Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock & Roll

Marie told me there was a documentary playing at the DFT that covered Cambodian rock'n'roll. Nuff said. I was there.

We hadn't been to the DFT in far too long. Sucks. Just "been busy" with other shit. And Netflix definitely has something to do with it. We ate some good vegan nosh at Seva in Detroit, hit up the Crystal Gallery in the DIA then checked out the flick.

It was really well done. Good production value. Well edited and paced. It covered the key players in the birth of Cambodian rock'n'roll and tracked them up until the Khmer Rouge took power in the early 70's. Shit hit the fan and Dead Kennedy's wrote a song about said shit hitting said fan.

Not surprisingly, the doc' gets pretty emotional. The good times are obliterated by the Khmer Rouge and the bloodshed that followed. It's a bummer. But if you take anything positive away from it, I think it's the resilience of the people.

This is a good flick and definitely worth viewing.

Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon

Shep Gordon was the greatest Hollywood manager to ever live. I don't think that's really disputable. This is a documentary about his life. And it's fucking funny as hell.

It pretty much starts out with Shep, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and a whole bunch of weed. Alice Cooper enters the scene. He manages Cooper and his life takes on a whole new, crazy trajectory. The movie focuses on Cooper the most since they have the longest and tightest relationship. Their relationship is the thread that weaves the whole story together. And quite a lot of the anecdotes and whatnot have been covered a million times before, most recently in the Cooper documentary by Sam Dunn; Super Duper Alice Cooper. But that's okay cuz you can never get enough Coop'.

Outside of Alice and music management you see Shep dabble in film production and even create a whole freakin genre of celebrities; the celebrity chef. That was this man's invention for god's sake. It's pretty remarkable unto itself.

Anyway, Shep is widely regarded as the nicest guy ever, he's rich beyond anyone's wildest dreams, and his life has been pretty god damn amazing. This documentary is very entertaining and definitely a must-see.

cool.

even cooler.

On Any Sunday: The Next Chapter

The original On Any Sunday is a motorcycle classic. It has Steve McQueen in it. It brought motorcycling to the public's eye and really tried to show it as a clean hobby / sport, and not something to be identified with outlaw M/C/s. It rules.

Well, a zillion years later the Director's son films a second chapter. It's the same formula as the first, but just with Mickey Rourke and Valentino Rossi instead of Steve McQueen. It's got super slo-mo and it was shot in 4k. All that jazz. Very slick and pro looking.

It's a good watch and covers many aspects of the 'sport' of motorcycling but rarely touches on motorcycling culture...the way the vast majority of bikers experience bikes...i.e. on the street.

Anyway, if you ride a bike this movie is for you. It's got dare-devil shit to MotoGP shit covered. Jumping football fields with your bike or high-siding at 200 mph and walking away from both unscathed. It's all there.

Dig it.

It's So Easy + and other lies +

Got this for x-mas. I'm obviously big on musician bios and so I was stoked to dive into Duff's take on GNFNR and beyond. I felt like the book was off to a rocky start but very quickly righted itself and became an engrossing read. Immediate comparisons will be drawn to Slash's bio and to be honest, Slash's is definitely better. I found it richer. But Duff's is Duff's and it's still a damn fine read. Not everything can be "the best."

Duff gave a lot of insight into the other band members, especially Izzy. And so it was an educational dive into some of the inner workings of Guns n Roses. You felt like you understood their respective personalities that little bit more after getting through the book. The walls are broken down and the characters are humanized. Although most of their antics and choices seem to defy what one would consider "human." Regularly drinking TEN BOTTLES OF WINE A DAY? Fuckin a'.

Duff's story is typically filled with ups, downs, lots of tragedies, epiphanies, success, failure, rebirth, and resilience. It's cool to see what he went through, how he learned from it, and how that took him down some unusual paths post-GnR.

If you like music you must like GnR. If you like GnR then you should read this book. That's my logic. Do yourself a favor and pick this up. You'll fly through it in no time. I think Pickle was telling me he was a born-again Christian but there's zero mention of religion in this book (and it's very recent). So if he is, he certainly doesn't mention it even once.

It's a wild ride.

incognito.

with his wife.

looking cool as fuck.

Dead Wake

Erik Larson is probably my favorite living author. He writes non-fiction novels. To use a hackneyed phrase, he really brings the past to life. The dude goes bananas traveling the world and researching a specific topic for any given book. Marie just bought me his latest book and I devoured it in about 4 sittings in 3 days. This one is about the final voyage of the Lusitania.

I'm sure the story of the Lusitania is more familiar to yanks cuz it was pretty much the root cause for engaging the US in the First World War. But I didn't really know anything about it. It didn't take me 2 seconds to figure it out once I realized the protagonist was a captain of a cruise liner and the antagonist was the captain of a U-boat.

Dead Wake seemed to be one of his most thoroughly detailed historical accounts. But even given the minutia, it just flowed so well. You look at things on a microscopic level the way Erik does and it's just awesome. The book builds and builds until an unholy crescendo of horror, pain, death and loss.

Everyone should read this book so I don't want to give anything away regarding the other parts of the story you might not know about. But it's not the sinking of the Lusitania that's the most troubling aspect of this whole story: It's the government.

This book was fascinating. Read it.

44,000 tons, 9 passenger decks, 787 ft long, almost 3000 people capacity inc crew.

Young Cycle Girls

This was a good flick to end this season of Motorcycle Movie Night. It was from 77 and therefore we got a little bit more than we typically got with a late 60's flick. The girls actually got naked in this one (very briefly) and they threw around obscenities that wouldn't have passed in the 60's. Society was loosening up, and so were the Young Cycle Girls...

