So at lunchtime today I went and swam again. A week without swimming is like a week without sunshine, baby! Good to get back but it wore me out. Maybe I should have stretched before? I figure if I ramp up slowly that counts as stretching for swimming, but maybe I need to rethink that.

Anyway, the second thing I did at lunchtime was hit the Moorpark Library. I picked up a few things, among them the DVD of the documentary (yes! more documentaries!) Murderball.

Man! What an amazing film. Aside from frank and adult conversation about sex, I think this is a movie I think everyone would enjoy and learn from. These are the real people who are para- and quadraplegics. The sport of Quad Rugby looks like a hell of a lot of fun, and it along with other sports at the Paralympics are basically complete sports for folks who for whatever reason end up with limited or different physical capabilities. They are able to push themselves and really compete. Also, the chairs look like weapons. Leah was a little dubious when I told her we were going to watch a movie called Murderball along with dinner, but she liked it too.

I wish I’d have seen it when it came out, but this way I get to see it free and maybe encourage someone else to check it out.

Despite being excited about Speed Racer, I find myself unimpressed by the vast majority of the movies that come out. Two documentaries that are on tap look really great though.

The first is American Teen (via Slashfilm, and again):

The second is Surfwise (via Slashfilm):

Missing Persons is not a band I ever got way into, but I remember liking their music. My uncle had Spring Session M and we listened to that record on his stereo when we went to Lake Dolores (a long defunct waterpark halfway to Las Vegas). Keep in mind I was 10 years old in 1980 so was pretty much absorbing my music from family and radio at the time. It would not be for five more years that my musical tastes would really start “setting” as I got into Talking Heads, New Order and the like.

The thing that stands out most in these three videos is the decreasing vitality of the music and the increased vitality of the imagery of the videos. The musicianship is strong, but the songs just get weaker. It’s easy to make fun of these videos as ridiculous. MTV was new at the time, and the imagery was fun and inventive. We take the deployment of effects and costume and “acting” by musicians for granted now, and the art has been refined so now some 25 years later we know what good music videos are like, and these aren’t it.

A fun fact for me, retroactively, is to know that this band was formed out of the crucible of working for one of my favorite artists, Frank Zappa. Dale and Terry Bozzio, along with Warren Cuccurullo worked for Zappa for a number of years. Zappa was famous as a taskmaster toward his musicians, and when you listen to the music in these videos it’s fun to appreciate the tightness of the guitar and drum parts. Dale also has wonderful control over her voice. She makes peculiar vocal choices, but it’s definitely strange on purpose.

Like I said, I am not a huge fan of Missing Persons, as evidenced by none of their music being on my iPod, but perhaps I’ll grab some and try and re-appreciate a band most folks probably make fun of for ridiculous outfits.

Come to think of it, perhaps I should reevaluate some of the bands the kids like because they seem like piffle.

Mental Hopscotch, 1980:

Words, 1982:

Right Now, 1984:

UPDATE: Credit where credit is due, I was prompted to think and pontificate about Missing Persons because of a post over on the excellent blog Kill Ugly Radio.

Last night I went to the SIGGRAPH LA event at Petersen Auto Museum. It was a terrific event and there was much inspiration and food for thought. I met my friend Chris Greazel there. It’s always great to see Chris.

Apparently a touch screen “minority report” type interface for visualizing accessories has increased sales of accessories 30% for Lamborgini. Interfaces makin’ BANK yo. The interface was done in Flash, the images pre-rendered and compsited on the fly, if I’m remembering that right.

I think more learning of 3-D modeling tools is in my future.

Saw many cool Low Riders. Saw Michael-Keaton era Batmobile. Saw Mach 5.

Chris’ experiences seeing Speed Racer made me want to go even more. I’m thinking of seeing the IMAX version.

I need to vote in the SIGGRAPH elections. I’m a member now, and everything! I became a member after the EA event last month.

Chris said the first time we went to a SIGGRAPH thing was in L.A. in 1989. I thought my first one was around 1994. I can’t remember. But I was definitely interested in computer graphics at that time. I’d go to any computer animation festival had by computer geeks, art museums, or science museums. It was amazing stuff.

