It’s Martin Luther King day so I’ll let the great man speak first:
“We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
Amen.
And now, for your viewing pleasure and informational elucidation, is a wonderful documentary entitled: I Am Fishead
It’s narrated by Peter Coyote and treads a similar path to The Corporation with its chilling and enlightening examination of the psychopathology of corporations and corporate leaders.
Bruce Sterling tweeted the link to this philosphical “documentary” essay – an exploration of identity in the digital age, the absorption of self within technology and the expression of being within an ethereal existence.
The digital settles in as background. We remember less and query more. Our identity play would be considered schizophrenic in the last century. We have more friends than ever before yet know new frontiers of isolation. The quantification of our experience haunts us in the form of a persistent history. And we are distracted more than we ever knew possible. These circumstances are paradoxically a description of the near future and a diagnosis of the current state of affairs. The truly timeless is redefined – it has transcended that which is classic; it has become that which is never finished.
On one level there’s a lot of playful bafflegab going on (hell, just read their About page for an example) but when the comments and ideas start layering upon themselves in your mind (or at least in my alleged mind) it takes on the construct of a larger perception of how we are mutating ourselves in this data soup we call the world today.
We may not (yet) be in that place described by Stewart Brand in the first publication of the Whole Earth Catalog when he said: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” but we are evolving ourselves with our technology and if we continue to do so with a modicum of wisdom and courage to change there may be hope for we silly monkeys.
As the introduction to Whole Earth continued:
So far, remotely done power and glory – as via government, big business, formal education, church – has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing – power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.
That was in 1968.
We are only now becoming aware as a larger community of what this means as the changes we have been investing our bodies and minds in start to take hold and change the world the world around us.
Are you ready to change? You should be because you already are in the process of self-evolvement. The big question is: how aware and self-directed will your personal evolution be? And how will you share that with the world at large?
Know thyself.
And get me a beer while you’re at it.
Cheers.
P. S. Speaking of monkeys – here’s a little Elvis for ya:
I’ve been busy over the holidays doing the usual things: wrestling with trees in the living room, eating too much, enduring overlapping fractured conversations in rooms full of simultaneously speaking family members and stuff like that.
During that time I’ve also been reorganizing my office/edit suite and lining up my production agenda for the coming year.
This will include all the upcoming efforts I’ll be applying to the Ruffus Project as a whole – including a slate of new episodes made exclusively for release on the web and a series of print-to-order books based on the original shows. That post will be put up here soon – I promise.
I’m also in the process of setting up a whole new blog site at robbomills.net which will – eventually – take over from this site. Millsworks will fade away and get archived somewhere but I’m not going to worry about that right now.
Both of those projects evolved from our creative incubation process with the Rhino Group – a semi-weekly gathering of our core colleagues at Parkdale’s Rhino Bar & Grill.
More ambitious plans lay in wait for some longer form projects and I’m looking forward to being able to reveal them as they get closer to reality.
On top of all that I’m also looking for some kind of job because none of these works are paying my salary – yet.
There’s a lot of commentary I want to offer up since we are entering the year where the War On The Internet truly erupts. The Occupy Movement which sprang from the Arab Spring is just the tip of the iceberg of the disruptive nature of social media and the new ability of citizens to bypass traditional corporate and state controlled media to receive and disseminate information and culture. The interwebz hold the distinct possibility to make fundamental changes in how not just our individual lives are lived but how we as human beings think, operate and interact with each other and the planet we share. That’s big stuff. And believe it or not, kids puppet shows – and other offerings from indie producers like myself – have a place in all that. We are at the cusp of “use it or lose it” with respect to the Net – and also, believe me, of “defend it or die”.
That material will have a better home on the new RobboMills site.
There are many others playing in the same cultural media sandbox as yours truly. I’m privileged to know and work with quite a few remarkable people here in Toronto who are increasingly active in establishing what we do online as a serious industry. You’ll be hearing more about them too. They are awesome.
But – between now and then I have to get all the shit in the boxes on my office floor up on the shelves, all the spaghetti of wires under/over/across my standing desk organized into a reasonable facsimile of a non-combustible electrical array, all my outstanding contracts and other legal documents vetted and signed, and I think there’s also this little thing called back taxes.
Blah blah blah. There’s always going to be something to do.
Soooooooo – bear with me as I get my proverbial shit together and we’ll have a fun and entertaining ride in Robbo’s culture bucket from now to the end of 2012. What happens after that is between you and your local faux-Mayan bullshit distributor.
Predictions for the coming year? Everything is going to get very dark and scary and mean and bloody – and there will be puppets. Keep smiling, tell the ones you love that you love them, and speak out loud against lies, intolerance and hypocrisy. And eat more vegetables.
