Head crammers
Books, DVDs and websites worthy of cerebral space
By Eric Wolff , Kinsee Morlan
Your surfing stops here
Sezio.org is a local website that has capabilities that CityBeat and SignOnSanDiego only wish they had. First and foremost, Sezio is clean, cool and it makes it super-simple to find the information you want. And the information, by the way, is all about local art and music. The enhanced blog-like site is filled with good photography and feature writing by a group of people who really do give a crap about creating a local scene akin to what you’d find in New York or San Francisco. “The amount of art and music in this city has grown exponentially,” said Sezio business director Zack Neilson. “San Diego’s becoming enough of a cultural hub; if you’re trying to cover traffic and politics, you can’t adequately cover arts and music.” Sezio just launched its new site a few months ago, but the Sezio crew has been creating artistic and musical happenings around San Diego for a few years. Do yourself a favor and get to know these guys.
—Kinsee Morlan
B’s ain’t bad
Films can be downloaded for free or for a small fee at Jaman.com. A few mainstream flicks, like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape or even the newer There Will Be Blood are downloadable for $3.99, but it’s the free foreign films and ridiculously bad indie B-movies on Jaman you’ll want to check out. Be sure to download the cool Bollywood films and a few of the indie shorts, but be wary of the bad amateur soft-core porn that’s creeping onto the site—it’s bad, and not in a good way. Do not watch Pool Party—trust us.
—Kinsee Morlan
Just freakin’ do it
Kyle Bravo, an artist who runs a little indie print shop in New Orleans with his wife Jenny, first pieced together his odd collection of do-it-yourself info from ’zines he’d collected over the years and published it as one big ’zine appropriately called How2Zine. In the intro to his new paperback book containing much of the same info, Making Stuff & Doing Things (Microcosm Publishing, 2008), Bravo bitches about how the term “DIY” has been “co-opted by the mainstream” and “exploited to the point of mediocrity”—a direct jab, we believe, at profit-seeking ventures like the “DIY Network” cable channel. What Bravo so unabashedly touts in his new, only semi-mainstream book (its publisher has indie cred) is that DIY is actually a whole lot more than just making stuff and doing things. DIY is a punk-rock, screw-the-man way of life that can lead to off-the-grid independence. Bravo leads with the “Get Up & Go” section and a little piece called “How to change the world in just four easy steps!” From there, he goes into stuff like how to make giant puppets, how to make a solar composting toilet, a lengthy section on “Urban Foraging” and so on and so forth. Cheers to Bravo for keeping punk-rock DIY alive.
—Kinsee Morlan
The athlete types
Greg Oden, the No. 1 pick by the Portland Trailblazers in the NBA’s 2007 draft, was in San Diego last weekend for Comic-Con. He was there to promote a basketball comic book, which, apparently, must be read in reverse. Oden writes in his blog, “That got me confused a lot. Once i [sic] got started reading it the right way it was actually pretty good.” Well, that’s a relief. Oden’s not the only big-name athlete to take keyboard in hand and join the blogosphere. Visitors to Yardbarker.com can find 140 athletes and executives blogging their little hearts out. San Diego Chargers linebacker Shaun Phillips opines on the need for a rookie salary cap and which hotels to avoid in the Bahamas (“the food sucked at my hotel”). Padres executive Paul DePodesta details the why and how of nearly every trade or signing made by the team. Most of these guys are athletes, and few are what we might call “fluid” writers—their grammar may be questionable, and they may post only very occasionally—but the subjects they choose and the details they pick reveal perhaps more than the authors intended. Yardbarker offers a kind of backstage pass for professional sports.
—Eric Wolff
Sensual read
Better Non Sequitur, a San Diego independent publisher, just released See you Next Tuesday: The Second Coming, a collection of short fiction by writers from around the world that, at times, sizzles with sexiness. You’ll probably groan with displeasure at Brendan Connell’s piece about a gal who likes to, ahem, use religious crosses for more than innocent prayer, but you’ll moan with grrrreat pleasure at the inexplicably sexy and climatic writing of “Lobster Dinner” by Debbie Anne Rice. The Second Coming is a one-handed read best consumed in bed, near a loved one, or within arm’s length of lube.
—Kinsee Morlan
Indie lit and Indie buys
Buying things ain’t so bad when the things you’re buying are handmade and for sale by the creator. From cool jewelry and fine art to T-shirts and something called BOBS—which the maker describes as “tiny little assemblages of nuts and bolts that look a lot like little people in a frozen ‘Help! I’m being robbed!’ pose”—Etsy.com seemingly has it all. And while you’re on the indie kick, pop on over to www.vagabondagepress.com and check out the latest issue of The Battered Suitcase, a literary magazine with “indie sensibilities.” The brand-new mag is home to poetry, short stories, novelettes and even published song lyrics by guys like Moist Bamboo of Toy Horses, a super clever and hipsterly ironic band from the U.K.
—Kinsee Morlan
Flesh tickling
Sigur Rós reaches into souls and plucks at every emotional string. Hearing the music is enough to cause skin to pucker into tiny goosebumps, but watching the music makes skin pucker and tear ducts leak uncontrollably in a strange combination of joy, sadness, loneliness and togetherness. So, yeah, we dig Sigur Rós, and the diggin’ goes deep. If, like the rest of us millions of Netflix users, you’ve been waiting for months and months for Heima, the film documenting live Sigur Rós performances across Iceland, go to Current.com/currenttv and watch “Sigur Rós’ @ MoMA,” the just-released (as in Aug. 5) exclusive video of Sigur Rós’ June 17 performance at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. After the 46 minutes of music-making is over, stay on Current.com for a few more minutes and enjoy the rest of the hipster-oriented content on the peer-to-peer news and information network.
—Kinsee Morlan
Published: 08/05/2008
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