Infidel Sorcerers of the Air

RED Epic 5K test shoot: Feathers

2011-03-11T10:37:00.002-05:00

Feathers from Mark L. Pederson on Vimeo.

This is the long-awaited test shoot we at OffHollywood did with the new RED Epic 5K digital cinema camera. Alonso Homs acted as DP and I was juggling DIT work and also operating the handheld shots of the pillow fighting from 0:52 to 1:49 and 1:52 to the end.

union busting is all the rage

2011-02-28T11:22:00.001-05:00

"A unionized public worker, a member of the Tea Party, and a CEO are sitting at a table.
In the middle of the table, there is a plate with a dozen cookies on it.
The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies, looks at the Tea Partier and says, 'Watch out for that union guy; he wants a piece of your cookie.'"

write some

2010-10-31T15:26:00.003-04:00

Oh look! This thing still exists.
I've made a snap decision to participate in this year's NaNoWriMo (or National Novel Writing Month, for the less acronym-savvy of you). The idea is to churn out a 50,000-word novel in thirty days. As they say, "December is for editing".
We'll see how it goes.

Old, Blackened Century now on CD

2010-06-10T13:02:00.002-04:00

Flaming Tusk has incarnated their debut full length album Old, Blackened Century as a "compact disc" (remember those? they use LASERS!). It's housed in a handsome digipak, showing here:

It can be yours for the low price of $9 (plus the usual shipping, handling, and the imperilment of your soulllll). The CD digipak and the pay-what-you-will digital download are both available at music.flamingtusk.com.

magic on my block

2010-05-24T20:48:00.000-04:00

Eggplants and flowers offered to the orisha Oya, deity in Santería and Yoruban pantheons, goddess of cemetery gates.
Left at the fence of Astoria's Our Lady of Mount Carmel cemetery, popularly known as the Irish Famine cemetery.

bonsai rose experiment no. 1

2010-05-24T13:33:00.004-04:00

The rosebush in front of my house (which you may have heard about before) is especially vigorous this year. I, of course, credit my judicious regimen of trial-and-error deadheading and pruning which began last year. I'm forced to curate this plant semi-clandestinely, as my landlords' parents feel the rosebush is theirs. For my part, I feel I'm the one who's pushed it to produce so well this season and as such I have certain rights of my own.

Like taking cuttings, for example.

I've decided to see if it's possible to train a rosebush into something approximating a bonsai-like size. I picked a cutting which had an abundance of branches while still being small enough to start in a pot. Internet research led me to believe that the success rate of rooting new cuttings is fairly high, so I got myself a pot and bag of organic potting soil and went to work.

This cutting, my first experiment, has a dab of honey on the cut end to stimulate root production (apparently this is a thing?), and I'm hitting it with 700 lumens of artificial daylight from a compact fluorescent bulb at least until it shows some evidence of new growth. Let the experiment begin.

Flaming Tusk media barrage

2010-05-13T10:06:00.002-04:00

It's been quite a week, mediawise, down here in our spectre-haunted practice space.

First, on Monday we received an alert about a new review of Old, Blackened Century on the Penny Arcade affiliate metal blog From The Dust Returned. Writer/editor Autothrall writes, in part:

They've here written a pretty tight debut showcasing their potential, which rests heavily on the killer riffing of Don Blood and 'Zosimus'. Seriously, these gentlemen can groove, and though many of their riffs recall the primal, morbid ascensions and declensions of an old Slayer, or the more creative sludge of The Ocean, Cult of Luna or the later Isis records, I'd say on the whole what they evoke is quite an original trip, worth taking even if the vocals require a little adjusting (unless you're already into extreme sludge like Soilent Green or Eyehategod).

The entire review is available at From The Dust Returned.

On Tuesday the May/June 2010 "Golden Gods" issue of Revolver magazine was released into the wild, and on page 48 they include Flaming Tusk as a "Quick Fix", showing here (click to enlarge):

Revolver describes us as sounding like "...High on Fire and Immortal mud-wrestling in a blackened sludge pit full of blood, bile, lava and more blood." Evocative, no? Go out and buy every copy you can find, though Revolver tells us that last year's Golden Gods issue was their biggest-selling of the year, so tracking it down may not be easy.

And finally, Veteran free weekly paper NY Press devoted a half page in their music section in their May 12-18 issue to Flaming Tusk, describing us in the headline as "gentlemen metalheads".

The full text of the article is available on the NY Press website in the Music Features section.

To those who can make it, we'll see you at Lit Lounge on Monday, 5/17.

more praise for Old, Blackened Century

2010-03-15T12:50:00.003-04:00

No Clean Singing has heaped high praise upon Old, Blackened Century in an extensive, entertaining and perhaps somewhat stalkerish review. Here's a taste:

Maybe it’s enough to say that if you’re starting to get bored with the metal you’ve been cranking recently, and you’re after something out of the box, you should go listen to Flaming Tusk’s horrifyingly enjoyable opus. (But really, be forewarned about the last song on the album — “Icy River”, which clocks in at nearly 10 minutes — it’s like the sonic equivalent of being tied naked to your bed with a dozen giant, oily black centipedes slowly crawling toward your face.)

I'd say that's pretty much what we were going for.

cab ride

2010-03-14T23:44:00.002-04:00

About twenty four hours from now I'll be on a jet plane off to Granada, Spain and the beginning of my Morocco excursion. Expect plenty of photos and possibly some interesting audio clips after my return.

this week in Flaming Tusk

2010-03-03T15:24:00.002-05:00

Atanamar at Sunyata: Mindful of Metal dropped in on the most recent Flaming Tusk show and I guess he liked what he saw because he's posted a glowing (uh, I mean, blackly glowing... in a totally metal way) review of the show to the internet. With pics!

This coming Saturday, March 6, Flaming Tusk will appear live on WNYU.org streaming radio's SOMA DEGENERATE metal show between 4PM and 6PM Eastern Time. We'll be playing about a half-hour live set followed by an interview with the band and you should tune your internet into the waves and listen. I'm not sure at what point or points in the broadcast we'll be on-air, but if you're a metal listener I strongly encourage you to set aside the whole two hours because metal selecta Navjot does a killer job putting together a playlist.

OBC gets a review

2010-02-05T13:52:00.002-05:00

And the reviews of Flaming Tusk's Old, Blackened Century have begun to come in. First out the gate is Atanamar at Sunyata: Mindful of Metal. Among other things, he writes:

"...dissecting the influences here may be computationally intractable, and that is a wonderful thing. Flaming Tusk have a truly unique sound... Old, Blackened Century has violently appropriated my attention, much like Cobalt's Gin did last year... The songwriting is superlative."

The full review can be found here.

irrefutable wisdom about the Oscar nominations

2010-02-02T11:33:00.005-05:00

Because the world is waiting for them with breathless anticipation, I bring you my thoughts on this year's Oscar nominees (or the ones I care at all about, anyway). To follow along, please find the official nominee list here.

BEST PICTURE
I was pleasantly surprised by this group, and for once I've seen half of them. The selections are really interesting to me: two sci-fi movies, an animated movie (well, 2.5 of them if you count Avatar and District 9, the former moreso than the latter), a small indie film with limited audience appeal, an orgy of profane ultraviolence, and an Iraq War movie. I haven't seen "Precious: unnecessarily long subtitle featuring both the source novel's title and the pseudonymous author's pen name" or The Blind Side, but in some ways I sort of feel like this is equivalent to nominating both Deep Impact and Armageddon.

So, Avatar. Have you seen it? It's statistically probable that you have. Yes, it's essentially "Dances With Alien Catpeople" with (possibly) goofier writing. Avatar's categorymate District 9 provides us with the contrast of a sci-fi adventure that's actually intellectually stimulating, but let's not kid ourselves; Avatar is the clear favorite in this category for reasons both cynical and pure. As for purity, it's totally undeniable that Avatar is a major triumph of visual cinema. The 3D is certainly the best anyone's ever seen, and it's used very effectively (ha) without being gimmicky most of the time. James Cameron has legitimately done something nobody else has really managed to do before, and he deserves his kudos for that. Cynically, however, I'm forced to acknowledge that the Industry NEEDS Avatar incredibly badly. 3D is likely the last major effort the Industry can make to get audiences back into theaters, and it's their opportunity to get 3D into the home viewing market (see also the 2010 CES conference). The Industry can only make massive profits when they successfully control content distribution, and 3D provides one last way of attempting that kind of control. Exhibitors, studios and consumer electronics manufacturers all needed Avatar to be a huge, massive hit and they got their wish. Whether the movie's success actually translates into the salvation of Hollywood remains to be seen, but they're definitely going to pile on the justificatory awards, as we saw at the Golden Globes. Do not be pissed off when Avatar wins Best Picture; there are Reasons.

Now, I would argue that Avatar's shoe-in presence in the Best Picture slot actually provides the space which allows such odd and interesting and probably doomed choices for the other nine nominees. District 9 is an excellent movie on all fronts, but typically the Best Picture category goes nowhere near sci-fi when they can help it. The inclusion of A Serious Man makes me feel like it's the mid-90s again, when the Academy was interested in paying some lip service to small, independent films. Inglourious Basterds is an idiosyncratic, ultraviolent, over-the-top piece of catharsis porn with some unbelievably excellent acting and the best object lesson in building tension that I've seen in a very long time. As such it could well have been nominated without Avatar's snowplow clearing the way, but, again, this feels like a very mid-nineties style choice for the Academy.

The rest of the Best Picture nominees are films I either haven't seen (Up, The Hurt Locker), or I haven't seen and also don't care about. It's entirely possible that Precious... is an incredible, moving social commentary, but I have serious doubts that The Blind Side is anything other than pukeworthy treacle.

ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Christoph Waltz, please. That's one perfectly compelling, frightening Nazi.

In general I don't have a lot to say about the acting awards this year, but look for these categories to be go-tos in which the Academy will recognize Best Picture nominees that aren't Avatar. They may pull one of their favorite shocker moves and give the Best Actress statuette to an unknown first-timer in the person of Gabourey Sidibe, but... actually, now that I think more about it, that's a pretty likely outcome.

ANIMATED FEATURE
Up will likely take this because it won't win Best Picture. Before I saw Avatar I felt Coraline was definitely the best 3D movie I'd yet seen, so that's a contender. Fantastic Mr. Fox is great and fits well with the mid-90s vibe happening in the Best Picture category, but I think the award is more likely to go to Up. I, personally, would have liked to see Avatar nominated in this category, but those who know me are familiar with my feelings on just what the hell an "animated feature" is these days.

ART DIRECTION
Lots of strong contenders here, but c'mon... Avatar invented a whole world in incredibly rich detail (what up, Richard Taylor!), and this is a category the public understands very little about so it's a good one to toss at the Best Picture winner as support for the decision. Then again, it's also the only category The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is nominated in, so the Academy might want to make a final nod toward Heath Ledger and any kind of a nod at all toward Terry Gilliam. But it's an outside shot.

ACHIEVEMENT IN CINEMATOGRAPHY
Uh, duh... its achievements in cinematography are the primary selling point of Avatar. If the movie absolutely deserves to win anything it's nominated for, this is the totally noncontroversial category. Maurio Fiore had better be clearing a statue-sized space on his mantle. In any other year, Inglourious Basterds would win.

DIRECTING
Again, the favorite is Avatar, if for no other reason than it was clearly the most obviously difficult and consuming of the nominees to direct. Best Directing should be the confluence of the greatest performances, the most artful framings, and the most skillful elevation of stock elements past cliché... as such, probably every nominated film OTHER than Avatar has a legitimate claim to this award, but unless the Academy starts to feel guilty about the kudos it's laying all over Avatar they're not going to give it to anyone other than James Cameron. The other nominees are victims of bad timing.

FILM EDITING
A category close to my heart. While I haven't seen all of the nominees, I would really like to see Inglourious Basterds take this statue. Avatar was no slouch editorially, but the editing was hardly the overriding feature of the movie (and c'mon... three editors, one of whom was the director/writer/producer/overlord). Inglourious Basterds is a masterpiece of tension and tension is almost entirely about the skill of the editor. Sally Menke has proven her genius many times; let her take this one home.

ORIGINAL SCORE
Avatar will win this, which is lame because James Horner is laaaaaame. I'd love to see Fantastic Mr. Fox take the win, personally.

SOUND EDITING / SOUND MIXING
These are probably more gimmes for Avatar, though all of the nominees could probably lay equal claim to the awards and it would be nice to see some variety to the night.

VISUAL EFFECTS
Again, Avatar, and rightly so. Though in any other year it would be District 9... the seamless blend of live action and CG animation in District 9 was incredibly impressive and tasteful.

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
This is where Push... will win, probably. The Academy obviously wants to recognize this film somehow and a writing win is a pretty legit honor. Also, this movie is largely about the story of the movie itself, so there are metareasons to give it a writing nod. I just hope "Sapphire" comes up on stage with the screenwriter.

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
I think we have a battle here between A Serious Man and Inglourious Basterds, though The Hurt Locker (which I haven't yet seen) might take this to satisfy the Bigelow/Cameron battle and because it's apparently quite a good movie which the Academy would like to honor in some way. A Serious Man is the nominee most dependent on the sheer quality of the writing, though Inglourious Basterds certainly doesn't lack Tarantino's skill with a screenplay.

And that's all I care to prognosticate about and this point. Enjoy your Oscar parties, everyone.

Old, Blackened Century

2010-01-19T12:46:00.003-05:00

<a href="http://music.flamingtusk.com/album/old-blackened-century">Anathema by Flaming Tusk</a>

Tremble, world, for the moment is upon you. Flaming Tusk has released Old, Blackened Century as a pay-what-you-will download. YOU WILL. Try before you download by using the streaming widget above.

boozy musings

2009-12-07T02:23:00.003-05:00

After a rather inexcusably huge gap in posting, I've published a short reminiscence of my time in Ireland over at Blotto, the Journal of the North American Booze Council. It is, as one might expect from the venue (both of publishing and of subject) largely focused on drinking.

I've reproduced the introductory paragraphs below, and a link to the balance of the essay immediately follows.

Ireland is, first, a blur of ancient stone walls flashing out of the night as we blast down back country lanes, fifty kilometers per hour on the black left side of the road. Sarah has only been driving for a month. She and her sister Emma collected us after we touched down at Shannon, we weary and bleary and them bearing broad smiles and accents. They were, immediately, the most fun people I had ever met, but it was now obvious that in this Rover was where we were going to die, grinning, sung off to heaven by broadcast American blues music.

No one dies in Ireland before they’ve had a pint.

Second Class on the Overnight to Drunkistan, or The Boozy Foreigners – Part 2

from the mouth of the Squirrel

2009-12-06T18:50:00.003-05:00

Recording engineer Tom Beaujour took to his Nuthouse Recording blog recently to describe the "punishing task" of tracking the forthcoming Flaming Tusk full length:

"The absolutely massively named Flaming Tusk and their debut album was up next. Crazy-ass extreme underground metal. A smarter, more well-read bunch of guys you have never met. They are obsessed with bizarre spirits (of the alcoholic, not supernatural type) and had bottles of some of the weirdest shit I have ever seen (artichoke liqueur, anyone?) at the ready at all times."

Read more about Tom's further adventures recording Five Finger Death Punch, Mutiny Within and Upon A Burning Body here.

The new Flaming Tusk full-length will be out Januaryish.

douse the stars

2009-09-23T13:15:00.005-04:00

The Flaming Tusk recording session has been going tremendously well so far. In the first four days we got eight songs tracked with the full band, and our remaining four days will consist of guitar solo overdubs and the remainder of the vocals. I, personally, am rather astounded at the amount we've done so far and how incredibly rad it's all sounding even before any kind of real mixing work has happened.

While the band has been relying on a combination of NJ Transit and the MTA to get to Nuthouse Recording in Hoboken, our intrepid engineer / producer Tom "The Squirrel" Beaujour prefers to arrive in a much more rock n' roll manner, i.e.:

This being our first time in a Real Recording Studio, we've all been working out various methods of expressing what we're trying to get across. For example, our drummer Dumnorix Χριστόφαγος conducts guitarists through the control room glass in this manner:

We haven't decided on a name for the album yet, though we have a good amount of time before doing so becomes necessary. Days Without God is a popular choice on the shortlist, but I imagine the brainstorming will ratchet up during the mixing and mastering process. Album art will likely wait until we decide on which of the many metal labels out there deserves to release our apocalyptic awesomeness, but I assure you it will be great.

I leave you with a little taste of what's to come...

Visit flamingtusk.com for lots more video snippets of the work-in-progress. As always, the Abigail EP is available for free download from music.flamingtusk.com

"The USA Today" and Dan Brown deserve each other

2009-09-15T00:51:00.004-04:00

I do not intend to read Dan Brown's new novel. I DID read The DaVinci Code because the entire world would simply not shut UP about it ever ever ever, and I completely hated each individual page.

Because I am a very petty man, I was incredibly delighted to find my rubbernecked reading of "The USA Today"'s, uh... words... about Brown's latest justified by the gift of the following exquisite sentences:

Langdon is a professor of "symbology." (Brown says there's no such academic field. "The closest is symbiotics.")

