The Publics

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This evening, doing my best to avoid the horrific amount of work I have on my plate at the moment, I walked across the street from my apartment and went into a store that specializes in digital entertainment products (stuff for your TV) with the intent being to buy a TV series from the early ’90s. After browsing the aisles for a few minutes I came across something I liked - The Tick: Season One. If you haven’t seen The Tick, then you’re probably too old (or young) to relate to this blog post and should probably stop reading right now.

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Colors Magazine (often confused with Color, a skate mag produced out of Vancouver’s Railtown district) is essentially the propaganda wing of The Benetton Family, who own and operate numerous clothing brands including United Colors of Benetton and Killer Loop. If you can suspend your disbelief for a moment and view the magazine not as one giant Benetton advertisement and focus on its exceptional editorial content, Colors is one of the few magazines on the rack actually worth its asking price ($10). The latest issue, which opens with the sentence “Money is an illusion, a psychological relationship between an object and a value that has been given to it”, is an impressive achievement in content & design semblance that makes your average periodical look grotesquely unsophisticated in comparison.

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I don’t know whether this is a case of subconscious biting or willing something into existence through sheer mental force, but ever since I changed The Publics logo to that pyramid eye thing, I’ve been seeing this tag (shown above) pop up all over the streets of Vancouver. In all honesty, I can say that I did not consciously recognize the existence of this dude (Egypt) or dudette or whatever, before I threw up the new banner, but the phenomenon has last left me intrigued and puzzled. To further the mysterious-ness of “Egypt” I was talking to a Japanese friend of mine who just returned from Tokyo and she claims to have seen something similar in the back alleys of Shibuya, a world-famous locale for up and coming writers. And so, I propose a contest.

To whom ever can send me documentation of “Egypt” pre-dating its existence to a period of time before I changed my header will go this amazing device shown in the photograph above: An Apex television set. Yes, it is colour, and you can watch movies or play video games on it provided you have the required peripheral devices for such activities. Alternatively, for my international readers - if you’ve seen the “Egypt” tag in your country, take a photo of it and email it to me, that could also possibly win you the set, but only if you are willing to pay shipping and handling.

Send your submissions to: publics.info@gmail.com

Weng Weng, (1957-1992) was a Filipino action star and is often referred to as “the forgotten hero of Philippine cinema”. At 2 foot and 9 inches tall, Weng Weng holds the distinction of being the shortest adult actor to hold a leading role. He was catapulted into international stardom as Agent 00 in the 1981 blockbuster For Y’ur Height Only, in which he kicks many a genital and infiltrates “hidden island” using a jet pack.

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Now I’m no luddite, but nor am I a technophiliac.

Thousands, if not millions of people throughout the world believe in this idea called “progress” - a term usually associated with socialism, but has recently been receiving increased media exposure in North America due to a certain presidential candidate. Much like Obama is the figurehead for a new decade of positivity, so it is with the internet, which some people fawn over as if it was the second coming of Christ himself. Only this time he isn’t a Jew, he’s Korean, and he’s holding a huge plate of neon-fried chicken wings for you to gorge yourself upon.

But what about mixtapes? Weren’t they actually totally fucking rad? Are we better off with the mixtape’s modern equivalent - the MP3 blog? While MP3s are cool and everything, and blogs are like, whatever, I can’t help getting nostalgic for the early to mid ‘90s any chance I get. Shawn Kemp, malt liquor, Pearl Jam, Hawa’iin hotboxing your mom’s minivan – the ‘90s were filled with dope shit that has evaporated into the annals of history all too quickly. Remember Pluto? It’s not even a planet anymore, it’s become the cosmic equivalent of a disgraced pro-athlete, sent down to the minors to dwell in obscurity for-ever.

Junior Mafia: Get Money

Lost Boyz: Renée

When one thinks of information theft, the term usually conjures up images of depleted bank account balances or armament blueprints, but a new OCR (optical character recognition) device is changing the game faster than you can type ESPIONAGE.

Hanwang, a research firm based in Beijing, has created a handheld text-scanning device called the E-Excerpter. The device retails for 2600 Yuan ($380), weighs 90 grams, has a memory of 20MB and is able to record 8-10 characters a second.

Since its release, the e-Excerpter has gained a certain level of infamy among Beijing’s book retailers, many of whom have banned the device from their stores due to the occurrence of rampant text-theft. It seems that there is a sub-class of Beijingers who feel that investing in the e-Excerpter will eventually save them money in lieu of the ever-rising price of books and magazines. Handheld OCR products have the potential to become the great equalizers of information access if the current economic and censorship situations in China continue to escalate.

On the other end of the media-production spectrum is China’s unregistered print sector: illegal publications that avoid censorship by producing and distributing via secret locations and criminal vendors. The “Yellow Press”, as it is commonly known, has been subject to an intense government crackdown since late 2006, resulting in sweeping arrests and the confiscation of over 200 million copies of magazines and newspapers.

While the majority of China’s illegal newspapers tend to focus on fake tales of celebrity death and pornographic images, the medium remains the only option for any individual who wishes to express an opinion that violates the government’s strict censorship guidelines.