The Muffs do, come to think of it, make a lot more sense as a cartoon.

Various Artists – Alright, This Time Just The Girls (1999) on Sympathy for the Record Industry

One of a few of my compilation albums, and even rarer still, one pressed in the 1990s. The only other for sale vinyl copy I can find of it is on Ebay for $80 bucks. Hurray for me. Mine only cost me $10 at George’s Song Shop. I love you George!

Anyways, this album many of you may not have heard of, but I would hope for the Riot Grrrls out there, heard of some of the artists on it. It is a double LP, colored wax (hot pink) set, of the best riot grrrl, lo-fi, punk and alternative girl groups at the time. Some artists include: The Muffs, Lunachicks, The Eyeliners, Hole, Starpower, Calamity Jane, and The Electrocutes. It is a fine compilation of gritty angst and bitterness….oh takes me back to my teen years….wait….still bitter. Damn.

The guitars are filled with the post-grunge overdrive, the acoustic tracks are nice and bare, and overall, if you listened to this one with your eyes shut, you would know it was from the 90s. Everything isn’t overly compressed, and it has a nice variety of styles from pure punk, to some experimental acoustic tracks, even a little jazz. The emotions and intensity can be felt in the airwaves.

I like this one, but I can’t listen to it too many times. I don’t know if it’s the intensity, or just style, but like I said in my earlier post, I like a good solid sing-a-long tune. Granted you can sing along to most of these on the album, but knowing the subject matter, I think I’d rather be more active. Like taking a hammer, and smashing patriarchy. Gosh I love doing that.

• Side A
  • I Don’t Like You – The Muffs
  • Fed up With High School Days – Banana Erectors
  • Nick and Nick – The Grown-Ups
  • Ain’t Hittin’ on Nothin’ – The Detroit Cobras
  • Dishy – Candypants
  • Shake – Friggs
  • Baby Love – Supersnazz
  • When I Was Your Girlfriend – The Chubbies
  • Happy Days – The Barbarellas
• Side B
  • Shit Finger Dick – Lunachicks
  • Six Years – The Eyeliners
  • Put a Sock in It – Lo-Hi
  • Anyway You Like It – Holly Golightly
  • Cet Air-La – April March
  • My Fascination – Buck
  • Retard Girl – Hole
• Side C
  • Survive – The Bags
  • I’m Sorry – Starpower
  • Sad Little Bug – April March & The Makers
  • Terri Man – Red Aunts
  • My Spit – Calamity Jane
  • I Want You – Shitbirds
  • Bomb the Twist – 5, 6, 7, 8’s
  • Happy Right This Second – Trinket
• Side D
  • I’m Not Coming – Fur
  • Ca Plane Pour Moi – Three Headcoatees
  • I’m into Something Good – The Stool Pigeons
  • Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind – April March/ Los Cincos
  • Eggnog – The Electrocutes
  • Burn Your World Down – Pussy Crush
  • Keep It In The Hole – Candy 500

The Tube of You:

Madness, Bingo
The Decks, DTC
The Del Toros, Can’t Be Yours
The Nocturnes, Back Curran
Dear Nora, This Is Not a Test
Dealership, All the Kids
Liam Finn & Eliza Jane, On Your Side
Dead Can Dance, Ariadne
Dance Hall Crashers, We Owe
Florence & the Machine, Dog Days Are Over
Damone, Tonight
Tom Waits, Goin’ Out West
Cub, My Flaming Red Bobsled
Amy Millan, Finish Line
Damn Handsome and the Birthday Suits, Tainted Love
Julee Cruise, Until the End of the World
The Jezabels, Unmarked Helicopters
Cranes, Don’t Wake Me Up
The Concretes, Tjyven (The Thief)
The Woodlands, Until the Day Dims
Concrete Blonde, God Is a Bullet
Coralie Clement, Sono Io
Regina Spektor, Two Birds
Cocktail Slippers, Anything You Want
Club 8, Say a Prayer
The New Up, Dear Life
Cocteau Twins, Pearly Dewdrops’ Drops
Cock and Swan, Morning’s Window
The Shortcuts, Nothing New
COCO, Much to Learn
CocoRosie, Bloody Twins
Falcao and Monashee, Teleportation
Cibo Matto, Beef Jerky
Civet, Extra
Lightning Dust, Honest Man
The Muffs, My Awful Dream
Chop Chop, Fed
Jenny Choi, Driving
Polynya, Fields
Book of Love, Getting Faster
Blake Babies, I’m Not Your Mother
Cinnamon, A Northwest Passage
Chicklet, Threshold
Suddenly, Tammy!, Bound Together
Talbot Tagora, Solar Puppets
Neko Case, Margaret vs. Pauline
Royalchord, Too Easy
Hans Zimmer & Lisa Gerrard, Barbarian Horde
The Rocking Horse Winner, Tomorrow

