The Namesake
The Namesake trailer is out. and it looks great. i loved the book and Mira Nair directing means it should be good! The few shots of India made me miss it so badly. India is most definitely incredible. [via Coudal]
Archive for March, 2007
Golden Cage
Speaking of Erlend Oye, he’s got a newish side project out called Whitest Boy Alive and they have a new video out for Golden Cage, the video was illustrated by Geoff McFetridge as well as the band’s identity. I love it! [via Ichelzu, dude has the serious skinny on good concerts in Mexico City]
Overflow
The other day I stumbled upon Overflow. Just about the most simple, beautiful, useful app switcher I’ve seen yet. This could easily replace the dock. works great with spacebar + command key shortcut
Lost at Sea (almost)
The correct title of this post is: Lost at Sea or How I got to hang out with Kings Of Convenience, Feist and Broken Social Scene at Roots in Bucerias.
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This post is rediculously too long. there are two parts to it: Part 1 (the surfing/Lost at Sea part) and Part 2 (the getting to hang out with two of your most favorite musicians part). Somehow, they both tie into each other in a nice little way, but reading long pieces of text on the internet sucks, so you can use the following links to jump to whatever part is more your flavor: Part 1 & Part 2
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My good buddy Michael was down visiting us from Laguna Beach, last weekend. We spent a few days surfing. On Saturday, we went up to Punta Mita to grab a boat and get dropped off at the Cove (La Bahia). The Cove is a great surf break, just around the bend from Anclote in Punta Mita and just outside the large Bay of Banderas, in open sea. Normally I go with Action Sports when I show up with Pato, they charge us 150 pesos each (about 15 bucks). On this day, since we were two gringos, they wanted 250 pesos each (better known as “highway robbery”). I told dude that’s the gringo rate, that I live in Bucerias and I’d be willing to pay 300 pesos total. Dude said no way. A few minutes minutes later dude came back with 400. I didn’t budge and dude wouldn’t either, so we went down the road to some guy named Oscar, another one of the boat operators. Oscar tried to give me the gringo rate as well and we settled on 350 pesos. Still too much, but better than nothing. Oscar’s boat driver dropped us off at the Cove and I asked him to pick us up in two hours.
The Cove was empty, we had the break to ourselves. Solid three and four footers with a high tide, but as the tide lowered, the waves lowered as well. By an hour and a half or so they were tiny. We were ready to go home. Michael is an avid surfer, a close family friend and works in the surfing/clothing industry so we just chatted non-stop about life, work, surfing etc… while waiting to be picked up by our boat. Two hours passed, three hours passed. At about the 3 1/2 hour mark, we both started to get a little suspicious. Michael was smart and wore a hat, I was dumb and did not. By this time, my face was fried and my body was cold from the water. We tried to keep it positive, every time a boat would come out of the bay, we’d assume that it was our guy and each time, we’d be wrong. At the 4 hour mark, we decided that the boat driver had forgotten us and we decided to do something about it. We had three choices:
- Swim to shore and walk along the rocks, back to Anclote, barefoot (dangerous)
- Swim to shore and try to get picked up by one of the Four Seasons security guards (trespassing)
- Swim 2 kilometers out to sea and flag down an incoming boat (boats entering the bay follow a few channels) and hope there are no strong currents that suck us out to sea
We choose swimming to shore. As we got closer to shoreline, we could see the sharp, barnacle-encrusted rocks rising above the water line, the sea urchins below the water and 50 feet of 6 inch water to walk through to make it to the rocky shore. Small waves were threatening to wash us into the rocks. We conferred and chose the 3rd option: paddling out to the channel. It took us about 30 minutes or so to get out towards the channel, missing two boats and finally flagging down the 3rd. A guy from Guadalajara and his two fishing guides, they laughed and handed us cold Pacificos after hearing our story and then radioed in to the port control to let them know what had happened.
After we got back to Anclote and profusely thanked the guys for picking us up, I walked by Oscar, the guy who owned the boat that forgot about us. He immediately launched into some bullshit story about how they had been out to pick us up twice and that we weren’t there. I felt like throttling the jerk-off in the mouth. This is Mexico though and people here have cousins, so my cooler instincts prevailed and so I told him he was full of shit and struck off to file an official complaint with the port captain. My efforts were futile though, as I couldn’t find the captain and I wasn’t about to ask around. As I was walking back to the car, Oscar said that he felt worse about it then I did and I figured that was about as close to an apology as I would get. Oscar is very glad that he didn’t ask me for half the money and I’m glad I didn’t pay up front.
As Michael and I discussed the day’s events, it became clear that we were about as lucky as could be. If we had gone into shore and stepped on an urchin, walking back would have been impossible. If we had swam out to open ocean and the currents had taken us out to sea, we’d be in big trouble. Besides the hour of insecurity of being left out there, the only real damage was a nasty case of sunburn. My face was fried, my nose was literally purple. Jessica hooked me with some aloe and now my face is more tan then red. I can’t complain.
What’s the best way to slough off a potentially bad situation? How bout an impromptu acoustic concert from two of your favorite musicians? Andrew called us at about 8:30pm to tell us that Feist, Kings of Convenience and Broken Social Scene were all down at Roots, eating and that Erlend Oye had brought his guitar and would play if we came down. Andrew was calling everyone he knows to come down and represent our small little “pueblito tipico”. It turns out that they were on a ten day vacation staying in Punta Burros.
Most of the crew conversed amongst themselves, as Erlend grabbed his acoustic guitar and joined our band of onlookers. We ended up being treated to several hushed acoustic songs. The night culminated when I asked Erlend to play “The Build Up” or “know How”, full-well knowing that both are duets with Leslie Feist (who is Marcia’s favorite musician of all time). Erlend started The Build Up and when it came time for Leslie’s verse, we could hear her sweet muffled voice carrying over from the table behind us. Most of the band joined in and we were treated to impromptu versions of several Kings and Feist songs, culminating in a round-the-table over-the-top rendition of “I’d Rather Dance with You” with Leslie Feist on the spoons and glasses. I got most of it down with a little audio grabber thing I have and I’ve been trying to get the tracks off of it for days now (love them Sony products). When I finally figure it out, I’ll post em (I hope they don’t mind). Everyone was taking pictures with their little point-n-shoots and of course I brought along my camera. I did manage to grab a few shots, but honestly I felt really awful sticking this huge camera in their faces when all they were trying to do was grab a bite to eat, so I sat in the background. I get a little weird around people who I perceive to be even slightly celebratory. Must be my time spent in Los Angeles, where going to breakfast involves seeing various levels of celebrity types at any given joint.
It was a great night, the perfect end to a terrible day and even though there wasn’t that much interaction between us, it was great, being in the presence of all these really talented musicians. Especially Kings of Convenience and Feist who are literally the most listened to artists in my iTunes library and have been for years.
Where Am I?
or where the hell have i been? let’s see…
I’ve been editing my trip photos, which should be appearing any day now. In the midst of transferring my files from the old G5 to the new Macbook, I seemed to have botched the job and my entire back-catalog of photos seems to have gotten munched on a Maxtor One Touch drive that went down, about a week ago. I had a vault back-up which was on the drive as well (I had the files and the vault on the same disk temporarily until I could transfer the files to a new hard drive). Big mistake. And I’ve been trying, with little success, to get the drive up and running again or at the least to retrieve the files. The head doesn’t seem to have crashed but the disk won’t mount and Disk Utility and Disk Warrior are useless. Through trial and error I found a way to view the files and to even copy a few off the disk and even though the Finder says they’re alright, they aren’t, when I load them in an app, all i got is crap. It’s been a ton of ups and downs and basically I’m to the point now where I’m about to swallow my techie pride and run the drive off to Drive Savers (that’s the silent sound of my bank account getting noticeable slimmer). To add salt to insult, the same thing happened to my pops about 6 months ago with his Lacie Porsche drive. I opened both drives up, today, during troubleshooting and it turns out both drives are Maxtor. Thank you Maxtor.
Word of hindsight wisdom: Kids, don’t skimp on back-up drives. and don’t try to put 80 gigs of photos into Aperture at one time. not good.
On the flip side, I’m 90% done with a much needed graphical overhaul of this site and it should be good to go in a few days or so, if all goes well. and I have a great surf/music adventure I’ve been working on and I’ll post that in a short while.
so stay tuned.
Wendy Mason
my cousin, Wendy Mason, is a conceptual artist working several different mediums and she’s a recent Cal Arts MFA Art grad. She’s got a new site up and her work is insane, go check it out!
Regret
Two good articles to read on a regretful day: The regrets of the man who brought down Saddam and The Illogic of Empire. I used to be all into sending out political emails and stuff to friends, but the last 6 years have been too hard, like flogging a dead horse. [via C&L]
Article.1
My friend Michael hipped me to Article.1. they have really wicked tshirt blanks. washed, faded, distressed, even inside out! a great alternative to American Apparel and girlfriend approved. You can be sure you’ll be seeing these with my “tacos and gorditas” mexican folk typography tshirt line. snap!
Red
Red Interactive Agency. Quite possibly the coolest web agency site ever. [via the K]
NetVibes
NetVibes. really nice portal/rss reader/etc… bloglines should be envious and .mac should have been doing this 2 years ago.
Flickr Dreams
Ok, so i’ve been thinking about jumping into the stock photography game, researching getty, corbis, istockphoto, digital railroad, veer, etc.. And then it occurred to me that I have a gazillion photos already up on flickr, tagged, ready to go. So my next question is: [drum roll here] why doesn’t yahoo! get with the program and develop an istockphotoesque, micropayment system for flickrites who want to sell their photos. it’s a win/win situation, flickrites can decide to (or not to) put their photos up for sale and yahoo immediately enters a crowded playing field with a crap load of killer content. Obviously this is dependent on yahoo! wanting to get into a completely new field, but all the technical aspects of the operation could easily be handled with minimal tweaks to the current user interface and i’m sure they already have the back-end in place to handle micropayments. well, yahoo!, whadyasay?!
ps. if you are/have been represented by getty, get in touch with me, I have a ton of questions.
Update: According to Webware, Flickr competitior Zooomr is developing a micropayment system so that zooomr users can sell their photos online. Zooomr will take 10% of sales, very fair price. What up Flickr? [via StockPhotoTalk]
Akzidenz Grotesk
with all this Helvetica resurgence floating around, can’t forget my good bro Akzidenz Grotesk
Tibetan Video Protests
Boing Boing: Tibetan exiles to protest Chinese rule via ‘net video Tibetan exiles around the world and their supporters plan to use YouTube to commemorate “global uprising day” this Saturday, March 10. The Revolution will be Televised, Y’all.
Aperture vs. Lightroom
There’s an Aperture vs. Lightroom field test series over at O’Reilly.net. Two writers from their respective Aperture and Lightroom blogs switched applications for a week and wrote about their experiences. Overall, it was an interesting comparison, although Michael Clark (the “Inside Lightroom” blogger) just stacked Aperture up against Lightroom in a feature for feature test, most of Aperture’s more interesting features were left out of the comparison because they weren’t already found in his Lightroom workflow. That really discouraged me. The greatest thing about Aperture isn’t that it gives you a clear, comprehensive workflow, it’s that it throws the app defined workflow out the window and allows you to use it any one of a hundred different ways. The trade-off is that you are left to develop your own workflow and sometimes that means changing up your habits. He did find a nasty bug having to do with chromatic aberrations, which is a little troubling to me (makes me wanna go and do my own tests). One commenter really hit the nail on the head.
Macbook + WinXP
Today I had a meeting with a consultant who installs really smart but relatively inexpensive home automation systems, the kind that has central access points to control audio/video/security/networking/internet/lights etc… The consultant had one of the those really hip Acme Made computer bags with the Alexander Girard fabric, she pulls out a black Macbook, opens it up and she’s running Windows XP. Judging from the desktop, I’d say it was definitely her primary OS.
It was the first time, I have seen (with my own physical eyes) someone running XP on a Mac, nevermind running it as a primary OS. It made me feel a little awkward and discombobulated as if I had been tricked or something, but it was definitely interesting. I wanted to ask her why, but the chance escaped me.
note to self: new things are ok.
dwell video
dwell has new video segments on their website. at first I thought it was a pretty cool and a logical step. i’d heard rumblings of a tv show as well. but after I checked out the first one, it just sorta didn’t jive with dwell’s impeccable style and branding. maybe the video production just isn’t up to speed yet, but it felt more like a minimalist home make-over show than a video extension of dwell’s printed brand.
Trusty Burritos
Ah yes, today we kicked off around 4:00pm, Andrew, Ro and I, to catch a little wind-blown afternoon surf action. We rolled up to Burros to find two other people in the water and nice 2-3 footers. The waves weren’t big and they weren’t particularly well formed, but each of us had a good old time. I caught two rides that were a nice welcome home, after being gone for so long. I wouldn’t say it was the perfect day but we were very thankful to the surf goddesses for giving us Burros practically to ourselves and some nice rollers as well. After the relatively short session, we came up on the beach and just chilled out in the warm golden sunshine, watching the peelers in classic, mesmerized, surfer fashion.
It’s good to be back!
Over Looked
My good buddy, Garrison Gunter, took a bunch of photos as a research project in Panama and created a photo exhibit that showed in New York and is now in Jerusalem: Over Looked: An Installation of Two Stories. The photos are printed on light cotton fabric with colorfast inks and hung on washing line with wooden pins, inspired by the aesthetics of laundry-strewn back alleys Panama. very creative installation.
Brand New School
Brand New School have a new site up. and it’s wickedly great. good design and functionality. very very smart. I love the subtle ways the layout changes on resize, muy nice. go CalArtians go!
Children of Men
Foreign Office’s background infographics for Children of Men. wonderful. [via Solace]. relatedly: the graphics for Stranger Than Fiction were great as well. I wonder who did ‘em.
