My friends are writing books.

Not only that, the books are getting picked up and now, you can buy them!

My friend June Cross has finally finished her memoir. It's called "Secret Daughter", order it here, and read June's experiences with the whole book publishing thing in her blog here. June and I worked on a couple of films together, including the orientation film for the Museum of African American History in Baltimore.

And my friend Andrew Beaujon's book on Christian rock is out as well. The snappy title is "Body Piercing Saved My Life", snag it here. He'd been thinking about this one for a while, and pitched it everywhere without much luck. Then, Bush got elected for the second time, and his phone started ringing and ringing.

Tags: Books, Secret Daughter, June Cross, Andrew Beaujon, Christian Rock

Crazy for bicycles.

I rode in the 5-boro bike tour over the weekend. Lots of fun; much better organized than last year. Once again, not that many folding bikes in the crowd, which surprised me; my dahon speed pro served admirably once more.

I've put some photos over on the photoblog:

[fotoblog]

Tags: 5 boro bike tour, new york city

TFF: loudQUIETloud

I'm gonna keep posting my reviews of things from the Tribeca Film Festival even though it's over for this year. I saw a lot of great films, and I think a good few of them have a solid chance for distribution, so eventually you can see them again. Thus:

loudQUIETloud

is the title of a pretty cool documentary about the Pixies reunion tour. It's a nice mix of behind -the-scenes footage and concert footage. The concert stuff looks amazing; they shot on super-16 film and it was worth every cent.

The basic premise the film-makers ended up settling on was that this was a doc about four band members who don't actually seem to talk to each other very much. You get to spend time with each of the band members as they do whatever they do when they aren't together, which can be fascinating and hilarious. How rock is it to see the Deal girls doing needlepoint, right? The drummer, who provides the closest thing to an arc for the film, seems to have become obsessed with magic and card tricks during the interim (again, extremely rock, yes?) and basically everyone's been living life as someone who used to be in the Pixies. Guitarist Joey Santiago is seen playing with his wife as a duet to about 14 people...

There's no big finish to the film; the tour ends and no one has written any new pixies songs or booked time in a studio, despite the overwhelming acclaim and financial success of the tour. But if you're even a marginal pixies fan, you'll want to see it. The main problem, as I see it, is that Some Kind of Monster already came out...It's hard to compete with footage of Metallica in group therapy. But all in all, this was a blast, and even if it's a bit of golden oldies & halcyon days, it's great to see the people behind the amazing music. Oh, they also got Daniel Lanois to do the score.


ps: at one point, someone in the film says that Kurt Cobain said he was just trying to rip off the Pixies...on my way home from work today, U-MASS came on my ipod, and I'll be damned...right there in there chorus, is the hook to 'smells like teen spirit'. How about that.

Tags: Tribeca Film Festival, Pixies, Stick Figure Productions