The Jack Noodle Journal

How was your weekend?
Mine was pretty alright.
I worked 8 hours at the office on Sunday. Hoorah for shoes!
I did take Saturday off. That was nice. I got the lawn mowed.

Hey my buddy Stu put his noise movie up on YouTube. You can watch it here and see what I have been talking about.

Seeing his flick on YouTube got the fire going under me and I finally put a movie of my own up. You can watch it here. It’s my Annabel Lee movie. Many of you have seen it already. It’s from a few years back now. I did it for a video editing class during my college years and also turned it in for an English assignment. Starring Phillip.

I’ve been meaning to jump on the YouTube bandwagon for awhile but hadn’t taken the time. I’m hoping to put a bunch more movies up. It was pretty easy. I still need to do a little work to figure out how to get the optimum picture quality out of my YouTube submissions.

Alright, I’ve got to start the work week now. Back to the shoes.

Well hi there.

I haven’t gone to any of the festival events I wanted to attend in the last post.
There has been a mass of work here at the office that has rendered me nonfunctioning by the time I’ve got home the last few evenings.
I’ll be working quite a bit of overtime over the next 15 days. I don’t anticipate it being the happy fun time overtime like last weekend. It will be more torturous.
Oh well. Suck it up Noodle. I should be fine if I can keep a good humor about me.

I’ve got the tunes cranked up today in the headphones.

I have been listening to Sonic Youth quite a bit these days. Very tasty.
There are 7 Sonic Youth albums on my iPod. Gosh, that’s quite a few.

I’m also planning on listen to “Tago Mago” by Can.
Also some Liars.

I’m thinking about buying “20 Jazz Funk Greats” by Throbbing Gristle off of iTunes later today if I get bored.

Oh yes and of course “Year Zero” will be in the rotation.

Word up homies?
Does “word up” usually have a question mark after it? Or would it be an exclamation point?

Gosh.
The PDX Fest starts tonight. It’s an experimental film festival going on for the next 5 days in our fair city of Portland. I want to go to at least a few of the events. I am an experimental film maker you know, and I think it would be good for me to rub elbows with those folks at the festival. As I was telling someone the other day, I am SO experimental that you can’t even see my movies. They are playing in the theater behind my eyeballs! Yeah.

I want to go out tonight, but I am just so sleepy right now. I’m anticipating having trouble making my feet work to get me off the couch and out the door tonight.

Web Visions 2007 is coming up. Next week I think.
I went last year, remember? I won’t be going this year. Yeah, I’m not feeling it. Maybe I’ll go next year. I’m not too excited by web design stuff this year (GASP!). None of the general admission events peaked my interest. I thought the “secrets of Flash video” thing looked cool but I didn’t want to pay 700 bucks for something I could eventually figure out if left to my own devices. Is it just me or is that convention starting to get out of control with the expensive workshops?

Lots of events to keep an eye open for. I’m going to try to be better about getting out to things.

It’s a gorgeous spring morning. I could have stayed outside traveling my commute all day long.
I’m in the dark cube now.
It’s supposed to start raining anyway isn’t it?

I was listening to U2’s album “Joshua Tree” on the way in. Gosh that’s a good one. Amazing. I hadn’t heard it all the way through in a year or two. Joshua Tree is eternally stuck in my list of all-time favorite albums. Say what you will but it is impervious to your gawfaws. One of those unswayable albums.
It was making me misty eyed on the bus this morning.

Can you believe that Joshua Tree is 20 years old now? Boy, that qualifies as old timer music. Kids feel the same way about Joshua Tree as we did in the 80s when our parents talked about “Rubber Soul”.
1987 what a year. I can barely remember it.

Oh to have the passion of a 14 year old again (not in a weird way people, stay with me here)! No, really. That’s what Joshua Tree reminds me of. A simpler time. The World was probably just as screwed up back then but as a 14 year old, I was blissfully unaware.

Yesterday I kept getting distracted from my work duties by playing around on the LinkedIn website. Have you guys been there? It’s like a Myspace or a Friendster for business people. I think they intend for it to be a more serious social networking site where you can generate business contacts. I signed up for it a year ago and forgot about it until one of my coworkers here linked up. It’s an alright site I guess. I’m not that into the Friendster Myspace stuff. I did spend a lot of time looking up old coworkers. I invited people to join up and kept checking to see if my contact list was growing. I’m not going to go there today. I swear.

I often wonder how much more work I would get done if my computer wasn’t hooked up to the nets.

