I was going over some of my MP3’s and was wondering…. can any one of the regular readers of this site (all 5 of you..) come up with a top ten listening list?

I’m not asking you to rank your all-time favorite bands, but I’d sure like to know what everyone is in to right now.

I want your top-ten. It doesn’t have to be popular. It doesn’t have to be cool. Don’t try too hard. It can be as lame and stupid as you want.

I will go first. I’ve been listening to a bunch of Jap-Girl-Punk shit at work, but this is what dominates my leisure-time. (in no particular order)

1. Beta Band – To you alone
2. Afghan Whigs – Rebirth of the Cool
3. Scarface – My Block
4. God Lives Underwater – from your mouth
5. Kimya Dawson – the beer
6. Lambchop – Your fucking sunny day
7. Mos Def – Umi Says
8. Spooks – Thing’s I’ve Seen
9. (50 Cent and the Game) Hate it orLove it
10. Pogues? – Bottle of Smoke
11. (I cheated) – Outkast – Roses

There are about a dozen more songs I want to name, but this is what I find myself listening to most often. If I wanted to be hip I’d pepper my picks with bands like ‘the pebbles’ and Watusi Zombie, but alas I am lame, and I just really want to know what everyone else is listening to.

So, here I am. Late to the party, as per usual. Apologies.

Great gig this past weekend. Landed a resident booking. More on the horizon.

Finally free of the bruises which plagued me in the wake of the car crash. “In an interstellar buuuuuuuurst, I’m back to save the uuuuu-huuuuu-niverse.”

More news to come. For now, a warm bed beckons.

Dammit I think this song is so cool. ‘Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood – Summer Wine’

I heard this song on WPRB tonight and I can’t tell you how much I dig it.

Evan Dildo from the Lemonheads and some porn chick already covered it once. But I think it needs to be redone again.

A new cover of this song would be a big indie hit. Say Willie Nelson does the male vocals, and the chick from the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s does the female part. It’d be fucking huge.

I’d provide a link to the MP3 if I could, but I can’t find a decent one. So go to your favorite P2P and get a copy of this song.

As a rule, I hate movies. But If I ever shot one, this would roll first over the closing credits.

If there is a bible for anyone making a low-budget feature-length movie, then Dale Newton and John Gaspard’s, Digital Filmmaking 101: An Essential Guide to Producing Low-Budget Movies (2001), is it. An update of their previous book, Persistence of Vision: An Impractical Guide to Producing a Feature Film for Under $30,000 (1999), the newer version, as its title suggests, stresses tackling the feature-length movie in the digital medium as opposed to film. Whereas only several years ago hopes of distribution for anything not shot on film would have been virtually non-existent, today’s aspiring moviemaker needs to give serious consideration to the digital format as his medium of choice. Fast, clean and incredibly economic (to the tune of about 20,000 dollars less than shooting on film), the digital medium is the future of independent moviemaking, according to Gaspard and Newton.

Continue reading Book Review: Digital Filmmaking 101: An Essential Guide to Producing Low-Budget Movies by Dale Newton and John Gaspard →

Octopus Genesus

When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days – and also afterward – when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.

Genesis 6:1-4

Continue reading Octopus Genesus →

There is this form of expression I recently thought of calling “corporate art”.

Normally when folks hear a term like this I suspect they think of abstract paintings in hotel lobbies and hallways, or strong looking works of sculpture, or maybe those inspiration posters, or something similar. I remember loki at one point in college mentioned he was sort of fascinated with that kind of thing, or at least the lobby-paintings aspect of it. If I recall this is what inspired the Red Room exhibit (of ’97 or ’98 probably).

Anyway, fascinating though this stuff may be, this isn’t what I mean by “corporate art”.

Continue reading Corporate Art – Part I (An Introduction) →