key & peele

basil

whoa

whoa. some guy killed about 27 people today at an elementary school in connecticut, 20 of them five-to-ten years of age. mass shootings are always terrible but this one is especially sinister. it seems that the target was children, specifically.

pacific rim

i fucking love giant monster movies. the first one i saw is jurassic park when i was about 5 or 6. i remember being completely terrified every time i watched it, lying on my stomach inches away from the 2' x 2' tv-vcr combo in the barely furnished family room. the room has since become the house's display-dining room. that one nobody eats in.

california playlist

about to get on a plane and try my luck in los angeles. i'll miss the east coast.

'hawaiian wedding song' - the surfmen
'when i'm small' - phantogram
'breezeblocks' - alt-j
'hold on' - john lennon
'gone' - kanye west ft. cam'ron & consequence
'max dugan returns' - david shire ft. dominic fera

favorite movies

I've been thinking a lot recently about my favorite films.

The new Sight and Sound movie lists came out a while back. I never knew the criteria for those. How did each person choose? To someone like me – movie enthusiast and aspiring filmmaker – what does it mean to have a favorite film? Is it something I consider to be a great work of art? Or is it something I can watch over and over again, that maintains the same level of enjoyment every time? It could be a movie that influenced the way I look at films and filmmaking and storytelling as I pursue my career, or it could be something that just rocked the way I look at the world. Maybe it just something that's nothing but deep sentimental value.

work music for late nights

and early mornings.

plato on politics

"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber."

- plato

men in black 3

charles mingus saved my life

hawken

the concept art is badass. it's like an R rated wall-e. or I guess pg-13. how seriously can people take robot violence? the landscapes are especially great.

editing

I forgot how fucking hard movie editing is. It literally is the grammar and style of the filmmaking language, so you could imagine the vast complexities and endless permutations one encounters. I have been in the editing stage of my thesis film for the past several months, the main reason for my lack of entries among other things. I've found these pieces of information useful.

an intelligent design

Why can't this be the mysterious way God put Man on Earth?

the king

limping

plainview

re: attitude toward student loan debt.

FLW

i should've posted this months ago.

"Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change."

- f. l. wright

summer tv line-up

with my time off, i've been able to watch tv, something i've been meaning to get back into for a while. here's my line-up:

important civilizations

"In general, important civilizations start with a rigid and superstitious system, gradually relaxed, and leading, at a certain stage, to a period of brilliant genius, while the good of the old tradition remains and the evil inherent in its dissolution has not yet developed. But as the evil unfolds, it leads to anarchy, thence, inevitably, to a new tyranny, producing a new synthesis secured by a new system of dogma."

- b. russell

first narrative film

return listening

1. 'bingo master' - the fall
2. 'disparate youth' - santigold
3. 'bad dog no biscuits' - the seatbelts

4. 'johnny angel' - patti lynn

5. 'shot by both sides' - magazine

6. 'child of the valley' - the wooden sky

time to dust the cobwebs

commute listening

flying to ca in a few hours. playlist.

1. cristal - yo yo ma
2. renfield - philip glass & the kronos quartet
3. car 24 - the seatbelts
4. sab than pursues the princess - michael giacchino
5. splitter - jonny greenwood
6. a day in the life - beatles

graduation day

i graduated college today. and wednesday. well i actually graduated in december but i took part in the official ceremony today. and wednesday. the last four years changed the trajectory of my being. the people i've grown close to have influenced me in ways that i never would've anticipated. and i feel so lucky to have developed my perspective in the greatest city in the world. im gonna miss it all dearly.

i think the most important thing i learned can be summed up by an mf doom line (or ben folds, depending on what you're into): the more you know, the more you know that you don't know shit.



now on to new adventures.

just a ride

RIP MCA

i usually don't get sad when musicians die, but MCA was a personal hero of mine, ever since the first time i listened to the beastie boys as an awkward brown kid in middle school. in a weird way, i looked up to him, ad-rock, and mike d as older brothers. they were just so fuckin cool. id scour the net to watch interviews and live performances. id download all their shit, and then all the shit that they were influenced by, and then all the shit that those influences were influenced by. in high school, id make videos with my friends that pretty much ripped them off. in college, the first internship i ever got was for MCA's company, oscilloscope laboratories. i learned a lot there. fuck i cant believe he's dead.

my top 5 favorite beastie boys, uh, things...

more pixies

sweet original:

anorexia

pixies

NGE

westlake

maurice ravel

thief

minimalism. very strong. very cool.

cambrian explosion

"God is really another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things." - p. picasso

i need a fix...

