.A. | The New Republic 030211

Christopher Leinberger: “The missing presence of real estate and infrastructure, together the largest asset class in the entire economy, is the major reason we are bumping along between 2.5 to 3.0 percent growth. This is not enough to create sufficient employment, allow government coffers to recover, or for the United States to maintain its standing in the world. Infrastructure investment, which anyone paying attention knows, is woefully inadequate. | We have major deficits in the most important transportation infrastructure required to succeed in the 21st century knowledge economy, rail transit. It is hoped the delayed federal transportation bill will be passed this year and let metropolitan areas build the types of transportation system they want and need, rather than state government dithering with business as usual approaches.”

Twitter / Frances Keyland: http://blindflaneur.com/ …

“”http://blindflaneur.com/ love this blog ! One of the winners of the Top Vision Impaired Blogs of 2010

Bob Dylan with Suze Rotolo in the Columbia Records studio in 1962. [Source: dylandreams] Rotolo died of lung cancer this week at age 67.

Whose Life Is It, After All? « Pied-à-terre 122308

Suze Rotolo was the girl on Dylan’s arm on the album cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. She became his girlfriend when she was 17 and he was 20. Their tempestuous affair became the stuff o f his songs, and Dylan fans resented her for wounding his tender heart. He remembered her fondly 40 years later in his memoir, Chronicles. Now Suze has published a memoir of her own, A Freewhelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the 1960s. She disc

Remembering Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s ‘Freewheeling’ Muse : NPR

Suze Rotolo, who strongly influenced Bob Dylan’s songwriting and walked beside him on the album cover for The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, died of lung cancer on Friday. She was 67. Rotolo, an artist and teacher, grew up in Queens. She began dating Dylan in the early 1960s, after meeting him at a marathon folk-music concert at the Riverside Church in New York City. She was 17 at the time.

ussed it on NPR’s Fresh Air, where you can read an excerpt:

The Long-Term Effect Of Wisconsin’s Union Battles : NPR 040111

New York Times labor and workplace reporter Steve Greenhouse explains why other states with large budget deficits are now also considering taking on public unions — and how the standoff between organized labor and Republican governors is likely to play out.

Why Your Boss Is Wrong About You - NYTimes.com

Samuel A. Culbert [professor in the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of “Get Rid of the Performance Review! How Companies Can Stop Intimidating, Start Managing — and Focus on What Really Matters.” ]: “As anybody who has ever worked in any institution — private or public — knows, one of the primary ways employee effectiveness is judged is the performance review. And nothing could be less fair than that.  In my years studying such reviews, I’ve learned that they are subjective evaluations that measure how “comfortable” a boss is with an employee, not how much an employee contributes to overall results. They are an intimidating tool that makes employees too scared to speak their minds, lest their criticism come back to haunt them in their annual evaluations. They almost guarantee that the owners — whether they be taxpayers or shareholders — will get less bang for their buck.

YouTube - Mawada.net The Libyan Protests Organized with Discretion 2/24/2011

Cut off from normal communication, protesters organize through a dating site. For more, click here: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/moamma…

Libyan Opposition Uses Dating Site To Talk In Code : NPR 030111

Libya’s secret police monitor communications including social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. So government opponents have had to find another way to communicate. The anti-Gadhafi activists have created accounts on Mawada, a popular Muslim dating website. They’ve been speaking in coded messages, according to ABC News. | One example: May your day be full of Jasmine. That’s a reference to the so-called Jasmine Revolution sweeping Arab nations. And I lllllove you, with five Ls, meant that they are working with five comrades. One opposition leader said he now has more than 170,000 admirers.

Dirk Vandewalle Peers Inside Qaddafi’s World : NPR

Dirk Vandewalle, an Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, gives an inside look at Qaddafi and his 42 year long rule in Libya. Vandewalle has studied and written about Libya since the 1980s. In 1986 he lived in Libya for 14 months, as the only Western scholar at the time.

Covering Protests, Al-Jazeera Boosts Fans, Enemies : NPR 030111

In the darkened control room of news network Al-Jazeera, more than a dozen screens show reporters ready to go.Pictures are set to roll from hot spots across the Middle East, and director Charlie O’Kane chats with a correspondent in Bahrain. It’s the top of the hour and Sami Zeidan, a veteran news presenter, gets ready for live coverage of one of the most challenging stories of his career. 

South America’s Middle Class Boosts Economies : NPR

Roll over, Charles Darwin - wWho knew there were electronics factories in Tierra del Fuego?

Rebooting the News #84 « Rebooting The News 022811

Tweeting while watching the Academy Awards. Connecting up and across at the same time. An example of Audience Atomization Overcome.

