putting the j in jjosh

In 2004 when I went to the Small Press Expo (SPX) in Bethesda, MD I did a couple of things. I met Carla Speed McNeil, met another guy named Thor (my alter ego, I’ll tell you all about it later), and had a great conversation with Jeff Rowland who is the writer/artist of Wigu. I had so much fun talking to him that I bought one of his books, thoroughly enjoyed it, and now follow Wigu online. He recently started a new storyline, and I heartily recommend it…it starts here…

This description from Wikipedia is too good not to share:

The comic is centered on the adventures of a little boy named Wigu Tinkle and his family. Each chapter of the comic represents one day in Wigu’s life. Wigu is an intelligent child with an active imagination who uses much of his free time to watch television and play video games, where he encounters the beings of Butter Dimension³, primarily the intergalactic heroes Topato (a flying potato whose catch phrase is "Spring into action!" and whose primary defense mechanism consists of being made entirely of poison) and Sheriff Pony (an eloquent Space Pony who, as the storyline reveals, excretes vanilla ice cream instead of fecal waste).

Wigu has a teenage sister, Paisley, who is the stereotypical goth girl, though insists her being a nihilist is entirely different. She actively seeks out depression and angst. Wigu’s father Quincy makes money by composing music for porno movies. He is also a bodybuilder and tends to walk around without a shirt, which sometimes gets him into trouble.

Displacements by Michael Naimark.

Here’s how to do this:

1. fill a room with stuff, camera in the middle, on a rotating platform

2. slowly move the camera around, filming stuff in the room

3. paint everything in the room white

4. put a projector on the platform and turn it around at the same rate, projecting the film of the objects onto the objects themselves…

nice.

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embedded vimeo, via

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!

Wow, check out Muto.

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Found on vimeo, via waxy, done by blu.

Shot in an afternoon, edited in a day, and featuring the lovely Ms. Lila DeVito, I present to you "Modern Marvels – 80’s Tech".

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I think this is the best mix I’ve done. Started in October, this is officially 2007’s mix, but you can dig it in 2008! It leans heavily on mashups and hiphop, because that’s where I think the most interesting and innovative music is happening these days…

Enjoy! Lemme know whatcha think…

(right-click or ctrl-click to download zip file of audio mp3s and cover art jpg)

Psychedelic Hiphop Dubplate

UPDATE – it has been suggested that I should point out that I made a lot of the mashups myself…enjoy!

joshgranger.com science corrospondent Pat G returns with a link to an article that suggests the reason aliens haven’t contacted us yet is that they’re probably all geeking out in their own virtual worlds. You could make an awesome virtual world that does everything you could ever want it to, and then you wouldn’t have to bother with expending all the energy to go to other planets or build more crap on your own planet.

When the conversation gets to environmental concerns (as it often does in our house), I often feel that to have hope in the face of such disaster requires a fundamentalist faith in technology. Sometimes I have to break it down like "Well, I honestly think that this crises might be the thing that spurs us to space travel to colonize other planets." And I’m not really joking, you know? But now I think this virtual reality angle is so much more energy effecient, it will become my new go-to. A bit harder to explain, but perhaps a bit easier to absorb than the whole "other planets will save us" theory.

It reminded me of this chilling scene from Carla Speed McNeil’s amazing sci-fi comics epic, Finder. If you are into comics at all and don’t know Finder, you must go and get it and get into it now. Now, I say! It is amazing. She’s the only comics person that I actually went to a convention to meet. Check her website, lightspeedpress.com, she’s got first chapters from many of her books there for you to check out, or you can order the trades from her. I recommend starting from the beginning with Sin-Eater. It’s so dense and amazing…

Anyway, this scene is from "Dream Sequence", and it shows the extension of all this thought, introducing a character who goes to work in a virtual world, in a sort of cubicle farm. It really stuck in my head because it seems so plausible…

The weather in Savannah was gorgeous for the three days we were there. Upper 70’s, nice breeze, low humidity, sunny skies. We had lucked into some kind of early week special at our B&B (the meta-named "Bed & Breakfast Inn") that resulted in our getting a swanky room with a balcony. We’d go down and have breakfast, then come back up and start the morning slowly on the balcony — reading, enjoying an early morning beer, or just sitting in a rocking chair with Grits, the B&B cat. Then we’d stumble into Savannah and walk around like we were in a dream.

Savannah lent itself to this feeling because it was full of weird, old houses and friendly, eccentric people. Savannah is home to the house that Disney based the Haunted Mansion on, is full of churches and beautiful squares that slow down traffic, and features giant old trees that fairly drip with Spanish Moss. 

One afternoon as we were coming out of Colonial Cemetery, we saw a strange vehicle driving slowly down the street. It looked to be a modified Hearse, with people’s heads sticking up out of it and a guy in front speaking through a microphone like one of the passionate crazies right out of Slacker. There was a phone number on the back; we called and booked the midnight tour the following night.

We did a lot of fun things in Savannah, but the Hearse tour is definitely up there as far as originality. It was in a real, modified, formerly working Hearse. We rode where the bodies had been.

Our driver was a large, red-headed, long-haired, death-metal-t-shirt wearing guy named Nate. Or, as one girl called out as we drove by, "BIGG Nate!!!!" And Nate gave us a chilling tour of a damn spooky city. Also notable for driving us into the ghetto to see, as Nate put it, "the ghosts of burned down crack houses."

Walking home around 12:30, we accidentally walked near a house that had featured in one of Nate’s more memorable tales. It was chilling, and we picked up the pace. Then, as we got closer to our B&B, we came across one of the squares that had a particularly scary story about a ghost of child that supposedly haunted it.

