Taxonomize Your Revolution!

The pre-launch party for Al Gore's new media project, IndTV, was billed as a revolution in televised media, the creation of a station for the people by the people, where the youth of America would be able to raise its voice to the rafters without the pesky influence of corporate sponsorship or big-money power-jockeying. And if you thought that last sentence was was a run-on, you should have heard some of the breathless ramblings of the night's speakers and poets.

Grating poet Aya de Leon spoke of the youth finally getting a voice, and how that could change the course of history -- as if the same things weren't said by many of their parents (now running the hated mainstream media) 30 years before in the very same city.

Michael Franti said the launch didn't need a corporate sponsor, that it was sponsored by "the good people of San Francisco". Moments later, Mos Def asked the crowd to check out a collaboration between the nascent IndTV and Google, apparently not considered a corporation. A young woman on the screen wowed the crowd with such revolutionary tidbits as the top ten most searched for movies on Google and the top ten searches that start with the word 'illegal'. A few punks in their early teens heckled the video from a parking garage above the crowd.

Meanwhile, Mos Def (why Mos!?, why!?) moved to the other stage where he began by confusing the hometown of the painter he introduced as one of his favorites. Then the big moment: the emergence of a chubby-looking Al Gore, an even chubbier-looking Leonardo DiCaprio and the relatively svelte-looking San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, whom Mos Def seemed to confuse with chubby actor/celebrijournalist Sean Penn.

At this point, I too became confused as to what I was doing here when 24 was on in an hour.