“Things You Should Be Doing When The Meteor Hits” Dept: OK. Yes, we’re all gonna die from impact with an outsized planet fragment, but in the meantime, there’s Kutiman:

Kutiman is an Israeli musician that had the simple, but utterly genius, idea to sample YouTube. He trolled Lord knows how many music videos to find raw material, sliced and diced it, and formed it into these incredible compositions that he’s pulled together into an online album he calls “ThruYou“.

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard/seen something new that grabbed me by the eye-pits and immersed me in delight, but Kutiman’s compositions left me flabbergasted, floored and completely transported — not only by the album’s concept (which is genius) or how good the songs are (they are excellent), but also in how sensitively and well he handled the video editing which is an integral part of the song’s delights. For instance, consider this gem called “Someday”. It’s like watching a light and satisfying O. Henry-On-YouTube short story with a surprise twist (the singer) and wonderful little ending (the smile):

When I first saw Kutiman’s stuff, what immediately went through my mind is “this must be the delight that God feels in the human experience”, that delight that artists get to experience and share — immersed in and weaving all these disparate and seemingly unrelated shards and fragments of human passion and expression, floating up like incense, into intricate and beautiful tapestries of sound.

Do yourself a favor and spend 40 minutes with this album at www.thruyou.com and I hope you have as joyful a time taking it in as I did.

“Unctious Little Toady Slayer” Dept: Here’s Jon Stewart of the Daily Show bringing the pain to the odious little business-brown-nosers at CNBC. These “financial journalists” and “experts” bowed and scraped to the same captains of industry for the months before our crisis, the same CEOs whose hubris is wreaking so much havoc and personal pain and who are still robbing the taxpayers blind.

One can only hope that this has the same effect as Stewarts infamous “Crossfire” appearance where his very public expose of the show’s vapid and bankrupt premise was so authentic and devastating that the show was cancelled not too long after.

It’s a pity that the Very Serious Media, for the most part, has left the heavy lifting of this kind of obvious truthtelling to late-night comedy hosts like Stewart and Colbert, but at least we’re in capable hands.

More From The “Death Of The Expert” Dept: Brian Appleyard offers up a nice finisher:

…I didn’t mention the findings of Philip Tetlock at Berkeley. He studied pundits and discovered they were, to a rough approximation, always wrong when making predictions. He took 284 pundits and asked them questions about the future. Their performance was worse than chance. With three possible answers, they were right less than 33 per cent of the time. A monkey chucking darts would have done better. This is consoling. More consoling still is Tetlock’s further finding that the more certain a pundit was, the more likely he was to be wrong. Their problem being that they couldn’t self-correct, presumably because they’d invested so much of their personality and self-esteem in a specific view. (That makes me think of so many people, almost everybody, in fact.)

Tetlock said: ‘The dominant danger remains hubris, the vice of closed-mindedness, of dismissing dissonant possibilites too quickly.’

Personally, I am fully aware that I am wrong about everything, a posture which, if applied correctly, would make me right 33 per cent of the time in Tetlock’s tests and, therefore, a better pundit than the pundits.

(via Andrew Sullivan, as always)

“In-Jokes From The ’80s” Dept: A hilarious tribute for we children of the Hairspray Decade…

I’m too shagged out to post, so here’s some stuff I found lying around my favorite sites.

First, the serious stuff. Israel, Palestine and Gaza form a snake-eating-its-tail scenario so difficult that even well-seasoned experts don’t know where to begin:

The more complicated answer was provided by Marc Ambinder, who analyzed my personal situation correctly: Gaza has overdetermined me into paralysis… My paralysis isn’t an analytical paralysis. It’s the paralysis that comes from thinking that maybe there’s no way out. Not out of Gaza, out of the whole thing.

I found this in a good analysis by Eyal Press on Ta-Nehisi’s blog:

As the Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab noted in the Washington Post, a survey conducted in November found that a mere 16.6 percent of Palestinians backed Hamas, due largely to the group’s intransigence and unwillingness to forge a national-unity government.

