MonkeyFight

The Big Busk

The Boy started moving his body to music around the age of 6 or 7 months. I couldn’t even believe that his early wiggles were related to music. I thought he was somehow engaged in some early form of Pilates, working his core muscles in preparation for crawling. I really did. 

But it's now clear that he dances, particularly when I put on The Isley Brothers. So to nurture his interest in music The Wife and I brought him to Billy Bragg’s Big Busk on Wednesday at Lincoln Center. Billy Bragg is super cool. The show was basically a hootenanny. The audience was invited to bring instruments and play along with him as people onstage held up chord charts for guitar - he called it a kind of folkie karaoke. This is pretty much what I do with my Middle Brother whenever we see each other. We hunch over sheets of music and hack away at our intstruments at a dirge like tempo to tunes like Folsom Prison Blues and Angel from Montgomery. It's fun. I wish I did it more often. And I loved seeing Bragg doing the same thing with an audience of thousands.

This was the rehearsal in the afternoon.

 

And this was the performance later in the evening. 

 

People who brought instruments were also allowed to busk around Lincoln Center before the show. It brought a bit of a grass roots vibe to Lincoln Center Plaza. As I watched the different people playing to the I got to thinking about how hard it is for most people to stand in front of a crowd, let alone sing to a crowd. I mean, some people might make fun of this fellow's resemblance to Molly Ringwald but I consider him a courageous man. He faced the bustling, disinterested crowds of Manhattan armed with a tiny ukele and a handful of hearfelt songs.  

I noticed some smirks on the faces of passerbys that day. It made me realize that I'm no good at busting balls any more (unless you fuck with me). It's too easy to make fun of someone when they take a risk or do something different. Besides, I wish the streets were filled with people playing ukeles and accordians.  

I've found most people, including myself, wish they would take more risks. Even small ones. Have you ever stood on the edge of a dance floor feeling paralyzed from the hips down (apologies to anyone reading this who is paralyzed from the hips down). Have you ever watched your friends fearlessly sing karaoke while you stifle the little Japanese song bird in your heart?

So I applaud all those who brought their instruments to Lincoln Center to participate in The Big Busk. And I applaud Billy Bragg for spending the time and energy on something communal and inspiring.

 Molly Ringwald would be proud.

 

Introducing The Bliss Archive

The Bliss Archive is pretty self-explanatory. It’s a place for people to upload moments of bliss. Whatever that means for them. People have posted dramatic rare experiences and ordinary every day moments that somehow became not so ordinary. So far there’s a story about a rainstorm in Laos, a Fats Waller song that changed someone’s day, a photo of a little girl riding her bike for the first time, a sighting of humpback whales, a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a drawing of a hug.

The site was inspired by The Ignorant Bliss of Sun and Moon, a short film I wrote that screened at the Tribeca Film Festival. That film is about a down and out guy cycling between misery and inspired clarity. In a lot of ways the film is about these fleeting moments in our lives when all the stress and pain and general madness clears away and we’re able to get some perspective on life.

One of the barriers to doing this has been a certain embarrassment I feel around it. I mean, this is some earnest stuff. Where’s the irony? I’m a liberal, secular, Brooklyn-based, brown haired, glasses-wearing white guy so I’m supposed to approach my day with a delicate blend of local, organic cynicism and irony. I was bred to be a sarcastic prick. But there’s not a trace of cynicism to be found here. The Bliss Archive is free from the tyranny of irony and snark.

I’ve only shown the site to a handful of friends. Now I’m inviting the entire world wide web to participate. So take a look at the site. Read, watch, listen. Click on the Follow button.  And Post something - a distant memory you'll never forget or something that happened today. You can post pictures, music, video, anything that helps you share a moment when you were reminded of how you want to live or just that it feels good to be alive. 

And in case you've got some of that embarrassment I mentioned - don't worry - it's anonymous once it's on the site. 

We all have our own personal archive of bliss - we just don't tend to share it. Start here.

Notes From the Festival

I've been attending the Tribeca Film Festival this week with The Ignorant Bliss of Sun and Moon, the short I wrote and produced with director and friend John Hyams. It's been a great experience so far and I still have two more screenings. They do an amazing job of getting people out to the screenings - even for the short films. We've been playing to sold out shows so far.

