Monstermania

It's taken me a few days to recover from the great time we had at Monstermania 2008 in Cherry Hill,NJ, this past weekend. This was our first time attending and we were impressed. The con is actually held twice a year on March and August. Horror-101 was represented along with a contingency of Baltimore indie filmmakers. Here are some snapshots from the time we had.

The con was heavily attended, and there were many celebrities there. Among them, Bruce Campbell, Malcolm McDowell, Jason Mewes, Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Brian O'Halloran, Heather Langenkamp, and many others. You'll have to excuse the lack of celebrity pics, as we concentrated more in spreading the word on the site, making friends and meeting fans.


Armando, Mark Colegrove (director, 'Isle Of The Damned'), and Paul Joyce (composer,'Isle..')


Chris Lamartina (director,'Dead Teenagers'),Armando, and FX Artist Ian Potter


View of the crowded vendor's room on Saturday. Left of our table.


Same vendor's room. View of right of our table.


A fellow big Transformers fan showed me his tattoo of Unicron. I'm a TF geek. He had Optimus on his other arm.


Christie, a great girl from Boston, showed us her striking laced body art.


Button-vest Woman showed us her extensive button collection.


Over 300 people waited in line around the hotel to meet Bruce Campbell. Oddly, I didn't seen him once during the weekend. They stashed him away when he wasn't 'on display'. I had met him before at Horrorfind two years ago.


Zombie Wolverine and Spider-Man!


All of a sudden, Paul grew a horrific head out of his shoulder!


And then this kid ripped it off and started playing with it! I think we converted this loveable kid into a future FX artist.


We make some new friends. Armando meets Boston filmmaker Alexia Anastasio, editor of 'Vampyra:The Movie' and director of 'Salome'


Armando live-blogging from the hotel room. Notice the alcohol--typical writer!


It's Saturday night. Let the partying commence! Sink full o' cheap beer and Jaggermeister.


Look who I ran into at the crowded hotel bar--Brian O'Halloran (Dante) from 'Clerks' and 'Clerks 2'


There were many celebrities there, but the one I wanted to meet was Sid Haig ('House Of 1,000 Corpses','The Devil's Rejects') He was down-to-earth awesome!

And so it went at Monstermania Spring 2008. Much thanks to Mark Colegrove, who took some of these pics. A great time was definetely had, and I think we'll definitely be back there next year!

The Good, The Bad And The Queen. Pt 2

Just came back from having a great time at the Monstermania horror con in Cherry Hill,NJ. I’ll tell you about those exploits on my next blog. I gotta head to bed shortly as I’ve an early call for a video production gig in Wash, DC.

*****

The art of the music video is dead these days. With the decay of MTV into teenybopper reality-TV trash and the constant bombastic depictions of rap artists flaunting their bling-bling along with a gaggle of dancing hoochies, an inspired, greatly-conceived music video is a rarity these days. I leave you then with this clip called ’The Good, The Bad And The Queen’ (Damon Albarn’s side-project), a rousing, gorgeous song married to a set of exotic Sufi-dancing images with the result being one of the most amazing videos I’ve seen in a long while.Directed by one Stephen Pook. Enjoy...

The Good, The Bad And The Queen

Got a 93% on my first major Biology class exam. Woot!

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I just picked up a couple of new CDs. First is ’The Good, The Bad, And The Queen’



This is a side-project from Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz), one of my favorite musicians. He’s matured into a pretty damn talented artist, able to explore many musical genres, from indie rock to African music, hip-hop to latin music. The man has a wide interest in all music in general, and I really dig that. This is a ’supergroup’ of musicians he assembled: Paul Simonton (The Clash), Simon Tong (The Verve) and Tony Allen (Fela Kuti). It’s a delicate, mid-tempo record for most of its duration, with standout tracks like ’Herculean’, ’Behind The Sun’ and ’Green Fields’. But it ends with a great track called ’The Good, The Bad, And The Queen’, a 7-minute piece which ends with an outstanding psychedelic rock guitar freakout jam session. I’ll have to post something separately about this last track.



