February 3rd,2007 KAFANA BALKAN @ ARTSF 110 Capp st. @ 16th.st 5 th floor 8PM-1AM Sliding scale $8-15 Come out and support a great cause and listen to some wildly festive music. Boban and Zeljko invite you to our very first installment of KAFANA BALKAN-a benfit for the Bread and Cheese circus that has been making free circus shows and workshops for refugee children in Kosovo for the past 4 years.The international troupe consists of members from Bosnia,Serbia,Canada and United States.

We had a very informal meeting of XL Terrestrials at one of our undisclosed caffeinating locations today to discuss TOC v.3.O. That’s “Transmigration Of Cinema” for all you slackheads just tuning in… Welcome! Slackers ( yes, “praise slack!” even in 2007, minus the xtra retro-cheese and quite possibly all that [se]x-ist wanking ! ) situationists, cacaphonists, jammers, media contortionists and escape artists, future re-writin hacklabbers, and sustainability/realtime tinkerers are all a part of our color palette and calling. So if you have a moment, try this latest version on for size and let us know if you think the XLT Organism can help you bear fruit and proper arms in these troubled times:

This is a pure web teaser! There is no Sons of El Topo project to see in the cinema, the proposed sequel to Jodorowsky’s cult classic El Topo. But both this 1970 oddity-masterwork (which was the beginnings of the midnight movie due in part to Lennon and Yoko Ono) and Holy Mountain are screening at Castro theater this weekend, which means something must have recently occurred in the film’s legal status…having been locked up in a decades-long struggle with producer Allen Klein.

Yep, there’s a magazine dedicated to hactivism and new media which runs a pretty mean gamut from up-to-speed resistance measures to music reviews on the outer limits to cultural oddities that will keep you on your toes… Nueral.it In hardcopy it is supposedly available at Cody’s Books in the Bay Area, but you can also dig in onlne in eng and italian. No. 26 : Disturbing the System has bundles of info that you should be downloading into your consciousness and your toolkit immediately.

Goethe’s 12th “Berlin and Beyond” festival at the Castro looked a little thin and fluffy from the program at first glance, but we are very happy to have our first impression totally dismantled. All of the films we have seen in this year’s selection so far have either proven to be unexpected surprises, engaging, intense, challenging, or in a couple cases, curious fodder for XL terrestrial (propaganda) analysis. And this year’s filmmaker panel session grappled with the complexities of “violence in film”, which reflected a recurring theme from many featured guest directors.

We think it might be important for those who have made the pilgrimage to Macworld this week to get a grip on the fact that unless the new iphone has upgrades to work underwater and/or during the next ice age, withstand ied-s, and/or annihilate the deathstar of the warmongers… there’s not really much social progress that will be made with a phone, an ipod , and a camera wrapped into one ( wow, revolutionary as a latte with xtra foam on valencia street!

Steve Bell

“Join EFF for a birthday bash to celebrate 16 years fighting for your rights.” They are asking for $20 donations , but no one turned away for lack of funds, and proceeds go toward one ofthe most progressive legal teams on the planet. January 11, 7-10 PM at 111 Minna Gallery in Soma, SF. Scott Beal of Laughing Squid will be on hand to donate a generous gift and you can find out about all the raging battles for what’s left of digital freedom…

When Neil Postman used to analyze the Media Ecology and the Technopoly he’d say that we were becoming heavily wired for a catastrophic excess of solutions to problems that didn’t previously exist, and that even our language for expressing the new social complexities was migrating into forms more groomed for pushing hair products. Then as the Age of Biotech was just beginning to get us into slippery-slope wetware re-designed it quickly went molecular, so that the Ick Factor became a little too abstract to alarm or nauseate the uninitiated citizen/human.

Somewhat surprising and very unfortunate for US audiences that nearly 2 years after winning best documentary at the SF International, no one’s picked this film up for cinema or dvd distribution, but it’s available from their own site. Czech Dream makes a highly instructional piece for pulling back the shabby curtains on mass media, advertising firms, and the hypermarketed every-Man in a way that reveals the sausage-making of manipulative campaigns and should spawn a new wave of pranking collision-course consumerisms. And here we get a taste of the east-block currently undergoing the high-speed colonization “upgrades” to shopping-mall democracy.

spring 2007 west coast Wednesday May 16th new college theatre 777 Valencia Street, San Francisco www.newcollege.edu Friday March 30th 2007 7-10pm TELIC 975 Chung King Rd. in chinatown www.telic.info Friday April 6th 2007 7-10pm Eco Village 117 Bimini Pl, LA 90004 www.laecovillage.org Monday April 9th 2007 7pm CRCA - Center for Research in Computing and the Arts University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, Ca. with SD Indymedia and NewMediaFix.net Previous Tour Dates: NorCal Station 40, San Francisco