700 out of 2,100

President Bush just signed into law an imigration bill that authorizes construction of nearly 700 miles of fence along parts of the 2,100 mile U.S. border with Mexico. Cost? Unknown, but the bill shells out $1.2 billon dollars to construct the incomplete barrier. Sigh. I can't believe this inane plan actually made to law. There has to be better things the country can do with $1.2 billion.

The Self-Assured Policeman

Ugh. I tried to make a sound collage today. I seem to be out of practice. Here is what came of it.

Text by Søren Kierkegaard.

What Happened When It All Went Wrong

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This week at work I had to administer a webcast and everything that could go wrong with the event did go wrong. In short, it was a disaster. While running around trying to get everything in order, I recorded this clip to gauge my stress level.

The Hardcore Show #7

Not punk rock, but some of it is definitely hardcore. The Fully Celebrated Orchestra's madhouse free jazz, Uri Caine's drum-heavy samba, Brave Combo's fierce take on a Polish folk song, and Betty Carter's heartbreaking ballad. Fine stuff this week, here's hoping you listen.

Click here to listen to the show.

Uri Caine – Samba do Mar
Farmer’s Market – Less Paul, More John
Brave Combo – Hosa Dyna
Fully Celebrated Orchestra – Succbusology
Davey Williams & John Corbett – Playing Along
Marc Ribot – Hitman
Betty Carter – Nothing More to Look Forward To
Tin Hat Trio – Lauren’s Lullaby
Tiger Lillies with Kronos Quartet – Weeping Chandelier

Updates to the Photo Gallery

Fifteen new pictures! That brings us to 132 pictures to look at. Follow the link!

Did Steve Garfield Delete My Comment?

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The other day I posted a comment to one of Steve Garfield's videos. When I came back later it was gone. Did he delete it?

After you watch the video, follow this link to see Steve's original post.

Update: 3 Hours after making the above video, my new comment remains on Steve's site. However, he has not yet answered the question.

Update: Over 24 hours have passed. The comment is still there, but no answer.

A Simple Gesture of Greeting

Yep, that's me down there. I'm waving at you. Why aren't you waving back? Don't you like me? I'm just trying to be friendly. It's just a simple gesture. A simple, friendly gesture of greeting. It's not like we have to get in a long conversation or anything, I'm just trying to say Hello. Hello? Can't you even respond in kind? It shouldn't be that hard. Well, I never. If that's the way you're going to be about it. I don't need this kind of treatment. With friends like you...

10 Utterly Irrational Worries

1. When riding an escalator, I worry that one of my fingers will caught on an unseen flap of metal and, before I can extricate myself, the digit will be ripped cruelly and painfully from my hand.
2. When crossing a busy, crowded street that forces me to pass between stopped cars, I am concerned that one of the cars will be rear-ended as I pass in before it, driving its bumper into the front car and severing my legs at the knee.
3. When eating prepared foods, I sometimes become paranoid that an error has been made in the preparation process. Instead of shitake mushrooms, for example, the cook or food-preparer accidentally used poisonous mushrooms, and I am therefore doomed to a violent and unpleasant death.
4. When cutting vegetable for dinner, I sometimes worry that the knife will slip from my grip and fall to the floor. That may not sound so bad at first, but I hold in my mind a mental image of the knife standing straight up, its point buried deeply into the top of my foot.
5. When descending the concrete stairs into the subway, or any set of concrete stairs for that matter, I worry that I will miss a step and tumble end over end to the bottom, breaking my neck in the process. Alternatively, I do not break my neck, but only my front teeth.
6. When taking an aspirin for a headache or other minor malady, I am haunted by the thought that perhaps something went wrong in the preparation of the medication and that instead of relieving me of a headache, this little white pill will throw me into a permanent coma.
7. When shaving and I accidentally nick myself, I am troubled by the thought that this tiny cut could become infected and grow into a gruesome sore, disfiguring me for life.
8. When I attempt to jaywalk across a busy street and have to run to do it, I sometimes feel a slight twinge of pain in my knees and I am filled with the fear that my knee might suddenly give out and I will collapse to the street, whereupon I will be hit by an oncoming city bus.
9. When drinking from a bottle of beer, soda, seltzer, or other such carbonated beverage, I sometimes wonder what would happen if the liquid that was about to touch my lips was replaced with battery acid.
10. When looking up at a tall building, I sometimes get the feeling that one of the glass windows will work itself loose, tumble to the ground, and behead me on the spot.

