…and anything you’ve sent to that email address in the past 36 hours
is probably stuck in email limbo. For the next little while, use the joey@joeydevilla.com address.
Month: August 2004
Categories
Homemade Nirvana Flash Video
When MTV and MuchMusic
debuted, I remember some people complaining that what was shown in
music videos often had nothing to do with the song or that they
imagined comepletey different visuals for the song. With the rise of
cheap and plentiful broadband, good audio compression and tools like
Flash, making your own video for your favourite songs is easier than
ever.
Indie artists often don’t have the money to make videos (which means
that they also don’t have the money to hire lawyers to hand out
cease-and-desist nastygrams), so a good number of these homemade videos
are for songs that wouldn’t otherwise have them. Notable ones
include Wesley Willis’ Merry Christmas and geek troubador MJ Hibbett’s ode to computers of the 1980s, Hey Hey 16K (which I first mentioned in this entry).
The threat of lawsuits doesn’t stop everyone, however — especially if
they live in places where the observation of copyright is a little,
shall we say, relaxed. A Chinese site whose URL I can’t find has a
number of videos, most of them dreadfully bad, save for this video of Nirvana’s Dumb.
I rather like the artist’s cartoony renditions of Kurt, Krist and Dave;
if Nirvana had a Saturday morning cartoon show just like one of their
chart contemporaries, they’d probably be drawn like this.
Here’s a scene from Mysterion the Mind Reader’s act at the Bovine Sex Club last Saturday night.
It takes a lot to get someone at the Bovine to call you a freak, but
Mysterion’s “driving nails up his nose with a hammer” routine managed
to do just that.
Whoo! Sinus pain!
You can watch the video to see him in action [2.1 MB QuickTime link].
He does some pretty nifty card tricks, too.
Here’s a picture I snapped from the front end of the front room of Accordion City’s notorious watering hole, the Bovine Sex Club. While the picture won’t win any photography awards, I think it captures the chatty vibe the bar had going between band sets.
After emerging from a tasty dinner of avocado salad and beef skewers at the Red Room,
I noticed the fenders on one of the bikes locked up nearby. They looked
a little unusual, and on closer examination, they turned out to be
homemade. They’d been cut from a plastic distilled water container and
secured with washers and plastic ties:
I’ve always been impressed by home-grown ingenuity, and these water-jug fenders also have a funky DIY aesthetic too. Well done!
Gord Gower, former president/co-founder of my first workplace, Mackerel
Interactive Multimedia, is a former Accordion City resident who now
lives in my favourite American metropolis, New York City. He says he
plans to write his impressions about all the going-on in the Big Apple
as the Republican National Convention rolls into town and has given me
permission to re-post them here. Here’s his first installment:
My Rights Have Been Stepped On!
Well, it’s finally happened, activities
connected to the upcoming GOP convention have come crashing down on
this lowly, barely legal citizen of New York City. I am no longer
allowed to use my park! This morning I got off the train expecting as
per usual to spend a few pre-work moments sipping the luke warm remains
of my morning coffee while pouring through the Opinion Pages of my
beloved NY Post. Denied!
connected to the upcoming GOP convention have come crashing down on
this lowly, barely legal citizen of New York City. I am no longer
allowed to use my park! This morning I got off the train expecting as
per usual to spend a few pre-work moments sipping the luke warm remains
of my morning coffee while pouring through the Opinion Pages of my
beloved NY Post. Denied!
It would appear that the organizers of the RNC see it more important
that they get a side stage erected on the grounds of the Herald Square
parquette, than allowing myself and maybe 25 or 30 plain old folks get
their morning post subway breather. The nerve, I mean just what are
these folks bring to my city anyhow. I mean beyond a few million dollar
boost to a sagging midtown economy, and a bit of down home Texas style
patriotism, what’s in it for me?
I guess I will enjoy the thrill of seeing 250,000 dreadlocked black
bandana wearing a-holes make jack asses of themselves as they search
for a place to protest; AND I guess I will enjoy seeing 10,000 cops,
secret service and special forces bring the countries busiest business
district to a grinding halt… Down here the issue is more of what we
really DON’T want to see. My five friends who work down and around here
and I will just leave that one un-mentioned as per usual.
OK, honestly, I am a giddy as a school girl the night before seeing
Brad on the first day back to school. While everyone I work with is
shuffling about all grumpy like, cursing this way and that, and quickly
making plans to cash in those extra sick days, me, I’m trying to figure
out how to best plan my staying up to watch the final strains of late
night news analysis, while still getting up early enough to wander the
grounds trying to catch a glimpse of my favorite stars on Team W!
There’s also a slim chance that a friend of Jens, a bonified member of
the GOP might get me close enough to catch a whiff of some real live
neo-con party action [OK, a real outside chance…]
Yep, giddy as a school girl… It’s going to be an interesting week
indeed. I have every confidence that this city can pull it off. The
combatants are already appearing on the field, the professional
protestors have already started flying in, the cops already have many
of the barricades in place. The battle for Central Park is in 11th hour
negotiations and the whining and chest pumping is being played out on
queue… We’re all expecting something on the level of Ali lighting the
torch in Atlanta happening hear on day one… who knows maybe they’ll
bring a cheque to top up all that missing homeland security funding the
city needs! Now wouldn’t that be sumptin!
I will try to keep you posted.
If you want to know a little bit more about Mackerel, one good place to look is Cory Doctorow’s article on its demise, titled Burying the Fish. It was submitted to Wired, but got cut.
Quentin Smith has kindly offered to host the “Doom 3-Playing Teenagers
Screaming Like Hyenas in a Wood Chipper” video on a high-bandwidth
server. I don’t know how long he can do it for, so there are no
guarantees.
Thanks very much, Quentin! I raise a filet mignon on a flaming sword to you!
(And yes, the kids in the video were what convinced me to go and
get a copy of the game. As soon as I find out why my Radeon 9800 isn’t
working right.)