Cinqo de Mayo's on Tuesday, in September

In April of 2007, I went to see a movie called Grindhouse in the theatre. It was actually a double feature, two films done by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, a sort-of homage to 80's style slasher/gore flicks complete with fake trailers between the two features.

It was, to this day, the single best movie-going experience I've ever had. The theatre in question, the Van East Cinema, is owned by a local Asian family who - appropriate for such a film - don't give a shit what you do so long as they get their cash. It was epic. People were passing around joints in the line, I walked in with a twelve pack under my arm, and as the lights went down my friend Frankie opened his trenchcoat and removed a bottle of rye, saying, in an Irish-Italian mafioso voice, "Perhaps we could strike up some kinda deal!?"

Amongst the fake trailers at the 'intermission' were Hobo With A Shotgun, Zombie Werewolves of the SS, and Machete. And guess what? Robert Rodriguez has gone ahead with his promise to make Machete into a full-length feature. Trailer is available here, and an excellent interview with star Danny Trejo ('Tortuga' on Breaking Bad) is available here.

Choice excerpt:

AVC: How are you able to be so prolific?

DT: I love doing it. Let me tell you something. When I was young, I was an armed robber. I did robberies. And there’s no adrenaline rush like that. When you’re using drugs and doing robberies, it’s hard to distinguish whether you’re doing robberies to support your drug habit, or doing drugs to support your robbery habit. Those guys that flip on motorcycles—it’s like the same kind of adrenaline. It’s unreal. The only time I ever felt that was when I heard Andrey Konchalovskiy yell, “Action!” And then I was like, “Wow. Here we are again. This whole adrenaline—” But this time I didn’t have a gun. I was like, “Wow. This is awesome.” I just totally got hooked. I found my calling. And then when I got my check, I said, “Fuck.” [Laughs.] “Wait a minute. For the first half of my life, I went to prison for being a bad guy. Now they’re paying me to be a bad guy.”

AVC: Did you take acting classes?

DT: In 1985 it was a little different. I would just go with the extras and the director would see me. I was always Inmate No. 1, and I always had one line like, “Kill ’em all.” [Laughs.] It was like, “I can do this.” I remember a director handed me a shotgun and he said, “Kick in this door and take control.” There was a poker game going inside, and the director said there would be a couple of stunt people inside. He said to improvise. So I kick in the door, somebody jumps up, I bash them with the shotgun, and I ask this guy, “Oh, you wanna die, huh?” This lady starts screaming, and I put this gun right in her face. So the director yells, “Cut! Cut! God, Danny, where did you study?” I said, “Let me see. Von’s. Safeway. Thrifty Mart.” [Laughs.] So all this stuff I was doing, I just knew. You’ve got to remember, I was Inmate No. 1 for the first five years of my career. So shit, I know how to be an inmate.

Scheduled for release on September 3rd and featuring a cast of - I find this hard to even comprehend - Robert de Niro, Steven Seagal, Lindsey Lohan, Michelle Rodriguez and Cheech Marin, not to mention Trejo, well, guess I know where I'll be.

Killing Time with Craigslist

I'm sitting here with my bags already packed and a couple hours to kill before my flight to Toronto. Already having exhausted my regular internet distractions, I've turned to the Best of Craigslist to fill the time.

So, just to share a few that literally had me laughing my ass off and spewing beer all over the keyboard:

Trading High 5's For Musical Instruments

Apologies, From A Pervert To A MILF

Free Toilet

I Stomped On Your Fire, You Choked On A Biscuit

Large Boat For Sale

Thanks For Shitting Your Pants

...but, for all the funny and probably-not-real ones, you find the odd post that seems totally sincere and intelligent, like this one from a middle-age guy asking for style advice to win back the respect of his wife.

Ready? Ready? Ready? Breathe!

In the realm of sample-based music, I didn't think I would ever hear anything weirder than Matmos' A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure (well not really, in fact I own at least one weirder sample album, an indie disc I picked up years ago in Eugene, Oregon that's mostly built out of recordings of bathtubs draining). But anyways, forget all that noise, because .... wait for it ....

Nine Inch Niles' The Seattleward Spiral has arrived! because I know you've been waiting for-evarr for this one

I won't even attempt to explain it. Listen to it if you dare, I estimate the average human being will lose 10 brain cells per minute, and don't blame me if your head explodes at some point. It's actually almost a form of aural torture.
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I will say though, even if the end product is pretty damned rough around the edges, the api script used to create it is really something else, and could eventually lead to some nifty applications.

