A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

The other day I met this really cute girl who told me she was going to film school so she could make music videos. The only problem was she didn’t really know anything about them. I am no expert or anything but I made a date with her so she could come over and watch music videos with her. I probably have about 15 music video DVDs and get pretty excited about my favorite ones. The be all and end all of music video DVDs are the PALM Pictures Directors Label series. They are releasing extensive DVD’s of the best music video directors around. Although I am still waiting for the Jonas Akerlund and David Fincher ones… Of the PALM discs the one I am most into is the Spike Jonze one. Michel Gondry’s disc is brilliant, that guy is on a whole new level, but Jonze disc has my favorite music, features, and I can relate most to his stuff. If you don’t know Jonez music video work, you know his movies. He directed Adaptation and Being John Malkovich and he just finished a live action version of Where The Wild Things Are. On top of that he was amazing as an actor in David O. Russel’s Three Kings. Anyway, after the jump I am going to give you my three favorite Spike Jonze music videos. I hope you dig them as much as I do.

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About two months ago I suddenly looked up and realized that 10 people in the bar I was standing in were wearing some form of prohibition era hat. Fedoras and pork pies went out of style with Kennedy, why the hell are they making a comeback now. Now I have no real place to be talking about fashion since I have worn a t shirt and jeans every day since I was born, but this hat thing is a bit odd. I didn’t really think that much of it until I went to Urban Outfitters the other day and the store completely freaked me out. In this one store they seem to have every item on earth that will make you hip. For me being cool should be about finding weird things from all over and appropriating them into your style. You find a thrift shirt and some vintage belt and find a style that makes you unique. There are a lot of great things that I would want in Urban Outfitters but to see all that manufactured cool in one place made me feel a bit sick. They sell Holga cameras there for $70 dollars. They sell limited edition Nike Dunks. They sell books by Chuck: both Klosterman and Palahniuk. And of course they sell fedoras. They had about 10 different kinds so you can pretend you are unique and interesting. The chances are in a bar with 10 people wearing cheap hipster fedoras that maybe only one person will be wearing the exact one you bought. Every time I have brought this up with people wearing these hats they tell me they have had it for years… This may be true, but I didn’t notice. What I want to know is on exactly what day did this become part of the hipster uniform and why wasn’t I informed. But the main reason this all became a post is that on Halloween I asked my friend where she got her fedora; I was wondering if she was shopping at Urban Outfitters. Her reply? “I got it at Warped Tour for $10.” Remind me to shoot myself. The Fedora is officially the new trucker hat.

Anyway, I looked through my posted pictures from just September and October and I came up with 40 images of people wearing old timey hats. Several of the pictures have multiple people wearing the hats. These pictures come from just four parties. M, High Voltage, Trash and Six Six Sick. High Voltage was the most Hat Filled party, with Trash being the least filled. I only shot a few weeks of Six Six Sick so I didn’t get many shots, but I think they averaged 3 hats per party. Keep in mind that I did not intentionally shoot people with these hats, I was just looking through old galleries. Anyway, check out all 40 pictures of silly hats here.

A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

Welcome to the Halloween edition of Favorite Things, my weekend blog about three things I dig. Today we are talking about zombies. I love zombies. I got into an argument the other day with someone who tried to say that vampires were better than zombies. That is just bullshit. Vampires are fucking boring. If you get eaten by a vampire… guess what? You get to live forever. Get bit by a zombie? You are just constantly hungry for brains and the chances are someone alive, who is much faster than you, is going to come a long with a shovel or a shotgun and detach your head from your body. That is scary. I am not a big horror buff, but I am a zombie fan. My horror section is probably 60% zombie films. One of my favorite movies of all time is Dawn Of The Dead. Just thinking about it gets me all excited. I sort of want to live the rest of my life in an abandoned shopping mall actually. It is so spooky. Sean Of The Dead was pretty fantastic too… it was probably the funniest horror movie I have ever seen. I have all the Evil Dead movies including the Necronomicon special editions that scream when you press them. I own at least two Re-Animators and Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive and about a dozen more (Redneck Zombies anyone?). Anyway, zombies are amazing and not just because they moan a lot and eat brains… they do a lot of other things too. After the jump I am going to break down my three favorite things that zombies do, so please, read on.

