"Write on, my man."

Cycling Trivialities

2010-05-12T18:11:00.001-04:00

Some random person created one of the best anti-war videos I have ever seen.

the Pale Blue Dot

2010-05-12T18:09:00.000-04:00

This one gets me every time.

BEST STAR WARS TRAILER YET. seriously though.

2009-06-02T13:40:00.002-04:00

Created by my old place of work, Blur Studio.

"

Video Games | Star Wars: The Old Republic | E3 09: Jedi vs Sith Cinematic

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Daaamn. My friend posted his Reel.

2009-05-20T15:06:00.000-04:00

Gabriel Portnof Lead Lighter Reel 2007 from gabriel portnof on Vimeo.

On the distribution of Wealth.

2009-05-20T14:26:00.001-04:00

-Posted by my friend at my job.

When I was a kid, my father worked at a college that was on an old estate on the north shore of Long Island. That is Gatsby territory, and the area was filled with former fancy estates most of which had been converted to other uses. I remember reading then about how people used to have incredible fortunes and built amazing huge houses with hundreds of rooms and hundreds of servants, and how even the richest of the rich could no longer afford that sort of thing.

If you look at the history, the closest the US came to actual revolution was in the 1920's and early 1930's, which was that Gatsby period. Many people think that Roosevelt saved capitalism in the US by spreading the wealth and bringing in social programs like social security, WPA, etc.

IMHO, the Republicans consciously were seeking to bring back that era, where being rich meant being REALLY rich. And they succeeded. And, strangely enough, also succeeded in bringing back the event that ended that previous era, the Great Depression.

This is probably why businessmen on the whole supported Obama, for the same reason they supported Roosevelt: sense and fear winning out over greed.

You probably will recognize this song:

They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob,
When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead,
Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;
Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell,
Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum,
Half a million boots went slogging through Hell,
And I was the kid with the drum!

Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.
Why don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell,
Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum,
Half a million boots went slogging through Hell,
And I was the kid with the drum!

Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.
Say, don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?

A friend's Reel

2009-05-20T00:48:00.001-04:00

This is a friend's VFX Director Reel. The cool part about it is he did everything on it. From modeling, to Surfacing, Animation, Lighting, FX, and Compositing. He's a real talented mf'er. I wish I was more like him.

Gabriel Portnof's VFX Director Reel from gabriel portnof on Vimeo.

Nothing Compares to This.

2009-05-06T19:24:00.004-04:00

Nothing Compares 2 U (cover) live

I was watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall last night, a movie that I wasn't into at first but has grown on me considerably. At one point the main character is at home lamenting his lost love to the tune "Nothing Compares to You", a song that was originally by Prince, but was covered by Sinead O'Connor. I remember blasting her cover, much like the character in the movie, after being broke up with by my first love. I locked myself in my room and wallowed for hours in pure adolescent misery. I opened my ground floor window in Greenwich village so the whole block would now that nothing compared to her. At the end of the film there is a great Hawaiian cover of the song which I fell immediately in love with, both because of it's comedic awkwardness, and also for the fact that the song is great.

Then oddly enough, this morning on KCRW, as I drove east on Venice Blvd, Jason Bentley puts this new cover of the song on. I thought to call my girlfriend so we could have a laugh about the coincidence, but was beaten to the punch by her call to say the same thing. We were both listening to the same song on the same station. It was a good moment.

I threw 3D graphics at Obama.

2009-05-01T18:34:00.001-04:00

this is a picture of the president watching the Monsters Versus Aliens Superbowl trailer which had my explosion shots, and I also did the Logo that flies at the viewer at the end. So, i visually threw graphics at the president's face! I am McLovin that somebody found that image on the Huffington Post.

I wonder...If he flinched, does that mean i get to give him a punch in the shoulder like that childhood game we all used to play?

OH SHIT! they're back

2009-05-01T17:40:00.000-04:00

When childhood cartoons go AWESOME!

Transformer "Revenge of the Fallen" trailer #3 from Bay Films/Michael Bay Dot Com on Vimeo.

Cornify my blog please.

2009-04-30T18:26:00.000-04:00

Network Television kills me.

2009-04-21T14:37:00.002-04:00

I am very much a fan of movies and I can spend a whole day sitting and watching them. But frankly, I have seen a lot and the movie channels only play a limited selection per month and just do repeats. Another source is network tv since there are a bunch that will play movies during the day. But between the commercial breaks (especially hard when watching long epics like LOTR that needed editing to begin with), and the editing of scenes to be PG, I am usually left with a bad taste in my mouth. I understand that the movie companies let them tear apart their films simply because they get royalties...but it's really inexcusable. This is the kind of shit that pisses me off:

Eddie Izzard- Death Star Canteen

2009-04-15T18:59:00.001-04:00

TAX TIME!!!

2009-04-15T14:07:00.000-04:00

Sensible Deductions, y'all.

REQUIREMENTS...by Tracy Morgan.

2009-04-13T20:37:00.002-04:00

Sorry I've been gone for so long. I've been marinating since January. Just got back to work. Stories to follow...

I <3 road trippin'

2009-02-27T23:28:00.000-05:00

I LOVE NOT WORKING

2009-02-20T23:42:00.001-05:00

Is it bad if during two months of time off, all i want to do is leisure type stuff? Is there some project I should be working on? The work ethic can be nagging sometimes, but i do a good job of womping its ass.

Dick Cheney, seriously, go FUCK YOURSELF.

2009-02-07T15:30:00.004-05:00

In the Immortal words of Gandalf the Grey....YOU SHALL NOT PASS!

Venice breakwater and getting towed in LA

2009-02-06T18:15:00.008-05:00

So, yesterday I went surfing in the rain. It's not something I ever really pictured myself doing, since I always associated the beach with sunny days. But for the last week it had been perfect sunny weather and unfortunately, flat wave-less conditions. I had gone several times though since I have months off from work and plenty of time to kill. Also, the fact that I had just bought a cool long board from Bask, my homeslice and neighbor, had also made in imperative that I go in a lot. But the lack of ride-able waves created a hunger for bigger waves that I have never felt. I tend to be overwhelmed quickly by big surf because i have bad ears. My eardrums get hurt easily by the pressure of waves taller then myself and swimming under them doesn't help much.

Yesterday a storm rolled in and the waves and wind picked up dramatically in the afternoon. I rode my bike to the beach and was surprised to see that the spot was crowded, even in the grey stormy chop. I guess other surfers were wave starved as well. Not to mention that the recession has probably opened up more then a few schedules to weekday riding. Nothing really remarkable happened, there wasn't the appearance of dolphins or whales as there has been lately, and really, the rides weren't spectacular. i guess it was more or less the fact that we were all there, crowded into a 200 foot stretch of beach behind a stone jetty, weathering a storm in rough seas that made the moment memorable. The spirit of riding and the love of huge masses of water dumping over as they hit the end of their domain in a last ditch effort to show off their power.

It was also the feeling of the rain pelting my head and the waves coming in almost on top of each other. You never knew where the next one was coming from, how big it would be or if there was one right behind it. Essentially bobbing up and down constantly and never being still or catching your breath. On top of that, any wave I caught had two or three guys catching it at the same time so it was like bumper cars unless I let the wave pass (which i am learning to do via my homeboys, since its usually them I end up bumping into).

The rides were surprisingly fun though, since these waves were often large, but would have smaller waves right in front of them, so you might catch the upper part of the wave, and end up dropping down into another wave below it, and then catching two or three more breaks on the same ride since they were so broken up and random. It reminded me of the way Japanese painters represented waves in ancient times, like it had no order and was so crazy the waves had waves kind of like a perm hairdo.

Another thing that I loved about the experience was the way people looked at me, on the beach, and in the neighborhood. There are a lot of tourists in Venice and they tend to stare in admiration at surfers, but add a storm and rain and you get the look of absolute respect. You can see it in the face, they think you are crazy, but they also admire the courage and skill it must take to head down to the beach on a bike in a wetsuit and a board under my arm. On top of that, I was riding back on abbot kinney boulevard and ran into a friend of mine who lives in San Francisco. So at the moment where i was telling him how the fin on my board broke, i realized that at the same time last year i was huddling inside my NY apartment avoiding the cold and staring longingly at my barren snow covered backyard remembering what it was like in the summer for BBQs. We make our own lives, and I chose this one. I can't say that I have any regrets right now. Of course I miss home, but I will be there in March and I know it's not going anywhere and that the winter SUCKS. But i do miss taking a day to walk across the park and go to a museum.

I tried giving LA a chance as a city with culture by visiting LACMA for the first time. That was actually a successful day, the museum's collection and layout was very impressive....but I had to drive really far in traffic and I ended up getting towed, then being saved by my girlfriend who works nearby. Had she not been around i could have spent a ton of money on cabs and probably wouldn't have been able to get my car out of the pound that evening anyways since i made it with like 10 seconds to spare before they closed for the night...gotta love that. A city that has no workable transportation system towing cars from meter spots and then shutting down the pound at 7pm.

Yeah, you heard correctly, I parked at a meter spot, you know, where you pay to park and assume that since the machine took your money that you would be okay. I even looked at the sign and saw that it was 4 hour parking and it was 2pm, no mention on that sign about a Tow zone...that was on another sign on another pole about 50 feet down from the sign i checked. I put in enough money to last until 6pm and marched off joyfully to enjoy some art. Low and behold, LA is a magical city that has meter parking that suddenly becomes a tow away zone at 4pm. Something like that in NY is unheard of, and the signage would be crazy if it were because New Yorkers fight about that kind of shit all day long. But LA doesn't think it's necessary to put that info in like HUGE RED LETTERS. Instead, they let tourists fall into the 400 dollar trap (and it must be mostly tourists considering the fact that it was in front of the museums and la brea tar pits) I imagine they make a LOT of money from that and leave a bad taste in most peoples mouths, people who were just trying to see some culture in a vast barren desert of cultural waste.

I truly understand why so many people hate LA, I used to with a passion. Now I spend a lot of time defending it in conversations with people I know who don't live here. It's a city that doesn't behave well. From the police, to the drivers, to even the awkward and disdainful way Angelenos walk in crowds. It seems more like a town for people who don't actually want to live around other people. Thankfully, I don't care about that aspect anymore. I'm here for the work, the weather, and the waves. That's it brah.

Leisure Blogging

2009-02-06T18:10:00.004-05:00

Does anybody besides me see the irony in the fact that Kellogs dropped Phelps as a sponser because he was photographed taking a bong hit? Doesn't Kellogs owe marijuana at least a nod?!

If stoners decided to pay Kellogs back with a boycott, they'd go out of business STAT.

Ehhh, whateves. the Last Dragon is on cable right now.

OMG

2009-02-03T19:40:00.000-05:00

This kid's brain on drugs.

Add some rack focus and push the blur et voila...mini world.

2009-01-23T14:27:00.004-05:00

Helpless from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
Music: “HELPLESS” (S. Harland-Wright*/D. Jackson)
© J. Albert & Son Pty Limited*/Control
Performed by Headstrong featuring Shelley Harland
Used with permission
http://www.headstrong-hq.com/
http://www.myspace.com/shelleyharland
Thanks to Greenpeace Australia, Shelley Harland, Darrin Brindle, Abram Powell.
For more information on the building of the sand whale featured in this short film visit: http://www.greenpeace.org.au
Artist info @ www.keithloutit.com

Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Riding the M104 up to Harlem because I couldn't control my John Thomas

2009-01-21T18:55:00.008-05:00

I was thinking the other day about growing up and being a young unripe tomato in the streets of NY. One memory jumped into my mind suddenly and made me laugh out loud. It was something I hadn't considered in a long time, mainly because I no longer have to concern myself with the catalyst of this particular misadventure in my old age. The catalyst being the uninvited boner.

Any guy can tell you that part of growing up as a lad is dealing with an over anxious, under nourished one-eyed willy. A nasty creature who regularly decides that he wants to make his presence known to all who dare to be in the same vicinity as his mightiness. He cares not about the propriety of his arrival, not what the situation is, or who he will be introducing his boniness to. He just wants to dance.

So, among the many many sources of stress that a young boy has to cope with, like school, girls, friends, homework, the future, bio-nuclear warfare (it was a real source of stress in the 80's), puberty. it was yet another bomb that could go off at any second. a time bomb located right there between the legs. methinks mine was a particularly sensitive bomb that loved to blow at the most awkward moments, like right at the end of class, right as i was being subbed into a basketball game, or right as i had to get up for my bus stop.

This moment in time was the latter. I remember it very vividly. It was summer, I had a huge sony walkman with a broken rewind button and big fat dj headphones (headphones i was forced to defend more then once). I remember that I was listening to Janet Jackson on KISS Fm (of dj red alert fame). I believe the song was "Let's wait a while". It was 1986, back when buses were huge rounded exhaust spewing beasties. I was late and had to run to catch the bus before it drove to the next stop. I had to run while holding my sweatpants because they were very baggy and if i ran they would fall down around my ankles...yet another thing to worry about.

I managed to make the bus at 86th street and broadway. I walked to the back to see if there was anybody I knew on the same bus. Of course there was, but she was my teacher. That was awkward and disappointing (and only added to my impending boy humiliation). So I said "hi" and sat down in an aisle seat and turned the volume up to zone out and dig on the tunes.

The ride was uneventful and I don't think a single sexy thought crossed my mind the whole time. Until I perked up at 110th street noticing that my stop was next. It was as if my stupid penis got wind of my need to stand up and decided that it needed to stand up too. The fact that i had soft sexy feeling sweatpants didn't help my case either. So suddenly i popped a tent. And again, I can safely say that the tent popping had NOTHING to do with my thoughts at the time. I was most likely focusing on the street number and my projected path to the exit doors. But mr pee pee didn't care. He just woke up and went "Boing"..."Reporting for duty, sir!"

There I was, sitting near my teacher and turning red as a beet. I had to think fast and decide how I was going to play the situation. Did I just throw caution to the wind and try to stand up and possibly cover my bulging sweatpants with my bag or my huge walkman? Did I maybe try to hunch over while tucking the tip under my waistband and hope nobody noticed the obvious change in posture? Or did I just not get up and wait it out?

At the last possible second I went with my last option. I stayed in my seat and and decided to hope it subsided before I was in the bronx. I remember my teacher tapping my shoulder and pointing at the street sign. I mumbled something like "I wanna get something from the store on 113th street" and hoping she didn't mention that I would be late. Maybe she knew secretly what I might be going through because she nodded and got off the bus without a fuss. The bus closed the doors and started rolling uptown. 114th street came and went, 116th, 118th, 120th. the stops were coming so fast and nothing was changing. My little boy pecker wouldn't give me a break. It was armed for battle and refusing to stand down no matter how many baseball games i pictured in my mind.

I ended up getting off the bus in Harlem and then being so afraid that it might happen again that I just ran back to 112th street. I was late that day...And i probably popped another one in math class...fucking sweatpants.

The Coolest set of pictures from Russia...

2009-01-21T14:25:00.004-05:00

This collection is the freshest thing I have seen in a while. Check it.
This photo set is by Aleksey Petrosian, Russian photographer.

YAY!!!!!!!!!!

2009-01-20T13:13:00.003-05:00

I just knew this would happen. Hallelujah.

Brought to me by my sister.

Sometimes I secretly wish I had become a musician

2009-01-16T20:52:00.002-05:00

I played several instruments and sang all the time...but it just never stuck. I just wanted to DANCE.

WOOLWORTH'S

2009-01-16T20:46:00.000-05:00

I owned that Sesame Street LP!!! I guess it was 87 cents.

Obama on the mind

2009-01-16T18:27:00.002-05:00

4 more days!!!!! Anybody get the feeling that the sky is clearing? I do.

Daft Punk vs. Adam Freeland - "Aer OBAMA"

The wicked witch is dead...

ding dong.

Notorious spraying some dude with lyrical goodness.

2009-01-15T17:18:00.002-05:00

Notice the dude on the right biting his nails, and then exiting stage left. That's what it must have felt like to battle Biggie Smalls.

Star Wars...kind of.

2009-01-15T15:29:00.002-05:00

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

"My friend Amanda had never seen a whole Star Wars film. When I asked her if she wanted to watch the original trilogy she said that she would, but that she already knew what happens. So I took out my voice recorder and asked her to start from the top.

I then created some very basic animation in Final Cut to go along with her narration."

- Joe Nicolosi

www.fishrockit.com

Koyaanisqatsi in it's entirety :)

2009-01-15T14:53:00.000-05:00

You can thank me laterz.

