Dave "The Man" Weaver

Life is good. I've given away two big desks that were cluttering up my back room, and the room is spacious for the first time since I moved in six years ago. I've got a new computer/video-production desk in a box behind me that I plan on assembling today or tomorrow, and will spend the rest of the week starting to put together my new production studio. I feel good. I knew that I would. So nice. So nice.

Anyway, that revelation wasn't the reason for this post. What prompted me to whip out the scanner and upload some photos to Flickr was the discovery of this ancient printout. I found it in a random stack of papers somewhere in the depths of my cluttered back room. It happens to be a dot-matrix printout of a poem my old college buddy Dave Weaver wrote in November of 1986, and "emailed" me via the semi-proto-internet we had on campus. (see the end of this post for a transcript.) Dave was a card; a funny guy from Urbana, Illinois with a talent for learning Chinese and playing bass. Actually, he could play lots of instruments, and was always trying to play his music for his friends. Problem is, our crowd was into punk, hardcore, and rockin' out, and Dave tended to write heartfelt emotional music, so most people didn't really want to hear Dave's latest creation. I, on the other hand, loved Dave's music. So much so, that when Dave borrowed my old Fostex four-track and let me hear his demo songs, I pressed him to allow me to engineer an album of his original tunes, which we did during Oberlin's Winter Term one year.

Since I needed to have a pic of ol' Dave on this post, I dug up a few pics from my archives and scanned 'em in. If you really want to shudder, go check out a few of the others I found in my "Oberlin College In The 1980s" Flicker set. I know I wasn't a Don Juan back in those days, but I can't believe my friends actually allowed me to run around loose looking quite that bad. You can also see our old dining hall, and even a shot or three from the TIMARA studios, where I worked on getting my electronic music degree.

I've lost track of all my old Oberlin buddies. My original roommates and best pals were Roger "The Party Mutant" White (who was an ethnomusicology genius who introduced me to Motorhead, Judas Priest, and James Brown; I think he's married now), Jeremy "Jer-Bro" Tompkins (who was a Bio/Chem double-major, which is ridiculous at a top-rank school like Oberlin, I used to have great fun typing his papers for him as he dictated to me, and got me drunk for the first time, as well as many times afterwards.), and my good buddy Tom "Thomas C From Across The Sea/The Might Of One And The Libido Of Three" Manion (who always insisted Cleveland was America's North Coast, shared my love of surrealism, and loved The Floyd more than anybody. Last I heard he had packed two dufflebags and gone to seek his fame and fortune in the theater world of NYC). I also shared great times with Pat Wehner from West By God Virginia who drank and watched Twin Peaks with me, Jim "I'm An Actor" Thompson who would always be willing to stand up during poker games and recite horrendous paragraphs from porn novels I had clipped out for him, Jonathan "SuperJew" Silverman who was the life of every party and invented the rewording of the Run DMC lyric "not bad meaning bad but bad meaning HOBGOOD!" which he would scream out no matter where the song was playing, Kathy Thompson and Cathy Gale who I had massive crushes on, Matthew "Hello" White who was just the nicest guy you'd ever meet and was embarrassed at the birthday rap I wrote for him (he was born on 5-5, the fifth of May--as he liked to tell us), Larry "The Axe-Man" Axtell who cohosted a wrestling radio show with me and fled from Oberlin to join the Ringling Brothers Clown College, and Mike Soohoo who was head of the Asian American Alliance and taught me how important it was to not to overuse the word "hate". Two quick bits about Mike Soohoo: he made the mistake of telling us a story about how he had been teaching at a summer camp before the semester, and how the kids made fun of his name, calling him "Soo Who?" and "Soohoobaru". Oh, how we used that against him for the rest of the year! Mike and I also had an ongoing war over which of Prince's rejects were hotter: Appolonia or Vanity. (I was a big Vanity fan. I have all her records!) Oh, and so many others I'm forgetting: Casey, Terra, Jon Fine, Douglas, Jenny Seltzer, Marti, Kevin, Reid, Harm Farm, Bitch Magnet, Jenny Douglass (who I had a crush on in sixth grade, and then was surprised to discover at Oberlin!), and my brain can't cope with the hundreds of othes I knew and loved to be around.

For posterity, here's the text of the poem Dave Weaver wrote off the top of his head to amuse me:

Ted, Ted, he has no fear
Born and raised with a pack o' bears,
Bigger than you ever did see
Can eat his way through a factory,
Faster than the lightning strikes,
Slyer than the Devil's tikes,
Ted, Ted, he has no fear.

