06 15 09 2:25 |No comments yet Stomp Clap Stomp Clap

Wow. Not sure how I missed this. Here's Dante's video for "Tucker Stomp" we had a great time making this record in Detroit.  Dante is easily one of the most ambitious and creatively honest hip-hop artist I've ever worked with.

Untitled from Havoc Detroit on Vimeo.

06 05 09 3:26 |Only one comment Every button has a sweet spot

At least that's what I though, as I lay in bed at Hahnemann Hospital after emergency surgery fo my displaced femoral neck fracture. See, the morphine machine had a sweet spot. It would beep after a satisfying click of the hand held control and administer it's gods. The bed's controls also had a sweet spot. I could press across the control without result until I came to that spot in the center that sent my legs up or down to the perfect spot. But there was one button without a sweet spot in the room. The call button, the 'help' button, the 'more endocet, stat' button. I could press and press with no click or beep to alert me to a successfull notification of my discomfort. It was only a few moments later, that the voice of the teacher from the Peanuts cartoon came shuttling into the room via loudspeaker as the voice of the nurses station call center. To make matters worse, the bottons were switched between my and my room mate ( a fidgety leg amputee who insisted on taking sugar packets with his percocet) So my call would alert his nurse and his call mine. And the speaker/microphone system  was so poor that no one could understand anyone. It got to the point on Friday night that I would call for a nurse and just say "bnoogah blah goobah huweay", and "be right there" would be the reply. It was infuriating and funny. Just like this whole temporary disability situation.

Great care at Hahnemann Hospital though. I'm recovering well. I'll post X Ray photos next week after I get the stitches out. Bnogbah!

05 07 09 11:45 |No comments yet The ways of Italian TV

I feel badly for the New England Patriot's rookie linebacker that tore his ACL during a training mini-camp. I feel badly for those arrested while protesting the Army's use of XBOX 360 video game systems to entice recruits to come into their Army Experience Center ( though there is another discussion to be had about why this works and those it works on). I feel badly that there is no US TV coverage of the Giro d' Italia race that starts on Monday.

I feel great about having gone to Detroit for a few days to play a show with Benjamin Teague and Bradley Rhodes. Brad and I spent an amazing 4 days with John Charnota (who made the videos seen below) and Alison Wong (who will have a new website soon). Good music, good times, good food.

We also took in the Graduate show at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Lots of performances and kinetic art this year. There was stuff moving around and people making noise and doing stuff at every turn. I really enjoyed being back on the grounds and saying hello to old friends. Including Elliott Earls who passed on this wonderful still from his latest work "The Saranay Motel", I play the part of record producer Timothy Paul. The film will be released later this year.

This is a great photo:

Our film team "No Right Return" completed our 48 Hour Film Project entry over the weekend. We were given comedy, the artist Dan Crocker, a wallet, and "do you even know what that means?" to use in our 4 to 7 min film. We cam up with 2 news anchors who are forced to report on a pending apocalypse from a TV sales network while selling their products. It's dark and dense, and funny( we think so at least). I'll post it when it is legal to do so. We're hoping to continue our dynasty after winning "Best Film" last year for 'Kitchen Aid" which was one of 18 films from around the world chosen for the 2008 48 Hour Project DVD. It was also shown at Cannes, which is in France, which is nice.

Oh, and I'm playing rhodes and kalimba in a band, Do You Need the Service? With Mark Sconyers, Justin Hallman et al. It's an approachable instrumental project with a lot of potential and good energy. Click here to listen. Stay tuned, and watch those knees!

03 27 09 10:30 |No comments yet Noah and Manny

I called a glass company yesterday about fabricating a shower stall
for us. Got a guy named Noah on the phone.
Noah : "You know how we choose tile guys back in my country?"
Tim : "No I don't, Noah"
Noah : "We take a guy and throw him up in the air so he hits the ceiling."
Tim : "..."
Noah : "If he hits the ceiling, we make him a painter."
Tim  : "Oh, wow"
Noah : "If he falls back down onto the ground, we make him a tile guy."
Tim : "That's terrific"

These two short films were created by our amigo muy importante, John Charnota. Whom we have been swimming with, and jumped off a water trampoline with too.

