Film Screening: Sonic Outlaws + Stephen Colbert short "How to Be Popular" January 5, 2007

Friday Jan 5. 7:00 PM. Admission: $5.00. Location: Fools Foundation - 1025 19th St, Sacramento, CA - off K St between 19th & 20th next to the back end of Old Spaghetti Factory.

Within days after the release of Negativland’s clever parody of U2 and Casey Kasem, recording industry giant Island Records descended upon the band with a battery of lawyers intent on erasing the piece from the history of rock music. Craig "Tribulation 99" Baldwin follows this and other intellectual property controversies across the contemporary arts scene. Playful and ironic, his cut-and-paste collage-essay surveys the prospects for an "electronic folk culture" in the midst of an increasingly commodified corporate media landscape.

"Sonic Outlaws" is a rowdy crash course in '80s and '90s American counterculture. Craig Baldwin's unorthodox documentary rockets through the world of copyright infringement, fair use, and sound and image sampling: from its roots in the dada and cubist movements to Andy Warhol's soup cans, from Silly Putty to satellite downlinks, from billboard improvement to do-it-yourself Barbie surgery. According to these outlaws, tradition-based folk art cannot emerge in the present world because all significant images and sounds are strictly protected by copyright laws, and thus can't be used as parts of new works.

"A blizzard of visual and aural input. Provocative. Consistently engaging." - Variety

"Gleefully anarchic. Craig Baldwin is one of the most wildly inventive indie filmmakers working today." - New York Times

"Our sense of the shape of creativity and of originality must always be in question if we are to flourish. Sonic Outlaws does precisely that." - Chris Chang, Film Comment

"Thought-provoking images and statements flash by quicker than MTV on fast-forward. Baldwin has chosen to make Sonic Outlaws one giant media collage. At times, your senses may overload, but it's guaranteed to keep your synapses popping." - CityPaper.Net

Sonic Outlaws will play with the 1994 Shock Productions short film "How to Be Popular," a parody of 1950's educational films with Amy Sedaris, Paul Dinello, Mitch Rouse and narrated by Stephen Colbert.

Official Website: http://www.shiny-object.com/screenings/