The video has almost 2 million plays on youtube and it just went up on Friday, so naturally, the internet has gotten a hold of it to do awesome things like this.

Cee-Lo’s Shawshank Redemption from Dallas Observer on Vimeo.

They also did the Peter Gabriel scene from Say Anything and that one dance scene from Dirty Dancing.  My question was “where the hell is the Reservoir Dogs ‘Stuck in the Middle With You’ video?”  So I went ahead and made one.  Its way more disturbing than it should be, but shit…jumping on internet memes for selfish gains is a tough job, but someone has to do it.  I’m unable to embed it, but all you have to do is click the gruesome screen shot below to watch it on my channel.  EDIT:  WMG Pulled it off youtube.  Here it is on Vimeo.

Cee Lo Mashup: Reservoir Dogs + “F*CK YOU” from Ryan W on Vimeo.

Just a note:  This game is far more hilarious if you start with AVP:R and move backwards.  Good luck and godspeed.

* Three Red Dots – Three Drinks
* Predator Heals Himself – Full Beer
* Predator Self Destruct – Full Beer
* Shoulder Cannon Kill – 2 Drinks
* Levelling The Jungle Scene – Have to Drink The Entire Time Its Happening
* Jesse Ventura Spits – 1 Drink
* Jesse Ventura Says “Slack Jawed Faggots” – Half Beer
* Gratuitous Shirtless Dude shots – 1 drink
* Anyone Says “One Ugly Motherfucker” – Full Beer
* Disc Kill – 1 Drink
* Spear Kill – 1 Drink
* Decapitations – 1 Drink
* Skinned Bodies – 1 Drink
* Badass Wrist Blade Intimidation – 1 Drink
* Gary Busey does something weird – 2 drinks
* Bill Paxton Hits on a Chick – 2 drinks
* Boobs – 2 drinks (one for each boob)

A few weekends ago, I went and saw the movie Predators.  My friend Matt and I are massive fans of the Aliens and Predator movies, so he took some time out from playing World of Warcraft to fly out here from Minnesota and see it with me and our mutual friend Ae.  To prepare for what we hoped would be an epic experience, we developed the Predator drinking game.  The rules are as follows:

• Three Red Dots – Three Drinks
• Predator Heals Himself – Full Beer
• Predator Self Destruct – Full Beer
• Shoulder Cannon Kill – 2 Drinks
• Levelling The Jungle Scene – Have to Drink The Entire Time Its Happening
• Jesse Ventura Spits – 1 Drink
• Jesse Ventura Says “Slack Jawed Faggots” – Half Beer
• Gratuitous Shirtless Dude shots – 1 drink
• Anyone Says “One Ugly Motherfucker”  – Full Beer
• Disc Kill – 1 Drink
• Spear Kill – 1 Drink
• Decapitations – 1 Drink
• Skinned Bodies – 1 Drink
• Badass Wrist Blade Intimidation – 1 Drink
• Gary Busey does something weird – 2 drinks
• Bill Paxton Hits on a Chick – 2 drinks
• Boobs – 2 drinks (one for each boob)

To play the game, we executed the Predator movies in reverse, starting with AVP:R, then AVP, then Predator 2, then Predator.  While playing this game, 2 things were difficult.  The first difficult thing was all the drinking.  Seriously, there are so many wrist blade intimidation/disc/spear/decapitation combos in these movies.  A predator gets on a spree, and suddenly you owe the game 6 beers.  Also, AVP, though it is PG-13 (and mostly terrible), is deceptively heavy on the kills and wrist blade intimidations and whatnot.  We thought it would be a break in the action.  It wasn’t.  I guess you could say that whoever won, we lost.

By the time we made it to the first movie, we were all basically blacked out, and we never made it past the handshake scene, because we stopped to re enact it frame-by-drunken-frame about 16 times.  So yeah, the drinking game was extremely hard, but it paled in comparison to the second difficult thing which is Being a fan of the Predator (and Aliens) films.