If there were such a thing as "symbiotics", I assume it would actually be the study of the lucrative synergy between hack lowbrow novelists and remedial newspapers written by and for the lexically challenged.

and... go

2009-09-01T14:13:00.002-04:00

This is it, eleven days until Flaming Tusk charges into the studio to begin recording the followup to the Abigail EP. It's a fairly un-metal thing to say, but I'm a big fan of Nada Surf's Weight Is A Gift so it's quite exciting for me to work with producer / engineer Tom Beaujour seeing as how he was responsible for the recording on that there record. Also, hell, he's the editor-in-chief of Revolver Magazine so you know he's got an ear for the heavy stuff. We're going to be knocking out this whole thing really quickly, but we've been rehearsing the material diligently and I'm pretty confident we're going to make excellent use of our studio time.

these are the bands I know, I know

2009-08-08T14:44:00.004-04:00

Music!

photo by Michele DiBernardo

Seize Them! played the main stage at the Astoria Music Now! festival (because of the exclamation point, mostly) on July 25th. It was fantastic to see such a concentration of great Astoria bands and musicians, and I hope we get to play it again next year. As usual, the recording of the show is available for free download at seizethem.com.

Flaming Tusk will be taking a good chunk of September to record our new, uh, record with engineer/producer Tom Beaujour at Nuthouse Recording in Hoboken. We're hoping to get a bunch of our new songs tracked, and following immediately after our last day of recording Flaming Tusk will be playing a show at The Cake Shop on September 20th with Athens, GA's own The Dumps. We're probably going to be playing GREAT after two weeks in the studio, so you definitely don't want to miss this show.

Seize Them! in print

2009-06-22T14:13:00.002-04:00

At long last, Seize Them! has been recognized in print. The luminaries at local press outlet Ins&Outs Magazine have released their article on us which began with an interview way back in December.

The actual article, unfortunately, is not on Ins&Outs' website, but I did take the time to type it all out and post it on Seize Them!'s site so you can read it here in its entirety.

motion pictures

2009-06-01T19:58:00.006-04:00

Flaming Tusk played Hull's Sole Lord record release party on May 26, and here is a video clip of us playing "I Nap In Blood" from The "Abigail" EP.

doing the Charleston

2009-05-27T18:06:00.003-04:00

Here's a great set of pictures by Vanshnookenraggen from last night's Flaming Tusk / The Witches Tit / Hull show at The Charleston.

rose

2009-05-22T10:45:00.000-04:00

The rosebush in front of my house is doing rather well this year.

Mastodon 5/9/09 at The Fillmore New York

2009-05-10T10:48:00.007-04:00

Last night I caught one of Mastodon's two NYC shows at which they are playing the entirety of their new album Crack The Skye. I'm a big Mastodon fan, but I'm upfront about my favorite stuff of theirs being Leviathan, two albums back. Crack The Skye is a good record, but it is significantly more "rock" than Mastodon has been in the past (though some folks said that about their last record, Blood Mountain, too), with clean vocals and, y'know, choruses. I predicted (to my friends and bandmates) it would be a huge crossover hit, and that seems to be coming true what with CtS's activity on the Billboard charts of late. My hope is that their next record will be extra-brutal, leaving all the new fans going "...what?".

The show went off well; they started with album opener "Oblivion" and went straight through, guitar-exchanging time between songs smoothed over by atmospheric keyboard washes and video projections that seemed primarily derived from the film Alexander Nevsky. The crowd, somewhat to my surprise, seemed both very familiar with the new songs and definitely on board with them, if the fist pumping, singing along, and mosh pit activity are any indication (despite all of the above tapering off as time went on). The material does come off a bit better live than on record, in my opinion, which is a credit to the crushing power of Mastodon's live presence.

Speaking of which, the band (and especially lead guitarist Brent Hinds) really came alive after the CtS portion of the show had ended and they moved on to a selection of hits from Blood Mountain and Leviathan (okay, and "March of the Fire Ants" from Remission). I don't know if that stuff is just more fun for them, or if they were psyched to have finished with the "business" portion of the show, but it definitely left me wanting to see a more typical Mastodon concert wherein they play anything they feel like playing.

The night's two opening acts were Intronaut, from LA, and Kylesa (fellow Atlantans to Mastodon). Intronaut were decent... Most of their songs had a few cool moments and a couple of songs were rocking all the way through, but overall I found them to be too pretty too much of the time. Kylesa is a band I'd wanted to see for a while, and I did enjoy them, though you have to work pretty hard to convince me that your band really needs two drummers and I'm not sure they really did. Musically, they're certainly heavy and can bring the crushing riffs, though the lead guitar work tends to be a little simplistic.

ooooWEEEOOOOOOOO

2009-04-20T14:59:00.002-04:00

Internet, I call your attention to Seize Them!'s first show of 2009, the AMandA party on 4/18/09 at Wonderland Collective.

We burned the warehouse down, but first we played the Doctor Who theme song.

Download the whole set for free at seizethem.com.

flaming tusk envideoed

2009-04-12T23:52:00.010-04:00

An intrepid audience member captured Flaming Tusk's performance of "Ichor" during their 4/6 Precious Metal gig at Lit Lounge.

two things and another thing too

2009-04-07T01:40:00.002-04:00

A: I am so very happy that the American Right feels the need to run into the room and shout 'MR. ROGERS SUCKS!!1!1' in order to get attention. Or maybe all the R fogeys have realized they're about to be replaced by people like the new guy running The National Review, so it's just cane-waving at lawn interlopers.

B: Wired, Make and Paste magazines have clearly all been talking to the same design consultant. Next time you're near a recent copy of any of the above (especially Paste), pick it up and pay attention to how the covers feel. Some very smart person clearly has been exhorting publishers to enhance the ways in which print offers a richer experience than pixel-based media. Touchscreens aside, reading blogs lacks tactility.

C: Monday night's Flaming Tusk show at Lit went over really well. Rumor has it some operative or other captured part or all of it on video.

MetalKult.com pimps Flaming Tusk

2009-04-02T21:13:00.002-04:00

Interweb metal mainstay (and Guitar World affiliate) MetalKult.com has seen fit to recommend that folks come out for Flaming Tusk's April 6 Precious Metal show at Lit Lounge.

Read all about it.

SXSW Day 4, Sat. March 21

2009-03-22T11:23:00.003-04:00

Saturday was a much lighter day than either Thursday or Friday. I began my adventures at the Flatstock poster exhibit at the Austin Convention center where there were reams of incredibly cool concert posters on display by the artists who made them. I wasn't in a buying state of solvency, so I had to satisfy myself by taking cards and dreaming about the day Flaming Tusk or Seize Them! goes on tour and needs awesome posters for advertising and merch. Someday, someday... The work of Matt Parrillo from Monolith Press and Brian Mercer of Mercerrock were particular highlights.

Finally managed to catch up with my friend Garann at Waterloo Park for some of the day's free shows. Israel's Monotonix were crazying up the place with their garage punk chaos, which was admirably tight given the band had set up in front of the stage in the mosh pit and were frequently riding pieces of the drumkit on the upstretched arms of the crowd. I believe they claimed some kind of world record for having performed eleven shows at this one SXSW festival, but their precise meaning remained unclear due to accent thickness.

Monotonix was merely the warmup for my second Circle Jerks show of the festival, and they killed it once again. Far more stage diving at this show than the one at Emo's, and in my estimation (if this show was any indication) stage divers have suffered some serious ego inflation over the past decade or so.

I dropped in to Elysium out of curiosity about the second Japan Nite showcase. You can never be sure what you're going to get, musically, from the Japanese: wild creative experimentation and slavish imitation seem to the the two most likely options. I suppose that's true of music everywhere but somehow this polarization seems to express itself most clearly w/r/t old Nippon. Special Thanks from Aichi prefecture were taking the stage as I arrived and, sadly, they sit solidly in the latter category. Uninspired pop punk with cutesy girly vocals delivered by a lady who appeared to be about thirteen. Nothing to see here, and you've heard it all before. To their credit, the band was having a great time despite equipment problems.

For what may turn out to be the final official music event of the festival which I attend, I caught the PJ Harvey and John Parish show at Stubb's. Ms. Polly Jean is as compelling as ever. She and her band were working a WWII vibe visually, PJ in a blazing white torch singer gown and hairpiece/hat, her band in suits and fedoras. This show established a theme for me of seeing big name performers I like playing material I've never heard before, in this case cuts from the recently released "A Woman A Man Walked By". The music was still essential PJ: simple, atmospheric, idiosyncratic, primal. I very much want to hear the record, but I'm not sure an outdoor amphitheater is the right venue for this stuff. At its quieter moments, backed by banjo or ukelele played gently and mournfully, the music failed to reach the back half of the crowd or touch the louts who'd rather shout drunkenly to each other about air mattresses and "dry showers". An intimate club, small enough for the bigger moments to frighten you slightly, would be ideal.

The show was over too soon, the clock forcing the band to make way for The Indigo Girls and, later and most unfortunately, Third Eye Blind.

Sunday is likely to see me drinking in more of Austin, TX than can be had by wandering East Sixth Street and vicinity so this is likely my last South By Southwest post. If the stars align, the next time I'm here I'll be playing with one of my bands. Or, at least, I'll bring somebody with me to augment my mediocre networking skills (though, on that tip, I did manage to give CDs to quite a few band members... here's hoping they don't lose them). Until next time.

SXSW Day 3, Fri. March 20

2009-03-21T13:42:00.003-04:00

The vernal equinox ensured that today's festival doings would receive equal amounts of daylight and darkness. I got into town early (meaning, 2PM) because there were Things To Do!

First off, I sat in on a demo listening session at the convention center. The panelists were four producers in various genres, and they were pulling submitted CDs out of a bin and listening to the first verse and first chorus of the songs their supplicants wished them to judge. Despite frequent caveats of "we don't know anything!", the panel generally proceeded by explaining what would make the song in question blow up huge on the radio, or why it never would. Afterward the producers made themselves available for meeting and greeting, so I took the opportunity to press the Flaming Tusk EP on Don DeBiase, the one guy who seemed amenable to metal. He seemed very excited to get it.

I discovered via SMS that The Onion were presenting a showcase at Radio Room featuring Ra Ra Riot. I really liked their self-titled 2007 EP and I wasn't sure I'd make it to their 1AM show, so this was serendipitous. I probably missed half of their short set due to the length of the line (in the afternoons, one's badge counts for naught. you wait with the rest of the peons), but what I saw was as lush and danceable as their record, with the added perk of seeing all six folks including the cellist and violinist bop around enjoying themselves. They also drew one of the most tightly packed crowds I'd been in since the beginning of SXSW.

I stuck around to catch ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, who I'm not terribly familiar with but thought might be interesting. They definitely brought the fire with a rave-up apocalyptic groove. I'm not convinced the second drum kit was necessary, but it at least looked cool to have two drummers set up face to face mirroring each other's slammings. The crowd was singing along and trying to avoid the drumsticks and water bottles being thrown from the stage.

The first show on my To See list for the day was Brooklyn metal act TOMBS at Room 710. Brutal blackened post-hardcore (you realize I'm just inventing genre names, right?). I was jealous of their sonic intensity. Crazy psychedelic washes of noise backed by blastbeats and bass chords. The guys look like they will kick your ass, but I spoke to guitarist Mike Hill for a bit after the show and he was happy to meet a fellow metaller from NYC. He took a copy of the Flaming Tusk EP with enthusiasm and I told him I'd do my best to catch their next NYC show on April 12th at Public Assembly (with Ghengis Tron, Black Anvil and Wetnurse).

The Southern Lord Recordings showcase at Emo's Annex kicked off with Thou from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They were decent enough doom metal, but the show felt a touch flat and uninspired. Their vocalist would do well to work a couple of variations on his stock scream into the act.

Next onstage was Eagle Twin from Salt Lake City. They were another octave-dropped guitar and drums two-piece and it's possible my feelings about them were clouded by how much I liked Jucifer two days before. I was mildly disinterested until, perhaps ironically, they got to their more minimal material about halfway through their set. Eagle Twin have some good ideas but they might do better with a wider sonic palette. The guitar tone was impressively huge, though.

I ducked out of Southern Lord's show in order to catch Texas black metallers Absu at Spiro's Amphitheater. Absu black-metalled so hard that they evilled a hole into their snare drum. Fortunately some dark angel lent them another one. They're not so black metal that the drummer/lead vocalist is above cracking jokes in his death growl voice. The crowd was very pumped up, abetted by Captain Morgan and his wenches handing out free rum shots and branded swag.

The highlight of my evening was seeing Rwake at Red 7. They completely destroyed the room with their Arkansas-bred intensity. It was the first show of the night that had me headbanging and holding up invisible orbs. The stage was full of people who looked like they were just this side of becoming toothless meth addicts, but for their decision to crush metal riffs. I really wish their set had been longer, but such are showcases. I had the chance to speak to lead vocalist CT for a bit after the show as he was selling Rwake merch and he accepted my offer of the Flaming Tusk EP enthusiastically. He also mentioned that he was looking for another band to fill out a bill in Brooklyn that one of his friend's bands is playing, so here's some crossed fingers that CT doesn't lose the disc and likes it.

I returned to the Southern Lord showcase and missed the beginning of Wolves In The Throne Room's set, but what I did see was great. Lit only by two candelabras flanking the stage, WITTR poured out a tarry black torrent onto the crowd. Atmospheric and harsh, but never without a keen sense of droning melody, like a clawed hand reaching up to scratch the stars from the sky. The band plays like you just might never hear anything again once they're through with you, and you have little choice but to submit to the crush.

Finally, Pelican. Chicago's instru-metallists. They seemed pretty psyched about having just signed to Southern Lord, and they played some tracks from their forthcoming EP. They were high-energy, heavy, stony, doomy... Southern-Lordy. I'd definitely see them again.

And that was day three! Lots of good shows, and hopefully effecting pressings of the flesh. Will I survive Day Four? Tune in tomorrow to find out.

SXSW Day 2, Thurs. March 19

2009-03-20T12:34:00.004-04:00

I got a pretty late start after adjusting to this whole idea of "there are things that you want to do happening all day and all night", but I wound up at the tail end of the Kerrang!/Guitar Hero party at Wave. It was, theoretically, invite-only, but I wasn't hassled at the door for being a badge-wielding gate crasher so I suppose they must have been nearly out of free booze.

Attack! Attack! from the UK were playing, and while the ample pogoing happening onstage indicated the band was having a great time I was distinctly underwhelmed by their nümetal-cum-metalcore schlock. It managed to sound overproduced even live. This is what you think is rad enough to import from overseas, Kerrang!?

On the sun-dappled front porch of Beer Land Texas I found The Fresh & Onlys from San Francisco flailing out their energetic, rave-up garage rock. Lots of fun. They, like quite a few other bands I've seen so far, were afflicted with PA problems, but once power was restored they brought back the rock, and it was good.

I followed a stiltwalker down the street to Headhunters and stumbled upon Austin's own Meganaut. They've got the self-promotion angle locked down. The dudes were delivering heavy party rock that in its weaker moments drifted toward hair band territory, but it was saved by the reassuringly beardy, bluesy vocals. Not sure I'd seek these guys out again, but if they're playing the bar you're drinking in you'll likely be satisfied.

Today's theme was seeing bands from New York City, and I started off by checking out the Tee Pee Records showcase at Room 710 to catch Kreisor. They're a big-riff three piece who were playing heavy rock with a strong 70s-via-retro-90s vibe. Sadly, they seemed to fall a bit short of the mark. The guitar solos were simultaneously wanky and simplistic, the bassist dropped the ball on the backing vocals, and I left after three songs.

For the remainder of the night I parked myself at The Ale House for the The End Records showcase. This was a good choice. I only caught the tail end of Junius' last song, but I liked what I heard. Next up was Brooklyn's Hull. I'd wanted to see these guys for a while, and I guess it took flying all the way to Austin to do it. Nevertheless, Hull blasted out a toppling wall of stoner-flavored sludge that got everyone in the club fired up. Lots of hair in faces. Nice guys, too. I spoke to Carmine, one of Hull's three guitarists, for a little while after the show about NYC metal and promised I'd come see them again when they played back home.

Next up was These Are They from Chicago. Their vocalist claimed that we were witnessing their first live show, but if he hadn't tipped us off there would have been no way to tell. Very tight, if perhaps only medium-technical death metal. The bassist and rhythm guitarist were headbanging along and tossing their blondeness all over the place, but the vocalist and lead guitarist could stand to amp up their stage presence at tad.

Back to the New Yorkers: Goes Cube shook the Ale House with very heavy post-punky spacerockmetal. Very full sound for a three-piece band. The guitarist was the first band member of the evening to fulfill the punk tradition of coming off the stage to play in the audience. The club got progressively more crowded as Goes Cube's show brought people in off the street, so they're doing something right.

Chicago's Tub Ring are not only a band, they're their own mosh pit. In any given song it's a tossup as to whether the keyboardist / maraca juggler / backing vocalist will spend more time playing or standing on his instruments. They're impossible to classify musically. I heard everything from electro-klezmer to extreme noise terror, all of it heavy, unrelenting and turned to eleven. Their breathless live show is a great rock and roll spectacle, but it's hard to tell how their sound(s) might translate to a record. Super nuts, but they got the girls dancing so what more can you really ask for?

If you're into thrash, Early Man sure are a thrash band. Flying V guitars chugging away at high speed on the 6 string, ripping riff after riff. That said, it's thrash. If you're looking for anything else, you're out of luck. Early Man are singular in purpose.

Day three beckons. Last night I swapped sleeping orientation on the couch to balance out my musculoskeletal stresses. One must pace one's self

SXSW Day 1, Wed. March 18

2009-03-19T14:09:00.004-04:00

As with all conferences, I assume, the whole adventure begins at Registration where you hope your hefty fee will actually result in receiving the magical badge which grants access to everything you want to see. I must have gotten there at prime time (about a half hour after registration opened), as there wasn't much of a line after I finished up.

Wandered through the trade show, but wasn't terribly tempted by any of the vendors. I must have missed all the best free swag.

