Walk The Line

Birthday dinner with dad last night. Collard greens, fried portabello mushrooms, brown rice and sweet potatoes. He also cooked up some fish for the ominivores.
I practiced doin' ollies on my new skateboard in his backyard, managing not to break any new bones and then we all watched Walk The Line.

The acting is excellent and over all the movie was pretty good. I might have liked some more music especially some live concert scenes that really captured the excitement of a live show. I thought "Ray" did a better job in this respect. One can't help comparing the two movies. The Johnny Cash of this film is a-lot more vulnerable and needy than the tough as nails Johnny Cash of his songs. This is mostly a good thing but it's a bit over done in places.

The movie did what any good biopic of a great artist should do. It made me feel like I wasn't doing enough to push my own art. I find I'm defending myself to myself. Reassuring myself that I'm editing my book, working on two short films, and getting scripts ready for a series of short films with my comedy troupe who just finished an eight week run. I guess I'm doing a-lot. It would help if more of what I did had the immediate feedback of being on stage. Oh well. I could do more of the open mic poetry type scene, but mostly I write stories and long ones at that. I dream of the day I get a book published and do a tour. That will rule.

Tech Tuesday

I want to start a tech column in a local publication. I'm not the biggest techno geek and neither am I a ludite. I'm somewhere in the middle and therefore well suited to choose tech issues of interest to only moderately tech savy people and to do so in plain language. I hope.

Google Video Changes the Game
If you have a website, even just a blog, www.video.google.com is putting you in a position to be able to have video on your site easily and without fears of using more bandwidth than you can you afford.
Sign up for a free account and you're able to submit videos to the huge database of video files Google is compiling. Google will take any video as long as it's not deemed obscene. They host the videos and they even have a hand dandy link that will give you the code to put the video on you site. You're visitors will view the clip from your page while Google takes the hit to the bandwidth.
Don't have any videos of your own? You can peruse through, find clips you like and put them on your site. Remember that other webmasters and bloggers can also use your clips without crediting you, so if you're submitting original material identify yourself in the clip.

This is one step back towards keeping the small time players in the game with the big boys who would just as soon own the inernet the way they own TV and radio.

Click here for an example of this site using Google Video to host a clip.

A Tip for Online Shoppers
A quick lesson was learned this weekend. Ordering three books on Amazon my girlfriend was bummed to find two of them didn' t qualify for free shipping. She looked at the more expensive versions of the same books, which were only a dollar more, but came with free shipping. The shipping would have been about four bucks a book, so we saved six bucks and our books are on the way.

Podcasting?
Apple is to be commended. They've done a great job of making folks think that they have a monopoly on Podcasting, hell it's even named after their product. So, for the many folks I've run into who still don't know you don't need an I-Pod or even a portable MP3 player to listen to podcasts. A podcast is just an Mp3, and most podcaster use something called an RSS feed to send out and automatic notice when they upload a new episode, that is to say a new MP3. There are many services now that will allow you to sign up for the RSS feed once you get the address from the podcast you're interested in subscribing too. Apple does indeed offer one of the best and it's free at iTunes.com.

That's it for now. I'd love to hear your ideas and I'll get some more out next week.

My Birthday

It's all over now, well almost. I still have to have my birthday dinner with my dad on Wednesday.

On my actual birthday, yesterday, I woke up after having a lovely night with my sweetheart, movies and lots of cuddling (I'll not kiss and tell) and had a lazy morning. Bryna told me she was taking me out to lunch but first we had to feed her sister's cat as her sister went whale watching. When we got Emily's house to feed the cat all of Bryna's sisters were there with our friends Chris and Jesse and the husbands and boyfriends (Bryan and Adonis) and lots of food and drinks and presents.
After that nice afternoon surprise party which Lydia and Emily put together, best little sisters ever, I went to an ICBINC wrap party to celebrate the close of our 8 week run. There were some presents for me there too.

