Josh Reisner

I recently programmed a redesign of Brad Ascalon’s site:

Brad is a furniture and industrial designer based in New York City with clients and exhibitions worldwide.

The site shows off some new Jquery javascript techniques.

Beautiful, transcendent show at Mercury Lounge last night. Opening band was The Dig, who were great and are having a record release party at Mercury in early June.

They also played a new song, Popinjay, video is below. I’ve already posted too much TJF so here’s a link to get the song on Amazon.

Until I got to work today, I didn’t know that fires even got to seven alarms; I though it ended at five.

My office is where the NY1 logo is in the picture.

NY1 and NYTimes

Update 4/12 Amazing YouTube footage, via HuffPo

Wikileaks has obtained sickening video of a US Apache helicopter killing a bunch of unarmed men and then wounding children in a van in Baghdad in the summer of 2007. The children were denied care at US military hospitals and taken instead to an Iraqi hospital.

Some quotes from the men on the radio:

Look at those dead bastards. Nice.

And, when Saeed, the Reuters journalist, is wounded, struggling to get up off the curb

All you gotta do is pick up a weapon

Or, apparently be rescued, because when a van shows up with children to take him to the hospital, they flatten it.

Well that’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.

NYT coverage at the time and now, after the release of the video.

Update 4/7: Here’s an excellent analysis by the Medium Lobster at Fafblog

Update 7/8: Bradley Manning, the whistleblower, now faces up to 52 years in military prison.

The Grates played an an amazing show at Brooklyn Bowl last night. I took some photos with this Sony CyberShot Leah is lending me, but I haven’t quite figured it out yet. Flash or no flash? There was this one part where Patience rode someone’s shoulders out into the crowd and it was a great moment but dark. The only shots I got were when I overlapped with someone else’s flash. Anyway you can see at Flickr.

The Grates: Inside Outside

Chase Bank, 10th and 2nd, across from the St. Marks Church, Sunday morning. Via Marklow. According to Morgan Winn:

This happened across the street from my apartment. The protest happened yesterday. Chase is one of the biggest investors in mountain top removal mining. The protesters said they would leave a mountaintop in every Chase. They did.

I think it was pretty baller. Also didn’t hurt that the bulk of the protesters were part of a church choir that was singing lovely inspiration tunes.

It was an excellent show tonight at the Bell House. I think she noticed that I knew pretty much all the words to all the songs. It was her first show in the US! It was a big excited crowd and a warm welcome.

Update 4/7 Ok so obviously she noticed. From her blog:

I had 2 sold out shows in new york which may have been the most enjoyable experiences of my life.

At the top of the “Most Emailed” list on the NYT is a fairly standard report about how the Texas State Board of Education is changing its curricula to deemphasize Darwin and the ‘separation of church and state’ etc etc (so hard to get upset about this stuff anymore!) but this one part toward the end caught my eye:

In economics … they also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.”

“Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,” said one conservative member, Terri Leo. “You know, ‘capitalist pig!’”

Yes! Yes I do. Wise move. In Austin NBC affiliate KXAN’s report, you can see another one of the legislators using that language.

In related news, the Insight Center released a report showing, among other things, that the median net worth of all our single black female free-enterprisers ages 36-49 is just: five dollars. And that was before the recession.

Via Scats.

Continuing with the theme of South African rappers, here’s a video for Zef Side (Beat Boy) from Die Antwoord. It’s interesting to me that in both this and the Jack Parow video previously they emphasize poverty as much as US rappers emphasize wealth.

It’s been a meteoric rise to internet fame for them since Xeni Jardin first posted about them in February. Now they have a record deal with Interscope and Neill Blomkamp has agreed to direct their next video.

Hopefully their success won’t detract from their striking recession-bling look. And Yo-landi’s haircut.

Also this taxi-jam video is pretty fierce.

No mp3s yet, but you can listen to their whole album at dieantwoord.com.

Ah the magic of YouTube. I don’t know what he’s saying (Afrikaans?) but I like it.