my robot battles, let me show you them

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

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

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

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

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.

TEH SEKRIT

It's taken me a long while to pin down my off-putness at the popularity of The Secret. On the face of it, the mere fact that it's facile, bland pop-metaphysics pushed at frustrated middle class strivers by Oprah should be enough for me to want nothing to do with it, but I still couldn't quite decide what made it so objectionable.

Now, before you write me off as a curmudgeonly empiricist who enjoys telling small children that Santa Claus is merely a symbol, I will declare that I have hoodooish leanings of my own. I do believe that human consciousness is intertwined with the greater universe beyond our bodies in ways that we're only beginning to understand, for example. I find a lot of resonance and verisimilitude in many of the ideas of Taoism and Zen practice (I only wish I had the discipline for that practice). So, in sum, I am loathe to simply write off the idea that one's mental state affects the greater world around them.

However, in my estimation the ultimate point of any spiritual practice is to further empathy and identification with one's fellow human beings. The impression I get from The Secret, however, is more of an "every man for himself" sort of vibe. If your situation is less than optimal, it seems to be suggesting, well it's all your fault. Dare I say this smacks of (shudder) "conservatism"?

Author Daniel Pinchbeck seems to have cut to the heart of the matter in a way that was heretofore unclear to me, and therefore I will quote him. (the entire article can be found here)

From this perspective, the individual's psychic state determines his or her physical reality, and the occult laws of attraction can be utilized to increase one's bank account or sexual magnetism. If you haven't cashed out, it is because you are not using your psychic powers at their maximum rate. If other people aren't getting their's yet, it's not your problem, but their bad karma. This is a metaphysics suited to the narcissism of the baby boomers and the "Me Generation," whose lifestyles have denuded the planet's rainforests and ripped big holes in the ozone layer. bold added by me for emphasis

So yes, people of my parents' generation, this taps into my low-level ire at you: those who utterly failed to prevent the various potential environmental and political catastrophes everybody with a brain has seen coming for decades. Could we expect anything other than The Secret and its pseudophilosophy-for-profit ilk?

My friend Rebecca was kind enough to point out that my germ of a thought here has been better elucidated by finer writers than I. There's an excellent Salon.com article about the insidiousness of The Secret here.

Here at the end, though, I suppose I must turn toward positivity. Perhaps exposure to The Secret will inspire Joe and Jane Suburb to explore their own minds and know themselves better than they would have otherwise. Perhaps an orgy of "enlightened" self interest will bring peace and prosperity to the globe. Perhaps David Byrne said it best:

He would see faces in movies, on t.v., in magazines, and in books. He thought that some of these faces might be right for him. And through the years, by keeing an ideal facial structure fixed in his mind... or somewhere in the back of his mind... that he might, by force of will, cause his face to approach those of his ideal.

the internet is silly

LOLcats, I believe, won out over other possible LOL(variable) options because the internet is 90% cats already. Also, for an inhuman killing machine, a cat's got a good personality.

What other things might the Internet also enjoy anthropomorphizing?

I believe this was done by Jeph Jacques; correct me if I'm wrong, won't you?

projects are happening

Over the weekend of the 18th I flew down to Florida to shoot wedding footage for the documentary project. It went quite well and we should be able to give Tedd and Christa an excellent wedding video as both a present and a "thank you for participating" gift. On our way out of the state we made a detour by Kennedy Space Center, to enjoy their tourist-related activities, which was quite a lot of fun. We did learn, however, that rocket scientists can't spell.



Seize Them! went into the recording studio yesterday to begin laying down tracks for a demo / album. This is something we've been looking forward to doing for quite some time. Unfortunately, due to the idiosyncratic way the studio was set up by its designers, we weren't really able to get anything done. After spending over four and a half hours attempting to do extremely exotic things like "getting sound in the headphones" we had time to record two takes of "Let Me Be Your Boy" before we had to start packing up. It was, in a word, frustrating, but it was also a great example of the Quality Triangle.

The Quality Triangle has you use Fast, Cheap and Good as the vertices and then says you are allowed any two at a given time.

retraction correction amendment

The situation has evolved, and it appears that my claim stated during the Seize Them! show on 5.12.07 (which you can download in .mp3 and/or FLAC format from here) that James Doohan's ashes were lost in the New Mexico desert is no longer true.

I know you were all very concerned.

let me explain something to you

©Leah Riley

When Leah starts selling things, you will buy them.

rock n' roll debriefing

Seize Them! successfully rocked their first "public" show at the Last Resort Art Space on May 12. It was an interesting time, if I do say so myself.

Photos from the event, taken by Spencer Gordon (who just happened to be there and was kind enough to employ my camera) are viewable on flickr.

If you're curious, and/or a die-hard Seize Them! fan, you can download an audience recording of the show from seizethem.com. We've got an MP3 version and a FLAC version for you audiophiles.

Performancewise we were solidly high-energy and entertaining but definitely sloppy, at least in comparison to how tight we've recently been in rehearsal. I chalk this up to the accumulation of many little details that conspired to place us, or remind us of our place, outside our comfort zone.

Immediately after our cursory soundcheck we began to play. I forgot to actually insert my earplugs, which dangled around my neck for the whole show instead. Because of that my guitar seemed extremely loud to me, which made me self-conscious. I clammed quite a few chords and notes throughout the evening but all of us in the band agree that it was a really positive thing that nobody's mistakes threw anyone else off or caused the person in question to spiral downward into a shame-based disaster.

The event was... odd. It was billed as a barbecue but failed to be billed as a DIY barbecue with grills that may or may not actually be properly coaled and capable of grilling food. Even with the extremely low attendance (in fact, absolutely none of the people I invited came to the show, aside from a very recent acquaintance who brought several friends) the beer ran out practically immediately and over half the party had to leave to go buy beer. That puts a bit of a crimp in the party flow, I'd say. DJ Porkcube did his best to keep the party live but was hindered by band scheduling and clumsiness with the PA.

A representative of Iraq Veterans Against the War had an info table set up, which was great, but then got up to make a speech promoting his cause, and for some reason chose to connect with his audience by flatly insulting them outright and inspiring most of them to temporarily leave in search of beer or less hostile vibes^*. I'm completely in favor of connecting political activity to these kinds of shows and parties but I just don't understand what's to be gained by aggressively antagonizing the very people you're theoretically trying to sway.