Now for the presents. Adonis got me The Wild Bunch on DVD, one of my favorite movies of all time. Bryna, her sisters and Brian all pitched together to get me a new skateboard which I'm quite stoked about. Maybe I'll hurt myself less on better equipment eh? Probably not. My friend Ben got me SNL The Best of John Belushi. I love John Belushi. And Sid got me a gift certifiate to the Natural Foods Co-Op where I like to do some eating.

Thanks everybody for a great weekend and some nice stuff. We all like stuff.

Rapture Letters

http://raptureletters.com/

This is the greatest website ever. Allow me to quote the site:

"After the rapture, there will be a lot of speculation as to why millions of people have just disappeared. Unfortunately, after the rapture, only non believers will be left to come up with answers. You probably have family and friends that you have witnessed to and they just won't listen. After the rapture they probably will, but who will tell them?

We have written a computer program to do just that. It will send an Electronic Message (e-mail) to whomever you want after the rapture has taken place, and you and I have been taken to heaven."

This site goes on to explain how this works, what will trigger the sending of the e-mails etc. I'm in love. I had to help. I sent them the following e-mail immediately:

Hi,
Great idea you got here.
I would like to help.
I am a devout atheist, not only do I not believe in God, but if he should turn out to be real I will choose not to follow/worship or otherwise interact with him based on my disagreements with his management philosophy.
This is where I am of great value to you.
For a small fee, to be paid prior to the rapture of course, I will over see your programs execution, help maintain your servers, etc when you have all gone up to heaven.
I am happy to make available my resume listing my technical qualifications as well as my many sins that you may be assured I will indeed be left behind to complete this important work.
Please consider my offer.
Kindly yours,
Keith Lowell Jensen


I have yet to hear back from them...

Birthday Art from Darin

Darin and Christie are amazing artists. Click here to check out their website.

They are the folks that started the Trash Film Orgy with Junior, Sid and I, and they've kept it going while I left to do sketch comedy.
They were also founding members of ICBINC my sketch comedy troupe.

Darin did this awesome zombie painting which I've loved for years and I planned on buying it some day, but when ever I have money to spend on art I pay an artist to design flyer art or an ad (D and C have done plenty of these for us.)

Darin gave me the painting for my birthday. Thanks Darin. This will look great in my kitche across from my Universal Monsters poster.
Original art is about the coolest thing to get for your birthday.

Ha Ha I had corn rows

Mason wasn't calling me back and I needed a haircut. Finally I left the following message. "Mason, I made a new t-shirt that says 'Hair By Mason' and I'm wearing it right now with the messy ass mop on my head. You better cut my hair before you're name is ruined."

So, mason called back. He's taken a room in his basement, moved in a barber's chair and a barber's sink and all kinds of fancy stuff and a friend of his even put up a few paintings so he's got a regular little salon. He cut my hair, giving me the mid life crisis special as requested. In other words, he recreated the haircut I had when I was 21. Then my friend Tom showed up and we got to talking. I haven't seen Tom in a while and it sounds like he might sound-track my pod cast. Oh by the way, I'm getting a pod cast together. Of course I am.

Anyway, Mason saw I wasn't going anywhere in a hurry so he started messing with my hair, and the SOB gave me cornrows. It hurt and I'd say, knock it off it hurts, and he'd say "Shut Up!" and I'd say, "You can't tell me to shut up. I didn't ask you to do this." And he'd say "Shut Up!" Then I left his house in Oak Park (a largely black neighborhood) with these dopey ass corn rows in my hair. Mason's neighbor saw me get in my car and nearly fell down laughing. Don't worry, my hair and I are doing much better now.

Dreams

I've written down almost every dream I've had for months now at http://kljdreams.blogspot.com/.
The entries are a bigger mess than usual as far as spelling and grammar. I usually just wake up and write 'em or I write 'em real quick at work, the first chance I get so as not to forget them. Unfortunately I have lost a few by not writing 'em down quick enough.
I'm not linking it with my other pages on the right anytime soon but I'll throw up a little reminder that it's there now and then. Be warned I may have dreamt about you and a goat dancing the macarena!