Some other highlights: We had some audio trouble with our tape but the tech people at the festival handled it really well, so only one screening was painful. Stolichnaya is a festival sponsor so my organs are in a nice vodka marinade. I've seen Elton John perform. I've seen DeNiro mumble through a few words at a podium and give his signature eye-brow raise.

My friend Jason LaMotte won the Special Jury Prize for his short film The Terms. It's an excellent film adapted from a short story by Mike McCormack.  We're discussing turning it into a feature. When Dennis Leary announced the prize he said, "This film is about a father who's going to shoot his son in the head...and it's a comedy." Then he said, "I'm Irish. I thought it was a documentary." Check out the trailer here: http://www.thetermsmovie.com/

I met Jason last year at the Palm Springs Film Festival and we quickly hit it off partly because we had a shared creative sensibility and partly because we both had our first babies due within a week of each other. His was bornin late August and The Boy was born in early September.  I've only been to three festivals but each one has resulted in great things. At Aspen Shortsfest I met Adam Collis who eventually bought one of my scripts, and my friend Matthew Bonifacio who I'm collaborating with now on Brickhead. At Palm Springs I met Jason and also Sharon B., the woman who programs the shorts for Tribeca. If I hadn't met her I have no idea if The Ignorant Bliss would have made it into the fest because they receive nearly 3,000 submissions so it's easy to get lost. And now at Tribeca Film Festival I've been able to hang with Jason some more and I've met several New York filmmakers and producers who I will follow up with over the coming weeks. So the take away: do stuff and show stuff and talk to people. Then do it for about ten years and see how it's going. Then keep going. 

More later.

The Monkey Fight is On

I’ve been meaning to change oinkbird to monkeyfight for months. I’m sure you know what that’s like. When I imagined doing it I saw a coordinated effort involving graphic designers, branding consultants, and loads of fresh code written by people in foreign lands. But fuck it.  I gotta start somewhere. So I’m just changing the name. Bang. Just like that. I certainly don’t want to be half assed about it but it’s never going to get done if I don’t do it in pieces.  So I’ll start here and gradually it will become what is inside my head, which is monkeys.

About 15 years ago, I was introduced to the image of monkeys in my head by a woman who taught yoga in New Orleans. (This is the same woman who put me in a position that made me feel as if my back was breathing but that’s another story.) She said during class one day, “Try to calm the monkeys in your mind.” And suddenly all the monkeys in my head got a little worried: “Oh shit. She spilled it. He’s onto us.” It was one of those moments that resonate in a way that make you pay attention enough that you might actually learn something new. I didn’t. I mean, it caught my attention but I didn’t do much about it:  "Oh right." I thought. "Sometimes I’m generally distracted and unclear about what I’m supposed to do with my life so perhaps I should- hey look at that piece of string.” Monkeys love string.

I did mange to hold onto a thought though; not exactly beware of the monkeys, but be Aware of the monkeys. Point is – I think it’s gotten exponentially more difficult to focus on things of importance with the speed and density of distractions these days. High speed monkeys. I mean, I check my email thirty five times a day. I look at my phone over a hundred times in a day. And honestly, how did we used to spend the minutes we now spend on Face@#!ck? Literally, what did we do in the days when 'status update' and 'feed' were boring technical words? Don’t get me wrong – for all I know people were choking kittens before and now they’re harmlessly looking at pictures of people they wanted to have sex with when they were 17.

The Boy is over seven months old – 231 days to be exact. He’s got two teeth on the bottom of his mouth and two coming in on the top. He’s found some syllables: “da-da” and “ga-ga” - both timeless classics. He’s not crawling yet but he can sit like a champ. I played catch with him this week; he would throw a little tiny ball and I would throw it back in his lap and he would pick it up and throw it again. It didn't exactly go in my direction but it seemed a little early in life for coaching. This went on for about five minutes and I could have done it a lot longer if he’d let me. Yesterday I took him into Manhattan – just the two of us - to pick up my filmmaker swag bag from the Tribeca Film Festival. Naturally the chicks swarmed him (ie me). I fed him a bottle, he fell asleep, and then I requested a meeting with Sony Pictures Classics. He ate his first noodle last night – whole wheat elbow macaroni.

Every parent says it goes fast. They even say it in the same way, shaking their head with a sort of breathless disbelief, “It goes fast.” My hope is that monkeyfight can slow things down a bit and help me stay connected to the things that matter most to me. That's the fight. And make no mistake, I love me some monkeys - I just don’t want them running the asylum that is my head. And besides, monkeys can play catch with the best of ‘em once they’re tamed. So if we play our cards right we might even be able to field a team in the end.
     