As I watched the whole series in reverse, I realized that the state of the Predator franchise has been in one big downward slide since Ol’ Painless came out of the bag.  The same goes for the Alien franchise, which has deteriorated in parallel since the second film, but we’ll just focus on Predator for now.

Alien Versus Predator: Requiem

AVP:R is a joke.  Some music video directors and some hack writers took a bunch of soap opera (and Lost?) b-team actors (Whoa its Rickety Cricket from Always Sunny!) and threw them into a pretty basic premise with some inspired moments and a lot of gore and still managed to fail.  There are some cool moments (a trend that gets repeated throughout the series) but ultimately the whole thing is bad.  Almost bad enough to call it “So-Bad-Its-Good”, but not quite there.  I read somewhere that the directors wanted to cut out the human element, and start the movie off inside the Predator camp, with little to no dialogue…like Dances With Wolves or Wall-E.  That would have been awesome.  Why they chose to run the other direction, I’ll never know.  The “human” plot of Guy-with-checkered-past coming back to his hometown to brood and make allusions to his checkered past while his little brother gets beat up a lot and delivers pizzas and a marine comes home from Afghanistan and a Predator runs around playing David Caruso “investigating” the Alien presence could basically be any movie plot.  Switch out the Aliens with a serial killer or a shark or a coven of witches and swap the predator with Robert Shaw or a detective played by Morgan Freeman and you have…ah fuck it.  You have every movie on TBS in the afternoon, ever.  It was also DARK, not in a Texas Chainsaw Massacre kind of way, but in a “what the fuck is wrong with my TV?” kind of way.  It also rips off the ending from Aliens completely.

Alien Versus Predator

Getting to AVP after AVP:R is like finding an oasis in the desert.  Its a shitty oasis with no boobs and no blood and a stupid Buddy Movie subplot, but its still an oasis.  From the beginning, its clear that AVP was created by someone with EXPERIENCE in making movies (The Resident Evil Franchise, Event Horizon).  Its shot pretty well, you can see stuff (which we should all know not to take for granted at this point), and the effects budget was obviously pretty big.  The characters are pretty hastily defined, but it sets up something fun:  An Alien queen is trapped in Antarctica shitting out Aliens and a bunch of Predators are going to go hunt them while a whole bunch of humans show up to die in horrifying ways!  Badass!  Again, there are some awesome moments, but the second the Predator teaches the hero-chick how to be a Predator the whole thing falls apart.  So stupid.  The cool moments:  An Alien and a Predator throwing each other around like wrestlers, and a pretty amazing boss fight, but the movie still fails to satisfy the irresistible premise of Aliens and Predators engaging in intergalactic conflict.

Then we go back 14 years to Predator 2.  Note the time difference.  14 fucking years we fans have to wait for another Predator to appear on screen.  That’s dedication.

Predator 2

Awesome fucking movie.  I don’t care what anyone says, this movie rules.  There is almost nothing wrong with it (ok there are some things, but fuck you), and it is also the only time we see boobs in the whole franchise.  4 movies and only two living, breathing boobs to be found!  If anyone wants to dispute me on the awesomeness of this movie, do it now.  It has Gary fucking Busey, a Predator picking off coked-up Colombian gang members, Danny Glover being too old for this shit, Bill Paxton hitting on chicks (seriously, he’s Hudson wearing a suit in this movie), a dude getting his spine AND skull ripped out, the first appearance of the bladed disc, the first appearance of the spear, the slaughterhouse scene, and the fucking subway scene.  Like Alien 3, I have no idea why anyone rips on this movie.  In the context of the Predator series, Predator 2 is perfect.  It advances the mythology (and even sets up the Alien Vs Predator concept), has awesome action, great pacing, more explosions, more deaths, and a new setting.  I realize that in the eyes of AFI or whoever decides that movies are good Predator 2 is hokey and weird and kind of dumb, but to Predator fans, this movie is the truth.  I used to like this better than the first one, and shit…sometimes I still do.

