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This is a new version of my entry for the Open Video Alliance’s contest “Open Video in 60 Seconds.” This is the way I should have made the video the first time.

There’s a clip of me in there from 2005. The music is “Landlocked” by Human Response (aka my friend Jan Hanford).

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I don’t know if anyone really pays attention to this but the flaming pink brain logo has appeared and disappeared from this site (and my twitter account) a couple of times. I just put it back and thought I’d explain what it is/why I use it.

20 years ago I had a public access TV show that I named “Grey Matter Gravy.” This video is the title sequence that I ran at the beginning and end of the show. The name was chosen for two reasons. First, the concept: my brain was on fire with all kinds of ideas and the show was the best of those or the “gravy” (gravy being made from the drippings of burning flesh). Second, the drippings of burning flesh was gross and thus was a good puck rock name. And I chose the British spelling “grey” because all my favorite bands were from England.

Fast forward to about 2003 I was trying to create a local group of artists to play with video and the web and decided to use the name for the group and the url graymattergravy.org (this time going with the more traditional “gray” to avoid misspellings). The group didn’t really go anywhere but I really liked the logo I created so I reclaimed the name for myself and registered graymattergravy.com in 2005 to host my artwork and experiments. The site isn’t much to see right now – it’s currently my Drupal playground.

So here’s the evolution of the logo. I played with being more and less literal, finally deciding on a simplified single image (no puddle of gravy) without text. I keep threatening to get a tattoo of this one day. Maybe 2010 is the year for that.

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This is my entry for the Open Video Alliance’s contest “Open Video in 60 Seconds.” The music is “Delirious” by Human Response.

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I’m starting to train for the Capital of Texas Triathlon with Team In Training and I’m documenting it all here.

I first learned of Team In Training about 2 years ago from my friend Thomas Caleshu. We worked together and he was raising money for Team In Training as part of this triathlon that he was going to do. It turned out that he’d had Hodgkin’s lymphoma when he was 13, but thankfully he’s been in remission for the 18 years since he completed his treatment. After watching Thomas train all the time, I got inspired to start running and I’ve been doing that for about a year and a half.

I really enjoy running and pushing myself to go farther and faster. People often ask me if I’m ever going to do any races. I haven’t up until this point because I’ve never really been interested in competitions. I don’t care about racing against anyone but myself. But what I do really enjoy is a good challenge because everyone has the opportunity to win. A few weeks ago while I was out running it occurred to me that Team In Training was more about the challenge – about challenging yourself, both in endurance and fundraising, than about competition.

That brings us to today where I’m training for this triathlon and trying to raise $3500 for the The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Both seem like pretty big and exciting challenges to me so I thought I’d start a videoblog to document what happens. So please check it out and see how I do. If you can, it would super awesome if you’d donate a few bucks to help make this happen. There are nearly a million people just in the United States living with or in remission from a blood cancer.

Tomorrow night is the first performance of a show that I’m working on at Jump-Start. It’s a German play that was our (the Jump-Start of 1985 when I was a senior in high school) first show. For our 25th season we’ve reimagined it a bit. It’s a one person show that we’re doing as a site specific piece in the actor’s house. My part has been directing the webcast/closed-circuit video. We have a cameraperson following the actor around, augmenting the visuals for the audience there in the house. We’re also going to webcast it so my aim is to make the webcast work as it’s own piece.

This version of the show runs Friday & Saturday, Jan. 22 & 23 at 8PM CST. You can catch the webcast on the Jump-Start site. Check out the video archive.

We’ll be doing it again in Feb., Mar. and April with a different actor each time.

Here’s a local story about the show.

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This is a special episode of Talkbot that I made for Jump-Start’s Performance Party XXV. I really rushed putting this together for the show and was disappointed because I knew it could have been better. So this is the “George Lucas Special Edition” complete with moving mouth animations, a new audio mix and both parts combined into one, 2 minute epic.

Another special thing about this episode is that I used some of Jan Hanford’s music. If you didn’t know, Jan writes Talkbot with me and she’s also a musician. The song used for the opening and closing is track 7 – Crosstalk from her album Immortal:

Immortal by Human Response

And the performance music is track 1 – Delirious from her album of the same name.