Separated At Birth

In case you didn't know, Tower Records recently declared Chapter 11 and now must liquidate its assets. I dropped by the branch on B'way this weekend and picked up a handfull of CD's that I've been meaning to acquire.

In this batch were the above two CD's, picked up merely because they've been on my list, but check out the covers. Intentional?

My bet is that it is.

Watt is a big Coltrane fan, and since Watt's music on this CD explores the "interstellar space" of his body and his recovery from a near-fatal illness, I'd say the homage is quite apt.

The Hardcore Show #6

The songs for today's show kind of fell in place. I have very little to say about them. Listen to the show if you want to know more.

Click to listen.

Toy Dolls - Fisticuffs in Frederick St.
The Pogues - Waxie's Dargle
Wire - Ex-Lion Tamer
Wire - 12XU
Minutemen - Tour Spiel
Sublime - Babylon
Meat Puppets - Maiden's Milk
Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper - Elvis is Everywhere
Negativland - Cityman
Husker Du - Diane

Daily Commuter

Click the image to play.

For a few days last week I walked around shooting videos of myself with my little Nikon. I had a vague idea about what I wanted to do with the clips, edit them together and create a video about my commute to work. I had originally intended to give it a voice-over, but I backed off.

As I was making this, I thought about Steve Garfield and how he is always optimistic in his videos, and I wondered how he can always remain so upbeat and pleasant. He reminds me of a lot of people I've known in life, people that can remain positive in the face of so much misery in the world. Needless to say, I am not one of those people.

Music is "Macbeth" by Ciccone Youth.

GooTube

Well, Google bought YouTube for $1.6B in stock and rumors are flying that they may continue to invest in other video properties. Google is clearly trying to dominate the online video field, so YouTube is a smart buy in terms of established user community.

In terms of user-generated content, though, YouTube is considerably weaker than some of the others. YouTube is dominated by repurposed clips, TV excerpts, music videos, extracts from DVDs. You can see this in the company's previous deals with NBC and CBS. User content is decidedly depricated.

Sites like Revver and Blip TV have a few talented users who actively create compelling content and use this new media for more than just video diaries or a dumping ground for pop-cultural effluvium. So, having snapped up the one with the strongest community, Google will now likely turn to the outlets with superior user-generated content.

However, the best thing about sites like Blip TV is that their end user agreement protects the intellectual property of their community. Where both Google and YouTube reserve the right to exert proprietary control over the videos uploaded to their sites, Blip TV leaves the rights in the hands of the creator.

If Google gets their hands on some of the finer sites like Blip TV, I hope they leave the liberal EULA intact. But I don't think they will.

The Incredible Mouth Band

BoingBoing linked this one earlier today, so no doubt it's already been around the Web and back again. But, for those of you in my paltry readership who don't vistit the mighty BB, you're in luck. I love it so much I had to post it here.

Frozen Farts

Just so you don't think that I'm all snapshots, videos, and podcasts, here's a portion of the book that I'm writing. A novel no less!

Updates to the Photo Gallery

WhooHoo! Seven updates to the photo gallery, that makes 117. But take a look at the one above this entry. Don't you think it's worth your time?

The Hardcore Show #5

I am having a hard time writing about today’s show because I haven't followed the rules I set down at the outset. There is no punk rock in todays show, and definitely no hardcore. But I still believe that its spirit is here.