Afterward I wandered around Austin's 6th St., drinking in the festive chaos. I've never been to Austin before, so to me it looked like all the bars in the city must occupy this one five-block stretch. I am assured that this is not the case.

The first bit of live music I took in was the final two songs of Roman Candle's set at Troubador. They're a rocking five-piece from Nashville by way of North Carolina. They were having a great time and I'll have to make sure to check out more of their music.

Next up I drifted over to the outdoor stage set up in the parking lot at 7th St. and Neches. Austin's Snake Skin Prison were setting up, and their start got delayed by generator problems which left the PA unpowered. To kill time, their bassist went on an effects-heavy hard rock jam excursion to the delight of more or less no one. Once the PA finally kicked in, the band had started up a hard rock cover of Robert Johnson's "Crossroads" which was pretty uninspired. They got around to some originals afterward, which were built around hamfisted weaksauce wankery and embarassingly stupid lyrics. They appeared to have some local fans, though.

I saw The Van Pelt from NYC on the schedule and the name rang a bell from my indie/hardcore/emo friends listening habits back in the 90s, so I caught the final two songs of their set. They sounded really rich and full, despite having broken up in 1997. The crowd was very enthusiastic, continually calling for "one more". Might not be a bad idea for these guys to keep on going.

Finally 8:00 rolled around and it was time for the first show on my To See list: Jucifer on the Emo's Annex stage. I didn't really know anything about them ahead of time and was very pleasantly surprised to discover that they rocked my face right off. Guitarist Amber Valentine (really? "Amber"? in a band that sounds like this?) generates a huge, crushing octave-dropped tone through a wall of bass cabinets AND handles the light show with a bunch of foot pedals. Musically, I could only come up with "crazy powerstoner doomthrash" as a descriptor. They're a two-piece, in the vein of Hella or Lightning Bolt, but apparently Jucifer predates both of them and I have to say I find Jucifer much more interesting. They played with total passion, the drummer hidden behind a wall of fog and grinning like a loon as he smacked the hi-hat with his foot. Go see these guys. They're nominally from Athens, GA, but I talked to Amber after the show and she clarified that they "haven't really lived anywhere for eight years".

Next up was a portion of the Texas Hardcore showcase at Red 7, and I caught Hatred Surge play their short set. They played with admirable passion and intensity, but ultimately the music was, well, hardcore. Which is to say: fast, chaotic and indistinct. The crowd dug it, and the crowd looked very much like hardcore crowds always have. 'X' tattoos, Xs on hands in thick black marker, and one kid actually wearing a JUDGE t-shirt. The venue did have a vendor of shirts and 7-inches, which felt appropriate.

Back over to Emo's Annex (which, by the way, is merely a tent in a parking lot) to see Valient Thorr. I'd been warned ahead of time that they were, well, questionable, and my warning was correct. While they have a highly energetic stage presence, musically they're hair rock in denim vests. Metal fans be warned. I ditched 'em after two songs and wandered over to see...

The Circle Jerks! The badge-holder line was long, long enough that the guys behind me from Time Magazine and Spin decided to give up. But I did make it in, and I saw what I'd estimate to be half of their set. I must say, they were killing it up there. Despite age and the bald patches mixed with dreadlocks on the vocalist's head, the band ripped it up. Plenty of offering the mic into the crowd for shout-along lyrics, as at any good punk show. The guitarist bounced all over the stage, and the crowd clearly felt the Circle Jerks still rage after all these years.

Finally, to round out the evening I caught The Decemberists at Stubb's. They were playing the entirety of their new album, Hazards of Love, which was interesting for me as this was the first time I'd ever seen The Decemberists despite being a fan. A friend of mine had expressed some negativity about the leaked copy of HoL he'd heard, but I think it hung together pretty well as a performance piece. My verdict is still out on the album, as I haven't listened to it yet. I'm sure as with most Decemberists stuff, I'll start out mildly indifferent and wind up enjoying it greatly. The band was clearly having a great time, and Colin Meloy rocked out quite a bit more than I would have imagined.

And that was my day one! I retired to my accommodations with aching feet in anticipation of Day Two. Stay tuned.

FLAMING TUSK IN PRINT

2009-03-13T01:08:00.005-04:00

Photographic proof of the "Abigail" review printed in the April, 2009 issue of Decibel magazine. Page 88.

"Abigail" in Decibel Magazine

2009-03-03T17:08:00.006-05:00

Decibel magazine's Cosmo Lee (also of metal mp3 blog Invisible Oranges, Stylus, PopMatters, and Pitchfork ) wrote a brief blurb about the Abigail EP on the Throw Me A Frickin' Bone page of the April '09 issue. Here, reproduced in its entirety:

Astoria's Flaming Tusk wins the odd bird award here. I have no idea what to call this. You Fail Me-era Converge, but sludgier, proggier and with black metal rasps? It's messy, but melodic and strangely compelling. You can download it for free at the band's site. Try or die!

TRY OR DIE.

Go buy every single copy of this issue you can find.

kill the undead

2009-02-10T21:27:00.001-05:00

I am tired of zombies.

No, fortunately, I am not besieged by walking corpses (anymore), but I have reached and breached my saturation point with the resurgence of the zombie in popular culture. That I have just learned about the existence of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is partly responsible for this, but the feeling has been growing for some time.

Now, that book may be hilariously awesome and my criticism isn't directly aimed at it. But reading the title did force my brain to state, unequivocally, that no, everything is not better with zombies in it. As I'm one of the subliterate few who've never actually read Pride and Prejudice, I grant that it's entirely likely that it IS better with zombies in it, but I try to make a point of not allowing contradictory specificities to get in the way of a good sweeping generalization.

I understand the horrible appeal of the zombie. What is more frightening than a mindless, inexorable killing machine which goes beyond mere murder and threatens to turn the victim into another rotting, ravenous abomination? Creepy. The enemy that can't be reasoned with, threatened, or even defeated. Certain death. Scary stuff.

I also understand the usefulness of the zombie as a blank slate for cultural commentary. First, the zombies were the Communists, coming to enslave us all into their hive-mind, arms outstretched, desirous of devouring our free, capitalist individuality. Then the post-modernists had their way with the trope and the zombie became, ha ha! reversal!, the very television-saturated, consumerist breathwasters who epitomize the American Way. As they say on The Internet, I see what you did there. Ultimately the zombie can stand in for any enemy which cannot be understood or communicated with and which seeks nothing but our total destruction.

My nascent rejectionism has nothing to do with that, though. Mythical monsters are only useful as commentary on our fellow humans after all.

It's the sheer, ever increasing volume of zombie-related material. Why does the world need even one more zombie story? Is the next zombie movie going to be somehow scarier, or funnier, or more clever than the scores which have come before? Isn't it telling that the most major innovation in recent zombie history is depicting them as fast runners instead of foot-dragging lurchers? Is this all we've got?

The modern cultural consumer is well known to want "the same, but different" across all media and all genres. I suppose I can't fault our pop artisans for putting food on the table by giving the audience what it desires. But I, I am tired of it, in the same way I've long been tired of cop/doctor/lawyer/family drama TV shows.

The undead are over, and I'm signing the Do Not Resuscitate order.

stagnation?

2009-01-24T13:38:00.003-05:00

Several of the voices in my head have been complaining that all I ever post about in this space these days is Flaming Tusk (next show Feb. 9 at Lit Lounge). This imaginary criticism is, I suppose, accurate.

To be fair, the Tusk and Seize Them! have been, together, almost the entirety of my creative output over the last several months. My "job" has been pretty slack since late December, so I don't even have any fun anecdotes about famous people or Cinematic Excess. The idea of writing something tickles my brain, but I still suffer from my chronic problem of lacking a story idea compelling enough to get me typing. Last night I even considered writing Doctor Who episodes but where, I must ask, is the line between writing "on spec" and writing "fan fiction"? As I lack any contacts or credibility with the BBC I fear any efforts on my part would fall into the latter category.

Rest assured, Internet, that as soon as I do or think something interesting you'll be the first to know.

this thing is happening

2009-01-13T17:24:00.003-05:00

FLAMING TUSK
1/16/09
MARKET HOTEL
BROOKLYN
9:30 PM
$7
also: The Fakers
Blue Leader
Human Host
Family of Love

I even put wheels on my 4x12 cabinet because holy hell are those things difficult to move.

Metal-Rules.com interviews Flaming Tusk

2008-12-18T15:48:00.001-05:00

Canadian metal webthing Metal-Rules.com has published their interview with Flaming Tusk.

Read and weep here.

Flaming Tusk in Underground Rising Podcast #12

2008-12-09T14:13:00.002-05:00

Dark Sky Records has included two tracks from Flaming Tusk's Abigail EP in the twelfth edition of their Underground Rising podcast.

We're on there with four other unsigned bands, and the podcast is distributed for free via the iTunes Music Store so go ahead and click on the link above if you've got iTunes installed.

Flaming Tusk's "Abigail" EP reviewed by Metal-Rules.com

2008-12-01T12:45:00.005-05:00

Hanntu at Canadian metalhead web mecca Metal-Rules.com has reviewed Flaming Tusk's Abigail EP, rating it 3 out of 5 (which translates to "recommended for serious fans" on their scale).

Metal-Rules says:

This five piece band from Astoria, New York plays an eclectic mix of death, black and thrash metal that draws as much musical influence from The Doors and Black Sabbath as Immortal, via Emperor and Deicide and Testament... Singer Stolas Trephinator mixes up tortured gurgles and screams with death roars to great effect, and the fact that I’m reminded of Schmier, Zetro Souza, Abbath and Glen Benton can only be a good thing. And it’s well worth you to taking the time to read their twisted lyrics, seeing as how ABIGAIL was inspired by the true story of Abigail Taylor (I won’t spoil it for you here but you can look it up on Wikipedia)... With the jagged, doom-ish riffing and the black/death vocals, ABIGAIL is a great debut effort. With the inevitable improvement on later albums in the lyrics department as the band matures, Flaming Tusk will be one to keep an eye out for.

Read the full review by clicking here

There's more to come from Metal-Rules.com w/r/t Flaming Tusk, so stay tuned.
And, of course, download the Abigail EP.

Flaming Tusk photo op

2008-12-01T02:06:00.004-05:00

FT buddy Andrew Lynch dropped by the house yesterday to take some Flaming Tusk band photos for our upcoming profile on metal-rules.com. I fiddled with a color treatment on one of my favorites, with the following result:

W.

2008-10-30T11:39:00.003-04:00

Last night as we were on our way out of the theater following a screening of W., my ladyfriend and I were asked to record an interview with a Swedish radio journalist regarding our feelings on both the movie and the actual man. Since I've apparently represented the entirety of America on the Swedish airwaves, I suppose it's appropriate now to spout my feelings to the rest of the world.

When I first became aware of the existence of W., my reaction was that it's simply far too easy to take two-plus hours' worth of shots at our still-President. How, I thought, could a comedy about a self-parody really be all that interesting? It wasn't until much later that I learned the movie had been directed by Oliver Stone, and while I'm by no means a fan of all, or possibly even most, of Stone's films I was was intrigued enough to put W. on the "will see" list.

I think it's not giving too much away to say that the movie charts the course of George W. Bush's life from his induction into a frat at Yale until just before the 2004 presidential campaign (also, the boat sinks!). Structurally, it intercuts his distant past with more recent past in an attempt to evoke resonances between events in Bush II's first term and his troubled history.

To use a term of technical film criticism jargon, my reaction to the movie was more or less 'meh'. I do give credit to Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser for attempting to draw Bush as a semi-real character rather than a pure caricature. What they could not overcome was the fact that George W. Bush simply isn't a very interesting man.

So Bush is an alcoholic, privileged rich boy who's had everything handed to him his whole life and suffers from extreme Daddy Issues? Gee, that's fresh and compelling. And how do you draw an audience into the inner life of a guy who pretty clearly lacks one? The closest we get is visualization of Bush's "happy place": being all alone on the field at the empty Texas Rangers stadium.

Far too many scenes build to, essentially, punchlines consisting of well-known Bushisms with which we are all too familiar. There's an overall lack of drama stemming from the audience's foreknowledge of every single event that's going to happen. This, of course, is an issue with any biopic or historical fiction, but what one generally hopes for is interesting characters and an evocation of the tension those characters felt during the events in question. In W., the Grand Events are generally dispensed with via stock (and/or artfully altered) news footage after which we are treated to dramatizations of conversations had by the Big Players Involved. Maybe the revelation of Dick Cheney's grand worldview of American Empire is supposed to be shocking but, really, how can it be at this stage?

Speaking of said players, I must give credit for both best performance and most interesting characterization in W. to Jeffrey Wright for his portrayal of Gen. Colin Powell. Making Powell the sympathetic character in the Bush administration was most likely a gimme for Stone and Co., but it does work. Conversely, Thandie Newton's Condoleezza Rice is simply a silly cartoon. Elizabeth Banks's Laura Bush is boring as hell, but then again so is Laura Bush. Richard Dreyfuss is excellent as Dick Cheney and deserves praise for a relatively subtle performance given his source material.

Swedish Radio wanted my opinion on how W. was likely to affect the Bush legacy. I told them that Bush's legacy was written long before this film, and that even without it Bush will be remembered at best as a President who not only failed in everything he attempted to do (unless the plan was to create a state of perpetual war and chaos, which is entirely likely), but diminished the power and stature of the United States to such a degree that American hegemony over world affairs is likely over forever.

If that latter point is true perhaps I should be grateful to W.

criticism!

2008-10-24T20:18:00.001-04:00

No musical thing I've ever been involved with has been reviewed before. Before now, that is.
Venerable metal blog Chronicles Of Chaos has written up Flaming Tusk's Abigail EP in their Demos department. Read the review.

regarding Sarah Palin

2008-10-20T11:43:00.000-04:00

A longtime reader (hi, Dad!) wrote me to express his surprise that I hadn't written anything about Sarah Palin in this space. Perhaps I've been attempting to ignore her so as not to feed the troll.

I would write Sarah Palin off as a cartoon, a self-parody and a caricature if it weren't for two things: the success of her demagoguery and the insult to women she embodies.

The former is, of course, the reason she was brought onto the McCain ticket. In addition to transparently and cynically attempting to attract disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters, McCain's campaign realized that Palin was perfectly cast to play well to white suburbanites and rustics suffering from Authoritarian Personality. She's somebody they can "relate to" who is "like them". While McCain had to attempt to appeal to the majority of Americans, Palin was tasked with currying the favor of reactionaries, racists, medieval-minded Christianists, jingoists and homophobes. Her affected "golly-goshdarnit" aspect puts an apple-cheeked mask on the grinning demon of insinuation, hissing at us to wonder "who Barack Obama really is". Let's not forget that the base she is pandering to isn't merely the bedrock of a political party, but the lowest and meanest parts of human nature.

Her candidacy is an insult to American women, particularly those who've devoted their lives to achieving some kind of political parity with men. However, it's not merely the fact that she was chosen specifically because she is a woman which causes offense, or the attempted manipulation of the female electorate evidenced by her selection. Rather, it is the particular stereotype of femininity she chooses to adopt as her public persona.

It's popular to characterize Sarah Palin as stupid. I find it difficult to believe that anyone can achieve political success, especially on the national stage, by being staggeringly unintelligent. Even George W. Bush, who is by no means an intellectual, clearly has a type of fratboyish social smarts. However, it is clear that Palin is more than happy to appear, accurately or otherwise, like a rampaging airhead. Proudly oblivious of key foreign policy ("what's the Bush Doctrine?"), unable to name credible news publications that she reads to inform herself, inability to speak in public without clumsily relying on GOP talking points... the list continues to grow. She epitomizes two of the most contemptible aspects of modern right-wing politics: the populist appeal of total ignorance ("hey, she's an idiot like me! I really relate to that!"), and the denial of responsibility via rejection of reality as evidenced by her reaction so far to Troopergate.

As an aside, this may be brilliant positioning for her role as Vice President, since under Cheney it has become clear that the new purpose for the VP office is to manage all the outrageously illegal activities that the White House cares to undertake. The Republicans, via Alberto Gonzales and many others, have clearly demonstrated their belief that public expressions of abject incompetence are a viable legal defense against charges of criminality. Perhaps by installing as Vice President a woman who goes out of her way to cultivate an aura of ditziness the nascent McCain administration is merely taking the next logical step to cover the ass of the Imperial Presidency.

In sum, the women of the United States have been offered as their political champion a picture perfect cliché of the subservient, ignorant, photogenic Conservative Woman. Her politics, of course, are also essentially anti-woman, what with her refusal to recognize that the decisions to carry her daughter's pregnancy to term and to essentially force her daughter into a loveless marriage with the mullethead who knocked Bristol up are choices. Palin's antique religious philosophy doesn't do her gender any favors, either. I shudder to think of the impact her election may have on a generation of American girls, and that's sad. Her elevation to office should be a cause for celebration, and it would be if her place was taken by any number of other, vastly more qualified women.

For me the possible election of a McCain/Palin ticket smacks far too heavily of a dystopian sci-fi novel in which the President dies in office to be replaced by a moronic religious zealot who decides that launching all our nukes at Canada is exactly what Jesus wants.

Remember, everbody: turnout, turnout, turnout. Go vote.

good feedback

2008-10-16T19:57:00.001-04:00

Vanshnookenraggen seems to like the Flaming Tusk EP.

WARNING: EXTREMELY BRUTAL

2008-10-16T09:55:00.003-04:00

People of the world.

NYC extreme metal band Flaming Tusk has just released their first EP, Abigail, onto an unsuspecting world.