Predator

The one that started it all.  I’ve read a lot about this movie and the general consensus seems to be that Predator is an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie first, with everything else being secondary.  I disagree, I actually think its the least Ahnold-y of his movies, due to the awesome supporting cast and the flipped premise.  A lot of his early films are just him being Arnold Schwarzenegger offing truckloads of disposable extras and spitting one liners while some chick follows him around and almost gets killed a million times.  In Predator, he’s surrounded by one of the most bad-ass tough guy teams ever to hit the screen, and no matter how many disposable bad guys he and his friends destroy (complete with awesome live action stunts), there is always one ultimate bad-ass watching him, waiting for his time to go one-on-one.  Its like the Predator watched an Arnold movie marathon from his Predator-throne and thought “this dude looks pretty badass.  I’m going to find him, kill all of his friends, and then challenge him to a fist fight.”  Its a Predator movie.  The Predator owns the movie the whole time, which is no small feat considering the awesome cast and engaging story.  Sure, Arnold wins, but that’s the game.  The Predator is ready to die for the hunt, and there’s a whole planet of these motherfuckers somewhere waiting to come and hunt again.

We didn’t make it that far though.  We were blacked out with half full beers in our hands long before we could check out the “Leveling the Jungle” scene.

Predators

So we got up on Saturday July 10th after this movie marathon, and dragged our carcasses to Kips Bay to see Predators, the “re-boot” of the franchise, produced by Robert Rodriguez, starring Adrien Brody.  Again, another case with a genius premise.  A crew of ultimate bad-asses from planet earth (a Yakuza samurai, a hot-chick sniper, an African special forces guy, a Mexican gangster, a death row inmate, a black ops dude, and a Russian military soldier) all wake up on an alien planet, to be hunted by the predators.  Wow.  What an awesome idea for a movie.  Seems hard to fuck up.  Well, it doesn’t fail…but it does just kind of…under-perform.  This movie is like a guy you work with who doesn’t always come in on time, and he does mediocre work, but he’s not bad enough to fire or even really care about.  After the movie, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of “meh”.  It should have been easy to make this one a blast, but for some stupid reason it took itself so seriously and refused to have any fun with its over-the-top premise.  Or even when it seemed like something sweet was going happen, like a scene where the Yakuza has a SAMURAI SWORD FIGHT WITH A PREDATOR, it ended up lame and underwhelming.  Seriously how is that possible?  I was ready for it to be on par with the Zombie Vs. Shark scene from Zombi, but somehow, it was BORING, which is indicative of the whole problem with this movie (and the franchise as a whole), that it manages to take irresistible setups and render them boring as hell.  More cool moments happened in Predators but it took itself so seriously that I ended up taking it seriously, which ended in just 90 minutes of no fun.  And yet again, there is a “Predator and Human joining forces” subplot that fails just as bad as it did in AVP.

After this whole adventure I was forced to take a hard look at my fandom of the Aliens and Predator movies, and I concluded that not only is it hard to enjoy a lot of these movies, but its downright hard to stay a fanatic after each crushing defeat.  I think we Aliens and Predator fans have it the worst when it comes to being fanatics.  No one yells at the screen during the midnight screenings.  Our video games, while once great, now generally suck.  Our fan fiction and fan art is TERRIBLE (alright all fan fiction and fan art is terrible), and the films we love haven’t been good since the early 90’s.  Its one kick in the nuts after another.  I mean, Star Wars fans got it pretty bad, but at least they got bent over by a bazillion dollar over the top spectacle that at least finished nicely.  And Lord of the Rings nerds, well…they’re pretty high on the hog with all their Oscar nominations and LARPing (not us…do you know how fucking hard it is to climb a tree holding a spear?). Star Trek freaks are kicking ass too with their awesome J.J. Abrams re-boot and good-looking cast.  Twilight fans…well they’re are all doomed anyway once Breaking-Batshit-Dawn comes out, but at least they get boners.  We get nothing of the like.  We get Adrien Brody doing a batman voice…Ripley impersonating an Alien…and Gary Busey.

My point is:  It’s tough being a fan of the Aliens and Predator franchise, but we shall overcome.  I’m not giving up on these movies and I never will.  I’m still going to buy Predators on DVD, and I’ll be waiting patiently for that Alien prequel I read about on some disreputable website 12 years ago.

