I’m a man of peculiar taste when it comes to music. Much like my film watching, I’m less concerned about the genre, or anything external and more concerned with whether something is actually good. Sometimes it takes 3 or 4 listens to an album before it clicks. (And I do listen to entire albums. Despite being part the digitally connected generation that can pick music ala carte through every channel imaginable, I believe there is a place in the marketplace for deliberate and meaningful albums. Nine Inch Nails “Year Zero” comes to mind.)
Not surprisingly, I’ve been wearing my quirky hat as of late and I’ve been listening to things across the spectrum. Here’s my list of music which I will playing through the holidays as I travel.
5. Thomas Dolby - The Flat Earth
Thomas Dolby hit it really big in 1982 with The Golden Age of Wireless and the chart topping single “She Blinded Me With Science.” Dolby’s folllow-up The Flat Earth failed to glow white-hot like Wireless, but it was a strong second outing and contains some of my favorite Dolby tracks. Favorite tracks: “I Scare Myself” is a great down-tempo calypso-like track with muted trumpets and loose fluid piano noodling. The title track, “The Flat Earth” is a great chill track with prominent backing vocals, perfect for long stretches of road at night. By far my favorite track is “Hyperactive!” partly because of its great music video, and partly because of the playful energy of the song - you can get really caught up in it.
4. Daft Punk - Alive
I said 5 months ago that “electronic and synth music has always held a dear spot in my heart, I love the complexity of sound, which is often complemented by less complex lyrics.” Alive is a live album that plays out more like a DJ Tiesto set, than traditional album. In fact, each track features anywhere from 2 to 4 different Daft Punk songs as bleed, cut, scratch and meld into one another. Add a healthy dose of enthusiastic audience members who cheer, chant and clap and you have an engaging, epic live album.
3. Emmerson, Lake & Palmer - Brain Salad Surgery
Most people pick up Brain Salad Surgery because of its cover. Rendered by H.R. Giger, the imagery packs a punch as an easily memorable cover. I, however, did it backwards. I listened to the album without ever seeing its fantastical cover. (Not only that, but I was really late to the Emmerson, Lake & Palmer game. When the album came out in 1973 and I wasn’t even born yet.) What actually inspired me to track down and listen to ELP was my interest in prolific Japanese composer Nobuo Uematsu. He names ELP (along with other Western acts) as chiefly responsible for his influence. The centerpiece Brain Salad Surgery is a 3 act opus “Karn Evil 9″ which runs over a half an hour. Sit in a room with headphones on and loose yourself.
2. Various - A Colbert Christmas
The Comedy Central special “A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All” has really been a gem of holiday comedy this year. The television special plays out like an early episode of “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” with special guests dropping by to move the story along. You can listen to an engaging Fresh Air interview about the special over at NPR. Every track on the album is toe-tapping, sing-along fun, (save for the Toby Keith track which is excruciatingly painful to listen to.) Despite being a comedy album, the music is actually well produced, making it perfect to sneak into the playlist at Mom and Dad’s.
1. Sam Sparro - Self Titled
Watch out folks, Sam Sparro is going to be big. Still a relative unknown in the U.S., he’s already taken Europe like a wild fire. Last January I was listening to BBC Radio 1’s “Annie Mac’s Mash up” when the I caught the hook for the absolutely infective “Black and Gold.” The eponymous first album from Australian born Sparro is a home-run. Infectious, Phat hooks complement a frolicking and fun attitude that glows through the entire album. The awesomely retro second single “21st Century Life” goes down easy, while the sythn-tastic “Sally” makes me long for 1989. A great album to groove to while hanging out with some friends back home.
As an editor watching a movie my discerning eye (and ear) can inadvertently take me out of the moment. It can be a continuity mistake, an incongruous plot device, a really obvious over-dub or just a jarring edit. But when I see them during a movie, it kills it for me. Similarly, suspension of disbelief is such an important element of story telling in film that breaking it, even for comedic purposes, can be the death knell of a movie.
With this in mind I’d like to share some examples I’ve recently encountered.
Last month I was re-watching Casino Royale to refresh for Quantum of Solace. (Note: Solace plays second fiddle for Royale in every way.) There is a particular scene where Bond is chasing a man through an airport. It is a tense cat-and-mouse scene, but something is a little off.
