lines of flight

Recently I was doing research on the 90s music scene in Hawai’i.

I found this guy JonHawaii2003 had posted footage of Tool and Stone Temple Pilots at the first Big Mele—an alternative music festival that ran in Hawaii for seven years—on YouTube. Turns out Jon was one of the sound guys for the show, and knows a thing or two about getting quality concert footage.

I contacted him to thank him for the hard-rocking flashback, and a week later he reuploaded the Tool footage in even better quality!

Here’s the link to the entire 10-part playlist, or if you just want to hear my favorite (aka most popular on Radio Free Hawaii) song of the day, that’d be Opiate featuring a surprise guest appearance from singer Layne Staley of Alice in Chains:

The one thing you can’t see here is the waves, they are going off(!!) in an area of the island where huge surf is not that common. Despite Kualoa being a Ranch and having an abundance of ranchly things like cow poo (and the fungus that grows upon it), I can hardly imagine a more beautiful backdrop for a killer music festival.

I wasn’t even a huge Tool fan until that day, when the bass in my face—an emotionally blown state since I’d just been dumped that day—rocked my world. Other artists that played the Big Mele were Stone Temple Pilots, Fishbone, Violent Femmes and Primus.

No subsequent Big Mele ever packed as much of a punch as this one did, for me. They lost even the little bit of diversity they had, becoming way too alterna-punk-heavy for my tastes, tho I did go in ‘96 (No Doubt! plus Cypress Hill and their ginormous inflatable Buddha) and ‘97 (Wu Tang, sorry guys, that is *not* Wu Mountain behind us). Lineups of all The Big Mele festivals on hawaiibase.com.

This video slideshow accompanies a travel feature in The Atlantic called Saunas and Silence: The Finnish idea of a perfect vacation. It’s writer/photographer Trevor Corson’s take on Finland where, he claims, solitude is a national pastime.

The pictures are lovely and he’s done a good job capturing that back-to-nature instinct that Finns cherish, myself included. Admittedly, a good portion of the rest of the world probably considers going to a rustic cottage on a mosquito-infested lake to be a difficult and boring sort of vacation. But hey, that’s where the beer comes in, and it’s really, really good for your soul. The nature stuff, not the beer.

Finnish food was not really featured in the story like I wanted it to be, it’s as simple and boring sublime as getting away to the cottage. I suppose it’s possible that the author doesn’t find pickled herring on hard rye bread a mouthwateringly irresistible breakfast food and was trying to be nice by not mentioning it, but, I really wanted a few more mentions of tasty Finnish eats.

Overall though I’m digging this self-produced video slideshow. Good inspiration for the ones we’ve been working on for Mālamalama, as mentioned here and here.

Am I the only one that missed this Sesame Street Captain Vegetable clip as a kid? This is too funny.

As if the crazed and kooky haired muppets weren’t enough, the dialog has extra snark (”what are you, some kind of weirdo?”) and the silly song gets stuck in my head when I least expect it.

Taking the cake (er, salad?) are those sad looking vegetables! Poor Andy gets his black licorice candy swapped for a plate full of dry, raggedy celery. I dare a cracked-out puppet to try and take my licorice and replace it with celery. NO.

But that’s of course beside the point. The point is to promote good nutrition and not nightmares, so the trippy hippies at Sesame Street reprised the sketch with John Leguizamo as Captain Vegetable.

Leguizamo’s Captain Vegetable comes off awkward in places and to be honest, Elmo was never my main muppet. But it’s still a funny skit and the costume reaches new heights of ridiculousness. Is that corn silk coming out of his head? At least he’s armed with more than two vegetables. Thanks, playa!

The old link was passed on by friend, web designer, music lover, LA denizen Tim Ganter, back when he was still blogging… poke, poke… Thanks for introducing me to Captain Vegetable, Tim!

Two Beer Queers is a podcast about beer, from Hawaii. These guys have a great balance of raunch and refinement–they take their beer very seriously, but get in plenty of off-color silliness as they pour, observe, sniff and drink(chug!) each brew.

TWO BEER QUEERS EPISODE 09 – OLD RASPUTIN & PARADOX.

Hosts Bully O’Sullivan and Russel Kealoha taste test all the oddball beers that I would like to try, if I weren’t reaching for familiar brands. Even tho I consider myself a discriminating beer-drinker, the beers featured on this show make me want to challenge my palate.

I really love how the Two Beer Queers keep in mind the masses of BudLight and Heinekin drinkers, constantly encouraging everyone to try something new. At the same time, they let us live vicariously through them, since my wallet already knows that a $13 bottle of stout is not gonna happen anytime soon! I can’t imagine what a 20-something(??) oz beer would have to have in it for it to be worth so much. Breastmilk? Miracle anti-oxidants? sheeeeeit. But watching you drink it is fine with me, 10% ABV would put me down too quick anyway.

