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How to get a MacBook Pro and an iPod for the price of a dinner date

04.10.06 @ 5:27PM Tags

After a feature I wrote for DVguru made it onto the front page of digg, Slashdot, and tech.memeorandum over the weekend (and got linked to by over 250 web sites), the last thing I should do is write a post on my own site about computers. I’m a filmmaker, not a nerd/geek/other-derogatory-techie-term, right?

Whatever. I’m too comfortable with my offline machinations to be self-conscious about my recent foray into online tech journalism. Although I will say that I learned a valuable lesson about the current state of the internet and the way traffic spikes–frankly, for the feature, my review methodology was not at all sound, and I was merely trying to get the review up before the weekend officially started, yet the timing ended up being more important than anything else. Regardless, I found it amusing when, in response to my recent propensity for blogging, someone called me a “nerrrrrrd” (via IM), especially when that someone hosts a weekly videogame show on GameSpot (just kidding, Rich).

Anyway, after much finagling, my MacBook Pro is on its way. Yes, I’m switching to a Mac. Why? Well, in this case, Final Cut Pro was a strong enough gateway drug to convince me to pay a visit to the dealer. Also, while I’m all-too familiar with the innards of PCs, I was tired of the paradox of choice–in Windows, there are too many applications and controls, and I just want the damn thing to work so I can be productive. I’ll keep my HP workstation around as a big, messy box of applications, storage space, and virus-protectors, and I’ll use the Mac laptop as a nice, pared-down, mobile model of productivity. That’s the theory, at least.

There are a number of drawbacks to my decision to switch to Mac, chief of which is my inability to use Microsoft OneNote, which is a terrific idea/journal/organizer program. Furthermore, one thing is undeniable: PCs are cheaper. And seeing as I haven’t been gainfully employed in almost a year, I was asked by a friend, “how in the hell are you affording this?” Good question.

After spending most the day in a Connecticut coffee shop, writing by hand on blank, unlined paper (I accidentally left my legal pad at a friend’s house in DC), I realized it was time to bite the bullet. So how does a starving artist with no full-time employment afford not only a MacBook Pro, but also another nonessential Apple purchase made back in December? If you head over to Apple.com and order a 2GHz MacBook Pro and 60GB video iPod, with tax, you’re looking at a hefty fee of $3,100. In my case, though, the two devices are going to end up costing me almost nothing. Here’s how:

-$2000: My Emerging Artist Grant from the NEA/DAC. I’m going to end up splitting the $2k between the MacBook and a copy of Final Cut Studio, but for now, it’s all going towards the laptop.
-$310: I actually got a free iPod from freeipods.com (I would not, NOT recommend this to anyone else), and promptly sold it on eBay (this was back when I was still anti-Apple).
-$267: My old MP3 player, a Rio Karma, bit the dust while it was still covered under Best Buy’s extended replacement plan, and they sent me a full refund. I used this towards the new iPod.
-$200: Amazon.com does not have physical retail stores like Apple does, so there is no sales tax.
-$150: Amazon also has a substantial mail-in rebate on the laptop.
-$75: I actually signed up for the Amazon VISA card, because of the rewards you get on a purchase of this size, and because…
-$30: Amazon also offers an instant discount for signing up for their card (this is the first time I’ve ever bit on one of these offers).

So, when it’s all said and done, for over $3,000 of Apple hardware, what did I pay out-of-pocket?

$68.

Here in New York, that’ll get you a steak, a vegetarian dish for your date, and a couple of cocktails. Depending on the restaurant, maybe just the steak.

If you’re an affluent first-worlder (not a word, I know), being cheap is one of the ugliest qualities you can possess–it’s just paper, it’s just numbers, it’s just money. I’m not trying to encourage penny-penching. But if being smart with your money can enable you–and I consider both of these purchases to enable me to get a lot of work done in the short-term, and to be a better filmmaker in the long run–then it’s obviously worth it. Thanks to the Durham Arts Council for the grant (this is a sad excuse for a thank you post, but my original post was lost to the wolves and the time for re-writing it has passed), and thanks to…

Wait, I almost forgot–as a filmmaker, both of these items are tax-deductible! By the time I’m done cooking the books, they’re going to be paying me.

6

Some like it raw

10.4.05 @ 4:40PM Tags

There’s a problem with sex in the movies: there’s not enough. Crotchety old people complain about nudity a lot, which is amusing–do these people not shower?–but if anything, sex is drastically underrepresented on film. Here at No Film School, I declare that we do not see enough cellulite on celluloid. Well, not that I WANT to see more cellulite, although that would probably be a good thing for body image, realism, etc.