I’ve can understand the political pressure on national leaders to deal with terrorists or, like Hamas, fringe, hostile, barely-governments with no real desire or clue how to really govern. But at some point with steady restrained pressure, you’d think these entities would wither and die the slow death of public opinion. Why inflame and strengthen their meager claims to credibility with ham-fisted declarations like “the war on terror” or full-scale invasions? A little restraint and protective containment could starve these people out. Unless, as I’ve read recently, Israel wanted to get one more lick in under the ultra-permissive Bush administration before Obama took office…

Now, on to the stupid stuff.

I should be too old for this to make me laugh, but it does:

A new food blog from some of my favorite political bloggers.

Obama’s new tank limousine.

Amelie as a child (this kid is really actually this cute – see more here):

File under “unclear on when to just leave well enough alone”:

Something beautiful:

Finally, some great stuff from TV On The Radio:

In politics: On Fox and over at Coates’ joint, “Barack the Magic Negro” and the Blago pick of Burris and the naked race appeal by Bobby Rush has the race talk bubbling. At HuffPost, Kathleen Reardon says Obama is so bright that he may be overestimating the American public’s ability to think at his level, with the kind of openness and complexity he’s capable of. Personally, I think his campaign proved he’s stunningly adept at realpolitik when the occasion requires, and he has an uncanny knack of reading and vocalizing the public mood. Remember how well it worked out when Clinton and McCain mocked him as a lightweight, Barbie Doll celebrity intellectual? Meanwhile, conservatives are obligatorily squawking about some of Obama’s advisors being too liberal (they always call it “radical” – nevermind Freedom Fries and torture) as though anyone gives a rat fart what they think since Obama is stunningly popular, as much as a wartime president (ie. Bush after 9/11), with a CNN poll revealing that 76% of Americans say he’s a “strong and decisive leader”. (That doesn’t even count the amount of popular media oxygen he sucked up when the shots of his pecs hit the stands.) A stunningly popular, intelligent, politically savvy, bi-racial, young President with rock-hard pecs and abs that looks badass in sunglasses has got to be giving the GOP some serious gas. They started that game by trying to turn George Bush into Tom Cruise, and they now they’re dealing with the PR nightmare of Obama as 007 .

On politics and culture: I keep coming back to this, but it’s my blog so I get to be obsessive. The era of the rule of the expert, the CEO as rock star, the talking heads, the free market, and the endless good times free ride is over. We are a nation looking for new icons, new leaders and figureheads, a new mythology of who we are, trying to find our mojo again. On Jan 20, the Obamas will step into this void in the most visible political office of the land – an office that has culturally symbolic power as well as political power – bringing with them the culture of Chicago and the Midwest, the city and the racial minority, the progressive and the intellectual, the 21st century and the world-conscious citizen. Think about how radically our culture has been affected since 2000 by Bush and Cheney’s world – the maudllin ballads of patriotic country music, the Crawford ranch and the wealthy playing cowboy, the East Coast dynastic succession of endless Bushes with their endless political connections and intrigues, the oil man, the “these colors don’t run” bumper stickers, Freedom Fries, Top Gun flight suits, frat boy style jokes and fumbles with foreign dignitaries, incorrect grammar, James Dobson and Pat Robertson. We’re about to watch a President that used a Jay-Z shout-out in a campaign speech take office. I say again – I don’t think Americans really get the 180-degree head snapping cultural earthquake that we’re all about to experience.

