Friday, February 27, 2009

O, hai?


Good day, Action and Action readers. As Rob mentioned a few days ago, there will be a couple new faces here, and I’m one of them. We’re going to be doing things a little differently around here. While Rob’s gallivanting around the world playing elephant polo, watching the Watchmen, or doing whatever the hell he does, yours truly will be contributing. Get prepared for lots – and I mean lots – of rick rolling.

Okay, that’s not going to happen.

Anyhow, I’d write a little bio or introduction about myself, but those entries always seem so… self indulgent, you know? I mean, unless you’re deeply, unforgivably, in love with me, why would anyone want to know? Does it really matter if an anonymous blogger, say, lives in Toronto, thinks that the Rural Alberta Advantage is one of the best bands in Canada, advocates the written work of Paul Quarrington, or writes for other blogs? Why would anyone, save their mothers, want to read their Twitter pages? Does it matter what their pasty, mouth-breathing asses look like?

No, it doesn’t. What matters, friends, is life, love, and Sharon Stone's Bronze-aged pencil-erasing nips (which bear an uncanny resemblance to Popeye's elbows). Actually, forget pencil erasing, I need a mind eraser.

Action and Action-ites, it’s nice to meet you.

Love,

Mark

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

this just made my head explode.

I...I'm actually speechless. Please just watch this clip in its entirety, it is worth seeing the ten full minutes.



via Videogum

How does this not have 50 million views? This is like the hidden jewel in the ocean of human waste that is Youtube. Oh, speaking of which, I started a Youtube channel.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Joaquin Phoenix insanity recap.



I haven't mentioned anything thus far about the epic Joaquin Phoenix meltdown that has been going on for the last few weeks, as it just seemed too...easy. But you know what, fuck it, this is rapidly becoming one of my all-time favourite celebrity meltdowns, and I don't care whether its really real or if its all just an elaborate media stunt to create a compelling documentary subject for his brother-in-law Casey Affleck. This shit is funny. First he claimed to be retiring from acting to concentrate on his music career. Then there was his first ever live concert that made a collective nation say, "what the fuck??" Then there was the already-legendary Letterman appearance. Now he is being mocked mercilessly by Alec Baldwin and Ben Stiller. Seriously, what the hell is going on with this guy? Whatever it is, I personally prefer my crazed-Letterman appearances to be a bit more Crispin Glover-y.

Monday, February 23, 2009

crazy exciting changes.



So I know I wrote that long-winded piece the other night at 4am about how I was going to start using this space to talk about my personal life a bit more, but I ultimately decided that that was a silly idea. This blog has never really been about me, only things that I happen to be interested in. So I ended up starting a totally new blog where you can go from now on if you want to find out exactly what is going on in my ridiculous life.

So from this point on, Action and Action is going to exclusively be about different aspects of the pop culture universe...more or less exactly what it's been since I started it. But it has occured to me that I am never going to have the time or dedication that is required to make this blog into what I really think it could be, so I've contacted a few like-minded friends who are going to start contributing here, and I am really excited about this decision. It will add some much-needed fresh perspective and some new voices into the mix, but the bottom line as that way more content is going to be going up, and I think it's going to be good times for everyone.

So all that's going to be happening in the next little while, and I hope you guys enjoy the changes!

oscar mania.



So, it was the Oscars last night, and no, I did not watch them, as I do not have cable. I did follow them on some various liveblogs for a while, but instead of paying attention until the end I opted to watch Danny McBride's new HBO show Eastbound and Down, which incidentally is fucking hilarious and far more entertaining than the Oscars could ever hope to be. But I do have a vested interest in the winners of the awards so let's see how I did on my picks.

Hmm..it looks like I correctly called the Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor and Best Actress categories. Yawn. Unfortunately Mickey Rourke was completely screwed out of his best actor award. Now, I like Sean Penn and don't want to take anything away from his work in Milk, but the way the character of Randy "The Ram" Robinson and the real life persona of Mickey Rourke came together in The Wrestler...that was one of my favourite film moments in a long, long time, and I thought Rourke deserved to be awarded for the performance (some kind of mention of Darren Aronofsky, cinemetographer Maryse Alberti, or writer Robert Siegel would have been nice too.) But hey, its the Academy, you can't expect too much of them I guess.