That’s it.  If you are a fellow fan, please feel free to commiserate and share your hardships right here in the comments.  We’ll always have each other, right guys?

This photo came across my e-desk in my office on the third floor of the internet. It came to me via my assistant, Emilio Estevez from Freejack, and it is the best thing I have ever seen.

First of all, lets hope that the little girl is OK.  OK?   She’s fine.  She went on to live a full and happy life because this woman clearly had complete control of the situation and wouldn’t let anything happen to her (probably) niece.

Second of all, lets call this what it is, but then ignore what it is so the hilarity can flow freely.  This is probably photoshopped.  Almost 80 percent sure that it is.  If it is, I don’t give a damn.  Give the photo-shoppist a bucket of my laughing tears and a gold watch as a reward, because he needs to be recognized as a god among men before he dies covered in bedsores at his computer.  This guy is the Van Gogh of the internet.  Lets not let his life end without recognition for such a work of art.

Finally, lets attack this as if it were a real life snapshot of a real life situation.  So many questions.  What was interesting that the photographer was trying to capture?  Lets watch my niece plays with our dog (fucking HELLBEAST) while my lovely wife (who is awesome with both kids and dogs) supervises?  What is the woman holding the dog thinking?  She seems to be nodding off…which makes this so much better.  One person in this picture is bored to the point of nodding off.  The other person is in full-on primal holy fuck a fucking sabretooth tiger is chasing me I’ll never sleep again mode.  That’s fear right there folks.  Look at it in the face.  Right there.

Furthermore, where are they?  Is that chicken wire around the gates of fucking hell?  Because that thing is clearly a one-headed Cerebrus.  AND WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH THAT DOG?  Good god its horrifying.  Its like, hey I’m a little girl walking along in my yellow raincoat thinking that there is no way that the things from my nightmares will ever be real, well maybe there is a slight chance but my parents told me it was all good so now I’m just hanging out with my aunt and uncle on their meth ranch and I’m eating a Push Up and fucking WHAM! EVERYTHING I EVER WAS AFRAID OF EVER IS NOW REAL AND ALIVE AND TRYING TO FUCKING KILL ME.  I will never trust anyone again.

Congratulations That Picture, you have now unseated this Bill Dance Fishing Bloopers Montage as the best thing I have ever seen.

So, I was going to do Popcorn, for the next installment of MTBMOAK (jesus…need a better acronym), but I had to put that one on the back burner, since the new Nightmare on Elm Street travesty is out and I wanted to catch up on the series before I went and had my hopes and dreams shattered.  Thanks Platinum Dunes…you should have just stuck with Alexander Aja and the Hills Have Eyes Remake…that shit was badass.

The fifth nightmare trailer (seen above) ran in constant rotation on the free Pay Per View previews channel, and I remember being utterly horrified and excited by it.  At the time, I think the only Nightmare on Elm Street I had any experience with was the fourth one, when a bunch of older kids made me watch it at a party that my parents dragged me to.  Being well versed in the boxes and cover art for each Freddy Movie (my favorite being Part 3), I knew what he was about, and I even knew that he had started off scary and gradually got funnier and funnier.  That doesn’t mean he still didn’t freak the shit out of me though.  It was the dream sequences that did it…the first one I remember seeing was in part 4, when Kincaid (YES I know the Dream Warriors by name, thanks) gets trapped in a junkyard by Freddy, and as the camera zoomed out, we see that the entire planet is one huge junkyard.  5 minutes in, for the impatient.

Same thing with the asthmatic girl’s death scene (sorry don’t know her name because she wasn’t a Dream Warrior) while taking a test in class.  The fact that she was being murdered by Freddy in a dream while everyone around her just sat there filling in their test sheets freaked me the hell out, because it nailed that weird helpless feeling you get in dreams where something awful is happening, and while there are people around, no one is doing anything. 2 minutes in.

