united bamboo at bryant park

spring '09 collection - favorite from fashion week so far

i think i've got some clips you should see

cause i don't know where the cranberries are

make no mistake

neon gold

asp's sister just started a well named label and is putting out the 7" for the aforeposted passion pit single sleepyhead.

check out many endorsements:

volcanic legacy

some nikon fm 10 pics from an epic road trip through oregon with KKR.


we tried to go visit this island...


but got bombarded by a freak hailstorm as we hiked down to crater lake.


the rogue boat captain (total dude) said he hadn't seen weather so crazy in the nineteen years he'd been working there. all boat trips were cancelled and a snowball fight ensued.


and then i turned 24!

the respectacle

tim and eric of tim and eric awesome show great job are interviewed in this month's believer. as a new fan of the shows it's interesting to learn about the parameters they set themseleves as well as their specific aesthetic goals. i recommend reading in full but here's a chunk i found particularly edifying as a viewer:


BLVR: How bad, or good, was local Philly-area cable TV when you were growing up?

TH: Terrible. Just atrocious. I grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania. There was a show I loved called Al Alberts Showcase, which was on on Saturday afternoons. Al was an old man who would have these four- and five-year-old kids on his show. The kids were barely able to put a sentence together, but they were made to sing old standards. Bizarre.

EW: What I really liked, maybe even more than cable TV, were these old videotapes of high-school performances from the ’70s and ’80s. I was president of the A.V. club in high school, and I came to fall in love with that amateur style—in both the production and entertainment sense. Everything was so earnest and yearning and, in the end, very sad. It was riveting.

BLVR: Why was this amateurish style riveting for you? Did you find an authenticity with these old videotapes you couldn’t find elsewhere?

EW: Yeah—it was real. There’s a real person up on that stage; it’s not an actor in front of the camera. There was an awkwardness I always found fascinating. Why are they shooting this? Why are they performing this? Shit, why am I watching this? It was mesmerizing.

Tim and I still have this theory that the realistic will always outdo the inauthentic. Always. That’s the main reason we haven’t hired a professional sketch troupe for the Awesome Show. Real people, for better or worse—mostly worse—will always be preferable.

When we started Awesome Show, we knew we didn’t want to hire graduates from the Groundlings or Second City. If we were going to parody, say, a commercial for a local car dealership, we’d want to hire a real person who would just read what we told him to read. We knew we could get solid performances this way that we couldn’t have gotten otherwise.

TH: Even when we were doing Tom Goes to the Mayor, from 2004 to 2006, we would bring in nonprofessional actors and record their voice-overs. These people would produce such laughs—such genuine laughs—that it really improved the work. It made everything just sound better. These weren’t photocopy cutouts of people purposefully acting strange.

BLVR: I’d imagine it’s not too difficult to find these types of performers in L.A.

EW: Oh, it’s so, so, so easy. You’re just inundated with them in L.A.! Everyone is so desperate to be a star. Literally, practically every person who lives here has some sort of acting aspiration. Every once in a while, Tim and I will sift through these low-end websites and pick out hundreds of amazing headshots.

When these actors come in, they more or less don’t know what the hell they’re doing. And that’s exactly what we want. We stick them in front of the camera and just experiment.

BLVR: Are you concerned that once these actors become too self-aware, they’ll stop being funny? I always thought that was the case with Larry “Bud” Melman on Late Night with David Letterman, in the ’80s and early ’90s. As soon as he found out he could be intentionally funny, he ceased to be.

TH: Very much so. We have to guard against that all the time. Some of these actors want to act in a certain way, either to play up a joke or to sell a certain line—and it’s our job to tell them not to do that. We tell them to just act normal. Otherwise, it’ll never be as effective. In fact, it would be really lame.

BLVR: One of the things I like about the Awesome Show is that even though most of these performers are quite bizarre, you don’t mock them. They’re on the show and they’re doing their thing, but it’s almost like they’re part of the family.