Did you see it? Bond slings off his jacket and the next cut he’s wearing it again. (The implication in the scene leading up is that he’s in a security line at an airport.) In a tense real-time sequence the edit just looks silly and jarring. It is likely there was more footage of Bond placing his personals into the x-ray basket. Though, if the edit kept that in you’d have to deal with pesky facts like Bond is likely armed with a hand-gun. (How does he get through security?)
Moving along, last week I was cajoled into watching Mike Myers’ latest comedic travesty The Love Guru. The story meanders around Myers’ character, a self-help guru, who wears a chastity belt while helping others find love. The heavy clinking chastity belt sets up such obvious gags as the “erection gong sound.” (See the film trailer.) Ultimately the film is a luke-warm love story leading up to the inevitable removal of aforementioned chastity belt. But what bothered me the most was the following scene.
Can somebody please tell me how Verne Troyer’s character magically managed to punch through the chastity belt? Adding a goofy “gong” sound doesn’t excuse that the entire premise of the movie is based on removing this impenetrable heavy metal belt. You can’t punch through metal, even if it’s a crotch hit gag. How exactly is the the “Guru Pitka” in so much pain? Wouldn’t the belt act as an impregnable cup? (A note to comedy writers: your movie still needs to maintain a certain level continuity and believability, just as any other type of movie. As a viewer I’m willing to suspend my disbelief to a point, but don’t insult your viewers for a cheap senseless gag.)
The weather, as expected, was great. A nice breezy 80 degrees each day. It’s a treat to wear shorts comfortably in December when you live in the North.
It was an interesting week. I mainly played the role of silent cameraman, while everything went on around me. (Plenty went on, I’ve got almost 10 hours of footage to dump!) The trip was valuable; it helped me recenter my focus and realize the “Art Scene” isn’t really for me.
I’m not a traditional artist, that breed is dying. At this point, I even hesitate to categorize my self as an ‘artist’ since so much of my design aesthetic has nothing to do with the traditional fine arts. I’m a bit of a fish out of water working on a Web TV show about drawing the figure.
The truth is I’m working very hard (with little pay!) to help other people realize their creative visions. There is a generational schism taking place between ‘old media’ and ‘new media’ - I can see the writing on the wall and I’m not so sure others do.
It’s an strange (natural?) progression I’m taking - when I first came to New York I was happy just taking work any production work, anyone’s creative vision really. It is beginning to wear thin. I’m learning I don’t like standing in the shadows of others. I guess somethings never change once you leave the corporate world.
Come January I will kick my screenplay into high gear as I start attending the New York Film Academy Screenwriting workshop. Then I think it’s time to start looking to work with the best people of my generation.
This was all heavy on my mind as the plane made its ascent above the clouds. The clouds almost looked painted - it was beautiful and just for a moment I forgot about what a silly little mess life can be.
!Warning! - Non-Creative Boring Life Post. Approach with Caution!
*PLOP*
Just back from an excursion to Virginia and Maryland. The trip down wasn’t too bad, I made great time and didn’t hit much traffic. Driving home tonight, however, was a series of unfortunate and aggravating events - some of which I’ll share with you now!
I’ll begin by saying weather sucked, this contributed to my first bottle neck in Northern Virginia. A black Acura TSX lost control, hit a truck and did a 360 into the side-wall at an underpass. +1 gawking holiday traveler +2 stupid Virginia Drivers. I braved the traffic, and about 25 minutes later I was across the state line into Maryland.
It was in this slow moving traffic I began frantically looking for my iPod. Damnit! I left it in Virginia. This was going to make the rest of the trip very long. It was a shame really, I had a bunch of Doctor Who Audio Books lined up to keep me busy. (Tom Baker all the way to David Tennant, baby.)
I was instead forced to listen to the incessant chatter of the top 100 radio stations to keep myself sane. After I lost all hope in humanity, I scanned the FM range for anything tolerable. Fourteen different versions of “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.” It was beginning to look a lot like I was going to kill myself.
To kill some time I called some friends, caught up with them for a bit until I hit Delaware - or rather I didn’t “hit” Delaware as much as I crept at speeds in an excess of 5 miles an hour. But it was once I got over the Delaware Memorial Bridge that my personal hell truly began.
I. Hate. The. New. Jersey. Turnpike.
And no, it’s not that silly little “Hey you always hit traffic on the turnpike” kind of hate. You can always expect to hit some traffic there.