As we came back to Last Resort to finish packing up our gear we were told that the cops had arrived during our absence to shut the party down, claiming they'd seen the fliers advertising the show, but unfortunately for them the whole event was over by the time they arrived. A party isn't really a party unless the cops show up; that's what I say.

---

*If I recall correctly he chastised the crowd for failing to mosh during Stuedabaker Brown's set... SB is a midtempo pop-rock band that doesn't exactly inspire moshing most of the time... and then proceeded to call the crowd "vapid". Smart move, there.

oh how I hope

Chris Onstad, creator of the Achewood (the world's greatest comic strip) said the following in a recent interview:

"Today I was working on a screenplay. You know, where Ray and Roast Beef went down and fought in the Great Outdoor Fight. We’ve got a couple studios interested in the script, so we’re trying to finish that up and get it sold."

ACHEWOOD MOVIE, Y'ALL. Oh man... attention all producer types - FUND THIS FILM. It goes without saying that I, of course, should be hired to edit it. Is there a film editor out there who loves Achewood more than me? The answer is clearly no.

seizethem.com ARE GO

Subject / verb agreement PSHAW.

But yes, the new and improved seizethem.com is live and ready to serve you.

I'd wanted to have some brand new, spiffy-sounding demos finished for the site launch but, y'know, I've only found so much time to get things done.

09 F9 OH NOES

With all this hullabaloo about the revelation of one of the AACS keys I thought I'd contribute my own anecdote illustrating the hilarious futility of and aggrivation caused by DRM schemes.

I recently bought a new DVD player, one that has an HDMI port to connect to a fancy digital monitor and can upscale standard def DVDs so they don't look as crappy in high def. Now, I do not yet own a high definition television and instead use a widescreen Dell computer monitor with a wide variety of inputs. Along with the DVD player I purchased an HDMI to DVI adapter, as the Dell monitor lacks an HDMI input but certainly has a DVI port. Okay, fine and wonderful.

However, to my horror I discovered that the player detected that my monitor was not HDCP compliant. It proceeded to blink the feed to the monitor on and off every few seconds, and fill the screen with static. Mind you, I was attempting to play a standard definition DVD that I legitimately bought and paid for. This was, in a word, infuriating. I could not watch content that HDCP wasn't even invented to protect, simply because Philips complied with the HDCP extortion.

But here is the kicker.

I have several DVDs I've received from an unnamed source who ripped commerical discs, recompressed them using DVDShrink, and burned them onto DVD-R discs for me. And guess what? I can play these in my new player and the video is passed over the HDMI->DVI adapter with no problem at all.

So suck on that, DRM-fanatics. HDCP has created a situation where it is greatly to my advantage to acquire only "pirated" discs. Legitimately buying content, in this case, screws me to the wall. Ha de ha ha ha ha haaaa.

come one, come all

Seize Them! is finally getting out of the basement. Come have some barbecue.

---

Lots of other stuff going on... I've been slacking on the blarghposting because I wanted to have some actually finished things to talk about. So stay tuned for the launch of the brand new seizethem.com, plus decently-recorded Seize Them! demos and such.

I've begun playing guitar as backup to singer Iseult Collins. Mostly covers right now with a few of her original songs. Acoustic guitar + singer duo type stuff. She's all rarin' to go so it's entirely possible we'll be performing at some open mics fairly soon.

More later.

oh, the pain

I returned to Club Midway on Friday night to enjoy the electrotainment subunit OUCH (warning: Myspace) as well as the triumphant return to New York of Adam Fanning and The Crust. This was my first opportunity to enjoy OUCH as a four-piece, as they now feature C Plus on extra smooth dance moves and backup vocals.

Jeff and I have booked our flights, hotels and rental car for the upcoming Florida trip which will contain both a wedding and the second location shoot for our E2 documentary. Wheels are actually turning on this project, people.

It appears I'll be shooting some video for the Laura Thomas Band (warning: Myspace) this coming Friday which they intend to post on The YouTube. Links forthcoming.

And speaking of pain, the Department of Defense was kind enough to demonstrate their new pain ray, the "Active Denial System", on some people and record some video of the experience. Windows Media clips are available at the bottom of the page here and there's also this clip of an AP reporter getting quite the giggle out of being blasted with millimeter-wave EM energy.



Ha! Take that, free press! Note how carefully he avoids describing the experience as painful. Gotta sell it properly if you intend to deploy high tech weapons of physical coercion against your own population (lord knows we don't care how it plays with the Brown People). RETURN TO YOUR FREE SPEECH ZONE, CITIZEN, OR WE WILL ZAP YOU. Isn't it fun to live in the last days of a sham democracy?

anyone caught hating on MC Rove will get they mouth blew out

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Master of Ceremonies Karl Rove.
When Karl Rove is one day locked away in a very small room for a very long time I hope this is the only piece of video he's ever allowed to watch.

I say that because maybe it will remind him of the good old days.

Gaze upon your rulers and despair.

wrd

The letter combination 'wr' begins some of English's Most Awesome Words:

• wrack
• wraith
• wrangle
• wrap
• wrath
• wreak
• wreath
• wreck
• wrest
• wrestle
• wretch
• wretched
• wriggle
• wright
• wring
• wrinkle
• wrist
• writ
• write
• writhe
• wrong
• wroth
• wrought
• wrung
• wry

Thanks to my friend Jeff, tonight I had the pleasure of meeting Phish's archivist Kevin Shapiro. He spoke to a small crowd drawn from the intersection of Phish fans and media nerds about the practicalities of maintaining (and monetizing, let us not forget) a rock and roll archive. A good deal of it was a fun romp through Phish history, and he'd put together both a slideshow about the archive and a video montage of performance excerpts tracing the history of the band. I was audacious enough to give him my current editor's showreel, which he accepted very graciously, and Jeff and I both were able to speak with him for quite a while after the whole thing wrapped up. Kevin's a cool guy and I really appreciate the time he took hang out with us for a few minutes.

I think I sent Kevin a reel of mine waaaay back when I worked at Bozell... I guess I've been trying to get my hands on the mountain of Phish-related footage they've got envaulted up there in Burlington for a while.