Cheers, fellas! I am officially a fan. Keep up the good work!

These are the pieces I’ve collected by Aaron Martin. He’s that guy!

Clockwise: the large multimedia painting is called Posed (Inhibition Dead), Sept. 1, 2003. The marker on tile piece that says Aarons Paky is earlier, not sure the date. The angry one is Charles, “He loves to sing, and picks on red pandas,” circa 2004.

I love the paintings especially, but Aaron’s styles have evolved a ton in the last few years and my woebot family needs a new member! Check him out in the first issue of Contrast magazine.

And check him out this Saturday at the Contemporary Museum Cafe. I can’t wait to meander around the grounds which inspired Shepard Fairey in 2005, so nice!

TCM pr person twittered two days ago:

TCMHonoluluPR: Live art? Come to TCM Thursday, Friday and Saturday this week to see Aaron Martin (aka Angry Woebots) create a mural from11:20-2:30pm/cafe

This three minute, 50 second video was featured as a web extra to accompany a story about seahorses in the January 2009 issue of Mālamalama online.

My job was to coordinate the production, do the interviews, edit the spoken audio and when we didn’t have all of what we needed, to do some narrative voice-over. The decision to add the voice-over was last-minute and it ended up being recorded in an empty office with leftover fake Xmas snow used as sound insulation(?!).

This web extra has had over 400 views on Vimeo so far; that’s the version embedded into the story, but you have to go to Vimeo to see the glorious HD version. We used Vimeo because we were having some problems uploading to our Mālamalama YouTube channel. Now YouTube is cooperating, so I’ve embedded the HD version here.

Splitting our views between different video hosts is obviously not ideal. YouTube is less elegant than Vimeo, but it has a *much* larger community. Vimeo looks awesome, and for a small fee, we’d be allowed to embed HD video on our site, but no decision has been made yet.

I welcome any feedback and opinions on the issue of video hosting and playback.

This post looks briefly at two plugins that integrate WordPress and Twitter. I spend a lot of time with each, and this kind of integration makes sense in theory, but I have not yet seen it work incredibly well in practice.

Both Twitter Tools and TweetSuite have options to enable widgets for displaying tweets (including favorited tweets in TweetSuite) and also give the option to auto-tweet when you publish a post.

The developer-described “experimental” digest features of Twitter Tools were the main draw for me to test this WordPress plugin by Alex King. I wanted to see what happens when you extract a specimen of Twitter text and consider it out of context. At the very least, I could have an archive of my tweets.

However, missing for me in the Twitter Tools digest is the option to collect this daily or weekly digest as an Unpublished draft, which would allow me to comment, edit and tag before it goes live, or even chose to keep it private (on account of being extra boring or annoying).

Apparently this plugin isn’t being actively developed anymore, which does not bode well for its usefulness in the future.

The other Twitter-based plugin I’ve tested recently is Dan Zarella’s TweetSuite. TweetSuite generates trackback-like “tweetbacks” that post automatically when anyone twitters a link to a blog page. The list of tweets at the end of the article on Zarella’s page is probably the best(?) example the tweetback display in full force.

To see it on my site, I sent a tweet about my own post, and at the end of that post, voilà! you see the tweet that the twitterverse saw. (You can go ahead and ignore the lame fact that that post has one comment and one tweetback and both are from me :~p what I learned on that post helped me produce a page that got over 3,300 views in one day!)

Neither Twitter Tools nor TweetSuite does it all for me yet, nor are they right for the Mālamalama magazine site. Both my sites may be too non-techie for it to ever take hold, but who knows, even Mālamalama is on Twitter now, so maybe one day…?!

Double rainbow at dawn on New Year’s Day in Honolulu, 2009.

Can you take a bad picture of a rainbow? I wanted to share this, but I could not for the life of me figure out which of these photos is best.

there are rainbows

12 Photos

 

So I’m adding them all but justifying the lack of editorial eye by using this as a chance to play with the NextGEN photo gallery plugin (again).

This time it needs to be a sidebar with a thumbnail that launches the whole photo gallery, from alongside a larger story. This is a functionality that has been requested at Mālamalama, just testing it here.

By the way if anyone else is just getting started with NextGEN Gallery plugin, there are some helpful instructions available from this guy.

UPDATE January 12, 2009

Doing this all kinds of wrong, ugh. Using the compact view album instead of a link to a gallery that has it’s own page(!!). Makes a lot more sense… I think? Only thing is, I can’t have words wrap around this because if I put it in a narrow div then the gallery and slideshow try to open within it.

