All Hallow's Madness

Last night Satish and I went to Judson Church for a NYxNY event (put on by NY Magazine) called All Hallow's Madness. As they put it:

New York by New York is an experiment in six parts. We're collaborating with some of our favorite bands, D.J.'s, vegan chefs, comedians, and underqualified art auctioneers on an event a month (six in all) through the beginning of the new year. We're not sure how they'll turn out.

There was a photo scavenger hunt that people with tickets had the opportunity to participate in all day. Upon arriving, one could hand in their memory card, and the winner would be announced right before the main performance of the night. Buying a ticket also got you an open bar and year's worth of New York Magazine. People were really creative with costumes; I saw Calvin & Hobbes, Wayne & Garth and a very politically incorrect Sharon Tate, among others.


Kudu, Dan Deacon and Chromeo performed; Satish and I mostly went for Chromeo. I saw my friend Tristan there, whom I actually met in the summer right after I put photos of his circuit bending performance on Flickr.








This was one of the best shows I have ever been to. For their encore, they came out with switched clothes (which was hilarious since Dave 1 is itty bitty and P-Thugg is a little larger). At the end, they pulled everybody up on stage to dance with them.

I shot a tiny bit of video and will upload them tomorrow. You can mostly hear Satish screaming along to the songs in all of them, which was great.

[photos by me and Satish]

AWNY conference

I forgot to talk about this today! Tomorrow my friend Amber and I are running a workshop at the AWNY Advertising Career Conference at FIT. It's called Communications Planning: What the heck is it anyway?, and we're doing three of them in a row. If any of you will be there, come say hi.


If you are here because you came to one of our sessions, thanks so much for coming! We hope it was helpful. Please don't hesitate to contact either Amber or me with questions or comments. Also, click here for that list of other links we talked about (in case you didn't write it down) for learning more and getting involved.

pumpkin carving

10/25/2007
Originally uploaded by tokyohanna.

Sometimes I don't feel like an American at all. Last night I carved a pumpkin for the first time in my life. I don't know how that happened... maybe it wasn't huge in Puerto Rico when I was growing up? We did have Halloween though... no clue. I never did it in college either. There are a lot of American traditions or pop culture thingies that I absolutely didn't participate in, growing up. I haven't seen 90% of the 1980s movies that everybody quotes all the time (although I did fanatically watch Flight of the Navigator over and over for years). I just saw The Breakfast Club in 1999. I just saw High Fidelity this past summer. Name the movie and I probably have not seen it. Same with television shows (that one is even worse).

Anyway, it was definitely about time for this pumpkin thing. I did it at my apartment with my roommate and our mutual friend, Hobart.



I made one to match my mood.


I toasted these with salt afterwards. Also something I had never done (or eaten).


I'll take more photos when they're lit; they'll be on my Flickr photo stream.

oldish video

Last week, I remembered that this video exists. It was my response to a Creative Thinking assignment at school. Fenske said:

"One of something is boring.
Ten of something is art."
Then he said "Show me this. Show me that multiples of something can add up to having more meaning than the one thing by itself." (I am paraphrasing this part) Pretty much "The whole is bigger than the sum of its parts."

This is what I did:


Most people know this, but tattooing is "the practice of making a design on the skin by pricking and staining." In other words, many many many pricks with a needle. many. get it? okay. So I showed the movie. Most people didn't get it. I didn't care though, I mostly did this for myself and the assignment was a good opportunity for it. My friends helped; Subodh filmed the whole thing and Aaron wrote the music (& helped with FCP).

Here it is today:


A little over a year and a half later, I got the close tag on the back of my left arm.

Anyway, just wanted to share that video. I hadn't seen it in almost two years and realized I had never uploaded it before.

Extremely unrelated: Paul made a pie for us yesterday and I wrote about it here. yum.

This just in.

In response to my entry about him, my father sent this photo just now:


The original excerpt: "...pencils for which we had to buy extensions (you put the ever shorter getting pencil into it so that you extended the length of pencil stump) ... we used the pencils until nothing was left of the wood/lead." neat!

EDIT | The new text that came with this: "This is an expensive replica of how it looked ... imagine the silver holder a cheap plastic piece and the pencil without the silver tip but with a completely used up (flat) eraser and bite marks all over it (on the little stump)"

I was not pleased.

After buying a concert ticket a few nights ago, I was taken to this message:


Well, that's nice. The partnership seems to make a bit of sense. And for once - Ticketmaster doing something nice for me? Even though I didn't really like any of the bands in this sampler, it was free. I clicked on the link, typed in my iTunes password and came to "Sorry, wrong password, try again" or something to that effect. I tried again, and it was wrong again (PS no it wasn't). It told me to call Apple if I couldn't remember my password.

I signed onto AOL with the screen name and password, and I was right: I had the correct password all along. I knew that, because I regularly shop at iTunes (but just wanted to double check that I wasn't out of my mind). So I try to get the free album again, and what happens? Oh yeah, this.


How convenient. Who wants to bet that wasn't an accident. Although on the other hand, Andrew told me that it worked for him and he was able to get the free album. In any case, I was less than pleased, but also not surprised (pretty sad to be unsurprised by a terrible annoyance from a brand, right?). As if I - or anybody else - needed any more reasons to hate Ticketmaster, right (or is it iTunes? or both?)?

