Category Archives: Uncategorized

Are guys allergic to chores?

More men are vacuuming under the couch cushions rather than just sitting on them.

(Picture and description are actually from the story…)

Guh… Does this blow anyone else’s mind? People magazine paid 6 million (!) for exclusive baby photos of J.Lo and Marc Anthony’s twins. Marc Anthony then took half of that and bought his wife a pair of 3.2 million dollar earrings… Double guh…

Ok. I can understand when Hustler offers Ashley Dupre a million to pose nude; there are millions of guys who want to involve her in their own private fantasies. It’s out, but it makes sense. 6 million for fucking baby pictures though? That means there is 6 times the demand for these baby pics. Ok, this is something I just cannot fathom. Maybe it is because I am a guy. Maybe looking at baby pics is to women what looking at porn is to men, in that it fulfills the same fantastical obsessiveness. But, ya know, apparently 6 times as much.

The thing that makes Mafoo’s brain shatter into 6 million tiny shards of fractured agony is this: Doesn’t People understand that within minutes these photos will be all over the web??? So that their exclusive feature on the spawn of these two hateful gluttonous monsters will be meaningless???? Can anyone hear me???? Aaaaaaaa!!!!!!!

Ok, fuck it. I guess I just don’t get it. Here’s a video about a guy who fucks his picnic table:

This is a beautiful work of art, no joke. It’s nice to see other people mining Full House for inspiration.

(via Spout blog

Worst Karaoke Session Ever – Watch more free videos

I think I just found my next transcription project.

(Btw, this weird embedded player may not show up in your RSS reader, so visit my site if you can’t see it)

As many of you know, I recently transcribed and arranged The Beatles Revolution 9 for Alarm Will Sound. It was definitely the largest arrangement I have ever done, and probably my largest completed project (The Little Death is on its way…). We performed it at the Kitchen a couple weeks ago and I got a lot of good feedback. There was a decent response on some blogs about the performance, but a little birdy told my that New York Magazine was looking to do a feature on it, so I wanted to wait until that came out before I posted.

Well, it came out today! Here is an excerpt of the review by Justin Davidson:

A French-horn player whimpered like a newborn into one microphone, as a violinist murmured through a trumpet mute into another mike so that her voice sounded watery and indistinct. A percussionist smashed and stirred a bagful of broken glass with a hammer, and a clarinetist blurted the tune to “There’s a place in France / Where the naked ladies dance.” A sober young man, unaccustomed to performing, wielded one of those old-fashioned squeezable car horns and in an impassive baritone kept repeating: “Number nine … number nine.” Yes, you got it: Welcome to the live, all-acoustic version of Lennon and McCartney’s foray into musique concrète, “Revolution 9,” as performed with irresistible panache by the twenty-member ensemble Alarm Will Sound.
…
Nonchalantly virtuosic and unburdened by conventional wisdom, the players in Alarm Will Sound invent challenges that some might regard as mystically pointless—Matthew Marks’s obsessively detailed transcription of “Revolution 9,” for instance. The payoff lies in performances that make complexity sound crystalline, that dismantle a piece’s purity but leave its energy intact.

For some reason, my full name is used (I defer the use of my full name to the real Matthew Marks), but whatevs, this is pretty cool. After being solely a performer for so long it is nice to approach the music from this side. It is a lot less high-stress and you get a great deal more praise. Why’d I ever choose to be a horn-player? :)

It was cool to, ya know, talk to a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer from a major magazine about my latest creative endeavor. Although, I was a little worried I had made a bad first impression. I was introduced to Justin Davidson just after a Revolution 9 rehearsal, while I was still in my buoyant creative high. My first words to him were, “You know, you kind of look like John Lennon!” He looked at me oddly and proceeded to ask me about the arrangement as I slowly removed my foot from my mouth. Whatever though! He had these great round Lennon glasses just like I had when I was a young obsessed John Lennon fan.

He was very interested in the garbage bag full of glass bottles we were smashing, as well one would be expected to be, mainly because at one point in the rehearsal Jonathan Shapiro advised the woodwinds to step back as he took a hammer to it, in case any shards were to fly in their direction.

If you missed it at The Kitchen we’ll be doing a slightly-revised version at the Bang on a Can Marathon on May 31st. Come see it. It should be pretty cool in that crazy glass garden they have at the World Finance Center.

