putting the j in jjosh

Two things:

1. They have these great bagels where I’m working right now. In fact, these are the only bagels I’ve tasted while in NYC (admittedly a scant 2 years) that rival the bagels of our corner joint, Bagel World. Bagel World’s bagels are astounding. We pretty much only get them when we’ve got company staying, or are heading out on a road trip, or are taking them to M Devito. I can’t even describe how good they are.

But anytime I’m trying another bagel, I use Bagel World’s as my baseline. And no-one’s come close. Until I started working at this place Postworks in Soho. Their bagels are really good too. And they’re there every morning. I had to basically take a vow of chastity as far as eating them because lemme tell you, a bagel in the morning equals energy sugar crash at about 11am. But the point is, they’re good enough that I wanted to have one of those bagels and one of Bagel World’s right next to each other to do an A/B test to see which were better.

Now that the show I’m working on is beginning to heat up a little (our first deadline is Wednesday), I’ve been coming in early to get a headstart on the day (I owe that tip to JG from back at TVI). I burn out if I stay late, but coming in early is awesome. Nobody’s there, you can crank music if you want, you get the satisfaction of getting so much done before people even arrive.

Last week I came in really early, like arrived at 7:30am (ok, so it’s early to me, you farmers!), and there was a guy in the elevator with all these bags of delivery food. I figured they were for some meeting or something.

"That’s a lot of food…" I say.

"Yeah," he says in some kind of heavy accent, "and they’re all bagels!"

"Oh, you’re delivering the bagels that come every morning?"

"Yeah."

"Oh wow, I love those bagels." At this point the elevator has hit my floor (six). "Where are they from?"

"Oh you know hmwhafre plaza?" He says something totally unintelligble. The elevator doors open. I step out but hold them open.

"Where?"

"From the bagel place in hmwharfair plaza…"

At this point The elevator screams that it wants to move, and I can’t tell the guy that I STILL CAN’T UNDERSTAND HIM, so I go. I swear it sounded like "Warfare Plaza". I gotta find that place.

2. on the way in to work I listened to the Bonnie Prince Billy song "You Want that Picture", which I’ve always enjoyed as a really great duet and storysong. But this time I really heard the lyrics. So amazing. The chorus:

well it’s true that I cried
but then I went outside
and I stood very still in the night
and I looked at the sky
and knew someday I’d die
and then everything would be all right

it’s all right
and everything comes down to this
that everything there ever was
or will be
is all there is

Bonnie Prince Billy – You Want That Picture

Oh also remind me to tell you some time about Maxine & I seeing BPB at the Apollo and meeting him backstage afterwards and giving him a copy of our Musicwood DVD…

This banner was taken at a site a couple of blocks from our house. Down by the Gowanus canal there’s this huge site that’s been bought by Whole Foods, and during the real estate boom/non-recession, it seemed like ther perfect place for a Whole Foods. But now the economy is bleak, and they’ve discovered that the ground there is so toxic from all the crap and sludge that pollutes the canal, that it’s gonna take a zillion dollars to get it all cleaned up.

Someone broke into the site and painted this massive command onto the remains of a wall. Pretty nice. I wonder if it was the same folks who did the "open your eyes"/"fuck wall st" that’s painted on the old factory across the street from it (and was joshgranger.com banner two months ago). I saw this and wanted a picture of it so bad that I broke in there myself to get it.

Fun facts about the Gowanus Canal:

– it featured in the film Half Nelson

– there is bacteria growing in there that is found nowhere else on earth (thanks KT!)

– when a whale accidentally swam up into the canal, that whale died

When we are lucky, we get to start our Monday off with a slice of pure unadulterated joy…thanks Avalanches…thanks Fluxtumblr…there are some wonderful moments in this vid… so jubilant…

This I love. The music is so great, the concept so simple, the execution so classy and well done. It’s kind of hypnotic, and I feel like there’s more going here somehow…watch it again…

Chocolate Bunny from lernert Engelberts on Vimeo.

[via Constant Siege, who’s been on a major roll lately]

Wow, a quick look at this guy’s other shorts on vimeo turns up this gem as well…

Revenge from lernert Engelberts on Vimeo.

I have so much work to do, and I should really be doing it, but instead I made this.

This is awesome and gorgeous and psychedelic and retro and modern at the same time. I vote yes.

Been thinking about vampires a bit. A while back I read this kfan post regarding Tru Blood and Mad Men, and it keeps coming back into my frontal brain, especially as the Mad Men hype machine goes into overload preparing for the upcoming season. I’ve seen only the smallest clip of Blood, but it made me feel odd, and I have no clue if I’d like it. And I do Like Mad Men, though I understand kfan’s ambivalence.

And then last night Maxine and I watched an episode of Intervention and it made me feel awful. I hated the thing, but I couldn’t quite figure out why. As Max pointed out, at its core it’s a show about people helping other people. Friends and relatives who so love someone that they go to this crazy length to help them. Which is true, but there’s something so voyeuristic and exploitative about it that I feel it kind of cancels out all the love. Like, if you’re doing this out of love, why on earth would you want the cameras there?! That’s not going to help.

I think A & E picked up Random 1 in part because of Intervention’s success, but I think Random 1 did it cleaner — when we appeared in someone’s life to help them, it felt like winning the lottery, like against all the odds here are these 2 guys who have shown up help! Amazing!

Then today seeing one of the Mad Men bus stop posters I started thinking about how advertising and junk tv sucks the life right out of you. How you feel awful after that stuff, how advertisers are trying so hard to get you to do things, buy things. An article in today’s NYT about Woodstock and how it was the last time that advertisers would miss out on opportunity like that to merchandise a movement, a demographic. I have a book called The Conquest of Cool that is all about that, about the machinations that inevitably transform the underground cool into the purchasable mainstream; it reads like a grad school text, so I’ve never gone truly deep into it, but maybe now’s the time.

In other words, it’s the advertising guys that are the true vampires here. The guys who spend their entire careers trying to get people to give their vital essences up to buy products, to watch shows. JG sent me a book that was about a 60-minutes style tv show where vampires start to take over the show. It was pretty good, kind of simple clean spooky fun, with a metaphor built into it about the camera and people’s relationship to it.

All I’m saying is that if you think of Mad Men as a vampire story, it has a true ring to it. It’ll be interesting to see if that bears out over season 3.

Wow. More like this please. Welcome to the week.

I remember seeing this one as a kid and loving it. Watching it now I’m completely pumped by the subtexts of conformity and individuality, something that the Muppets deal with a lot. I don’t wanna read too much into it though, it’s just a good time, isn’t it?

Also I’m reminded of being in college and deciding to grow my hair long and my beard wild. My roommate Jeff C telling me I should grow it all to the same length and style my hair up in the air so I could look like "one of those muppets with the crazy hair and the beard all the same length". I love that look.

 because it’s Friday.