First Takes-Chase the Magic SE

So I wanted to try out a newly discovered video editing technique.

(I say newly discovered cause it's one of those techniques that have been available since like forever and I was flipping around on YouTube and was like "iMovie does that?")

Basically, you can take an audio recording, set little markers at certain beats, and drag video clips over the audio file and iMovie will adjust the clips to fit the markers.

This is how you're kinda supposed to make a music video.

The program is designed mainly to make your home movies look cooler, and not exactly powerful enough to really do the kinds of things I want it to do. (Complex stuff that has to do with syncing, blah, blah, blah) So there are all these little kinds of problems around detail editing that I haven't solved yet.

However, the big program costs actual money.

Not big money.

I could go out and get it right now and not feel even remotely guilty.

In fact, it could be finished downloading before I even post this blog.

But here's the thing,

You don't learn to play guitar on a Gibson 335.

You learn on a beat up, rusty,  perpetually out of tune, flea market, made of balsa wood and ripped calluses, piece of crap guitar.

You do this to strengthen your hands and firm your resolve.

Master an Fmajor where the action is four and a half inches from the frets and you know you've got what it takes to handle playing with the big boys.

And with this "free with the computer back in 2008" program, I haven't quite shed enough blood to convince myself that I should be making professional movies.

Although, I must admit, I am having all kinds of fun doing it.

I haven't stayed up this late and obsessed over a project like this in a long time and it feels good to stretch, even if the muscle isn't very strong yet.

Anyway, I wanted to test out this newly discovered technique, designed to make your home movies look a little cooler, and I needed to concentrate on the technique rather than the final product.

So I'm breaking with format this week and using a recording from my first album, and there's no real narrative, so stop looking for one.

Basically this is just a coolish looking home movie with an old recording.

Click the picture below to take you all the way to the YouTubes.

So yeah, enjoy.

South by South Snowden

Austin, Texas.

Home of the South By South West Festival.

SXSW (By those in the know, or media writers with limited word counts)

Austin is also, considered by those who have visited, an incredibly liberal oasis in the middle of what is very decidedly a Red State.

Which means everyone orders coffee using odd italian phrasing and Apple MacBooks are distributed with highschool diplomas. It also means that there is an unacheivably overpriced organic food supplier and Joan Baez stayed at a Motel 6 there once.

I live in the Bible Belt of a decidedly Blue State, which means the tap water tastes fantastic and Walmart carries amazingly crisp broccoli.

I win.

But the SXSW Festival is all the talk in the trades right now cause it is supposedly the hippest gathering of independent music and the cutting edge of technology.

Every cool pop band from Imagine Dragons to Daft Punk gets to rub elbows with the cutting edge indie bands with their turn tables and ukuleles. Thousands of shows and impromptu jams exploding over the little town, man, that sounds fun.

Yet, now that it's in full swing, the only thing everyone is talking about is a presentation/live interview of Edward Snowden via iChat from Moscow.

Which, I get, I guess. Edward Snowden is like the closest us lefties have had to a bona fied Patrick Henry.

(Don't bother looking it up, he's the dude that said "Give me liberty or give me death!")

If information is bags of gold coin, Snowden is Robin Hood.

Unless you think he's more like a traitor and should be shot through the heart for treason, you Nottingham Sheriffs, you.

Most of us, however, are like Errol Flynn era Maid Marions, wondering why Robin is spending all his nights with Little John.

To make the point more clear, none of us really understand most of it.

We kinda knew all that information was being stored and sifted.

We kinda agree that government secrets are the only way to go.

We kinda hope Americans won't do anything terrible with that information.

And yes, we're all kinda creeped out that Target can use our private browsing pornography preferences to help increase sales of tissue and unscented lotion.

Yes, it's incredibly shocking how much personal information is out there using the simplest search techniques imaginable.

I kid you not, I once had to kick a group of gentlemen out of my coffee shop because they would spend hours at their laptops Facebook stalking my employees. To think that with just a first name and a work location a bunch of forty something perves can access the summer vacation photos of a seventeen year old girl looking for bikini shots.

And, yes, you can totally blame the girl for posting bikini shots, the little strumpet, but that's not really fair is it? Nobody reads the fine print and nobody can live in a world if all of their actions are guided by the fear of creepy men.

After that I instituted a program where we could wear any name we wanted on our name tags.

Corporate got all pissy about it because somehow Batman once made the latte of a secret shopper, but I never gave in, none the less.

I'd post bikini shots of myself all day if I thought it would get people to come out to the shows.

