While I was up at All Tomorrow’s Parties hanging out with the Criterion Collection crew and helping them run the show in the make-shift festival cinema at Kutcher’s, I had the incredible experience of getting to sit at the feet of a master: Jim Jarmusch. I was chatting with Barry, a rep for Panasonic moments before the Q&A started and as Jim walked to the front, Barry handed me a yet-to-be released brand-spankin’ new out of the box HD camera (sorry, I can’t remember the model) and said “Here, help me shoot this!” And so I did!

It was one hell of a great Q&A and I highly recommend that you click through and watch some of these vids. Wayne Coyne makes a cameo and Jim’s thoughts on cinema and art and music are some of the most eloquent I’ve heard.

The Hardcourt Bicycle Polo Federation World Championships are happening this weekend directly across the street from my house here in Philly! I’ll be able to watch from my bedroom if I wanted.

My friend Lance Weiler has been working hard on a new project where creative people meetup and discuss the future of multi-platform story telling, open-source media making and cutting-edge technologies in the creative industries.

DIY Days will be in Philadelphia, happening on August 1st at University of the Arts. But if you’d like to get a jump start on the action, there will be a pre-party and creative meetup on July 8th.

The pre-party details:

Wednesday, July 8 :: 7-11pm @ Johnny Brenda’s
Presented by the WorkBook Project and PIFVA
$5 at the door or FREE for PIFVA members

Special performances by
* SCIENTISTS ARE THE NEW ROCKSTARS

* CHIEF WRECKEM’s ORGANS vs TURNTABLES

* Speed power points presentations about
the FUTURES OF ENTERTAINMENT.

* PLUS a number of targeted NETWORKING SESSIONS to help you meet others who are making creative work in PHILLY.

My neighborhood hosted it’s 3rd annual arts festival this weekend. I’ve been saying this is my favorite day of the year in Fishtown, a day when I’m extra proud to live here and be part of such a vibrant and wild-spirited community. What promised to be a rainy affair turned out to break free of the showers and even give me a sunburn. It was lovely, as always.

A big part of the festival, for those of you who don’t know yet, is the ‘Kensington Kinetic Sculpture Derby’. I took lots of photos of the derby and here’s a video of some of the best sculptures in action:

We’d love to see your smilin’ face at the next Hunter/Gatherer gig being held on March 13th at 7pm at the Green Line Cafe on 45th and Locust in West Philly!

Audrey and Jesse will be playing with two cool local bands, Faux Slang (who’s EP you can download for free here) and Fence Kitchen. Having just delved into both bands’ catalogues, I can assure you it will be a good show. Please come out and start yr weekend right!

Unsurprisingly, my fourth (and Audrey’s third) True/False Film Festival lived up to its growing reputation as one of the best documentary festivals in the country by delivering great films, new friends, engaged conversations and rousing parties. We had a blast. As always, you can see all my photos in a Flickr set here.

Some highlights:

My favorite film was Big River Man, a film I didn’t even know was in production when I blogged about it’s subject, extreme distance swimmer Martin Strel last year. I wish the trailer was up online, but alas. You’ll have to do with my over-used one word description for things I love: amazing!

A closer runner-up for me was We Live in Public the new film from Dig! director Ondi Timoner that follows the media experimentation of early Internet entrepreneur and Pesudo.com founder Josh Harris.

It was really cool to meet both Josh and Ondi at the fest and get to talk about film and the future of online video – a subject clearly close to my heart.

Other excellent films we saw and loved: Pressure Cooker (about a Philadelphia high school’s culinary class and it’s extraordinary teacher), No Impact Man (about a NYC family who famously choose to go as no-impact as possible for one year), Over the Hills and Far Away (about a Texas family who’s quest for healing of their Autistic child takes them on a spiritual quest to Mongolia).

Last but not least, how could I not mention how cool it was to get treated to a short set from avant-garde legends Pelt before just about every screening! Nothing like a little Buddha Machine and gong quartet to pep you up for a great film experience.

I haven’t been blogging about bands all too often here on The PJS because I do most of that over on yvynyl lately. However, this band I just discovered is too mind-blowing not to share.

Stag Hare is a young fellow named Garrick Biggs who lives in the middle of Utah. Followers of Growing, Brightblack Morninglight and Faust (as I am a huge fan of all three) will certainly fall deeply in love upon first listen. Here, lemme show you:

Stag Hare – Born into Magic

Also, if you dig this, you should most definitely check out my dear friends Niagara Falls who have a new limited-edition vinyl LP available now and are playing a show tonight at The Marvelous in West Philly. I’ll be there!

