----------------------------Original message---------------------------- By definition, 'parody works within the parameters of its sources" -- one reason, in fact, why the Supreme Court ruled that 2 Live Crew's use of the trademark chorus of Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman" was permissible. Recycling rich white men -- why not? What else can one do with them? You are certainly welcome to your perception that this kind of pardody is not terribly subversive, and while I wouldn't make *huge* claims for it, I think its parody is *unsafe* to the system in a way that much popularly-consumed paridy (Saturday Night Live, etc.) is not. But as to the video itself. Maybe you've seen things a video conferences that I've missed, but I've never seen another video that uses so many images per minute, or intercuts them so precisely -- unless you want to count the photo-montage videos done for Peter Gabriel, which are very different in my mind since they are not based around previously existing footage. Even _Natural Born Killers_ at its climactic peaks doesn't use images in this way, or use nearly as many. Sheer quantity of images, by itself, would not however be my main argument for the interest of these videos. What I think is so powerful about them is that, rather like surrealist readymades, the use technology to create a kind of _reductio ad absurdum_ of the talking heads of the media (some, like Quayle, need little work!). The precision of the editing, and the way it's linked to the beat of the music, subverts the representational fields from which these images derive, and (at the least) makes the viewer highly aware of the _production_ behind the apparently transparent medium of television news -- giving it, I think, a critical value against the smooth surface of hegemonic imagery. Finally, the art of juxtaposition itself has the potential to be a form of creation. By your use of the term "borrowed" I suspect you don't think much of the proposition that in re-arranging found images anything new is created, but on the contrary I think it is intensely creative, and indeed questions commonsense assumptions about 'originality,' 'authority,' and 'intention.' BTW, thanks to all who posted the info on EBN -- I looked in my stack of catalogues and found the video listed, where it had escaped my attention, in a TNT flier. ======================================================================== "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies" --Friedrich Nietzsche =======Russell A. Potter========<[log in to unmask]>=====================