...cuz i'm goin' dooown.

killer riff.

route 1

offscreen sound

a film exercise from my sophomore year at nyu. shot on 16mm film. i was too poor to get the film transferred digitally so i just recorded the projection with a dv cam. lo-fi. way cool.

my good friend steve balasta acted in it. he has a really interesting blog that's worth checking out. it really makes ya think about shit: http://stevenbalasta.wordpress.com/

you can fly

my brother and i would watch this vhs a lot when we were younger.

bbng

very cool jazz/hip-hop group from toronto. free downloads at their site: badbadnotgood. there's a lot of treasure on the internet. you just gotta dig.

idealism

"Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist." - g. carlin

bond

james bond book covers by michael gillette

the hour of the star

i'm currently reading the 'the hour of the star' by clarice lispector. i'm only a third of the way through. pretty sweet read so far. some quotes i like:

a) "When she was a little girl, her aunt, in order to frighten her, insisted that the vampire –– the one that sucks human blood by biting its victims in the flesh of the neck –– casts no reflection in the mirror. She reckoned that it might not be such a bad thing being a vampire, for the blood would add a touch of pink to her sallow complexion."

eurodisco

the quiet one

original demo from 1969 when he was in the beatles. later finished and put on my favorite album of all-time:

lalo schifrin

are you still there?

meanwhile...

title

corrado

fuckin masterpiece

space

moze & addie

scoundrel

1. 2.

the white stripes

beginnings.

(just press play for both and mute the one on the right; it should end before the narration starts, or maybe not, i dunno)

option two is 'sonic armada' by air.

option three is 'mambo sun' by t. rex.

option four is camp lo's 'krystal karrington' instrumental by trugoy.

option five is 'the third eye' drum solo by max roach
option six is 'iron man' by brandt brauer fricke

the criterion collection

all film fans are indebted to the criterion collection. their repertory dvd releases are pretty sweet. their existence allows the long-term survival of really solid, smaller-budget films from years/decades ago. films like that usually don't do much of a good job at the box office when they are released. but thanks to dvd, these solid films stick around. my favorite example of this is Fight Club. you really think 1999 was ready for that shit? 'boy meets world' was still on tv. now fight club's a must-watch, and not only among cinephiles.

clairvoyance in 'the shining'

abba

the host

the third man

"Remember what the fella said: In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love; they had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." 

- h. lime

jenn grant

just heard this song today. pretty sweet.

p. cheyefsky

from my no. 1 favorite movie (tied with pulp fiction).

construction

article

stooges

endings.

(just press play for both and mute the one on the right)

YouTube Doubler

2001: a space odyssey

by rich kelly

sundance kid

1/23/12

her narrating this:

criminally underrated

makes a great double-feature with taking of pelham one two three (1974)

mr. bean

edan

a white rapper for mlk day? fuck it. this is what they're referring to when they say 'that real brooklyn shit' (today's brooklyn shit, at least). my favorite live rap performance, tied with kanye west doing runaway (i added that after the page break).

and yes, he uses a fuckin' theremin.

flower waltz

christina's world

christina's world by andrew wyeth

free will+determinism

gotta love 'em

quote

"Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it."

- M.T.

ouatitw

2011 movie list

Lists. There are so many fucking lists this time of year. If you read the film trades then you're probably sick of all the goddamn movie lists everyone's making. Or maybe you're not, I dunno.

I'm sick of all these goddamn movie lists everyone's making. But I probably feel this way because I disagree with most of them. And I don't disagree to be the cool contrarian eccentric. I disagree because I frankly have no fucking clue what most of those people are thinking, those people who make the lists.

Here are a couple of my own movie lists, most/least favorites of 2011:

overture for 2012

1. 'fahrhenheit 451-prelude' - bernard herrmann
2. 'william tell overture' - gioachino rossini
3. 'interstellar overdrive' - pink floyd
4. 'lohengrin-prelude, act i' - richard wagner
5. 'hallelujah i love her so' - ray charles