Audrey and I went up to Brooklyn to celebrate the turning of the new year at my sister Becca and her husband Brandon’s lovely new apartment in Park Slope. Goodtimes!

It became a bit of a wee wild one, as you can see by this mid-evening F Train ride with some wine-toting strangers. The late-late-night photos, ahem, weren’t posted. But here are the rest of them!

There’s another excellent night of avant/psych music at my friends’ house in Fishtown. Come on, feel the noise. From the desk of my friend Brooke:

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 21
8:30 PM
@ 2037 FRANKFORD AVENUE
(between Norris + Susquehanna Aves. Enter around back on Sepviva Street)
$5 donation
byob

Hope to see you,
Brooke

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ZOMES

Lungfish’s guitarist Asa Osborne is back with an instrumental record chock-full of eerie fuzzed out loops and droning drums. Released under the pseudonym Zomes, this debut album is dark and cinematic with influences ranging from library music to East-German electronica.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

DANIEL HIGGS

Daniel Arcus Incus Ululat Higgs is a musician and artist from Baltimore, Maryland on whose behalf superlatives are destined to fail. It’s not that his artistic output – spanning three decades, numerous albums, books of poetry and collections of drawings – simply eludes classification, it defies it. Often we hear that a true work of art is meant to speak for itself, and with the work of Daniel Higgs the maxim rings truer than ever. His art is of the cosmos, we on Earth merely lucky that it happens to be confined to our atmosphere, in our lifetime. Higgs is known primarily for his work as the sole lyricist and frontman of the band Lungfish, a four-piece dedicated to charting, in this listener’s estimation, nothing short of the evolution of all species, known and unknown. That the band has undertaken this pursuit in the guise of a humble rock outfit, in the absence of any public relations fanfare, etanarrative, or manifesto has been enough to endear them to tens of thousands. They are enshrined as one of America’s last true folk bands, and Higgs anointed as a patron saint to artistic purity.

In recent years, Higgs has released a number of solo outings that can only be described as the ultimate in isolation, worlds away from the hypnotic, communal rock of his band. On Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot, Higgs weaves meditative, casually ruptured drones using acoustic and electric guitar, upright pianos, banjo and jew’s harp, recorded entirely at home on cassette recorder. He pairs the music with a series of paintings that call to mind religious iconography passed through the disfiguring surrealism of Miro.

Higgs has wedded his music and his visual art into a singular being, meant to be encountered as a conjuring force similar to that of the tarot experience. The yggdrasil is the great tree of Norse myth that connects all worlds of cosmology. Passing into Christian folklore, the tree is said to connect heaven and earth. In his relentless pursuit of the indivisible, Higgs travels up and down this spine and hatches a new transubstantiation of sound and image into life-form.

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BILL NACE (tbc)

Bill Nace is an itinerant guitarist in the improv-minstrel mode. His best known projects are X.O.4, Northampton Wools (with Thurston Moore), Vampire Belt (with Chris Corsano), but he is happy to work without a net in a variety of settings.

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OTTO HAUSER

(of Espers & Vetiver) solo

I’m going to gather a group of folks to get down to DC for the historic inauguration of our 44th President. January 20, 2009 will be a great day! Out with the old and in with the new, says I.

Destination DC has a cool site up to help mitigate what will certainly be one big ol’ crowd of gawkers (via Intelligent Travel). I’m ready to brave the madness myself. And I’ll bring a set of binoculars, too.

If you want in, leave your name below and I’ll let you know more details soon. Probably going to be just a day trip from Philly. Let’s carpool!

I can hardly express how overjoyed I am today. How relieved. How hopeful. To finally shrug off the nightmare of the last eight years. To finally let go of the anger. It brought me to tears last night. Heavy, primal tears. I finally believe in America again. Thank God. I finally have my hope restored. This is something I will talk about for the rest of my life. My grandkids will hear about it in fine detail.

Boy, we have a lot of work to do, though. That much is clear. Let’s get up and do it!

Today, please enjoy this illustration by the talented Patrick Moberg.

Philadelphia Phillies became World Champions last night, in case you didn’t hear. If you were in Philly last night, there wasn’t a chance in hell you missed it. The noise + celebertion + collective euphoria was unbelievable. Here’s a crappy, dark, blurry shot I took on my phone outside of Johnny Brenda’s in Fishtown. Probably 500 people in the street from all the bars in that area. Fireworks. Police. Crazed fans. Amazing.

the summer camp hanging out by the lake vibe…

the fun new friends we made…

the amazing music performances…

But I can’t. I’m too exhausted. But I know if I don’t post something now, I might never get to it. I’ll let me mediocre photos tell the story for me.

