it was contemporary, it was fresh
May 24th, 2008Shot in an afternoon, edited in a day, and featuring the lovely Ms. Lila DeVito, I present to you "Modern Marvels – 80’s Tech".
time to get your PhD
May 19th, 2008
I think this is the best mix I’ve done. Started in October, this is officially 2007’s mix, but you can dig it in 2008! It leans heavily on mashups and hiphop, because that’s where I think the most interesting and innovative music is happening these days…
Enjoy! Lemme know whatcha think…
(right-click or ctrl-click to download zip file of audio mp3s and cover art jpg)
UPDATE – it has been suggested that I should point out that I made a lot of the mashups myself…enjoy!
when I get that feeling I need virtual healing
May 19th, 2008joshgranger.com science corrospondent Pat G returns with a link to an article that suggests the reason aliens haven’t contacted us yet is that they’re probably all geeking out in their own virtual worlds. You could make an awesome virtual world that does everything you could ever want it to, and then you wouldn’t have to bother with expending all the energy to go to other planets or build more crap on your own planet.
When the conversation gets to environmental concerns (as it often does in our house), I often feel that to have hope in the face of such disaster requires a fundamentalist faith in technology. Sometimes I have to break it down like "Well, I honestly think that this crises might be the thing that spurs us to space travel to colonize other planets." And I’m not really joking, you know? But now I think this virtual reality angle is so much more energy effecient, it will become my new go-to. A bit harder to explain, but perhaps a bit easier to absorb than the whole "other planets will save us" theory.
It reminded me of this chilling scene from Carla Speed McNeil’s amazing sci-fi comics epic, Finder. If you are into comics at all and don’t know Finder, you must go and get it and get into it now. Now, I say! It is amazing. She’s the only comics person that I actually went to a convention to meet. Check her website, lightspeedpress.com, she’s got first chapters from many of her books there for you to check out, or you can order the trades from her. I recommend starting from the beginning with Sin-Eater. It’s so dense and amazing…
Anyway, this scene is from "Dream Sequence", and it shows the extension of all this thought, introducing a character who goes to work in a virtual world, in a sort of cubicle farm. It really stuck in my head because it seems so plausible…
the dead center of town
May 18th, 2008The weather in Savannah was gorgeous for the three days we were there. Upper 70’s, nice breeze, low humidity, sunny skies. We had lucked into some kind of early week special at our B&B (the meta-named "Bed & Breakfast Inn") that resulted in our getting a swanky room with a balcony. We’d go down and have breakfast, then come back up and start the morning slowly on the balcony — reading, enjoying an early morning beer, or just sitting in a rocking chair with Grits, the B&B cat. Then we’d stumble into Savannah and walk around like we were in a dream.
Savannah lent itself to this feeling because it was full of weird, old houses and friendly, eccentric people. Savannah is home to the house that Disney based the Haunted Mansion on, is full of churches and beautiful squares that slow down traffic, and features giant old trees that fairly drip with Spanish Moss.
One afternoon as we were coming out of Colonial Cemetery, we saw a strange vehicle driving slowly down the street. It looked to be a modified Hearse, with people’s heads sticking up out of it and a guy in front speaking through a microphone like one of the passionate crazies right out of Slacker. There was a phone number on the back; we called and booked the midnight tour the following night.
We did a lot of fun things in Savannah, but the Hearse tour is definitely up there as far as originality. It was in a real, modified, formerly working Hearse. We rode where the bodies had been.
Our driver was a large, red-headed, long-haired, death-metal-t-shirt wearing guy named Nate. Or, as one girl called out as we drove by, "BIGG Nate!!!!" And Nate gave us a chilling tour of a damn spooky city. Also notable for driving us into the ghetto to see, as Nate put it, "the ghosts of burned down crack houses."
Walking home around 12:30, we accidentally walked near a house that had featured in one of Nate’s more memorable tales. It was chilling, and we picked up the pace. Then, as we got closer to our B&B, we came across one of the squares that had a particularly scary story about a ghost of child that supposedly haunted it.
