the beast and other such merriment

I edited a couple shorts for my friends in Galadina back in July. One of them just went up on MySpace two weeks ago and already has had over 80,000 viewers. Crazy!

Go here to watch the Beast ... if you have a strong constitution ...

(Also: Casual Gay.)

some advice from chopper.

I was sitting with my friend Alastair tonight, saying I need to toughen up a bit (after relaying a story about being soft-skinned about criticism), to which he replied, "what you need to do is harden the fuck up."

By which he was meaning to refer to this ever-so-awesome bit of Australian television:

dougcasting.

Okay, so I gave my song another listen, and decided it's not ready for prime time. Once this cold wears off, I'll give the singing another go and see if I can get a full take that I don't cringe at. (If not, maybe I'll just post it anyway, and you can tell me whether or not my cringing is warranted.)

But on the off-chance that you're one of the two people that wanted to hear my voice and good music, here's the two things, presented in serial rather than parallel form: Dougcast 1.

Track listing:
Flogging Molly, "If I Ever Leave This World Alive"
Hot Hot Heat, "Middle of Nowhere"
Hot 8 Brass Band, "Jisten To Me"
Bob Dylan, "Thunder on the Mountain"
Miles Davis, "Half Nelson"
The Hold Steady, "You Can Make Him Like You"
Etran Finatawa, "A Dunya"
Against Me, "Pints of Guinness Make You Strong" (acoustic)
Lali Puna, "Micronomic"
Superchunk, "Unbelievable Things"
The Minor Thirds, "In Medias Res"
Moondog, "This Student of Life"
Clipse, "Keys Open Doors"
Bloc Party, "This Modern Love"
Hot Water Music, "Bleeder"

Let me know if you actually listen to it, like it, want to hear more, have any suggestions, etc.

Unrelated: This interview with Uwe Boll is a must-read of megalomania.

zombie mac, with new powers!

So a week later and $500+, I have my Mac back. It now has a much larger (and, more excitingly, functional) hard drive, running a newer version of the Mac operating system with new, exciting applications! The downside is that not only does it not have my old, also exciting applications installed, I forgot to back them up, which is a nuisance. However, I did backup all my other data a week before it died and gmail thoughtfully fills in most of the gaps. Lost a couple things but it could have been a LOT worse.

Amidst trying to get various apps back up and running, I decided to experiment with new arrival GarageBand, which is Apple's make your own recording thing. Being Apple, it's absurdly intuitive, and after putting together something with loops and primitive keyboards, I recorded one of my songs using the built-in mic. The audio quality, apart from the high noise floor, is MUCH better than I expected. I'm still trying to decide how I feel about the song (an old one, "Perfect Houses", that you might have seen The Jet Effect play in our, like, one show ever - I played guitar for that one). I mean, I like the song (it's simple but not too embarrassing) but I'm pretty rusty on guitar and still trying to get my head around singing, vocal delivery, the basics of singing in key. I recorded three different takes. If I can figure out how to export them from Garageband and can withstand possible embarrassment and think anybody cares, I might post them to get feedback, either here or at the NAP.

Otherwise, just getting over a nasty cold/flu that I think I've finally licked after a week, probably my body's revenge for abusing it during the film festival. Cut a movie trailer, and may be cutting another one shortly. Getting the animation project back off the ground, slowly.

And going to make a cup of herbal tea. Like, now. Bye!

FYI ...

my computer died last night. (Boot drive failed while trying to correct disk permissions, can't correct them from single-user mode.)

Psychically, I backed up last week, but I still lost a couple things (a week's worth of emails, a few pages of writing and a day's worth of work on an editing project) that hopefully I can recover. But I am not optimistic.

Time to shower.

how we read

something not about death ... this link at Scientific American is interesting to me, in that it breaks down reading into three parts and kind of helps me explain to other people why I'm a fast reader. I remember my dad trying to time me when i was a kid, and then telling me to stop and ask what word i was on, and i couldn't. I could only give him a general area.

While the article emphasizes phonics, I don't think that's ever meant as much to me - there's lots of words I read that I can't pronounce. (I managed to eke a whole linguistics paper about this freshman year.) For me, I think contextual clues (what comes before and after) and holistic word recognition (recognizing a word from a shape) are much more of the puzzle - as I see a sentence, I see all the words, work out most of them from the shape, and as i scan the words more closely i get to the end of the sentence more quickly as the content becomes more obvious. (Meanwhile, I'm probably scanning the next sentence with my peripheral vision.)

This is probably one reason I have no problem with subtitles.

The downside of this is that it doesn't work very well for things that are dense in content - I'm literally reading faster than I can absorb - or for very idiosyncratic writing styles. I often find when I read, say, Italo Calvino, that I have to re-read sentences, get lost, will wind up re-reading the same paragraph twice and get to the end before I realize I've already read it.

I wonder if there's a class to take for slow-reading.

o death.

Bergman. Then Michelangelo Antonioni, director of the masterpieces L'ECLISSE, L'AVVENTURA, and THE PASSENGER (as well as possibly others - there's a number of his films I have yet to see.)

And then Jeremy Blake. Although I didn't know his name until today, I knew his work: he did the incredibly striking animation sequences in PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE and the films that played behind Beck during his SEA CHANGE tour (as well as the cover of said album), and apparently has done a lot of other groundbreaking video work I haven't seen, and he committed suicide a week after his girlfriend did the same. Antonioni was 94, Bergman was 89, but Jeremy Blake was only 35. This is a tragedy of a much different order; it's horrible and sickening, actually.

Also dead this week: Houston reporter/personality Marvin Zindler. In his vigilant crusade for consumer rights and against slime in the ice machine, he literally worked up til the very end, filing his weekly report from his hospital bed, 9 days before his death.

Please everyone stop dying for a bit. Thanks.