03 05 09 11:49 |No comments yet Start talking again

It was a great twist of circumstance that put a stranger and I in a room today, and had us singing "LA Freeway" and listening to John Prine sing "Clay Pigeons". I'm lucky to say that most days, I love my job and am thankful for all the people it brings my way.

02 23 09 1:06 |No comments yet A room ful of strangers

This photo of Lenny mssing with the turntable sort of sums up my January and February. Balancing on nothing, almost falling off every few seconds, but touching a lot of things and making weird noises. It's been a hectic and challenging few weeks. But I'm pleased to report excellent progress some very exciting new projects. The Train and Dial is almost done. My solo record, Everything Burns is almost there. Ryan Widger's record is getting there and still giving me the howling fantods. and the North AM demo is taking shape, but is on hiatus until after tax season. I'll have all this up for your listening enjoyment ASAP. Turns out that bourbon is mostly corn, and rye is mostly rye. Oh, and it's illegal to distill in your basement in South Philly.

Almost broke myself snowboarding last weekend with Danno. It was awesome. I haven'e been in a few seasons, so it was real nice to get back on it. Damn box rail though almost broke me in twain. We were the oldest dudes in the terrain park that's for sure. Turns out fluorescent colors are back in, Debbie Gibson is not. They had a house band playing in the bar up there at Elk Mountain. I heard them play Wagon Wheel over lunch, which was very nice. The poconos are good people.The fashion parallels between hipster, snowboard wear and the Culture Club are almost too deep to consider without getting your face all up in a knot. I'd put all three images up here but I'm afraid of opening up a bandana vortex and letting the 4 horsemen of the fashiopocalypse through. 

Below is amazing. Thanks Brad.

01 14 09 09:14 |Only one comment ASUS EEE PC Review : first impressions

So with Christina's weekly commute to teach in Baltimore in mind I set about to replace her aging PowerBook G4 with something lighter, smaller, and faster. My timing was perfect as throughout 2008 Intel has released and perfected their  line of 'Atom' chips and associated chipsets. These processors run faster and more efficiently than anything else and are available for next to nothing. After scouring the internet for reviews and user opinions on these "Netbooks" (as these Atom equipped small laptops have come to be called) I settled on the Lenovo S10, available from Lenovo nicely equipped for around $400. 10" LCD, 1GB RAM, WiFi, 160GB Hard Drive, XP Home.Bam. Done. Lovin' it in Red, but wait. Lo and behold!  Best Buy, a store we never shop in due to the general malaise that sets in over the one here in South Philly, has an ASUS (pronounced Ae - Sooos) EEE (pronounced eeeeeeee, like your falling off something very high) PC Netbook for $199! Oh my. ASUS EEE PC 8.9" LCD, 1GB RAM, 4GB SSD, WiFi, and Xandros Linux for an OS. Gulp. But for $199! I jumped on my bike ran down to Best Buy last night and picked one up. Turns out the box is so small that 2 would have fit in my bag. Got it home and had at it. The hardware is really nice. Rigid chassis, bright screen, nice fit and finish overall. Touchpad feels good, clicks a little rough, but feels very solid. The supplied charger is very small and light. I can hear one tiny little fan whirring away inside. I was able to connect to our home network and the internet in a minute. Upon doing so I was alerted to several updates that were available from ASUS that I should let the EEE install. So I did. Rebooted and was greeted with a flickering screen and no desktop. Hosed the whole thing up. So I wrinkled my nose a bit and broke out the small users manual. Turns out there is a recovery partition on the 4GB drive. So I forced a restart and held F9 which gives me the option to format the drive and re-install the OS. Took about 45 seconds and I was back up and running, this time ignoring the alerts to update the software. So back to square one, I handed it over to Chrissy and let her have a go before I really jacked the thing up by fiddling with it too much. She's used Linux casually on a desktop and on our Nokia N800 tablets so seeing another distribution of it didn't throw her for a loop at all. 5 minutes later she had transferred a PowerPoint presentation, Word document, music and videos to the EEE via SD card to and from both the Mac and PC. She was able to open and edit them using the included StarOffice and MPlayer applications. So far so good. She opened up YouTube and was able to watch videos, which played back perfectly (BTW we have been addicted to this song and video, which we are convinced will end up in the Ronald Chevalier movie.  Here it is :  The speakers on this little netbook sound VERY GOOD, a lot louder and fuller than the PowerBook G4. The screen looks great and the included Xandros 'launcher' application is very easy to navigate. I've read of some users replacing the OS with other Linux flavors, but I think this will do just fine. I ordered an 8GB SD card to augment the 4GB of internal storage, most of which is used by the OS and recovery partition. I'm planning on putting the 4 cell battery through its paces tonight.Overall this is a great little device for basic computing, it's not a desktop/laptop replacement, but rather a devce that lies between. A great tool for her to move and edit data between locations. Looking forward to getting one for me!

