If you didn’t see this on February 25th, you really missed out:
Hilarious, no? An iPhone, a brilliant girlfriend with a great sense of humor, and a whole lot of serendipity are the needed ingredients.
Also, if you haven’t heard, I am moving to San Francisco in June! Dawn and I found a great apartment together in her existing building and we are incredibly excited about it.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – July 18, 2009
Contacts: Dave Krzysik, 415-273-1545
Jason Gohlke, 510-684-6100
The New York Times says the Brainwash Movie Festival “pirat[es] a piece of that old Hollywood magic and challeng[es] conventions on the role of public space in the process.” (Now Playing, a Digital Brigadoon, 7/29/04, Chris Thompson)
“We project movies onto a tarp in West Oakland,” counters festival director Shelby Toland.
The sometimes thought-provoking, often wacky, but always original Brainwash Movie Festival returns in the summer of 2009 for what could be the best festival ever.
“These are movies that know they’re movies,” claims festival judge Jason Gohlke. “If you like the art of storytelling, if you care about the suspension of disbelief, or if you just like watching moving pictures on a screen, you don’t want to miss Brainwash this year.”
Attendees to the festival are encouraged to either drive, bike, walk, or take public transit to the venue, where movies are screened in traditional drive-in movie theater fashion, complete with FM transmission and a full-service concession stand.
The fully juried festival will screen 23 original shorts in two separate programs (see http://www.brainwashm.com/2009/07/2009-brainwash-program/). There will also be a Premiere Party — Brainwash Zombie Night — on July 18th at 9 pm at 1357 5th Street in Oakland, which will be the West Coast Premiere of the feature film “Doctor S Battles the Sex Crazed Reefer Zombies: The Movie.” Filmmaker Bryan Ortiz of San Antonio, Texas, will be in attendance for Q & A.
The 2009 15th Annual Brainwash Movie Festival will be held July 31st and August 1st at 9:00 p.m. in Oakland — check BrainwashM.com for location details. (Tentative location is the Steel Building at 1960 Mandela Parkway @ 18th; backup location is 1357 5th Street.) Moviemakers to attend include Mark Thimijan, creator of “Mister Coffey.”
Admission is $9 per person per night OR $30 for a Double Brain Pass, which gets two people into the entire festival including a special exclusive preview night. Buy tickets at http://www.ticketweb.com/snl/EventListings.action?orgId=16986 or at the gate.
For more info, see http://brainwashm.com/.
Check out the mildly embarrassing trailer Dave and I updated last night for the 14th Annual Drive-in/Walk-in/Bike-in Brainwash Movie Festival (7/25-26, 9 pm-11 pm, 1357 5th St in Oakland, $9 each night):
Oops, no longer available: http://www.youtube.com/v/QMZ7T0GShHM
[hmm, I wonder if I still have copies of these on an external hard drive that happens to still work]
I know, it’s all over the place, to put it mildly. But it establishes the precise level of quality and weirdness Brainwash has honed over the last thirteen-plus years.
(The old version had previews of movies from previous years instead of this year.)
I encourage you to come to the festival if you’re anywhere near the Bay Area. This year we’re featuring a solid crop of weird and funny shorts (none longer than 23 minutes), often with the famed “Brainwash twist” — and it’s a good deal. Bring your FM radio, and feel free to drive in, walk in (via BART, most likely), or bike in.
[We could also use help setting up the screen…. let me know if you’re interested in some hard physical labor (with the offer of free dinner and/or pizza during or afterwards). Looks like it’s going to be Tuesday night after work. The more the merrier.]
There’s lots more at BrainwashM.com.
So I’m finally posting this raw footage, roughly cut together, from the very end of my trip to Minneapolis at Christmas 2006. Enjoy?
I was very tired.
Best baseball clip ever: Pat Venditte, switch pitcher for the single A Staten Island Yankees, decides which hand to use against a switch hitter, who is simultaneously deciding which side of the plate to hit from.
That’s right, I said “switch pitcher.” More on Venditte from the Sporting News. [Editor’s note, 2023: THANK YOU SO MUCH, ARCHIVE.ORG!] This is seriously the best thing ever. I hope Venditte gets to the majors. Seeing him in action would be more than worth the price of admission.
There are so many more points of decision in this scenario than the standard one with a switch-hitter and a non-ambidextrous pitcher. Normally, it’s easy: The conventional wisdom is to bat lefty against a right-hander, and bat righty against a left-hander.
But if you don’t know which hand he’s going to pitch with before you approach the plate, when do you decide which batter’s box to go stand in? And if you’re the pitcher, when do you decide which hand to throw with?
as a Libertarian… and he has some interesting things to say about the two major parties.
I find it very interesting and very revealing to hear a Southern Republican former Congressman (and Reagan appointee!) say this about the party he was in for decades:
The one thing that matters to Republicans above all else and to the exclusion of virtually everything else — other than raising money — is to elect people to office and keep people in office.
Principle and substance has no longer anything to do with what the party stands for, particularly at the national level.
He also touches on the fact that the “Democrat” [sic] Party has “fallen into the same trap: the trap of incumbency.”
I’m a dork.
Somehow it seems to have become my 30th birthday. I am approaching it with equanimity and, actually, a fair amount of joy. Things are going well. I am in the driver’s seat of my life and I like it.
My long-time friend Will now has a “vlog” (“video log,” of course), which is excellent. The best possible thing I could have woken up to today (after getting some nice calls yesterday) was Will’s entry for my birthday. All I can say is thanks. What a great, great guy.
Watch the video here or here:
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