So I found this bug in WordPress. I can’t delete posts or add new catagories without unloading the current Theme and reloading the default Theme. This is time consuming and maddening and I don’t have time to chase this one down right now. So I’m filling the test post with this text.
Archive for March, 2007
For those of you that don’t know, Second Moon is the first feature by Pilsen resident Masahiro Sugano. It features Gustavo Donoso among others and Renae’s apartment. So helpthe master of late night chinatown noodle crawl out, OK?
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Friends! Please come to the screening and bring your friends. We have to pack the house. I need your help.
Second Moon, my debut feature film, will be shown as part of the Annual Chicago Asian American Showcase at the Gene Siskel Film Center on April 4, 7:45 p.m. It’s scheduled for one screening only right now.
If we pre-sell all the tickets by the end of the month, we get to have a second slot on the same weekend. That will give me more leverage to bring in film critics and producer’s reps. I need this to happen to get a shot at distribution, to which I stand against the odds right now as all first time indie films do.
So come and watch the film. I want to know what you think of it. Support me through constructive criticism and love. If you hate it, just tell me afterwards, “It was charming.” I guarantee you though, it’s a pretty odd and interesting film (Check out the screen shots below).
Tickets are available online at <http://www.ticketmaster.com
Tickets are also available at the box office of Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 North State Stree (opens 5 p.m. on weekdays and 2 p.m. on weekends).
WED April 4, 7:45pm SECOND MOON FEATURE
Masahiro Sugano | 2007 | 109 min | HD | USA Featuring Andre Ing, Jennifer Shin, Jim Finn, Rueben D. Echoles, Freeman Coffey, Cy Shim, Monte
With vignettes from around Chicago, Second Moon tells the story of Q, an agent of an underground organization called “Art of Love.” Under the guise of “liberating love,” the organization helps its clientele (suburban housewives) cheat on their husbands. One day, Q runs into M, a transient Korean girl. The Art of Love outlines a specific code of conduct that forbids agents from monogamous relationships. M seduces Q into a relationship, rendering Q conflicted between his love for M and his loyalty to the Art of Love. Second Moon alternates between scenes of corrupt agents and quirky chases in Chicago, with surreal sequences in an “underground lair.” Also interesting is the parallel between Q’s sexual encounters in the lair and his culinary encounters with M’s cooking. Inspired by Milan Kundera’s book, Unbearable Lightness of Being, Q’s quest for ultimate happiness has come down to his choice and belief of love.
We are honored to present the North American premiere of Second Moon, which recently world premiered at the Pusan International Film Festival. Native to Japan, Masahiro graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was nominated for a Student Academy Award. His films have since appeared in festivals worldwide, including the prestigious Sundance. Second Moon not only represents a milestone to our festival, as it is the first locally shot and directed feature that we have shown in our 12-year history, but it brings a Chicago Asian American to the world cinema stage with his bold and confident storytelling and stunning visual style. We couldn’t be prouder and happier to call him our friend!
Lots of people are talking and writing about about Twitter (go to Twitter.com and check it out). For something this simple, it seems to polarize a lot of people. What no one has said is we used to have something just like Twitter. It was called .plan and finger. You used to edit your ,plan file and say what yourplans were, what you were doing. And if people wanted to know what you were doing, they’d used the Unix finger command: finger parody@dev.null.com for example. Back in the day it was the only way to findout what was going on at Id games when they were knee deep in developing a new game. But it’s a Unix thing, and it doesn’t really work under todays network enviornment, where machines rarely have static permanently assigned IP addresses and rarely leave their machines up 24/7. And the mechanism was used in one of the first denial of service attacks, so admins turned it off on servers or blocked it at the routers. So now we have to go log into yet another server, or download yet another app to get the same functionality. And the pundits get to worry about how their going to monetize it.
(in all hoonesty Twitter has more functionailty then .plan files, and is ripe for mashup, as witness the cool Twitter/google maps mash up. Personally I don’t think it’s all there yet, but it’s certainly a harbinger of Point of Place and Plan software.)
Mail.app, the OS X email client has been acting incrasingly flakey and today it lost all it’s settings. Not just content with losing them, it won’t let me save any replacement ones, and I’ve tried every trick in the book. So I’ve wasted the better part of the night having to go online and get the necessary tools to migrate to Thunderbird (the Open Source standards complient browser from the Mozilla Foundation). I need special apps because Apple in it’s infinite hubris has straid from the path of using standards complient files for email (Mbox), instead opting for a propriatary system tied to their Spotlight search function. BLEAH. I’m having one hell of a time getting all my mail into Thunderbird it could take days.
Thunderbird isn’t blameless in this: it can’t recognize the VCard adress book standard. So I’ve had to get an app to convert to LDIF, then import into TBird. And TBird has the worse user interface for managing lists: you have to create a list then hand typ in all the addresses. That’s total bullshit.
Long and short: if you emailed me within the last 2 days, please do it again. Thanks!
More on this as things develop.