I caught up with Nine Inch Nails’ ’Year Zero’. I’m also a big fan of Trent Reznor. Also think he’s a very talented musician. It’s interesting to contrast him with Damon Albarn. Two very gifted musical artist working in different genres and with different instruments. I consider Reznor to be a master of electronic/industrial music, because what he does with electronic instruments and computer sequencers is art. This one was released last April, but because I was too busy, I just couldn’t find time for it. From the few listens I’ve given it, standout tracks include ’Survivalism’, ’Me, I’m Not’, and ’The Great Destroyer’. Reznor’s music has gotten very nuanced, and if you’re expecting the loud, hard rock monuments he build in masterpiece records like ’The Downward Spiral’ and ’The Fragile’, you’ll be dissapointed. I don’t much care for the track ’Capital G’, which is your obligatory ’let’s criticize George Bush’ song (I don’t like Bush much myself, but I think there’s something cliched about music created directly to attack him) But a Trent Reznor record still stands as a must-listen for me in this era of borish nu-metal, annoying neo-punk, and the crap commercial radio plays.

Trent has actually released a new 2-Cd set of instrumentals called ’Ghosts I-IV’, which is available online and you can download at the NIN official site. I’ve not had time to check it out yet, but I’m hoping to do so very, very soon.

Damn you, Pancreas!

The question was 'Give a detailed example of how the body maintains homeostasis thru a negative feedback system'. I went with 'the hypothalamus sends a hormone named glycogen to the liver, which in turn reduces sugar levels in the blood'

Bzzzzzz! Wrong! Damn you, Pancreas! It is the Pancreas which secretes insulin that in turn tells the liver to absorb glycogen (it's a sugar, not a hormone). Oh, it's not the hypothalamus who starts this process, but the adrenal gland. Doh!

Tonight was my first major Biology test. Except for the above question, I think I did well. I also had to turn in a meticulously well-organized lab notebook. I worked on that thing all weekend long. The notebook should fly well too.

So I think I'm going to reward myself and have a bit of Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice-cream. I haven't had some ice cream in a long time. The cold weather killed my cravings for it all winter long. Alas, the weather's getting warmer.

I'm going to satisfy my sweet craving then hit the bed.

We create our own reality

My filmmaker friend Scott Kecken has this bit about his life philosophy posted at his facebook profile. Sounds great to me. I think I'm going to steal this bit from him. I think he won't mind:

"We create our own reality"

"When it comes down to it, there is no one else stronger than yourself. We can be socially, culturally and even biologically constrained but no one can do what you can do for yourself. The mind is a powerful thing, use it, think positive, write down your inner most desires, place them in your favorite place and watch out for the opportunities that come your way. Once that door opens, abandon fear and doubt, walk through and work your ass off!!"

Well said, Scott. Well said. This I will adopt it into my life.

*****



I finally caught this one on DVD, 'The Prestige' from Christopher Nolan. I found it to be a bit flawed. It's about the rivalry between two illusionists at the turn of the 20th century. Gorgeous-looking film. I like both Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. But I had a problem with its pace. The first hour of the film is too breezy, and the escalating rivalry between the two men is treated very blase. Scarlett Johansen kinda comes and goes thru the film; she's not given much to do in the film. The film doesn't come together until the last 30 minutes or so. The whole thing is a setup for a twist climax between the two illusionists. It's an interesting ending--thought-provoking even--but I wish the first half of the movie would have drawn you into the characters more instead of just skipping thru their development. Oh well, I'm still psyched for 'The Dark Knight' this summer.

Napping on a Sunday afternoon

Just got up from taking a nap on a lazy Sunday afternoon, and thought I would do a blog.