Over the years I have come to realize that I look at the world is through the lens of punk rock. To many people that may seem strange. To them, punk rock was only an anomaly of pop culture, a gang of mowhawked or skinheaded young people who may have flourished in the late 70s and early 80s, but had no real impact on American culture.

I’d beg to differ. Punk wasn't just a temporal movement. Punk represented an impulse that is inherent in human nature, one of rebellion, of resistance, of a sense of estrangement with the world into which you were born. The way I look at it, the early American revolutionaries were punks, reactionaries who resisted the status quo, seekers of true freedom.

That said, I think a lot of the music in today's show embodies that impulse. I'm not sure how this is true, it's just instinct, a feeling I get from the tunes that I don't get from others.

This is even more true because it took me longer than I expected to cobble these songs together. I had orginally selected a different set of songs, but when I juxtaposed them, they didn't communicate what I thought they should, so I re-evaluated and came up with these.

I have no idea if they'll speak to you in the way the speak to me...but I hope they do.

Click to listen.

Cab Calloway – Utt-da-zay
Louis Prima – Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody
Leon Redbone – You’re a Heartbreaker
Klezmatics – Undoing World
Warren Zevon – Carmelita
Tiger Lillies – Russians
Leonard Cohen – Hallelujah
Eleni Mandell – Tristeza
Chuck E. Weiss – Marcy
The Ziggens – The Waitress Song

My New Desk

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We bought a new desk at Ikea and installed it in our Den/Office/Dressing Room. Now we have two desks so E and I can work on our projects at the same time. I guess I should change the name of this blog because I am no longer relegated to the kitchen table, but I I'm stuck with it now. Music by the Meat Puppets.

Drive Out the Bush Regime Rally

On my lunch break this Wednesday I walked down to the United Nations in search of food and instead stumbled on an anti-war demonstration. I had my little Nikon with me, so I shot some quick video. Not bad for a still camera. Click image to watch.

Big Media vs. New Media

Over at BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis wonders about the YouTube videos of American soldiers being attacked and killed in Iraq. "If they were seen here," he writes "I’m also not sure what the reaction would be. Some would use them to bolster arguments to get out. Others would use them as arguments to fight harder and get these fuckers."

The fact is that big media fails to deliver the whole story, just bits and pieces of information that they want us to see, the stuff that makes a good, marketable story around which they can sell advertising. The fact that American soldiers are being attacked and killed in Iraq doesn’t sell corn flakes. Instead, big media gives us the story that they think we want to hear.

With YouTube, we get chunks of information without context. We are free to sample from a large quantity of unsorted data, grabbing a handful of disparate puzzle pieces and attempting to put them together ourselves. While with YouTube might be able to see stuff that big media doesn’t show us, this disected process can only leave us with our imagination to fill in the information gaps, to organize these bits and bytes into a coherent story, a kind of ad hoc newsroom of the mind.

What Jeff doesn’t seem to talk about on BuzzMachine (over the months I’ve been reading) is how both new and old media are unreliable sources of information, that both the real and the virtual newsroom are not lenses, but filters that either intentionally hold back information to craft a coherent story, or atomize the information that we need to construct a semblance of truth.

Because human beings have a hard time dealing with such ambiguity, the only logical future for new media is that it will be subsumed by the old. The media will use its new forms to conform to old media’s storytelling tropes, filtering the real world into digestable stories, narratives, and good vs. evil morality plays. New technology will eventually be grabbed by corporate behemoths who will use their deep pockets to harness its potential and use it to tell their hackneyed, marketable stories...and sell us corn flakes.

Updates to the Photo Gallery

I just posted 17 new pictures to the photo gallery, that's 110 images for your viewing enjoyment.

Street Food

We took the subway out to Astoria, Queens for some shopping, but instead of getting off at our normal stop, we got off at Broadway and stumbled across a street fair. I shot this clip with my new Nikon camera, a still camera with a movie feature. The camera is cool because it's so small, I can carry it with me at all times. Click on the picture to watch the clip.