A Thing or Two

Seriously? Nothing since May?

I don't always play on the Interwebs. Sometimes I do other things.

For example, in May I read 9 novels. That's a lot, even for me. So, not a lot of blogging. You can't have it both ways.

I Can Haz Writin Skillz?

In an admittedly serpent's tail-ish reference, I'm posting a link to an ironic syllabus and course overview for the Internet age, by Robert Lanham, courtesy of McSweeney's. The course is designed for students wishing to prepare for a career in writing for non-pulp fiber, short form posts, for the future "post-print era," in which there would be no more newspapers, magazines, or books.

The prerequisites.

Students must have completed at least two of the following.

ENG: 232WR—Advanced Tweeting: The Elements of Droll
LIT: 223—Early-21st-Century Literature: 140 Characters or Less
ENG: 102—Staring Blankly at Handheld Devices While Others Are Talking
ENG: 301—Advanced Blog and Book Skimming
ENG: 231WR—Facebook Wall Alliteration and Assonance
LIT: 202—The Literary Merits of Lolcats
LIT: 209—Internet-Age Surrealistic Narcissism and Self-Absorption

Workshops include sessions that help students to "perfect their tweeting, blogging, and short-form writing skills."

If it weren't so true it would be funny.

DJ C.Flo places 2nd nationally at WMC's 2009 VJ Challenge

My son Coleman Howard remixes music videos live in West Coast clubs, under the name DJ C.Flo. Mixing videos live is different from what video DJs (VJs) do. Typically, a VJ will create video effects while someone else runs the audio. Live music video remixing is pretty new.

Coleman competed in Miami this March in a VJ challenge at the World Music Conference and placed 2nd, with a completely different set than was expected.

Check out his winning set here:
Video DJ C.FLO in Miami
(Note: video is 8 minutes 41 seconds long)

Kutiman = YouTube mashups + compositional talent

I can't stop going to Thru-You.com and streaming the musical selections created by Kutiman.

This is, basically, an "album" of 7 new and original songs, created fresh by putting bits and pieces of YouTube videos together. One song is soul/funk style, another is reggae, another is a sweeet ballad, and so on.

Brilliant!

Neccos - Mmmmm

I'm thinking about experimenting a little with our candy selection at the Darkside Cinema. It might be fun to offer candy that appeals to our sense of nostalgia. I never see Neccos, Sugar Daddies, or Bit-O-Honeys in movie snack bars anymore, and I'll bet some of our patrons would love to see these again.

In my research I uncovered these fun facts about Neccos.

Q: What are the original eight flavors in a Necco Wafer Roll?

A: The original eight flavors: orange, lemon, lime, clove, chocolate, cinnamon, licorice and wintergreen. The ingredients are simply sugar, corn syrup, gelatin, gum, colorings and flavoring.

Q: What are the six flavors in the Sweethearts Conversation Hearts?

A: The six flavors in the sweethearts Conversation Hearts are cherry, banana, lemon, grape, orange and wintergreen.

Bonus: Necco is a shortened version of "New England Confectionery Company."

Suck on that!

KBVR show features Paul Turner (Darkside Cinema) and Jon Lewis (Oregon State University)

Oregon State University's student-run radio station, KBVR, features a series each Monday at 11:00 a.m. Pacific, called "Talking in the Theater" and hosted by Mervin Kurniawan. In this MP3 recording, Paul and Jon discuss the 2009 Academy Awards. The show is about a half hour long. 

Tower Records sign comes down

Today in Sacramento, the original home of Tower Records, the big yellow and red sign was taken down.

Russ Solomon started the Tower empire in the 1950's, selling records out of his father's pharmacy on Broadway in Sacramento. The Tower Records store at Watt and El Camino was one of his first, opened in 1960. The big yellow and red sign neon appeared a year later.

Tower expanded through the decades, with stores in major U.S. cities and eventually in Europe, Central and South America, and Asia. But all good things must come to an end, and the introduction of MP3 technology hastened the demise of the mainstay part of the business—recorded music. As the CBS TV coverage points out, Russ Solomon is still selling music, now in a newer store called R5, located at 16th and Broadway in Sacramento.

I worked for Tower from 1975 to 1977 as a Jazz LPs (that's vinyl) buyer in Campbell, California. After a brief stint at Columbia Records in San Francisco, I came home again to the Tower family, and worked as a Tower Books manager from 1978 to 1979, both in Mountain View and then later in Berkeley.

I always thought that logo needed updating, but boy, you could see those yellow and red plastic bags from a mile away.

(Thanks for the tip, Uncle Mick.)

College Isn't Free: Rap Video by Nathan Worden

There were lots of great short films shown this weekend at the da Vinci Film Festival. But what seemed to catch my imagination the most were the films created by teenagers. The amount of talent and commitment shown by these young folks was really great.

Here's a rap video by Nathan Worden, a high school senior in Corvallis. It's called "College Isn't Free," and it rocks!

Balloons in the movies: "Helium and Celluloid," by Jerry Rees

In my previous post, I talked about the da Vinci Fast Film Project, where each film used a balloon as a prop. Here's another inspired use of balloons in movies. Jerry Rees has put together archival movie footage from many popular classic films, with an added twist: in each scene, he's digitally inserted a balloon. It works amazingly well!

