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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.