fitz

Fitzcarraldo. Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog’s masterpiece of a movie. Makes all other movies seem like kindergarten. Werner’s directors commentary on the DVD is the most articulate I have heard on this medium yet. He talks about the hardships of making the movie, the border war that broke out between Peru and Ecuador, the natives attacking them with arrows, planes crashing in the jungle, crew members maimed or killed, the three years it took to make the movie, the worst drought and subsequent worst rainy season of the century, controlling Kinski’s madness and daily “yell outs” on the film, and yet throughout it all, his unwavering faith that he had to see the movie to completion. After watching this movie I wanted to get Kinski’s autobiography, All I Need is Love. But the cheapest one at Amazon is $120.00. I was able to track one copy down at the Library and am having them ship it over. I love the Library.

It feels so good to have my site back. I don’t even know where to begin. How about my typography class? Well it’s beyond incredible. It’s taught by Bill Moran a third generation letterpress printer and graphic designer. We work with only old lead types and wood alphabets on huge old iron equipment that makes me want to throw all Macintosh computers out the window and get back to the basics of metal, ink, and wood. Wood type, its creation and use is an inspiring craft that is both a wonder of engineering and of design. Bill’s publishing company is Blinc Publishing and he still does a ton of letterpress work for different clients. The textures of which can not be beat by the stale and precise nature of the electronic machine. Recently he has worked with the Hamilton Wood Type Museum (a personal field trip is in the works for afrojet) to create one of the first new wood type font faces Hamilton offset which is available at Chank. The best part of the class is exploring the historical and sociological aspect of type, their designs, and the engineering problems vs. design problems that the designers were trying to solve when they were invented. Also interesting is how different and newer technologies for printing changed the way new typefaces were designed. It’s also given me a new appreciation for arts and crafts wallpaper.

oh hey. My site is back online…

Wow. I am overjoyed. I think I may have broken some record for sites being down. Denver. Long story short – my old host, although being free, had no idea how to administer their server and had no reason to fix it when it went down. Afrojet was shown no love. But you get what you pay for and now I am paying for it. Huge shouts to the good and decent people over at Mcdonaugh Brothers for hooking me up, hosting me and plugging me back in. May all further vacations be my own decision. I realized while my site was down how much I had become addicted to it and the communication with others that it sparked. So without wasting any more time…let’s just pick it right back up. Q.E.D.

A little more redesign here. I wanted to give afrojet that faded out look – something like the Star Tribune newspaper that’s been sitting on my patio since early March. It’s all dusty and hazy. I also wanted to inject some blue and get rid of the underline in the links which was getting uglier everyday.

I would like to go on record before Tuesday, and proclaim that Bill is definitely the Mole.

My new favorite television viewing is Unwrapped on the food network. It’s a ‘behind the music’ of old candies, cereals, gum etc. I had no idea Cheetoes were spray painted with cheese. Next Saturday they are portraying “Crazy Drinks”. Damn that’s solid television.

Cool new site gives us a look into the new Baltic Contemporary Art Museum on the river Tyne. A huge artistic space, with some open studios. It would be great if more of it was open to the public but it looks like a great project nevertheless. Featured artist is Tatsumi Orimoto, whose performance piece envolves him “turning up unexpectedly in busy places – a restaurant in moscow, a tea shack in Tibet, Oxford Street in London – his face covered with round loaves and baguettes, often accompanied by an entourage of fellow Breadmen.”

Copenhagen offers a 10 step blueprint to a more pedestrian city and offers some stylish bikes that you can rent for $2.50.

Just missed the rain this morning. I thought I was goner for sure. Last night I spent some time trying to digitize some old 45’s on the powerbook to very mixed results. I really need to find a way to efficiently digitize some of my old records. So far my setup is sub-par and an Ipod is useless until this can happen.

I can’t quite put my finger on it but there is something about this couch [ via core77 ] that looks really comfortable. I’ve been contemplating a new car and although a toyota will probably be dialed in the near future, I’d much rather have a pimped out school bus.

