Celebrity interviewer/scene reporter/vlogger Davidjr.com is posting daily updates on the Gen Art Film Festival over the course of this week. The festival runs from April 2nd to April 8th in New York City and features seven feature-length and short films by emerging young filmmakers in seven days.

This is the video for day one of the festival and it features Matthew Broderick, Alan Alda (promoting their film Diminished Capacity), Julianna Margulies and many others.

Good luck Tom:

MySpace, the world’s largest social network Web site, said it has formed an online music venture with three major recording companies in a challenge to Apple Inc’s dominant iTunes Music Store. Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group have minority stakes in the new MySpace Music venture announced on Thursday. Financial terms were not disclosed.
MySpace Music will offer free music and video streaming supported by advertising, paid-for MP3 downloads, ringtones for cell phones, concert ticket sales and merchandise. Chris De Wolfe, chief executive of MySpace, said the launch date of the new service was “fluid” with commercial features being added to the site over the next three to four months. He said MySpace is in talks with more music industry partners to offer their services on MySpace Music.

In the meantime, Apple’s iTunes recently supplanted Wal-Mart as being America’s #1 music retailer, with 19% of the music sold in January.

I’m not suprised, in fact I was just thinking the other day, when is Naomi Campbell going to flip her lid again?. I’m going to turn this into a drinking game you know. Every time she throws something, its a shot. If she just acts like a spoiled 12 year old in a public place it’s two drinks of Pabst. But if she goes all the way and gets arrested, you have to drink a six pack of Miller Chill, which tastes simular to Naomi Campbells ass.

British police escorted supermodel Naomi Campbell off a Los Angeles-bound flight at London’s Heathrow airport on Thursday, airport sources said.

She was then arrested at Terminal 5 at the airport for allegedly spitting at a police officer, Sky News television reported Thursday.

A London Metropolitan Police spokesman said a woman was arrested at the terminal for an assault on police, but refused to disclose her identity or give her age.

 

Refused to disclose her Identity or age?, wtf? I can identify her by her left nipple alone, London doesn’t know what the hell’s going on.

The Punk Goes compilations have always been pretty cool. Video Matt basically falls asleep at night with a smile on his face every night listening to Punk Goes Pop (specifically Slick Shoes cover of Mandy Moore’s ‘Candy’).

The latest edition to the series is Punk Goes Crunk, featuring 15 dope-ass tracks to make the homies say ho! and the girlies wanna scream. With songs from the dropped Yo! Indie Rock Raps that was scheduled to be released on Immortal Records, the disk contains Dre, Biggie and Lil Jon covers.

From the press release:

It’s official, Punk Goes Crunk is hitting stores on April 4, 2008 and the cover artwork has now been revealed below. Groups currently announced for the comp include Say Anything, Person L (Kenny from The Starting Line), Forever The Sickest Kids, New Found Glory, The Maine, Hot Rod Circut, My American Heart, and Scary Kids Scaring Kids, All Time Low, The Devil Wears Prada, The Secret Handshake, and Set Your Goals.

1. “Put Yo Hood Up” - Set Your Goals (Lil Jon) (4:59)
2. “Got Your Money” - Say Anything (Ol’ Dirty Bastard) (4:15)
3. “I Wish” - The Secret Handshake (Skee-Lo) (2:52)
4. “Men in Black” - Forever the Sickest Kids (Will Smith) (3:05)
5. “California Love” - My American Heart (2Pac) (4:16)
6. “I Wanna Love You” - The Maine (Akon) (3:03)
7. “Kryptonite (I’m on It)” - Emanuel (Purple Ribbon All-Stars) (4:30)
8. “The Seed” - Person L (The Roots) (4:22)
9. “Still Fly” - The Devil Wears Prada (Big Tymers) (4:55)
10. “Umbrella” - All Time Low (Rihanna) (3:49)
11. “Notorious Thugs” - Scary Kids Scaring Kids (The Notorious B.I.G.) (7:23)
12. “Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang” - The Escape Frame (Dr. Dre) (3:30)
13. “Gin and Juice” - Hot Rod Circuit (Snoop Dogg) (3:44)
14. “Hey Ya!” - Lorene Drive (OutKast) (4:24)
15. “Tennessee” - New Found Glory (Arrested Development) (4:05)

The disk is released Tuesday on Fearless Records. Click here for clips of every song… word to your motha’.

[Synthesis blog once again brings you the philosophy of Synthesis Weekly columnist Mad Bob. With no further adieu, we present to you Immaculate Infection.]