But traitor, or revolutionary?

Thomas Paine or Ethyl Rosenburg?

The real problem is that how you feel about it says more about what television you watch than it does about your historical point or the relevance of your perspective.

The Great Sift, as it's now being called, where each of us are beginning to migrate into our respective corners, choosing the agreeableness of our news intake, coming to conclusions when the scope of the information is beyond our horizons, the drawing of lines in the sand, the creation of Blue State Bible Belts and Red State Liberal Oasises, that's really what's gong to be the end of American culture.

There's really nothing the NSA can do with the dirty texts I send my wife, but don't think for a second that you're safe from the terrible motives of tyranny, everytime you gas up your car or bite into a double bacon burger.

All of us agree on just about 99.9% of all things.

Nobody likes potholes.

Everyone likes clean water.

Nobody likes vegatables, but they want good ones available at reasonable prices.

You have to wear your seat belt, but go ahead and forgoe the motorcycle helmet if you need a better undertanding of Newtonian Motion.

Smoke pot, marry gay. Or both. Or neither.

Own guns and regulate your militias, there's a reason why a land war hasn't been fought on the continent since the Mexicans tried to disagree with our minifest destiny. You don't pick a fight with a Texan, that's just stupid.

The saying goes, that a polite society is an armed society.

Okay, sure, I get the logic.

But if I conceed you that, then we also should agree that a transparent socity, too, is a polite society. Information can regulate behavior like an assualt rifle can regulate a zombie horde.

Either way, Snowden's never coming home.

The man gets to die in a foreign airport long before we ever agree if he was right or if he was wrong.

But he did get to open for Daft Punk.

So that's pretty cool.

Sunday Sevenish

Sometimes, when I fail to post up a Friday Five, it's only cause I got lazy.

Sometimes, it's only cause I got this idea for a thing, and that thing becomes more important than any other thing.

Sometimes both.

Sometimes Jennifer Lawrence.

And sometimes all four.

I spent the morning and early afternoon traveling down and back to see my dad. We had some good laughs and a good lunch.

In the car ride home I thought a lot about the Friday Five, but nothing seemed to really spark the imagination and then Joann sent me a picture of the cover of Catching Fire, the sequel to the Hunger Games, which came out on DVD that afternoon, with hours and hours of extras, and pretty much decided to dominate the rest of the day.

So no Friday Five for you.

Cause, and I must say it, Catching Fire is a really good flick.

Like really good.

Like there was not a single wasted frame of celluloid.

However, it made butt tons of money and was based on a young adult novel, so the critical analysis of the flick was beside the point, which I think is a shame because it was an action disaster movie, a love story, and post WWIII sci-fi and yet was made to feel real and present at the same time.

You feel like you want to write it off until you start to realize that there were gladiators in a democratic empire and the firing squad is still a legal form of execution in some states.

Huzzah, I say, Huzzah.

Now, yes, I am a sci-fi fanboy, so I do find myself feeling apologetic to the literati from time to time for how much fantasy, super hero, dystopian futurama fluff I imbibe on a regular basis, but that's kinda like feeling bad for not reading the nutritional facts on a Chicken Chalupa.

And just like all art forms, there's good, bad, really good, really bad, kitschy, failed kitsch, and surprisingly magnificent examples of the craft.

It was the "surprisingly magnificent" monicker that got my ball a rollin cause I started to think about all kinds of movies that really just blew my mind in one way or another, but were either shined over because of how popular they were, or never captured the zeitgeist of the moment, or never rediscovered by the pop culture people who are in charge of that sorta thing.

So here's just a random list of movies, some popular, some unheard of, that I could literally watch hundreds of times. And mostly have.

First: Stranger Than Fiction
Will Ferrell is funny, yes, but watching him as a grounded character surrounded by the most amazing performers and a tale that's just quirky and fantastical enough to keep you slightly unprepared, well, what can I say? If you haven't seen it, please do.

Second: the original Red Dawn:
One of my best friends referred to this movie as "cold war propaganda trash" which, you know, okay then. I can't really, really, argue with that. A war movie about high school children becoming guerrilla fighters due to a Soviet invasion of the U.S. starring the Brat Pack. Yeah, I know, but if you sift passed all the flag waving and second amendment rhetoric and start to think a little globally and you start to think about how often an invaded country turns to a quagmire of children killing children, and yes, until you're in your thirties, you're still a kid, then it's possible to put an american face to a terrorist act. Freedom just happens to be our religion. That, and Leah Thompson. Wolverines!