Yesterday I wrote about Carhartt and the bottom up marketing of their brand and then about two hours later I read this article about Sony Ericsson and how they plan to use real actors who will be scripted to talk about their product. The actors will then go hang out at bars and local hip spots and pretend to create a buzz for a product where there is no buzz. I REALLY want to know what Minneapolis bars these people will be “kicking it” at. I will keep my vision sharp for anyone getting gushy about their new mobile phone. Very strange times. How strange? How about the guy who’s auctioning on Ebay advertising space on his penis? Or how about the people who are so addicted to chatting online that they don’t mind having fake friends (bots), whoes only purpose is to sell some 11 year old girl tickets to the latest Disney movie. I’m amazed sometimes that I even work in this industry. Take one wrong turn and you end up in a very bad neighborhood. But hey, I love my job. Which is a bummer because now I can’t write a letter like this [ from Kelly ] if I ever leave.

It’s officially time to move to England. What a great show! DJ Vadim, Strictly Kev from DJ Food and Charlie Dark from Attica Blues. It would take 3 years and $100.00 to see all these guys pass through the arctic tundra of Minnesota. I still remember the DJ Vadim show at the Seventh Street Entry last year. Killa Kela, the whitest and most talented beat box alive today, stole the whole freaking show.

What really grabs me and makes me want to light dangerous firecrackers about the room is that Carhartt (a rugged outdoor work clothing company) sponsors this recurring show of European hip hop headz. Truly a marriage made in heaven and a tell tale sign that the Europeans are light years ahead of us in global cross marketing and, well, just everything in general. Looking at the US Carhartt site and then comparing it to its overseas Carhartt European companion, it’s obvious that the global brand strategy is completely different, with a totally different demographic of consumer. If anyone knows of other companies that have this global brand schizophrenia I’d be very curious to know. I can’t quite put my finger on why it’s so interesting but I think when I see it show up so clearly in a flyer like the one above, I can only think that it’s a good thing. Perhaps this is a special case though and not the norm. European Headz definitely embraced Carhartt and then someone at Carhartt got a clue and ran with it. It wasn’t a clothing company trying to build their brand of the backs of a movement. So I suppose what’s so appealing about the Carhartt case is definitely the bottom up kind of marketing where the found object (Carhartt) is taken by a populous, embraced, transformed, and then re-embraced by the company once again after the transformation. Hmmm…

Get your Skillers and head off to the lawn mower races.

A sammich just isn’t a sammich if it isn’t my peanut butter and jelly sammich. I have sat on the mountain, pondered a selfless otherness and found great strength in the design of the perfect PB&J. Lately, the lunch crowd gathers around the table and squeals with glee as I slowly remove my two breaded babies from their brown paper carrier or zip-lock love pouch. Those French foodies and in-cuisine fetish pundits, who labor over their Sushi and saffron dusted chicken, all strum the same chord and it rings: “that looks really good”. And it’s settled. Everyone would rather be eating a PB&J. At least today. But it’s not fair. Ego aside, I make a mean Sammich. I’ve studied the products, the brands, preformed countless experiments both in density and viscosity. I read the latest trade journals and spend my Friday nights at Byerlys groceries waiting to see what the great inventors of our time have now allowed us to consume and what will be placed upon the “New Products” shelf. Oh man, as a kid that was it! I still remember the morning I came bouncing into Byerly’s with my father, ran right up to the new products shelf and began to take stock of that weeks new inventory, when suddenly, I came face to face with my first childhood love – Marshmallow Fluff by Durkee-Mower, Inc. I’m still emotional about it and not enough time has passed to write about it yet. So, I’ll get back to the PB&J.

Of the three ingredients, The bread is really the most essential product. It sets the foundation and serves as the canvas for your art. Like all things built, a strong foundation is the cornerstone to delivering a solid product. Fuck white bread. Wonderbread? The worst. Get yourself a strong wheat bread, but no nuts, no raisins or other foreign objects or unnecessary ingredients. Pre-sliced is best if you can get it. But get it thin. I’ll have none of that Texas toast. It’s all air. For best results I use “Nasty Bread” a super triple sourdough made locally here in the twin towns. The key thing to selecting your bread is making sure that it can take the peanut butter without crumbling or rolling up with the spread of your PB. I strongly suggest bringing your PB to your local grocer and holding some of your own experiments in the bread Isle. You can usually check out about 7-10 loaves before you start to draw attention to your actions. Plan carefully.

As for the PB, I’d like to say that the natural stuff from the Co-op or nature store is preferable but really it sucks. Sucks hard. They don’t use stabilizers in their PB and therefore you always get the peanuts and the peanut oil separating in the jar, which frankly is O.K. if your making a Thai peanut sauce, but it’s absolutely disastrous if your planning on having a sandwich hold its consistency between the morning when you make it and your lunch break when you actually eat it. Forget the natural stuff and go right to Jiffy or Skippy or one of the low end brands at the Mega food store. These brands I am quite sure make their PB for the express intent of being used in a PB&J sammich. And it’s chunky baby. No smooth PB. That’s just wrong.