To download it for free, in pretty much every possible digital format, visit flamingtusk.com and click on Music, or visit our bandcamp.mu page, or use this handy embedded player:

Abigail (Guts Down The Drain) by Flaming Tusk

~~TOTALLY~~ NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR MELTED FACES

title imminent

2008-10-09T22:43:00.002-04:00

The Flaming Tusk demo has been promoted to the Flaming Tusk EP. Title TBA.

Add flamingtusk.com to your RSS feed reader, or just, y'know, keep checking back.

Plus I'm sure I'll announce it here.

Hail.

you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

2008-09-25T18:33:00.005-04:00

People are flipping the hell out about the Canon EOS 5D MKII and the fact that, in addition to stills, it shoots 1080 HD digital video as well. A primary culprit in the hype about this functionality seems to be Vincent Laforet and this blog post of his.

Now, I do not disagree that the 5D MKII is most likely a very nice camera, and furthermore I think the 1080 video capture feature is pretty cool. What it most certainly is not, however, is a game-changer in the professional cinematography world.

Vincent claims, or at least repeats claims, in that blog post that the 5D MKII shoots "full resolution 1080p RAW footage". This is wildly inaccurate, as a brief glance at the official specs sheet makes plain. To quote:

Movie Type: MOV (Video: H.264...)

H.264 compression is not at all RAW. Not even close. It is, in fact, quite highly (if nicely) compressed^*. So let's not dupe people into thinking that they're getting RAW HD video footage from this camera.

Vincent also quotes an unnamed "top commercial film editor who regularly edits RED camera footage" as saying that the 5D MKII's low-light performance is “far superior to the RED camera”. From the test footage that I've seen, this is impossible to say. It is clear that the 5D MKII applies a quite strong gamma curve to the image (and other color processing), rolling the shadows off into oblivion. Granted, this is a very common procedure in video post (crushing contrast), but the fact that the 5D MKII is doing so in-camera makes it impossible to tell how noisy the shadow areas actually are. Applying permanent gamma curves in-camera is also by no means a hallmark of RAW footage. If you actually look at RAW 2K, 3K or 4K footage (from, say, the RED One camera) you'll notice that it actually looks rather desaturated and has fairly flat contrast... until you apply your own color and gamma curves. This, friends, is the point of RAW video capture: to give you maximum possible pixels and minimum pre-processing of the image so you have a beautifully pixel-rich canvas on which to work your color grading magic in post-production.

As another nitpick to set against the claim that this camera will somehow be widely adopted for professional (or even pro-am) cinematography is the fact that you are limited to a 30fps framerate. No 24 or 25 fps capture? No varispeed for fast or slow motion? Good luck interesting most cinematographers.

Also, while Canon-compatible still lenses are very nice I seriously doubt you're going to find any cinematographer who's itching to stop using the huge variety of extant PL-mount cinematography lenses made by Cooke, Angenieux and others.

In summary, while the 5D MKII seems to be an excellent DSLR the 1080p video capture feature is likely to be used as nothing more than a nice added-value functionality for stills photographers and photojournalists. I find it highly improbable that it will find any significant adoption in the cinematography world. And please, let's not continue to make wild claims about RAW 1080 video capture.

*What sets "raw" apart from "not raw" image capture isn't so much lack of compression (even though that's what I seized upon in the post above), it's whether or not the image has been "demosaiced" (or, if you prefer, de-Bayered) into an RGB image. AFAIK there's no way to generate an H.264 file that isn't RGB or YUV, meaning that the image must have been de-Bayered at some point and is therefore no longer "raw".

whew.

2008-09-22T12:38:00.002-04:00

Good lord, a lot of mail piles up when you aren't paying attention to anything but work for three weeks. I guess that means there's still a world out there.

As Good As Dead was a pretty great experience overall, and it feels good to be done with working on my first feature film as a crew member. My hope that taking on a freelance job as a RED tech would allow me to meet some good people and move closer to my ultimate career goals was pretty well validated, fortunately. If I'm very lucky I might get to have some small hand in the post process for the movie but even if I don't I did impress quite a few folks with my editing and made some excellent contacts.

We had the wrap party at swanky meatpacking district club Tenjune, which was nifty even if the open bar only lasted two hours, and I had the pleasure of indtroducing my special ladyfriend to Cary Elwes. Good stuff, good stuff.

Seize Them! appears to have landed a monthly residency at Tribeca nightspot Uncle Mike's, which we're all quite excited about. Our first show of the series is this Saturday, 9/27, at 10:15PM. Come on by if you're in the area.

Flaming Tusk has begun recording our "2008 Demo", as we're calling it. Looks like we're going to have five songs ready to go in a couple of weeks. The goal is to book a debut show for Halloween night. If all else fails we'll just throw our own party, of course.

imaginemerunningbywhileshoutingthis

2008-09-08T14:04:00.002-04:00

Hoo boy, so much going on.

I am writing from the set of the in-progress indie thriller feature film As Good As Dead, on which I am performing the services of a RED camera technician. Basically this means that I try to keep the cameras running (they're using two), and I back up all the footage from the cameras and deliver it to the post facility the production is using. It's been pretty fun so far, if tiring, and it's cool to get to work with Cary Elwes, Andie MacDowell, Frank Whaley, Matt Dallas and Jess Weixler.

They're still in search of an editor, which is a bit painful for me. When the producer dropped by the room where I was working to announce to the production staff that an ad needed to be placed so they could find an "experienced editor" I turned around and said "well, there's me!". Sadly, my lack of feature credits precludes me from consideration (for now, anyway) despite having quickly thrown together an edit of part of a scene that was praised highly by several producers and inspired the director to say to me "that's really good! You're a good editor. Want to cut the movie?". The director, sadly, does not have a lot of clout on this particular picture. Still, I'm trying to be a good sport about it and I hold out some small hope because the production is having a tremendously difficult time finding an editor with the necessary experience who will work for the amount of money they're offering. We shall see.

Band stuff is going pretty well. Seize Them! has a show coming up on 9/27 at Uncle Mike's in Manhattan, and Flaming Tusk is in preparations to play our debut show on Halloween.

Congratulations and kudos to my friend, author Chris Krovatin (better known to his bandmates as Stolas Trephinator), on the release of his latest novel, Venomous. Pick it up if you're into dark YA fiction. I'll begin reading my personalized copy right after I finish White Noise.

the truest freedom is having no rights at all, I guess

2008-08-01T10:41:00.005-04:00

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Hey, guess who officially doesn't have any 4th Amendment protection anymore? You, citizen, if you're crossing the border into the United States.

The Washington Post has revealed that it is Department of Homeland Security policy that their border agents may seize, "absent individualized suspicion", "any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form," including hard drives, flash drives, cell phones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes. They also cover "all papers and other written documentation," including books, pamphlets and "written materials commonly referred to as 'pocket trash' or 'pocket litter.'"

Additionally, the DHS reserves the right to "share copies of [the data] with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons". Also, they can hold on to your belongings as long as they desire... most likely just enough time to grab all those nude photos you took of your girlfriend during your vacation to the French Riviera that you thought you'd so cleverly stashed in that hidden directory.

All joking aside, though, this is unbelievably outrageous. Having your laptop (or, remember, "any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form,") seized indefinitely to be scoured, copied, shared and sifted for any hint of wrongdoing (or wrongthinking, one must assume) "absent individualized suspicion" is not only the definition of unreasonable search and seizure, it is blatant tyranny.

Have a nice trip, citizen.

developments

2008-07-23T12:10:00.003-04:00

Many things are happening.

Firstly, I've made the transition from full-time employee to freelancer and I think I'm going to be much happier. I expect to get a fair amount of editing work through the company I previously worked for full-time, and I'm free to seek out other work elsewhere. What made all of this possible was an opportunity (thanks be to DJ Porkcube) to work with OffHollywood Digital as an on-set technician for the RED Digital Cinema cameras they rent out to major productions. I'm really looking forward to that... I love being on a film set full of professionals working at the top of their game, and no one can deny that I like playing with expensive, hi-tech toys. So, ideally, I'll be able to pick up a couple of days of work each week being a RED pimp and a couple of other days of editing work, which will leave me with ample time to work on things for my bands Seize Them! and Flaming Tusk (no website just yet, folks).

Secondly, huge congratulations to my friends in Boston-area band The Luxury for winning a slot as an opening act for Coldplay's August 4th show in Boston. The show is sold out, but if you happen to be going give The Luxury some love and t-shirt dollars. They gathered enough votes in the WFNX-sponsored contest to land them in the top three, which meant they'd get presented to Coldplay as a potential opener, and then Coldplay chose them. Good on ya, guys.

Thirdly, plans have been made to fly to Columbus, Ohio next month to continue shooting the Everything, Kansas documentary. We've had a few setbacks with some of our interview subjects going through some major life upheavals, but the project moves forward. Also, I'll be up in Boston this weekend to attend Christa Terry's party for the release of her book iDo: Planning Your Wedding With Nothing But 'Net and to shoot some followup footage with her and her husband Tedd.

Fourthwise, Seize Them! will be playing the world famous Knitting Factory New York on August 15th, quite late in the evening. We're very excited about this and anyone who can get to the city should definitely come on out. Details are available at the seizethem.com Gig Calendar.

this is what the world is for, making electricity

2008-07-04T22:39:00.003-04:00

Yeah, it's overwhelming, but what else can we do?
get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute?

If we must define the Anthem of the Summer as The Song I Can't Stop Listening To, then I'm declaring for MGMT's "Time To Pretend".

In perhaps the only way fitting for a summer brainworm, Time To Pretend seems to be the sole really worthwhile track on MGMT's album, Oracular Spectacular, but let's not be curmudgeons in the face of joy. "Electric Feel" is pretty damned good, too. "Time To Pretend" hits me right in the heartbone with what are, let's face it, gimme lyrics tuned specifically to my particular species of rootless suburban refugee. A wink and a nod to ya, boys... your alchemist knew what she was doing when you two went into the retort.

DETHKLOK CONCERT-TYPE THEATRICAL HYBRID EVENT

2008-06-27T16:48:00.003-04:00

Dethklok, playing the Nokia Theater in Manhattan on 6/25/08

It was my first time at the Nokia Theater (where, yes, they display phones on the walls and have a "charging station" for your "handheld"), and I realized that the last time I'd been in that space was back when it was the Astor movie theater... I'm pretty sure I saw the re-release of 2001 there a few years ago.

My crew of folks, like many others in attendance, chose to skip the opening act. Dethklok went on around 10PM. Seeing full-length animated music videos for each song was pretty cool ("Murmaider" being a standout), though I wish overall I had a better view of the real, physical band. The photo above was taken during the encore, "Hatredy", which was dedicated to George Carlin and for which they had no animation and turned up the stage lights.

It's hard to think of the Dethklok show as a totally legit concert, but it was certainly an event, and I had a really good time. I've had a bit of a heterosexual man crush on Brendon Small for quite some time, having been a big Home Movies fan, and it was very cool for me to see him up there rocking out.

The performances of the songs were more or less note-perfect to the recordings on Dethalbum, which is, I suppose, what one would expect and many would desire. I'm always left a touch cold by rote performances, but when you have to sync your rocking to pre-recorded video well enough so that your singing matches your cartoon counterpart's lips, I guess there's nothing to be done other than slave yourself to a click track. Then again, drummer Gene Hoglan is known as "the atomic clock" so maybe I'm off the mark here.

One minus point was the sponsorship by some videogame called "Bad Company". As a mark of how old I am, when I saw the banner for it out by the merch area I briefly assumed it was an advertisement for a new Bad Company album, so it was significantly less hilarious to me to discover its true nature. Really, at any other rock show I'd be pretty offended by being advertised to with a pre-show video clip, but considering Dethklok's source as an ad-supported television show I kinda let it slide.

Soon enough, Dethklok will be opening for Flaming Tusk.

thank you, Rep. Kucinich

2008-06-10T11:51:00.006-04:00

Well, my deadline for Impeachment by the Ides has well passed. However, I was very pleased to hear this morning that Rep. Dennis Kucinich introduced a "Notification of Intent to Offer Resolution" of articles of impeachment against president George W. Bush. I assume he felt that the timing was appropriate, what with the long-awaited publication of Phase II of the Senate Intelligence Committee Reports on Prewar Iraq Intelligence (short version: surprise! The Administration lied about everything everyone's been saying they were lying about all along. Whee!)

Now, I'm not terribly well versed in Congressional protocol but my assumption is that the Resolution has not technically been presented for consideration by anyone. However, the entire text was read into the Congressional Record. The entire text can be found here, in .pdf form, but rather than reproduce it in its entirety below I will, rather, include the Article headings which go a long way to telling the whole story of why it is vital that Bush be removed from office.

There's little likelihood of all thirty-five articles making it into any final impeachment, and several of the Articles, while certainly scathing damnations of Bush and his Administration, are probably not appropriate for impeachment (at least, on their own), but it is a fairly complete litany of the Administration's more proveable crimes. The order of presentation is somewhat questionable as well, but this is niggling. I've highlighted my personal favorites in bold:

Resolved, That President George W. Bush be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate:

ARTICLE I.—CREATING A SECRET PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN TO MANUFACTURE A FALSE CASE FOR WAR AGAINST IRAQ

ARTICLE II.—FALSELY, SYSTEMATICALLY, AND WITH CRIMINAL INTENT CONFLATING THE ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 WITH MISREPRESENTATION OF IRAQ AS AN IMMINENT SECURITY THREAT AS PART OF A FRAUDULENT JUSTIFICATION FOR A WAR OF AGGRESSION

ARTICLE III.—MISLEADING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AND MEMBERS OF CONGRESS TO BELIEVE IRAQ POSSESSED WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, SO AS TO MANUFACTURE A FALSE CASE FOR WAR

ARTICLE IV.—MISLEADING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AND MEMBERS OF CONGRESS TO BELIEVE IRAQ POSED AN IMMINENT THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES

ARTICLE V.—ILLEGALLY MISSPENDING FUNDS TO SECRETLY BEGIN A WAR OF AGGRESSION

ARTICLE VI.—INVADING IRAQ IN VIOLATION OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF H.J. RES. 114

ARTICLE VII.—INVADING IRAQ ABSENT A DECLARATION OF WAR

ARTICLE VIII.—INVADING IRAQ, A SOVEREIGN NATION, IN VIOLATION OF THE UN CHARTER AND INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL LAW

ARTICLE IX.—FAILING TO PROVIDE TROOPS WITH BODY ARMOR AND VEHICLE ARMOR

ARTICLE X.—FALSIFYING ACCOUNTS OF U.S. TROOP DEATHS AND INJURIES FOR POLITICAL PURPOSES

ARTICLE XI.—ESTABLISHMENT OF PERMANENT U.S. MILITARY BASES IN IRAQ

ARTICLE XII.—INITIATING A WAR AGAINST IRAQ FOR CONTROL OF THAT NATION’S NATURAL RESOURCES

ARTICLE XIII.—CREATING A SECRET TASK FORCE TO DEVELOP ENERGY AND MILITARY POLICIES WITH RESPECT TO IRAQ AND OTHER COUNTRIES

ARTICLE XIV.—MISPRISION OF A FELONY, MISUSE AND EXPOSURE OF CLASSIFIED INFORMATION AND OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE IN THE MATTER OF VALERIE PLAME WILSON, CLANDESTINE AGENT OF THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

ARTICLE XV.—PROVIDING IMMUNITY FROM PROSECUTION FOR CRIMINAL CONTRACTORS IN IRAQ

ARTICLE XVI.—RECKLESS MISSPENDING AND WASTE OF US TAX DOLLARS IN CONNECTION WITH IRAQ CONTRACTORS

ARTICLE XVII.—ILLEGAL DETENTION: DETAINING INDEFINITELY AND WITHOUT CHARGE PERSONS BOTH U.S. CITIZENS AND FOREIGN CAPTIVES

ARTICLE XVIII.—TORTURE: SECRETLY AUTHORIZING, AND ENCOURAGING THE USE OF TORTURE AGAINST CAPTIVES IN AFGHANISTAN, IRAQ, AND OTHER PLACES, AS A MATTER OF OFFICIAL POLICY

ARTICLE XIX.—RENDITION: KIDNAPPING PEOPLE AND TAKING THEM AGAINST THEIR WILL TO ‘‘BLACK SITES’’ LOCATED IN OTHER NATIONS, INCLUDING NATIONS KNOWN TO PRACTICE TORTURE

ARTICLE XX.—IMPRISONING CHILDREN

ARTICLE XXI.—MISLEADING CONGRESS AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ABOUT THREATS FROM IRAN, AND SUPPORTING TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS WITHIN IRAN, WITH THE GOAL OF OVERTHROWING THE IRANIAN GOVERNMENT

ARTICLE XXII—CREATING SECRET LAWS

ARTICLE XXIII—VIOLATION OF THE POSSE COMITATUS ACT

ARTICLE XXIV.—SPYING ON AMERICAN CITIZENS, WITHOUT A COURT-ORDERED WARRANT, IN VIOLATION OF THE LAW AND THE FOURTH AMENDMENT

ARTICLE XXV.—DIRECTING TELECOMMUNICATIONS COMPANIES TO CREATE AN ILLEGAL AND UNCONSTITUTIONAL DATABASE OF THE PRIVATE TELEPHONE NUMBERS AND EMAILS
OF AMERICAN CITIZENS (ed. note: I have a feeling 'numbers' will be edited to read 'calls' in the final draft)

ARTICLE XXVI.—ANNOUNCING THE INTENT TO VIOLATE LAWS WITH SIGNING STATEMENTS, AND VIOLATING THOSE LAWS

ARTICLE XXVII.—FAILING TO COMPLY WITH CONGRESSIONAL SUBPOENAS AND INSTRUCTING FORMER EMPLOYEES NOT TO COMPLY

ARTICLE XXVIII.—TAMPERING WITH FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS, CORRUPTION OF THE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE

ARTICLE XXIX.—CONSPIRACY TO VIOLATE THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965

ARTICLE XXX.—MISLEADING CONGRESS AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IN AN ATTEMPT TO DESTROY MEDICARE

ARTICLE XXXI.—KATRINA: FAILURE TO PLAN FOR THE PREDICTED DISASTER OF HURRICANE KATRINA, FAILURE TO RESPOND TO A CIVIL EMERGENCY

ARTICLE XXXII.—MISLEADING CONGRESS AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, SYSTEMATICALLY UNDERMINING EFFORTS TO ADDRESS GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE

ARTICLE XXXIII.—REPEATEDLY IGNORED AND FAILED TO RESPOND TO HIGH LEVEL INTELLIGENCE WARNINGS OF PLANNED TERRORIST ATTACKS IN THE US, PRIOR TO 911

ARTICLE XXXIV.—OBSTRUCTION OF INVESTIGATION INTO THE ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

ARTICLE XXXV.—ENDANGERING THE HEALTH OF 9/11 FIRST RESPONDERS

I suppose putting the issues related to the Iraq War first satisfy the "if it bleeds, it leads" dictum of public relations, but personally I think the strongest arguments for impeachment lie further down, in discussion of secret laws, extralegal imprisonment, etc.