And now – here’s a video of a crow tubing on a rooftop.
Ruffus The Dog’s Christmas Carol is now online and available for the world to see and share. You can even watch it here:
It would help a lot if you go to the YouTube site to Like and Comment on the show. That kind of audience engagement – *cough*buzzwords*couch* – really does make a difference.
We’ll also be posting it to our Blip.tv channel and a bunch of other sites very soon – as in: as soon as I can get my shit together to do so.
I promise to write a whole bunch more about how we made it, with photos and clips, and what our next steps will be for the Ruffus project – but for now you can check out what other people are saying by checking out their posts and leaving comments:
Please share this show with as many others as you can. It’s our gift to everyone for the holidays.
Download links will be posted soon – and if you want to watch the earlier Ruffus episodes you can find them on the official Ruffus web site.
And if you really really like JP Houston’s song “Merry Merry” you can find it on our Bandcamp site as a free download. It’s an immensely catchy tune and deserves to be heard over and over again. Enjoy!
Cheers.
P. S. Comments here are also appreciated. Tell me what you think of the show – I’d really like to know.
The full production will premiere online on December 17th. We’re also having a screening at the Revue Cinema that day where Ruffus will appear in person to answer questions. I’ll probably be there too.
A fun and informative TED Talk by Joe Sabia, described thusly:
iPad storyteller Joe Sabia introduces us to Lothar Meggendorfer, who created a bold technology for storytelling: the pop-up book. Sabia shows how new technology has always helped us tell our own stories, from the walls of caves to his own onstage iPad.
Internet Rising is an utterly awesome documentary which describes itself as
a digi-documentary investigating the evolving relationships between the Internet and collective consciousness of humanity. It provokes many questions about ancient and modern paradoxes of life, its pleasures and pains… and the gray area contrasts in between – but most of all it is meant to be an inspiring conversation starter; a launchpad for future remixes of a collective search for some meaning/mindfulness. It is also spiced with a bit of humorous satire to give our *overloaded* BIG DATA _information_ dump() brains a little break from the daily race :)
On that same Saturday we will also be hosting a public screening at the historic Revue Cinema here in Toronto. Showtime: 11:00 am.
Here’s the poster for the show.
Not bad, huh?
Limited copies of the poster will be printed, signed and sent to our generous Indie Go-Go donors. There’s still time for you to get yours by visiting our Indie Go-Go campaign page and making a donation.
If you are in the neighbourhood – that would be Parkdale, west end of Toronto – and if you’re up for a family friendly matinee screening of a Christmas classic then come on by. After the screening there will be a brief Q&A with Ruffus – live on stage! The pay-what-you-can box office proceeds will be donated to the Toronto Public Library Foundation.
The holidays are fast approaching and I made a promise last year that our Ruffus The Dog’s Christmas Carol would be finished and released by then. Here’s how you can help make it so.
When we started the project we attempted, through Indie Go-Go, to raise the full $8,500 we expected we could scrape by on to make the whole thing work and release it to the world. We only managed to achieve $2,090 but that generosity from our supporters convinced us to carry on and go ahead with the shoot. I’ve blogged about that before – here and here and here – and here’s our original Indie Go-Go pitch.
Well now, after almost a year of gradually, inexorably (if not continually) working on the post production of the show we are coming down to the wire. The many favours and dedicated sweat equity contributed, in addition to the much needed cash, have carried us almost to completion but once again we find ourselves in need of real money to ensure the project gets finished at the level of quality it deserves and to enable us to release it to the world on time for the holiday season.
The show will be released online for free streaming and downloading with the option to buy DVD copies, songs, posters, calendars, t-shirts and (hopefully) a graphic photo-novella. But it’s gotta all be done and ready for release before December 15th.
Our clock is ticking.
If you can contribute that would be freaking awesome. If you can’t you can still help us with word-of-mouth, just telling people about the project.
Full Disclosure: When I refer to “we” on this project I am mostly referring to “me”, since I’m the guy who has always chosen to wear too many hats. Hey – I got a fat head – might as well use it, right? But I always say “we” because I am not a one-man-band; I rely upon and have benefited from the extraordinary generosity of my friends and family – all of them colleagues and collaborators in this work with me. I couldn’t do a thing without them.
Thanks in advance for your generosity. If you have any comments or suggestions or if you have any questions please feel free to post them here or via email.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back in the basement and keep working on the show.
I'm going to be slowly making some changes to the website both in format and content - and I'm pretty sure even the URL will change.
It's going to be more of a personal news aggregator with a featured video blog from yours truly. We'll see how long that lasts. So bear with me - thanks.
It's going to be more of a personal news aggregator with a featured video blog from yours truly. We'll see how long that lasts. So bear with me - thanks.