Death of a Poet

Monday, January 29th, 2007

U Tin Moe

Yesterday was the funeral of one of Burma’s most famous poets, U Tin Moe. Yet the Burmese government refused to allow the media in the country to report on his death. And though he was living in Los Angeles, the U.S. mainstream media did not cover the event because the poet was virtually unknown here.

U Tin Moe had been living in exile since 1999 because of his support for the Burmese democracy movement, the National League for Democracy, and its leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

Before the Burmese junta blacklisted U Tin Moe, who died at age 74, his poems were read in public schools. He was also well known for his kind, honest nature. About 200 people from the Burmese community in the United States attended his funeral at Rose Hills Memorial Park.

As the casket was taken away, a friend of U Tin Moe’s wailed: “You are still alive. You are still with us. We’ll continue to fight for Burma.”

Say What?

Monday, January 29th, 2007

Here at PopandPolitics.com, we really dig tag clouds – the feature we have off to the right of our posts under “Heat”. With tagclouds, more frequently used tags are displayed in a larger font, whereas less popular words/subjects appear smaller in the tag cloud. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag. Lately, tag clouds have also become news sources of their own. Check out the tag cloud for the President’s State of the Union from this past week on blogger Chirag Mehta’s site. He has the State of the Union Address from as far back as John Adams’ Foundation of Government speech in 1776.

how ya feelin’?

Monday, January 29th, 2007


To understand both pop + politics in the Web 2.0 world, one must be in touch with the specific feelings across online content-generating demographics at a particular point in time and place.

Enter WeFeelFine.org, the excellent real-time visualization of the above, created by Internet artist Jonathan Harris and Google personalization tech Sep Kamvar.

Basically, WeFeelFine aggregates and searches the blogosphere for phrases like ‘I feel…’ or ‘I am feeling…’ One of 5,000 predefined feelings is associated with each post and the demographic attributes are tagged on. Their mission statement describes an “artwork authored by everyone”:

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

We’d love to hear about any other new and up & coming online tools for understanding audience, culture, society or just having fun.

smokin

Monday, January 29th, 2007

smokinSmokin’ Aces is a most rare thing: a good movie released in January. Crazy! A Universal Pictures-Working Title Films product written and directed by Joe Carnahan, who brought audiences Narc (2002), this movie kills, it’s a “gotta see, no doubt” with enough action, suspense and violence to satisfy the entertainment masochist in all of us.

The plot seriously moves. You sit down, nibble a kernel or two, and bam you’re in the middle of the movie. If you’re a fan of twisted crime dramas like Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, mafia flicks like Goodfellas or Guy Ritchie’s Snatch, one of my personal favorites, then you’re gonna love this movie.

The all-star cast is phenomenal, including Jeremy Piven (Entourage), Ray Liotta, Ben Affleck, Andy Garcia, Alicia Keys, Common, Taraji P. Henson (Hustle & Flow), and Ryan Reynolds (Van Wilder). The hitmen are the real stars, though, all of them, from redneck white supremacists, strapped-for-cash bounty hunters, hot vixens, and just overall psychopaths.

The storyline goes like this: Buddy “Aces” Israel (Piven), a Las Vegas performer turned certified thug, becomes an FBI informant and is placed in the witness protection program. Rival mob boss Primo Sparazza puts out a million-dollar contract for Israel’s head. A whole slew of crazy hitmen (and women) compete to be the first to get to Israel in his Lake-Tahoe casino hideout. Liotta and Reynolds, as FBI agents Donald Carruthers and Richard Messner, are on the case, trying to get to Israel before he gets whacked.

The only faults of the movie in my opinion are Common’s acting and the drawn-out but still-clever ending. Common, dear, I love you as a rapper, but please don’t ever act again.