EW: Part of the fun, right. And that’s really important to us. We never, ever want to seem like we’re manipulating them too much. We were never into bringing people onto the show and mocking them. Howard Stern sometimes does this, and we don’t like how he treats his gang of crazy people. It’s too brutal. Sometimes it’s funny, but mostly it just feels exploitative to us. I’m not into that idea of mean comedy.

TH: Not to sound too mushy, but we are also fulfilling a lot of these performers’ deepest dreams and wishes—which is to be on television. There is no other opportunity for these people to appear on TV. This is it.

BLVR: It also helps that you’re down in the mud pit along with the rest of them; it’s not as if you’re lording above them with your intellect and good looks.

EW: Exactly. We never put ourselves on a pedestal and make ourselves look like the cool guys. Even if we tried to do that, it would be impossible. We look terrible. You can see our double chins hanging out. We’re wearing makeup. Our faces are covered in Vaseline. We’re disasters.

reputation, posterity and cool are traps

patton oswalt recently returned to his high school in sterling, virginia to speak before the graduating class. below is the speech which is hysterical and poignant. part conan o'brien, part david foster wallace and part kurt vonnegut:

First off, I want to thank the teachers and faculty of Broad Run High School for first considering and then inviting me to speak here. It was flattering, I am touched and humbled, and you have made a grave mistake.

I’m being paid for this, right? Oh, wait, there’s some advice, right off the bat – always get paid. If you make enough money in this world you can smoke pot all day and have people killed.

I’m sorry, that was irresponsible.

You shouldn’t have people killed.

Boom! Marijuana endorsement eleven seconds into my speech! Too late to cancel me now!

It’s dumb-ass remarks like that which kept me out of the National Honor Society and also made me insanely wealthy. If I move to Brazil.

I graduated from Broad Run High School 21 years ago. That means, theoretically, I could be – each and every one of you – your father. And I’m speaking especially to the black and Asian students.

So now I’m going to try to give all of you some advice as if I contained fatherly wisdom, which I do not. I contain mostly caffeine, Cheet-o dust, fear and scotch.

I know most of you worked very hard to get here today but guess what? The Universe sent you a pasty goblin to welcome you into the world. Were The Greaseman and Arch Campbell not available?

So, 1987. That’s when I got my diploma. But I want to tell you something that happened the week before I graduated. It was life-changing, it was profound, and it was deeper than I realized at the time.

The week before graduation I strangled a hobo. Oh wait, that’s a different story. That was college. I’m speaking at my college later this month. I’ve got both speeches here. Let me sum up the college speech – always have a gallon of bleach in your trunk.

High school. A week before I graduated high school I had dinner, in Leesburg, with a local banker who was giving me a partial scholarship. I still don’t understand why. Maybe he had me confused with another student, someone who hadn’t written his AP English paper on comparisons between Jay Gatsby and Spider-Man. But, I was getting away with it, and I love money and food, so double win.

And I remember, I’m sitting at this dinner, with a bunch of other kids from the other local high schools. And I’m trying my pathetic best to look cool and mysterious, because I was 17 and so into the myth of myself. Remember, this dinner and this scholarship was happening to me.

And I figured this banker guy was a nice guy but hey, I’m the special one at the table. I had a view of the world, where I was eternally Bill Murray in Stripes. I’d be the one with the quips and insights at this dinner. This old man in a suit doesn’t have anything to teach me beyond signing that check. I’ve got a cool mullet and a skinny leather tie from Chess King. And check out my crazy suspenders with the piano keys on them. Have you ever seen Blackadder? ‘Cuz I’ll recite it.

And then this banker – clean-shaven, grey suit and vest – you’d never look twice at him on the street – he told me about The Five Environments.

He leans forward, near the end of the dinner, and he says to me, “There are Five Environments you can live in on this planet. There’s The City. The Desert. The Mountains. The Plains. And The Beach.

You can live in combinations of them. Maybe a city in the desert, or in the mountains by the ocean. Or you could choose just one. Out in the plains somewhere, perhaps.

