This month’s banner (sorry for missing a month, by the way, but aren’t you glad you don’t have to look at that eye photo any more?) is on 3rd st near 3rd ave in Brooklyn near our apartment. We actually saw it there when we moved in 2 years ago and I’ve been meaning to take a photo of it for ages…also cool ‘cuz 2 years ago we didn’t quite know the whole Wall St collapse was coming, but whoever painted this seems to have willed it to happen…
you can’t tell so much from the banner, but the letters are HUGE on that abandoned building…
UPDATE – if you’re not seeing the new banner hit refresh a couple of times until it shows up…
Ze Frank is famous on the internet. And he’s damn funny. And I love that he’s not trying to be all up in movies or tv or whatever, he just rocks the internet. Here, check this out, he will rock you.
Tomorrow my mom goes in for surgery and it’s being done by a robot! Sort of. In a strange coincidence she told me about this DaVinci machine (not the telecine one, you tv folks) that’s going to assist in the surgery and it had just been featured on Grey’s Anatomy a couple of days prior…I told her I’d post the clips for her, so here they are…
This is why I still have Discobelle on my newsreader. For some reason I
love seeing what the underground European club kids are into at the moment. And this one is a blast — it’s full of everything reminding you what it’s like to be young, angry at everything for no reason, in love with life, full of so much energy you’ll almost explode, almost a parody of Youth Kulture. The chorus is kind of a joke, "we came, we saw, we killed the crowd" reflecting some of the antagonism that a performer feels for his audience, as well as being a chant-along anthem for the kids.
Plus, the song is called "Hooligans" for crying out loud!!
lots of people apprently have seen this, but I never did…it’s good, I love the whole ytmnd thing…
my dad gave me a great geeked-out book on language and linguistics for Christmas…it’s like the most amazing, uh, bathroom reading…you come out of there with stuff like "Hey Maxine, did you know that of languages with no relation to other languages, Korean is the most isolated?" Lately I’ve been reading about what the author calls "garden path" sentences. These are sentences that seem to go one way but then suddenly force you to change direction due to the syntax. For some reason they really tickle my brain. This is my favorite, chew on it a while:
The old man the boats.
Also I came across this the other day and I just watched it over and over and over until I was in a pleasurable trance…something about that flip is so appealing:
ps they accepted our offer on the house in Williamsburg (Brooklyn)! we’re all jacked up and getting readt for months of paperwork and follow-through…you’re all invited to our house-warming, we’ll let you know when…
Part of our Musicwood doc is going to be musicians performing on acoustic guitars. We’ll use this to weave the music through the film, and to remind you exactly what it is these guys are fighting for, you know? So we’ve been approaching pr folks for Sting, Neil Young, Glen Hansard, etc. But Maxine came across this great unsigned artist named Sergius Gregory, and it turns out he’s based in Alaska! So when we flew out there to shoot, we flew him down to where we were and arranged to spend a day filming him in various (fantastic) locations:
in the rainforest, in a Native American Clan House, on a dock…
Here’s a cut of his performance in the forest…we won’t use the whole thing in the film, but we wanted to put it together because there was such an amazing feeling when he played this in the forest…I get chills just thinking of it…
hopefully some of that comes through…
UPDATE – Sergius is about to release a record (or something) so he’s asked me to take this down temporarily…seek his record out! Buy it! Support the music!!!!
70 year-old Buddhist monk Hua Chi has been praying in the same spot at his temple in Tongren, China for over 20 years. His footprints, which are up to 1.2 inches deep in some areas, are the result of performing his prayers up to 3000 times a day. Now that he is 70, he says that he has greatly reduced his quantity of prayers to 1,000 times each day.
I love that they bleeped them, so B&E still seem sort of nice…I love how well the mouth movements are synced up…I love the nods and looks they give each other…it’s great…
As a kid I remember certain VHS tapes that my sister and I almost wore out from viewing so much:
– The Court Jester recorded off the UK’s Channel 4
– a marathon of Gallagher borrowed from Aunt Helen and Uncle Bill (kids love the watermelon smashing)
– a holiday Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast special
– a marathon of Kids in the Hall taped off a Comedy Central KITH Mother’s Day special
Watching this KITH clip, I was surprised by the fact that I could almost do this entire monolgue from memory…even now there are certain KITH bits that I use in my day-to-day conversations ("Time moves forwards! Not backwards!") that I’m sure people aren’t picking up on, that I’m doing just to amuse myself. This clip is still great.
We’re back from Alaska, and whatta trip. I don’t know if you can read this flyer, but it’s for a marathon on Prince of Wales island, where we did a bunch of filming for Musicwood. I don’t know why the guy running it is carrying a gun, but they sure do like their guns up there in AK. The trip was amazing — cable cars, 500 year-old trees, a ferry to a barely inhabited island, Native Americans carving totem poles, interviewing logging company guys, a Native American tree ceremony, the felling of a giant tree (Timmmmber!!!), flying in a tiny sea plane, listening to Sergius Gregory playing guitar in the forest, etc. Amazing.
But also this one thing happened and for some reason, even as it was happening I kept thinking "I want to write this down." So here it is, raw, no revision. Maybe it’ll become a short story, not sure.