Duffy does it again

2009-01-15T14:38:00.001-05:00

Duffy - Warwick Avenue
Uploaded by Duffy-official

Goldfrapp

2009-01-14T14:08:00.006-05:00

Lets take a second to check out Goldfrapp videos i likey. Inspired by the previous post.
Happiness:

Scariness:

Strict Machine:

Black Cherry:

Train:

Animated "Fly Me Away"

Felt Mountain:

Deer Stop:

Eat Yourself:

Clowns:

Utopia:

Caravan Girl...skater chic:

Holding my breath while driving

2009-01-13T20:31:00.027-05:00

This morning I nearly blacked out trying to hold my breath while driving 80 mph. My excuse for such an absurd situation is simple, but requires a bit in the way of an explanation. I had been trying to appease an ancient pagan god.

I like to think of myself as being a rational human being. But frankly, most of the time I am not. I once had a huge argument with an ex-girlfriend. Actually, It was the only argument I ever had with her. The theme was "magic" and whether or not it existed. It started because I felt like the universe had a plan and that us being together wasn't random. She disagreed, and it shocked me that she didn't think we were part of some bigger destiny together. I ended up stomping off in frustration...frankly, a little bit hurt.

I think I have always believed in higher purposes and prophecy...stemming mostly from vanity and the idea that I actually matter in this huge cold universe...that it actually knows and gives a rat's ass who i am. It's kind of pathetic really, but I like to think that it's also kind of romantic that something like cosmic recognition would separate me from a lump of coal.

I have vivid memories of sitting in the vast back seat of my dad's huge Cadillac, driving down old route 100 in Vermont. Passing centuries old cemeteries with imperfect rows of civil war era tombstones. These peaceful old stones were always surrounded by tall wild grass and butterflies in the summer, or grey and frozen under snow hats in the winter. Each time we would pass one, my sister and I would quickly catch our breaths and hold it intently. When we were young and highly susceptible to any kind of story telling, somebody had, in a rather off-hand way, mentioned that it's good luck to hold one's breath when passing a cemetery. Little did they know that I would end up holding my breath COUNTLESS times in my life because of that brief and relatively meaningless conversation. And to add to that bit of silliness, or possibly to add to that bit of actual wizardry (depending on the cosmic unprovable truth), they mentioned that when you were passed the last tombstone you had to chant "Rabbit, Rabbit, thank you for the day god". That would put you in good with whatever or whomever the Day God was and that some rabbit was also going to look out for you. Why a rabbit? I have NO idea. It also makes me wonder how many gods there might be, and what I might need to do or say to not piss them off as well. You see how big the universe can get when the invisible becomes unsure?

Those were the days of Dungeons and Dragons, of sticks, picked up in the forest, becoming magic long swords, and old bushes becoming trolls and ogres...the days of pagan gods, myths and lore. When i looked in the mirror and actually thought i might be looking at another person, who looked like me, but was actually existing in a magic alternate universe. the days when a black cat crossing my path was a message from the fairy's, and witches that they knew my path, that they could cut my path and reach out and grab my soul. The days, when we drove in a Cadillac constructed of thick steel and American automotive pride in the 60's. the days of overalls and magic strawberries.

What's left of these days? I no longer shudder at the huge amounts of magic that I can't see, I no longer think I might have married the ocean that day i lost the silver ring my first girlfriend made me in camp while I was surfing in the Atlantic. I don't believe that I can move objects simply by willing them to move...if I will hard enough. I am pretty sure that I was wrong about that by now. Otherwise I'd be stopping and suddenly focusing on doing shit with my mind CONSTANTLY, and people on the sidewalk would walk around me uncomfortably, wondering why I wasn't taking my medication anymore.

What's left of all that, is this...I still hold my breath when I am passing cemeteries. Only the one that I pass everyday on the 405, as i head up and over the mountains north of LA, is a huge military one. And sometimes there's traffic. So there I am, a rational adult. Holding my breath until i see stars and my face is blue, just to avoid some bad luck. Maybe it's because I am aware of how insanely lucky I am in life that prevents me from taking a breath during this arduously long dead people passing. But goddamit, I am popping brain cells and risking an accident with this left-over habit. Maybe I need to change my commute route. I don't think you can see any cemeteries from the 10 or the 5, right?

This video posted by my sister made me think of this for some reason. The setting reminded me of Vermont...the center of all things magic. There are actually 3 versions to chew on.

I guess I should also mention that i make wishes when i blow out my birthday candles, when i blow away an eyelash that has been plucked from my cheek, and when i look at my watch and it's any of the following times: 12:34:56, and any 3 set combo of numbers, like 11:11:11 and 01:01:01. etc etc...but there's no chant aimed at any deities and making wishes is normal, right?

Mr. Chi City....Pure Wisdom for the peoples.

2009-01-13T18:59:00.001-05:00

Fucking Parking Ticket

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

What to keep in the fridge....

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Vandelay Industries

2009-01-13T18:08:00.001-05:00

Seinfeld had it's hay day...much like the Cosby Show...defined a period in NYC's recent past.

"And you want to be my latex salesman!"

Validation?

2009-01-09T13:57:00.002-05:00

We all need it.

Thank you, Kurt Kuenne. Look him up...he has others.

I have been trying to figure this one out for years...

2009-01-09T13:43:00.004-05:00

I had assumed it was done using tracking points, like field markers and camera pan...but they actually get the stats from the camera itself and coordinate that with the camera's fixed position. the color keying was a no-brainer. Nerd stuff.

I LOVED WONDER WOMAN

2009-01-09T11:48:00.001-05:00

I wanted her to lasso me.

I think I used to do this to my older sister when she was much bigger then me...

2009-01-08T17:50:00.000-05:00

Cat to English translation...

2009-01-06T16:44:00.001-05:00

First, in Cat tongue:

Second, in People tongue:

Burt and Ernie do M.O.P.

2009-01-06T15:21:00.001-05:00

Ante Up Bitches.

Young Love...

2009-01-06T15:18:00.003-05:00

Anna-Bell, Anna-Lena and Mika at the police post at the main railway station in Hanover, central Germany, after being caught heading for the airport so Anna-Bell and Mika could 'get married in Africa'. Photograph: /AFP/Getty Images

These kids are amazing...

From the UK Guardian:

It is a dream that has been shared by lovers across the centuries – the chance to elope to exotic lands. But few would have been as bold and spontaneous as six-year-old Mika and his five-year-old sweetheart Anna-Bell who, after mulling over their options in secret, packed their suitcases on New Year's Eve and set off from the German city of Hanover to tie the knot under the heat of the African sun.

The children left their homes at dawn while their unwitting parents were apparently sleeping, and took along Mika's seven-year-old sister, Anna-Lena, as a witness to the wedding.

Donning sunglasses, swimming armbands and dragging a pink blow-up lilo and suitcases on wheels packed with summer clothes, cuddly toys and a few provisions, they walked a kilometre up the road, boarded a tram to Hanover train station and got as far as the express train that would take them to the airport before a suspicious station guard alerted police.

"What struck us was that the little ones were completely on their own and that they had lots of swimming gear with them," said Holger Jureczko, a police spokesman. He described Mika and Anna-Bell as "sweethearts" who had "decided to get married in Africa where it is warm, taking with them as a witness Mika's sister".

Anna-Bell told the German television station RTL: "We wanted to get married and so we just thought: 'Let's go there.' "

Mika said: "We wanted to take the train to the airport, then we wanted to get on a plane and when we arrived we wanted to unpack the summer things and then we wanted to go for a bit of a stroll in the sun."

Mika and Anna-Lena's mother, who was not identified, said she had known nothing of her children's plan. "I'm still in a state of shock. I thought 'I'm playing a part in a bad movie.' When we realised the kids were missing we went looking for them." But only when the police called did they realise what had happened.

Asked why they failed to let their parents know, the children said they thought they would not be gone for long.

Mika told police he instigated the plan having been inspired by a winter holiday with his family in Italy. "Based on this the children began to make plans for the future," Jureczko said.

To allay their disappointment at being caught, Hanover police gave them a tour of the police headquarters. Jureczko said: "They'll have the chance to put their plan into action at a later date".

Cool Vid...a' la ma souer

2009-01-06T14:01:00.001-05:00

Adidas House Party

2009-01-06T13:31:00.001-05:00

Besides the out-of-place British soccor player, this vid captures the old house party feeling.

BLACK DYNOMITE!!!!

2009-01-05T14:28:00.001-05:00

"Uhhh, Hush up little girls...A lotta cats have that name."
WOOT?!

"hmmm? you gonna wake up the rest of the bitches!"

Monsters Versus Aliens

2009-01-02T17:50:00.002-05:00

A quick trailer/director interview about the new project I am on.

Ice Age 3

2009-01-02T17:45:00.004-05:00

So, i did like HALF of this trailer. I knew they loved me over there. They just didn't know how to show it :)

Ode to Joy by Beeker

2008-12-19T13:51:00.002-05:00

Merry Xmas, Happy Hannukah, Kwanza, and Ramadan.

Encore with Habanera

Jizz in my pants...

2008-12-18T14:15:00.001-05:00

Note Timberlake making a cameo in the supermarket.

Ashes and Snow- Feather to Fire

2008-12-18T14:10:00.001-05:00

Kind of tugs at the heart.

Feeling Unmotivated?

2008-12-12T18:47:00.000-05:00

Serge Gainsbourg- Coolest french dude ever.

2008-12-10T16:56:00.001-05:00

Je T'aime

B.B. (Brigitte Bardot)

Quite a legacy...

2008-12-10T14:00:00.001-05:00

Dear God,

2008-12-10T13:29:00.001-05:00

Sorry, I've been too busy to post. Coming back soon.

"Presto"

2008-11-17T13:20:00.001-05:00

Remember waking up early on saturday morning to catch all the new cartoons? well, this one captures that old feeling again. Bravo.

Pro Prop 8?

2008-11-11T17:09:00.001-05:00

SHAME ON YOU!!!

Monster Versus Aliens

2008-11-10T20:44:00.001-05:00

My latest project. We get to destroy San Francisco. It's awesome.

YES WE DID

2008-11-05T18:09:00.001-05:00

I knew it would happen.

Cat Song

2008-10-20T13:10:00.000-04:00

Good morning...

the latest in Photo-bombery

2008-10-17T19:47:00.003-04:00

I just barely made the crop on this one. PERRRFECT.

The Republican Base

2008-10-16T16:04:00.000-04:00

this pretty much sums it up...

I really can't wait to hand these people their asses on November 4th. god bless america.

Shots rang out

2008-10-15T18:39:00.012-04:00

I have ranted about guns before on this blog. I have had plenty of experiences and close calls with guns and I am very familiar with the violent pop that a hand gun makes when fired. But something I hadn't actually seen up close and personal was somebody dying from being shot.

I might have seen somebody receive fatal wounds in a gun battle in NYC, only i didn't stick around to find out. I've had bullets whizz by close enough to me to know that a few feet might have made the difference of a lifetime. But this experience had a very different effect on me. I am an adult now. Being near gunshots and death is something that doesn't "pump my nads" or make for an exciting night. It is what it is, a horrible tragedy.

It was a crazy day for me. I had woken up at home in NYC late for my flight to LAX. I grabbed my crazy cat Miso, stuffed him unceremoniously into the soft airplane-friendly carry case i had bought the night before. kissed my girl goodbye and basically all but tackled a taxi in the rain. I did the classic maneuver you always see in the movies and promised the taxi driver a 50 dollar tip if he could get me to the airport in time for my flight. it actually worked, unless he was normally a psychotic driver. the guy cut through the lanes like his life depended on it and we hydro-planed all the way to Newark in plenty of time for me to make my flight.

I wish i had a funny story about taking crazy Miso out of the carrier and walking through security with him in my arms surrounded by thousands of strangers. but he was so scared that he just clung to me and didn't move at all. The only funny part of that was that i warned everybody around me that i had a crazy cat and people literally backed up giving me like 15 feet in all directions in an area that was pretty much crammed with people.

The flight was over very quickly since i passed out. I woke up with the cali sun in my face and was psyched to be back and not in the cold wet dark soup i had just left behind. I got home, dropped off Miso, and immediately went out to party with Bask1, my NYC bud who was my new/old neighbor in Venice. It was the Abbot Kinney Festival. A once a year event when one of the main shopping streets in Venice becomes a street fair. Great food, crafts, cruiser bikes, venice characters, bands, beer gardens, and general mayhem.

Despite my fierce limp and my jet lag and hang over, i was filled with a great positive excitement about being there. It was my new home, and it was sunny, tasty, edgy, hip, and very SoCal. I buried my face in a lamb gyro and bumped into locals i had already met in my brief time there, including the neighbors who live next door to me. All was good, all was laid back.

As night rolled in, I decided to get a beer or two at the OtherRoom and just chill out. I knew a few people who go there and It's three blocks from my house. Plus my cat Miso was still freaked out in the new place and my big human ass crashing around would only cause him to hide under the bed, rather then snoop around like a ninja.

I said whatsup to the bouncers. they were nice guys, but unlike the other spots in the area that employed older, more professional type bouncers, the OtherRoom has younger, kind of "local" looking guys. At the risk of sounding racist, they were latino and kind of thuggish looking. And they always had friends in the area who stopped by and hung out with them on the sidewalk, or parked in the spot right in front. I knew they were kind of "gang" guys, but it never occurred to me that the affiliation would ever get near the wine bar. Although, in retrospect, i did think it was kind of an odd choice by the owners, considering what places like the Brig do, right down the street.

So i was half way into my Hefen Weizen and standing in the doorway with my back facing outside. I was right in the middle of thinking about what a good day it was. i was so happy to wake up, with my cat in my new place, my new cruiser beach bike (Schwinn Cruiser SSX), and my new/old awesome job. When all of a sudden, there was a short sequence of extremely loud pops. The clap of the noise shook my eardrums and i could feel the sound waves in my skull. I knew INSTANTLY that it wasn't anything but a gun going off right behind me. I ducked down and wedged myself behind the big metal door. Of course, the OC crowd that has become the norm at the OtherRoom were all standing looking around like it was just fireworks or a joke of some kind. I was the only person, at least in the doorway or inside that ducked down.

Then came the screaming, and then yelling, and then I heard "he's shot!" and "the guy ran that way!". that's when i stood up. I figured that they must have been talking about the shooter and that he was probably done doing what he came to do. You could hear the word spread back into the bar in waves, and people started rushing to the back and out the front to get away. At that point I stepped out the doorway and saw the victim. I had nodded to him on the way in. He seemed like a confident and proud kind of person. He was maybe a bit younger then me, wearing long shorts, an over sized t-shirt and high tops. But now he was no longer proud and confident. He was laying in the gutter with one leg up on the side walk and the other leg oddly flat and kind of twisted along the curb. He was already white as a sheet and his chest was already drenched in blood. but he was alive. his friends were all around him trying to raise his legs and get him flat on the street.

I can't really convey how disturbing it was to watch this man slowly expire. His friends were clueless as to what to do and they were somewhat drunk themselves and within a minute, two of them got into a fight, right over there dying friend. there was a lot of yelling and screaming and several girls just standing there crying. And this poor guy, clearly unable to talk, but very aware of his situation. he was looking all around, and up at the sky and then at his friends and then back up at the sky again. Maybe he knew he was seeing things for the last time, maybe he was in shock and just trying to figure out what was happening. I will never know what was going on in his head. Just what was happening in mine.

First off, it was my street we were on. I just moved there. I spent the last year whining about how gentrified NYC has gotten and longing for the good old days of chaos and crime. And now here I was, getting my wish. A man was just shot execution style about 12-15 feet from where I was just standing, and three blocks from where I live, on the ground floor, with a glass front door. Not only that, I was getting to watch the inept response of the local EMS and Police first hand. A man was clearly dying, surrounded by people who couldn't help him, other then to press some bar towels on his blown out chest.