On Israel in Gaza: Hamas and the Israeli government are locked in yin-yang Escher’s loop of endless antipathy, seemingly unable to escape, carelessly passing on the hate and bloody consequences to their own people. Hamas needs Israel’s retaliation to divert attention from its lack of a true governing philosophy. Israel seems unable to control it’s own trouble-making settlers or do anything except respond in force, which any child can see can only strengthen Hamas and inflame Arab support. Hate has no generating force behind it. It survives on revenge and reprisals. Without them, hate can only wither and vanish. But the last Israeli leader with the courage to attempt to end the cycle was assassinated, and in the 13 years since no one else has arisen to make a new attempt. TPM says that there’s some hint of an international force in Gaza to bring some objectiveness into the situation. Maybe some outside influence could do some good.

On movies: As Shakespeare said, “O brave new world, that hath such animators in it!” (Note: Slightly modified to fit this blurb…)

On my personal fortunes: According to my cookie tonight – “Don’t be hasty; prosperity will knock on your door soon.” To which I harrumph, “Yeah, and then run away leaving a flaming bag of poop on the doorstep.”

On being a pun geek: Frayed Knot. Heh heh. Good one. Did I ever tell you the one about the Orthodox-Jew-eating dragon?

Greed. Music. War. Love. And many others. We are swept away by their terrors, transported by their glorious vistas. They are the coin of every culture, they are spoken everywhere from the cave of Lascaux to the farthest reaches of space that we can imagine. They are instinctively relearned every generation born, and compulsively and futilely cataloged as they pass and fade into memory. They permeate our our libraries and video stores, but after earnestly searching the many mirrors we’ve held up to our human experience we know nothing more except that their dialect changes from century to century. They seem so much a part of us that we cannot find their source. Their cycle – from speaking to consequence to recorded history to forgetfulness to speaking – is a circle so complete we cannot find their beginning or end. They are elusive, slipping out of our most ingeniously designed rhetorical and religious frameworks only to reappear fully realized and potent and true in our most mute and primitive centers of intuitive, collective understanding.

They are our most defining human trait, but we seem collectively powerless to act upon them. They act upon us. They ARE us. What would we be without them? What could we be without them?

PS. If you haven’t seen Children of Men (clip 2), go immediately and rent it. I watched it two nights in a row, back to back, astounded.

PPS. In case you’re wondering, this was all brought on by watching this tonight:

Not much to say. I’ve been working my arse off on getting a client project launched and losing $$ hand over fist while doing it. I have a pathological need to put out $40K work, even if it’s a $4K client. I need more $40K clients, man…

Jen came over tonight. She’s a friend we made from our last church who’s stuck with us. I was struck as she ran out the door tonight to catch the ferry back to Seattle how different she is from when we first met her. She found Flickr and her own self-expression and hasn’t looked back. She’s changed dramatically, for the better. Ah, friends. Good to have them.

The President-Elect continues to kick ass. He rope-a-doped Lieberman who will now be his devoted legis-slave or face the consequences, he’s going to neutralize both Clintons in State (potentially), Rahm laid down the law today (“big changes”) for Wall Street execs, Daschle (major healthcare progressive) is taking over HHS, and Napolitano, someone I was immediately impressed by when I heard her on NPR, is going to head up Homeland Security. Adults. In the White House. Working hard for us. No drama. It keeps sinking in. You know how I know it’s working? Because Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenant is reduced to trash-talking, calling Obama a “house negro”. Woo-hoo!

And in the spirit of new global reconciliation, here’s robots being robots and cats being cats. Together.

Curly headed monsters!

Our curly-headed monster came back today from her Camp Casey Adventure®. Both Janece and I noticed that she seemed a smidgen more grown up, like something about being away from her parents for a couple of days gave her a new lift of confidence in her own independence. She seemed pleased with herself that she was able to both have fun and miss us at the same time. She was really great for her Nana and Papa, too, and of course we’re proud as punch. And, a little sad, of course. Like I’ve written before, each new step for her out into the world is a little bit of tearing apart for us – all good and supposed to happen, but still melancholy.

Zombies!