Ted, Ted, the ladies' man,
Got one in the closet and one in the van,
Take his cane and overcoat,
Show them gals the roundabout,
Don't look now, he's looking fine,
Big leather hat, he wines and dines,
Ted, Ted the ladies' man.

Ted, Ted, the master o' rap,
Can put you down better than tiger trap,
He knows the ins and out of the world,
The city stops when he says a word,
He can do the numchucks and the figure four too,
You better watch out when he's comin' after you,
Ted, Ted, the master o' rap.

For the record, I did tend to wear an overcoat and suede cowboy hat, and carry a cane as an affectation. What can I say, Oberlin was a pretty alternative college, and I was a big dork. I did literally sleep in a closet for a semester, as our dorm room had a huge walk in closet, and we converted it into a second bedroom. I never had a "lady" in there though. And I can "do the numchucks" as well as the figure four. Watch out, Chuck Norris.

Fisher-Price Barack Obama

My mom is great. As a gift for my sister for Christmas, she made a little shadowbox of the Obama family, as portrayed by Fisher-Price Little People. Genius!

The Michelle Obama figure is Susan from the Sesame Street set, the only FPLP character to have textured hair. The Barack figure actually came from my collection, and was a bald hospital figure all in white. Mom painted the suit on, and used puff paint to give a little texture to his hair as well. Click the links above to see more.

CageMatch 12/13/08

CageMatch time again. This happened last week, but I've been busy lately and forgot to blog about it. Here we go!

View video here first. Go now.

Now let's chat. The original idea for the video came from one Kit FitzSimons, who pointed out the lyrics in the Kate Perry song "Hot and Cold" and how they mirrored the up-and-down romance of the characters in Honkey Kong. Then Alyssa said she had a good idea for a video. I said, "sorry, but Kit already has an idea." "Let me tell you the idea anyway." She said she'd love to see something like the new Target commercial from Christina Aguilera. I took a look at it and loved the comic book-y Lichtenstein-y imagery, and decided we could combine both ideas into one.

This involved a lot of lugging lights and other equipment around for a video shoot at Alyssa's and one at Kit's. Unfortunately, my lighting skills are not up to the highest notch, and so the bluescreening I tried to do was a bit shoddy. I really need to get a real greenscreen and a crash course on lighting. Anyhoo, we had a lot of fun with Kyle and Alyssa being playful with each other and then hating each other. Highlights were the bit where Kyle throws the flowers at Alyssa from off-camera, and the impromptu bootydancin' bit. Banana Breakup was fun to film (as always). The fight scene amused me terribly, and the high-five bit made them look totally cool. I was happy that my coatrack idea worked okay. That amused me.

Back in The Studio, I drew up some comic panels in Photoshop and textured them with benday dots from a Lichtenstein painting. I also found some old comic book ads that I used for the opposing pages; you only see them for a moment, but I think they add to the feel of the video. If I had a bit more time and energy, I would've put some Adam West-esque "BAM!"s and "POW!"s in there, and maybe some explosions where Kyle and Alyssa are having the pointing war at the end, but I think it turned out generally okay.

Oh, forgot to mention that I wrote the entire voiceover script while attending my dad's Really Terrible Orchestra Of The Triangle concert earlier in the week. He provided colouring pages for people to amuse themselves with while the "bad" music was performed, and I took him at his word and scribbled down text while the music played, then rehearsed it during the reception afterwards while all the bigwigs hobnobbed and got drunk. Hah! (And I later noticed that I channelled the spirit of Jeremy Clarkson at the end there. Sweet.)

This was the first video in a long time that people wanted to watch again immediately after the show, so that felt good. We rescreened it both at the theater and back at Kit's place.

You can also see the comic book cover promo I made here, featuring the visages of Kyle, Alyssa, Kit, and Eitan. It's an adaptation from an old 1950s romance comic which you can see here. (Yes, I made Alyssa's cleavage more pronounced. Pervert.)

Cooking By The Book

This has to be one of the funniest mashups I've seen in a while. Brantley turned me on to this piece of genius, which he found via this page. The video tends to get rapidly taken down by copyright claims by Lazytown, so if the link I've provided doesn't work, try searching YouTube for "lil jon lazy" or "lil jon lazytown". You'll be glad you did.

I had to mp3 this one for my eternal listening pleasure.