read this other guy

Okay my friend Mike has now received the first ISOTA plug. He is the creator of the thus-far completely hilarious webcomic Classy Dames & Able Gents. You should read it because it's funny.

For example:



And also:



Hopefully there will soon be ways to give him money.

you like comics, right?

It's anarchy, Anna! Communist anarchy!

In other news, waiting on funds to print stickers. Probably post-New Year.

she's been dancin'

I have been contracted (with promises of free beer) to videograph the upcoming performance of the world's greatest drunkest Guns N' Roses tribute band Mr. Brownstone. They're playing at NorthSix in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, this coming Friday night (12/9/05) at midnight and it's one of their last shows.

Friends, I know what you probably think of tribute bands but let me tell you... these guys are Fun As Hell. In fact they are most likely A Lot More Fun Than The Real Guns N' Roses Is These Days but having not seen those jerks lately who knows?

I have drafted my friend Andy to act as a second camera operator for the evening and we're hoping that the guy running the soundboard will record the show for us so's our edited concert video can have good sound.

My double-secret probation reason for wanting to do this, other than Slash being virtuosically aped by my friend Gerard Egan, is hope that Gerard's incredibly excellent real band, Boss Tweed will want me to someday shoot a concert film for them. So I'm considering this an audition of sorts.

will come to town, will party down

So here's a first attempt at a possible ISOTA James Brown sticker. I was flying home from Seattle this morning and the idea of layers of magnification came to me as a "way in" to some kind of design scheme.



Speaking of the flight, it featured blankets and pillows unlike the flight which spawned the Infidel Sorcerers of the Air. It also featured having to pay for a crappy little box of snacks. NUTS TO YOU, AMERICAN AIRLINES.

Film recommendations: "F for Fake" by Orson Welles and "Sword of Doom" (Daibosatsu Toge) by Kihachi Okamoto.

I am getting back on this horse.

and now, back to the music

This past weekend saw a very productive Seize Them! practice. Every original song that we still perform as a three-piece gained depth and breadth, as we either fiddled with arrangements or just injected different moods into our playing. Jeff is making progress adjusting to the new requirement that he fill in bass as part of his keyboard duties, and for that I commend him.

As usual I recorded both days of our rehearsal into Garageband on the old laptop. It sounds pretty good for a live rehearsal recording. The keys are still low, which is odd considering how loud they sound in the practice space. Garageband is giving me heretofore not seen problems exporting bits of the recording to .mp3, but once I get that ironed out I hope to submit a track or two to Warren Ellis' "APPARAT" podcast in which he selects music for his audience from music contributed by his audience. That's a pretty neat idea. I've added a link to APPARAT on the sidebar, so check it out.

In another assault on my creative output I've acquired a copy of Mario Kart DS. I'm extremely excited about the idea of portable networked gameplay, so here's hoping it's as fun as I... hope... it will be. If you're a Mario Kart DS player you can find me using my "friend code", which is 077369 003388. ZOOM.

wheel of steel

I am finally (almost a month after paying for the thing) the proud owner of a used Stanton STR8-100 turntable. So far it appears to be in pretty good condition, though the platter is not entirely level. I've been messing with the pitch and speed settings and, of course, making the occasional timid scratch. Not that I intend to do much scratching. But it's sure as hell fun to mess with records.
Overall my creative output has been more or less stalled out. My personal life has gone radically off the rails as of last week so I'm still trying to figure out a bunch of crap related to that. Comparatively, making music and stickers and photographs doesn't really hold a lot of interest. So for all zero of you readers I apologize that not much interesting is going on in this space. Hopefully things will change soon.

par for the laziness course

Not much accomplished this weekend creatively, though I took a really fun bike ride through Long Island City. Visited the graffiti gallery at the 5 Pointz Building, which riders of the 7 train will recognize.
Managed to .mp3-ize and distribute the salvageable manifesto readings from last weekend in Portland, and hopefully I'll get the musical portion of that proceeding handled Monday or Tuesday night.
Speaking of .mp3s, I have succumbed to the sexiness and ordered a black 60GB iPod. "Infidel Sorcerers of the Air" will be laser-engraved on the back; it'll be an artifact after I'm famous as hell. FAMOUS AS HELL. Now don't worry... in an attempt to be less than ridiculously decadent I AM selling my Archos AV420 on eBay.
Also speaking of .mp3s I wasted a tremendous amount of time this weekend adding album art to my .mp3 collection in anticipation of the iPod. By my reckoning this is in the top five of Most Completely Pointless Timewasters Ever, but it'll be COOL or something to have album art pop up on all of these tracks. And hey; maybe I'm preserving tiny album art in ephemeral digital form for the Internet Archaeologists.
Uploaded two new images to flickr, showing here> and here .
Had an interesting discussion with jm about where in the country or in other countries one would like to "settle down". Wow... guess I'm getting to that age.