I had another zombie dream last night, but with an interesting twist given my interesting realizations of late. I dreamed I was one of them, that I could feel their emotions and residual humanness because I was linked to them, even though I retained my own mind and self-will. The dream was still grotesque and disturbing as are my usual zombie dreams, but I woke up with an odd feeling – concern and protectiveness for the zombies, even though they were dangerous and destructive and I could sympathize with the humans trying to destroy them.

Which brings me to a bit of memorabilia I’d forgotten. When I was young – 6th grade or so – we left our cult-ish, fundamentalist church we’d grown up in all our lives. We were, of course, instantly ostracized and for a while my family drifted looking for a healthier church to replace our religious experience. It was pretty traumatic on us kids to have our insular world turned upside down, and we developed all kinds of coping behaviors.

One thing we did was come up with finger/hand puppets we called Kru’ms – a short derivative of “Christian Faither’s” (the Christian Faith Church was it’s name). The Kru’ms were ridiculously antagonistic and annoying, like Colonel Klink and the Nazis in Hogans Heroes. They could spawn infinite clones of themselves and we battled and bested them to great hilarity for so long as kids that the hand puppets became kind of a family institution – something we even passed on to other families who thought they were hilarious.

Our dear cousins, the Osbournes, were a part of the church that we were estranged from for a while (before they, too, ended up leaving). I had a dream one night that my cousin Nate and some of the other kids from the church were hunting me and wanted to kill me. Nate found and cornered me, and even though I begged him not to do it, he shot me in the belly.

I remember the impact in my dream, remember holding my stomach and looking down at the blood running out between my fingers. I distinctly remember feeling my life draining away. But I didn’t die. All the blood drained out and I felt a new bitter strength flow in. I got up and began chasing the now-horrified Nate who kept shooting me with no effect. I caught him and killed him by breaking his neck. When I was done with him, I went after the other kids. Mercifully, I woke up before I finished them off although I knew that their doom was also sealed. When I woke up, I didn’t feel scared or sad anymore about leaving the church.

OK, obviously I was dealing with a bit of trauma, and I clearly came up with a way emotionally to find closure, however disturbing. I think the most interesting part of the dream is that bitter strength I felt flow into me, that zombie power if you will. It was a force that felt deathly strong and powerful, but not filled with joy or completion or forgiveness – just a single-minded bitter will to avenge the injustice done to me. In the dream I felt no emotion/connection – just a dark delight that I was now powerful, that the tables were turned. I think in retrospect that poor Nate represented all of the kids in my school and neighborhood who had persecuted me/us for being the odd ones out. I think that in the middle of the emotional turbulence of my childhood church world breaking down, my destruction of him in the dream was the advent of one of many emotional gates that have come down between me and other people.

The funny thing is that when I had that dream, I’d never seen a zombie movie or read a zombie story of any kind. It was all pure id expression by a little 6th grade kid.

And now, after a disturbing romp through my childhood….

Otters!

We watched Emmett Otter’s Jugband Christmas tonight. We didn’t have TV growing up, but Janece said it was apparently a Christmas time favorite. Cute story, fun songs. “Bathing Suit” had Janece and I laughing:

And here’s the all-time H8R theme song (performed by the River Bottom Nightmare Band):

My favorite lyrics:

We know we’re a mess
But I does not like to be clean
We don’t brush our teeth
‘Cause our toothache can help us stay mean
We don’t wish to learn
But we hate what we don’t understand

Heh heh – spot on. Jim Henson rocks. We have The Dark Crystal in from NetFlix – I’m looking forward to seeing it again.

I’d be interested to know what y’all thought of it, if you had a chance to watch it. If not, here it is.

I wasn’t the audience for this – me or any other Obama partisan. It was aimed at still-undecided voters (who in the world is undecided at this point?) or weak Dems/Rep that could still be persuadable with the idea of “emotionally educating” voters still not sure what Obama feels is at stake in this election.

It comes as no surprise to anyone who followed the Democratic National Convention that the production values were second-to-none. The lighting, camera work, and editing was immaculate and the whole piece felt surprisingly short and tightly executed given that there 30 mins of airtime to fill. Any pundit tuning in and expecting to see a Ross-Perot style policy harangue was willfully neglecting the campaign’s creative record to date.