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A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

Takashi Miike is probably the most well known and beloved of the Asian Extreme directors. He has directed 75 films in under 20 years including 40 this decade alone. With all that production you have to have some misses and he does. I have seen probably 30 of his films and a lot of his Yakuza films run together a bit. For those not up on Japanese cinema a HUGE percentage of their live action films are based on organized crime. Imagine if they released 100 mobster films in the US. Out of control. The Yakuza is bigger part of Japanese culture than the mob is here, but they still release an insane amount of these films. Some of his biggest successes have been in this genre like Ichi The Killer and Dead Or Alive, but it is his taste for the bizarre that has really made him well known. He became well known in the US after directing the horror film Audition. The film an almost boring romantic film for the first hour and then suddenly breaks your neck with one of the more horrific torture scenes ever put to film. He is one of my favorite directors and if you continue reading I am going to break down my three favorites from the master of the strange. All my favorites are from 2001 a year in which he directed 7 full length films. There is no more fucked up director than Miike. Oh yeah, one other thing, he directs children’s films too… although I can’t imagine what parent in their right mind would let their kid see The Great Yokai War.

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A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

Before 1988 I pretty much listened to music my parents made me listen to: The Beatles, The Monkees, and a lot of Jimmy Buffet. The first music I ever owned I got for X-Mas from my Aunt: Michael Jackson’s Thriller on vinyl. It came out in ’82, but I probably didn’t get it until X-Mas ’84. It might have been ’83, but I have a pretty clear memory of dancing to Michael Jackson in pre-school and I was born in 1980 so I am not sure if I remember much of anything that happened in 1983. I do have vivid memories of wanting Regan to win in 1984. So back to my point. In 1988 I was in the second grade and I really started to listen to music on my own. The rock songs I remember being into were Born In The USA by the Boss and We Didn’t Start The Fire by Billy Joel. Other than that I only listened to Hip Hop. Run DMC, Fresh Prince, LL Cool J and mostly Young MC. In the 4th grade I switched schools and this popular kid Stephen Salyer told me to listen to this top 40 radio station in DC called WAVA. (Strangely that same kids’ brother played me Nirvana for the first time. I heard Bleach before Nevermind was out but I couldn’t stand it.) From 1990 – Valentines Day 1992 I listened to nothing but top 40 music, most of which was rap. On Valentines day WAVA switched formats to Contemporary Christian music. That day I moved the dial over to WJFK and started listening to Howard Stern in the morning and pretty much listened to exclusively Nirvana (who I got into after hearing their Incesticide Album) until Kurt Cobain killed himself and I started listening to exclusively to punk rock until 1999 when I moved into a dorm room with a guy who hated punk and loved Dave Mathews. We made a deal: No punk for me and no Dave Mathews for him. We could however agree on one music and that coincidentally was old school hip hop and I was back to the beginning. Anyway, there is a lot of music that I listened to from 1989 to 1992 that were HUGE hits to me, but no one really remembers because of another huge hit on that album. I want to talk to you about three of those secondary hits today. So my three favorite forgotten hits after the break.

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A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

Welcome to the first addition of A Few Of My Favorite Things. To start things off I am going to talk about my three favorite Blaxploitation films. I probably know more about Blaxploitation that anyone you have ever met. I have seen over 50 Blaxploitation films and in college wrote a 20 page research paper on the genre. For those not familiar will Blaxploitation film, or Exploitation film let me give you a quick explanation. Exploitation films are not called exploitation because they exploit anyone… they are called this because they exploit certain elements in a film that are sure to sell tickets. These elements include violence, sex, action, or after 1971 all black films. Some of the more notable exploitation genres are slasher flicks, women in prison, spaghetti westerns (will be featured on this site soon), Sexploitation, biker films, and kung fu films. These films were made cheaply and mostly badly. As long as you had a good trailer and had the elements of your genre you could pretty much sell the film. In 1970 there had not been many films made for a black audience. People did not really think that you could market to that crowd. Melvin Van Peebles thought otherwise. In 1971 at great risk to himself he wrote, directed and stared in a film called Sweet Sweetback’s Baaadasss Song. I am not a huge fan of the film, but it changed everything forever. Aside from starting the career of Earth Wind and Fire, the movie showed Hollywood that there was a black audience to exploit. In 1972 Shaft and Superfly were released to great commercial success. After that EVERYONE wanted to make black films. Between 1972 and 1975 nearly 100 of these films were made before people got sick of the low production values and rehashed plots. A sequel to Blacula may have been to much for anyone to handle. That being said, without these films modern black films and urban culture would be so different from what it is now. So now that you know what’s what… let’s get to my favorites after the break.