Since it was just an hour or two after the huge festival, of course there were about 10 squad cars and 30 cops within a minute on the scene. But they just walked around with their hands on their guns and the other hand waving flashlights at people and at the victim and his friends. Not a single one of them got near the victim or offered any advice to his friends about what to do. They were talking on their shoulder walkie talkies and i am sure that several people had called the ambulance and so had these cops.
But time just kept passing. The was moving less and the pool of blood under him was getting bigger and bigger. The cops were still walking around and one or two of them were stretching out the crime scene tape and others were asking people questions in the crowd. To me it seemed like everything was backwards. The ambulance should be the first thing, then the questions can be asked. Had they moved faster to save the victim, they might have had the best eye witness. but his life didn't seem to be paramount. which made me also shudder to think what would happen had it been me in the line of fire and not this guy. Mind you, this was a block from Julia Roberts and Angelika Houston's homes. So we aren't talking about straight ghetto. We are talking about where ghetto and gentrification are fighting over a neighborhood that obvioulsy was recently ruled by ghetto. So, there are gangsters on my block, as well as multi million dollar lofts. Ambulances shouldn't be so slow to respond here.
More time passes. I looked again at him, and knew he was not there anymore. One of his friends had his hand over they guy's mouth trying to feel for a breath. I saw him pull his hand away and shake his head. That was it. The guy's life was over. His last moments spent in the gutter at Abbot Kinney Boulevard, surrounded by wine bar patrons and his close friends. The shooter had apparently ran in the direction of MY place, so when a cop asked me what i saw and i told him that i hadn't seen the shooter he said i should go home. i looked at him and said i live in the direction that the shooter ran in and i am fine waiting here a bit longer to give them the chance to follow up on that. he nodded, the logic was pretty much self explanatory.

I waited a few more minutes, until i couldn't stand watching this shocking failure of basic humanity, coupled with the failure of basic medical services that so quickly and ruthlessly shoved the book end into this victim's existence. i didn't care if he was in a gang, i didn't care if it was revenge for something else, all i cared about was the failure at all levels to live and let live, and to save a life that is so sacred to all of us as individuals, yet so worthless as a whole.

I got on my cruiser and started riding in the direction of a killer. To add yet another level of dread to the night, the ghetto bird (police helicopter) that was hovering over the area locked it's spotlight on me and followed me for a whole block. it was like straight out of Menace to Society. I live in the REALNESS.

That night i locked all my windows and doors. The sound of the helicopters hovering went on until the morning.

here's a local report about it and some posts from witnesses.
and another, with a police briefing included

The victim was a father of two.

On being intolerant of intolerance

2008-10-15T14:06:00.011-04:00

Work Forum snippet...on Liberals vs. Conservatives...

Animator2 wrote:
why are they so angry?!
Animator3 wrote:
Never has there been a more appropriate situation for facepalm.
Zen2 wrote:
WOW.  Obama said it was easy to rile up a crowd by stoking hatred, but  thats not what america needs now.

That was by no means an "attack" on those people.  i consider that a  very mild reference to bad leadership...he wasn't even blaming the  gracious lovely folk calling him a terrorist and calling for his death.

anything i read or see about the GOP lately makes me feel like Bill  Murray after getting slimed as a Ghost Buster.

Animator4 wrote:
I dunno, if I was going make a Ghostbuster's reference, I'd probably go  with the pink slime from Ghostbusters 2 that concentrated anger, hate, and all the other unsavory  emotions.  Those McCain supporters probably use it like Bryl cream or Ben-gay for achy  joints.

Animator5 wrote:

I love it when an aging crowd yells "Get a job!" ... because somebody has to pay for their Social Security.

Animator4 wrote:
Because they want to live in an America where being white and Christian meant you were better than other people, and Obama is a symbol of how much that world has disappeared.  They have been told covertly and overtly for decades that the reason for those changes are things like affirmative action, feminists, uppity blacks, and liberals.  They now fear that the enemy within will take over the country.

Zen2 wrote:
God, I sure hope so.  GOBAMA!

Animator5 wrote:
We really do live in two Americas. Sad.

Zen2 wrote:
i'm still annoyed that we won the civil war.

Animator6 wrote:
Well lookey here.  The party of tolerance and gummybear icecream.

Zen2 wrote:
that made me so proud.  Upper West Side, born and raised.

i've never heard Liberals claim to be tolerant of conservatives, just minorities, and alternative groups.  those liberals also weren't yelling for anybody's death,  just booing and flipping off is pretty minor for that area.  it was like, hey, you wanna walk through my neighborhood (one that's like 90% very liberal) and tell me what yo think?  well here's what i think.

they didn't have one sound bite of an argument?!  the movie made in pennsylvania was all about the sound bites of what the people were actually saying.  which is what was really scary, not boo boo, or get a job.  nice try though.

Animator6 wrote:
Be proud if you want.  I think its pretty douchbaggy for anybody (both sides) to be like that.

Zen2 wrote:
that's a legit stance.

but if you flip it around.  maybe it's actually coming together by behaving similarly.  maybe there are some Pennsyltucky folk who will see that and say "hey lookit, they just like us!"

if liberals were all hare krishna and zen-like they would be even weirder to the McCain folkses.

and honestly, I can't be tolerant of the GOP.  not anymore.  tolerance for that party went out the window for me, the second we attacked iraq. it's time to really fight about it.  a LOT of people have died in the last 8 years of unnatural causes.

Animator6 wrote:

My question is why can't we all just get along instead of playing this whole my side is right and yours never will be. In all honesty there is no right it is all a matter of perspective. Politics is like a winding road with thousands of divergent routes with no end in sight. Just take this in mind when you try to argue that you are right to people that disagree with you. All you end up doing is make either you or them angry and waste both of your lives in a petty argument.

Animator7 wrote:

you guys should watch this

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html

it is directly related to this very discussion

Zen2 wrote:

hey Animator6, I generally don't argue with republicans.  I can't even understand them.

Actually, I understand the really rich ones that voted for Bush for tax breaks and the removal of the estate tax.  I understand them.  no need to argue there, and there's no chance of changing their mind$.

As for the rest of them.  anybody who believes in one or any number of these ideas: that gay people don't deserve the right to marry, that a fertilized egg is a human being with more rights then the woman who has it in her uterus, that Osama and Hussein were buds and we did the right thing by invading a large unstable nation, that you should be able to have a beer with the leader of the free world rather then get schooled by them, that immigration is a huge problem worth building a wall around texas, that it's okay to not vote for a war veteran because he windsurfs, but then four years later vote for one who can't remember how many houses he owns, that you can trust corporations to allow money to trickle down to the lower classes is somebody who i will NEVER COMPREHEND.  let alone want them to walk down Columbus Avenue as a small herd.  that's MY neighborhood.  I promise to never set foot in rural texas with an Obama sign in my hands...that's just stupid and actually dangerous.

Animator8 wrote:
Booing someone's belief system (whether correct in your mind or not) exudes intolerance.  It is less dramatic than "kill him" but it is still intolerance none the less.

Zen2 wrote:
Is it intolerance, if it's being intolerant OF intolerance?  methinks not.

well, things are getting better.  Had they pulled that s**t in the
70's, 80's, or even early 90's on the upper west side they would have gotten shot by one of those handguns they are trying to protect.

Changing Animator1's mind...

2008-10-15T13:33:00.003-04:00

At work there are discussion forums that amount to debates on any and all subjects between almost 2000 animators working in 3 seperate studios. I view it as a great source of information, differing views, therapy, and rant space. here's a snippet from yesterday...

Zen2 wrote:

extremism is definitely a problem for both sides of an argument. clearly some kind of middle ground needs to be met in a democratic society. or at least a clear majority on one of the two sides. but that will almost always leave out extremists on both sides no matter what the outcome is.

as for who gets into the media and who is extreme? maybe I am. I believe that people who think gay marriage shouldn't be allowed is fanatic extremism. it's fundamentally religion based and its an infringement on equality. especially in a country founded on equal rights, and the separation of church and state. it's like we are collectively throwing away our own principles.

Almost 50% of this country thinks that gay marriage should be illegal. that's EXTREME.

Animator1 wrote:

well, I'm glad someone brought this up. I was getting tired of all the one-sided name calling.

At the risk of starting a flame war maybe I can explain that side of the arguement. Proposition 8 is to define 'marriage' between a man and a woman. It is not an anti-gay issue, but they are involved because they choose to be so. It is defending a word that is sacred to us and is being twisted into something it is not. Let me put it this way, what if 'gay' meant relations with animals or relatives? Pretty absurd and even offensive, right? For someone who is married, the word "marriage" is sacred. Those that really love their family would find the word "family" sacred. I'm sure that you can think of some other words that have strong meaning to you. Marriage defined as between man and woman has been since the dawn of time, through out all cultures in all lands. Marriage was created by married people (if that doesn't sound too weird) and it disconcerning to have someone else try to redefine it to serve them.
Believe me, there would be a lot less hub-bub if they had respected the meaning of the word "marriage" (tolerance for others beliefs) and chosen a unique word or gone with the traditional "domestic partnership" phrase. /California/ Family /Protection Act/ of 2001 entitling them to the same state law benefits as married couples. If they want more rights they can continue to go thru the legal process to recieve them. I respect the feelings of all on this issue.

But that's not all. As a political issue, this will change many other things that will and have infrige on other peoples rights. First of all, this gov't decision to allow gay marriage was against the will of the people. The state successfully voted on this issue on Prop 22 year 2000 . It was the popular choice and the will of the people of California. That decicion was overturned by four activist judges in San Fransisco. This simply restores the meaning of marriage thru the will of the people.
This has and will continue to destroy the freedom of religion and other rights too. In fact, this forces conflict with religion. This has already happened. A Swedish priest chose not to marry a gay couple in his church in Mass. as it was against the religions tenants. He was jailed for this. A doctor declined a lesbian couple for invetrofertilization and invited them to go elsewhere. Instead of going elsewhere the lesbian couple took it to court and forced him against his values to do it anyways. A Catholic adoption agency was forced to close down by the state because they have a religious mandate to adopt to heterosexual couples. Boy Scouts of America fought a tough legal battle years ago to keep it's scout leaders heterosexual (for obvious reasons) and won. It will be overturned. I could cite many other examples from the past but you get the picture.

There is no hatred, bigotry, or ignorance here. Just a desire to preserve what we have always felt was sacred. One does not need to be a religious right-wing nut-job to feel this way. Whether you agree with it or not, please be tolerant of it.

My Hero wrote:

You seem like a reasonable guy and let's hope we can all keep this from being a flame war. It is worth talking about.

This, which I think is the basis of your argument, is simply not true. There have been plenty of cultures where men could be married to several women, and there are large parts of the world today where that is legal. (Islam still generally allows as many as four wives.) Marriage between people of the same sex also has history, and wasn't declared illegal in the Roman Empire until the Christian era. It is currently legal is six countries. (In any case, I'm not sure that historical arguments have all that much weight. Slavery also was permitted in most societies for most of history, and until the last couple of hundred years Jews were not legally citizens in many countries.)

Personally, I think the sensible way to cut this Gordian knot is to remove marriage from civil codes. People should be able to form civil partnerships, which would have all of the legal rights and responsibilities currently assigned to marriage. "Marriage" should not be a legal concept, but a social and religious one. So, if a Christian church wants to only allow marriage between one man and one woman, that is their right, while if another wants to allow it between two men or two women, that is also their right. But the legal parts would be civil partnership.

However, the word "marriage" is too deeply embedded in our society and the ideology of this issue for that separation to happen, at least any time soon. Given that, the problem with outlawing same sex marriage is that marriage is the key legal part of how families are formed. We are born into families (in general).In general, we grow up, move away from our parents, pair up, and form new families (with children or not). Thus humanity precedes, generation by generation. The laws that take force when two people marry are the laws that our society uses to support this generational formation of families. These run from tax codes that allow couples to treat two incomes as one, inheritance rules, rules dealing with the dissolution of such a relationship, and so on. When you marry someone, you switch your next of kin from being your parent to being your partner.

So, yeah, it would be nice if the loaded word "marriage" could be removed from this and all laws shifted to some kind of domestic partnership. A movement among the same-sex marriage opponents to do that would, in my mind, be understandable and moral. The current effort, though, comes down to being an attempt to keep same-sex couples from forming families, or at least to put them in an underclass category where their families don't have the same legal protections and responsibilities that heterosexual families have. This to me is immoral, as well as being unfair.

Zen2 wrote:

ok Animator1. i will tolerate what amounts to your lack of tolerance. we do live in a free country after all. but really, using the word "sacred" in legal discussion is a breach of the whole point of this country as defined by our founders. and the fact that what other people do in their homes has anything to do with what you do in yours is just NOT A FACT.

by all means, hold marriage sacred. love thy wife and all that. but don't go out and vote against somebody else's ability to feel economically safe, and "sacred", equal, and in love, the same way you do. that borders on fascist, and like i said before, fanatical extremism with clear roots in religion.

i can see the future here, since it does repeat itself. gay marriage will be legal everywhere in a bunch of years. and there will be documentaries about the long road to equal rights for gays. it will show speeches made by people opposed to it and people will say, as they do when watching racist speeches of the 60's, "look at those shameful ignorant people! they're so scared."

this is the time to do the right thing, while you still have the chance. history is not going to view you well if you don't.

Animator1 wrote:

Gotta admit that's a pretty good arguement. Let me know when you run for office.
But until that day the problem lies with the separaton of church and state. I believe I mentioned the problem of the priest thrown in prison because he wouldn't marry lesbians against the tennants of his faith. Or the doctor being forced to perform procedures against his moral will...
The very definition itself changes the laws regarding this. That's another reason why I fight for civil unions and marriage to be 2 separate things.

Serously, people, I mentioned this was not an anti-gay thing for me (although it's obvious they are involved). It protects traditional marriage. I've told you prop 8 views, I've told you the Scouts views, I've given definitions and clarity, I've stated the will of the people as it was voted on. I've stated how i would support civil unions as well as marriage. Never have I implied God smiting anyone (quite the opposite re my earlier comment on Katrina) or that gays should be locked up. I have gay friends, and while we don't always agree on the issues that doesn't make me hate them as people. Please don't imply otherwise.

Zen2 wrote:

it's very much an anti-gay thing. narrowing the definition of marriage to being between a man and a woman is DIRECTLY aimed at blocking gay marriage. and as for your gay friends, i don't see the difference between you actively denying them the right to marriage, and you not approving in a very direct sense, of their lifestyle.

if you are implying that prop 8 is defending marriage against wider definitions and couplings like the aforementioned bestiality, and pedofilia, then you're offering up a red herring. pedophilia is a crime because it victimizes children. bestiality is...well, super far out of the realm of possible threats to marriage and anybody who thinks that gay marriage might lead to animal marriage really needs to take a step back and splash some cold water on their faces.

mentioning all these other threats to marriage is a talking point of the christian right, and it really is disgusting to think that one will lead to the others. and highly insulting to my intelligence and sense of common decency.

i am surprised that a priest would get thrown in jail for not performing a marriage in his church. i would need to see the article on that one. seems like if a church doesn't believe in issuing a church document or right then it can choose not to do so. a doctor is different.

they are licensed by the state, and they can't make moral judgements about their patients bodies. if a dr doesn't believe in abortions then he shouldn't be a ob-gyn. the same thing goes for pharmacists. lest we let religion and morality dictate to people what kind of care they get. imagine that if all the drs and pharmacists in alabama decide whats moral, then they effectively overpower the state. that can't be allowed.

Animator1 wrote:

Of course not. I didn't mean 'sacred' as a 'religious-only' way as i know a few atheists/agnostic who have strong feelings of the institution of marriage and have used the same language.
I don't believe I've mentioned faith in this discussion other than using particular examples. ex separation of church and state, God didn't smite NO. And, yes, I cited a lot as many religions are involved with (but not exclusive to) one side of the arguement as gays are to the other (but not exclusive to.)
The terms of definition where implied towards unions of genders, not race, religion or otherwise.
And whoever thru out the "red herring" bit implying I was saying bestiality and homosexuality were the same thing.... NOT appreciated. That's what I meant by "implying otherwise"

Zen2 wrote:

my last post must have come out wrong. i didn't mean that you were implying that they are the same (homosexuality and bestiality), or that one leads to another in the same individuals.

i've just heard the argument before that we are "protecting" marriage from the other possible couplings by limiting it to one man and one woman, that is what you said in the beginning and you did list the other offending types of couplage'. its a good way to argue AROUND the issue of gay marriage. "it's not that i have anything against gay marriage, i just want to protect marriage from all the other crazy stuff" Rick Santorum of Penn loved that argument.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Santorum

so if you let same sex marriage in the door, then the definition gets loosened and the perverts of the world get to march in as well. not that you were saying homosexuals might do the other things themselves. but that the point of prop 8 is to make sure those real pervs don't get into the club. which seems logical, until we step back and look at what is actually happening. gay marriage is getting shot down. the rest are still violent victimizing crimes regardless of the definition of marriage.

