I always thought it would be awful being 2nd chair at any instrument in the orchestra. Then again you don’t have to worry about messing up the solo. I woke up this morning feeling a bit like a 2nd chair violinist and wrote this for all who sometimes feel the same.

So it’s about that time. Yep, time to redesign the site. I think this is going to be the new logo for ’09. Still working on the site concept.

It has been snowing for the past three days and rather than despair over the snowfall, I decided to make a snowman. You can tell he’s my creation, he’s a little over dramatic.

I came across a rather interesting band recently and I’m a little upset I missed them. It’s a really artsy, literary band and most people will consider it a little ultra-hip. I’m really enjoying the album, a few songs are hard to get through but it’s very whimsical and well orchestrated. In addition, the video for one of my favorite songs on the album, I have really come to enjoy. It’s really well shot and very simple and minimalist but very beautiful.

So after a weekend hanging with friends in Texas I had a bunch of random footage. All taken with the movie mode of my little cybershot camera. So I took all that footage and tried my best to make a cohesive thing out of it. Anyway this is the result, nicely filled with cliches. It’s a small film for my friends.

There is this interesting mashup site called YouTube Doubler that basically plays two Youtube videos at the same time. Well a couple of more famed tubers decided to really exploit this and created whats below. No matter what you think of the song itself this is rather interesting. This new read/write culture that we’ve created never ceases to amaze me. Not only are the two collaborating without being in the same room but they added a third layer ever so slightly, we have to collaborate with them to get it to work right. Even something as simple as playing to videos together gives another layer to this project.

Hit play on both videos below and then pause the one on the left. Wait for the countdown to hit :00 on the right then hit play on the left video and enjoy. It might take you a few tries before you get it in sync.

I’ve just returned from seeing Synecdoche, the latest Charlie Kaufman movie, and I enjoyed the movie quite a bit, some parts are truely hilarious. However I doubt many will. As a matter of fact several comments from neighboring patrons included “I’m glad it’s over” and “What the hell was that all about?” Two people behind us decided to leave near the end, oddly about 15 minutes till the end. Why not stay till the punctuation mark?

Anyway, why they left: The movie is a classic example of postmodernism, throwing the sequence of time out the window as well as being rather self referential. Someone not accustomed to the genre or Kaufman films in general would find the movie hard to follow. Ironically I enjoyed the film for the very reasons that some left. I found it interesting and well layered but about the beginning of the second act I noticed a surprising similarity to Six Characters in Search of an Author. Which gave me a basis for understanding the movie without much explanation. So I spent the movie admiring the details as I no longer had to pay attention to the road signs. I think that is the key to Kaufman movies.

It was enjoyable and interesting, my only wish was that it didn’t hand it to you on a silver platter at the end. He decided to simply beat you over the head with the message at the end like so many art films I wanted to enjoy. Children of Men is a good example of this. Small spoiler: I wanted the movie to end when Hoffman gets the role of Ellen near the end, just after he enters the door.

Watch the trailer and if you are into a slightly tougher read, then give it a go.

I stumbled across this short film on the internets and I liked its premise. This idea of finding a common ground between intellectual and social classes.

I’ve been having small conversations about how the labor worker is endangered in this country for a while now. Moreover thanks to technology and necessity there will be a need for more and more knowledge workers. Which we are currently at a deficit, I believe. Mainly because we’ve made it terribly difficult to become a creative knowledge worker. First, its expensive and second, we tend to pinhole a specific discipline and beat them over the head with it. So much so that it begins to dominate their lives. Architects that believe everything is Architecture, because of the very nature of the metaphor. We build relationships and design the very boundaries of our existence, etc… In every discipline as the focus becomes narrower I think a persons entire scope also becomes narrow and they believe that all life subsists of their discipline. Which is an easy correlation to make but we make it at the sacrifice of the myriad of possibilities from every other discipline. Artists love to believe that what they do and what a mathematician does is hugely different. When we know for a fact that both are interrelated. The golden ratio is a prime example as it relates to aesthetics. More over plenty of mathematicians can submit to the idea that a proof can be elegant or even beautiful. Using terms of aesthetics to describe mathematics. Sometimes science becomes more about creativity, rather than logic. Take string theory for example which states that all possibilities exists and are collapsed to a reality by an observer. Granted that being a rather simplistic statement of a particular part of string theory, nonetheless it almost sounds like philosophy rather than physics. These field experts are knowledge workers but they work at a deficit of interdisciplinary knowledge. Which is why collaboration is so important. But what if we were able to collaborate in our own heads as well as with other people. What if an Artist could put down the paint brush and discuss metallurgy or the kazimir effect. Or a chemist having a conversation on color theory or Calvino’s Lightness. What if we found a common ground in our own heads, would it be easier to talk to each other? Would the conversation be good?

I have recently returned from Paris and can now snobishly say that American coffee sucks. I won’t blather on about how cool the city is or how I wish some of the culture would be represented here in the states. But feel free to look through the photoblog from my week there. The book will be available in the coming weeks.

I’ve always thought these videos were really beautiful.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.