At least twice a week I get an email asking for support for a new project via Kickstarter. More often than not I pledge money, wanting to act in solidarity with friends and acquaintances with giant ideas but small bank accounts. And Kickstarter, once a promising platform for artists and other cultural producers to raise money, has become the go-to tool for fundraising by writers, artists, designers, political activists, and even popular musicians and award-winning filmmakers. As more friends use it, and as I cough up more and more money with every visit to the website, it seems a good time to try to crack it open to see how it works—and who it really works for.

On February 25th of 1970 artist Mark Rothko took his life by cutting his arms with a razor the very same day nine of his paintings arrived at London’s Tate Gallery. He was found in his kitchen covered in blood. Mark Rothko took some barbiturates and opened a vein in his arm. Today Rothko lives on in his work, owned by the bourgeoisie. The rich and powerful can afford to buy one of his paintings. His painting Orange, Red, Yellow sold for $86,882,500 on May 8, 2012. This striving to own a part of this man may be one of the biggest slaps in the face he could receive. Mark Rothko was not silent about his feeling for the Bourgeoisie.

Almost since the birth of cinema, anarchists and anarchism have been a subject for exploration (and exploitation) on film. So much so, that films with anarchist protagonists or anarchic themes could literally fill a book. Indeed, such films *have* filled a book; Richard Porton’s Film and the Anarchist Imagination (1999, Verso) provides an exhaustive examination of the influence of anarchist ideology on this particular sector of the culture industry. As a self-identified anarchist and film producer, I would have to give Porton’s text much credit for inspiring this article, and my work in general. Though this is not a review or a synopsis of his text and anyone who desires a much more detailed discussion of the topics, that I merely graze here, should head immediately to his brilliant book.

How is it possible that three women,Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Maria Alekhina, members of the Russian punk band, Pussy Riot, remaine locked up in a Moscow j the Russian Orthadox Church are the most responsible.  In any event, they are both despicable in their own right.

“Germany got Bader-Meinhof,” went the 1978 poster by the punk band Crass “England got punk.” (Savage, 1991 p.481). But perhaps it should have read: Italy got Autonomia. After all 1977 was a year in which sections of youth in both England and Italy enjoyed explosions of creativity. In Germany it was a year of repression and the closing up of political space. This contemporaneity triggers questions about potential similarities between the Italian movement of ’77 and the emergence of punk rock in Britain but it also masks real differences. Punk’s emergence at the heart of the Anglo-American music industry ensured the rapid dissemination of its innovations and a widespread and enduring influence.

A rally for Republican Party nominee Newt Gingrich in Las Vegas on Thursday morning was interrupted by local Nevada grindcore band Traumatic Anal Devastation. Apparently the band showed up outside the rally, plugged their instruments in, and generated what Gingrich staffer Terry ‘The Stick’ Foley called “the sound of a tank driving through a minefield.” Police showed up and pulled the plug on the youthful thugs after about 5 minutes (the equivalent of 20 songs, according to estimates from our grindcore research staff).