Remember: the importance of impeachment is not in the satisfaction of punishing a Very Bad Boy, it's the official, public repudiation of the anticonstitutional actions of the current Administration and the intent to make sure the Executive Branch of the United States Government cannot continue on this course.

ST! video now on YouTube

2008-06-06T11:49:00.000-04:00

Well goll-lee, I guess we're a real live band now that we've got video on Teh YourTurbs.

Enjoy these clips from our record release show at Don Hill's on 4.25.08. Remember, you can download the whole show for free from seizethem.com. And, of course, our EP is still available on collectible, digipaked CD and via the iTunes Music Store and Amazon.com's MP3 store.

Cleoporchcat:

Drinking Song:

Ramble Tamble:

Barack Obama For President

2008-06-04T11:33:00.002-04:00

My sincere congratulations to Barack Obama for securing the probable Democratic nomination for the presidency. This morning I made my first-ever monetary contribution to a presidential campaign by donating here, and I strongly suggest you do the same. Obama has been able to come this far primarily with funding generated by small donors, and that needs to continue.

We, as a nation, now have the opportunity to elect this man and, thereby, indicate to the rest of the world that we're willing to join them in the 21st century as responsible global citizens. My great hope is that what can loosely be called "my generation", those of us 18-35 or so, will continue to rally behind Obama. It's our future we're deciding here, and if we want to get any kind of a decent start undoing the horror created by our predecessors it begins with this election.

make me famous, using democracy

2008-05-21T16:00:00.003-04:00

Seize Them! has entered yet another contest, this time with the intent of landing a slot at this year's Lollapalooza festival. Unlike the Ourstage thing I mentioned previously, you can actually go vote for us directly by following this link.
Vote early, vote often (once per day per email address... personally I've got four or five addresses to use), in the grand Chicago tradition. The number one band right now has 1020 votes after three days of vote casting, while we've got somewhere around 40, so as you can see we have a way to go.
Any and all voting is greatly appreciated.

hey look I made a thing

2008-05-07T00:22:00.002-04:00

The Seize Them! EP digipaks arrived.

You want one, yes?

museums can be fun

2008-05-05T21:32:00.002-04:00

Kids enjoying Olafur Eliasson's Ventilator at MoMa in New York City.

Seize Them! EP now on sale in various formats

2008-04-28T12:36:00.002-04:00

Dear Internets,
At long last the Seize Them! EP (hereinafter referred to as the ST!EP) is a reality, the proof of which is that you can spend money and have one of your very own.

Those of you who like physical CDs in beautiful, collectible digipak packaging (and with a free sticker!) will want to either head over to the relevant page on the seizethem.com site, or see the sidebar on this blog for a Google Checkout link. If you prefer PayPal, we can accommodate that at the High Water Media webstore.

You hipper and anti-materialistic types might prefer to download your ephemera from the iTunes Music Store (click here: , or, again, use the link in the sidebar), or the Amazon.com MP3 Store.

In all cases the EP costs a mere $5. As Ferris Bueller says, "If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up. It is so choice".

BONUS: Seize Them!'s 4.25.08 EP release show at Don Hill's is available for FREE DOWNLOAD from seizethem.com. Listen, and weep that you were not there to witness the glory. Or, if you were, it makes a nice souvenir!

Notice to Hillary Clinton (all others please ignore): Get out of the race. Obama has an insurmountable delegate lead unless you resort to antidemocratic massaging of "superdelegates", and Republicans will never vote for you. End the charade. Seriously. Also, your campaign behavior (and Bill's) has been disgusting and reprehensible.

vote for ST! on OurStage.com

2008-04-14T14:02:00.003-04:00

I've entered three of our songs into competition at OurStage.com (prizes vary, but the important one is next month's contest for a slot at this year's Bonnaroo festival). The banner above will take you to Hey, Golden, but we've got Shimmery and Cleoporchcat on the site as well.

Take a minute to help us out, if you would be so kind, and we will be eternally grateful.

endings

2008-04-11T11:13:00.003-04:00

The self-titled Seize Them! EP is finished. It goes to the pressing plant today. Discs will be in hand by April 24, just in time for our record release show on April 25, and internet e-tailers like the iTunes Music Store, Amazon, Napster, etc., will have it up for sale by early June.

A huge debt of gratitude to our mixing and mastering engineer-cum-producer Don Red for his talent and tireless effort. Thanks, also, to so many other people that the only appropriate place to mention them is in the liner notes. Look for your name.

Here's a theory I made up in five seconds after seeing a headline: Katie Couric is positioning herself to become Hillary Clinton's press secretary. You heard it here first, folks.

seriously, folks, we need this guy

2008-03-20T10:40:00.002-04:00

This man must be elected president. If you haven't watched Barack Obama's recent speech, start with the first quarter of it below, and go on to the rest of it. Go ahead, seriously:

There are many noteable things here, of course, not the least of which is what Jon Stewart referred to as "talking to Americans as if they were adults". Is it as shocking to the rest of you, after all these years of utter mindlessness in the government, that you can actually watch and be enthralled by half an hour of a political speech?

The promise of an Obama presidency goes beyond the man himself to the, honestly, much more important question of the people Obama will bring into positions of power in the government. People like Samantha Power, who I mentioned in an earlier post. She's obviously on the outs for the moment, but I have no doubt she'd find a place in the Obama administration. Obama will surround himself with the people who have the worldview the United States needs to survive the early 21st century.

In music news, Seize Them! has finished recording all the instrument tracks for the upcoming, yet-to-be-named, EP (dropping in April!) and they are awesome. All that's left is vocal recording and a final mix. Very exciting.

I've been fiddling with the idea of a cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" in a bluegrass-esque style, and last night I whipped up a proof-of-concept demo just to see if it works. It does. Listen to it here, if you're interested.

leap year rocking

2008-03-04T13:52:00.002-05:00

Just a quick note to say that my band, Seize Them!, has posted the recording of our 2.29.08 show at Connolly's Klub 45 in Times Square to our website, seizethem.com. .mp3 and FLAC formats, as usual. Share and enjoy!

We'll be back at Connolly's on Mar. 28th, then at a Jam Solid Productions Battle of the Bands in Garwood, NJ on 4/20, then we have our EP release show at Don Hill's in TriBeCa on 4/25. Lots of live Seize Them! coming up for you to enjoy.

The EP is coming along well. Bass and drums tracking is finished, and this coming weekend will see all the guitar parts recorded. After that it's the keys and the vocals, and then we're into the final mix! Huzzah!

I don't want to have to say 'I told you so'

2008-02-28T12:47:00.005-05:00

In my earlier post about the necessity of impeaching the current President and Vice President, I offered as part of my rationale the imperative of repudiating as much of the Bush Doctrine, its associated assaults on the Constitution, and the general MO of the American Empire as possible. The danger inherent in failing to publicly reject the illegal and reprehensible powers that the current Executive has assumed to itself is that future Presidents will have the road open to them to do far worse.

Personally, I am supporting Barack Obama in the current contest (sorry, Ralph... I voted for you twice, but you're all done), in no small part because I believe his election will send a strong message to the rest of the world that the United States, recent evidence aside, is not entirely a nation of insane, jingoistic assholes and that we might actually take the idea of behaving as a modern global civilization somewhat seriously. Obama seems most willing to engage with the world on a constructive level and, more importantly, I think he has a sincere desire for the United States to be a good-faith shepherd of its empire.

That said, my support of him is not wildly enthusiastic because despite the extra plush he'll add to the velvet glove he is still a corporatist hegemonist, albeit a kinder, gentler one.

Clinton... well, none of us have any illusions about Hillary Clinton, now do we? She is, after all, the number one recipient of campaign contributions from the defense industry, even beating out John McCain¹.

Both Clinton and Obama spend a lot of their airtime talking about 'withdrawing' from Iraq, and I've been commenting for nearly as long that as good as that sounds to our absurdity-fatigued ears it's a disingenuous statement at best and a total lie at worst. Both candidates plan to finish the mammoth diplomatic compound known as The Green Zone (a civilian contractor friend of mine who did a six-month stint in Iraq reminded me several times that there are many "green zones"), both candidates intend to leave tens of thousands of soldiers in Iraq to train and advise the Iraqi military, "combat Al Qaeda" and "neutralize Iran", both candidates will leave most if not all of the military bases we've constructed there in operation, and that massive diplomatic presence is going to require an equally massive security force.

The latter part is where it gets a bit depressing. We're all aware that the vast majority of diplomatic security for Americans in Iraq is provided by private, armed military contractors like Blackwater and their ilk. My feelings about the danger that extralegal, unaccountable paramilitary forces pose to both human life and democratic governance are well known, so I don't feel the need to go into detail here.

Barack Obama has also taken a public stand that unaccountable private militaries are dangerous and undesirable, for which I laud him. Obama sponsored a bill last year which sought to create a structure for prosecuting State Department contractors who commit crimes in extraterritorial areas of operation, for one thing. However, his actions seem to be drifting away from his rhetoric on this issue and I think this is a point on which he must be taken to task.

A "senior foreign policy adviser" (who is left unnamed in the article, but is almost certainly Samantha Power) told Jeremy Scahill in a recent The Nation interview that Obama "will not 'rule out' using private security companies like Blackwater Worldwide in Iraq" and that, further, "Obama does not plan to sign on to legislation that seeks to ban the use of these forces in US war zones by January 2009"².

Now, it's true that Obama plans to increase funding for actual US Government diplomatic security forces, but the above article goes on to say that actually creating a diplomatic security force of the necessary size and training would literally take years. There are, apparently, only thirty six diplomatic security agents currently in Iraq who are actual US Government employees, as compared to Blackwater's thousand and other firms' hundreds³. If Obama's bill creating a prosecutorial structure for private contractors is not passed, and if Obama continues to refuse to support the Stop Outsourcing Security Act, we'll be left in exactly the same position we are now: with an unaccountable, extralegal Praetorian Guard.

Obama's campaign claims that we really have no good choices here and that this is an inherited problem. That it is an inherited problem is certainly true; that we have no choices is not. The obvious choice, and the one we've been led to believe we're getting, is a total withdrawal from Iraq barring the usual (read: drastically smaller than currently planned) diplomatic corps we have in all nations with whom we have relations. The United States' unwillingness to give up strategic territory that it has seized is what makes it appear that there are no choices. Obama can, and should, do better.

1. The Huffington Post: "Defense Industry Embraces Democrats, Hillary By Far The Favorite"
2. The Nation: "Obama's Mercenary Position"
3. Ibid.

terminator? i hardly KNOW her!

2008-02-14T01:56:00.004-05:00

I've suddenly become ambivalent about Fox's new series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. This happened more or less at the last minute; when I started watching the fifth episode I had every intention of removing the season pass from my TiVo and turning my back on the show entirely.

Briefly, for those who are unfamiliar with the premise, I will summarize. TSCC relates the continuing adventures of perpetually menaced mother Sarah Connor and her son John, the future savior of mankind. As in the movies which began the franchise, Skynet, the AI master of the world, sends robotic assassins back through time to murder John Connor and thereby remove the primary threat to its future hegemony. The human resistance in the future is able to provide a co-opted Terminator to protect young John, but in a departure from the previous stories this Terminator is significantly technologically superior to Skynet's typical soldiers. With this Terminator's help, Sarah and John attempt to do what they can in the present day (the series branches off from established continuity between T2 and T3 and brings the characters into 2007 from 1999) to thwart Skynet.

The Terminator universe bears returning to because it has, in the words of an associate of mine, every sci-fi trope you could want. Rogue AI, a post-apocalyptic future, robots, a young hero-to-be, time travel, time-traveling robots, hallucinatory alternate realties, etc. etc. However, the only way generic signifiers are made satisfying is by wrapping them around a story which feels true enough to its premises to enfold you in the characters' lives. Battlestar Galactica, for example, succeeds wildly at this (or, at least, seems to... I've come to the series very late and, as of this writing, have seen only the miniseries plus the first seven episodes).

TSCC is struggling with this problem right now. My primary complaints with the show all seem to turn on this issue of presenting drama which feels like it has flowed believably from the initial propositions of the plot. Verisimilitude, if you will.

I have so far been unable to match the characterizations of both John and Sarah Connor that we see on the screen with their, shall we say, idiosyncratic family history. They play their past significant lip service, but it has so far failed to come across as anything more than the typical family drama teenage squabbles, albeit with the survival of humanity at stake rather than, say, going to the prom with a shady date. At first I assumed this was the angle of the series, that the Connors were going to try to be A Real Family Despite The Insanity (John, you have a robotic killing machine for a sister, now!), and I feared excessive schmaltz. It may still be heading in this direction, but I was happy to see, in the fifth episode, that we may be reprieved of this and get an Ensemble Adventure kind of show instead. Those can sometimes evolve into We're All A Family Now shows, but Buffy The Vampire Slayer teaches us that the journey can, at its best, create incredibly compelling serial drama.

Almost everything good about TSCC can be summed up by saying "Summer Glau". Granted, this role isn't a huge departure from her turn on the dear departed series Firefly, but there are good reasons Summer's the go-to actress for this particular niche. The lessons she learned from Joss Whedon are serving her well here. Her presence and, more specifically, her character, are the most absorbing aspects of the series.

"Cameron", as she is known, is the zenith of the Terminator technology we've seen so far. Her AI is vastly more capable of passing as human than previous models, and her mind can conceive slightly more nuanced strategies than pure brute force. If one accepts the Terminators as Skynet's tools for infiltrating human groups while remaining undetected, Cameron represents a highly refined product revision. I've also concocted several plausible reasons for choosing as John's protector a Terminator cloaked in an extremely attractive girlbody approximately John's age, but forgive me if I save those for my lucrative side career in slash fiction.

Summer is succeeding most completely, when the writing allows her to, in drawing the audience into the mystery of life as a hyperintelligent machine. Her uncanny ability to straddle the line between total cipher and mere alien provides hope that a Terminator can be a real, interesting, complex character.

I was curious about the shift I made during episode five from feeling the show was wasting nuggets of good ideas to a spark of hope for the future, so I ran to The Internet to see just who might be writing this thing. In what I assume is no coincidence at all, episode five is the first of those broadcast so far not to be written by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd. Who, then, is working on this thing?

The IMDb lists thirteen writers¹ for The Sarah Connor Chronicles in addtion to Cameron and Hurd. Executive Producer Josh Friedman wrote Spielberg's The War of the Worlds and de Palma's The Black Dahlia, Executive Story Editors Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz are responsible for twenty episodes of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, Producer Aaron Miller coordinated post production on fourteen episodes of Firefly, Consulting Producer Natalie Chaidez comes out of NBC's Heroes, producer John Enbom put a bunch of time in on Veronica Mars and, most promisingly, co-Executive Producer Toni Graphia filled that same position on the aforementioned Battlestar Galactica for thirty-three episodes (though she's only credited on three episodes of TSCC so far). The talent pool is here for, potentially, better-than-decent serial sci-fi drama.

I'm going to keep Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on an episode-by-episode probation for now, and I sincerely hope the writing team makes a serious effort to explore what makes the Terminator premise interesting. I also hope they have time... there was a three point ratings dropoff between episodes four and five which was most likely caused by episode four being fairly craptacular, and that #3 position in its timeslot will be challenged now that the writer's strike is over.

¹An upcoming episode in the first season is titled "The Demon Hand" which forces me to think it's a reference to Harlan Ellsion's episode of The Outer Limits titled "Demon With A Glass Hand". Ellison was given an "acknowledgement to the works of" credit and some money by The Terminator's production company and distributor to defuse any desire on his part to sue them over similarities between the movie and his script (along with another of his Outer Limits episodes, "Soldier").

is this for real?

2008-01-29T15:03:00.000-05:00

The New York State chapter of the National Organization for Women has posted a rather hyperbolic and certainly outlandish press release on their website condemning Senator Ted Kennedy's endorsement of Barack Obama:

Women have just experienced the ultimate betrayal. Senator Kennedy’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic presidential primary campaign has really hit women hard. Women have forgiven Kennedy, stuck up for him, stood by him, hushed the fact that he was late in his support of Title IX, the ERA, and the Family and Medical Leave Act to name a few. Women have buried their anger that his support for the compromises in No Child Left Behind and the Medicare bogus drug benefit brought us the passage of these flawed bills. We have thanked him for his ardent support of many civil rights bills, BUT women are always waiting in the wings.