       

Cracking Chat Roulette

A short film by the Neistat Brothers’ inspired me to explore Chat Roulette a few nights ago. For those of you who don’t know: Chat Roulette is a site that allows you to video chat with random people all over the world. With the click of a button a person appears on your computer screen. You can either chat with the person or move to the next person with the click of your mouse; this is called ‘nexting’ someone. Chat Roulette is largely populated by lonely guys hoping to glimpse a woman and/or expose their johnsons.  So there is a lot of nexting going on.

 I went on the site and watched a few faces appear and disappear as if my screen was an eye that conjured someone new with each blink. The experience was perfectly dehumanizing and potentially depressing.  There’s also something about the aesthetics of communicating with single anonymous guys via webcam that makes you assume a johnson is just around the corner. 

On a whim, I wrote an opening line - ‘I REFUSE TO NEXT ANYONE! ANYONE!!’ - to paste into the text box before I could be nexted.  It felt like a defiant gesture - some sort of dare.

 I watched the first guy read the sentence.  It seemed he was translating the words in his head. He could be anywhere in the world after all. Then he laughed and gave two thumbs up. Turns out he was Argentinean, sitting in his living room in Buenos Aires.  He told me he was new to Roulette and was glad to meet good people.  When we were done chatting he flashed me...the peace sign. Then I chatted for a while with a 16 year old kid in China who told me his English was not strong. I told him I once taught English to Chinese students in Brooklyn and then referred him to some ESOL sites. He told me I was an excellent teacher. I love Chinese students.  Next I chatted with a guy in Maryland who loved my opening line so much he vowed to spread it across Chat Roulette. I encouraged the idea but asked for a footnote.

I was a bit uncomfortable about it, but in the name of science I even put The Boy on camera at one point. Onscreen were a few 20-something guys who had the sort of amped energy that went with chugging beers and beating nerds but not necessarily in that order. Score one for humanity: when they saw The Boy they cheered and said he was cute. I like to think The Boy saved a nerd that day.

I still got nexted a lot but mostly by people who disappeared so quickly I couldn’t even send my message. And I had less success with a pink stuffed animal and a guy who was dangling from a noose above an upturned chair.  But for the most part people responded well.

The funniest encounter happened when the screen went completely black and these words appeared on my screen: get naked.

I responded in kind: I REFUSE TO NEXT ANYONE! ANYONE!!

The conversation continued as follows copied verbatim from my screen. My responses are in CAPS:

get naked

I WON’T NEXT ANYONE!

Get Naked

DONT BE A COWARD. BESIDES I AM NAKED. MY SKIN LOOKS LIKE FLANNEL [ed. I was wearing a flannel]

Get naked

YOU ARE BLACK AS NIGHT - NO OFFENSE

let me see your dick

I LOST IT - WHERE ARE YOU?

next me - my mouse doesnt work

I REFUSE. I TOLD YOU I REFUSE TO NEXT PEOPLE. BESIDES I THINK WE'RE GETTING ALONG WELL.

next me

FOR CRYING OUT LOUD - YOU SHOW UP TO CHAT ROULETTE

next me

WITH NO CAMERA & NO MOUSE
AND YOU ASK FOR DICK?!
SORRY CHARLIE, YOU'RE GONNA HAVE TO REBOOT YOUR COMPUTER. WE'RE IN THIS TOGETHER
im on on my ipod

THEN IT'S A STARING CONTEST. WHERE ARE YOU?
in new mexico. cmon next me

OK I'LL CUT YOU A BREAK BUT YOU HAVE TO SAY PLEASE
Please

NEXT

My adventure with Chat Roulette was exhilarating. I felt like I’d made an inroad into the dynamics of the site and it ultimately reinforced my love of the humans. By telling people I wouldn’t next them I was essentially inviting them to take pause. I was letting them know I would give them a chance. Stay awhile. I was also poking fun at the compulsive nexting everyone was doing. People seemed to appreciate that too.

Unfortunately, women can’t really expect to go on Chat Roulette without being aggressively harassed.  If a woman were to attempt this same experiment she would get a glimpse into a perverted corner of the male psyche that would either boggle her mind or confirm her worst fears.  Someone should figure out how to do a Women’s Only Chat Roulette.  Just footnote me on it. 