Gosh, is it Monday already?

How was your weekend? Mine was brief.

Hey, Stu’s movie night on Friday was splendid! It was an impressive turn out at the Mission.
Stu did a great job editing the video together. Quite inspiring. Made me want to get off my ass and get this video stuff going.
I knew Stu’s work would be good but I was surprised when his fellow classmate’s documentaries were better than I was anticipating.

He was pretty happy with the footage I shot for him but gave it a compliment that made me cringe. He said my shots were his go to, special effect, grainy, horror movie shots. Argh! People, I need a new camera! It was hard to pick out exactly which shots were mine in the final cut but I did see a few quick, muddy, dark, grain bits.
I’m totally getting a new camera kids.

I worked all weekend.
I knocked out 24 hours of overtime. Hold on lets see here. Let me do the numbers…
24 hours translates to 72 clipped, prepped and retouched product shots of shoes. 72 shoes.
I’ve worked 33 hours of overtime the last week and 2 days.
Oh yeah.
I came to the realization sometime last week that I should really load up on the hours while I’m young and fit.
It’s not ditch digging. That’s good.
Loading up on the cash and paying off some tax bills.

I did my weekend work at home in the front room. It’s nice working at home, but is sometimes more difficult. Lots of possibilities for distraction. Working at the office is sometimes better because 8 hours really equals 8 hours. At home you are trying to go as fast as you can to beat per image times. These shoes had times of 20 minutes a pop.
K was a good sport with me there, but not there.

Now it is Monday and I am at the office working on more shoes.
I’m pretty stoked because I’m not very tired and I’m in a good mood.

Hey there.

We had buckets of water pouring from the sky yesterday. I got pretty soaked on the way home from the office. I didn’t have any head covering and my noggin became drenched. My hairdo doesn’t work in the rain I’ve decided. Time to shave this crap off again.
There’s no rain coming down right now, but I’m sure that will change shortly.

Nine Inch Nails released the CD “Year Zero” yesterday. Yep, it’s in the stores now. Everyone should go out and pick up a copy. I haven’t bought my copy yet, but will be getting it shortly. It’s important to support this one with your dollars this time out. Hefty sales will reward the efforts that went into the marketing and experience design that took place over the last few months. There are quite a few industry types and marketing folks looking at this experiment to see if it will be worth doing for future artists and marketing campaigns. I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve spent reading about it and investigating the various websites and clues. Giving them the 17 or so dollars for the CD seems like a pretty good price for the entertainment experience I recieved.

Looks like Year Zero is getting good reviews so far. I’m still really digging it after a hundred listens.

Hey, this Friday night you all should come out and watch my friend Stu’s completed movie. It’s called… hold on one sec… “NOISE: a night of CACOPHONY at the SOMEDAY LOUNGE.” This is the one that I helped film at that noise concert a few weeks back. It should be pretty good. I haven’t seen any of the footage I shot so I am anxious find out how it looks. It’s at 7 Friday night at the Mission Theater. Stu’s short film will be shown with the other student’s work who took the NW Documentary class.

So there was a mass shooting at Virginia Tech college on Monday. You hadn’t heard?

I had a coworker that hadn’t heard there had been a shooting until Tuesday afternoon. How did he manage to avoid that news I wonder? He says he had his headphones on all day and didn’t watch any TV on Monday night. Hmm that’s good advice.

Gosh. I’m not trying to be disrespectful, but come on news media! Geeze!
They are so vulturous. I can’t believe how fast they had their graphics up after the shooting. I feel like they are almost giddy to have a new human drama television show. I watched about 15 minutes of NBC on Monday and was thoroughly disgusted by how scripted everything seemed. I won’t be watching any more coverage of it. NPR is just as bad. Hours of news conferences with hungry reporters yelling questions at police officers and governors who don’t have any answers. I feel really bad for the victims and feel saddened by the loss of lives, but do we really need 24 hour coverage of this disaster?

This is horrible but I’m wondering if this constant, repetitive declaration of this as “the largest mass shooting in American history” is giving the next shooter out there a score to try to beat?

From the other room just now my boss questioned out loud why is everyone focusing so intently on the 33 dead in Virginia while 157 dead in Iraq today is below the fold with a smaller sized font for the headline?

Good question boss man.

It turned out being a really good weekend! Not that I was expecting a bad one.
We had some good fun.