And now the greatest betrayal! We are repaid with his abandonment! He’s picked the new guy over us. He’s joined the list of progressive white men who can’t or won’t handle the prospect of a woman president who is Hillary Clinton (they will of course say they support a woman president, just not “this” one). “They” are Howard Dean and Jim Dean (Yup! That’s Howard’s brother) who run DFA (that’s the group and list from the Dean campaign that we women helped start and grow). "They" are Alternet, Progressive Democrats of America, democrats.com, Kucinich lovers and all the other groups that take women's money, say they’ll do feminist and women’s rights issues one of these days, and conveniently forget to mention women and children when they talk about poverty or human needs or America’s future.

This latest move by Kennedy, is so telling about the status of and respect for women’s rights, women’s voices, women’s equality, women’s authority and our ability – indeed, our obligation- to promote and earn and deserve and elect, unabashedly, a President that is the first woman after centuries of men who “know what’s best for us.

http://www.nownys.com/pr_2008/pr_012808.html

I have a hard time believing this is legit.

First, if a political endorsement is "the ultimate betrayal" of women, I have some very serious problems with NOW-NY's grasp of history. Groundless hyperbole doesn't serve anyone, people. Also, with the litany of complaints leveled against Kennedy in that opening paragraph, one is moved to wonder how NOW-NY could even be surprised about this so-called "betrayal".

Secondly, I find it offensive that NOW-NY is somehow conflating support of Hillary Clinton's presidential bid with generalized support for women. Hillary Clinton represents all women? Is this simply because she is a woman? I doubt anyone can make a credible argument that support for a particular male candidate somehow expresses support for Men In General. But here we are, being told in no uncertain terms that not supporting Hillary is the "abandonment" of women.

Thirdly, NOW-NY clumsily calls out all the left groups who aren't supporting Hillary and declares it's because they're all simply sexist. I say "clumsily" because the sentence actually reads "He’s joined the list of progressive white men who can’t or won’t handle the prospect of a woman president who is Hillary Clinton". Who is Hillary Clinton. Perhaps NOW-NY is not aware that Hillary Clinton is not terribly popular among the activist left because of her politics. Hillary is a pro-corporate American hegemonist (like, granted, pretty much all the presidential candidates). It's insane to expect the left wing to be happy about Hillary Clinton simply because she's a woman. And, also, isn't singling out gender as the trump-card ur-characteristic the exact kind of sexism that NOW theoretically fights against?

Finally, the last paragraph doesn't even parse properly, and this is one of the reasons I'm suspicious that the press release is a fake. What I think is being said here is that Kennedy's endorsement is demonstrative of the second-class status of women in American politics. But what is all this inane crap about women having an "obligation" to "...elect, unabashedly, a President that is the first woman..."? An obligation? Really? Would NOW-NY feel "obliged" to elect Ann Coulter if she were running, simply because she's a woman? Somehow I doubt it.

What all of this makes me wonder is how NOW-NY feels about black politicians, male and female, who may endorse Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton. Are they also handing down the "ultimate betrayal" of women? Or do they magically get a free pass because of their skin color?

Come on, NOW-New York State. You can't really stand behind this, can you?

a national new year's resolution: impeachment by the Ides

2007-12-27T11:00:00.000-05:00

The single most important issue in the 2008 campaign for the presidency is that of executive power. I am not intending hyperbole, here. The current executive administration has aggrandized a whole raft of illegal, anticonstitutional powers to itself which must be officially and legally repudiated before they're passed on to the next president.

The Boston Globe submitted a questionnaire on this issue to the current slate of candidates in both parties, and here are the answers they submitted. For the most part, especially on the Democratic side, the candidates reject the blatantly anticonstitutional and tyrannical behavior of the current executive administration. Mitt Romney provides some horrifying answers and has, as of now, alerted us to the fact that a Romney administration would alter the presidency even further and twist it ever closer to outright monarchy.

It's a good thing that these questions have been presented to the candidates, but a soundbite answer during campaign season is hardly enough to ensure the continuation of our nominally republican form of government. Two things are required: a detailed and extensive list of the current administration's violations of the Constitution and a definitive declaration that these assumed powers are now and forever unacceptable.

The best way I can think of to achieve these goals is the impeachment of (ideally) both the president and the vice president. Constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein summarizes the various reasons why impeachment is both necessary and proper in this article from October of 2006, which I strongly suggest you read. Short of impeachment, I can think of nothing that will create the necessary legal precedent to outlaw the egregious expansion of executive authority we've seen in the last eight years, and which Dick Cheney has spent most of his political career attempting to achieve.

The stumbling block now is political will in Congress. Despite the garish obviousness of the executive branch's anticonstitutional behavior, there is no serious impeachment movement in Congress. It may be unpleasant, but it is the Constitutional duty of the Congress to check the power of the executive branch even if that means accusing a sitting administration of high crimes and misdemeanors and setting it on trial before the Senate. That this has not happened is especially baffling given the nearly unprecedented lack of approval the American public has shown for both the president and the vice president.

As such, I suggest that Congress choose March 15th, the Ides of March, to begin impeachment proceedings against both George W. Bush and Richard Cheney. Thankfully we have no need of daggers to rid ourselves of tyrants anymore (one hopes); the papercut suits us much better. Impeachment by the Ides! Start printing the posters now.

DDDP - Day 48, pgs. 459-678 FINIS

2007-12-18T19:01:00.000-05:00

Well, that took longer than I expected. I only averaged 15.29 pages/day given my occasional brief hiatuses. Hiati? Breaks.

So.

During a mild griping session about Demons recently, I was gently reminded that a novel is not a film. This remark, while somewhat insulting (literary criticism majors... what else could one expect?), is nevertheless true and criticism of Demons must be relevant to the idiom. However, basic tenets of storytelling have applied since at least Aristotle's time and never mind that there are scores of people who've built academic and artistic careers around flaunting every one of these rules.

But was Dostoevsky's aim with Demons to be a storyteller? In short, did he intend to entertain? I can't think that he did, at least in the overall sense. Portions of the book are, in fact, entertaining. I quite enjoyed the Pyotr Stepanovich character's manipulations, rabble-rousing and general skulduggery. The high school age kids in the political club made me laugh a couple of times with their rhetoric and head-butting. Fedka the Convict was well-written and perhaps the most distinctive character of them all. The latter portion of Book III is actually paced quite briskly and the scenes of mayhem are vivid and engaging. I found Kirillov's suicide, and the scene immediately preceeding, quite riveting.

The characters feel flat because they aren't characters; they're Dostoevsky's embodiment of various ideas he wishes to explore. This can work, if the ideas are themselves interesting. But here is the great flaw in the novel: they aren't. What we're given are caricatures of extremist (and, in the case of Pyotr Stepanovich, entirely hypocritical) thought. Extremism tends to parody itself, of course, so perhaps Fyodor can't be entirely blamed for that. But one of my cardinal rules of fiction is that that which is true is not automatically interesting, hence the craft required to produce a novel/film/poem/etc. which really grabs an audience.

The ideas are uninteresting because they're facile and clichéd. I'm saying this with the benefit (or detriment, I suppose) of exposure to over 140 years of post-Demons writing in which many of these same themes and ideas have been explored, so I am, of course, both jaded and biased. But what really galls me is that Dostoevsky knew people like those he skewers here. He was part of leftist political groups. He was sent to Siberia for political crimes! And while he succeeds admirably in poking fun at and satirizing his former comrades his desire to point out the evil of their ideas devolves them all into shadow puppets. Why couldn't we have an honest look at real people who maybe believe certain things along these lines? Why couldn't we live with them and discover why they felt this way, how they can be easily corrupted by power-seeking megalomaniacs? No, instead, let's have a ponderous thesis on how the abandonment of God creates misery.

Another stumbling block is nothing lesser or greater than time itself. Dostoevsky spends a huge amount of Demons parodizing the works of his contemporaries and even with all the footnotes the value of this is simply lost on those many of us who aren't deeply familiar with nineteenth century Russian literature. Perhaps Dostoevsky's original audience could be expected to point at a passage and exclaim "OH SNAP, TURGENEV!" (or whatever the equivalent may have been), but it's all lost on me.

In summary, Demons is not a bad book. There's quite a lot of beautiful writing in it, for one thing. But it's deeply flawed to my eye. I would be very interested in hearing the perspective of an academic who holds this book up to be a great example of literature and hear what they think is so important about it. I, in my ignorance, can't simply claim there's nothing to it... but I am moved to ask what "it" may be.

intertubes championship online edition 4: mystical crystal arena

2007-11-29T13:27:00.000-05:00

I've recently returned from a Thanksgiving holiday excursion to Annandale, VA, where production work continued on the Everything, Kansas documentary. The footage looks pretty great and our hosts were excellent interview subjects so my pleasure with the progress of the project continues to grow.

Seize Them! is scheduled to start recording drums for our upcoming EP this weekend. We'll be traveling out to Rene's stepfather's house in wildest New Jersey and transforming the drum room there into a recording studio. We hope to get three to five drum tracks laid down and then we'll take it from there. Exciting! I can't wait to have some decent-sounding recordings.

To support this project I bought myself an inexpensive large-diaphragm condenser microphone (the MXL V63M) primarily for vocal recording, but it's also useful for guitars both acoustic and electric. I've really only tested it to make sure it survived shipping, but I hope to actually record something with it in the next day or two. My fantasy is to start a Demo-A-Day project in which I come up with at least one part of a new song every day... this is not likely to happen, but we'll see. Last night I wrote a pretty fun soul-style bassline that may become something bigger.

R.U. Sirius is proposing the creation of an Open Source political party organized around antiauthoritarian lines. Looks fairly interesting and I'll be curious to see how it develops. Will they address the obsolescence of the nation-state?

The WGA strike is still on, and more power to them. Their demands are entirely reasonable (how shocking that a content creator should be paid when a parent company uses that content to sell advertising!), though it's a little ironic to me that the state of labor unions in this country has collapsed so completely that the only unions left with any real power are those populated by sports stars and creative brainworkers. Here's hoping, however, that my below-the-line friends out there aren't losing too much work over this.

If you're interested in one of the most ridiculous "linking policies" I've ever seen, head on over to the relevant page on the Vancouver 2010 Olympics site. I'm pretty sure absolutely zero of this is even vaguely legally enforceable, and my favorite part I will excerpt here (thereby violating their rule about not reposting any material they don't provide as part of their RSS feed! OH NOES!): "The posting or creation of any link to the VANOC Website signifies that you have read this Linking Policy and agree to abide by the terms and conditions contained herein." Wow! So any of us can "agree" to a laughably overbroad policy without even knowing what that policy is! Nice try, VANOC intellectual property lawyers. Next time why not stick with a nice, simple instruction that VANOC trademarks are not to be used without permission? Easier to not look like a total idiot that way.

DDDP - Day 29, pgs. 257-458 + 682-714

2007-11-29T09:00:00.000-05:00

Finally made my way to the end of Part 2. The extra pages noted in the title comprise the Appendix which was, according to the foreword, originally intended to be the last chapter of Part 2. Having read it, I'm fairly amazed that it wasn't kept in the original printing.

Part 2 is a large step up from Part 1 in sheer entertainment value, though some may consider that to be damning with faint praise. The game is afoot, as it were, with plots and manipulations forming. The focus shifts to Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky and Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin (the fact that I could type those names without referring to the text is indicative of how frequently they come up within it), and theirs is an interesting relationship that seems to be half antagonism and half comradeship. Stepan himself has receded almost entirely to the background following a brief scene with Varvara Petrovna and she, too, has been silent for some time now.

The highlight for me, personally, was chapter 7, titled "With Our People", in which Nikolai and Pyotr attend a meeting of the local revolutionaries. From my limited experience with left-leaning activist groups it was spot on in lampooning the general sense of passion and lefter-than-thou sniping which prevails. That Dostoevsky was prescient of murderous "socialist" tyrants like Stalin, Mao and others with his character of Shigalyov was interesting to me. The revelation which follows soon after that Pyotr is in no way a socialist but rather a bloodthirsty seeker after power leads me to believe that ol' Fyodor had probably encountered a few people just like him in his day. While Demons is supposedly a condemnation of revolutionary thought, it so far seems that what he is damning is the tendency for authoritarians to adopt any guise or superficial ideology necessary in order to conquer their fellow men.

Especially intriguing to me was the mention of Proudhon by the unnamed lame teacher present at the gathering who suggests that the "despotic and fantastic pre-resolutions of the problem" ('the problem' being what to do with the hopelessly irredeemable masses... Shigalyov suggests slavery while others suggest wholesale slaughter) that Shigalyov suggests are shared by Proudhon. Proudhon was one of the early anarchist writers and the theorist who split the International Working Men's Association between his ideas and those of Karl Marx primarily over the problem of the source of revolution. Marx expected a revolution of the working class to be led by the intelligentsia, academics, and other middle-to-upper-class (and maybe beyond) socialists while Proudhon believed firmly that only the working class could lead itself in rebellion (unless I'm conflating my memories of his writing with those of Bakunin... they were similar, regardless). He also believed in peaceful revolution, which is what raised my eyebrow relative to his theoretical association with Shigalyov. For those of you who are unfamiliar with him, I highly recommend reading Proudhon as he was among the original proponents and theoreticians of anarchism and the basic ideas and concepts have yet, I believe, to be better distilled and described.

Finally, the appendix. The missing last chapter. I said I was amazed that it had been left out of the original printing, and I certainly am. That chapter goes a long way to filling in pretty much every gap there is in the picture of Nikolai Stavrogin's character and I'm curious to see what might be revealed in Part 3 that made the publisher feel it was unnecessary.

Onward.

DDDP - Day 13, pgs. 125-256

2007-11-13T18:06:00.000-05:00

No, I didn't read all those pages in one day. 19.6 pages/day isn't a great average but, as we keep telling ourselves, it's not a competition.

The book has gotten MUCH more interesting now that Part 1 is over. Part 2 immediately thrusts us into the plotting and scheming of the two sons, Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin and Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky. Uneasy alliances seem to be the order of the day, with vague mentions of a "society" that's out to kill those who've left it and undisguised tension between supposed comrades. That people are being used, and using one another, is clear. Precisely to what ends we do not yet know, though the assumption is some sort of radical political upheaval. I'm interested to see how a supposedly socialist overthrow is going to be led by an upperclass serfmaster if it happens at all. Stavrogin's allegiances are merely hinted at thus far, or spoken about in a vague past tense, so it could go in several directions.

An excellent scene, I thought, between Shatov and Stavrogin with a heartbreaking portrayal of Shatov as a man who feels betrayed by his idol and mentor and yet cannot break from his devotion. It managed to be both expository and a character illustration, which is something of an accomplishment.

The main thing I'm curious about is whether and how the entirety of Part 1 will turn out to be necessary to the story. My assumption is that our future understanding of what's happening will turn on our detailed education in the fine complexities of our characters' social structure.

you kids turn that racket down!

2007-11-08T23:44:00.000-05:00

photo by Ethan Beigel

We didn't go on until late, my friends. After 12:30AM sometime. I could barely hear my guitar, but the sound was pretty darned good out in the audience. Adam Fanning, the promoter and bartender, had to start asking us to turn down 'round about the time we started up Drinking Song which I found really distracting. Apparently some upstairs neighbor called to complain. I don't envy anyone who lives above a rock club.

One completely new song in the set, The Pixies' "Dig for Fire", and one resurrection of an old tune called Great Unknown. It's all available for download over on seizethem.com

If you're in NYC the weekend before Christmas, come down to R Bar on the Bowery for our show on December 22 at 7PM. Our first weekend gig!

Sorry for the break in Dostoevsky postings; the band stuff has put a brief crimp in my reading.

Dethpakt - Day 3 (pgs. 80-124)

2007-11-03T18:24:00.001-04:00

Finished Part 1, Chapter 3, which was primarily concerned with the social intrigue in Stepan's social circle; matchmaking, paranoia about past indiscretion and future infidelity. A new character, the engineer Alexei Nilych Kirillov, has appeared, and seems to be a potential source of disruption and upheaval. His theories about suicide appear to serve both as illustrative of his nihilism (Nilych... cute, no?) and possible foreshadowing either in literal terms or more metaphorically, in line with his assertion that to fearlessly commit suicide is to become God. Though, of course, he like Stepan claims to be athiest.

It's difficult at this point for me to imagine what relevance a lot of the events of this chapter may have to the story later on. Certainly there is a deepening of mistrust and ulterior motive between the various characters. Seeds are being planted which will surely produce discord among the ranks of either the political club or the town's aristocracy. Stepan is revealed to be even more ridiculous and contemptible than we've previously seen and it's clear that Anonymous Chronicler (though slightly less anonymous now) has no desire, in the future of his retelling, anyway, to present Stepan in any kind of sympathetic light. Stepan is at the mercy of his ego, still wishing to be seen as important, influential and dangerous, and is tortured by both unrequited love (in the form of the domineering Varvara) and inappropriate/impossible ardor (for his former student Praskovya Ivanovna Drozdov). Is it this latter infatuation with Praskovya that drives a wedge between Stepan and the AC? AC has revealed his desire to be "introduced" to Praskovya, even though he realizes an actual pairing with her is impossible.

Anyway, I'm hoping that Dostoevsky will soon move on from putting the pieces on the board and begin the actual game. Then again, we're still in the first act and perhaps the slow build of anticipation is entirely what Fyodor is intending to achieve here.

