Looking through my original list it seems that I was able to successfully create every book cover that I came up with during my brainstorming session. And all of them were posted onto the Flickr set, except for one.

When I was uploading the files to Flickr, I just decided to leave this one out because it seemed too mean-spirited to include, since all of the other covers were references to serial killers, or opportunistic politicians, or both. But hey, since nobody reads this site anyway, here it is!

So there you go.

faces all around me

Got an email from my friend KellyAnne (visit her kool-ass site, Koolass.com! It’s totally kool-ass!) who was asking me about a video that I did a loong time ago. So I thought I would share it with the people who might be checking this site out.

So around 2001 I was in between jobs (this was around the time of the dot-com crash), and I had some time to kill. I put together a couple of interesting projects, one of which I mentioned previously: Dictionaraoke. Another project was just a bunch of Flash videos for some random strange songs. One song, “Faces,” was lifted from an old Sunday school flexi-disc and just screamed to have a video made for it.

So I dutifully drew faces as described in the song. Happy faces, sad faces,
bored faces, etc., and threw it all into Flash. I was just making stuff up as I went along, and didn’t even have an ending for the video until I actually started to put it together.

So what was the ending? Well, have a look for yourself and see.

“Faces” — Flash animation

A couple other videos can be found at the video section of Legnog.com, a site that seemed like a real funny idea at the time but basically became a huge chore and not-at-all fun once I started working on it on a regular basis. Not like THIS site at all. Oh no.

The biggest online project that I’ve been involved in so far has to be Dictionaraoke, an online gallery of songs made up of MIDI audio and speech samples from online dictionaries. It was inspired by an NPR Weekend Edition Saturday story about Merriam Webster including word samples in its online reference site. One of the songs that I created has the distinction of having been played on both Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and the Dr. Demento Show, which means that I’m famous in cafes and college dorms nationwide.

Dictionaraoke was a project of the Snuggles collective, a group of fans of the band Negativland who work through a lively mailing list that covers all sorts of topics, some of them actually related to Negativland. Another compilation that we worked on in the past was Free Speech For Sale, an advertising-themed collage-fest. I have a short track (”All He Sees Is You”) on that comp, right next to such luminaries as The Evolution Control Committee and Escape Mechanism. Best of all, Free Speech For Sale is completely free and downloadable from the above link. So now you have no excuse not to check it out.
One other edited audio piece that’s made some waves is my version of George W. Bush’s reading the poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” known better by its first line, “Twas the night before Christmas”. That piece got played on the radio a few times, made its way into compilation put together by DJ Riko and Stay Free! magazine, and can currently be found in the Presidential cut-up department at DIYMedia.net.

So there’s a short list of some of my audio work that you can find online. There’s some other audio coming up soon, just as soon as I figure out where the crap to host it. You can also find some links to other audio works at my SRN page.

Negativland — “A Special Opening”

Yep, from the Negativland Over The Edge compilation Sex Dirt comes this editing of the film that the samples are taken from. This video was inspired by the fact that the original instructional film Parent To Child About Sex, is available at archive.org. The editing is very simple.

Jim Allenspach – “In The Beginning”

This was the video that I made for the first track from my EP Friends and Other Rejoicings (c.f.). The video was originally made for a video presentation at Recycled Rainbow, an occasional arts salon in the Cleveland area.

The Bran Flakes — “Don Knotts”

From the most recent Bran Flakes album I Have Hands comes yet another edit job. The source material for this video came from other Don Knotts clips posted onto YouTube. So there.

And don’t forget, everything on this site is 100% made by hand! Sure, the hands were used to move pixels, sound samples and other appropriated imagery around, but still. All done by hand!