12 22 08 10:26 |No comments yet Serving Hamlin for the Holidays

December found me hunting. I enjoyed a great 4 day trip to Bertie County, NC with Brad, Cliff Rowland, and Ethan Call. Boar and deer were our quarry, well, intended quarry as we didn't manage to actually shoot anything. En route we enjoyed an all too brief visit with Brad's parents and picked up some North Carolina Barbeque (yes, it is amazing and somehow feels 'healthier' than other varieties of slow cooked meat). We encountered the slowest, yet kindest Red Apple Convenience store in the world. We got there late and had a round of sandwiches and some beers and aged 12 years while waiting in line. It was amazing. Anyhow, the hunting. We stayed in a small 'cabin'(tin roof and 4 walls) with a wood stove. Much to our dismay, the wood stove was sitting in the middle of the cabin with nary a chimney/vent inm sight. It was getting dark so we attempted to fashion a vent from some old roofing metal (probably noxious) we had found around the cabin. After tying it all together with half rusted barbed wire we stoked it up and settled in for the night. Yup, almost died 2 nights in a row from the smoke and fumes this little stove put out (Number 29 it said on the front of the stove, a name that will live in infamy). There were good times with the stove and bad time with the stove, it was a 'rollercoasted of emotions', as Cliff so aptly put it.  When not hunting we enjoyed meals at the Heritage House (formerly Catfish's), which included a stunning mackrel cake(replete with bits of scale and bone, which I very much enjoyed) and the now infamous 'Corn Sticks' which are bars of rolled corn meal and lard fried to a golden brown and served with butter. I'm trying to think of something humorous about the corn stick, but they are delicous and become their own punchline only while at the Heritage House. We also played a bit of music. Many thanks to Cliff for teaching me some new fiddle tunes and letting me butcher his beautiful 1929 The Gibson Mandolin. There are photos on my flickr page, click the photos link ofer there ------>> for a look see.

December also rang in the premier of 'Homeward Bound : John Mellencamp' a documentary on the Biography Channel/A+E produced by Stage 3 Productions. I had the amazing opportunity to write the original music for the piece and mix the show. It was a lot of fun working very closely with a small, super competent team on a project that let all of us flex a little creative muscle. The show was very well received and is in rotation on the Biography Channel and will move to A+E in January, We hope to make more of them in 2009 so stay tuned. 

All of the above has kept me too busy to make a new holiday record, so I'll direct you to our last effort "Happy Birthday Jesus" by Middle Hill available here. CLICK. It's the 6th item down the page, right click (ctrl+click for macs) and save them to your computer for repeated enjoyment.

Wishing you all a warm and rejuvinating holiday season, and a happy and prosperous 2009. - Tim

11 19 08 12:58 |No comments yet The race to the Waffle House with Hon. E. Wells

Turns out I wasn't the only one amused by the email going around suggesting that I donate money to Planned Parenthood in Sarah Palin's honor and have the thank you card send to John McCain's campaign headquarters. Planned Parent hood received over $768,000.00 dollars in her honor. Awesome. What happened to John McCain over the course of the campaign, huh? He turned into some kind of crazy mutant.

Spent the weekend in NYC at Brad's opening at Larissa Goldston's gallery. It was a hoot. Great work and good times making music and bumming around. Check out LarissaGoldston.com to have a look at his new batch of paintings.