Dethpakt - Day 1 (pgs. 1-79)

2007-11-01T23:18:00.000-04:00

It often takes me a while to adjust to the pace of storytelling in literature of the 19th century (am I falsely implying that I read a lot of it?). My attention wandered quite a bit during most of the first chapter of Part 1. Some of this I blame on my modern reading habits of riding the subway and listening to music, but even when I was holed up in the Quiet Reading Zone of my bedroom I had trouble focusing much until Chapter 2, wherein we get beyond heavily footnoted scene-setting and enter the territory of sparsely-footnoted scene-setting.

Footnotes are a necessary evil, I suppose, when reading fiction from a time and place too distant for casual cultural references to survive the journey. But they still interrupt my rhythm and pull me out of the world Dostoevsky is painstakingly building.

We've spent a good deal of time so far getting to know who Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky is through the eyes of the Anonymous Chronicler (acting as Stepan's confidant and our snoop) and while the inner character of Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin is still being revealed (or, rather, her machinations become more layered) we have certainly been drawn a detailed portrait of their relationship to each other. It is also clear, however, that this is going to continue to evolve.

As of now I'm theorizing that the Anonymous Chronicler is remaining as such out of fear of persecution for having been involved with the liberal Skvoreshniki political club, but it's hard to say anything definitive while we're still somewhere in the middle of Act 1. AC certainly has a bemused contempt for Stepan, Varvara and the club members and I'm curious to see how that may have developed.

It's unlikely I'll get to post tomorrow about my further reading due to my attendance at a Rock & Roll performance in the evening-time.

Dostoevsky's "Demons" Dethpakt - The Beginning

2007-10-31T18:54:00.001-04:00

My interfriends and I like to fancy ourselves literary types, so on occasion we challenge one another to read a classic, "difficult" work of literature. Last time around, about six months ago, it was Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. I opted out of that particular dethpakt since I had A: already read the book and B: just begun reading Pynchon's later novel Mason & Dixon. If I recall correctly, the GRDP, as it was known, saw a completion rate under 50%.

"What will we read next?" came the query several days ago. Things were suggested, James Joyce rejected. Then Ellen, our resident Library Scientist, submitted Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel Demons for consideration and lo, agreements were made. The pakt begins November 1.

The basic rules are: read the book or die in the attempt, and write about your progress somewhere on the interblog. The idea is to finish within a month, but as there is no system of enforcement beyond ridicule and no prize to be had other than satisfaction and cultural stimulation (and perhaps some feelings of superiority), well, just read the thing. If you want. Or don't. Or DIE.

I'll be posting regular updates on my progress-thus-far and thoughts about the book here in this very space. These and other dethpakters' musings are being aggregated at dethpakt.bangmoney.org for convenience and posterity.

On my commute today I thought I'd get somewhat acquainted with the book by reading the foreword and translator's note. The edition I'm reading is the Vintage Classics pressing from 1995, translated by husband and wife team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which is widely considered to be the authoritative version.

In the foreword Pevear provides a rough outline of the novel, summarizes the themes involved, draws brief sketches of the main characters and ruminates on the meaning of the title (which had originally been translated as The Possessed... in fact, the Wikipedia entry for Demons is still filed under this title). Pevear explains that the eponymous demons are the "foreign ideas" of liberalism, socialism, nihilism, anarchism, existentialism, etc., that have possessed the revolutionary characters in the novel and driven them to commit terrible deeds against themselves and others. Dostoevsky, Pevear elucidates, was, by the time he wrote this novel, very much committed to the Slavophil way of thinking; that of respect for God (in the guise of the Russian Orthodox Church) and Mother Russia. This, despite (or because of) Dostoevsky's mock-execution and decade-long imprisonment at the will of the Tsar due to revolutionary activity in the 1840s.

Pevear seems himself convinced that these demons are responsible for many of the horrors of the twentieth century, laying, for example, the atrocities of Stalin at the feet of Communist ideology rather than the despotism of Stalin's regime (perhaps the two are inseparable in his mind... one wonders if he blames the current atrocities in Iraq on Capitalism, or the current regime in Washington, D.C.). Whether these are his actual opinions or merely his defense of Dostoevsky is not clear to me at this time. As someone with sympathy to the "radical left" mode of thought I'm curious to see what I think of Dostoevsky's take on the virulence of these particular memes.

Onward, my droogs.

doodily ding dong DETHKLOK

2007-10-29T13:24:00.000-04:00

So guess what? Brendon Small (along with Mike Keneally, Bryan Beller & Gene Hoglan) is TAKING DETHKLOK ON TOUR.
Unfortunately for me they're not playing New York. But here's where they are playing:

10/29 Albuquerque (UNM)
10/31 Las Vegas (UNLV)
11/1 Los Angeles (UCLA)
11/2 Berkeley, CA (UC Berkeley)
11/5 Fort Collins, CO (CSU)
11/7 Minneapolis (U Minneapolis)
11/8 Vermillion, SD (USD)
11/11 Boulder, CO (UC Boulder)
11/13 Carbondale, IL
11/14 Madison, WI (UW)
11/17 Lawrence, KS (KU)
11/18 Chicago (Northwestern)

It looks like all of these shows are free (gratis) "students only" gigs at various universities. But here's hoping there's more to come. Further info (a little) on the Adult Swim Presents site and Mike Keneally's website.

the days are just packed

2007-10-23T13:14:00.000-04:00

When Halloween falls on a Wednesday, the Saturday beforehand is generally pressed into service as Party Day and, of course, everyone you probably know is hosting something different since all time is quickly becoming a simultaneity. So what's going on down in New York?

Well, first of all, there's a non-Halloween event those of you who are into this "music" thing should check out: the Laura Thomas Band is playing at the slick new venue R Bar on Thursday the 25th at 9PM. In addition to LTB, your $10 buys you the rock stylings of four other bands, and the show kicks off at 7. Lee Sobel of Lo-Fi Entertainment is handling the booking at R Bar these days, so you can be pretty sure you'll have a grand ol' time.

Saturday night hosts two parties in particular that I feel moved to hype at you.

Midnight Kitchen is throwing their benefit for the Surfrider Foundation, the Psycho Beach Blowout, at Southpaw in Brooklyn. The theme is rockabilly surf-horror burlesque, and advance tickets ($15) buy you admission to an unbeatable lineup of entertainment featuring Detroit Cobras, Sasquatch and the Sickabillys, The Tarantinos and modern burlesque legend Angie Pontani! Wear a costume, unless you're too cool for that kind of thing. For my part, I'm providing the video backdrops for the event so you'd better believe I'll be there.

Deli Magazine, Tekserve and the excellent Bella Noir are hosting a Halloween party at The Delancey. They've got four bands lined up, in addition to themselves (Morning Theft, Seasick, Champollion and Femme Generation[all the way from TEH CANADIA]), as well as DJ Nora K. Wear a costume, they've got $3 PBRs all night (free from 11 to midnight), and it's $7 to get in.

WHAT WILL YOU CHOOSE?

get back

2007-10-18T13:09:00.000-04:00

Well! I survived the trip to Portland, and it was an excellent time. Thanks to the denizens of the Saluthaus for their extreme hospitality, and ditto to Ariel Marsh and Peter.

Jeff and I shot a bunch of great footage for the documentary, which, it appears, may now have the working title of Everything, Kansas. I'm really happy with how things are shaping up, and the overall themes are really coming out in the interviews. Next up is a trip down to Virginia for Thanksgiving to continue the process.

Seize Them!'s show at The Underscore last week went fairly well... other than poor René being forced to crawl his car into the city for 2.5 hours due to a rainstorm and then the both of us forgetting his cymbal bag at home. Thankfully, the band who played before us was kind enough to lend their cymbals for our show. 50% of the other bands scheduled to play cancelled, and there was very nearly zero audience other than the bartender, the sound guy, two dudes from the earlier band and a couple of our die-hard hangers-on. Tough room. But we played it. The show is available for free download, as usual, from seizethem.com. Click the picture to take you directly to the relevant part of the site:

Next up, Seize Them! rocks The Lucky Cat in Williamsburg on Nov. 7 along with Don Red and The Affected Affections.
Additionally, I've created a profile on ReverbNation for Seize Them!, so you can enjoy even more ST! presence by checking us out here.

I've submitted the paperwork to New York State to create High Water Media, LLC, which will be the business entity overseeing most of my creative output from here on out. A long life to High Water Media! Check in with the blog over there for occasional updates on what High Water is up to.

victory!

2007-10-05T18:32:00.001-04:00

According to Steve Hyden of The Onion, our current cover-song-of-choice, CCR's "Ramble Tamble", is The Most Rockin' Song of All Time. Who knew we had such good taste?

Oh right... we did.

You can, of course, hear several versions of it if you download our free shows from seizethem.com.

Greetings, by the way, from lovely Portland, OR, where Jeff and I are continuing work on our documentary film project.

Seize Them! 9.8.07 free download available

2007-09-19T12:18:00.000-04:00

Seize Them!'s 9.8.07 show from our house party is now available for free download in .mp3 and FLAC formats from seizethem.com. Share and enjoy.

This show was a lot of fun and I think we rocked it, some sloppiness aside. And I broke my D string about a minute and a half into Ramble Tamble, so the rest of the song has a bit of a noisy vibe which fits in perfectly with the audible shout of "Sonic Youth didn't need to tune!" provided by my friend-in-the-audience Zach.

i do good work

2007-09-17T17:01:00.000-04:00

Last week I completed work on Carolyn Sills' (of Boss Tweed fame) video entry for Showtime's Homegrown Humor contest. I give you Little Brooklyn Country Boxes for your enjoyment:

PLEASE go check it out on its page on the Homegrown Humor site, and leave us supportive comments and a high rating. It doesn't make a difference in the actual contest, but it sure feels good.

Supposedly the semifinalists are chosen today. I'm trying to not care too much.

And guess what? ANOTHER of my travel photos has been picked up by Schmap for one of their travel guides. Budapest, this time, and the photo actually has me in it!

I should mention that this photo was actually taken by my good friend Cristian Villalobos.
And here it is, in situ, on Schmap's site. It's easy to be popular when you work for free!

televisual interWOW

2007-09-17T12:52:00.000-04:00

Something like that.
The Emmy Awards were aired last night. I think I was most amused by Fox's "dump sphere"... the awkward cutaway of a black globe hanging above the audience that they used whenever they needed to dump what was being said on stage. Sure, they COULD have used a simple shot of the audience but why not make it incredibly obvious that you're censoring your broadcast? Now we'll never know what joke Ray Romano made about Kelsey Grammer and/or his new show, or what the end of Sally Field's sentence was after she started making an antiwar statement or... I think there was at least one more dump but I can't recall what it was. Anyway, nice one, Fox. Did you stick the intern on the censoring duty or something?

But seriously, folks: congratulations to the winners. First and foremost, congratulations to my friend Glenn Clements for his part in bringing home an Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Series Emmy for The Daily Show, and also to my ex-professor Sam Pollard for his Outstanding Picture Editing for Nonfiction Programming award (shared with Geeta Gandbhir and Nancy Novack), and his Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking award, both for When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.

I was happy to see 30 Rock take home the award for Outstanding Comedy Series, which it deserved, and I doubt that happens to a series in its first season very often. Al Gore now has an Emmy, too, for his work with Current TV. It's nice to see the Emmys pay some respect to internet-based video entertainment but, honestly, I don't know anyone watching or using Current.

I'm sure it'll shock most of you to know that I'm more interested in the less glamorous awards won by the crews of these programs. Rome, one of my favorite recent programs, won a cinematography award as well as art direction and hair styling. Congrats to David Rogers and Dean Holland for their well-deserved editing award for their work on The Office. I'd congratulate Elena Maganini on her editing win for Dexter, but I haven't gotten around to watching the series yet.

Finally, the last words I ever have to say about Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. I received some snarky comments a while back claiming that Studio 60... MUST be a good show because the pilot episode won some Canadian TV award. I disagreed, of course. That commenter must take some pleasure in the fact that the show was nominated for a few Emmys: Outstanding Casting For A Drama Series, Outstanding Cinematography For A Single-camera Series, Outstanding Directing For A Drama Series, and Outstanding Guest Actor In A Drama Series (twice, and John Goodman won, kudos to him). I can't argue with the cinematography nod, as the level of craft was certainly exceptional there. The directing nod was for the pilot, again. The pilot of that series was undoubtedly its best episode, and congratulations to Thomas Schlamme, but the pilot is not a series and the series was crap. As far as the one award the show did win... well, what does it say about a series that gained its highest recognition for a guest appearance by a respected actor?

Thus endeth my Emmy-related logorrhea.

i'll sleep someday

2007-09-10T11:53:00.000-04:00

The good people at Schmap have decided to include another one of my photos in their Schmap Guides. This time it's the Prague Schmap, and they've used this picture of St. Vitus Cathedral:

Here it is, incorporated into the actual guide.

Saturday night we had one of our three-floor parties at the house, and it went quite well. DJ Porkcube opened the festivities with a two-hour-long set of booty-shakers (which you, lucky dog, can download and enjoy), then Mindspray set up in the top-floor apartment and rocked the hip and the hop for a while to the enjoyment of many. Our ex-roommate Josh, who was tragically killed by a hit and run driver a couple of years ago, used to be part of Mindspray so it was cool to have them in the house, as it were, again. Seize Them! also has a song about Josh, so there was an interesting synchronicity there.

Speaking of the band, we rocked it hard. I think we played really well, and I'm bummed that my carefully-set up recording system crapped out on me about thirty seconds into the first song. Worked fine during rehearsal, so I'm doubly annoyed. But the people who could stand to be in the basement while we played seemed to enjoy themselves, and we got a lot of good compliments. We tried out a new song which doesn't have any lyrics yet but certainly will by the time we play The Underscore next month.

No pictures from the party have come into my possession as yet.

Naomi Klein and Alfonso Cuaron have teamed up for a short film to promote Klein's new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The basic thesis, as expressed in the short embedded below, seems to be that there is a parallel between the methods used by interrogators to shock prisoners into childlike states and corporatist exploitation of crisis to gain popular acceptance for Milton Friedman-style capitalist "reforms". You may or may not enjoy the book, but this short is great:

my, the world certainly is full of things!

2007-09-06T12:10:00.000-04:00

Producer-in-extraordinary Degoao (also of OUCH fame) hosted a dee-lightful event at The Lucky Cat in Williamsburg last night.

DJ Porkcube started it all off with a set full of frenchy electro beats which, had a critical mass of people been achieved, would certainly have had everybody grooving.

Don Red got up on stage next to treat us with a rare solo acoustic set of old favorites backed by new Donner-produced rhythm tracks (featuring jm). A priceless moment when a girl emerged from the bathroom, having missed Don's intro to the next song, and turned around in surprise to gawp at the stage when the first lyric, "I want to fuck you 'til you die", roared from the PA. Don, as he reminded us, is not afraid to swear in song titles.

And then there's Ronald Jenkees and his squinty style. There's not much I can say about him that isn't said by the following youtube clip, so I'll leave it at that other than thanking the folks at BoingBoing for pointing him out.

Hey, guess what! In the late fifties the US Air Force was funding probably-highly-unethical and distasteful research into torture! What a SURPRISE! Anyway, here's a link to a never-reprinted but widely cited book outlining the results of said research titled The Manipulation of Human Behavior. Sorry that it's formatted as an html file for some inexplicable reason, but that's how I received it and that is how I pass it along to you. Enjoy? GET SOME (Torture Manual)

nobody understands the Irish quite like the Japanese

2007-09-02T19:16:00.000-04:00

It's been a big couple of weeks here in Infidelia.

Last weekend my creative partner Jeff and I went down to Cary, North Carolina to shoot more footage for our feature documentary project. Our hosts/subjects were Will and Leah Woods, many thanks to them, and we shot about 7.5 hours (times two cameras) of coverage. On the pile it goes with the Tedd and Christa material from February and May. Next up is Columbus Day in Portland, Oregon, and it should be great.

While we were gone the Seize Them! stickers arrived. They look like this:

The good people at High Water Media have already begun strategically placing the Seize Them! sigil all over town. For example:

The stickers will be on sale at shows for $1, but I imagine we'll give away or stick up far more than we'll ever sell.

Speaking of the band, Seize Them! will be rockin' a house party at The Jam Factory (aka home) on September 8. Short notice, but we're hoping people turn up for a good time. Our upstairs neighbor Justin has been working on his VJing skills and said something about employing a distribution amplifier and a bunch of cable to spread his videoicty down to our floor.

For what it's worth (which is, apparently, a good deal to promoters), the band now has 1,502 "friends" on myspace (also 2110 "plays"... you have to listen to 1/4 of a track to have it counted as a "listen"). I've already been exposed to some rad Japanese bands like The Croagh Patrick (Dropkick Murphy's-like Irish rock with japanese lyrics), and Sitha (electro / new-wavey stuff). Invite us over for a tour, y'all!

This Wednesday the 5th the man that is the incredible Degoao is curating a booty-shaker at The Lucky Cat in Williamsburg featuring Don Red and DJ Porkcube. Recommended highly. By me.

8.15.07 debrief

2007-08-17T12:44:00.000-04:00

thanks to ineveragreedtothat for the photo

It was a fun show at the Lucky Cat, though it felt a touch odd the whole way through. Huge difference in the sound of that club versus The Underscore. Fortunately, I could hear my vocals and Jeff's vocals fairly decently through a monitor, but I could barely hear my guitar at all. I'd kept it turned down slightly in the hope that the whole band wouldn't overwhelm the small brick room with unintelligible cacaphony, but I suppose I went too far. Rene couldn't hear the guitar at all, which actually helped him during our new song, Cleoporchcat, because he was able to concentrate entirely on Andy's bass.

