Month: December 2008

First Blush juice

looky

I bought a few of these fancy shmancy grape juices called First Blush. They are in a glass bottle, grape juice from wine grapes.

The only disappointing one so far was when I got the “cabernet white” flavor– it has some white tea in it, and I can barely taste the grape juice.

At a few dollars a pop, they are a bit pricey. However, their cylindrical bottle is pretty, and uses a metal cap, instead of the plastic Voss water cap. This all-recyclable container is good enviro-karma. I’ve been using the bottles as water bottles for my night stand, since they wash in the dishwasher and have a screw cap so I don’t spill if I knock them over in the dark.

The labels are plastic, rather than printed on glass, so I guess they are not entirely recyclable. The wrapper comes off after a couple washings, which is part of the reason I bought them… We had a party and used a bottle for some incredibly strong herbal infusions we made with grain alcohol; a guest almost mistook the bottle’s contents for the original grape juice and took a giant gulp, which would have been Real Bad.

Buddha Machine 2

music

Strong temptation to buy the Buddha Machine 2.0 from FM3. It has new colors, new sounds, and even a pitch-shift dial that lets you change the pitch of the sound loops.

While it’s theoretically possible to build your own Buddha Machine, I think it’s a bit pointless, since the packaging is a lot of what makes these little guys fun… maybe if I made a wooden enclosure for it? That might be awesome.

There are also some remixes cropping up. Maybe I’ll have some on my ipod.

Rendering Hell

flix

I don’t have my laptop for the next few days; I feel so naked.

I’m currently editing Alan Dunkel’s music video for “The Waiting Game,” and the Hella Fresh feature film “Devious, Inc.” (A Samantha Sullivan Production directed by xuxE). Both are shot in HD on Sony XDCAM EX media.

So I’m rendering both down… initially rendering Devious on the G5 was going to take 6 days. That means I wouldn’t be able to edit this weekend; it would be ready to edit late Tuesday night. I moved it to render on my laptop, taking a paltry 3 days. So it’s sitting at home. Sad.

Office Coffee and Sustainability

stardate

Second day at work.

There’s this insane coffee machine from Flavia which is on a pod system. Not only is the machine a huge hulk the size of a small beer refrigerator, it’s also accompanied by a giant caddy of all the different drink flavors. Each flavor pack comes in a plastic pouch with a plastic nozzle on the top. You put the entire pouch in the machine and it accumulates the used, empty pouches.

Some drinks take two pouches.   Example: to make a cappuccino you select cappucino, then the door opens, and you put in the creamy topping pouch.  The machine closes and makes the foam.  Then the door opens again and you put in the coffee pouch of your choice.  There’s also a Milky Way topping, which I initially screwed up because I didn’t understand it was a topping and not a drink.  Anyway, it’s a lot of garbage for a coffee.

On top of the superautomatic espresso machine are a bunch of little earthenware pots, which coworkers use for drinking espresso. They look suspiciously like the yogurt pots that St Benoit comes in. The cups have La Fermiere and “www.cermer.com” on them. So… yes. They are yogurt pots. No one here seemed to know this. Whatever. At least we’re reusing something. Although in real life you’re supposed to take those pots back to the store…

The Passion of Joan of Arc

looky

I’m watching The Passion of Joan of Arc, durected by Carl Theodor Dreyer. It’s a silent movie from 1928 and obviously all in black and white.

St. Joan is pretty weird lookin in this one. Played by Maria Falconetti (aka Renée Jeanne Falconetti), she’s described as “haunting” in the dust jacket, and I’d have to go with that. Many of her shots are from below, and she has a giant round face. She has very short hair that makes her look like an androgynous man. Her eyes are glazed over with a manic, spacey look that makes her seem like a cult victim. Which I guess arguably she was. They eye-light every shot of her, which gives her eyes a glossy and watery look.

This film has a history – it was heavily censored, and then entirely lost, while the director was still alive. That must have been terrible. He died thinking his movie was gone forever; he tried to cut together another copy made from alternate takes, basically from scraps. Come to think of it, that would be pretty awesome to see also. It could be the lost lost film.

Anyway, recently in 1981 someone found a copy in a closet in a mental institution in Oslo. Uh yeah. The skeptic in me wonders whether this is really the original, since no one alive is around who could tell the diffference.

One nice thing about this release – it has a soundtrack, which is awesome, since obviously the original was lost. The one that comes with the movie is Richard Einhorn’s 1994 “Voices of Light”. However something that is kind of crazy: there are at least two other “soundtracks” for this movie, including two different versions by electronica groups “The Nursery” and “Ugress.” I’m not sure if they’d fit directly with the movie or not.