My Homemade Bass Video!

This is my first actual attempt at video editing, so please forgive the sound part of this. The bass sounds louder because it was closer to the camera mic than the accompanying music played through a stereo.

About the bass:

Yeah, it's cardboard. I originally wasn't gonna put any wood in it other than the neck, but as I worked, I realized I needed to brace the body inside. When I found out I could lacquer cardboard, I went fucking nuts. In the end it still feels like cardboard, just a bit stiffer and water-resistant. I put in a homemade pickup made from a piezo buzzer, which works well but feeds back a little easier than I'd like. The neck is a wide stair rail that I ground down, the headstock is a piece of the same rail cut off and turned around. The little devil horns were somehwat accidental, I just enhanced them. The tuners are just bolts with plastic heads. The strings are weed-whacker strings of varyious gauges, threaded onto the tuning bolts through holes in the headstock. Genius, really. There are probably 6-7 screws in the entire thing, the rest is held together by wood glue. I was extremely stressed toward the end; I had invested so much effort into this project (not much money, though, fortunately), and I didn't even know yet if it worked. I have to thank Karissa for her patience with this project, too. She listened to me talk endlessly about every fucking detail, and I can't imagine how agonizing that must have been. Unfortunately for her, I have more projects in a similar vein I want to try, and she has to hear more.

On a different-but-equally-cool note, I just found out Metallica should be releasing their new album, Death Magnetic, some time in September. Awesome. If they come anywhere near here, I don't care if I have to whore myself, I'm going to make the show.

New page of Golden Brown up, you can check it out here. Sorry for the week's delay, I was really hoping to have this page out before my vacation started.

What am I watching?

Undead- A meteor shower causes an infection leading to zombie outbreak in an Australian fishing vilage. Aliens then come in and 'cure' the residents, walling them in and raining "acid" rain on them. The acting is okay, if a little stylized and overdone. The mysterious fisherman helping the others is too moody and his action scenes remind one of a redneck version of the Matrix. The FX were pretty good overall, though. The one eerie element of the movie is the expressions on the faces of those being abducted. The ending is grim-but-determined, much like a Romero flick.

Jenifer- A detective rescues a torture victim, only to fall in love with her, despite her horrible facial disfiguration and diagnosed mental retardation. When they say disfigured, they mean fucking disfigured! Her eyes alone scare the shit out of me. The sex scenes are typical of softcore, but are absolutely disturbing when you see Jenifer's face, hear her guttural cries, and remember that mentally there's something missing. Oh yeah, and she kills and eats animals & people. This is a very creepy film that was well made and has a great ending-not-ending. I had a helluva time finding this movie on IMDB at first, only to realize it's part of the now-mutated for cable Masters of Horror series.

Batman: Arkham Asylum- The inmates of Arkham Asylum take over on April Fools Day and demand Batman in exchange for hostages. Based on a Grant Morrison graphic novel. This is just a fan film trailer, but I was so floored by it that I had to post it here in honor of the now-in-theaters The Dark Knight. Even though just a trailer, it ties with Batman: Dead End as an all-time favorite fan film. It sucks that it's in Spanish, but the imagery is so faithful to the way Kelley Jones illustrates Batman that I can't even find words for how cool this is (Kelley Jones was known for a very creepy rendition of Batman: super-long ears, constantly bearing gritted teeth, elongated limbs and a cape that blended into the darkness as though he were literally a part of the shadows). Even his Joker is uber-creepy, both in looks and voice. I strongly recommend following the link for this movie and watching it.

Clerks- A day in the life of a convenience store clerk & a movie store clerk. How weird is it that I have never seen this movie? I can relate to the blatant misanthropy and the descriptions of idiot customers, but I found the dialogue pretentious. It's a bunch of young people who all seem to possess a biting wit and awareness of politics and humanity and can spit it out in sentences without even thinking it. Bullshit. Jay & Silent Bob worked great in this movie because they countered this GenX psuedointellectualism with biting anti-wit. Jay even fucked up a joke in the movie and had to retell it. I was overall disappointed in the movie. I did like how Randall summed up the insignificance of store clerks, however.