I've become an MVP!

...by which I mean, I have been Producing Music Videos over the past few weeks. It's been a lot of fun, and definitely the best way to get a crash-course in how to shoot more cinematically (rather than journalistically), how to storyboard, and how to coordinate productions. This has been keeping me super busy, and is the main reason why my blog has gone neglected over the past few weeks.

CCTV is starting a group that produces music videos for local artists, which is a great idea. Our group chose a pretty hot track by Rebel and the Truth, a live hip-hop group that sprung out of Berklee, for our pilot. The song is called "Reminisce," and reminds me of old Will Smith/CL Smooth tracks from long ago. It will not leave my head. We just finished shooting the performance sequence at The Middle East Upstairs, and are going to shoot some vignettes illustrating the lyrics throughout the rest of the week...



(photos courtesy of Matt Landry. Mine were crap.)

Also editing a video by The Lost Crusaders for a track called "Whose Name Will I Call?" The track is a bit maudlin, but pretty good. And the shoot I assisted last Sunday was a lot of fun. I also served as Media Manager, which meant sitting in a U-Haul with a bunch of computers all day, uploading data from P2 cards, and generally bopping my head to Hot 97. I could get used to a permanent gig like that :) The vid was shot on those P2 cards rather than to tape, so I'm probably going to need help treating the footage correctly (MXF files, anyone?) Luckily, I've got people.


(Cam-whore auto-portrait. Who could resist?)

Finally, I started teaching HTML at CCTV. The group I teach is kind of advanced, and interested in learning CSS along with a primer in basic page structure, which thrills me, because CSS is fun to teach. What's cool is that the ladies in my class are all non-profit professionals, whose organizations have actually sent them to CCTV to learn how to enhance their web presence. Having that responsibility feels kind of awesome!

Yellow Drum Machine!

Last night, we did Share.tv episode 4 with Calliope Quartet, which was awesome. Ricardo, the percussionist, actually played his face: he kept rubbing a mic across his stubble to make these crackly noises. It was so cool!

Also, I finished my feature on the Yellow Drum Machine by Frits Lyneborg from letsmakerobots.com. It turned out pretty well, I think.



I'm currently uploading the full episode onto Blip.tv. Usually, uploading an hour-long vid to the internet is a pain in the ass because it takes so long. But now that I've got my Asus Eee PC (I named it Mylo), I can at least do that same task at the bar across the street from the station!

Cheers!

Skype interviews are kind of fun!

Dashed home on my temperamental moped this morning to do a phone interview with Frits L. from Let's Make Robots, a robotics guru from Denmark whose adorable little Yellow Drum Machine robot has been making the rounds on the interwebs. Yellow Drum Machine (YDM) is a tiny, Johnny 5-looking rover programmed to seek out sturdy standing surfaces, roll over to them, tap out a little beat on the surface, and sample and remix himself on the fly. If you haven't seen the vid of this little guy, you should check it out:



John, one of our audio guys on the Share.tv crew, pointed us to the video and I immediately contacted Frits for an interview. He was so good to oblige! We talked for awhile about the nuts and bolts of hobby robotics, then got into the more philosophical issues concerning the subtle differences that separate robots from coffee machines. I'll be editing this feature all week, and it should be part of next week's episode of Share.tv.

Stay tuned!

The Glim-Dipper Glim-Dropper

AKA and I improvised this little ditty last weekend. I feel my instrumentation (bass especially) is a little too Boards of Canada. But that's never a bad thing, right? We should shape it up: give it some structure, shorten it a bit. But it's a good start, and I loooove the backwards-forwards on the bell sample.

Here it goes.

Beat Research!

Beat Research!
Originally uploaded by lovers v haters

Went to Beat Research at Enormous Room tonight.b to see Ghislain Poirier! Vid by Paper Rad! Hooray!

Kidneys on the mend!

For the first time in about 2 weeks, my lower back isn't throbbing; I guess this means that my kidneys are on the mend! I celebrated by getting back to my gym routine and my attendant addiction to the rap video "station" provided by BSC at every piece of equipment. Oh how I'd missed them! Here's Scenario by A Tribe Called Quest, which is actually the best rap video ever made, if not the best music video ever made (or that I can presently recall).

