During the recent Bandcamp initiative to donate their profits to Trans Rights, I revisited my wishlist and rediscovered some gems I'd always meant to spend more time with but hadn't gotten around to. One such treasure was LIVE album from BANANA, a collection of artists with just one release as far as I can tell.
It's a Saxophone meets Vibraphone Swirl and I can't stop listening to it. It's a bit jazzy improvisational, a bit Philip Glass and all delightful.
The other day I awoke with They Might Be Giant's "Where Your Eyes Don't Go" stuck in my head. Obsessive morning listening led me to discover a 1987 radio show appearance from the band that I'd never heard before - The Frank O'Toole Show. O'Toole was a WFMU DJ and, clearly, a friend of the band. They spend a solid hour goofing around, playing Dial-A-Song recordings and early demos of their own. It embodies everything that I loved about the band when I first discovered them; it's weird, legitimately funny and filled with great songs. You can get the full TMBG Wiki insight on the performance right here.
Oh, and you can hear the original demo for "Where Your Eyes Don't Go" - which led me there in the first place.
Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Elysium director) launched an experimental film studio called Oats Studio. They've posted a number of films on YouTube and a handful of them are absolutely worth watching. Rakka feels pulled straight from Blomkamp's playbook with a dystopian future overrun by aliens, Fluke is an uncanny valley animation of depressing weaponry experiments and Cooking with Bill is.. well, just gross.
But there's a twist! For Oats Studio is not just a studio, it's a "Lab". Here's the official writeup:
The Studio is an independent incubator of ideas with the capacity to handle all aspects of production from start to end. Oats Studios works in an open source format with the audience by allowing the fans to interact with the filmmakers and the studio directly, and allowing the fans access to the actual film's assets to then merge with their own creativity.
That last bit is certainly the outlier from any other movie studio. You can actually Download the assets from each film and then do... whatever? It's possible that your ideas might even get worked into a future volume of works. How that works with royalties and IP is probably a little murky but that seems like a problem to worry about when it becomes a problem.
For those of us that aren't going to be creating new works, it's an interesting user to follow on YouTube as you do get a variety of work from some rather clever filmmakers.
Have you seen the trailer for Netflix's American Vandal? Is this satire? Is this a parody that will only be revealed in the last minutes of the final episode? Or will the story come to expose some horrible reality that's hard to swallow? Whatever it is, I'm amused, a bit baffled and certainly intrigued.
I caught The Retirement Party exhibition from Tyler Hildebrand over the weekend and rather enjoyed the massive installation of works. Much like his portfolio site, the works are presented as a huge wall of works crammed side-by-side. Stylistically it ranges from strange folk art (see Peanuts rugs and toilet seat covers), bizarre character sketches and collages with just the right amount of pop-culture references. I won't lie, the Roseanne series of images caught my eye not because of their overt nostalgia but because they just served as a familiar jumping off point for something interesting.
The latest from Frank Chimero is his online pop-up shop, AOK. The store offers a smattering of mugs, totes and shirts emblazoned with the drawings and musings of Chimero. I don't know anyone who wouldn't love a Please Talk To Me About Podcasts mug and I'm personally a fan of the Never Leave the House turtle.
Owl Labs is a young company with one solid product under their belt, The Meeting Owl. The desktop device comes with a 360 camera up top, omnidirectional microphones, 360 speaker and a plug-n-play system that makes it compatible with whatever conferencing software you're already using. The video software that runs the device also outputs "smart" panes of video that focuses the camera on whomever is talking, often resulting in sliding panels of those who are the most vocal.
I realize this post sounds a bit like an advertisement but I'm just pleased with my experience using the device, particularly from the remote side of things where I can actually see everyone in the room at once. It is, admittedly, an expensive device for what it does but if you can convince your finance department to let you go for it, you should nab one.