unapologetic2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 19:23:00 +0000

Watch more AOL Movies videos on AOL Video

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:32:00 +0000

Is this thing on? I think blogger kind of sucks now, and doesn't like FTP posts. argh.

-- Post From My iPhone

the wild rumpus starts...

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 18:54:00 +0000

speechless.

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:14:00 +0000

anyone who knows me well knows how important the Alice books are to me. this remix/song/video derived from the sounds and images of the Disney Alice cartoon is wonderful, and is further proof that sampling and re-mixing often results in original creative work and should be encouraged by rights holders (as if Girltalk weren't enough proof of that.) enjoy.

update: if you like the song you can download it free from the artist, "Pogo", here:
http://www.last.fm/music/Pogo/_/Alice

Snow!

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:37:00 +0000

New Orleans, interestingly, is gorgeous when covered in snow. Not something we locals would know or expect. Experts in all other forms of precipitation, snow, sleet and wintry mix confound and perplex us.
Snow just brings out a childlike glee- I couldn't help smiling all the way to work today, driving through the oncoming flurries.

-- Post From My iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 04:33:00 +0000

What an amazing and beautiful moment in history. I am in awe.

-- Post From My iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 12:59:00 +0000

GO VOTE! I'm in line now.

Hopefully, we'll wake up in a new world tomorrow...

-- Post From My iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 06:29:00 +0000

happy Large Hadron Collider Day, everybody! Looks like we're still here so far... Black holes and strangelets notwithstanding. Here's to making it through the day!

Test

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:43:00 +0000

Testing blogging from my iPhone...

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 19:11:00 +0000

twitter (#gustav) is the place to be for gustav updates live on the ground and from the fugee community (like me!)

my friend bea has some great Gustav photos up on flickr.

I'm at a Panera in Pensacola with Megan and Ray trying to keep up with everything going on at home via news and twitter... staying in Destin again, which is surreal. had a conversation at a bar last night with some asshat retired atty type who after hitting on my sister in front of me decided it would be a good idea to press me repeatedly on why i think we should keep rebuilding a 'doomed city'... i stayed civil - didn't stick around long though. grrr.

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 17:01:00 +0000

my sister and i finally got to destin this morning at 4:30, after leaving nola at 8pm - over 8 hours for what should be a 4.5 hour drive. Turns out we were about as lucky as we could have been - we made better time than anyone we've heard about, took the Causeway out of town and must have hit a pocket of (relatively) little traffic. thank god for small miracles.

i don't know what to say about everything, it looks highly unpleasant; it's more than i want to think about at the moment and i'm not in the mood to philosophize. round and round and round he goes, where he lands, nobody knows...

As I know from 2005, this could be a completely life-changing event. Same situation, same evacuation, the parallels are surreal - but there's one thing in my life that's different this time around. It's strange to say this - especially here, where I've never really discussed relationship-type stuff (and with good reason) but the worst part of this for me at the moment is the possibility that I'm going to have to sit here and watch this happen without my girlfriend. Megan is the best thing to happen to me in a long, long time, and if everything else in our lives gets twisted all around, she's the one thing I want to stay constant. She's only an hour down the road in Pensacola, but the first rain bands are already here, and driving will be treacherous, so things aren't looking good for the being together when the storm makes landfall, and I can't even tell you how much that sucks.

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 12:03:00 +0000

Three years ago. So much has happened in three years, for better and for worse - mostly better; and suddenly, the chapter ends, a new one begins, and we're back on that day again, facing down the same fears of the unknown. The motions and emotions are the same as the last time; what's different is that having learned some lessons, we are (appropriately) more afraid and (hopefully) more prepared. Our defenses are heightened, literally and figuratively.

The city is already emptying; not many cars on the street, there's a palpable, quiet tension in the air and that odd, empathetic 'we're all in this together' connection with everyone you make eye contact with.

What I'd really like to do is stay here with my cameras and be out in the middle of whatever happens; unfortunately that's unlikely as I'm not that kind of adrenaline junkie (and I'm not stocked up with the supplies for that kind of action, truth be told.) Megan left town last night with her roommate; I'll probably leave tonight to join my family in florida. again.

evacuating every now and then, dealing with the fear, is the price we pay for living in New Orleans. i know and accept that - and it's more that worth it, for as long as there's a New Orleans to come back to.

still, i can't say i want to go through this again.

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:20:00 +0000

Blogging, along with every other NOLA blogger today, from the Rising Tide III conference... it's about time i got here, nearly 3 years late...

While my own blog-posting fell off after the storm, for various personal reasons, blogging in New Orleans really took off, and took on a life of it's own, slowly becoming a vitally important voice and force in the recovery of the city, citizen journalists acting as watchdogs and gadflies and really being responsible for effecting some of what small positive change has occurred around here in the last three years.

makes my pre-katrina blogging seem pretty superficial. (the old site is still around at http://www.unapologetic.com/blog/)

well, it's hard to stay quiet in the middle of a chorus, and being here at Rising Tide and surrounded by so many people whose writing and action i so admire, i'm inspired to get back to this blogging thing and see if there's anything important that i can contribute to the conversation that is happening all around me.