As an added bonus, artist Russ Bennett, chief designer of all of Phish's festivals from the Clifford Ball to Coventry, spoke for a while about those projects and his feelings about art and artists. He was an inspiring guy, reminding us all that "taking a day job means you're not working on your art".

explosions in the sky

February 25, 1942.

Two days after Goleta, California was shelled by a Japanese submarine, a mysterious object appeared in the skies over Los Angeles.

At 2:25 in the morning the sleeping citizenry was blasted awake by air raid sirens. They blackened the city, as ordered. Some of them, afraid, but unwilling to miss the spectacle, watched as searchlights converged and more than a thousand explosions shattered the sky. Six died.

There is no consensus as to what, exactly, was being fired upon.

Not long afterward, the Scientific and Technical Branch of the US Army Directorate of Counterintelligence began an "in-house project" called the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit.

The original black and white photo was taken by an unknown photographer (or created by an unknown graphic artist) at the Los Angeles Times.

when the shadow strikes

Further to the ongoing ludicrosity of American Empire, today I read a news item about the Pentagon hiring a group of Native American trackers to help train forces in central Asia how to hunt "terrorists". This is, of course, an excellent way for that giant money laundering machine known as the Defense Department (which, you'll remember, has literally "lost" trillions of dollars according to ex-Secretary Rumsfeld) to spend a little more cash on useless nonsense, but that's not the best part.

The best part is that this group of trackers is known as The Shadow Wolves. Seriously. If they were japanese ninja (and oh god, why aren't they ninja?) they'd be KAGE NO OKAMI. Possibly "Ogami". My japanese is weak but the POINT is that this is hilarious.

My favorite sentence from that article? "Defence officials are convinced their movements can be curtailed by the Shadow Wolves."

can you do any less?

This is not the interview I hinted at in the last post.

Instead, it's a quick note to ask the populace this: what is going on with The Simpsons?

Last night's episode "Rome-Old and Juli-Eh" (#JABF08) featured an unfunny yet somewhat disturbing exploration of intergenerational love and/or sex filled out by some insights into Marge and Homer's fantasy roleplaying ("Hola, I am Esteban de la Sexface!" was a highlight of classical Simpsonian absurdity that I will probably never forget). However, the true gold was to be found in the 'B' plot. The throwaway plot required to fill 22 minutes of airtime.

It was clear to me that the writers, or the subteam of writers assigned to the B story, have discovered that they can literally do whatever they want given the world's oft-referred to and artfully handled lack of continuity. This, coupled with the show's high yet underutilized budget leads to the kind of epic High Weirdness engaged in by Bart and Lisa to which we were treated. In summary, Bart discovers a source of unlimited free cardboard boxes and Lisa concocts a plan to use them to build a huge castle in the backyard. When the free box company learns that the boxes were used for imaginative play rather than legitimate business, they assemble an assault team of delivery drivers to storm the fortress and take back the boxes. This plays out in a Lord of the Rings-esque battle sequence featuring waves of attackers and, and I am not kidding here, a dragon. The high point comes when Nelson arrives out of nowhere to help save the day, and dives off the battlements shouting "HAAAAAA HAAAAAAA!". Bart and Lisa are, of course, victorious and celebrate their win by melting down the castle with a garden hose. The last we see of them is an overhead shot of the backyard which reveals the dragon, slain by a cardboard lance, lying dead behind the house.

Given the high level of craft involved in this sequence and the number of laughs per minute it evoked from myself and my housemates, I move that The Simpsons progress toward an all-absurdity format. There have been paradigm shifts before; the one that leaps to mind is the famous Monorail episode which has come to be acknowledged as the beginning of a new Simpsons era. Here's hoping the Cardboard Castle episode will garner similar nostalgia.

your back curves like a creeping vine

Zodiac, in my opinion, needed to lose up to half of its second act. I began to lose interest in the steady stream of data about the killer, and that translated into mild exasperation as the protagonist later revisited a lot of the same information. That said, it featured many solid performances and Fincher was as skillful as ever in evoking a mood. But come on, man... tighten it up a notch. The closest comparison that sprang to mind while in the theater was All the President's Men in that it's an epic investigation with a focus on a small group of investigators (though four in this case, rather than two).
I found myself curious about how this movie is ever going to transfer to video, even HD, given that so many people's faces are about a 1/2 stop above absolute darkness in most of the movie. But it turns out it was shot on HD, rather than film, so never you mind I suppose.

Sorta broke in my camera recently, though I didn't really find much to shoot.



I think this is my favorite one, and a lot of this image is a testament to the power of Adobe Lightroom HEY ADOBE I JUST PIMPED YOUR SWEET APPLICATION ALL I'M SAYING IS ONE HAND AND THE OTHER DO SOME WASHING YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN. The original is way underexposed and far too amber even with tungsten white balance. You can certainly see noise in the dark areas, but this was shot at 800 ISO and then had the midrange brightness forced way up in post. For all that it's been through I'd say that's awesome. So all hail RAW.

NEXT: An interview?

begin document

This past weekend my collaborator Jeff and I trekked up to Boston, camera gear in tow, to begin shooting our documentary about the emergent social element of the Everything2 website and it went very well. Some things about filmmaking never change, and one of those things is getting up too early and hauling heavy equipment around.

We shot several hours of interview footage with our first two subjects and I'm quite pleased with the results. I'm not sure where we'll be off to next on this grand adventure, but watch this space.

The Pentax K100D DSLR that I ordered a while ago has arrived and I'm currently shaking it down. The kit lens is a bit slow, as expected. I haven't pulled any of the RAW images I've shot off of the camera yet so I don't really have an evaluation of the image quality, but you can bet I'll have something up on flickr as soon as there's something worth posting.

One interesting thing I discovered is that the K100D is approximately one stop more sensitive than my Minolta light meter. A normal exposure reading on the meter when it is set for 400 ISO seems to be equivalent to a normal exposure reading via the K100D's meter when set at 200 ISO. I'm not sure what the source of the discrepancy is yet... it's possible that the Minolta has become miscalibrated, it's possible that the K100D is inaccurate, or it's possible that ISO ratings for digital capture don't really have much to do with ISO ratings for film. More research needs to be done.

For those of you in NYC, I recommend coming out to the Last Resort Art Space on Friday the 23rd at 9:30PM for good times. Ignore the fact that the flyer seems to feature a furry.

my name in lights

I have returned from Amsterdam, and lo it was good. It's a rare city one goes to in which merely walking around feels like an embrace, but Amsterdam is that city. My new future fantasy is to move there and open some kind of post-production facility. Anyone wanna donate a ton of money to the cause?