Maxine wouldn’t let us go anywhere near the square, and we were glad to get back to our room, our beer, and Grits.
the South
May 13th, 2008Hi, no posts for a while I’m afraid as Maxine and I have road-tripped ourselves to the South! We had a lovely stay with my ole pal Jack, his expectant wife Kara and amazing dog Morton (who we miss terribly!) in Durham, NC, and we have now forged on like Sherman to Savannah, GA. Also like Sherman, we have spared Savannah from our path of destruction and are loving how great it is here. It feels surreal and serene, like living in a storybook of some sort…
Posting should resume next week, but in the meantime, here’s a track from Jack’s former band, The Diplomats, that he recorded a while back with Mitch Easter(!) — producer of the first two REM albums! It sounds pretty great…
[audio:Chris_Bell.mp3]
Also, here’s a picture of a hook-rug of a cat holding a pumpkin that we saw at a market in Raleigh, NC. Both cat and pumpkin are nervous for some reason.
Awesome.
See you next week!
I say oo, you say long
May 8th, 2008"possibly the best rap about a cup of tea EVER"…
Cup of Brown Joy by MC Elemental (via Warren Ellis)…
living with a certified tea addict, this all makes a lot of sense to me…also it’s genius…and put together so well…
very rare to see successful british-comedy-hiphop…
bugs! bug me…
May 7th, 2008In February, right when I had started the blog, I was working on a project at Sundance Channel when I saw an editor working on these amazing Isabella Rossellini short pieces based on the sex life of bugs(!!). They are weird and amazing. Yes, they have that sort of "consciously viral" quality to them (i.e., "I’m a big business but I’m making something weird so it gets forwarded around the internet!"), but luckily Isabella R is so over-the-top and great that it doesn’t matter.
I immediately thought I would grab them from the edit room and post them on my blog before they were even out! I had just started my blog, and already a real scoop! This was going to be great!
Then I realized that Sundance would know it was me and I really like working there (still, I kinda feel, as Gillanders would say, "the old Josh would have done it."). So I’ve been patiently biding my time for them to have an official release and now it has happened. Here is a brief sampling of two of them, bee and snail. Find the rest on the Sundance site here.
(For some reason they’re not available outside the US, which has caused a bit of a stink on the internets (old-school rights management in a new school world)…someone on boingboing provides a workaround to the original flv’s here)
dr. banner
May 5th, 2008
This month’s banner picture was taken at MOMA’s Olafur Eliasson exhibit, "Take Your Time". It’s a bunch of light, color and mirror based installations that have to do with the perception of perceiving (apparently). The banner picture was taken in a room that had these weird and intense lights that made everything look either yellow or black. It really messed with your eyes, but in a good way.
Picture to the left was this odd balcony that looked as though it was over an infinitely deep chasm, but was really just clever mirrors. Click here for bigger pic.
Great exhibit.
it is now May
May 5th, 2008It is May. Let us celebrate in two different ways.
First let us celebrate in the Scottish fashion.
(Belle and Sebastian – Mayfly)
[audio:Mayfly.mp3]
Then we shall celebrate in the Celtic-y Pagan-y fashion.
Makes me want to watch The Wicker Man all over again.
I love that Wikipedia describes it
"combining thriller, existential horror and musical genres."
That’s got me written all over it.
mixsion statement
May 2nd, 2008
(pic of mixwit.com, the new mixtape site with a great cassette-style interface)
Since I started the blog in February 08 I’ve been thinking a lot about this stuff. I wasn’t really sure what joshgranger.com was going to be when I bought the domain. Then while getting ready to start the blog proper, wordpress (whose software powers this site) had a little exercise before you start blogging where you write down what you plan to do, who the audience is, how often you’ll blog, etc., in an effort to make sure you know what you’re getting into.
My little written bit basically amounted to sharing anything I found online that I thought was cool — music, video, linkage — much like my favorite blogs. I’ve come to think of it as an extension of the mixtape, which is an artform I’ve loved since I was taping off the radio in 1982. In college my mixtaping reached a alltime high level: I was using the media lab to tape things off of VHS videocassettes; I had inherited my dad’s old cassette player that could control the level in (yes! no more loud to soft transitions); I was part of a group of fellow mixtapologists who took it very seriously (report cards were made for each mix, a fanzine was published (I show up on page 13)); I was able to scour the college radio station for b-sides and weird rarities, or record myself doing "long-distance dedications"; ETC.
Post college, I was lucky enough to have a father who loved cutting-edge tech, so I could offer people CD mixes when it was still a novelty. When I decided to try DJ’ing, I did a lot of research before deciding to go with CD decks (more flexibility, don’t have to buy records all the damn time). I could run the decks into my computer and record the mixes, then split them into tracks with other software.