The most striking part, intentionally, was the tone. The Obama campaign, true to form, has carefully come full circle at the end to his original campaign proposition of hope and change. This long-form political ad (“informercial” sounds way too cheesy for this kind of quality) was built to connect Obama’s policy points – things we junkies have heard interminably – to real American stories, to connect what he as a candidate has been doing on the trail for 21 months to easily recognizable, on-the-ground realities. And to do it by leaving a sense of optimism – that the future has yet to be written.

Obama has once again demonstrated his desire to be a progressive Reagan, to win the election with a positive message. Watching the ad had the effect of laying a blanket of silence over the maddening political buzz of the last few weeks and giving viewers an emotional calm injection about the presidential race. That’s an enormously powerful message, one that people respond to instinctively, whether or not they know rationally they are being given an emotional appeal. Positivity seals the deal.

The only off note to me was laying it on too thick with the “Healer-in-Chief” imagery at the end. If I was on the editing side of the table, my instincts would have been to lean back a bit on that and let people come out of the piece simply letting Obama’s image stand as the hardworking, intelligent, decent leader that he can be. I think any healing the nation will experience will be tangential to a successful, no-drama administration. I don’t think we need a national therapist as much as just an adult leader.

Other than that, money well spent, I think, and another notch in the belt of the best political PR team either party has seen in a long time. I’m sure it had exactly its intended effect.

A side note on creative stuff:

Nevermind the electorate – I wonder how many creatives will be inspired to get into the usually tacky world of political ad building after the Obama team’s example. From the typography to the logo to the signage to the staging to the multimedia, this campaign team has just never stumbled. As a designer interested in the power of branding, messaging, and creative quality, I’ve just been impressed over and over at their attention to detail and their management of a brand on such a large and unruly scale.

More than that, the Obama branding has seamlessly allowed for third-party viral branding of all kinds – the Will.I.Am video, the Shepherd Fairey “Hope” and “Change” posters (with their endless imitations), and on and on.  If Obama was running this race to be Designer In Chief, this race would be an electoral massacre.

For those who are interested in such things, some interesting thoughts on Obama’s brand and other winning political brands here, here, here and here.

So good that I had to post it immediately. The best viral takedown piece of the campaign season, IMHO:

Update! Bonus “Wasssup!!!” video (McCain/Palin Pain Edition)!

McCain’s weird little campaign suspension ploy

Sarah Palin’s Couric interview

I tried to watch this interview, but I was so embarrassed for Sarah Palin that I had to turn it off after she “answered” the first question. Her Alaskan political maneuvering show her to be plenty Machiavellian and hard-core about how she deals with political enemies, so I know I shouldn’t feel sorry for her. But, geez…. What were they thinking?

Since the McCain campaign has utterly tried to shut themselves away from the media, and de facto, the American people, by cutting off any serious and sustained press Q&A, let’s hear it for the TV hosts (The View, Letterman), interviewers (Couric) and guests who have taken it upon themselves to give this Palin nonsense the peeling it deserves. Without getting personally nasty, they’ve starkly exposed McCain’s pick and Palin’s floundering for what it is. Take it away, Sharon Osbourne:

Janece on why Evangelicals like Sarah Palin

I just read this post tonight and I think it’s really good. Janece gets at the confusion I feel about why in the heck so many Evangelicals are so excited about Palin when she falls so short of Evangelical ideals as a political leader.

McDonalds Hamburgers

Think you know how a McDonald’s hamburger looks after 12 long years on a shelf? Think again. Creepy.

And not in a happy “thanks for the shout-out” kinda way.

Courtesy of The Stranger’s blog.

Stephen, Janece and I had a long talk tonight about love, loss, death, and the spiritual and metaphysical scaffolding that is built on and around those things. There is a lot to absorb, and (thank goodness!) a lot of future blog material. (It can feel a bit daunting to do one post a day.)