Beauty, Paranoia and Black Holes

J. Edgar Hoover: J. Edgar Hoover was the former head of the FBI and a severely sinister and creepy individual. He was twisted and power-hungry and would stop at nothing to increase his own influence and prestige. He built the FBI into a potent law enforcement tool but he also used that potency to achieve his own selfish and strange gains.
One of the suspect activities the FBI indulged in under Hoover’s watch was to secretly wiretap figures within the Civil Rights movement. As a result, the FBI accumulated hours upon hours of clandestine footage of Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. While the practice is dubious and illegal, historians today are absolutely ecstatic to have this treasure trove of information that shines a light into the personality of such a dynamic public figure.

It turns out that what Martin Luther King Jr. revealed in those tapes is even more selfless and righteous than his public personae. He was not an attention-seeker; in fact he consistently bemoaned the public role that was thrust upon him. King spoke often of being tired, of just wanting to go back to being a preacher, which he felt was what God had called upon him to do. But, with the encouragement of the people with whom he had surrounded himself, he pushed on until the fateful day he was assassinated in April of 1968. Incidentally, there is more than a little suspicion that Hoover’s FBI was involved in that incident.

Listening through these tapes, Hoover did not take away the beauty and selflessness of the man in question. Instead, he focused his attention on King’s imperfections. The tapes revealed that King was an adulterer and Hoover quickly labeled him a sexual deviant and a hypocrite. He found every avenue he could to dehumanize and tear down a great man.
It is difficult for me to explain this, but I feel badly for J. Edgar Hoover. How could a man have so much hatred in his heart that they fail to see the brilliance of a once-in-a-lifetime figure like Martin Luther King Jr.?


Withdrawing the Benefit of the Doubt: It is jading, but helpful, to understand that there are people out there very much like this — people whose hearts are so hardened and filled with cynicism that they would miss the beauty that surrounds them. The truth of the matter is that the establishment is fundamentally afraid of change. It makes sense; if one has power, they will do whatever they have to do in order to hold onto it. This is why you will never see the Federal Government choosing to decentralize its power and shift it to states and local government. This is why the establishment was afraid to let blacks and women vote. This is why the Chinese army drove tanks into Tiananmen Square, and this is why more recently the Burmese Government slaughtered monks. This is why the establishment crucified a man for speaking a new philosophy and causing agitation amongst the populace.
So anyway — I have a tendency to give people the benefit of the doubt. For years I have, in my head, reconciled George W. Bush’s actions with the unique pressures and situations he finds himself in. I have said to myself, “Well, I’m sure that his intentions are good.” I formally withdraw that benefit of the doubt. I have come to the conclusion that people like Bush and Cheney simply don’t see the beauty in this world. Bush may see beauty in some perceived afterlife, and as for Cheney, I am not convinced he sees beyond dollars and cents and beyond the limitations of his own lifetime. My conclusion is that these guys are in it for their lifespans and then they’ll leave the mess for generations after them to deal with. It’s a sinister world view, but actions don’t lie. You don’t break laws, establish a secretive cabal-like government, drop bombs, consistently increase military spending and wage preemptive warfare because you’re trying to create a peaceful and tolerant future. It is pure and simple retention of power.

Black Holes and Cosmic Lessons: It goes on and on. But we can find pertinent patterns in nature. A black hole sucks everything into it until, as the theory goes, it reaches critical mass. Then all the accumulated centralized energy and power bursts forth and is once again disseminated to the universe.
Power centers will crumble, establishments will fall.
Come on people — send me your thoughts and ideas. Madbob@madbob.com.

The recent conviction of Chi Mak, a Chinese-born engineer working for a US Defense contractor who “slept” for 20 years before being activated in order to swipe sensitive military documents, is bringing to light what US Intelligence insiders have long known, that the Chinese government has a vast network of agents already at work in the US:

The Chinese government, in an enterprise that one senior official likened to an “intellectual vacuum cleaner,” has deployed a diverse network of professional spies, students, scientists and others to systematically collect U.S. know-how, the officials said. Some are trained in modern electronic techniques for snooping on wireless computer transactions. Others, such as Mak, are technical experts who have been in place for years and have blended into their communities.

“Chi Mak acknowledged that he had been placed in the United States more than 20 years earlier, in order to burrow into the defense-industrial establishment to steal secrets,” Joel Brenner, the head of counterintelligence for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in an interview. “It speaks of deep patience,” he said, and is part of a pattern.

Peeking duck indeed.