Third: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince:
I know it's silly to list the sixth installment of one of the most popular series ever, but if you watch it again, you'll notice that it's the only one that is constructed like a movie and not a "Harry Potter" movie. The performances, the dialogue, the pace, the exposition, even the sight gags, all combine very gracefully and maturely. It is the "Empire Strikes Back" of the series and deserved a lot more critical acclaim than it got.

Fourth: Mumford
Speaking of Star Wars movies, did you know that Lawrence Kasdan was responsible for both Return of the Jedi and The Big Chill, in the same frigging year? The same guy who wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Bodyguard. Anyway, just slightly down the list of his IMDB page is a teeny weeny forgotten about movie called Mumford. I won't spoil it for you except for the fact that it includes pretty much the only watchable performance of Martin Short ever, and solidifies the fact truth the world doesn't get enough of Hope Davis.

Five: Lenny
I can't imagine that working with Bob Fosse was anything other than terrible, but this black and white biopic of comedian Lenny Bruce is my favorite of the three films he did. The movie is pretty frenetic until this incredible melt down scene where the camera shoots Dustin Hoffman from the back of the theater and it's so long and so terrible you're both devastated and horrified and sad.

Six: The Little Prince
Lerner and Lowe's last musical together, and yeah, it's pretty heavy with seventies schmaltz, but gosh the songs are good, and the performances good, and Bob Fosse as the snake, I've heard the stage show isn't all that, but boy would I like to see it.

Seven: Across the Universe
Continuing the musical theme, this is a musical movie incorporating Beatles tunes. And, okay, yeah, Julie Taymore really starts to lose herself in high concept art that just becomes stupid (See Spiderman: The Broadway Musical) and can Twila Tharp us to death, but the guys who did the production work on the sound track where just unbelievably tight and you had to know a little inside pool to get it, but even if you didn't, the moment when Evan Rachel Wood sings Blackbird, ooopmh.

Seven and a half: A Life Less Ordinary
Sure, a road romance with Cameran Diaz and Ewan McGregor, but there is this wonderful side romance of cupids played by Holly Hunter and Delroy Lindo that the whole thing is like a mash up of  Quentin Tarantino and Frank Capra.

Seven and three quarters: Better Off Dead
Actually, this list is going to go on forever and there wasn't really much of a thread to begin with, so we're just gonna stop here. Except to say that David Ogden Stiers was actually at the opening night cast party where Joann and I went home together for the first time and John Cusack rules.

Next week I may keep the movie theme going with the exact opposite of this list: Overrated Meh.

(Looking right at you, American Hustle)

Sorry Jen.

TBT: All the Things

You know what there aren't a lot of?

Cowboy Firemen in feety pajamas.

You know why?

Guts.

There aren't a lot of five year olds with the guts to be everyone's hero in comfortable couture.

With the added super power of the super slide when padded soles meet the greasy shag.

Nobody knows what they want to be when then grow up, so this boy has decided to be ALL the things.

He doesn't change much over the next 32 years.

Same thin lips and steely gaze. Same left handedness and still requires a chin strap to put on a hat.

There are sublet differences though.

He's much taller now. And doesn't like his feet being covered when he sleeps. He never did get to drive a fire truck and he's pretty positive that he'll never ride a horse or fire a six shooter from the hip.

He doesn't cry as much during bath time.

He eats his vegetables.

He still doesn't know what he wants to be when he grows up, and he still thinks he can be ALL the things.

In fact the central problem of his life right now is what to be and where.

Being all the things, to all the people and all the places, all the time, is confusing.

Not impossible,

just confusing.

Which is why he picked this picture today.

Cause there's a boy who wants to be all the things, and sees nary an obstacle.

His only concern is waiting for mom to leave the living room so he can run his baby brother over with his fire truck.

Cause it's Black Hat Day.

And when it's Black Hat Day, someone's getting run over with a fire truck.

Those are the rules.

First Takes - Quiet Amy

Special treat this week with Joann guest starring.

Which, considering how many hits her pretty little face is gonna generate, will most likely become a thing.

I like things.

Things are good.

Just click the picture to take you straight to the YouTubes.

And this week, don't just send feedback, I'd also love to hear suggestions for future songs.

Thanks :)

The best part

Context

I could tell immediately something was wrong.

There's a little dance, a little hesitation, quick glances down the hallway, and a shortness of breath that insinuates a need to confess of sorts.

What's wrong dude?

Wait . . . Dad?

Mmmhmm?