Reverend Keith Lowell Jensen

Click on image to enlarge

I've been meaning to do this for a long time and when a friend of mine told me the minister that was supposed to perform his wedding this weekend dropped out, well, I knew then that it was time. Congratulate me folks, I'm now a reverened. I may even cough up the $35 to become Doctor Reverend Keith Lowell Jensen. Become a reverend yourself, it's easy and in most states it will allow you to perform weddings, funerals and I think I can be a caller at bingo! Just visit www.ulc.org. The tenents of the church are easy to digest:

"We ask only that you promote the freedom of religion and do that which is right. It is up to the individual to determine what is right as long as it does not infringe on the rights of others and is within the law. That is as close to the Golden Rule as one can come."

Sounds good to me. Please address me as Reverend Keith Lowell Jensen (or Reverend KLJ if we're tight) from this day forth. Go in peace my brothers and sisters.

Belle and Sebastian, The Life Pursuit reviewed

Here's a review I wrote for this week's SN&R.

Belle and Sebastian
The Life Pursuit
Matador Records
www.belleandsebastian.com

2003’s Dear Catastrophe Waitress was a comeback album for Belle and Sebastian, both critically and commercially. The Life Pursuit accordingly will receive a sophomore album’s scrutiny--and it holds up. It is their best work to date. Producer Tony Hoffer navigates a wide range of influences: T. Rex glam; Motown; ’70s flower funk; and even a few moments that recollect Sid and Marty Krofft’s psychedelic, musical kids’ TV shows. As he’s done with Beck and Supergrass, Hoffer steers away from a retro-lovin’ approach and maintains a sound that is purely the band’s. Stuart Murdoch’s vocals are stronger than ever, showing stylistic range and confidence one can imagine is the result of recent success. With repeated listens, it’s clear that The Life Pursuit is full of fantastic and varied pop songs, with no filler.

Three New Reviews from Jason

Visit Jason's site for lots more. Click Here.

RUNNING SCARED (No Stars)
No need to mince words: "Running Scared" is one of the worst, most absurd and inept thrillers I've ever seen. Everything about it is bad, from the annoying, overly stylized editing (that would give Tony Scott a headache) to the idiotic plot twists, to the uniformly terrible performances (Paul Walker overacts so strenuously trying to be "tough" that I was afraid he was going to pop a blood vessel), to the laughable, sub-sub-sub Tarantino dialogue that tries to work "fuck" into every sentence so many times that it becomes unintentionally funny. But even all that fails to adequately describe the stupidity of this movie. By the time it pauses for a very long, utterly retarded sequence in which Walker's character's wife (Vera Farmiga) rescues a kid from the funhouse-like apartment of a husband/wife team of child pornographers and murderers that has absolutely not one thing to do with the rest of the movie, I could hardly believe a script this awful ever got produced. I guess that's Hollywood for you.

THE WORLD'S FASTEST INDIAN **1/2
This largely entertaining feel-good film is based on the true story of New Zealand resident Bert Munro (Anthony Hopkins), who incredibly set the land-speed world record back in 1967 at the Bonneville Salt Flats on an Indian motorcycle he'd been re-tooling for years using mainly household appliances. The film is charming and fun during his long boat and road trip from New Zealand to the Salt Flats - strangely, it's when he reaches his destination that the pace slows (taking the film to an overlong 127 minutes) and the corniness of the film becomes a bit too much. Still worth seeing for its sheer likeability and for Hopkins' exuberant and cheerful performance, one of his best in a while.

DOOGAL **
The animation in "Doogal" is absolutely gorgeous. The colors are bright and the landscapes are lush and look truly three-dimensional. It's also got a surprisingly good score. So it's a shame that in every other department it's such an uninspired bore. The script is an endless series of bad puns and mostly witless references to other movies - literally, almost every single line is something like "Zeb's dead, baby. Zeb's dead". And that's one of the better ones.