On the other end of the spectrum (and if you need a quick q-tipping to wash that noise out of your ears), this seems like a fantastic excuse to revisit Kutiman's ThruYou project - possibly the best website I came across in all of 2009. I was - still am - ecstatic to see that it is preserved online.

Stranger Than ... Nothing

Via the Projects section on Metafilter comes one of the greatest website ideas in years: Fictopedia!

From the FAQ:
"One of the guiding principles of the Fictopedia experiment is to see if people can learn to live with a little inconsistency. We're so used to treating our legends and fictions as if they were academically researched, factual histories, that we forget that stories don't have to add up, as long as they are GOOD. Thus, if someone writes an article about a character and then 3 people incorporate that character in other articles in ways that are totally inconsistent (in one article he's a knight in a fantasy world, in one he's space captain, in a third, he's a private in WWII), its nothing to worry about. Its just 3 creative reinterpretations of the same character"

The possibilities are endless. For example, although this is creative fiction, the article creators don't retain any copyright control over it, so what's to stop someone from reading an article on Norwegian slam poet Arnis Radis and deciding to 'become' that person, perhaps making a few viral videos and pushing them out onto the 'Net.

For a glimpse into how the project was conceived and fleshed out, here is the original Projects thread. Watch for my article on the Bantalorean Vocal Encoder to appear soon, as I've slowly been developing it throughout my recent treeplanting days.

edit 22/06: my article has already been added to!

buzzin buddy

Google's answer to Facebook finally appeared in the form of Buzz. Not sure how I feel about it but I'll roll with it for a bit.

Some of the doubts expressed by posters in the Metafilter thread centred around not knowing where and to whom updates would go. Like, if you are on Facebook (I'm not) and post something, you know that anyone you have as a contact will see it, and that's it. But with Buzz, it's already tied in to your email and other sites linked through a typical Google Account. So as a test run, I linked my blogger account - I'm pretty sure nobody reads this other than random Couchsurfing people, as I link to it through my info page - wrote this post to see if it shows up. Anyone else catchin my buzz?

FollowFollowUp

Last year (by a day) I wrote about the Detroit man who froze to death and had a game of hockey played around his protruding legs. For a tertiary look at it, I'd like to recommend a viewing of Detroit 2009, The Movie - a 25 min. news montage. Its a bit slow, though interesting, in the early stages before getting to a somewhat heartbreaking clip with Johnny Redding's brother, a bizarre political inquiry / improvised musical number worthy of David Lynch, and some delightfully wacky interviews with city residents, including one guy who is building a flying saucer in his backyard, and another guy who serves raccoon barbecue buffets.
Enjoy and welcome to 2010!

Schizowebbia

Recently I spent a weekend at home in front of the computer keeping a friend company while she was quarantined with a bad case of swine flu. It was the first time I'd used my msn messenger account in roughly a year; over the course of those 3 days I realized how many old friends I had on there, with whom I had no other way to connect.

intermission: FUCK FACEBOOK

ah, so, anyways, it occurred to me that there might be a way to get Kopete to connect with my primary medium of online conversation - GMail's GChat. I kind of forgot about it until today, but after only 10 minutes or so of searching, I found a great tutorial that worked for me right off the mark.

I present an excerpt from my groundbreaking first convo:


Barrett Jones  22:18:12
Yeah. On my phone.

k. v. m.  22:18:18
yeah you were my guinea pig

Barrett Jones  22:18:38
I see. What kinda guinea pig?

k. v. m.  22:18:39
i just spent a while trying to get my instant messenger client to recognize gmail

Barrett Jones  22:19:00
Ah. You are on gmail now.

k. v. m.  22:19:06
bbbbbboooo ya shaka son
hey does this cost you a lot of money or anything?

Barrett Jones  22:19:22
And msn too.
Nope. I've got plenty o data.

k. v. m.  22:19:39
yeah trying to consolidate my online persona

Barrett Jones  22:20:07
Word. I've got too many as well.

k. v. m.  22:20:25
schizowebbia
or something
anyways thanks!
and btw you type amazinly fast on that little thing

Barrett Jones  22:23:08
Thanks. I've had a little practice by now.

k. v. m.  22:23:42
yo fingers is all up in that g-spot