dig it!

Teens have it so hard today, man.

A quick summary of something stupid: Miley Cyrus. Teen Choice Awards. Pole dancing. It looks like this:

Compared to the Sean Kingston thing from a while back, yeah, there’s a big of a double standard going on why this is not okay and that is supposedly okay.

But I think before you even get into objectification and underage sexual representation and, honestly, hypocrisy toward young female sexuality, I have to register this point again: Why is Miley Cyrus a successful pop star again? I feel like ten years ago we were force fed Britney Spears as a joke (herself a slightly more trashier version of someone like… Tiffany)(Though “I Think We’re Alone Now” is still awesome and “Hit Me Baby One More Time” was never all that awesome), and now it’s like that joke has become a wound and BillyRay Cyrus’ daughter is the salt that the Evil Music Industry Powers That Be are stabbing us with because they can.

It’s such a bizarre conundrum of the young female pop star, any young female pop star, with some initial talent and something marketable that is then seemingly surgically removed and changed into something even more marketable. She teases subliminal and not so subliminal interests of naughty sex and eroticized youth while possibly not quite understanding it herself. And not being given the breathing room to actually make that journey of discovery (which, yes, involves the breaking of certain boundaries to see what they’re made of). All the while surrounded by adults who should know better, but possibly don’t know better, or just have $$$ in their eyes. Then there’s the younger generation, who either are lead to believe that this is okay, this is socially acceptable, or that actually find something they can relate to, a down home-ness, a simpler mindset, an affinity for something positive in skeeziness.

I’ll stop myself there. I understand how it all works and because of that, I don’t understand how all of this actually works. And I don’t want to. Who are the positive young female role models for their youthful peers in this country?

Beyond that, there’s questions that come with certain aspects of pop culture – lolita obsessions, violence in movies, really bad music that is more choreography than actually listenable music – that don’t have answers. They just pose more and more questions and shudders of worry about posterity. Does everything fall into This Is What They Want?

Obviously she’s not American, but one of the many reason I like Lily Allen is because I still get the sense that she’s either doing or at least trying to do everything on her own terms. Her mistakes and her successes have one very important thing in common: They belong to her equally. Also, she’s awesome.

I’ll leave this particular spice of WTF with saner words than I can manage on the subject, one of Counterforce’s favorite internet crushes, Tracy Clark-Flory:

“That’s some potent imagery: an emblem of childhood (an ice cream cart) juxtaposed with a symbol of modern young womanhood (a stripper pole). Looks like her managers are following the Britney Spears sexy-virgin path to success — or self-destruction, depending on your perspective.”

In other news:

Meteor shower tonight!

Jake Ryan: “Be my guest.”

Will Arnett and Mitch Hurwitz team up for new FOX pilot.

Big Willie Styles in Vegas for his B-day.

Crystal ball sets hour on fire. Should’ve seen that coming!

Guy coming to rescue gets shot in the balls.

Watch Community, the new pilot starring Joel McHale and Chevy Chase.

Everyone wants a piece of you…

Album cover to the Clueless soundtrack

Recently, I got in a fight with my partner over a minor bit of dialogue from Amy Heckerling’s 1995 movie Clueless. Please don’t question who was right on this. I was a pre-teen girl in 1995. At one point, I could recite the entire thing. I’m sure, if given a cue here and there, I could do it again at 25.

