Last night I finally got to see some of the work coming out of Andy Field’s Forest Fringe. The microfestival at BAC was a vibrant and buzzing combination of short experiences, fuller scripted pieces, sound work, music, installations and intimate performances. Some of the pieces were more ‘finished’, whilst others just setting out on their first period of R&D. The whole event fitted into the nooks and crannies of the BAC building, and filled the spaces in between with live music and discoveries aplenty – one highlight being the items of clothing dotted around, inviting you to take them in exchange for you’re an item of your own, and it story. Like any good festival, there was more than you could see in one night, and each attendee built their own experience.

Pieces I encountered included Search Party’s Growing Old With You, in its early stages of an R&D process investigating how our society is changing with its aging population. The issue was approached on a micro-level in a one to one experience that exposed the performer’s approach to their aging, before asking you to exchange your own story for a small birthday cake. Though this was the ‘newest’ work that I experienced, it was also the one that affected me in the rawest manner. I’m definitely going to be looking to hear about what it grows into.

Mamoru Iriguchi did the best sideways step in heels I’ve seen a man in a dress do, as he held your hand in the dark, asking you to investigate the house you share during a power cut, illuminated only by a head torch (projector affixed to a helmet, projecting a rich animation, which moved with you.)

Tania El Khoury’s Fuzzy asked an audience of up to 5 to act as her and her (absent) partner’s therapist. The piece felt like it was erring on an interesting clash of cultures as seen through the relationship of a Lebanese woman and a man from the Midlands. Though the performance perhaps felt like it was playing to a larger crowd, how we adjust to more intimate performance styles (does a more expressionist approach alienate in a useful or destructive way in intimate performance?) is definitely something that bears investigation.

Charlotte Jarvis’ video installation All American Hero wafted the smell of cold Chinese takeaway and stale popcorn towards you as you slumped on a sofa, watching the video diaries of the world’s first All American Hero. Something between X Factor and the Million Dollar Man, it felt all too plausible.

Throughout the night, I dipped in and out of the Travelling Sounds Library (pictured), which featured the work of Blast Theory, Unlimited Theatre, Duncan Speakman (and more). The library invited you to settle onto a sofa, open up a book, and discover an mp3 player and headphones containing a selection of several phonic experiences lasting from 2-40 minutes. Kaleidoscope by Abigail Conway was a particular highlight for me, a piece that asked if you could change anything about yourself, what would it be?

Finally, I investigated the Waiting Room, where you were able to peruse the emails that scored the process of putting the festival together. Stressed, funny, and often personal, this view into the ‘back channel’ of the event gave the whole evening the feeling of ‘opening up’ rather than ‘presenting’, which fitted perfectly with the fringe ethic.

Some video I cut together of the Playgrounds event I attended at the V&A last Friday. Brilliant collision of gaming, art and theatre curated and created by Hide&Seek. Think I need to get designing some games myself. If the vimeos don’t like you, here’s the Youtubes.

Saturday the 6th of March was the Million Women Rise march. Scheduled the closest weekend to International Women’s Day, Million Women Rise brings together women from all over the country to march against violence against women – domestic and sexual abuse. For more on my thoughts on why it’s important for women to stand up agains VAW, and why it does require a different approach than violence against men, by men, see here.

This following quote was on a few placards, and really stuck in my mind:

“It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier in armed conflict”
- Major-General Patrick Cammaert, former Commander of UN Peacekeeping forces in the eastern Congo (Source).

There was a really good turn out. You can see the F Word’s coverage here with links to @CTrouper and @Jester‘s  photo sets. Below see an audioboo I recorded just before we got going, a flickr slideshow of my snaps, and a couple of videos of speakers/singers at the rally after the march.

It’s difficult to get involved in domestic and sexual violence protest if you are male, because it’s often important that such spaces are ‘safe’ spaces for people who have been subject to such violence, and also that women are able to be seen to be powerful in their own right.

