bahamas "barchords"

I like music, so why not try an album review? Oh yeah, no reason not to.

KCRW introduced me to Bahamas, singer/songwriter Afie Jurvanen, late one night while I was driving with "Caught Me Thinking". The song is both upbeat and sad, in the same way a masterchef's signature dish can balance sweet and spicy. The song instantly reminded me of two of my favorite artists, (smog) and Elliot Smith.

Every song on Barchords is simple and delicate. The first song, "Lost In The Light", is hauntingly sparse and beautiful. Though repetitious, the mood and female backup singers really make the track for me. It's a song I listen to when the sadness creeps in through the floorboards in my head.

Other highlights on the album include the noisy guitar build at the end of "Never Again", the magnificent guitar solo on "Your Sweet Touch", and the almost minimalist approach to "Overjoyed" which begins with the lines "Overjoyed, if laughter's all we had/Overjoyed, there's joy in feeling sad".

how i got started on youtube

During the summer break before my senior year in college I interned with my entire film class for a start up company that was going to be a television station for the internet. Unfortunately, neither the company nor the world was quite ready yet. Logically, after college I began posting videos on my website, this website.

My classmate Akiva Schaffer, one of a few students from my film class that turned down the internship, and I reunited at a Channel 101 screening. I remember boldly and naively asking him if he could suggest me to his agent who had just got him an audition for "the new Ben Stiller movie" and him telling me to make something for Channel 101 and he would show them. Though I wanted to be a part of it, I felt like an outsider in that scene and I never made anything. On other hand, Akiva and his two best friends found incredible success with Channel 101 and their group, The Lonely Island, joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in 2005.

One Sunday morning my friend Avi Rothman called me and told me to check out a link he sent me. It was "Lazy Sunday" and it was on YouTube. I immediately started poking around on the site, thinking this is it. This is what I've been waiting for. I can be myself, I can be an individual, I can be pimplywimp.

I had just seen Brokeback Mountain and was amazed by Heath Ledger's performance. I started to see parodies of the film all over YouTube. I came up with the idea to make a video about a ridiculous form of forbidden love between a man and a cat. Little did I know how popular cats were going to be on the internet. So on Superbowl Sunday 2006 I shot Brokeback Meowntain with a friend and posted it March 3, 2006. It ended up getting 70,000 hits. After that I was hooked.