The flick was about three girls from Colorado who get on their Honda 350's and spend Easter break heading for the west coast. They want to see the ocean in LA. Sounds fun. What could go wrong? Except for they make some dumb decisions along the way, get mistaken for Hell's Angels, get molested by the fuzz, raped by a drug dealer, have their bike stolen, and practically rape a virginal pinball wizard. It ends up being a less than ideal trip. But they make it. And all the while they have the theme song for the movie playing in their heads. It's cornball. But it was a really entertaining 80 minutes.

So here's the thing; the DVD case (yeah, I own this) says this movie has the most shocking ending since Easy Rider. That's quite a statement. But I tell ya what, none of us were expecting the film to end how it did. Holy shit, it was shocking alright. Right up there with the end of the Pink Angels.

I didn't have high expectations for Young Cycle Girls but it was a sleeper. PJ thought it was the best motorcycle flick we'd ever seen.

Dig it.

her

At first I thought her looked good, then I thought...meh, I'm over it. But Marie loved it and ended up buying the blu-ray, so the cards were dealt and we watched it last night.

It was legit. Joaquin Phoenix did one hell of a job in this flick. It's practically a one-man play. He did a great job portraying the protagonist and he rocked a hell of a fine mustache.

The film is about a guy who falls in love with his computer's operating system. It's set in the not-too-distant future where wearable tech is ubiquitous and autonomous vehicles, immersive video games and artificial intelligence is mainstream. It's all rooted in reality and it appears to be a very accurate foreshadowing of what's to come in our lifetime. Given that, I don't think falling in love with his OS is as silly as it may first sound. Consider for a moment that his OS is voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Wouldn't you have phone sex with your OS if it sounded like ScarJo? Yeah. Exactly.

The costume is excellent and so is the cinematography. The score is done by Arcade Fire. It's a very well-rounded flick. I really don't have any bones to pick with it at all. The costuming also goes to show that although high-waisted pants look awful on women, clearly men of the future can pull them off just fine.

You should watch this movie. It's pretty light-hearted, well-acted, and original.

Here's a gratuitous shot of Scarlett Johansson channeling her inner Debbie Harry.

Karmic Management

Sorry for the shitty graphic. I'm too lazy to take a pic of the book myself. It's not like it's a terribly thrilling book cover...

This is another one of those "read it on a plane ride" type of books. Only 140 pages or so.

I'm always interested in reading any books that merge Eastern Thought or Buddhist teachings in particular, with business or management. I found this little book and gave it a spin.

It wasn't mind-blowing, but it's worth passing along due to its brevity. It's not a big time investment so you can blaze through it and pull out a couple nuggets of truth. Or find a couple things to dwell upon.

Karmic Management essentially teaches you that in order for you to succeed in business, you first have to help other people succeed in the same types of things you want to achieve. The more you give and the more you help, the more it will created echoes that give back and help you out in the future. Make your team look like superstars because they in turn will reflect back upon you and make you look like a superstar. Stuff like that...

The cool thing about the book is that some, if not many of the concepts are things we already do at my job. So that's reassuring. But there's definitely some concepts to pull out and really think about how we could implement them at work.

I plan on re-reading some of these chapters to get some of the main ideas down on paper and then taking that to my Managers at work and seeing how we can use them to spark conversations and positive change.

Word.

Rebel Rousers

Bruce Dern owned this movie. His acting in this flick reminded me of Dustin Hoffman in Papillon. Just something about the way he delivered the lines...it was reminiscent of Hoffman's character. But anyway, yeah, Dern ruled.

Rebel Rousers is the penultimate movie I'm showing in this season of Motorcycle Movie Night. It came out right after Easy Rider and included the rising star, Jack Nicholson. He doesn't have much of a part in the flick worth writing home about, but he does wear some very memorable stripy pants. And his chopper is outta sight, man. Incredible trumpet pipes up to the sky and a great sissy bar. In fact pretty much all the bikes in this movie are fucking rad. It's a truly killer line-up. You get some good detailed shots of the bikes, too. Mostly Triumph choppers if I recall.

This movie has got to be the most unintentionally racist biker flick we've ever seen. The bikers are in an undisclosed town but it's clearly full of Mexicans...or rather, it's full of white actors with bad spray tans pretending to be Mexican. Their dialogue is unreal, man; it's the whitest, most generic Mexican patter you've ever heard. There's a little kid named Niño, but they pronounce it Nino like he's fucking Italian. I think "loco" might be the only Spanish word they utter. Everything else is just white-boy impressions of how generic Mexicans talk. It was priceless and definitely made the movie hysterical.

The flick has a story, or two stories actually, and they're woven together very loosely. The actual plot is really just wedged into the movie to try and give it some sort of cross-over legitimacy. But it fails miserably due to crap acting and white boys in spray tans.

Anyway, at the end of the day this has all the earmarks of a classic 60's biker flick. It ticks all the right boxes and we found it highly entertaining. Just check out the trailer above. Dig it!

Popular Lies About Graphic Design

This is a cool book.

I think this is a great, very quick read about design. The author just plays devil's advocate and/or tries to dispels "lies" he's been told or encountered in his design career. Most of it is spot-on, and some of it is up for debate. But that's how it should be; a dialogue.

I'm looking forward to passing this along to the rest of my co-workers. I think they'll find it an inspirational read. The layout is excellent and worth the price of the book alone.

There isn't a ton to say about this. It's pocket-sized. It's well designed. And it's thought-provoking and sometimes confrontational. There are guest spots by quite a lot of famous and not-so-famous designers. Sagmeister and Carson make cameos. Y'know how it goes...

Good book for any designer. Another good one to hand out at design school. Dig it.