BURKEPOST BLOG

The first story Ari thought of took place on stage, with gloves.

The MY WORST Video Podcast brings you short, true stories. It’s what people are willing to share about their worst jobs, decisions, embarrassments, or dates. No mud, no lotus.

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This week’s story is from Michele, who once had a job harassing people by phone about clock accounts.  It did not end well.

The MY WORST Video Podcast brings you short, true stories. It’s what people are willing to share about their worst jobs, decisions, embarrassments, or dates. No mud, no lotus.

This podcast wants to be one of your iTunes subscriptions.

Subscribe to The MY WORST Video Podcast

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Hampshire College.  Optical printer.  1997.

This is a shortened, cryptic version of Javsi’s worst embarrassment story.  It was just too dang embarrassing.

The MY WORST Video Podcast brings you short, true stories. It’s what people are willing to share about their worst jobs, decisions, embarrassments, or dates. No mud, no lotus.

This podcast wants to be one of your iTunes subscriptions.

Subscribe to The MY WORST Video Podcast

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Welcome to The MY WORST video podcast.  These are short, true stories about our worst experiences. Prepared with love, just for you!

This first episode is a 2-minute story from Jordan, a musician.  His worst job was a wedding where he had a wardrobe dysfunction and had to provide the soundtrack to a tragedy.

This podcast wants to be one of your iTunes subscriptions.

Subscribe to The MY WORST video podcast

MY WORST job - Jordan from Patrick Burke on Vimeo.

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Here’s a performance by the Bright, a band led by Megan Hook.  Please enjoy.

The Bright, The Rough Cut from Patrick Burke on Vimeo.

The song is called, Some Image in Your Head.  I shot the performance with my DVX and did the editing.  I used a Gaussian Blur/Screen Composite to create a foggy dreamscape, compensating for the fact that I was shooting with available light.

The venue was Cafe Muse in Hollywood.

My current project is a radio piece (with supplementary video) about the recent firing of more than 1,500 undocumented garment workers at American Apparel. A government audit of personnel files forced the exodus. This has been a favored approach in the Obama Administration, in contrast to Bush’s detention raids.

Peter Schey is representing American Apparel as part of his private practice. He’s also the Executive Director of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law and has a suit pending class action suit seeking an end to immigration raids. I visited him at the center to talk about workplace enforcement under Obama.

SCHEY excerpt from Patrick Burke on Vimeo.

This is, of course, just a sample of that long interview. More background on the story is laid out on spot.us.

I recently finished co-shooting a feature-length comedy called Not Porn. Fortunately, that’s an accurate title. It’s about a guy who makes sexy movies, his colleagues, and their romantic complications.  Here’s a visual sample.

NOT PORN!! teaser test from Patrick Burke on Vimeo.

And here are some production stills, taken by Rocky and Ojay.

That’s a Glidecam rig that I used a lot on this movie, with an HVX-200 on top.   Respect and thanks also to Willie Tipp,  the other cameraman, as well as Director Chris Kessler, Gaffer Wilson Gabbard, Grip George, AC Ro, and ExecProd Henry.

Also gratitude and respect to Radiohead for their inspiring song that I put in the sample, Trickster.

The zafu (cushion) is from Bodh Gaya, site of the Bodhi tree.  After Siddhartha/Shakyamuni’s breakthrough there, he went to Sarnath, outside Varanasi. That’s where I got this dangling cloth. I wasn’t able to concentrate on my breathing while I was there, but now, many years later, I bow to India from my perch in Echo Park. The relics aren’t important; they’re just signs.

A Sitting from Patrick Burke on Vimeo.

Omar and Cedric released Octahedron in June, but I didn’t know until I made a rare trip to Amoeba the other day, getting a pittance for unwanted CDs.  If there was any fanfare for The Mars Volta’s fifth full-length album, I missed it.  So here’s a review with little interference.

Octahedron opens with a minute and 36 seconds of droning.  It makes me wonder if that’s why I haven’t heard of it.  Their soundscapes are known to dawdle.  But clean guitar starts slow and nice in a restrained repetition.  Cedric Bixler Zavala’s first line, “Do you remember how you wore that dress?” suggests we might be in for an album with coherent stories – maybe as unified as the first two, and less coded.  The next line reassures TMV fans that this one too will be dark and incomprehensible: “It slit my sight beneath the eyelids.”

Five minutes in, I’m making the funk face, because the drums have kicked into this ballad (Since We’ve Been Wrong) and now the bass is going places, leading, blooming out of early melodies. To me, composer Omar Rodriguez-López’s guitarwork has usually been the best part of The Mars Volta’s crescendos, so that sounds like growth.

Octahedron is a slower album, with exceptions.  The hard rock highlight is Track 6, Desperate Graves.  It has a mini-headbanging chorus, a rare guitar solo, and Cedric’s best use of his vocal range.  The dark imagery of cut wrists and cut wings don’t appeal to me (“When I breathe the heavens can’t hold me/And I can’t believe any more/The light brings/The highest execution/Show me the wings I must cut”), but it doesn’t prevent this from being a great song.  Melodies overpower meaning, in this case, and several times throughout the album.

The third track’s title, Halo of Nembutals, refers to drug for inducing sedation, hypnosis, coma, and death. “Hear my request to be disowned/Of this I ate/Communion shaped/Serpent rays in prism tail rainbows escape.”  Here, too, I’m singing along, enjoying the song, despite the numbing content. In the lapsed-Christian vocals of Luciforms, the protagonist doesn’t want heaven to exist, a tragedy of embracing a devil over angels.  Another of this albums many devils, in With Twilight as My Guide, lives in tunnels and has daughters in our protagonist’s heart.  So there’s lots of regret and lost faith, suffering and fear.  But at the end of the track, it’s beautiful and fragile, “Every body hang like dead leaves/Don’t you hurt these/Branches waiting.”

Teflon is politically-themed, bass-driven, math rock, with an almost-catchy refrain: “Let the wheels burn/Let the wheels burn/Stack the tires to the neck/With the body inside.”  Cedric invites you to consider cremation and killing hostages in the oval office.  Near the end of the song: “One driver in the motorcade is all it takes.”  Is he referring to Teflon Ron Reagan, or maybe a composite smooth president in a cruel world?  The sessions were recorded in August 2008.

I first tried dissecting the lyrics without reading interviews, and I was disappointed with the lack of unity or insight.  Then I read about Cedric’s inside jokes, sarcasm, and absurdity, and Omar’s justification that it’s better to celebrate and look for meaning in dark subconscious fragments than to be afraid of them.  That may be true, and contemplating impermanence is beneficial, and most of Cedric’s melodies may be moving, but the fetishization of darkness is eventually poisonous to consciousness.

Cotopaxi is supposed to be the hit, right?  The song is faster and louder, but it’s also more familiar, and Cedric is too shrill for too long.  Then again, Omar directed an awesome video for Cotopaxi, which makes me like it more.

Second to last, Copernicus is a boring lullaby. It does get more interesting nearly four minutes in, with programmed percussion and a variation in the vocals, then it’s back to a slow chorus that begs for its own end.  The last track, like the first, starts after about a minute-and-a-half drone.  Luciforms is at least a representative track to end with, given that once again, needlessly dark imagery fails to ruin otherwise great rock.

Instruments=9.1

Vocal melody=8.4

Words=4.6;  Angel/Devil Cheese=61%

Hard Rock=30%

Great songs= Desperate Graves, Since We’ve Been Wrong, With Twilight as My Guide.

Avoidable songs=Cotopaxi, Copernicus

Overall=8.08