Share.tv finally went up!

One down, six to go! Share.tv premiered on CCTV tonight on channel 10 and on the internets in front of an audience of at least 15 people.



I'm mentally exhausted-- the show definitely did not go up "without a hitch." There were some gaffs and slip-ups, but we chugged ahead, without there being a moment of dead air. Turn-out was... well, it could have been much better. Noah and I played the entire time, which was something neither of us really wanted to do. As for me, it's really hard to perform on the floor, and serve as a floor director as well.

The point is, I survived. Plus, I'm really excited to make the next episode 100% better than this one. I think my crew is pretty enthusiastic about being part of the project, and their support is what counts.

Pics, video, etc coming up tomorrow afternoon... are up! Check out: hotsocieties.com/share/?page_id=3, otherwise known as the "Gallery" page.

Cool Beans!

No, I wasn't making fun of you, Andrew Boch

Saturday night, Noah and I went to go see Ernie and the Automatics, this ca-razy blues cover band who I can picture playing at someone's wedding (not mine), and whose line-up consists of two members emeritus of the band Boston (Barry Goudreau and Sib Hashian), an event photographer who actually hands out her business card at the gig, and Ernie Boch, Jr., the Northeastern automobile industry giant. (Come on Down!)

I actually never heard anything by the Automatics, and the only song I know from Boston ("know" being used in the loosest of senses) is Forplay/Longest Time because it's the Imposible Song on Rock Band, which is a game we like to play in the living room at Park Street. Really, I just like the idea of Ernie Boch, Jr. He's a guy who has the balls to create his own aura of superstardom and foist it upon us. I can respect that. (Also, one of my friends is his nephew, a fact I did not know until after my little Ernie-crush was kindled.)

The concert was at the Middle East, with the Automatics playing the downstairs venue, and White Williams playing upstairs. When I went to go get our tickets, the girl behind the counter could not find my name on the will-call list. Turns out, she assumed I was on the will-call list for White's show (since according to some sources, I am a "hipster"). I corrected her, and she actually apologized, saying "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to stereotype". In all fairness, I did want to see White Williams, so I responded "It's okay, we're trying to be ironic." I was kind of pressing to go upstairs after the Automatics played to see White Williams, too. But that didn't pan out.

Anyways, we got to meet Ernie later that night; he was a really chill guy. We thought that talking about knowing his nephews could be a great ice-breaker, but turns out, Ernie was so nice and kind of jazzed to talk to fans that we didn't need the way-in. Also, we had the impression that he only vaguely recalled who Andrew is. Somehow, the night ended with me, Noah, my roommate Emily, and some guy she met on the Something Awful forums piling into Ernie's limo to listen to a hot new unreleased single by the Automatics. This was monumental because (1) it was the first Automatics song that isn't a cover, and (2) we noticed that where most rock stars' limos would be filled to the hilt with liquor of all kinds, Ernie's limo held ONLY CANDY, leading us to realize that Andrew's extraordinary dependency on sugar is indeed hereditary. And a good time was had by all.

AKA's got a blog now

Because he wants to be me. His blog is here.

new podcast

...at the old LvH site.

Amon Tobin shakes his butt!

Oh wow oh wow I saw Amon Tobin at the Grammercy Theater last nite with Jonny and Heather!!!



This was such a great show, and everything was perfect, even down to the minute details, such as not having to wait on line to use the restroom at all, and nobody had peed all over the toilet seat either! Good times! Amon was amazing; it was my first time seeing him live, and I had no clue how adorable he is performing. DUDE, he SHAKES HIS BUTT to the beat! Opening for him was P-Love, who was kind of a n00b, but he did really well, and chatted up the crowd throughout his whole set. It was kinda like how, in college, there was this kinda nerdy audio guy who lived down the hall, and sometimes you would stop by his room and he would spazz out trying to impress you. It felt more like that than an actual DJ set. It was cool.
Amon Tobin played a set with 7.1 surround sound, which was mind-blowing. Like, every so often, you'd hear this small shout, and you'd think it was coming from the crowd, but then it would grow and morph, and take flight and flutter around you. I don't know how he was doing that, but maybe it had to do with this mysterious glowing blue box he had on stage that seemed to have no other purpose in his show other than to fuck things up.