As for Jelly’s…I think this is where you have the most freedom to play and create your own style of sammich. Always observe the equal parts rule: no more or less then the PB. The sandwich has to follow strict egalitarian codes. Two slices of bread and two tablespoons each of peanut butter and jelly. Also remember that jam is not jelly. Jellies are preserves. And be careful with seedy jellies. Those seeds can stay with you all day.

Lastly, and so often overlooked by the PB&J novice, cut diagonal or not at all.

If your looking for something to read now that your sitting there enjoy your own sammich. Might I suggest recommendations for airports of the future?

Man I wish I could have an intern. Just a daily life kinda intern. Someone to clip articles from papers and magazines, record televisions shows, listen to my phone messages and sort through my emails to weed out the riff raff. It’s always a game of catch up. Someone like The Wolf (Harvey Keitel) from Pulp Fiction. He was super organized and could dial in huge complicated projects in just minutes. He would be a great personal intern. I really need to be spending all my time Ipod Turntableizing and can’t be bothered with some of the mundane aspects of reality that interfere with the creation of my new log home and typographical studies.

Madness grips early on today. Bill’s Bachelor party starts in just hours. We hit the links at 9:30AM and I have elected to start things off right with a few Heineken’s to round out my essential food groups of Golden Grams and toast this morning. Deutsche Welle – German News on the cable box. Large headed puppets broadcasting the news in German. It’s like watching those two grumpy, jaded Muppets who sit in the balcony and berate the other Muppets but I can’t understand a word they’re saying. Perfect. I can’t imagine this is any less informative than the Today Show.

I’m just glad to be here today. A cruel and mean bike commute last night. People, especially the automotive type, are just rotten. I can think of at least a dozen ways i was almost maimed or worse last night. The first of which was stopping in at the Washington Ave liquor store to pick up some spirits. Biking up to the establishment you enter a wide undisciplined parking lot that the careless owners have allowed to become a playground of depravity and drunken bullheads. They lay about, a dozen or so in total, shirtless with their bellies punching out to ask the sun for more of a burning. It was a freaking war zone in broad day light. I dodged one 40oz bottle that almost caromed off my melon and then got pissed as hell and ran over some other guys arm. Another intoxicated indigent attempts some retaliation and gets one leg up before he falls onto himself and lets out a heavy guttural “harrumfff”. I fantasized for a second about kicking all their asses and being this guy standing on top of like twelve beaten bodies – pumping my fists in the air. Then more disgruntled noises from the parking lot beckoned me back to reality and I tore off cursing my luck. Do other people have these problems?

Not more than two blocks away from that Mayhem and a Passat goes screaming past me on River Road. Everyone in the car thinks it’s cool to scream shit at me. Rotten bastards. That’s just low. What has gotten into the masses? Are people not getting laid enough? Were they dropped as kids? Maybe their Rolling Stone subscription is ending or their EMINEM CD has a scratch in it.

Poor bastards are just pissed that they’re trapped in their cars. They know they are dying one gallon at a time. Every hour they spend in their car locked into a horizontal negotiation of post work traffic brings them two steps closer to full blown shooting-up-the-turnpike insanity. Sweaty and working hard for momentum, I must represent some beacon of freedom on my Trek 830, a free and lackadaisical mockery of their well designed four door trap. Yeah!

So I get over that hump and then the clouds open up and a torrential downpour strikes. It feels good at first. A new beginning and a fresh baptism, a cleansing from the early leg’s craziness. But then it comes down so hard that I’m almost blinded and it’s getting cold. Cars are looking uneasy as they pass me and I know they wish they didn’t really have to “share the road” as the sign says.

Just as it’s letting up, I get passed by a fraternity of bike nazi’s all wearing the same dorky spandex uniforms (man those things are ungodly stupid) and they start tossing shit too. Some righteous nazi shit about the fact that I’m not wearing a bike helmet. Oh man, wrong guy wrong time fella’s. What a fucking waste of skin and organs. And good bike parts too.

So you see it’s no minor miracle that I’m here now, washing the dirt out of my pitching wedge and nine iron, scurrying around in my bare feet looking like Ozzy trying to find my damn bathing suit, and contemplating what a whole day’s bachelor party will bring…