Here it is, Christmas Eve day and I have nothing to blog about that's both Christmas-related and relevant to Nerdcore For Life. Every good blogger knows that you need to post some kind of holiday message whenever a holiday comes around. But then, a festivus miracle!
The editors of Nerdcore For Life, Kipp and KC Norman sent me a bizarre animated Christmas card. Their company, Storyboard Productions did the whole thing. Watch and be mesmerized:
Tickets for GLITCHED: THE DUTCH NERDCORE EVENT are now on sale!
http://www.glitched.nl/tickets
If you buy your tickets now you can get them for a mere 7.50 Euros. (like 10 dollars)
Also, you can't sell tickets without a venue. So we can announce that the show will be taking place at Club Panama in Amsterdam. The place is perfect for a screening and concert and features both a sweet screen and stage.
The club is amazing and has hosted some huge A List acts before. Here's the website which happens to be in dutch.
http://www.panama.nl/nightclub/home.php
To re-cap, GLITCHED will start off with a screening of Nerdcore For Life and be followed by performances by BEEFY, MC ROUTER, YTCRACKER and MC LARS. Here is the when and where info:
Glitched: The Dutch Nerdcore Event
Thursday Feb 26, 2009
Club Panama, Amsterdam
Nerdcore For Life screening @ 8PM
Live performances @ 9:30PM
Hey now! Did you vote for my entry in the Chicago 2016 Olympic Bid video contest? If so, Thanks!
I placed second which is actually kind of just what I hoped for. Second prize is $5,000 worth of video production gear! I'm a glory hog and wouldn't have minded winning the whole thing but man oh man can I use that equipment. I even get to pick my own stuff so for the first time, "Crapbot Productions" will actually have some physical assets! Looks like my call to Rod Blagojevich to ask him to pull some strings for me in exchange for a piece of the prize really paid off.
If you're in the Chicagoland viewing area on Thursday be sure to set your alarm for 6:40am to see me and the other winner on channel 5 be introduced by an "Olympian." I'm hoping it's Aphrodite.
Chicago is a candidate city for the 2016 Olympics and the Chicago Olympic Bid Committee announced a video contest called "Why Chicago?" back in October. The point of the contest is to create a short video explaining why you feel Chicago should get the 2016 games.
I work in the city and I decided to carry a little videocamera with me for about two weeks and film different cool things around town. The first round of the contest ended the other day. The video I entered is a little goofy but the judges and visitors to the website (www.chicag2016.org) picked it to be a one of the 5 finalists in the contest. The "final 5" will all be shown on NBC5's morning show sometime next week but I won't get any advanced notice about the time or date.
Now here's where I need help. The second round of the contest started on Friday. The finalist videos are up on the website and two winners (first and second place) will be selected based on scores given to them by visitors to the site. So I need people to vote for me!! Voting is only open for a week so votes need to be cast before Friday, December 5th! The contest has some great prizes. To see what they are, click here.
The winners are decided just by votes on the website. I had a really high score going but unfortunately, other contestants are getting their friends to give the other entries the lowest possible scores! So I need all the "5 star" ratings I can get! Plus, The star ratings are actually weighted. The more votes I get, the more weight more score gets. The formula is complicated but long story short the more people that for me, the better.
Don't give bad scores to the other videos though. It's uncool to give a good video a bad rating just to help someone else win. But if you watch another entry and really, really like it or dislike it though then hey, knock yourself out I guess. I think it's best not to worry about the other videos too much.
Here is my entry. If you like it and want to help you need to register at Chicago2016.org and cast your vote there. The voting process might seem complicated but it's super simple. It should only take about 3 minutes to register and vote.
Oh, also, if you have multiple e-mail addresses, don't create more than one account to cast multiple votes. One person who votes in the contest will be selected to win a trip and it would too bad if the winner turned out to be a fake person. Plus it's you know...cheating. But please do pass along a link to this blog post to anyone else you know who might want to help out!
If you have any questions, just let me know: Nerdcoreforlife@gmail.com
Thanks a billion!
Dan
After waiting to talk about this for about 2 months I think planning is far enough along that we can announce this:
The date is set for Thursday Feb 26, 2009. The venue has been booked but 4Worx hasn’t announced it yet so I’ll hold off on mentioning it. Let me just say, the place is awesome and it’s featured a lot of A list concerts.
So where will the “Dutch nerdcore event” be taking place? Amsterdam, of course!
What will be going on? We will be holding the European premiere of Nerdcore For Life and immediately after the screening there will be live performances by four of the artists from the film. Who’s performing? Just MC ROUTER, BEEFY, MC LARS and YTCRACKER that’s all. I’ll be there too to present the film...and party my ass off Amsterdam-style.
More details can be found the event's website:
http://www.glitched.nl/
So there you go. Amsterdam….2009. Be there and witness Nerdcore History!! Or just stay at home and wait until we post videos and blogs about it afterwards.
That's it. That's the whole mention. But as brief as it is I still feel like the Pope of Chili-town. Why? Because I was quoted in frickin' MovieMaker Magazine! I actually buy and read that shit! It's Moviemaker Magazine man! And not only is it MovieMaker, it's their annual "Complete Guide To Making Movies: 2009" issue. That thing stays on sale for like 6 months and they send copies to film schools all over the country. Like I said, it's a tiny mention but it still kind of amazes me that we made a movie for almost nothing and it wound up being enough of a "real movie" to have its title appear in MovieMaker Magazine.