So the rights and protections are NOT the same.

somebody pointed out that Domestic Partnerships don't have the same rights as marriage. i think it was in situations where they couldn't care for themselves and the partner couldn't make any decisions about medical care.

thats a very scary right to have to live without. do you see how unfair that is?

Animator1 wrote:

Seriously, I understand your concern about it. And I understand your need to fight for that. Throw it out on the next proposition and see what happens. You don't need to answer this publically but would the distiction between marriage and civil union be more palatable if this was added? I don't know to what degree but I do know some people are more sympathetic to this way of thinking.

Zen2 wrote:

being that I am hell bent on wanting equal rights for all people who want to live and love one person for the rest of their lives. i would say that having the two definitions have the same exact rights is necessary. why they would need different names is less important...and actually seems somewhat moot.

I personally don't need to DNR someone, and actually I am a heterosexual, so my fight is more along the lines of making this country live up to it's name. the whole argument makes us look pretty bad, and kind of backwards. I mean really, Canada?! whats that all a-boot?

My Hero wrote:

Were I able to wave my hand and change things, I'd make what the state does civil unions, which would involve all the legal rights and responsibilities, and make marriage purely a matter of religion and convention. That wouldn't satisfy the Prop 8 people, though--they want to reserve the word "marriage" for a man and a woman, and they want the state in enforce that. But, unless we're going to make this a theocracy, I think that aim is rather offensive.

Marriage has an ancient history, as mentioned, as the basis of family. When I went from living with a woman to marrying her, the difference was in the community and the broader family. We were part of the family tree, part of the family structure. Marriage gives you a certain position as a member of the community. (I''m not saying that unmarried people don't or shouldn't have status as part of society, too, but marriage is traditionally at the center of that structure.)

I cannot think of a single legitimate reason why gay people should not have full access to that position as pillars of society. The idea that the way your sexual desires are directed should determine whether you can form a family in as full a sense as anyone else is frankly nonsense. The fact that some churches think that right should be limited to people who like to have sex in a particular way is irrelevant. They have that right within their own churches. Beyond that, it is nothing less than bigotry.

I know that I'm drawing a harsher line about this than I did in my earlier message, and there's a reason for that--my patience about this has run out and I'm feeling upset. Some of you may have heard about the now-infamous case of the first grade class who went to throw rose petals on the City Hall steps to celebrate their teacher's wedding. That class was from my daughter's school, and the little girl quoted in the article is the sister of one of my daughter's best friends. Her parents are also friends of ours, people we know from the school and from our synagogue. As mentioned in the article, that girl's parents, two women, are planning to get married within the next two weeks, before that right may be taken away from them. This case has become a causes belle for the Yes on 8 crowd, and is all over the right-wing blogosphere, stated as the realization of their worst fears, though really also as the fulfillment of their expectations. I talked a few minutes ago to one of the girl's mothers, who is rather distraught, about how our children would navigate the media storm that apparently has descended on our school, and how people who oppose Prop 8 are angry that the school allowed this to happen, because it gives ammunition to the Yes on 8 crowd.

When I read the article about this wedding and the class's attendance on the front page of the Chronicle a couple of days ago, it never occurred to me it would be a problem. I felt a flush of happiness at feeling close to such a sweet thing, and when the article mentioned that some controversy was already appearing I felt a flush of pride at the comment from our principal (also a member of our synagogue, fwiw), who defended the children's attendance. The idea that somehow every moment children spend in first grade is so filled with academics that they cannot afford to share in the joy of their teacher's wedding at City Hall (only a few blocks from school) is absurd. The idea that the Yes on 8 crowd is using this as a poster issue is disgusting.

Peter, whether or not we would wish it otherwise, marriage is the name of the game. Even if there was such a thing as a civil union that was exactly legally equivalent (and there is no such thing right now), to deny the term "marriage" based on anything other than the joining of two people into a family is simply wrong. I wish you would reconsider your position. In traditional European societies marriage was a business relationship between two families, having more to do with the passing down of property than with love. Now, marriage is the way society recognizes a love relationship that is meant to last for a lifetime and join two people together. Can we in good conscience, with true morality, and yes, even with the love that God has granted us, can we seriously say that marriage should be limited to those who have the right set of organs between their legs? What business is that of ours, and how can any of us be so arrogant as to say that two adults who love each other should not be able to share the state of marriage, the state which our long tradition has placed at the center of family and society?

In a world where Britney Spears can can married in a drunken stupor in Las Vegas and divorced days later, where 50% of marriages end in divorce, where the pregnant 17 year old daughter of the Republican VP candidate is going to be forced into marriage with her unwilling boyfriend and the Republican Presidential candidate is married to the woman he picked up in a bar while married to his first wife, the idea that marriage is some sort of special and sacred institution that cannot be extended to gay people is simply unsupportable.

Santa Ana winds

2008-10-14T15:29:00.002-04:00

I am waiting on renders at work so i can sneak in some posts.

I have now switched to Beach Cruiser mode instead of skating around the hood due to my thankless ankle. But a new danger has revealed itself. The winds are up to 60 miles an hour. which in places like NYC, have always meant watch out for flying debris from off the sidewalk. Here its the debris from above that is dangerous. Palm trees shed some really large palm stalks and often they come tumbling from like 100 feet above...in the dark. they land in the middle of the street and on cars, and on people. right now, the streets are covered with the palms, which are sharp and stick up in weird angles. it looks pretty much like a small tornado came through.

Another bit of excitement created by these winds is, of course, wild fires. I was driving up and over the mountains heading north on the 405, when suddenly the left lane is a line of Highway Patrol cars racing north with their lights and sirens at full blast. As I peeked the hill and saw into the valley, I was met with an image that immediately reminded me of the huge smoke pillar downtown on September 11th. I have seen forest fires before, once in a valley i was staying in in Napa, and at other times, on road trips mostly out west. but this one was clearly in a city. or at least the edge of the city. there are houses set right into the middle of the fire, and you can see all the lights of the fire engines and police clustered in the area.

And thousands of us, maybe millions, all driving to work, thanking fate that it ain't our neighborhood we are looking at. It's like being right next to a disaster, but not in it.

Westsiiiide...whoa.

2008-10-14T14:52:00.003-04:00

The ocean wind on my face, Orion's belt peeking through between palm trees gently swaying in the breeze as they pass by above me and my swiftly moving skateboard. the streets, only barely familiar to me, revealing themselves to be somewhat inconsistent in the quality of the concrete, yet consistently quiet and dark.

The excitement of knowing I have brought myself to this place, that this is what I wanted, and I now find myself finally doing what i had pictured in my mind. Skating Venice at night. just blocks from the ocean, where large and perfectly formed waves crash in the dark. In a few hours, the sun would rise in the east and light up the water, for my first free Saturday of surfing. All is good. I am drunk and doing a pretty good job at flowing along despite unseen cracks and holes everywhere. I am a good skater...dude. I can still olly, and every now and then i land a kick flip. I rule.

Suddenly, the street disagrees with me. It's like "brah, your 35 years old...suck it". my board stops as it hits a deep pothole and the wheels get caught. my relaxed stance of uber-confidence is suddenly horizontal and my right ankle rolls over the tip of the board as i splay out my arms and slide into a concrete home plate located somewhere under a parked pick-up truck. pain seers through my leg as my usually pretty athletic ability to fall, politely and quietly, declines to come to my aid in this moment of need and catharsis.

Defeated, I get up off the ground, look around at the uncaring trees around me and the empty, yet mocking street under me. I pull my abandoned board out from under the truck and try to skate away from the whole embarrassing scene of come-upence. But the ankle has another idea. It decides it's going to stop functioning for a month or so. It's like "dude, we're done". Take a seat, son.

The next day, I woke up to a big mortadella salami instead of a foot and hopped to a taxi to get to the hospital in Santa Monica. on a side note, best emergency room ever. there's a large flat screen TV there to watch, but i didn't get to watch it because before i could even get my paperwork done, I was "fast-tracked" into the doctors office, handed a bottle of Vicodan and given x-rays. an hour later i was back at home with the knowledge that there was nothing torn or broken. just my icarus-like hubris.

It's raining meat...

2008-10-13T18:15:00.000-04:00

There's Mortimer!!

You gotta love cats

2008-10-10T14:17:00.002-04:00

This guy Simon Tofield, really gets it.

COMEDY GOLD

2008-10-09T13:10:00.000-04:00

Triumph the insult Dog meets David Blaine

Shifting Gears to Bi-Coastal

2008-10-07T18:08:00.006-04:00

Is bi-coastal even a word?

Sooo, I guess NYC just can't have me all year long anymore. I'm sorry, but with global warming muscling out snow days, yet falling pathetically short of overpowering the cold fronts and their tendancy to piss cold rain. Nowadays, I am WAY less prone to wrap up in a jacket and bear my way through it, especially after living in a permanent state of Springtime in San Francisco for almost 6 years...and perpetual summer in LA for 2 years.

Add that to the "improved" or "gentrified" change in the culture of the city itself, with it's obvious loss of that "Where the Wild Things Are" state of mind, and the torturous taming of the beast by Connecticut and every suburb within an airplane or car ride, I no longer find myself amazed by it. The excitement that once overwhelmed me whenever i was out and about in NYC has faded. Now, I am all too aware of all the great places out there in the wide world beyond the five boroughs. NYC works it's magic on me only when juxtaposed against these other places. I need to miss it and what's left of it's originality. I need to miss the museums, the parks, the pizza. Of course I DON'T need to miss my family and a lot of my friends. That I could do without. But I think NY's appeal will mainly come in warmer months, and in a sense that it is still a bit different from LA or SF. It still stays up late, it's still big and intimidating (although only in a sense of size, not danger and culture), it's still the new Rome, ands I am still a born native. So I hold on, just not as tight.

Which brings me to a new winter season of posts. Posts that might involve NYC, but only in an anecdotal way, or in a relative way. These posts are my winter in LA posts. And rest assured, they will carry weight and meaning in a NYC sense, because you can take the who-ski out of the what-ski, etc etc.
yada yada. So game on, Venice California...

Remixes and Combos. Like those special edition comics where heroes team up.

2008-10-07T14:27:00.003-04:00

Transformers!!!

2008-10-03T13:45:00.000-04:00

ILM rocks!

WORKSAFE PORN

2008-09-29T13:15:00.001-04:00

http://view.break.com/577249 - Watch more free videos

Palin Couric SNL

2008-09-29T13:12:00.000-04:00

I know its supposed to be funny. but really, it's basically one degree shy of the truth.

Navigation System, go fuck yourself

2008-09-22T17:52:00.020-04:00

There's no denying that i am in love with my car's navigation system. I have invested over $2000 to fix it twice over the last 4 years. I leave it on all the time, looking at it even when i am making a drive i am very familiar with. first of all, i love maps, and second of all, there is something comforting in the knowledge that my car knows where i am and where i am going at all times. but recently my faith got shook twice on a long solo road trip. the first incident happened up at 9000 feet above sea level in the mountains of Wyoming. I was going over one of the highest passes that interstate 80 takes on it's long journey over and across the continental divide. It was dark and I had about a half tank of gas. but even with that limited fuel, I knew that i could most likely make it to Laramie, a supposedly large town (large by Wyoming standards, which probably meant that there was a bunch of fast food spots and a hotel). what i wasn't sure of, was what exit it would be or if i had to use a secondary road. So i had to depend on my navi and wait for the car to get close enough to see the turns on my 8" by 8" screen.

I started to notice wisps of clouds floating across the road. at first the smoky little puffs resembled the ghosts of large animals like elephants and woolly mammoths floating slowly across the pavement. they were kind of interesting to me and they broke up the monotonous look of the winding yellow and white lines of the pitch black road ahead. I was blasting through them in the same way that you blast through those steam leaks coming up through manholes in the city. they are solid looking until your car blasts through them without any resistance. but to my alarm, these puffy clouds quickly multiplied in frequency, becoming at first a herd of them, and then before i knew it, i was in fog so think that i literally couldn't see more then 10-20 feet ahead of me. i turned on my fog lights, which helped a bit. then it got worse forcing me to turn off my regular headlights because the white splotch the light made in front of my car was almost blinding.

there was one truck that flew by me at about 40 miles an hour. by that point i had slowed to probably 30 mph so as to not fly off the bending road. i had no idea how far of a drop off on either side was, or even if there was a shoulder at all. i tried to chase the truck's red tail lights for a bit, but to see them i had to literally be within 20 feet of them. i'm not one for extreme tailgating in the dark on a lonely mountain pass, so eventually the tail lights got ahead of me and quickly faded into the thick haze.

It was at this nerve racking moment that i looked to my navi monitor for comfort. to my chagrin the fucker had frozen up and gone blank. it's done that once before. It was when i was going to an important party for my grandmother in some god-forsaken part of long island with my sister and both of our girlfriends in the car. of course, that incident didn't leave me and my passengers in a possible life or death situation. unless you find getting lost in Long Island akin to dying. it was only annoying because i had to then call my grandmother for directions after so pompously refusing them...plus i hadn't actually needed the Navi for months since i always knew where i was going. this new and ill-times malfunction had to be the god awfullest worst timing imaginable. to fix it i would have to pull over and restart the car. only i had no idea if there was even a shoulder to pull over on. i couldn't even see signs that were probably just a few feet away. i didn't know if there was an exit or not, if i had missed mine, or even if i was on the right road. even if i had seen an exit, getting off would have been perilous because it would be impossible to see how to get back on or where to go from there. i might end up following a dotted line to nowhere.

so, despite the butterflies in my stomach. despite the sense that i could be in really serious danger if i took a wrong turn or tried to stop on the freeway. i just gripped the wheel and stayed determined to follow what i was pretty sure was still I80 all the way until it started going downhill again. I turned on some Jazz music because that was the best way i could still feel like things were ok, like i was still in the middle of civilization. I was going to have to do this the old fashioned way (old fashioned like 1995). I figured if a bunch of illiterate frontier men could do it by donkey wrapped in dried pelts, then i could manage it in my 740il BMW. but i was both vexed by my usually reliable satellite link cutting me off, and kind of nervous about how to get back to civilization before my gas ran out.

thankfully, about an hour of this crazy soup driving later, i noticed that i needed to brake a lot to keep under 40mph. This was an indication that i finally was descending the backside of the pass. if you can't see any horizon, you lose the ability to judge uphill and downhill except by the way the car speeds up or slows down. 30 minutes after realizing that i must be going downhill i started to notice a red color in the haze. and then all of a sudden, like a sheet being pulled back from my eyes, the fog cleared and i was looking out over a vast valley filled with city lights. I pulled over and restarted the car and the navigation told me i had "arrived". thanks bitch.

the second adventure was even crazier then that one. I was driving down to LA from San Francisco, after spending three days haunting my old city, hanging out with friends whom i didn't realize how much i missed until i saw them. it's amazing how you can become part of a community and then disappear for a year and a half, and then come back to people who greet you like you never left. it's actually a great feeling. i know i have a home there if i should want it back (which i often consider).

anyways, I took the scenic route as i do whenever i am on an official "road trip", but i have learned that that ride can be 10 hours if you do the 1 the whole way. so what i do to compromise, is to drive west on Geary street in San Fran all the way to the beach. get out, walk to the water, say hello to the pacific since it's the first time i've seen it in a while, and then drive south on the 1. it's a gorgeous and intense ride all the way down through the big sur. but really, once you pass the big sur, you might as well head inland and jump on the 5 and shave 3 hours off the second leg of the trip. i decided to let my know-it-all navi find me a route to the 5 from the 1. it came up with one pretty quickly, as a matter of fact it popped up and said to turn in 800 feet. i slowed down quickly and turned onto a small, almost hidden road with a cow barrier. i didn't see any signs and it looked well paved and used. i also had my map set to 25 miles per inch, which sometimes gives a winding road the appearance of a straight road since it doesn't have the resolution to render all the little bends in the road. so in essence, the road looked like a straight shot on my digital map. i also noted that i should have plenty of gas based on the distance to the 5 and what my car said my range was.

What followed the most intense road i have ever travelled. this insane experience didn't happen because my Navi malfunctioned. this one happened because it WORKED. It knew of a road that it really shouldn't have. actually, NOBODY should know about this road. it should NOT be on any map for any reason. well, apparently, as my girl's military brother says "assumption is the mother of all fuck ups". he also says things like "whats wrong with your S.A. (situational awareness)?!" these are both phrases that i should have considered during the split second decision to follow this road. my S.A. was highly FUBAR as i was making several ill informed assumptions.