If you want to oppose male violence against women, and are male, you can start by recognising that women are not objects or possessions, oppose their portrayal as such in the media, magazines, music, your workplace, and your own home. You could also check out the White Ribbon Campaign, and support Rape Crisis Centres, Refuge, and Amnesty International‘s work in countries where rape is being used as a weapon of war, and state religion refuses women rights over their own bodies.

Today I am leafing through the barely penetrable Digital Economy Bill, and I am thinking. I am thinking that we are not being heard. For all of the petitions that we sign, the words we pour into blogs and articles, the posturing we do on twitter and facebook, how much are we – the online tech-literate – how much are we simply talking to ourselves?

It’s been almost a month since I sent my Open Letter to Peter Mandelson. I have had no reply. No acknowledgement. No engagement.

The Digital Economy Bill is not about a digital economy, it is about how an analogue one can cling to profit within it.

This is the creative industry versus the distribution industries. The online world is a hive of creativity, of emerging technology, of passion and code, of distribution of information and means, it is a place to be valued beyond money. It is also a dangerous place to operate if it is control that you want, that you need. This is an amazing and incomprehensible thing for government.

The 20^th century creative economic model has operated on a basis of scarcity – of distribution, of controlling numbers and controlling access, and this was all orchestrated via the grand narrative of fame. As web 2.0 musician Steve Lawson puts it:

I no longer need to pretend to be a rock-star. The mythology of rock ‘n’ roll is nowhere near as interesting as the reality of creativity. Whereas the reality of high-dollar touring, promotional duties, photoshoots etc. is phenomenally dull. That’s why the rock ‘n’ roll myths were created – to cover the tedium that is the day to day reality of most touring musicians. The number that ever made millions from it is so small as to not really be statistically relevant when discussing what’s best for ‘music’ – they just had an enormous media footprint. Source

We are, for the most part, not calling for some creative chaotic utopia where the creative industries are either funded, or amateur, and we should not be losing artists because they are not ‘jack of all trades’ people – because they can’t design, market, distribute, and create. But we should be encouraging open and collaborative processes. It is in those spaces that you learn, and that you can plug your skills gaps with the expertise of others. It is in online spaces that you have direct access to your fans, your audience, your participants. That you can remove the necessity to market, or reform what marketing is.

You cannot legislate material that can be translated into information. You can, however, market experience, physical possessions, skill in a studio, the binding of a book. People like to touch. They like to breathe the heat of lights and smoke at gigs, they like the run their fingers over the cover of a book. I do not believe that the online world opposes that.

It also is worth mentioning that for those with money – those who lobby, and those, for the most part, who are in government, have never or can no longer recall what it feels like for finance to be finite in real terms – it is very hard for them to understand the motivations behind downloading something that costs less that £10. They see it as flippant, lazy and dishonest. They don’t understand that for many (and including myself) £10 is the weekly food budget. They don’t see that these things are done out of love, and that every spare piece of cash longs to be spent on seeing a band live, garnering what is worth more to us than money – physical experience.

So how about we bring this love to the physical world? Open Festivals – free to attend, sponsored, artists and musicians performing across the country– raising money for the Open Rights Group. We celebrate creativity, and we raise awareness and money.

This kind of action, as well as garnering money to support important and organised IRL action and lobbying (a power direly in need, not least to rival the weight of money behind the distribution industries), will also raise the profile of this issue to the ‘real’ sphere. Plenty of people who this bill will affect have no idea about how it will do so, or why they should care. We need to take this information to the streets. This will also speak in a language government understands. Clicking a petition is an important thing to do, but physical bodies in psychical spaces (and in British weather), that is action the establishment understands.

