putting the j in jjosh

small article in the NYT about a bike thief in Toronto (apparently the city known as the most bike friendly) who stole over 2300 bikes!…that’s a lot, but then this paragraph also caught my eye:

That was just the beginning. An additional 200 bikes were seized in Mr. Kenk’s home. Ten landlords around the city reported that their garages had been rented by Mr. Kenk and were bulging with bicycles. As the police gathered the mounds of bikes, they also found cocaine, crack cocaine, about 15 pounds of marijuana and a stolen bronze sculpture of a centaur and a snake in battle.

15 POUNDS of mj! And how about that sculpture! It sounds so great. Obviously, when he saw it he just had to have it. If only it had been a centaur with a crossbow fighting a minotaur with a trident. Amazingly when you type "centaur and snake in battle", you get this, which is really creepy and probably not what the statue was like at all:

This is fantastic. At a festival in Ireland (check the electronic thump in the background), a group of jump-suited folks decide to play soccer. Also they are wearing binoculars. Hilarity ensues.

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Among the various podcasts out there, I have to give a serious shout-out to Stephen Fry’s podgrams. Fry is a BBC tv comedy institution and he also shows up in various films and TV shows, but the most fun thing about him is how British he is. He has a great accent, seems to both enjoy being from the whole Oxbridge crew as well as satirizing being from it, and really enjoys being well-spoken and intellectual-y. All tempered with the off-the-cuff best British silliness in his humor. The BBC describes him thus:

"Stephen Fry seems as English as tweed, silver toast racks and the London black cab he can be seen driving around the streets of the capital."

His podgrams are very irregular, but are always a blast to listen to. His latest consists of Mr. Fry reading a speech he recently gave regarding the BBC and the motion to "slice" their licensing fee to include the (apparently) foundering Channel 4. He uses this speech as an excuse to talk about his own history with the BBC (from listening to BBC radio to making shows of his own) and to explore the current state of media production and distribution today. For anyone in or connected to any kind of "content production" in today’s world, it’s a pretty great podcast.

The podgrams can be found here, though you’ll have to subscribe via itunes…in case you’ve no time nor audio to listen to a podcast, there’s a text transcript here…and his blog is also fun (he’s a bit of a tech-head)…he’s got a great post talking about being semi-famous and what it’s like to have people coming up to you all the time to talk to you, have pictures taken, etc. Interesting stuff…

I love this bit from the BBC podgram:

And as for broadcasting, well after a mad diversion of believing that it was all about distribution, every media boss now repeats the mantra Content is King.

‘We repent,’ they seem to be saying, ‘being a media boss is no longer about owning as many stations, networks, nodes, outlets and ports as possible – it’s about production, about making things. I see that now.’ 

‘Hurray,’ shout the programme makers, ‘finally you’ve understood. So, give us the money then.’ 

‘What money?’ say the media executives, ‘there is no money. We spent it all buying up companies and their back catalogues. We needed content in a hurry, because – in case you weren’t aware … content is king, you know.’ 

‘Doh. Hang on … but what about new content?’ 

‘Good lord no. Are you mad? Far too expensive.’ 

Recently I came across a CD of audio from this semi-band project I was in back in something like 1999 or 2000. My pal Bijan and I were gonna both play guitar, and then instead of having a singer, we’d just have a dat player playing these stories that we would record. (I’m sure This American Life was on at the time, but I wasn’t aware of it.) The songs’ dynamics would match what was going in the story…

I only managed to record 3 stories, and we had all of 4 practices before we gave it up. Then I advised Bijan at work that if they didn’t give him a raise he should quit. They didn’t, he did, and the next thing I knew he had moved to New York. It was crazy.

The CD I found has two of the stories I recorded — the third, which was fantastic, has been lost to the aether.

First is Mr. B (initials for names to protect the storytellers)…a guy I worked with a handful of times. A real old-school producer guy, who talked a mile a minute and smoked constantly. He wore all black and was a blast to hang around with. I just figured he’d have a good story, so I got the mic and started recording…his story is split into two parts…the first sound you will hear is Mr. B lighting a cigarette…

Mr. B’s story part 1 – 5:12

In part two, at the appropriate time, Bijan and I were going to start playing J Geils’ "Angel is a Centerfold" and it would slowly get louder and louder as the story went on, before erupting into a massive crescendo at the end! Whatta show it would have been!