The road soon started to ascend up into the mountains. I expected this because there's no other way to the central plains then through the mountains. so I was happy to have found a mountain road fully stocked with hairpin turns and awesome views. it was pure driving pleasure, and there was nobody around to spoil my nature experience. the sky was blue with an occasional fluffy cloud and the vegetation was surprisingly thick and green for the end of the summer. my guess was that the mountains were so steep and rugged that the weather pattern was perhaps wetter then other less extreme parts of the coast. there were brilliant purple and yellow mountain flowers and hawks flying over them, hunting for field mice and other small mammals. i was blasting America and Bread to add to the mountain-america drive.

Slowly the road got higher and higher up, to the point where i could see over the edge of the road down thousands of feet to the sea. plus the road was getting narrower and narrower. my wide car was basically just holding the outer edges, and sharp turns became VERY sharp. it got exhausting. an hour of this driving passed and i realized that i was still pretty much at the beginning of the road. i zoomed in and realized that the road was more like the pattern of the brain, or a complex maze you might find in a cognitive exercise book. i realized that my sense of distance had been entirely mislead. i also realized that i couldn't even turn around on the road due to the fact that it was one lane, and there was no shoulder and a sheer drop-off. that's when my situation started to sink in. my gas might not actually do the trick. and i was too far in to consider anything besides continuing along the way. plus, I hadn't seen ANYBODY ELSE ON THE ROAD.

A bit later, after countless blind hairpin turns and steep inclines, the road started to level off and descend again. trees started to appear on the side and i could see that it became a bit less curvy, but it also entered a thick forest. so now i am throwing the car into neutral and coasting as much as i could to try and save gas. the trees were redwoods and eucalyptus. my favorites. the fragrance in the air was pristine and i knew i was in bear/lion country. as soon as i thought that, i came around a turn and stopped short. there were 5 guys, armed to their teeth, wearing paramilitary like outfits standing in the middle of the road. i looked at them...they looked at me. there was a nice long moment. my black BMW with Manhattan plates, their high powered assault rifles and side arms and camouflage. one of them said something to the others and they slowly, reluctantly, cleared a path. I rolled past them and just said "thank you gentlemen"...no response. i watched them carefully in the rear view, getting ready to floor it if they should start taking their rifles off the shoulder straps. this wasn't Kansas, Toto.

So with that surreal moment fresh on my mind. the growing awareness that i could be heading headlong into some para-military training camp or worse, i continued on. the forest got thicker and thicker, the turns got more and more frequent, and the sun became more and more dappled. my sense of imminent disaster was growing and growing with each turn. then, around one of these turns, i was suddenly face to face with 4 motorcycles and their riders. these guys were taking a break in a glade and i was CLEARLY not expected or invited. but they weren't BLOCKING the road, so i nodded and just kept on driving past that scene.

A few more miles and i was starting to check my phone to see if i had any signal in case i needed to call somebody and explain that i was going to die in the mountains of central California. i realized that i could have at least given my coordinates thanks to the same fucking Navi that got me into the situation in the first place. no signal though. i was fucked.

Then I came around another turn and had to stop short facing a military road block. there was a toll booth and a sign saying that i was approaching a military base. Since i was just relieved to see Americans whom i might be on the same side as, i rolled up and stopped to let them approach.

The heavily armed guy who came up to me looked very surprised at my appearance. He asked me what i was doing there and i just pointed at my Navi. "I wanted to get to the 5 and this stupid thing told me to take this road. I just want to get to LA."

He seemed to relax and told me that i had taken a military road and that it goes through a certain fort on its way to the 5. he also said that he could let me through but needed my IDs and registration. I happily gave them up since it meant i wouldn't have to go back and run out of gas on that crazy road. He checked my info and wrote some stuff down and then gave them back to me. he then told me that i couldn't use my cell phone or take any pictures...and that for no reason should I stray whatsoever off the road. I nodded my agreement and said i was sure to just go right through. He also mentioned that there was a single gas station in 30 miles. i had about 80 miles left of gas. PHEWWWWW. i was safe.

At least i thought i was safe. that road, my friends, was not exactly the safest place to be. and i quickly learned why i wouldn't want to stray. there were tanks all over the place, they were practicing maneuvers and blowing shit up on the sides of hills. and there i was, the most lost guy in the state of California, equipped with satellite GPS. in the middle of a military base...an active military base. i don't think i can get specific about this, as i think it's kind of a secretive thing. but i can just say that what i saw, what i drove through was FAR from what i had expected when i set out that morning with a chocolate milk and croissant in hand.

Needless to say, I made it through. I got gas. I got to the 5. Navi, go FUCK yourself.

The Front Fell Off

2008-09-22T17:47:00.000-04:00

"the environment is perfectly safe...we're out of time?"

How to deal with financial ruin...

2008-09-17T13:14:00.003-04:00

I'm back at a computer again...yay.

Izmir Turkiye and the call to prayer

2008-08-28T18:50:00.006-04:00

It was 5AM in Izmir. I had arrived late in the night before, on my way to Ephesus to see the ancient ruins of a roman port city. The only room we could find was down an alley in a very scary part of town. the room had a back door that i couldn't lock and it led to some rather sketchy rooftops. It seemed like a setup to my un-trusting new york self, so i hid my credit cards and blockaded the door with all the furniture in the room and devised a desperate plan to smash a book shelf on any intruder's head as they tried to navigate the pile of stuff in between them and us. i had the key in the lock and knew which direction to turn it even in the dark, and told Amo to head straight out just in case.

I slept fitfully but well, occasionally a strange noise had me lurch forward out of bed, only to realize it was a cat, or a rooster scurrying around in the alley out back. i had no idea what was beyond the alley because in the late hour of arrival i was unable to see anything in the unlit streets beyond. but at 5AM, came the sudden and haunting tone of the Adhan. the call to prayer. it was still a foreign and startling phenomenon to my american ears, but i knew what it was. i opened the window to see the light coming up on the eastern horizon. it showed the silhouette of several minarets and winding dark streets and old ottoman buildings set into large foothills.

at around the same time and slightly offset came the same prayer, from different singers in different mosques in the immediate area. they kind of filled in each other's pauses and acted as a chorus of deep soul wrenching tones. needless to say, it was very moving moment for me. not only marking the end of a long tense night, but opening my vacationing agnostic eyes to a deep seated cultural spiritualism and love of religion that i had never really known before. i saw a cat stop walking across a roof and sit down to watch me, and down the street a rooster began to cuckoo loudly, as if trying to match the power of the broadcast. there was a dog barking and a cool breeze blowing in through the sheer window shade against my face.

i have felt the tug in my heart as a child reading the bible stories about jesus being crucified. i know the sense of awe and humility in pondering god. what god must be capable of, what he/she might think about me personally and what the consequences could be if any one of these religions are right about sin. i am agnostic, i don't know what happens after death but i am capable of grasping that there could be an afterlife, just as quickly as i can believe that there isn't one. i have read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse and believed truly that someone can achieve an enlightenment where they suddenly understand everything. i have looked into a river as he did, and felt that the truth must be so simple, yet so infinitely fantastically impossible to fathom. I have felt the definite sense of leaving my body while deep in meditation and wondered if that meant that i had a soul, a part of infinity and separate from time. but i still don't know what any of my wandering experiences tell me.

what i do know is that this moment in Izmir was something special. it was, i guess, a small window into a large and foreign world. a huge intense religion that stems from one that i am familiar with. they believe in Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and of course, Gabriel. they believe in the total homage to god and really, the rest of it is just cultural. but the belief in one god, one purpose is the same. the overwhelming emotion and focused spirituality of this prayer echoing through the silent sleeping city proved this to me. i had just earlier looked upon the collection of religious artifacts in Topkali Palace in Istanbul and had made assumptions when, after seeing Moses' walking stick, and the golden arm of John the Baptist, i had gazed upon the arsenal of Muhammad. the man had three golden swords and a bow. my judeo-christian mind hadn't quite processed that a holy man could carry around weapons and still be holy. but again, that wasn't the point of the weapons, or the artifacts. it was just the remains of these men, who had loved one god, in a world that loved the elements individually. they had felt a different and maybe "higher" truth even when faced with death and worse. it's very moving, and this call to prayer, on this morning really caught me off guard and overwhelmed me.

then about 2 hours later, PKK blew up a car in the city and injured 19 soldiers. but that's a political battle, not one about god.

2008-08-14T20:04:00.004-04:00

I have been in Venice Cali for the last week, and tomorrow i leave for Turkey until the end of the month. I know, I know. Life just won't be the same without my verbiage.

In the meantime, check out these two gems.

my sis's blog. she's on vacation too, so it might just be pics from the wilderness. you can never get enough of the wilderness...
http://jihky.blogspot.com/

my dear friends blog. he has a similar theme to me, only he gets to the point.
http://www.thingsiholddear.com/

The best live performance of the Star Wars theme EVARRRRR!

2008-08-07T09:57:00.002-04:00

Oh man. The world without beauty pageants would be a sad, cold, lonely place...

She's got spin moves like Yoda and, clearly, the force is strong with this one. LOVES IT.

I <3 Paris Hilton

2008-08-06T15:07:00.016-04:00

"I bet the engineers at Mercedes Benz and McLaren never thought of this problem when they designed the 617 hp and almost half a million dollar SLR McLaren. How do you prevent a celebutard from decapitating herself on gullwing doors?"

Most people I know need to subdue a gag reflex when talking about Paris. But I have always cheered her on as she glides through life with an air of ease that we can all only dream of. She has never pretended to be anything besides a pampered airhead, yet people seem to despise and resent her, or love her, like i do. Almost as if she is stealing her fame from people who would otherwise deserve it. As if truly deserving it, or working for it even matters in today's world! A vast number of people resent her fame like it's all that's wrong with America. I think Britney Spears really holds that title, where Paris seems to define how to play America for what it's worth. Britney was a well packaged and overly produced piece of white trash who left us all wondering how her awful music got on all the radio stations. Her trashiness is now only evident after years of drug and family related decline, and a pot belly. Where Paris is still gliding away in the public eye, regardless of having never really proven to anybody that she has any particular talent. Well I say, Bravo to that. Paris, show us how incredibly vapid we really are. I think we need some real honesty in our media branded lives.

In my book, Paris is the modern version of somebody like Princess Di or Jackie Kennedy. She can merely stand in front of cameras and smile and end up on the cover of every known magazine on the rack. I think that this is because she represents the pinnacle of our society. She is the result of being born at the top. It's a class thing, even though she has none. But, the real reason she has no class, is because nobody cares about class anymore. True old school grace isn't even understood by the masses of today. As Paris has illustrated, a well placed sex tape is as effective a PR maneuver as a ride in the royal carriage to Buckingham Palace.

When Paris got her own TV show I was amazed at how funny she could be. Simply by behaving exactly the way you would expect somebody would when they grow up answering to nobody and getting everything they want. She is American Royalty, get over it America. You are looking in the mirror.

As far as her looks are concerned, I actually never found her attractive until she made me laugh on her show. I mean, she has no tukus, and I am a certified ass man. But I respected her "honesty" and her complete lack of regard for the tightly strung farmers and red staters she was torturing on her show with such reckless abandon. It was a perfect example of how money works, and what's right or wrong about capitalism. She defines freedom, at least the idea of freedom that we champion here. So it was that she appealed to me by using her perceived flaws and turning the whole thing around on its head. that made her HOT.

here she is charming a grumpy bus passenger she calls "Milly"

Now she has impressed me yet again. Her self-spoofing ad knocking McCain raises her up another notch in my book. She knows what people think of her and she knows how to make it funny. Bravo Ms.Thing, you go girl.

Paris Hilton Responds to McCain Adfunny videosFunnyOrDie.com

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

One thing you HAVE to know about riding a motorcycle

2008-07-31T11:06:00.008-04:00

I was driving up the Henry Hudson Parkway on my way to work and i took a turn that I always take near 191st street. Suddenly a memory of one of my first motorcycle rides came back to me on that turn and i got the chills down my spine. A motorcycle is, as we all know, an extremely dangerous way to travel. But one thing that nobody knows when they start off is that they don't turn like bikes. I have a lot of experience riding bikes, i got my first one as a child with tassles on the handles and a large banana seat. I got to know my city by biking everywhere as soon as my parents let me go outside on my own. That developed into a real romance with two wheeled vehicles and i eventually became a bicycle messenger at the age of 21.

All of this biking experience was in no way a primer for riding motorcycles. in fact, my competence at riding damn near killed me on that very turn when i first bought a 600cc Kawasaki Eliminator (see below). take this as my attempt to save a life when i say that motorcycles do not behave at all like bikes. there is a fundamental difference that i rarely hear people talk about and i had never heard of by the time i took this turn at 60 miles an hour.
the physics of a bike going over 40 mph are completely different from what you might assume. once you are moving that fast you no longer turn by the normal means of aiming the tire in the direction of the turn. it's called COUNTER STEERING (I found this link after writing this post) and it's something that a rider absolutely HAS to understand. to turn right, as i needed to that fateful day, you need to turn the handles LEFT. this is completely counter intuitive but absolutely true. when you are moving that fast, what happens is the bike turns in the direction that it is leaning. in other words, when you see motorcycle races where the riders are so leaned over that their knees scrap the ground, its really the leaning, and not the handling, that makes the bike go in the proper direction . if you turn the handle bar left for a right turn the bike tilts to the right, as if its falling over from inertia as you turn right. then, and only then will the bike turn right.

I learned this at 60mph as my bike started to fail the turn when i assumed i needed to turn right for the right turn. i saw the yellow line of the side get closer and closer as my incorrect handling put my life in danger. by the time my hand and foot were inches from the 4 foot dividing wall that seperated the uptown traffic from the downtown traffic i realized the "leaning" necessity and threw my weight as hard as i could to the right. that just barely saved my handlebar from scraping the concrete which would have pulled the wheel right into the wall and sent me into a deadly over-the-handle-bars flip that probably would have ended my life either by the impact, or by flying into oncoming traffic. my heart was in my throat and my life was hanging by a thread.

so, be aware of this fact. COUNTER STEER when you are finally moving at break neck speeds on a two wheeled contraption of any kind. steer left to go right, and steer right to go left. you will thank me for this if it ever comes up.
note: the orientation of his shoulders. they are oriented to the left, as if he is turning left. but. in fact, he is turning right. THIS WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE. it's amazing to me that nobody tells you this when you buy a motorcycle. you have to figure it out the hard way or look it up.

Jamaica 1992

2008-07-29T14:33:00.012-04:00

It was a wild trip for me. I had never been down there and had no idea how intense the culture was and how absolutely lawless. My friends and I were young college students who had just been set free in the world with limited maturity and even more limited budgets. The trip itself was minimal in cost. I think I spent a total of 300 dollars on two weeks. the flight was 140 and I ended up renting a chicken coop that some industrious Jamaican grandma had thought to put a window and a bed in it..after removing or eating the previous chicken tenants. I believe that sheet metal structure cost me about 5 dollars a night, of course there wasn't a bathroom or a fan so it was bare bones living. But i was at the perfect age for that and all I really cared about was saving money for the "partying". Plus my coop was right next to a large room with a patio that my friends were renting and they had a bathroom that i could use.
the coop

Considering that a full garbage bag of weed was about 50 bucks and the cost of other things like that were equally as negligible, we ended up over doing it by a lot. One girl lost her mind in the middle of the second day while on the beach and was actually never quite right again. Another friend of mine, Honan, ate some "space cakes" and ended up turning into a turnip the next day. We literally carried his limp body from one shady spot on the beach to another, turning him over when we thought he might be burning. At one point we ordered food, and of course it took two hours to arrive. In Jamaica you will get handed a menu with, say, eggs on it. You then order it, asking if they have it, they nod, and then a second later you here a motorcycle start up and drive off. That means that they didn't have it, but had a motorcycle and YOUR time to go out and find some.

there's Honan in a stuper, the guy behind him was suffering but not quite as much

So, this time the lady comes back with food, finally, and gives everyone their dishes. She's left with eggs and toast and starts getting annoyed that nobody is claiming them. we turn to Honan and ask if he ordered eggs and toast and he just nods no. She storms off muttering about white people and a minute later Honan looks up and says "i'm hungry". We look at him and somebody asks if he ordered. He says "yeah, eggs and toast"

Honan recovered the following day, slightly slower then his usually slow self, but at least he was using his legs again. So we spent a nice uneventful day in paradise, puffing large spliffs and drinking Rum Creams and Dragon Stouts. The water there is always that perfect temperature and very calm. Everything was easy going except we kept on noticing a very tough looking Rasta guy with a large machete lurking around the bushes surrounding our rooms and my chicken coop. The grandma who owned our "inn" mentioned that he was her nephew and had come down from the hills to be "security" for her guests. well, we didn't feel all that secure, but once we knew this glaring character was working for the lady we assumed we could just relax and enjoy ourselves. so we did.