The point is this: I normally vehemently disagree with people who point fingers at sex in the movies as a bad thing, and there are plenty of people Republicans who do so… just before they return to their office, and do their interns over a desk. Democrats also get in on the action, I should note; intern-doingship is a bipartisan activity, and in some cases may even be a bisexual activity. But this new study makes a pretty good point, which is:

[They studied] 87 films, in which there were 53 episodes of sex. Only once in those sex scenes did a condom feature, and that was a reference to birth control, they say. In 98% of sexual episodes, which could have resulted in pregnancy, no form of birth control was used or suggested.

That’s true. When’s the last time you saw a sex scene where someone actually went to the nightstand drawer?

There are a lot of places one could go in analyzing this. Should it be assumed that when you see Charlize Theron riding Ben Affleck, that the movie just skipped the application process, and that he’s wrapped? Certainly no amount of diffused lighting and romantic music can smooth over the graceless pause that accompanies safe sex. But the fact is, if they did have a scene where our stars go through the prophylactic process, it would just be awkward. Oh wait–it is awkward–in real life.

The general, unspoken rule in sex scenes seems to be to cut out all the unpolished parts. In Hollywood movies in general, and relationship movies in particular, this is the case: instead of showing what the guy actually did to get the object of his affection, romantic comedies just cut to a montage sequence where the guy and girl playfully tackle each other on the beach, buy each other cotton candy, and wear sweaters. This way the filmmakers avoid any potentially not-funny jokes that the man may make in the courting stage. All awkwardness is excised. Nowhere is this rule of cutting followed more closely than in physical lovemaking. Indeed, take a moment and think about all the things that have happened in your own sex life that you never see portrayed on the screen; when’s the last time you saw Heather Graham clean up?

Part of the mainstream appeal of movies has always been that the characters on screen don’t have to deal with the annoyances inherent to the real world: job problems, health problems, birth-control problems. Certainly there are some films that portray these things, but in general, this “excise the inconvenience” rule explains why you don’t see baby-control portrayed on the screen.

Basically: there’s an obvious dichotomy between real-life sex and on-screen sex, and contraceptive use is only one of many differences. Many people go to the theater to escape the awkwardness of real life, and the last thing they want to see is Russell Crowe sheathing himself in latex–his box-office appeal barely held up to becoming a Cinderella Man, much less a Trojan Man.

Not included in the published study: the dichotomy between the hotness of people having simulated sex on-screen, and the hotness of people having actual sex in real life.

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On Beck, 112, Clipse, peaches and cream, onions, and men's grooming products

09.28.05 @ 6:43PM Tags

The best satire is able to parody something BEFORE it actually happens out in the real world. Beck‘s hilarious pastiche Midnight Vultures, released in 1999, fit this bill perfectly. It was one of the few albums I owned at the time that was actually acceptable to crank up in your vehicle, if you were suburban and in high school, which meant you were probably disaffected, ironic, sarcastic, and self-conscious–all qualities that the album shared. Midnight Vultures, which I could write about at length but won’t, included the track “Peaches and Cream,” which is a dirty piece of slang that I will leave for you to look up on Urban Dictionary, if you are unaware of its meaning.

In 2001, two years after Beck’s song came out, the R&B group 112 released their own single, also titled “Peaches and Cream.” The songs shared more than just the same title: Beck’s mocking song was sung from the perspective of a guy bragging about his affinity for a certain activity, while 112′s song boasted about the same thing–minus the mocking part. Here are some lyrics from 112′s version:

Won’t stop girl you know I can’t get enough
Wanna taste it in the morning when I’m waking up
Like peach cobbler in my stomach when I eat it up
Got your legs around my neck so I can’t get up

Oh girl I need it
I gotta have it
It’s always on my mind
Know what I mean?
Peaches and cream
I like it in my car
Or even in my bed
Or baby on the stairs
Know what I mean?
Peaches and cream

Apparently people didn’t know what they meant, to answer their question–and neither did the radio censors. In this way, “peaches and cream” was 2001′s “skeet”–a slang term that artists undoubtedly relished getting past older, probably whiter, censors.

Not that I want to make this site into a repository of dirty lyrics–I just find it interesting that all these songs are played heavily on the radio, including ClearChannel Top 40 stations, which white 13 year-olds listen to the most. But regardless of age, there are a lot of people who hear these songs in a bar, on the radio, or in a club, and “like” the song without having any idea what they’re really about. Not to exclude myself from this–I had to ask a friend what, exactly, Clipse were talking about on their 2002 single “Grindin”:

Clipse: Grinding, and you know what I keep in the lining…
Me: What, exactly, do they keep in the lining? A flask?
Friend: No, a gat. That means gun. You actually thought it was a flask?

