Washington Interns Gone Bad - Episode 7

Here's the 7th episode of my feature film, Washington Interns Gone Bad. I highly recommend you start at the beginning, so here's part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 and part 6.

This episode was a lot of fun to shoot. We had a restaurant lined up to shoot the lunch scene in, but it fell through at the last minute. So we turned a corner of the living room of 942 Westminster into a restaurant. For those keeping track, that's also the location of the party scene in Episode 2, Becky's bedroom in Episode 4, and will be showing up a few more times in later episodes. Then for the exterior, we used Bistro Au Ghetto, a closed-up building that the artist next door painted to look like a little cafe. While we only shot there for about 10 minutes, we built up quite a crowd of onlookers for that.

Enough about locations though. This episode is where we first meet the sleazy lobbyist character. Since at the time I wrote this I had never heard the name Jack Abramoff, I can't say that this character is based on him, but once you see one of the later episodes you will have to think that Abramoff based himself after this character. The scene at the restaurant shows my anger at democrats who have all but abandoned the working class in favor of big corporate donors.

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Ween - Frank

Here's a sick Ween jam from the 5/22/00 show at the 9:30 Club in DC.

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Washington Interns Gone Bad Episode 6

Here's the 6th episode of my feature film, Washington Interns Gone Bad. I highly recommend you start at the beginning, so here's part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5.

Becky gets back to work after a weekend with Scottie and Elizabeth goes postal on her. Elizabeth's smackdown of Becky is highly inspired by my own experiences of working for the democratic party while trying to be an activist and realizing that these two things don't really work so well together.

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MP3 O' The Week

Want some music? Well I want to send you some. Go here right now and sign up for MP3 O' The Week and every Tuesday (or thereabout) I will send you a song. It's that easy.

It's All About the Price of Oil

On 10/22/02, British folk/rock legend Billy Bragg played a short free set in the lobby of the AFL-CIO building in Washington, DC as part of a get out the vote rally. This song, It's All About the Price of Oil, is as true today as it was 4 years ago.

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Washington Interns Gone Bad Episode 5

Here's the fifth episode of my feature film, Washington Interns Gone Bad. I highly recommend you start at the beginning, so here's part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.

Here's the obligatory mid-film romantic interlude as well as the obligatory montage. The inspiration to do a montage was equal parts Naked Gun, every other cheesy 80's movie, and Trey Parker's brilliant montage song that was in an episode of South Park before it was in Team America.

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Tookie Williams Execution

Here's my most popular video that I have on YouTube, finally available for podcast. Over on YouTube, this video has gotten close to half a million views and over 2000 comments, many of which have made me lose a great deal of faith in humanity. On the night of Dec 13, 2005, I went to San Quentin Prison to capture the protest and media circus surrounding the execution of Stanley "Tookie" Williams. I'd always kind of ridden the fence on the death penalty. But something about being outside that prison that night while the state killed a man put things into a very clear perspective for me and I would very much like to see our country abolish this barbaric practice. Now before people start firing up the hate mail (too late, I get hatemail for this one all the time) this does not mean I think that we should just open the prison gates and let everyone free, but I do think that our criminal justice system needs a pretty massive overhaul, and I think that there are some major socio-economic reforms that need to happen in order to end the desperation that breeds such high crime rates in our country. So, without further ado, here's the video.

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I came, I saw, I did not shoot

Last night I went to another fun and informative Meet the Vloggers event at the Apple Store. A couple of things have happened since I had been a presenter there last month. First of all, I picked up a lot of great information that helped me to change the back end around, add a much better feed and make my content available for podcasts. Secondly, our MC for the last one is now sitting in a federal prison for refusing to turn his raw footage of a protest video to the authorities. I had read about his case in the SF Weekly but I didn't make the connection between him and the article until after I had met him last month. His case is very important to preserve press freedom for citizen journalists and if that's something that you feel is important, please consider kicking in to his legal defense fund from the previous link.

Back to last night... myself, Chris and Heather were all back from last month, plus some great new folks. I brought my camera with the full intention of putting together another highlight reel, but I never even took it out, so you'll just have to bear with good old fashioned text. Jose from Burntwire.tv was our MC and he started things off with a quick demonstartion on how easy it is to start your own vlog. Then Enric demonstrated some vlogging utilities that he has developed including VPiP - Video Playing in Place, which is what I use on this vlog to show videos. Heather and Chris showed their vlogs (linked above) and I showed mine, letting the audience vote between the video of Stella playing Peek a Boo and Sleater Kinney playing at Vegoose. They chose Sleater Kinney. Then Clay and Lon showed some clips from Moron Life which I plan on viewing more of as it looks hysterical. Jose showed a very funny clip from his vlog (link above) while waiting on a download from Justing with Last Laugh SF, a collection of very well produced shorts. Afterwards there was a lengthy Q&A session where people asked some very good questions on very detailed aspects of vlogging, feeds, hosting and more. This was a great event and I look forward to attending as many of these as I can as long as people are willing to tolerate my godawful public speaking skills.

Washington Interns Gone Bad Episode 4

Here's the fourth episode of my feature film, Washington Interns Gone Bad. I highly recommend you start at the beginning, so here's part 1, here's part 2, and part 3.

It's only Becky's 2nd day of her internship and she is beginning to realize just how far in over her head she is with this internship. Elizabeth schools her in Washington "professionalism" and the congressman decides that he wants to keep a special eye on her.

While none of my personal experiences working in politics were ever quite as extreme as what I put in this film, it was based around real scandals (the summer before I wrote this was what we DCer's referred to as "The Summer of Chandra" where every local media source was all Chandra Levy and Gary Condit, all the time) and while none of the characters were directly based upon real people, they certainly shared elements of real people. The fact that we tapped into something very real with this film is illustrated by the many instances in the years since it was made that life has imitated art. Here's the first of those instances.

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I miss Sleater Kinney already

A week from tonight, Sleater Kinney will be playing their very last show before going on an "indefinite hiatus." I'm always sad to see a band that I really love break up, but at least I've gotten to see them 4 times. This is video that I shot of them at the Vegoose Festival. I had an all access pass and got to shoot them from the side of the stage, and after the show I met Corin and got her to call Anne (who was home and having a very difficult pregnancy with Stella). I've got the whole show up on YouTube and available to download as a full DVD with better audio at sleaterkinneytorrents.com

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Washington Interns Gone Bad Episode 3

Here's the third episode of my feature film, Washington Interns Gone Bad. I highly recommend you start at the beginning, so here's part 1 and here's part 2.

All of the special effects and most of the stunts in the entire movie happen in this episode, so get ready for a wild thrill ride!

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