why we fight

I just finally got around to seeing Eugene Jarecki's documentary Why We Fight. It's a film I'd been wanting to see ever since I heard about it, but various circumstances demotivated me from seeing it until this very day. However, this is a movie I believe will survive for a long time so I suppose there's no real rush.

Why We Fight is, in my opinion, as successful a contemporary document of the reality of being an American as any that has ever been made. It's the movie I think a lot of people hoped Fahrenheit 9/11 could be.



I realized recently that I had been deliberately avoiding watching anything containing footage from September 11, 2001. I, like many people, got so sick of not being able to turn around without seeing the World Trade Center towers crumbling into dust that watching it deliberately seemed ridiculous. It reads as silly to me to state that Why We Fight presents the event in a "tasteful" manner, but it's an accurate statement. But it's also a dry assessment and the truth is that Jarecki's facility with the power of the material moved me greatly. This is not to detract from Michael Moore's elegant solution to the problem which was, in fact, probably the most skillfully cinematic moment in his entire film. I have my hopes that Christopher Seward, an editor I briefly met recently, had a large part in creating that sequence. The point of the exceedingly long paragraph above was to say that if you have had a similar aversion in the past, I suggest not only that you should overcome it for this film but you will be greatly rewarded for doing so.

So thank you very much to Eugene Jarecki.

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Also, hilarity on tonight's The Daily Show's dissection of Fox News' coverage of the Daytona Beach Serial Killer story.

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Also also, I feel compelled to toss a large neon WTF? at Sharon Stone for being so gung ho for Basic Instinct 2. If I recall correctly she complained loudly and widely about how her trust and genitalia were exploited in the original Basic Instinct.

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Lastly, holy awesome to the hundreds-of-thousands-strong marches across the United States in support of undocumented immigrants.

euro zero zero on flickr

One more step... stepped.
After many hours of prep work I have uploaded the Euro Zero Zero pictures to flickr.
Enjoy.

dick dick dick dick dick is a killer

Okay, this is totally awesome. The folks at Graffiti Research Laboratories have created an excellent video HOWTO explaining the process of embedding LEDs into works of graffiti. If nothing else the sountrack to video alone is worth hearing.

Thanks to BoingBoing and YouTube.

solar powered rock n' roll revolution

First of all, Classy Dames & Able Gents has updated, this time translating everyone's favorite game, Mornington Crescent, into comic form.

I'm happy to see, via the Foresight Nanotechnology Institute's email newsletter, that OrionSolar has been given one million dollars in venture capital to assist them in producing their totally awesome nanodot-dye-based flexible solar power sheets which may wind up producing solar power for about $.70 per peak watt. That, friends, is CHEAP solar power these days. I want these guys to succeed for many reasons, not the least of which is my dream to travel the world making a documentary about how to make communities sustainable while charging my various media electronics with a light, cheap, flexible solar power source. I actually wrote to OrionSolar back when I first heard of them to see if they'd be interested in sponsoring such a venture by kicking me some product, but they informed me that, regrettably, they did not have anything in production just yet.

Met up with 2/3 of Boss Tweed to discuss their upcoming european tour and how the video footage I shot might help them in that endeavor. We also tossed some talk around about doing a music video, so we'll see what might go forward with that. Man, it'd be fun. After the "meeting" I checked out Warren Malone, a very good singer-songwriter, at a small gig he was playing at the grandiosely named yet tiny Allen Street club the Rockwood Music Hall. Excellent stuff. Interesting encounter with a waitress, too. She brought me my $5 bottle of beer and then, when I paid her, informed me that her "livelihood was based on tips so anything I could spare would be great". I hesitated and then handed her the dollar I'd been planning on leaving on the table like a typical tipper would. I'm pleased she enlightened me about this arcane practice of... tipping, is it called? and I'll endeavor to help out the city's waitstaff in future.