I don't really have all that much else to say. Except I would like to point out that I predicted the inevitable Heath Ledger Oscar a full 8 months ago*, after I had only seen the trailer for the Dark Knight, so that shows you just how shallow and predictable the Academy is. But I still feel they got this right even it was maybe for the wrong reasons. Heath's Joker is easily one of the most iconic screen villains of all time, and that performance was objectively astounding, no matter what happened after he finished his work on the film and if you disagree with me here, you are wrong.

Then again, it is just some meaningless gold statues that cause all this fuss, and the Oscars ceased being relevant or even very interesting years ago, so who cares really.

*OK, I acknowledge that I predicted his nomination 8 months ago, but come on, that's still pretty good. And once they announced the nomination my exact words were "this one belongs to Heath," so I feel like all in all, I am allowed to boast about this.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

a dalmation riding a bike.

Also, this clip comes from Japan so that pretty much makes it an epic win for all parties involved.



via afrojacks

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

late night ravings / michael jackson robot head.



So I've been having lots of trouble sleeping lately. Well I shouldn't say that much, as I've been sleeping a normal number of hours per night (at least for me,) but it's just that my sleeping patterns are completely screwed up and I am keeping some seriously vampiric hours these days. I have generally been staying awake until around 7 or 8am until the sun is fully up and then sleeping until about 2 or 3 in the afternoon so that by the time it is around 10 o'clock at night I am awake and alert and ready to be productive. I have spent the night hours working on various projects - I've rediscovered my love of FL Studio and I've been obsessively working on a few new songs using that and that's taken up hours and hours of my time.

I also completed a new Spin Earth video that you can see here, which was on Toronto pop star Lights. That was actually my first experience editing video, all the other stuff I've worked on up until now I have had help from some generous friends who know about such things, but I'm starting to get the hang of it now, so I think I will gradually be making more and more video content that I can post here and elsewhere. I actually sent the video to Lights and she wrote me back and said she thought I was hilarious so hey, go me.

I have also been trying to start a new writing project, which has been an interesting experience for me, as its something that I've always been interested in in but have never really been able to get past the very initial stages of. So the odds are against me that I will ever complete anything that I am satisfied with, or that I am comfortable sharing with anyone, but just starting to work on something has been cool and its been another thing that I've been able to turn to in order to feel like I'm not wasting my time. I guess this is why I haven't been writing in this blog that much as I've been spending a lot of daily writing capital working on that, but I will try to balance it out a bit more in the future.

I definitely consdider my primary job as being a musician, so it has been frustrating for the last few weeks kind of waiting for the giant music industry machine to lumber back to life after the new year break so I can get back to work. I have so much stuff coming up in the next few months but I still have the next few weeks to sit around Montreal and sort of figure out ways to make myself useful. It would be nice to spend this time working and making extra money, but work is pretty scarse because of my erratic schedule, not to mention my general aversion to getting jobs of any kind that suck the life out of you, which is the vast majority of jobs in existence. Nevertheless, as I mentioned before I have been in a great creative mindspace so that has been cool and has helped me to avoid the depression that would probably have set in by now had I spent this entire time watching television (which obviously I have done a lot of as well.)

Another thing I have been doing recently is watching really odd movies in the really early hours of the morning. The other morning it was around 6am and I was trying to sleep and then for some reason it occured to me that it would be a good idea to watch Rob Zombie's Halloween remake. I actually really enjoyed it even though it was really weird seeing this depraved violence unfold in front of me as the sun was coming up outside my window. But I think Zombie is actually a great filmmaker, and I think I'm going to write a bit more about the movie and a little bit about the horror/slasher genre in general but I'm not going to do that right now as this post is long enough as it is. I'll try to post that later this week.