You can imagine how traumatic this stuff can be for an 7 year old who knew nothing about surrealism, or any of the other bullshit words they use to describe those dream sequences.  That shit was just scary. The trailer for the fifth movie bugged me out so bad because it seemed like they had amped up the weird in the 5th movie, with all the odd camera angles, drooling maniacs, birth canal imagery, and some freaky shit involving a motorcycle.  I watched that trailer about 6 times a day, and every time, it made life feel like a living nightmare.  Which has a weird attraction to a nerdy little kid with an overactive imagination.  I also remember getting chills from the “Kruger, this time its for keeps!” line, because being as terrified as I was, it was cool to see someone fighting back against the terror…which is why I liked the cover to the 3rd movie so much… more on all that later.

So after getting my girlfriend to begrudgingly re-watch the series with me (I skipped Part 2 to expedite the process and I’d seen most of it when I was really young and still thought it was a little “gay”), we made it from the first (pretty damn awesome) to The Dream Warriors (still the best, but a little slow), through Dream Master (really ridiculous but had its moments and it made me go download that dramarama song), and almost made it to The Dream Child before I lost control of the Netflix queue in a sucker’s bet with my girlfriend, so the 5th movie was knocked out in favor of about a thousand Hilary Duff movies or whatever it is girls watch…I kid, she actually has great taste.  So I had to open an account at the shady video store across the street to watch this one.

Everything I had read said it was a well-meaning piece of bad that got hacked up by the MPAA so it wouldn’t get an NC-17 rating and was plagued with confused writers who were still finishing the script as the movie was being shot.  Freddy’s Dead is usually regarded as the worst Nightmare movie, with this one as the second or third worst.  SO there you have it.  As I was doing all my usual internet opinion-reading and regurgitating, I realized that 9 YEAR OLD ME DIDN’T READ SHIT UNLESS IT WAS CALVIN AND HOBBES OR HARDY BOYS.  So I stopped giving a shit what the internet thought and I attacked The Dream Child with the freshest pair of eyes I could muster.  This wasn’t hard since I don’t have much opinion on the Nightmare movies anyway, which should be obvious since its taken me 19 years to see even one in its entirety (apart from New Nightmare, which ruled).  So here’s what happened, through the eyes of me as a kid:

The story follows Alice, The Dream Master who can pull other people into her dreams whenever she wants.  In the beginning she’s doing something with her boyfriend Dan, who survived from Part 4, and they are moaning and scratching each others backs and everything is all blue and they arent wearing clothes but you dont see boobs then.  Then it gets crazy, because Freddy was dead, but Alice starts having these freaky dreams, like, she almost drowns in her shower, and then she even starts dreaming when she is awake!  Turns out she is pregnant, and they totally showed boobs in the shower part.  Her child is named Jacob and he is dreaming about Freddy because he IS part of Freddy, or something…Freddy is trying to come into the world through Jacob…or something.  But he’s not born yet, and the girls friends start dying in really crazy ways, and Freddy’s Mom was raped by 100 maniacs in an insane asylum and she is also in the dreams.  Then Freddy comes alive in the dream and finds his glove and is all freaky with one of his arms extra long and he says, “Its a boy!”.  Then Freddy skateboards and a dude shoots him with guns but then Freddy comes back all big like a wrestler and he is super Freddy and kills the guy with guns then Dan tries to drive his truck to save Alice but Freddy starts driving and rips off his own arm then Dan finds a motorcycle and tries to get to Alice but then the motorcycle IS FREDDY and it starts talking to Dan while they are going like a million miles per hour then the motorcycle like eats Dan and he becomes part of it, and he looks like a skeleton cyborg driving the motorcycle but it turns out he is just dreaming and dies.  They don’t show any more boobs and then Alice goes to fight Freddy in the dream world and everything is all upside down while Alice’s friend goes to find Freddy’s mom’s bones and lay them to rest or something and she does and then Freddy comes out of Alice and they are like part of the same person but fighting each other then Freddy’s Mom shows up and tells Jacob to unleash the power on Freddy so Jacob barfs these souls on Freddy and they tear baby Freddy out of Freddy’s body and Freddy’s mom picks up baby Freddy who looks all crazy and Freddy goes into his Mom’s belly and then tries to rip his way out and then dies forever.  It was AWESOME.