The sun came out finally yesterday and we managed to do some yard work. It was so exciting!
I finally got the backyard mowed! Now that first mow of the year is complete, it’s almost time to mow the front again.
I also did some weed eating with the Grass Hog.
K got the garden planted. She says this is the earliest she has had it in the ground.
We stayed outdoors most of the day.

On Saturday night we went and saw the We’re From Japan kids play at Dante’s. It was a good show. I really like the new tunes they are starting play.

I was an idiot and didn’t wear any ear plugs at the show. My ears were still ringing Sunday afternoon and I felt like I was trying to hear with my head stuck in a pillow.
So stupid. Playing Russian roulette like that with my hearing is going to bite me on the ass in a handful of years. I just know it.

Oh yeah, I went to the office on Saturday and worked 7 hours of overtime. I’ll be trying to work as many hours of overtime as I can get over the next few months. I want to try to get us out from under this tax bill as quick as possible. We’ll be sending our “I’ll gladly pay Tuesday for a hamburger today” tax letters in the mail tomorrow.

We didn’t get to the library over the weekend. We might try to go tonight.

Oh man! I almost forgot. Yesterday was our man Phillip’s birthday! He’s a five year old man now. They grow up so fast! We didn’t do anything too crazy for him. He said he wanted a mellow birthday this year. We went on a long walk and told him how happy we were that it was his birthday.

Well kids, we are really getting bent over by the IRS this year.

Coming home from the office yesterday evening I had a strange uneasy feeling. Something was in the air. I kind of felt like I had forgot something at the office.
The source of my unease was revealed when our tax lady called in a fluster.

Looks like we owe thousands of dollars in taxes this year! Yep that’s right. I said thousands. Not hundreds. Thousands with an “S”.
Sucks.

Sounds awfully pop star dramatic doesn’t it?

Well turns out a large chunk of my income wasn’t taxed last year. My 6 months of freelance work.
I know. I should have set some money aside at the time. I don’t know what I was thinking. Well, actually I was thinking that everything would balance itself out with K’s full time work and my 6 months of being a full time employee. I worked freelance in 2005 and the taxes managed to work themselves out somehow. We didn’t make as much money in 2005 though. I think we also managed some school deductions.

Oh well, it’s only money.
I won’t be getting a new DV camera anytime soon now.
I guess we can always remember back to the days of fun we had last year spending that untaxed money.

I tire quickly of others complaining about taxes so I’ll try to wrap this up myself. It does bum me out though that over the next several months I will be sending checks to the IRS so that a President I never voted for can spend my money on a war I never wanted us to get into. Sure, I know that’s the way it’s always been but I will be noticing it more now compared to just having it deducted beforehand, coming up as a line on a paycheck stub.

It’s Friday though and that is a good thing!
I think the forecast is calling for buckets of rain.
It will be a good weekend for movies.

Okay, I’m going to listen to the Beatles’ song “Taxman” right now and get to work.

Hey there, happy Thursday!
It’s a stormy Thursday. Don’t worry, It will be sunny by the afternoon. I just need to keep that old proverb in mind and I will be fine “April showers bring May something something”.

It doesn’t feel like a Thursday does it?
That’s okay. I’m glad that it is Thursday because that means Friday is coming and then Saturday.
Alright enough! You guys know how the days of the week work.

I have been starting to do some research on Man Ray this week. We watched a DVD about Marcel Duchamp the other evening and it talked a bit about how Duchamp and Man Ray were buddies. “Oh yeah, Man Ray” I says to myself.
I know that getting into Man Ray is a angst ridden teen, late high school, early college endeavor but for whatever reason I steered away from his world back then. It’s okay for me to be looking into it now because this year I’m considering myself a self-teaching, late high school, early college film student. I’m going back over the stuff I somehow missed.

Here is a link to some of Man Ray’s Films on the internets. There is some cool stuff.
The Postmodernist in me is interested in mining some of the nuggets from the Dadaist, Surrealist and Experimental film movements and applying it to my digital video work. There are some good ideas still left to be sampled from the olden days. I’m working on being able to capture really nice, and well composed moving images. I’m not so interested in story or narrative driven motion picture work right now.

We are planning on going to the library this weekend during one of the rain spells. I’m going to check out some books on Man Ray and the Avant-garde movements of the 10s, 20s and 30s. That’s one thing I have to keep in mind while researching these topics I get excited by: I can check out books, I don’t have to buy them. I have quite a few books that I have bought during my various research projects. Save your money and check them out buddy! In my own defense though, the library takes a while to be up to date and sometimes I need my high tech information to be hot off the presses. It is also nice to be able to revisit a topic a year or two later, after I have forgotten about it, by going into the other room and grabbing the store bought book off of my own shelf.

