It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. I haven’t worked on my podcast, or posted a Song of the Day, even though I was fully intending to. I started recording episode 4 of #smileSays, and took a break because I needed to do some fact checking online. This was on late Monday night, May 25 (early Tuesday morning, May 26). When I went online, this was when I learned:
In the 1st Episode I share a little about myself and why I started this podcast, what to expect from upcoming episodes and talk about some of what went on this week, including COVID-19, Westworld, WWE, Taraji P. Henson, Dairy Queen and assorted randomness.
It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve posted anything because I have been prepping my new podcast. #smileSays is now available on the following podcast platforms:
Subscribe now so you won’t miss a thing. I was originally going to host the podcast here, but decided to let Anchor host and syndicate it in the hope of generating revenue through donations or integrated advertising. There was more that went into the decision than that, but I’ll digress for now. I’m going to see if I can embed the episodes on the site as well. The player featuring the latest episode should load here:
If it doesn’t load, or you want to listen to an older episode, you can check out individual episodes in the meantime by checking the sidebar on a desktop or scrolling further down on mobile. I’ll get it to work eventually.
The Quad Cinema is showing Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde as part of their Hammer Films retrospective, giving me another excuse to recycle some old material, a clip that was recycling old material to begin with. Back in 2006, I produced a video podcast (before the format had really been established or anyone knew what it was) called Potluck: Substance Over Style. The person I was supposed to interview backed out last minute, so I had to come up with an episode on the fly. I pulled out some old videotape of my mom, a couple of other old tapes and some digitized public domain film and put this together. By the way, my mother has never even seen Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, believe it or not.
Ten years ago this weekend, I was the host / emcee of The New York Infringement Festival, a series of plays and one person shows held over Labor Day weekend in Greenwich Village. Someone (I forget who) had created this large puppet called Bushiva to parade around Washington Square Park. I don’t know if they had any specific performance planned, at least, I wasn’t given any direction when I was asked to help operate the puppet.
Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans that weekend, and if you remember, the initial government response to the crisis was far from adequate. Consequently, there were a lot of activist groups and politically minded individuals demonstrating when we arrived with this giant George W. Bush head. I decided to give Bushiva a voice right there on the spot and started fielding questions from pedestrians, offering satirical commetary on the policies and practices of our then president.
I’m not sure who shot and edited the video below, which was posted to YouTube some years ago and I came across recently. Even though the general public’s questions prompting the responses aren’t included, you can still get the idea. It would be great to have a look at the raw footage since I’ve never seen it, but I’ll take what I can get.
If the embedded video doesn’t load, click to watch Bushiva at YouTube.
In the last couple of years, I’ve been embracing this whole social networking, internet shit, and making contacts on various social networks. A lot of young people have been following me, and if they have something interesting or cool, I’ll follow them back. A lot of them have videos showing off their various skills: singing, playing music or sports, skateboarding, freestyle BMXing, doing gymnastics, dancing or any other number of things that kids do. I try to pass along an encouraging comment from time to time; to keep developing their talents, be mindful and safe, and so forth. I get the sense that many of them hope to pursue careers in entertainment, and it’s with that in mind that I write this. It’s not meant to be an end all, be all guide to the entertainment industry; it’s just my thoughts based on my experience. I’ll get to the advice, but to put it in context, let me tell you about Will. Continue reading If you want to work in entertainment→
I was checking out the news and saw that Alan Johnston’s captors have released a video of him strapped in an explosive vest. Click here to watch the BBC report.
In case you didn’t know, Mr. Johnston is a BBC Correspondent who was kidnapped right off the street in Gaza on March 12 of this year. If you would like to learn more about Mr. Johnston’s plight or sign a petition to help free him, you can click the badge that I’ve added to the sidebar if you’re on the site, or click the one below:
(Updated 5:21PM) I saw Michael Moore‘s Sicko a few weeks ago at one of the test screening things where you fill out the card at the end. I didn’t blog about it, because they would prefer that you didn’t until the movie is out and I can hold up my end of a deal. Well, the movie is not quite out yet, but it hit the internet for a while over the weekend. I had it embedded below courtesy of Google Video, but I had some lunch, ran a few errands and watched the first John From Cincinnati (finally), and it was gone when I came back.
It’s really fucking good, not as political as his others, despite what the advertising wants you to believe. I had one minor problem with it (maybe not so minor, depending on how you look at it, because if I was really a blockhead, that one thing would have negated everything that came before), which I won’t discuss until someone posts a comment and asks me about it.
In the meantime, feel free to watch the video below. It’s from a press conference at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, where he was promoting Fahrenheit 9/11, and was asked how he feels about it being distributed over file sharing networks without explicit authorization:
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