Graffiti Research Lab set up residence in Rotterdam just before I arrived in the Netherlands and took over the LED wall on the KPN Telecom Building. The generous fellows requested submissions from The Intertubes and who was I to resist them?



I just wish I could have seen it in person.

oh, internet, how you reveal and obscure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

well, that's it

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


Now to business.

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

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

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

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

Last Resort

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



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

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

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

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

Roh Delikat

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

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



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

more musicks

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


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

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

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



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

Happy New Year

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

First with an OUCH concert on the Williamsburg Bridge:




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




There were lights:


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

He had soul. He was superbad.

Rest in peace, James Brown. Get the afterlife on the good foot and doin' the boogaloo.


James Brown: 1933-2006

Merry Christmas

...and/or Happy Seasonal Holiday-Cum-Fourth-Quarter-Consumer-Spending-Frenzy of Your Choice, blog-reading public.

Lessee, what's going on?

Music videos for Boss Tweed and OUCH are in the offing. Lads from the latter will most likely be dropping in to view the footage I recently shot up in Northampton and from there we'll talk about what we might wanna do.

Pseudo-planning a trip back to Amsterdam for a couple of days in February as a mini-vacation following the completion of this year's 2007 Pro Football Draft Preview: Blue Chippers and Hidden Gems (I'm pretty sure that title will be even longer in 2008 - more lettery value for your dvd dollar). It will have been a very busy January by then. Why, you may ask, am I going back to a city I've been to so recently? Sometimes it's less about the place you go than the people you see.

Recent explorations in TV land have proven to me that the NBC version of The Office is equally enjoyable when compared to the BBC original, if not more greatly enjoyable.

I am reading Tolstoy on the subway. Next up will be a novel about zombies.

Lastly, the lovely and talented Shepard Fairey is at it again:



By the way, the set of photos linked at the top of this post feature my friend Tara Giordano, a fine actress of some reknown.

Them Brangit

This weekend I went up to Northampton, MA to soak in the collegial atmosphere and videotape OUCH! brangin' it at The Elevens. Some sort of mini-documentary or music video type thing will most likely follow.

Thanks to the town of Northampton for good rock n' roll party times.

RipFest is over

The screening was last night. I went to the earliest one, the 6:30, and subsequently spent about an hour nursing a beer at the nearly-empty afterparty before the rest of my crew arrived.

Personally I'd rate it as the weakest of the five in most respects, though we did get several solid laughs. People had very kind things to say to me and about working with me so that massaged the ego a bit. I passed out a few copies of my reel.

I'm still not sure if I'm glad I did it, but I did meet a few good people and that's always positive.

I'm still tired.

RipFest Update 2

The movie is titled "The Finalists" as of right now. For a summary of events to date I will copy below the email I sent out to the filmmaking team:

Hey, folks. Just thought I'd keep you all up to speed with what's happening.

Ignore the timestamp on this email; no, I didn't work 'til 1:00 in the morning (I'm saving that for later in the week). But I did get all of the footage logged and digitized into the Avid. It really looks great, so kudos to the camera team for their work. It's clear that everyone on the set was working very hard because it comes through on the tapes.

Tomorrow I'm going to put together an assembly edit so I'll have something you can see which will give those who dare to look a very rough outline of what the finished movie might be like. Jodi's [the director] planning to drop in in the evening to see how things are going and steer me in the proper direction.


Watch this space for future updates.

From what I've seen so far I think there's a fun little movie in there somewhere.

This is typed with tightly crossed fingers (can't you tell?), but it appears that "Belly Danza", the Don Omar video (feat. Beenie Man), is actually finished. I handed off the master tape to the director today, so barring any negativity from the label it will be on air (if I can believe Don Omar's manager) as soon as humanly possible. I just showed the final version to my roommates and they all reacted positively so I have some faith that it will entertain. I would link to it here, but I hesitate to do so before it officially premieres. However, I'm sure super special sekrit peepul can find it somewhere relatively nearby.

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Tonight's Daily Show and Colbert Report seemed particularly energetic, so perhaps they've received a bit of a post-election jolt. I have faith it will continue for a while.

As I said to a friend today, I have an awful lot to criticize about Heroes warning: sound but I seem to keep watching it. As such I thought I'd point out some of the good things about tonight's episode.
I thought the murder of the new Super Memory character was cleverly executed, especially presaging it with the violent opening of the tomato paste can. The brief closeup of the dripping blood was, subsequently, all that was required to conjure the horror. I appreciated that we've encountered what is probably Hiro's moment of hubris.
Um... well, those were the things that stood out. On balance, though, I'd say this most recent episode was a bit better than average. I'm worrying that it's acquiring Lostish strokes but perhaps once I'm seduced into embracing the over-the-topness I won't mind.

NBC clearly believes they're building a new Thursday night comedy machine, and I'm pretty confident they're right. My current favorite (non-animated) show is 30 Rock ('cause as you all know, Metalocalypse is my favorite new show PERIOD) and NBC has moved it to Thursday to join with their version of The Office. I have finally seen an episode of the American version of The Office and I was quite happy to see that it managed to retain the stylistic elements of the BBC original without feeling like it was simply aping them. It's funny, too. If, y'know, you like comedy.

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I realize I haven't said anything about the elections yet. I'm sure something will come to me eventually.

RipFest update

Okay, tickets for RipFest 9 are on sale now. Since you all love me I expect you to spend money.
Seriously, though, it should be a fun time.
The screening / festival is on Monday, Nov. 20 at 6:30, 8:00 & 9:30PM and the program will run about an hour and ten minutes or so. Apparently this thing sells out (probably largely because we, the participants, are not allowed to comp anyone) so BUY NOW.

Also, BUY.

RipFest #9, part 1

Today was the first production meeting for Raw Impressions RipFest #9 and I think this is going to be a lot of fun.

The whole group gathered for mass introductions and business type things, and then we found out in which of the five groups we'd be working. From there we repaired to a local diner (by the way... trying to seat 11 people at a diner in midtown on Marathon Weekend is not terribly easy) to get to know one another and go over logistics. We are off and running.

