Dave Eggers is making movies!!

So this might be old news, but I never actually posted about. Dave Eggers, my favorite contemporary writer, is making the jump from novels to screenplays this year. Eggers is the author of the novels/memoirs You Shall Know Our Velocity!, A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius, and What is the What. He's also written How We are Hungry and How the Water Feels to the Fishes, both great collections of short fiction. And, if you didn't already know this, he basically is McSweeney's. Now though, he's got two movies coming out, one of which is being directed by the absurdly amazing Spike Jonze. Check out the trailers below:



Away We Go, staring John Krazndklsfasdl of The Office (who like all people looks incredibeard in this trailer!) and Maya Rudolph of the SNL.



Where the Wild Things Are. Nothing needs to be said about this one.

Weezer - "The Good Life"

1996, that's the year the following video came out! Let us celebrate it's 12 year anniversary by watching it and then discussing it a little bit:



Now I hadn't watched this video in years. A very, very, very long time. I honestly don't think I've seen it in this decade. It just magically popped into my head this morning while listening to MF Doom, of all people. All I really remembered about it was the overall existence of pizza in the video and the scenes with multiple cameras focused on the same thing from slightly different angles, whose shots were then all composed into a single frame.

Another thing I'd like to point out, is that this actually isn't really one of my favey faves. It's just that I watched it and it made me notice two things.

1) That's totally Mary Lynn Rajskub! You may know her from Mr. Show with Bob & David (which ran from 1995-1998, one of Adam Sandler's sisters in Punch Drunk Love, or (surprisingly her most famous role) as Chloe O'Brien on Fox's 24.

2) Actually, it only made me notice one thing. And I already mentioned it (please reference item #1).

Alright, well this post led to nothing. Have a good day.

The You Tube

So I would say that most people that I know, know that I know nothing about knowing about what there is to know about YouTube. You could say that I'm not very good at YouTube. I don't know how to find funny things on there and am constantly amazed when my friends show me things that have been on the site for years, like that hamster eating popcorn on a piano.

Chocolate Rain? Found about that earlier this week. In fact, I know so little about viral videos that I can't even think of another super-popular video that I just found out about! All I got is Chocolate Rain. I guess I'm alway just too busy checking out music videos? (Also a lie, I use other sites for that...)

Another fact, I just started a YouTube account 2 weeks ago, and just today I figured out how to add friends to it. So if you got a friend invite today, you're among the first. And if you didn't get one, it's nothing personal, it's just that I HONESTLY HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO FIND PEOPLE. I'm like an old, old man when it comes to YouTube.

Final fact about Me vs. YouTube. If you go to my YouTube page, you'll notice that all of my favorite videos were simply stolen from all my friend's favorite videos sections. I can't find things on my own. And even using this method, I've only been able to find like, three things.

So............ that was just an absurdly long introduction to the following video that I've "embedded" below. As you can tell from what I've written above, I'm quite proud of this "find" of mine! This is seriously only the second time that I've found a video on YouTube worthy of sharing on my own (the first being this one). So, while it may not be the coolest thing ever, I found it! And I think you'll like it too. It's of a small child that looks a lot like a tiny Patton Oswalt pretending to sing some song I've never heard; Genius!

Video Genius: Lance Bangs

Lance Bangs with Fred Armisen

Lance Bangs is a music video director, not much older than you or I, who got his start in music video by doing a lot of live footage. A lot of it's still around and it's mostly very good from what I hear. Although he still does dabble in live footage (much of it is actually really good, check out these videos of Arcade Fire and Yeah Yeah Yeahs) his real butter and bread is in music video.

His style seems early 90's at times, but he mostly comes off as just a garage-editing geek. I love it! You can tell he's got a small budget, but he tries his best to stretch it out as far as he can, like in this video by The Thermals:



In that video, he makes fun of what a music video "is supposed to be." His budget, obviously tiny, is exemplified with plastic helicopters and hand drawn bomb shells.

He's a very talented and humorous dude, much like myself I should say. He uses similar styles in his videos as well, it's pretty easy to watch a video and say "Hey, I bet Lance Bangs made that" and only be wrong 10-20% of the time. If you watched that Yeah Yeah Yeah's live footage above, you'll notice that this Black Keys video shares a similar aesthetic:

The Black Keys - New Music - More Music Videos

And finally, my favorite Lance Bangs video, Wet and Rusting by Menomena:



For high quality downloads of any of these videos, check out Lance Bangs . Com. You'll need Quicktime to watch them and they are rather large files.

Remembering Science

Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad, hosts of WNYC's Radio Lab

Remember when science was fun? You got to poke at things and play in the dirt, you learned about animals and rocks and mountains. Too bad that was back in elementary school. Once you got to high school, for most of us anyhow, the good times were done and gone. Everything stopped being interesting. Your teacheer stopped being so enthusiastic. It was physics or it was chemistry and it wasn't about what physics or chemistry do in the world, it was about how memorizing Newton's Law, or Kepler's Law, or Boyle's Law, and remembering which element belonged in which column on the periodic table. Snoooooooooooooooze!

Anyhow, there's finally (actually it's been around for about 5 years or so) something that takes you back to those early days of learning about science, but this time it deals with everything. Not just rocks or mountains or animals or dirt and worms. We're talking about physics, chemistry, neuroscience...other-sciences? They present everything as brand new and explain exactly how everything works in simple and humorous ways. It's called Radio Lab and it broadcasts out of WNYC.

The hosts have such a great, cute, relationship with each other. One old and one young, they act like odd-couple best friends, who very often have differing opinions on sensitive subjects. This often leads into funny yet thought-provoking discussions.


Here's the link to an episode called Time in which they explain, well, time. And how maybe it doesn't really exist? It's good.

Click here to download Time by Radio Lab

If you like it, check out some other really great episodes by them including Memory and Forgetting, Sperm, Laughter, and This is Your Brain on Love. All of those can be found on iTunes by clicking here. If you don't have iTunes, you can get it for PC or Mac here.

15 Step

Here's a mix album containing one song from each of my 15 Most Profound Albums. This might not really be the best mix, in fact, you might really dislike it, but eff it yo. I had fun making it. Each song brings back memories, good times and bad. Frankly, some of it's embarrassing. I figured it was either this or I write out one of those 25 things list, and those are non-musical. So enjoy this instead! Or don't, whatevs.

Click here to Download

1. Falling For You by Weezer
2. Fat and Skinny Asses by Piebald
3. Regulate by Nate Dogg & Warren G
4. Movin' Out (Anthony's Song) by Billy Joel (this song will give you a heart atack-ack-ack in your cadillac-ac-ac while eating a pancake stack-ack-ack...?)
5. Lie For A Lie by Built to Spill
6. Hovering (Instrumental) by Beulah
7. Emma Blowgun's Last Stand by Beulah
8. It's So Easy by Guns and Roses
9. Nightswimming by REM
10. Memory Loss by Deltron 3030
11. Jocko Homo by Devo
12. Pigs That Ran Straight Into The Water, Triumph of by The Mountain Goats
13. You Should Do It Now While It's On Your Mind by Owen
14. Minneapolis by that dog
15. My Little Drum by the Vince Guaraldi Trio