Live Aid

As I mentioned yesterday (or was it earlier this morning?), I bought the Live Aid DVD. I'll admit, I felt kinda uncomfortable spending $50 on a DVD, but after reading the liner booklet and watching the entire DVD today (a marathon you can be sure), I feel much less guilty. It helps that all proceeds go to the Band Aid fund.

The DVD is mind boggling. Over 10 hours of concert, and the concert had thought lost. Bob Geldof in his "infinite wisdom" decided the show shouldn't be recorded and as such, half of the concert was not. Thanks to some lucky finds though much of the concert was recovered. What is even more mind boggling is that with the sheer size of the concert, the DVD's are far from complete. A 4 DVD set, there are performances missing from most of the bands, several bands are missing from the DVD including Led Zeppelin, Tears for Fears and Santana. I figure if the entire concert had been collected, we would be looking at a 6-7 DVD set. Unreal.

Most commendable about the DVD set is it's ability to present the music in it's best form while still reminding us of the horrible tragedy and greed that was causing millions of people to die in shame and fear of disease and starvation. It enlightened me to the fact that simply "giving a man a fish" was not going to solve the problem. Problems including the world market holding empoverished countries captive due to national debts, mountains of food destroyed every year at great expense to protect the price of product, poor infrastructure and ignorance that were not natures fault, but humanity's own cruelty.

The following is probably something more suited to my other blog, The Pylon, but due to it's current hiatus, I'm gonna make some suggestions here.

First off, if you have $50 buy the DVD set. It's worth it just for the starving people, but also it's a great musical journey and a peice of history.

Second, visit The Hunger Site. Click on the banner to donate food. While you're at it, link to the hunger site on your blog or e-mail, just add the following code to your page;

< a href="http://www.thehungersite.com/" title="The Hunger Site"> < img src="http://photos14.flickr.com/15221388_b12578666e_o.gif" alt="0xdc2270b939f4c7b3cefdd0cc" height="60" width="120" / > < /a >

also don't be shy to make it your homepage or put The Hunger Site in your MSN screen name for a while. If you want me to help you with any of this stuff, e-mail me and I will info@pilotsworld.tk.