The writers begin now, and write through the coming week. Then the production is shot over two days next weekend after which the tapes are turned over to me and I have five days to edit. The festival and screening of all the films is on Monday the 20th at the illustrious Anthology Film Archives and I strongly encourage you all to attend. As the program's director said, "get all your friends to buy tickets before they know what your film is about!". Tix are $15 (ticket website not up yet, I'll let you know) and all money goes to support this fun, nonprofit collaborative arts collective.

and on and on

Last night I went out to B.B. King's (the local club franchise, not the man's house) to catch the Stones Throw Records Chrome Children tour featuring Madlib, J. Rocc Percee P and others.

It was quite the time, though I can't say the half-hour wait in line to get my crap back from coat check was a selling point.

Here's Madlib's first song of the evening:


The original, shot on my digital still camera, looks quite a bit better so hopefully I can upload a nicer version later on.

here come the busys

Metalocalypse is my new favorite show.
Frisky Dingo has my thumbs up, too, and I assume this past Sunday's episode covered the entire season's budget. All the money's on the screen, too, people, in the writing and the artwork. Adult Swim's experiments thus far with product placement have been pretty successful in that the episodes sacrificed to Sponsorship tend to be no less funny than any of the others (the pathetic "Boost Mobile" episode of last season's Aqua Teen Hunger Force being an exception), but I can't help but feel a little sad that Matt & Adam didn't bust out Grizzlebees.


Man I am busy as hell starting now. Old projects at work are overlapping, and tomorrow I start cutting a music video for a Don Omar¹ song (featuring Beenie Man²[...I wonder if I now have beef with Bounty Killer?]) titled "Belly Danza". Sadly, Tony Danza does not appear in the video.

Anyway, there's that and then two weeks from now I will devote all my off-clock hours to editing for the 2006 RipFest project. Pros: meeting cool people who do good work, doing something that'll be seen, high probability of at least passable quality given the restrictions (two weeks total to write, shoot, post-produce and score), fun challenge. Cons: I will be living at my office. Hey, I have a couch.

Having accidentally blown off a sunrise shoot for Night Grinders last weekend I will arise cheerfully and do my duty this coming Saturday morning.

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1. My favorite part of this Wikipedia article is this: "Don Omar was also able to beat the in-store appearance sales record at Disneyworld's Virgin music store previously set by pop star Britney Spears."
2. My favorite part of this Wikipedia article is this: "as he has explicitly said in lyrics 'I'm dreaming of a new Jamaica, come to execute all the gays'."

politics, art... you know, the usual

Yesterday I saw a neon sign along 10th Avenue with some broken letters. The remainder read "SUPPORT OUR OOPS". I could only wonder how long it had been left in that state, and lament that we were driving by too fast to get a picture.

Kudos to the state of New Jersey whose activist judges have legislated from the bench in their war on people of faith and delcared that the state must create a legal status for homosexual couples that is equivalent to marriage. The state is not required label such a union "marriage" but it must be legally equivalent to heterosexual marriage. As proof that there's no pleasing some people, the chairman of Garden State Equality told the New York Times that "Those who would view today's ruling as a victory for same sex couples are dead wrong," and that "(h)alf-steps short of marriage — like New Jersey's domestic-partnership law and also civil union laws — don't work in the real world."

These are the hilarious vicissitudes of Federalism. A state can attempt to expand the freedom and liberty of its citizens while the Congress has taken steps to completely eliminate our so-called Republic by passing the Military Commissions Act of 2006. People, we now live in an overt tyranny which has done away with habeas corpus (the right to challenge your detention). The Executive now has the power to declare anyone, citizen or non, to be an "unlawful enemy combatant" and thereby strip them of all rights and confine them indefinitely to a secret prison. In that prison, nothing which will happen to them will be deemed torture, because as of now the President has the ability to decide what is and is not torture.

But it'll never happen to you, right? Well, according to a speech Sid Blumenthal delivered at the Center for American Progress on Oct. 23rd, Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, believes there are approximately 35,000 people around the world secretly imprisoned by the United States and that only 5% of those prisoners "might" have something to do with terrorism. Obviously there's a lot of verification and fact checking required to support those statements, but I'm (unsurprisingly) inclined to believe them. Last month the AP reported there were at least 14,000 secret prisoners out there... so it's not terribly farfetched.

Finally, I had the pleasure of touring artist Alex Grey's gallery called the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. For only $5 one can wander around take in his (generally) enormous and incredibly detailed "visionary" paintings. I recommend taking a look.

reggae update

Heads up to those of you in the New York City area: Thrillamatic Sound System will be spinning vintage and roots reggae at the Southpaw Down South Lounge on Thursday 10/26 starting at 10PM. This man is good, people. Very good.

I, myself, cannot go as I have a class on Thursday nights... it's been a shame lately that a whole bunch of good shows and friends' bands' performances have been on Thursdays. I'm missing out.

roll camera

Last night my friends Cristian and Farid and I started shooting some footage for our short film Night Grinders. I was pleasantly surprised by the complete lack of hassle given us by the police/MTA/whoever on the Staten Island Ferry, because I had assumed we'd be told not to shoot any video. All of this stuff will be available to use as transitional devices or establishing shots in the movie and we got a few cool things. Our original plan was to get some sunrise shots on Sunday morning, but we decided to put that off. I haven't seen any of the footage yet, but it's all night exteriors so everything will be all wackycolored.

Today at the cat show / adoption event at Madison Square Garden I saw none other than Mr. Ricky Gervais walking around with some friends checking out the cats.

Also I took these pictures (not at the cat show):





I would love to do a little stop motion animation thing of that LEGO man breakdancing on the record as it spins, but I doubt I could pull it off.

slave to brand loyalty

Well not really, but I do find it amusing that my digital point-and-shoot camera and my video camera are both Panasonic.

Speaking of the video camera, I spent an hour or so shooting some tests in Astoria Park. I wanted to try out the "24p Advanced" mode, which creates (supposedly) the most filmic look possible and is also the easiest way to ensure compatibility with tape-to-film (or dv-to-24p-HD). The 24pA thing is a cute trick... a clever way to pull 24 discreet frames from 60i video. They mess with the 3:2 pulldown in such a way as to allow an aware application, such as Final Cut Pro, to do away with the blended frames and provide true 24fps. I also threw the Gamma mode onto the CineLike-V setting and set the Matrix up for the "Cine" mode. All those "Cine" faux-prefixes should add up to purty pitchers, right?