Not suggesting, of course, that if you were a pre-teen girl in 1995, you have to hold Clueless close to your heart. As a matter of fact, I resisted seeing it until it was out on video for almost a year. We had cable at home when the movie came out, and MTV advertised it all the time. I also remember reading Seventeen and other teen magazines, and it ran stuff on it a lot (though I seem to remember Seventeen actually giving a less-than-laudatory review, criticizing its unrealistic use of hyperbolic slang and schoolgirl chic).

Adding to this, when I originally saw promotional stuff for Clueless, I didn’t see me in it. Cher and Dionne were ultra-feminine and super-rich (if also good-intentioned). Several of the popular girls in my seventh grade class would emulate their look and attitude (some, perhaps instinctively, bringing in a bit of Heathers-style bitchiness). I remember this one girl actually tried to give my friend Jerusha, a Pentecostal who had to wear ankle-length dresses and skirts, a makeover because she had “total Tai potential.” Ugh. I just checked out.

BTW, my seventh grade style was Tai pre-makeover. Minus the drugs, of course. One time a girl in P.E. offered to snort Lucas Limon with me and I ran away in fear.

For readers of the blog, perhaps you can guess my entrance into the movie. Yes, you got it. The soundtrack (which, for those who are curious, was released on Capitol — the movie was a Paramount picture). I couldn’t find a lot of scenes online, but for a sense of sound and image, check out this fan-made video, underscored by The Muffs’ cover of Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America,” which opens the movie.

I actually never owned the soundtrack. My friend Brandi had it, so I borrowed it from her. The closest I got was my VHS copy of the movie, which contained the music video for Supergrass’s “Alright.”

Maybe I can snag a copy at Cheapo Discs. Because man oh man, is the soundtrack ever a treasure trove of the era. With plenty of alternative musical artists — Radiohead, The Beastie Boys, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Coolio, General Public, Smoking Popes — it’s at once a document to a small period just after Cobain left us and virtually anything could get a pass on MTV or mainstream radio (Beck, for example), as well as evidence for just how important a soundtrack is in selling a movie. Remember how Cher doesn’t want Tai to burn the cassette to Coolio’s “Rollin’ With My Homies” — I always read this as sly product placement.

And lest we forget, the soundtrack is teeming with female artists. Jill Sobule, Salt-N-Pepa, Luscious Jackson, The Cranberries, The Muffs, and a just-about-to-break No Doubt (with a song about girlhood oppression from a woman who does not consider herself to be a feminist). They’re all here.

That the movie is underscored by music by female artists who are, if not all feminist, certainly embrace a pro-woman agenda should not be overlooked, especially in popular music’s larger sociohistorical context. Riot grrrl broke, the kinderwhore look had been made runway-ready, and The Spice Girls happened the following year. But Jill Sobule was singing about kissing girls and MTV played the single’s very post-modern, post-structural, super-campy music video all the time. Beavis and Butthead were also completely dumb about it (intentionally? as a commentary?).

Of course, working within the mainstream is tricky. Just look at the music video for Luscious Jackson’s “Here,” made specifically for the movie. It’s an exercise in compromise. On the one hand, we’ve got a tough group of Noo Yawk broads (one of whom is a lesbian) playing their gig in the middle of a skating rink during a roller derby meet. On the other hand, the derby girls are super-femme and the rink projects images from the movie. Sigh. Perhaps it begs the question “alternative to what?”

The inclusion of artists like No Doubt lead singer Gwen Stefani may suggest a post-feminist agenda, and the Luscious Jackson music video may hint at age-old tensions between underground and mainstream. However, I think that, in the context of the movie, a song like Jill Sobule’s “Supermodel” being used during Tai’s make-over scene (which I wish I could pull up, but can’t — cue the movie!) is winking at the performativeness and learnedness of becoming feminine, which I think at least suggests that the movie’s politics may lean toward its writer-director and actually align with more of a third-wave feminist perspective on gender politics.