OK, I should say the Jersey Turnpike traveler can share some of the blame - the way men piss with reckless abandon on the floor of at every single rest-stop. Let me be clear; these bathrooms were about as clean as the ones in Silent Hill. On my first stop I slid, on a sheet of urine. Each toliet was sprayed top to bottom with piss. Even the toliet paper was soaked and dripping.
However, it is in times like these that I am glad I am not a woman. I can’t even begin to imagine the horror that is the Women’s room on the Jersey Turnpike. Now you may say “But Merrel, That was an isolated incident! Surely not every bathroom along the Jersey Turnpike is like this.” Well, you’re wrong - about two hours later in the thick of traffic, I pulled off into the Woodrow Wilson Service Area.
Ice Skating on piss was bad enough - but I swear I saw an impatient traveler pissing in the sink. The sink! As a grown man, are your that incapable of waiting the additional 3.4 seconds it takes before you just end up going on the floor anyway?
Then there was the food, oh the food. Rest-stop food is always expensive, $13 for half a sub and drink anyone? Lucky me, I got stuck in line with the self proclaimed ‘produce inspector of Turnpike land.’ Her job as she saw fit was to continually warn me that the carrots and broccoli I picked up from the refrigerated section were “dead” and “no good.” I politely told her “They look fine to me.” She insisted again as we walked to register that I should get “fresher” carrots. I’m not shopping at Trader Joe’s, I’m in the middle of the Jersey Turnpike on a Sunday night. Trying to be diplomatic I said - “I’ll live, thank you though” and paid for my food.
Apparently, this was the wrong thing to say. The produce inspector followed me to the condiments bar and loudly proclaimed to no one in particular that I had just purchased “bad carrots.” She turned to somebody “Can you believe this idiot! I told him he was getting bad carrots and he bought them anyway!” I waited for her to find a seat. I found one close by and looked her dead in the eye as I ate each-and-every carrot and broccoli. The look of incredulity on her face was priceless. Considering how out of my mind on Christmas Carols this was definitely the right choice.
There is plenty more, but I have to be in Manhattan fairly early tomorrow… This ends my delirious stream of consciousness post. Cheers!
The next 2 weeks will be hectic - I’ll be visiting family next week for Thanksgiving in the DC Metro area and then two days after I come back to New York, I’ll be flying out to Miami for Art Basel Miami. The Telegraph once referred to the event as “The Olympics of the Art World.”
The event in Florida is huge, and I’ll be going as part of the production team to capture some events the studio I work for is putting on. This means I’ll be traveling with all my gear. I’m a little nervous about my lights, camera, and a couple of microphones. Once there, I’ll be doing lots of prep work and largely focus on the video shoot, which involves models and possibly a raised staged. Alternately, I’ll be promoting the studio and show to people.
After I’m back, it will be time for decompression and post-production. Speaking of which, I may have mentioned I’m an AVID guy, but the studio uses FCP. I’ve always been partial to AVID, but I’m glad I can fiinally say I have equal proficiency with both. There are a couple of things I find are much easier to do in AVID (keyframing for example)
Oh, almost forgot. I signed up for that New York Film Academy Screenwriting workshop I talked about. It begins next year January and it runs 12 weeks. In the mean time, I haven’t had much time to work on the screenplay, but I figure I’ll be devoting a lot of energy to it in the coming months.
It’s almost 2 am and I just got in from the city. After an exciting election party I headed to Times Square to watch Obama’s acceptance speech, in what I can only described as one of the most surreal moments of my life. The energy in the city was electrifying. The din of the crowd was overwhelming, as the chanting and sheer volume swirled around my head.
The crowd roared as some stood on top of telephone boxes, others focused intensely on the video screens as Obama gave his acceptance. I observed the instant comradeship between all these people chanting and hugging, and in all this elation was moment of true clarity.
It was here, in this sea of people, as I watched history unfold in front of me - that I thought to myself for the very first time in a long time, “I’m proud to be an American.“
In North America voice acting is oft thought of as a “lesser” form of acting, and it lacks a level of public prominence and appreciation other forms of acting have. That’s unfortunate since there are so many versatile actors who primarily do voice-over work, like the prolific Billy West or Phil “oh I remember that guy!” Lamarr. Despite the large body of work most voice actors have, voice over work has largely played second fiddle to other forms of acting.