Well pretty much, yeah.

After shooting I captured the 15 minutes of test footage into Final Cut Pro (using the Advanced Pulldown easy setup), then exported 24fps Quicktime movies (unnecessary step, actually... coulda used the captured clips directly) so Compressor could squeeze them down to a highish-bitrate MPEG2 file for DVD. I used Toast 7 Titanium to author the DVD and viewed it on our set-top DVD player.

To cut to the chase: the Cine gamma settings make the shadow areas slightly luminous, as if you were looking at projected flim. Soft light is this camera's forte, and the contrast added to the scene by the video has the effect of improving what seem to the eye to be flat lighting. It's fairly easy to achieve one of my favorite looks, which is a very hot rim or back light with beautiful, soft modeling on the subject's face. On the flipside, it's extremely easy to blow out the highlights and it appears that controlling contrast on the bright end is much more critical than the shadow. The settings I was using have some automatic, default Knee setting (Knee is highlight compression) and I dunno if I can fiddle with it but I'll give it a shot.

Regarding the 24fpsishness, I could see some slight stuttering when playing back the DVD but my snap analysis is that the DVD player is not doing a great job of adding in the pulldown frames on the fly... I'll need to check it on different players.
Next up will probably be some low-light tests.

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Oh Studio 60, you keep dangling quality in my face. They let Timothy Busfield direct this one, which I assume was justified by it being good for his character (oh, and also he's directed a whole bunch of television). He did a completely adequate job, though fell prey to the desire to show off the set and his choreography with a very long Steadicam shot that, in its defense, allowed Nate Corddry some screen time. But I am already tired of being reminded exactly what the tension is between Matthew Perry's character and the Christian. Seriously, people... we're four episodes in and the preview for the next episode (and by the way, whoever is in charge of the previews for dramas on NBC should be axed because they ALWAYS make the show, and this was true of the West Wing as well, look about thirty times more overwrought and hackneyed than it actually is) featured the promise of yet more unearned emotional commitment to the Relationship Story. The plagiarism thing was good, but resolved in a bit too cute a manner for my taste.

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Here's hoping YouTube's userbase is worth $1.6b of stock to Google.

time to get going

I have fulfilled a long-standing desire and purchased a used Panasonic AGDVX100A from a guy I've been working with for a while. Finally, tools! But to what use to put them?

My friend Jeff suggested an idea he'd been tumbling around for a while, and that is a documentary about Everything2. More specifically, a documentary about the unique and unexpected emergent social aspects of what began as a pseudo-encylopedic content management toy inhabited by writer geeks. Now that the general public is familiar and comfortable(ish) with the idea of internet-based social networking, we feel there could be serious interest in a story like this. We plan to spend a lot of the coming year traveling around the country (and possibly to other countries) interviewing people.

For my part, I'm happy to have a project that I can believe in.

fat

Eddie Murphy, once-legendary American comedian, has finally^* made his contribution to the emergent "Black Male Comedian Crossdesses as Fat Black Woman" subgenre with his new film Norbit. I imagine he will receive hearty handshakes from fellow pioneers Martin Lawrence and Tyler Perry.

Eddie's fatsuit is of the highest quality, as one would expect from a comedian of his stature.

If any of you cinema studies freshmen over at Tisch need something to write a paper on, you can guess what I'd recommend.

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*Silly me, how could I forget his earlier work in the Nutty Professor movies?

take THIS, Pat Buchanan

DVD magazine Wholphin has posted a short movie to their website featuring a group of guys playing beach volleyball over the border fence between southern California and Mexico.
Check it out.

West L.A. Fadeaway

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip has a few problems.

I am willing to grant that many of these may be my problems. The West Wing approached moments of greatness, as a major network television series, which were exceeded only by Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So, granted, unfair baggage.

Pilot episodes are granted significant leeway. A new show must distill the charisma of the cast, the hook of the plot and the tone of the entire series into one perfect episode. It's Herculean, and mythical Greeks comprise an astonishingly small percentage of the entertaiment industry.

Studio 60's pilot was very successful. People we like to watch were portraying the elite of a mysterious, controversial world, and the show snapped along with creative wit. Most of the necessary exposition was done cleverly (unlike on Smith, which is a less engaging version of Thief) and that which wasn't can be forgiven on Pilot grounds. Amanda Peet's performance was weak, but I envy nobody who encounters Aaron Sorkin's pages for the first time. The "Out Christian" character had potential, but also threatened to reveal itself as a fallout shelter necessitated by Studio 60's attention to religious America. And, yeah, they got me with the slick transition to the opening title. So very well!

How disappointing, then, to tune in eagerly to the next episode to discover that all the information from the pilot was recapitulated not ONCE, as substitute for a "last week on Studio 60" montage, but continuously. The audience is reminded of every character's history and interrelationships as well as the plot points leading to the current state of affairs.

Our introduction to the gritty details of live television production sank into a Dead Sea of didactic flowcharting, which may have bottomed out with Timothy Busfield's character literally listing all the departments under his control.


The prevalent tone was of such high drama that it strained to breaking the show's emotional credibility.

It bothers me that the creative team behind Studio 60 seems to think they must pack an entire season's worth of Big Moments into 42 minutes. Are they worried the show won't last? The Internet Movie Database suggests to me that the first season will only be six episodes long, so that may be revealing. I do believe that limited series are the most successful television format for storytelling, but that doesn't mean it's always going to be employed artfully.

One survival strategy may be the choice to set the show in the "real world". As such it can incorporate and refer to an infinite list of people, ideas and products with which its audience can identify.

This is an ideal vehicle for marketing, if one chooses to use it and is skilled enough to make it all ring true. That duty would likely fall to Hermes, I think. Shout-outs to the Internet Crowd are cute, too.


I hope to be proven wrong, because we desperately do need shows that deliver on the promise of talking honestly about our society. Studio 60's second episode was largely about cracking (possibly, I suppose we find out next week) under the cultural pressure, but nobody wants to watch a bad show about a bad show. I'm crossing my fingers.

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Meanwhile, Fox News (you remember them)is launching a preemptive strike against the "Armitage threatened to destroy my country" story coming from Pervez Musharraf by attempting to blame ex-President Clinton for al-Qaeda.