Otherwise, Seize Them! practice is on a mini-hiatus due to various members being out of town on upcoming weekends, but we'll have to get back at it with a vengeance in April if we want to be totally kickass for the giant party we're throwing in June. Also, WE NEED A BASS PLAYER, people. Please.

V for Vendetta, a story that I have loved for a long time, was actually made into a more than decent film. See it.

dorkery

Here's the equipment list of stuff I used for the recent Boss Tweed shoot:

Cameras - 2 Panasonic AGDVX100s and 1 Sony PD150
Audio Recorder - Apple Macintosh Powerbook, G4 800MHz processor, 1GB of RAM, using Garageband to capture
Audio Interface - Presonus Firepod
Microphones - 2 Shure SM57s

this news is broken

The Boss Tweed shoot was tons o' fun and the footage is pretty decent given that all the stage lights seemed to get turned off for their set. I, personally, didn't do as good a job on the camera work as I did on my previous outing, but my friends Jeff and John more than capably backed me up on the other two cameras so I have plenty to work with. Thanks to Galapagos Art Space for letting us shoot there and to the sound guy, Josh Loar, for letting me plug in to the soundboard.

After the show I went to a party that my upstairs neighbors were throwing and we decided to have a Whole House Party, incorporating all three floors of the building, over the first weekend in June. It will be awesome, with a rock show in the basement and hopefully a succession of DJs spinning for about an hour apiece upstairs. More info as developments warrant.

And now to start cutting the Boss Tweed show. They need a couple of clips to help get a European Tour booked for this summer, so I've gotta get on that.

well, you found him, counter-epithet

RIP Gordon Parks, photographer, filmmaker, novelist, poet, composer. Pioneer for black people in journalism, media and the entertainment industry. He died at 93.

are you ready for some football?

Today was spent recording voiceover for 4th & Goal Films' 2006 Blue Chippers and Hidden Gems DVD preview of the 2006 NFL draft. Voice talent was Brian Baldinger, former offensive lineman for the Cowboys, Colts and Eagles and current football pundit for Fox Sports. Now I'm sure the following revelation will surprise none of you, but... I'm not a huge football fan. However! This process (which continues tomorrow) was quite entertaining. Over the course of editing almost all the footage for this DVD (which you should BUY NOW if you're a football fanatic) I have certainly gained a greater appreciation for football and I think I might actually understand and enjoy a game more. It was also a treat to hear a guy like Baldinger, an incredibly knowledgable expert in his field, hold forth on the players we were profiling and provide some anecdotes from his up-and-coming career as a commentator (the short version: John Madden is a jerk).

Relevant to last night's Oscars, congratulations to my ex-professor (if only for a few days before I dropped his class) John Canemaker for winning the Best Animated Short award. His film is called The Moon and the Son. Kudos also to Jon Stewart and the Daily Show writing staff for their excellent job on the most entertaining Oscars I've ever seen. Daily Show producer Glenn Clements is a friend of mine and I haven't gotten to speak to him about it yet, but if he was involved I say ROCK ON, GLENN.

I've finished a rough cut of the Mr. Brownstone show from NorthSix in December and, I'm happy to say, I've been contracted to shoot the upcoming performance of Boss Tweed at Galapagos (next door to NorthSix) on March 11. Boss Tweed is a great band and if you're in the area you should come out and see the show. I'll be covering the action with three cameras this time (with assistance from John Wiseman and an as-yet-unchosen third cameraperson) so I should have great material. I've wanted to make a concert film for Boss Tweed for a while now, so I'm pretty psyched.

Seize Them! practice over the past few weekends has yielded excellent results. Jeff completed his Herculean labor of culling through all our old DATs to find gems we could work into new songs and he found quite a few. So our catalog of material is poised to expand dramatically. It also seems we're covering Boston's "More Than A Feeling" which is totally frikkin' awesome and if you don't love the hell out of that song I dunno how you get any joy out of life at all.

It looks like ISOTA sticker printing will be delayed 'til May. But no later than May! I will require them for my June vacation to the Roots Music Festival in Amsterdam and the subsequent chillout in Reykjavik.
Th th th that's all.

