Just a quick post for you readers. Daniel Martin Moore is a semi-local artist. I say semi only because although it would be easy to claim him as our own, he seems pretty devoted to Kentucky. I would just feel guilty trying to take that away from him. These videos were edited by Kevin Bayer for his Soft City Lights website and shot by Kevin, Kendall Bruns and myself. Holding the camera is easy but making quiet music interesting is a sisyphean task. So kudos to Kevin. While Kevin isn’t doing Soft City Lights he plays in You, You’re Awesome, The Damn Thing, and lends his DJ and video talents to Dance_MF. Also, look for a music video for a certain local band in the near future. I’ll say this much, the filming of it made the ceiling of my garage collapse. Unexpectedly raucous!
This is a topic that keeps popping up in my conversations as of late. In recent film and television productions there is a great lack of great theme songs. For most of film and TV history a great theme song was crucial to a successful project. The trend of licensing songs has killed this. Instead of composing a great theme for a character or for the opening of a movie we are left with films that attempt to cram as many “cool” songs into their runtime as they possibly can. Of course John Williams is the probably the most successful at this. His scores are inseparable from the films they back. But would “Robocop” really be itself without this:
I honestly can’t think of Robocop without thinking of that piece of music. That’s the power of a great theme. That’s why we ALL know the Star Wars music. Sure, LOST’s anti-theme is great and works for the show, but not EVERYBODY has to do it. Wouldn’t all cop related projects if they had cool theme songs? I think so:
One of the first major streetcar debates was held last Thursday on UC’s campus. I, unfortunately, was not able to attend due to the fact that Thursdays are one of my only days off to get errands taken care of. Thankfully a UC based radio show recorded the whole thing and put it up online for you to listen to in the comfort of your own home. It can be found here or on iTunes by searching for “Explore Cincinnati.” I’m not going to put too much of my own spin on this because it is very clear that the Jason Haap and his rag, The Cincinnati Beacon, are very sensitive to “bias,” also known in this case as “another opinion.” There is one point I would like concerning this debate, though. If Jason would like to continue to participate in debates like this and be taken seriously, he needs to work on his rhetoric. While I support the streetcar wholeheartedly, Haap does make a few decent points but they were lost in the muddle of his manically indignant delivery. The setting up and knocking down of arguments by sarcastically exclaiming things along the lines of “Wooow!” or “I don’t know what you guys think, but…” really harm a speakers point.
Hey, I’ll get back to this whole thing in a little bit, I’ve got a few more pressing matters to deal with at present. In the time being, head over to Cincy Streetcar’s new blog. This is something, especially with Obama’s promise to stimulate the economy via infrastructure projects, that we Cincinnatians need to get behind. People are trying to halt its progress and that is a real shame. So read, support and sell it to your friends.
There was a time when the Olympics didn’t take over your television sets for a full two week block. Before the advent of same-day satellite footage, a team of filmmakers would throw together Olympic highlights into a newsreel type of documentary so people could, if just for a couple of hours, participate in the current happenings overseas. By 1976 though, the ability to broadcast from overseas left these films behind as an obsolete entity. That being said, “White Rock,” a film documenting the 1976 Innsbruck Winter Games, stands as both the final Olympic film of this nature and perhaps one of the greatest.
There seemed to a bit of push by local media outlets, big and small, to shop locally this Christmas season. Well, in case you haven’t heard, it seemed to pay off to some extent. This article in the Business Courier suggest that people are really responding this call to consumer action. I managed to do all of my shopping downtown and, I have to say, it feels pretty good to not have slogged through the local malls this year.
Hopefully this isn’t too little, too late, but I would just like to tell people that New Years Eve at the Northside Tavern is free. The Tavern is always free, thus this will be free. I’ve been hearing door prices ranging from 20 to 50 dollars, so I just want to remind people that it is actually zero dollars to get in. I would suggest getting there early though, it is going to be packed. I’m not really sure where this whole rumor got brewing but it is a big fat fail. Keep reading →
Special edition, non-weekend DMF tonight alongside a midnight performance by Bad Veins. Come on down and ring out a fairly lackluster 2008. (Yes, I know Obama was elected this year, but most of the other stuff kinda blew.) Here is to 2009 being a whole lot better!
I wasn’t honestly planning on doing anything like this, mostly because I love to hate best-of lists. But since more than a couple people asked me to do it, I thought I would take the easy way out on content and put up a couple. I though that today we would just get the music one out of the way. I’m always in a weird place with music lists at the end of the year. I’ve never really been one for the serious artistry kind of music, normally opting out for cheap thrills. For example, Fleet Foxes seemed to be topping a lot of peoples lists, they would not even come close to being on my lists due to the fact that they make me sleepy. For me, the best music is thrilling, something that I listen to and get really excited about. For whatever reason many of the softer spoken albums that come out just don’t supply the visceral thrill that I really need. So, in no particular order, these are the albums and singles that supplied my fix this year. (As a disclaimer, I’m only going to post tracks for the albums that I didn’t hear much about from other people this year.) Let’s get started, shall we? Keep reading →
Of course, right after I said I was starting up again I disappeared for a week or so. This whole holiday season can be both overly busy and I attribute most of my absence to that. The other thing distracting me was the inaugural You, You’re Awesome show at the tavern. I used my limited ability to run lights to make the evening that much more fun… hopefully. All in all, I’d say the night went off without a hitch, so here are a few pictures from what should be the first of many shows. More pictures of the fun had after the jump!
Special edition, non-weekend DMF tonight alongside a midnight performance by Bad Veins. Come on down and ring out a fairly lackluster 2008. (Yes, I know Obama was elected this year, but most of the other stuff kinda blew.) Here is to 2009 being a whole lot better!
