Category: Video
The Banana, The Fastest Fruit
| May 23, 2011 | Filled under Blog, Video |
Art Car Weekend embodies everything I adore about Houston. It’s not just that I love the parade and it’s accompanying festivities, it’s that Art Car is a normal, everyday aspect of Houston life that people who don’t live here rarely get to experience when they come to, say, Greenspoint for a business trip.
For example. This weekend was the inaugural screening of the Tex Hex, an artist-built boat that floats along the bayou and shows movies on a screen to people sitting on the banks. In keeping with the Art Car theme, the Tex Hex showed short films regarding car culture, from personal faves Kenneth Anger, Buckminster Fuller, Buster Keaton, and the short below, about what is possible the most amazing soap box derby to ever take place.
It’s easy to see how this event, in San Fransisco in 1975, could have been the genesis for the Art Car Parade.
On Basketball, Tragedy and How I Became A Writer
| May 17, 2011 | Filled under Video |
In 2008 Oklahoma finally got a professional major league sports team. For years people said OKC could not support such a venture. Boy were they wrong.
I’ve always been a college basketball, never a pro fan, but that’s changing now that the Thunder are in the playoffs, against a Texas team even. Yesterday, on the even of the Western Conference Finals first game, my mom sent me this video.
In Oklahoma, basketball goes hand in hand with tragedy. But something else struck me about the story above.
I was 14 years old when the Murrah Building was bombed. I was in junior high, had not yet taken my first creative writing class, had not yet worked for a newspaper. But I loved to write, and I had been keeping journals every year. Watching the video now reminds me of my desperate need for info after the bombing. How voraciously I consumed every newspaper, magazine, news report and update. It never occurred to me before, but in no small way did the OKC bombing influence my later development into a news junkie and journalist.
R.I.P. Cleopatra
| March 23, 2011 | Filled under Video |
Elizabeth Taylor has died. I loved her in nearly everything she did, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf to A Place In The Sun, but the above scene has always been my favorite. The Film That Changed Hollywood, a feature-length documentary on the troubled production of Cleopatra, is an absolute must-see for anyone with an interest in the way cinema works, then and now.
Update: Here’s the obit I wrote for the Houston Press on her best movies.
Finders Keepers
| March 22, 2011 | Filled under Video |
These chicks stole my favorite (thrift store) nightgown.
Yes, I wear a nightgown from the thrift store. Whut.
Compare and Contrast
| January 24, 2011 | Filled under Video |
Jerry Lee Lewis in 1957.
Jerry Lee Lewis on January 21, 2011.
He can still hammer those keys away, even if he was a little slow-moving on stage. I have always, since I was nine years old, wanted to see him play. I remember taking a road trip to Missouri with my grandmother and listening to a JLL greatest hits tape and loving him even back then.
Read my write-up of the show on Rocks Off.
Put your hand inside the puppet head
| January 18, 2011 | Filled under Video |
This week in “I Love My Job,” here is how I spent my morning.
And here is the accompanying story.
In a past life I was an entertainment writer, though covering music has really always been my thang. I went to this as a last-minute assignment. Covering kids’ puppet shows ain’t exactly my idea of a lively beat but it was a super fun laid-back interview and they insisted after the fact that I try my hand at it. My job, it is so hard.
In approximately 24 hours
| November 5, 2010 | Filled under Photo Album, Video |
This is what I’ll be doing.
And now a Patric Swayze reference.
God, that trailer is so ’90s. But there are two things I love about this movie (besides the obvious, because it’s awesome): 1. it was directed by a woman, and 2. the three main actors did all their own stunts.
