Wool Wood & Whiskey

01-27-12 - YELLOW RAINCOATS NEVER LOOKED SO GOOD

KYLE LEEPER RAIN OR SHINE from Hellaclips on Vimeo.

Lots of style here, and inspiration to burn.

01-27-12 - OLDE MAN STYLE, NO. 22

Pickin’ & Trimmin’ from Matt Morris Films on Vimeo.

01-26-12 - CASSETTE: A DOCUMENTARY FILM

Someday in the distant future somebody’s going to make a documentary about the downfall of American society. It’s going to be a bummer, and an ancient John Malkovich is going to narrate it.

“Modern social scientists,” he’ll say, “trace the decline of the American empire to a singular moment: the production of the very first CD.” Cut to shots of thousands upon thousands of mirror-surfaced perfect circles — thereby inferring a correlation to colonial-era witch hunt criteria — followed by shots of the yuppies in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. “In a single decade,” Malkovich will intone, “a cultural shift of epic proportions, from the post-war ethics of quality, function and thrift… the gramophone, the vinyl record, the cassette tape… to the consumption of cheap, flashy consumer goods. Together, we worshiped the compact disc in all its fragility, and together we ensured our demise.”

Ok, so that will most likely never happen, but cassettes were pretty cool, and I’m glad we’re starting to come together on the consensus that cd’s sucked. Personally, back in high school I had a shoe box full of halfway worn out cassettes in the giant Buick station wagon I drove. For some reason, at some point I switched over to a discman with one of those ridiculous cassette adapters, and my life really never was the same thereafter.

A tape, you could pop in, pop out and then chuck back into the box without a care in the world. It played once and it would play again, for the most part. With cds you had to flip gingerly through some plastic-and-gauze book (that was going to scratch the things to high hell eventually anyway), delicately select a disc, handle it like an original copy of the Constitution, and then essentially play ring toss, aiming for the spindle on the player, all while driving.

I guess my point is that tapes were like America itself; tough but full of sentiment, maybe kind of imperfect but simple, functional and kind of beautiful sometimes. Don’t even get me started on mix tapes vs. iTunes playlists — I mourn for kids today. That’s why I was pretty excited to learn that a new friend is making a documentary on the history and re-emergence of the cassette tape.

Seth Smoot is a talented guy (one half of the amazing Seth-Kendra husband-wife photographer-stylist team Jenny and I had to opportunity to work with last weekend) and this doc is going to be tops. You should help fund it on Kickstarter — I did. Given the buzz on Hypebeast and a “Best of Kickstarter” nod from Sundance, this film is going to be big, and in the internet age docs like this shouldn’t have to go on anyone’s credit card.

2 1/2 Days Left!

01-26-12 - WHOLE EARTH CATALOG @ THE ICA AT MAINE COLLEGE OF ART

Daniel Fuller, director of the Institute for Contemporary Art at MECA has done the city of Portland, Maine a great service. Knowing our heady, heady roots and general earthiness, he saw fit to bring the Whole Earth Catalog compiled by MoMA here to the Northlands.

Don’t take it from me, take it from MoMA:

In 1968, Stewart Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog. Brand’s goals were to make a variety of tools accessible to newly dispersed counterculture communities, back-to-the-land households, and innovators in the fields of technology, design, and architecture, and to create a community meeting-place in print. The catalog quickly developed into a wide-ranging reference for new living spaces, sustainable design, and experimental media and community practices. After only a few years of publication it exploded in popularity, becoming a formidable cultural phenomenon.

This is a guaranteed ear-steamer and it opens TONIGHT! Appropriately, a concurrent show by Maine-born and bred Michael Smith-Bell — of Upside Down Fireplace fame — is in the gallery this evening as well. GET THERE.

01-25-12 - OLDE MAN STYLE, NO. 21

01-19-12 - UNCLE TONY

“She revels in unholy connections with evil corporations and she’s proud of the fact that her food is f—ing bad for you. If I were on at seven at night and loved by millions of people at every age, I would think twice before telling an already obese nation that it’s OK to eat food that is killing us. Plus, her food sucks.” –Anthony Bourdain on Paula Dean

01-18-12 - WOOT WOOD!

WW&W in-house wood consultant and Olde Man Style Master Peter Jackson Hussey of Structure Build and Design featured on WoodDesign.com. Says Peter:

“Within the process, the smell of cedar when cut, the smooth feel of walnut sanded to a fine finish, and the contrast and beauty of the grain as it absorbs oil are all observed and earnest experiences I have along the way.”

Check out his work if you haven’t, and grab me a 12 pack of Full Sail Sessions at the Blanchard’s in JP while you’re at it. Oregon beer in the Northeast, finally.

01-16-12 - WHAT DO YOU DO?

When people ask you what you do, and you say “I’m a writer,” that can mean almost anything. Books? Blogs? Journalism? Screenwriting? Copy? Advertising? For most of us grinding out words for a living these days, you can assume it’s an “all of the above” scenario.

The thing is, writing isn’t necessarily as mystifying as the other creative trades. Graphic design = photoshop nightmare to most people, and ask anyone who has tried to figure out software like Final Cut Pro on their own if they would rather have paid someone to do it. Bet I know the answer.

The issue for us writers is that most people write every day. Put one word after another, and if it seems ok, it’s ok, right? 99% of the time, that’s true, but sometimes it’s a little more involved.

That’s why, when I found my notes from a project I worked on this summer, I wanted to post them to here to illustrate what it’s really all about. Ideas don’t just work themselves into careful, succinct sentences. There’s an economy of function at work, and believe it or not, to get from one page of notes to a two-minute video takes a lot of work. And A LOT of editing.

So for all my writing brethren and sistren out there, keep grinding. And for anyone thinking about hiring a professional to write something for them today, Thanks — and please do. It’ll come out great. We promise.

01-13-12 - ON SALE

Way, way, way too busy with writing gigs to be excavating the good stuff for y’all these days, so I’m closing up shop. I’ll still sell original stuff — mostly hats and whatnot, which are not on sale — but everything else is marketed way down.