The next day we all went on a moped journey up through the mountains to some falls and our guide took us to his home and his very own field of ganja. it was a day i would label as "cultural" in terms of a Jamaica vacation and it was, in fact, very informative. It's a beautiful and rugged country, extremely poor, yet extremely proud and independent. There is a good deal of racism down there, due to the harsh history of the island and hundreds of years of slavery and abuse. I like to think of myself as being a "modern" white urban male, in that i am aware of the history but magically, because of my "coolness", i can manage to avert the consequences of racism towards me almost anywhere in the world.

I learned the hard way that isn't true down there. I'll admit that attitudes shifted once i got to mention coming from NYC, that carries weight in Jamaica since there is such a large connection between the two places and they all hear that NYC is a tough place...but if that never comes up.. I am a just another WHITEY BUMBOCLOT. I made the mistake of allowing my friend Imo, an attractive athletic African American from the south side of Chicago, the option of not renting a moped and riding on the back of mine because she was scared to fall. She wore close to nothing and had the relaxed look of a native riding on the moped of a tourist. That suddenly was brought to my attention when we were riding through towns up in the mountains. the winding mud roads would come around a turn and suddenly there would be hundreds of Jamaicans, out in the road walking about or dancing to the ever present Dance Hall music, It was usually blasting from speakers wired anywhere from rafters in the town's actual dance hall, to the branches of trees.
there's Imo in the middle and I am in the back all skinny with a ponytail

well, these towns would see the guide and clear a path, then they would see all the Whitey Bumboclots on their rentals puttering through in single file, until there was me and Imo. then they would lose it. Yelling to her to jump off and stay with them and actually start closing ranks and finally, after I would gun the acceleration to get them to jump out of the way, they would turn and literally chase us out of town. A few threw things at us, mangoes mostly, but a bottle exploded pretty near us.
We got home after many mishaps, including three accidents and a break down (not me, but others on the journey). After it got dark, my stupid moped's headlights broke, right as a storm rolled in about 2 hours before we got back to Negril. So i turned on my turn signal and it was like driving in half pitch black, half yellow lit jungle. Now you see the road, now you don't. I quickly learned to survey the lay of the road well ahead of me during the brief moment my signal was on. This was so i could coast while it was off and i was surrounded by pitch black peril. All that while in a tropical downpour of epic proportions which, in turn, formed little rivers in the road. Plus, Jamaicans were flying by in both directions, driving in cars not meant for off-roading, at speeds not meant for the autobahn, let alone mountain roads in the night rain. It was one of my most exciting rides ever.

Later that night we decided to unwind on the beach by taking a bunch of mushrooms and drinking for hours. My memory of that night is pretty foggy, but i do remember that at about 5AM I suddenly woke up to some laughing outside of my chicken coop and decided i wanted to rejoin the party even though it was absurdly late. so i went out and noticed my friends Matter and Berg "the slurg" Dorfman ( a name i coined myself after he refused to stop calling me "Matoose" for no other reason then the fact that i reminded him of an old friend by that name). they were sitting out on their little patio enjoying a spliff and some smokes. I also noticed an empty jug of Rum between them and knew they were totally wasted.

They welcomed my awakening by pulling out a chair and handing me the 6 inch spliff. Then we had fun talking and puffing for a while, until one of us noticed the glistening of eyes in the bushes about 15 feet from the edge of the patio. we hushed a bit and then there was some movement in the shadows around where we could see the eyes. There wasn't any moonlight so the darkness was pretty intense. I remember saying "I think there's somebody there". just when i said that the Rastaman comes out of the shadows and we can see him, standing their in the dark. He was wearing just a loin cloth and was holding a bottle in one hand and a dark metal object in the other. It was a gun. We all knew that instantly. there was a breathless silence, very long and very tense. until we started hearing the sounds of his low quiet voice. He was speaking in heavy Patwa (the local dialect) which made it almost impossible to understand over the sound of crickets and jungle insects all around. But we did start to catch on a bit. He was talking about how he killed white men before and how he was in the army up in the mountains. He was telling us a story, not really caring if we understood what he was saying and almost talking so quietly that it seemed as if he was muttering just to himself. the awkwardness and intensity of the situation scared the shit out of me. I knew he was as fucked up as we were and that he wasn't actually mad at us, but i had no idea how this would end up. especially, when my two blitzed friends started to laugh.

I was in a different world then my two friends. Matter and Berg had been pounding Rum for hours while i slept and they were way more scrambled then I. the nervousness must have gotten to them, or maybe they were really THAT fucked up that it was actually funny to them. either way, i gave them sharp looks and was like "Shhh!". but they wouldn't stop. it turned into one of those things where the laughing got more and more out of control. as if they were high and watching Super Bad for the first time. only what we were watching might have SEEMED surreal, but in fact, was VERY REAL. I tried to make the guy know that I wasn't laughing and that they were drunk, but to my surprise the guy never changed his position or his story. he seemed to not hear the laughing or not consider that it was him who they were laughing at, he just kept on talking about some horrible war-time killing he had been a part of. slow and deliberate the story crept on, with the occasional thrust of his gun into the air and a Patwa sound effect of gunfire. in the end, i got the impression that he had literally just confessed to some awful crime in front of us. but since we could hardly understand most of what he said, and we were clearly out of our gourds from days of substance abuse, that it was tantamount to confessing to a mango tree. it might have made him feel better without actually meaning anything or having any consequences.

What was interesting about that man in the shadows and his gun wielding tale, is that he was no longer around the next day and we never saw him again. That trip set the tone for my college breaks. I ended up going back no less then 8 times. but those 7 or so times afterwards were never as crazy or intense as the first window into that island.

Career Day South Central Los Angeles

2008-07-28T21:18:00.008-04:00

On my drive when I was moving from San Francisco back to NYC, i stopped by my girlfriend's sister's school in South Central LA and spoke to a class of 30 or so 12 year olds. It was a great experience just to get to see a small window of what a class is like over there and to get them excited about animation. It's actually not very hard to excite kids that age when talking about Shrek and Madagascar and my guess is that they behaved better then usual with me around.

One great benefit of being an animator is that kids LOVE animation. Sometimes the daily grind makes me lose sight of how many young minds are captured by the silly things i do, but all i have to do is talk to some kids to be reminded of that.

My memories of cartoons as a kid are magic. I used to marvel at simple Hannah Barbara cartoons as a boy, sitting in front of the tv in the morning with my 5th bowl of cheerios. Later on, even in college, movies like Fantasia blew my mind as i watched the work of hundreds of artists come together in a two hour visual symphony of motion and color. I can only hope that kids these days view my work with the same awe.

To digress for a moment, when I was living in San Francisco and working on Shrek 2, there was a very touching moment with one of our fans. This young girl was suffering from some horrible affliction in a hospital bed in San Mateo. She wrote to our studio about how much she loved Shrek and how it made her days in the hospital easier. we saw pictures of her in her hospital room and it ended up mobilizing the studio to collect tons of Shrek toys and memorabilia. The kind of stuff we got for free just by being employees but never really used. We ended up filling her hospital room with Shrek stuff and when the pictures were posted it was unforgettable. This young girl's smile was ear to ear in a forest of games and stuffed ogres. That moment made me feel like i was really making a difference in a small way for many people. If i consider that Shrek2 was the largest grossing film in Animation history and was swiftly the 3rd most grossing film of all time. That's a LOT of young eyes watching my stuff. THat kind of realization goes beyond liking what i chose to do for a living. It gives it real world legitimacy.

Back to the class I spoke to. Here are a sampling of the thank you notes i got back from these kids. these are my top 10 thank you notes:
click on the pics to enlarge...

My MOM is awesome....

2008-07-28T13:13:00.007-04:00

...For a billion reasons, but the one i just thought about was her knitting skillz-nillz. She has been knitting since I started having memories. She won several 1st place blue ribbons at various country fairs, both in Vermont and Martha's Vineyard. She has also knitted me everything from funky loud ski sweaters, to my favorite winter hat.

My winter hat that she made for me when I was about 18, is grey and blue and has a big Pom-pom, as per my requests. One other thing that makes it TOTALLY AWESOME is that it has my tag on it...ZEN II in big knitted letters across the front! what what? beat that, moms of the world.

Mr. Rogers

2008-07-28T13:00:00.009-04:00

He kind of spooked me with his shoe changing routine and sweaters. I never trusted that he was SO sweet and nice. I guess the guys in my life who wore sweaters like that, and were old, were my two grandfathers. One grandfather was a P.O.W. gunner who got shot down over France in WWII. He is tough as nails, drinks and smokes, and is raw and raspy like real men should be. I love him and always like seeing him, but Mr. Rogers would have turned and fled had my poppa walked onto the set. The other grandpa was my dad's father. A huge russian bear of a man, who's very presence at the dinner table had the effect of a storm cloud. He used to eat whole chickens in just a few bites, pausing only to spit the larger bones out.

So along comes Mr. Rogers on my tv set. all grandpa like, but without the glass of scotch and thunderous presence. It took me a bit to warm up to the slightly grey haired shoe changer. but i did, and i grew to love the show. Especially when he walked to the set of the 70's TV series "the Incredible Hulk", and ended up talking to Bill Bixby and a green Lou Ferrigno.. one of my favy's at the time.

Mr Rogers Hulk Interview
by RedPortiaOne

CNN just posted some factoids about the saint like guy and i wanted to share them because they really are some incredible things that i never knew...

1. Even Koko the Gorilla loved him. Most people have heard of Koko, the Stanford-educated gorilla who could speak about 1000 words in American Sign Language, and understand about 2000 in English.

What most people don't know, however, is that Koko was an avid Mister Rogers' Neighborhood fan. As Esquire reported, when Fred Rogers took a trip out to meet Koko for his show, not only did she immediately wrap her arms around him and embrace him, she did what she'd always seen him do onscreen: she proceeded to take his shoes off!

2. He made thieves think twice. According to a TV Guide piece on him, Fred Rogers drove a plain old Impala for years. One day, however, the car was stolen from the street near the TV station. When Rogers filed a police report, the story was picked up by every newspaper, radio and media outlet around town.

Amazingly, within 48 hours the car was left in the exact spot where it was taken from, with an apology on the dashboard. It read, "If we'd known it was yours, we never would have taken it." Mental Floss: Memorable commencement speakers

3. He watched his figure to the pound. In covering Rogers' daily routine (waking up at 5 a.m.; praying for a few hours for all of his friends and family; studying; writing, making calls and reaching out to every fan who took the time to write him; going for a morning swim; getting on a scale; then really starting his day), writer Tom Junod explained that Mr. Rogers weighed in at exactly 143 pounds every day for the last 30 years of his life.

He didn't smoke, didn't drink, didn't eat the flesh of any animals, and was extremely disciplined in his daily routine. And while I'm not sure if any of that was because he'd mostly grown up a chubby, single child, Junod points out that Rogers found beauty in the number 143.

According to the piece, Rogers came "to see that number as a gift... because, as he says, "the number 143 means 'I love you.' It takes one letter to say 'I' and four letters to say 'love' and three letters to say 'you.' One hundred and forty-three."

4. He saved both public television and the VCR. Strange but true. When the government wanted to cut public television funds in 1969, the relatively unknown Mister Rogers went to Washington.

Almost straight out of a Frank Capra film, his 5-6 minute testimony on how TV had the potential to give kids hope and create more productive citizens was so simple but passionate that even the most gruff politicians were charmed. While the budget should have been cut, the funding instead jumped from $9 to $22 million.

Rogers also spoke to Congress, and swayed senators into voting to allow VCR's to record television shows from the home. It was a cantankerous debate at the time, but his argument was that recording a program like his allowed working parents to sit down with their children and watch shows as a family. Mental Floss: Forgotten kids shows sure to give you nightmares

5. He might have been the most tolerant American ever. Mister Rogers seems to have been almost exactly the same off-screen as he was onscreen. As an ordained Presbyterian minister, and a man of tremendous faith, Mister Rogers preached tolerance first.

Whenever he was asked to castigate non-Christians or gays for their differing beliefs, he would instead face them and say, with sincerity, "God loves you just the way you are." Often this provoked ire from fundamentalists.

6. He was genuinely curious about others. Mister Rogers was known as one of the toughest interviews because he'd often befriend reporters, asking them tons of questions, taking pictures of them, compiling an album for them at the end of their time together, and calling them after to check in on them and hear about their families. He wasn't concerned with himself, and genuinely loved hearing the life stories of others.

And it wasn't just with reporters. Once, on a fancy trip up to a PBS exec's house, he heard the limo driver was going to wait outside for 2 hours, so he insisted the driver come in and join them (which flustered the host).

On the way back, Rogers sat up front, and when he learned that they were passing the driver's home on the way, he asked if they could stop in to meet his family. According to the driver, it was one of the best nights of his life the house supposedly lit up when Rogers arrived, and he played jazz piano and bantered with them late into the night. Further, like with the reporters, Rogers sent him notes and kept in touch with the driver for the rest of his life.

7. He was color-blind. Literally. He couldn't see the color blue. Of course, he was also figuratively color-blind, as you probably guessed. As were his parents, who took in a black foster child when Rogers was growing up. Mental Floss: Praise for the blind genius who invented cruise control

8. He could make a subway car full of strangers sing. Once while rushing to a New York meeting, there were no cabs available, so Rogers and one of his colleagues hopped on the subway. Esquire reported that the car was filled with people, and they assumed they wouldn't be noticed.

But when the crowd spotted Rogers, they all simultaneously burst into song, chanting "It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood." The result made Rogers smile wide.

9. He got into TV because he hated TV. The first time he turned one on, he saw people angrily throwing pies in each other's faces. He immediately vowed to use the medium for better than that. Over the years he covered topics as varied as why kids shouldn't be scared of a haircut, or the bathroom drain (because you won't fit!), to divorce and war.

10. He was an Ivy League dropout. Rogers moved from Dartmouth to Rollins College to pursue his studies in music.

11. He composed all the songs on the show, and over 200 tunes.

12. He was a perfectionist, and disliked ad libbing. He felt he owed it to children to make sure every word on his show was thought out.

13. Michael Keaton got his start on the show as an assistant. He helped puppeteer and operate the trolley.

14. Several characters on the show are named for his family. Queen Sara is named after Rogers' wife, and the postman Mr. McFeely is named for his maternal grandfather who always talked to him like an adult, and reminded young Fred that he made every day special just by being himself. Sound familiar? It was the same way Mister Rogers closed every show.

15. The sweaters. Every one of the cardigans he wore on the show had been hand-knit by his mother.

KUNG PAO FRESHNESS

2008-07-25T10:58:00.003-04:00

created by Jamie Hewlett

The year of the monkey

His is the pen behind Eighties comic-strip heroine Tank Girl, virtual band Gorillaz and the opera Monkey - and soon you'll be seeing his animated title sequence for the Olympics on TV.

AND...
BAMAN AND PIDERMAN by ALEX BUTERA

Mosaic Bench around Grant's Tomb being rebuilt

2008-07-24T17:32:00.009-04:00

NY1 reports

The mosaic "Around the World" themed bench winding it's way around the Neo-Romanesque tomb for Grant is finally being restored. Visually it can most be compared to a creation by Antoni Gaudi, solid but organic. It morphs and meanders randomly and depicts the various cultures of the entire world through colorful little tiles of glazed pottery. It was always a fun excursion for me when I was a kid. I could walk to it with my parents from my apartment and school which were on 111th street and 112th street respectively. It is around 124th and Riverside Park. It was always a starkly different kind of place from the rough neighborhood and it made my young mind aware of the world of art, memorials to the past, and the cultures of the world SIMULTANEOUSLY. the fact that the same artist is rebuilding it warms my heart.
Above 110th street was quite the dichotomy. Pimps, Hookers, Addicts, Catholics, and Liberals all living in the shadow of the largest Gothic Cathedral in the world.
This is 112th street. I went to school on this corner from 3 to 13 years old.

there's no place like Uptown. even now that it's been taken over by gentrification and the ever expanding reach of Columbia University. There's still Koronet, the largest pizza slices on earth...and they still have video games. although I doubt the tough kids who used to pull knives out are still there...
Commentary by the son of the Artist rebuilding the mosaic bench:

"I was quite young. I was 9, 10, and 11. We took three years to do it," says Tony Silva. "I remember this was a pretty tough neighborhood back then. There was lots of, you know, young hoodlums and gang members around and they were kind of scary folks, but little by little they started to come around and work on the benches themselves and it made them a little less scary to see them excited about a project like this."