“But you need to get out there and travel, and figure out where you thrive.

“Some places you’ll go to and you’ll feel yourself wither. Your brain will fog up, your body won’t respond to your thoughts and desires, and you’ll feel sad and angry.

“You need to find out which of the Five Environments are yours. If you belong by the ocean, then the mountains will ruin you. If you’re suited for the blue solitude of the plains, then the city will be a tight, roaring prison cell that’ll eat you alive.

He was right. I’ve traveled and tested his theory and he was absolutely right. There are Five Environments. If you find the right combination, or the perfect singularity, your life will click…into…place. You will click into place.

And I remember, so clearly, driving home from that dinner, how lucky I felt to have met someone who affirmed what I was already planning to do after high school. I was going to roam and blitz and blaze my way all over the planet.

Anywhere but here. Anywhere but Northern Virginia. NoVa. You know what a “nova” is? It’s when a white dwarf star gobbles up so much hydrogen from a neighboring star it causes a cataclysmic nuclear explosion. A cosmic event.

Well, I was a white dwarf and I was definitely doing my share of gobbling up material. But I didn’t feel like any events in my life were cosmic. The “nova” I lived in was a rural coma sprinkled with chunks of strip mall numbness. I had two stable, loving parents, a sane and wise little brother and I was living in Sugarland Run, whose motto is, “Ooooh! A bee! Shut the door!”

I wanted to explode. I devoured books and movies and music and anything that would kick open windows to other worlds real or imagined. Sugarland Run, and Sterling and Ashburn and Northern Virginia were, for me, a sprawling batter’s box before real experience began.

And I followed that banker’s advice. I had to get college out of the way but once I got my paper I lit out hard.

Oh this world. Ladies and gentlemen, this world rocks and it never lets up.

I’ve seen endless daylight and darkness in Alaska. I’ve swum in volcanic craters in Hawaii and saw the mystical green flash when the sun sinks behind the Pacific. I got ripped on absinthe in Prague and watched the sun rise over the synagogue where the Golem is supposedly locked in the attic. I stood under the creepy shadow of Christchurch Spitafields, in London’s East End, and sank a pint next door at The Ten Bells, where two of Jack the Ripper’s victims were last seen drinking. I’ve fed gulls at the harbor in Galway, Ireland. I’ve done impromptu Bloomsday tours of Dublin.

I cried my eyes out on the third floor of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, all those paintings that Vincent and his circle have to each other as gifts because they were all broke some cold Christmas long ago. I’ve eaten crocodile in the Laneways of Melbourne Australia and ortolans on the Left Bank of Paris, France.

I’ve been to Canada.

I’ve been to every state in this country. I’ve been to hidden, subterranean restaurants in New York with the guys from Anthrax and eaten at L.A. taquieras with “Weird” Al Yankovic. I held the guitar that Hendrix torched at Monterey Pop and watched Woodstock ’99 burn to the ground. I’ve lingered at the corner of Bush and Stockton in San Francisco where Miles Archer took a bullet in The Maltese Falcon, and brooded over the grave of H.P. Lovecraft in Providence, R.I. I’ve hung out with Donny Osmond and Jim Goad, Suge Knight and Aimee Mann, Bill Hicks and Don Rickles.

I’ve done stand-up comedy in laundromats, soup kitchens and frat houses, and onstage at Lollapalooza and Coachella. I’ve toured with bands, been to the Oscars and the Superbowl, and been killed in movies by vampires, forest fires and air-to-air missiles.

And I missed the banker’s lesson. 100%, I completely missed it.

In my defense, he didn’t even know he was teaching it.

Telling me about the 5 Environments and urging me to travel? That was advice. It wasn’t a lesson. Advice is everywhere in this world. Your friends, family, teachers and strangers are all happy to give it.

A lesson is yours and yours alone. Some of them take years to recognize and utilize.

My lesson was this – experience, and reward and glory are meaningless unless you’re open and present with the people you share them with in the moment.

