Heavy Pet-ing

This is an animation featured on youtube. Even though millions of people will see this, I had to post it because it is so damn charming. A student named Julia Pott at Kingston University made this as her final project. The short film consists of animation of cartoon animals synched with audio interviews of various people talking about there first crushes.

Civic Duty

I'm not a car person. Never have been. I never understood the love for an automobile. I just recently bought a '97 Honda Civic. I can't say that I love it, but I do enjoy it more than I have ever enjoyed a car before. I had to get it because I just got a teaching position in a town 33 miles away, and my wife and I can no longer carpool to the university. Plus, the gas for driving the Jeep everyday was killing me.

This is why I enjoy my "new" car - it's economical, kinda bland looking, no frills, yet enjoyable to drive. I like to think I now own the automotive equivalent of myself. Kinda weird and egotistical, like the old tv show "My Mother the Car" as an ego driven masturbatory fantasy.

Still, I really miss riding my scooter everyday, and hope to one day have a job in Denton that allows me to take 2 wheels instead of 4 everyday to work. Either that, or I'll live in a city with real public transportation.

Psych!

So I stumbled across a BBC2 radio special on the history of psychedelic music. Some of the interviews are really cool, especially with Joe Boyd and Mike Heron. However, some of the interviews are lifted directly from the tv documentary Rock and Roll: An Unruly History.

Unfortunately, the narrator adopts a kind of jaded a holier-than-thou attitude and thinks it is necessary to make dismissive jokes demonstrating how naive and ridiculous everyone involved in the 60s counterculture now looks. If you can get past the self-conscious narration, the series is pretty good.

For the Record

In honor of my friend Matt, I am going to try and post the LPs I have been purchasing of late.

From Half-Price in Dallas 9/10
Robyn Hitchcock - Invisible Hitchcock
Pentangle - Cruel Sister
Brinsley Schwartz - Nervous on the Road
Grateful Dead - Workingman's Dead

Ebay
Incredible String Band - Hangman's Beautiful Daughter
Fairport Convention - Unhalfbricking

From Recycled over the past month
Willie Nelson - Phases and Stages
Rolling Stones - Through the Past Darkly
Mike Heron - Smiling Men w/Bad Reputations
Pentangle - Solomon's Seal

From Forever Young
Incredible String Band - 5000 Layers of the Onion
Kinks - Lola vs. Powerman...
Incredible String Band - Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (accidentally scratched and immediately replaced - see above)

Waterloo and Cheapo in Austin
Neutral Milk Hotel - Aeroplane Over the Sea
Pogues - Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash
Palace - Days in the Wake


I have also raided the $.25 bin at Recycled and grabbed a bunch of stuff from Fleetwood Mac to the Clash. I'm also building up my Dylan and Pink Floyd catalogs.

Up Rotoscope

Here's a nice little rotoscoping animation set to music of the wonderful band, Neutral Milk Hotel. I spend a good deal of time scoping youtube for interesting animation. I really need to focus.

The Vinyl Solution

I have never been a huge collector of stuff. I usually own just what I need. I tend to have a lot of books because I'm an information junkie plus I just finished writing a thesis, so my shelves right now are brimming over. However, I'm usually not the kind of person who fetishizes the object and surrounds himself with knick-knacks and curios as a kind of expression of identity or as a shield against the world (excuse my over-simplified psycho-babble). As a matter of fact, I'm known for purging my belongings every few years when I get the feeling that I have amassed too many material goods. However, recently I have started collecting vinyl records at a rate that threatens both my physical living space and my budget. I attribute this need partially to the huge changes I have recently experienced in my life which have rendered the near future as a gigantic question mark.

I have spent the last near-decade working as a clerk selling used lps and books at an amazing independent bookstore. A small portion of our clientèle consists of vinyl fetishists who are so annoying, weird, and compulsive, that any interest I had in lps was quashed by these strange men who spend insane amounts of money on music that nobody else in their right mind would ever buy in a format that is antiquated and obsolete. "Yes, yes!" I cry. I am aware of the archival stability of records, and I am certainly no stranger to acquiring music that could rightly be called, if not obscure, then at least not top 40. However, my need to purge every few years, coupled with my distaste for the collector mentality, has rendered my collection of lps to an amount that never exceeds more than two small 1' ft. square boxes. I am a huge music fan, and I do work at a great music store, so I always have plenty of music on hand. It is simply that I don't feel the need to hold on to things forever.

During the last few years, I have become a big proponent of digital music, my hard drive is filled with around 80 gigs of music at any given time, because it allowed me to acquire a huge library of music, without the material build-up. However, I have recently found myself unsatisfied with this as my sole means of musical acquisition in that the music itself seems temporary and ephemeral. I really like the thing-ness of an album.

I think that this is only half the equation. I think that my recent graduation with an MA, and my uncertain future have driven me to turn to material goods as a kind of security blanket. I have had mini-occurrences like this before, where I balanced instability in my life with material things, only to purge later on. However, I think that this time I might hold on to these albums a little while longer. I feel a real kind of sea change coming regarding both material goods and music. I don't know what it is, but I feel that there is something deeper and conservatory about keeping these records. I'll let you know when I find out what it all means.
I promise to post more in the future.