You might have noticed that this post is somewhat different from most of my other posts that I've ever done. Up until recently I never really had an interest in using this blog to talk about my personal life beyond just writing about stuff that I am interested in or obesessed with. I think I had a vague fantasy when I started this thing that if I become more successful and well-known in real life, I could sort of have this forum to talk about certain subjects with this anonymity so I could say whatever I wanted and not have it come back to me, but you know what, fuck it, keeping a secret internet identity is too much of a hassle, and besides, if I can't tell anyone about this blog then no one's going to read it anyways and then what's the point in even doing it all, right? My point is I will probably start writing some more posts like this in the future where I go into a little bit more personal detail about what's going on with me, or nights like tonight where I am bored and restless and just felt like writing something and this is just kind of what came out. So I hope that sounds interesting to those of you that have stuck around thus far.

Oh yeah, the Michael Jackson robot head.



This is the reason I originally started this post, as it was around 3:30 and I found this beauty on Gizmodo. Michael Jackson is going through some financial troubles lately (which is totally mind blowing to me since he has made fucking astronomical sums of money in his career. Note to self: do not buy amusement park. Or put myself in a position where I have to spend millions of dollars of lawyers fees to defend myself against child molestation charges. Further note to self: really seriously remember that second thing I just mentioned. Don't do that, seriously.) Anyways he has financial troubles so he is selling this bust of the robot head from the climactic scene in Moonwalker for a measly few grand. Those of you who were born in the 90s won't remember Moonwalker, but it is MJ's epic 80s film where in the end he transforms into a giant robot Michael Jackson and saves some kids by defeating a bunch of evil drug dealers. No, I'm not making this up. Anyways that's all I really have to say about it, I just saw the head and thought "fuck, the Michael Jackson robot head," and so here it is.

Well I guess that's all I got for now. It's almost 5 am and I think that means its time to see some horrible violence inflicted on sexually curious teenagers. Sometimes I wonder about myself.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Thursday, February 12, 2009

inglourious basterds.




If you hadn't heard, the trailer for Quentin Tarantino's new WWII flick, Inglourious Basterds just premiered. This has been in the works for years and years and it looks like Quentin is fast tracking it for premiere at Cannes in a few months so I am pretty excited to see how this turns out.

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1808404206/video/11988602

Sunday, February 8, 2009

shrediting.

This guy may not be much of a guitar hero, but he is a goddamned virtuoso at whatever video editing software he happens to use.

Friday, February 6, 2009

do you want me to trash your lights!?!



By now you've probably heard about the now-infamous Christian Bale outburst from the set of Terminator: Salvation when he screamed at the DP, Shane Hurlbut for fiddling with the lights in the middle of an important scene. I have avoided mentioning it thus far but the internet has been going mental over this clip for the last week or so, with a large camp declaring Bale a self-righteous asshole. He probably does deserve some of this, as he does go way, way overboard during his nearly 5 minute long rant. So this has obviously become a new internet meme and has resulted in all kinds of funny, awesome reinterpretations like the techno remix:



I obviously find this stuff fucking hilarious (as you can see from the picture I photoshopped above this post,) but I also have huge respect for Bale as an actor and from what I understand, messing around with the lighting when somebody is trying to act is distracting and pretty frowned upon in the film world. AICN posted a great piece in his defense when this first happened and if you are going to listen to the outburst and laugh like so many of us have then you should read that as well as it gives you a bit of a different perspective on the whole situation. So this brings me to my point, which was that Bale recently phoned in to the radio station KROQ to talk about the incident. He sounds genuinely apologetic, makes fun of himself and explains his side of the whole situation and I think he sounds like a pretty cool guy who was going through some difficulties at the time and had a freak out that was unfortunately broadcast to the entire universe a few months later. Check it out:

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

more birthday fun.

Alright Michelle it's your turn. Have fun tonight!

Monday, February 2, 2009

three little words.

When Frankmusik becomes the next big pop sensation out of Europe, you will thank me for introducing you to him now. He's made a name for himself by putting out a few significant remixes in the UK for groups like Alphabeat (who are another band you should probably be listening to,) he self-released an ep in 2007 and is now signed to Island Records and is working with Stuart Price on his debut album which I'm pretty sure is going to be pretty, pretty, pretty good.



Some of you may be interested to know that Frankmusik has actually remixed a Mission District track, (this is how I heard about him in the first place,) so stay tuned for that, we'll be releasing it at some point in the next few weeks and it's pretty cool.