oh, internet, how you reveal and obscure

So apparently today there was a big flap in Boston, involving roads being closed and whatnot, because the Authorities were worried that a mysterious chunk of circuitboards and LEDs might be an explosive.

Hearing about this I called up some good ol' Internet news to investigate and saw the above picture stolen from cbs4boston.com of the offending device.

Now to my slacker 20-something eye, that is clearly the character Err obviously the character Ignignokt from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. I dig a little deeper and discuss this with some compatriots on an IRC channel and am pointed to flickr.com, specifically this photo taken on January 14th, 2007 (which I can't link to directly, apparently).

For those of you who didn't click on it, that's a distant photograph of a glowing Err made from LEDs on some kind of bridge overpass.

That flickr page contained a link to a particular blog, on which was this entry
in which it becomes clear that this is part of a viral marketing campaign done by Interference, Inc. (warning: lots of flash)

I can only assume that this is so-called guerilla marketing for the upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie, which premieres next month, though it could simply be for the show itself. DEAR TIME WARNER I DEMAND ADVERTISING DOLLARS FOR PIMPING YOUR PRODUCT PLEASE FORWARD CONTRACTS

What I find interesting about this is the fact that this entire supposed bomb scare with its associated inconveniences could have been quickly debunked by a twenty-something internet slacker. I move that Boston's emergency services hire several people who are either of or familiar with the internet slacking demographic and their preferences in late night adult cartoon entertainment. For the good of America.

Additionally, I suppose I can only offer kudos to Interference, Inc. because if your marketing campaign causes a bomb scare, closes an Interstate highway and sets the Interblargh aflame with posts such as this then I guess it's doing its job. Here's hoping they have a hefty legal fund.

Further, this metafilter thread has dug up video of the Moonenites being placed by the Interference, Inc.-affiliated GlitchCrew. As their thank yous remind us, Graffiti Research Labs taught us how to do this quite a while ago (and they don't seem too happy about it).

well, that's it

Before the rant which is the primary purpose of this post I will mention that I caught North's (warning: myspace) headline, mainstage gig at the Knitting Factory on Friday night. A good show and congrats to them for rocking a worthy venue. Here is a picture:


Now to business.

Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip has become an awful show. A decision has clearly been made to turn the entire venture into a vehicle for crappy romantic comedy. No fewer than six of the principals are entangled with each other and you can up that to eight if you want to count the borderline homoerotic confrontations between D.L. Hughley's character and The Other Black Guy. As the most recent episode has demonstrated, Sorkin et al have reduced themselves to cheap sitcom plots (we're locked on a roof! let's reference the fact that this is a cheap gimmick in the hope that our self-conscious awareness will mitigate the lameness of the cheap gimmick!)... nay, MULTIPLE cheap sitcom plots (there's a snake loose in the building! I'm going to lie for no reason to this girl I like only because it will inevitably cause conflict two scenes from now!), and entirely abandoned the original draw of the show, namely commentary on creating television in our current cultural climate. Lip service is paid to that, occasionally, but it's nothing more than bare-bones scenery for more completely uninteresting and unbelieveable "romantic" developments.

Even the one relationship I was actually semi-interested in, between the characters played by Nate Corddry and Lucy Davis, has been derailed for entirely contrived and pointless reasons. Aaron, please... this is SEASON ONE. Why are you falling back on the kind of crap one resorts to when all other ideas have been run into the ground?

In contrast, we're three episodes into season 2 of HBO's Rome and I am enjoying myself just as thoroughly as I did last season. It's becoming a tad awkward that a good many years have passed since the premiere of the series and nobody's visibly aged but shigata ga nai, ne? The acting is still high caliber, the characters are well drawn, the production design continues to be top quality and I'm continually impressed by the pacing given the sheer scale of events being portrayed. Somehow all the necessary elision feels elegant rather than cursory and spotty. Hopefully HBO won't get petulant and start sending out Cease and Desist letters to torrenters while simultaneously polluting the torrent pool because lord knows I'm not subscribing to HBO for one program and, besides, all my Evil Internet Piracy resulted in my purchase of the season 1 DVD set. So suck on that a little bit, HBO. Thanks for the quality programming, but here's hoping you won't cling to your extinct business model too much longer.

Finally, I have succumbed to my technolusts and placed an order for a Pentax K100D digital SLR camera. It's an entry-level model, so called, but the price was rightish and I imagine I'll be very happy with it once it's no longer backordered and is, instead, in my grubby paws. I'll get back to you in two to four weeks.

Last Resort

This past Saturday I attended the grand opening of the Last Resort Art Space mere blocks from my home it good ol' Astoria, Queens. It seemed to be a huge success, with great turnout and five bands playing the night away.



Personal favorites of mine were Robot Goes Here, a single-guy-plus-sequenced-electrobeats act of high energy similar to Atom and his Package in both form and content, and Dynamite Plan, a pop-radical punkish outfit who rocked our socks right the hell off.

Kudos to Nechama Levy for doing a huge amount of organization and promotion for the event, especially considering that she was nearly wiped off the earth by a garbage truck. I, personally, am tremendously happy to see the beginnings of some kind of Astoria Scene and hope it continues indefinitely even if it does initiate my predicted Williamsburgization of the neighborhood. Hey, even Williamsburg was cool before it wasn't.

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Meanwhile, I've completed (or at least stopped working on) the video I shot for Boss Tweed last March at the Galapagos Art Space. The band has requested that I not post clips on the intertubes due to dissatisfaction with their performance, and that's fine with me because all the stuff is so damned dark as to be nigh-invisible when compressed and then re-compressed into Google Video format.

Speaking of Google Video, I recently uploaded (at the behest of the creator, Courtney Schmidt) an excellent short film called The Patent Movie. It would not be a waste of ten minutes of your life for you to watch it. Music by Degoao of OUCH fame.

Roh Delikat

So here's the video I shot of Roh Delikat while I was making sure all the gear was working for the impending OUCH branging. I haven't figured out exactly what's causing the audio glitches... could be cheap tape stock, because I've always used the expensive stuff in the past.

Anyway, this is part of their song "Laudanum" from their current CD Sunny



The OUCH video went over pretty well and it's on its way out west to Park City as I type.

more musicks

Ahoy and hello.
OUCH (warning: myspace) brang it to Club Midway on Ave. B in the wee hours of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and the performance has been immortalized in video:


OUCH affiliate Courtney will be bringing along a copy of the DVD with her on her trip to Sundance in order to show some of her compatriots just what kind of crazy these dudes get up to. Assuming she does actually get to play it for someone there I will immediately make the dubious claim that my work has been shown at Sundance. The movie she's traveling there with, by the way, is a short called Conversion and will be part of the Native Forum at the festival.

It's possible that a slicker version of the DVD will be available to the public at a later date.

OUCH was preceded by several bands from Boston, my favorite of which was Roh Delikat who sound somewhat like a mixture of PJ Harvey and My Bloody Valentine (though that's doing them injustice). I bought their current CD, "Sunny", and if you're into awesome indie rock I suggest you do the same. This is Kristina, the songwriter, guitarist and singer:



I shot a brief amount of video of part of one of their songs to test out the camera gear and I will probably upload that to google video or YouTube soon.

Happy New Year

Let's see. How did I celebrate the death of 2006 and the birth of the invicible 2007?

First with an OUCH concert on the Williamsburg Bridge:




Second, our parade carried its rolling boombox into somebody's party:




There were lights:


The above places were knit together by our dancing, boombox-wheeling party train. Williamsburg, Brooklyn received many shoutouts directed at Sayreville, New Jersey courtesy of Hot97.