Here are the much belabored Katsucon pictures. Not much to show but just an idea how popular anime conventions have become. Katsucon attracted over six thousand anime fans this year. The hotel was seriously packed. I would have enjoyed the Con more if I wouldn't have been fighting a nasty flu which dragged me down for about three weeks in early February. I wish I would have taken pics of the dealer's room. There were hordes of people there and stand after stand of anime and Asian movie DVDs. I was even tempted to pick some old school anime stuff--maybe some classic Transer Z, which I posted about a couple of posts ago--but I just didn't have the time to sort thru the thousands of DVDs many of the merchants had on display. They also had a huge video gaming room--I didn't take pics of it--were they had every old school arcade machine you could think of, and dozens of large TVs hooked up to Xboxes (both generations), Gamecubes, Playstation2's, and even some Wiis. I was too sick to sit down and play any stuff. Damn it.

Much thanks to my buddy Thomas Fant for inviting me to work this gig. I had fun despite the flu.


The busy DC Omni Shoreham lobby on the Saturday night.


Just a couple of the hundreds of people who were hanging around engaging in CosPlay (Costume Play). If you can't recognize the characters, just say 'You're from 'Final Fantasy', aren't you?'



The long line of people waiting to go into the CosPlay event. This line went all the way around inside the hotel to the other end of the place. I didn't have to wait in line, as I had an 'all-access' badge since I was doing camerawork for the event. Ha-Haaaa!



The view from behind the control console as people filed in for the big CosPlay event on Saturday



The whole room filled up. It was much bigger than this picture shows. There must have been a couple of thousand folks there.



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I hit the ground running this last week of February and took care of a lot of business. I've work and school going on, but I've also been doing some videography gigs on the side recording high school sport games. I started the process of re-admission into UMBC this Fall so as to graduate this December. I'll also be applying for financial aid, and it looks those forms are going to keep me plenty busy this week.

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I checked out 'I'm Not There' this past Thursday night. This is an 'experimental biopic' of Bob Dylan, written and directed by Todd Haynes. I enjoyed it, mainly for the performances by Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, and Christian Bale. They all play characters which are interpretations of Dylan at different periods of his life. I also liked the use of the Dylan catalogue of music. I read that Haynes got lucky and managed to get Dylan's approval of the use of his music after a couple of attempts. (It is very difficult to get music rights for indie films. I would explain the process to you, and it would make your head spin.) Dylan is well-known for keeping a very tight leash on his music rights. In general, I enjoyed the movie, though I confess I'll have to watch it again on DVD to understand what was going on. The film's very topsy-turvy, jumping back and forth between all the characters, and you really got to think about what the filmmaker is saying about Bob Dylan with some of these imaginary versions of him. Gorgeous looking film, also.

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I had some time to kill last night Saturday, so I headed to this little Lynchfest event in downtown Baltimore. It was actually the 3rd David Lynch fest held here in Baltimore, a celebration of all things David Lynch. Being a big fan of Lynch, I figure I would check it out. It was held at Load Of Fun Studios at North Ave. Not a bad venue. Last night was my first time there--it's a 4-story tall art studio place, and they had a nice stage area there on the 4th floor. The night consisted of many musical acts doing music or interpretations of music from David Lynch films. There were a couple of guys who called themselves 'Bene Gesserit Witch' and they told the whole story from David Lynch's version of 'Dune' in a series of funny operatic songs. There were about 25 people there; it wasn't really the hugest event, but that's Baltimore for you. The best highlight for me was 'Expanding Man', another music group which did music based on Angelo Badalementi's stuff. Badalementi has been Lynch's main musical composer for a long time. The members of 'Expanding Man' are seriously talented. They had a main saxophone player, another guy playing a stand-up Bass (the Cello, I believe), two drummers, a guitar player, and finally, a DJ scratching on a couple of turn-tables. They were very impressive. I wonder if their stuff is out there on Myspace or if they have released their stuff on CD. It's worth tracking it down.

If there was a downside to this Lynchfest event was that they were concentrating too much on 'Twin Peaks'. They were projecting episodes of the cult classic TV show on the background as the bands played. They were also asking trivia questions from the TV show. I wish they would have given some love to some of Lynch's other films, like 'Eraserhead', 'Blue Velvet', or even his latest, 'Inland Empire'

*****

O Right, let me see if I can get some late lunch and be somewhat productive. I got many Biology Lab reports to type up and they're due by the 10th. It's Sunday, and the sun is setting on what was a gorgeous day.