And after all that discussion, Janece dug up one of our favorite animation festival shorts of all time that just seems to wrap it all up elegantly in less than 10 minutes. I have no doubt that this one will be played at our funerals. Friends, I give you… The Big Snit.

“Wednesday’s child is full of woe; Thursday’s child has far to go…”
~ Old folk rhyme

Amira is today’s Wednesday’s Child, but today she was full of “woah!” She and I played in in our first “band” setting — first her on drums and me on bass, and then her on keys and me on drums. It was awesome. I’ve taught her how to count off a song on the drum sticks — “One! Two! One two three four!” — which she did faithfully, and then while she was playing drums she started singing a little song she made up on the spot. I didn’t really catch the lyrics, but she was going to town. She’s picking up a sense of rhythm, too. I’ve been holding her on my lap and doing the bass drum/hi-hat while helping her beat out a rhythm with the sticks. She’s falling into it pretty naturally, I think. Anyway, it was cool to jam for the first time with my daughter. I’m going to try and rope her in to learning a rock band instrument so I can play music with her.

Ahmis says her mom has a piano at her house, and she’d be open to us bringing it back here so that I/we could play, but she said she doesn’t want to help us move it so I’ll have to figure out how to get it here. I was teaching Amira a bit of piano stuff when we lived with Janece’s parents, but haven’t really had the opportunity to do it since we’ve been here. I want to get her started with it, tho, and I’m planning on starting lessons with her sometime this next year if she seems ready.

As for Thursday’s child? Well, that’s me — lots of work to get done, some things I need to get done before months end and I have far to go. So, it’s off to bed. I’ll leave you with the White Duke…

Thursday’s Child
David Bowie

All of my life I’ve tried so hard
Doing my best with what I had
Nothing much happened all the same

Something about me stood apart
A whisper of hope that seemed to fail
Maybe I’m born right out of my time
Breaking my life in two

Now that I’ve really got a chance
Everything’s falling into place
Seeing my past to let it go
Only for you I don’t regret
That I was Thursday’s Child

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday born I was (x2)

Sometimes I cried my heart to sleep
Shuffling days and lonesome nights
Sometimes my courage fell to my feet

Lucky old sun is in my sky
Nothing prepared me for your smile
Lighting the darkness of my soul
Innocence in your arms

Now that I’ve really got a chance
Everything’s falling into place
Seeing my past to let it go
Only for you I don’t regret
That I was Thursday’s Child

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday born I was Thursday’s Child
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday born I was Thursday’s Child
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday born I was
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday born I was

Real art reveals. Grace Jones’ new video for her single, Corporate Cannibal, is real art and what it reveals is gut-level disturbing — a visual stare into the soulless, self-feeding, unfeeling, self-justifying animus behind corporate greed and power. Her incredibly expressive face is smeared, melted, stretched and twisted into a sinister amorphous writhing blob, like a barrel of oil or a suffocating hole come to life. And that’s all it is — you are forced to stare at this thing staring back at you without any trace of humanity, humor or remorse and listen to it say things like:

pleased to meet you, pleased to have you on my plate
your meat is sweet to me
your destiny, your fate

you’re my life support, your life is my sport

i’ll consume my consumers, with no sense of humour
i’ll give you a uniform, chloroform
sanitize, homogenize, vaporize… you

C.S. Lewis, the Oxford scholar who was one of the better recent creative framers of the Christian worldview, said he saw hell not as the dramatic, fiery pit and demons not as leathery winged nightmares, but like a cold, featureless, fluorescent lit office building where pale, suffocated figures in tidy suits moved quickly and efficiently through the corridors with the sole aim to promote themselves and crush, demean, harass, oppress, torture and feed off the suffering they are able to inflict on anyone else around them. No friends, no companions, no passionate enemies – only mutual loathing and uncaring manipulation for all eternity.