Maxine wouldn’t let us go anywhere near the square, and we were glad to get back to our room, our beer, and Grits.

Hi, no posts for a while I’m afraid as Maxine and I have road-tripped ourselves to the South! We had a lovely stay with my ole pal Jack, his expectant wife Kara and amazing dog Morton (who we miss terribly!) in Durham, NC, and we have now forged on like Sherman to Savannah, GA. Also like Sherman, we have spared Savannah from our path of destruction and are loving how great it is here. It feels surreal and serene, like living in a storybook of some sort…

Posting should resume next week, but in the meantime, here’s a track from Jack’s former band, The Diplomats, that he recorded a while back with Mitch Easter(!) — producer of the first two REM albums! It sounds pretty great…

(The Diplomats – Chris Bell)

[audio:Chris_Bell.mp3]

Also, here’s a picture of a hook-rug of a cat holding a pumpkin that we saw at a market in Raleigh, NC. Both cat and pumpkin are nervous for some reason.

Awesome.

See you next week!

"possibly the best rap about a cup of tea EVER"…

Cup of Brown Joy by MC Elemental (via Warren Ellis)…

living with a certified tea addict, this all makes a lot of sense to me…also it’s genius…and put together so well…

very rare to see successful british-comedy-hiphop…

In February, right when I had started the blog, I was working on a project at Sundance Channel when I saw an editor working on these amazing Isabella Rossellini short pieces based on the sex life of bugs(!!). They are weird and amazing. Yes, they have that sort of "consciously viral" quality to them (i.e., "I’m a big business but I’m making something weird so it gets forwarded around the internet!"), but luckily Isabella R is so over-the-top and great that it doesn’t matter.

I immediately thought I would grab them from the edit room and post them on my blog before they were even out! I had just started my blog, and already a real scoop! This was going to be great!

Then I realized that Sundance would know it was me and I really like working there (still, I kinda feel, as Gillanders would say, "the old Josh would have done it."). So I’ve been patiently biding my time for them to have an official release and now it has happened. Here is a brief sampling of two of them, bee and snail. Find the rest on the Sundance site here.

(For some reason they’re not available outside the US, which has caused a bit of a stink on the internets (old-school rights management in a new school world)…someone on boingboing provides a workaround to the original flv’s here)

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This month’s banner picture was taken at MOMA’s Olafur Eliasson exhibit, "Take Your Time". It’s a bunch of light, color and mirror based installations that have to do with the perception of perceiving (apparently). The banner picture was taken in a room that had these weird and intense lights that made everything look either yellow or black. It really messed with your eyes, but in a good way.

Picture to the left was this odd balcony that looked as though it was over an infinitely deep chasm, but was really just clever mirrors. Click here for bigger pic.

Great exhibit.

It is May. Let us celebrate in two different ways.

First let us celebrate in the Scottish fashion.

(Belle and Sebastian – Mayfly)

[audio:Mayfly.mp3]

Then we shall celebrate in the Celtic-y Pagan-y fashion.

Makes me want to watch The Wicker Man all over again.

I love that Wikipedia describes it

"combining thriller, existential horror and musical genres."

That’s got me written all over it.

(pic of mixwit.com, the new mixtape site with a great cassette-style interface) 

Since I started the blog in February 08 I’ve been thinking a lot about this stuff. I wasn’t really sure what joshgranger.com was going to be when I bought the domain. Then while getting ready to start the blog proper, wordpress (whose software powers this site) had a little exercise before you start blogging where you write down what you plan to do, who the audience is, how often you’ll blog, etc., in an effort to make sure you know what you’re getting into.

My little written bit basically amounted to sharing anything I found online that I thought was cool — music, video, linkage — much like my favorite blogs. I’ve come to think of it as an extension of the mixtape, which is an artform I’ve loved since I was taping off the radio in 1982. In college my mixtaping reached a alltime high level: I was using the media lab to tape things off of VHS videocassettes; I had inherited my dad’s old cassette player that could control the level in (yes! no more loud to soft transitions); I was part of a group of fellow mixtapologists who took it very seriously (report cards were made for each mix, a fanzine was published (I show up on page 13)); I was able to scour the college radio station for b-sides and weird rarities, or record myself doing "long-distance dedications"; ETC.

Post college, I was lucky enough to have a father who loved cutting-edge tech, so I could offer people CD mixes when it was still a novelty. When I decided to try DJ’ing, I did a lot of research before deciding to go with CD decks (more flexibility, don’t have to buy records all the damn time). I could run the decks into my computer and record the mixes, then split them into tracks with other software.

Part of the joy of the mix (both making and receiving) was getting/hearing something that made you say "where did THAT come from?!" And of course, the mixtape merely offered you the track name. There wasn’t really any context, so a really obscure track (I remember putting a Crooked Fingers track on a tape for Dan R before Eric B had even become Crooked Fingers…coup!!) could have an air of mystery about it that really added to the fun, and prompted attempts at one-upmanship.

The same is true of forwarding links to your friends — you just send the youtube link, not usually where you got it from. And this keeps that sense of mystery, that great feeling of "where did they find THAT?!"

my gosh, so interesting! tell me more!

A number of points:

1. Does this video bring the dopeness or the freshness? Discuss.

2. On my good days I’m pretty sure I could make something like this. I really could.

3. Do you think these are made up from other vids downloaded from youtube or from hi-rez sources? If you use youtube vids and then re-compress them for youtube, do they look like crap? Is youtube’s new mp4-ness affecting this?

4. Culled from Warren Ellis’s blog. His description: "http://www.eclecticmethod.net. Video mixtapes, video remixes, live video DJ shows and other peculiar experiments that involve beats, images and science." The site is indeed full of great stuff.