Unfortunately, despite the movie’s success, it hasn’t always been easy for Amy Heckerling. Sadly, 2007’s I Could Never Be Your Woman, a May-December romance starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Paul Rudd that some argued was more explicitly feminist, went straight to DVD. In the “Whatever!” DVD edition of Clueless, Heckerling even discusses how hard it was to get the movie greenlit because there were three female leads and no leading male character. It wasn’t until producer Scott Rudin became interested in the picture that the studios got into a bidding war and Paramount picked it up (after having originally turned it down).

It makes cultural moments like Clueless, as compromised as some may think it to be, a proud declaration of girl. With its soundtrack, it at least suggests the possibility of turning “girl” into “grrrl.”

No smoke, no mirrors. Just IN YOUR FACE rock'n'roll!

The Downbeat 5 was formed a decade ago by legendary Boston rocker J.J.Rassler, whom many of you might know from the band DMZ (along with future Lyres member Jeff Connolly). Rassler’s then-wife Jen shared a love for all things Dolls, Stooges and garage, tempered with a melodic pulse yet a fiery pace, and her prowling, howling vocals were the perfect complement to the piston engine that drove most of the songs in their repetoire.

Smoke and Mirrors was recorded live in a studio full of friends and guests, and the band proved it doesn’t know any speed but full. Plowing through some well chosen covers from The Kinks, The Yardbirds and The Velvet Underground along with a few of their own songs, The Downbeat 5 sound like The Detroit Cobras on a Red Bull buzz. I would have loved to have had my ears pinned back that night at Q Division studios!

Jen – now called Jen D’Angora - has the same gutteral yelp as The Muffs‘ Kim Shattuck, while Rassler plays the Johnny Ramone role by thrashing out infectious power chords and stinging guitar fills. But the band wouldn’t be half as much fun without the piledriving rhythm section of bassist Mike Yocco and drummer extraordinaire Eric Almquist (a monster player). Plus you have to love a band that thanks Ed Koch, Ratso Rizzo and the Olsen Twins in their liner notes…

The band’s 2005 release Victory Motel is sadly out of print (ping me if you have it!) but Ism is still available, and with a cut on the latest Little Steven Coolest Songs collection getting attention, hopefully there will be more albums to come. You’d be hard pressed to top this one for pure adreneline, though. 

The Downbeat 5 website.

The Downbeat 5 MySpace page..

The Downbeat 5 rip the stuffing out of “Shake“.

A rousing  “Dum Dum Ditty“, now rocking the Underground Garage.

Clicca qui per ascoltare la puntata
Mulholland hotel – Dj Teddy

boom bang bing…..futurismi e futurismo anche nel Mulholland Hotel, ma anche action painting nella sala della pittura, c’è una Ford Torino da spostare, il signor Clint Eastwood è deriderato in direzione! Van Halen, Kiss, Queen e Gorillaz nell’ipod a disposizione nelle camere dell’ultimo piano…

TRACK LIST:

SHEARER – can’t stop it
PORNOPHONICS – sad robot
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE - title and registration
THE MUFFS – all blue baby
RANDY – rarozblade
NELO – love solution

Buon ascolto!
Dj Teddy

Llevábamos mucho tiempo con buenos ensayos y, sobre todo, muy productivos. Pero el otro día nos atascamos un poco y la sesión sonó como a chatarra. A veces nos preguntamos cómo es posible que, en lugar de mejorar, a veces damos pasos para atrás, aunque bueno, analizando la situación es algo inevitable, pues muchas veces el que salga bien o mal depende del estado de ánimo que presentemos ese día o si llegamos más o menos cansados del trabajo.

No nos podemos quejar porque hasta ahora todo ha ido sobre ruedas y seguro que las cosas van a ir igual de bien. Hay muy buen ambiente en Iba Andando.

La semana pasada también dejamos atrás buenos conciertos. El jueves The Muffs en el Wah Wah, que durante una hora y medio devolvió al público a aquellos conciertos locos de los 90. Todas las caras eran conocidas y eso estuvo muy bien.

