I already posted this on my music blog yvynyl but I gotta share with all y’all who don’t read that (yet!). This is the new music video from my pals Free Energy. The vid was directed by m ss ng p eces and shot on location at the dudes’ house party earlier this summer. I’m really in love with this song and the video – and well, as I said on yvynyl:

Philly + bikes + summertime + my neighborhood + cute kittens + my buddies’ band + a great house party + cameos of dozens of my friends (damn, i didn’t make the cut!) + one kick-ass party song makes this my favorite music video of the week. Then again, I’m biased.

My friend Hudson and his brother Michael are making a documentary film about their 93-year-old grandfather Alva B. Lines. Here’s a bit of their first trailer the put together based on interviews they filmed with him recently.

I’m certainly intrigued by the film, but I’m equally interested in the way that these fellas are promoting the project using social media marketing tactics (posting updates to a Twitter account, maintaining a production blog in lieu of a ‘coming soon’ splash page, etc). I’ve long been a proponent of indie artists taking full advantage of the tools the web has to offer in building your own audience by keeping them in the loop throughout the entire creative process. I love pointing out projects that ‘get it’ and are doing it right. Another documentary that has been really hitting home runs in this realm is my friends at Project Pedal and their film For Thousands of Miles.

Thought we’re only a few steps into producing our own documentary, Mable’s Murder (working title), Audrey and I certainly aim to do the same kind of audience building and promotion once we’re further along into production. By the way, it’s a pleasent coincidence that Hud and Michael are also exploring stories from our grandparent’s generation. We hope to follow their project closely and share their successes with you in the coming months.

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!

I have never done the swim yet, but I have heard about it’s legend for years. My brother Paul, his best friend Chris, Chris’s siblings and several other nutty kids love to jump into the Bushkill Creek at Jacobsburg State Park in my high school hometown every Christmas. This is the 8th 9th year they’ve done it! I love this kind of good old fashioned funtimes. I’m going to try my best to be there for the 10-year anniversary. Check these great photos by Chris’s sister Schuyler:

Part One

Part Two

[via Joshua's blog]

Scenes from Shadow World from David S Kessler on Vimeo.

Audrey and her classmate Jesse are shooting a short film on 16mm this month and we all went out location scouting on the banks of the Delaware River just north of Port Richmond in Philly, nearly under the Betsy Ross Bridge. We just happened to stumble upon this fabulous little old overgrown jetty that was simply magical.

See the whole set here:

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.

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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

My friends Scott and Liz (and several hundred friends and co-conspiritors) put our a ‘fake’ edition of the New York Times yesterday. It’s one of those mega-stunts that gets all over TV and the Internet. They got meme’d. I’m psyched to see such an awesome, underground, progressive message breaking into the mainstream news cycle.

Copies of the paper are already selling on eBay for almost $100.

Read the digital edition here.

Gangi

I’ve been a fan of Matt Gangi’s music for something like two years, having completely randomly stumbled upon his MySpace page through friends. He’s an amazing songwriter and his sounds are completely 21st Century, but rooted firmly in the psychedelic era of the 60’s. He’s got an amazing ear and his partnership with Lyle Nesse on drums/drummachine/synth forms a killer duo. I’m so glad to have seen them play a small show at the studio/rehersal space/party house Inciting HQ last night – a complete treat.

06-animals

Magical, Beautiful

Magical, Beautiful is the band of my buddy Chris Keener whom I met years ago at True/False in Columbia, Missouri, his home town. He now lives in Chicago and collaborates with these fellas. We went to see them play at a small house show they booked, and I was blown away. Dualing synths, deep drums and what might be described as Joy Division-style vocals.

They just came out with their first music video recently:

Both of these bands are completely DIY operations, neither is on a record label. If you dig their music, I encourage you to click over to their websites and purchase their records. I have them, and I highly recommend them. Support indie music!

My good friend and mega-talented painter Mike Yoder just hung a solo show of new paintings on at Lycoming College Art Gallery. He does stunning work, with vivid, in-your-face color that slams you with a dichotomy of the beauty and the horror of fiery images of war.

On Facebook, you can see a photo gallery of the show here.

If you’ve ever been to my house, you’ll know that we have one of Mike’s paintings (a slightly older work done during an artist residency in Marfa, Texas) hanging proudly in our living room:

This short film is about champion mountain biker Dave Wiens as he recently took on a late entry by Lance Armstrong into the Leadville Trail 100 mountain bike race.

…but you have to do it anyway. That’s the title of my good friend Dorothy Robinson’s new book. If the title alone doesn’t make you want to buy one, you must have a heart of a stone! They’re pretty inexpensive over on Amazon, and being that Dorothy is one of the funniest people I know (just check out her blog for example), I highly recommend picking up a copy. Support your local author!

Our good friends Cameron and Lauren are working on a new documentary film project called The Delegates. They will be traveling to Denver for the Democratic Convention later this month with several different party members and explore the people and process behind the American party nominating system. With an historic convention this year, and I’m excited to see how the project turns out. Here’s a short clip they recently posted to the film’s blog:

If you’re interested to learn more about their project, please read their full treatment/press release after the jump, including links to help contribute money, time or resources.

At the end of August, Lauren and I are flying to Denver to film the Democratic National Convention, an event that will surely be a significant moment in American history. We’re going there to make a new documentary about the people chosen to represent the Democratic voters, THE DELEGATES.

Our film will accompany four delegates, with diverse hometowns, backgrounds, and interests, as they take part in the hype and hope of the Convention. Along the way, the delegates will illustrate the personal side of the democratic process, and share what it is like for ordinary Americans to take part in this extraordinary event. The film will follow the delegates from the moment they arrive at the airport, to the hectic scene on the convention floor, around Denver and finally to Barack Obama’s historic acceptance speech at Mile High Stadium.

We’re working on this film with our friends from DoubleSpeak Media who took me to New Hampshire to cover the primary for The Huffington Post. Now, we’re putting together a bigger team so that we can cover as much as we can at this historic event.

Most documentaries are kick-started with money collected through donations from family and friends. So far, we’ve never wanted to go that route. But our next film is about a subject that matters to all of you, and we need your help.

The Obama campaign has taken traditional fundraising strategies and turned them upside-down: building momentum by bringing their appeal directly to small donors. Following in those footsteps, we’re asking for your contribution to help make THE DELEGATES a worthy document of a pivotal moment in American history.

Give as much or as little as you can–every little bit helps and will be appreciated. If you donate $25 or more, your name will appear in the credits. Donate $100 or more and you’ll also receive an advance copy of THE DELEGATES on DVD.

To learn more about the film, visit our website at:
http://www.thedelegates.net

To donate right now, click here:
http://www.chipin.com/contribute/id/7a7c2418fb332bf9

Thanks so much!

Cameron

P.S. We’re trying to build a network of supporters. If you know anyone who might be interested in a film about the American political process, please forward them this email:
http://www.forwardtomyfriend.com/4dlra/e93e2e97b1363a9fc94d5de2eb09ca4e/

My life has been slowly becoming more and more like this. Especially this summer. I kinda like it.