Independent Net Publishing Gets Easy Again

June 17, 2004

An update on my post about “online mag­a­zines and the new Mov­able­type charges”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000347.php… The folks at MT have “lis­tened to all the feed­back and imple­ment­ed new policies”:www.sixapart.com/log/2004/06/announcing_pric.shtml which are much more sen­si­tive to the needs (and resources) of small non­prof­it and com­mu­ni­ty groups. It’s real­ly good news for all the inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ing hap­pen­ing via blogs. Look for my “pow­ered by” sym­bol to change to the new 3.0 ver­sion as soon as I install it.

It’s hard not to make the connection

June 21, 2003

In Iraq, U.S. sol­diers are blar­ing the sound­tract to ‘Apoc­a­lypse Now’ to psych them­selves up to war:

“With Wag­n­er’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ still ring­ing in their ears and the clat­ter of heli­copters over­head, sol­diers rammed vehi­cles into met­al gates and hun­dreds of troops raid­ed hous­es in the west­ern city of Ramadi”

Mean­while in my home­town of Philadel­phia four teenagers lis­tened to the Bea­t­les’ ‘Hel­ter Skel­ter’ over forty times before attack­ing and beat­ing to death one of their friends.
   Hor­rif­ic as both sto­ries are, what strikes me is the choice of music. ‘Hel­ter Skel­ter’ and most of the music on ‘Apoc­alpse Now’ were writ­ten in the late 1960 and ear­ly 70s (the movie itself came out in 1979). Why are today’s teenagers pick­ing the music of their par­ents to plan their attacks? Can’t you kill to Radio­head or Linkin Park? Could­n’t the Philly kids have shown some home­town pride and picked Pink? Why the Oldies Music? Seri­ous­ly, there have been some topsy-turvy gen­er­a­tional sur­pris­es in the sup­port and oppo­si­tion to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Is there some sort of strange fetish for all things 70s going on here?