putting the j in jjosh

Sometimes all you can do is watch with your jaw dropped and say "Skillz."

[via waxy]

Spectacular. I love that on CC’s blog where I picked this up, he’s says "This is the best thing you’ll see all day." How do they make this stuff?

Sometimes something is so geeked out fantabulous that you almost can’t even tell what’s going on. Case in point: this is Bohemian Rhapsody done on hardware machines. The machines make noises of different pitches when they do different things (the scanner scanning, disk drive reading disk, etc.) and these have somehow been programmed to make their specific pitched sounds in time to create Bohemian Rhapsody. Whoa. Get past the intro and it really starts to rock.

because I love to share the naked people, and this is breathtaking…

[via CC, who’s got a great blog you really should check out)

The name of the song is "Thank You Mario But Our Princess is in Another Castle". It’s a great song, made greater by the concept (sung from the perspective of the character at the end of the Super Mario levels), made even greater by the 8-bit video. I never thought of the characters as real before, or that they could get sad or have wants and needs. Good stuff.

The Promoe is back with a brand new track! His beard dreadlocks are more fierce than ever, and sometimes his delivery sounds a bit like Kanye. I wonder what he’s rapping about…

What a gorgeous day. Wow. Had my final eye appointment today and the doc said my recovery was "a miracle", so that was pretty great. Also the weather was pretty great. Also this clip of old-timey harmonica players that Pat H sent me is pretty great.

I know I’ve posted stuff by PES before (the rubik’s cube stop-motion thing), but it’s just so good, and then there’s the making of, which is a great look into the mind of someone who would make little films like this that obviously take tons of time and effort…good stuff…

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I forgot how great this scene from Delicatessen was…if I remember right, this trailer for the film was pretty much just this scene and my friends and I saw it and said "Yep, we’ll be seeing that." What a great film it is, I still think it’s better than their next films, City of Lost Children, or Amelie. I dug up this clip because I have to do promos for a show about a sexxxy hotel, and I’d love to replicate this somehow…I’m gonna try and show it in my brainstorming meeting…

Three observations:

1. this reminds me of a dream I once had

2. it’s hard to imagine the 2009 Madonna agreeing to a picture like this

3. this reminds me of a short film someone at Team made (Peter? JG?) with Shams

UPDATE: it also reminds me of the JG film Man’s Best Friend (in French)…no surprise there…

isn’t this the whole reason I have a blog? isn’t this why youtube was invented?

While I was in the middle of my eye troubles, my parents were coming into town to take everyone to see an opera at The Met. My mom had booked tickets like last summer or something(!) and even though Max and I aren’t that into the opera, it seemed like something that would be good for us, so we agreed to go. The time came, and I was out of the picture due to my eye. So my parents were in town, and one Saturday night they met up with Maxine, my sister and some friends of theirs for dinner at a little French place and then the opera. By this point I had been in our living room for coming on 3 weeks, and was kind of going nuts. It was depressing me further that everyone else was going out and having this good time, and I was stuck at home. I decided to watch a movie.

Maxine had seen Revoultionary Road a few weeks ago and said it was good, so I figured I’d give it a shot. But damn. I was already depressed, and this thing was like a monster of a downer…I don’t want to give anything away, but let’s just say it’s pretty clear from the beginning that things aren’t going to go well. I couldn’t take it, had to stop it about halfway through, I was so down, it was a killer. Seeing a film about hopelessness was a bad bad idea. I needed something else. And then, like a ray of sunshine from the heavens, came Pineapple Express.

Now this wasn’t a perfect film by any means, the violence was kind of weird (everything really seemed like it really hurt, which is odd in a comedy), and the Mad Magazine style hijinks didn’t fully mesh with the filmmaking style. It wasn’t even the best dope film I’ve seen in recent memory (that award has to go to Happy Face). But damn was it funny! Maybe I was just in the right place where I really needed a pick-me-up, but I was laughing out loud, and having to play parts over again. It was a damn good time. This was one of my favorite bits, some of the dialogue seems so familiar. They’re in the forest trying to make sure there’s no way they can be traced to a roach Seth Rogan threw out the window…

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It’s a really smart comedy idea to take that kind of stoned banter and put it in the context of a chase-y action-y film…

foxes…

Here’s a couple more of the tape tracks…

This one was recorded by my old suite-mate Pat & I, no clue why or how, but I do remember him doing the lip-flap and thinking it was funny…still do, it sounds like avant-garde idiocy…

Is It Lou Reed?