Graffiti mission debacles with Self

2008-07-24T11:51:00.010-04:00

If anybody read my post about hitching a ride to 42nd street on an out of service train, please go back and read what i added about Self. I left him completely out of the story having been confused with another story that was similar, as it turns out, as he pointed out, he was there BOTH times. I can't imagine what i would be leaving out if i waited another 10 years before writing these down. memory is fleeting...unless there's a soundtrack :)

He got me thinking about some other moments we shared. Like the time we were taking tags on 96th and Broadway one night in the heavy rain. We found that bombing (writing graffiti) in the rain was a great idea. first of all, you could hide under a big umbrella so it just looked like there was somebody standing near the wall, maybe lighting a cigarette. Also, cops back then didn't want to deal with writers, they had murders and violence to quell, and to jump out of the squad car in the rain was doubly unappealing to them.

So there we were, Left-One was doing big bubble letters on the old...ehh i forget what used to be there, it was like a supermarket or something. Self and I were watching out for cops in the middle island in the intersection. Self had bad long distance night vision so it was mostly up to me to watch for incoming. I was usually pretty good at it, and if i saw anything i would yell "WATER!". that was our code for 5-0's rolling. But this time my good eyesight was useless because these motherfucking Detectives suddenly jumped out of a Yellow Cab.

Cabs in NYC were the ULTIMATE undercover vehicle for cops. We actually considered it cheating on their part. You could spot a regular squad car with the lights on top from miles away. You could also get good at spotting unmarked cop cars because they were always dark colored Chevy Caprice Classics and had a very distinctive rounded shape. But there were always ten to twenty Yellow Cabs in sight at any given moment. We just wrote them off as non-entities. In other words, I would walk up to a wall, right in front of a fleet of cabs, even in their headlights, and just start tagging away without a thought to who was watching. Those cabbies probably saw a LOT because nobody ever thought to wait for them to pass. And usually, DT's (Detectives) never bothered us because they were too high level for Vandalism, but these guys felt the urge to do it this time. Before I could even yell, two plain clothes cops had thrown Left hard into the metal gates he was writing on, getting a nice amount of his own fresh paint on his face and chest. Self and I just stood there astonished. we knew..from experience..that it was best for us to stay anonymous just in case somebody had to go to the precinct and bail him out.

What followed is a CLEAR indication of how things used to go down on the upper west side before all the Yuppies moved in. the cops made him hold his large umbrella over THEIR heads so they didn't get wet. then they searched his pockets, found his big bag of danky weed, POCKETED it, and then told him to take a hike. they got back in their sneaky ( and somewhat UNFAIR) unmarked Cab and took off, leaving Peter with all of his unused paint. we continued our bombing mission after that. only now we couldn't get high...

Speaking of smoking while on a tagging mission, another memory I have of writing with Self, besides the time I had to bail him out of the Chinatown Precinct at 4AM, was when we decided to bomb the truck yard near Grand Street and Lafayette. We used to love getting into lots where the big boxy white trucks that deliver around the city are left at night. If there weren't any guard dogs then you were free to go in. The trucks were perfect because they were all white, and they got all over town daily. like rolling advertisements. plus, they were always parked so close to each other that nobody would know you are there and you could wedge your legs between them to reach very high spots.

Self and I planned on doing this one night. we got there very late, like 3AM and decided to roll and smoke a blunt and then do our mission. Only we got some Tabla from 106th street. this stuff was like mystery meat. it was questionably little and dense and definitely wasn't all weed. It also took down quite a few people at one time or another. One friend ended up losing his mind right before graduation and had a convulsive fit RIGHT in front of the dean. others would just panic or start throwing up. the two of us considered ourselves too hearty to be knocked down by one blunt of it. So we sat in the little triangular park where Lafayette and Kenmare come together.
after about 10 minutes we suddenly realized that we were zonked out of our heads and proceeded to get paranoid and freaked out by what we were planning on doing. I always freaked out a little on the inside before going writing. so much could go wrong back then. several times i would be rolling out for a mission and a black cat would cross my path. that was an all too common happenstance for me and it always put butterflies in my gut.

but this time we just plain over smoked ourselves. we sat there staring in fear at the yard and wondered what was going to happen if we went in. we talked ourselves down slowly, until the panic wasn't as total and finally, reluctantly, trudged forward to meet our fate. I believe we just sat there wide eyed and zonked for about a half an hour, like two of the three stooges. nothing ended up happening to us that night. we tagged the shit out of those trucks.

2008-07-23T12:13:00.005-04:00

My Broseph Bro-ham Budster, Dear, posted an image that has hung in my room since i can remember. It's from 1975 so i guess it was hung up on my wall when I was 2 years old. We lived on 111th street back then and it was ONE HELLUVA TOWN.

There are very few possessions of mine that are that old and well kept. My first ski boot from the age of 2, an egyption cat statue from the Metropolitan Museum, and that framed poster.

Life always has a soundtrack

2008-07-22T16:41:00.011-04:00

I love my ipod! before that i loved my CD walkman. and before that, I loved my walkman. I LOVE music, so much that I have to admit that I am listening to music most of my day. I miss meetings at work because when they are announced, i am lost somewhere in my music, animating to the beat. I daydream to it all the time and spend hours in my own world. I can identify with movies a lot when there's music playing. It's probably because a lot of my experiences are set to music in the same way.

Since I have a pattern of finding new music and then listening to it a lot until I start getting sick of it, the songs get ingrained into a set of memories. usually the memories of a time period that is about a month or two. Exactly how long it takes to get tired of hearing the song too much. That has the effect of essentially cataloging my life in terms of music, as if it is a library cataloging of life, by tunes. Often the songs have nothing to do with the memories in terms of theme, just in terms of coincidentally happening at the time of liking the song. so if i hear something like Bruce Sprinsteen's "Born in the USA" i don't get flooded with the memories of actually being born here, i get memories of living in Ireland and riding in my mom's rental car. it was 1985 and that song was on the radio all the time back then.

Hearing any old Fleetwood Mac or Beatles song can always transport me to the summer days of childhood. when I would lie on our Shag rug, in the Vermont sun, while my mom cooked yummy food from her garden and my dad grilled a perfect steak out on the porch.

My sister posted this gem. Just hearing that voice sends me spinning back in time. Stevie Nicks...I LOVE YOU.

Just imagine puffing on a spliff and macking out in THAT dressing room, that day.

If i hear an old Run DMC song i get the butterflies in my stomach as if it is just about to be my turn to perform in my old break dance troop.

It's the same way with distinct smells. hearing the song triggers the memory whether i want it too or not. mostly it's a pleasant thankfully, as most of my memories are pleasant. Sometimes i wonder if i would be able to get these memories so completely and clearly if it weren't for the sudden re-emergence of a certain tune. if i try to recall a memory without any song as impetus, the memory lacks the clarity and attached emotions and sensory experiences of the memory. it's usually just "paraphrased" rather then, when a song pops on, i can suddenly remember the very mind state of the time of the memory. i can remember how i felt, and what i thought about while listening to that music. it can often be so strong and surprising that i catch my breath.

I would love music even if it didn't have this incredibly personal ability to remind me of times long past because music stands alone and appeals to me even the first time i hear it, without any past experiences to get involved. but the fact that it does do this to me, that i can travel through my life with a well thought out mix, just adds to its magic and too its power over me.

I have always had issues with my ears, and i was once told by a well meaning Doctor that i could eventually lose my hearing. i had only partial hearing as a small child so it wouldn't be anything new to me. But the part of this possiblity that always got to me the most, as i grew up, was the loss of music. I knew that i could learn sign language in a worse case scenario, but to lose music would be something that i have yet to come to terms with. that's a loss that i can't even imagine.

Checker cabs and double decker buses

2008-07-18T12:05:00.015-04:00

The Daily News put together an Ode to the NYC taxi in honor of it's 100th anniversary...

Here i am sitting in a somewhat cramped back seat of a modern NYC taxi. I have my own AC controls, a credit card swiper, a GPS locater and television. Its a far cry from my memories of the huge tank like checker cabs i grew up with that had so much room that you had a bunch of feet between your toes and the divider. A large gadget-less void that was big enough for a potential nose dive if the cab stopped short. especially since there were no seat belts back then to stop your body from trying to steal home base. I remember the huge cavernous space and high, nearly vaulted roofs of those old tanks very fondly. I am, of course, happy that AC is now standard in cabs. especially considering that it is currently 95 and humid. back then there was no escape from that heat, even if you stuck you head out the window while the car was in motion. but i really miss those fold out seats to accommodate 6 people or just a mom and her squirrelly son. The fold out seats weren't big or comfy by any stretch. But i loved sitting in them and facing my mom, dad, or sister and making faces at them as i watched the city blocks recede in the rear window.

I also remember a lot of arguing about how to get places and how much it should cost with the drivers. But maybe that was brought about by feisty parents. i think it was also due to a lack of standard when it came to meters and how often they were faulty or broken. They used to be mechanical so the driver would flip down a lever and the thing would start ticking to time and distance (hopefully). Its funny how nowadays i don't even consider that the meter might be over charging. Back then my dad definitely did. I have no less then 5 separate memories of fights erupting between dad and driver. my dad's a rather big guy who wrestled in college so he was a very intimidating guy in a fight. Unless, of course, if the taxi driver was ready and grabbed a tire iron. When that happened my dad's ability to duck and weave suddenly displayed itself. He was fast! Ahh, the good ol' days.

Another fond memory about nyc transportation was the old double decker buses. They were bigger then the ones in London and riding in them gave me an eagle eye view of the neighborhood. I loved those buses so much that i made my mom or dad wait for one to come. As they got removed from service one by one, those waits starting getting more and more fruitless. I guess that was one of my earliest experiences with the odd sensation that "progress" in NYC doesn't necessarily mean "change for the better".

I don't want to eat chocolate or look at animals...

2008-07-16T17:46:00.002-04:00

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BEAT STREET

2008-07-16T11:15:00.003-04:00

Linoleum taped to the floor of the bedroom...nuff said.

That's not outer boroughs. A lot of that was filmed around Manhattan.

Hitching a ride on an out-of-service train WHILE on acid

2008-07-15T14:44:00.042-04:00

Is dumb. dumb. dumb. dumb.

but 19 years later, it makes for a pretty good blog post. so here it is.

I and three of my good friends were on acid one night, down in midtown. I think we wanted to go to one of the video arcades in times square that no longer exist. they were the kind of places that most resembled the bar on planet Tatooine in star wars. Smokey, dark, and extremely dangerous, even for Han Solo. the scum of the earth lurking behind every corner, waiting for a chance to prey on the weak. they would take your quarters and walkman at knife point if you weren't paying attention, or just decide to beat the shit out of you for getting close to their high score. a lively and fun social spot for three young boys knee deep in hallucinatory influences. believe it or not, none of us had ever even read any Hunter Thompson yet, so we were pretty much cutting our own path through the jungle of insanity.
It was hot, africa hot. or worse yet, NYC hot. sticky and no movement of air. you would inhale your own breath if you didn't keep moving. kind of similar to sharks that can't stop swimming in order to breath. we were in the 50th street station on the blue line waiting for a downtown E or C train. we had taken up one of the thick wooden benches that used to be in all the stations. it was around 2 or 3am so nothing was coming. my friends were all smoking cigarettes, i might have been too actually. all i remember is that i was really messed up and the smoke was just sitting there staring at me. it was so hot the smoke didn't rise up and away, it just got thicker and thicker and enveloped me completely.
between the heat, the spinning visuals going on all around me, and the dense reeking smoke, i began to get sick. well, i didn't begin to get sick. i GOT sick. i lurched forward and sprayed the ground beneath us with a nice even coating of barf. so now you can add the smell of that, and the look of partially digested pizza to the mix and the environment became quickly intolerable to the 3 of us. Self, Cosmos, and Ages (my three amigos) jumped up and ran away from the bench while i wiped the shrapnel off my lower lip.

I should take a second to briefly describe my three fleeing friends. not just because they were, and still are, very important to me. but also because they have very interesting backgrounds and were part of the flavor of NYC back then.

Ages came from a pretty poor household. he lived in a very small apartment with his Dominican mom in the projects behind Lincoln center. His neighbors were very dangerous drug dealers that covered their front door with "Jesus Loves" stickers in a show of humorous irony, or maybe it was to throw off the cops. i never asked them. but Ages was always the center of the party. everybody loved him and he had somehow managed to parle' himself into one of the best private schools in the city where he was very popular. he was a football and baseball star. he was also unbelievable funny and always down for adventure. to this day, i find that my friends and i still quote him regularly. unfortunately his awesome sense of humor wasn't universally appreciated by the uptight asshole teachers of Fieldston High School as much as, say, my sense of humor was. of course MY parents paid thousands of dollars in tuition so tolerating my miscreant behavior became simple economics. Where he got fucked out of a diploma and ended up disappearing off the map somewhere near San Jose, i was allowed to graduate. it's really very very sad.
Ages and I on 181st street in front of a burning van. circa 19 years ago.

Cosmos was also not very well off either and he lived in subsidized housing in hell's kitchen. He was the child of Algerian parents, spoke 5 languages and was basically too smart for his own good. He ended up in trouble simply by making people feel small in comparison. He was one of those guys who spoke of Inner Chi energy and focusing oneself in the universe. Right before lacing on some Doc Martin Steel tip boots and swinging from a street sign to karate kick someone in the head ( that's not a random analogy. it happened). He was the super genius who got dealt a bad hand. His mother moved to Alaska to become a Moony (the cult), and his dad was kind of a loose canon. he was the kind of lunatic that could only come out of the old school...and he came from old school Algeria. I once went to his house in the projects and his dad asked him if he wanted dinner. he said yes, and the next thing i know the guy is yelling and screaming at us in a language i can't even recognize. he then throws a packet of baloney at us before kicking us out. his dad eventually kicked him out for good. roughly around the same time, he was caught with a hit of acid at Horace Mann, kicked out of there, and was suddenly on his own. My mom ended up saving the day by putting him up for a few months and then using her clout as a defense attorney for foster care children to get him into the Kaplan house on St. Marks Place. but thats a whole other story. needless to say, Cosmos was a boy who faced tough odds, but was more then well equipped. he was that flower child who could kick ass and score higher then you ever did on any test. As a matter of fact, Cosmos moved out to oregon and got a masters in brain activity and is currently on his way to London to start a brain related job. it's always good to hear from him.

Self was more or less the leader of the pack most of the time. He was from the upper east-side and before that Governor's island and before that Hawaii. His dad was in the military so he was the one guy in our inner crew who had actually lived outside of NYC. He was also the first one of us to get into Graffiti via an older, very well known writer who managed to pass to Self a lot of skill and technique. Self was by far the most talented writer and artist we had and he raised the bar on us, which i think made us all work harder to get our own art up to a certain level. He was also key in getting us all into skating. By the time we were a writing crew we had already been a skating crew. Everywhere we went was by board, we always had them tucked under our arms or under our feet. It was more then a mode of transportation, it was our lifestyle. We often mixed the two pastimes. skating around taking marker tags was a great way to spend a night..or day. thanks to Self, both of these themes came together in our crew. We weren't thugs, as we liked to think, or as some people ended up thinking of our crew...we were like Self. Artists on wheels. Although I can't leave out one of Self's better talents. He didn't take no kinda shit from nobody. Most of our fights came from that aspect of him. people misread him because he had the look of a nice jewish boy, but the heart of a, um, lion. Now he is living in a great house in LA with a half-pipe in his backyard, which is approved of by his lovely and successful wife and two adorable kids. His artistry is still flowing, only now, like me, he has gone digital. he helped make the Harry Potter films amongst other great films, and now he is making an 3D/2D animated version of the widely known comic Block-Hedz.
Self-One...his backyard in LA...

So these three power houses had left me in a cloud of their smoke and a puddle of the consequential up-chuck.

"yo, where you guys going?!" I yelled as i got up and slipped in the puddle a bit trying to catch up with them.