El sábado la mitad de Iba Andando fue a ver a Bart Davenport, que según María firmó uno de los mejores discos de 2008, en esa lista que nunca llegó a hacer… Bueno, también faltan las de Jose, y Nico hizo los deberes a medias… Fue un concierto íntimo y lleno de buenas vibraciones. El tío, con una guitarra acústica, se metió a todo el mundo en el bolsillo.

Durante el pasado fin de semana también cerramos un par de conciertos acústicos, que nos apetece mucho volver a tocar, y una fiesta de bienvenida de verano. Ya os contaremos…

La Editorial La Cúpula y, singularmente, su editora Montse Terrones se han marcado un tanto con el primer descubrimiento del año: El borrón de Tom Nelly. Animador a la par que historietista, este novel norteamericano ha entregado uno de los cómics más curiosos de los últimos tiempos del que podéis ver un avance en la página personal del autor.

La historieta comienza a partir del everyman que se levanta, se asea y sale a comprar el diario. En medio de esta escena cotidiana brota un elemento siniestro: la imagen de una mancha informe que amenaza al personaje con su disolución a través del propio material que le constituye, la tinta. La única salida parece la huida hacia adelante pero, allí donde vaya, la mancha reencuentra al personaje, acechándole desde los márgenes de la viñeta, surgiendo de agujeros debajo de la cama o del propio rostro, la boca, los ojos, hasta que por estos orificios el borrón se ingiere en el protagonista. Una vez incorporada la mancha, el personaje recupera la apariencia cotidiana gracias a un sombrero que le cubre el rostro. En ese punto, una chica se reconoce a si misma en él e inician un relación afectiva y sexual en que liberan sus respectivas manchas para fusionarse y recuperar la normalidad, casa de campo incluida, peroooo…

La vocación de animador de Nelly se nota tanto en su dibujo, muy influido por el Mickey Mouse de Floyd Gottfredson, como en su narración orientada hacia el tránsito fluido entre imágenes con escaso apoyo de la palabra, en un tebeo prácticamente mudo. La combinación de la estética cartoon y esta carga de contenido psicótico aproxima a Neely a autores como Mattioli o, por su sentido trágico, al estilo cute-depresivo de Jason. Un tebeo muy recomendable. Como extra os dejamos con un vídeo suyo para el grupo The Muffs.

SOUNDTRACK: BE YOUR OWN PET-Get Awkward (2008).

Be Your Own Pet are a bunch of young kids from Nashville.  Get Awkward is their second album.  According to the liner notes, two of them were born in 1988 and one of them in 1990.  1990!  They play three-chord punk music which focuses primarily on having fun and partying.  I like to think that Black Flag’s “TV Party” might be an influence, but really they sound more like The Muffs than anyone else.   Jemima Pearl is one of those surprisingly cute punk singers who explode in a gruff gravelly voice (although never TOO rough or gravely) which makes all the proceedings quite fun.

The songs are short (only 2 songs are over 3 minutes), fast, and generally fun.  Song titles like “Food Fight,” “Zombie Graveyard Party!” “Bitches Leave” and “Bummer Time” should give you some sense of what the songs are about.  I’m led to believe their first album was a bit more aggressive (enough to get Thurston Moore to sign them to his Ecstatic Peace record label).  But this one keeps pretty well to the three chords (and occasional guitar riff) and fun shouting and singing.

It seems like every few years there’s a new young punk band who takes up the mantle of punk rock and BYOP were the most recent (although their web site says the just broke up).  And it’s cool for young kids to have a new young band to look up to.  Much like the theme of the book below, if you’re over 25 you ‘ll probably just think that this band is ripping off [insert your favorite brash young punk band here] but really who wants to listen to 40 year olds singing about parties and whatnot.  So, if you’re looking for a new young band, then, check them out.  There’s not too much new about them, but then, that’s not the point, is it.

And according to Wikipedia, three tracks were removed because they were deemed too violent (!).  Maybe the album is well suited to this book after all.