10 29 08 10:50 |No comments yet The Shape of Punk to Come

So I'm hosting a TV show for Comcast OnDemand. Yup, that's right. On camera and all the fixin's. For those of you in Comcast Country (Philly market at least) go to OnDemand > Go Local > Philly Reality > Strange in the City. Strange in the City, sure is. We're a little show in the backwaters of local OnDemand content that features people, places, and things in Philadelphia that may not be on the mainstream cultural radar. It's a lot of fun to make these shows and we hope to be able to make a lot more of them. These photos of me and the crew were taken at Faeriecon 08, a Faerie convention at the Philly convention center. It was a trip. The gentleman and puppett I'm interviewing there are from the Froud family. They did the creature design for Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal and Labrynth. Toby there was actuall the baby that was stolen in Labrynth. And there's the crew. CCFV's finest. Fearless. So check out the show, hope you enjoy it. 

In other news ; the Phillies. Chrissy and I had my folks over for dinner on Sunday night and were startled by being able to hear the roar of 80,000 fans from Citizens Bank Park in our Kitchen! We turned on the tube and experienced the delay between the live roars and the broadcast roars. It was amazing. My sound brain was trying to figure out how many seconds of delay vs. how far the stadium is to our house, but was distracted by sausage and escarole. 

Saw Ed Ruscha on Iconoclasts last night. They showed the piece that Andrea Landau and Chrissy worked on with the Fabric Workshop and museum. Not a great episode. Ruscha is not a very interesting/insightful person.

10 02 08 4:17 |No comments yet The beast without

The global economy is self aware and very much alive.  It expands and contracts as a reaction to its environment and knows how to protect itself. It is strongest when it is left alone and allowed to succeed and fail. It can learn and teach. The US financial sector should be allowed to prosper or perish while exemplifying the possibilities of a truly free market economy. Private banks have made very bad investments, investors have made very bad investments, consumers have made very bad decisions and all should be free to continue to do so. I think all lenders are predators, that's how they make money. A debtor knows this going into an agreement and must know enough to read the fine print. Lenders have gottten a little fat and very, very stupid in recent years and are now paying for it. In light of all this I am not a supporter of an economic bailout of any kind. I think periods of growth and recession are healthy for an economy and the minds and hearts of those living with that economy. Maybe a major crisis that really hits 'main st.' is just the wake up call that the US needs in order to really start to deal with energy, health care, and its position in the world. Or perhaps in the months ahead we come to the conclusion that our system is broken beyond repair, that the beast is dead. That maybe we should socialize our banks, maybe we should make it a lot more difficult to get credit, and maybe it is the Chinese economy that poses the greatest threat to our national security.

09 10 08 10:52 |No comments yet Redirecting faith

It happens to us all the time. Chrissy and I will sit down to go over our calendars, budgets, and plans; and we're quickly distracted by the cats, the neighbors, Evan Williams, or our dinner simmering on the stove. Our serious conversations often leave us both laughing our asses off and hi-5ing to something totally unrelated. It was in the middle of one of these serious 'watch lenny (cat number 2) fetch the tinsel pipe cleaner' sessions that we decided to sell our only car. See, year ago we traded in our 2004 red VW Golf 2 door for a grey/green 2007 VW Rabbit 4 door. It made sense at the time because Chrissy was driving a lot with her architectural preservation job and needed room for her army of Makita tools and long underwear. The Rabbit is a great car, our dream car actually. Good mileage, parks anywhere, sunroof and lots of cupholders. But we weren't really using it all that much. We drove the car a dozen times in July, maybe 20 times in August. With the loan payment, insurance and fuel that's a lot  to spend for so little return. So after a few more flicks of the pipe cleaner and Lenny careening off everything in the living room, I walked outside, took a few shots of the car and put it on Craig'sList. One week later the car is gone! Sold to a great couple in the Metro-Atlanta area. We're now two thousand some-odd pounds lighter and happier. Feels like a huge german engineered weight has been lifted from our minds. We've invested in a new bicycle tire pump and have joined Philly Car Share for our longer trips outside the city.It was an amazingly easy, albeit psychically stressful, transaction. The stress comes from this intimate dance of trust that has to be tangoed by the two participants in any online transaction. Especially through Craig'sList where there is not eBay's Karma-esque 'Score' to be worried about or any sort of protection or accountability. Do these people exist? Does their bank exist? How can we verify that an out of state bank isn't just a website and a phone in a hotel room? Turns out we can't and we just had to go with it. But it all worked out well. +1 points for all parties involved.