In other news, I decided yesterday that I am going to start dressing like a businessman while at work. I need to start dressing for success. I haven’t worked anywhere in several years that has had a dress code. My last few places of business just required that your private parts be covered up. I think this has given me a lax attitude towards work at times. I’ve worn ripped jeans, shirts with the elbows ripped out (last week), rock concert tee-shirts, cut-off shorts with combat boots, flip flops. I’ve worn clothes that I’ve slept in the night before.

I’m going to get serious and start dressing like a grown up. It’s time.
I’m kind of thinking the whole business aesthetic of the 50’s is kind of cool. The man in the grey flannel suit.
Why don’t we wear hats everywhere we go like they used to?

How do I begin though? Do I need a suit?
I think for starters I am going to stop wearing jeans and tennis shoes. That would be a good start. I’ll get some slacks and work shoes.
I should also cut down on tee-shirts. Maybe tuck in the shirts I do end up wearing.
When I get home from the office I want to be able to say, “Hold on, I’ve just got to change out of my work clothes before we go to the disco”.

Don’t worry though, I’ll be the same Noodle only dressed better. I’ll be an Avant-garde businessman.

I thought it was Sunday this morning when the alarm went off.
I was confused.

The weather outside is confused. It doesn’t know what to do. I wasn’t sure if I should wear a coat or not.
I wore a sweatshirt.

Downpours one second and warm sunshine the next.

I managed to only get the front lawn mowed on Easter Sunday. I got rained out before I could do the back 40.
I would have done all of my mowing on the sun filled Friday evening if I would have known, but I thought that it would be sunny on Saturday. Lots of rain on Saturday though and we stayed inside most of the day. Sunday after a dog walk there was finally a chance for mowing.

We went out to Pa’s house in Beavercreek for our Easter fun. Did you all have a good Easter? Yeah, it was fine.

I have been seeing the name LCD Soundsystem every time I turn around lately. The name keeps popping up during web surfings, and newspaper readings. I haven’t heard anything about them on radio broadcastings yet. On Saturday I finally did some investigating and review reading. From my research it was discovered that LCD Soundsystem was constructed from a recipe that included all of my favorite ingredients! I raced over to my neighborhood CD peddler and purchased a copy of the LCD Soundsystem CD: “Sound of Silver”. Holy crap people! I love it. Excellent compositions! Good electronics, good alterna-rock, some bits of old mixed with some not so old bits. A touch of disco, a touch of Bowie and Eno, a touch of electronica, a touch of that New York Interpol sound that all the hip kids dig (Joy Divisiony for the older kids). Some folks are already predicting that this one will be in several “best of the year” lists and I think that’s probably a safe bet.

The song “All My Friends” from Sound of Silver will be on all of the mix discs I make this year. Oh man is it tasty. It’s like a 7 minute and 37 second sigh. You feel sad at first, then a little hopeful, then wind up in a warm blanket with a loved one in front of a roaring fireplace and you are happy because your vacation starts the next day. Well, actually I’m listening to it right now and I don’t think it’s really a sad song. It’s upbeat. Maybe instead of sad it’s more of a bitter-sweet.

Yesterday I purchased the album “LCD Soundsystem” by LCD Soundsystem from iTunes. I needed to get more of the picture.
I read that one was awesome as well and by golly it is. It’s a bit rougher and not as produced as Sound of Silver. The second portion of the album is a collection of older cuts that are pretty amazing. More experimental sounding.

So I have the LCD Soundsystem albums and NIN’s “Year Zero” playing on repeat. Over and over. I love having music to be excited about.

On the movie front I’ve got a good one for you as well. It seems like it’s been a while since I have had a movie worthy enough for recommendation here in the journal.

We watched “United 93” a couple of nights ago. Oh man it’s a doozy. A real punch in the gut. We had the tears flowing by the end of the movie.
It’s a great movie. A horrible subject done in a respectful manner.

We weren’t interested in seeing any disrespectful, Hollywood schmalz fests about 9-11. The Castichells informed us correctly that United 93 wasn’t one of those. It’s pretty much schmalz free. Just the facts mam. Well, the facts that they had. The rest is crafted. If you must see a major motion picture about the events of 9-11 this is the one to see.

Don’t watch it if you are bummed out to begin with.
Such a good movie though.

It made me long for the days before 9-11.
Will we ever get back there? Yeah probably not. Why do we have to keep fighting wars though?