We went to Canter’s after. Good potato pancakes, substandard matzoh ball soup. Chris said his smoked turkey was excellent though. We talked, and sketched, and ate, (mostly talked) from about 10pm to 2:30am. As Leah might say, “that’s how we do.”

Chris lent me two books: one Bob McCall, one Jim Burns. Painted wonders decades old! I remember checking out the McCall one many times when I was in 6th and 7th grades. Beautiful paintings of a future that might have been.

Getting home at 3:30am is definitely difficult for my system.

We’ll probably do another late night next month. We’re plotting world domination.

Approximately.

And more Stew news! Can’t wait!

Strange’ soundtrack on iTunes

Cast recording exclusive to Apple

By GORDON COX

“Passing Strange” will be the first Broadway tuner to release its original cast recording exclusively on iTunes, more than a month before the CD arrives in stores.

Ghostlight Records’ digital release, set for May 27, makes the “Strange” OCR available in time to take advantage of the awards attention producers hope the show will receive after Tony noms are announced Tuesday.

Due to the time lag for manufacturing and shipping, the CD is not expected to be available in brick-and-mortar stores until July. Cast album was recorded April 14 in an unusual live session at the show’s venue, the Belasco Theater. (Most cast albums are taped in a studio.)

“I wanted to make the music available in time for all the exposure the show is hopefully going to get in the next few weeks,” said Sh-K-Boom/Ghostlight prexy Kurt Deutsch.

The iTunes exclusive reps another first for the old-fashioned legit industry, which like other sectors of showbiz is working to cultivate the benefits of digital-age fixtures such as YouTube and MySpace.

According to Deutsch, the initial iTunes-only release makes sense for a show like “Passing Strange,” a rock tuner that aims to appeal to a young—and therefore tech-savvy—demo. In recent years, he has seen downloads jump from 5% to 25%-30% of sales for albums of youth-appeal tuners such as “Legally Blonde.”

Deutsch and Bill Rosenfield exec produced the “Passing Strange” OCR, with Stew and Heidi Rodewald, co-creators of the musical, serving as producers.

I don’t usually have cause to watch the Tony Awards.

This year is different though. Passing Strange—the show which is the brainchild of Stew and Heidi Rodewald, both of the band The Negro Problem—:is nominated for seven Tony Awards!

• Best Musical
• Best Original Score
• Best Book of a Musical
• Best Orchestrations (Stew & Heidi Rodewald)
• Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical (Stew)
• Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical (Daniel Breaker)
• Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical (de’Adre Aziza)

I’ve been listening to the music of stew for seven years! Blogging about his and TNP stuff the whole time.

Yesterday I blogged that Passing Strange would be on The View, and here it is, posted to YouTube by Jeff Downing!

I’m so proud of stew! He just blogged about it too!

...I blogged over the weekend. Read that instead of something new today.

Misc, Art, Mother’s Day (that’s a good one!)

Iron Man, Redesigned (cool links to neat different Iron Man designs!)

Movies this Year (the movies I want to see; we didn’t see Speed Racer this weekend, but I suspect it’s not very good—still want to see it, maybe on IMAX so I can get the full gut-punching effect!)

Eloquent Defense of Kidblogging (about Dooce who nails why it’s fine to write about kids)

Tonight I’m going to the SIGGRAPH thing with my friend Chris. I think it’ll be fun.

It’s been a long while since I did a full wrap up of what I’m looking at and reading. So here’s some miscellaneous stuff I’ve read and thought about and watched and listened to.

Tom Bickle asked some really interesting philosophical questions today: How entitled?:

What’s in a name? Surely, any communication carries with it a promise. “Your word is your bond.” “A rose by any other name…” Should I promote myself with any or all of these titles, all technically true, some a paler shade of the truth than others? “Fake it ‘til you make it?” If I do, am I a phony? Should I feel ashamed? Would others feel deceived, were they to know how much a title chafes against my own self-esteem, factual accuracy or no?

It’s really got some great questions in it. Read it.