Haha, seriously it was kind of sweet.  It doesn’t make a lick of sense, but it really does try to make something interesting, and as far as the kill scenes and the dream sequences are concerned, it succeeds.  I was drawn to the bits in the asylum, where they use all these Terry Gilliam type camera angles to re-create Freddy’s gruesome conception, and the non-CGI effects looked pretty great, especially in the case of Dan, who really does become some kind of freaked out man/motorcyle hybrid.  Check out the full death scene below, the original version, with a few extra moments that they cut out of all later releases. That mechanical Freddy face FREAKED me out. I’m not sure how I saw it since it wasn’t in the trailer, but I have distinct memories of picturing that damn face underneath my bed or in my closet.

Along with that scene, and the occasional boob-showing, 9 year old me would have really liked when Mark, the comic book nerd, becomes one of his superheroes and fights back.  27 year old me was kind of bummed by it because at that point in the series, there had been so many points where one of the kids uses some crazy powers to fight back, with the same results every time.  The formula goes:  Freddy scares them or injures them in some really personal way, they use their power, get a few hits in on Freddy, and then he kills them anyway.  For once, I wanted to feel like someone had a chance, and that is where I want the remake to go, to play up the bad-ass aspect of the kids fighting back, and actually give them a shot.  If these remakes go on, and I kind of hope they do, I can’t wait to see what they do with part 3.  Other than that, these movies really have a chance to play up the subconscious torture and surrealism of dreams, and I think with modern budgets and effects, they could do some truly amazing things onscreen.  Not that they will.  AND FURTHERMORE (I’ve already taken this WAY into nerd territory, so why stop now) I want to see what its like for Freddy in the offseason, to see him brooding over his shitty little dreamworld and show him setting things in motion to return.  Like that part in Beetlejuice where Beetlejuice is chilling underground bored as hell and reading a newspaper.  That was awesome and a little creepy.

Alright, that’s about it.  Now, with that out of the way i can go see the terrible remake and get on my with pointless waste of a Nightmare on Elm Street watching life.  Ugh city.  Next up is either Popcorn, or Body Parts, because Popcorn is really hard to find.  Thanks for reading!

Movies That Bugged Me Out As a Kid – Hardware

I don’t mean to set myself up as any kind of eulogist, but I wanted to write about something beautiful that happened recently in the wake of something awful.

A friend died recently, under very strange (and tragic) circumstances.  His name was Chris Thompson (In the Photo Above), but a lot of his friends knew him as “Little Man”.  Upon meeting him, the name made sense.  He was on the short side, built like a truck, hair constantly pulled back…I always picture him in a leather jacket, smoking cigarettes and listening intently whenever you’d speak.  The nickname was never meant as a dig to his size…in fact, only his friends called him that, and no one ever did it with any trace of malice.

He was one of the first people to not be shitty to me on my first day in high school.  He hung out in “The Cubby”, a weird little alcove in a hallway near the library where the metalhead kids would hang out.  Chris and I were never close, but he was always extremely nice to me, and I appreciated that.  The closest we got was one summer we talked for hours on the phone (because without a car, what the hell else were we supposed to do?) about how to beat Tomb Raider (because that game was EVIL)…and he talked me through a few rough patches.

As time went on, our crew in The Cubby grew to include the skater kids, the ravers, the hip hop heads, the hippies, the drunks, the auto body freaks…basically anyone who found themselves on the fringes of the backwards-ass high school culture.  And it was great…we never wanted for someone to talk to or hang out with.

Anyway, we all kind of drifted after high school, apart and all over the world, which I’m coming to learn is basically required for adulthood.  It gets harder and harder to remember where you came from and the distractions pile up until something happens to yank you out of your routine, making you stop and realize not just how far you’ve come, but how great everything was where you started.