Also, how much should we condone civil disobedience? Proactive protest that does not harm people, or property, but that disrupts media events? Or DDOS attacks? Benign hacks which disseminate the message “it’s this easy to infiltrate a system, consider that when you vote on the Digital Economy Bill”. Raising the profile of the message in a way that demonstrates how much they don’t know about our world? Civil disobedience is a difficult point to consider, but I don’t doubt that some people will do so without consideration, should we gather ideas on how to do so without denigrating our intentions?

We also need to offer solutions. How to find and prosecute those who share copyrighted material for profit. Those who crack, propagate malicious code, set up bot nets and phish. Draw up new models for the music and film industries, fund studies into the gain vs. loss of people who love culture enough to ‘illegally’ download it. We need to do the work which the digital economy bill doesn’t, and set up a wiki to assess how the creative industries can and should operate in the online world. We can offer a publicly submitted memoranda to the bill, a 3,000 word document (about 6 sides of A4) offering our personal and industry expertise on a bill being proposed to parliament.

We need to speak up, because the most important things are only conspicuous by their absence. While the Digital Economy Bill includes measures that allow complete disconnection and up to

£50,000 fines if someone in your house is accused of filesharing. A duty on ISPs to spy on all their customers in case they find something that would help the record or film industry sue them (ISPs who refuse to cooperate can be fined £250,000) source

And also allowing the Secretary of State

the power to do anything without Parliamentary oversight or debate, provided it was done in the name of protecting copyright. source

Including imposing jail sentences. There is an awful lot that is missing:

[there is] nothing about ensuring that broadband is cheap, fast and neutral. Nothing about getting Britain’s poorest connected to the net. Nothing about ensuring that copyright rules get out of the way of entrepreneurship and the freedom to create new things. Nothing to ensure that schoolkids get the best tools in the world to create with, and can freely use the publicly funded media — BBC, Channel 4, BFI, Arts Council grantees — to make new media and so grow up to turn Britain into a powerhouse of tech-savvy creators. source

We need to make ourselves seen and heard. Why? Because we are this world; in varying but no more or less important ways we are stakeholders in the digital economy. The Digital Economy bill speaks entirely of the ignorance of our policy makers – but we can’t forget that it is our responsibility to speak to them about these failings, and in a language they understand. I am of the creative industry, some of you are too, but we are all the digital economy, because it trades in information, not money. We need to take this IRL, we need to take this analogue, we speak in their world, they need to learn about ours. Let’s act.

28^th October 2009

Dear Peter Mandelson,

I am writing to you regarding the #3strikes internet piracy legislation that you have recently confirmed.

I am involved in both the sectors of which you are taking such a damaging interest in, and although I don’t have the money to lobby on the same level as the music industry, I speak to you now as an investor. As an investor in the online world.

The analogue world is fleshy, simultaneously both tactile and ineffable. This is why we can invent concepts like money – you can hold on to it, and it can also be represented on pieces of paper, can change in value without changing in essence. The online world, on the other hand, is built on definite points, and logic. Oh it can contain the ineffable, just as infinity can be expressed as a value, but it’s built on single points, on values. If there is an online economy, its currency is information. And if we participate in online worlds, we are investing our information, our content in that world.

So I speak to you now, as an investor. I am a member of both the arts industry, and the online world. I work with arts companies on their online involvement, I blog opinion pieces and engage with politics and ethics, I write plays, and I am also researching art and digital technology. I may not be a big player, but I have a vested interest in online spaces that I participate in. I have a right to talk about how my share in these worlds is treated.

Despite the fact that your very own in depth Digital Britain report released in June 09 ruled out cutting off P2P sharers (“The most draconian penalty considered at the time was to slow down a persistent filesharer’s broadband connection”. Source) You continue to attempt to enforce a strategy that is at best foolish, and at worst illegal.

