Culture

Celebrity Inc. ― How Famous People Make Money By Jo Piazza Open Road, 2011 231 pages Celebrity is just like printing your own money, says Jo Piazza in Celebrity Inc. Two rich, spoilt, talentless celebrity brats ― Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian ― are experts at the fame game. Kickstarted by family wealth, and propelled to fame through a steamy sex tape and reality TV, Hilton “earns” around US$10 million a year. The Kardashian family franchise raked in $65 million last year.

Female acoustic duo Ngaratya have received advice from the best in the business in starting their musical journey.

Launched last month, Green Left TV is steadily building up video content on both local and international struggles for justice, to complement the weekly newspaper and Green Left website.

A crew of Palestinian actors and musicians from the Jenin-based Freedom Theatre toured Egypt in April. The aim of the tour was to conduct a series of “playback theatre” workshops and performances in Cairo and Alexandria. Playback theatre is an interactive theatre approach used as a tool for community building, public dialogue, cultural activism and trauma recovery. In a playback event, audience members share thoughts, feelings, memories and autobiographical accounts, and watch as a team of actors and musicians instantly transform these experiences into improvised theatre pieces.

NT Consultations Report 2011: By Quotations Published by Concerned Australians 72 pages, hard cover, $15 www.concernedaustralians.com.au NT Consultations Report 2011: By Quotations, published in February 2012, is an important sequel to the highly regarded This Is What We Said (February 2010) and Walk With Us (August 2011).

Pussy Riot is an anonymous Russian feminist punk band. Its anonymous members, whose identities are concealed by their costumes, formed in October last year as a feminist music collective that performs public “flash mob” gigs to protest the rule of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Brisbane branch of the socialist youth group Resistance has linked up with Occupy Brisbane and Stop CSG Brisbane to pull off two successful fundraising gigs. Dominic Hale and Alice Jenkins, from Resistance's cultural committee, spoke to Green Left Weekly's Hannah Reardon-Smith about political gigs. * * * What was the idea behind your approach to these Resistance gigs?

Debt of Honour: Australia’s first commandos and East Timor Exhibition at the Western Australian Museum Until May 20. When the Japanese entered World War II after the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbour, they swept through south-east Asia and the Pacific.

“Belief in Winter’s iron music turns the lands of home to Spring.” Kenneth Patchen, “Nocturne for the Heirs of Light” Even your blood seems cold slush so we come, bearing scientific warmth and clean blades Of faith and all such crude early things we moderns strive to sharpen, your mystic heart alone beats most desperate beneath our lazer aim: true tempered love at gunship point thrusts in you bleeding you clear in sha'Allah by dread hand of surgeon- drone, bootkick- blessing, your shabby portal opens upon us we ash-cross your brow:

Genre-bending musician Filastine says he has taken so much flak for being political in his music that these days he tries to be a little more innovative in getting his message across.

Musician and activist Phil Monsour is releasing his latest 12-song CD, Ghosts of Deir Yassin after the mobilisations for Palestinian Land Day on March 30.

In a recent interview with Hip-Hop DX, a hoodie-clad Nas exhibited an understandable amount of despair at the case of African American youth Trayvon Martin, the shot dead by George Zimmerman while walking home from the shops in Florida in February. The US hip hop artist said: “You never want to hear that kind of news. When it happens, you remember how many Trayvon incidents happen everyday all over the world... “It doesn’t seem like the race problem will ever get solved. I like to be optimistic, but it doesn’t seem like it’ll ever get solved.”