The Nerdcore show in at the Viaduct theater Chicago I wrote about in the last post was great and much fun. Even though it featured pretty much the three best known artists in the genre, MC Frontalot, MC Lars and Ytcracker, they still opened up the show acts that are not as super famous as them. It was an odd venue that was like half black-box theater and half music club but the place was packed at the whole show had a weird but very fun, communal feel to it. I even met a great couple that said they drove all the way to the Wisconsin film fest last April just for the premiere of the documentary. That's the kind of stuff that makes me feel all tingly. Here's a few choice pics from the night.
Tons more cool pictures of the night can be found on our Flicker page:
http://flickr.com/photos/nerdcoreforlife/sets/72157608802398855/
If you're reading this you probably already care enough about nerdcore to know that the top three nerdcore artists out there, Ytcracker, MC Frontalot and MC Lars are starting on their cross-country tour today. But if you weren't aware of that well....you are now.
The guys are making several million stops on the tour so odds are good that they'll be performing within driving distance of you. Full list of dates and locations are on MC Lars' myspace page:
Personally I'll be at the (above advertised) Chicago show at the Viaduct theater next saturday. Will you be there too? No? Why not? Because you don't live anywhere near Chicago? Yeah, that's an ok reason I guess. You're excused. Everyone else is required to attend for their own good though.
You can tell I'm starting to get a little worn out just by the fact that blog recaps of each of our screenings get shorter and shorter as time goes on. For the premiere I wrote a small book of a re-cap, took a few thousand photos and filmed everything. Six months later I return from a film fest with less than a dozen pictures in my camera, no video and zero hilarious stories of drunken, celebratory exuberance.
I just didn't have it in me to go full bore this time out. Sure I flew down to New Orleans for the screening but honestly it was mostly an excuse to take a little vacation.
It was a good trip though; I ate maybe 2000 pralines and the screening went well. Even though we got the midnight-movie slot we had a good turnout and everyone seemed to really like the film. A few people seemed to enjoy it more than anyone I've yet encountered. Plus I think everybody stayed for the Q&A which really meant a lot since the movie ended at about 1:20AM!
The big paper down there, The Times Picayune recommended us as their "pick" for the first night of the festival. The frickin' picked us over the screenings of Queen Latifa's new movie, The Secret Life of Bees and Mike Leigh's new film, Happy Go Lucky. In your face Queen Latifa!! I gotta say, it's always fun to roll into a new town for a film fest, pick up a copy of the local paper and see the film in there:
After the screening someone actually told me that what convinced them to see the movie was that picture of Router.
On Friday night the festival had a swanky opening night party that my friend and I went to. New Orleans is a classy fest and the party was pretty darn good. There was free gumbo and Pralines everywhere and I even saw Harry Shearer!! I wanted to go introduce myself but I didn't want to come off like the one dork in the room full of hip filmmakers. The guy that did go talk to Harry Shearer though was the Ambassador of Nerdcore himself, High-C. What they discussed, I do not know but I did notice that High-C came back to our table with the longest note/autograph I've every seen and one less copy of creative materials he brought with him.
Personally the screening was kind of a big thing for me. Why? Because not only did the movie play in a Landmark Theater but is played in mall. I felt so mainstream!
Just about 45 minutes before showtime I got a surprise text from one of my favorite nerdcore folks, Monzy. He was flying into New Orleans for a wedding and if his plane landed on time he was going to rush right to the theater. He made it just as the film started to roll. Monzy's awesome.
So New Orleans really knows how to put on a nice festival. I even got my first Swag bag!! That was a huge career landmark for me. It was a fun time and I got to party, feel cool, eat pralines and beignets, hang out with Monzy and High-C, meet some Nerdcore fans and talk to some really great people from the festival. I wish I had some crazy stories report but...wait, no I don't. I'm glad this fest was smooth and uneventful. It gave me time to focus on visiting above-ground cemeteries and voodoo shops.
The Chicago screening at Reggie's was last night and while we had a good turn out, the whole event was kind of crazy. The White Sox had a make or break playoff game Sunday and when I walked into the club, the game was on every TV and the place was full of people who were there to watch it. I had calculated that it would be over just in time for the movie to start but thanks to a rain delay both the game and the movie had to happen at the same time. Thankfully, the kind of people that care about nerdcore aren't usually the type of people to care about the playoffs so a lot of people showed up for the screening.
Still.....trying to turn off the baseball game and start the movie did not go over well with the regulars. We had the whole place rented out though and so at 6pm Nerdcore For Life was running on all 20 of the clubs screens and plasmas. It was a pretty cool way to see the movie and the displaced sports fans all left to seek refuge at the nearby Wabash Tap or the South Loop Club. After the movie we even had quick performances by The Former Fat Boys and William Sides Atari Party. So it was a good night.
But what was really amazing about the Chicago screening was the local press it generated for us. I got to do my second public radio interview and this time it was for the Chicago Public Radio show, Eight Forty-Eight. It went great and the producer mixed some music and quotes from the film into the final segment. It turned out awesome. The podcasted version of the piece is on-line and you can hear it by clicking on that pink box thing on the left.
After the show aired I heard from a writer at the free daily paper, the Chicago Red Eye. That paper is everywhere in chicago and they actually did a little thing on us back in july. Well this time they wanted to mention the screening in their weekend edition. I thought they'd give us a little blurb but instead, look what we got!