(nature noises)

On my nightly visit to the uptown N/R/Q/W subway platform I happened upon an interesting sight.

Those of you who frequent the Broadway line platforms at 34th St. might be aware of the art installation known as REACH New York, An Urban Musical Instrument. If you are unfamiliar with it, it's a bank of infrared light emitters and reflectors connected to a synthesizer and speakers all housed in a green metal case hung about an arms reach above the platform. If one blocks one of the many beams, various musical nature sounds like birds twittering or bamboo windchimes knocking together play from the speakers. There are two of them, one on the uptown platform and one on the downtown. People love this thing and it's rare that you spend any time waiting on the platform without hearing someone playing with it.

The uptown platform's installation has the largish box which houses all the controller equipment and I'd always envisioned some ancient Power Macintosh living in there serving all these sounds. Well, tonight I saw none other than (I assume) the artist himself, Christopher Janney, up on a ladder fiddling around inside the control box:


The train in the picture pulling into the station was mine, so I didn't have time to talk to him. Visible inside the open box was some recent model of Powerbook, an audio amplifier, and an apparatus that I assume was the switch detecting the IR beam trips. Janney appeared to be either loading new sounds into the installation or perhaps just testing it out.

Anyway, that was neat.

could you be loved?

I spent Friday night out on the town with my friend Cristian at a bar in Red Hook called The Hook. They were having a reggae night kicked off by a pretty good cover band from Jersey called Smoke and then the rest of the time was given over to Thrillamatic Sound System and King David High Five who DJed the shit out of some awesome old-school reggae tunes. No cover charge. I got there stupidly early by not noticing the start time on the flyer for which I was awarded a free beer by the highly accomodating bartenders. Cristian and I agreed that we felt very much like we were back in Amsterdam. I hope The Hook makes reggae night a regular thing because I will definitely be there.



Cristian, by the way, would like to organize a shuffleboard tournament between himself and a chess Grandmaster to be played out in Iceland. Coming soon.

Also, my good friend René spent Sunday getting a Decepticon logo tattooed onto his left calf. Here's a photoset.

eureka!

The Garageband export problem is solved!

Somebody (shout out to ronkurz at the Apple Support forums) has received an answer from a helpful Apple Store employee. Apparently all my problems have been caused by having forward slashes (/) in my filenames! For the non unix-types out there, the forward slash demarcates a filepath. When iTunes attempted to import the mixdown from Garageband it got all confused by the forward slashes and when 'HUH WHAT THE HUH NAH I'LL DISCARD THAT' and dissolved the file off into the ether.
Whaddya know. Exports work just fine now.

I feel kinda stupid. But hey! Who woulda thunk?

snow business like your mom's business

The snow cancelled any official band-related activity this weekend, though I did take the bus out to NJ to René's house and I played him some of our recent recording. He's feeling, in my opinion, overly self-critical. I'm still very happy with how easily Bianca dropped right in and caught on to stuff. Turns out René didn't call Bianca this week to tell her we weren't practicing so I hope she's not aggrivated by that.

Second meeting of the Nameless Art Collective on Saturday, again in the DUMBO loft. We added Farid's ex-coworker Nicole to the mix and she brings a desire to produce which is one of our missing pieces. She also apparently spent some time shooting a documentary about a real-life "School of Rock" situation that she may be interested in me cutting. The NAC decided that for our next meeting, in two weeks, we would pick a project to move forward on, and also perhaps consider a name for ourselves.

I was struck with the desire tonight to "mash up", as they say, the glory that is/was Sifl & Olly with the other glory that is/was The Wu-Tang Clan's classic album Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Two of the greatest expressions of their respective media in the '90s. I want to watch characters from Sifl & Olly perform the entire record.

what the HELL, people?

Okay, this issue with Garageband failing to export to iTunes is becoming infuriating. The problem itself is infuriating enough, but there appears to be no known solution.