Avoir les Robots

Last year my wife and I went to Paris where I was doing some research for a project with my mentor professor. Of all the amazing things we saw, this image was probably one of my most favorite things I saw the whole time there. It was wheat-pasted on a wall outside of the hotel where we stayed in the 6th Arrondissement about 3 blocks from Notre Dame. I almost forgot about it, but was looking for another image and stumbled across it. The thing I love most about the image is the fact that it is a robot with bucked teeth. This means that if this were a "real" robot, then somebody intentionally designed an anthropomorphized robot with a condition most people consider a physical defect. Second, it means that somebody decided to give a robot a set of teeth in the first place!

Holy Belief System!

The fine folks over at adherents.com have a page dedicated to the religious affiliations of hundreds of superheroes and supervillans. Every geek worth his slightly flabby salt knows Kitty Pryde is Jewish, but I must admit that I did not know that Green Arrow was a practicing Buddhist!

Centaur-fold

I really need to post more often. I am trying to finish my Master's Thesis and blah, blah, blah.

Here's a lovely Centaur t-shirt I give to you as a peace offering for my being absent for so long. Go here for more geeky, mythological, fantasy t-shirt needs.

Pop and Locke

Most of you who know me know that I have an irrational love for the television program LOST. Even though the third season has been somewhat in shambles thematically and in plotting, I still watch diligently.

Anyway, here's one of the nerdiest things I've ever posted in my entire internet existence. Not only does the fact that it is a LOST tribute picture make me a mouth breathing fanboy who is barely able to control his bodily functions in public due to the intense mental acumen required to project himself in a state of constant immersion into his sad little fantasy world, but it is also based on the lamest of warmed over word-play. Ladies and gentlen - I give you my sad little life.

Neu Kid in Town

This is one of my favorite videos ever on youtube. The formula is simple: baby + solid color background + bubbles + pioneering Krautrock band Neu = pure visual bliss.

When All is Syd and Done

Here is a video from July 2006 of John Frussciante of the Red Hot Chili Pepper's playing Syd Barret's "Jugband Blues" at a concert in Manchester right after Syd's death. I am by no means a huge fan of the Chili Peppers, although I admire their longevity and their desire to give 100% when they play live, but I've always appreciated John Frusciante, and really enjoy some of his solo albums. Anyway, Frusciante has always played around in the same kinds of territory (both musically and mentally) as Barrett, and I find this cover of one of Syd's more upfront songs about his mental condition, Jugband Blues, to be a sweetly moving tribute by a fan after the passing of one of his musical heroes.

Space is the Place

Ain't it Cool News has a piece on a really interestingly looking documentary called Future by Design about architect, designer, and scientist Jacques Fresco who designs Utopian cities that look like 1950s visions of the future.


This film looks amazing to me as I grew up looking at the work of artists like Don Davis, pictured above, who created a vision of the future so exciting to my 8-year-old brain, that I couldn't wait until the year 1995 when I could live in a space colony orbiting the planet. Needless to say I'm more than a little disappointed in the progress made in that area. I'm just happy to see that there are still people in the world like Mr. Fresco who still have that wide-eyed kind of vision about the future that fueled so much of my formative years.

Show and Tell

I hate to use this space for shameless self promotion, but I am playing my first show in months this Friday, September 8th in Dallas at the Cavern. It's located 1914 Lower Greenville, Dallas, Tx.

Mad (Office) Max

Evidently this has been around a while, but it's new to me. A person known only as the Whaler posted this on the Denton Rock City board. Here are four panels from a sixteen panel pamphlet by the artist Packard Jennings, which provides detailed instructions on how to overthrow your work place and create an anarchic agrarian utopia from its remnants. It is meant to be sent back to companies who send junk mail in the very same business reply envelopes which they provide. It's in a frame so when you go here, take the link that says, "Business Reply Pamphlet." Of course the artist's other stuff is also very much worth checking out.

69 Videos

My friend Jamie Courville is a film maker in NYC and also part of a collective that is making videos/short films for every single song on the Magnetic Fields' masterwork 69 Love Songs. Below are two videos made so far. The first is the wistful and beautiful "Abigale Belle of Kilronan" made by Jamie herself. The second is the brilliant and kinetic "Crazy for You but not that Crazy" made by an Irish gentleman whose name I can't remember.

Irish Manuscript Found in Bog

I know I'm a little late on this, but a bulldozer driver working for a fertilizer company in Ireland unearthed an 8th-9th century psalter in a bog. This article calls the find akin to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I think that's jumping the gun just a bit, but it is a remarkable and very cool find nonetheless.

Centaur of Attention

Kyron is a man who dresses as a centaur. He is available for parties.

link

Tropocalia Pioneer Tico da Costa

Here's a video of Tropocalia pioneer Tico da Costa telling stories about the guitar playing styles of his "four uncles" and demonstrating said styles. This video not only shows the immense musical talent of this legendary performer, but also his sense of humor.

Thanks to Chris for shooting and providing the video.

George Washington

My friend Brian alerted me to this. It's an animated video about the greatest warrior of all time, George Washington! It might be one of the funniest things I've seen in a while. It feeds into my latest fascination with humor that is based upon giving completely erroneous information about well-know things. In the same vein I also highly recommend the BBC series "Look Around You," which are parodies/tributes to in-class science programs from the 70s and 80s.

Update Sept 3, 2006

It turns out the creator of the "George Washington" song and video is Austin, Tx comic artist Brad Neely, author of Creased Comics. Mr. Neely is also the creator of the very funny and subversive alternative soundtrack to the film "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" called, "Wizard People, Dear Reader".