I was on the Eastside yesterday, and I passed this place. I didn’t know what to make of it:
Monthly Archives: November 2007
Bring that beat back, and back, and back again
The whole reason for the previous post was because I’d come across Yamaha’s Tenori On.
Not only is it beautiful to look at and watch in motion, but it does some pretty awesome sequencing/musical stuff. There are videos out there of musicians fooling around with it, but the demo video still does it for me.
Bring that (wicked chainsaw) beat back!
I’d seen sometime back that Drumcorps was coming to town. As usual, I was late again in catching this concert thinking it was another week off, when in actuality, it was this past Friday: the same day Plan B was in town.
Aaron Spectre, aka Drumcorps, is just one guy, but his music sounds like a couple guys from the foundry teamed up with Otto the Mechanic–an aspiring death metal vocalist–at lunch to rub chainsaws and welding equipment together.
The videos on YouTube don’t do ‘the music’ justice as you’re getting a fair amount of distortion when ‘this music’ is ‘played live’ at high decibel levels then recorded with your old run-of-the-mill video camera mic. But trust me, if you’re stuck in traffic, rather than honking your horn or giving yourself over to road rage, nothing works better to calm your nerves than a little Grist. Seems like he’s got a new one coming out, apparently with more guitar, for all you purists out there.
So now that that’s off the radar, I can start planning well in advance for edIT‘s December 15th date with Seattle. . .
Frisco
When I was around 4 years of age, my parents went to San Francisco. One of the gifts they returned with was this huge pencil. Printed all around it were the famous landmarks: Golden Gate Bridge, Nob Hill, trolley cars from the Rice-a-Roni commercials, et al. I thought “these things are huge.”
See, when I was at work in my coloring books, I’d always been content to use the standard no. 2, Ticonderoga-sized crayons. They were effective and I was able to stay inside the lines on every attempt. If I’d decided to make someone’s skin green, it wasn’t because my hand made a misstep on account of not being able to corral a writing utensil. It was pure artistic impulse.
My attempts to draw and color with this new-fangled pencil proved tough. I’d basically impaled my coloring books and made sloppy, non-exacting lines on large sheets of newsprint. The baseball team in this “city by the bay” was called the Giants, which naturally led my mind to deduce that giants lived in San Franciso. Who else could use a massive pencil effectively if not a giant?
Needless to say, I’ve been to San Francisco since then, and just last week visited again for work on a production with Stewart Hopkins. I’d seen the Golden Gate, but never had the opportunity to drive across until now:
Of course, I did manage to get other shots here and there, even a few more of the bridge without the fog.
Just a day before the San Francisco trip, I’d been helping the good folks out at Landreth Studios with this object in studio. You’ll just have to use your imagination.
More always,
Mike
On the Complexities of Time Travel and Negotiating a Teen Wolf Contract
So, I’ve been watching Heroes on NBC. As a lot of you know, its about time travel, world-wide plagues, mind control, morphology, flying around, et. al. Its kind of fascinating me now, b/c I remember back in the day how intrigued I was with the Back to the Future trilogy. Either I couldn’t put my finger on the whole idea due to my adolescent mind, or the writers were hastily trying to navigate Michael J. Fox’s prior engagement to play Teen Wolf or something and they cut a few corners.
There’s some thread in all of this that dictates that if you don’t like how something ‘ends’ then you go back in time and just rewrite the beginning. Sure it creates this little ripple in the time space continuum but its really no big deal as long as you get back in time to make sure nobody recognized the moment you teleported out of some boring conversation about coffee mugs or sneakers. That or you’ve got super awesome writers that can adjust on-the-fly to every producer’s whim or strange detour these far-fetched plots decide to take.
This Blog's for you, Bill
So, in mid-September, I was invited to a pig roast being put on by my buddy Bill Rugen. He was celebrating a couple things: a new patio/deck, a new professional direction by working full-time in the commercial photography market here in Seattle and a birthday. It was an all-encompassing celebration.
He said he was celebrating cornflower blue (the color) along with the invention of fold-up lawn chairs and non-stick pans, but I didn’t pursue that, you know, it was his day. . .
This is Bill, surveying the results of his culinary handiwork. The 70 pound pig seemed to cover the hunger of the 80 or so people in attendance.
This dude next to Bill was super-stoked. He kept yelling ‘Piggg,’ leading me to believe that he was Eastern European and in his homeland, that meant “hello.” Check out the photoset on Flickr here.
Blogumentary my Dear Watson
Its been a couple weeks since I last wrote, and since then I’ve:
1) seen seven (7) documentaries:
Sister Helen
Crazy Love
Does Your Soul Have a Cold
Songbirds
The Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea
The Story of the Weeping Camel
Moog
2) been in the market for a new cellphone and came across this thing:
the Pantech A1407PT, which uses bone conduction technology. (*should be noted I haven’t decided on which one to get, and when I do decide, it probably won’t be this thing)
3) been wanting to introduce the world to this guy, the blobfish:
who might as well be an ancient grandfather of mine given the sad look on that mug of his. That and the typical bit of phlegm that can sometimes inadvertently dangle from some Clinardian orifice.
4) been completely digging the new XLR8R DJ mix from Starkey, a guy from Philly I met at the Laptop Battle at Chop Suey a couple years ago. That, along with some of the tracks I’ve been hearing off of Food for Animals’ new release entitled “Belly.”
5) learned that this website now boasts the world/galaxy/universe’s largest photo/file/scan in existence. You know the image well, but at 16 gigapixels large, don’t you want to see the lips of Jesus in stunning, high resolution?
More always,
M
Memory foam?, . . . no, forgetful foam. . .
was one of the things I’d heard over the Thanksgiving holiday. Along with ‘I don’t like Ohio State, I don’t like their coach and I don’t like their fans. . .’ It should be noted that this was uttered by a die-hard fan of the SEC. I really don’t think it wasn’t meant to represent actual distaste for the state of Ohio or its residents. This guy is just passionate about his college football and remembering how Ohio State won the BCS Championship in 2002.
I’m back from Alabama now, and I’ll have some photos up here ‘directly:’ one which features a deer hunter riding a bike as well as the caricature of a turkey made from Thanksgiving day portions and meal options: very Giuseppe Arcimboldo. For now, you can check out this image created by my friend and colleague Jacob Gerber (with light technical assistance lent by yours truly).
Lastly, watched Old Joy, a film by Kelly Reichardt. Featuring performances by Daniel London and Will Oldham, its about the tension between two friends whose lives have taken different paths. Really subtle and not overacted, its captivating to see the film unfold. Plus, these characters journey into the Cascade Mountains on foot for the weekend, so when it ends, you’re exhausted from their hiking and relaxed by the hot springs the final scenes take place at.