After the show, Jonny, Heather, and I went to this bar at the Chelsea Hotel, where I saw an interesting looking switchboard from the golden days of telephone operation. Only at the Chelsea.



Jonny and I, true to form, got into a drunken fight about the merits of creating software that applies a detailed taxonomy to the myriad sound samples in your library, so you can call them up on-a-whim while improvising. I doubt it was interesting to anyone but us, and maybe to on-lookers totally miffed at these two idiots screaming about file-naming protocol.




My fotos of last nights event aren't really that great, but you can check them out on my flickr if you'd like. So instead, I'll leave you with a picture of this random-ass parade float I found on 116th street and Lenox avenue.



I think it has something to do with maintaining family values in the Community. Wait-- is that an ELECTRIC CHAIR? Hottt.

us v. them, over and over again.

Hello non-existant reader! Hello future generation!

Last night, I went to the Warper Party all by myself because Vicki stood me up. (Bizzy why!!!!?? Bizzy, come ON!!!!)

I knew I shouldn't have gone, given my only experience with the Warper crew has included some nasty Furries shittily covering that "back with another of those block-knocking beats" song, fist-shaking rage over Microsoft-Malfunction, and some ridiculous Yahoo v. Google argument that AKA still won't let me live down. That being said, I don't know why I went. But I went. Here are some fotos.



I took this picture of the video being reflected in the mirror behind the bar. This was the only pleasant thing about this evening, however, because what you can't here, reader, is the disonnant screech of some asshole blowing a trumpet into a microphone hooked up to some Max/MSP patch that causes consistantly growing feedback. This is where I started to grow deaf.

Then, this guy came out. I know, you're all like, WOW! And I was, too. At first.



Look at that guitar! It seems like this dude took the strings n shit off of his electric guitar, and glued it to a shitty tablet PC! Then he took the wires n gears and whatnot, and plugged them all into some patchbay that is plugged into the tablet PC! This is a pretty hot idea! Look, here's a close-up:



So, you have to give props to the man, okay. This is pretty cool. However, let's just say, the music he was playing sounds exactly like the college-dorm-shroom-trippy Windows Media Player "acid" visualizations swirling around on that damn tablet PC.

To reiterate: cool idea. Given. But come on, why does that shit have to sound like the soundtrack to some mid-90s soft-porn on Showtime? I took audio, but it was pretty shittily recorded, so I won't post it here.

So anyways, after that aural onslaught, I booked it out of there and hit the King.



I ate a STACKER.



More pics on my Flickr page, if you're interested. It's in a set called "The wackest shit I've ever been a party to". They're all taken from my camera fone, so they're super pixelated. However, I'm starting to really love the way the fotos come out looking like I ran them through some old Print Shop pointillation filter first...

They're all doing things

All of my friends are doing sparkly, spangly, wonderful things. Noah, who runs circles around the majority of people I know, hooked up these big foam Hulk hands to his computer sequencer via a CUI board. Create Digital Music caught wind of the project (due to his effusive flickr documentation of the whole project --- what a gift for self-promotion he has...) and posted about it on the blog. This is pretty neat, and you can look at it here. Noah is wearing his bee shirt.

Carlen, who is a big, beautiful baby, finally found some awesome people to collaborate with. (In which case, "collaborate" means taking the back seat to Carlen's genius, so I guess I mean she's found people to produce her...) She's doing a small, 3-minute video-blog show thingie that's very well produced by some kid from NYU. This link is here. Also, if you've never seen Carlen's half-hillarious, half-creepyasfuck blog, it's worth a visit: http://carlenaltman.blogspot.com/index.html

i should be flattered, i guess

Some dude calling himself "Musikgod" remixed one of my MFB songs "Sing 4 Me", so now it sounds like a Daft Punk kiddie orgy. Meh?

Wamp wamp. What it do? What it do?

Vanity?

Confession: I am addicted to Last.fm.

Not because I think it's so interesting as a networking portal (or as a "social music revolution" or whateverthefuck they're claiming to be.) I just hope that someone's looking at my page, seeing what I'm listening to, and thinking I'm dope.

Whenever I look at my profile, it reassures me that I'm dope. This is sheer vanity, and maybe I need help.