Archive for July, 2008
good music for a good cause
30 Jul, 2008 • posts i've written • No comments
The Walkmen’s first album, Bows + Arrows
I’m listening to it right now, and I can promise that you won’t be disappointed. Plus, (if good music isn’t incentive enough) if you buy the album from Amie Street for a measly 5 dollars, you’re also supporting a worthy cause. Specifically, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where Luca, a seven month old infant and honorary rhythm guitarist for the band, is undergoing treatment for a rare form of leukemia, Childhood Acute Myelogenous.
Enjoy the rock and make the world a better place: Buy the Album Now
BTW, If Amie Street sounds familiar, you may remember it as the only place that had those hot tracks by Eliot Spitzer’s other other, bought and paid for, half, Ashley Dupre.
for your earholes, dr. dog’s fate
28 Jul, 2008 • posts i've written • No comments
This here album’s been blasting my brain from inches inside my earginas. I could explain the album as the product of a rag-tag crew of hobos living in Hooverville during the Great Depression who are handed a few electric instruments and a copy of The White Album on vinyl. But don’t take my word for it! (thank you, Levar Burton)
Listen to a few free mp3′s off the album, courtesy of Stereogum:
Buy the album on Amazon
I have a soft place in my heart for these boys when they warmed my cold soul on a freezing Chicago night at Schuba’s sometime last year.
back to the future, part iv
26 Jul, 2008 • posts i've written • No comments
The Delorean just sat there at the light with the door open, in front of the new Macbar.
Doc Brown did have those kids with him in Part III….
gnarls barkley who’s gonna save my soul
25 Jul, 2008 • posts i've written • 1 comment
I don’t mean to simply repost things you can find across the web and on your TV, except when I think its truly a gem. And this video is only at 350 views right now! (so it could use some spreading)
I love the new album produced by Dangermouse, and I think this video (which features Jorma Taccone of The Lonely Island & Andy Samberg fame) strikes a nerve in the center of every crippling breakup. (we’ve all had one or two)
Speaking of Dangermouse, go buy his other well-produced album of the year by The Black Keys.
After a little contemplation, the video reminds me a little of the video for ‘Just’ by Radiohead.
a perception of scale
22 Jul, 2008 • posts i've written • No comments
At home, I have a computer I built in 2000 still running. I’ve only made one upgrade to the computer since I first put it together my senior year in high school; I added a second 60 gb hard drive. At the time, 60 gb was top of the line and incredibly expensive. Today I’m picking out a one terabyte external hard drive (for around the same price as that 60gb drive).
Have my needs increased? Have files themselves increased in size? We’ve certainly moved from consuming different types of media; we are transitioning from renting and buying dvds to downloading files; but even with my obsessive movie purchasing one terabyte seems like a luxury, or maybe unnecessary. I’m struck with the fact that the drive will mostly likely fail long before I ever fill it. I don’t remember feeling this way when I jumped from the 2gb drive in my previous computer to the 60gb — my music collection quickly consumed all of the available space, but maybe this is part of growing older, and with it, less revelant. Are teens filling up one terabyte drives with ease?
a word of advice from stephen colbert
21 Jul, 2008 • posts i've written • No comments
My job is pretty cool.
who looks more like the snow miser?
17 Jul, 2008 • Uncategorized • 1 comment
Or John Kerry?
Or what about French President Sarkozy? (thanks @badbanana)
Who’s the Snow Miser? Glad you asked, just press play:
guaranteed smile
16 Jul, 2008 • posts i've written • No comments
What, you need a reason? Just press play.
me and you
11 Jul, 2008 • posts i've written • No comments
New by no means, Jill Bolte Taylor discusses her massive stroke from a rare vantage point, that of a brain scientist at TED 2008. You’ve lived a wasted life if you haven’t seen this yet. Promise.
I think if I said that the space between me and you, me and everyone for that matter, is one of my most recurring consuming thoughts, I wouldn’t be alone. I’m not alone.
I’m currently reading Buying In by Rob Walker and in the book he recounts noticing that every film from his childhood was of either two themes: 1) deep down we’re all the same and 2) deep down we’re all different; he used to use that realization mostly as a quip in conversation until he started to really think about our need to feel both.
I suppose blogs are a blatant manifestation of this need. I use what consumes me to explore and crystallize thoughts that are rambling about my brain (thoughts that define me as an individual), but I also use it to try to connect with others, to feel a part of the fabric of this human web (no more ‘social’ web) in which we habit.
I think a good deal about how I can elicit a conversation between me and you here, or on twitter, facebook, in our putting room or on the street. Truth exists somewhere in the ether between you and me, and its waiting for us to find it together. I truly believe this.
my screenplay
09 Jul, 2008 • posts i've written • 2 comments
I’ve started scheduling small blocks of time for myself during the day to focus on projects, rather than the old system of giving attention to whatever’s on fire and I could turn this post into a list of techniques to be more efficient, or to save more time, but that’s not what this blog is about, and those aren’t skills I was born with.
What’s my screenplay about? It’s very loosely based on the Clint Eastwood film, ‘High Plains Drifter‘. In the film, Clint Eastwood as ‘the stranger’, drifts into a small mining town and is hired by the townspeople to kill three murderous outlaws who will soon be released from prison. (watch the trailer below)
Its actually one of the darkest westerns ever made, and its incredibly complex in terms of good and evil, right and wrong. I’m a big believer in the western genre’s format-westerns were the first film form that tackled existentialism in a big way, and westerns also confronted the ‘cultural other’ well before anyone else, too. In some ways its rigid, which helps in the writing process, but in other ways its incredibly flexible, and High Plains Drifter demonstrates that.
Yes, its loosely based on High Plains Drifter, but its also a zombie film… set in the 80′s… in West Texas. Yup. I said zombies. But not like these new fangled olympic sprinter zombies. George Romero understood why zombies were such powerful plot devices. Zombie films are not about the zombies. Zombies merely create anxiety and inevitablility which allow for human nature to play out between the living characters. Zombies are a manifestation of mindlessness, of losing control (the term zombie originated from slave times, from the powerlessness of the slaves). The zombies themselves aren’t good or bad, they are merely a rising tide, victims in their own right. I picked the 1980′s and West Texas because of the isolation you can find between tiny towns out there (and the looming metropolis of Dallas or Houston), and to reflect a time that seems not so far off, but in terms of technology it was the dark ages. Think about a zombie onslaught and you with no cellphone. I also think that zombies, in many ways, embody the 1980′s.
I hope that I can start working on it again soon. I actually shelved it after the last slew of zombie films wind-sprinted into theatres, but I think its time to ressurect it.
What do you think? Does it consume you?