Style Wars

On Saturday night I went to Style Wars, put on by House of Diehl.


Similar to a LVHRD event, Style Wars was a live battle. I think this is a traveling competition that happens in multiple cities globally. There were eight designers (or teams of designers) competing on Saturday night, and each had five minutes to design something on their assigned model, live on stage.

Competitors cut, tear, burn, spray-paint, and otherwise destroy/rebuild clothing, live on models or on people pulled from the audience.

House of Diehl have been all over the world, from supporting Sonic Youth in Europe, to performing to tens of thousands of people alongside Elton John and Versace at the Life Ball in Vienna, to shows at New York's fashion week. [going.com]

Eight got reduced to four, which got reduced to two, and the final showdown revealed the night's winning fashion designer (who got five hundred wonderful dollars). There was a panel of judges to comment and choose their favorites after each round, and the final winners were determined at the end by audience cheering. It was a cool event and experience, even though it was so crowded that my neck hurt by the end from having to crane to see.






I saw a few friends there, including Satish and Vicky (who were lovely line buddies for the hour that we waited outside), Alex, Merlin and Zachary (whom I spent most of the night with down at coat check).


[photos by Bronques @ LastNightsParty]

Hadouken!

I am still going nuts over here, so here is some visual and audio stimulation to hold you over. I have been watching this video since mid-May and have no clue why I haven't written about it before. It's a band called Hadouken! from Leeds. I guess they fall under grime (their MySpace page says indie/metal/garage. Get ready for low fi paper cutouts on a neon background.


GBH put it well with "Leave it to the fucking Europeans to finally get the rock and hip hop cross-over to work." I'm going to have to agree. In any case, I've got to love a band that named themselves after a Street Fighter move.

sense blending

The phrase "sense blending" popped into my head Sunday night, right after I had a mini state schema solely involving the Science of Sleep trailer. When I saw the movie, I was slightly disappointed and didn't think I liked it much, because it was different from how I thought it would be, based on this trailer. It violated my expectations, pretty much. As more time went by, however, I thought about it over and over again and grew to adore the movie for what it actually is. Anyway, I was in the mood to watch the trailer (the video store was closed, it was late at night). I had completely forgotten what happens at 1 min. 37 sec. of this thing. So, up to this point, there are all these visuals and sounds and narration and a bit of a story. It all mixes together perfectly, like the delicious red velvet cakes my roommate makes sometimes. At one minute and thirty seven seconds, a song called Your Heart Is An Empty Room comes on. It's one of those songs that makes you feel like you are completely immersed in a swimming pool, the song being the water. You are in the center of it. It is the absolute perfect song for that precise second in the trailer... in the universe. I am sure of it. So I had a state schema. I thought about why, and then realized that it was sense blending. A tiny bit synaesthetic, since the music sounded like the iridescent waves, the narration feels like the main chracter waking up with his feet in the icebox, etc.

This is not my point though, and I just wanted to share the state schema with everyone because I had been missing them (my last one was in March). Then I saw an interesting-looking link on the side frame of YouTube, and was brought to one of the coolest videos I have ever seen.

Do you guys remember Spin Art? It was a machine that you would put a piece of thick paper into, and it would spin really fast. Then you would squirt different colored paints on it and you would end up with something like this:


I played with this thing a lot as a kid. Anyway, Michel Gondry had the idea to use a turntable for this and attach a camera to the top that spun at the same rate, so you could see what the paint looked like AS it was squirted onto the paper (instead of just seeing a blur). That's not even the best part. The whole machine was powered by little electrodes that were connected to Björk's fingers as she played the piano.



Can you think of a better experiment between those two? Watch the video - maybe you'll have a sense-blended state schema.

eep

IMG_8278.JPG
Originally uploaded by lauragothacked.

So, this isn't exactly a cultural topic, but I am excited about this and want to share. I adopted a two year-old cat last night. Her name is Kazu Yoshimi (after Kazu Makino of Blonde Redhead and the robot-battling Yoshimi of Flaming Lips fame). I got her from KittyKind, a no-kill rescue /adoption group. They told me that they rescued her from another shelter where she was about to be euthanized. I will spare you all the gushing, but she is one of the sweetest cats I have ever been around. She sneezed in my face while I was asleep last night, which was adorable.

EDIT: I offered anybody at Naked free Pinkberry to anybody who got the two name references (without looking on the Internet). Arthur wins.


Also, I'll turn this into a semi-relevant post by saying that KittyKind is awesome. They interviewed me and had me fill out a form /application before telling me if I could adopt Kazu. The adoption fee of $125 covered her shots, testing, litterbox training, spaying, and a bag of dry food. She is getting over a cold, and they gave me free medication too. The fee also covers ten days of medical (if there are any problems I can just bring her in for that). After I signed the papers and paid, they even took me on a shopping trip throughout the store, giving me advice about different options for scratching posts, food, etc. THEN I got an e-mail this morning full of congratulations, further information, care advice and helpful links. Everything Communicates. I definitely recommend these guys.