On top of that, my guitar started cutting out during Liftoff and continued to give me problems through the end of the show. At the moment I'm blaming the cable... I hope it's not the amp again.

Overall I think we played decently. Not as well as at The Underscore, though. I'm not terribly happy with a couple of my solos and clammed chords, and I managed to sing the second verse of Boy twice somehow. Also missed the cue to go into my solo in Asteroids. But none of our individual problems threw us off in any significant way, which is a huge positive. The worst thing that can happen is that you get completely bent out of shape by some mistake and it becomes a downward spiral of bad.

About five people showed up of all those we invited, but there was a decent crowd of people affiliated with the bands after us who seemed to enjoy themselves.

I managed to completely forget to bring any guitar picks. Professional, yeah? Fortunately for me my very talented friend Laura from Bella Noir came to see us and happened to be carrying the exact pick that I use. Saved!

The show is available for download from seizethem.com, as usual.

fame, it's not your brain, it's just the flame

2007-08-15T13:33:00.000-04:00

Basically everyone I ever knew is more famous than I am.
This has been a strange week for sudden blasts from my past.

First, my parents sent me a clipping from our hometown newspaper regarding Jenny Powers, star of stage and screen and former Miss Illinois. In addition to being caught up on her latest exploits, namely landing the role of Rizzo in the revival of Grease and having been in Chris Rock's movie I Think I Love My Wife, I discovered via the IMDb that she also had a bit part in the pseudo-exploitation B picture Sexina: Popstar P.I.... which starred my roommate Don Red's ex-girlfriend's older sister in the titular role.

Second, my old NYU schoolmate Nicholas Jarecki (brother of filmmakers Eugene and Andrew Jarecki) has exploded into prominence. In addition to his book Breaking In and his documentary about director James Toback called The Outsider, he's written the screenplay for and is executive producing the movie The Informers based on the novel of the same title by Bret Easton Ellis. This is just about as appropriate a pairing as can possibly be, by the way.

The third instance of this oddness is also a hometown connection. Another of my roommates, editor Tyler Peck, has been expounding to me about this short film he's been working on called MADE: I Wanna Be A Hipster (doesn't seem to have a website yet) for some time now. Today I received a flyer for it in my email and discovered, to my shock, that the movie had been written by none other than Faran Krentcil, associate of mine from my theater days. Faran, it appears, is the editor-in-chief of fashionista.com, contributor to Fashion Week Daily and is something of a name in the New York City fashion world.

These last two entries can be filed under synchronicity, as well, considering that I found out both of these things after finishing reading Bret Easton Ellis' novel Glamorama. Which, by the way, I cannot recommend.

So, yes, I'm feeling a touch inadequate with all of these acquaintances of mine having such success. And I haven't even mentioned my other Broadway-luminary friend from high school or the friend-since-I-was-nine personal assistant to Tim Robbins.

Yes, goddammit, I will namedrop. I WILL. What else can I console myself with?

By the way: I'm in production on a feature-length documentary, my band is totally awesome (and playing tonight at The Lucky Cat in Williamsburg), I'm creating the most beautiful travel photomemoir you've ever seen, and I edit music videos for reggaeton stars. ALL HAIL ME. I knew there was a reason I moved to this town.

paging Mr. Madison

2007-08-12T17:31:00.000-04:00

I've recently taken to spouting at my Internet Friends that I feel the most important topic of debate for the vast armies of Presidential candidates is the aggrandizement of power by the Executive branch. The probability that the current Administration will hand the egregiously unconstitutional weapons it has created for itself down to whoever succeeds it should frighten all of us tremendously.

Fortunately, Bill Moyers recent journal is a discussion with constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein (a former member of the Reagan administration) and The Nation writer John Nichols concerning exactly what impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney would mean and why it is absolutely necessary.

PBS doesn't seem to have the episode available for viewing yet (check back later) but YouTube comes to the rescue. Here's the first part of the hour-long program.

En Que Fallamos

2007-08-06T15:11:00.000-04:00

For your viewing pleasure, the tele-novelaesque music video I edited for Ivy Queen's latest single "En Que Fallamos". Reggaeton, but less so than my previous reggaeton video for Don Omar.

35mm film -> DigiBeta -> Quicktime (320x136 H.264 339kbps) -> flash-ized by whatever version of On2's Flash compression software YouTube is usuing

ooooooklahoma, and the wind

2007-08-02T13:54:00.001-04:00

Some, most, or all of you may not know this (because I rarely think about it), but I have some roots in the state of Oklahoma. My maternal grandparents were from there, though they moved to California and raised my mother in Napa Valley.

Now I don't know much about Oklahoma. I've never been there, I've never met many of its citizens. But I do know that they've just created one of the most asinine goddamned things I've ever seen with my eyeballs, and it's this license plate:

First of all, the design is flat-out ridiculous with the faux-desert camo (hey! this Global War is going to be fought entirely in the desert, right?) and the incredibly shoddy clip-art eagle and inaccurate Twin Towers. Twin Towers, huh? Shouldn't that possibly be an image of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building? Must they appropriate a horrible event that happened in my city for their jingoistic idiocy? Maybe terrorism by white Christian people doesn't count in the Global War On A Tactic.

Which brings me to my second, more obvious point of ire: advertising the "Global War on Terror" with a license plate. What the hell is trying to be accomplished here? Do the trucks and SUVs of Oklahoma not already sport enough tacky, magnetic, Chinese-made ribbons "supporting" our troops? Are the faded US flag stickers proclaiming that These Colors Don't Run not making their owners feel sufficiently patriotic? Too embarrassed by their old War on Drugs plates?

Dear Oklahoma Tax Commission,
I realize you decided you could stand to make several bucks off of the fraction of your population that must constantly advertise their support of American imperial aggression, but not everything that can be done necessarily should be done. If these plates MUST exist, can we also get a plate featuring portraits of the major players in the Bush administration with the legend CRIMINALS printed below? It seems only fair.

Yours in slack-jawed horror,
QXZ

I Heart Danger

2007-07-29T14:48:00.000-04:00

Last night I went down to Bushwick (you could tell because of the guy's t-shirt that read KEEP WILLIAMSBURG OUT OF BUSHWICK... too late, man, too late) for a party at 3rd Ward Brooklyn called I Heart Danger. Good times.

On the ground floor, in the alley, they had a rotation of bands and DJs. The stage was topped with a fire installation which would pulse the height of the flames in time with the bass (when they could keep it lit), and the alley was packed with dancers. Video projection from one level up on the fire escape raked across the alley walls, terminating behind the stage, which created the effect of being in a video tunnel. Back toward the entrance, behind the bar, a guy was carving huge blocks of ice with an electric chainsaw and transforming them into sterno-can-bearing torches. There was a crew of people silkscreening shirts with both "I (heart) Danger" and designs of their own.

Up on the fourth floor, accessible via fire escape, was another bar. Also a geodesic dome housing more DJs. A chillout area near the back had a great view out the industrial loft windows, a teepee, video projection and giant foil-covered stackable stars to play with. The main attraction was the Portrait Party being run by Jeremy Nelson.

I spent a good long while watching him shoot portraits and his assistant project them on the wall. Can you find the one of me?

My guess is I'll be at the next party these folks throw.

7.21.07 aftermath

2007-07-23T13:18:00.000-04:00

The show went really well. We arrived at the club around 7 to get set up and do a soundcheck. I had ample time to get the recording gear running and was lucky enough to get a feed out of the mixing board to augment the guitar, vocals and keyboard.

We went on at 8:30 (which, according to the club, is what "8:00" means to Lo-Fi Entertainment), and that was great because a few people didn't arrive until minutes before we started. Turnout was probably between ten and fifteen people... I didn't get an accurate count. The band scheduled to play after us cancelled, so we didn't get the influx of people we were hoping for that would have included the next band and their early-arrival audience members.

The sound system was pretty darned good, and Jeff and I could actually hear ourselves sing! Shocking idea, that. I occasionally couldn't hear my guitar terribly well which caused a couple of my dumb mistakes. But overall we were very happy with the sound. The sound guy took some significant liberties with adding extra reverb and delay to the guitars, vocals and keys whenever he deemed it appropriate. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, sometimes it took me by surprise and messed me up a bit.

The crowd, small though it was, seemed to really enjoy themselves and we got several specific and, to all accounts, sincere compliments on a few things.

Anyway, tons of fun, and here's hoping we pulled in enough people for Lo Fi Entertainment to want to book us again!

The show is available for download in both .mp3 and FLAC formats from seizethem.com.
The best way to get on our email list, if you want to be, is to register a username at seizethem.com.

PS: stickers coming soon.

TOMORROW

2007-07-20T13:04:00.000-04:00

Seize Them! @ The Underscore
7/21/07 8PM EDT
$8 with this flyer, $10 without

Take a break from reading Harry Potter to come rock with Seize Them! in Manhattan. This is our first club show, and we're hoping for a really good turnout so our booking agent will feel moved to grant us more gigs.

Audience taping encouraged.

seizethem.com
myspace

my robot battles, let me show you them

2007-07-03T10:43:00.000-04:00

Last night I went out to suburban New Jersey with some friends to see Transformers.

As a child I liked Transformers. I watched the cartoon and I had some of the toys (some of the ones with actual metal in them, dear readers). While I was never a superfan, I have an affection for them to this day. I, like many people, was excited to hear a couple of years ago that a live-action + CGI Transformers movie was in the works, and then immediately worried upon hearing it was to be directed by Michael Bay.

Bay has always been known for his slickly bombastic action style and scant attention to story and character. In other words, he's the modern era's quintessential summer event filmmaker. I've enjoyed some of his movies. The Rock is entertaining and as much as Armageddon is as over-the-top as possible in every single moment it does make me cry at the end. However, his more recent movies have been uniformly terrible. Pearl Harbor is one of the worst movies I've ever sat through in a theater, and as I've written about elsewhere I feel Bad Boys II is an insult to humanity. I've only seen The Island with the sound off on a tiny TV during a party, so I really can't comment.

What concerned me most about Bay directing Transformers, though, was what I saw during the car chases in Bad Boys II (and, to an extent, in every one of his movies, though the problem has gotten worse over time): his beloved style of hyperkinetic, vibrating, extreme closeup action is basically unintelligible. One of the car chases in Bad Boys II was easily the worst car chase I've ever seen, as it was completely impossible to tell who was where and just what the hell was going on. Cinematically, it was a complete mess and would have pulled me out of the movie entirely if the rest of the film hadn't already accomplished that. Suffice it to say that I was worried I would barely be able to enjoy the spectacle of giant robots battling each other because Bay simply, and ironically, has a terrible eye for action sequences.

So off to Jersey I went, with a friend who is a super Transformers fanatic. He is a nigh-professional collector of Tranformers toys, had just come back from a major Transformers convention, and has been diligently following every single tiny scrap of detail about the production of the movie for literally years. And the theater was filled with a bunch of excited Jerseyites, the type of mass audience this movie was made for. The type that spent several minutes before the movie talking smack to each other about their preferred cell phone, and the type that nearly came to blows over seat ownership once the movie had started. In other words, it was a perfect situation.

Transformers is, by and large, a lot of fun and very successful.

Shia LaBeouf is charismatic, relatable and engaging as Sam, whisking us through the early exposition breezily. I felt the story skipped a couple of character moments with Sam later on that I would have liked to have seen, but I guess that's to be expected. Megan Fox, playing Sam's love interest and partner-in-adventure, is... well, she's eye candy, really, but her acting was certainly not insufferable. Take that backhanded compliment as you will, I suppose.

The robots are incredible, which is no surprise. They're given characters largely similar to that of the original cartoon series; that is to say, they're sentient alien technological lifeforms with essentially human personalities. Their human-ness may or may not bother you if you are a sci-fi fan like I am, but, as with many things in this movie, it's essential to remember that Transformers is a "kids' movie" and that the source material (specifically the original cartoon) is certainly no more sensible or "realistic". Peter Cullen returns in fine form as Optimus Prime, and despite a few silly lines he manages to breathe real life into a 3D model.

My fears about incoherent action were mostly unwarranted, which was a welcome relief. The climactic battle in Los Angeles does suffer somewhat from Bay's style, however there are a few nice wide shots featuring several giant robots clearly battling each other in the street which blew my mind and made me want to see a movie that was almost entirely that. All you screenwriters with Mecha scripts in your back pocket, now's the time to put them in front of some Money People.

There are definitely things for purists to get upset about, and undoubtedly they will. This movie is not really for them. But I'm pretty sure that if I were ten years old or so and you plopped me in a theater and showed me Transformers, it might just change my life.

LTB video

2007-06-27T16:06:00.000-04:00

Finally! The video I put together for the Laura Thomas Band is up on the Youtubes.

You can see them at the Rockwood Music Hall in Manhattan this friday, June 29.

creatures of the deep

2007-06-24T12:50:00.001-04:00

Yesterday (Saturday, June 23, 2007), I finally went to the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. I managed to forget sunscreen on the back of my neck, so that's feeling pretty brutal at the moment.

But I did get a few good pictures.

eat it

2007-06-13T00:24:00.000-04:00

Don Red is a culinary genius for inventing the following sandwich (hereby known as the Don Red):

Tuna
American Cheese
bacon

It also appears that I'm going to go see Moby's DJ set at Nublu on June 15th. Shut up, I have a good reason.

aaron, it's just not working out

2007-06-11T10:25:00.000-04:00

NBC is in the process of dumping the remaining episodes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip onto the air and cablewaves, and I couldn't help but look. It's like a car crash.

Studio 60... may have, with its most recent episode, ascended into the grand ranks of Worst Television Shows of All Time.

Let us recall that Studio 60... is ostensibly a show about what it means to make television in this, the first decade of the 21st Century. There's a lot to be said on this topic, and it seemed like excellent fodder for Aaron Sorkin's obsession with telling the stories of elite professionals at the top of their game. Unfortunately what this show became was a staggeringly clumsy monument to Aaron Sorkin's ego.

I have already covered, in previous posts, the descent of the show into inane soap opera built around characters we're given no reason to understand, empathize with or care about. This is largely due to Sorkin's cathartic fictionalization of his stormy relationship with Kristen Chenoweth (in the guise of Matt Albie and Harriet Hayes) while, one assumes, fantasizing about finding true love and fulfillment via the ludicrous schmaltz of the Danny Tripp + Jordan McDeere fiasco. This left turn into outrageous soap opera has been exceeded as a source of terribleness, however, by what I can only call the "oh, the Humanity!" factor.

Studio 60... has, in its desperate flailing, resorted to elevating every single major character on the show to the highest possible level of cosmic drama. Let's take a look at the various plot points on display in this past week's episode.

Tom Jeter (Nate Corrdry) has had his soldier brother kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Media has gone and effed everything up by revealing the hostage's connection to celebrity. The military dispatches two no-nonsense officers to visit Tom and "assess his level of trauma". Meanwhile, it turns out that the sexual harassment case lawyer who's been throwing herself at Matt happens to have shadowy connections to the paramilitary underworld and can dangle the carrot of ransoming Tom's brother in front of everyone.

Matt and Harriet are forced to relive their constant fighting about faith and reason by Tom's crisis, and we're treated to a "through the years" montage featuring highlights of their battle. This montage ends, with Matt pounding his fists on the desk, rocketing to his feet, slamming his chair back and shouting "we've been having this fight for two thousand years!!!" It might possibly have been the hammiest moment of Matthew Perry's life, the poor guy. And this on the heels of being forced to channel his real-life struggle with drug addiction into the incredibly simplistic and patronizing portrayal of Matt Albie swallowing "anything" he could get in order to keep writing the show. Because, you know, he's not going to make choices about what type of drug experience he wants to have, he's simply On The (ever unnamed) Drugs. Conveniently for us, the audience, Albie's assistant is keen to the signs of addiction that are completely invisible in Perry's performance because of her hypertragic past with her suicidal mother.

Meanwhile. Danny and Jordan are at the hospital, where they discover that the umbilical cord is wrapped around the baby's neck and an emergency caesarian section must be performed. Danny proposes marriage. Yes, Sorkin has included a pregnancy, a pregnancy in danger AND a potential marriage all in the first season. And what's worse is that he believes he can get away with this pile of horrible television cliches (as in previous episodes) by merely commenting on the fact that he is employing terrible television cliches. This is some of the laziest, most asinine writing I have seen on TV in years and Sorkin really, truly expects to get away with it.

To recap: we have staggering family tragedy, earth-shattering international incidents, The Great Debate impeding True Love, pregnancy, endangered pregnancy and a marriage proposal all in one episode. What really galls me to the core is Sorkin's apparent belief that he's earned the dramatic right to impose these monumentally huge stakes onto every character. Characters, mind you, that he has largely failed to make us care about at all.

Why can't we explore what we were promised, namely the thorny realities of making television in the modern age? Why must we instead be presented with some of the most over-the-top inanity this side of a Tom Clancy novel? Aaron Sorkin, why are you such a dick? Seriously... when did you decide to flip this series into a tribute to yourself? Your cosmic relationship woes, your supposed ability to employ classic television cliches, your reknown for tackling The Big Issues, the sweeping, unnecessary and ridiculous SCALE of it all.

Take some time off, Aaron. Maybe spend a while on the Internet, that medium you go to such lengths to minimize and deprecate and ignore. Deflate yourself, maybe take a vacation. Mull on this spectacular failure of a television series, and maybe in five to ten years you can come back and create a show about a man who was so good at his job that nobody ever understood him. That poor genius bastard.