I've gone over (and posted to) the forums at Apple support, and every person who has had this issue has not had it resolved. The ones who've called up Apple Support directly have received nothing helpful from the list-readers on the other end of the phone who seem just as baffled as those of us having the problem, and nothing they've suggested to any of these people has helped. What the fuck is going on here?

This seems to me to be a fairly common problem given how many instances of it I've found out there on the interweb, but there is NO FIX? This is unbelieveable. You'd think Apple would be all over this.

Then again, I realize that Garageband is a $15 piece of software (if you happened to pay for iLife) and is essentially crippleware to entice you towards buying Logic (or Soundtrack Pro with the Final Cut Studio package, but AFAIK Soundtrack Pro does not allow multitrack recording...) but come on. It's stupid enough that the only way to export audio from Garageband is as either an AAC file (for "podcasting") or via iTunes. You SHOULD be able to export from Garageband as a .aiff to any destination you choose, but, again, I assume this is the crippleware factor. Failing that, it's unacceptable for iTunes export to break for unknown reasons and NOT BE FIXABLE.

I'm an Apple fan, but this is really chafing my hide.

Dooooom!

Thanks to the ever-helpful ninja I have a new, fast hard drive in my Powerbook and thusly trouble-free 8-track recording is a reality! Testing over the weekend went very well.

Also, us three boys in the band brought in our acquaintance Bianca to play some bass with us and that also went very well. It's always awkward (for me, anyway) the first time a new person comes in to play, but it looks like it could be a very good thing. Our first homework assignment is for all of us to learn Black Sabbath's "Hand of Doom". Doooooom!

My friend Farid made good on his proposal to assemble a group of like-minded filmic folks to start producing some work. We all met at member Alexei's awesome loft down in DUMBO which overlooks Manhattan, the East River and both the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. Beer and discussion were both plentiful and it really looks like we might in fact Start Something. The current shakedown proposal is to do a very short film which would be ideal for portable video devices, very possibly based on a poem Farid has written. Off we go!

I received an email from, of all people, my old Latin teacher from way back in 7th and 8th grade. He's married to the woman who cast me in my first major children's community theater production waaaay back in the day and he's hoping I'll come up to the hometown for this year's production of "Oliver!" to talk to the kids in the cast. Maybe, maybe. I'll have to think about it.

big fat liars

You know what? I don't understand why everyone (or, at least, I get the impression from The Media that it's 'everyone', but it could be no one) is so pissed off at James Frey.

Now, granted, I did not read his book and therefore I don't have an emotional investment and cannot feel betrayed. I understand that people don't like being lied to, and I'm not a fan of people willfully misrepresenting themselves for reasons that aren't whimsical or amusing or muckraking or at least funny to me.

But here's the thing: what the hell difference does it make if A Million Little Pieces is gospel truth or a big pack of lies? Readers purchased the book to be entertained. Extrapolating from the popularity of the book I'd say people were entertained. The vast majority of readers do not know James Frey, James Frey has zero impact on their lives and vice versa. There is absolutely no difference if the James Frey in A Million Little Pieces is a fictional character or a depiction of a real person. The experience is the same. It was a good story that entertained readers and has no greater impact on the world than that.

A Million Little Pieces is not a history of nations or an analysis of current events or a biography of an important person or even "reportage". It is a novel-length personal essay at best. If you connect with the story contained therein, you connect with it regardless of whether or not it "really happened". Your time was not wasted, you sacrificed nothing, you were not asked to participate in anything other than the exchange of money for entertainment.

As I said, I haven't read it so any conjecture about my reaction to this revelation if I had read it is mere speculation, but I feel that if I had read and enjoyed A Million Little Pieces and subsequently found out that it was entirely false, my reaction would have been something like: "huh. really? okay. that guy's kind of a dick." and that would be the end of it. Now, I may be atypical because I am a Media Guy myself and basically take it as a given than any piece of mass media is, in large or small part, artifice. But I honestly don't understand why the general public thinks it's a Big Deal. Oprah, okay... she has to defend her "credibility" I suppose, but even she seems a little excessively indignant to me.