Now to figure out why the captions don’t show in the slideshow…

lately, workwise

Malamalama, the magazine where I have been a writer and online editor (content manager) for the past several years, is being cut back from three to two print issues per year.

However, they’re adding 4 web-only issues to the production schedule–in addition to weekly updates–which means more online content is needed, especially audio and video. As a feature journalist and content producer the chance to work with an enthusiastic team on new media projects is super fun, even with the increased workload(!).

So far we’ve taken a collaborative approach to the producer’s role of these web extras and are improvising and learning with every assignment. I’ve mostly been the one to collect and edit the interviews (with sound help as needed) while magazine art director Rowen Tabusa and photographer R. David Beales handle the visual content and editing. Then I write the meta data or descriptions, upload the content and often do some online promotion.

Links to our web extras with a few notes on productions are below.

Feedback is very welcome!

Web Extras

• Bamboo Ridge: Celebrating 30 years of local writing and writers written by me, picture by Cory Lum, audio and video work by Rowen Tabusa. The Bamboo Ridge package was for the first online issue in the new magazine layout–why yes, it *is* built on WordPress heh–a whole other accomplishment of which I am proud and enjoyed working on.
• From Page to Stage, a behind-the-scenes look at The Little Snow Fox and Other Tales of the North Pacific. This was put together in lightening speed with almost no advance planning — whew!
• Homecoming 2008 cute slideshow put together by David and Rowen.
• Our best work came next, the Writing with Thread feature about a world-class textile show in the art gallery. This one hit a minor chord with YouTube commenters.
• Most recently, Newcomer Butterfly has a Light Footprint is one I wrote and did an audio extra recorded over the telephone (photographs by lepidopterist Jim Snyder). This is my most self-contained web extra and even includes my voice sounding goofy as usual. I do like that Yahoo audio player that comes out.

NASA called it a “spectacular conjunction.”

Taken Nov. 30, 2008, off an Oahu lanai with a pocket camera that doesn’t begin to capture the color and texture of this beautiful evening.

According to the tv news, tonight was supposedly the best night for this biyearly phenomenon, but it was cloudy where we stood and only the crescent moon managed to break through, for a short time. Maybe tomorrow will be good.

A few photos from my recent trip to Northern California.

 

Not that spectacular, I know. I mainly uploaded them to play with the WordPress NextGEN photogallery plugin. I installed this plugin looking for a fast, easy way to get slideshows online, specifically for Mālamalama magazine, which is now built out in WordPress(!!).

However, I find myself really liking the gallery (thumbnail) navigation. The slideshow gives more control to the creator for things like picture order and audio–we like control at the magazine–but the gallery lets users select the pics they particularly like and breeze through the rest, or not.

The other option for this type of photo presentation would be to make a video with the still shots, but that takes a bit more labor and creates issues of how to insert the caption info. But, video can be hosted on a site like youtube, which reaches a wider audience and can be easily embedded by others.

decisions, decisions…

In Alaska I’ve met women like Sarah Palin.

Okay maybe not as high-powered, but women who shoot, who hunt, who drive four-wheelers, snowmachines (aka snowmobiles) and trucks–who drive very well, period–chop wood if they need to, grow things, raise animals and run a household. These are women you want on your side in a pinch, who hold their own among men and can look cute while they’re doing it! I like and respect these women. I know I’ll always be a helplessly liberal urbanite in comparison, but we can actually get along. Especially if there is alcohol involved. heh.

So I wasn’t mad at Sarah Palin. I don’t want her to run things, not one bit (((understatement))). But I felt like we were cool with each other somehow. That is, until she crossed the line and said this to Katie Couric:

I’m not one of those who maybe came from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and their parents give them a passport and give them a backpack and say go off and travel the world. No, I’ve worked all my life. In fact, I usually had two jobs all my life until I had kids. I was not a part of, I guess, that culture.

Hey Sarah Palin, guess what? I’ve almost always had a job, or two, or three, since I was 15 years old! We have something in common? Except my parents encourage my study abroad and I scrimp and save so I can travel more in the future. To be able to travel is a blessing, yes, but it’s also a choice almost every healthy, unincarcerated American can make.

Just like how Palin chose to spend her first semester of college at University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, supposedly cliqued up with some other girls who’d transferred with her. After their first semester, they all transferred to Hawaiʻi Pacific University in Honolulu, before she bounced to Idaho or wherever.

I dont know why she didnt like it here. Maybe she missed winter, or didnt like being a racial minority, or living in a very urban environment (or a small town local one like in Hilo). But just coming here to me showed an inquisitive, if not adventurous, streak. Again, respect. So why you gotta be so scornful, Sarah Palin!??

Amazingly she goes on to say,