Check out the rest here. Thank you Vladimir Nikolic!

These pictures are from a “nature walk” I took back in October while visiting family in Virginia Beach, VA.  Mother Nature never ceases to blow me away with her beauty.  It’s interesting however, for all our talk of environmentalism, and saving the earth, I notice less and less people every year enjoying the outdoors.  Bizarre.

Some catching up to do since I listened to a lot of records while baking cookies this morning. When the weather’s cold you gotta immediately start baking cookies. I tried icebox cookies this time - ones where you make the dough and refrigerate it for a period of time. Lemon coconut icebox cookies. They are even better than they sound.

Blodarv, Soulcollector (Northern Silence, 2004): both an LP and a 7″ are tucked into the hi-gloss sleeve, but the 7″ isn’t extras/”bonus tracks” - it’s just the songs that wouldn’t fit on the LP. The first time I listened to this I couldn’t get with it, even though the backstory behind the Blodarv dude (Blodarv being one among the legions of one-man suicidal black metal bands presently dotting the landscape, if by “dotting” we mean “as in a Seurat”) is interesting, and predisposes me to something more than my initial reaction (”fantastic, another one-man metal dude with a Tube Screamer, a Metal Zone, and a Fender Deluxe”). I want here to say something about the physical tenacity of LPs: if I hadn’t been looking at the album, I might not have played it again for some time, but the sight of it compelled me, so I played it again. Turns out that there’s some real texture to this - it’s subtle, which is a weird thing to say about an album on which there are exactly zero clean guitar sounds. But the mood this guy’s reaching for is his, nobly his. It’s pretentious, but hard-won pretentiousness is its own kind of realness once you’ve learned the secret handshake. The guitars, meanwhile, underneath all that borrowed tone, are played elegantly - there’s a real emotion in there, and it’s the center of the album. I predict that by this time next week I will be contemplating a self-made Blodarv t-shirt.

Denial of God, The Horrors of Satan (Painkiller Records, 2006; status: in a relationship): a double-LP worthy of the format. Starts out decent enough but doesn’t feel like anything special, then gets air on side three and promptly begins executing 720s. The songs get longer, the riffs get bigger, the evil emerges from the crypt. Stuff that the first disc had only hinted at suddenly takes form. I banged my head and felt no pain. The spiritual forefathers of these guys are Glenn Danzig and King Diamond and they’ve clearly studied their Immortal collection, but they’re also kin to several thousand bands that never got out of the garage: there’s a rough passion here that’d be hard to sand down.

David Grubbs, An Optimist Notes the Dusk (Drag City, 2008): look, I just love the music David Grubbs makes. So I love this. I agree with everybody who says that the way he tries to make a very dry style of poetry mesh with some pretty picturesque songscapes doesn’t always work, and almost never immediately works, but I think a little digging is worth the effort. If a press kit told me to compare a songwriter’s work to painting, I’d laugh and throw the whole package into the trash, but with Grubbs, painting is the exact analogy: there’s a big-picture broad-canvas feel to what he does, a landscape quality to the finished product. His songs take me places. His guitar style is unique. This record made me feel some things that other records wouldn’t know how to try aiming for. And it ended with some drones. More records should end that way. It’s nice.

Can you guess the name of the above piece? … ‘Storming The Capital’ (!)
Brilliant names aside, there are wonderous things to look at here.

VIA

My friend Aaron Hawkins alerted me this hotness. Pretty amazing stuff they’re creating at Oblong Industries

Click here to view the embedded video.

Watch this episode in QuickTime.

Two weeks without a computer. That’s exactly the sort of thing I was thinking of when I built two extra weeks into the season schedule. Of course, I expected the time to be used for sickness or sudden travel, but being without a computer works, too. Or doesn’t. QED.

I haven’t talked about NaNoWriMo in a while (this is where I’d link to some posts on the old Forum discussing various NaNo issues; that is, had I not entirely borked the Forum while setting up this current website). It’s interesting to note that the year I started doing these videos was the same year I quit NaNo, probably for good. Before that, I had participated successfully for three years. What I found in year four was that I had learned everything I needed to know from NaNo — I had taught myself how to self-impose deadlines for personal projects, how to reach certain difficult goals in an unreasonable amount of time, and how to be creative despite feeling not at all in the mood to be creative.

Which is to say, the Jigsaw Video Thing is a direct descendant of my time with National Novel Writing Month. Strange but true. To be sure, I got halfway through my fourth NaNo and realized I just didn’t want to write anymore… partly because I already had what I thought was a pretty good first draft of a novel (from a previous NaNo), and felt that if I were going to spend a bunch of time working on a novel, I should probably spend the time on that as opposed to writing something new. And partly… NaNo was taking time away from the things I was actually working on. I discovered that, because of the way NaNo had made me think about fitting in creative time into a busy schedule, I was essentially doing weird versions of NaNoWriMo all year round. I didn’t really need it anymore, because I had absorbed it.

So no, this isn’t an autobiographical entry; I don’t know that I even know a single person still participating this year (feel free to correct this misapprehension in the comments). But I do still have utmost respect for the experience, and am happy to give Baty and the rest another plug, such as it is.

Plus it was a nice segue into next week’s episode, which I also filmed today. It will be posted on Thanksgiving, but it has nothing to do with turkey. Or Turkey. But more words on 316 when 316 is realized.

And because I like to show off, this is one of those episodes I’ll remind you that I did the whole thing with only two hands. Wire is your friend.

Andrea Tinnes is a type designer that I met in Berlin when I was studying abroad. She’s designed some really nice typefaces, I particularly enjoy these two, the first is called Switch and the second is called Eastern Columbia. You can check out her work at typecuts.com. It’d be really cool if we could get some new typefaces for Christmas!

Thanks to Tom Feniks, our logo was just officially pimped. The best part about it… it was free! Wowzas!

• Number of messages sorted through: 172
• Number of spam messages missed by filters: 3
• Number of real messages marked as spam: 1

From: Chiefjusticemohammed Uwais
Subject: GOOD DAY

You know what? You’re right. It IS a good day. It snowed today. That probably does deserve all caps.

From: Anita Mansah
Subject: PLEASE READ WELL

Oh, I intend to. Thanks for looking out for me.

From: aw-confirm@ebay.com
Subject: Phishing: eBay Unpaid Item Dispute for Item #29025…

My, it was nice of you to tell me you were Phishing. Saves me the trouble of ignoring you.

From: “Desmond Clayton”
Subject: Your new female guest will love that you are blessed.

I’m sure she will. Did you intend to write a rhyming couplet? Kudos.

From: danceaward2009@tiscali.it
Subject: DancEurope2009: The way to show your dance competition performances in the best theatres of Europe’s Capital Cities.

Um… what? I think maybe you’re looking for Bill T. Jones. Or, really, anybody who gives a crap about dancing.

From: AccesD
Subject: Participez au concours « AccesD au Cirque du Soleil »

Oui? Non.

From: BLOCKBUSTER
Subject: GET SMART and KUNG FU PANDA are at BLOCKBUSTER®

Well, there’s a mighty fine reason to avoid Blockbuster. Not that I needed another one.

From: Shell Oil Customer Service
Subject: YOU ARE NO(5)

I AM NOT A NUMBER, I AM A FREE MAN.

From: Mrs. Mimi Kirian
Subject: OK?

…yeah, I am. Though I could use some more tea.

On the subject of spam, comments are always appreciated.

In an effort to further gross out Amy, I give you Patricia Piccinini. Her work can best be described as a very, very, very demented version of Ron Mueck’s work. Which is saying something.