Right now I'm listening to John Barry, author of the book Rising Tide, discuss coastal erosion at the mouth of the Mississippi and all the factors that have contributed to the current state of our coastline. This is an issue I've been familiar with since I was a child (literally, when I was 12, as a volunteer in the Louisiana Swamp section of the Audubon Zoo, I was getting people to sign petitions to save the wetlands) and I have learned an incredible amount about the mechanics of what's happening to us here. Barry is incredibly well informed... definitely need to read his book.

more later.

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:18:00 +0000

the web is often a wonderful and sometimes horrifying place; then there are times when you find something that embodies both of those extremes at once.

via TB, just came across these photos taken on the ground by a combat photographer with russian troops in georgia; they are some of the most beautiful, awful, revolting, honest, and important documents of the human condition i've ever seen. these are war pictures, and some of them get pretty visceral - so by no means recommended for the faint of heart - but if you can handle it, it's worth seeing.

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 15:24:00 +0000

while i'm on occupational nerd rap videos, here's one i just found that's highly educational about the CERN Large Hadron Collider, a topic I'm pretty intrigued with lately, because when they fire it up for the first time this fall, it will positively absolutely not ever even possibly ever at all create tiny tiny little black holes that could, you know, potentially suck in the whole earth.

CERN Rap from Will Barras on Vimeo.

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 05:51:00 +0000

i know, i know, i'm a design geek, and this video has a very, very limited audience of web-design geeks like me, but i know there are still a few of you out there... and it's just too good not to post (and it's actually pretty good advice, too.) ah, it's things like this that make me love teh internets, in a meta kind of way. :)

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:54:00 +0000

update: got my iphone3G - first in line at the lakeside mall ATT store, got there at 3:45am. but it's still a brick, caught in apple's worldwide activation crash. grrr!

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 06:08:00 +0000

two words about july 11, 2008:

iphone3G.

hellboy2.

that is all.

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:52:00 +0000

went to the tom waits show in mobile last night.
it was perfect, odd, sublime, cantankerous and benevolent.

the man is an orchestra. he got a standing ovation for just walking onto the stage (but really, it was for being there for us all, those times when we needed something strange and beautiful.)

saw henry rollins last week at tipitina's as well. he was by turns moving, hilarious, inspiring and infuriating - but always, of course, opinionated, energetic and entirely intense. didn't let up, even once, for three hours.

i like my pop culture heroes. i think i'll keep them. :)

"I work in the gap between art and life." - r.r.

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Wed, 14 May 2008 19:44:00 +0000

r.i.p. robert rauschenberg

few artist's works have influenced the way i think of art, the way i think of design... maybe even the way i think in general - as much as rauschenberg's. wherever my mind can see the beauty and pattern and composition of art in the chaotic and the ordinary, in the mass-media flotsam and jetsam of everyday life, i have (along with christenberry and cornell) rauschenberg to thank.

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:11:00 +0000

http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/samgrahamfelsen/gGBbrc

i don't know what to say, i've never heard a political speech so unflinching. i don't know if this will sink Obama's ship or save it, but i think that if his candidacy for president ends here, today, he will have secured himself a place in American history for speaking truth to power, for describing the social situation in the US with regard to racial issues as it really is, in frightening clarity, and addressing the elephants in the room directly.

hello there, mr. elephant, you've been here a while, haven't you? we're going to have to ask you to leave. thanks.

wow.

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 03:20:00 +0000

of all the good, bad, fucked up, wonderful, bizarrely strange and utterly pedestrian things to happen in the world and to me of late, none have drawn me to my keyboard to tell you about them...

until today. what stirred me from my torpor this evening was finding out about the impending demise of No Depression magazine, a publication that I can credit with fostering and expanding my love not only of alt.country music (whatever that is) but of music in general, turning me on to so many of my favorite artists and truly educating me about the history and culture of music in this country. While I've always been one to embrace the ascendancy of digital culture, downloadable music, music review websites and mp3blogs, it pains me to see my favorite independent ink and pulp pubs becoming less and less viable. The loss of intelligent, thoughtful and caring voices like No Depression and the late Punk Planet are a bitter downside to all the wonderful things that this series of tubes does for us.

Cheers, ND, and thanks for the words and the music.

Let's all improve our paper collections and make it a mission to keep McSweeney's , The Believer, Giant Robot, High Fructose, Juxtapoz and whatever other independent magazines are still out there making paper interesting alive, shall we?

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 12:36:00 +0000

i had a mardi gras. see?

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 06:52:00 +0000

happens every couple of years. i walk home from the quarter. it's a choice: streetcars only run once an hour that late, and I don't like taking cabs. it's not that bad of a walk, actually - nice straight shot down St. Charles, relatively safe, and it only takes about 45 minutes or an hour or so. If only it had been a little warmer tonight...

noreply@blogger.com (Allen) — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 02:07:00 +0000

holy hell. penn gillette is someone i greatly admire for his...

okay, let me start over, since blogger apparently ate most of my last post. I like Penn Gillette because he has always seemed to me to be an authentic person, for a celebrity - unvarnished, lacking in artifice. you get the feeling that he's probably very much the same in person as he is on camera - larger than life, intelligent, cynical, opinionated and unafraid to state and support what he thinks.

Which is why I was tickled to find that he's started something like a videoblog, called "Penn Says". Despite being sponsored (rather brazenly) by Sony, it seems pretty rough - unscripted and unedited - and pretty entertaining so far.