Follow me on Tumblr

So, until Google and whoever makes Internet Explorer start playing, nice, you can

follow me on Tumblr

(go there now for photos and video of the Dia:Beacon museum last weekend)

because ever since I upgraded to Internet Explorer Version 6, the "publish" button on Blogger no longer works and I have to save all my posts, then go back into the list of posts, check the new one, and click "publish all" which is a pain in the neck. So I'll be on Tumblr in the meantime. Reset your bookmarks.

Also, THIS IS HAPPENING?! Really? How am I gonna swing this?

Concert footage

As promised, finally got my concert video of the Damien Jurado/John Vanderslice concert up. It's on the last post of the last page of the Tumblr video scrapbook mentioned in the next post. But ALSO, I noticed that several other people took video of the rooftop scene. Since we're all standing in a circle, I thought it'd be neat to splice a video of all the different perspectives at once. It was a neat experiment, probably would have worked better with more angles. But here it is, some of it is my footage, some other people's:

A Year in Sum

I just got back from the Book Expo. Exhausted. But it was a ton of fun.

Last year, I did a year's worth of photos and video summing up the year. I made one this year but I guess the video files aren't the right type because now it crashes every time I open it, so even though I was done making the montage, I can't share it with you!

Instead, I'm just rendering little bits of it and dropping it into tumblr. Totally not what Tumblr is for, but let's try it. I've finished it now, so have a look and see what you think of this format. Maybe the computer will be nice later and let me render the whole thing.

http://jerseyyear.tumblr.com/

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Busy week

I know not a lot has been happening on this blog lately. But then lots of stuff DID happen this week and Blogger was out of commission for two days! So let me try to do a recap of this week: This week, I was invited to the Theatre World Awards in June, wrote a letter to Mark Wing-Davey (of Hitchhiker's fame), met Jerry Stiller, and saw both Damien Jurado and JohnVanderslice live in concert. Oh, yeah, and this took over my life today, but I'm not even going to get into that now.

We had a book launch for a book at work, and Jerry Stiller and a bunch of other famous people came to celebrate Jerry Orbach by reading from the new book. I shook Jerry Stiller's hand and thanked him a couple times. At one point, he pointed at me and asked my co-worker "Who's this?!" It was kind of odd, but funny.

Then, tonight I went to see Damien Jurado in Brooklyn. Technically, he was the opener. I didn't really care who the headliner was. He doesn't have a lot of stage presence since he just sits on a stool and plays guitar and sings, but he's sure talented. He had a woman sing with him for a while too (Melody, was it?). I'll post some video later. Here is someone else's video of him singing everyone's favorite song Ohio. Wished he would have played his harmonica. But still a really great performance.

Turns out the headliner was actually really cool. I hadn't heard of John Vanderslice before, but he's this really happy rocker who knows how to connect with his fans. "May is Audience Participation Month!" he said. Apparently he'd done a shout out on his email list or something asking for anyone who was going to be at any of his shows who would like to perform with him. So each night, he wrote their names on his hand and would call them up on stage. So tonight we had a beatboxer, a guy who sang and played tamborine, and a girl who sang. Their equipment kept crapping out on them, but I wasn't a fan of the synth sound anyway. The music was actually good. At one point, after tons of coaxing, he convinced his road manager to come out of the sound booth and crowd surf! Video of that to come. Then later on, John himself did some crowd surfing.

Haven't even gotten to the best part yet: he goes "Okay, let's sing the last few songs on the rooftop!" So he, Damien, and the band lead the ENTIRE AUDIENCE through the building, up the stairs, and onto the roof where all the musicians stood in the middle with fans crowding around close enough to bump into the musicians, and everybody else knew all the words and sang along. It was like some kind of weird cult, haha, but it was tons of fun. Definitely not what I was expecting. I'll post video later, but it was almost exactly like this.

Talking Funny

I'm not only interested in things that are funny but also things ABOUT comedy. I think the concept for this special below would be really interesting even if it was 4 professional comedians I haven't heard of. But all four of them being ultra recognizable makes it all the better. What's interesting most is the things that they disagree on.

Thoreauvian Flash Fiction

"As if you could kill time without injuring eternity."
--Henry David Thoreau

I'm starting a new writing project. It's a collection of flash fiction stories, all inspired by Thoreau quotes. I've written five already. They will go here once I revise and type them. For now, the website has the quotes which inspired the stories, but not yet the stories themselves. So you can read the quotes and wonder to yourself what inspiration came from that.

A couple timey-wimey reviews

First off, I recommend Source Code, directed by Duncan Jones. It's not time travel exactly, but still "timey-wimey" as Time Out NY called it. It's more to do with quantum mechanics--the mind and alternate universes and whatnot. It's basically 12 Monkeys meets Groundhog Day. It was better than I thought it would be. I was worried it would be too much like an action film, but it's more psychological and about character interaction than it is an action movie (which is good). There's a fair amount of refrigerator logic. Not that anything was wrong with the plot, but there are things that you realize later on. Definitely something to watch twice, not because it was confusing the first time, but it was enjoyable and you'll probably pick up a lot the second time.






And now to the Doctor Who series 6 premier. Didn't get anything done all day (except the doodle on the left) because BBC America correctly predicted we needed a series 5 marathon all day. Well actually I was at church for 2 hours setting up for Easter brunch, but the rest was just watching TV.

As River would say "Spoilers":

First off, the monsters: quite a scary, monsters that you forget about when you can't see them. So they've always been here on Earth and people just forget they've seen them? It's a bit like the quantum mechanics idea that your brain will not perceive anything it can't understand even if it's right in front of you, so there could be aliens all around you and you don't know it. It's also a bit of the weeping angels gimick where you have to keep looking at them, which makes them scarier because they look scary.

Second, Mark Sheppard is awesome, and it's really cool that he has a big role in these episodes. I wasn't expecting him to have an American accent since he's British and it's a British show. Oh, and how cool is it that his own father plays his older self? But, does Mark Sheppard only do TV shows that have both cowboys and space travel? Sorry, Firefly joke.

Third, nice new spin that it's not just that the Doctor and River meet each other out of order, but in opposite orders. I didn't really think much of the fact that the first time the Doctor saw River, it was the last time that River saw the Doctor. Now we know that the first time River saw the Doctor was the last time the Doctor saw River. So, that probably means that she's going to kill him, right? Hard days ahead, in prison for killing the most extraordinary man she's ever met. I hope they'll be a little more surprising than that.

I just read that there's going to be a movie called "Them" and I don't know who will be in it, but I do know the crew:

Written by Mike White (who wrote School of Rock)
Produced by Mike White and Jack Black
Directed by Edgar Wright (who directed Shaun of the Dead, etc.)
Based on a book by Jon Ronson (who wrote Men Who Stare at Goats)
Wow, that is amazing waiting to happen.

Podcast - Plain Ketchup - Celebrity Sleaze