I present The Buzz-A-Rama 500. Criticism is welcomed. I think the thing I’m most proud of is figuring out how to chop and loop the excellent Souls of Mischief track “Cab Fare” in Final Cut Pro in order to create an instrumental track for the score. Small victories. The sample is from “Angela” by Bob James, but is most widely recognized as the theme song from the show Taxi. Just my way of giving Andy Kaufman a hug. Things learned:
Considering story structure, shot composition, focus and exposure all at the same time is damned tough.
New York City remains the most interesting place in the known universe. (And yes, I’ve been to Elkins, West Virginia.)
Too much of a good thing is a bad thing.
Trust your instincts, abandon them, and then try to remember what they were in the first place.
I still have a lot to learn.
A profile of the only remaining slot car racetrack in New York City, the Buzz-A-Rama 500. Opened in 1965, it is still owned and operated by the original owner, Buzz Perri, in the Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn.
I spent a few solid hours yesterday in Kensington working on my next short doc project. I ended up having a lot of trouble trying to monitor my audio levels, compose my shot, and make sure everything was exposed correctly at the same time. I guess one-man crewing takes practice, and hopefully I’m getting better at this. Two of my subjects, an old married Brooklyn couple, both of whom are natives of the borough, made for some interesting footage (at least I hope they did). Step two is capturing the footage and figuring out what’s missing so I can go back for a reshoot. Generally my projects have stalled at this step, languishing in the purgatory that digital video exists in before it is moved to my hard drive and then into Final Cut. But hopefully I can push through my natural tendencies toward procrastination and get some editing started this week.
On the playlist today is the Philip Glass-composed score of Dracula–performed by the Kronos Quartet–which I just picked up from the library on Friday. That guy is on some total other shit.
I made a strange discovery today when I was browsing through Gothamist and read a story about the death of Bob Guskind, the editorial engine behind the Gowanus Lounge blog. For those of you who’ve never seen the blog, it seemed to function as a clearinghouse of goings on in the neighborhoods around my apartment–Park Slope, Carroll Gardrens, Gowanus, Prospect Heights, Bed-Stuy, etc. Guskind had a bizarrely encyclopedic knowledge of the shitty lux cons that have been springing up all over BK the last couple of years, and he seemed to take a special delight in taking asshole developers to task for destroying the fabric of neighborhoods for a quick buck. The content of Gowanus Lounge represented the maturation of what a blog could be–providing local, unique content as mass media outlets cut their newshole, reportage budgets and dedication to covering anything other than celebrity sightings. Anyway, the blogosphere, or at least the corners of it that I frequent, seem much emptier now. Rest in peace Mr. Guskind.