I coulda been a contender

The importance of the iPod Video is not the sexy media appliance itself (with its tiny screen and probably crap video playback battery life), but rather the sale of television shows via the iTunes Music Store. This is the first major step toward demolishing the advertising-based television model and that is a wonderful thing.

For the past couple of months I had been semi-seriously concocting a business plan around the sale of downloadable television in a multiplicity of formats (Quicktime, DivX, MPEG, etc.) and resolutions (320x240 up to full broadcast HD). The keys to this plan were an entire line of sexy networkable media appliances which ranged from handheld up to huge home theater devices and, of course, a web-based Video Store for the content. The time, I felt, was right. I figured I had about a year before anyone major got into the game with the specific caveat that, and I quote from my lengthy notes, "Whenever the iPod Video appliance comes out the game is over."

Obviously I was wrong about the one year lead time. However, what I was eerily right about was the price point. My conundrum was how to approach the networks and convince them that money more or less equivalent to ad revenue could be made via direct sales, and also how to keep the price down at what I felt consumers would pay for customer service and quality assurance. Here, quoted again from my notes, are my results:

How much should the content cost?
For serial programs, what are now “tv shows”, I need to see how much networks earn per viewer per show by comparing Nielsen ratings with how costly ad time is during highly rated shows.
The number one non-sports show right now is CSI with 12,854,000 viewers. It is rated #3. I need to divide the amount of ad dollars collected by the number of viewers to get an idea of how much money networks make per viewer per episode.
Hollywood Reporter, in this article, claims that :30 of airtime during CSI goes for $465,000. If one assumes 17 minutes of commercial time during a one-hour program that is a total of $15,810,000 in ad dollars per episode. Mathematics tells us that CBS receives approximately $1.23 per viewer per epsiode. If the company charged $1.50 per episode… maybe $2. $5 for a feature film.

I am obviously a brilliant media pundit. However, doomed now never to be rich.

crossposted to my livejournal

regroup

Have traveled to and returned from Portland, OR. Excellent city, wonderful trip. Lack of quality photos... I'm getting tired of the limitations of my current digital camera. It may be time to trade up, though I don't know if I can swing buying a digital SLR. At the very least a much better point-and-shoot may be worth it.
From that excursion I have some audio to edit. Recordings or friends delivering manifestos, and a band of musicians playing together in a basement.
Handed out two copies of my reel.
Hope to finalize a Black & Brown sticker design this week.
Added two songs by The Decemberists to my reepertoiree.
Work is about to get very busy.

just a list of things for my brain

Here are some project ideas or things I should be working on.

Q101 - A documentary about the people who ride the bus up to Riker's Island and back to visit incarcerated friends and family members.

Untitled Oil Crash Feature - A couple of friends trying to make their way from Brooklyn to New Jersey (or similar) in the years following the Oil Crash.

Writing songs as a score to the movie Metropolis.

Finish transcribing Eurotrip journal, lay it out with pictures from the trip and publish it via Lulu (probably).

His Holiness, Pimp Dis

Dis played dressup and I had some compositing fun.

Showing here.

Source 1
Source 2
Source 3

falltime

October! The weather is beautiful.
The turning of the month reset my flickr upload limit, so I was able to upload the kids-playing-in-a-fountain series. You can see them at my flickr.com page. Most of them are crops, which I hardly ever do, but I felt I had to stay somewhat back from the subject so as not to make anyone's parents wary. Anyway, it's okay stuff.
Band practice this week was recorded live to Garageband for the first time, so I now have a jam to mess with. I think our covers of Voodoo Lady and Immigrant Song were actually not half bad, but I need to listen to the recordings. Jeff is being very brave and taking on bass duties with his keys. He's getting better at it.
Discovered that Sticker Guy WILL do four-color printing on vinyl stickers and that their bulk prices really aren't bad at all. As such I started working on the first ISOTA Black & Brown sticker design. It's basically just going to be the full stamp image with the QXZ sigil and ISOTA worked into it. I can't get them printed in time for my upcoming trip to Portland, unfortunately.
Here comes the workweek.

too much pop genius!

