Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Great music in the works as Dweezil Zappa prepares to launch the ZAPPA PLAYS ZAPPA tour with many band members from original Frank Zappa touring bands. I’ve got my tickets for the San Francisco show at The Warfield.  The Frank Zappa pages on this web site have photos of some of the guys who will be on this new tour.
Here is a reallly cool frappr map of some online Zappa fans.

This is a visual supplement to The New Yorker article which describes without pictures this famous LP album cover and its positive marketing factor in Herb Alpert’s success as a recording artist. Above is the original version, shaving cream on the body of the beautiful Dolores. Below is the new version of the album, with the new Dolores, Bree Condon. As with most things, I like the original better, not that I would turn down a little taste of Bree. More about Herb Alpert albums.

This creep didn’t just step down, he wimpered, fell to his knees, bent over and is crawling away from Congress into a spider hole of darkness. Expect the Tom zombie to resurface in D.C. as a K Street lobbyist where the blood sucker’s pockets will be lined with fresh cash from unwitting Sunday morning collection plates.

Last week Andy Card, this week DeLay, next week Rumsfeld? We can only hope.

Today’s SF Chronicle is running an article about the growth and diversity of Internet video content. They include a list, and here are some of the hyperlinks to the sites. See the democratization of television on the march.

• YouTube – looks like flickr for videos
• Current TV – an ambitious user created video content network offering payment for your uploaded video projects.
• vMix – videos submitted and ranked from around the world
• vidiLife – yet another way to share videos with your friends
• Ourmedia – this one appears to have a socially conscious edge
• Break.com – kind of sleazy and commercial brand of site
• FireAnt – pioneering videoblogging
• Veoh – invitation to submit your videos. Clips from copyrighted films such as Coppola’s Dementia 13.
• GorillaMask.net – slick, sexy, commercial regurgitation of primarily professional mass media
• Grouper – a place to upload and share your videos from
• GUBA – enables images and video through good old Usenet
• Podzinger – an index of audio and video for podcasting

Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Animation Festival has been at it for 20 years now. Animators can go where the camera of the mind takes them, and these independent animators go to some crazy, sick and twisted places. See their online galleries of really crude, rude cartoons.

Here is video and coverage of Senator Russ Feingold‘s refreshingly clear stance on his proposal to censure President Bush.

Perhaps Americans’ vast knowledge of The Simpsons and American Idol trivia over their own Constitutional rights, has clouded our memory of Amendment 1 of the Bill of Rights which includes our right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

So America needs a Simpsons show where Bart recites parts of the Constitution and Russ Feingold makes an appearance. Go man, go!

When writing a previous review of John Ford’s classic World War II propaganda films, Why We Fight, I was not aware that another newer film Why We Fight was in the works. Well, this has been a season for remakes, why not documentaries too?

The earlier WWII Why We Fight was designed as a nudge to a neutral inward looking United States, whereas the new Why We Fight covers the now well established American military industrial complex. Might as well face it, never mind oil… these days we’re addicted to war.

Some may justify their jobs in the defense business sector; it’s good for the U.S. G.N.P., stock market, ya-da ya-da. As far as I can tell, the Iraq War has been nothing more than a three year economic stimulus package engineered by the Bush administration. Taken a look at a Halliburton stock chart since March 2003 lately? Back in Nixon’s day there was aversion to ending the Vietnam War, because it would hurt the job market with too many baby boomers coming home and competing for a piece of the great American Dream Pie. Chances are we won’t work our way out of this habit until it all blows up in our collective Old Glory faces.

Video presentation of Spore shows a procedurally animated game that allows you to build 3-D characters that possess behavior, such as “monkeys with guns” that wander around in procedurally generated 3-D worlds. Looks like way more fun and creative, faster and crazier than rotoscoping. Playing with artificial life, is sort of the opposite of tracing previously filmed live action. I guess if you generate a really great scene in Spore, you could record it and then rotoscope it, if you really enjoy doing that sort of thing.

Description from Google Video:

Will Wright talking at the 2005 Game Developer’s Conference about ‘Spore‘, which looks like it could possibly be the best video game ever.

Further Spore threads:

• EA web site for Spore, funny flash trailer cartoon
• A related game, kkrieger
• Discussion @ CGTalk Forum
• Will Wright @ Wikipedia
• Karl Sims, long time mad scientist in genetic animation.