Let me go back to that dinner, 21 years ago. There I was, shut off from this wise, amazing old man. Then he zaps me with one of the top 5 pieces of information I’ve ever received in this life, and all I was thankful for was how it benefited me.

I completely ignored the deeper lesson which is do not judge, and get outside yourself, and realize that everyone and everything has its own story, and something to teach you, and that they’re also trying – consciously or unconsciously – to learn and grow from you and everything else around them. And they’re trying with the same passion and hunger and confusion that I was feeling – no matter where they were in their lives, no matter how old or how young.

I’m not saying that you guys shouldn’t go out there and see and do everything there is to see and do. Go. As fast as you can. I don’t know how much longer this world has got, to be honest.

All of you have been given a harsh gift. It’s the same gift the graduating class of 1917, and 1938, and 1968 and now you guys got – the chance to enter adulthood when the world teeters on the rim of the sphincter of oblivion. You’re jumping into the deep end. You have no choice but to be exceptional.

But please don’t mistake miles traveled, and money earned, and fame accumulated for who you are.

Because now I understand how the miraculous, horrifying and memorable lurk everywhere. But they’re hidden to the kind of person I was when I graduated high school. And now – and it’s because of my traveling and living and some pretty profound mistakes along the way – they’re all laid open to me. They’re mine for the feasting. In the Sistine Chapel and in a Taco Bell. In Bach’s Goldberg Variations and in the half-heard brain dead chatter of a woman on her cell phone behind me on an airplane. In Baghdad, Berlin and Sterling, Virginia.

I think now about the amazing thunderstorms in the summer evenings. And how – late at night, during a blizzard, you can stand outside and hear the collective, thumping murmur of a million snowflakes hitting the earth, like you’re inside a sleeping god’s thoughts.

I think of the zombie movies I shot back in the gnarled, grey woods and the sad, suburban punks I waited on at Waxie Maxie’s. I think of the disastrous redneck weddings I deejay’d for when I was working for Sounds Unlimited and the Lego spaceships my friends and I would build after seeing Star Wars.

I think about my dad, and how he consoled me when I’d first moved to L.A. and called him, saying I was going into therapy for depression, and how ashamed I was. And he laughed and said, “What the hell’s to be ashamed of?” And I said, “Man, you got your leg machine-gunned in Vietnam. You never went to therapy. Humphrey Bogart never went to therapy.” And my dad said, “Yeah, but Bogie smoked three cartons of cigarettes a day.” And how my mom came down to the kitchen when I was studying for my trig final, at 2 o’clock in the morning, and said, “Haven’t you already been accepted to college?” And I said, “Yeah, but this test is really going to be hard.” And she asked, “What’s the test for again?” And I said, “Calculus” and she closed my notebook and said, “You’ll never use this. Ever. Go to bed or watch a movie.” And how when I got my first ever acting gig, on Seinfeld, my brother sent me a postcard of Minnie Pearl, and he wrote on it, “Never forget, you and her are in the same profession.”

I didn’t realize how all of these places and people and events were just as crucial in shaping me as anything I roamed to the corners of the Earth to see. And they’ve shaped you, and will shape you, whether you realize it now or later. All of you are richer and wiser than you know.

So I will leave you with some final advice. You’ll decide later if this was a lesson. And if you realize there was no lesson in any of this, then that was a lesson.

But I’d like all of you to enter this world, and your exploration of the Five Environments, better armed then I was. And without a mullet. Which I see you’re all way ahead of me on.

First off: Reputation, Posterity and Cool are traps. They’ll drain the life from your life. Reputation, Posterity and Cool = Fear.

Let me put that another way. Bob Hope once said, “When I was twenty, I worried what everything thought of me. When I turned forty, I didn’t care what anyone thought of me. And then I made it to sixty, and I realized no one was ever thinking of me.” And then he pooed his pants, but that didn’t make what he said any less profound.

Secondly: The path is made by walking. And when you’re walking that path, you choose how things affect you. You always have that freedom, no matter how much your liberty it curtailed. You…get to choose…how things affect you.