In this case, it was the untimely and weird death of our friend Chris.  Now, I don’t want to go ahead and act like we were best friends.  There are people out there who knew him infinitely better than I did, and no doubt felt the sting more than me.  I don’t want to downplay their loss, I just want to point out something that I think we can all appreciate.

After his passing I started seeing people change.  Most of this took place on facebook (making this the ONLY profound thing I’ve ever seen on facebook) where the people who knew Chris kind of gathered to commiserate over their loss.  After the initial shock faded, pictures started popping up.  Everyone who knew Chris started posting these amazing, scanned-in pictures (usually photos with Chris or connected to him somehow) of all of us as 8th grade, 9th grade, 10th grade kids, decked out in insane clothing, covered in our favorite bands, communal over Slayer, Megadeth, and shit…Marilyn Manson.  Dark clothes, weird jeans, shitty homemade bongs, even shittier weed, skateboards, great music, cigarettes, and more cigarettes…our only concerns being where we could hang out after school and whether or not the “cool guy” who didn’t card for smokes was working at Oasis Market.  Seeing these pictures reminded me, and I hope a few other people of how awesome we all were back then (despite some of the fashion choices), and it made me conscious of the kid I was, wondering what that kid would think of me now.

Which is infinitely valuable.  As things get more complicated and you get older, the best move (which I now realize thanks to all of this madness) is to just start doing/listening/thinking about/talking about whatever it is you loved when you were 15.

So before I ramble more, here are the photos.  I think they are perfect (especially that one of Joe’s wall with MEGADETH written in duct tape).  A lot of them were taken by Joe, some by Shawn, and some by Bill.  If anyone objects to these being up, just let me know and I will remove them.

Thats Chris in the bottom two photos as well.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that this is great.  I know we would all prefer to have Chris still around, with these photos safely buried somewhere, but given the situation, we’re lucky that at least something special grew from something so awful.

Rest in peace sir.  Play a Sepultura record up there.

Sorry about that to anyone who actually cared.  The only time I could write anything was once I made it back to my hotel room, and by that time I had been day-drinking for 10 hours, my feet planed flat by lugging around a 60 pound camera bag all day long.  To recap, here is a list of the non-work bands I (think I) saw at South By Southwest this year in Austin.

Thursday:

Collections of Colonies of Bees – awesome

jj – needs to do more than just sing over her ipod

SALEM – WHAT?

Holy Fuck – fucking amazing.  Most bands should just consult these guys before becoming bands.

Glitch Mob (!) – always great to see edIT doing his “conducting the crowd” dance.

Friday:

Metric – pretty great.  gorgeous lead singer, sounded so much better than the first time I saw them.

MUSE – thanks to the almighty Miles for that one

Tobacco – At the Anticon showcase, with all the requisite weirdness.  Sounded like if Glitch Mob made beats for Sole or something…the people I was with didn’t really like it.

The Very Best – Who were…the very best, even though I had diabetes and the shakes by then.

Saturday:

Fucked Up – Dude never wears a shirt, and thats cool.

Andrew WK – For the first time since Drew and I saw him at The Quest a billion years ago.  He was just as amazing as ever, opening up for Gwar, who I didn’t get to stick around for as it was freezing.  Best thing I saw the whole time though.

Vivi Brown – By accident.  She was playing the Perez Hilton party, which I somehow, for some reason ended up at, wearing an artist badge.  I left after 20 minutes to watch some comedy.  She was actually really impressive though.  Kind of a swing/soul/gnarls barkley type of vibe.

Black Cobra – Metal!!  Even if I only got to see one metal band, I was glad it was those guys, who I had never heard of.  Kind of an updated thrash sound…I think…  all I could really hear was Lone Star sloshing around my brain at that point.  I also ran into MetalSucks Ben for a minute, who is the fucking man.  He introduced me to a friend of his who worked at Relapse Records, which is where 15 year old me has wanted to work his entire life.  15 year old me hates 27 year old me.

DJ Quik – Second best thing I saw.  He brought out Bone Thugs to do a few songs, which was even more amazing.  Bizzie was conspicuously absent, probably somewhere knife-fighting with the public school system or something.