Part of the joy of the mix (both making and receiving) was getting/hearing something that made you say "where did THAT come from?!" And of course, the mixtape merely offered you the track name. There wasn’t really any context, so a really obscure track (I remember putting a Crooked Fingers track on a tape for Dan R before Eric B had even become Crooked Fingers…coup!!) could have an air of mystery about it that really added to the fun, and prompted attempts at one-upmanship.
The same is true of forwarding links to your friends — you just send the youtube link, not usually where you got it from. And this keeps that sense of mystery, that great feeling of "where did they find THAT?!"
the dopeness (or, the freshness)
May 2nd, 2008A number of points:
1. Does this video bring the dopeness or the freshness? Discuss.
2. On my good days I’m pretty sure I could make something like this. I really could.
3. Do you think these are made up from other vids downloaded from youtube or from hi-rez sources? If you use youtube vids and then re-compress them for youtube, do they look like crap? Is youtube’s new mp4-ness affecting this?
4. Culled from Warren Ellis’s blog. His description: "http://www.eclecticmethod.net. Video mixtapes, video remixes, live video DJ shows and other peculiar experiments that involve beats, images and science." The site is indeed full of great stuff.
I’mabouttopop
May 2nd, 2008At least I think that’s what they’re saying. Once again, culled from Analog Giant who says:
New single from the Brooklyn based R&B group Escort. Muppets, soul, R&B, the Rapture and remix all in one place is a guarenteed joy for me.
I have to agree, especially re Muppets, who seem to show up here on the jjosh a lot. Watching this vid last night Maxine and I were remarking that the Muppets still look so original and fresh. And great.
I love the future-guy rocking the space keyboard.
made in sheffield
April 29th, 2008
I should mention that this month’s banner photo is from Maxine’s friend Charlotte who was staying with us in February (apologies for my photoshop fakery, Charlotte!). She posts on flikr as madeinsheffield and she’s got some really good stuff there — apparently she won some photo competition that got one of her photos on the front page of The Guardian or something? And has some photos in galleries as well. We went to Coney Island for a winter visit and all 3 of us took pictures — it was such a great scene there on the vacant beach…
I took photos using this Holga camera (pictured above in a madeinsheffield shot) that Laird M gave me years and years ago; the camera is purposefully broken, so it has light leaks and double exposures and so on, which should hopefully result in interesting photos. Now I just have to find somewhere that develops the Holga film…I’ll post the photos once I get them…
madeinsheffield’s New York set here.
Ash Fetish
April 24th, 2008
Back in 1998 (10 years ago!!) Mike Heany, Andrea Seabrook, her crazy Mexican boyfriend and I made this short film called Character. It had been a while since we’d done any filming, and I wanted to try and make something where we shot it all in one day. I whipped up a script, we met up and shot it, and over the next few weeks I edited it at the place in Arlington where I was working at the time.
Unfortunately, due to a technical (and boring) screwup that can be translated as "Josh didn’t know what he was doing", at the end of it all, the cut that I had made would have to be put together all over again, eye-matching every shot in its 11 minutes. In other words, a major pain-in-the-ass hassle.
Such a pain-in-the-ass, in fact, that it has taken me 10 years and some downtime at work to get it done.
The sad part of all this, of course, is that the star of the film and one of my best friends ever, Mike Heany, tragically committed suicide in 2004. It’s given this whole project a kind of bitter-sweetness to it. But to be honest, it’s been more sweet than bitter. I have been laughing so much at how we’re cracking each other up during the filming, and just seeing all the fun we’re having, seeing how seriously Mike is taking the acting, seeing what a dynamic person he really was.
When you read the obituaries of famous artists, people are always saying how lucky we are that we can still experience that person through their art; from working on this film I am finding myself feeling the same thing about Mike. I’m so glad we have a fairly extensive number of short films that we made together, so I can still hang out with him from time to time.
At some point (maybe by next Dec?) I’m hoping to make a DVD of all the films Mike and I made together, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll post Character soon as well, but in the meantime, there was one great bit in the raw footage where Mike is trying so hard to get this line right that I almost felt like it was its own 3-minute short film. Admittedly, it’s a tough line. Please enjoy…
"I’m Not Going To Make Any Friends When I Wake Up As Ass-Fetish Samson"
UPDATE – there might be problems with the video…I’m going to tweak some settings and see if it helps…it’s working fine for me at work, but very stuttery at home…
UPDATE 2 – I think I’ve sorted the video issues…lemme know if its not playing well for you…
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