putting the j in jjosh

wax george clooney.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

This is footage I recently came across when I transferred all my digital8 tapes (yes!) to miniDV. It’s from a TLC promo I shot in my living room, for Thanksgiving in the Junkyard — an all-day Thanksgiving marathon of TLC’s show "Junkyard Wars." It was when I was still relatively new at TLC, when it was still fun, still a bit under the radar. We put a film-look effect on it, and cut it up with some clips from the shows, and it went on-air. It was kind of a great feeling to see this crazy stuff that I shot on my living room floor end up on a major cable channel.

(Fun fact: for months after that shoot, whenever I would use my drill it would smell like mashed potatoes.)

(Fun fact 2: I have still have that drill and it still works.)

I can never keep straight the order of the ages, is it Golden then Silver then Heroic then Iron? All I know is that supposedly societies always feel like they always just missed the Golden Age — it’s always in the past — and that they’re living in the Iron Age — the one that’s really really bad and is only going to get worse.

When I started working at TLC, the channel had just started making the move from being The Learning Channel to the more design-y living-y TLC. They were still showing science specials like "Hyperspace" hosted by Sam Neil, they were still showing "Junkyard Wars", and they still ran a block of what they called "Adrenaline Rush Hour", shows about cars and engines and stuff. They had just acquired the American re-make of a British series called "Trading Spaces", but the host — a woman named Alex something-or-other — wasn’t really working out.

keep reading…

here are the things I’ve been watching on youtube:

"viral" bike guitar hero thing – cool but lame, real but marketing

John Lee Hooker rocks the blues – subtitles?!

girls flip out over American Idol – amazing and horrifying at the same time

Miss Bunny – seriously, I don’t remember watching this one

BBC doc David Lynch made about surrealism – JackW, are you listening?!

BBC doc about Superman

1983 interview with Bono & lead singer of Simple Minds – hair

Adding to the list of US celebs who make weird Japanese ads because they don’t think anyone in the Western world will see them: Tommy Lee Jones. According to the synopsis on mefi:

"Tommy Lee Jones plays extraterrestrial ‘Alien Jones’, who has taken the form of a man to check on the world of humans, all the while drinking a Japanese brand of coffee named BOSS."

While not as loopy as I want them to be, these ads have kind of a quiet, TLJones intense brand of odd.

This one takes place in a "host club", a place where young women and pay trendy young men to entertain them. There used to be this great doc about host clubs on google vid, but it looks like it was sold so they’ve pulled it (good for them). Looks like it just aired on Sundance…some info about it here…) Here’s the ad…

the last shot takes the whole thing to a new level, doesn’t it?

class culture remix internet stylee. 

"what’re u doin in a cave?!"

I imagine two frustrated scientists who are crazy sick and tired of undergoing flight simulator experiments…they look at each other and begin to scheme out a plan to get revenge…not on the people who created the flight simulator, but a revenge on flight itself!

"Let’s make flies robotically run a driving simulator!"

[via]

Its snowing, can u tell?

I know there’s some kind of meta-point to be made here about culture and how the methods used by authority to control it are the same methods that artists will use to comment on it, or something, but I don’t feel like explicating…

instead, just enjoy this:

[via]

I don’t care how your Monday morning has been going so far. I don’t care where your energy level is. I don’t care if you work in an open-plan office-space cubicle. I don’t care if you hate electronic, dance-y music. I command you to play this vid and crank the volume up. Then dants your pants off.

Chicken. Moose. Rhino. Monkey. What more could you want?

Cousin Cole – "Chicken, Moose, Rhino, Monkey" from Eli Stonberg on Vimeo.

[via]

this banner is from an event we went to last Saturday called "Underground" at the Eyebeam gallery…Eyebeam is always pretty amazing and this event had some great stuff (Boozbot again!), and some weak stuff, and one mindblowing moment…the best exhibit was called "6 Walls" and was 6 people dressed up as walls (hard to explain) who would move around, sometimes acting as a hall, letting people in, sometimes closing themselves off to be an enclosed room…

at one point one of the singers from the band playing (Judi Chicago, pretty darn great) was inside the walled off room with people dancing around and glitter being thrown in the air and and and — that was a pretty wild part of it…

the banner is me looking closely at one of the video artworks…the pix below are from Maxine’s amazing new camera of the 6 walls installation…look closely & you can see the people’s faces painted to match the wallpaper in the middle of the walls…

people milling around in the walls…

the guy in the green cape (natch!) is one of the singers/instrumentalists for Judi Chicago…so funny that there’s a couple checking out cell phone pix while the walls move around and this singer yells and howls right next to them…

chaos…dig the guy in the back on the right in the orange motorbike helmet…M & I were wearing our camping headlights turned onto the red setting…

sweet close-up…

here, get a 16 second taste of what it was like in the walls from someone’s yt cam record:

Wednesday night Maxine and I went out with a group of folks to a place on Apt 138 on Smith St…sort of nice mid to upscale comfort food…since we had been shooting all that day (stressful) in the Alzheimer’s ward of a nursing home (intense), we went about as comforty as you could get and ordered their meatloaf wrapped in bacon with gravy. Truly you can make anything better by wrapping it in bacon.

On a semi-related note, when it comes to funnyordie, sometimes I think they’re too slick or clever for their own good, sometimes it frustrates me that they are big money pretending to be indie humor, and sometimes it just cracks me up. This one cracks me up:

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

in 2006 I went out to Burning Man on my own for a solo experience…it was pretty mind-blowing, and one of my best xp’s was climbing this amazing tower (pictured above, but you can’t tell how tall it really was) that had been built by the Cosmic Cowboy, and had some connection with chakras and 11:11. When I climbed it, he happened to be there and spent some time explaining the thought behind it, which was thorough and deep. When I got back, I did a bit of research into 11:11, and found it interesting. The best advice on it, though, came from Cosmic Cowboy himself who said something to the effect of:

when you see 11:11 on a digital clock, it’s meaningless, you know, but it’s also the only time the clock has the same digit across its face…it only happens twice a day, it’s pretty rare that you happen to look at your watch or a clock and see it. It doesn’t mean anything big, it’s not an omen or anything, it’s just like, hey, you’re on the right path. Or something like that.

If you’ve spent any time with me where I come across it, you’ll know I don’t whoop and holler or anything, but I do think it’s neat…I get a kick out of seeing it…so imagine my feeling today when I looked to see what time it was, and my computer clock, the VCR clock, and the clock on top of the TV all said 11:11…and then I checked the date within that same minute’s timespan, and guess what the date is today?

 thoughts that occur to me while watching this Diplo video sampler:

1. when mashups work well I feel like I’m listening to the past and the future at the same time

2. who knew there was a cartoon of Swamp Thing?! Alan Moore’s run = one of the best comics ever. buy it now.

3. is that Shmoo or a proto-shmoo?

4. is that real 60’s era nudist stuff? or retro-filmed contemporary erotica? oh, also this clip nsfw.

5. how awesome were those GI Joe edits! I feel like that was back in the internet’s young teenage years, but wow, I think I laughed at the body massage one so hard I cried…

6. man, even though Diplo is pretty over-exposed with remixes and so on, this is pretty great

diplo "banned in libya" from sleep [lazydig] on Vimeo.

(apologies for linking to ebaums but I couldn’t find a list of the GI Joe edits anywhere else…)

Another night w boozbot

even the poison sign cant ruin the message