So yeah, all that happened.  I spent my entire time in Austin drunk and eating mexican food, bratwurst, hot dogs, barbecue, basically whatever was in front of my face.  I almost shit my pants 3 times.  Thats 3 times more than my lifetime average.  I spent my mornings shooting our bands, and my nights running around like a fool trying to cram as much music in as possible.  My feet have never hurt more in my entire life.  I’ve never been offered more swag in my  entire life.  Most every drink or meal was free thanks to the same people who gave out the swag.  Swag littered the streets – by Saturday there were cases of energy drinks and CD samplers strewn all over the streets.  Our bands are great.  Its fantastic to hang out with the new bands who still appreciate their position and don’t take it for granted.  I spent a ton of money at Flatstock, the big poster convention there, and at Third Man Records, the store set up by Jack White of the White Stripes.  Every dollar I spent there was spent on something great and extremely limited.  I tried for three days to get a bacon bloody mary, only to be thwarted by high demand and diminishing supply.  When I finally tasted it, there was no bacon-infused vodka and my body was violently rejecting alcohol, so it was underwhelming.  I ached when I went to bed, and ached when I woke up.  Chairs were sacred spaces and I would have shanked someone for a seat on more than one occasion.

It was awesome.  I hope I can go back next year.

I’m in LA now, working out of our offices in Beverly Hills.  Its great to be working again, maintaining some normalcy.  After this I’m going to Vegas.

Today was much better.  Spent most of the day following around the guys from New Politics, who are, for lack of a better word..new.  They sound like Rage Against The Machine working with Dinosaur Jr…

We filmed a bunch of hilarity with the guys (seriously sweet guys) then i ditched the camera rig at a co-workers hotel room and hit up The Mohawk to see Collections of Colonies of Bees, SALEM, jj, and Holy Fuck.  COCOB and Holy Fuck were fan-fuckin-tastic, the rest… not so much.

Then it was Street Sweeper Social Club, who I wrote a terrible review about in Metropop.  They were better live, but the best part was that edIT and glitch mob were playing after them.  After talking to the crew from Warner (also, amazing fuckin guys) I got to enjoy edIT and two other dudes.

I loved not having a camera attached to my face today.  These are the worst blog updates ever.

Also, this is the best thing i’ve seen in the last 45 minutes.

So I’m at South By Southwest (or Douce by Douchewest, as one of my bosses calls it), for the first time ever.  To put it quickly (I need to get to bed …like now), South by Southwest is like spring break for the music industry.  Bands, panels, day-drinking, the whole nine.

I’m here to shoot bands for my labels – RCA, Jive, Columbia, Epic.  Today I schlepped a hundred pound camera around on a mad dash to find HDV tapes, barely making it to my only real assignment – a handshake party for the RCA artists and college marketing kids.  After some drunken interviews with our artists, we headed to a showcase, featuring the very same artists we interviewed.

Showcase was a total debacle.  They billed it as a hip-hop show…kind of, with our guys setting things up for a late night BUN B (the living half of the legendary UGK) performance.  Needless to say, the timing of the show COMPLETELY fell apart (as hip-hop shows are wont to do…they cal it “hip hop time” in the biz), and our guys didn’t go on until the crowd started chanting for Bun B to take the stage.  So our guys got booed offstage while their management almost got into fistfights over the situation backstage.  The boo-ing actually made them play harder though, so I commend them for it.  But Bun B was in motherfucking DALLAS the whole time, so no one would have seen him play, no matter how hard they booed.

Anyway, it was a weird day, and I’m looking forward to having things more planned out tomorrow.  Today was a mess, tomorrow will be better.  Also, Jordan (my label contact) and I got approached by a guy, appropo of nothing, who wanted to talk about how much he hated Brett Favre for switching to the Vikings.  He showed us his poorly sketched Packers tattoo and demanded that we film him ranting.  He was so pissed off and so huge that I was certain he was going to beat my ass for being from Minnesota.  He actually turned out to be really cool…and he demanded that I post his rant online so he can “blow it up on facebook”.  So…that will happen soon.

See y’allz tomorrow.