Delirious by Human Response

Last year Steve and I put together 24 Hours 24 Artists for Jump-Start’s Performance Party XXIV. It was a lot of fun, a lot of work and sadly, not happening this year. Instead, I’m going to webcast the entire 4 – 5 hour Performance Party XXV tomorrow night which Jump-Start says will have “something for everyone: season previews, big groups, solo performers, dance, live music, performance art, comedy, video, fire-eating, glamour, and the absurd! Strap on your space-helmets, it’s going to be a fabulous ride.”

Catch the show live, starting at 7pm CST.

Update: Check out the video archive.

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Hey check it out! It’s another cat video on the internet. In fact, it’s a video of a cat watching a cat video. How fun is that? I know, right.

Anyway, the reason that I made this was to show Jay how I edit iPhone video in Final Cut Pro. So, if you’re interested in that (plus how I compress the video), download this -> iPhone to Final Cut Pro.

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This video is part of a game that a bunch of us are playing this month. The idea is that each day, someone different makes a 90 second video, inspired in some way by the previous day’s piece. This video was inspired by Heath’s video and tomorrow Mike will make one somehow based on this one. I’m collecting all the videos over here.

In case you’re interested, here’s the chain of though that led to this video. I started by writing down some things that interested me in Heath’s video. One of those was the closeup of his eyes. That made me think of the scene in 2001 where David Bowman goes into the monolith. I’ve been listening to The Flaming Lips a lot lately and I thought the end of Silver Trembling Hands and the beginning of Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast would make a cool alternate soundtrack. My original idea was to have Aren (the robot from Talkbot.tv) just say something funny at the end but I’d been listening to the Glee soundtrack all day and I thought it would be better if I could somehow work in one of those tracks. The best one is their version of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing which, I realized, is the song that they used in the last scene of The Sopranos. And that fits perfectly with the Walt Whitman poem that Heath used. All of that happened in my head in about a minute after not coming up with an idea all day.

Update 11/20/09: I finally implemented Ogg video on my site in the new HTML5 video tag. If you are using Firefox 3.5 you’ll get the ogg video when you click play. If you are using Safari or Chrome you’ll get an mp4 file and if you are using IE6, 7 or 8 you’ll get a flash player. I’m using javascript to replace the thumbnail image with the video player because the poster image attribute isn’t supported yet. Also having the image displayed first makes it look better on my iPhone.

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I’ve known of The Flaming Lips for a long time. I vaguely remember seeing them play in Oklahoma in the fall of 1986. Fast-forward twenty-something years and Last.fm is constantly telling me that I need to listen to them. So about 4 months ago I downloaded a few of their albums and totally fell in love. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is so fucking good it instantly became one of my all time favorites.

So here I am, all excited about The Flaming Lips and as luck would have it they were about ready to release a new album – Embryonic. They even had 3 of the tracks already on iTunes which I purchased right away. Then I listened to them. WTF? This didn’t even sound like the same band. On top of that, unlike the beautiful recordings with special headphone surprises of their last few albums, these tracks sounded like they were recorded badly, on a 4-track , in a garage.

Soon after, they started promoting the new album and had the whole thing streaming on the web in a few places. So I gave it a couple of listens but I was still disappointed. My friend Steve says that the first album you really like from a band will usually always be your favorite. I find that’s mostly true. Rarely does a band reinvent themselves and it makes you like them more – after all, you fell in love with the old version. That said, Radiohead certainly did it with Kid A.

So here’s the thing about Embryonic; in my opinion it’s not really a collection of songs. It’s more like one 70 minute epic. Right after it came out 3 weeks ago, I bought it, put it on my iPod and went out running with it. That’s where it finally made sense to me. Once I was able to focus on it and listen to the whole thing – none of the tracks out of context – it began to reveal itself. Now, something like 3 dozen complete listens later, I have to say it’s brilliant. I love it more each time I hear it. It’s without a doubt my favorite Flaming Lips album so far.

I shot this video on my phone yesterday as I drove over the favorite part of my usual running route. “See The Leaves” came on and it felt perfect. I thought I’d try to share it with you.

And yes, I would love to have the special furry fan edition of Embryonic!