I will say this: ATP was hands-down one of the best, most fun festivals of any kind that I have ever attended. Yes.

[UPDATE: Pitchfork actually has a fantastic review of the weekend - and I agree with pretty much every point, for those of you music nerds interested in the finer points of the performances.]

Just returned from another fantastic festival. I met several great people, as usual, as this festival is one of the best ones for meeting filmmakers. Though I shook his hand, I didn’t actually get to speak with Jeff Goldblum other than the few seconds before taking this gratuitous photo for my blog. Yeah, I’m a fan boy. I admit it.

One of my favorite conversations was the 45-minute long chat I had in front of the coffee shop on Sunday morning with Godfrey Reggio, the director of one of my favorite films of all time, Koyaanisquatsi. I had the chance to really pick his brain about his films, his hometown New Orleans, the direction of digital media and the implications of the ubiquity of digital cameras on privacy and society. Fun!

I’m happy that I finally got to meet Karina Longworth, the blogger for Spout.com, after being Internet buddies for a couple years. And though usually a chore, my trips into and out of town were both great. On the way in, I met and had a fantastic conversation with Lee Kline of the Criterion Collection, who subsequently invited me to project video at their cinema at All Tomorrow’s Party (more on that later). And then, on my way out of town I spoke with the talented animator Matthew Talbot-Kelly about blogging, animation, business and family. Great stuff. If you have the chance, I also highly recommend his short, Blind Man’s Eye.

You might notice that I haven’t yet written about the films I saw. Honestly, there weren’t any that totally blew me away. Maybe I’m getting jaded. Or media-saturated. Or filmed-out. Not sure. But in any case, my favorite feature-length films I caught were:

• Waltz with Bashir – an animated documentary about a soldier trying to piece together traumatic events during his experience in war
• Happy-Go-Lucky – Mike Leigh’s humorous look at a girl who thinks the can save everyone around her through sheer will and humor
• O’Horten – a quiet but cute film about a Norwegian train conductor who doesn’t know what to do with himself after retiring
• Pirosmani – a 1969 film I was lucky enough to project about one of the most famous painters from the Republic of Georgia. It only ran once because the print didn’t come until the last possible minute and wasn’t included in the program. Unfortunately, not many people came to the screening.

Lastly, allow me to speak about one of the best things that happened during the festival: gondola karaoke. Whilst riding a fully loaded gondola with my friends up to the end-of-fest staff party at the Chuck Jones theater in Mountain Village, Beth says, “Say, what are your favorite songs? Let’s sing them!” which we proceeded to do with reckless, tipsy abandon at top ear-splitting volume. I think there were moments of Queen to Elvis Costello to Madonna. And then we did it again on the way down. Even drunker. Oh yeah.

[click img to see it full sized]

[Vampire Weekend]

We got to enjoy a very relaxing, sunny summer day listening to music outside at Drexel’s campus this past weekend (see all the photos here). The Popped! Music Festival got a lot bigger this year. Last spring we were cramming into small local venues watching great up and coming area bands. This year, it was a full-on festival complete with international musical acts.

My friend Alexis did a great job pulling this thing together over the past year. I helped her out planning a bit early on, so Audrey and I scored some VIP passes and had a good time watching the (ahem) mild debauchery going on back stage.

If you’d like to see some live music clips from the event, check out my music vlog yvynyl live.

We were lucky to spend the weekend up near Wellsboro, PA to celebrate our friends Andy and Darshana’s wedding. Andy’s folks have this amazing farm right on the edge of the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon, which I have never seen before. We camped out there, falling asleep to the sounds of wild nature – toads and owls and all sorts of cool sounding beasties.

We took a hike out to the rim of the canyon, swam in one of their small lakes, played mad bocce ball, ate awesome vegan goodies until stuffed to the gills, and built huge campfires. An A+ event, for an A+ couple. Happy day!

The good people of P’unk Ave and The Hacktory are putting together a free event called Ignite Philly on Wednesday June 11th at Johnny Brenda’s at 6:00pm. I’ll be there!

The basic premise of the thing is to ask some local innovators to get up on stage and give a talk about what they do. The catch? They can’t speak for more than 5 minutes and their powerpoint slides will only stay up 15 seconds max. Should be an excellent time for all us nerdz and non-nerdz alike.

You won’t want to miss the awesomeness of featured speakers like:

Hope to see you there!