2.28.2009

The Cusp


From warm to snow to balmy to stormy...it's the cusp of spring again!

Got some good bike riding in this week, including a long ride with Denise to visit Polly, ending in a dark sprint home by myself through the scary-when-its-dark part of the Rock Island trail.




No scarf! Warm breeze in my hair! Nothing compared to a few weeks ago...




the cusp (a mixture of springs) from nocoastfilms on Vimeo.

2.25.2009

Weather's Nice

Get out and dance!

BOOMBOX from Ely Kim on Vimeo.

(as an aside, on Monday, I sent a boombox to the state surplus property auction...)

2.20.2009

Animated Education

Nicely done, and certainly made me understand things better:


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

The Short and Simple Story of the Credit Crisis.

Crisisofcredit.com

The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

For more on my broader thesis work exploring the use of new media to make sense of a increasingly complex world, visit jdjarvis.com.

2.19.2009

More Color from Michael Hernandez-Stern

Beautiful, uncut footage, graced with the markings of the Brown MCM transfer machine...


DIGI/HYPNO-TIZE from MNHS on Vimeo.

transfer of most recently developed film.

2.15.2009

2.14.2009

Mysterious Cat

This cat was spotted in a couple local restaurants last weekend.

First, on Friday evening, it was at El Chapparo, enjoying imported Mexican Coke:


The next morning, it was spotted at the Green Gateau, contemplating leaping into a lit candle while crow's nesting on a crayon.



2.12.2009

'ders gets a new MacBook

On his first night with a new computer....


Anders swam with the fishes...


Visited the Eiffel Tower with a cabbie who supplied him with Old Style (the new, more expensive variety)...


...and even went for a stroll on the moon with his shadow.


I'd say that's a pretty good first night.

Another early FCP

no, not final cut pro, it's a friday cat post!





via rad dudes and found magazine

2.09.2009

Rad Dude Robbie

One of my favorite dudes is also one of the raddest dudes, made officially so by the internet as of today. 





Yeah, Robbie.

2.08.2009

"Adam"

New work out of USC -- cinematography by Jon Miller, and a score by Anderson Reinkordt!  I particularly love the Edward Hopper-esque shot in this clip



More about the work here.

The Wire, auf Deutsch

I can't even imagine what this must be like to watch.  The chief dubber explains:

When one is otherwise paying attention to synchronization in dubbing, it’s a straight speech, that means no throaty voices, nasaly voices, “spuckeklacker” (stuttering/lisping). You really try and make sure this doesn’t happen or you simply don’t end up using these kind of takes. But in this series we’ve had to accept them. The slums, the ghettos, the on-the-street, that should come across as authentically as possible. That the people don’t manage to speak very clearly or nicely, they can do that too – I hold my nose a little now, here and there, speak more nasaly, sometimes stutter a bit, don’t speak so clearly, so that can come across.

In general it’s really hard to bring the slang over to German as it is in the original. I’m sure there’s been a lot of urban jargon in there, but you have to be careful about momentarily fashionable speech, because what’s common right now is at one point “in” speech – once dubbed, always dubbed. So when someone watches that in five or seven years, “in” speech spoken here on the street in Germany won’t be “in” anymore, or people simply don’t say things like that anymore. So one has to take care with those sorts of things.

To bring over the style of the speech out of the slums or ghettos, we haven’t used very exact, grammatically correct German. Nobody says “Wegen des Fahrrads” (because of the bikes), rather “wegen dem Fahrrads” (’cause of them bikes), for example there we use wrong German. Here and there we’ve used other phrases, sometimes with an English or American sentence structure.

2.05.2009

Mix for Sam Solomon

My friend Sam, who is working on his PhD in Comp Lit at USC, recently had his car broken into and the bastard took all his mix cds.  Irreplaceable, that heartless bastard.  Anyway, in response to a sad Facebook status regarding this matter, I decided to to make Sam a mix. 

I asked him what sort of mood he'd like for the mix. 

mood, i guess, would have to be of the "i'm stuck in traffic but kind
of rocking out" or "it's late at night and i'm cruising and this music
is kind of making me cry in the best way" but i will accept anything.

Here, then, is

Sam's Best Way to Rock Out While Crying in Traffic

  1. Drugs and Sunshine -- The Chinese Stars
  2. Johnny 99 -- Bruce Springsteen
  3. My Girls -- Animal Collective
  4. My Big Nurse -- David Byrne & Brian Eno
  5. Green Starred Sleeve -- UUVVWWZ
  6. Pretty Girl Ffrom Chile -- The Avett Brothers
  7. The Healer -- Erykah Badu
  8. The Orchard -- Fire On Fire
  9. New Star Song -- The Mountain Goats
  10. Mercury -- Mahjongg
  11. Kid for Today -- Boards of Canada
  12. Your Mama -- Kennedy

How's Your News?

I loved the This American Life piece on How's Your News that aired a couple years ago. Glad to see it's going to reach a large audience!

via The Daily Dish via Boing Boing:





Shepherded by Matt Stone and Trey Parker, this new MTV news series - yes, MTV, yes, news - is by and about disabled people. Timmy! A sneak preview via Boing Boing:



Creator Arthur Bradford:

We had a lot of fun shooting this series. Everywhere we went people would stare at the bus and come up and talk to us. For me, as the director, it was often exhausting and sometimes stressful, like when one of our reporters would have a seizure or shit their pants in the middle of shooting something important. Both of these things happened more than I'd like to recall. But it was overall a pretty magical experience and the fact this this show is now going to air on primetime and be available to so many households across America is something we should all rejoice in.

Amen.

2.04.2009

Lincoln Ve-Low Photoshoot

Conrad asked me to take some photos for Lincoln Ve-Low. On a gorgeous Saturday during magic hour, we hit the pavement.




He insisted this was not to include photos of his face. Whoops. (cough, cough)


Shadows get longer, and the sun is so golden.



Plymouth spire, rolling to Ideal Grocery (where they've known me since infancy) for last-minute soup night ingredients.

My co-worker & her husband (Cycle Works pro Rick Dockhorn), who had seen me out taking photos, laughed when they saw me carrying a bottle of red wine and a carton of half & half. Fair enough.

2.02.2009

Abandoned Asian Amusements


Dark Roasted Blend has a fantastic little collection of photographs of abandoned amusement parks in a few Asian countries. I don't particularly like amusement parks -- I was very prone to motion sickness as a kid, and since my dad was also, we tended to stay far away. Ande, for his 24th birthday, wanted nothing more than for me to take him to Six Flags over New England and go on my first roller coaster. Meh. I was a good girlfriend. I digress...

I don't really care for amusement parks, but I LOVE when nature reclaims spaces humans have abandoned.

2.01.2009

Calving Time


A little early start this year, but as Mami said today, "At least now, it's February!"

Last Sunday, a first-time mother gave birth to a little bull calf. It was very cold, and beginning to snow, so my mom & Chris carried the calf into the barn, where we'd put down some straw. Generally, the cow will come right along, but this mother was preoccupied with trying to eat, and didn't follow her still-wet and becoming icy little one. My brother toweled off the calf as it tried to nurse on his knee. We tried for quite some time (about 2 & 1/2 hours) to get the cattle all to come into the barn, hoping to be able to separate the mother out and pen her in with her calf, to no avail. Finally, well after dark, well into the snowstorm, and after all we kids had given up, my parents gave up, too.

Monday morning, the first day of the Year of the Ox, Mami went down to feed and found cow with calf. There was another bull calf born this week, too, though thankfully, there was some warmer weather this weekend.