If, as you maintain, there are 7 million illegal files sharers in the UK, you must consider that you cannot cut off 7 million people’s internet connections without due process of law. It’s perfectly easy to piggy back on unsecured wireless connections, just as it is possible that a connection is shared by a building, a family, a business. Furthermore, are you proposing to process each illegal filesharer through the justice system? (And at the cost of the taxpayer – “Her Majesty’s Court System currently holds 200,000 criminal cases per year” source – how is it going to deal with millions)? Or are advocating a form of marshal law, where ISPs are sheriffs, and users are guilty until proven innocent?

Disconnecting people from the internet does not fully comply with EU legislation. In fact it directly contravenes EU legislation. I am referring to amendment 138/46 which [...] declared that access to the internet was a fundamental human right. source

You seem to be so eager for the Royal Mail to modernise, I wonder why you don’t see it equally as important for the music industry to do so?

I’d like to believe that the U-turn after the digital Britain report had nothing to do with your meeting meeting with one of the most powerful figures in the British music business, Lucian Grainge, the chairman of Universal Music – Source, soon after which you announced your resurrection of the draconian #3strikes, but it’s hard to understand why else you have decided to make this fallacious decision. And fallacious it is, the figures bandied about are bolstered by false accounting for losses to the creative industries, and even aside from the exaggerated and erroneous figures involved in the headlines (see Ben Goldacre’s excellent blog post for more) their maths is flawed at the point they assume every download is a lost sale.

Copyright was originally brought about in 1709 to “encourage the creation of artistic works by granting a right to copy for 14 years.” It now stands between 50 and 95 years Source. Its aim was to encourage a profession. I am not arguing for an artistic community that consists solely of amateurs, I understand, boy do I understand that artists need to be paid. But being paid is not the ends for which art is made, it is the encouragement. The leveller. Not the stick with which to beat the consumer.

I, and many of my peers are not calling for an end to the creative industries, we’re calling for changes to a very specific aspect of them – distribution. I’m not talking about some ‘choatic utopia’ (Source), what I am saying is the way that we consume is changing. Myspace, and Spotify have already changed the way that that we access music, and that artist distribute their wares. Youtube allows anyone with a camera and a computer to have their say. The Age of Stupid crowd-sourced the complete £450K production budget and are pioneering a system that allows anyone to buy a licence to screen it whenever and wherever they like – keeping the profits for themselves or their climate campaign.

Here’s a real industry perspective:

“The majority of my audiences watch my films over the BitTorrent system, a system so revolutionarily brilliant that it means I, an independent film-maker, can distribute a film in full High Definition to hundreds of millions of viewers with absolutely no cost incurred to me” – Monaghan Media source

And that of a consumer:

“Now, I muster all the spare cash I have to pay for an internet connection, and go to gigs as often as possible. I tell my mates (and a bunch of strangers on the interweb) about all the new bands I’ve heard of, and encourage them to see them live. So, I’m paying for the music I like, I’m paying the costs of distributing it, and I’m promoting it” source

P2P filesharing is revolutionary, it’s zero cost, close to zero in carbon emissions (servers), it runs on recommendations. It is another shift to the ‘pull’ ethic of the digital world. In a hyper-connected, information heavy existence, you cannot deliver neatly packaged tales of what we should buy and how we should be, because there are a million other voices that will simultaneously disagree. People taped music from CDs and radio before now, that’s been going on for years, what I believe really scares industry is the peer – peer review, peer sharing. Theirs is no longer dominant voice, we’re building our own worlds. Yes we need to deal with people who make a profit out of illegal filesharing, but criminalising a large proportion of your electorate is not the way to go about this.

A Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, what you should be doing is using the Digital Britain report to offer big business a manual to the digital world. If they want to survive, they have to evolve, you are doing this country a disservice when you pander to their childish cries to stem the tide of change.

However, I have to say that so far these simple facts seem to have evaded you, you seem determined to press on. So let me tell you now that #3strikes will not work. Because we will not allow it to. No one will.