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Finally. Since I moved to NYC I have been reading about talks the city has had about allowing cell phone reception in the subway. Now, while I don’t like the idea of being on the 6 train during rush hour with every asshole on the train talking on their cell phone, I think it is insane that you can’t get reception in trains because people don’t want to be bothered. Every day I ride the J train into the city… it is an above ground train and people talk on their cell phones. I talk on my cell phone. And you know what? It is not that bad. I am rarely bothered. The only time I am ever annoyed is with those god awful walkie-talkie phones that should be illegal in the first place. I would slap the person silly who came up with that fucking idea. That beeping drives me fucking nuts. Sorry… off track. The point is in a few years you are going to be able to talk on your phones while you are in the station which makes calling work to tell them you are going to be ten min late because the train hasn’t showed up yet that much easier. Obviously in case of emergency it is a life saver… literally. For most of the people reading this site it means not missing important phone calls about change in party plans when you are waiting at the Bedford L. I was in DC the other weekend and I could use my cell on the train there. I was on the train for nearly an hour and if I didn’t have reception I would have missed an important call. Anyway, clearly the idea is a good one when the dissenting quote the Times found was this one.

But Karol Ledworowski, 28, a student who lives in Tudor City, thought it was unnecessary. “You can wait until you leave the station to make a phone call or receive a message,” he said. And he worried that terrorists could use cellphone signals to detonate a bomb underground.

This brilliant individual thinks that we shouldn’t have phones on subways is because the terrorists might win. What the fuck? How about when the terrorist blow something up and you are trapped underground and can’t call for help, or reach your families. Or… how about terrorists figuring out another way to blow up a bomb with out a fucking cell phone. For example a suicide bomb like every other time. Or how about stop living your life in fear and worrying what the god damned terrorists are going to do you dumb Bush voting mother fucker. Sorry… I am ranting. This is good for the city, they just should have done this years ago.

So I figure the point of a journal is to write down stuff you are thinking about so maybe you can work it out better in your head.  Get your feelings on paper.  That being said a thousand people a day read my journal, so writing about personal shit and thinking you care about it is pretty egotistical.  So read the next paragraph so you can know why I didn’t take photos last night, then move on to the next post.  Thanks.

So last night I was going to go to Rated X and take pictures.  Michael T asked me to, and Jess put me on the list.  I wanted to go because it was the last Rated X for a month and because it was peoples birthdays and such.  Anyway I was pretty much on my way out the door when I found out that my ex-girlfriend was going to go.  This sort of freaked me out.  I decided I would take an hour nap and just show up in time for the hot body contest and take a few pictures and go home with minimal emotional scaring.  Once I fell asleep, I could not get up again.  So there that is.

Now the thing is, there is no reason I should be afraid of my ex.  We parted on good terms and I am sure if I needed something from her I could call her and she would help me out.  That being said I don’t want to see her, because when I see her I can’t hug her and hold her hand and stuff and that does not make sense to me.  This girl was the closest thing to me for six weeks.  (While that is not very long, it was the first time I have had a girlfriend in a very long time and she grew on me quickly.)  But now we don’t talk.  I haven’t seen her in two weeks.  This person who was so close to me, is now nothing in my life.  Relationships are so weird to me.  The friendships I have had with people I am no longer friends with end because someone moves, or we just stop hanging out slowly and see less and less of each other.  With girls I see semi-regularly we just talk less and hook up less and eventually I get a new phone and I don’t put her number in it.  In any other relationship you just don’t stop suddenly.  My girlfriend and I didn’t work out, that’s fine, but it doesn’t make sense to just stop everything all together.  It just seems unnatural.  Why do we shut out the people we once cared about the most.

Anyway, I was mostly okay with it anyway.  When we first broke up I didn’t mind too much.  I mostly was upset I was going to have to stop having unprotected sex and an air conditioned place to stay, but as time goes on I seem to miss her more and more.  I haven’t seen her in two weeks, she should be out of sight, out of mind.  I keep having dreams about her and I don’t know why.  I don’t think I want to get back together with her, I don’t even know what I would want.  I sort of had a point when I started writing this, and I realized I don’t any more. I just don’t know why I miss her more now, instead of less.  And I don’t know why human relationships work the way they do.  I don’t get jealous when my friends hang out with other friends.  I don’t write friends out of my life just because it is easier to deal with that emotionally.  I just wish sexual relationships worked more like friendships.  People are weird.  That’s all.