Nah, not really.
I was fooling around with the guitar thinking "hey! I will come up with come kickass riffs!". But instead all I really did was just hack out a lot of pop-rock junk that I'm not terribly interested in right now. Seems that's what my hands want to play, though. Maybe I'm nobody to argue but right now I'm just not feeling it.
Later on after dinner I'm going to take a crack and creating some INSANE FOR JUSTICE stuff so we'll see how that goes. I still haven't come up with a better phrase for that project yet. Even if I discard it this will allow me to fool around with incorporating text, and a QXZ tag and probably the "word" ISOTA into the thing one way or another. This is all assuming I don't get distracted by TV or a movie or video games or whatnot. You've really gotta watch out for the whatnot.
Flickr upload limit has thus far prevented me from posting kid-playing-in-fountain pix so I guess that'll have to wait 'til after the first of October.

gotta get back in time

I wound up going with Manhattan Color Labs to do my processing and scanning 'cause I walked down the wrong street and wound up on their front doorstep rather than Adorama's. Their "high resolution" scan turned out to be only 400dpi, but that's okay for current purposes (i.e. none).
Some of the shots I got of kids playing in a fountain with late-afternoon backlight are pretty nice and can be nicer with some judicious cropping. Most of the shots from under the Hell Gate Bridge viaduct are crap; I think I was too distracted by my annoyance at finding kids playing there to frame anything interestingly. The quickie digital camera shot I grabbed and posted to flickr (and the first post in this BLOG) is actually better than any of the stuff I shot with the SLR. Hopefully I can get back there sometime soon before that tree loses its leaves and shoot it properly.
The Mystery Roll turned out to be photographs from my excursion into Manhattan on 9/12/01. The roll was pretty spoiled by heat after sitting around my house for four years but some of the images are salvageable. I'll put the good ones up on flickr tonight.
Work today was boring; put together a "tribute" video for the guy who used to run the Macy's Parade Studio for some award that Macy's is giving him. It was basically randomly chosen and placed still images and some video clips all set to "If I Had A Hammer" as sung by Peter, Paul and Mary. Not great. Also continued work on this graphic design project for Yves Saint Laurent that I somehow got assigned to do. It's basically layout stuff, putting together catalog-style pages with images and text. Not my usual thing, but for some reason the bossman wanted me to do it. Maybe I'll keep one or two of the images in case I want a design/layout portfolio. Not that my work on this is particularly impressive.
In other work-related activity the assistant producer on our Lead Paint Abatement video that we're doing for the city has been madly logging footage. The best characterization of the footage I've seen so far is "probably useable", though a lot of the sound is distorted and the producer is a pretty awkward interviewer.
Nothing will get done on personal projects tonight, but hopefully I can pick it up again on Thursday. I'm considering using the phrase "INSANE FOR JUSTICE" on the first wave of Black & Brown imagery, but that's just something that popped into my head the other day relevant to something I was watching on TV so it doesn't feel like a winner yet.

moving right along

"London Rockumentary" start is delayed a bit while Katie moves from one apartment to another. Fine with me; I've got the Monday tireds and it's not like there's a deadline on this project.
I'll be taking some rolls of film (remember film?) to Adorama for processing and scanning. Prints can suck it. I still like shooting film. Although, if I could afford one of those sweet 12 megapixel (or whatever) digital SLRs I'd probably do it. It's not so much the film stock, really, as it is the vastly vastly superior lenses on SLRs and the fine exposure control. All my digital photography right now is with a mediocre little Nikon Coolpix 880, so it's more or less snapshots. I'm not even sure what's on at least half of one of these rolls so it'll be an adventure.
Today's jobs at work included putting together a reel of B-roll footage for National CineMedia and their recent Bon Jovi on the Big Screen simulcast, and removing a dude's ex-girlfriend from a video of him skydiving.

launch

I seem to be beginning a few projects now that autumn is coming upon us.
The Black and Brown Trading Stamps have arrived, so there should be James Brown-related goodness happening once I find someone to print four-color vinyl stickers for me at a price I can afford. I may start out with a simpler black and white image to keep costs down, but part of what I love about this imagery is the color palette.
Recently acquired iLife '05, so Garageband is now in my toolkit. This weekend I examined the possibility of taking Seize Them! rehearsal jam tapes and capturing the bits and riffs I like into Garageband and editing them that way to create songs the band can learn. I can also have some fun with my drum machine (an Alesis SR16 that hardly ever sees use) and some samples to create what the kids these days are calling "phat beats".
Re-started my photography by finally going and shooting underneath the Hell Gate Bridge in Astoria Park. A bunch of kids were out playing a baseball-derived game in the area I wanted to shoot, so I really only got one or two "stark" shots like I wanted.
Tomorrow I start viewing footage with my ex-Multivision coworker Katie for her London rock documentary. Finally I can get back into cutting something real.