I actually did. Anyway–getting back to my original point, which was this: the tone of Beck’s version really nailed the boasting tone of 112′s track of the same name–and Beck’s parody came out first. When I heard 112′s song on the radio, I felt that the genius of Beck was confirmed.

And then, here in 2005, I’m disappointed by Beck’s new album, and find out he’s become a scientologist, which kind of ends his career in my eyes. I hope not.

After a ridiculously long lead-in, we now proceed to another piece of satire that nailed something before it actually happened: The Onion’s article Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades, which was published a year and a half ago, back in The Onion’s heyday. These days The Onion is still funny, but a lot of its writers left a couple of years ago and it hasn’t been nearly as consistent since (many of them reportedly went to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which is not-coincidentally consistently genius now). Here’s an excerpt from the Onion article, narrated by fake Gillette CEO James M. Kilts:

[Then Schick] came out with a three-blade razor. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Mach3Turbo. That’s three blades and an aloe strip. For moisture. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I’m telling you what happened–the bastards went to four blades. Now we’re standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three blades and a strip. Moisture or no, suddenly we’re the chumps. Well, fuck it. We’re going to five blades.

The whole piece is so pinpoint-accurate that I had a hard time picking out a single block quote–in fact, I may venture so far as to call the article genius. “Genius” is a word I normally don’t like to throw around a lot, but I already used it once in this post to refer to a singer who got his career started by singing “Soy un perdedor,” so my genius-proclaiming credibility is shot anyway.

Well here, now, a year and a half after the Onion article was published, Gillette is indeed releasing a five-blade razor (seen above). The New York Times article that covered the product launch is eerily reminiscent of a certain Onion article, in terms of the language used and the boasts made by the real, actual head honchos at Gillette:

[Peter K. Hoffman, president of Gillette's blades and razors unit] promised that come early 2006, when the Fusion products hit stores, Gillette will mount a “blockbuster marketing program, absolutely huge, the biggest launch of a Gillette shaving system in history.” And, yes, that is true even if adjusted for inflation, [James M. Kilts, Gillette's CEO] chimed in.

Note that it’s not called a razor, it’s called a “shaving system.” And it’s the most expensive launch ever, even adjusted for inflation? Wow. That’s big. That’s manly. That has balls. Which you can shave. Or not–after all, it’s not “Gillette: the best a metrosexual can get.”

Until I just pulled his name from the NY Times article, I didn’t realize that The Onion had used Gillette CEO James M. Kilts’ real name atop their own piece–which is completely legal under parody law, since he’s a public figure–which makes their article seem even that much more prescient.

I think that covers it–how Gillette, Beck, 112, Clipse, peaches and cream, and The Onion (kinda cheated by saying “onions” in the title) connect. That is, not at all, except for the fact that I wrote about all of them here, in a meandering, unfocused, and largely pointless post.

Here, then, a final quote from Mr. Kilts. At this point, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a real quote or not; if it’s fake, it might as well be real, and if it’s real, it might as well be parody:

“Put another aloe strip on that fucker, too. That’s right. Five blades, two strips, and make the second one lather. You heard me–the second strip lathers.”

0

On-demand publishing is cool. That is, if you find that sort of thing cool, or even remotely interesting

08.8.05 @ 11:12PM Tags

So I just found out about Lulu.com, which is a publishing website, primarily for books. Basically you can get distribution for a book you’ve written without having a publisher–they print and ship books on-demand (it’s kind of like what mp3.com was for music, back when it was useful). What a great idea–you could also use it to publish magazines, journals, etc.

CustomFlix is sort of the same idea for DVDs, although you have to pay setup and maintenance fees there, and DVD-Rs are not the same as commercially replicated DVDs. I think this on-demand publishing system works better for books, because DVDs are very cheap to duplicate professionally, whereas books are not (a year or two ago I evaluated CustomFlix for a DVD project, and the site only made sense if you were going to sell less than about 250 DVDs. For my project, which never saw the light of day, that number was 0, so it didn’t make sense).

The idea behind sites like Lulu, CustomFlix, and CafePress is to remove obstacles to getting a good idea distributed. I was going to use this to segue into saying the same thing about the so-called Digital Video revolution, but I feel like that’s been said a thousand times before, and I should probably mention the whole DV-is-enabling thing in my “About this site” section anyway, which I still haven’t written.

The other question, of course, is whether Lulu will just be inundated by bad writing and shoddy product, kind of like this website; of course it will. Now anyone with a computer can publish a book.

But that’s the way it should be, and not just for books, but movies, music, etc. The more the obstacles are removed, the more the emphasis is placed on the one thing that should matter the most: luck. Damn! I meant to say talent.