Perhaps in this age where practically everyone in our culture is aware of the fact that they are constantly being lied to by those in power about Things That Actually Matter, whether or not you support or don't support those doing the lying, having one's trust in a simple True Story violated is the back-breaking straw. Maybe everyone should be grateful that James Frey has actually provided the public with not only an entertaining work of essayish fiction but a case study in Media Literacy. You shouldn't implicitly trust anything presented to you by media. Everything must be questioned.

Except me, of course.

we hardly knew ye

It appears that my long-disused Alesis SR-16 drum machine has given up the ghost. I plugged it into my analog mixer and then into Garageband the other day and tapped a few pads experimentally. Rather than the very-good-yet-clearly-sampled drum sounds I was used to, I instead heard blasts of trashy, staticy, distorted digital noise with the vaguest hints of drum sounds buried in them.

"But that's awesome!" I clairvoyantly hear you thinking. Yes, in certain circumstances it could be very cool. But it's a sound that you can only use sparingly and it's a shame that such a quality, versatile machine has been reduced to a novelty noisemaker.

I have no idea what might have happened to it. It's been more or less sitting around untouched for a good long while. Ah well. Entropy wins again.

my city was gone

On the Great Grand European Tour of 2000 (the subject of the forthcoming Euro Zero Zero "visual memoir") my friends and I had the privilege of visiting the community of Christiania. Christiania is essentially a squatter community that has been more or less left to its own devices (lengthy ongoing legal battles aside) for several decades now.

Unfortunately, it appears that the Danish government has decided to build privately owned condominiums within Christiania. To this point all property within Christiania has been collectively held. In addition to the condos the government wants all existing Christiania residences (mostly ex-military barracks and DIY houses) incorporated into the Danish public housing system which will increase the rents paid by the residents from approximately 250 DKK to "between DKK 2500 and 4600 for a 50 sq. m apartment."

This, if it happens, is essentially the end of Free State Christiania. I will be sorry to see it go, and doubly sorry that I didn't take any pictures while I was there.

You can read the full story at The Copenhagen Post Online.

Thanks to Boingboing for bringing this to my attention.

I fly DIY

So we ran into a technical snag this weekend with the recording. While the Firepod audio interface is working wonderfully, I'm having issues in which I get an error message from Core Audio saying that my hard disk is too slow. I have to figure out if the hard drive or bus speed on my laptop is causing some kind of bottleneck when recording seven simultaneous tracks, and if so what I can do about it. External firewire drive using a firewire hub? Use Jeff's slightly faster bus-speed Powerbook? Get a Mac Mini? The bus speed isn't all that fast on the minis and I haven't yet seen what the RPMage and throughput is on the hard drives in those suckers. Pick up an old dual G4 tower that I can pack with fast-ass hard drives and lotsa RAM?

It's all a money sink, but man we're having a good time with this.

she done done it

Serendipity.
I opened this month's issue of Res magazine warning: page is chock full of animated ads for Adobe products that will probably slow your browser to a crawl to discover that the artist who did the wonderful cutout paper piece on the Adirondack Furniture building which I photographed this past weekend has a name! She calls herself Swoon and the intarweb tells me she has pieces up all over NYC.

So Swoon, if you ever happen to read this, consider this a shoutout. I love your work.



Swoon interview from 2003
Swoon interview from 2004
Swoon Google search results

that's not writing, that's just typing

Finally finished transcribing the euro-trip journal into Word in preparation to lay out the pictures + words published thing which I'm tentatively titling Euro Zero Zero. I've also got about half the photos from the trip scanned, so the next step will be to edit the photos and re-write the journal into some kind of actually interesting narrative.
Not getting much done otherwise yesterday or today; I've come down with some mild flu-like thing which is making me feel like ass and lazy as hell.