Chevy Tahoe Mashups

April 3, 2006October 25, 2007

Chevy Tahoe Mashups

When Chevy and the producers of The Apprentice decided to leverage the interweb’s hidden creative juices by letting people mix canned video clips of the Chevy Tahoe and generate the next big SUV commercial, they apparently misunderestimated the even greater collective disdain for SUVs. Now they’re facing a dilemma: Play host to dozens of (sometimes hilarious) anti-SUV ads, or censor them. To their credit, the negative ads have remained online, though Chevy isn’t providing an interface onto them — you’ll have to rely on Goog to dig them up.

A bunch of links at treehugger.com, like this gem: You live in the city, chump, and this: Be honest…

March 29, 2006October 25, 2007

250,000 Rubber Balls

Yes, it’s a Sony commercial, but nevermind that. Who would have thought that throwing a quarter million superballs down a San Francisco street could have such a gorgeous, calming effect?

Longer, higher-resolution version at Salon, and a very high resolution at the source.

March 19, 2006October 25, 2007

Chris Bliss

He’s not juggling 19 plates or anything like that, but even with just three objects, this is some of the most graceful, awe-inspiring juggling I’ve ever seen — and in perfect grace with the Beatles’ “Golden Slumbers.” The finale is intense. More at Chris Bliss.

Thanks Barry

June 13, 2005October 8, 2016

Amplified Bicycle

Mallet On the second night of the recent Matthew Sperry Memorial Festival, cellist Theresa Wong played an amplified bicycle, in a performance that brought many in the house to tears. Wong, who studies performance at Mills College, had been playing the amplified bicycle prior to having known of Matthew or his death. I had been storing the bicycle from which Matthew was struck in our garage for quite some time.

After the performance, I offered Matthew’s bicycle to Theresa to use as her instrument; she accepted. I spent Saturday afternoon getting the wheels rolling again, chain disentangled, brake pads unstuck, and cleaning up the road grit. Rested my hands on the grips – the last things Matthew ever touched – and took the bike for a spin, meditating on his life. Sunday I delivered the bike to Theresa’s Oakland loft.

Theresa found the bike resonant, full of surprising sounds. After a few minutes of orientation, she improvised a piece for Matthew. A wild dove had been hanging out in the loft for a few days, and we imagined it to be Matthew’s visiting spirit.

July 30, 2004September 11, 2013

e-i-e-i … hop hop!

eieio In the middle of a rousing round of “Old MacDonald” tonight, Miles surprised us with a joke, substituting the “O” in “e-i-e-i-o” with… whatever other words from his wee vocabulary he could think of. Legend: “Ucky” = pacifier, derived from “Nucky,” which means Nuk. “Hop hop” is multi-purpose noun standing in for all hopping creatures (frog, cricket, kangaroo, and, most frequently, bunny). By extension, it also means carrot. “Poo poo” means poo-poo, which derives from “poo-poo.”

November 26, 2001September 12, 2013

Trapeze Practice

Finished tweaking my first iMovie. It’s pretty limited software compared even to personalStudio, not to mention Final Cut Pro, etc. But what it does well, it does really well, and it’s not hard to get quality results. Would be nice if it output MPEG, but it does support a huge number of QT output options, and is way easy to learn and work in. But personalStudio spoiled me for real-time everything and 10 layers. Maybe someday…

In early 2000, before I got married, I went down to Santa Monica and spent a day on the flying trapeze, in the back yard of a guy who does stunts in Hollywood. We shot some video that day, and that’s what I used as stock for the iMovie experiments.