Wait . . . so a while ago, I was on YouTube, and I was just watching this video on Portal, and, then, at the beginning, there was this picture of a white ball with a bloody face on it, and it just popped out of nowhere, and I can't get it out of my head.

Wait . . . Wilson? Are you talking about Wilson?

Who's that?

Was it a volleyball and did the face look like a hand print?

Yu yu yu yu yeah. huh.

Dude, that's just Wilson. He's from a movie, Cast Away.

I thought he was a demon who popped out wherever.

No dude, he's Tom Hanks' friend in the movie Cast Away.

But why's he all bloody?

Well, okay, so Tom Hank's is stranded on an island and he has to start a fire, so he rubs a couple of pieces of wood together like this:

{Me miming Tom Hanks starting a fire}

But it takes a really long time and he gets a blister on his hand. Do you know what a blister is?

Uh huh. Like a cut.

No not exactly, but kinda. So the blister pops and Tom Hanks get angry and grabs a volley ball and throws it into the jungle. Then he notices that his hand print has made something that looks like a face on the front of the ball. So because he's all alone, he starts talking to the face like he's his friend and he calls him Wilson. The ball becomes his best friend for years while they are together on the island, and then it gets really sad because Tom Hanks builds a boat and sails away from the island and then there's this big storm and Wilson falls off the boat and disappears. It's one of the saddest parts of any movie ever.

Oh.

Here. {I grab my iPad and look up images of Wilson. Thanks Google.} Is this what you saw?

Yu yu yu yu yeah.

Yeah dude, that's just Wilson.

Kay.

See, no need to worry.

Kay.

And that was pretty much that. In fact, cause it was bed time, rather than reading a story or falling asleep in front of the TV, he wanted me to tell him the whole story of Cast Away since we couldn't find our copy of the DVD. (I don't think it survived one of our last media purges.)

I did dance lightly over the plane crash, and omitted Helen Hunt entirely, but it made a nice little bed time story with a somewhat happy ending.

I say somewhat, because I firmly believe that the moment when Wilson drifts off into the vast Pacific Ocean, it is like one of the saddest moments ever caught on film. If I were to work a top list into today's blog it would be when the gun goes off on Old Yeller, Jenny dying on a Tuesday, Sophie's final decision, the brothers bleeding to death on a park bench at the end of Red Dawn, and Tom Hanks apologizing to a volleyball.

I'm sure there are others. Tell me about the bunny rabbits again, George, and when Mr. T somehow causes Burgess Meredith to have a heart attack, but you know, that's just crossing hairs.

But the idea of context was what was really on my mind today.

See, if you're eight and you've never seen Cast Away, and someone suddenly shows you a picture of a bloody hand print on a volleyball, there's really no reason for you to think it's anything other than a demon that pops out at you.

The mind will just start to make things up.

Fill in all the blanks until a full story emerges.

And, is it more than just pessimism to suggest that the story is always a terrible one?

Calvin falls asleep on the couch and kicks a wine glass off one of the end tables and all I could think about in the middle of the night with the sound of shattering glass is that someone just broke in and I have to kill some one and why don't I have a baseball bat?

Part of that is some over active anxiety, but, a big part of that is survival instinct.

The Homo Erectus that doesn't conjure images of lions at the sound of a snapping twig, gets eaten nine times out of ten.

It's very possible that we're just simply hard wired for aggressively terrible conclusions.

Learning how to untangle the mess the modern amygdala makes is a lifetime pursuit.

But it's a worthwhile one. Once you get passed something, something being your own imagination, and see things at face value, you start to have courage and faith and that icky feeling in the pit of your stomach disappears and your voice has authority and your spine seems to, well, grow a spine.

Yet the real conclusion isn't just about facing fear.

See, I've been throwing myself out into the big bad world a lot.

Which has lead to a substantial amount of rejection.

And an even bigger amount of indifference.

Which can be much much, much much worse.

So much worse, that it is nearly impossible not to jump to the conclusion that everything I've ever created is terrible, and I'm just a clown of a man.

Which, when you think about it, is no less ridiculous than worrying about a bloody faced monster popping up down the hall.

But who's to criticize anything down a darkened hallway five minutes before bedtime?

Or to feel a sense of self worth when you're told by a major music producer that Selina Gomez would never sing "change is difficult, but my heart is reeling" as if you have any idea what that means.

Too cheesy or too complicated?

I don't know.

Never will.

Don't have to.

As long as I continue to remind myself, that most likely, my bloody demons are nothing more than props.