Aside from the impossibility of monitoring and prosecuting all (let’s call non-profiteering sharers ‘domestic’) p2p filesharers, we will stop you from penalising any of them. If you begin to cut off people’s internet access, then everyone who can afford to do so will set up alternative unsecured wireless networks across the country. If you aim to track torrent usage, we will proliferate details on how to obscure or re-route your IP address. If you shut down those sites, we will use private chat to discuss what we want, and private cloud storage systems, drop boxes, to share content. We will rename files, disguise track identites with a couple of bytes worth data, break meta-data, and come up with new ways of encrypting our actions. The industry will not only lose out on ‘sales’ but valuable usage figures too.

You are attempting to solve a digital problem using analogue solutions. We are open source, we are anonymous, and we are everywhere. Don’t fight us, don’t push, help dying industries reform, and remarket themselves in a sustainable way.

Here’s some further reading from prominent musicians/Bloggers:

http://www.stevelawson.net/wordpress/2009/10/featured-artist-coalition-backs-lily-wtf-says-everyone-else/

http://agit8.org.uk/?p=336

http://www.challengerappears.com/blog/2009/09/connection-failure-mandelson-takes-on-the-internet/

http://www.stephenfry.com/2009/07/27/series-2-episode-4-itunes-live-festival/

Please don’t make this mistake. Because you will regret it.

Kind regards,

Hannah Nicklin.

________________________________________________

If you wish to send this letter to Peter Mandelson, or send something of you own, you can contact him via Writetothem.com. Don’t forget to replace my name and details with your own.

Do also check out this entry just posted by Steve Lawson, a musician and thinker who is making a living out of digital distribution.

If you want to take further action, read more, or get actively involved in the fight for our digital rights, please do check out, and where possible, support the excellent work of the Open Rights Group and 38Degrees.

Image by Stéfan, shared via a Creative Commons licence

Cards on the table, music means a lot to me. It’s scored many critical moments of my life so far, and papered over the cracks in the boring bits. Music has brought me back from the edge, when I felt like my brain was going to leap out of my head, music has set me far freer than alcohol ever has, whisky helps, but give me a dirty rock club, heat, smoke, lights and I will dance until I can’t breathe, until I feel like I could disappear.

For every heart break, there’s a song that goes with it, for every break up, an album you have to reclaim, for every beautiful moment, a piece of music. Music is reciprocal, it’s shared, it brings people together, it makes moments, and it is inspired by them. It is an essential form that talks to us of the universal; rhythm scores our lives, all life.

I like music, you get that. But I would have heard none of the tracks above had it not been for file-sharing. I am not poor, not in real terms, I have a roof over my head, food in the fridge, an education. But my food budget for the past two years was something between £7.50 and £10 a week, I have roughly zero disposable income. I download files. Illegally. So does almost everyone I know. If you took that music away from me, you’d be taking away the thickness of experience. You’d be halving the substance of my memories.

This is a blog in reaction to Peter Mandleson’s threat to cut off internet access to persistent file-sharers.  There are two questions here; one is it legal, two, is it useful?

Despite the fact that the in depth Digital Britain report released in June 09 ruled out cutting off P2P sharers (“The most draconian penalty considered at the time was to slow down a persistent filesharer’s broadband connection”. Source) Peter Mandleson has since announced a new plan that

Calls for the secretary of state to be given the power to direct the communications regulator Ofcom to implement technical measures against illegal peer-to-peer filesharing. Source

So, is it legal? There’s quite a strong argument against these measures in terms of them being unenforceable – you cannot cut off 7 million people’s internet connections without due process of law. (I shouldn’t have to say this but) you cannot assume guilt; it’s perfectly easy to piggy back on unsecured wireless connections, just as it is possible that a connection is shared by a building, a family, a business. Is Mandleson proposing to process each illegal filesharer through the justice system? (And at the cost of the taxpayer – “Her Majesty’s Court System currently holds 200,000 criminal cases per year” source – how is it going to deal with millions)? Or is he advocating a form of marshal law, where ISPs are sheriffs, and users are guilty until proven innocent?