That al-Qaeda was, in fact, summoned into the American imagination by Clinton's FBI is not the angle here so much as the less-supportable "Bubba plum fergot to tell us!" shrug. Somebody still believes that Condoleeza Rice has enough credibility (poor thing) to tell the New York Post Clinton is a liarpants, too. This is probably the part of the job General Powell warned her about over dinner. One wonders how bad things have to get before a President pro tempore of the Senate gets hung out to dry.

And finally, on a personal note, I found out today that I did not get the job I desired at TokyoPop.

Offense

Two things offended me between my house and the train today.


A Fox News Hummer. Of course. A death machine for the death merchants. What the hell else would those bastards use? I desperately wished I had a paint pen with me so I could have scrawled something witty like "LIARS" on their shiny black paint job. Alas.


This sign is posted on the temporary pedestrian walkway on the south side of the Triboro Bridge. Note that the sign gives zero indication on whose authority photography has been banned. Thank you, but I will photograph any publicly funded and maintained piece of infrastructure I like.

9/12/01

Five years ago today:


Looking downtown along the West Side Highway from approximately Houston St.


A firehouse in the West Village.


Probably the first I saw of what would be many such posters.


I R Indeed. A wall in the West Village.


At the corner in front of the Exxon Station, Caton Ave. at Coney Island Ave. 9/12/01.

the violent and perilous expedients of compulsion

These pixels have been dark for quite a while, and therefore my apologies to whoever has been obsessively reloading ISOTA in search of new content.

I suppose I'm "between projects". Euro Zero Zero seems to have stalled out as an interweb thingamajig and a printed, bound version feels a bit remote. It requires me choosing to exercise the writebone to come up with some kind of text content, and then getting my layout on in Illustrator. I am, as yet, uninspired.

Seize Them! has been somewhat sidetracked the past few weeks due to certain members (namely, me) being away over several weekends. Jeff selected some bits from our old rehearsal DATs to put up on the website, so that shall be done soonwise. When we do get to practice, Ken seems to make significant progress in familiarizing himself with our material. Promising.

Some vague ideas for stickering or stencilling have begun precipitating into the brainmeat lately. Possibly they will be related to Alexander Hamilton; I've been somewhat obsessed with him lately.

What I really need is a story idea. I have an urge to write a screenplay, actually finish a screenplay, and make a movie. I lust after the Panasonic HVX200 HD camera. T'aint cheap, but t'aint really expensive either, considering. But there's no way I'm going to give into my lust and lay out for the thing without some kind of goal in mind for it. Really. Probably. Really.

That said, if anyone just got a sudden urge to be spontaneously philanthropic please don't be shy.

But like I said, I need a story idea. This should be a good time of my life for stories, right? 28 years old, had some ups, had some downs, laughed a little, cried a little... must have something to say, right?

Careerwise the status quo prevails. I have finally sent hardcopies of my reel and resume to my friend at Sony Computer Entertainment America, so if I'm lucky I might get a call from them. Another friend of mine forwarded an email to me which was calling for assistant editors in LA. I originally put it aside, but last night (in the wee hours, when rash ideas can creep past your drowsy judgement) I sent my resume off to the contact. Again, highly unlikely anything will come of it but it would, hopefully, satisfy my desire to actually be working in movies or semi-quality TV.

By the way, my dad is a rock star.

I have just passed the 10 year anniversary of my move to New York City. Perhaps there should be a party.

the other half

Okay, the Icelandic companion to the Amsterdam pictures has also gone up onto the interwebs and can be enjoyed here.
Personally, I think this set contains some of the best photographs I've ever taken.

partway there

I have finally scanned an uploaded actual film pictures of the city of Amsterdam to flickr.com. You can see just the new ones here or look at a set of all my Amsterdam pictures here.

I can read!

Some thoughts on some books I've been reading, now that I've dug into the pile acquired around my recent birthday:

The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman - This volume accompanied me on my recent vacation. If you find wit and absurdity amusing, as I certainly do, you'll have no reason to dislike this book. I did find that the list of 700 Hobo Names became a little bit of a chore to get through, but there are enough gems in it to be worth your time.

Quantum Evolution by Dr. Johnjoe McFadden, PhD - A pop science book, one of a genre I've always loved, applying quantum theory to the questions of the definiton of life and the mechanism of evolution via natural selection. His propositions, in a poor summary of a nutshell, are: 1. that conditions in the "primordial soup" (whatever its nature may have actually been) could have been such as to allow quantum superpositions of aggregations of whole molecules allowing the seemingly-improbable genesis of self-replicating proteins, 2. that quantum effects on codons within DNA lead to adaptive mutations, 3. that human consciousness may be the result of oscillations in the brain's electromagnetic field(s) which behave in a quantum manner. It was an intriguing read, though one does have to wade through a lot of layman's-terms explanations of quantum theory which are not significantly different than those used in many other related books. This is necessary, I suppose, but can lead to skimming if you're accustomed to reading a lot of pop-quantum theory. And who isn't?

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins - I'm ambivalent about this book. It certainly lays out in clear terms the mechanisms by which the oligarchy of which we are citizens operates, and while these revelations should not come as surprise to anyone who's been paying attention it's still a worthy examination of the history and development of the current state of world affairs. However, it often feels as if Mr. Perkins were writing a movie treatment or prose screenplay. Some of his recollections of events are simply too detailed to not raise an eyebrow... dramatic pauses for a character to sip a drink, etc. I was also irked by what felt to me like over-repetition of key points. This is difficult to criticize as, clearly, provision must be made for readers with poor memories and those unwilling to flip backward in the book to re-read anything. Still, I'd recommend this book to anyone who desires to have their last illusions about How America Really Works shattered. Assuming, of course, you believe his story.