[READ: September 16, 2008] Little Brother

I have to get this out of the way:  READ THIS BOOK!  It is fantastic and it will motivate you like nothing I’ve read.  READ IT READ IT READ IT.

Okay, I feel a little better.

I read an interview with Cory Doctorow in American Libraries, the magazine of the American Library Association.  It was a short interview about this book, and he said such great things in a few paragraphs, that I immediately went to work and checked out the book.   And, wow, what a fantastic book.

This may be the kiss of death for any young reader, but Little Brother is an important book.  And everyone should read it.  And yes, I know it is fiction, but fiction can be a very powerful tool for waking people up to injustice.  Upton SInclair’s The Jungle was instrumental in the creation of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which established the Food and Drug Administration.  Not bad for a work of fiction, eh?

It’s a different world now, and one book probably can’t have as much of an impact as it did then, but we can still hope, right.  Oh, and Cory Doctorow is a pretty cool thinker as well.  I’ll give more details later, but for now, let’s get to the book.

Little Brother is about Marcus, a 17 year old high school student who spends much of his free time with technology (he goes by the name W1n5t0n): he builds his own laptops, he creates small camera detectors out of toilet paper rolls, and he thinks of ways to confuse the motion sensing gait-detector at his school.  Yes, that’s right, there are computers all over his school.  They can’t look at your face (that would be unconstitutional) but they can monitor the way you walk, because, like fingerprints, everyone has a unique walk, and its a way to see who is not where he is supposed to be.  Although as Marcus points out, walks may be unique, but they are also VERY similar, and very easy to mask. And we’ll learn a bit more about false positives very shortly.

Marcus is a geek, he used to play D&D (Dungeons & Dragons) and LARPs (Live Action Role Playing Games–in which you dress up as fantasy characters and act out scenarios…ah, if only they’d had that when I was a young D&D player).  But since he became an older teen he has been heavily involved in ARGing, (Alternate Reality Gaming).  On a day that he and his four friends skip school to begin the latest round of the coolest ARG around: Harajuku Fun Madness,  there is a terrorist strike in San Francisco.  In the commotion, Marcus’ friend Daryl is injured.  While trying to flag down help, the four friends are taken by the Department of Homeland Security.  Since the kids are full of techie gadgets they are immediately under suspicion–even though they are all American citizens.

They are taken on a boat to a location somewhere off of San Francisco (what is eventually nicknamed Gitmo-by-the-Bay), where they are held for several days and interrogated.  In all this time, their parents don’t know if they are even alive or dead–DHS does not notify them.  After a few days, the DHS releases three of them–Daryl is left behind in an unknown limboland.  They inform Marcus that if he tells anyone about what happened, they will recapture him and that will be the end of him.

What happens next is an inspirational story of underground subterfuge.  Using the inspiration of sixties protests and marches for freedom, Marcus tries to rally the youth of San Francisco to fight the DHS.  Marcus loves his country, he loves the freedoms that we have, and he hates to see them not only stripped away, but practically given away by a frightened populace.

Freedom isn’t Free [a popular bumper sticker reads]
So why do we keep giving ours away? [is my rejoinder]

The DHS has begun tracking people through their RFIDs.  RFIDs (Radio Frequency Identification) are real and they are in everything.  The most common usage of RFID trackers are your EZ Pass (or Fast Lane or Smart Pass or whatever you call the automatic toll paying device in your car).  I knew several people who didn’t want “the government” tracking where they went in their car, so the wouldn’t get an EZ Pass.  I got one anyhow because I figured if the government knew I went to New York City every couple of months that would be okay.  In the book however, RFID detectors have been placed all around San Francisco, and so, they can now track your every move.

As with much in the book, I’m not exactly sure how much of it is actual and how much is just plausible.  It’s entirely possibly that there are RFID detectors all over San Francisco, but I’ve no idea if there are.  However, there are enough factual things in the story to let you know that at the very least, many of the scenarios are quite possible.

