Thursday, August 17, 2006

Mash-up or shut-up


The engineers at Yahoo! had t-shirts printed with the 'mash-up or shut-up' slogan for their hack days where they mashed up varioius Yahoo! APIs with varying degrees of success. Left-wing investigative journalist Greg Palast has gone down the the remix and mash-up route to promote his Armed Madhouse book.

Slice up Palast, win a prize for it, or vote on the best hack-job -- in the absolutely fantabulous re-mix contest sponsored by Creative Commons and Air America Radio. Win immortal glory in the first-ever competition to mash up an audio book -- Greg Palast's New York Times bestseller, "Armed Madhouse."

All members of the public are invited to download recordings of the book by Jello Biafra, Amy Goodman, Larry David, Janeane Garofalo and other troublemakers and create your own version, with original music, sounds and beats of your own making.


Win, prizes, love, respect and publicity from our sponsors including Alternative Tentacles, Simon & Schuster, Hollywood Can Suck It, Penguin/Dutton, Lost Film Fest and the Palast Investigative Fund.


Here's how the contest works:

1) We have uploaded 19 tracks from the audio version of Armed Madhouse.
Aside from Palast reading throughout, you can also remix: - Ed Asner reading from the section on globalization madness, "The Network." - Brod Bagert as "Fishhead" reading about Dick Cheney's sex-life and The Big Easy - Medea Benjamin & Kevin Danaher reading about Paul Bremer and the reconstruction (re-destruction?) of Iraq - Jello Biafra as the voice of Osama bin Laden - Randy Credico as George W. Bush - Mark Crispin Miller as Thomas Friedman - Larry David screaming, "Kerry Won!" - Brad Friedman as lobbyist sick-o Grover Norquist - Janeane Garofalo as Mindy Tucker Fletcher - Amy Goodman reading about Dr. A.Q. Khan - Jim Hightower reading about James Baker and whorehouses in Texas - Greg Proops as Lawrence of Arabia and Winston Churchill - Jerry Quickley reading the "Great Brown Ballot Boycott" - Randi Rhodes reading from the chapter on how the Bush regime had its sticky little hands on Iraq's oil - Shiva Rose as Katherine Harris

2) Listen to, and then download, these tracks at www.gregpalast.com/remix -- re-mix'm all or parts of them, with music or sound effects. Create as many as you like.


3) When you are finished remixing, sampling, and/or mashing 'em up -- send us either a link to download your submission(s) or the submission itself (as an mp3 file) to submitremix(AT)gregpalast.com


4) We will then put your submissions on to the Armed Madhouse Remix site and anyone who wants to cast a vote on your track can do so on our mix-tape page. We'll leave it up to the general public to decide how brilliant, mediocre or horrendous your remixes are.


We are offering the tracks under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license so that producers worldwide can use the audio in remixes and new compositions.


It is absolutely free to participate in the contest -- all you have to do is agree that neither you nor anyone else will charge for the remix you produce -- and that you accept Creative Commons' rules that all material is available for public non-commercial download and use (with, of course, attribution to you as the producer).


DEADLINE:
You have until October 23rd 2006 to submit your track and all voting will conclude on October 30th 2006. Winners will be announced on Friday, November 3rd 2006.

INCREDIBLE SWAG:
Kick their asses and win a bunch of quasi-useless prizes and UNLIMITED GLORY.

The top 5 winners will be selected by the general public by casting votes on the Armed Madhouse Remix website.

Be sure to vote wisely as you can only vote once per track.


These top tracks will be featured on our website as well as some of our sponsor's sites -- and may even get air time on Air America Radio! We will also feature the top 5 tracks on our next spoken-word cd with Alternative Tentacles Records.

The producers of these tracks will receive:
- The original 5 CD audio book of Armed Madhouse (from Simon & Schuster) read by Palast and friends; - The hard-bound book, "Armed Madhouse" (from Dutton), - Winston Smith's frame-ready four color blow-you-away poster of the "Armed Madhouse" - The spoken-word cd, "Weapon of Mass Instruction" (Alternative Tentacles), - The BBC documentary on dvd, "Bush Family Fortunes" (Disinformation Co.), - An Air America package - A Lost Film Fest / Evil Twin Booking / Hollywood Can Suck It package