"Fuck the train, it's not gonna come. let's go through the tunnel to forty doo-wops! We gotta get away from that nastiness" said Ages over his shoulder.

Now, in retrospect, OF COURSE THE TRAIN WOULD COME. just not in the time that we wanted it too. so i nodded in agreement and we walked to the downtown end of the platform. gave a quick look back at the station, saw nobody, and proceeded to enter the darkness. It's the local so we were up against the far wall where there is a foot wide ledge that you can walk along. slowly. if you lose your footing you fall about 5 feet onto dark tracks. there are rats, puddles of sludge, and all sorts of sharp and dangerous nooks and crannies to fuck yourself up on in the pitch blackness. there was also the hum of the third rail below, just waiting to turn one of us into the next Ramo of Beat Street. so we had to use the distant light of the 42nd street station and the occasional dirty light bulb to make out the thin ledge from the dark void.
Every 2 blocks or so there was a small exit to another shaft that seemed to be mostly for workmen. They were also good places to go when trains pass. But the long arduous stretches between them were just ledge. although the wall we were up against wasn't straight. it was a repeating alcove or arch-like indentation that was about 10 feet wide. at its deepest it was about 3 feet and at it's edges the ledge width was a foot. it made it difficult because one second we had enough room to face the direction we were creeping along in, and the next second we had to turn sideways and slip carefully past the outer edge of each alcove. it was hair rasing and slow. and we were...again...on acid. I tried not to freak myself out by looking too long at anything or trying to see into the pitch black at all. i just kept my eyes on Ages' Fieldston Football shirt. It was one of those brightly colored jerseys that had the school orange on it. his number was in bright white and the sleeves were bright white, making it visible in front of me.

It was after about 4-5 blocks that i noticed something changing. we were deep into the tunnel, about half way and i noticed the front side of the tracks getting lighter. then i noticed Ages getting lighter. I turned to see what was doing that and saw it. It was a train. And it was already pulling out of the 50th street station where we came from. the headlights where big and getting bigger. I guess we figured we would here it before it got too close, but we didn't. probably because we were making so much noise ourselves fucking around and joking about what we were doing.

"HOLY SHIT! GET TO THE NEXT EXIT NOW!!" I yelled. I see the flash of 3 sets of eyes look back over my shoulder and suddenly disappear and start moving forward away from me. I chased after them. but it was too late. we couldn't run for fear of bumping on of the alcove sides and falling in and we were too far from the next dimly lit exit. I would say we had a city block to go to get to the next little workmen exit. Cosmos suddenly stopped at the deep part of one of the alcoves of the wall and mushed himself up against it. Ages then flattened next to him and i was last to flatten myself up to the wall. I remember Ages trying to put his arms around the three of us and pushing towards the wall. there was a lot of "Oh Shits" and "Fuck dudes" and "This is crazy" remarks and I remember feeling the filthy concrete all cold and wet against my face. I peeked to my right just in time to see the train barreling down on us. I peeked down at my feet and could tell in the train's headlights that we had about a foot and a half between us and the edge of the ledge. What i was really worried about was the off chance that something was sticking out from the train or if the train's speed and size would create some kind of wind vortex that might pull us into it. I also remember thinking that i wanted my mommy.

The next thing that happened was pretty much unbelievable. The driver must have spotted Ages' bright white sleeves wrapped around Self, Cosmos, and I. The horn sounds really loudly and keeps on blasting as it passes us. the screech of the breaks being pulled and the train whizzing by was incredibly loud. our own screams got completely swallowed up by it, and yes, we were a' screamin'. I would like to take a moment now to mention that this story happened TWICE. everything up to this point was basically the same both times. but the time i am not talking about was graffiti related, and when the train came to a stop and the doors opened two cops came flying out just barely grabbing us before we ran top speed back the other way. You can run much faster when the light from the train is illuminating the ledge and you don't have to worry about falling into the tracks because the train effectively prevents that from happening just by being there.

but back to the acid trip time. this time the train stops, and one lone door opens. a fat face pops out of it and yells "Hey, whada fuck are yuz guys doin' here?! Yuz aint allowed on da tracks! Get inside here!"

We raise our heads and look incredulously at this random conducter and realize that he just wants us to get on the train. "We thought that the train wasn't running and didn't have enough money to go out and walk down to 42nd and then pay again" said Cosmos. smart guy that he was.

The conductor just shakes his head and mumbles that we weren't allowed on the tracks again. We looked at each other, realized that this guy was a bit "slow" and we weren't going to get much trouble from him. so we boarded the train. In the light of the train i got to see that both of my friends were now black like charcoal from the dirt on the walls. we looked like chimney boys from mary poppins. the train doors close behind us and the train starts moving. a minute later we pull into 42nd street and the train comes to a stop halfway in. the conducter steps out and uses his key to open just one door for us. "Dis train is outta suyvice. yuz boys don't do that again..ok?"

we nod at him and step off the train. i remember there were a few people at the stop who seemed very confused about why three filthy boys who clearly didn't work for the MTA got off an empty train half pulled into the station. we had literally just hitched a ride from the conductor.

2008-07-14T13:56:00.003-04:00

NY1 reports that NYC might lift the ban on dancing that has frozen people for decades now. the city limits dance floors to establishments that pay for a very expensive "Cabaret" license.

it was mostly ignored until Guiliani squeezed the life out of the city by cracking down on just about everything.

I think the impact of this is a lot bigger then New Yorkers realize. It's been footloose up in this piece for too long. yay!

Sesame Street it ain't anymore...

2008-07-10T15:36:00.013-04:00

One aspect of the gentrification process i have had the pleasure/horror of witnessing in my neighborhood since the 80's is the sudden disappearance of old old friends. I don't mean the friends that you call to meet for dinner or drinks, or the kind you go to the beach or park with. i am talking about the "deli guy" or the "lock smith guy". the guys/girls that you deal with on a daily basis, the ones whom you exchange short but pleasant small talk with. the ones that mark your day, like you said hi and chatted with the "newspaper guy" on the way to the subway every morning and that was one marker in your daily schedule.

these people used to have the effect of making me feel like i was in a small town, even though the empire state building was looming in the background. it made me feel like an important individual to my huge surroundings, not like i was being swallowed up by it. I was never at all anonymous, as i waved to this person or shouted "YO!" to another. because without those small acknowledgments of recognition, it is a very easy thing to feel surrounded, yet alone.

sometimes it would suddenly occur to me how well i knew some of these people, like Shim See the korean deli guy on 85th street and Columbus. I knew him since i was a kid, and he had given me my first summer job slinging frozen yogurt for $5 an hour. he had also sold me my first 40 ounce. he was , like, a MAJOR person in my life, as were so many other individuals i need to strain to remember.

nowadays, as i walk past the latest Starbucks or Fastfood spot that used to be a small family run Pizzeria, i realize that the loss is larger then just the good Pizza. what we are left with is overpriced coffee, frustrated and over juiced yuppies, no wait for placing an order but a looong wait to GET the order (ever notice that little corporate trick? mcdonalds does that too). Plus these places are staffed by surly impersonal people who clearly don't want anything to do with the customers they ignore every day, and they get replaced like once a week. it's really very sad to think about how much that changes a neighborhood. the mom-and-pop shops full of people who had pride in ownership or in what they did all day. I used to go to a small grocery store run by turkish guys and one of them, Oktay, used to make me guess how much my mom's bill would be. if i was within a dollar i got a free lollipop. try to find that kind of awesomeness in a whole foods and you'll be standing there all day being told to move out the way.

The most shocking aspect about this painful process is it's suddenness. it was like bombs going off randomly making places and the people in them vanish overnight. the LAST deli on Broadway thats within 4 blocks of my house went out of business last month. this means that not only has rising rent managed to knock out BASIC services (like toilet paper and a bagel) to a neighborhood of people, it has also managed to make old friends of mine disappear like thieves in the night. there's never a going away party, a picture opportunity, a chance to say goodbye. you just walk out of your apartment one day, and down the block to the deli like you have for the last few decades, and suddenly you are facing an empty dark abandoned room where your deli used to be. Mohammed and his sons will never again serve me that coffee that was a mere 60 cents and yummier then starbucks. they will never see me all drunk at 3 am jones-ing for a bagel or a chocolate milk and have a laugh about it. they will never sell me the ny times on sunday again. they are just memories now. just like that. poof.

to add insult to injury, i have no doubt that what will end up being there is useless to me. i will be walking another 2 blocks just for TP, and will pass 2-3 starbucks and 7 banks along the way. this gentrification thing goes a little bonkers after a while. at first it's exciting to not duck bullets and crack heads, but when the delis go, and all those neighborhood people that defined the community go with them, what are we left with? bad coffee and a bunch of assholes who have NO idea what used to be there. grrr.

I guess it's hard to realize that what you thought was permanent and a large part of the character of your hometown is in fact, just a phase in a fluid process of change. i always wondered why old people were so grumpy about change. now i am starting to understand. things don't always change for the better. but they inevitably change, especially a big crazy place like New York City. thats the price we pay for such a non static environment.

This is the kind of guy I was up against on the San Francisco single's scene

2008-07-08T15:47:00.002-04:00

The Douche levels are off the charts. It just gets better and better. Thanks La Rocca.

http://view.break.com/527579 - Watch more free videos

David Eddings and "the Will and the Word"

2008-07-08T13:12:00.040-04:00

This Image created by Geoff Taylor

When I was growing up I was an extremely lucky city kid because my mom took me and my sister on great vacations for the whole summer. we had started in Martha's vineyard, then Vermont, and ended up in Tuscany when i was 15. But in the summer of 1985, we were living in a poet's small house on the side of a mountain, overlooking a bay in Ireland. There was plenty of time to just live there, make friends, and get into reading books from the local library. I found an author who shook my world. David Eddings. Before that, and that summer, I had been a fan of science fiction and fantasy fiction mostly, and a morbid fan of religion/Christian based fiction on things like witches and the anti-Christ. the Christian lore was especially tasty that environment. I could walk a mile or two and find an abandoned Abbey that was built eons ago, washed in the red light of the sun setting over the Atlantic. Inhabited only by nettle bushes, cow poop, crows, and the occasional rabbit or cat. Sitting in that place, in the shadow of such a structure, reading about the war of angels and Satan seemed much realer then it would have, if i were reading it in Central Park. My imagination loved to try and grasp worlds far different from my own, but similar to the one i was getting a chance to see, and creatures that were like humans, but more interesting, like immortal Elves.
Photo taken by Krystian Kozerawski

Before that summer, I was also a huge lover of D&D and all things Tolkien. I was reading the Hobbit as i was learning to read, in Vermont, where I could walk into the woods and easily believe i was in middle-earth. these epic tales, that created worlds with maps, are in a lot of ways, still affecting how i dream and sometimes day-dream. I still would love to be able to learn a spell, or get into a battle on a warhorse, armed with a two-handed 6 foot sword enveloped in blue fire. It's a dork's paradise in my head sometimes. one that might feel at home at a Comicon Convention, but oddly, doesn't.

So David Eddings managed to grab my imagination at a perfect time. He created a whole world, with kingdoms that vaguely resemble Earth's historic kingdoms, and intertwined it with a set of holy books that outline a war between gods and religions that end up centering around our child main character. It was a bit soap opera-ish and often formulaic, but the characters were great and the story was epic. He also created a set of physical and "magical" laws, that allowed for a blurring of reality. i.e. magic that could be explained philosophically. I walked around spewing that philosophy all day in my own head. i talked about it to myself, mostly, and my sister who has an equally vast appetite for alternate worlds and possibilities. Questioning the "realness" of what i see around me, or at least the perceived disconnect between my mind and my surroundings. and being more questioning of the mundane, and less questioning of magic, legend, and prophecy. as if the latter might be more valid then the former. I felt in my young heart that there was a good chance that life would get far weirder and more like these stories then what has actually transpired in my real life (I am not a powerful immortal sorcerer, I am an animator). I unfortunately never learned the magic or became a Pawn of Prophecy like i so thought was a possibility back then. Not surprisingly, I then turned to learning how to VISUALIZE magic on tv and film. There's no getting closer to it, in this reality, without being disappointed.

David Edding's main stories revolved around a boy who learns that fate and destiny, and the basic struggle of the universe was based solely on him. who WOULDN'T love that kind of story? especially a boy of about the same age who dared to believe in the possibility that everything might be an illusion and that really he creates everything, or that everything happens because of him. the idea that maybe the earth was created just so he would have SOMETHING TO WALK ON, while he did the deeds that gave the universe it's very reason for happening. just imagine how empowering that is to a kid who isn't even allowed to drive a car, or drink a scotch at the pub in town? It's the kind of narcissism that makes a young mind ecstatic, expanding into the infinite possibilities of the future. I thought i was just some dumb kid with learning disabilities for a while there, now i was learning that i could actually expand into a god.

It was perfect. the boy learns as he gets older that he is the absolute focus of all that is evil, and all that is good, and that his mind is expanding as he is put into danger. he learns that his Will alone can make things happen. very much like it would in a lucid dream, only it was reality. Mr. Eddings is genius in his descriptions of the abilities and how they make an almost real sense in how it works. I started believing that if i just concentrated hard enough that I too would be able to change into a wolf, or eagle, or to call down lightning strikes by just throwing my will at the sky. or be able to morph my own body with the image of a wolf. transposed for a moment as my cells bow to the weight of my sheer thought. he called it "the Will and the Word" and i really thought it could happen. it wasn't an elvish spell that needed to be recited, it wasn't some witches mixture of potions and frog's eyes. it made sense. You bend your consciousness at an object, the force that gives you the strength live and think, and then use a word to communicate to that object, to funnel your thought into the real world and make the thought become reality.

there's a part in the story where Garion, the main character, and of course, the boy i wanted to be, rolls a boulder over. he was a novice, and just practicing his new ability. the rock's weight feels like it is on his body and he feels exhausted like he actually physically lifted the thing. when he manages to fight off the extreme fatigue, he realizes that his body sank into the soft grass under the weight and he was now stuck. his mentor laughs at his mistake and wonders why he never considered the laws of cause and reaction. he needed to exhert force under the rock, AND force down against his own weight against the earth itself. because, logically, the weight goes SOMEWHERE, and logically he ends up taking on the weight himself. it makes sense in a the paradigm we find ourselves in everyday. My physics teacher, Dr. Chuckrow no doubt believes in it too (if you believe in telekenisis in the real world, of course..which he did :)

I did too, sometimes I still do. but then, i felt like i could do it myself. It was kind of a gut feeling or inate suspicion that i had it in me. all it would take was TOTAL CONCENTWATION. So, i spent an hour or so, on the side of that Irish mountain, trying to topple a pile of rocks, and to force the sheep a few yards away, to drop their guard and walk right up to me. I would command the thought, and then utter a word to make it real. I figured if i couldn't do one feat, maybe i could accomplish the other. as if they were different uses of "will" and maybe i had more of a knack with dumb mammals then i did with dumb rocks. I kept on saying "Fall" to the rocks, and "Approach" to the sheep. like a dork. thankfully, i was alone on that hill with the sheep so nobody saw how silly i was.

to my absolute chagrin, I couldn't bring about either results. the rocks remained still, and the sheep got no closer then the 5 or so yards that they always tolerated (they were a lazy bunch of animals, they would allow me to approach to a certain point and then they would move as fast as i would, always teasing and tantalizingly close, but never close enough to touch...something that maddens a boy who considers himself a fast runner, to the point that i must have spent days on those hills trying to just grab one of them...but never succeeding) so to get them to obey my thoughts would have solved a major problem for me at the time. moving the rocks would have been cool, but not as cool as controlling the sheep. either way. my mortal, limited, no "will" having ass, couldn't do any of it. that was a hard pill to swallow. very much like the pill of getting your first job out of college. i thought the world would fall at my 20 year old feet as soon as i told it i was ready. but instead, i had every adult letting me know how much i DIDN'T know, and how much i COULDN'T do...and just how much they weren't going to just fall at my feet. I guess you need to learn how to walk before you can run.

You start out HUGE and endless, then you get struck down to infinitely small. life happens when you decide to go from there. from Infitely small, to bigger then that. that's what "the Will and the Word" taught me.

A sampling of my blackbooks

2008-07-05T22:48:00.008-04:00

click on the pics for enlargementoutline, paint drips, resulting piece

best peom ever written...wei wong.

the blotter page...
half-e artwork. notice the driver is on the wrong side. drawing oneself into a corner...

california writer

bask1 original.