I think this video comes close to visualizing the raw hunger behind this horrible scene – the need to feed oneself, no matter the expense to others. Charles Mudede at the Stranger’s blog — The Slog — says it well:

What’s most impressive about Grace Jones’ new video is its offers the viewer no passage to or flashes of enjoyment or thrills. The whole work is unpleasant to watch and hear—a grinding beat, a morphing monster. This is not a spectacle of corporate capital, corporate greed, corporate hunger. A spectacle seduces the thing it exploits and annihilates. With Jones as the corporate beast, there is no seduction, no sugar, no soft suffocation. Grace Jones makes every effort to fully represent the terrifying force of today’s global rich.

I’ve rarely heard a sermon tackling this form of evil and the complacent parts we sometimes play in how it spreads, how unthinking we are about this kind of evil and how we are bombarded with enticements and pressures to see it as normal, as the “American way of life”. In fact, even many churches and preachers blatantly promote this self-absorbed philosophy of wealth, status and consumption. And yet, this dark animus is THE main cause of our global crisis of human misery and ecological decay.

It’s an addiction, a willing acquiescence to a destructive lie. We give everything to live this kind of life, and it gives us nothing back. Like addicts, together we have to reach down through our numbed senses to feel that we’ve hit bottom, and begin the hard work of disentangling from the thing we desire that is eating us alive.

(Hat tip to Charles Mudede and the Slog for posting the video.)

Pulling (another) all-nighter. Didn’t plan it, didn’t want it, but I was compelled to get in some episodes of The Wire (first appearance of Snoop!) and then all my work tasks just kept being tasky…

I was palpitating a bit too early about the whole tire-gauge thing. I momentarily forgot that Obama has about 100x the bad-assery that Kerry had, and that John McCain just can’t help compulsively screwing his campaign over. Here’s Obama with a pitch-perfect, humorous-yet-exasperated smackdown about this tire-gauge nonsense:

In other news, some really beautiful stuff at BibliOdyssey that totally tickled my fetish for ornate and lovely historical illustration — an instant bookmark favorite:

If you, my dear readers, come across this kind of thing, please please do send it along so that I may obessively collect and drool over it.

Also, I totally dig the genius that is Garfield Minus Garfield. The creator simply takes old Garfield strips and removes everything but Garfield’s owner, Jon Arbuckle, from the frame. As he puts it, “Garfield Minus Garfield is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.” Read 10 strips in succession, and you’ll start to feel the funny coming on.

I’m getting there. Just a week or two more of hard work and I will have gotten past this current hump of stuff.  Hopefully more posts after that.

In the meantime, here’s some music that means something.  Read an interview in Relevant Magazine with Ben Harper where he discusses his collaboration with the Blind Boys Of Alabama.  I got inspired to look up some video from their sessions and found this one.

Dedicated to Virginia who died yesterday; Micaela, Dian, Joe and Kathleen who have gone on ahead of us into the Great Dance; and to my beloved brothers Stephen and Matt who still have some road left to walk without them:

Judging by the number of YouTube hits, I think I’m a little late to the Zonday par-Tay! Let it rain!

Vanilla Snow remix

Shaky Panties remix

Vader In Da House! – “My face got burned and now it’s not the same – Chocolate Rain.”

(FYI… yeah, that’s his real voice. )

I can’t believe that I missed out on Jurassic Five ’til now.  They have some seriously tight old-skool beats and lyrical flow.

Thanks, Sky!

To those of you that check in semi-occasionally, sorry for the lack of posts.  I’ve been working 16 hr days and will continue to be all this month.  That’s what coming down off a long startup-company-bender will do for you.  (More on that some other time.) I’m burnin’ to write more, but until I can, here’s some more cool viddy-o…  I’m surprised this event hasn’t gotten to be Burning Man sized already. It looks hella fun…

Hey Maria, this one’s for you:

From the movie “Network”