With the help of my handy Final Cut Express book (wonderful thing by Tom Wolsky), I got to work chopping up some footage that was made the previous weekend of our friend “Will”. He’s been wanting to make a video series for ages, so I’m helping somebody’s dream come to life!

Enjoy.

Better yet, new ways to get music appeared. Purchasing so much never involved so little. Listening to so much never involved so little – and the trend bled out to other media, too. It’s not only music that you can gorge yourself with – but videos, images, and now books. Now that these things take no physical space, the human appetite is for media is revealed: it is bottomless.

Can the mind become fat? Probably not. An argument could be made that the effect of information saturation can be a paralysing one – filled with so many ideas that you might not know what to make of one of them. But most people would say: “the more you know”. It’s a good thing that people can spend hours on YouTube, Wikipedia, or any other of the millions of websites with something to learn.

But let’s be real: most people use these things for diversion. Funny videos, flash games, and instant chatter. It’s no surprise: this is the course that hardware and software design over the last decade has taken us. You’d be crazy to think the tools didn’t guide the hand.

Endless consumption – even of media – is not a good thing, and there is a lot of pleasure to be found in making. It’s a pleasure that a lot of people have discovered, and even made a living out of. But without expertise, making things with a computer is daunting for most, and it’s completely a hardware and software issue. Our filesystems and inputs are built around the creation and organisation of documents and spreadsheets.

But if forward-minded organisation put their weight into it, people could be encouraged otherwise. If software were less puzzling and more channelling, it’s hard to imagine people could hold off. Garageband is a good follow on that. Hardware could definitely make some pleasant strides with a more human(e) method of input. Just look at how well the iPhone has done.

As before, the technological revolution of this decade won’t really be the parts that drive it, it’ll be what’s done with it: a little less taking, a lot more making.

But who would be crazy enough to do something like that, a week from now?

Edit: Evidently not Apple, bugger.

These days, my mornings are so sombre

that my heart sinks down to my stomach,

and my stomach enfolds it, and says:

What’s for breakfast?

She drives a hard bargain.

You give me something I want

and I’ll give you something

you want.

Could we touch hands again?

I love how your teams of fingers feel.

Could we work something out?

You drive a hard bargain -

But what can I say to that ribbon

in your hair, and that forehead

that I have to kiss?

You give me something I want

and I’ll give you something you want.

A little something for the about page that will be rolled out along with the new store in the future. Speaking of the store – we got the tshirts yesterday, and we’re doing a printing run right now. With any luck…

This Friday there will be a charity event called “The Art of Change”, organised by NYU student group UBUNTU. UBUNTU is a group aimed at raising awareness of – and also stopping – genocide. For those of you interested in attending, the address is 20 Cooper Square, 4th floor, and the time is December 4th, 6:30pm.

Anyway, as far as I know, this particular event is geared towards getting photographers, artists, musicians, writers and filmmakers together to discuss how these kinds of talents can be put to use in a world which is sadly still ailed with cruelty – as well as auctioning off artwork, with the money raised going to charity.

The piece above is my effort to help out, and will be on auction this Friday as well. Here’s hoping that a little difference can be made.

I hope to be seeing some of you at Scheveningen this year again – it’s been a weird old decade. Everybody got so worked up about the new millennium and for a long time it just felt like an advanced version of the 90s. But it’s wrong to divide up time like that, so I’ll stop right here.

A few favourites:

Here’s the full gallery.

Was working on a new picture to use as an icon for myself today, and ended up with this – little too detailed to be any use at small sizes, but fun to do nonetheless. For those not in “the know”, it’s based on this classic:

It’s year of the tiger next year, you know.