Mr. B’s story part 2 – 2:05 

Next is J, who worked with us for a while at Team. If you knew her, you’d never guess that as a kid she was chubby and unathletic…Bijan and I were practicing in Team’s rarely used 2nd floor space, after-hours, and J saw us one night and asked what we were up to. An aspiring actress (wonder where she is now?) she said she had a good story…

J’s story – 4:13

This is from Derren Brown’s "Something Wicked This Way Comes"…I watched this last night and found it pretty great. His sense of showmanship is really good, and it makes me feel like maybe this was what it was like watching magicians in the early 1900’s, before tv and the net made us all savvy…

It’s 9 minutes long, but a darn good illusion-y time…

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Roscoe pointed out to me a while ago that the Rza has started Wuchess.com, where Wu-Tang chessheads can join up and play each other…now, here comes an NYT vid of a game between Rza and the New York Times chess editor, Dyan Loeb McCain…

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and here’s a link to the game they played…you can go through it in steps to see how it went…I’m not that good at chess, but it looks like Rza holds his own pretty well…

With 4.5 million youtube views since it was posted on June 20th, a New York Times piece, and links on every link blog, it’s possible that Matt Harding’s dance vid needs no help from me to get itself passed around the internet…

And yet, like the NYT says:

However you interpret it, you can’t watch “Dancing” for very long without feeling a little happier.

In case you’ve missed this slice of happiness, here it is.

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Is this another example of a stupid human trick on youtube?

Or another example of how the contemporary urban environment is now constantly being re-contextualized for fun fun fun.

Something to think about.

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Much like the hi-5 video from a while back, this takes a (not so) simple idea and sees how far it can go…

For some reason this vid makes me feel good about life.

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Yes, the Red Hook, Brooklyn Ikea opens on Wednesday, in two days’ time.

Yes, they’re doing some crazy promotion thing where the first 35 people in the store will get a free couch.

Yes, there are already people camping out in line.

I camped out once at RFK for Grateful Dead tickets in 1993 (I think it was ’93…Traffic was the opening act, so JW what year was that?). I knew a lot of people going to the show (and to camp out), and I figured I should experience the fabled Dead show at least once before Jerry died. Camping out was a lot of fun, almost a party unto itself, with various parking-lot shenanigans and goings on. I didn’t sleep much and the next day while driving home I had to repeatedly slap myself in the face to stay awake.

If you’re curious about the shenanigans and goings on at the Ikea camp out, racked.com is live-blogging from the line; they’ve got an embedded blogger who’s fifth in line.

It may be overstating the obvious, but these people must really really really want an Ikea couch.

UPDATE – from one of my favorite blogs of the moment: "Red Hook Blacks Line Up To Rob First 100 IKEA Customers."

I always wanted to get Carla Speed McNeil together with Timothy Speed Levitch and have them hang out and talk about what it’s like to be called Speed. Speed Levitch was a metaphysical tour guide of NYC, and subject of the fantastic documentary The Cruise.

I first met Speed out at Burning Man (my sister pointed him out to me — thanks, Katie!), then ran into him a bunch of times soon after (he gave a tour for Silver Spring, MD’s Silverdocs!), got handed his book, and was finally able to go on a tour with him in December 2003 (the day after Santarchy!). It was a walking tour of the West Village in NYC, and was such a blast…Mike H, Alan M, his wife and I walked the chilly streets, listened while Speed did his thing, and ended up for beers at Chumley’s (now closed!).

He also gave me one of the best pieces of advice for The Advice Project: "run wild with your healing." Nice.

I’ve tried to keep track of Speed since then, but his phone numbers get disconnected, his websites go down, he vanishes. I recently heard that he was out in San Fransisco doing tours, but couldn’t find any info about it. Then this morning I found this, which is great:

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I love the bit about Macy’s. Of course, the website listed at the end is defunct, and the phone number goes to the voicemail of someone named Keith, but Maxine and I will be out in SF late in July, so I’m gonna try and track him down for a tour. He does have a blog, such as it is, and there’s an e-mail on there, so maybe that’ll work. We’ll see.

UPDATE – I just tried searching for Speed’s Richard Linklater-directed short film "Live From Shiva’s Dance Floor" (about SL’s idea for a 9/11 memorial involving grazing bison on the World trade Center site) but couldn’t find it anywhere, not youtube, rapidshare or even a torrent! When that happens these days it actually makes me mad. It should be online somewhere! Somebody DO SOMETHING!