Here are a couple more responses to the arrangement:

Ye Wei Blog, by the editor of Perfect Sound Forever:

AWS horn player Matt Marks arrangement was stunning not just because it showed for certain how dynamic and lively “Revolution #9” really is but also how funny it is too and even melodic in places. Using bike horns, megaphones and horn mutes to recreate the sinister, strange music that makes up the piece, AWS also filled in the blanks with Marks and others recreating the taped voices, chants and cheers also heard in the song. “I am for peaceful revolution,” a AWS member said quoting Lennon before the song was played and afterwards, they made you feel that he was, if not advocating for a sonic one that Stockhausen, Berio and others had already arrived at. Among these other composers, the song finally had its context and made sense. The crowd seemed to appreciate that too, awarding them with rousing applause.

Artists Unite:

The topic of revolution, though, is not a lighthearted topic. “Revolution 9,” the Beatles’ work, arranged by Matt Marks (horn player of Alarm…) was a dazzling display of orchestration and recreating sound effects and tape loops live. But the entire evening left me feeling less like I was present at a revolution than at the study of one.

UPDATE: Justin dropped me an email. Apparently he was shocked because just a few days prior, some man on the street had called him John Lennon as well! Nice.

Here is the cutest thing ever:

Awesome.

I like movies. A lot. I’m kind of a geek. I have a decent, and growing, library of DVDs and VHSs in my apartment full of films I’ve seen several times and would watch again in a heartbeat. If you were to visit me way out in the depths of Brooklyn I would no doubt have in the back of my head a desire to sit and share with you one of my favorite films of that lot, no matter if you were visiting to rehearse, borrow some eggs, or just say hi after a long absence. The trouble is um, my taste in movies…

A glance at my library:

A lot of Japanese horror, samurai, and children’s movies

A good amount of Cronenberg, Lynch, Tarantino, Scorsese, Kubrick, Pasolini, Mamet, and Greenaway.

A bunch of obscure musicals

See, sometimes people just want to sit back and watch Knocked Up or something. I can understand that. But, and maybe this is the masochistic part of me, I like a film to demolish my sense of morality, reality, and normality.

Now, this may be sounding like: I have such great taste in film, and everyone else just wants to watch Hollywood crap. Nein! Not the case. Because, I also have a decent collection of excessively bad movies. The problem is that I find it very difficult to casually watch a film. Often I can find as much soul-destroying sublimation in Wild Women of Wongo as I can in Aguirre, the Wrath of God. As Melly often points out, watching a movie with me can be work.

So this brings us to my latest cinematic excursion, Funny Games by Michael Haneke

Funny Games is not necessarily a “good” movie. It will not leave you feeling fuller for the experience. It does not serve to guide us further in this game of life.

It is there to fucking rock.

Following the film, I stood outside the theater people-watching the traumatized viewers exiting the theater. One dazed couple exited, the women groping for an explanation of what she had just seen. “Listen to Heavy Metal, girl. Listen to Heavy Metal and you’ll understand.”, her boyfriend suggested. I laughed and we shared knowing nods. The movie features some of John Zorn’s excruciatingly energizing speed metal experiments. Zorn made a lot of music to be ugly, to show ugly. This is what Haneke provides: a violent, psychologically ugly portrait of a horror movie, presented to you from the perspective of the killers, two charismatic young men dressed in outfits that are part yuppie-tennis chic/part commedia del arte.

Critics have shredded this film, most deriding it as “pointless”, as in a pointless exercise in directorial sadism. Um, excuse me. Who the fuck ever decided that movies need to have a point?

Here are some excerpts (via Metacritic:

New York Daily News – Elizabeth Weitzman
A patronizing, self-satisfied piece of work, Funny Games is Michael Haneke’s way of chastising us for blindly following the traditional rules of entertainment.

Variety – Derek Elley
As shocking and deliberately manipulative as the original movie and — some may reckon — even more pointless.

New York Post – Lou Lumenick
The joke is on arthouse audiences who show up for Funny Games, which is basically torture porn every bit as manipulative and reprehensible as “Hostel,” even if it’s tricked out with intellectual pretension.

San Francisco Chronicle – Mick LaSalle
Just because it’s a conscious commentary on other vile, useless, pointless cinematic exercises doesn’t make it any less vile, useless and pointless.

