June 27, 2007

Neato Viddys on the Intertubes

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No Top Ten this week since I was back home in Nebraska for the weekend (I’ll have a posting on a snazzy new Omaha music venue later this week), but in the meantime enjoy some new music video clips, and one that’s not so new but still very good.

Kanye West – “Stronger”
In which Kanye West invites Daft Punk (whose “Harder Better Faster Stronger” is sampled prominently) to watch him emerge from a weird EKG-looking machine in bulge-enhancing briefs, and then dance around in a denim vest and louvered sunglasses while Japanese subtitles explain it all

Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Rockers to Swallow”
In which a leotard-sporting Karen O performs the band’s new song (from Is Is, out July 23rd) in front of funhouse mirrors to an appreciative crowd, filmed by what appears to be surveillance cameras
Watch on Yahoo! Music here

Ali Love – “Secret Sunday Lover”
In which the young British singer (featured on the new Chemical Brothers single, “Do It Again”) imagines himself in a kind of campy spy-slash-disco movie. He even gets the girl at the end

Interpol – “The Heinrich Maneuver”
In which director E. Elias Merhige portrays a surreal, slowed-down (and possibly reversed) Los Angeles street scene (apparently referencing the song’s bitterness towards a West Coast ex-lover) complete with eye-rolling “surprise” ending which almost ruins it

Sonic Youth – “Teenage Riot”
The original video, in which the band perform the “hit” from their just-rereleased masterpiece Daydream Nation. Also featuring, um, everyone from Pee Wee Herman to Sun Ra

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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