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

  

 

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The Typo Project

Step away from your blog for a few weeks and Egypt falls to the revolution. I should go on vacation more often.

I just noticed two typos in the first paragraph of an article by Jeopardy genius Ken Jennings on Slate. In the article, Jennings describes what it was like to compete against a computer by the name of Watson.  I refuse to link to it because, as previously stated, there are two typos in the first paragraph. I stopped reading at that point so I may never know what Ken has to say about going head to head with a machine.  

Slate is one of the more respected online sites for whatever it is they do so I was particularly distressed to come across such amateurism. It yanked my ire especially hard because I’ve been re-reading Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style this week - last night even - and I’ve been charmed and inspired by ‘the little book’ about writing. E.B. White’s essay An Approach to Style is particularly inspiring when describing the experience of  writing: 

Writing is, for most, laborious and slow. The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by.  A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up. Like other gunners, the writer must cultivate patience, working many covers to bring down one partridge. 

I found this to be an evocative and accurate description of my experience as a writer since I never sit down to write without my 20 Gauge Browning Pump Shotgun.  Like Watson the supercomputer it is a legendary workhorse, but unlike Watson it's crafted from forged steel and fine walnut.

The errors in Slate are hardly rare; I see more typos than ever across major sites like The New York Times and Wired and Girls Who Went Wild Going Wild Again. I assume this is in part because of the speed with which content has to be produced and posted in the digital age. Even these blog entries leave me with an uncomfortable hurried feeling and I post about as fast as a carrier pigeon with a dial-up connection.

I simply can't raise my son in a world that accepts so many careless mistakes. Since The Boy's birth I've already started saying, 'I'm doing well' instead of 'I'm doing good'.  But the time has come for bolder action. I hereby propose The Typo Project, a global initiative in which readers alert media organizations of their typos.  The flood of phone calls, emails, letters, tweets, retweets, and pokes will let them know the People are watching, and organizations of good conscience will raise the bar accordingly. Organizations of bad conscience will rue the day! Somebody start a Facebook page already. The movement might not be as sexy as Tahir Square but it’s a start.

Regardless of The Typo Project's success and the money, fame, and power it brings me, this experience has proved that I should no longer sit in front of my computer reading Ken Jennings’ meditation on competing against a computer. Otherwise, the computers have already won.

***

Ed. Note: Those individuals concerned about the Slate proofreader who might be fired due to my outrage should be reassured:  I don’t care if the kid loses the job.  For Christ’s sake I want the job (as long as it’s high pay and low hours) (and I can make my own schedule) (actually, never mind I’ve got shit to do).

THE IGNORANT BLISS

It looks like Jamie Stewart, the guy who did Man in a Blizzard, is having his day and then some.  His story's a good reminder to artists to stay active and do the work despite the challenging speculative nature of it all.  Here's a guy who went out with his camera in the middle of the blizzard when nobody was telling him to or paying him to do it and it's proving to be his big break.

When I wrote of Stewart's film I mentioned that both my recent walk in the blizzard and his film made me feel all warm and human inside. So I thought I'd use this opportunity to post the short film I made with John Hyams which premiered at Palm Springs International Shortfest this year. It's called The Ignorant Bliss of Sun and Moon.  For me, it's always been a film about the human experience - or less pretentiously said - all the ups and downs and confusion of it all. The title refers to the occasional moments of bliss that catch us off guard and stir us in one way or another, make us feel small but in a good way - or make us feel small and big at the same time.

As a new parent, I occasionally wonder how I might talk to The Boy about topics such as these - topics revolving around inspiration and consciousness and his place in the universe.  Maybe I'll start by getting some life-sized toys in the house so he doesn't think he towers over elephants and lions. I mean, is he going to forever think he can put a hippopotmus in his mouth?  Isn't this preceisely why there are so many deadly hippo attacks in the wild?  Babies who play with tiny toy hippos must grow up to be clueless tourists in Africa who attempt to hug the adorable and murderous animals.

In any case, The Ignorant Bliss of Sun and Moon is in some ways about a guy struggling with his place in the universe.  Like a lot of people (i.e. me) he's a bit confused and overwhelmed by it all so he cycles between bouts of self-destruction and momentary bliss.  So if you've got six minutes to spare...