The culture of voice acting in Japan, however, could not be more different. The vocation of voice actor, known as a seiyū in Japan, is exalted to the level of movie star. Most seiyū work across a wide variety of mediums including commercials, anime, movies, television shows and video games. Given the high level imported movies from English speaking countries, there is plenty of work to go around.
Prominent seiyū are the focus of popular magazines like Voice Newtype. Think of them as the Us Weekly, of voice acting. Full with pictorial spreads, and a behind-the-scenes television show.
With all this in mind, I present to you a Japanese language clip of from the third Season episode of The X-Files, “Pusher”.
This short clip is copyright 20th Century Fox. I claim no copyright, and am using this clip for fair use, informational and discussion purposes.
The seiyū playing Dana Scully is Keiko Toda. Even if you don’t understand the language, her tone and intonation are strong and wrought with conviction. As Scully runs to hit the fire-alarm, we hear Toda add elements of flight and struggle to her voice. These light touches create a believable character - an element that is sometimes lost when English voice actors are playing translated roles. Speaking of roles, Toda has played characters across the board including Thomas The Tank Engine, Nikita in the movie La Femme Nikita and Sally in the Disney/Pixar film Cars.
One can only hope that the North American market wakes up to and appreciates the special role voice actors play in telling stories. I’d like to see more seasoned and versatile voice actors taking roles in high budget CGI animated films instead of big name screen actors, a sentiment I know is shared by Billy West[1]. With the next wave of web animation storming the internet, I also hope to see a renewed vigor in voice acting as web-tv takes over our viewing habits in the next ten years.
[1] On numerous occasion Billy West has stated his displeasure of actors who don’t understand “sonic performance” and “just play themselves” in big movies that “spend zillions on visuals, and then have this totally fucking flat-lining voice track.” You can read West’s whole interview with the A.V. Club here.
It seems that music listeners have been bemoaning the lack of music videos on MTV since the mid-1990’s. A subject many-a-person has waxed poetic about. So it comes as an interesting footnote to “MTV doesn’t play music videos anymore, and thus has become obsolete as waves of people go to places like youtube” debate is the new music video website MTV Music.
The site is pushing hard with that “remember when we played these music videos” and the featured video page is peppered with the likes of Genesis, A-Ha, Dire Straits, Duran Duran, and Michael Jackson. The site itself takes some cues from NBC’s HULU, and it looks like the same proprietary video streaming technology.
ArsTechnica has a nice article about the service, which claims “MTV smacks YouTube, posts almost every music video ever.” And while the current Viacom lawsuit against Google/Youtube is not lost on me, the article overzealously states the actual number of videos that are actualy featured on the service. For example, Hikaru Utada, an international household name, whose album “First Love” is the #1 Best Selling album of all time in Japan is no where to be found. Her 2007 single “Flavor of Life“, the #2 digital song of 2007, reached 7.2 million worldwide downloads.
Even stranger, is a relatively less high-profile band The Polysics, do appear on the service. The Polysics owe a lot of their style to Devo, and their song “I my me mine” is quirky and fun.
The jury is still out whether MTV will be able to supplant Youtube as the “King of all Music Videos” - it’s been almost 15 years since it’s worn that hat comfortably.
Edit: It appears the site is having problems with embedding video. I’m going to leave this embedded video in the post, I’m curious if it will work for others. It isn’t working for me.
I’m contemplating plunking down $2,500 to do a 12 week screenwriting course at the New York Film Academy. One of the goals of the course is to “finish the course with a first draft of an original screenplay.”
Honestly, I could continue developing my screenplay on my own, but I think this would be an excellent exercise in refining my process, and would allow me to apply some more personal pressure to completing this project.
I’m a glutton for punishment I guess - I have plenty to keep my hands full with other personal creative projects and my work at the studio, where my role is expanding rapidly. Despite this, I want to put more on my plate.
For example, earlier this year I did something I’d wanted to do since I was a kid; learn Japanese. It was hell, I was studying the language four to six hours a day, studying all day during the weekends. But I was committed to the process, and came out of a six month period with a good fundamental understanding of the language.
I hope this course will do the same for my screenwriting ability.
Hi! I'm Merrel Davis. I'm a video editor by trade, and an aspiring screen writer at heart. I came to New York City to realize my creative dreams. This blog serves as a travelogue of sorts in my personal journey.