Scripting News: Upcoming: The minimal blogging tool 010511

Dave Winer: “A tool whose only output is a set of RSS feeds. You can have as many as you want. When you want to create a new post, go to the editor website possibly using a bookmarklet that copies the selected text, title and link from the page you’re coming from. Enter (or edit) the body of the post, and optionally a title and a link, to correspond to the three main elements of an RSS item. You can also link to an enclosure. Click Post and the new item is added to the feed and the feed is published. A realtime notification, via rssCloud, goes out to all who have requested realtime notification”

Curating the Revolution: Building a Real-Time News Feed About Egypt - Phoebe Connelly - Technology - The Atlantic

Andy Carvin is a senior strategist at NPR working on digital media. He’s known for putting together comprehensive and innovative packages around breaking news stories, and for the past three weeks, his Twitter stream has been a non-stop curation of the Egypt protests. Carvin has turned himself into “a personal news wire for Egypt.”We talked with him about how he gained 4,000 followers, why he hasn’t mapped his sources, and if curation is the new journalism. 

AC: I think curation has always been a part of journalism; we just didn’t call it that. Think of the word “media.” It’s about being in the middle, between the story and the public.”

The “Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators” Article » Pressthink 021311

Jay Rosen: “So these are the six signs that identify the genre, Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators. 1.) Nameless fools are staking maximalist claims. 2.) No links we can use to check the context of those claims. 3.) The masses of deluded people make an appearance so they can be ridiculed. 4.) Bizarre ideas get refuted with a straight face. 5.) Spurious historicity. 6.) The really hard questions are skirted.”

Scripting News: Keith Richards is a hacker! 022611

Dave Winer: “I watched a video with David Carr and AO Scott of the NY Times. Carr said the TV networks love shows like the Oscars because of the realtime connection. I know what he means. I am a huge fan of movies, and am rooting for and against a bunch of movies that are up for awards tonight. He says the Grammys had record viewing this year because of social media. I certainly experience that, I don’t know if I’ve ever watched the Grammys, but I did this year because of all the interesting back and forth on Twitter among my cohorts. I will of course watch the Oscars. TV and realtime networks go really well together. Glad the TV guys now see that. (And don’t let Al Jazeera sweep up the whole net-based news thing while you guys are pretending it’s the 90s in your news departments.)”

“Like,” “share,” and “recommend”: How the warring verbs of social media will influence the news’ future » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism

Joshua Benton: “When I click a button next to a story, does that mean I like the fact that “Tunisian Prime Minister Resigns,” or that I like the story “Tunisian Prime Minister Resigns“? But there’s no doubting the appeal of “Like,” which feels like a vote when “Share” mostly feels like work. | But there’s a bigger issue here, as news organizations — many of them traditional bringers of bad news — have to adjust to an online ecosystem that privileges emotion, particularly positive emotion. | Emotion = distribution”

Book Review: A.J. Liebling’s ‘The Sweet Science and Other Writings’ - washingtonpost.com 070209

In “The Earl of Louisiana,” Liebling takes on Louisiana politics, describing the campaign shenanigans as Earl Long — brother of the assassinated Huey Long — tries to win back his former seat as governor. Early on, Liebling watches a newsreel about “Uncle Earl”: “In the beginning, I could see the Governor was as confident as Oedipus Tyrranus before he got the bad news.” Later on, “the Governor’s voice was sad, like the voice of a man recounting the death of Agamemnon.” After commenting on speculation that Long might be physically or mentally ill — the governor had recently been hospitalized for a nervous breakdown — Liebling adds that he himself “inclined to the theory that if a man knows enough to go to the races, he needs no doctor.”At one point, Liebling pauses in his election coverage to visit the bar of a blind old boxer named Pete Herman, “the best infighter I have ever seen in my life.” 

Paul Krugman: Shock Doctrine, U.S.A. - NYTimes.com 022411

Paul Krugman: “The story of the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book “The Shock Doctrine,” which argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.Which brings us to Wisconsin 2011, where the shock doctrine is on full display. ” 

Sebastienne Mckay, “UNDER THE COBBLESTONES………. THE BEACH”

Link to “Paris May 1968: Under the Cobblestones, the Beach”
http://blindflaneur.com/?p=484

YouTube - Galyna Kolotnytska Gaddaffi’s Voluptuous blonde

Gaddafi fears flying over water, prefers staying on the ground floor and almost never travels without his trusted Ukrainian nurse, a “voluptuous blonde”, Galyna Kolotnytska according to a US document released on Sunday by WikiLeaks.One source, whose name was blacked out by the Times, tells the US embassy that Gaddafi cannot travel without Galyna Kolotnytska, “as she alone ‘knows his routine,'” it said. 

2011 Naked Emperor - The-Social-Network

Mondoweiss — The War of Ideas in the Middle East

Mondoweiss is a news website devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective.