And lastly, and I guarantee this. It’s the one thing I know ‘cause I’ve experienced it:

There Is No Them.

I’m going to get out of your way now. Get out there. Let’s see which one of you is up here in twenty years. If you’re lacking confidence, remember – I wouldn’t have picked me.

two letters

v.p.

down and dirty pictures

i'm about half way through peter biskind's fascinating book. it led me to track this video down. the highlight for me is around the 25 minute mark when qt starts talking about the career trajectories of the great filmmakers. fascinating.

we are the people

images from the current conceptualism exhibit at the geffen contemporary @ moca taken with newest addition to the novel designs camera arsenal.

can i tell you later?

you want free stuff? you go with holocaust...

i kind of have to hand it to gototrafficschool.com on this one. what an enterprising organization. received this am:

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Or, if you know anyone else who has recieved a ticket you can forward them your referral code X763-CAK7 Any person who registers for our course using your referral code will get a $2.00 discount. Not only that, we will deposit $5 into your personal MAKE MONEY account. Login to your account at

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to cash-out whenever you want! Or sit back and watch your Make Money balance grow and cash out later!

You can make a ton of money by referring your friends and family to GoToTrafficSchool.com. From all of us here at GoToTrafficSchool.com, we wish you a happy and safe birthday!

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both are smoking cigarettes

recent mcsweeneys post:

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE'S SCRIPT FOR WITHOUT A TRACE. BY BOB WOODIWISS
- - - -

INT. SUBURBAN HOME—LIVING ROOM—DAY

(Four FBI agents—SAMANTHA SPADE, VIVIAN JOHNSON, MARTIN FITZGERALD, DANNY TAYLOR—stand in a cluster, smoking cigarettes. Their unit supervisor, SPECIAL AGENT JACK MALONE, enters through the home's front door and joins his team.)

MALONE: I got here as fast as your perception of fast tells you I got here.

JOHNSON: Thanks, Jack. You made it just in time for your arrival.

MALONE: Good. What've we got?

JOHNSON: A void.

MALONE: A void? What kind of void?

JOHNSON: Purportedly human. Seemingly male.

MALONE: A purportedly human, seemingly male void. Hmm. That's potentially regrettable.

JOHNSON: Hence our presence.

MALONE: Right. So who used to occupy this void?

SPADE: Some say a successful businessman. Others claim a devoted family man. Then there's the preschool household member upstairs who, when we questioned her a few minutes ago, described the entity that's no longer construed as being here as "my horsie-daddy."

MALONE: So the void could be equine?

SPADE: To certain observers, naturally.

MALONE: Do we know how this void was created? How it came to be?

TAYLOR: Do you mean was it put here by God?

FITZGERALD: Or do you mean was it conceived by the same minds that created the concept of God?

TAYLOR: You know, Martin, your knee-jerk denial of God's existence could seriously hamper this investigation.

MALONE: Hey. Guys. Let's hold off on the dialectics till after we've collected all the evidence. What'd you find, Viv?

JOHNSON: These books were on the nightstand, Jack. A Brief History of Time and Love Story.

SPADE: So there was a struggle.

MALONE: An internal struggle, you mean. Between human intellect and animal passion.

JOHNSON: Right. Which could have led our dichotomous reader to seek contemplative solitude.

TAYLOR: Or self-destruction.

FITZGERALD: Define "self"! Define "destruction"! Your terms are irrelevant in this context.

MALONE: Hold on. What's that? On the floor near the table.

SPADE: Looks like blood.

FITZGERALD: Which would seem to confirm the existence of a physical form at one time or another occupying the present void.

SPADE: And, by extension, our own existence independent of subjective interpretation.

FITZGERALD: Interesting but tangential hypothesis, Sam. Here's where I was going, though: if, for the sake of argument, we accept that the void we're investigating was formerly a flesh-and-blood entity, yet the entity's flesh is nowhere to be found, while its blood is plainly extant, even, in fact, pooled and sticky, can we infer the existence of evil in the world?

