Radical Net
Was hangin gout with my friend Carey in South Africa who’s the first filmaker from the emerging Radical Arts movement in the States to come out with something. Her film Original Child Bomb will be a massive hit at the Festivals. (It’s premiering at the Berlinnale this year). It meditates on the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the 2nd World War with some devestating colour footage showing both those bustling, urban, densely populated cities on the bright summer morning just before the Bomb fell. With animation and editing, these horrifying images are woven into the similarly bright, blue-sky morning the New Yorkers were enjoying on September 11th. In his record breaking 2004 miliary budget, George Bush has allocated $15.5 million to the develpment of bunker-busting “mini-nukes” or RNEPs (Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrators). These have a 5 kiloton nuclear warhead in them. 3 RNEPs equal the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshimi. Dropped in an urban space they would kill 20,000 people instantly and destroy everything within a one mile radius. It’s the first nuclear weapon developed since the end of the Cold War. What is the Bush administration doing? Nuclear weapons are not a hangover of the Cold War, They are a threat now.
There is a great deal of information out there. And there is a great deal of ignorance. Films like Carey’s and some of the great radical documentaries on the Net are well worth looking at and pondering. Check them out and vote.
Eric Blumrich is the creator of BushFlash and he has a very powerful piece about the casualties in Iraq.
Rather suprisingly, Leonardo Di Caprio is a very engaged activis t and has made a piece with Global Green USA and the Tree Media Group.
And then a grimly funny account of mutual mass destruction, The End of the World. (This sometimes sticks… here’s the URL: http://members.cox.net/impunity/endofworld.swf)