Marcus is followed by the police one night because of his BART pass (the public transportation version of the EZ Pass).  They want to know what he’s being doing in certain areas of San Francisco.  It’s just routine surveillance, they tell him.  And he is understandably pissed.  And here Doctorow gives one of his many informative passages….  What I liked about the book is that Doctorow explains some pretty detailed and complex ideas, but he keeps in character, with the wonderment of a  teen excited about a new game.

This passage in particular I found enlightening and scary:

Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists.  Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twentythousandth of a percent. That’s pretty rare all right. Now, say you’ve got some software that can sift through all the bankrecords, or tollpass records, or public transit records, or phonecall records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time.

In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people.

Guess what? Terrorism tests aren’t anywhere close to 99 percent accurate. More like 60 percent accurate. Even 40 percent accurate, sometimes.

What this all meant was that the Department of Homeland Security had set itself up to fail badly. They were trying to spot incredibly rare events–a person is a terrorist–with inaccurate systems.

No matter what you think about Homeland Security, or it efficiency, it’s hard to argue with these numbers.

Back to the story.  Marcus is outraged by what happens, and even more so when he learns that his beloved laptop that he built has been bugged.  He uses his XBox, complete with ParanoidLinux, (an operating system that encrypts EVERYTHING) installed.  Soon, he is organizing a resistance movement called the XNet.  And, he is no longer w1n5t0n, he is now m1k3y, and he uses all of his tricks to try and bring down the DHS.

His parents (mom is a British ex pat who loves to get her knickers in a twist about injustice and dad is a former marcher in the sixty) do not know the full extent of what happened to Marcus.  When they hear about the XNet on NPR his father is appalled at these kids’ behavior. This surprises Marcus until his mom tells him that his father was devastated at the thought that Marcus was dead.  Marcus’s dad has joined the ranks of people willing to sacrifice his freedom for a (false) sense of security.

Marcus tells people how to create RFID jammers [Google RFID jam for thousands of hits] which causes great disruption to San Francisco and even Marcus’ dad.  The Xnet subversion spreads throughout the world, where people post videos of abuses by the DHS, and offer other ways of jamming the system.  There’s even a punk festival organized by the XNet: Never Trust Anyone Under 25.

This slogan is obviously appropriated from the Yippies’ “Never Trust Anyone Under 30″ (there’s a bit of a history of the Yippies explained by one of Marcus’ teachers (a great exposition resource in a YA novel)).  The difference between the 60s and the 2000s is that in the 60s the police couldn’t capture everyone at a protest.  Now, they can use technology to immobilize thousands of people at once.  And, unlike in the 60s, the media seem to be unwilling to investigate beyond the information fed to them by the government and corporations (liberal media, ha!).

I’m not giving anymore of the book away, because even though I think it is important as a book of protest, I also thought it was a great read–I couldn’t put it down, I read it in traffic jams–and it is suspenseful as hell.

Oh, and just in case you think it’s all technology and security…there’s a pretty steamy romance brewing with a fellow XNetter too.

So, read the book!  Get a copy of it somewhere: buy it, go to your library, or download the whole book for free here.  No kidding.  Doctorow gives away all of his works with a Creative Commons license. Why?  Well, he’ll tell you here.  But in a nutshell he says:

For me — for pretty much every writer — the big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy.

What’s a Creative Commons license?  They’ll tell you here.

Doctorow is one of the great champions of freedom of information.  You can tell that this story combines a number of his passions.  He’s also a co-editor of one of my favorite sites: boing boing (although I didn’t know that until just recently).   And here’s his own website: craphound.

The back of the book has bibliographical information about how to find and do many of the things in the books.  There’s also some afterwords from Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and by Andrew “bunnie” Huang, the original Xbox hacker.  The add real-life inspiration to the story.

And speaking of real life, the end of the book implores you to vote in the upcoming election (in the fictional world there’s an upcoming election, too).  And, I implore you as well…if you’re old enough to vote, get the facts, learn the truth and vote against the people who are taking our freedoms away.

[UPDATE: September 27, 2008] It’s very rare that I get trecommed a YA book to Sarah, since that’s her thing, but I’m very glad I did, as she enjoyed the book too.  Here’s her take on it.