The second argument against the idea is that it actually directly contravenes our human rights under EU legislation:

Disconnecting people from the internet does not fully comply with EU legislation. In fact it directly contravenes EU legislation. I am referring to amendment 138/46 which [...] declared that access to the internet was a fundamental human right. source

The action also contravenes what was pretty much the whole conclusion of the Digital Britain report: that broadband internet access was a right, not a privilege.

These actions are bolstered by false accounting for losses to the creative industries, and even aside from the exaggerated and erroneous figures involved in the headlines (see Ben Goldacre’s excellent blog post for more) their maths is flawed at the point they assume every download is a lost sale.

It’s all beginning to sound a bit desperate isn’t it?

Whitehall insiders believe the U-turn is more likely to have been caused by a prior meeting with one of the most powerful figures in the British music business, Lucian Grainge, the chairman of Universal Music – Source

Do you know what might save you a lot of money Universal? How about pulling out of all of those lawsuits, cutting down on those very finely paid lawyers of yours. A shiny penny to anyone who can set Universal Music Group’s legal costs against their projected losses to file sharing.

What we are seeing here, is the end of one type of business: the physical distribution of digital products. Source

These movements against progress are nothing less than the death throes of a nasty, parasitic part of a very worthy industry. They are not useful.

Copyright was originally brought about in 1709 to “encourage the creation of artistic works by granting a right to copy for 14 years.” It now stands between 50 and 95 years Source. Its aim was to encourage a profession. I am not arguing for an artistic community that consists solely of amateurs, I understand, boy do I understand that artists need to be paid. But being paid is not the ends for which art is made, it is the encouragement. The leveller. Not the stick with which to beat the consumer.

Culture is not only enjoyable, it is vital to us as a species, culture frames our existence; it helps us reflect of our selves, it asks big questions. Culture was also vital to our evolution, the ability to tell stories- to imagine differing outcomes was key to our growth– we teach out young using stories, cautionary tales and nursery rhymes. Our cultural heritage is open source, peer to peer, shared. See ballads, fairy tales, myths, legends, and performance like commedia dell’arte (its latter day incarnation is pantomime, but it used to be free to view political satire, kind of like a Spitting Image road show). The ownership of stories (told visually, actively, aurally) have changed since then, with the advent of a market economy, came patronage, and then a global capitalist system decided that not only did it want to own our stories, it wanted to sell them to us too. Distribution. But now the system is changing again.

The great chaotic utopia envisaged by some online evangelists would be culturally impoverished – a world that would create millions of buskers, but no Beatles. Source

I, and many of my peers are not calling for an end to the creative industries, we’re calling for changes to a very specific aspect of them – distribution. I’m not talking about some ‘choatic utopia’, what I am saying is the way that we consume is changing. Myspace, and Spotify have already changed the way that that we access music, and that artist distribute their wares. Youtube allows anyone with a camera and a computer to have their say. The Age of Stupid crowd-sourced the complete £450K production budget and are pioneering a system that allows anyone to buy a licence to screen it whenever and wherever they like – keeping the profits for themselves or their climate campaign.

Here’s a theory:

The world of ideas is changing, the news is becoming mutual, Obama’s politics was mutual- not driven by spin, broadcast control and brand [...] It’s all about the pull [...] Think pirates. Think mavericks, think renegades. They will re-form our world, they can tell us what the future might look like. It’s critical that artists are engaged with the digital world, not for marketing, but to ask difficult, big questions of it – Charles Leadbeater @wethink at Shift Happens

Here’s an industry perspective:

The majority of my audiences watch my films over the BitTorrent system, a system so revolutionarily brilliant that it means I, an independent film-maker, can distribute a film in full High Definition to hundreds of millions of viewers with absolutely no cost incurred to me – Monaghan Media source

