putting the j in jjosh

plushie culture goes grime…

so foxxxy…why isn’t this in high quality! dam you utube…

so rare to see a full-on, well-lit, choreographed music video, isn’t it? or is it?

So have you noticed the commenter named "oointgroov"?

Back in 1998 (I think) I was working at BBC America, painstakingly cutting out the swear words and nudity from British programming to make it palatable for American audiences. We would also cut up their programs and put in breaks for commercials. It was early days for BBCA and they didn’t really know how long it would take an editor to cut an hour of programming down, so they would give us tons of time for not much work. Which was great.

So I had all this time there. I would crank out my work for the week, and then parcel out delivering it, made sure I looked busy, and worked on all sorts of personal projects — mix CD’s, party flyers, personal films. I would hang out a bunch with one of my best pals, MR, who was working there at the time. We’d take these 2-hour lunch breaks and watch series that weren’t assigned, and just generally ahve a good rockin time.

The drummer for my band in college was working on a solo project called T Groove. He did this thing where he posted a bunch of solo split tracks for one his pieces, called "Robot Dance Party", and invited people to remix it. So MR and I spent some time remixing it on the AVID editing system I was using. This was kind of painstaking. I would put in the tracks from T Groove, and then download drum samples from the drum machine museum (site since taken down). Since we couldn’t control the speed of any of the audio, I would have to try each sample out individually, and then use the ones that just happened to be at the same tempo as the original track. Took a while, but damn fun.

Then we went to AT&T Labs’ text to speech demo and put in a bunch of lines for the speech synthesizer to rap over the track. This part was a blast. Something about the way "he" would read the lines, emphasize weird syllables, stretch sounds out in odd ways. Awesome. We made the chorus the refrain of "who put the ‘oo’ in T Groove". MR posts as commentator oointgroov. A while ago, I asked T Groove if he still had the remix but he said he didn’t.

Then out of the blue last week, he found it! I listened to it one morning, and it was the best part of my day/week. It gives me a good good feeling even now to listen to it.

"The beats T kicks are funkity fresh/ kicking the shit out of old John Tesh."

Robot Dance Party (Oo in T Groov MCTex2Speech remix) – T Groove

No really. a piano.

A piano in our trash.

MAXINE (appropos of nothing): Oh, I didn’t know his name was Burt…

JOSH: Who?

MAXINE: Burt.

For some reason lately I’ve been thinking about the future and all the things that must be going on now that they will find utterly ridiculous. When I think about this, I start with the easy ones: can you believe that stuff about gay marriage?! Unregulated financial markets? That having a black president was a big deal?!

But then I’ve been reading things that put it in perspective, that there are bound to be countless other cultural assumptions we’re making that they won’t in the future. I read about how it was a big deal that JFK was the first Catholic president. Really? People cared about that? I can barely imagine. I read an account of Columbus setting sail on his historic journey, and how he had to bribe and assuage his sailors because they actually believed that they were going to sail off the map, and that there were monsters there waiting to destroy them. They actually believed in monsters! It’s hard to fit that in my brain, that perfectly ordinary, rational humans believed in the physical actuality of fantastical monsters.

When I worked on Random 1, one of the Executive Producers was David Riordan, the guy who wrote the 70’s hit "Green Eyed Lady". Sometimes we shared an office, and he was a pretty extraordinary person. He would often wax on about these far-out notions of time — some of the stuff I had come across at Burning Man — and gave me a great calendar from the law of time folks who believe that humanity’s sense of time is fundamentally flawed, and that by making 12 months out of what is clearly a 13 month year (due to lunar cycles), we are at odds with a primal part of our nature. I love this stuff.

One of the greatest things he told me was he firmly believed that in the future, society would look back at us now at marvel at the fact that we truly believed that time was money. that we would equate time with money. that we had the phrase "well, time is money." That this would seem so crazy to them, the same way we look back at "colored only" water fountains and can’t quite believe it now. I love this notion, because there does seem to be something wrong with the idea that time can somehow yield money. One is so fundamental and life-connected, the other so base and illusory.

Thinking about it now, equating it with Columbus and the fear that some folks have about gay marriage, I’m realizing this: that the very notion of time = money is a monster itself, as fantastical and unreal as the monsters of 1492 mapmakers.

for some reason this came into my head while we were waiting for de-icing on the runway in Minneapolis (2 and a half hours!)…and then I thought how great it would look if it were written down in blank verse, read in a poetic monotone…and then I thought how great it would be if this were a poem written by God:

so no-one told you life was going to be this way

your job’s a joke

you’re broke

your love life’s D.O.A.

feels like you’re always stuck in second gear

when it hasn’t been your day

your week

your month

or even your year

but

I’ll be there for you

I’ll be there for you

I’ll be there for you

I’ll be there for you

Mall of america.

 from the NYT review of "Australia" (a film my sister claims should be watched with gin & tonics (and I’m sure she’s right)):

“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession,” Milan Kundera wrote. “The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”

Hat.

snowy minneapolis. cold.

if this is your thing, you should grab Clipse’s new mixtape over here. I don’t know why I like Clipse so much, something about their flow, the way they rap about drug dealing like it’s international playboy stuff, the spare but tough beats? Dunno, but it works.

it’s the hood’s Obama/ shoveling McCain

out the project windows/ the drama’s insane

the rap game’s upside-down like David Blaine

I gave you truth/ revealed my proof

loosened them knots from your mind

like I was your masseuse

I don’t know what I like more — what a hoot this clip is, the fact that my mom(!) sent it to me (with the major point of how proud she is to know how to forward things now), or that the star of this piece is acting like my mom would act if confronted with this situation.

for some reason I love the part where she says "Is this my new TV?"…cracks me up every time…

wax george clooney.

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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…