Imperial America by Gore Vidal - This is mostly a repackaging of Vidal's essays and speeches from the past thirty years on the topic of American Empire, with a smattering of new writing thrown in. Heavy on repetition, since most of the above writings mirror each other in scope and content. It's certainly interesting to see the paralells between our current situation and those stretching back to the Nixon administration (and most all in between), and the overall lesson, of course, is that Nothing Has Changed. That current events seem surprising is support for Vidal's observation that we are the United States of Amnesia in which no history is remembered and neither are we desirous of remembering it. This book will provide you with Vidal's arch take on the history of American Empire beginning, more or less, with the Mexican War or the Spanish-American War of 1898 depending on which essay you're reading. Both are convenient benchmarks for When Things Went Wrong, said Wrongness finding it's apotheosis in the years immediately following World War II and, after a minor dip for a decade or two, surging forward now. Still, it's a repackage ripoff in many ways. Borrow a copy if you're interested.

recycling

I dug through a bunch of my old photos yesterday and scanned quite a few. They've been uploaded to my Flickr page. Some good stuff of kids I had as a camp counselor, and a portrait I really like of a student in a class I helped out with in college.

Also, I put up some pictures I took on my trip to China in 2000 and those are all grouped into a set here.

On Sunday my friend Jeff and I drove up to the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts (which occupies the land the original Woodstock festival was held on) to see Trey Anastasio, Mike Gordon & The Benevento/Russo Duo and Phil Lesh & Friends. Car trouble caused us to miss most of the Trey + Mike + Duo set (note: Avis car rental sucks), but what we did catch was a lot of fun and very impressive. I'll have a better sense of it once I download the full set from wherever it becomes available.

The Phil & Friends show was a lot of fun. He had Joan Osborne on vocals and man, she can sing. Forgive her for having released a silly single many years ago, folks.

stop-gap. filler.

I'm sure, my dear audience, that you have been disappointed with me for not providing a detailed debriefing regarding my recent travels to the Old Countries. I offer my apologies and assurances that such postings are coming once I get my photochemicalcelluloid pictures back from the laboratory.

I can report, however, that I have created a crude web-based showreel of some of my editing work and it can be found here. You'll need Quicktime installed on your machine to watch the clips because Windows Media can suck it. You heard me.

The impetus for bringing the above into existence was an interesting coincidence that happened just prior to flying to San Diego to attend a good friend's wedding. It's not uncommon for mail to come to my house addressed to any one of a number of prior residents and last Friday a box arrived for long-departed Brett which was clearly marked as having been shipped from EBay. Upon opening the box I discovered a well-packed baseball card and thought I should, of course, contact Brett about it. He offered to send me packing materials and postage money but I demurred and told him that, oddly enough, I was going to be in San Diego the next day and that this was clearly a good opportunity to hand-deliver it and catch up.
It was during said catching up that he mentioned that there was a possibility that he could help me get work at Sony Computer Entertainment America editing for them.

So we'll see. I have no expectations, but it's an exciting idea.

takk

Takk: it´s basically the only Icelandic word I know.
But yes! Here I am in Reykjavík. Mission Amsterdam was a complete success, and Mission Iceland is progressing expensively.
A possible report following tonight´s runtur is... well, possible.

wachtwoord

Hello. Mission Amsterdam in progress.
More later.

more more seize them!

I am harnessing the massive marketing power of last.fm.
Check it.

more seizethem.com news

DNS seems to be propagating, at least as far as Verizon's network is concerned. Some of you may still not be able to get to seizethem.com but it IS up, so be patient. The 6.3.06 show is still up for download and if I interpret the traffic counter correctly it appears nearly 20 people have downloaded the show to date.

Also, there is now a Seize Them! email listserve, which you can sign up for here. There probably won't be much, if any, traffic for a good long time but, y'know... there it is. Enjoy.

Seize Them!

Some news.

First, there is now a real, working seizethem.com.
Secondly, a link on that page will allow you to download a .mp3 version of Seize Them!'s performance from the 6.3.06 houseparty. FLAC version to follow shortly.

That is all.

P.S. Please be patient with seizethem.com being a little flaky over the next few days.

THE STICKENING

PS Print has come through admirably, and the ISOTA QXZ stickers have arrived! The stickening begins forthwith.

musics

If any of you millions of faithful readers are looking for some live music events in New York City for this weekend, note these:

Tonight at The Delancey on the Lower East Side, my friend's band North is playing and I dig them.

Saturday night at The Bowery Ballroom is a triple threat, costume-tastic show featuring Peelander-Z, Bling Kong, and the second-to-final-ever show for good ol' Mr. Brownstone, everyone's favorite Guns N' Roses tribute. Their set will be introduced by a short video I put together for the band, so don't be late.

Here's a picture of Peelander-Z from Bonnaroo 2004 -


I'm going to try my damnedest to get at least a listenable CD of Seize Them!'s performance from last weekend burned to give to some people over the next couple of days. Just gotta keep that kick drum from peaking.

and on 'til the break of dawn

The party was a "smashing success" as they say in the martini-swilling monocle-wearing circles.

Friday night was a bit of a nightmare... torrential rains shut down all the subway trains which could take me from work, in Manhattan, to home in Astoria and cabs were impossible to hail so it was a walk over the Queensboro bridge for the first time since the transit strike last December. Then upon arriving home I discovered the worst instance of basement flooding (the third flood in five days) yet which added a whole 'nother disgusting layer of preparation to handle before the party.

But by Saturday evening all was in place (minus any hot water in the house, which was unfortunate for residents and houseguests alike) and the guests were rolling in from as far afield as California, Detroit and Boston.



DJ Porkcube set up and spun an incredibly awesome mix of Brazilian tunes, hip hop, soul, dub and various other flavors for about 2.5 hours. I was gifted with a pair of source CDs of the set and plan to enjoy it frequently. DJ Porkcube's actual mix can be found in .mp3 form here and I highly recommend downloading it.

The Disgraceland Family Freakshow contingent set up in the upstairs apartment and wowed the crowd. Magic tricks, hanging weights from various piercings, bed-of-nails tricks, swallowing balloons and then requesting that the crowd staple tips into the performers with larger denominations granting access to a wider variety of target areas. I, personally, didn't get to witness the action due to crowd size but the oohs and aahs and AAAAGGGH!s were audible all over the house.

And finally we in Seize Them! performed our second ever rock show. Once every 2.5 years is not a great record but we'll see what we can do about that. Our set started at 1:18 AM so thanks to the neighbors for not calling the cops and thanks to the party guests who stuck around through the whole thing and beyond. I'll probably have live tracks posted to the ol' enterwebnets as soon as I run them through Logic to even out some uneven things in the recording.

Dave has posted his pictures of the event here.

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I've been notified that the ISOTA stickers have been printed and are on their way to me.