Selling the car is right in line with a trend of thinking that started when we moved back to Philadelphia in 2006. We used a moving compay to get us back here from Detroit and we were billed by the pound for their services. We weighed over 18,000 pounds. So during the unpacking process and continuing until today we have been tossing, selling and trading everything that we don't use regularly. From sporting goods (don't have a Subaru anymore, don't need the Subaru bike rack) to musical equipment, to air conditioners, to computers, to all manner of gadget and doo-dad. Chrissy and I are not vegans, we're not tree huggers, or greenpeace rabble rousers, but it does feel great to be lighter. To take up less space, have a smaller footprint. I'll be writing a bit about the car share experience as soon as our keys arrive. We'll fobs actually, as the cars have the keys inside them. And credit cards for gas inside them, as gas is included in the hourly use rate. Again a karmic quandary, Car Share. Will the car be returned on time and gassed up by the last driver? 

Oh, and Sarah Palin might be one of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse.

08 19 08 09:41 |Only one comment Agreeable

Christina came back from teacher orientation at MICA in Baltimore feeling "nourished". Not by the hummous wraps they carted in for lunch, but by the people and community that she found there. It got us to thinking of how important it is to question the nutritional value of not only our food, but also of our day to day activities. Jobs, relationships, time off etc. can all be quesitoned. "Is this healthy? Is this nourishing? Is this energizing me to continue contributing to that thing that is providing this nourishment?". It's a great way to look at work, school, neighborhoods, and religious institutions. It's a very clean analysis for many things, but one that's probably not often done. The  food to living analogy is great. Perhaps go on a diet of unhealthy things? It's beginning to chime back to the Seven Habits, but I like it. Hmm...what's for lunch?

Chrissy was excited by how organized and clear the school's administration was throughout the day. MICA puts a lot of responsibility on their professors and rewards them with a community of teachers and students that are among the best anywhere. We're both very excited by this new opportunity and the chance to explore Baltimore.

08 05 08 9:12 |No comments yet Huh?

These are hideous. These are the new ?uestlove Nike Air Force One sneakers. Wow.

Chrissy and I have taken the last few days off to tool around, hit some beaches, and cook. Had a blast at Brigantine beach yesterday, and visited Lewes beach today. Really enjoyed laying out as it began to rain and watching it pass over us. Finishing a mix and 3 songs for a 21 Day film project entry this week. Hopefully we'll have as much luck as we did with the 48hr Film Project. I wrote 3 songs for the film. One entirely in Spanish. One is a rocking jingle style number, and the other is... well we'll just have to play the video when it's finished on Friday. It'll be funny. I also scored the opening to a new Comcast OnDemand show about Puppies. A few chords mixed with some barks and some great animation by John Conning @ CCFV. Fun fun.

Paris Hilton filmed a response to John McCain's ad. It's really nicely done and quite funny. Click here to watch it. It is perfectly safe for work.

I've got some entries in waiting about new music, Aza Raskin, supercolliders and tequila, but those will wait until Thursday. Back to vacation

07 07 08 8:32 |No comments yet College Latin et al.

So here it is, well part of it at least. My site is now more compatible with Internet Explorer. Turns out it was a super easy .css fix after all. Coincidentally Internet Explorer has been found to be the least safe of all the major browsers. Which means more spam, phishing, and the opportunity for identity theft. Click here to read all about it. Later this week I'll have new colors, a new header, and links to my videos on YouTube.

I had 2 great meetings last week wrt new projects. Anwar Hassan and I are about to embark on an electro pop project. David Dworanczyk and I are diving into fleshing out some of his original material, starting with a very personal and moving song titled "In Between". The first EP of my Everything Burns solo project is also almost there. 

Chris Landau turned me onto PicLens today. It's an amazing Firefox add-on that has to be seen to be believed. Insane. I highly recommend it.

I also came to grips with our Mandolin Slicer today. It's more complicated than it needs to be, but it seriously whooped some onions, carrots, and celery into shape tonight. And yes, I almost took off the tips of my fingers a few times.