He calls it, "Cinema's Romance with the Balloon: a retrospective of the most famous scenes."

da Vinci Fast Films

Over the weekend at the da Vinci Film Festival we screened the Fast Film Projects to a sold-out crowd. These films were created in only 48 hours by 9 different teams ranging in age from 12 to 60. Some of the entries looked and felt a lot more polished than you might expect.

Each Fast Film was required to use this year's standard-issue prop (a balloon) and da Vinci quote, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." In some, these two elements were inserted into a story that had perhaps already been conceived. In others, the entire (short) film was inspired by the balloon and the quote. The winning film, "Fair Share," was chosen by audience response at the screening Sunday evening, March 8. "Fair Share" was written, directed, and edited by Evan Gütt, a high school senior from Corvallis.

Full video: Dick Cavett interviews Cheever and Updike

What a treat! The NY Times is hosting the full video of a 1981 Dick Cavett interview with John Cheever and John Updike. It's 28 and a half minutes long, but not long enough.

Dick Cavett: A Last Look at Updike and Cheever

Never enough Riddley Walker

If you know me, you know I am a long-time fan of Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban. Over the decades, I must have bought 15 copies and given most of them away. In fact, last Friday at the Friends of the Library book sale, I picked up another hardcover copy for $3. Bargain!

One can never have too many copies of Riddley Walker. To lend, to give as gifts, or to leave on the bus stop bench for that unsuspecting reader to find, steam through, and forever be changed.

This review of Riddley Walker, by Eli Bishop, is worth noting for its deep appreciation of the original novel, its notes about the novel's context within the literary genres of fiction and science fiction, and its description of the advantages of drawbacks of the newest edition of this previously out-of-print classic, republished in 1998 by Indiana University Press.

For a Russell Hoban fan page on Facebook, go here. Or not.

Living on display

My friend Ian is living on display for three months in the upscale, green Portland building Cyan PDX.

From the website:

"Cyan PDX are well-designed urban apartments with small carbon footprints for real people."

This is an interesting way to showcase the experience of living there. We look forward to the promised videos.

2009 da Vinci Film Festival March 6 – 8

The 2009 da Vinci Film Festival will be held March 6 – 8 in Corvallis, Oregon, featuring 30+ selected films ranging from features to short subjects, documentaries, and films by young filmmakers.

Check out the new television commercial on YouTube!

Wordle me this, Batman

If you like tag clouds, you will enjoy Wordle.

As the site says:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Jonathan Feinberg and his colleagues at the IBM Research Visual Communication Lab are behind this amusing and creative diversion, which I learned about from Tara Rodden Robinson.

I made these Wordles using the URL for this blog. Pretty much the same words show up, but I changed the font, color scheme, and layout style. Oh, and for the one with a white background, I added a little border.

Create your own Wordle using a URL, or from text you enter, or from a del.icio.us user's bookmarks at http://www.wordle.net/

GigaPan technology from Carnegie-Mellon University

Here's a segue back to my eclectic postings, from what I now see has become an Obama-obsessed blog.

By now, most humans have seen the incredible panoramic photo of Barack Obama's inauguration, taken by New York photographer David Bergman and described on his blog. (He's offering prints of the image, too.)

Following up on the story behind the photo, I learned about the GigaPan Epic, a consumer version of the robotic device used to help your consumer-level camera capture and stitch together the hundreds of photos necessary to create such a high-resolution image.

The GigaPan technology was created at Carnegie-Mellon university. You can learn more about the device and software, and look at the other panoramas at the university's computer science site.

Thousands of panoramas posted by users from all over the world are available for viewing at the GigaPan site. I may never do another Sudoku.

He keeps it cool

Another presidential post, this one on the positive side.

Has there ever been a cooler president? Women swooned for JFK, it's true. But could he dance?

Today on KRVM-FM I heard the song Chocolate City by Parliament. George Clinton sings:

They still call it the White House
But that's a temporary condition, too.

Yeah, baby.

And just so I don't lose track of this, I'm posting a link to SNL's digital short, "I Keep It Cool." (Although I'm sure you've seen it by now.)

It was 45 years ago today

Looking through some boxes today, I ran across this note.

In the intervening years I'd forgotten that I wrote about events on that terrible day.

A pretty cold account, but then I never did feel safe writing about my feelings, not until about 1999.

I was in the 7th grade (yes, at age 11), and I remember being upset not only by the news and the teacher's tears, but also by the trembling voice of our principal, coming over the intercom into our classroom.

Fellow students, especially those whose parents had supported Kennedy's election, were hysterical. My parents were far right-wingers and fervent supporters of Barry Goldwater in the 1960 election. I knew I was supposed to be upset at the assassination of our President, but it took me a while to get there while I kept thinking that this might make my parents happy.

Yikes.

Obama Headlines across the world

This impressive page is a tiled arrangement of many hundreds of newspaper front pages from around the world, featuring headlines announcing Barack Obama's election to the U.S. presidency. The images were compiled by (simply) "Geoff" with help from the Newseum's collection.

You can click through on any image for a closer look. Be sure to also take a look at the mosaic he put together from all these images, and his other projects, noted in the footer.

Nice work, Geoff!

Images of HOPE: NYTimes slideshow of Barack Obama

This narrated slideshow of images by Damon Winter for the New York Times contains several photographs you will long remember.

Worth clicking through!

Slideshow takes just a coupla minutes.