Philip Weiss: A Jewish Argument around the Arab Revolt | Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Philip Weiss, exulting in the glorious news from Egypt, says: “the handwriting on the wall is Arabic.” The 55-year-old meta-journalist dedicates his website MondoWeiss to “the war of ideas in the Middle East.” His project is more daring and difficult than that sounds. Really it’s to start something between a moral argument and a civil war over the big book of Jewish tradition and “spiritual wholeness” — over US national interests, the Palestinian condition, Israel and the whole modern idea of Zionism, by which he means the judgment from 19th and 20th Century European experience that Jews cannot be safe as a tiny minority in non-Jewish countries.

Why Wouldn’t the Tea Party Shut It Down? - NYTimes.com

Frank Rich: “That’s not to say there is no fiscal mission in the right’s agenda, both nationally and locally — only that the mission has nothing to do with deficit reduction. The real goal is to reward the G.O.P.’s wealthiest patrons by crippling what remains of organized labor, by wrecking the government agencies charged with regulating and policing corporations, and, as always, by rewarding the wealthiest with more tax breaks. The bankrupt moral equation codified in the Bush era — that tax cuts tilted to the highest bracket were a higher priority even than paying for two wars — is now a given. The once-bedrock American values of shared sacrifice and equal economic opportunity have been overrun.”

Live Blog - Libya Feb 26 | Al Jazeera Blogs

Elliott Colla: “The Poetry of Revolt” in the New Egypt | Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon 021511

Elliott Colla is sharing the soundtrack in his head of Egyptian revolts, today and yesterday, going back to the 1880s.Poets were invariably major players — in heady, optimistic, galvanizing roles as popular risings took off. Novelists (including the great Naguib Mafouz) got the darker job afterward of detailing regrets and reversals. Most of Egypt’s ten popular rebellions before the epochal events of this winter were against the British, and most of them were sorry failures. 

Elliott Colla: The Poetry of Revolt 012111

“The slogans the protesters are chanting are couplets—and they are as loud as they are sharp. The diwan of this revolt began to be written as soon as Ben Ali fled Tunis, in pithy lines like “Yâ Mubârak! Yâ Mubârak! Is-Sa‘ûdiyya fi-ntizârak!,” (“Mubarak, O Mabarak, Saudi Arabia awaits!”). In the streets themselves, there are scores of other verses, ranging from the caustic “Shurtat Masr, yâ shurtat Masr, intû ba’aytû kilâb al-’asr” (“Egypt’s Police, Egypt’s Police, You’ve become nothing but Palace dogs”), to the defiant “Idrab idrab yâ Habîb, mahma tadrab mish hansîb!” (Hit us, beat us, O Habib [al-Adly, now-former Minister of the Interior], hit all you want—we’re not going to leave!). This last couplet is particularly clever, since it plays on the old Egyptian colloquial saying, “Darb al-habib zayy akl al-zabib” (The beloved’s fist is as sweet as raisins). This poetry is not an ornament to the uprising—it is its soundtrack and also composes a significant part of the action itself.”

YouTube - Muammar Gaddafi addresses the nation 022211

The Libyan leader blames foreign powers for the current unrest in his country and says the protesters are on hallucinogenic drugs.This video includes the first 20 minutes of his more than one hour long speech broadcast on state television. 

YouTube - Gaddafi addresses Tripoli crowd

In a surprise appearance, the Libyan leader gives a defiant speech to supporters in Green Square in the centre of the country’s capital.

Grasping the new online reality - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

In a July 2010 blog post, Mauritanian activist Nasser Weddady stated that: “As of now, it looks to me like Washington DC politicians need Middle East activists a heck lot more than Middle Eastern activists need them.”Following the events in Tunisia and Egypt-largely unaided by foreign help-this seems truer than ever. 

With that in mind, the US is nevertheless uniquely positioned to push for greater freedoms. In addition to its stated values, many of the Internet’s great platforms, not to mention the Internet itself, came from American innovation.

But with great freedom comes great responsibility, and as the Department of State reflects upon its initiative, it should ensure that any move toward greater Internet freedom begins at home.

Jillian York is a writer, blogger, and activist based in Boston. She works at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Centre for Internet & Society and is involved with Global Voices Online.

Dubai Tonight (Season 1)');">DubaiOne | Watch Our Archived Shows > Dubai Tonight (Season 1)

Dareen Abughaida joined Dubai One from London where she was a presenter covering major events around the world including the global financial crisis.Dareen anchored Global News Update on Bloomberg TV, kicking off the morning shows, and setting the tone for the business day in Europe. She also presented World News bulletins throughout the day, covering a range of issues from North Korea to Gaza. Dareen joined Bloomberg UK to launch and present the channel’s first and only program on the Middle East called Middle East Money Focus.