Also, if you really look at people really hard we sort of look just like any other animal… a boring looking animal.  It seems weird that I am into people and not some cool looking animal like hippos.   Sorry.  Go look at pictures of your self from some party now.

Last week I posted the video to the remix of the Fat Joe song “Make It Rain”. Other than the fact that this song is about throwing stacks of money at strippers, which I find hilarious, I am not a huge fan of the song. That being said, the R Kelly verse might be the best written stanza since Shakespeare. I just wanted to talk to you about some of my favorite parts.

I be drilling these chicks like Major Payne

This line is extremely clever in a way only R Kelly could come up with. You see, he is referencing the Damon Waynes movie Major Payne which deals with a drill Sargent yelling at his subordinates. Yet when he says the word drill, he is actually speaking about having sex with these for mentioned chicks. In this line “drilling” has a double meaning. Brilliant.

When I make it rain, they be like “Yo… do it again”

Obviously they are excited when he throws money at them. You might think that they would feel disrespected by this action, but Kelly explains that the money they receive more than makes up for feeling completely debased. Or a second theory is that while normally they would mind this action, when R Kelly does it, they want him to do it again because they understand his brilliance.

From the club to the coupe, inside my gates
Up in my bedroom screaming each other’s name

He explains that no matter where he his, girls will have sex with him. He can get strippers to copulate with him in his car, in his house or in his bedroom. It does not matter where, as long as they have been showered with money prior to these actions.

They was perty perty, and I was flirty flirty
Lil’ dro, lil’ bub now they getting’ dirty dirty

These girls were very attractive and he was acting very flirtatious, but they did not become promiscuous until he provided them with hydroponic marijuana and and champagne.

Don’t ax me what my name is, stupid bitch I’m famous

Whilst the word AX is not in my vocabulary, I take this to mean “ask” in Kelly’s parlance. R Kelly is known the world over for his outstanding lyricism, his unquestioned singing abilities and his fondness for urinating on underage women. Because of these reasons you should be well aware of who he is. As a future warning for those who have not yet met Kelly, please, when introducing yourself tell him your name, but it is commonly accepted that you know his name, and you should under no circumstances ask for it.

You gon’ make me aim this
Leave your ass brainless

What Kelly is suggesting here is that because you did not immediately recognize him he may, in fact, have to aim his pistol of some sort and shoot you in the head which would cause your brain to leave your skull.

I’m tryin’ to stay R&B
But these streets is a part of me

This could possibly be my favorite lyric of the song; It is certainly the one I most relate to. R&B or Rhythm and Blues is most commonly associated with romance and relationships. I would go so far as to say that R&B is an expression of love. That being said, R Kelly is not all hugs and kisses. The dangerous street life that we are so familiar with from Kelly’s “Trapped In the Closet” videos, is very much still a part of him and that he might really shoot you in the face because you asked him his name, but he will try not to.

So don’t get it twisted

Please, don’t misunderstand me.

You see I order one bottle, then I fuck with one model

I mean, that’s just how it goes. When you order champagne, you fornicate with a model.

Then I order more bottles, now I got more models

If A is true, then B is true. 1 bottle = 1 model. More bottles = More Models

I’m from that city where them niggaz don’t play mayn

Blacks do not play games in Chicago. Never. Not one game. Or, this could also possibly mean that there are some very serious fellows in Chicago and that you should be careful when cracking wise around them.

I take a chick to my room like caveman

I think what he is saying is that when he meets a woman he likes, he bashes her over the head with an over-sized club and then takes her back to his cave for unconscious rape. Whatever, he is saying, I am pretty sure that it implies rape somehow, conscious or not.

So ask your girlfriend my name, I bet she go
“Skeet skeet skeet skeet, Weatherman ’bout to make it rain!”

R Kelly has so much confidence in his attractiveness to women that he believes that your girlfriend is interested him. So much that she would say either something as ridiculous as “skeet skeet skeet skeet” or she would actually orgasm then and there to the sound of his name. The part the part about him being a weatherman is slightly more confusing as weathermen usually predict weather, while R Kelly is actually making metaphoric weather when he “makes it rain”. I would compare these actions to those of a weather deity and less to a man.

Yes. I said it. R Kelly is a god; more specifically R Kelly is the Rain God. Fear him.

Good Night and Good Luck.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm1lDpwV3-c[/youtube]