New York Magazine – David Edelstein
Haneke’s assault on our fantasy lives is shallow, unimaginative, and glacially unengaged–a sucker punch without the redeeming passion of punk.

Boston Globe – Ty Burr
If this is daring in theory, it’s a failure in practice. Exactingly well-made, the movie is grueling and unpleasant in the extreme – that’s the point – but it’s also working from a specious premise, that film-school Brechtian devices can bring on mass enlightenment.

And my favorite:

USA Today – Claudia Puig
So sadistic and disturbing, Games is easily the toughest movie to sit through since 1994’s “Natural Born Killers.”

Ha! What? Natural Born Killers? You call that tough? In 14 years, you haven’t seen anything worse than Natural Born fucking-Oliver-Stone Killers?? But I guess that kind of sums it up. When your job consists mainly of watching the latest Disney anthropomorphicism, then I would think that Funny Games would freak you out.

The scary thing here is that these reviewers seem bent on ferreting out a message, finding some clue to the director’s desire to transform our lives for the better, and their failure to find, or manufacture, a satisfactory “point” signifies the failure of the film. I don’t believe that Haneke is trying to “shame-the-viewer”; I don’t think he is “chastising” us (how could a horror-film director chastise a horror-film viewer??); and I certainly hope that he is “manipulating” us! I want to be manipulated! I’m paying fucking 12 bucks to see this, I don’t pay 12 bucks to stay in control.

These reviewers seem to want their movies to be agreeable and easy. Which is fine as a consumer, but you’re a fucking reviewer! You don’t hear of food critics ordering caviar and complaining of its pungency. Movies like these should be the reason you became a reviewer. Criticize its form or its philosophical message, but not its audacity or pretentiousness. Every substantial work of art is pretentious. It has to be because it came from a mind confident in its statement, a mind free of speculative criticisms. What I find most troubling, though, is the perspective that art should have some sort of societal merit.

Ayn Rand. Say what you will about her economics or politics, her perspective on the creation of art is monumental (I encourage every artist to read The Fountainhead). She dismisses the philosophy that art should serve the greater good, that art has any sort of social responsibility – aside from the gratification of the artist. Art for a purpose: to cure some social ill, for the betterment of mankind, will always be lacking, in that its inspiration is deluded. Funny Games’ end was in itself. Sure there are statements and messages you can take but really, as Andrew O’Hehir from Salon put it:

the conclusion I reach after a great deal of high-powered cogitation is this: He’s fucking with us.

Yes! It is manipulative and sadistic and pretentious and self-serving! He breaks the fourth-wall throughout the film, why?, because he fucking wants to! And I loved it. I want a director to put me through the wringer, I want to be “sucker punched”. I don’t need a message that will change the world. I want to be changed, and ya know, Forrest-fucking-Gump may have had a redemptive aim, a desire to warm our hearts and make us more compassionate (or some shit), but it did nothing for the art of film. Maybe it made critics feel better about themselves, but it was Chicken Soup for the film-goers soul. Funny Games was a fucking Lamb Phaal for the film-goers soul. It scalded your senses and seared your insides for days. Just how I like it.

After watching the movie, I made the long trek home from Times Square to Kensington at about 2am. My thoughts were locked on the movie (I actually spent most of the night awake in bed, pondering what I had just seen). Just as I was turning the corner to arrive home a cab passed me.
The ad on the top of the car read:

NO, WE DON’T THINK SMOKING SHOULD BE IN PG-13 MOVIES EITHER!

This is what got me thinking of the socialist approach to art. Those that would value public health and safety over expression would have no qualms about compromising artistic integrity, vision, and honesty for the “greater good”. I really don’t see any difference between banning smoking from films and banning sex or drugs from films, aside from one movement comes from the left and one from the right.
Is there really a substantial idealogical difference between this and this? Sure, there is a difference between a critic deriding a movie for the lack of a “point” and a movement to censor actions from films as a whole, but I believe they are from the same perspective: one that believes art has a responsibility, art should be created for the betterment of society and mankind, art should illuminate us out of the darkness and into the light.

Fuck that.

Art need only rock.

(-via Neatorama)

Ugh… Come on Google, not you too.

(see My vote for stupidest new website of 2007)

Of course, my even more cynical side says that this is really just a way for Google to deflate Blackle’s criticism…

This will prove true for all of the senses, I believe.