Or How I started Worrying and Went Tactical…
Without getting into the arguement in general of whether or not clothes define the man, to some people I am defined by the photovests I’ve been wearing for the past twenty five years. Being a nerd I tend to carry a load of crap around, and I like the pockets for carrying and for organization. I know what goes into what pocket, and I don’t loose things that way. It’s my version of Getting Things Done. The times I tried living out of pouches and waistbelts were disastrous, inevitably i ended up with either a shoulder bag or a another vest. And I’m currently without a working vest (actually I have two vests, the one that just dissolved after a year’s wear and the one it replaced which is shredded but which I can’t bear to throw away since it ( mostly) survived the auto accident that destroyed my camera).
When the main cargo pocket on the newest vest dissolved, I emptied it out. The contents filled my small messenger bag. Which is amazed me at the time, I mean, it’s just a photo vest, it’s not a camera or computer bag! I tried carrying the messenger bag and my backpack for a few weeks but the strain on my back was too much. I’m still in pain from doing it. And it threw my stride off completely, making me waddle much more then usual. I couldn’t imediately add the former vest contents to the backpack. It was already over loaded. So I migrated to a larger pack, no mean feat in itself considering my desperate financial straits (and impossible without help from Jeff Mickey). The pack i ended up with is GI surplus MOLLE II rig, which is modular, expandable via add on pouches and a top loader. Top loaders suck for organization, I’m forever digging in it and dumping it out to find what i need. And you can’t keep your cell phone in it without missing calls (yeah, I tried). So I have to start organizing the contests into small pouches and bags.
So I have a few problems. Replacing the vest or it’s functionality, and organizing the ruck. Getting pouches and bags for the ruck has prooven the easiest task. It’s a matter of visiting all the places I have my stuff stashed and rearranging things a bit to free up smaller bags, using different colored super market bags and cleaning out a pile of clear topped plastic carryout chinese food containers I lucked into. Not perfect, but it will do for now. Replacing the vest is turning into a nightmare. I could, if I had the money, just buy another one of the same brand I’ve been using for 25 years. Except the quality has changed drastically, as has the size. What used to last 5 or more years doesn’t last one, and doesn’t hold everything. It’s also become harder to find my size. A similar vest from a better manufacturer costs more then double. Even with moving the bulk of stuff to the ruck, I either have to festoon my belt with pouches, get a fanny pack, or a small shoulder bag. Adding a specific vest replacement pouch to the backpack isn’t an option, it’s just not as fast or as easy for the things I need constantly. My pants pockets are already overloaded with just a wallet and keys in them, so that isn’t an option.
Fanny or waist packs aren’t really an option. Fat guys wearing them look, well, ludicrous. And they’re always sliding around or down. I’m not too keen on belt pouches, since it would mean exposing the insanely high waists on all my pants to public ridicule. And I don’t have any belt pouches anymore. I used to: I had a collection of Eagle Creek and other name brand pouches from various attempts at going vest-less that I ended up using to organize my tools and photo gear. So I spent a bit of my copious free time looking into them. And found that in the interim, almost all the pouches I used to have are no longer made, and have been replaced by shit. Excuse me, that l read items of lesser quality. So I kept looking. Eventually I found tactical bags and pouches in the same price range as my old vest, but of much higher quality. I’m going to post a few to the wishlist. Almost all of them can be carried in multiple ways, almost all of them are expandable by adding other pouches to them and they all come in black. I have enough trouble wandering around Chicago wearing a large camo packpack.
Untill such time as I can afford one, or a good samiritan comes forward, I’ve begun work on an interim solution. I’m sewing together an older ripped small shoulder bag that i used to wrap up the remains of my camera. I’m also going to try my hand at sewing a few organizers. So far the repair efforts have born little fruit. I hand sew about as well as I hand write, or hand anything. It looks like shit, or exactly like you’d think something hand stiched by a homeless person would look. It takes forever. It does however give me something to do at night when I can’t sleep.
There is nothing like like wandering around a big city, or even a big pseudo city Like Evanston at 4am and almost walking into a deer. I walked around a corner and almost into it. The deer looked at me for a bit and then clip-clopped across the street, and then meandered down the block and out of sight.
“BANKER’S HOLIDAY”
An Exhibition of Fine Art Photography
from
THE PILSEN PHOTO GROUP
- Ned Broderick – Renae Lillie – Jeff Mickey – Michael Wasniowski – Jeff Yudkowsky
March 16th – April 15th
Openings, Friday, March 16th from 7 – 10pm
and
Sunday, March 18th from 12 – 4pm
at
CHICAGO PHOTOGRAPHY CENTER
3301 North Lincoln Avenue
Chicago, Illinois
(773) 549-1631
I make an extremely brief cameo in The Thin Man’s video of An undertaker Muses. Here it is at iFilm. Just for the record, iFilm sucks- it’s a slow, slow site, with an airless design and terrible searching. Input the name of the group, the name of the song and the directer’s name and you still get Throwing Muses first and thirteen pages to go through before you find the video your looking for. Thanks to Goodrobot for actually wading through the murk to find it-I had given up.
(And no, I’m not going to reward iFilm for a suck ass experience by embedding it here. I am going to try to beat it out of Andy and post it some place real.)
Get your art on tonight! Join Ned, Renae, Robin and maybe even Kenneth at 4Art for the Second Friday art crawl.
