Skip St. John

I am a child of cable. I have never known bunny ears and I have never known less then 80 channels of choice. My love of films can be traced to two places. One being all those nights my brother and I would rent 20 or so movies before a long family trip and copy them all in a two day span. Which in the case of VHS means watching every movie you are copying. I still love Cobra, and the car that Stallone drives in that film is well, Awesome…times 50!

Awesome 50

To name just a few, I now have access to everything CBS, Comedy Central and Hulu (whose content collection is massive) have to offer. I can share what I am watching with others and they can do the same. I have downloaded for free and with out fear of prosecution over 60 horror films from the 1930’s through today! This all is of course only the video side of boxee. The software has many more applications for audio but we want bore you with that here.

Ok so I had TV covered. What about movies? The answer came in a red box for Christmas from LG. Again my family came through and got me the LG BD300, the first Blu-ray player with Netflix streaming built in to the box.

Last night I finished the new network setup I needed in the house to support all these new devices. Pluged in the last HDMI cable and sat down with the real internet on my real TV and was overwhelmed with choice.

Finally lets do the math. $120 has been shaved of my bill as I still need the internet. So my yearly savings from no cable amount to $1440. Though my devices in this story were gifts, if they had not been the AppleTV and LG Blu-Ray would have cost me right around $500. Let us not forget the subscription to unlimited movies from Netflix at a steep price of $8 a month, $96 for the year.

Apple TV - $230

LG-Blu Ray - $260

Getting rid of cable? Price….no wait i actually make money. $844 this year alone.

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Tolva Family holiday antics, which I was lucky enough to be a part of, summed up nicely here by my brother.

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If you need to know what I might like for Christmas, look no further.

I will also except the french inspiration for this film
C’est arrive pres de chez vous - Man Bites Dog

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I continue to have respect for this guy.

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Tonight I head to the Congress Theater with some new and old friends for an evening with Girl Talk. If you have never heard or heard of Girl Talk then you most likely don’t know that much about the art of mashups. DJ’s, producers and other such interested parties take two different songs and mix them together so that playing them or parts of them together make a brand new song.

The process can have many effects. Sometimes you are meant to think, “How clever” when you hear The Temptations put together with Coldplay.  Other times the combination of two well known artist or much loved beats work together to really get a crowd going like mixing Justin Timberlake and Michael Jackson. Girl Talk uses both effects quite well. Wired magazine a few months ago put this chart together visually dissecting the latest album.

photo from wired magazine

My brother and a friend of his just completed a pretty cool study of the popularity and types of artists that get mashed together and how often. He can explain it better the I can here. The visuals they created are quite amazing and telling.

But it got me thinking about what side of the equation does this data really show. Do the groups that get mashed together the most do so because it is easy for the creator or because the audience is silently demanding it? All types of music have this curve of audience pressure. A group creates a new movement that the audience reacts to and accepts then the audience starts demanding that the movement produce more just like it.

Where in this curve is the art of Mashup? I have no idea. But tonight as hundreds of kids dance to the old and new I will be watching there faces to see. Hope to see you there. I’ll be the guy in the corner singing Annie Lennox lyrics over Tom Sawyer from Rush.

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So after a long hiatus of doing so, I Googled my name today. I was amazed to see how the social networks have really taken over the space of what represents a person online. Three of the top seven results for me where from linkin, facebook and a random tweet I posted about a month ago.

But then I started to see some old linkes from when I was a film major and more importantly still making films. Links like this one and this one. It has been forever since I have thought about these and today I would like to thank Google for being a better archivist then I am, on me. I finally found a link to a short film I made along with my friends Stephen Hitchcock and Bo Hakala. I couldn’t believe it was online. So I present to you Irving Park, the winner of the 2003 Cedar Rapids International Film Festival. (I need to start putting this on my resume.) Oh yea!

Irving Park

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Recently Stephanie and I attended a wedding for a friend of mine is Queretaro Mexico. Queretaro is a old city by Mexican standards that is the capital of the state of Queretaro. We traveled by plan to Mexico City and then took a 3 hour bus ride through the valleys and mountains of south central Mexico. And no, there were no chickens. To be honest the whole thing was a bit of a pain in terms of scheduling and travel but the promise of a great wedding and getting to see friends that we do not always get the chance to see kept us going.

The city itself is stunning and almost unchanged from the days of yore. In 1996 the entire downtown center of the city was made a world heritage site by UNESCO. I have visited other World Heritage Sites and have been blown away but their beauty, longevity and what they represent. I have also been blown away by how they have been saved.  My brother, father and I visited the city of Matera in Italy a few years back. These World Heritage Sites are so well preserved and picked that one could plan a lifetime of travel around only visiting World Heritage Sites.

The tours were wonderful. The wedding was intense and amazing, full of audience participation and unknown dancing. The Tequila flowed like water and the water was avoided at all costs. Yet the biggest impression Queretaro made on me was the fact that I never knew it existed. We all have places we want to see in the world and we all feel like we should see more of it. But when you see something wonderful that you weren’t even looking for, let alone even aware of, you feel humbled. There are so many places to visit and items to see that I don’t even know what those really are. So Queretaro, you little happy accident. Thank you for reminding me that even though my list of places to go is long, it should only keep getting longer.

More pictures from the trip here.

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The key to faking out the parents is the clammy hands. It’s a good non-specific symptom; I’m a big believer in it. A lot of people will tell you that a good phony fever is a dead lock, but, uh… you get a nervous mother, you could wind up in a doctor’s office. That’s worse than school. You fake a stomach cramp, and when you’re bent over, moaning and wailing, you lick your palms. It’s a little childish and stupid, but then, so is high school.

More pictures in a bit.

More pictures here

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I have always prided myself on making  my Halloween costumes from scratch, no matter how difficult it is. You have to of course select a good costume in the first place. When you go big like say Edward Scissorhands or  Pinhead from Hellraiser, you can get a way with a bit on “un-authenticity” due to the complexity of the outfit. But when you select a costume of some thing more human and less you know dead, detail is everything. So this year Steph and I will be going as Ferris and Sloan. If you need more explanation we are not friends.

I have people in two states currently working on this with me. The jacket is the sticking point. Horribly 80’s and apparently custom made for the movie as no one seems to know of a manufacture. Now I just have to find the car!

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