SPADE: Don't you infer the existence of evil every time you carry a weapon? Or your badge?

FITZGERALD: No. I infer uncertainty while perpetuating the illusion of objective order, like they teach at the academy.

(A WOMAN with a small child on her hip descends the home's staircase. She pauses a few steps from the bottom, looking across the living room at the FBI agents.)

MALONE: And who might you be?

WOMAN: Who do you see me as?

MALONE: My instinct is to regard you as the spouse.

WOMAN: Then who else could I be?

MALONE: I'm Special Agent Jack Malone. Can you tell me, was it you who discovered the household's human-male void?

WOMAN: Did I see nothingness first?

MALONE: That's the question.

WOMAN: I can't be sure. I may simply have been the last to see the pre-nothingness.

MALONE: Right. Tell me about when either, neither, or both of those events took place?

WOMAN: Just this morning. I was with the baby ...

Flashback to:

INT. KITCHEN—DAY (EARLIER THAT MORNING)

(The WOMAN sits at a table, feeding a BABY in a high chair. Both are smoking cigarettes.)

WOMAN: In a man's world, I am defined as less than a man.

BABY: Gimme, gimme.

WOMAN: In a child's world, I am defined as a servant.

BABY: Horsie-daddy!

WOMAN: In my own world, I am defined as someone who's expecting the cable guy sometime before noon.

Cut back to:

PRESENT

MALONE: And where was your alleged husband-businessman-horsie-daddy during all this?

WOMAN: He was the resignation in my voice.

MALONE: Thanks. You've been very helpful.

(AGENT JOHNSON is at the rear of the living room looking through a sliding glass door at the backyard.)

JOHNSON: Jack, come here. You need to see this.

EXT. BACKYARD OF THE SUBURBAN HOME—DAY

(AGENT JOHNSON, cigarette in hand, stands next to a doghouse. The other agents have gathered nearby, smoking.)

JOHNSON: Apparently, the object of our probe is out here. Look. C'mere, girl.

(A standard poodle emerges from the doghouse and lies down on a bare patch of ground.)

MALONE: Viv, this is a dog. The void we're investigating, I thought we agreed, was left by a male human, possibly equine, entity. How can this be who we're looking for?

JOHNSON: Jack, think about it. How can it not be?

MALONE: Touché, Viv. Nice work.

CREDITS

- - - -

i don't have to prove...that i am creative!

but banksy's got strong feelings about creativity:


whereas the chicago public library has nothing to prove as far as i'm concerned:

all my pictures are confused

of the thirty one finalists, chosen from over a thousand pieces of art submitted to the Manifest Hope Gallery Contest by MoveOn.org members and other grassroots artists these two are my favorite.
you can bid on any piece of art and the artists have pledged to donate the proceeds from this auction to progressive efforts aimed at helping Obama win this november.

looking down the barrel of a gun

waxin and milkin' isn't just named after probably the best beastie boys song around, it's an incredible collection of images documenting sports, film, style, art, music... everything good.

here's a visual smorgasbord for your viewing pleasure:

there must be a hundred balloons in here.

i'm late jumping on the band wagon with this one, but not too late. tim and eric awesome show great job doesn't just have perhaps the most brilliant name for a television show ever, but the season three premiere last night absolutely slays.

here are some highlights:

it was like being at the beach, only no sand. no sand, only beach.

will govus takes some great photos.

the name of this blog is novel designs

typography meets commerce meets arithmetic

show off

i quite like this work by artist melvin galapon

everyone will say you've lost your edge

nice work sony.

decorating the alamo

i'm thinking the following item would be an excellent addition to the pad. about as antiquated as the landline at this point.

sweet ink

i'm not one for body art, but this would make for a killer tattoo.

via chicagoist

how to make something awesome lame

this is like your parents getting to hang out with your favorite band.

inspired host: "well paul shafer was probably your inspiration over there, right?"
awkward barely audible response: "yeah, I love him"

wow. never go on myfox. never. never. never.