This is one of the piano tracks I recorded myself. When you recod with a 4-track, it records stereo right and left, and then essentially the stereo right and left of the other side of the tape. That’s where the 4 tracks come from, get it? So if you’re recording 4-track onto an old tape that already has music on it, you have to record over every track, otherwise you can get weird leftover stuff that plays backwards because it’s coming from the other side of the tape. I know, it’s confusing to explain, you kind of have to experience it. I’m only explaining it so you can get a sense of what’s going on in this track. This is a (kind of long) improvisation I recorded (in D minor?) in a practice room. I’m pretty sure it was meant to be straight, with no overdubs or anything, much like that first track I posted last week. But when it came time to mix it down, I was on acid.

I remember at the time I was really impressed with myself, I thought it sounded like some kind of heavenly choir, or other-worldly voices were mixed in there and I was sort of amazed that this is what I had recorded. That night, still on acid, I played it for Jack’s roomate and his friend (who were both on acid as well) and it blew their minds. They couldn’t believe I had made this. Hell, I couldn’t believe it either. It was confusing.

The next day I realized what I had done. My piano bit is in there, and then some kind of sped up overdub coming from a stray track that eventually turns into some backwards Led Zeppelin that I was trying to record over on the other side. Also Jack’s 4-track had this built-in reverb which I had cranked up so it does indeed sound otherworldly and odd. It’s almost 6 minutes long, and all kind of clashes together and sounds a bit like a mess to me now. But I bet if you took acid it would sound amazing.

Dirgible Impromptu

This last one I can’t stand, but Jack requested it. I think it’s maybe the second thing I ever wrote with lyrics, and I’m trying to do this spoken word thing, and the lyrics make me cringe terribly and sound very immature to me now. Yuck.

Tilt-a-whirl

Let’s see, this month’s banner photo was taken by Maxine, I’ll post some more tape mp3’s soon, my blog by camera phone plugin isn’t working (which is killing me), my eye is doing still better (good stuff) and I saw this which I really liked:

The Lost Tribes of New York City from Carolyn London on Vimeo.

I knew I was going to save this one for Friday. So last semester of my senior year of college I had electives open and I took an Audio Production class. The teacher wasn’t that good, but I got a lot out of it and it was a blast. The projects the prof gave us were good, he just wasn’t very good at explaining things…i.e. performing the role of the teacher. Ask Dan R., he took the class with me. The good thing the prof did though, was make us learn all the analog ways of doing things before bringing us into the digital world. So we were splicing tape with razor blades, making tape loops that were held in place with pencils and so on. It was great. I have this experimental tape loop piece but it’s only on reel-to-reel 1/4 inch tape, so I’ll have to transfer that later.

Even once we made the move to digital, the system was so crash prone that you couldn’t do a very long piece, you’d have to stitch several short ones together. We used the system to "master" the first Raygun Theatre album (also on cassette) and I can remember it was a glitch-plagued nightmare, increasing Jack’s every distrust of the digital world.

But what I have for you is my final project for that Audio Production class. I can’t remember what other people did for their final projects, but here’s mine. It’s an 8-minute acoustic guitar rock opera of the story of Samson and Delilah.

Jjosh – Samson and Delilah

My favorite part is the bit in their duet where they start singing at the same time. She’s going "Samson" and he’s going "Delilah, aww I love ya" — I’m still proud of that bit. Delilah was sung by Molly, the girlfriend (now wife) of my pal Pat H. She knocked it out of the park, the piece really comes alive when she enters. She even nails the absurdist ending that I tacked onto the story, she was great.

For some reason I think my sister is going to love this track.

It’s been so fun posting these, maybe I’ll continue a little into next week…