My hero stew blogged today! He doesn’t blog very often, but he, and his latest project, a broadway play called Passing Strange are getting a whole lot of attention these days. For one thing, it’s been running for a while now, and some real strange stuff has been happening. From way over here in California it feels like this—first Spike Lee showed up, and next it was that First it was on April 17th, Whoopi Goldberg wore the Passing Strange sweatshirt on The View.

And the show keeps rolling along, and getting great reviews. On Monday, on The View, “see a musical performance from Broadway’s Passing Strange.” So if you watch The View, check it out. I’ll probably catch it online later. But don’t look for the music of Passing Strange on the pre-Tony awards show; they got cut, causing some controversy.

Stew’s post struggles with the very notion of going mainstream. There’s a tension in Passing Strange, that tension is that it’s both a rock show and a Broadway play. The thing is both things, and as such, Stew has certain expectations about what rock shows are about, but on the other hand, audiences on Broadway are not necessarily rock show crowds. I love the openness of his thoughts about this. I’ve been a delighted fan of stew for a long time, and part of my fandom is this openness to the process. I love that he writes what he’s thinking about his art. Basically, I love the man and his work. It hurts that I probably won’t see his show this year, but I enjoy every minute of the work that comes out. On the Passing Strange website, they have some song downloads—mp3 files of songs from the show. I have to admit, the song Keys has the capacity to make me cry.

Another artist blogging is Matt Brooker, who blogs at D’Blog of ‘Israeli. Matt is the incredible artist behind the War of the Worlds comic I blogged about last year. I’ve been following his blog since then. So his latest post is entitled The Wacom Airbrush: In-Depth Review. I swear Wacom should hire this guy! He is an artist who actually used to work with airbrushes, and acquired one of their “airbrush-style” stylii (styluses?)—the Wacom Airbrush Stylus. Now mind you, I think I’ve only held an airbrush one time, and that was when Chris was using one back in the late 1980s. The impression I got was that they sputter and make a mess and are hard to control. But some of my favorite artists yield them beautifully Vargas and Soyarama. Brooker does not correct my impression of the airbrush. He says even in digital form, this is an input device that it takes time to learn. It’s fascinating to me, as a person interested in user experience and human-computer interaction, to see a user who is reveling in an input device that is harder to use, and takes longer to learn to use, and will take practice to master. It goes against how I think about interfaces and user input. But of course this is art, so perhaps it makes perfect sense. Great artists must practice. It takes discipline to get better at it. It takes time. I probably will never buy this peripheral, but reading about it was joyful.

Speaking, as we sort of were, of comics, I present a wonderful new blog called The Journal of Caroon Over-Analyzations, which I found via Cartoon Brew. This blog cracks me up. Articles like From the archives: A Freudian Analysis of Beavis and Butt-Head or Alchemical Symbolism in Smurfs are terrifically fun to read. Some even point out real issues of culture and race, as in From the archives: Chromatic Sexism and Animated Felines:

Did you ever notice that patterns emerge in the fur colors of major protagonist characters of the domestic feline species portrayed in popular, secular, post modern children’s media? Female feline protagonist tend to have white fur, a reoccurring characteristic for the heroines in a significant number of films involving cats, examples include female characters from The Aristocats, Cats Don’t Dance, The Rescuers (she’s a mouse, but the concept still stands). On the other hand, the male feline protagonists have orange fur, examples include male characters from Garfield, Heathcliff, The Aristocats, An American Tail, Cats Don’t Dance, etc.

I’m not sure how to transition to this next one, but Matt Haughey shared a post on Google Reader that’s great: Web 2.0 Expo Presentation Rundown. That post has great links and encouraged me to explore further some of the videos of speakers at the Web 2.0 Expo. I mentioned the Clay Shirky video before, but the Andreessen and Fake Steve Jobs videos are also worthwhile.

It’s Sunday—Mother’s Day. Happy Mother’s Day to my own Mom, to Leah, and to all the other Mom’s out there!

As a follow-up to talking about Iron Man, here are some alternate designs for Iron Man from Project Rooftop: Iron Man Invincible Upgrade, and Part II

Some great designs!