leesean.netI went to DoTank:Brooklyn’s DIY Urban Agriculture Skillshare at the Change You Want To See Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Carina Molnar of the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities taught us how to compost with worms in a plastic bin, Aurash Khawarzad of PPS.org showed us how to make seed bombs, and Ted Ullrich demonstrated how to assemble a Windowfarm.
Above: Ted Ullrich introduces DoTank
Ni Hao You Doin’? – A new Hepnova shirt on Zazzle in collaboration with Joey G.
We were hanging out in Little Italy/Chinatown tonight and Joe came up with this brilliant bilingual pun that celebrates the confluence of cultures in a pizza/scallion pancake slice of Lower Manhattan with classic New York wit and attitude. Here’s to pasta and to potstickers and to Sino-Italian-American friendship! Ni hao you doin’?
RIP: A Remix Manifesto filmmaker Brett Gaylor and underground cartoonist/fair-use icon Dan O’Neill in San Francisco, 23 June 2009.
Tonight Creative Commons co-hosted a San Francisco screening of RIP: A Remix Manifest, a documentary about remix and copyright.  The movie features interviews with remix culture pioneers and opinion leaders like Girl Talk, Lawrence Lessig, Gilberto Gil, and Cory Doctorow.  RIP was on my summer viewing list.
I went to check out the screening with Michelle, another Creative Commons (and lurking reader of this blog).  Filmmaker Brett Gaylor did a Q&A after the screening.  He also introduced special guest Dan O’Neill of Air Pirates fame, who was profiled in the documentary.  You can download the film online under a pay-what-you-want model.
After the Q&A came the dance party. DJs Adrian and the Mysterious D and VJs Eclectic Method rocked the house with their mash-up madness.  I haven’t danced that hard in years. Awesome!
Here is a summer reading/viewing list of books and documentaries relating to my internship at Creative Commons and to my ongoing personal interests. It’s a self-assigned curriculum for summer self-improvement if you will. The general themes include technology, the internet, copyright, culture, creativity, and food. I haven’t actually read all the books yet, but I have seen all the movies.
At the time of writing, all of the works are available for free (legal) viewing or download online except for Food Inc., which is now in theaters around the US – and a must see for EVERY American. I know I have kind of geeky interests, and not everybody cares to read 300+ page books about copyright, but everybody eats, so go see Food Inc already!
Books
The Wealth of Networks
How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Yochai Benkler
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace 2.0
Lawrence Lessig
Free Culture
How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
Lawrence Lessig
Remix
Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy
Lawrence Lessig
The Pirates Dilemma
How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism
Matt Mason
The Public Domain
Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
James Boyle
Viral Spiral
How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own
David Bollier
The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It
Jonathan Zittrain
Music and It’s Reflection on Society
Catalan: La Música i el seu reflex en la societat
Spanish: La música y su reflejo en la sociedad
Edited by Indigestió
A collection of essays about the role of music in contemporary society. Only in Spanish and Catalan for now though.
Tales from the Public Domain: Bound By Law?
“Bound by Law translates law into plain English and abstract ideas into ‘visual metaphors.’ So the comic’s heroine, Akiko, brandishes a laser gun as she fends off a cyclopean ‘Rights Monster’ – all the while learning copyright law basics, including the line between fair use and copyright infringement.†-Brandt Goldstein, The Wall Street Journal online
Documentaries
Good Copy/Bad Copy
A Danish documentary about the current state of copyright and culture
Rip: A Remix Manifesto
A Canadian documentary film about copyright and remix culture.
The Future of Food
An in-depth look into the controversy over genetically modified foods. Watch it online at Snagfilms.
Food, Inc.
Filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA.
The Legend of Leigh Bowery
The Legend of Leigh Bowery explores a life lived as if it was a performance. Leigh Bowery was a costume/clothing designer, nightclub impresario, performer, and musician whose vision influenced many of today’s most important artists. He later became known to the world at large as the muse and subject of preeminent British painter Lucian Freud.
I worked on my ODI and AMO characters this weekend, adding color, and putting them on t-shirts:
