Belated Birthday Gift

Slideshow

The BlackBerry Z10 phone comes loaded with an app similar to iMovie’s ‘trailer maker’ – this app is called ‘story maker.’

I simply plugged in the photos and videos – any photo and video of a Macias brother – and add your favorite song and it turns it into a slideshow for you. You can choose to rearrange the order of the photos and length of the clips if you choose, but I just let it automate. The final step is adding titles and choosing one of six filters to throw over the video. I chose ‘chromatic.’ It’s a cool feature, it only takes a few minutes to slap together a video, and you can upload straight to YouTube from your phone. I will definitely be creating more slideshows.

Vlogs

This is a short series of video blogs recorded directly to YouTube via webcam. They are informal attempts to subvert the ideas of video blogging and being a “YouTuber.” There are four videos currently – dated from June 5th, 2011 to March 6th, 2013. If you choose to watch the entire sequence of videos in the “quadrilogy” playlist, it will consume <2 minutes of your time/life.

I previously posted the first two installments here and here.

As I delve deeper into vlogsperimentation, I will add new recordings to the playlist, and updates will be edited into this post. This will be my definitive video blog post.

Thanks, Love You.

Broke Batman

An unfit, slovenly, unemployed Batman and his (k)night out.

relative ways

 

Vinyl Sunday

Back in 2001 or 2002 when I documented my life frequently on another blogging service (LiveJournal) I was friends with a nice young man (username - angryyoungman – ha) from Maryland.  We both liked Alkaline Trio and that was reason enough to be friended on that blog/social network.

His name was Andrew and he worked at a record store in Glen Burnie, Maryland (Record & Tape Traders) and one day he posted out of the blue that he’d give away a record to a fellow LiveJournal friend.  All anyone had to do was comment first!  So I did.  And I was.  I was quickest to draw on his offer and he was a man of his word.  I don’t recall him revealing what record he was giving away, just that there was some sort of inventory overstock.  He was a real sport about it.  I think he would have mailed it to the Carribean if the first commenter had been from there.

It was also the first record that I could call my own.  Other records had been purchased for me, and a lot of the records around were from my parents’ collection, but this one had my name on it in a First Class package from the USPS.  Although I hadn’t purchased it per se, it was mine all mine. It was probably the sense of importance from “winning” it that made me place such importance on it, but it honestly is a fantastic record and it altered the direction of my musical tastes… thanks angryyoungman, where ever you are.

10/7/97

poster designed by Justin Hampton

10/7/97

First concert.

I was 12 years old?  I remember being 13, but if the date on the ticket stub is correct, I was 12.  I think it was a school night.  I was in no way old enough (or ready) to attend a concert on my own.  My mother asked my sister to take me to the concert.  Lord knows what dinner date my 20-years-older sister had to cancel, or if she had to use vacation hours to accommodate her little brother.

In addition to adult supervision, I had to invite a friend under the terms and conditions of my concertgoing.  I invited my friend Mark.  His mother had been taking him to concerts for years.  So – it was my sister, my friend Mark, my sister’s friend John-George and myself.

I had been listening to Blur’s self-titled album since it came out in March of that year.  I was obsessed and knew the words to all the tracks with intelligible lyrics.  My favorites were  ”Beetlebum” and “I’m Just A Killer For Your Love” along with (of course) “Song 2”.  I was hyper-self-aware back then and thought people could read my mind so I kept sending out negatives vibes to people who only enjoyed “Song 2” or the self-titled album.  Even then, posturing myself for some semblance of hipsterdom sending the thought “poser poser poser poser” to everyone else.  I can’t blame myself, I was just a stupid kid.

This was in 1997, the days of yore, pre-broadband.  I had to tug at my mother’s heel to get her to drive me to brick and mortar retail outlets to buy their back catalog.  She bought Blur for me as a birthday gift.  Parklife, The Great Escape, Modern Life Is Rubbish and Leisure?  That’s plain spoiled.  I couldn’t even find Modern Life Is Rubbish at The Wherehouse or Blockbuster Music, it had to be ordered into the store by a clerk.  Remember when CDs cost $17.99 even though they weren’t imports?

My parents definitely loved me or wanted to shut me up.

It was a really good night.  Everything is, of course, a blur.  I had hair parted in the middle back then.  I remember wearing a blue v-neck shirt with a green horizontal stripe across the chest because I wore that stupid shirt all the time.  I also wore my black corduroys.  Appropriate concert attire.

My sister and John-George took my friend and I to the original Philippe’s (I probably didn’t even try the french dip) in downtown Los Angeles.  I wouldn’t return for another 12 years.  My sister bought me a Blur shirt as soon as we entered the Palladium, without complaining about the $25 price tag.  We missed Supersport 2000’s (who apparently only ever played a handful of shows) set but caught the tail end of Smash Mouth’s set.  I got to dance with my sister to “Walking On The Sun”.

I told my sister and John-George that I wanted to be in the crowd for Blur.  It was the first but not the last time I would coat myself in a glistening layer of other people’s sweat and smell the impossibly strong odors of hundreds of people.  John-George instructed me to ball my hands into fists cross my arms in front of me and hold them up close to my face and set my feet shoulder width apart and shuffle with the crowd.

The Palladium’s waxed down hardwood dance floor scared the bejesus out of me in that crowd when Blur hit the stage.  The lights were impossibly bright, the chandeliers hanging were impossibly huge and I was impossibly happy that they started their set with “Beetlebum”.  I chickened out after nearly falling and being trampled every other second of that song.  We watched the rest of the concert from the raised and carpeted standing section off to the sides, where people were enjoying the music more civilized-like.  I really can’t remember much more about the evening.  I’m sure there was lots of bobbing around and smiling and singing.

I can with all honesty say it was the best day of my 12th year of life.  It was the first time that I had ever been electrified and enlightened by live music but it was not my last.

The light, it bends.

r3d & LLW

New York City, NY (Brooklyn) | 9-3-09

I love the flash light photography that Jay & Jay made on the rooftop of their apartment in Brooklyn.

I loved when Jessica wrote “the quick brown fox”.  Or when she drew an outline of Jose’s skeleton shirt, and even the star inside of a circle which Jessica might have intended to be a pentagram but looks like a beach ball.  This is my favorite, though.

Jose probably asked, “what’s my motivation?” and I told him “just go buckwild” and he proceeded to dance like a raver for 30 seconds and the results are a luminescent Rorschach test.  Sometimes I see a heart when I look at it, or I can make out a pair of eyes, or I follow the path made from the lens into the twisted and tangled jungle of light and lines.

This was also the only flash light picture where nobody’s feet or hands or shadow can be seen.  Jose was really dancing his little heart out and not even a slow shutter could catch his shadow.

(credit)