And that of a consumer

Now, I muster all the spare cash I have to pay for an internet connection, and go to gigs as often as possible. I tell my mates (and a bunch of strangers on the interweb) about all the new bands I’ve heard of, and encourage them to see them live. So, I’m paying for the music I like, I’m paying the costs of distributing it, and I’m promoting it source

P2P filesharing is revolutionary, it’s zero cost, close to zero in carbon emissions (servers), it runs on recommendations. It is another shift to the ‘pull’ ethic of the digital world. In a hyper-connected, information heavy existence, you cannot deliver neatly packaged tales of what we should buy and how we should be, because there are a million other voices that will simultaneously disagree. People taped music from CDs and radio before now, that’s been going on for years, what really scares the Powers That Be is the peer – peer review, peer sharing. Theirs is no longer dominant voice, we’re building our own stories.

I believe that cutting off filesharing is fundamentally unfair, fundamentally unjust – and penalises the young, and the less well off.

Yes artists need to make a living, but hierarchical distribution is not the only way to do that. Radiohead released their album In Rainbows allowing people to pay ‘what they thought it was worth’, you could pay as little as 1p for it. The average paid was around $6 (source). They also very recently gave away a song for free. In a world where everyone is vying for your attention a loyal fan base matters more than ever, you cultivate that through trust, interaction and recommendation.

Ben Walker, (the man who did the Twitter song [and much else besides]) suggests that “when it’s so easy to make and share music, you’d be an unpopular person if you charged for music.”

Copyright has evolved, we now have Creative Commons, and likewise we can find new models from which artists can make a living, offering “goods that are infinitely duplicated (music) for free and tying them to scarce goods (vinyl records, t-shirts, collector’s items etc.)” source, is one method, Likewise we are never going to be able to duplicate the  singular experience of seeing a performance live, people still pay for that. Artists will still make a living, what digital distribution demolishes is the hierarchy – superstars and massive profit margins.

Johnathan Phan, of Pirate Party UK suggests that

Whereas earlier we had [one] artist making 10 million, we now have a hundred people making 1 million. source

It is not useful for Peter Mandleson to be attempting to tackle file-sharing. What he should be doing, as Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, is using the Digital Britain report to offer big business a manual to the digital world, if they want to survive, they have to evolve, Mandleson is doing the country a disservice when he panders to their childish cries to stem the tide of change.

Our world is slowly realising that unrelenting growth is not a sustainable model, in economics, in the environment, in our populace. Unfortunately this message takes the longest to reach the people at the top. What’s the answer? Support artists, not labels. Go to gigs, love music, share your love with others.

And if anyone tries to prosecute you for sharing torrents, show them the Pirate Google, and tell them to fuck off.

]]> http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2009/08/dinosaurs-will-die/feed/ 6 http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2009/07/from-this-afternoon/ http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2009/07/from-this-afternoon/#comments Sun, 19 Jul 2009 11:37:00 +0000 Hannah Nicklin http://www.hannahnicklin.com/?p=96

Download now or watch on posterous

IMG_0244.MOV (3692 KB)

Apparently Notre Dame is *the* place to find live music on your wanderings…

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]]> http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2009/07/from-this-afternoon/feed/ 0 http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2009/07/some-live-music-i-came-across-wandering-around-notre-dame/ http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2009/07/some-live-music-i-came-across-wandering-around-notre-dame/#comments Sat, 18 Jul 2009 13:47:00 +0000 Hannah Nicklin http://www.hannahnicklin.com/?p=93

Download now or watch on posterous

IMG_0238_mpeg4_003.mp4 (2339 KB)

The Latin Quarter – couldn't be bothered to queue to go in Notre Dame, was kind of landmarked out- so I went and did what I much prefer – wandered around 'til I got lost, and discovered things. I found a cake shop, an exhibition of the original character designs for Ice Age 3, a protest against Islamaphobia and came across some live music in a park. Which is hopefully what this is a video of. Hopefully. Some pics to follow, just wanted to see if this works…

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